Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses (36 page)

What had I seen and forgotten at St Columba’s? What had struck me in the subconscious when I was thinking of other things and was now lurking unobtainable in some dusty corner of my brain?

I picked up my pencil again and began a list of oddities, hoping that one of them would snag the memory and bring it to the surface again.

Grace, bathing pool, cocoa, late start, supper in dorms, loafing around in gardens, teachers making own beds
. In fact, teachers appearing to work a great deal harder than any of the girls, as far as I could see.

‘Good grief, Dandy,’ Alec said. ‘Do you know you’re huffing and puffing like a hippo in a mud wallow?’

‘How are
you
getting on?’ I asked him.

‘Dreadfully, I think,’ Alec replied. ‘Although since I don’t know what I’m supposed to be achieving, perhaps I’m getting on quite wonderfully.’

‘Well, what have you got?’

‘I’ve set out cause of death, characteristics of victim, relation to suspect and suspect’s reaction,’ he said. ‘For instance, battle, fire, fire, drowned, drowned. Man, man and woman, man, woman. Is this the sort of thing you mean? Father, lover and friend, lover, who knows.’

‘Suitor not lover,’ I said. ‘For Elf.’

‘Off the rails, threat to confess, claim of amnesia, flight. If there are patterns there I can’t find them.’

‘Africa, Highlands, Somerset, South of Scotland,’ I added.

‘Well, Irish Sea,’ said Alec. ‘There’s nothing there, is there?’

‘Not much,’ I admitted. ‘Except you didn’t really go far enough with Fleur’s reaction to events. When she heard about the Major she went off the rails, that’s true. When Charles and Leigh died, drunk in a fast car after a fast party – a very off-the-rails death – she went back to her family. Elf died while she was with her family and she left them, went to where there were hardly any men at all and no chance of romantic entanglements, and when No. 5 happened there . . .’

‘She went somewhere we don’t know,’ Alec said. ‘Not back to her family – that didn’t work last time. And presumably not to another girls’ school since
it
didn’t break the curse either. And she’s hardly likely to go on another bender like a flapper girl. Not at thirty. By golly, Dan, I think I’m beginning to see the point of this. It does help one . . .’

‘Organise?’ I said, trying to make my smile not too smug.

‘So where would she go to be even more safe and cloistered than she was at St Columba’s?’

‘Cloistered. Hm,’ I said. ‘An out-and-out nunnery? More Ophelia than Juliet, after all?’

‘I wonder which heartbreak it was that earned her the nickname,’ Alec said. ‘Charles or Elf?’

‘Sorry?’ I said. ‘Listen, darling, I’m thinking. I know I was very offhand about suicide – God, I’ll never forgive myself for Mamma-dearest hearing me! – but something’s occurred to me. She fled.’

‘Yes,’ Alec said.

‘She took flight. She’s never done that before. I mean, removing herself from her family’s care and starting her wild time must have been a gradual thing, mustn’t it? She didn’t go to bed a good girl the night she found out about the Major and wake up a bad girl in the morning. And she went to a sanatorium after Charles and after Elf. Presumably she took a bit of time deciding to be a schoolmistress too and did some rudimentary preparation for it. This time, though, new future planned, all set to take Jeanne Beauclerc home to Pereford (I wonder why she didn’t tell her mother?), she abandoned everything and simply
fled
. That can’t have been guilt.’

‘Fear of discovery?’ said Alec.

‘What discovery?’ I said. ‘No one knows who No. 5 is and we haven’t been able to come up with a single scrap of evidence that Fleur had anything to do with her murder. She can’t have felt the noose tightening.’

‘But scarpering like that and leaving Jeanne Beauclerc in the lurch does look like fear,’ Alec said. ‘So if not fear of discovery, arrest, conviction and hanging, because she didn’t really kill No. 5 in the legal sense, then what?’

‘Not in the legal sense, no,’ I said slowly. ‘But if she felt that she killed her father purely by being born, she might have felt that she killed No. 5 because she put the woman in harm’s way quite inadvertently.’

‘Yes, of course!’ said Alec. ‘Which makes perfect sense of her saying “Five” like that when she saw the corpse!’

‘Oh, hallelujah! At last!’ I said. ‘She
already
felt she was putting this person at risk of harm and when she saw the corpse she knew that the harm had come.’

We beamed at one another.

‘But we’ve got side-tracked. What did she fear? Why did she run away?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Alec with a quiet thrill of triumph in his voice, ‘because she knew where the harm had come from.
She
didn’t kill No. 5 any more than she killed No. 1, but—’

I joined him and we spoke in chorus.

‘
She knows who did.
’

‘And,’ continued Alec, ‘she thinks she’s next.’

‘So she didn’t dare take Jeanne Beauclerc along.’

‘We have to find her,’ Alec said. ‘And it
is
pretty urgent, after all.’

We did not, however, get off at the next station and try to tell all of that to Sergeant Turner on the telephone. Even if he had let us speak to Constable Reid we might have been struggling to unwind the plaited threads of poor Fleur’s history and convince him. Instead we spent the rest of the journey devising the plainest, clearest report into which such a twisty tale could be straightened out and when we finally fell out of the little train at Portpatrick again some thirty-six hours after we had left we went straight to the police station.

Constable Reid was on the back shift and we found him in the office all trussed up with his tunic closed and his hat on, ready to go out and make one of his rounds. Since the weather was so filthy, though – it had started raining almost precisely at the border on our journey north and sheets of water were coursing down over the sea, turning even this summer evening as black as January – he took little persuasion to abandon the plan and give us his ear.

‘Nobody’ll be out causin’ bother on a night like this,’ he said. After that his contributions dwindled.

‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,’ was all he offered as we laid it out for him, and he stopped taking notes a little way in. By the end, he had his hat off and his head in his hands.

‘So . . .’ I finished, ‘if you can at least find the boat you’ll know which way she went and then you’ll know which police force to ask to look for her. Or however you do it. Obviously you know best.’

‘The boat,’ said Reid. ‘That you knew about on Monday afternoon, and here we are on Thursday night.’

‘Yes, sorry about that,’ I said. ‘But you know now and so you can get started.’

‘I cannae start somethin’ like that,’ said Reid. ‘It’ll need to be the sarge and he’ll need to ask the inspector and even he’ll mebbes need to go right to the top.’

‘I see,’ said Alec.

‘And that’s fine by me,’ said Reid. ‘I’ll go straight up to his house right now and tell ’im.’

‘Won’t he be angry if you bother him at home?’ I asked. ‘I’d rather wait until the morning and have it done than antagonise the sergeant tonight and get nowhere.’

‘I’m no’ carin’,’ said Reid. ‘I want to see Cissie. She answers their door, you know.’

‘She still hasn’t forgiven you?’

‘Not a word since she said she didn’t want to see me Tuesday afternoon,’ Reid said. ‘I’ve left two notes in our wee place and she’s taken them out but no’ answered.’

‘Well, she can hardly avoid you if you turn up on the doorstep,’ I said. ‘Shall we come too?’

‘I’ll manage fine myself,’ said Reid and he shooed us out of the little police station so that he could lock it behind him.

Portpatrick was battened down, either for the rainstorm or just for the night, with windows and doors closed, no washing left out to catch the warmth of the fading day and no one leaning on the harbour wall or sitting on the bollards outside Aldo’s. In fact, Aldo’s was in darkness.

‘Joe must have given up on any custom tonight in this dreadful weather,’ I said.

Alec shook his head.

‘It’s hard to believe you live in Scotland sometimes, Dandy,’ he said. ‘No purveyor of fried fish would ever close before the pub, you know.’

‘Well, maybe Thursday is his half-day,’ I said. ‘The man must rest sometimes.’

‘Thursday?’ said Alec. ‘Pay-day? Never.’

‘I bow to your greater knowledge,’ I said. ‘I hope he’s all right.’

We stood looking across the harbour to the little shack for a moment, but the rain was coming down in drilling icy rods and my hat brim was beginning to droop.

‘I’ll go and see him tomorrow,’ Alec said. ‘Come inside, Dandy, before you catch a chill.’ Thus cloaking his sloth in chivalry, he held open the door of the Crown and, shaking ourselves like dogs, we entered.

‘What are
you
going to do tomorrow?’ he said as we waited for the landlady to respond to our ringing. ‘The police will take over looking for Fleur and Fleur, when she’s found, will tell us at last who No. 5 is. What’s left for you? A day of rest?’

‘I think I’ll go to Parents’ Day,’ I said. ‘Gatecrash it, I mean. I’d dearly love to work out what’s going on up there and I’ve got some examination papers and a letter to return to Miss Shanks. That will be my protection if she calls Sergeant Turner on me. And as for a day of rest: I’m certainly not sticking around the Crown. The convalescent widow and I have had a falling out, you know, and I can’t face another round of hostilities.’

The rain had let up by the morning, but it did not leave the world new-washed and sparkling the way English rain does. Instead, the stone of the houses, harbour and cobbles was soaked and dark and the sky was a kind of exhausted grey. I looked across to Joe Aldo’s shack from my window as I dressed and felt again a small flare of worry.

There was a knock at my door and I opened it, expecting Alec, but found Constable Reid standing there.

‘Good morning,’ I said and leaned out to call along the passageway. ‘Alec? Reid’s here. Come in, Constable. What news?’

‘Aye, I thought ye’d like to know,’ said Reid, entering and looking round with a true policeman’s eye, not at all the bashful gaze of a young man in a strange woman’s hotel bedroom. He would go far if his luck fell that way. ‘The sarge took some convincin’ and I kind of had to make your friend sound a wee bit dangerous and no’ just soft, but he’s agreed she might ken who our corpse is and there’s no denyin’ she’s pinched the boat, so he’s away gettin’ the coastguard and them sorted out.’

Alec gave a quick rap at the door and entered. ‘Reid,’ he said.

‘The search is on,’ I told him. ‘Go on, Constable.’

‘Aye, right, so,’ said Reid. ‘That’s all.’

‘And how did it go with Cissie?’ I asked.

He shot me a piercing look. ‘She never came to the door. She sent the cook. An’ I’m askin’ you again: what did you say to her?’

‘Oh Dandy, for heaven’s sake,’ said Alec. ‘What
did
you say to her? It was really none of your business, darling.’

‘Nothing!’ I said. ‘I’m sure of it. I think it’s a bit much getting her to caddy for you but I didn’t say a syllable about that. And I wonder what her mother would think of these moonlight walks of yours, but I said nothing about that either. Look, if I get a chance later, I’ll go to the Turners’ house on some pretext or other and I’ll ask Cissie, when she answers the door, what the matter is. All right? But I’m busy today. I’m hoping to crack the nut of St Columba’s, and if it turns out to be a police matter, Constable, I’ll give it into your hands and yours shall be the glory and the promotion; and then shall come the engagement and the orange blossom and the cottage with the roses round the door, and
then
maybe you’ll stop accusing me.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about half the time, missus,’ said Reid.

‘You follow as much as half?’ said Alec. ‘Good for you.’

I waited until I could be sure that Parents’ Day was in full swing before I climbed the cliff path for what I expected would be the final time. Splashes of yellow had swarmed over the terrace and headland all morning, clearly visible from the village below, as the girls prepared the grounds for the visitors. Bunting was strung around poles and cracked smartly in the sea breeze and a flag of indeterminate design (it might have been St Columba himself) was run up the pole. From eleven o’clock onwards motorcars began to arrive, an endless rumble quite audible down the hill, and also there was the odd pair of lost parents driving along the sea front and pointing upwards to the school before executing an awkward turn at the harbour head and retracing their steps to try again. When the strains of a small pipe band (although not small enough for my liking) began to be heard drifting down from the terrace, I put the examination papers in my bag, settled my hat firmly against the gusts and ventured forth.

It was a scene of some gaiety despite the chilly greyness of the day. Long tables with coffee and cakes had been set out along the terraces and little round tables with posies of roses on them were dotted here and there on the damp grass. The hardier parents were seated, the mothers eating cakes with one hand and holding their hats on with the other, while fathers hunched against the wind and tried to light cigarettes inside their lapels. The more tender parents were forced to shelter on the terrace itself in the lee of the building, even though that kept them in full blasting proximity to the band.

‘I hope to
God
luncheon is inside at least,’ said a skinny mother, shivering like a greyhound, as I passed her. ‘Darling, couldn’t you go and petition?’

‘Not my idea to come, if you remember, Ursie,’ said the man she was with, who was standing poker-straight and scowling at the nearest bagpiper. I decide to attach myself to them, since I could tell from the woman’s shoes, the man’s tie and the drawling voices of them both that these were what Hugh calls ‘our sort’. In other words, these parents were some of those I could not quite believe had a girl at Miss Shanks’s peculiar little school. Perhaps if I got them talking they could explain it to me.