The Burry Man's Day (12 page)

‘These doctors,’ said Buttercup. ‘They would have us all on milk and water if they had their way. Of course he wasn’t. I mean, he was the Burry Man for twenty years and more and the nips of whisky are as much a part of the day as the burrs and the flowers, aren’t they?’

Mrs Dudgeon did not answer this although it seemed to mollify her. She chewed her lip for a moment, still casting quick glances from side to side, and then finally she raised her head and addressed me apprehensively.

‘Will there be an inquiry?’

When I shook my head I saw in her face a strange mingling of expressions, growing puzzlement and something else too. She could not, quite clearly, ask whatever it was she wanted to ask, and that in some way left her helpless. I looked back at her, just as helpless, longing to ask her what was wrong, what
else
could possibly be so wrong as to supersede something as enormous and immediate as her husband’s sudden death.

And did she really believe he had hardly drunk a drop all day? It was possible: people do manage to maintain such delusions. I have an aunt as wide as she is tall, fingers like sausages and calves like hams, who tells me with round-eyed sincerity, all chins a-waggle, that she lives off thin soup and grilled cutlets, actually tells me this while dipping her spoon in and out of the quivering mound of trifle with which she is cleansing her palate after the
boeuf en croute
.

Perhaps Mrs Dudgeon was not as bad as this; perhaps she knew exactly how drunk Robert Dudgeon had been and was feeling guilt that she had not prevented it with some application of wifely skill: nagging or huge helpings of milk and potatoes, but it was not guilt, that expression upon her face, nor anything like guilt. I tried to pin it down but my attention was distracted by one of the handmaidens proffering tea. The rest of them watched me almost greedily as I drank, but only for a moment did I wonder why. No fewer than three, leaning against the sideboard in a row like waitresses in a lull, had cloths in their hands and they were waiting to pounce on our used cups, desperate for even such a scrap as that to make them feel busy and helpful. Out of kindness I accepted a biscuit and a plate to put it upon, and made sure to scatter plenty of crumbs. How it must have thwarted them that the grim woman of the night before had done so much of the available housework before they got there.

‘No inquiry,’ said Mrs Dudgeon, just as I finished my tea and relinquished the cup and as I did so and heard her words, I remembered something and at the same time I suddenly recognized the expression on her face, but before I could put a name to either the memory or the look they cancelled each other out and the moment was gone, quite gone, like a sneeze unsneezed, or like a gun half-cocked and unfired while the pheasant flaps off into the dusk, screeching.

‘So that’s that,’ said Mrs Dudgeon. She gazed about her as she had the day before, at the chair opposite, at the picture on the mantelpiece, and she spoke with great calmness, into the silence of the room. ‘That’s the end of it, then. That’s that.’

‘That’s that?’ echoed Cadwallader, later. ‘She said, “That’s that”?’ Buttercup and I had joined him and Daisy in the library whereupon he had poured me a monstrously huge drink and demanded to be told all.

‘Yes, but it wasn’t the way it sounds now,’ I said. ‘Was it, darling?’

Buttercup only blinked.

‘It was as though she were saying, I had a husband yesterday and today he’s gone and there’s no reason for it and no one to blame and that’s that. Actually, I rather thought it was her son
and
her husband, you know. She did glance towards the son’s picture as she said it. She had them both and she lost them both and there’s the end of it and she’s on her own now. It was terribly sad and it makes perfect sense.’

‘It does?’ said Cad with a sly look at Daisy which I could not begin to interpret. He waited, Daisy waited, Buttercup stared into space and sipped her cocktail.

‘And yet,’ I said, almost reluctantly. I was tired, drained from all the giving of sympathy, not to mention the bonny babies. ‘And yet . . . there was something.’

‘Mrs Dudgeon said something?’ asked Daisy.

‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘She looked . . . Oh, I don’t know. It’s probably nothing. Once before in my experience someone at a comparable moment behaved not as I thought she would and in that case it turned out that all was far from well. So I suppose I’m just looking for trouble and, therefore, as my nanny warned me, finding it. Ignore me.’

‘So this feeling you had,’ said Cadwallader, ‘it was just a funny look from the widow, was it? Nothing else?’ I stared at him and at Daisy too, puzzled, with a growing feeling that something was going on here I could not quite catch on to.

‘What are you two up to?’ I said. Cad gave back a limpid gaze, but Daisy fidgeted and would not meet my eyes. She has a dreadful habit, started goodness knows where and when, of sticking her cocktail stick, once the olive has gone, into the setting of her engagement ring, then snapping it off and sticking in the next bit, and so on and so on until her beautiful cluster of five diamonds looks like a dried porcupine. I have seen her go through an evening like this, little ragged bits of cocktail stick poking out from her finger, and I assume that her maid removes them at bedtime. Grant, I am sure, would smack my legs and put my ring in the bank if I did the like.

‘One of these days, one of those stones will ping right out, darling,’ I said. ‘And if it goes in the fire, I shall laugh.’

Daisy raised her eyebrows in that haughty way of hers (I am immune to it) and said: ‘Don’t take it out on me, Dan. Just give in.’

‘Give in to what?’ I said.

‘I knew it,’ said Cad. ‘Although you wouldn’t listen. I knew it this morning. Robert Dudgeon knew it last night. And what you’ve said convinces me that Mrs Dudgeon knows it too. Now, if an autopsy had come up with something solid I was prepared to believe I was wrong but . . .’

‘Not this again,’ I said, almost, almost laughing. ‘Robert Dudgeon died of heart failure owing to alcoholic poisoning. How can you doubt it? How can you doubt Inspector Cruickshank?’

‘I don’t,’ said Cadwallader. ‘I’m sure Dudgeon did die of heart failure, everyone does, in the end. And no one can doubt the alcohol. I’d even be willing to put quite a bet on poison.’

‘A poison which the post-mortem failed to detect?’ I said. ‘Not an untraceable poison, Cadwallader, really! One can be drummed out of the Sherlock Holmes Society for the mere mention.’ He ignored me.

‘What did
you
think of the inspector, Dandy?’ he said.

‘What did I think of what aspect of the inspector?’ I said.

‘Not to mention the doctor,’ he went on.

‘The police surgeon?’ I said. I had not thought much of the police surgeon, truth be told, but before I could properly bring him to mind and wonder why exactly, Cadwallader was speaking again.

‘Did Robert Dudgeon look drunk to you last evening?’ he said.

I shook my head. All of a sudden my scalp prickled.

‘Well, then,’ said Daisy.

Both she and Cad were looking hard at me, waiting. The ludicrous thought struck me that they thought I had had something to do with it all. Why, otherwise, were they staring like that? What did they want?

‘Well then what?’ I demanded.

‘Will you take the job?’

‘What?’

‘Daisy here has filled me in as to your terms.’

‘My . . .?’

‘And I’ve told him, without a word of a lie, darling, that you’re absolutely splendid, even if you do tend to store your light under the nearest bushel for safekeeping.’

‘Oh, I see!’ said Buttercup at last. ‘Daisy did tell me about you branching out into diamond theft and murder, Dan, but I forgot.’

‘I’m not sure I’d put it quite that way,’ I said. ‘Not on my card, at least.’

‘You have cards?’ said Buttercup, impressed.

‘I don’t,’ I admitted.

‘But you do have the knack,’ said Cad.

I shrugged modestly.

‘And you have the time, Dan,’ said Daisy.

I could hardly deny that.

‘All right,’ I said at last. ‘I’ll do it.’ And I thought to myself, why not? Perhaps last time was not a fluke. Perhaps I do have the knack. And I may not have a pipe, nor a deerstalker, nor a magnifying lens, nor an apparent walking cane that is really a sword and a compass, but I do have a Watson. At least I did last time and I was sure I would not have made any headway without him. Now, the question was how to get him off the grouse moor on the twelfth of August. I should have to give him the whole of my fee.

Chapter Five

Alec’s face, upon first seeing the castle, was a sight not to be missed so I made sure to be standing alongside Cad and Buttercup outside the great iron-studded door as his motor car negotiated the grassy ramp. He looked up, up, up, counting arrow slits on the Hall floor, the library floor, and the first bedroom floor, then took a step back and shaded his eyes with one hand to look at the last two floors above. His head-shake as he turned his gaze back to Cad must have been meant to loosen the crick in his neck, but Cad took it as awe.

‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’ Cad said, absolutely artless.

‘Wonderful isn’t the word,’ said Alec.

I managed to turn my snort into a cough, but Cad was busy anyway, introducing himself and Buttercup and trying to explain to Alec’s valet about the other house and the system of connecting telephones.

Buttercup could not be prevented from launching into her tour.

‘We ’ll finish up in the library, darlings, so wait for us there,’ she said, before bearing Alec away into the kitchens. I saw that she was set to turn into one of those hostesses who
process
house guests rather than entertaining them, but there are worse kinds of hostess than that since, when one has been simmered, seasoned, minced and tinned by them, one is then left pleasantly alone. Besides, the castle and Buttercup’s guileless raptures over it were genuinely diverting and at least here it was rooms and fittings not dreary gardens or, worse, the drains, walls and ditches over which my own husband enthuses so mystifyingly. Hugh is always rather bewildered at his guests’ blanket refusals to be shown a new kind of cattle grid or an ingenious self-filling water-trough in a far field.

While we waited in the library, I took the chance to hammer home to Cad one point I felt our earlier discussion had left rather vague.

‘I do hope you realize, darling, that even though you’ve retained my services’ – I pronounced it as I thought a real private detective might: ‘a-retayned may a-suhvices’, which was lost on Cad, of course, hardly Henry Higgins after all – ‘I can’t guarantee to find anything out. And if I do, I’m an absolutely independent agent.’

‘Of course, of course,’ said Cad, then spoiled it by adding, ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, I probably won’t discover anything at all, but I’m setting out to discover “what” and “whether”, not to confirm “that”.’

‘Daisy told me this would happen,’ said Cad. ‘She warned me that I wouldn’t understand what on God’s green earth you were doing, much less talking about, but that I should leave you to it and it would all come right in the end.’

‘That’s the thing, you see,’ I told him earnestly. ‘It depends what you mean by “come right”.’

‘And there you go again.’

‘Look,’ I persisted. It was quite, quite crucial to establish this, I thought, and I was most impressed with myself for my scrupulousness. After all, I wanted nothing more than to racket about in Queensferry, on expenses, with Alec, and if I ever got Cad to listen to what I was saying and take it in, I might find myself back in Perthshire instead, stuck with the children all day and nothing to look forward to but spending the evening with Hugh. ‘Put it this way: if you were the peddler of a patent home Marceller – no electricity, singeing or stickiness – I would not be one of your own medical doctors saying that hair would be strengthened and rejuvenated with every application, Cad, I would be the woman who wrote to the papers saying mine had all fallen out and not grown back again. Which is not to say that you are, of course.’

Cad’s face told me before I was finished that my analogy had not been helpful, so I told him straight.

‘I think something strange is going on,’ I said. ‘Clearly Robert Dudgeon was troubled on Thursday evening, and Mrs Dudgeon is worried and perplexed as well as grief-stricken now. And Robert died. If he was murdered –’

‘He was.’

‘If
he was murdered, then his fears, his widow’s anxieties and his death might all be explained at one fell swoop. But it may just as easily be that he was worried about one thing, his wife is worried about another and in the middle of it all his heart gave out from alcoholic poisoning. I just want to make it very clear that although I know you feel dreadfully guilty, Cad dear, I am not a salver of your conscience in this. I’m a . . .’

‘Seeker of truth.’

‘Yes! Exactly.’ I had, at last, got through his glowing, creamy skin. ‘I’m a seeker of truth, and I’m afraid that unearthing grubby but unrelated secrets is –’

‘Your speciality?’ said Alec’s voice. I had been so caught up, I had managed to miss their advancing tread and he and Buttercup stood framed in the doorway.

‘But darling, there’s your card right there!’ said Buttercup. ‘Dandy Gilver: Servant of Truth. And underneath in italics: Grubby Secrets a Speciality.’

‘I’ll order five hundred to be going on with,’ I said, drily. ‘I was going to say “an unavoidable hazard”. Well, Alec?’

‘Quite,’ said Alec, sitting.

‘What did you think of the oubliette?’ I went on. ‘Larder? Or not?’

‘Larder would be such a waste,’ said Alec, turning innocent eyes on Cad and Buttercup. ‘An ice house, perhaps. Or a hot bubble bath, although the plumbing would be a bit of a challenge, and off the kitchen is hardly handy. Venison smokery? Or, if one could put in a large pane of glass, it would make a tremendous fish tank. You could grow your own lobsters, de Cassilis. Or, substitute wire mesh for the glass and it could be an aviary. If I were Mrs Murdoch, I’d like nothing more than a pair of peach-cheeked lovebirds wittering away while I pounded my bread dough.’