Francis Dunbar leaned against the edge of his desk. He folded his arms and considered, not looking at me. ‘There’s plenty of digging to be done on the pipeline out to the Tay. I can certainly make it happen. But I’m afraid my foreman won’t be very welcoming. Those Traveller folk don’t use clocks – just turn up when it suits them. And things have already gone missing from the building site.’
‘Yes, I know your foreman thinks the Travellers are light-fingered. But you can give Euan a chance, can’t you?’
Frank nodded absently. It seemed to me that every move Francis Dunbar made was a little absent, as if he were preoccupied with a burden of work and worry that constantly pressed on his brain like concussion. I hated to give him more to think about.
And all the time I was fearfully aware of how striking was his silhouette against the long midsummer evening’s warm light in the open window.
He turned to look at me at last.
‘Canny and kind,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a word with Mr Munro.’
‘Kind yourself,’ I said. And because he was perched there on the edge of the desk, closer to my level than when he was on his feet, I dared, spontaneously, to give him a little kiss on the cheek. ‘Thank you.’
He didn’t move or say a thing. When I stood back we looked at each other eye to eye.
What’s your proper work, Julie? I would like to be a theatrical escape artist, I think, like Houdini, or a circus owner like Bertram Mills. I want to dazzle people and be applauded for it. I am good at it, and it is thrilling. Walking a tightrope when you’ve had too much to drink – dangerous and wonderful.
So I gave him another kiss, on the mouth this time, and he let me. I could feel his lips moving beneath mine as he responded very gently, just for a moment.
Then I felt myself reddening.
So I stopped.
I really shouldn’t have done it.
But … but I felt I’d restored both my authority and my feminine charm. How powerful it made me feel. It reminded me, actually, of my very first driving lesson in Mother’s sports car – the thrill of holding all that energy in my feet, of knowing that my small person was harnessing all that magnificent strength – that is how I felt now. How quick-witted and alluring and powerful!
‘You’d better go,’ he said gently.
‘So I had.’
He didn’t tell me I shouldn’t have done it though.
Our suppers were all cold now unless it was soup or we dined out, because it was so much easier to prepare and tidy up a cold meal ourselves from the distant kitchen. Solange had been doing the running, as the youngest of the grown-ups, but now that I was better I was able to help. In a couple of the overstuffed Queen Anne chairs ruined by jubilant Victorian upholstery, Mémère and Jamie sat tight doing nothing – Mémère because she is the Dowager Countess of Strathfearn and Jamie because he is a boy. But as the morning room faces east and is dull in the evening, even during the long light of midsummer with the tall windows open, Jamie got up to switch on a lamp.
It was just as I was coming back into the room after a trip made to sweep away the remains of our supper. When the light went on as I crossed the threshold, I noticed a corner of brown paper peeping out from under the edge of the faded Persian carpet close to the door to the passage.
I set down the tea tray I’d been carrying and slid the paper out from under the carpet. For a moment I found myself staring in bewilderment at what I thought was the same brown envelope that had been haunting me ever since I arrived at Strathfearn House: there on the back was the engraved name and address, Dr Hugh Housman of the Ashmolean Museum.
But this was a different envelope. It was sealed and had never been opened.
I turned it over. It was addressed to ‘Mlle Solange Lavergne’.
He must have pushed it underneath the door while it had been closed, but hadn’t realised that his note had slipped beneath the carpet on the other side. If it hadn’t been for the switched-on lamp suddenly spotlighting it as I walked in, we might never have seen the corner peeking out.
But now everyone saw me kneeling there staring at it. So there wasn’t anything to do apart from hand it over to Solange.
I think we all felt the same feeling of dread in our stomachs as we watched her open it. Jamie actually shoved one of the chairs behind her to act as a sort of aerial artiste’s safety net, expecting a collapse when she got to the end of whatever she was reading.
It came as expected.
‘Mon dieu!’ Solange exclaimed, and fell into the chair in tears with her face in her hands, the crumpled letter pressed against her cheek as if it were a handkerchief.
Mother leaped to her side.
‘Solange, darling, whatever is it?’
‘It’s my fault,’ Solange sobbed in French. ‘All my fault.’
‘What’s your fault?’ Mother gasped.
‘Monsieur Housman has taken his own life, killed himself! I-I told you we fought, but not – not how we fought. I struggled with him – I struck him in the face, I broke his spectacles.’
Well. Solange confessing to the broken spectacles explained and confirmed a great deal.
She didn’t give anyone a chance to respond though; just tore on with guilty and miserable sobs. ‘And because I was sulking upstairs I was not here to meet Julia when she came home from school, so perhaps it is my fault she was hurt as well – oh! I should be arrested.’
Needless to say, the rest of us were now quite helpless with astonishment.
My nanny raised large and beautiful dark tear-filled eyes, despairing, and I tried desperately to comfort her.
‘You know I saw him, Solange,’ I said. ‘I saw him standing in the burn and his glasses were broken, but he was fine. So you had already struck him then …’ I remembered his swollen eye – yes, it had had time to swell, some time must have passed between when she hit him and when I saw him. But not much, because he hadn’t cleaned the blood from his upper lip … or maybe his nose had started to bleed afresh. At any rate … ‘He wasn’t trying to kill himself! He was fishing for pearls. Whatever happened to him after that, it couldn’t have been your fault!’
‘He was not himself – he might have been passing the time until the Tay tide came up, waiting to let the river take him! He says so right here! He says the river is more constant than any lover – that he is returning to the river because …’ She bent her head, sobbing, and then read aloud: ‘“The river’s gifts are more eternal than the fleeting gifts of the flesh –”’ Another sob. ‘He begs me to forgive him.’
I wanted very much to twitch the letter out of her hand and read it myself, but I didn’t dare.
‘Nanny.’ I put my arms around her.
I don’t know if I was more shocked at her confession that she’d struck a man, or that she’d been so entangled with a man that she’d had to strike him. Dear Solange? A man who’d then been so distraught he’d gone and drowned himself?
Mother was not so sympathetic as I might have expected.
‘Suicides must be reported properly to the police. The Procurator Fiscal must be notified; he’s supposed to investigate sudden deaths. There may be an inquiry. It won’t be a matter of poking about on the riverbank or writing to the man’s colleagues and family. There will be proper police interviews all round – yourself included. Are you sure, Solange?’
Solange handed her the note. Mother waved me and Jamie away in irritation as we crowded in on both sides of her to try to read along. Colette stood behind our grandmother with her hands on Mémère’s shoulders; we all knew how much Mémère dreaded a thorough police investigation in her house. But she just sat like a statue beneath the electric lamp, stoic and calm.
There were too many of us in the room. Mother told us sharply, ‘Go outside, the pair of you.’
Jamie stepped out through the open French doors and crossed the terrace to lean against the stone railing, waiting for the storm to calm. I followed him. We felt terrible for Solange, but also I think we were
both a little embarrassed.
‘It’s so still when the work stops,’ Jamie said irrelevantly, looking out over the lawn. ‘Makes it feel a bit like it’s summer ten years ago.’
‘But not really. Because the grounds weren’t covered with diggers and wheelbarrows and tips full of concrete when we were little.’
I sat down on the terrace railing.
‘I suppose we’d better not show Nanny the piece of Dr Housman’s specs you found this morning,’ I said. ‘It would just cause more hysterics.’
‘We’ll have to show the police though.’
Something occurred to me.
‘What happened to the rest of his clothes?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Hugh Housman wasn’t wearing any clothes when I saw him. The McEwens found his cap; and I saw him lose it, so that makes sense. Where are the clothes he was wearing when he left the door open at the Inverfearnie Library? Why’d he take them off to drown himself, anyway?’
Jamie thought for a moment. Finally, he said quietly, ‘Don’t tinkers collect old clothes? Sheep’s wool and coal and old clothes?’
‘You’re not the least bit funny!’
‘I wasn’t trying to be funny.’
We looked at each other, and I knew what he was thinking. The McEwens were in for it.
Now began a time of protracted gloom and torrential rain. It was heralded by Inspector Duncan Milne, the policeman who’d been appointed by the Procurator Fiscal to grill us all about Housman’s declaration of intent to drown himself. This time he didn’t warn us he was coming. When he turned up at Strathfearn House no one answered the wide-open door, and no one heard him when he shouted. He stomped back out to his car and sat leaning over the driver and blasting on the horn until Jamie and I came tearing out to see what was going on.
The police took their time getting out of the car, the driver opening the door for Inspector Duncan Milne and for Angus Henderson, whom they’d brought along in the back. Then they all lined up facing me and Jamie, as though we were about to begin a football match. Both other men were rather dwarfed by Sergeant Henderson. They looked faintly absurd lined up against the dripping roses in the French garden.
Inspector Milne stepped forward. He raised his peaked cap and nodded to me. But it was Jamie he addressed, in a cool, dry voice: ‘Mr Beaufort-Stuart? Your mother Lady Craigie is in, I hope? I’ve been appointed to make a precognition for the Procurator Fiscal.’
‘What’s that?’ Jamie drawled amiably, hands in his pockets, every inch the Earl of Craigie’s son. ‘The precognition, I mean.’
The dry, thin man looked him up and down indifferently. ‘Mere gathering of facts,’ he explained. ‘At this time, we’re interviewing known witnesses. No formal statement is needed yet. The Procurator Fiscal may refer to the precognition to make a ruling as to cause of death, or to determine if a hearing is necessary.’ He paused patiently, as if this were an explanation he gave on a regular basis and he knew he had to wait a moment or two before it stuck. Then he finished, ‘It’s principally Lady Craigie and her maid with whom I’d like to speak today, though I understand Lady Julia has remembered a few more details. There will be an interview with Miss Kinnaird tomorrow. Mr Dunbar was kind enough to come in to our premises this morning.’
‘Julie, can you get Mother? And Solange,’ Jamie suggested neutrally. ‘I’ll show these gentlemen in.’
Inspector Duncan Milne of the Perthshire and Kinross-shire Constabulary established himself in Frank Dunbar’s study.
My own session with him went very quickly; all he wanted was for me to add a description of Dr Housman’s state of undress to my original interview.
Jamie, of course, had nothing to say except that he’d found the piece of Housman’s spectacles. He hadn’t even been at Strathfearn when Dr Housman first went missing.
While the interviews were going on, Sergeant Henderson stood guard to prevent anyone trying to eavesdrop through the door in the corridor. Mémère posted Colette to stand guard outside our door, next along the corridor, so that no one could eavesdrop there, either, and after Milne had finished with me and Jamie, this arrangement of course allowed us to eavesdrop through the folding wall in the morning room. Mémère provided us with the glass tumblers necessary to amplify the sound through the panelling. Mother sat like Patience on a monument staring out over the wet terrace, trying to pretend the eavesdropping wasn’t happening.
It was nearly as good as listening to a BBC radio play on the wireless. We couldn’t quite hear the police inspector’s questions, but to begin with he had his assistant read aloud the whole of Housman’s pathetic letter to Solange. The policeman’s halting matter-of-fact voice uttering this tragic statement gave it the faintest taste of farce, and as Jamie and I listened, I could see my own astonishment mirrored in his face. In our wildest dreams I don’t think we could have ever imagined our dear nanny entangled with anyone – and what a splendid entanglement this had been!
‘“My sweet Solange,”’ the officer read. ‘“It has broken my heart that you are so im–”’ he coughed in embarrassment, ‘“immovable, that you have so little belief in me. I swear I can give you no answers, no details, no measure of my worth. I can only give my promise. How I long to be able to offer more than mere promise! But if you cannot take my hand on trust alone, there is no other woman …”’ another choke of embarrassment, ‘“… no other woman alive to whom I would ever turn.”’
The officer plunged on, ‘“I so longed for a new life with you. I cannot bear to think it cannot be …”’
Here Mémère, growing impatient at our enraptured listening faces when she couldn’t hear what was going on herself, hissed, ‘What are they saying?’
And Jamie actually shushed her.
‘“… What new worlds we could have known together! How different, how empty my own new world will be when I enter it alone …”’ (And so forth.) ‘“And now, I return to the river I know so well, where you know you can find me, the river whose gifts are …”’
I thought the poor constable fellow was going to choke himself with the clearing of his throat it took to gird his loins for reading the end of the letter.
‘“… the river whose gifts are more eternal than the fleeting gifts of the flesh. I beg you to forgive me …”’ harrumph, ‘“my darling.”’
Dr Housman had signed it Your Hugh.
Nanny put on an excellent performance.
She was as chilly and poised and regal as Mary Queen of Scots on trial. Though Inspector Milne was irritatingly low-voiced, we were able to judge by Solange’s answers that he asked her all the expected questions about where and when we’d found the note, and if she recognised Hugh Housman’s cap and the broken piece of his spectacles, and whether she had reason to believe Housman was of volatile character. But it was when Milne started prying into the nature of her, ah, friendship with the scholar that she truly shone like a star.
SOLANGE [frostily]: I am offended at your suggestion that our liaison was not proper. We are not children, Inspector Milne, exchanging sordid kisses in the darkness of the cinema! [Sound of nose-blowing into presumably lace-edged imported French handkerchief.] Dr Housman was a fluent speaker of the French language.
INSPECTOR DUNCAN MILNE: [mutter, mutter, snort]
SOLANGE: [sulking silence]
INSPECTOR MILNE [in loud tones apologetic]: Perhaps, Mademoiselle Lavergne, you do not understand the significance of your friendship with Dr Housman in the event there need be a hearing at Sheriff Court as to the nature of his death.
SOLANGE [loudly]: I understand its significance perfectly. I could not hear your question.
INSPECTOR MILNE [just as loudly]: Was there an exchange of physical affection between you?
SOLANGE [with queenly chill]: It would have been a poor affair if there had not.
(‘One for the French!’ Jamie hissed in my ear, and I had to smack him because he made me snigger inappropriately and miss Milne’s response. M
émère threatened in a stage whisper that she would not let us be her spies if we couldn’t do it quietly.)
SOLANGE: … Between us, yes, not secretly, but in private. And the physical exchange of affection does not prove itself only in the touch of bodies, Inspector Milne. There are other small kindnesses a person can do to show affection. I saw to it there were always fresh flowers in his room at the day’s end. He made me a gift of a pair of earrings, pearls he’d found himself in the river here – he had them set at MacGregor’s.
(Of course all of this took place before I arrived at Strathfearn. I feel sure that if I’d been there I would have sniffed out the romantic hanky-panky sooner than Mummy, possibly preventing the fatal tiff.)
‘And yet you feel Dr Housman may have had reason to end his life, as this letter to you suggests?’ came the dry, relentless voice of the interviewing police inspector.
‘We fought,’ Solange said simply. ‘And I do not mind saying why. He tried to turn me against my dear Lady Craigie. He also made remarks about her mother, Lady Strathfearn, which I found coarse and tasteless; about her age and her sanity, criticising the way she has run the estate since her husband’s death …’
Jamie and I, face-to-face as we listened through the folding wall, caught each other’s eye at exactly the same moment in silent agreement not to pass this insulting gossip on to our grandmother.
‘I was angry and did not speak to him for several days. When he approached me he made no apology and I found his physical advances …’ She struggled for a word and came up with, ‘inappropriate. After more rebuffs than I can count he took my lack of response for coyness and when he would not stop, I struck him.’
She paused, then added remorsefully, ‘I struck him quite hard.’
‘How hard?’
‘I broke his spectacles.’
The Pearl Thief Page 10