The Winter Ground (27 page)

‘And later?’

‘Later?’

‘When I turned around and couldn’t see her, it was actually later than this starlight trip we’ve been discussing. It was just as we were realising something was wrong.’

‘She went out twice?’ said Robin. ‘Is that what she said?’

‘Is that what you say?’ I asked him. It was one of the first rules of detecting not to provide the witness with a story to confirm or deny, but instead to coax the story out of his own mouth, from his own memory, but my word it was an odd way to carry on with someone who did not know what one was up to. Robin Laurie was staring at me in a most squirm-inducing way.

‘I’m not saying what she did,’ I said, trying to help him along, ‘only that I couldn’t see her. She wasn’t visible.’

He looked more perplexed than ever. ‘She was invisible?’

I could feel a flush beginning to spread up from my collar, but just then he smacked his hands together and laughed the boyish laugh again.

‘Oh, I get it!’ he said. ‘You couldn’t see her! Yes, of course, she put her head down on her lap, didn’t she?’

‘Thank you!’ I exclaimed, flooding with relief. ‘That’s what I meant. She said she was bent over in her seat, feeling faint and doing what one is supposed to do to get the blood flowing.’

‘I thought at the time she was having some difficulty with her stocking,’ Robin said. ‘I almost offered to help.’

Ordinarily, I should have frowned at this, but I was so grateful to have got around the awkward corner that I smiled at him. This time we both sat back in our seats and let huge breaths go.

‘Now,’ said Robin, presently, rummaging in his waistcoat pocket and then flipping open his watch with an extravagant gesture. ‘Tea? Or a drink perhaps? I took you at your word about dinner, I’m afraid, but if you didn’t mind taking pot luck …’

‘No! Heavens no,’ I said, making those vague and meaningless patting gestures at my hair and clothes which, who knows how, have come to betoken imminent departure.

‘My brother … I don’t ask the kitchen to put four courses in the dining room for me every night … but you’re very welcome.’

‘I shouldn’t dream of it,’ I said, standing, having an abhorrence of being that most burdensome of all burdens: the unexpected guest.

With nothing to look forward to except the Brodies of Cairnbulg, then, I took my leave. Dinner, two hours of cards, bed, breakfast and off again, I told myself, and it was in a good cause. I stepped into my motor car and slammed the door. Hours and hours of driving, a disgusting dinner, two hours of cards played geologically slowly and with much discussion – Ernest and Daphne were well known for their habit, when a rubber had got away from them, of requiring their guests to lay all hands on the table for a post-mortem. How the sister-in-law who made her home there stood it, I cannot imagine, except to say that she was always drunk by tea. After the card lesson, nothing but a hard bed in a cold room, porridge of the stiffest order and the same hours of driving all over again. All to find out that Ina Wilson had been telling me the truth about her short trip out to the starlight that night and why I could not see her when I looked.

Yet it was not just the prospect of the Brodies that kept me sitting there on the gravel at Cullen instead of dragging myself off down the drive (although they helped). A far weightier anchor was the niggling little voice in my head telling me that it did not add up, and that even if it was a tiny question, invisible to the naked eye, and even if marching back in there and asking about it would destroy any shreds of the cloak of casual interest under which I had hoped to hide and would reveal my mission to
be
a mission, it would still be there like a pea under twenty feather beds every night, and that sooner or later I would be on the telephone anyway, shredding my casual cloak the finer.

Quite simply, if Ina Wilson, as Robin had just confirmed, really did have her head in her lap fighting faintness when I looked round, then she had put her head there before the scream, and that might have been because she knew the scream was coming, because she knew what was happening, because – taking the argument to its conclusion – she had somehow made it happen and was sickened by remembering it.

The sun had gone completely now and the house looked tired suddenly, the pink plaster cold and the windows dark and blank. I crossed the porch and opened the inner doors to the hall. (My return would be less peculiar, I thought, if I treated it as a second thought and did not summon a servant with the bell.) Almost at the same time, a door opposite me opened, spilling lamplight into the dimness. A tall figure stepped slowly into the square of light and stood there silhouetted, looking back at me.

‘Ah good,’ I said, ‘sorry to disturb you again, but there’s something troubling me.’

‘I’m sorry?’ came the voice, and I started. What could possibly have befallen Robin in the time it took me to go out to the drive and come back again that could have taken the drawl out of his voice and left that weariness in place of it? I moved forward.

‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got a bee in my bonnet for some reason.’

‘Who are you?’ the voice said.

I was only steps away from him now and yet still, as I gazed up at his face, I could not make sense of it. Not until I looked downwards and saw the cardigan jersey, the bagged corduroys and the carpet slippers, did I realise my blunder.

‘Lord Buckie?’

‘Who are
you
?’ he said again, and I could hear a very faint echo of his brother’s voice as his surprise gave way to a natural amusement.

‘I— Oh my goodness, I do apologise. Yes. My name is Gilver – Dandy … lion. I dropped in to see Robin and I just … I haven’t come for the silver. Don’t worry.’

‘Well, I’m afraid he has gone out,’ he said. ‘Might I relay a message from you?’

‘Not really,’ I said, feathers of panic begin to tickle at me. I did not want to have to tell this man about Anastasia’s death. ‘I could leave a note, perhaps. Will he be gone long?’ Not having heard a motor car, I suppose I imagined that he had taken a dog for a walk or something.

‘He could be.’ Lord Buckie – it was a struggle not to think of him as ‘the old man’ and yet I knew he was barely fifty – treated me to a considering look, deciding whether to go on. ‘I expect he has gone visiting. Of course, you are very welcome to wait.’ He bowed slightly and ushered me towards the open door behind him. I made a slight bow in return and trooped wordlessly to where he was pointing. It was only after I got there that I regretted it.

It was his library, and quite clearly his bolthole, one comfortable chair drawn up by the fire and a table littered with books, pipes and spectacle cases. There were not, as far as I could see, any of the expected accoutrements of serious illness, no bath chair or chaise, not even any medicine bottles or so much as a blanket, nothing but the thinness of his legs under their corduroy trousers and the bony chest above the cardigan buttons to speak of his frailty. His skin too, I saw as I came into the light, was stretched pale and papery over his cheekbones. Only in silhouette could he ever be mistaken for his brother, one of them as lithe as a green willow-wand and the other as dry and hollow as a reed. He settled back down into his chair and waved me into a seat on a hard sofa against the wall.

‘Now then,’ he said. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help?’

‘Quite sure,’ I said.

‘Then might I offer a little advice?’ he went on.

I nodded, rather puzzled.

‘I am very fond of my brother,’ he said, ‘but I have no illusions about him. If I were you, Miss Gilver, I should count myself lucky that he was not here today and I should give it up now. I mean no disrespect to you in saying so, my dear, quite the reverse and I hope I haven’t shocked you.’

He had, of course,
horrified
me and at the same time had flattered me more than I had ever been flattered in my life.

‘Lord Buckie, we seem to be at cross-purposes. I’m Mrs Gilver. From Gilverton.’

‘Hugh Gilver’s wife?’ said Lord Buckie. ‘Hugh Gilver’s wife, here to see Robin?’ Now I was in even greater danger of collapsing into giggles; of course, he must have some experience of the odd Mrs coming mooning around after Robin as well as the hopeful Misses, tails wagging and hearts about to break.

‘I’m on my way to Cairnbulg,’ I said, and I had never been more grateful to know the stainless Brodies, all but pasteurised in their rectitude. ‘I just dropped in in passing, truly, and am in no need of your protection.’

At last, the earnest look fell away from him and he sat back and gave a short laugh.

‘But why did you drop in to see Robin alone and not me too?’ he said. ‘I’m always happy to have some company. Really, you can hardly blame me for thinking it a tryst.’

‘I had heard you were ill,’ I said. ‘I had got the idea that you were …’

‘At death’s door?’ said Lord Buckie, baldly. ‘Or halfway up the drive? Unfortunately not.’

‘Hardly unfortunately,’ I said, very uncomfortable. ‘Thankfully, mercifully.’ I should have kept quiet, for the discomfort only grew.

‘Oh no, you mustn’t say that, my dear,’ he said. ‘Whatever fleeting moment of sorrow you would feel to read over breakfast one morning that Old Buckie had popped off at last, it cannot count against my claims.’ I frowned and shook my head slightly, not following him. ‘My life has long been a burden to me,’ he explained. ‘Its loss would be a release.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, cursing myself for being drawn into this. No wonder he did not get many visitors if this was how he entertained them.

‘Please don’t be,’ he replied, and went on: ‘Eternal rest and an end to cares. What reason is there to be sorry?’ Well, I thought, I was sorry I had come and sat down in this library for a start. With dismay, I realised that the question was not a rhetorical one; he was looking at me, expecting an answer.

‘You said you were fond of your brother,’ I blurted out. ‘And from hearing him speak I know how much he cares for you too. That’s something worth living for.’

‘I have lost more than a brother can ever make up for,’ he answered. ‘I wish I could believe that I shall see them all again – my housekeeper never tires of trying to convince me – but at least I shall stop missing them. I could give up twenty brothers – even twenty Robins – to stop missing them.’ At the close of this speech, quite the most doleful I think I had ever heard in the whole course of my life, he finally took pity on me and rallied a little. ‘But how cheering to hear that Robin speaks kindly of me in my absence. I never imagine the parties he attends to be places where relatives are asked after.’

‘It was not a typical gathering,’ I admitted. ‘But he did seem – and it was remarkable to me too – to be a very family-minded young man.’ It was with some surprise that I realised this was true: all of the poison regarding Robin’s cold-hearted desire for his inheritance had come from the gossip of others and the only words I had heard from the horse’s mouth spoke of warm feelings and a heart which could grieve with the best of them. ‘He does hide his finest qualities very skilfully, doesn’t he?’

‘Good God, no!’ said Lord Buckie, near laughter again. ‘That’s exactly how he does it, my dear. He doesn’t hide his tender heart. Not at all! He offers tantalising glimpses of it in between the roguery and every woman between twenty and fifty decides that she can save him.’

Not every woman, I thought to myself. Ina Wilson, for one, was having none of it.

‘But I love him dearly,’ Lord Buckie went on. ‘He has such claims on my heart that I forgive him anything.’

‘I have a brother myself,’ I said, ‘and a sister, and you make me ashamed, Lord Buckie, for I am not sure I would ever describe my own family feeling in quite that way.’

‘It’s more than family feeling,’ he replied. Then he gave me a shrewd look. ‘Forgive me, I can see how uncomfortable I’m making you.’ He paused while I mumbled a pointless denial. ‘But I rarely get the chance to speak of them …’ A pause and a sigh. ‘When my dear wife died’ – I could not help a sinking feeling, seeing that our excursion away from doom was over – ‘all but one of my children were already gone. And that one, my oldest, wasn’t even sick. She didn’t have it.’

‘I know,’ I said gently.

‘She drowned.’ He looked up at me. ‘And Robin almost drowned trying to save her. Did you know that?’ I shook my head. ‘I have never forgiven myself.’

‘For what?’ I asked him.

‘When her mother died, I meant to rouse her, to stop her sinking into the kind of grief I feared she was too young to bear, but instead I only added to it and …’

‘I am sure you could not have done that, Lord Buckie,’ I said.

‘I told her she was more than enough for me, that we would be everything to one another now. It must have seemed that I was asking her for strength she did not possess, that I was asking her not to mourn. So she went to the cliffs and threw herself into the sea.’

I gasped.

‘I – I – thought it was an accident,’ I said.

‘We managed to keep it very quiet,’ he said. ‘Or rather Robin managed. Out of kindness to me. And so I could forgive him pretty well anything. Even his afternoons of visiting.’

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘visiting! A young widow? I hope not the wife or daughter of one of your men.’ I was trying desperately to lighten the mood. ‘Very bad for the estate, that kind of thing.’

‘A retired piano teacher,’ said Lord Buckie, himself making a brave effort to sound cheerful. ‘But between you and me, my dear, she still sees one pupil. Robin is always to be found there whenever he’s feeling ruffled. She lives in the head groom’s cottage as was and pays her rent on time.’

‘A retired
piano
teacher?’ I was trying and failing to picture Robin Laurie drinking tea in a cottage with my first piano teacher, Miss Cribb – moon-faced Miss Cribb with her slightly crossed eyes and her bun so tightly scraped back. I always wondered that it had not managed to uncross them.

‘Well, my housekeeper maintains that she might well know how to
dance
on a piano but nothing more.’ He was almost animated as he spoke, and I considered, quietly to myself, the growing puzzle of Robin Laurie. A scamp? A blister? Could any man who lit his ailing brother’s final hours this way be all that bad? Could anyone who jumped into the sea to save his niece be a cad at heart? Could anyone who kept up something as cosy as this afternoon arrangement with the piano teacher really be the kind of wrecker who deserved all of Ina Wilson’s disdain?