The Burry Man's Day (32 page)

‘What a very law-abiding bunch these Lothianites are,’ said Alec. ‘Very slim pickings.’

‘And even that can’t really be worth considering,’ I said. ‘There would be no earthly reason not to do it some other time instead. The place was shut up under dust sheets and one day was as easy as the next. Besides, why would the gang need a carpenter?’

‘To get them out of their frames?’ said Alec, but he was wincing even as he spoke at how feeble this sounded.

‘Ludicrous,’ I said.

‘Well, let’s keep at it anyway,’ said Alec, shoving today’s
Evening News
towards me, and opening the last of the
Scotsmans.
I sighed and followed suit.

‘Tommy has missed his chance,’ I said, finding the advertisement for steerage to New Zealand again. ‘I’m so bored I could have joined him.’

‘What?’ said Alec.

‘Oh, nothing,’ I said. ‘Just a joke. Ignore me.’

He did and all was peaceful except for the occasional turning over of a page and the sounds of Bunty’s dreams until Alec exclaimed in a loud voice: ‘Dandy!’

‘Wha–. . . have you found something?’

‘You’re reading an advertisement for dress patterns. Really!’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, Alec, but this is a complete waste of time. I’m sure of it. It’s all wrong for the character of Robert Dudgeon to imagine that he’d commit a crime and even if it weren’t it doesn’t make sense of the last minute turn-around on Thursday evening. You can’t suddenly find out with only twelve hours to spare that you’re going to need an alibi. You don’t “find out” something like that, do you see? And that’s very much how it seemed to me when I spoke to Dudgeon. Something had come up, something had unexpectedly moved forwards, or backwards, making an unforeseen clash. It happens to me all the time.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, you know,’ I said. ‘You say to yourself I’ll spend next week on Christmas shopping and then the week before Christmas on writing letters and going round the tenants and I’ll just be able to fit it all in, and then you look at your diary and you realize that next week
is
the week before Christmas which means there’s exactly half as much time as you thought there was and you haven’t a hope in hell.’

‘Well, if it were a diary clash of some sort – and I can’t really see what sort, I must tell you – why wouldn’t Dudgeon just tell Cad about it?’

‘Any number of reasons,’ I said. ‘It could have been very personal or something he didn’t feel particularly proud of. But it needn’t be the kind of thing that gets into the papers. We’ve scoured every inch of them barring the Births, Marriages and Deaths!’

‘I’m not willing to settle at “any number of reasons”, Dandy,’ said Alec. ‘Name some; name at least one thing that must suddenly be done and can’t be left undone and is worth all the rigmarole of the stand-in Burry Man to get it done, because I can’t think of any.’

‘Nor can I,’ I admitted, ‘except speaking of births, marriages and deaths . . .’

‘What?’ said Alec.

‘Just that,’ I said. ‘One has to register them by a certain date and when the date comes round it can’t be put off any further.’

‘But anyone can register a death,’ said Alec. ‘Within reason. And I suppose the same goes for a birth too. It’s only a marriage that needs the principals to – What is it?’

‘Listen!’ I said. ‘Don’t look at me like that. On Saturday – no, Sunday – one of the times I was at the Dudgeons’ cottage anyway, do you remember? Mrs Dudgeon was holding forth about not being able to register Robert’s death the next day, because the registry office was shut. Her sisters tried to shout her down but she held to it adamantly, maintaining that it had been open the week before on the August Bank Holiday to let everyone who had business then get it done while they were off their work, and that it was shut this Monday – i.e. yesterday – to let the staff have their holiday too. Alec, I think that’s it! Why would Mrs Dudgeon know all the ins and outs of the registry office holiday times unless she had just found out with a terrible jolt that it was shut when she thought it would be open? That’s it. Dudgeon found out on Thursday afternoon that the office was closed on Monday and that Friday was the only chance to go, but he couldn’t tell anyone why he had to go there.’

Alec blinked.

‘But she was wrong,’ he said. ‘And even if she wasn’t, why
did
he have to go there? We’ve already said it couldn’t be to register a birth or death.’

‘Well, it must have been to register a marriage, then,’ I said.

‘Whose?’ said Alec. He sounded terribly irritated and I supposed I was looking rather smug, but for one thing it had been his idea to sit up until we were both tired beyond the point of politeness and for another I had just thought of something. An explanation both plausible and easily checked.

‘His,’ I answered. ‘It had to be. Because if anyone can register a birth or a death the same goes for witnessing a marriage. It’s only the principals in each who aren’t interchangeable. He was getting married.’

‘But . . . if you’re right – although I am sure you’re not – who was he going to marry?’

‘Mrs Dudgeon?’ I suggested. ‘Or the woman we’ve been calling Mrs Dudgeon.’

‘If he was going to legitimize his marriage to his wife,’ said Alec, ‘she would have to know that they weren’t actually married already.’

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘In fact, I think she did know. When I blurted out to her – during that same conversation – that she would have to look out his certificates, meaning his birth and marriage certificates and his passport – she flew into a complete panic. And her sisters twittering round asking if she had lost the certificates and offering to look for them only made her worse. And – Oh my, Alec! This must be right – do you remember? She was beside herself when the body wasn’t brought home. She kept asking about his
things,
asking if they had gone through his pockets and looked at all his
things.
I couldn’t work out for my life what it was that she could be so very worried about being seen, but imagine if he had some document to do with the marriage and someone read it. What a scandal that would be.’

‘Indeed it would,’ said Alec. ‘Which raises the question: how could they possibly not be married? They’ve lived here all their lives, surrounded by brother and sisters all of whom were probably
at
their wedding. And it will be recorded large as life in the parish register for all to see. Also, if it was such a dark secret, who did they let into the plan?’

‘Why need they let anyone in?’ I said.

‘X?’ said Alec. ‘Remember X? Someone was in on it. Someone who was willing to step into Robert Dudgeon’s shoes. And anyway if he were going to marry Mrs Dudgeon she’d need to be there. And she wasn’t, she was sitting in Craw’s Close in her little cart.’

‘So maybe he was going to marry someone else,’ I said.

‘Who?’ said Alec. ‘Why? And if he was going to marry someone else, Mrs Dudgeon would hardly help him.’ He stretched luxuriously in his armchair and dumped the lapful of newspapers off his lap. ‘I think this is one of those ingenious explanations which occur in the small hours and seem quite hopeful until one looks at them again in the light of day. And it doesn’t explain anything about Dudgeon’s death.’

‘Neither does anything else we’ve come up with,’ I pointed out. ‘At least this adds enough stress and strain to explain why his heart might give out.’

Alec merely stared at me.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I’m talking drivel. It’s time for bed. But in the morning I’m going to go and look in the parish register at least.’

Chapter Fifteen

I made another attempt to convince Alec the next day as he, Bunty and I walked down to the Rosebery Hall where the parish registers were stored. We had cooked up a tale about him discovering that he had forebears from this area and wanting to squint through the parish books to see if he could find them and we were hoping that the clerk in charge would let us go through the things in peace and not ask a lot of questions and try to help us.

‘If he does, we can give up and go to Register House in Edinburgh,’ I said, ‘and be sure to pick a name that isn’t actually going to appear. Now, here, in the cold light of day, are my reasons for thinking this is it: one, Mrs Dudgeon knew quite a bit more than we can otherwise explain her knowing about registry office opening hours – or rather thought she did. Two, Mrs Dudgeon was beside herself about the police surgeon going through Robert’s things. Three, Mrs Dudgeon was frightened at the thought of having to produce a marriage certificate in order to register the death. These incontrovertible facts are all neatly handled by the solution that Dudgeon was off to get married that day.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Alec. ‘For one thing, Mrs Dudgeon was wrong about the office being shut on Monday. It was open. Two, she might have any number of other reasons for not wanting the police to go through her husband’s belongings; a natural reticence and desire for privacy would be enough. Three, you don’t know it was the marriage licence that was troubling her. You said you mentioned birth, marriage and passport. It could have been any of them.’

‘Well, I wasn’t really thinking when I said passport,’ I said. ‘I would doubt very much whether he had one. And it doesn’t really matter that she was wrong about the office shutting, does it? It’s the fact that she had an opinion on the matter at all that’s interesting.’

We had arrived at the town hall steps where three little boys playing marbles on the memorial garden to the side were easily persuaded to look after Bunty for a penny each.

‘Only don’t try to ride on her back,’ I said, not liking the way one of them was eyeing her up. His crestfallen look told me I had divined his intention correctly and I followed up my warning with a stern look before following Alec inside.

The records clerk was delighted to oblige us, happily lugging volumes of the old parish registers from some back premises and laying them reverently on the large table in the public consulting room.

‘We have them all here,’ he said. ‘Much better really when you think of the damp in those church vestries. Some of the earlier ones are terribly spotted and foxed as it is, the years they mouldered there. Much better safe here with me.’ There certainly was no chance of them growing damp now, I thought, unwinding my scarf and unbuttoning my cardigan even though they were only silk chiffon, for on this August morning the windows were clamped shut top and bottom and there was a roaring coal fire in the grate. The clerk himself seemed perfectly comfortable, though, in a suit and with a woollen jersey in lieu of a waistcoat. In fact his hand – slightly foxed and spotted itself – was cold when it brushed against mine. Alec shrugged off his own coat and loosened his tie as soon as the old man had left us.

‘Phewf!’ he said. ‘I hope this isn’t going to take too long, Dan. Where should we start? Any point looking at Friday?’

‘No, of course not,’ I told him. ‘If I’m right about what Dudgeon was up to, he certainly wouldn’t have done it here. He’d be away in Edinburgh somewhere where no one knew him. Now, I’d say he was about fifty, and let’s say he would have married at about twenty, after the end of his apprenticeship, but certainly in time to have had a son who was old enough to go off to the war, more’s the pity for them all. So let’s start in ’88 to be on the safe side.’

It was terribly slow going at first, partly because of the crabbed handwriting of the old parish minister and partly, in my case, because I kept being distracted by all the other entries. I found the death of several female de Cassilises – the records of the line dying out which led to Cad, Buttercup and hence me being here in the first place – and some of the names were highly diverting.

‘Pantaloupe?’ I said. ‘Can anyone possibly have called their baby girl Pantaloupe? Isn’t that a fruit of some exotic kind?’

‘Cantaloupe, you’re thinking of,’ said Alec. ‘And I rather think the child was Penelope. The loop of the f above is mixed up in it.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Well, that’s good – they would have been bound to call her Panties at school, poor thing. Where are we now, darling?’

‘1895,’ said Alec. ‘And there they are. 17th April 1895. Robert George Dudgeon born 1st June 1873, Carpenter, 2 New Cottages, Cassilis, Dalmeny to Christina McLelland, spinster of this parish, born 8th May 1875, 17 Clark Place.’

‘Hmph,’ I said, staring at the entry. ‘Well, then. Bang goes my brilliant idea.’ I continued to turn the pages, searching the columns.

‘What now?’ said Alec.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Just looking. There he is. 21st June 1899. Robert George Dudgeon.’

‘Doing what?’ said Alec, looking over my shoulder.

‘Being born,’ I said. ‘This is young Bobby.’ I sighed and shut the book, just as the clerk came back to check on our progress.

‘Can I get you anything else?’ he asked, surprised to see us sitting back from the table with the volumes before us closed.

‘Not today,’ said Alec. ‘But you’ve been most helpful.’

‘There is one thing,’ I said. I could hear barking and shrieks of laughter from outside and I knew I had better not leave Bunty much longer but I was still troubled.

The clerk was looking at me, eagerly helpful, with his hands pressed together.

‘You were open for business yesterday, weren’t you?’ I said.

He gave a tight little sigh, almost a tut, of irritation.

‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine where everyone is getting the idea that we weren’t. You’re the second person to ask, you know. Some foreign gentleman telephoned to the registrar himself and asked the same thing only days ago. I must make a sign for the window, but really I can’t see how it came to be in question.’

I suppose one must have an orderly mind to be a good registrar’s clerk and this wild rumour about odd days of holiday here and there was clearly upsetting him.

‘The notion was that you’d stay open on the bank holiday to give people a chance to conduct their business and then you’d close the week after so that you could have a day off yourself,’ I said. It did not go down at all well.

‘I?’ said the clerk. ‘I? I’ve never agitated for “bank holidays”. I can’t imagine where you would have heard that.’ He spoke as though I had accused him of joining the Workers’ Union as a marching member, and I had to struggle to keep my mouth from curling up at the corners. ‘And besides,’ he went on, ‘our business is not the kind that can be saved up for a holiday. What an idea!’