The Winter Ground (21 page)

This, I thought, had the unmistakable ring of truth about it, except that he was speaking of Topsy, not Ana, and of a rope instead of a pony.

Inspector Hutchinson puffed out his cheeks and rolled his eyes when we left Charlie’s wagon a few minutes later, but he did not speak until we were well away from it and could be sure that no one was listening.

‘Not a great liar,’ he said, ‘but I’ve heard worse. Could you tell where the join was, Mrs Gilver?’

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘All the stuff about the liberty horses and the Prebrezhensky girls was true enough – it was so detailed and it tripped off his tongue. But he wasn’t at the back door having his gasper, was he? He didn’t actually see a thing.’

‘No, that was all Ma Cooke’s doing,’ said Hutchinson, ‘and he made one big blunder that clinched it.’ I waited. ‘He said he was by the doors near Ana and when she fell and Andrew and Tiny “went” rushing up to her. See?’

‘No.’

‘Here’s Ana,’ said the inspector, marking the ground with the heel of his boot. ‘And here’s Charlie.’ Another mark. ‘Here’s the other clowns. Now when she fell …’

‘Oh, I see. He should have said they “came” rushing up, shouldn’t he? Very subtle, Inspector.’

‘It’s the kind of thing you should look out for,’ said Hutchinson modestly.

‘Are you sure you want to be encouraging me?’ I asked him, matching his tone if not his mood exactly. ‘Shouldn’t you be rather down on me and my like?’

‘Not me!’ said Inspector Hutchinson. ‘I’m hoping you’ll keep at it and fill me in as you go. The more the merrier, keep them all on their toes.’

‘And will you return the favour?’ I said. ‘If I’m to be much use, it would help me to know what’s happening.’ I half expected a ticking-off for cheek and a swift end to our collaboration, but the inspector surprised me.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘And the first thing I must tell you is what the doctor said. First impression only, you understand, for he will not be doing the post-mortem examination until later on today, but as far as he can gather she really did die from hitting her head on the ground. The injury is quite clear, he says. One blow to the side of her face, bruising from jaw to temple, shattering her cheekbone and fracturing her skull.’

I swallowed and nodded.

‘If she had been bashed on the head and then arranged on the ground, the injury would be quite different. As would the bloodstain. He was as sure as he could be that she hadn’t moved after she started bleeding.’

I could believe it. I remembered from the night before how, until one moved her hair and saw the spreading stain, one could tell oneself she was just resting there.

‘And there is a slight swell on the ground just where she came down,’ said the inspector. ‘Just a bump – you’d never notice it under the grass but it was enough to make the difference.’

‘So she really might just have fallen off her horse?’

‘I doubt it,’ said the inspector. ‘But what I do say is that whoever pushed her or pulled her off or set a trip to throw her off, maybe he didn’t mean to kill her. Maybe that was just bad luck.’

‘Can I tell Mrs Cooke you think that?’ I asked him. He considered me for a moment before he answered, looking as weary as ever again.

‘Aye, why not?’ he said. ‘I’ve no time to be bothering with charging her and all that palaver, mind. So I don’t want to see her or Charlie down at the station confessing to false evidence. But if you can get her to stop making my job harder for me, you feel free.’

Not, I thought to myself as he strode away from me, one of those policemen who thrive on dotted ‘i’s and crossed ‘t’s, and I wondered what his Chief Constable would say if he heard the half of it. I had once been landed with the Chief Constable of Perthshire at a Hunt Ball dinner and I knew that there was not an undotted ‘i’ or crossless ‘t’ anywhere about him.

Mrs Cooke, however, was not to be swayed.

‘Poor Charlie,’ she said, when I waylaid her in her wagon. ‘He saw the whole thing?’

‘Yes, and told the inspector about it in more or less identical words to your own,’ I said. She looked back at me blankly. ‘Inspector Hutchinson is not the kind of man to be fooled,’ I insisted. ‘And anyway, what I’m telling you is that the surgeon thinks she fell off her horse and hit her head on the ground. Do you see? If only you would leave things be and let the police draw their own con clusions, the chances are they would call it an accident. The chances are it
was
an accident. Oh, don’t you see?’

‘Of course it wurr,’ said Ma. ‘If it wun’t, you think I’d have asked Charlie to—’

‘Aha!’ I said, making her put her hand to her mouth as she had the previous evening but in earnest this time.

‘All right there,’ she said. ‘I got Charlie to say he’d seen it. So run me in. Tell your inspector to get his handcuffs ready.’

‘I shan’t,’ I said, very glad that Inspector Hutchinson had as good as told me not to. ‘But what you’re doing, you and Charlie, is only raising suspicion instead of quelling it.’

‘I’m not one for the police,’ said Ma. ‘Too many’s the times they’ve listened to the flatties calling us thieves and tinkers. Too many’s the times they’ve run us off grounds what we’ve every right to be stopping on. I’m glad they’ve the sense to see it wurr no murder, but I’d still rather have you tell me what happened than them. You’ll puzzle it out for me, won’t you, my beauty?’

‘I shall try,’ I said, feeling far from certain on the point. ‘And you can help me out with some practical details. For instance, we know that Ana left too early and spoiled the spec, but what was supposed to happen? How should it have gone?’

‘Well,’ said Ma. ‘We’ve got two specs. In one, the Russians goes off first, then Topsy, then the liberty prads, clowns next and Ana last, but Pa always said it wurr wrong to have the ring so empty at the end.’ I must have looked sceptical, because she nodded as though agreeing with me. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘but he’s always been a proud man and it’s getting worse the less he has to be proud of. Breaks my heart sometimes. Anyways, it wun’t do me no good to stickle over the likes of that so we changed it. And in the new spec Pa’s prads wurr the last to go. Just like last night – except for Bill being in it too. The clowns off first, then Ana, Topsy, the Russians, the prads and Pa at the finish.’

‘Just as they did, in fact?’

‘Only a bit later. It was Ana going off four swings quick what threw Topsy and knocked the timing.’

‘And was it supposed to be bang, bang, bang one after the other?’

‘Never, no,’ said Ma, her enthusiasm for the spectacular growing in her voice as she recounted it. ‘Ana did her best stuff once the clowns went off, most usually, even if she had less time in this spec than the other. The little maids had their finale next and they went off to leave Topsy space for a few lines on the floor – beautiful floor-work she does, seems a shame sometimes she’s always up on a line. If we could get a base man she could work up an adagio before dinnertime. My own ma had an adagio spot – mind you, them days the roughs would cheer to see a lass in tights whether she was any good or no, but my ma was—’ I cleared my throat, and Ma brought herself back to the matter in hand. ‘Then the liberty prads did their last show, all up on their back legs – lovely – and that was that. A good spec, even if I’m saying it myself.’

‘Very interesting,’ I said. ‘That was tremendously helpful – thank you.’

‘What is it you’re thinking?’ asked Ma.

I shook my head at her. ‘I don’t want to get your hopes up,’ I said. ‘It’s just something the inspector mentioned that I think is worth checking. But I have to be frank with you, Mrs Cooke. If no one did this, if Ana simply fell, I may never find out why. There may not be anything to be found out.’

Ma shook her head, setting her curlpapers bobbing, and retied her dressing-gown cord a little tighter around her middle, as if girding herself for battle with me.

‘She’d no more do such a thing than you would pitch yourself out of that chair right now and smack your face on the rug there,’ she said. ‘Than you would put your hand in the fire reaching out to lift your cuppa, than you would drive yonder little car of yours face first into a brick wall trying to turn a corner.’

‘But if you don’t believe she was killed and you can’t believe it was an accident, what else is there?’ I said. ‘And I must say, since I’ve been here I’ve heard of nothing else but broken legs and lost arms.’

‘You dun’t understand,’ said Ma. ‘How do you think Ana learned to stand on Harlequin’s back? And the arabesques? Handstands? Flick-flacks? How do you suppose she learned it all?’

‘On the mechanic,’ I said, ‘like Inya and Alya?’

‘No, none of that,’ said Ma. ‘Ana’s not proper circus. She’s a josser. She taught herself, from a little maid. And how she learned was by falling off, on to the grass of a paddock, every blessed time until she din’t fall off no more.’

I was still confused but I was intrigued by the glimpse of Ana’s past, the first I had heard so far.

‘What do you know about her?’ I said. ‘About when she was a little … maid, I mean.’

Ma laughed softly but her eyes glistened with sudden tears.

‘Well, she wun’t no Russian princess, that’s for sure,’ she said. ‘She wurr a lady, though, no doubt about that much. Beautiful things, she had.’

‘What kind of things?’ I asked. I had only seen Ana in her ring costume and in the same rough practice clothes as all the others.

‘Her nightgowns and her chimmies,’ said Ma. ‘Pure silk like spiders’ webs, they wurr. And a writing case all set with motherof-pearl and pens to match. But there’s more to life than silk and pearls and she had a hard start. You could see it in her eyes even if she never let me read her palm and so I reckon whatever she wanted to forget, she was welcome to forget it and tell her own tale.’

‘It didn’t endear her all round,’ I said. ‘Not everyone has your sympathetic spirit, Ma.’ I flushed, for the name had slipped out unbidden, but she only smiled at me and inclined her head as though acknowledging a compliment, which I suppose it was in its way.

‘I’d have got round them all in the end,’ she said. ‘I told Topsy many’s a time she din’t know how lucky she wurr, big band of Turvys and Cookes all about her all the time, so’s she was born knowing who she wurr and how come. Family’s the thing, see, but try telling that to young ones. Topsy wun’t know what it felt like to be a lost soul and she’d no call to be laughing at Ana for the pain of it. Same as Tiny and Andrew, I used to tell her. Ana din’t fit any better into where she come from than them two. Except as her not fitting was all on the inside. Like that Toberomey’s missus. Her spirit’s dying in her breast, you ask me. She don’t fit where she’s landed, not nearly.’

Now that was very interesting, I thought to myself later. I had simply hinted that someone – no one in particular – might feel rather less than sympathetic in regards to Ana’s nonsense and Topsy’s name had come up without my giving it the slightest nudge. Could it be that Inspector Hutchinson was right after all? And did Ma actually know something or had she simply divined it? I had no high opinion of Madame Polina with her palms and leaves but there was no denying that Polly Cooke had a feeling for people.

First stop the shepherds’ hut, I thought, where Donald and Teddy were looking rather tidier than the previous morning; perhaps Zoya had more interest in brushed hair and scrubbed necks than me, who had been planning rather vaguely to drag them back to Nanny in a day or two and hand them over for sluicing

‘We had cheese sandwiches for breakfast, Mother,’ said Donald. ‘And cocoa.’

I suppressed a shudder.

‘Well, good then,’ I said, trying to sound brisk since I was sure that briskness was the usual sound of their mother and would put them at their ease. ‘Now, tell me, boys. What happened last night at the back of the ring?’

At that, the simple internal comforts of the sandwiches and cocoa seemed to recede a little; both of them looked instantly less rosy, less replete. Teddy visibly shrank into his chair, shook his hair down over his forehead and then looked up at me from under it in that way which was intermittently endearing a few years ago but had long since palled.

‘What do you mean?’ Donald said.

‘Why did Anastasia leave?’ I asked. ‘She wasn’t due to, you know. Did you see anything? Did she say why she was going?’

‘Is she dead?’ said Teddy. ‘Mrs P said she was gone, but we couldn’t be exactly sure what that meant, could we?’

‘She is,’ I said. ‘She fell off. Like Perdita’s uncle. Cousin Bellamy, remember?’ I had clear memories of their re-enacting the grisly end of distant Cousin Bellamy all over the nursery, gardens and especially banisters since he had come off at the top of a steep stretch of scree and had tumbled backwards under the hooves of the following hunters, coming to rest face down in a streambed or, in Donald and Teddy’s version, a heap of coats and dog blankets thrown down at the foot of the stairs.

‘You mean she got squashed by the liberty prads?’ said Donald.

‘No, no, simply that she—’

‘What did she fall down? Did the pony hare off up the path beside the waterfall?’

‘No—’

‘Only we thought she was in the back tent, didn’t we?’

‘Or else what was the scream? We thought that was Inya, didn’t we?’

‘Blimey, Ma, don’t tell me that scream was Anastasia. Did she see someone back there and scream and rush off up the hill and tumble down into the pool? Did she drown?’

‘No—’

‘Only Anya said last night she had hit her head.’

‘Did she hit her head and pass out and
then
drown?’

‘And get dragged back to the tent by one mangled foot stuck in a stirrup, all wet and dead?’

‘Will you stop it?’ I managed to get out at last. ‘Yes, she is dead. Do you hear me? Anastasia died last night. Will you stop being such …’ I could not finish the thought, since what I was asking, in essence, was that they stop being such
boys
. ‘All I need to hear from you is what happened when she left the ring.’

‘Nothing,’ said Teddy. ‘Nothing at all. She went cantering round and round and then … why does it matter anyway, Mother?’

Donald kicked him.