Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses (26 page)

‘And?’

‘And she was pretty forthcoming about life in Portpatrick, eventually,’ he said. ‘Oh, at first she tried to make out she had resigned, only she wouldn’t say over what, or why she had left in the middle of term or what possessed her to give up the fresh sea breezes for this moor and the hacking cough she has had since she got here. Eventually, though, as I say, she broke down – a chest infection is wonderfully weakening to the spirit – and vouchsafed to me that she had been sacked. Her eyes watered as she told me and I don’t think it was just from coughing.’

‘You are a meanie, Alec,’ I said. ‘You might have taken the poor woman to a tea shop if they wouldn’t let you inside the school.’

‘Tea shop?’ he cried. ‘Dandy, I don’t think you quite appreciate the scope of this moor. You might as well say I should have taken her to a bull fight or a cancan show. The North York Moor makes Perthshire look like Biarritz!’

‘All right, all right,’ I said. ‘She was sacked. Why?’

‘
I’m
still shivering a little,’ Alec said, then at last he resumed the tale. ‘She didn’t know why. And I have to say I believe her. She was still very hurt and completely bewildered. She said she had known Miss Fielding from some place they had both worked at before and that Miss Fielding had written to ask her to join the staff of St Columba’s while it was still at the planning stage. All was well for five years or so and then Miss Fielding died. Before she was cold in her grave, Miss Blair said, Old Hammy Shanks had sacked her. Just told her her services were no longer required and could she push her key through the letter box as she was leaving. Along with a Miss Spittal who taught riding on a monthly contract, Miss Mount the swimming instructress who used to travel in from Stranraer in the summer term and a pair of sisters from Portpatrick village who took the little ones for ballet and taught the big ones a spot of waltz and rumba.’

‘And Miss Taylor and Miss Bell?’ I said.

‘They were still in post when she left,’ said Alec. ‘And since – quite understandably – she didn’t keep up a correspondence with a place which had used her so ill, she doesn’t know what became of them afterwards.’

‘And you think she’s being quite honest, you said?’

‘Oh yes indeed. She’s horrified by having been sacked, Dandy. A spotless record up until that point, apparently, and now she feels all tarnished and sullied and doesn’t want to make friends so that she never has to tell anyone. I felt quite sorry for her, in spite of everything.’

‘What everything?’

‘Oh, you know,’ said Alec. ‘Cricket! And you should have
seen
the creature.’

‘Poor woman,’ I said. ‘We can’t all be . . . bathing beauties.’

‘Bathing . . .?’ said. Alec, laughing to mock me, but only a little. ‘The very thought of Miss Blair in a bathing suit!’

‘Speaking of bathing, though,’ I said. ‘It seems odd that a school would sack its swimming instructress and then build a new pool.’

‘Didn’t you say it was endowed or donated or whatever?’

‘But I think the parents just stump up the cash, don’t they? I don’t speak from experience, obviously. Doesn’t the school choose what to lash it out on?’

‘Anyway,’ said Alec, ‘so much for Miss Blair, alive and kicking and sacked in a very peremptory way in February of 1926.
Not
one of the four bodies, which four murders would have brought into play.’

‘Speaking of which,’ I said.

‘Ah yes, indeed,’ said Alec. ‘Speaking of which. Well, I left The Bridge House and shivered and shook in my rented motorcar all twenty godforsaken miles, reaching Goatland Priory just in time for drinks. And this time, I’m glad to say, I got one. They must be pretty desperate for visitors up here – welcomed me with open arms and barely a thought of who I was and why I had come here.’

‘Here?’ I said. ‘You’re still there?’

‘I am,’ said Alec. ‘Sitting in a lovely warm bedroom in front of a roaring apple-wood fire with an enormous brandy and a tummy full of mutton. I like Forrester, I must say.’

‘And was he as forthcoming with stories as he is with meat and drink?’ I said.

‘Not exactly,’ said Alec. ‘I’ve had to tell rather a lot of whoppers, in fact. So I’m going to make the most of my comfortable night, because once I go and they get a chance to discuss me with mutual acquaintances they’re never going to let me darken their door again.’

‘Go on,’ I said. We had a slight hiatus while the exchange confirmed another three minutes and then Alec resumed.

‘Well, I told them who I was, naturally. Thankfully Aurora wasn’t around at this point, just Forrester himself, his mother and an aunt who it turns out is a closer relation to the departed Elf than this branch – spot of luck, I thought. Anyway, we managed to find some names to fling back and forth – I was at school with the son of another aunt and one of this aunt’s husband’s sister’s children is married to a girl who was a bridesmaid at a wedding in Hampshire where I was a pageboy.’

‘God Almighty,’ I said.

‘I know, but it helped in the end to have them think they knew me. And yet the connection was so slight that I felt unencumbered when it came to concocting my history. I said I’d been visiting my daughter at The Bridge House – cue lots of chatter about what sort of place it was and I came out with my sorry little story that its chief attraction for Belinda, that’s my daughter, was that it was a long way from Dorset and a very long way from the sea. I said she had got a sort of a phobia for the sea since her mother drowned.’

‘Oh, Alec!’

‘And so they asked, as you would, whether it was a boating accident and I mumbled a bit about my wife always having been very unhappy and something about a brother lost in battle and a baby son who only lived a—’

‘Oh,
Alec
!’

‘And Forrester himself, as you can well imagine, couldn’t get out of the room fast enough. So he popped off to his office or somewhere and that was my cue to rouse myself from my pit of gloom and apologise with much hand-wringing about the unburdening. Couldn’t account for it, no idea why I suddenly let go in a rush. All that. And it was at that point that Mrs Forrester and Aunt Nadine – Mrs Walters – came over all maternal and rushed to assure me that these thing happen in the best of families – i.e. their own – and that’s when they told me about Elf.’

‘Where did you get the nerve?’ I asked him. ‘You just rolled up at the house, dropped into an armchair and started spouting about suicide!’

‘Hardly,’ said Alec. ‘I emptied my petrol tank out onto the moor and plodded up the drive with a five gallon can. And I put in a good two hours of work with the women talking about the school – very careful groundwork: you’d have marvelled at me.’

‘Oh, you can always get women talking about schools,’ I said. ‘It’s just like servants.’

‘The poor widower Osborne has had his troubles there, too,’ said Alec. ‘I really set to and wooed them. By the time they were telling me about Elf we were old friends, the three of us.’

‘And what
about
Elf?’

‘Yes, well, it was drowning with him too, if you remember.’

‘Vaguely,’ I said. ‘Now that you remind me.’

‘Off a cliff, on the coast, by Pereford. He had gone for a walk and I’ll give you one guess who with.’

‘No!’

‘Oh yes. They had been spending a great deal of time together that summer, lots of walking and rowing about in a little boat and there might even have been some poetry.’

‘Written?’

‘Not as bad as all that, I don’t think,’ Alec said. ‘Read out, though, in the rowing boat.’

‘Dear me.’

‘And so Elf’s mother – Mrs Franklin—’

‘Marigold,’ I said. ‘For her sins. I always felt a kinship.’

‘Anyway, Marigold did some Lady Bracknelling about, seeing what she thought of Fleur as a daughter-in-law. She didn’t go as far as to ban the nuptials, but she wasn’t too keen.’

‘Why not?

‘Just wait, Dandy,’ said Alec.

‘I know Fleur had a wildish spell after the war although I don’t know the details. But there were no babies and nothing in the papers and she had
such
a lot of money.’

‘All will be revealed,’ Alec said. ‘So this day Fleur came back to the house at Pereford without Elf and looking very white and strained and collapsed in a heap on the hall carpet.’

‘Marble,’ I said. ‘The carpets were rolled up and stored in the summertime.’

‘Poor girl, then,’ said Alec. ‘Anyway, as she was coming to, she said quite plainly in the hearing of Marigold Franklin, as well as Fleur’s own mother and sisters, that she had told Edward again and again that she wouldn’t marry him and that he just wouldn’t take no for an answer. And she said, “I’m so sorry,” and fluttered her eyes and that was it for four days.’

‘That was what?’

‘Catatonic shock, the doctors said. By the time she came round the second time Elf’s body had washed up and the inquest had been ordered and Fleur claimed she couldn’t remember a thing. Couldn’t remember the walk or coming back to the house and saying what she had. She stuck to that story like glue and wouldn’t budge. Her mother and sisters seemed to believe it and they closed ranks and wouldn’t let anyone – not Marigold, not Elf’s father, and certainly not the police – talk to her. They bundled her off to a nursing home and the Franklins seem to have taken the view that nothing would bring him back and that since the two families were already connected through Aurora and Drew (and their baby son) any scandal would end up tainting the whole lot of them, so they went along with the theory of an accident. Witnessed by Fleur, who was Elf’s betrothed and who had suffered some kind of hysterical amnesia from the shock of it.’

‘Golly,’ I said. ‘They really just told you all this?’

‘I told them my daughter witnessed my wife’s suicide and that I was a lonely widower despairing of an end to my solitude with this millstone of tragedy and shame around my neck. And I think there are a few Franklin nieces who’re in their thirties and looking set to wither on the vine.’

‘Alec, you do say the most hideous things sometimes.’

‘Here in Yorkshire,’ Alec said, ‘we call a spade a spade. And I’m a bit drunk too, I think. Anyway, I’m sure Aurora hasn’t told anyone in the household about the new chapter of scandal with Fleur. The ladies were speaking as though of ancient history.’

‘And where is Aurora?’ I said. ‘Has she dashed off to be with Fleur somewhere?’

‘Oh no, she’s here,’ Alec said. ‘She appeared for dinner. A slightly sticky moment when she heard my name and asked me if I was the Mr Osborne from Perthshire. I did a marvellous job of looking like someone who’d never heard of the place and then her own mother chimed in with ‘No, dear: Dorset’ and the moment passed. She’s not the shiniest button in the box, as you said yourself, and so she was quite placated with the story of my daughter at school nearby and seemed to settle on the idea that I’ve been here a lot and we might have run into one another at things with ponies. Her daughters, apparently, spend a great deal of time walloping around the heath on horseback and they meet the Bridge House girls all the time.’

‘Right.’ I was thinking back over all that he had told me. ‘All has not been revealed, though,’ I said at last. ‘Why did Marigold Franklin not want Fleur as a daughter-in-law when she looked into things, Bracknell-style? As you say, the two families were already connected.’

‘Because,’ said Alec and his voice had a drum roll in it, ‘simply because Fleur had been secretly engaged once before.’

‘So what?’

‘And the reason she hadn’t married – or even got as far as the engagement being announced – was that her then lover died before the wedding. In other words, he was No. 3.’

He waited.

‘Dan? Are you still there?’

‘I am,’ I said. ‘Too stunned to speak. I’ve never heard any of this.’

‘It was pretty successfully hushed up by the Lipscotts,’ Alec said. ‘But the Forrester-Franklin contingent – being in the family, as it were – were able to find out all about it. It happened in 1919. A car crash this time, although no one saw it happen. Fleur walked away from it and the fiancé was burned to a crisp.’

‘I can’t believe it.’

‘After which Fleur spent the late winter and spring in the usual nursing home and had only just got back to Pereford from
that
rest cure when the Franklins arrived for their ill-fated visit.’

‘And Fenella and Marigold just told you all this?’

‘Well, Marigold is a born gossip and she’s quite removed from the scandal really. Only a nephew married to a sister of the wicked girl.’

‘And Fenella?’

‘She’s getting on in years,’ Alec said.

‘What does that mean?’ I asked him, sincerely puzzled.

Alec cleared his throat.

‘It means I’m not entirely sure she understood just who I was,’ he said. ‘In fact, I rather think she took me for her late husband.’

‘Oh, Alec,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me you really took advantage of a poor old lady wandered out of her wits! Goodness, it must have been years since I saw Fenella Forrester – it’s hard to imagine.’

‘It did her no harm,’ said Alec. ‘She was glad to see him, if anything; must have been a love match. And anyway in this case the ends more than justify the means. Three of them now, Dandy. The lover of 1919 makes three.’

‘And how will you set about learning any more of him?’ I said. ‘Can you winkle it out of the ladies? Is there anything that could get you started on a hunt through the newspapers? How many fatal car crashes can there have been in that year? If you were to restrict yourself to Dorset and London.’

‘Sh!’ said Alec. ‘Someone’s coming.’

I pressed the earpiece so hard against my head that my ear smarted from the pressure and I was rewarded with the sound, coming down the line, of a door being wrenched open and an angry voice, almost shouting.

‘Alec Osborne!’ the voice said. ‘Alexander Osborne! Yes, from Dorset, granted. But not any more. And you just marched in here and tricked my poor mother-in-law like a common con artist from the gutter.’

‘Is that Aurora?’ I asked, but Alec did not answer.

‘Mrs Forrester,’ he said and I had to strain very hard since he was no longer speaking towards the instrument. ‘What do you know about the young man of your sister’s who died in 1919? Not the one who died in 1920, you understand. The first one.’