Dandy Gilver and the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘And we’re off too,’ I said, coming back down the steps from the stage. ‘We shan’t be hanging around disturbing you. But can you answer a question, Miss Bonnar? Why was poor little Miss Thwaite sacked? Was it because she said something to us that she shouldn’t have?’

  Mr Bunyan gave us a sharp look. ‘How?’ he said. ‘What did she say to you?’

  ‘She mentioned Mr Mayne’s unfortunate accident,’ said Alec. ‘And then she seemed to think perhaps she shouldn’t have.’

  The effect was extraordinary. Bert grew very still until the only thing about him that was moving was the smoke curling up from the cigarette he held pinched between his thumb and fingers. Beryl muttered something about a glass of water and walked off towards the cloakroom. With a glance at Alec, I followed her.

  She was standing at the sinks, right enough, but she had not poured herself any water. The tap was off and the basin was dry. She was looking at herself in the mirror and shifted her glance to my reflection as I approached her.

  ‘It’s all very puzzl—’ I began.

  ‘You should just leave it alone, Mrs Gilver,’ she said. ‘This is our world. My world. It’s not something you’d understand so why not just leave it alone, eh?’

  ‘Are you threatening me, Miss Bonnar?’ I said, caught between the pleasant tone in her voice and the unmistakable import of her words.

  ‘No,’ she said, almost groaning. ‘No threats, no insults, no favours, no “accidents”. I don’t want anything to do with it. I’m done with it. I just want to dance. If we win, we win fair and square and if we lose we’ll be back next year.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said again.

  ‘Good,’ she said, her cheerful face back to normal. ‘Count yourself lucky.’

  The stewards of the motorcar were distraught to see us returning, until they realised that they would be paid the same rate for a few minutes’ work as for half a day.

  ‘I’ll drive,’ said Alec. ‘Since I know where we’re going. You see, I’ve had a brainwave, Dandy. We were looking in the newspapers for the death of “Leo Mayne”. But death is an official business. If it was Beryl’s partner who’d died the death would be announced of “Herbert Bunyan”, not “Beau Montaigne”.’

  ‘Good heavens, you’re right,’ I said. ‘What suddenly put you on to that?’

  ‘Lorrison reminding me of Sir Percy,’ said Alec. ‘He said “Roly” in just the same way Sir Percy said “Roland”. In quotation marks. Now, it’s back to the Mitchell with us to track down Billy Boggle or whoever who died during the competition last year. And if there’s nothing in the notices under his real name we shall go to Register House and look up all the deaths by date until we find him.’

  Thankfully, there was no need to. The librarian was not pleased to see us returning but when we asked for newspapers covering the same dates as last time, she smirked as she walked away. Evidently we had revealed that we had missed what we were looking for and that evened the score after our insult to the press clippers.

  ‘Right,’ said Alec as he opened his enormous volume flat on the table at the date in question, and I opened mine.

  ‘Ssshhh,’ said the librarian, predictably.

  There was nothing even remotely likely that day, not in the Herald, the Evening Times or the Record. Everyone who died in Glasgow on 11 June 1930, be they gentlemen, professionals, tradesmen or common folk, died in a bed of their own or one in a hospital and at the age of sixty at least, except for one poor child of three who was carried off by a fever.

  ‘We’ll keep looking,’ said Alec. But the next day’s budget of newspapers was as unfruitful. More dowagers and pensioners and only one young man, who had been scalded in a shipyard accident.

  Alec turned to a third day with a brave smile which did not quite reach his eyes. He ran his finger down the column of names in the Herald as I ran mine down the shorter column in the Evening Times. We both stopped at the same moment.

  ‘Eureka!’ Alec said, then gave an anxious glance at the desk. The librarian, however, had gone to help a patron decipher the card catalogue.

  ‘I’ve found him,’ I said.

  ‘So have I,’ said Alec. ‘Peter Dooley. That would be a terrible name for a dancer.’

  ‘Len Munn,’ I said.

  ‘Mine’s twenty-two.’

  ‘Mine’s thirty-eight,’ I conceded, ‘but it’s not as though they’re acrobats.’

  ‘Peter Dooley died suddenly of an accident on Monday the fourteenth of June,’ said Alec.

  ‘Len Munn died after an accident too,’ I said, swivelling the volume so that he might read it for himself.

  ‘It could be either of them,’ said Alec, ignoring it. ‘We should look into both.’

  ‘Oh come off it,’ I said. ‘Len must be short for Leonard and so is Leo. Munn practically is Mayne.’ Alec looked mulish. I swivelled the volume back. ‘Does yours have an epitaph?’ I asked.

  Alec nodded. ‘Taken too soon.’

  ‘I win then,’ I said. ‘Len Munn’s says “Waltzing with the angels”.’

  Alec sighed. ‘Touché,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Now how do we find someone who knows him and hasn’t been told not to talk?’

  I considered the question while rereading the notice of death. ‘Suddenly at home, following an accident, on the 14th day of June, 1930. Len Munn (38) of Glasgow, beloved husband and son. Funeral ten o’clock, St Peter’s Church. “Waltzing with the angels”.’

  ‘I wonder who’s the nearest undertaker?’ I said. ‘They must keep a ledger with addresses, mustn’t they?’

  ‘But we couldn’t get near it for a king’s ransom,’ said Alec. ‘Undertakers are notoriously punctilious. Well, I suppose one would be glad of it when it came to oneself really.’

  ‘There must be some way,’ I said. I could not take my eyes from the little entry in the newspaper. There was an idea somewhere in the back reaches of my brain, struggling to come to the fore.

  ‘Mrs Munn must be a fanciful sort of woman,’ I said.

  Alec knows when I am truffling after a useful notion and merely nodded and watched me. The librarian, finished with her customer, came stalking back on those block heels and settled herself behind her counter again. She bent her head until she could not be seen behind the vase of peonies which sat there.

  ‘Florist!’ I said. The librarian looked up in great umbrage at the outburst but I waved a hand at her. ‘It’s all right. We’re going. If you would just be so kind as to tell us in what part of town St Peter’s Church is to be found.’

  It was almost too easy to give any sense of satisfaction. We found our way to Partick, following the instructions the librarian shied at us more to make us leave than from genuine helpfulness and, from St Peter’s, set out in all four directions, crawling along and peering up and down the side streets.

  It was a comfortable and prosperous-looking corner of town, far from the dazzling heights of Bearsden but equally far from city slums. The tenements were set back behind railings, with narrow strips of garden in front, allowing laurels and hydrangeas to soften the line of the ground-floor windows, and they rose only three storeys high in total, letting some light into the streets between them.

  After a few forays, we found a short shopping street, where the tenements had painted banners between the ground and first floor and large plate windows giving straight on to the pavement. There was a dairy, a Co-operative Society Baker, the obligatory Italian fish and chip restaurant, and finally what we were searching for: Dainty’s the Florist, only a stone’s throw from the church where Len Munn had been sent on his way. I crossed my fingers as we entered.

  The smell of a florist’s shop is a curious mixture. There is the scent of the hothouses where one spent such swathes of one’s girlhood, taking exercise in foul weather and attempting to find quiet corners to talk to suitors during one’s season: the warm damp of the sprinkled water; the rich fragrance of soil and moss; the flowers themselves, rank lilies, spicy roses and the pungent r
eek of hyacinth. As well as these comforting smells, though, there is always that of wet newspaper and floor soap too to stop one’s reverie.

  The door, which had clanged as we opened it, clanged again as we let it close and a middle-aged woman in a stout green apron came bustling through to the counter from a back room.

  ‘Help you?’ she said.

  I scanned her person quickly, looking for signs of the best approach. She wore no wedding ring and so might still be a romantic soul despite her decades. Before I could turn that thought to account, though, Alec had taken charge.

  ‘I hope so,’ he said with a huge sigh. ‘We’re at the end of our resources, to be frank.’

  ‘If it’s a rush job I’ll do what I can,’ the florist said.

  ‘It’s not a job at all, strictly speaking,’ said Alec. ‘It’s this. We’re trying to track down a Mrs Munn who lives near here. Mr Munn died last year – young chap. And the only thing we know is that you did the flowers for his funeral.’

  ‘And how did you know that?’ said the woman.

  ‘I asked,’ I said when I sensed Alec hesitating. ‘During the service I couldn’t help whispering to my neighbour in the pew. They were so very beautiful.’ I took a wild guess. ‘White is such a restful colour—’

  ‘They were purple and yellow,’ said the florist, making my heart sing.

  ‘And yet for a chap as original as Leo, it was exactly the right thing to do.’

  This mollified her, as well it might for I could only imagine the ruckus purple and yellow funeral flowers must have caused.

  ‘And now you’re looking for her? Why?’

  ‘News to her advantage,’ said Alec. ‘But we’ve had no luck finding her.’

  ‘Are you from a solicitor's, sir?’ said the florist, with a dubious glance at me, for I was inexplicable in those terms.

  ‘We’re from the SCDM,’ I said, thinking nothing ventured nothing gained, and sure that some of these initials must be the right ones. ‘We’ve set up a memorial cup and it’s due to be awarded for the first time later this week at the Championship. We’d like so much for Mrs Munn to know. She might even wish to come and see the cup awarded.’

  The florist clasped her hands together under her bosom as though about to sing and a beatific smile spread over her face. ‘That’s just lovely,’ she said. Then she frowned. ‘Don’t any of Mr Munn’s old pals at the dancing know the address?’

  I swallowed. Thankfully, Alec took over.

  ‘It’s a delicate business,’ he said. ‘Rivalries, you know. And superstitions too. It’s a world apart.’

  This was vague to the point of senselessness but the florist did not want to admit how far outside the dancing world she lived by revealing her puzzlement. She nodded slowly with her lips pursed, then reached under the counter and drew out an enormous tome of a ledger, bound in half-calf and much mended with plaster linen. She heaved it open, flicked back and forward a few pages, and then stopped with her finger tapping the page.

  ‘Mrs Leonard Munn,’ she said. ‘Yellow snapdragons, yellow Turk’s bonnets, purple iris and purple mock orange.’

  ‘Purple mock orange?’ I said.

  ‘My own patented dye,’ the florist said and turned the book to let us see what was written there.

  ‘Now?’ said Alec, back out on the street again.

  I looked at my wristwatch. ‘It’s past teatime,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Alec. ‘Infra dig to go visiting, or you’re too hungry to think straight?’

  I considered loftiness, but in the end admitted the truth.

  ‘I’m ravenous. But besides that, I could do with some time to work on a line of questions that won’t get us shown the door.’

  ‘To the Grand then,’ Alec said. ‘And we’ll start afresh in the morning.’

  11

  Hugh loathes to stay at hotels and will dredge up the most tenuous acquaintanceship with a nearby house whenever he is forced to travel from home, ending up unwelcome and uncomfortable but always unbowed. He then has the cheek to complain to me when our hosts exercise the right to pay the return visit if headed north.

  ‘But who are these people?’ he demands, glowering down the breakfast table at me.

  ‘The same people they were when you were passing through Gloucestershire last spring,’ I say. ‘I said we should press on to Bath and the Royal Crescent, if you recall.’ This usually puts him firmly back behind the Times and lets peace, or at least silence, reign.

  I, in contrast, like nothing better than a night or two in a cosy hotel room. Choosing dinner at dinnertime, rather than just after breakfast with Mrs Tilling complaining about the fishmonger, is always a delight to me. And Grant makes friends wherever she lands and is usually so taken up with them that she pares her attentions back to a minimum and is a great deal less bother than when she is bored.

  That night in Glasgow’s Grand Central was a treat. We dined downstairs, sure that no one we knew would see us and stop to chatter, and then had coffee and brandy up in my room planning for the next day. When I went to bed, after a delicious bath in a toasting warm bathroom with a carpet upon the floor, and lay listening to the traffic – a perfect cacophony of horses’ hooves, motorcar engines and the thrum of the tramlines even at ten o’clock – I could not have been more content. I even missed Bunty a little less there where she had never been and went as far as to imagine her back at Gilverton curled on the blue chair or down in the kitchens being treated to milksops and leftover gravy.

  The next morning we took up the reins of the case, refreshed and determined.

  White Street, where the Munns had lived and where we hoped to find the widow Munn still in residence, was only minutes away from the florist and we left the Cowley outside the little run of shops there, thinking that a visitor in a motorcar was unusual enough to interest a whole tenement and put Mrs Munn on her guard in fear of neighbours gossiping.

  And this was exactly the sort of respectable place for interfering neighbours. We had to pull a brass bell beside her nameplate outside and wait to be admitted through the front door of the close and ascend.

  ‘Try to look harmless,’ I said to Alec, ‘in case she’s checking from the window. No, don’t look up!’

  Either Mrs Munn was trusting enough to open the door to all-comers or she had peered down at us and liked what she saw, for in only a moment the door clunked, the latch sprang open, and Alec and I entered a tenement for the first time in either of our lives, the first of many times in that most peculiar case.

  A long narrow corridor lay behind the door, stretching back into the heart of the building. The floor was painted stone and the walls were tiled to shoulder height with bottle-green tiles so dark they were almost black, and painted above shoulder height in a cold pale grey, an attempt to help what little light crept into the stairwell and passageway from the windows above the flats’ front doors.

  Mrs Munn was out on the landing, the door open behind her. At first I assumed that we had found Leonard’s mother, rather than his widow – ‘beloved husband and son’ the notice had said, after all – for she looked well into her forties and if someone had told me she was fifty I should have believed him. She was still slim, with fine wrists and ankles and an attractive way of holding her head on her slender neck, and was dressed glamorously in a silk wrap and long earrings, with her red hair piled high. Her face, though, was the face of a Scottish matron, less weathered than many although as unpainted as all, and so ordinary as to seem familiar, a face one had encountered a hundred times on any walk along any street in a Scottish city.

  ‘Mrs Munn?’ said Alec. She nodded, politely quizzical. ‘We’re here to talk about Leo Mayne. We need your assistance with something.’

  She took a step back before she could help it, then she checked herself and drew up.

  ‘Who’s sent you to my door?’ she said grandly but not managing to hide her fear. ‘As if I didn’t know.’

  ‘We came off our o
wn bat,’ I said. ‘Might we come in?’

  Mrs Munn turned and walked back into the flat leaving us to follow her and shut the door.

  Inside was a remarkably well-fitted-up little house of sorts, rather surprising when one has only ever looked at tenements from the street and imagined slum life to be going on in there. There were half a dozen doors and although some of them must lead to cupboards it appeared that Mrs Munn’s style of living was equal to any of Hugh’s tenants and was probably superior to most of them.

  We were taken into a parlour overlooking the street, with a bay window and a yellow-tiled fireplace, empty and with its polished grate gleaming.

  Mrs Munn sat down on the edge of a dark velvet armchair and waited, her poise unmistakable.

  ‘We’ve been trying to form a clear view of how Mr Munn died,’ I said, ‘and we keep running up against a brick wall.’

  ‘But who are you?’ said the woman.

  ‘Private detectives,’ said Alec.

  ‘But who’s sent you?’ she asked again. ‘Who would want to be investigating Leo’s death now?’

  ‘We can’t divulge that, I’m afraid,’ I told her. ‘But we’re very interested to know why it wasn’t reported in the newspapers.’

  ‘I couldn’t have kept it out of the papers,’ Mrs Munn said. ‘There’s no use looking at me.’

  ‘And can you tell us what exactly happened?’ I asked.

  To my surprise, she plucked a handkerchief from the sleeve of her dressing gown and pressed it against her eyes.

  ‘Poor Leonard,’ she said from behind it. ‘I relive it every day.’

  ‘You were actually there?’ said Alec.

  ‘Of course I was there,’ said Mrs Munn, drawing the handkerchief away. ‘We were competing. Couple number eleven, Foxy Trotter and Leo Mayne.’

  ‘You,’ I said. ‘You were his dancing partner?’

  ‘His partner in everything,’ said Mrs Munn. ‘And yes – I see the looks on your faces – I was a little older than my husband, but we were a true match.’ She rose to her feet and opened a door beside the fireplace. I thought she was leaving us to enter another room, but behind the door lay a shallow shelved cupboard, from which she took a purple and yellow velveteen album, tied along its spine with yellow tasselled silk. She set it on the large table in the bay window, opened it and then brought it over to lay it across Alec's lap and mine as we sat side by side on the little horse-hair studio couch.