Dandy Gilver and the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘It’s a trick, Roly,’ Tweetie said. ‘Of course she’s telling us to pull out, from the kindness of her heart I don’t think.’

  ‘She’s being a sight kinder than you,’ Roly said.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ said Tweetie. ‘Just don’t sniff your wretched handkerchief then. Or keep it under lock and key if you’re really so frightened. I am not pulling out.’

  As quietly as a man of his size could possibly manage, Boris rose from the piano stool and slipped out of the room in the direction of Lorrison’s office.

  ‘I’ll pull out too,’ said Beryl. ‘I’m not wanting to win again from somebody else’s black luck. Me and Bert’ll take our names off the list right now if you and Ron’ll do the same.’

  ‘Eh now, wait a minute there, Beryl,’ said Bert. ‘This is the first I’ve heard of this.’

  Beryl, her chest heaving, turned on him. ‘He died,’ she said. ‘A good man’s dead and a good woman’s a widow. How can you be thinking of anything except stopping it happening again?’

  ‘Twenty pound prize money and a raise in my weekly wage is how,’ said Bert. ‘I never killed him. Why should the cup and the money go to somebody else just ’cos we’re working at the same ballroom? See sense, Beryl, will you?’

  Boris returned with Lorrison in tow, just in time to hear Jamesie Hodge pipe up.

  ‘If it’s all right with you, Alicia,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll do what Beryl’s saying.’

  Alicia, her eyes wide with fear, nodded and took his hand.

  ‘I’m out, Mr L,’ Jamesie went on. ‘If I’d have kent Len was killed I’d never have stayed and I’d never have let Alicia within a mile of the place.’

  Beryl, on hearing these words, gave a long cold look at Bert, a look that I could not begin to decipher. I filed it away for later study and turned to Tweetie.

  ‘There,’ I said. ‘That is exactly what your parents have been telling you, Miss Stott. And what Mr Armour would tell you too if he could. Now, why not take Miss Bonnar up on her very kind offer and withdraw before anyone else is harmed.’

  ‘Now just you see here,’ said Lorrison, striding forward. ‘This is exactly what I said would happen. This is exactly the sort of bliddy nonsense I knew was coming when you two characters showed your faces. I don’t know where you’ve got this story from – Foxy Trotter herself more than likely – but if youse think you’re gonny throw your weight about and make the Locarno look bad, you’ve another think coming. This ballroom has got good business out of having the Champs and we’re set fair to make it the double this year. Ronald Watt – if you pull out, you’re finished here. Same with you, Tweetie, and you too, Bert. And youse know I mean it.’

  I waited for one of them to protest that Beryl had been missed out of this shower of ultimata, but although each of them looked ready to kill Lorrison or Beryl or perhaps both, no one said a word. We all stood in some manner of silence, either glum or seething, while Jamesie and Alicia scurried away to the cloakroom, their hats and coats and a life without danger or glory. So keen were they to leave that I did, at that moment, begin to wonder if they were really as innocent as they appeared after all. I gazed after them, musing.

  Thus it was that we heard what might have been missed under the usual sounds of the piano and the soft thump of dancing slippers upon the wooden floor. We were all still standing, silently, when the main door downstairs opened and was let bang shut and two pairs of feet, one female in narrow heels and one male in steel-rimmed soles, mounted the stairs.

  ‘Aw, fling it to hell!’ said Lorrison. ‘They’re early.’

  ‘Let’s see how quickly you drop out now,’ murmured Tweetie in a sly little voice.

  ‘I’m ready to put the whole thing in his hands,’ said Beryl stoutly.

  The door squeaked on its hinges and we turned in time to see a trim woman of middle years holding the door open for one of the most elegant young men I had ever seen in my life, including the romantic leads in repertory company plays and the tennis and golf chaps in the swishest hotels in Monte Carlo. From his hair, which was slicked back with such precision that it looked polished, to the shoes whose soles had ascended the stairs with such bright clicks of their silver tips, he was a vision of dapper perfection.

  ‘My, my,’ he said in tones of the wildest gentility overlaying a foundation of grocer’s boy, ‘I hardly expected to see you standing still and sweet silence from the pianoforte. Where is the feverish frenzy of final practising?’

  ‘You might well ask,’ said Beryl. ‘We’ve got something to tell you.’

  ‘I’ll deal with this, Miss Bonnar,’ said Lorrison. ‘Welcome back to the Locarno, Mr Silvester. I have a bottle of your favourite through in my office and I can send out for a bite to eat just as soon as you tell me what you fancy. Come this way.’

  17

  By the end of the day, I was heartily sick of Mr Victor Silvester, head of the Imperial Institute of Dancing Masters, founding father of the Scottish Professional Ballroom Dancing Championships and, at least in his own estimation, great chief Pooh-Bah of dancing wherever dancing was done. If he had been dropped from a hot-air balloon into the jungles of Borneo and found six natives stamping around a fire he would have told three of them to work on their foot placement and sent them a bill for his time.

  Grant had made a hero and a heart-throb of him by the end of the same day and Barrow was as close to unbending as was possible for him. These two developments occurred because, to my intense and reasonable annoyance, the verdict following a hurried conference in Lorrison’s office between the great man, Alec and me was that the Champs would proceed with the addition of an extra couple planted in the dressing room and on the floor who would follow Tweetie and Roly closely and watch over them for possible interference and harm.

  It took Silvester roughly a minute of watching Alec and me to determine that we were not the men for the job and roughly another minute, after I had summoned them via a call from the telephone kiosk outside, to decide that Grant and Barrow – suitably briefed by himself, naturally – would do.

  At least half of my disgust with the great man was owing to his flat refusal to throw Tweetie out of the contest. I explained to him that her solicitor fiancé was unaware of her connection to the Locarno and the Championship and would not sue Mr Silvester or any of his strings of initials if he simply showed her the door.

  One would have thought I was telling Dick Whittington to put down poison for the cat.

  ‘The matter has been dealt with, Mrs Gilver,’ he informed us, as lofty as he was surely mistaken. ‘There is no need to pay any heed to such silly little pranks. None at all. Now then, let’s see what these youngsters are made of.’

  He turned to where Grant and Barrow stood waiting in the middle of the floor. Barrow clasped Grant to his bosom, so close I expected her to step away and slap his cheek for the effrontery, but she fixed a beatific smile upon her face, looked over his shoulder as though at a heavenly vision in the distance, and took his free hand in hers. Silvester beat time with the end of his ivory-topped walking cane until Boris at the piano came in with a waltz tune. Barrow assumed a smile to match Grant’s and they set off, one-two-three, one-two-three, spinning around the room like tops. I noticed that Grant’s skirt, which had looked perfectly unremarkable while she walked about, now swung out in a bell behind her and I concluded that she had, at some free moment, unpicked the seams and added gussets against just such an eventuality as this one. I shook my head more in wonder than anything else and pursed my lips at her blank angelic face as she and Barrow passed by where I was standing.

  When they had made two full circuits of the room, Mr Silvester banged his cane on the floor again.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Not bad at all, although we could be up all night. Of course, it’s a bit of a worry that no one’s going to know who you are. But we can always say you’ve come down from Inverness or somewhere outlandish like that.’

  ‘Alonzo and Alana are from Invernes
s,’ said Beryl.

  Mr Silvester saw off these details with a wave of his gloved hand. ‘We must also come up with a pair of names,’ he went on.

  ‘Cordelia Grace,’ said Grant, ‘and Pierre Barreaux.’

  She rolled the Rs so enthusiastically when she delivered this that she had to clear her throat surreptitiously when she had finished speaking.

  ‘Is his Christian name Peter?’ I asked Alec in a mutter.

  ‘I seem to remember so,’ said Alec. ‘That was very quick thinking, wasn’t it?’

  It must have appeared so, but I knew Grant and I would have wagered that while she stitched extra panels into her skirt and sewed whatever had been in those extra cases she had brought with her, she had also been thinking up suitable dancing names.

  ‘Those will be fine,’ said Silvester, whom I was beginning to suspect of being christened Tom Smith. ‘Now let’s see your whisk, your chassé and a hesitation change if you know how to do one.’

  Boris struck up again and Grant and Barrow launched into a string of those ludicrous dance steps, lurching first one way and then another before stopping dead, which ruin all the enjoyment of a party for everyone: the couple themselves because they are concentrating too fiercely for conversation and the couples around them because they have to keep their wits honed to jump out of the way.

  ‘Stop,’ shouted Silvester after Grant and Barrow had darted in every possible direction and Grant had rippled once or twice around her partner like the ribbon on a maypole. ‘I’ve seen enough. You’ll do. It won’t be beyond the stretch of imagination that you would spend the ten shillings to enter. Of course, it’s easy to tell that you are not really a couple. There’s no short cut to that perfect sympathy that only comes from months if not years of dancing together until not only your bodies but your minds and hearts and souls are …’ He had lost sight of the beginning of the sentence in his fervour and he fell back on an airy gesture instead of trying to pin it down. ‘But as I say, you’ll do. You’ll have to take part in all four dances, mind. Can you tango?’

  Barrow and Grant both preened a little while Boris found the sheet music and embarked upon a throbbing Latin number.

  We left them to it. Beryl agreed with Alec and me. Tweetie, enthusiastically, and Roly, reluctantly, were against us. Lorrison and Silvester were no help at all, and so there was only one thing for it. We went to Balmoral to try the Stotts again.

  Jeanne let us in, it being Mary the maid’s free afternoon, and a ghost of an idea, or at least the shadow of one, flitted over me when I saw her. It was gone before I could grasp it but it left me staring at her in a marked enough way to cause her to squirm and ask me if there was something wrong.

  ‘There certainly is, Miss McNab,’ I said, and I could hear how sharp I sounded. ‘Matters have deteriorated steeply since we last met.’

  ‘Did you give Miss Thwaite the sewing?’ she said and, just as I had when she was bending over the dead wren, I thought to myself that she was a cold young woman; colder than could be explained away merely by the indignities of living as a poor relation, cold enough so that I started to wonder about her early life and the mother and father she championed so fiercely.

  There it was again! She had said something or something had been said about her which touched on her family and which would have rung bells in me if I had been cleverer or had been paying sufficient attention. I certainly could not run it to ground now, because Lady Stott had come to the library door when she heard us arriving and was beckoning us even now.

  ‘Theresa’s away back to the dance-hall,’ she said. ‘Where have you been? You’re supposed to be watching out for her, but she’s skipping off here, there and yonder and you’re nowhere to be found. We’re very dissatisfied, aren’t we, Bounce?’ This with a glance over her shoulder.

  ‘My dear Lady Stott,’ said Alec, striding forward and taking her clasped hands in his own. ‘We have been detecting as we told you we would. Being detectives rather than bodyguards. But you will be delighted to hear that we have drafted reinforcements and that Miss Stott and Mr Watt are being very closely watched right now.’

  ‘I hope you’re not charging us extra,’ came Sir Percy’s voice from inside the library.

  As was her wont, Lady Stott swiftly realigned herself with us and rounded on him. ‘How can you talk about money when your own daughter’s safety is at stake?’ she said, marching back inside and standing over him.

  He was sitting close to the fire in a smoking jacket and carpet slippers with his feet up on a little stool and a glass of something comforting on a small table beside him. Lady Stott shook her head and tutted with her hands planted firmly on her well-corseted hips.

  ‘Look at him,’ she said. ‘Look at you! Sitting there as if you haven’t a care in the world.’

  I thought she was wrong about that; it was not that Sir Percy was without care, rather that he was beyond his capacity to stay alarmed. He had given up and was waiting to let be what would be. It is a dangerous state of mind, especially for a client who might decide while in it to save his money rather than squander it on our fees.

  ‘If Tweetie can dance, why can I not sit quietly and have a whisky?’ said Sir Percy.

  ‘We’ve come to try to stop her dancing,’ I said. I knew we were about to alarm them but saw nothing for it. ‘Is there anything you could do, threaten her with, withdraw from her, that would prevail? An allowance perhaps? Is there anything in your gift that she values enough?’

  Lady Stott tottered over to the armchair on the other side of the fireplace and sank into it.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she said. ‘Why is it so much more desperate all of a sudden?’

  Alec and I glanced at one another, deciding which one of us should attempt to tell the news without sending the Stotts into a frenzy, but even the glance was too much for Lady Stott to bear.

  ‘What? What?’ she said. ‘What do you know? What’s happened?’

  ‘It’s about Leo Mayne,’ I said, thinking that the truth could not be worse than the suspense for the poor woman. I was astonished to see a glance, the twin of Alec’s and mine, shoot between the two Stotts.

  When Lady Stott spoke again she sounded wary. ‘What about him?’ she said. ‘What have you found out?’

  ‘We don’t think his death was an accident,’ said Alec. ‘At least not entirely. His dancing partner was threatened in much the same way as Tweetie has been and we think that the devil who threatened her caused Leo’s death too.’

  Was it my imagination, I wondered, that Lady Stott sat back in her chair a little – as far as her corsets would allow – as though relieved? I could not for the life of me fathom which part of Alec’s report might have been a relief to her and before I could question her my attention was claimed in its entirety by Sir Percy.

  ‘Do you mean to tell me,’ he said, and his voice was low and cold, like the growl of a large dog when a stranger comes just near enough to the end of its chain for it to form a view of him, ‘do you mean to tell me that Margaret went through this last year and this is the first I’m hearing of it?’

  ‘Who’s Margaret?’ said Alec, not unreasonably.

  ‘Foxy Trotter,’ spat Sir Percy.

  ‘Now, Percy,’ said Lady Stott.

  He raised his hand like a policeman stopping traffic and quelled her. ‘What do you mean, not an accident?’ he said.

  ‘He was nobbled,’ said Alec. ‘And we fear it might happen again. We’d like to examine Miss Stott’s costume.’

  ‘Her costume?’ said Lady Stott, weakly swallowing.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Is it here?’

  ‘She keeps everything in her room,’ said Sir Percy. ‘But I don’t understand.’

  ‘Nor do we,’ said Alec.

  ‘But you do, don’t you?’ said Sir Percy, fixing his wife with such a fierce glare that she shrank backwards, cringing. ‘You knew about last year.’

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘That is, not at first. I had no idea when Tweetie started
being threatened. I don’t think Tweetie knew herself.’

  ‘Or if she did she was careful to keep it quiet,’ said Sir Percy.

  ‘Why are you always so determined to see the worst in her?’ cried his wife.

  ‘Oh, let me see!’ said Sir Percy. ‘Maybe because she’s turned her back on all the advantages we worked so hard to give her and gone slumming in the gutter with the very dregs of humanity—’

  ‘How dare you!’ said Lady Stott, back in booming voice again.

  ‘Oh! Oh!’ said Sir Percy. He was really beginning to work himself up now. ‘It’s well seen where your loyalties are when you get right down to it. How dare I? How dare I?’

  ‘Yes. How dare you be so high and mighty when if it wasn’t for your precious rubber underwear buttons you’d be in the self-same gutter with the self-same dre—’

  ‘A respectable professional man like Julian who cares for her and is willing to—’

  ‘And not a word from me about any of it. Ten years I was living in that two room and kitchen scrimping and scraping every penny while you poured money into that blessed factory—’

  ‘I’ve given you a fur coat, a set of jewels or an oil painting for your birthday and Christmas presents every year since I’ve had the brass to buy them—’

  ‘I didn’t know they were grudged!’ shouted Lady Stott. ‘I suppose you’ve got the cost all tallied up. And Tweetie’s presents too.’

  ‘Nothing’s grudged,’ shouted Sir Percy back at her. ‘Not her car, not her diamond tiara, not the new house, nothing. But when it’s flung back in my face for a night out at a dance-hall—’

  ‘You’re certainly listing them quick enough for someone who’s not grudging,’ said Lady Stott with a sneer.

  ‘It didn’t take you long to count up the years and get to ten!’ he sneered back.

  ‘House?’ said Alec. He is a marvel sometimes. ‘Do you mean to say Miss Stott and Mr Armour are expecting the gift of a new house when they marry? That could surely get their attention.’