The Burry Man's Day (22 page)

There were no more villagers loitering usefully as I ascended the rest of the Loan and as I had expected there were no signs of life along Station Road, just the sweep of low walls and high hedges hiding the solid Edwardian dwellings from view. There was no way of knowing whether the cart might have turned along here on Friday evening or carried on up the hill straight ahead, but thinking that there was more chance of another encounter if I kept on, I passed the end of the road and kept climbing then, as the hill levelled off at the gates to the school playground, I heard a hearty voice hailing me.

‘Good morning, Mrs Gilver.’

‘Oh, God,’ I groaned to myself. Of course, since I was passing the school, I was also passing the schoolhouse, and just as inevitably on this bright summer morning, Mr and Mrs Turnbull were out in their garden, engaged in healthful exercise in the fresh air. I deliberated about waving and walking on, and then decided to take the bull by the horns. For one thing, it might have been one of the Turnbulls that turned the Dudgeons round on Friday evening and sent them back down to the Craw’s Close and the greasy pole. So I needed to ask what they were up to on Thursday afternoon too. And besides, I might, just possibly, be able to turn the conversation back to toadstools again – in fact, given how much they both seemed to enjoy discomfiting other people,
they
might well turn it for me – and it would be very interesting to see if they began to squirm when I veered towards the particular mushroom in question. (How I wished I could remember its name!) Even if I did not have the nerve to do this much, though, it might still be well worth my while to get them talking again: I needed to decide for myself whether I suspected them because they were actually suspicious or if I merely disliked them so much that I wanted them to be guilty. Thinking that a detective’s life is full of sacrifice, I organized my face into a surprised smile and called back.

‘We meet again! How lovely! And what a splendid garden.’ This was pure flattery. The truth was, I was very pleased to see, that their plot was not a patch on either of the Mr Dudgeons’, looking straggly and rather dry, their spinach bolting for the heavens.

‘You certainly do keep busy,’ I added toadyingly, as I reached the garden wall. ‘I’m surprised you have time for this with all your other pursuits.’

‘A little each day is easily accomplished,’ said Mr Turnbull.

‘And it’s such healthful exercise,’ Mrs Turnbull chimed in. I managed to maintain my smile and suppress my groan.

‘But I must leave it there for today, my dear,’ said Mr Turnbull, taking a fat watch out of his waistcoat pocket, ‘and get ready for the funeral.’

‘Ah yes,’ I said, as though only then remembering. ‘Poor Robert Dudgeon. It’s today, isn’t it?’

Mrs Turnbull was gathering together her trowels and her basket of greenery – whether scrawny harvest bound for their luncheon table or weeds bound for the heap it was hard to tell – clearly not planning to continue her toils alone.

‘I wonder if you would like to join me for a cup of coffee, Mrs Gilver,’ she said. ‘It’s just gone eleven.’

Now, I am no snob but I was a little startled at this. The woman seemed to have not the faintest idea of her place. However, as it happened, the invitation was most welcome from a professional point of view, even if it was quite improper and without any social appeal.

‘Delightful,’ I gushed. ‘How kind.’ I unlatched the garden gate and entered, mentally looking forward with great eagerness to a day when the case would be solved and I could cut her dead.

She rang for coffee as we entered the hall and then excused herself to go and tidy the garden out of her hair and fingernails, ushering me towards a parlour. It was exactly what I should have expected. Some good late Georgian furniture, inherited no doubt, but with all its lovely gleam polished so aggressively that it looked as though it was coated in golden treacle, bare dark boards smelling strongly of household soap with not a rug in sight, and ill-fitting slub covers over the chairs and sofa in one of those prints of cabbage roses like bunches of gargoyles tied together at the neck. The same ugly print made up the curtains, the pelmet, the runner on the sideboard and even the lampshades, suggesting that Mrs Turnbull had made a bulk purchase of the stuff and run up the lot herself. Despite the warmth of the morning outside, slowly melting its way to another hot afternoon, the room was frigid, even the paper fan in the grate curling with damp, a cold not to be explained by the way that the windows were ‘healthfully’ open six inches at top and bottom, and I would have bet my eyes that the paper fan was kept there all year round and that Mr and Mrs Turnbull sat here in the midwinter with nothing but their own glowing selves to keep them warm. If I had been on the school board I should have taken them up about it; it takes years to warm a stone house up again once it has got properly cold, and one could imagine the next incumbent shivering through a few Januarys cursing the Turnbulls with chattering teeth.

Mrs Turnbull rejoined me just as the coffee arrived, looking rather revolting with bare legs and sleeves cut short to the shoulder. I had kept my little jacket around my shoulders and I had to try hard not to cradle the coffee cup in my hands for warmth when she passed it to me.

‘Yes, poor Mr Dudgeon,’ I said again, as we took our first sips.

Mrs Turnbull looked rather drawn both ways at this. She wanted nothing more than to launch into all that she felt about the death, but she did not want to start from a point of sympathizing with the departed. She pursed her mouth and made a tsk-ing sound.

‘The children are terribly unnerved by it all,’ she said.

‘Your children?’ I asked, wondering why that should be so.

‘In a sense,’ she answered. ‘My husband and I have not been blessed with children of our own, and so we think of all his charges as our children. And, as I say, they are beginning to make up silly stories about it already to frighten themselves with.’

‘It was most unfortunate,’ I said. ‘Dozens of them must have been right there on the spot when he fell. One can only hope that it was all over so quickly that they could be led away before they really latched on to what was happening.’

‘If only that were so,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘But I’m afraid the parents, nine times out of ten, take no care at all to keep their talk away from little ears. And when they try to be discreet they simply confuse the children even more. By the very next day, there were half a dozen different versions of what had happened, all wildly fanciful, of course. I heard them regaling one another as they sat having their picnics. Quite tiny children some of them and you would not believe what they came out with.’

‘Oh, I think I would,’ I said, laughing. ‘I’ve been exposed to the Dudgeons next door.’

‘The who?’ said Mrs Turnbull.

‘Next door to Robert and Chrissie,’ I said. ‘The little red-headed scamps. They have some simply bloodcurdling tales to tell of what goes on in those woods.’

‘Well,’ said Mrs Turnbull, frowning slightly, ‘there we cannot blame the parents. Donald is one of our stalwarts.’

‘Really?’ I said, wondering to what manner of stalwart she was alluding.

‘Oh yes, a tireless worker for the cause.’

I racked my brain briefly to determine which cause this might be. He did seem to have a green thumb, but could horticulture, even to such as the Turnbulls, really be called ‘a cause’?

‘He is quite the most charismatic speaker on our entire summer circuit,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘His success rate astonishes even me sometimes. In fact, I have suggested to him that he would make an excellent lay-preacher, but he’s a religious conservative through and through. He wouldn’t hear of it.’

I was having to work pretty hard by now to stop myself from gaping. Charismatic? A speaker? A lay-preacher, even?

‘You seem surprised, Mrs Gilver,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘Have you and Donald met?’

‘I have met him, just briefly,’ I said. ‘And more to the point I’ve seen the whisky bottles on the rubbish heap outside his cottage. I shouldn’t have thought he was lay-preacher material at all.’

Mrs Turnbull threw back her head and let out a peal of laughter. Happy as I always am to provide entertainment for my fellow man, I felt the stirrings of annoyance as wave after wave of chuckles issued from her. I was glad to see that she slopped some coffee on to the lap of her dress, which was rather pale, and I hoped it left a stain.

‘He speaks in our Temperance tent,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘And each time he does, men flock to the front to hand over their bottles and watch him pour them out into the ground. It’s a marvellous sight, Mrs Gilver. But I suppose it does mean that he ends up with more than a few empties!’ She was laughing again, and this time I had the grace to smile a little with her.

‘Well, so much for my judgement of character then,’ I said with what I thought was great magnanimity. ‘I thought he looked a born drinker. In fact, I thought he was drunk!’

‘Appearances can be deceptive,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘It’s not the first time poor Donald, with his looks what they are, has been taken for one of the lost lambs instead of the shepherd. But he is as fierce a foe of the demon drink as any man born and he is leading his children along the straight path in the most determined way.’

I thought wryly to myself that he might care to widen his scope a little. They were perhaps well drilled in the evils of drink but their minds ran far from the lessons of Sunday school when at play in the woods.

‘Well, I’m glad for the sake of the children and their mother to have the source of all the bottles cleared up,’ I said. I was merely making chit-chat, but to my horror Mrs Turnbull read rather more into it than I had meant.

‘You’re of our mind?’ she said. ‘I had heard that at Mrs de Cassilis’s little party, you had a cocktail in your hand. But I’m delighted to hear it.’

I began to gabble. ‘Well, no, that is, yes. You did. I’m not. I can’t abide whisky but I’m not a teetotaller. Not that I’d say I’m a drinker, you understand. I’m – you know, a glass of sherry before lunch, a cocktail or two, wine with dinner and perhaps a little something afterwards . . .’ I ground to a halt, thinking that this list sounded positively debauched when one said it out loud in one breath like that. ‘Moderation in all things,’ I finished, lamely.

‘The doctrine of moderation in all things,’ said Mrs Turnbull, ‘is as harmful as it is hypocritical.’ I blinked. ‘That may sound radical,’ she went on. I had been thinking it sounded insufferably rude, but she was welcome to call it radical if she chose. ‘But no one actually means moderation in all things. No one really advocates moderation in murder, moderation in slavery.’ This was obviously a pre-prepared speech, one which had been wheeled out many a time before now and would be many more times to come. What a cheek, to make me sit through it here in her parlour where etiquette prevented me from escape!

‘In short, moderation is only to be recommended where the phenomenon in question is essentially harmless.’

‘I don’t agree,’ I said, which was a bald statement to make in any normal social intercourse, but as my sons would say ‘she started it’. ‘I think moderation can be safely advocated if the . . . stuff,’ I had forgotten her wording, ‘is harmless
in moderation
.’

‘Oh, but my dear Mrs Gilver,’ she said, earnestly coming to sit on the edge of her seat and leaning towards me, ‘it’s not. It’s
poison
.’

Under the present circumstances, I felt I could say nothing in argument against that. Mr Dudgeon’s intake had been far from moderate, it was true, but he was on his way to be buried that very morning and I was in no heart to champion whisky any further. One point worth noting in passing, I thought, was that this readiness on Mrs Turnbull’s part to talk of whisky as ‘poison’ rather pointed to her innocence in the matter of Robert Dudgeon’s death. She would hardly want to draw a close comparison between the two if she or her husband were the author of the crime.

‘It’s utter, utter poison and quite useless in the bodily economy,’ Mrs Turnbull was saying. ‘If my husband were only here he could tell you.’

‘Your wish has been granted,’ said Mr Turnbull, sweeping in the parlour door in a black tie and rather green-tinged dark suit. ‘What can I tell Mrs Gilver, my dear?’

‘Your wife is attempting to get my signature on the pledge,’ I said, speaking with no more reverence than this silly nonsense deserved; it was long past time I staked a claim in the conversation again.

‘You may scoff,’ said Mr Turnbull. I inclined my head, accepting his permission graciously, then I took a hold of myself again. I must swallow all annoyance and do what was needed for the case.

‘I hold no particular brief one way or the other,’ I said, trying to sound lofty. ‘Only I do wonder if going around saying it’s poison is wise. Around here in particular.’ I was speaking with forked tongue, hoping to jolt them, but if they did know anything about Robert Dudgeon they hid it remarkably well and only frowned at me in puzzlement and waited for more. ‘Around here where so many depend on the stuff for their livelihood, I mean. What would become of Queensferry without the bottling hall?’

‘Queensferry without the bottling hall,’ said Mr Turnbull in a dreamy voice, as though he was speaking of Elysium, ‘would be a better place in every way.’

‘Then you would only have to close all the mines and scuttle all the fishing boats and you’d be happy,’ I said, and I did not trouble with much politeness. All very well for Mr Turnbull to lay waste to any trade that was not ‘healthful exercise’ in another form, but we could not all be schoolmasters. ‘And our young men would be off on a ship to the New World to work down their mines instead.’ I remembered Tommy from the night of the greasy pole, threatening emigration to escape his wife and her nagging tongue, and I thought that I would accept a fairly long boat ride to get away from the Turnbulls right now. Mrs Turnbull, I noticed, was reddening with wifely anger to hear me speak to her husband so, but before she had managed more than a rumble, he stepped in.

‘We keep our eyes raised to the heavens and our hearts follow, Mrs Gilver,’ he said. ‘We are not troubled by those who would pull us down.’