The Winter Ground (24 page)

‘A hospital nurse,’ said Ina, ‘when I was ill. He spoke of it the other week, don’t you remember? At least, he alluded to it. My nurse came to us from Buckie, came back to town after nursing the Laurie children and their mother.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘Oh, I see! And Robin knew that? He blames this nurse leaving for … Oh, and Albert
doesn’t
know, does he? Gosh, what a tangle. How very uncomfortable for you.’

‘Yes,’ said Ina. ‘It is. It’s horrid.’

‘Only,’ I said, my thoughts catching up with me at last, ‘doesn’t that episode reflect rather better on him than almost anything else one has ever heard? Why exactly would this shared nurse make you revile him? I mean, if he was incensed by the nurse leaving his poor brother’s family in the lurch, then he can’t be as mercenary as all that. At least he didn’t throw up his hands and shout hurrah at the thought that they might succumb from lack of expert care. Because one of the worst things I ever heard about the man – and there is plenty to choose from – is that he stood idly by rubbing his hands and counting his gold while they all went down. That
would
have been shocking.’

Ina was shaking her head.

‘Susan Currie is an excellent nurse,’ she said, ‘but discretion is not her strong suit, at least it wasn’t then. She should never have come prattling to me about her last case. She shouldn’t have burdened me with it. It wasn’t fair.’

‘I can see that,’ I said. ‘But did she actually tell you anything about Robin himself – anything that’s worse than we all know?’

But Ina only shook her head again; clearly, while Nurse Currie might be a bristling switchboard of sickroom gossip she – Ina Wilson – was a dead line.

Back at the ground, it might only have been my fancy but there seemed to be an atmosphere hanging over the place as palpable as a low fog, at least as far as the adults were concerned: no one in her doorway; no one mending his props by the big fire; all the wagons closed tight against the roaming inquisitors in a way they were never closed against simple cold. The children on the other hand had bounced back like rubber balls let go at the bottom of a pond. Tommy Wolf and Little Sal were juggling what I shuddered to notice were glass beer bottles to one another, with Bunty wheeling between them, but not wheeling in her usual fashion, whining with excitement and snapping her teeth; wheeling in perfect figures of eight with her nose and tail high, and snootily ignoring the flashing bottles above her. The Prebrezhensky girls were there too, wrapped up in their thick jerkins and leggings and looking infinitely snugger than the others (I supposed they were prepared for Russian winters and so did not have to make do with an extra jersey and two pairs of mittens during a cold snap in Perthshire), and had taken on a far greater task than the training into submission of my beloved Dalmatian: amid great gales and shrieks, they were teaching my sons to cartwheel.

I drew back into the shade of the trees to watch them for a while. Of course, Donald and Teddy had precisely five days of circus under their belts compared with the others’ years, but I fancied I could discern something slightly more foursquare about them as they smacked their leather-gloved hands together and launched themselves at the frozen ground. In the execution, though, they looked pitiful and it was a lesson to me to compare their helpless flailing legs and clumsy landings with the appearance of helpless flailing that Andrew Merryman put on. I could see, all of a sudden, that the cringing and buckling he had shown to me might have been the act, the skill and precision he used to produce it being the real Andrew, the real Miles, the man himself.

‘I wouldn’t tip them, would you?’ said Alec’s voice at my shoulder, making me jump.

‘What?’

‘If I saw them on a street corner. I’d keep my change in my pocket.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Pity opens more purses than pride.’

‘Dear God, Dandy.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But I can’t seem to get Nanny Palmer out of my head this morning, and she was right. I can sweep past any number of fiddlers dancing a jig on street corners but there’s an old soldier with no legs and a black spaniel who sits at the Waverley steps and I simply pour my wallet into his cup every time I see him.’

‘Him!’ said Alec. ‘Yes, me too. I’ve started going up the other way out of the station to avoid him.’

‘How were the tent men?’ I asked him.

‘Oh, all together before the show started and for its short duration,’ said Alec. ‘So either they’re lying for one another or they’re out of the running. And they were in the strawed tent – the animal tent at the back doors. They didn’t see a thing.’

‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘I can understand the grooms being there, but why the tent men? Shouldn’t they have been in the tent?’

Alec gave me a little smile, one which I have come to know as the accompaniment to his beckoning me after him along the path of greater knowledge where he precedes me. I loathe those little smiles.

‘It’s an obvious mistake,’ he said, ‘to imagine that a tent man is a kind of stage manager and will be hanging around to help with the running of the show. In fact, they have very little to do with that side of things. They are more like handymen. They erect the tent and set the larger props, that’s all. For instance, they attached Topsy’s rope as soon as Cooke’s arrived here.’

‘And there’s no chance that the rope met with a mishap and they helped themselves from the clowns’ props?’

‘None,’ Alec said. ‘That would be far too lackadaisical. What you don’t seem to appreciate, Dandy,’ and there was that smile again, ‘is how expensive rope is. How closely guarded and well maintained.’

‘How about motives then?’ I said. ‘Any rumblings of unrequited love for Ana or Topsy, as you suggested? You seemed pretty sure on absolutely no evidence.’

‘There’s no need to be quite so scathing,’ Alec replied, which I took to be a no. ‘How did you get on with Ina? Doing anything there?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I answered. I had been musing on Ina’s story all the way back from the castle and I was far from certain what I thought of it. ‘She had an answer for everything I threw at her, but the timing didn’t seem quite right. I tell you what would help – let’s go into the ring and walk it through.’

We were in the performing tent before I had finished explaining it, and Alec was nodding.

‘Sounds rather fishy,’ he said. ‘You looked around before the scream and couldn’t see her.’

‘And she can’t have had her head down then because it was supposedly the scream that made her feel woozy.’

‘But she’d hardly have slipped out to stoke up on all the moonlight and magic after things had started to go awry. Very well, you sit and I look, or I sit and you look?’

‘Well, it was me looking before, but then you’re rather bulkier than Ina. Let’s try both.’

I could certainly see Alec bent double in Ina Wilson’s seat, even when I ran much faster over the ring than I had before; the sawdust had been swept away this morning and there was no chance of slipping if one put on a good pace. So, we swapped roles and that was how Inspector Hutchinson and Pa Cooke came upon us – me going up and down like a jack-in-the-box and Alec lolloping backwards across the ring, shouting that I stuck out like a sore thumb and a blind man could have seen me.

‘What’s this, what’s this?’ said the inspector. I took a deep breath, sent a silent apology to Ina Wilson, for whatever she was up to I was sure it was not knocking Anastasia off her pony, and told him. Pa Cooke looked as delighted as might be expected to have someone who was nothing to do with Cooke’s suddenly dragged on to audition for first murderer, but to my surprise, the inspector shook his head.

‘I’m going to forgive you for not telling me, madam,’ he said, ‘and here’s why. You weren’t looking for her last night, were you? You were just looking around.’

‘Yes, but I very clearly remember not seeing her,’ I insisted. ‘As evidenced by my going to her today to ask where she was.’

‘I always said she was a funny one,’ said Pa. ‘Very keen on hanging around us, she was, Mr Hutchinson. Right from day one.’

The inspector waved him into silence.

‘Yes, but looking and not seeing someone bent down and practically out of sight is completely different from looking to see if you can spot someone you
know
is bent down out of sight, and seeing a bent-over figure who’s the only buddy in the place is quite different from noticing someone all crouched over when there are forty other people to be looking at. The difference, my dear Mrs Gilver, between “can you see this, that or the other” and a plain “what can you see” is not a small one.’

Alec looked ready to argue, but Inspector Hutchinson put his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets and began to pace up and down as though he were a professor on a podium settling into a long lecture. I hoped not.

‘Similarly,’ he began, which was a heart-sinkingly professorial opening, ‘when I spoke to your sons just now’ – I felt a slight flush creep over my cheeks, for I had had good intentions of being there when Teddy and Donald were ground through the inspector’s mill and I had quite forgotten – ‘I was very careful not to ask if they saw such and such or did such and such, but merely asked them what happened last night, what they could tell me.’

‘And what did they tell you?’ I said.

‘That something happened to the pony,’ said the inspector. Alec, Pa Cooke and I all shared one ricocheting look amongst us, which I was almost sure the inspector missed. ‘They’re very bright young lads, Mrs Gilver. You must be proud of them.’ I nodded and managed to hoist a smile to my lips, briefly. I was sure that what the inspector described so diplomatically as Donald and Teddy’s ‘brightness’ was the same facet of their personalities which made me want, sometimes, to roll them up in a thick carpet and lie on top of it. ‘They said exactly what they thought I wanted to hear, assuming that I wanted to hear what you did. And you too, sir.’ He gave first me and then Pa Cooke one of his most paint-stripping stares. Then he turned to the doorway. ‘Boys!’ he shouted, and Donald and Teddy appeared, still slightly red in the face from their cartwheels and still in the leather gloves which made them look like dockers.

‘Now, lads,’ said the inspector. ‘Tell me again what you told me earlier on.’

‘Certainly, sir,’ said Donald in a voice clear but rather high. ‘We were watching the show, as we said. We couldn’t see the acrobats and the light was a bit dazzling to see much of Miss Turvy, but the liberty horses were absolutely thrilling and even though Anastasia did all her best stuff at the front of the ring, it was still jolly exciting every time she came whipping round past us.’

‘And then,’ said Teddy, taking over very smoothly, ‘this one time, round she came and the pony’s ears were flat back and his eyes were rolling and he was showing all his teeth – trying to get behind the bit, you know – and with Ana clinging on to his – would you call it a bridle, Mr Cooke? That fancy thing Harlequin wears? – well, anyway, with Ana clinging on for dear life he just kind of scissored over the ring fence and shot away out of sight.’

Pa Cooke was by now staring at the boys out of narrowed eyes and one could almost hear the cogs turning. Cogs were turning in me too but I am sure my eyes were as round as eggs, my mouth hanging open. I could not help shaking my head a little: this was nothing like the version they had given me.

‘Now, sir,’ said Hutchinson, putting out an arm towards Pa Cooke as though ushering him to centre stage to start an aria. ‘What exactly did you say to this pair? Hmm? Can you remember how you put it?’

‘Say to them?’ said Pa Cooke. ‘When? What are you getting at, man?’

‘On the way out of the ring last night, of course,’ said Inspector Hutchinson. ‘I’d like confirmation of what it was you said, and the more accurate the better.’

‘Confirmation,’ Alec murmured at my side. ‘Oh, very clever.’

And indeed the hint that the inspector knew everything already and that denials would be useless and make Pa look a fool did the trick rather neatly.

‘I asked them if they’d lifted the box,’ he said.

‘I know you did,’ said the inspector. ‘Little Sallie heard you. She’s a delightful unspoiled little lass, isn’t she? And what about you, Mother dear? Can you bring to mind what you said to your lads in preparation for them speaking to me?’

‘Now, come, please, Inspector,’ I said. ‘Yes, I spoke to them but I will not agree to “preparation”.’

‘My apologies,’ said Hutchinson. ‘I’m afraid in my line of work I do get in the habit of talking very plainly and I forget what’s expected in polite company sometimes.’ This, of course, was no apology at all but I settled for it.

‘I asked them whether they thought Anastasia had decided to leave the ring or whether her pony had run off with her,’ I said, which was true, to the best of my memory.

‘And they told you what they’ve just told all of us here now?’ said the inspector. ‘Ears back, eyes rolling, bit between the teeth.’ One knew he was talking about the pony but one had to marvel.

‘More or less,’ I said, but then something got the better of me. I like to think it was sheer selfless integrity and honour. ‘Less,’ I said. ‘Much, much less. They did think, on reflection, that Harlequin was the one who decided to leave, not Ana, but there was none of the …’

‘Incidental colour,’ finished the inspector. ‘I thought as much.’

Donald and Teddy did not quite seem to be following all of this, but they understood enough to know they were in trouble and they each pulled their trick of choice. Teddy looked younger in that way he still can; a remarkably effective talent which stays Hugh’s hand and Nanny’s tongue. Donald, years past such ploys, put all his efforts into such a look of cow-eyed innocence that he took on the appearance of a halfwit.

‘Now, listen to me and listen well,’ Inspector Hutchinson said to them, ‘I’m going to forget everything you’ve told me and we’ll start on a fresh page. Agreed?’

The boys nodded, looks of youth and innocence going strong.

‘Very good. Did the pony run off with that poor girl last night or not?’ said the inspector, breaking his own rule of how to ask questions.