‘The name of the guilty party?’ I echoed, jabbing at my hat with a pin and wincing at the memory of those tacks. ‘You don’t think it’s Beryl?’
‘I don’t think it’s Beryl alone,’ said Alec. ‘It can’t be. Beryl can’t have made that silly headband – that must have been either Jeanne or Miss Thwaite – and if Grant’s right about its entire design being geared towards a drenching in cyanide then whoever made it is in this up to her neck. And then there’s Julian.’
‘He surely didn’t stitch the band,’ I said. ‘But he did practically faint when he realised who I was and he was in the ballroom today until he slipped out again. Do you think we could get his home address out of Tweetie and beard him tonight or must we wait until Monday and catch him at work?’
‘It’s going to be a long night anyway without a visit to Julian,’ said Alec. ‘As well as grilling Jeanne and Miss Thwaite, I want to go back to Foxy and ask about her headdress.’
It began to feel like a long night about fifteen minutes after we arrived at Balmoral.
‘You!’ cried Lady Stott as she caught sight of Alec and me in the sitting room doorway. ‘You’re sacked.’
‘I’m not at all surprised that you feel so,’ said Alec.
‘Well, I am,’ boomed her husband. ‘Tweetie is here alive and well at the end of that blessed competition and that’s all we asked of you. You shall have a bonus and it’s me who writes the cheques, Eunice, I’ll thank you to remember.’
‘Well?’ said Lady Stott on such a high pitch that she was almost squealing. ‘Alive and well? Look at her, Bounce – she’s ragged. She has seen something no young lady should ever have to see. I’d be astounded if her nerves aren’t frayed till the end of her days. Oh poor Roly, poor, poor Roly.’
‘You’re not making it any better, Mother,’ murmured Tweetie in a weak voice, from where she was draped on a couch like a mermaid on a rock. Then she turned to us and managed a brave if rather watery smile. ‘Have they caught her yet, Mr Osborne?’
If we had told the truth – that they had not even started looking – I think both of the elder Stotts would have burst into flames with indignation. So I simply shook my head and Alec made do with a regretful grimace.
‘Poor Roly,’ said Lady Stott again. ‘He was such a nice boy. So attentive and such a good listener. And so young!’
‘How are you feeling, Miss Stott?’ I said, taking the liberty of settling on a low stool drawn up close to her side and peering at her. Her pupils were normal sized again and although she had that deathly pallor, there was no sheen upon her skin now. I took her hand and chafed it in my own. ‘We were terribly upset about having to leave you. That stupid policeman.’
‘And that’s another thing,’ thundered Lady Stott. ‘What’s the point of all those luncheons and fund drives and games of golf if when something like this happens you can’t go straight to the Chief Constable and get him told?’
Sir Percy fidgeted a little on his plush armchair and smoothed his hair before speaking.
‘Matters are rather more complicated than you – in your protected innocence, Eunice – can possibly understand.’ If he had doused her in petrol and lobbed a lit match he could not have produced a more violent reaction.
‘My what?’ she said in a very low and wavering voice. ‘My protected innocence, is it? Who do you think you’re talking to, Bounce Stott? Do you think I came up the Clyde on a biscuit? I’ve forgotten more about what goes on in this city than you’ll ever know and I don’t care who she is. I want you to tell the Chief Constable and the Fiscal and Lord Burrell and the editor of the Herald and anyone else you can think of to tell, that she’s on the run and she must be found. This is your own family, for the love of God.’
‘Ronald Watt was no member of my family,’ said Sir Percy with a warning look. ‘Nor even of yours.’
Lady Stott subsided a little, fluttering her hand at her neck, tidying her pearls as she always did when she was discomfited.
‘Too close for comfort,’ she said. ‘And this pair might as well have been chocolate soldiers.’
‘We’ve discovered how it was done,’ I said, unable to sit through another tirade on the subject of our inadequacy. ‘Tweetie’s headdress was soaked in cyanide and Roly breathed it in until he collapsed.’
All eyes, unsurprisingly, were suddenly upon me. Sir Percy’s face had fallen, all his bluster wiped away and replaced by a dull gaping shock. His wife, in contrast, seemed to have added all his lost fervour to her own and was breathing like a bull, swelling over the top of her corsets. Tweetie was staring with wide eyes, aquiver in a way I had not seen except when a hare is sitting up in a field. Jeanne was the only one whose expression puzzled me. She was sitting forward, staring at Tweetie and looked, if one had to choose a word, annoyed. And annoyance was a most peculiar response to what she was hearing. I glanced at Alec to see if he had noticed it, but he was exchanging some silent masculine message with Sir Percy.
‘Now, Miss Stott,’ I said, ‘we need you to try very hard and remember everything you can about what happened in the cloakroom today. Was anyone alone with your things at any moment?’
Tweetie ignored me. ‘Cyanide?’ she whispered. ‘On my headdress? You mean it was me? I killed Roly?’
‘You did nothing of the sort,’ snorted Lady Stott. ‘You were in grave danger yourself. You did nothing wrong. You killed no one. Tell her, Bounce.’
‘You were the instrument of death, Tweet,’ said Sir Percy. ‘Not the agent.’
Unsurprisingly, Tweetie took this characterisation of her part in the tragedy rather badly. Her eyes filled with tears and her bottom lip began to quiver. Lady Stott formed an even dimmer view but expressed it more forcefully.
‘Instru—’ she said, so aghast that she could not say any more without another deep breath to gather strength to speak. ‘Instrument of death? What the merry blazes is wrong with you, Percy Stott? How can you say such a thing to your own darling girl? I’ll instrument of death you!’
Sir Percy gobbled and spluttered but could not break into his wife’s flow to mount a defence. And even Alec, to whom he extended a supplicatory hand, could not help him. Alec looked as shocked as Lady Stott, actually.
‘Beryl,’ said Tweetie when at last her mother drew breath.
‘Exactly,’ said Lady Stott. ‘Beryl blooming Bonnar is the instrument and agent and everything else of death. So put that in your pipe, Percival, and smoke yourself blue.’
‘Beryl was alone with my things,’ said Tweetie. ‘It was about an hour before the doors opened, we were all in our costumes but I hadn’t put my head ornament on. We went out on to the floor to get our pep talk from Mr Silvester, but Beryl hung back.’
‘Why?’ I said. ‘What reason did she give?’
Tweetie laughed and shook her head. ‘Beryl Bonnar doesn’t have to explain herself to anyone,’ she said. ‘If anyone else had kept Mr Silvester waiting there’d have been hell to pay, but—’
‘Theresa!’ said Sir Percy. ‘Will you mind your language? See what hanging around with those rough sorts has done to her, Eunice? Six years at the best school that money can buy and it’s all undone.’
‘Your father’s quite right,’ said Lady Stott. ‘Julian wouldn’t care to hear that sort of word on your lips, Tweetie.’
‘Julian isn’t the cherub you think he is,’ Tweetie said, in a sort of sly drawl.
I caught Alec’s eye, wondering if we should press her on what she might mean, but he shook his head.
‘Miss Stott,’ he said gently, ‘how long was Miss Bonnar alone in the cloakroom?’
‘Ten minutes perhaps,’ said Tweetie uncertainly. ‘I mean, I can’t be sure. I was in my gown and had put my wristwatch away with my other things. Roly still had his pocket watch though. You could ask him.’ As she finished this speech her voice died in her throat and with a huge gasp, she began to weep, tears pouring down her face and sobs tearing at her.
Both her parents converged on her then, f
ussing like a pair of hens, shushing and patting and tucking the blanket tighter around her shoulders. Then Sir Percy sat on the edge of the couch and rocked her with his stout arms clasped firmly around her shoulders and Lady Stott, outwitting her corsets by the power of overwhelming maternal devotion, managed to bend double over the back of the couch and plant kiss after smacking kiss on Tweetie’s head like the priest of some flamboyant Church performing his rituals.
I caught Jeanne’s eye and nodded towards the hallway then the three of us left as quietly as we could, fain to disturb the pietà, this precious moment when all three Stotts were one.
We retired to the library, where Jeanne went straight to a tantalus of brandy and a soda siphon, poured herself a respectable snifter and drank it down like medicine before turning to face us.
‘My father will be spinning in his grave,’ she said, with an apologetic grin. ‘But I started to feel quite giddy in there. How many shocks can there be in one day?’
I gave a polite smile, one I learned from my mother, designed to acknowledge that one has understood the confidence just shared but give not even a shred of encouragement to the sharing of any more. Alec, in contrast, was listening.
‘How many shocks have there been?’ he said. ‘Roly’s death makes one.’
Jeanne smiled uncertainly at Alec and her eyes strayed to the tantalus again before she answered.
‘Roly’s death is the biggest shock, naturally,’ she said, putting her head slightly on one side in the way that some men find winsome. She practically fluttered her eyelashes too and I wished there was a way to tell her that Alec is immune to such wiles; it makes uncomfortable viewing for a third party who knows how thoroughly it is bound to fail. ‘But Beryl getting away with it is another – actually getting to leave the building and escape. And hearing the details of how it was done makes difficult listening.’
‘Was your father a teetotaller?’ I asked her.
She blinked, surprised at the change of subject, and turned to me. ‘He was a lay preacher,’ she said. ‘Very low church as they say in your part of the world. Of course, the whole Church of Scotland is quite low.’
‘Which church did he preach at?’ I asked.
She gave the uncertain smile again and even briefly re-tilted her head, before realising that there was no point flirting with me and straightening it again.
‘Why do you ask?’ she said.
‘Oh, gosh, no reason at all,’ I said. ‘I was merely trying to talk of other things to soothe you after the upsets.’ She did not believe me and I did not blame her. ‘But if you feel equal to a few questions, then we can crack on, can’t we?’
‘Fire away,’ she said. ‘I have nothing to hide.’
‘Well, of course not,’ said Alec in his most innocent voice. ‘That surely goes without saying.’ And so the fact that it had not gone so was there like a huge gaseous cloud between us throughout the rest of the very short interview.
‘Which means there’s no need to look so scared,’ he went on. He smiled at her again and the venomous look she shot back was almost too blatant to go unremarked. I muttered a quiet ‘touché’ to myself and waited to hear what would come next.
It is not often that Alec arrives at the state of mind my sons describe in their slangy way as ‘having it in for someone’ but when some unfortunate individual does ruffle him badly, then he is positively biblical in his dealings.
‘What we really need to find out from you, Miss McNab,’ he said, ‘is who made her headdress.’
‘Tweetie’s?’ said Jeanne, which was intensely interesting. If she knew about Foxy’s headdress it was news to me and I regarded her with even more attention than before, which had been plenty.
‘Tweetie’s naturally,’ said Alec and once again Jeanne realised that she had slipped.
‘Well, you should know,’ She said. ‘You delivered it yourself, all ready for stitching.’
‘It wasn’t in the parcel we took to Miss Thwaite, I said. ‘It was left behind here with her shoes? ‘Oh,’ said Jeanne. ‘Then she must have finished it earlier than I thought.’
‘But she did do it?’ I said.
‘Who else?’ said Jeanne. It was an insolent riposte rather than a true question but I decided to take it at face value.
‘Well, you, of course,’ I said. ‘Up there in your little sewing room, unsupervised. Unseen.’
‘Are you accusing me of trying to kill Tweetie and of actually killing Roly?’ she said, gaping at me.
‘Neither,’ I said, with a breezy cheerfulness which made me feel quite proud. ‘I’m not accusing you of killing Roly – why on earth would you? – and I don’t think anyone else at all has considered that Tweetie was the target. That’s yours alone, Miss McNab. Whatever suggested it to you?’
She stared, aghast, for a long empty moment before she answered, then all the fight went out of her and she slumped back in her seat.
‘Get me another brandy, won’t you?’ she said. Once she had it in her hand – in fact had half of it already down the hatch, and it was no small measure – she went on. ‘Wishful thinking, I suppose,’ she said, then she shook her head. ‘No, not as bad as all that. Just that Roly is—’ She gasped. ‘Was, gosh it’s horrid, isn’t it? Roly was a simple soul – ordinary, even – and Theresa is anything but. I can’t for the life of me imagine why anyone would want Roly dead. But since the day Theresa joined the happy band at the Locarno she’s been lording it over them all, or trying to, with her motorcar and her education and her address. I couldn’t blame any of them, that’s all.’
Her voice had grown quite bitter, for of course it was not only Tweetie’s fellow dancers to whom she showed off, shoving her advantages at them and sickening them.
‘The dancers don’t seem to care about anything except dancing itself,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine Tweetie gets far patronising Beryl, for instance.’
Jeanne knocked back another fair-sized slosh of brandy and gave a mirthless laugh. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I just cannot believe for a minute that Beryl is mixed up in this. She’s …’
‘We’ve met her,’ I said, ‘and I agree. She is. But the world she moves in …’
‘The world her father moves in, I’ll grant you,’ Jeanne said. ‘But the world Beryl moves in is practice, lessons, costumes, choreography, music, competitions and trophies. And her father has nothing to do with any of it.’
‘He didn’t get her the job at the Locarno?’ said Alec.
Jeanne shook her head. ‘Beryl does have her father wound around her little finger,’ she said. ‘She has that much in common with Tweetie if nothing else. So of course, if she chose, she could have every treasure fall into her lap, for no one in this city would dare refuse her, but she is made of finer stuff and doesn’t trade on her father when it comes to dancing. Look, if you're finished with me, I’m going to go and lie down. I’m terribly tired.’
Not to mention, I thought to myself, rather the worse for two enormous brandies.
‘What an unhappy young woman,’ Alec said when Jeanne was gone.
‘But we finally broke through the crust and got some good solid information out of her,’ I said.
Alec paused in his pipe-filling and gave me a hard stare. ‘You should hear yourself sometimes, Dandy,’ he said, for all the world as though he had not just been grilling Jeanne to a crisp himself. ‘You really should just jolly well hear yourself.’
‘It was Miss Thwaite who made the headdress,’ I said, ignoring him.
‘But it can’t have been her who drenched it in poison. If she had, why would she open the toffee tin and show us the hankie? Even if her hints were rather vague.’
‘That is a very good question,’ I said. ‘And it suggests that she’s not a poisoner. I’m glad, because if we’re going to visit I want a scone and a cup of tea.’
23
Miss Thwaite was already in her nightcap and gown with vanishing cream making her worried face gleam as she looked around the door to
see who was knocking.
‘Oh!’ she said, letting it fall open and gesturing us inside. ‘It’s you. What a to-do. What a to-do. I can’t believe it.’
‘Has it been in the evening editions then?’ I said, glad in a way for perhaps the most disturbing part of the story of Leo Mayne was the way the whole affair had been swept under the carpet. At least if Roly’s death had been reported there was something working as it ought to, no matter how far short the police might be falling in their duties.
‘No, nothing like that,’ said Miss Thwaite. ‘Someone came round asking.’
We were back in the kitchen which was cosier than ever with the fire well banked for the night. The door was open to a little cupboard-bed such as one finds in many lowly Scottish dwellings. One or two of the more modest cottages at Gilverton still have them, although Hugh tried hard to have them dismantled after the great influenza outbreak, feeling that such close air could not be healthy. He succeeded with most of his tenants, but a few who had known him as a child held firm, one fearsome pensioner who had worked in the nurseries and so had undoubtedly seen Hugh in his bath once upon a time had asked him how he’d like to have a brass bed sitting in the middle of his living room like a boil on the nose and if he wanted her alcove bed off her he could build a new room on to her cottage and she’d be glad of it.
Miss Thwaite, showing great delicacy, closed the door to her bed before she sat down.
‘Has someone come from the police?’ said Alec with more hope than certainty. ‘What did they ask you?’
‘Great merciful heavens, no,’ Miss Thwaite said. ‘It was someone from the club came round. Asked me if I’d seen anything of Beryl after the Champs. I hadn’t the first idea what had happened till then. I spent a quiet day in the steamie getting my washing done and I’ve been ironing all night, see.’ She gestured at the dolly above her head where a collection of very fine lawn nightgowns and bed caps, with their lace meticulously ironed, was hanging.
Dandy Gilver and the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom Page 21