Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses (8 page)

‘For a digestive condition,’ the companion put in.

‘Aren’t duck eggs richer than ordinar—?’ said Alec.

The widow swept on. ‘And the cook at the school—’

‘Mrs Brown?’ I fell on this very slight particle of sense.

‘Mrs Brown indeed supplies them to her niece who—’

‘Ahhhhh!’ said both Alec and I. Then we frowned, in unison, as though we had been practising.

‘—repays the favour, it appears, with gossip about her patrons, carried right back up the hill and spread around. Stop dabbing me with that shawl, Enid, do! Give it here, can’t you?’

The companion buckled and whimpered as the widow snatched the garment out of her hands and wrapped herself very firmly up in it.

‘I am most grievously disappointed,’ she announced. ‘And now I’m going for my walk, which I certainly need more than ever today.’

‘What an extraordinary person,’ said Alec, looking after her as she sailed away, with the benighted Enid sliding along at her side as invisibly as a rather large young woman in bright rust-red tweeds can ever slide.

‘Another one,’ I agreed. ‘So Miss Shanks finds out from Mrs Brown the housekeeper who found out from her niece at the Crown that Mrs Gilver the assumed French mistress is not just unsuitable but actually scandalous and wicked and . . .’

‘. . . she hotfoots it down to engage you,’ said Alec. ‘The plot doesn’t exactly thicken but it far from dilutes, wouldn’t you say?’

‘It curdles,’ I said. ‘But I tell you one thing, I’m going to do my very best to remember my
avoir
and
être
and see if I can’t get myself ensconced up there. I don’t know if it’s anything to do with whatever’s up with Fleur—’

‘Or the four people she has apparently killed . . .’

‘But there’s something very odd about St Columba’s.’ I turned and gazed up at the long grey facade of the place again. It was not looming this morning, for some reason. If common sense and sanity had not prevented me I would have said it had taken a good step back from the edge of the cliff overnight and was now safely set behind its gardens in an unremarkable way. I saw Alec frowning at it too.

‘Very changeable light round here,’ he said. ‘Must be what draws the painters.’ He shivered faintly.

‘And I take back what I said about your cuckolded fisherman,’ I said. ‘Right now, if I thought you could pass as
Miss
Osborne, I’d swap cases with you.’

‘Well, come and meet my client to be going along with,’ Alec said. ‘He’s an interesting chap, and not a fisherman, by the way.’

He pointed me on the right course, along under the St Columba’s cliff and out around the natural arm of the harbour until we were opposite the main street and could look back over at the Crown, at the housemaids shaking eiderdowns out of the upstairs windows and the grocer’s shop two doors down. The grocer was unwinding his awning against the sun for the day and the delivery boy was packing his basket with brown parcels, whistling the same snatch of song over and over again, quite tunelessly. Behind the main street, where a few cottage rows clung to the hillside, washing was being pegged out – heavy overalls and school pinafores on this Saturday morning when the working week was done – and in one front garden a stout housewife was scattering scraps to a small flock of chickens. At one of the villas perched on the high road, a matron in a blue coat and a matching hat (with a feather we could see all the way from the far harbour wall) let herself out at her garden gate and turned to walk briskly towards the station, stepping up her pace even more as the whistle sounded to tell of an approaching train.

‘Here we are then,’ Alec said and I turned back to face him, then raised my eyebrows.

‘I wondered what that was,’ I said. ‘I smelled it last night.’

‘I tasted it last night,’ Alec said. ‘And very delicious it was too.’

We were standing in front of a rather commodious brick shack of the kind often found at harboursides; an erstwhile boathouse perhaps, or a lifeboat station abandoned when a grateful village or a wealthy patron stumped up for a grander one. They often see out their lives as storehouses for nets in winter or lowly shelters for lobster pots in the off-season. This particular shack, however, had gone on from its beginnings to bigger and better things. Its walls had been whitewashed and its window frames painted a cheerful shade of green. A pillar-box-red door stood open, allowing us a glimpse of shining cream-coloured linoleum, a high counter made out of glass and more of the green-painted wood. A sign above the door said
Aldo’s Fish Bar
in red writing, with little flags decorating the corners.

‘You dined off fried fish last night?’ I asked Alec.

‘And fried chips,’ he said.

‘And then two tongue sandwiches and milky coffee at supper time,’ I said. ‘You should have the figure of Henry VIII by rights.’

‘Come in and meet Joe,’ Alec said, and disappeared into the darkened doorway.

I followed, leaving behind the scent of seaweed and yesterday’s catch and stepping into a rich, grease-laden, savoury fog so thick one could feel it settle on one’s skin. It must, I thought to myself looking around, be impregnated into the very walls, for there was no food in evidence, nor was there any sign of its being on its way or traces of it left over from the night before. The glass counter shone like the windows of an excellent housekeeper, as though vinegar and brown paper had only just been applied, and the metal grilles beneath the counter, where one assumed the hot food waited to be sold, glittered like the radiator of a beloved and expensive motorcar.

Alec had disappeared behind the counter, passing the empty frying vessels and disappearing through a door into the back premises.

‘
Buongiorno
, my friend! Good morning. Good to see you.
Avanti
!
Benvenuto
! Come in!’

The voice was as rich and warm as the thick scents that filled the room and must surely have been by far the most exotic sound ever to have boomed out around Portpatrick harbour. Feeling suddenly shy, I peeped around the doorway. On a stool in the middle of a tiny scullery, peeling potatoes into a tub the size of a dustbin clamped between his knees, was a black-haired, cherry-cheeked man, broad-shouldered and thickened with middle age, dressed in a collarless shirt, cambric trousers like a fisherman and a butcher’s striped apron.

‘You sound pretty chipper,’ I heard Alec say to him. ‘Is she back then?’

‘Cheep-ah?’ said Joe. He wiped his face with a forearm as though he had been sweating, even this early on such a fresh spring day; and then, holding his knife like a fairground thrower, he flicked it into the barrel of peeled potatoes. It entered one of them with a whistling sound and a small splash of water.

‘Happy,’ said Alec. ‘You sound happy. Has your wife come home?’

‘No, no, no, no, no,’ said Joe. ‘Not a sight, not a sound.
Niente
. I am happy because you are here to help me. Now I have a friend.’ He beamed at Alec, and since the beaming entailed an expansive sweeping glance around the room, at last he spotted me and shot to his feet, wiping his face again and tearing off the blue cotton cook’s cap he had been wearing.

‘
Scusi, signorina
,’ he said. ‘How I can help you? The cafe she is closed, but how I can help you? Only say. Giuseppe Aldo is your servant.’

‘How do you do?’ I said and then immediately blushed to hear such primness responding to his torrent of chivalry.

‘Mrs Gilver is a friend of mine,’ said Alec. ‘My business partner, actually. Also a detective, don’t you know.’

‘A lady detective . . .’ said Joe, or Giuseppe as he seemed to be. He sat back down again at his stool, motioning me into one of the three wooden chairs set around the little table in the scullery. Once there he gazed at me, letting out a long low whistle. ‘Okay-dokey, so you breakfass? You hungry? Hah?’

‘I could manage a little something,’ said Alec, ignoring my look. He had eaten a heartier breakfast than someone who had had two dinners might have been expected to, and not a half-hour before.

‘I make you
caffé
and
zeppole
,’ said Joe. ‘Mos’ delectable food you ever have in your life before. Coming up!’ He stood and took the two paces needed over to a cooking stove set under the window. There he pulled a heavy, high-sided pot onto the ring and lit the gas with a match. I suspected from the look of the pot’s outside what it contained, and very soon my nostrils told me my guess was accurate. It was a pan of beef dripping slowly warming up for things to fry in.

As to what might be fried, once Joe had changed his striped blue apron for a white one, long enough to reach the top of his boots and wide enough to meet at the back of his considerable girth, he fetched an enormous bowl from the cold larder, washed his fingers in water from a kettle – hot enough to make Alec and me both wince, although Joe just chuckled and shook his reddened hand dry – and started breaking off little pieces from a mound of dough which was mushrooming inside the mixing bowl like a puffball.

All the time he worked he was talking, and soon the strange sing-song of his voice, as odd as it had sounded when first I had heard it, came to seem quite natural so that I would not have said he had any accent at all.

‘She is gone like the setting sun,’ he said. ‘Like the sun she will return, but I cannot deny she is gone. Gone from my arms but not from my heart. I work too hard. I leave her too long and she is lonely. I do not blame the poor child. She is a child to me. Fifteen years since I marry my sweetheart and she is still that sweet girl to me. So, my friend, you will find her and bring her home and I will rejoice and I will never again work so hard and let my sweet love be lonely. Eat, eat, eat, eat!’

For the fat had got hot and into it he had dropped little spoonfuls of his mixture, watching them (as tenderly as any mother watching her children at play) before fishing them out again and laying them down gently on a plate of sugar. He rolled the plate around until the sugar was crusted all over the little puffs of pastry, and then he tipped the first one onto a clean plate for me.

‘Wait, wait, wait, wait,’ he said. He poured me a tiny cup of evil-looking black coffee from a fat little pot which had been spluttering on another gas ring, then he swept his arm down like a starter at a race meet and said it again. ‘Eat, eat, eat, eat.
Buon appetito
. Enjoy!’

And despite the fact that I knew it was fried in dripping, and the fact that I had eaten my breakfast along with Alec and that the coffee was strong enough to give me goose pimples, I
did
eat – and it was the tastiest little pastry I had ever had in my life. Light, warm, sweet, almost salty – just far enough from being salty to make one yearn for another bite to see if the salt was
there
. I finished it, licked my sugary fingers as delicately as I could, and craned forward to peer at the pan of hot oil.

Joe Aldo burst into a cascade of delighted laughter.

‘That is it!’ he said. ‘That is the secret. The genius in the lamp, and only a true cook can rub it! I make them one little bite too small. Just one tiny little bite too small and no one, no one, no one, no one ever refuses another. Hah!’

Alec wagged his finger at me and laughed along and I managed to muster a sheepish smile too. I sipped another incendiary mouthful of the black tar Joe Aldo called coffee and asked for a second pastry like a good girl, not wanting to spoil his fun.

When there was a pyramid of them on a plate between us and the fat little coffee pot was sitting on the table too, at last Joe moved the shimmering pan of fat back from the gas ring (setting it on the windowsill, I noticed, where it was sure to taint the wash hung on a rope in the tiny back yard). He removed his white apron, put on the striped one again and went back to his potato peeling, flicking the potato off the knife with an expert twist and plunging his hand into the bucket up to his elbow, wetting his rolled shirtsleeve and not noticing.

‘So,’ he said. ‘I am a bad husband, working and working and never a rose, never a song, never a dance in the moonlight for my lovely wife. Not since her birthday, February, have we danced together in an empty room.’ I took in my stride this hint about the home life of the Aldos and its distance and different nature from my own. ‘And someone saw her, her beautiful black hair and her eyes like rubies. Ah! No – sapphires. And her cheeks like peaches in the evening. I can’t tell you in English how beautiful is my wife. If you spoke my language . . .’ He decided, apparently, to try it anyway and spent the next minute regaling us about the many wondrous charms of his wife in swooping, elated Italian of which we understood nothing except – in my case – the oft-repeated ‘-
issima
’s, which gave one the distinct impression that he really meant it.

‘And you’re sure it’s someone in the town?’ said Alec when Joe finally stopped talking.

‘She never get letters I don’t see. She never leave the village. It must be someone she met here.’

‘But you don’t know who?’ said Alec. ‘You weren’t able to think of anyone?’

‘Most of the time she see only ladies. Washing, see?’ He pointed out of the window at the waggling rope of laundry. ‘Rosa can wash the lace as fine as web of a spider. She can wash wool as soft as the day the lamb is born.’ I looked askance at the washing outside, just beyond the reach (I hoped) of the oily smoke from Joe’s cooking pan. It looked to be plain yellow cotton shirts and white calico underclothes to me, and I wondered if Rosa’s beauty and prowess in laundry were to be believed. But then, the pastries had been as delicious as their advance press, so perhaps I was being unfair to him.

‘She must see
some
men,’ said Alec.

‘She see postman, milkman, grocer boy, farmer on top of the hill. He kill a lamb for us and butcher it just how we like it, Rosa and me. I fry fish for my living,
bella signora
, but my wife Rosa she is the cook. She make a two-day pot of lamb and tomato would raise the dead from their graves. A
pollo con funghi
could cure a plague.’ He turned back to Alec again. ‘But it could be anyone. Bank manager, fisherman, pub landlord, anyone who ever see her face or hear her voice. I not angry. How he help it, this man, whoever he is? But she has to come home. She will come home. And before Sabbatina even knows she is gone.’