Dandy Gilver and the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘What something?’ said Miss Thwaite.

  ‘An object decorated with green sequins we believe to have come from one of Miss Stott’s gowns,’ I said.

  ‘Her sea-green pleated,’ said Miss Thwaite. ‘She wore it at Easter for the big friendly but never since.’

  ‘And so we are concerning ourselves with means, motive and opportunity,’ said Alec very grandly. Miss Thwaite turned admiring eyes on him. ‘Anyone might have got his hand on the object,’ he went on. ‘But the sequins are a different matter.’

  Miss Thwaite, however, was shaking her head. ‘Tweetie had got behindhand,’ she said. ‘And I was busy taking in Bert’s waistbands. The weight’s been dropping off him lately and the judges come down on poor tailoring like a ton of bricks. So she pasted the last of them on.’

  ‘And anyone at the dance might have snatched them off?’ I guessed.

  ‘They were falling like autumn leaves,’ said Miss Thwaite. ‘The floor was littered with the things. Miss Bonnar slid on them in the cloakroom and nearly went over.’

  ‘Really?’ said Alec. ‘That’s very interesting.’ He nodded at me, telling me to note it down.

  ‘As to motive,’ I said, for I had written down BB slipped – angry? already, ‘does Miss Stott have enemies? Mr Wentworth thought not, but although his loyalty does him credit …’

  Miss Thwaite was shaking her head. ‘I’m not saying everyone loves her,’ she said, ‘for she’s full of nonsense like a lot of girls that age and she’s been spoiled her whole life, but she doesn’t have enemies.’

  ‘Rivals, then,’ I said.

  Miss Thwaite took her time to answer that. ‘If I denied it, would you believe me?’ she began cautiously. ‘But I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. Beryl loves to dance, loves the dancing world through and through. It’s an escape for her and she wouldn’t do anything to spoil it. She never questions a score, never argues if she’s knocked out. So yes they’re rivals, but Beryl Bonnar – despite everything – is as honest as the day is long.’

  ‘And opportunity,’ said Alec. ‘We’ve heard conflicting stories about this morning, Miss Thwaite. Miss Stott reckoned someone might have gone into the cloakroom, but Mr Wentworth didn’t think so.’

  ‘They all went,’ said Miss Thwaite. ‘Their coats were in there for one thing.’

  ‘But once the practice was under way?’ said Alec.

  ‘In and out all morning,’ said Miss Thwaite. ‘Same as ever. They go for drinks of water, to change their shoes, powder their feet, mop their brows after a fast dance, dab at perspiration all over, I expect.’

  ‘You’re saying that Miss Bonnar, Mr Wentworth and Mr Montaigne all visited the cloakrooms while Miss Stott’s bag was in there.’

  ‘And Tweetie herself too,’ said Miss Thwaite. ‘In fact, there was one moment when they were all in there and I got to play for pleasure for nearly three minutes. I got through my favourite section of Chopin’s Nocturne in C minor.’

  ‘Yes, I noticed your two styles,’ I said. ‘It must pain you if you’re a musician.’

  ‘Oh, I’m no musician,’ said Miss Thwaite. ‘I’m a seamstress. I make the costumes. I just help out on the piano for practice sessions. It’s Wally Walton and the Wallflowers that play for the dances and Champs. Mr Lorrison would never have an old woman the likes of me on his stage when the punters are in.’ She smiled, seemingly without rancour. ‘But he does pay me, so I’d better get back to it, if you’re finished.’

  She rose and made for the door, opening it and standing half behind it as though to shield herself.

  ‘What was the object, if you don’t mind me asking?’ she said.

  ‘It’s not important,’ I replied, meaning that we would rather keep the information to ourselves, for Mr Montaigne-Bunyan had already tripped himself up most usefully.

  ‘It wasn’t …’ Miss Thwaite hesitated. ‘You’ll think me fanciful, but it wasn’t a creature of some sort, was it?’

  ‘Now what,’ said Alec, ‘makes you ask that?’

  Miss Thwaite looked from one of us to the other and her thin cheeks paled. ‘It was, wasn’t it?’ she breathed. ‘It was an animal.’

  ‘It was a dead bird,’ I said, swiftly changing my mind and deciding that we would learn more from telling a little. ‘With the spangles stuck to it.’

  Miss Thwaite put one hand up to cover her mouth, pressing it hard against her face until her skin whitened around her fingers. ‘Just like poor Leo Mayne,’ she said.

  But despite our pleading, despite Alec’s urgent assurances of confidentiality, despite my leaping to my feet and practically shaking her, she refused to say any more. All we got out of her as she scuttled off was a look of despair and a muttered: ‘Dear Lord above, not again.’

  8

  Mr Lorrison, seen at close quarters in his office, was no more appealing than he had been across the dance floor. It always perplexes me when someone takes the trouble to be dapper, without taking the trouble to be clean. In this case, an unfortunate suit was paired with a stridently patterned tie and some very pronounced braces, not to mention his cufflinks, which looked like polished jade but which were surely onyx (or even Portsoy marble). Yet, for all that swank his hair was stiff with old pomade and his cuffs were grey along the edge. When he turned his head one could hear the rasp of a badly shaved jaw scraping against his soft collar and a look at it – frayed at the seam – told one that this must happen most days.

  ‘I don’t want any trouble,’ he said when we entered after knocking.

  ‘And yet trouble you have,’ said Alec. ‘Miss Stott’s troubles are yours if they befall her here, wouldn’t you say?’

  Alec is usually adept at meeting his company on their level, winkling information from carters and cottagers with his easy talk of farming troubles. He even made himself at home in a coalminer’s kitchen once and secured his welcome with a gift of pipe tobacco. I wondered if he was unaware that he was putting Mr Lorrison’s back up or if he simply found the fellow so unsavoury that he did not care. Certainly, the curled lip and narrowed eyes could not be misunderstood. Mr Lorrison thought Alec was a fop and despised him.

  ‘If Tweetie Bird’s not happy at the Locarno, there’s plenty more would be glad to step into her place,’ Lorrison said. ‘I’m not running a finishing school for young ladies.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Sink or swim, is it?’

  He inclined his head as if to salute one who shared his understanding.

  ‘I take it Leo Mayne was one of the sinkers?’ I went on, then took an involuntary step backwards as Lorrison rose to his feet and leaned across his desk towards where we stood.

  ‘I’ll have none of your snide hints here,’ he said. ‘You’re on thin ice, if you only knew it. Very thin ice. That was an accident. It could have happened anywhere.’

  ‘And what exactly did happen?’ said Alec.

  But Mr Lorrison was shaking his head and walking round his desk towards us. ‘Out,’ he said. ‘Out you go. I’ll need to see about this. I’ll need to see what I think before I let youse back in here to spread rumours. Go on, sling your hooks, the pair of you.’

  ‘Shall we go to a tea shop and see if we can get ourselves thrown out of there too?’ asked Alec when we were back on the pavement again. ‘We might as well try for the hat-trick.’

  I ignored him, for something had caught my attention. A pair of girls in shop overalls were standing in front of the large picture of Beryl and Bert and scrutinising a small bill pasted at the bottom of the window. I sauntered over to them and eavesdropped shamelessly.

  ‘It’s Friday, I’m telling you,’ said one. ‘Today’s the first and that makes Friday the fifth. They never have the Champs on a Saturday, when it’s professionals. They don’t have to.’

  ‘Are you dancers?’ I asked them.

  They started a little for they had been attending so closely to their discussion that they had not noticed me.

  One of them giggled. ‘We’re not bad,�
�� she said. ‘We don’t disgrace ourselves.’

  ‘Are you competing?’

  This brought gales of laughter.

  ‘In a pig’s ear,’ said the other. ‘Naw, we’re coming to watch if we can get tickets and time off.’

  ‘And who is your favourite?’ I said. ‘Who would you put your money on?’

  ‘My da would kill me if I placed so much as a penny bet,’ said the first girl. ‘But my favourite is Beryl and Beau. Oh, they’re just lovely!’

  ‘And how long have you been following professional dancing?’ I asked.

  Alec, who had been looking perplexed, finally cottoned on. ‘Were you there last year?’ he said.

  The girls nodded and one clasped her hands under her chin with a sigh. ‘Beryl was that elegant,’ she said. Then she continued in a more determined tone: ‘She deserved her win. She would have won anyway.’

  ‘Even if … what?’ I said.

  ‘Even if Leo and Foxy had carried on,’ said her friend.

  ‘Leo Mayne?’ I said. ‘We keep hearing his name but we don’t know the story.’

  Of course, that was irresistible to them and led to a measure of drawn-out, dramatic hinting.

  ‘It was hard to credit it really,’ one began. ‘The way they glide about – and some of the quicksteps so tricky.’

  ‘And yet they never put a foot wrong.’

  ‘I still can’t believe it.’

  ‘Me neither. Beryl’s my favourite but I wish Leo and Foxy were going to be dancing again.’

  ‘You’re quite sure they won’t be then?’ said Alec.

  Both girls turned scornful looks upon him.

  ‘What?’ said one. ‘Listen to what we’re telling you!’

  ‘You haven’t told us anything,’ I said, ‘except that the dancers glide about without losing their footing.’

  ‘Aye,’ said the other. ‘And then Leo Mayne goes to walk down the self-same stairs he walks up and down ten times every day of his life and bang!’

  ‘From top to bottom like a sack of coal.’

  ‘During the competition?’ said Alec.

  ‘Right in the middle of the Champs. Right before the tango.’

  ‘Straight down the stairs and stone dead at the bottom.’

  There was a moment of silence after that.

  ‘Dreadful,’ I said.

  ‘Awfy.’

  ‘And now here it’s come round again.’

  ‘Still, no reason to expect that anything will go wrong this year,’ said Alec, completely mistaking their mood.

  They threw him a cold glance, as befitted one who had spoiled the fun, favoured me with a significant, conspiratorial look, since I had not, and took themselves off.

  ‘Well,’ said Alec, gazing after them.

  The children huddled in the rug against the wheel of the Cowley were getting understandably restive, and so, digging in my purse for sixpences, I went to dismiss them and start the journey homewards. Despite the fact that the boy had cheek enough to bite down on the coin, testing it, I told them they could keep the blanket and they bore it away wrapped around themselves like a cloak.

  ‘Do you think they’ll pawn it?’ I asked Alec, watching them go.

  I have grown so used to Hugh’s sanguinity regarding my detecting affairs that, when I told him of our latest engagement and he banged down his wineglass and dropped his fork on to his fishplate with a clatter, I honestly believed that he had swallowed a bone or looked through the dining-room window and seen a poacher.

  ‘A Glasgow dance-hall!’ he said. ‘Dandy, have you gone quite mad? I don’t expect you to know about it, Osborne old chap, because you are not Scottish—’

  ‘I’m not Scottish!’ I retorted.

  ‘You are a Scot by marriage to a Scot and the mother of two more,’ said Hugh. ‘And you have been reading the Scotsman every day for twenty years.’

  I did not disabuse him. In fact, I had been having the Scotsman laid on a table in my sitting room for twenty years but I do not think I had ever glanced at the thing. Donald, who knows this, giggled and then buried his nose in his glass.

  ‘Know about what?’ said Alec.

  ‘Gangsters,’ said Hugh. ‘Glasgow is rife with gangsters and dance-halls are their lairs.’

  ‘What rot!’ I said. ‘Gangsters are an American invention, Hugh. I don’t suppose they’ve got as far as London yet, much less Glasgow.’

  ‘Rival gangs with knives and razors marauding around the city and fighting in the dance-halls,’ said Hugh. ‘You must have seen the newspaper reports, Dandy.’

  ‘Actually, Mother,’ said Donald, ‘I saw something on a newsreel at the Regal and I think it was Glasgow. I wouldn’t like to think of you getting mixed up in anything like that.’

  ‘When were you at the Regal?’ I asked, for I had never known either of my sons to show an interest in moving pictures. Donald blushed to the tips of his ears and bent his head over his plate again, concentrating like a surgeon on removing some minuscule bones from his turbot. I took this to mean either that he had developed an interest in some Hollywood glamour puss and was sneaking into the Regal to gaze at her or, less ridiculous but more worrying, that he had formed an attachment to some girl who would not be coming to dine here with her parents and at whose home we should not be going to dine either and whom he had therefore to meet in Dunkeld and take to the pictures. I glared at Hugh, telegraphing an instruction to draw Donald aside and get the name out of him, only praying that the name he got was Mary Pickford.

  ‘The Locarno is not a gangsters’ lair, Hugh,’ I said. ‘It’s the venue for professional dancing championships and the people there are perfectly respectable.’ I squashed down a mental image of Mr Lorrison and his green cufflinks as I said so.

  ‘What are you two doing there if they’re so respectable?’ said Hugh, rather nastily and quite unfairly. The first case I ever took was amongst our set, the second too and, although I have since been mixed up with shopkeepers and schoolmistresses, the number of truly disreputable individuals with whom Alec and I have had dealings is tiny.

  ‘It’s a matter of jealous rivalry,’ said Alec. ‘Sabotage at most. I think there’s a woman’s hand behind it, don’t you, Dandy?’

  ‘Some of the women are as bad as the men,’ said Hugh. ‘I’d be a lot happier if you wrote to these people and gave your apologies.’

  I shook my head at him in disbelief. ‘My dear Hugh, if you would like Sir Percy and Lady Stott to be informed that I’m throwing in the towel because you think they and their daughter might set upon me with knives then you write and tell them.’

  ‘Who?’ said Hugh.

  ‘A baronet with plantations in the Indies,’ I said. ‘Now, let’s talk about something else, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘What did you see?’ Alec asked Donald.

  ‘The Blue Angel,’ said Donald, blushing again.

  ‘Ahh,’ Alec said, sitting back and smacking his lips like someone tasting a new bottle of port. ‘Miss Dietrich, eh?’

  ‘Who?’ said Hugh again, for he only reads the gloomy pages of his gloomy newspaper and never the reviews.

  I drafted my letter to the Stotts after dinner, accepting the commission and quoting a reasonable daily fee to see us through the days leading up to the Championship and the day itself. I had just started writing out the final copy in ink on good headed paper when Alec joined me. He looked at the blue chair, gave a great sigh and sat opposite it.

  ‘Hugh and Donald in the billiards room?’ I asked.

  ‘Donald’s gone home and Hugh’s busy with this river weed thing,’ Alec said.

  I nodded as though I knew what that was. Hugh is forever busy with some dreary calamity or other somewhere on the estate and since we bought the neighbouring one for Donald he has twice the fun. Donald himself marches about dutifully enough with his father or his steward but he has never shown any true zeal.

  ‘He needs a wife,’ I said. ‘He shouldn’t be sloping off to the Regal and mooning ov
er German sirens.’

  ‘He’s twenty!’ said Alec, whose own efforts at making a match were still rather desultory as he headed towards forty.

  ‘Where shall we stay in Glasgow?’ I asked. ‘I don’t have any friends there, obviously. But there must be a decent hotel somewhere near the Locarno, don’t you think?’

  ‘The Central at the station, I expect. Presumably that will be quite near the library too.’

  I had to hide a smile. If I am overly fond of my little notebook and pencil then Alec’s weakness is the clippings collection of the nearest library. It started in Edinburgh once when he was poring through back copies of the Evening News looking for a wedding announcement for a case of suspected bigamy and the librarian in charge, tired of his endless huffs and sighs, asked if perhaps the clippings would be more convenient for sir.

  The clippings were of no use at all to sir in the matter at hand but he fell instantly under their spell anyway. He even rang me up from a kiosk across the street to regale me.

  ‘They’ve got everything in there,’ he had said. ‘All gathered together by subject matter and catalogued by date. Everything, Dandy. This is going to change our world. Transport, council meetings, weather reports. You name it.’

  ‘Gosh,’ I remember saying. ‘Council meetings and weather reports.’

  ‘Criminal stuff too,’ Alec assured me. ‘Theft, burglary, assaults. Everything gathered together and indexed.’

  To tell the truth, I thought I would rather miss the quiet afternoons sitting at one of the large library tables, turning the pages of years’ worth of bound newspapers, hunting that elusive pip of information that might crack a case.

  ‘What do you think the papers will tell us about Tweetie Bird and the Locarno?’ I asked now.

  ‘Nothing at all about Tweetie,’ he said, ‘but I was hoping for something about Leo Mayne. I know those two girls on the street said it was an accident and I can understand it not being Lorrison’s happiest memory, but why did Jeannie McNab drop his name into the conversation in that sly way and why did Miss Thwaite bring him up when she did? Why would a dead “creature” make her think of a young man falling downstairs?’