After the Armistice Ball (36 page)

‘I can offer you an arm,’ he said to Daisy, but his voice was strained, and even as he spoke he braced his legs – I am no sylph, even had he not been shaking with exhaustion – and so Daisy assured him that she was fine.

At the head of the stairs he turned and began to shuffle down awkwardly sideways, almost pressing me against the banisters.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Let me see her.’ So he faced around the way he was going again and down we went towards Lena.

One of her hands was hooked through the banister rail by a snapped wrist and her head lay crushed against her shoulder. Her face was hidden, only the nape of her neck showing. I could see pins sticking out from under her old-fashioned bun, plain metal pins never meant to be seen, and I was surprised by the skin on her neck, soft and plumply crumpled, with some sparse downy hair, too short for the hairpins, which had sprung into curls.

Daisy stopped as she drew level and crouched down to look at her.

‘Are you sure?’ she said.

‘Absolutely,’ said Alec. ‘We must go and find a telephone and ring the police. I’ll put Dandy in the car and come back for you.’

‘We can’t just leave her here alone,’ said Daisy. ‘Take Dandy to a doctor, Alec darling, and telephone from there. I shall wait here and keep watch. Yes, yes, I promise not to touch anything. But we can’t leave her alone.’

I should have offered to stay. I did not know then that my ankle was broken, and Daisy had had it much worse than me, tied up and thinking she was going to be hurt. I should have insisted that I stay with Lena’s body. Why did I not? Simple: I was scared. I still did not feel safe. But safe from what? From the horror of what we thought she had done? That was what I told myself. That was how I explained why I still felt lost and how I made sense of the shifting inside me, slow but relentless, like sand on the ocean floor.

Chapter Nineteen

‘And what was the candlestick doing on the stairs?’ asked Inspector MacAlpine, yet again. Even the constable in the corner, taking laborious notes of my answers, looked up with an exasperated sigh and flicked back in his pad to read what I had said last time.

‘I put it down because my ankle made it difficult to climb the stairs without holding on,’ I said.

‘And you picked it up because . . .?’

‘We didn’t know who was there or what to expect. For all we knew there was a gang of thugs around every corner.’

‘And you were there because . . .?’

‘We were concerned about Mrs Esslemont. When we found out she had agreed to meet Mrs Duffy in a deserted house we thought undue pressure might be brought to bear. As it was. I told you, when we arrived Mrs Esslemont was tied to a chair.’

‘And you broke your ankle . . .?’

‘I cracked a small bone in it getting into the car. I slipped on the gravel. But I didn’t even notice until I was halfway up the stairs.’

‘Didn’t notice a broken ankle,’ said the inspector blandly but quite firmly.

‘Chipped,’ I said, just as firmly. ‘A very small bone.’ It was too exasperating the way he kept worrying over the one thing that was absolutely true while missing the great gaping holes, but I could hardly point that out.

‘And what happened next, Mrs Gilver?’

The constable sighed yet more audibly, loud enough for his superior officer to throw him a glance from the corner of his eye. Hugh, stolid and dumbstruck beside me, followed the glance and blinked at the sight of the uniform as he had every time he had looked at every uniform in the last week. He was there ostensibly to be my supporter and protector but he looked so poleaxed that, if anything, I tried not to speak too bluntly for fear of upsetting him.

‘We found Mrs Esslemont in the ballroom and untied her and Mrs Duffy ran away, tripped on the candlestick and fell down the stairs.’ The servants’ passage, its doorway well concealed in the panelling, had not been found in the police examination of the scene and so the scattered contents of the tray had escaped the need for explanation.

One thing should be made quite plain: Alec and I had not cooked anything up on that first journey in search of a doctor and a telephone. It just so happened that in answering the questions put to us, in separate rooms, by a startled sergeant in Alec’s case and a bewildered constable in mine, we did not chance to mention Cara. I was horribly aware even then, of course, that while my interrogator might think he was being so rigorous as to be forced to offer two apologies for every one question, I knew that he was merely nibbling around edges of what would choke him if he were to take a proper bite.

I think it was the fact of Daisy that allowed us, in conscience, just to answer each question as it came and resist pouring out the whole story. We did not see Daisy before her first interview, in her hospital bed in a private room with what she reported to be a very dashing Chief Superintendent (Daisy always does land on her feet), and she might easily have reported word-for-word everything that passed between Lena and me. At that point I should have resigned myself to telling all to Inspector MacAlpine and should have excused myself for not having done so before by pointing out truthfully that I had answered every question asked. That was the other point which helped Alec and me repress any guilt: we managed interview after interview, day after day, not to lie. The Silas, Daisy and the diamonds end of the affair held together so well on its own, you see, that nothing alerted the policemen to something’s being hidden and Daisy, although quite without any natural reticence, presumably still had an eye on Silas’s flotation and wanted to side-step as much scandal as she could. I expect that is how it was, although we have never spoken of it.

And so, the records show, no crime was committed. At least not by anyone in a position to be brought to book for it. Lena’s death was found to have been an accident, as indeed it was. As for her attempt at extortion, even had Silas and Daisy been minded to drag it all out, the general assumption that she had planned it all alone meant that her death put an end to any thoughts of redress. And as Lena herself had pointed out, since one cannot steal what is already one’s possession, the theft of the Duffy diamonds turned out not to be a theft at all, but only one of many instances that year of an old family attempting to shed some of its assets in unsettled times.

If somewhere in a police station in Edinburgh an officer scratched his head and wondered whether the name of the poor lady who fell down the stairs in a country house in Perthshire was not the same name that had been shouted down the telephone to him by some madman gibbering about a murder in Drummond Place, then we can be sure that he did no more than scratch his head before he put it out of his mind.

Hugh remained as perplexed as ever about how I had got myself mixed up in it all. Yet more evidence of my silliness, I expect he thought,
if
he thought. Silas had to be told everything, of course, and when my cheque came it bore his signature. Furthermore, Daisy, who answered the telephone when I rang to protest about the shameful enormity of the sum, said that was Silas’s doing too and if I felt like talking to a brick wall she would call him to the telephone, but really darling, there was no point, as he was determined to reward me for saving her life and if one looked at it that way, wasn’t it rather insultingly stingy.

‘You sound cross,’ I said, wondering whether I shouldn’t repay something after all, if it was causing trouble between them.

‘As well I might,’ Daisy said. ‘Not only have I saved our flotation – through your genius, darling, of course – but I have almost been killed too and one would think Silas owed me some extravagant gift or at least that I should have my every heart’s desire for a while. As it turns out, however, it’s quite the reverse. I am to present him with yet another son in the spring. Don’t laugh, Dandy, it’s too bad. Relief and too much champagne, you see. Oh well, I suppose it might be a daughter.’ She sobered, with a sigh. ‘Speaking of daughters,’ she said but stopped, and so when the girl cut in to tell us our time was up there was silence on the line and we felt too foolish to ask for another three minutes.

No sooner had I hung up the earpiece before the telephone rang again and the same aggrieved voice – I should like to box that girl’s ears – told me I had another caller. It was Alec.

‘I’m in Edinburgh,’ he said. He had gone home to Dorset, I think to quiet his mother (understandably rattled by the news of yet another death in the family he had been to join). ‘But I’m just about to start for Dunelgar to meet Gregory. Can I pick you up on the way?’

‘Have you decided to tell him more?’ I asked. ‘Have you changed your mind?’

‘I’ve been summoned,’ said Alec. ‘And I can’t make
up
my mind, much less make it up and then change it. I’ll see what he has to say, but I need an ally.’

I had to agree, of course, but I felt very little enthusiasm for the visit because I had been trying my best to keep Gregory Duffy out of my thoughts. The daughter who had so clearly been his favourite was dead, his wife was dead, and as for his other daughter, the mystifyingly dispreferred Clemence – and it really did mystify me any time I considered it – his current treatment of her was a puzzle I could not begin to solve.

I had always been more taken with Cara myself and I expect the same was true of most people who knew them both. There had been something so fresh and sweet about her little monkey face that had to be found charming and Clemence’s beautiful mask and cold elegance could not compete. I should have thought, however, that a parent could love them both and love their difference more than any sameness. But Clemence was off to Canada after all. I had learned this from Mary, who had thrown up the area window and called to me as I descended the steps of the Drummond Place house after leaving a card of condolence on the day of Lena’s funeral.

‘I couldn’t think for the life of me what the noise was,’ she said, looking more than ever like Mrs Tiggywinkle as she leaned out over the sill above a frothing tub of washing. ‘I thought wee boys were whacking the railings.’ Sure enough, the best that could be said about the sound of the wooden clog strapped on to my plaster, the steel tip of my cane and my one proper shoe was that it was percussive. Grant was all for keeping me in the house for six weeks, such pain did it give her to see an outfit of hers wrecked by the white lump sticking out from the bottom of my skirt.

‘How are things?’ I called down to Mary, with a glance up and down the pavement to check that I was unobserved. (Drysdale, agog at the wheel of the motor car, would have to make of it what he would.)

‘An earthquake would be peace perfect peace compared to this place,’ she said. ‘Miss Clemence left from Leith two nights ago, gone to meet the liner at Gibraltar. She didn’t even stay for her mother’s funeral and if you know why, madam, don’t tell me. The less I know about any of this the better. I’m off at the start of the week. Down the other end of the street there, to a lawyer and his wife and three wee ones and another one coming, and I’ll be well shut of it.’ She looked over her shoulder as if at a sudden noise and then with a wiggle of her eyebrows she thumped the window down and was gone.

So Clemence was already started on her long journey and would miss her mother’s funeral. I doubted if even Mr Duffy would go and there was something dreadful, I thought, about a funeral with only the minister and the other officials, even for Lena. I only thought that for a moment, mind you, before I shook myself with disgust at my mawkishness. That kind of flabby sentiment – thinking that there is good in everyone – is responsible for a great deal of harm.

Why then, I wondered, after Alec’s telephone call, was I trembling at the thought of telling Mr Duffy the truth?

Had I seen him at any time in the weeks since Lena’s death, I should have had a convenient answer. No one with an ounce of compassion could have piled more pain on to the shrunken shoulders of the old man who opened the door to Alec and me later that day. I gasped at the sight of him, and instinctively went forward to take his cold, papery hands in my own. He squeezed them and gave a nod to Alec.

‘Osborne,’ he said, and I was relieved to hear some of his old self in the curt, barely polite, masculine greeting.

The shutters were open today, but otherwise the hall looked as it had the last time, with the rug still rolled and the furniture still sheeted. He led us to the back of the house, and I was glad not to have to climb the stairs with my cane, and even gladder not to have to pass the exact spot. We went through the baize door to the servants’ quarters and I suddenly knew where we were going. I did not follow them up the narrow stairs, but waited in the ground floor passageway resting my foot, listening to them walk along the stone flags above my head and then stop. They stood still for five minutes and more, perhaps talking although I could not hear their voices, and then they moved again, slowly, back to the head of the stairs and down to join me.

‘You look cold, my dear,’ said Mr Duffy. ‘Come out and sit in the orangery and we shall have some whisky. I’m afraid I can’t rise to tea.’ He smiled, holding out his arm, and led us through another maze of passages then out into the light of a conservatory, empty of anything but a few tough-looking palms. It was dusty and neglected, but comfortable in the warmth of the afternoon sunlight.

‘What made you go along that passage, sir?’ said Alec, once he had fussed me into a comfortable chair and lifted my legs on to another. Mr Duffy handed me a beautiful old glass one-third full of whisky and sat down with his own, gesturing Alec to go and fetch one from the decanter.

‘I was searching the house,’ he said, ‘looking for the diamonds.’ Alec looked around, startled.

‘And did you find them?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Duffy, taking an appreciative though dainty sip, an old man kind of sip, from his tumbler. ‘I knew she wouldn’t have sold them. She loved them, you know. Really loved them. The Duffy diamonds. I think they were the only reason she married me.’

I took a gulp from my glass. I abhor whisky, and can usually only choke it down with a great deal of very cold water. In fact, I think it’s best to do what the Americans do – ice, lemon and soda – but Hugh will not hear of it. I shuddered as it spread through me, the liquid setting me on fire all the way to my stomach and the fumes rising up and coming out of my nose. I can well believe cars can go for miles on the stuff if the petrol runs out.