Dandy Gilver and the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom

by Catriona McPherson

  But Alec was off already, shrugging himself back into his coat as he went.

  ‘How?’ Roland said again. ‘Why would Julian send things like that to Tweetie?’

  ‘If he found out about the dancing, nothing would be less surprising,’ I said. ‘Not many men could watch you and Miss Stott dancing and believe it was a purely professional partnership.’

  ‘You’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ said Wentworth. ‘How could he get into the Locarno unseen?’

  I opened my mouth to argue but then considered that he was right. Before I could try another tack, though, I heard Alec returning. I should know his footsteps anywhere.

  ‘He’s gone,’ he said. ‘And the Stotts are down there looking like walking wounded. Dandy, what on earth’s going on?’

  ‘Right then,’ said Roland. ‘If he’s gone I can get back to work.’ He went to the door, leaned his head out and whistled as though hailing a cab.

  ‘I’m coming,’ said Theresa’s voice in the distance. ‘But I’m not a sheepdog.’

  Wentworth grinned and swaggered back over to the gramophone, where he wound it furiously and then set the needle down. I jumped at the blare of sound just as Theresa re-entered the room, kicking off the buttoned shoes she had put on for Julian and slipping out of her cardigan.

  ‘Mrs Gilver,’ she said, ‘since you have blotted your copybook completely, you might make it up to me by finding Jeanne and telling her to bring me my dancing shoes.’

  ‘Miss Stott,’ I said, bristling. ‘I was invited into the library by your mother who is not only a snob but also a show-off. And I fail to see how shaking clear proof of guilt out of your fiancé is blotting my copybook in the slightest.’

  ‘Guilt?’ she said. ‘Julian? What rot.’

  I became aware of Alec’s hand on my arm and turned to see him giving me the impish look with which he tells me he has thought of something. I looked back at Theresa.

  ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘I shall give your message to Miss McNab.’

  But Theresa and Roly had already withdrawn their attention from me. At a particularly complicated little run of notes in the gramophone record they locked eyes with one another, nodding along in time and tapping their feet.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ said Watt. ‘If we go into it out of a featherstep instead of a fishtail there’s probably just time. It’s a difficult run to get out of too, mind you.’

  We left them to it.

  As we crossed the landing I could hear the Stotts well into one of their bickering matches. This one sounded heartfelt, as well it might after the recent debacle, but I thought the familiarity of it would soothe them.

  ‘Jeanne’s in cahoots with Julian,’ Alec said. ‘If you’re right that he knows about Tweetie dancing then he has motive but she has the means. She’s playing tricks on his behalf, I’ll bet you.’

  ‘In which case,’ I said, picking up speed, ‘she should be undone or at least discomfited to hear that her accomplice has shown his hand. Oh Alec, if you’d seen the creature! He looked as grey as a peeled prawn.’

  ‘Don’t, Dandy,’ Alec said. He spoke quietly, for we were now in the narrow corridor leading to Jeanne’s room. ‘We can’t all be brave, strong and true. The poor chap must have thought he’d walked right into a trap.’

  I stopped dead and stared at him. ‘Poor chap? Sending nasty messages and threats to his own fiancée? Death threats, Alec.’

  ‘Perhaps he had a bad war,’ Alec said. ‘There are plenty walking around looking fine who’re actually sicker than any old soldier in a bathchair.’

  ‘I am beyond astonishment,’ I said. ‘A poison pen and a bully.’

  ‘Perhaps uncharacteristically, though,’ Alec said. ‘Perhaps he needs Sir Percy’s money so he’s got to stick with Theresa even when she’s making such a fool of him, thinking he doesn’t know. And so he pays her back.’

  I did not answer, for I was shocked to hear such callousness and, more than that, I was troubled to find Alec and myself so far adrift in our view of the matter. I filed it away to pick over later and knocked on Jeanne’s door.

  Perhaps I knocked too hard, rapped even, taking out my annoyance on blameless painted pine. Certainly, when we entered it was to find Jeanne sitting up very straight with a startled look upon her face.

  She was in the late stages of making a brown-paper parcel, tying it securely with stout twine. Immediately my mind flew to the idea that there might be evidence to be got rid of. I have never been able to think of a better way to do it than to send a parcel off into the world with a fictitious return address and plenty of postage. Jeanne, however, tied off her knots very calmly and made no attempt to shift the parcel out of sight.

  ‘Mr Armour was just downstairs,’ I said, by way of greeting.

  ‘Asking for me?’ said Jeanne.

  ‘Why should he do that?’ Alec chipped in. But I could tell already that she had the better of us.

  ‘I’m sure I can’t imagine,’ she said, ‘but if not then why did you tramp all the way up here to tell me?’

  ‘Do you know him well?’ I asked her. She shrugged. ‘You’ve never gone to his office on any of your days in town when Miss Stott is dancing?’

  ‘I’ve no need of a solicitor,’ said Jeanne. ‘I have no property, nothing in trust, no inheritance.’

  Either she was choosing, wilfully, to misunderstand me or she really could not imagine Julian the man rather than Mr Armour the lawyer, but she seemed sincere. Alec’s neat theory began to dissolve before our eyes.

  ‘Actually, I’m glad to see you,’ she went on. ‘I was thinking of coming down and trying to find you.’

  ‘To tell us something?’ said Alec. He sat down opposite her at the little table and had the cheek to nod at my bag, where I carried my much maligned notebook. I was to record the details for his later consideration it seemed, while he concentrated on extracting them.

  ‘To share an idea, anyway,’ said Jeanne. ‘I’ve been thinking more about the threats, sitting up here alone.’

  I could not say whether she meant to inject pathos over her reduced station in life into every single line of her conversation, or whether it had become a habit over the years since her parents died, but it was hard not to roll my eyes as she served up another slice of it.

  ‘We’d be delighted to hear it,’ said Alec, either oblivious to the annoyance or hiding it well.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about who might be behind them, you know,’ said Jeanne. ‘Mr Hodge, Miss Christie, Miss Bonnar or Mr Bunyan.’

  ‘Or Lorrison or Wentworth,’ said Alec.

  Jeanne shook her head. ‘I can’t imagine that Roland would put his own chances in the Champs at risk by upsetting his partner and Lorrison would push his own grandmother off a cliff before he made any more trouble for the Locarno.’

  This did not quite chime with what Lorrison had told us, for he had seemed unconcerned by Tweetie’s plight, sure that he could replace her.

  ‘Now, Jamesie and Alicia weren’t there every time something happened,’ Jeanne went on. ‘So that counts them out. And leaves Beryl and Bert. Either of them is capable of the wren. It’s not a very sophisticated matter, is it? To take a real bird and dress it up to evoke the idea of “Tweetie”. Anyone might have done that.’

  ‘And what about you?’ I said, remembering how unflinchingly she had bent over the dead wren as Alec held it that first day.

  ‘Oh, indeed,’ she said. ‘But the book is another matter. I can’t see Bert Bunyan knowing of such a thing, can you? I’m sure he’s heard the rhyme but would he really think of it’s being a book and go out to buy one? He would not. And he’d be too young to have had that edition of the book lying around, left over from childhood.’

  ‘Unless it belonged to a parent,’ I said.

  Alec raised a hand a little, telling me not to interrupt in case I stemmed the flow, but Miss McNab welcomed my contribution.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘My parents or your parents. But
Bert’s parents? Never.’

  ‘Nor Miss Bonnar’s, from what she told me,’ I said.

  ‘Ah,’ said Jeanne. ‘Well, we don’t have to take Miss Bonnar’s word for it, thankfully. Because even if a little girl from her family might have treasured Cock Robin, there’s the prayer card.’

  ‘It was pretty girlish too,’ I said.

  ‘It certainly was,’ said Jeanne. ‘But what it wasn’t was ecumenical. Beryl wouldn’t have had such a thing in her possession. She wouldn’t dare. Her father would kill her.’

  Alec said nothing; he is an innocent in these matters.

  ‘I see,’ I said, nodding. Then I put on my most guileless face. ‘That really does just leave you then, Miss McNab, doesn’t it? A girl brought up in a bookish house who need not view the prayer card as an out-and-out tinderbox. Is this a confession?’

  Jeanne turned on a sixpence. ‘The threats were a deliberate campaign,’ she said. ‘The culprit might well have procured the card and the book. You spoke as though they were used because they were lying around handy.’

  ‘We both did,’ I agreed. ‘And, given that, you are the only likely person.’

  Jeanne, after another sixpence, smiled triumphantly. ‘You’ve forgotten someone,’ she said. ‘A female of the right sort who was there every day.’

  ‘Miss Thwaite,’ said Alec. ‘But wouldn’t the dancers have noticed if she had left the room? That’s what we concluded.’

  Miss McNab snorted. ‘The dancers wouldn’t notice if Miss Thwaite burst into flames,’ she said. ‘So long as she’s there playing when they say stop and back when they say start again, she could turn cartwheels around the floor in between times and they wouldn’t see a thing.’

  This accorded perfectly with what we had seen of the dancers, of their concentration and their oblivion to all around.

  ‘And now she’s gone,’ Alec said. ‘I suppose Mr Lorrison might know where to find her, but he’s not the most helpful chap I’ve ever met.’

  ‘She hasn’t really gone,’ said Miss McNab. ‘That is, the pianist has gone but the seamstress wouldn’t dare. Not when dear Miss Stott has just changed her mind about every bit of her silly costume days before the show.’

  ‘Do you know where she is?’ I said, sitting forward with great eagerness.

  Miss McNab smiled her sly smile and pushed the brown-paper parcel across the table towards us.

  ‘Not only do I know,’ she said, ‘but I have to get this frock and trimmings to her this afternoon. I don’t suppose you’d like to deliver it for me?’

  We were well on our way, with Alec driving and me clutching the parcel like a puppy, before we began to wonder if we had been …

  ‘Played like a pair of trout,’ Alec said, after searching for the right phrase a while. ‘What was the great revelation about the prayer card, by the way?’

  ‘Denomination,’ I said. ‘It must have the name of a church stamped on the back. Did you notice, by any chance?’ Alec had taken charge of the items of evidence and they were currently in the dressing table in his hotel room, where Barrow had been instructed to place them.

  He shook his head. ‘It seemed the least interesting of the three exhibits,’ he said. ‘The sort of ten-a-penny little oddment one might find anywhere.’

  ‘That’s because you’re English,’ I said, ‘and you very rightly imagine that all Christian churches are part of the same communion.’

  ‘Whereas you are Scottish by marriage to a Scot and mother to two more,’ said Alec.

  He does not often tease Hugh, for he continues to feel a bond of brotherhood with him based on nothing more than their being men. It is that much more delicious to me, therefore, on those occasions when he reveals that he is really my friend and ally; kind to Hugh, but mine.

  ‘We should have studied all three immediately,’ I said. ‘Holmes would be disgusted with us.’

  ‘Holmes would have dusted for fingerprints too,’ Alec said. It was becoming a theme with him. He had been pestering our friend Inspector Hutchinson for months for some training and a shopping list of equipment. Hutchinson, with his usual pith, had said: ‘Leave the smudges to us.’

  ‘Let’s go over them with a fine-toothed comb as soon as we get back tonight, shall we?’ I said. ‘Rather late in the day.’

  ‘And in the meantime, Miss Thwaite,’ said Alec. ‘If we ever find her.’

  We were a long way from Balmoral now, and even from Partick and the good red sandstone streets where Mrs Munn mourned her lost love. This was Springburn, high on a hill looking down over the engine works towards the shipyards on the Clyde, and the tenements here had no railings, laurels, or brass pulls at the door. They were flat cliffs of soot-blackened stone, even the windows filmed over by the endless smuts and smoke that poured out of the chimneys to the south.

  But the same bustling Glasgow life went on around them. There were fewer carts, since the women of Springburn carried their own shopping home in capacious baskets instead of waiting for grocers to deliver, and there were no motorcars at all besides ours, so that the streets were host to great tribes of children playing undisturbed at their mysterious games. They stopped open-mouthed and gawped at my Cowley, then fell into step behind it and made a procession as we went along. We had had no thought of a stealthy approach to Miss Thwaite and it was just as well because, by the time we neared the heart of the district, there must have been forty little followers.

  None of them was barefoot, and none so ragged as the pair who had accosted us outside the Locarno. The boys were in jerseys and long stockings, rather thick for June except that most of them had pushed their sleeves up to their elbows and their gaiters down to their ankles or at least had become thus dishevelled in the course of play. The little girls were neater, with rough pinafores over their dresses, pinny strings tied in bows and dress cuffs buttoned, and their long black stockings were evidently fastened to something under their skirts. Not corsets, I trusted, judging from the way they ran and sang and tumbled over only to pick themselves up again.

  Miss Thwaite lived halfway along a short street which led to a dead-end at the railway line. There was a grocer’s shop on the corner and we came under the gaze of a handful of women who had congregated there to pass the time of day on their way to or from their shopping.

  ‘Fine day,’ said the boldest of these.

  Alec tipped his hat, causing an outbreak of giggles. Some of the women could hardly have been twenty, despite being dressed in the same headscarves and house-aprons as those three times their age. It was only the hair rollers peeping out from under the scarves which spoke to their youth.

  ‘Are youse lost?’ shouted another woman.

  ‘We’ve come to see Miss Thwaite,’ I called back. And my accursed voice caused the usual ripple of interest and amusement.

  ‘Oh my, my!’ said the bold one, swishing her skirts and thereby mocking me.

  ‘Ignore them,’ said Alec grimly. He hoisted the paper parcel into his arms and marched from the car to the close mouth. Inside, there was no floor paint nor china tiles. The steps under our feet were bare stone and the walls were distempered, brown to shoulder height and cream above. It was less gloomy than the approach to Foxy Trotter’s house, however, because here there were windows on the stairway, one at every half-landing, and someone had stretched net across the bottom halves of these and had hung cotton curtains too – rather old and faded, but neatly hemmed to just the right length and gathered into precise folds with tucks along the top. I guessed at a seamstress’s hand.

  The same hand had done a great deal to make the best of the little house. It was rather cramped, the hall being no more than a square of four doors and no room even for an umbrella stand. The facing door led merely to a cupboard, where Miss Thwaite stowed Alec’s overcoat and hat, and I surmised that there was just one room to the front and one to the back. It was to the back room, the kitchen, that Miss Thwaite ushered us.

  ‘I hope you’ll excuse me,’ she said, ‘for my sewing
is laid out in the parlour and if you would have wanted a cigarette I couldn’t allow it.’

  We assured her that the kitchen was fine and seated ourselves. It was more than fine, in fact: cosy from the fire burning in the range under the high mantel; smelling of lavender water from the ironing which was draped over the dolly above; and lightly spiced from a tray of scones cooling under a tea cloth on the table. The furnishings were mean enough, to be sure, a deal table with two wooden chairs, a painted sideboard and just one armchair near the fire, but Miss Thwaite’s talents had provided many comforts. There were embroidered cushions anywhere one might come to rest and a little wooden footstool had been transformed with tapestry and horsehair stuffing. On the table and sideboard and on the shelves beside the sink there were doilies and lace-edged lining panels and the very curtain that hid the sink legs, and no doubt a pail or two, was as nicely tucked and hemmed as the curtains out on the stair, and as well-judged as to length. When Miss Thwaite opened a drawer in the table to take out a tray cloth I saw a pile of more than a dozen in all colours and all pressed into neat sharp rectangles. My own maids would have been proud to make such an even stack of cloth, for a maid worth her salt is much pained by oddments. I learned this when Becky explained the need for more linens to keep all the piles the same height in the cupboard and prevent it looking untidy. Hugh had queried the bill from the haberdasher’s; it being one of the greater annoyances of life at Gilverton that we have never had a housekeeper and that Hugh therefore has a hand in such things.

  ‘We were very sorry to hear that you lost your position,’ I said to Miss Thwaite. ‘Very sorry indeed if we had a hand in it.’

  She considered this for a while before she answered. She was at the sink swirling hot water around in a teapot while the kettle came back to the boil. I found myself hoping that some of the spiced scones would be coming our way, for this case was turning out to be as badly catered as Alec had feared and my insides were beginning to pinch.

  ‘It’s as well,’ she said in the end. ‘It was convenient for picking up sewing and dropping it off again but I’m better off out of it.’