Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses (33 page)

‘But?’

‘It turned out that what was wanted was about six weeks. Six weeks after Miss Fielding died, they were both handed their pay packets and told to leave.’

‘Odd.’

‘Miss Bell said she assumed Ivy Shanks was in a fluster about money – she and Miss Taylor were on salaries commensurate with their great learning – and they offered to take a kind of furlough or whatever you would call it, while Miss Shanks got herself sorted out. Miss Taylor even offered to be a sort of acting headmistress and do the accounting. But no – they were thanked kindly and shown the door.’

‘In the middle of term?’

‘It seems so.’

‘And they just left their budding scholars and university hopefuls in the lurch?’ I said. ‘They could at least have stayed on in the village and given some extra tuition.’

‘I never thought of that, and Miss Bell never mentioned any guilt about the girls, actually. That’s odd too. In fact, she went as far as to say that she and Taylor – that’s how she referred to them both: Taylor and Fielding, like the army! – anyway, she said that she and Taylor felt a measure of relief that they were no longer to be stuffing Newton’s apple and the House of Tudor into the heads of a lot of farmers’ daughters who forgot it all every day over tea.’

‘Academic snobs,’ I said. ‘Some of the St Columba’s girls are really quite bright indeed. Thank goodness, in a way, that I didn’t get a chance to ruin them.’

‘So I’d say that Miss Shanks made a blunder in offloading the two of them,’ Alec went on. ‘But it wasn’t the fevered and frantic business of running away and scrabbling for an agency stand-in that it’s since become.’

‘Odder than odd,’ I said.

‘Passing strange and far from wonderful,’ agreed Alec. ‘But here’s something Miss Bell did say that’s interesting, Dandy. When I told her about Miss Glennie – late of Balmoral, as you say – Miss Bell said something like “maybe Fielding’s ways had rubbed off on Shanks after all”.’

‘What did she mean? Did you ask?’

‘I did, but all she said was that they had never blamed Miss Fielding for wanting a nursing matron she knew right there on the spot but they had always thought it a great lapse of judgement to make Miss Shanks an equal partner.’

‘I agree,’ I said.

Alec crossed his eyes and blew a big breath out of his puffed cheeks.

‘The more I hear the less I know,’ he said. ‘Anyway, the point of tracking them down was to make sure they’re not No. 5 and I’ve done that.’

‘Have you? Absolutely? Can we be sure Miss Taylor didn’t come back from Greece and drown?’

‘Yes,’ Alec said. ‘Miss Taylor apparently is fair-haired and five-foot-three. So No. 5 remains a mystery. How did you get on with No. 3?’

I told him the brief facts: the proximity to the Major’s lodge and the boy being the right sort of age and class to have been Fleur’s lover, but I told him too of the complicating factor of Leigh Audubon, the dead fiancée.

‘But you think no one knew about the engagement until after the deaths?’ Alec said. ‘Well, then. The Audubons would be more than happy to have it put about that the girl was engaged to him, considering she was alone with him in a car at after midnight, especially if they weren’t heading towards her home. And you say it wasn’t Charles Leigh’s Bugatti? And presumably it wasn’t Miss Audubon’s either, or they’d have said so. If it turned out that this car belonged to someone who can connect them with Fleur . . . or if Fleur was at the party . . .’

‘Let’s hope Mamma-dearest is in the mood to talk,’ I said.

‘You sound very scathing when you call her that,’ Alec said.

‘I don’t mean to,’ I replied. ‘It’s what the girls always called her. Maybe I’m getting cynical about them all and a note is creeping in.’

The steward came along just then, asking us if we would like the curtains drawn over since we were on the west side of the carriage and whether I would care for a foot-warmer and what we would each like by way of a drink before dinner?

‘We should do more of this, Dan,’ said Alec when the man had gone to fetch a whisky for Alec and a sherry for me. ‘Beats rocketing around in that little Cowley.’

‘Wait until we’ve got to Taunton,’ I said. ‘See if you still think so. One always forgets that the West Country isn’t just round the corner from London.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Alec. ‘I spent my childhood on the Cornwall sleeper getting to school and back again. It holds no secrets from me.’

He was, however, looking shattered and grey (as one always does after a night on a train) rather than pink and refreshed (the way the people look on the railway posters) when we arrived, with the milk, in Somerset the next morning. I had already had more than enough by King’s Cross and would have welcomed a night in an hotel, but there was no stopping Alec: he had bundled me into a taxi and we were at Paddington before I could object, then there were two good first-class sleeper tickets still available, which made it seem meant, and now here we were, flat of hair and gritty of eye, standing in the yellow mist of an early summer morning, wondering how best to get to Pereford and beard Mamma-dearest in her den.

‘Better to hire a motorcar here,’ I said, ‘than get to the nearest station and then find out they haven’t got one.’

‘We’re not in Scotland now, Dandy,’ Alec said. ‘We’re back in the civilised world. Of course they will.’ It should have been touching to see how he drew down deep lungfuls of the air, as though it were his first proper breath since last he was this near home, but after my short and dreadful night’s sleep it was only irritating and I took a mean pleasure in hearing the porter tell him that there were no trains north for a good hour or more and Sir would be better in a motorcar if there were any kind of hurry about it.

‘Marvellous,’ said Alec. ‘Just the kind of cheerful helpfulness I’ve been missing. Not like that old misery on the Portpatrick dog-cart, eh?’

I decided not to tell him that a porter at Stranraer carried the whole timetable of his beloved railway in his head, but only nodded and followed him meekly to the hiring garage to let him pick.

Pereford. I had expected to find it changed; smaller-seeming, perhaps, or even run to seed in some way. I had fully anticipated that I would be forced to smile at my eighteen-year-old self and her besottedness with the place as the humdrum reality quenched the golden remembering. So when we turned off the Dunster road and swept between the gateposts, I steeled myself for disappointment. The avenue was the same, the branches just meeting over our heads and the new leaves exactly the yellow-green of the shoemakers’ elves’ little caps in the book I had read to Fleur at bedtime.

‘It’s just round this corner,’ I said to Alec and then as we turned it I gave a cry.

The roses were blooming, tumbling and scrambling all over the pillars of the verandah, and the path was carpeted with their petals. The lawns, their nap like velvet, rolled away to the edge of the trees and the marks from the gardener’s broom brushing off the dew could be seen in swathes. The pink-painted stone of the house was, as it had always been in early-morning sun, like the inside cheek of a seashell, blushed with peach; and at the windows, already open for the day, cream linen billowed out like the train of a wedding gown so that it seemed the house was waving a welcome at us as we slowed and stopped at the front door.

Our pull of the bell was answered by an elderly and rather stooping butler, who smiled with kindly enquiry.

‘We’ve come to see Mrs Lipscott, with apologies for the hour,’ I said. ‘But if you tell her it’s Mrs Gilver – I’m an old family friend.’

‘Of course you are, Mrs Gilver,’ said the butler. ‘Or Miss Leston, as you’ll always be to me.’ I squinted at him, felt the flicker of recognition and quarried deep and long for his name.

‘Higson?’ I said, at last.

‘Hinckley, madam,’ he replied, ‘but well done after all these years for getting that close! So Mrs Gilver and who shall I say, sir?’

‘Mr Osborne,’ said Alec.

‘Of Dorset?’ said Hinckley.

‘Bill Osborne is my brother,’ Alec said, visibly impressed.

‘If you would care to come into the morning room,’ Hinckley said, ‘I’ll tell Mrs Lipscott you are here.’

We followed him across the marble of the hall where more of the pink and yellow roses from outside were gathered together in bowls and in pots on pillars. Their scent – warmed by the light from the cupola floors above – was as sweet as honeysuckle already. I gazed about myself with growing rapture. There was the Fragonard (disputed) which we had all loved with girlish devotion. There was the Staffordshire pig with her ten little pink piglets which stood on the round table in the middle of the hall and under which we used to tuck the edges of notes to stop them blowing away. There were the three sketches of the house done by the three daughters the summer before I came to stay and framed as a triptych to stand on top of the library door.

Alec was in the morning room and had turned to face me.

‘You have a very misty look on your face, Dandy,’ he said.

‘The chairs!’ I cried. ‘The same chairs!’ I rushed over to the ring of armchairs grouped around the fireplace – four of them – where Lilah, Mamma-dearest, Pearl and I would sit, with Fleur on someone’s lap and Aurora, as she preferred it, sprawled on the rug waiting for the carriage to be brought when we were going out for the day.

‘Why shouldn’t they have kept their chairs?’ said Alec. ‘Do you think Mrs Lipscott will receive us or just send a response? I don’t fancy having to get firm with that sweet old butler.’

‘Oh, she’ll come,’ I said. ‘Of course, she won’t be up yet. If it were just me I daresay I’d be taken to her bedroom and have to sit amongst her letters and kittens the same as ever, but I suppose she’ll put on a dressing gown and come downstairs since it’s you too, darling. Alec?’

He was standing with his back to me over by a side-table.

‘Alec?’ I said again.

He turned and I saw that he was holding a photograph frame in his hands. He held it out towards me and I walked over. It was Fleur, grown-up but not yet grown sombre. She was standing with her foot up on the running board of a motorcar and her head flung back, laughing. Her hair was short already and had ruffled up in the breeze so that it was a blur around her.

‘I’d guess that would be about 1918 or so,’ I said. ‘Before.’

‘Oh, it’s certainly before,’ Alec said. ‘Look at the car, Dandy.’ I looked but shook my head. ‘It’s a Bugatti,’ he told me and our eyes met. He was breathing as though he had been running. Perhaps, like me, he had not really believed any of it until now.

‘Dandy?’ said a voice behind us. We turned and I could not help going over with both hands out to clasp those of the woman who had just entered the room. Mamma-dearest was probably older-looking to anyone who could look with an objective eye, but all I saw was the same mass of hair held up in a kind of hammock of net for sleeping, and the same pink flannel nightgown and pink silk dressing gown (cosy for bed and just a hint of decency in case I’m out in the garden and the vicar calls, she always used to say). ‘Dandy, my dearest darling.’ She wrapped me in a hug, smelling of lily-of-the-valley scent and mint tooth-powder. ‘What on earth brings you down here?’ Then she held me at arm’s length and beamed at me. I simply could not bring myself to say any of the things I should have said. Nor could I bear to soften her up with small talk and family news then turn the conversation later. I simply gave a dumb look at Alec.

He walked over and put the photograph between us, right under Mamma-dearest’s nose.

‘We’re here to talk about Charles Leigh,’ he said.

Any hope I had held that we were wrong drained out of me, just as the blood drained out of Mamma-dearest’s plump cheeks.

‘But . . . Charles was nine years ago,’ she said. All the colour was gone from her voice too and she spoke in a bleak near-whisper.

‘And Elf was eight years ago,’ said Alec. Mamma-dearest squeezed her eyes tight shut.

‘And – I’m so sorry,’ I added, ‘but someone else died last week and Fleur . . .’

‘Has she gone off the rails again?’ said Mrs Lipscott, opening her eyes. ‘Do the girls know? They haven’t told me.’

‘They wanted to spare you,’ I said.

‘Did they send you to tell me?’ she asked. I started to answer no but Alec cut me off.

‘What happened with Charles Leigh, Mrs Lipscott?’ he said, shaking the photograph a little to make her look.

‘She bought it with her own money,’ said Mamma-dearest, hugging herself, putting her hands right up inside her nightgown sleeves. ‘On her eighteenth birthday when she came into what the Major had settled on her. I knew it was too young to settle money on them, but of course . . . And you can see how she loved it, can’t you?’

‘And the crash itself?’ I said. ‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, miserably. ‘No one knows except Fleur.’

‘Tell us what you do know,’ I said gently. ‘Perhaps we can piece it together from there.’ She walked slowly over to one of the armchairs and dropped down into it. We followed her.

‘Well, after . . .’ she began, and then she cleared her throat and started again. ‘At the age of about seventeen, of course, Fleur took a great shine to the lodge. Ironic is the word, I think.’

‘Ironic how?’ I asked. Mrs Lipscott opened her eyes very wide in an innocent way and for the first time I did see that she was older now.

‘Oh, you know,’ she said. ‘It was as unlike Pereford as chalk and cheese and it was the Major’s house and Fleur never even met the Major.’ She turned to Alec. ‘My husband died in Africa when Florrie was a little baby,’ she said.

‘So she was at the lodge when Charles Leigh died,’ Alec said.

‘Why do you want to know all this?’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘And Dandy, why do
you
?’

‘Was she at the party with them?’ Alec said and I found myself wondering if he was always this brusque, if I was too when it was a stranger I was grilling, whether I only saw it now because Mamma-dearest awoke every tender feeling in me and made me see Alec’s manner in a new and unflattering light. It could not be denied, however, that it was working.

‘Yes, she was at that wretched party,’ Mrs Lipscott said. ‘The party Charles and Leigh went racing away from. You see, the thing about the lodge was that she could get up to all sorts of mischief unwitnessed; it was such a long way for us – the girls and me – to haul ourselves up there. Even if we heard tell of her escapades, which usually we didn’t. It’s quite out on its own.’