Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble

by Catriona McPherson

  The air was still, in the shelter of the courtyard. Not a breath of wind stirred. Yet, a shudder passed through me and left my skin crawling, as the dreadful revelation broke.

  Suits of armour come in pairs. And yet there was just one in the attics of Castle Bewer. One suit of armour with two lances. One suit of armour with its own curious, canvas under-suit left inside it and rotted to shreds around its feet, and another canvas suit bundled up and shoved into its arms. One suit of armour left and its mate pressed into service again after hundreds of idle years.

  It was when Leonard and Bess started arguing about dressing the stage with swords and cannon – and suits of armour – that Ottoline hurried away. She went to the attic and got her dress dusty and her stockings filthy. She was checking what she suspected and, once she knew it was true, she took to her bed, saying she had lived too long and wanted only to die. Her son and his bride had killed her husband and her life was now a hateful thing to her.

  But why would one put a dead man inside a suit of armour, having killed him? Why make a body so heavy it was all but impossible to move?

  I gave a start, but barely noticed the giggle that ran around the audience at it.

  I could think of one excellent reason to weight a body and it made sense of many things. Francis said he had a vision when he plunged into the moat and sank to the bottom. Ottoline screamed holy murder when she saw him go in. Not in case he sank, but in fear of what was sunk already. I frowned. She had always suspected where Richard’s body was, I realised. She did not let Penny swim in the moat although Bluey had swum there when he was a boy. The difference was that when Bluey was a boy there was nothing worse in the moat than a few tadpoles and perhaps a water rat. But by the time Penny was born, Ottoline dreaded it had a much more grisly resident, sunk to the bottom and slowly mouldering there.

  A bell rang and I flinched again and looked around me. The scene was drawing to its close. Banquo and Fleance were gone and Macbeth stood alone.

  ‘I go and it is done,’ he said. ‘Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell that summons thee to heaven, or to hell.’ Then he marched upstage, grabbed me above my elbow, gave me a look that could freeze a cauldron of boiling oil and dragged me off with him.

  Leonard was waiting. ‘Get that costume off,’ he said in a low mutter. ‘You are a disgrace to the theatre. You are sacked.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’ve got other things to do.’

  I left him spluttering, flew to the ladies’ dressing room, stripped my servant’s dress off, shrugged my own back on, and went to find Alec.

  The first room I tried was clearly Sarah Byrne’s little bolthole. There were flowers on her dressing table and a pink silk wrap pushed back on her chair where she had let it fall as she sat there. Next door again was Moray Dunstane’s, with more flowers – I wondered if they sent them to each other – and a satin wrap hardly different, except for being quilted where Sarah’s was sheer. He was already in there, his crown off and his kingly robe thrown on the floor, busy sticking grey wisps to his temples to become the old man.

  ‘What the devil?’ he said.

  ‘Sorry, wrong door,’ I told him and tried a third time. This room was even fuller than ours, simply stuffed with tables and stools and one-third full of actors, all throwing off soldiers’ garb and donning servants’ cloaks, or throwing off servants’ cloaks and donning the ghosts’ shrouds for later. Alec was halfway, standing in his summer vest with his trousers rolled up.

  ‘Dandy?’ he said. ‘Wrong dressing room, darling.’

  ‘He’s dead,’ I said.

  Paddy Ramekin and Julian clutched one another.

  ‘Who?’ said Paddy.

  ‘Onstage?’ said Julian. ‘It’s the curse!’

  ‘Moray? Or Max? If it’s Max I could go on. I know the lines.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Alec, ignoring them.

  ‘And I know where the body is too,’ I said, which set Julian and Paddy all a-flutter and got Alec out into the corridor beside me, summer vest, rolled trousers and all.

  ‘Where?’ he said.

  ‘I’ll tell you, but come away from here,’ I said. ‘Leonard is probably hunting me down to cut out my heart. I made a bit of a mess of things, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Where?’ hissed Alec as we fled along the corridor to the safety – from Leonard, at least – of the kitchen passageway.

  ‘In the moat,’ I said. ‘In a suit of armour.’

  ‘Who did it?’

  ‘Bluey. Or Minnie and Bluey together. Ottoline has long suspected and she finally worked it out yesterday.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Same way I worked it out just now,’ I said. ‘Because there was only one suit of armour. And only one reason to put a corpse in the other one.’

  Alec clutched me, just where Moray’s fingers had bitten in deep to the flesh of my arm, making me yelp. ‘Dandy, you don’t think they know she knows, do you? You don’t think she’s in danger?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, not yet. They’re still laughing at her. Saying she’s gaga. Saying she’s peculiar about the moat.’ But, as I spoke, we both heard footsteps and, looking along to the end of the passageway, we saw Bluey striding with great purpose. He could have been going anywhere but his general compass looked to be set for the Gatehouse Lodging and Ottoline’s bedroom there. Swift and quiet, we started moving.

  Thinking there was no way we could have beaten the castle’s owner through its labyrinthine corridors when he had a head start, we slowed and listened as we reached Otto’s door. Then with a soft knock we entered.

  All was quiet darkness. The window was open to the night air but the hush in Ottoline’s room was such as I had never heard and the inky blackness blinded us completely.

  ‘Light the candle, Alec,’ I said, my voice ragged.

  As Alec fumbled for a match and struck it, I found the bed and Otto’s hand upon the coverlet, icy and jagged. She had clutched at her bedclothes as she died.

  ‘Long gone,’ said Alec, raising the candle and looking down at her. ‘Nothing to do with Bluey. Long, long, gone.’

  ‘She got what she wanted,’ I said. ‘To die in her own bed in her own house. She said this afternoon she had lived too long. Oh, but it’s hideous, Alec. What a pitiful end.’

  Alec heaved a sigh up from his boots but, before he had quite huffed it all back out again, he stopped. ‘Are you absolutely sure it was Bluey and Minnie, Dan?’ he whispered. ‘Because if – and I’m only suggesting it as a possibility but – if Otto had put her husband in the moat in a suit of armour, and he’d be found if the castle were sold and the new owners drained it, I should jolly well think she would want to die in her own house in her own bed. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Alec!’ I said. ‘We’re standing at her deathbed. Have some—’ Then I caught my breath.

  ‘And,’ Alec went on, ‘if she knew that her husband’s century meant a tax bill and the sale of the castle to pay it I should jolly well think she’d feel she’d lived too long too.’

  ‘But she didn’t know about the note!’ I said. ‘She didn’t know about Stumpy … Ssh, someone’s coming.’

  We had just got ourselves out when Bluey appeared at the head of the staircase at a trot.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Great minds.’ Then, as he took a closer look at Alec, he said ‘Rather informal attire for visiting my mother, old chap.’

  ‘Were you coming to see her?’ I said.

  ‘Actually, I left the play because it suddenly occurred to me I should replace that little locket on top of the picture. I’ve got the Speirs family sworn to secrecy about where they found it. Thank goodness, because we couldn’t keep thinking up new places. And then I just thought to myself I’d see how Mama was poddling on. Is she sleeping? Has she had her cocoa.’

  It was a masterful performance, if performance it was.

  ‘Stashing bits of jewellery, eh?’ I said, hoping my tone would unsettle his act, but he only frowned at me and asked again.


  ‘Is Mama all right?’

  ‘Bluey,’ said Alec, suddenly. ‘Why did you change the drawbridge from that feat of engineering to the one you’ve got now.’

  Bluey groaned. ‘I didn’t,’ he said. ‘That was my mother and I was furious. She did it while I was away staying with Minnie’s family just before our wedding and she’s never really given me a proper reason for it. Why?’

  Alec and I looked at one another. At least Alec stared at me beseechingly and I glared at him. It did no good, my glaring. The task was mine.

  ‘Bluey, I’m afraid I have some bad news,’ I said. ‘Two pieces of bad news, actually. One recent and one rather old, at least for news anyway. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Old news?’ said Bluey, ‘Don’t tell me you’ve unravelled it all! Is the ruby truly gone?’

  ‘Never mind the ruby just now,’ said Alec, in his kindest voice.

  The kindness made Bluey blink. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You’ve found out what happened to my father, have you? Well, out with it. It’ll be a relief more than anything, finally to know.’

  ‘It’s not your father,’ I said and perhaps I placed the emphasis oddly, for he blinked twice more.

  ‘Oh,’ he said again. ‘Am I to take it that I am an orphan?’ His lip wobbled. ‘Let me get Min before you tell me, would you? I’m not sure I’m equal to it on my own.’

  23

  ‘But Ottoline couldn’t possibly,’ Minnie said. ‘She’s a— Was a— Oh, I can’t believe she’s gone! And all alone in a dark room too. My heart will break from it.’

  I decided then and there never to tell Minnie I had suspected her of plotting to kill her mother-in-law to keep secret the fact that she had killed her father-in-law too. Some things are better left unsaid.

  We were in the little sitting room we had been led into on the first day, all clutching brandy and sodas and all trying and failing to make much sense of it all.

  ‘She was a willow wand,’ Minnie managed to get out at last. ‘Even if she somehow killed Richard, with poison or a pistol or something, she doesn’t … didn’t have the strength to put him in a suit of armour, carry him to a window and tip him out into the moat. She couldn’t do it.’

  ‘She didn’t do it alone,’ said Alec. He took a stiff swig of his brandy. ‘She had help. From Gunn.’

  Minnie and Bluey exchanged blank looks.

  ‘Gunn, your father’s valet,’ I said. ‘Now the butler at Mespring.’

  ‘Why on earth would Gunn …?’ Bluey managed to get out before words failed him.

  ‘For advancement,’ Alec said. ‘He was a lowly valet in a charming but rather lowly household, if you don’t mind me putting it that way. And now he’s a butler in one of the grandest houses in the land.’

  ‘And my mother wrote him a glowing reference in return for him helping dispose of my father’s body, did she?’ said Bluey, sounding bewildered. ‘But why would a reference from such a “charming but lowly” individual have such an effect on people as “grand” as the Annandales? It’s not as though there’s friendship between the two houses.’

  ‘He didn’t go empty-handed,’ I said. ‘He took – at least we think he did – he took the Cut Throat with him.’

  There was a silence so profound it almost seemed to ring.

  ‘I was right about that then?’ said Bluey.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ I said gently. ‘It’s the only thing that makes any sense. It was Sarah who put all of this in my mind, really. She said when she was a child she never believed Duncan was dead, because no one saw it happen. And it struck me that all of the stories about the Cut Throat stemmed from after Richard was gone. Nanny didn’t know anything about the curse and the obsession. Bluey, you said all that only came out afterwards and it wasn’t part of your own childhood. No one saw it happening, you see, because it didn’t happen. Ottoline made it all up. She made it up out of whole cloth to explain the absence of both her husband and the necklace. To cast herself as the voice of reason – saying she wanted to give it to you, Minnie, but Richard wouldn’t hear of it. To cast herself as the victim of rather sordid circumstance – saying that her husband was mad and had abandoned her. To cast herself as heroic and loyal – saying she had kept his descent quiet from everyone. But she had to change the castle’s staff. No one can keep a secret long in a house full of servants.’

  ‘And the true story is simply that she had killed her husband and did not want to hang,’ said Minnie. ‘That was what underlay all her passion for keeping this place and living out her whole life here.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘As long as you owned the castle she was safe. If it changed hands, the new owners would no doubt make it their first priority to improve the drawbridge. That hasty affair thrown up after the murder has never been worthy of the place after all.’

  ‘I’m not arguing,’ Bluey said, ‘because I never understood Mama’s position on that gimcrack bridge, but why choose that side of the castle and cause the problem in the first place?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Alec. ‘Of course. Because even a strapping young Gunn would be hard pressed to heave a knight in armour up over a windowsill. They must have dragged the body to the drawbridge, dressed it there and then simply rolled it.’

  Bluey was staring aghast at him. Alec, carried away by the light shining on the puzzle at last, had forgotten he was talking about the man’s father. Hastily, I changed the subject.

  ‘She must have been horrified by the plans this summer.’

  ‘Poor Mama,’ said Bluey. ‘All the visitors, the treasure hunt, you two crawling over the castle looking for clues, Dandy.’

  ‘Did you know her hearing was perfect, by the way?’ I said.

  ‘We had our suspicions,’ Bluey said. ‘I thought perhaps she’d just got tired of taking part in things and that was the easiest way to remove herself. Poor thing. Poor Father too. Poor us, all round.’

  Minnie stood, took the glass out of his hands and drew him up to standing. ‘Let’s go to bed and try to sleep for a few hours, dearest,’ she said. ‘I’ll get Mrs Ellen to sit with Ottoline until morning and then we can telephone to the undertakers.’

  ‘And the police?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Minnie. ‘Ottoline will be laid to rest with some respect and then – if we decide to drain the moat or work on the drawbridge and make a gruesome discovery – we shall deal with what comes.’

  ‘Are you suggesting we just carry on?’ said Bluey, swaying where he stood. ‘The play and teas and luncheons. The treasure hunt?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Minnie. ‘We are a house of mourning.’

  ‘And what are we to do?’ I said. ‘Alec and me? Stand by and say nothing? If there has been a crime we can’t turn a blind eye.’

  Minnie swung round to look at me. ‘You, Dandy, are to go to Mespring and find out from Gunn what really happened. If it was perhaps an accident. Or if it was deliberate, why on earth she did it. It wasn’t the nonsense about the necklace, clearly. So why did Otto kill him?’

  We waited until a decent hour for visiting below stairs. It was seven o’clock in the morning when Alec, Grant and I, and Penny to represent the family, made the journey from Minnie and Bluey’s field to the Annandales’ magnificent park. We had not slept a wink. We had simply scraped off our stage make-up, dressed in less remarkable clothes and waited for sunrise.

  ‘Why do wives murder their husbands?’ Alec said by way of chat, once we were under way.

  ‘Mariticide and uxoricide,’ Grant said, ‘are usually jealousy of a lover, discovery with a lover, inheritance, insurance or simple disaffection. Manslaughter could be discovery again or maybe they were arguing and she shoved him down one of those spiral staircases. That would do it.’

  I tried hard not to be shocked. After all, it was Grant’s clarity of thought that had made me invite her along with us in the first place.

  ‘But don’t you think it must be something to do with the Cut Throat?’ Penny said. ‘Why would Granny weave the curse int
o her story so tightly if it didn’t belong there?’

  ‘We think the curse was a fairy tale Otto herself made up,’ said Alec.

  ‘But how else could a necklace have caused a murder and got such a starring role in the drama invented to cover it up?’ I said. ‘If there wasn’t a curse at the heart of it?’

  ‘Perhaps Mr Bewer wanted to sell it and Mrs Bewer wanted to keep it,’ said Grant.

  ‘Or,’ I said, ‘perhaps Richard wanted to give it Minnie and Otto didn’t want to let go. She did say that he snatched it off her neck during an argument. Perhaps there was a grain of truth in that.’

  ‘Is it only because I’m a man,’ Alec said, sounding rather hesitant, ‘and so don’t really care about such things that it all seems … Not that I’m suggesting ladies are silly about their jewels but … It doesn’t seem big enough. A necklace? An argument about a necklace?’

  ‘Once an argument about a necklace has caused a shove down the stairs and a death it becomes the matter of a noose,’ said Grant.

  ‘Poor Granny,’ Penny said. ‘Let’s see what Gunn has to say.’

  Gunn was just finishing breakfast when we arrived at the servants’ door, our four faces so grim that the little housemaid hustled us straight into his pantry, terrified of she knew not what, and then scurried off to fetch him. He arrived, wiping his lips with a cotton napkin and looking equal to anything we might ask.

  ‘Ottoline Bewer is dead,’ Alec began. ‘And we know the whole story.’

  ‘The whole story?’ said Gunn. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘We might need your help to fill in a few of the details,’ I admitted. ‘But we know she killed Richard and you helped her weight the body and roll it into the moat. We don’t know why she sent faked letters from all over the world but we suspect you helped her. You bit your tongue while you were listing the places they came from, you know.’

  ‘I wondered if you’d noticed that,’ Gunn said. ‘How would a servant who’d left the household know where his old master was travelling? That was a bad slip.’

  I groaned to myself. There was nothing special about Lisbon in the list of cities at all. Gunn had simply happened to stop talking just before he said its name.