Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses (39 page)

‘I don’t know,’ Alec said. ‘But I’m sure she did. He told Fleur what to say and you obligingly relayed the message to him, not understanding what she said until he translated it for you.’

‘I got the gist,’ I said, and then another tremor made its way through my innards and this one left me cold.

‘Alec,’ I said. ‘Cissie said she didn’t understand what Rosa and the stranger were saying but she knew it was sweet-talk. I thought she didn’t hear the words themselves.’

‘But now you think maybe she did hear them but she didn’t understand them because they were in Italian?’

‘And she doesn’t like fish and chips,’ I said. ‘So she very likely had never seen Giuseppe Aldo even if his wife was familiar to her.’

‘More evidence,’ said Alec. ‘But Dan, what’s wrong?’

‘I told Joe the Turners’ maid was the one who saw Rosa and friend on the cliff top. And – oh Alec! – maybe Cissie
isn’t
sulking. Maybe she’s missing. Maybe he got her too.’

Alec was running already and reached the police station before I had made it a yard up the street. By the time I got to the door Reid and he were on their way out again. Reid wrenched open the door of the police motorcar and Alec shoved me in and then jammed in after me. As we began to climb the hill with the engine whining, Sergeant Turner came out onto the street and stood, hands dangling at his sides, watching the three of us speed away.

Outside the Turner villa, Reid screeched to a halt and jumped down. He leapt over the garden gate, rounded the side of the house and disappeared. Alec and I scrambled after him. In the yard, the kitchen door was banging back on its hinges and Reid was in the middle of the linoleum floor with his arms wrapped round an astonished Cissie like an octopus with its prey while a thin cook looked on, a baking bowl under one arm and a wooden spoon held up like a baton.

‘Cissie,’ I said. ‘Oh my dear girl, thank goodness!’

‘Who are you?’ said the cook.

‘I’m a chump and this is my idiot friend,’ I said to her. ‘Gilver and Osborne. They were speaking Italian, Cissie, weren’t they? That night on the cliff top. Rosa and the man who wasn’t her uncle?’

‘Lots of people speak Italian,’ she said. ‘Get off, Wullie.’

‘Has someone been speaking Italian to you?’ said Alec. Cissie blushed.

‘Writing it,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a friend and admirer, Wullie Reid, and he’s told me all about you!’

‘What’s going on?’ said the cook. ‘This is my kitchen, ye ken, and I’ll call the mistress if you don’t tell me what’s to do.’

‘All about me what?’ said Reid.

‘All lies,’ said Alec, ‘whatever it was. This secret admirer, Cissie – has he asked you to slip out and meet him yet?’

‘He said he had to go away a wee while,’ she said, ‘but maybe next week, he said he’d take me a hurl in his car and we’d get some dinner.’

‘Out for dinner!’ said Reid. ‘How am I supposed to compete wi’ that on ma wages?’

‘William,’ I said, ‘I think you’re losing sight of the main point here, aren’t you? Aldo only needed to keep Cissie apart from you until he was ready to shut up shop and disappear for good. He’s not coming back to take her for dinner or even for a bag of chips at the harbour.’

‘I don’t like chips,’ Cissie said. ‘He promised a proper dinner.’

‘Cissie, that man is a liar and a murderer,’ Alec said. ‘It was Giuseppe Aldo who wrote to you. He was the one you heard on the cliff path with his own wife and he killed her. He would have killed you if you had gone out to meet him too.’

‘He’s a very dangerous man,’ I said, ‘and he plays risky games. Do you realise, Reid, that he pretended his wife was on the telephone that day when really it was Fleur all the time who was in Glasgow station and . . .’ I stopped and let the silence fill me.

‘What is it, Dan?’ Alec said.

Finally, the little pip of information which had been tickling at me was in my grasp.

‘Up,’ I said. ‘Sabbatina Aldo said that Fleur had invited her “up” to stay for the holidays. She kept saying Fleur would go home. She couldn’t believe Fleur would go anywhere else except home. But Pereford – Somerset – isn’t
up
anywhere. Sabbatina meant Alt-na-harrie. The Major’s lodge. The place Fleur went to when her life at Pereford changed for ever all those years ago.’

‘But they sold it,’ Alec said.

‘To an anonymous buyer,’ I reminded him. ‘And Fleur came into a lot of money when she was eighteen. More than she could spend on a Bugatti.’ I turned to Reid.

‘Constable,’ I said, ‘Miss Lipscott is at home in a hunting lodge near Ullapool. I’m sure of it. If you go there, you’ll find her.’

‘I’ll never get let go all the way up there,’ said Reid. ‘The sarge’ll be after me wi’ a strap for takin’ his car this far.’

‘We’ll hire a motorcar and you can come with us,’ I said. ‘It’s pretty tricky to find, actually. You’d probably do better with a native guide. Meantime, Cissie, I’m sure Aldo is gone for good but until he’s caught – just to be on the safe side – perhaps you’d better stay in and don’t answer the door. No matter who it is calling.’

‘My God, Alec,’ I said as we made our way from the high road of villas to the back street where the car-hiring garage was to be found. ‘Do you realise how many young ladies there currently are stashed all over this fair land? Four counting Sabbatina, who’s in Fleur’s room at the school, breaking her poor heart over her mother and her patron. And her no-good father as well, probably.’

‘Why’s she stashed?’ Alec said.

‘Because I wasn’t thinking straight and I couldn’t tell if the school was mixed up in the Aldo mess.’

‘It’s not, is it?’ he asked, and then he rapped hard on the open garage doors at which we had arrived. ‘Me again, Mr Donaldson. I’m getting to be your best customer, eh?’

‘Aye, right, son,’ said the man in the dark-blue cambric overall straightening up from where he was bent over an open bonnet. ‘But ye’re no’ in luck today. The car’s away.’

‘Oh,’ said Alec. ‘Right.’

‘Aye, thon Eye-tie took it yesterday. Said he’d a wee trip to go on.’

I glanced at Alec to see what he made of this.

‘Has he cut and run?’ I asked.

‘Why on earth would he run in a hired car which would soon become a stolen car if he didn’t return it?’ Alec said to me.

‘Eh?’ said Mr Donaldson. ‘Who’s sayin’ he’s no’ returnin’ it? He said he had a wee bit business where there’s no trains.’

‘Alec!’ I said, clutching at him. ‘Sabbatina told me! She said she had spoken to Joe about Fleur running away. He knows where she’s gone. He’s gone after her to Ullapool. And he’s got a day’s head start on you and me.’

My fingers ached all the way up to my shoulders from gripping the back of the seat in front of me as the little motorcar swung around the bends and sailed up and over the bumps in the road.

‘You all right back there, Dan?’ said Alec, looking over his shoulder. I nodded.

‘I’m too tense to be sick,’ I said, ‘and I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday anyway.’

‘Mind and not faint on us, then,’ said Reid. His eyes were trained on the road ahead, peering into the small patch of light his headlamps made on this twisted lane under the trees.

We flashed past a sign for Ullapool, the white wood just gleaming enough for the black letters to show up against it.

‘Not far now,’ I said. ‘How could anyone live all the way out here without a telephone these days?’

‘And no answer to the telegram boy,’ Alec reminded me.

For all our desperate efforts to get to Fleur some way – any way – quicker than chasing off in belated pursuit of Aldo had failed. Sergeant Turner stared us down to sheepish silence when we tried to tell him that the corpse was Mrs Aldo, that both the witnesses who claimed not to know it had known it perfectly well, that the lover on the headland was the husband, that the wife on the telephone was the lover, that the girl whose family sold the house had bought it . . .

‘Oh aye?’ he had said. ‘And where does the French one in the farmhouse fit in?’

‘I don’t know,’ I had said.

‘She doesn’t,’ said Alec. ‘That’s a separate matter completely.’

‘Oh aye?’ said Sergeant Turner again. ‘See, to my mind, when you’ve finished a puzzle – a jigsaw puzzle, say – you’ve no bits left over. That’s how you know you’re done.’

So he would not telephone to the nearest constabulary and have them send a man to the lodge and he would not countenance a trip in his precious police car and he would not give Reid a sudden afternoon free. He fixed the lad with his terrier-like scowl, brows down and eyes glinting, and told him to get himself round to the grocer’s shop at the bottom of Main Street where a parcel of bacon had gone missing from the boy’s basket and was yet to be found.

Alec and I had been waiting at the station for the next train to Stranraer and the hope of another hiring garage when Reid had hurtled up in an ancient little Mercury and summoned us with a long blast on the horn.

‘Whose is this?’ I asked, scrambling myself into the tight space of the spare seat behind the driver. There was no chance that Alec could fold himself into it, I knew.

‘Mrs Turner’s,’ said Reid. ‘Cissie pinched the key to the garage door for me.’

‘You’ll both be sacked for sure now,’ I said.

‘Yup,’ said Reid and, turning out of the station brae, he roared off up the hill to join the road to Stranraer, Girvan and points north as if the hounds of hell – and not just Sergeant Turner and his formidable wife – might be after him.

There had been moments of calm, even passages of conversation, and in the course of bumping along the terrible Highland roads, at last the pieces of the St Columba’s puzzle had fallen into place. With nothing left over, as Sergeant Turner so rightly decreed was the way of things.

‘It was nothing to do with Fleur and the murders,’ I told Reid and Alec. ‘Not really. Except that Fleur’s guilt was why she was there. She wanted to get away from men. She thinks she killed her father and two lovers, remember.’

‘
Thinks
she did?’ said Reid. I ignored him.

‘And Miss Fielding took in waifs and strays. She took in a girl who said she’d killed her lovers and she took in the daughter of a noble French family who’s done something naughty enough to be disowned. Second chances, see? The key is that the women at that school either brought money – Shanks, Lovage and Fielding – or they brought learning – Taylor, Bell and Blair. Or they were waifs and strays. That’s Fleur and Jeanne. And recently Miss Glennie, too. The Lambourne Agency is obviously in on the operation, seeking out likely candidates for Miss Shanks. And the Misses Christopher and Barclay are very much her lieutenants in it all. The point wasn’t that Miss Glennie used to work at Balmoral, you see. The point is that she was sacked from Balmoral. For something. Something that means she doesn’t have up-to-date photographs of her mother and father even though they’re still alive.’

‘Disowned again?’ Alec said. ‘What for this time?’

‘Well, she has lots of snaps of a child,’ I said. ‘She said it was her brother but now I think it was most likely her son.’

‘That would get a governess sacked right enough,’ Alec said. ‘But why would it get her a job in a school?’

‘Blackmail,’ I said. ‘Plain and simple. Barclay and Christopher are doing something for Miss Shanks that Miss Taylor and Miss Bell – scholars of depthless integrity – would never do. And something Miss Blair – as the PE mistress – couldn’t do. Once Miss Glennie submits, they’ll have such a hold over her that she’ll work for nothing. Shanks thought Jeanne and Fleur could be persuaded to do the same but it turns out she was wrong. They were made of finer stuff; they held out as long as they could and then, when Jeanne could bear it no longer, they hatched a plan to escape from her.’

‘Ah,’ Alec said. ‘That’s why they had to go away and hide. She would have told the world of their sins if they’d just resigned.’

‘Exactly,’ I said.

‘But what did she blackmail them into doin’?’ said Reid.

‘I didn’t work it out until Parents’ Day, today,’ I said. ‘They were doing various things. Or at least two different sorts of things for two different sorts of girls. And it all begins with cheating.’

‘Girls cheating?’ said Alec.

‘No, but parents being told that girls cheat,’ I said. ‘Parents like the Rowe-Issings and the Duncans being told that their daughters are cheats, but that Miss Shanks will keep it quiet in return for testimonials, swimming pools and stables, that kind of thing.’

‘But some of the girls are genuinely bright, aren’t they?’ Alec said.

‘Yes, some are,’ I answered. ‘Sabbatina Aldo is and she’s of no interest to Ivy Shanks at all. I never could work that out. Why a scholarship girl with a fine brain was not the toast of the staffroom. Now, you see, the girls who’re going to university from St Columba’s all come from very solid middle-class backgrounds. Those parents wouldn’t drop dead at the thought of cheating as Basil and Candide would (not to a man, anyway) but they’d happily shell out for a bit of swanky advantage.’

‘That’s not fair, Dandy,’ said Alec. ‘You don’t even know any middle-class people. They’re the salt of the earth usually.’

‘I do!’ I said. ‘I know Inspector Hutchinson from Perth and I know Hugh’s estate factor. And I’m not saying all of them. No doubt Ivy Shanks has to go very gently to see who will be amenable and who would go to the police and daughter be damned.’

‘But you’re sure about the operation overall?’ Alec said.

‘I am. Because listen: the college-bound girls are going to read geography and history (Miss Barclay), science (Miss Christopher), and French. Hence the huge panic when Jeanne disappeared. No one is up for English – hence the huge
lack
of panic over the English mistress. Until, that is, Miss Shanks thought she had another sitting duck in me – wickedly living in an inn with a young man – and decided that Clothilde Simmons might be a whizz at English. Oh God!’

‘What?’ said Alec.

‘I accused that dratted widow of writing a poison-pen letter to Hugh,’ I said. ‘But of course it was Ivy Shanks testing the waters. It was when she realised that Hugh couldn’t care less and neither could I that she sacked me. Oh my God, Alec! That widow-woman must think I’m insane!’