Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses

by Catriona McPherson

  Table of Contents

  The Dandy Gilver Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Postscript

  Facts and Fictions

  The Dandy Gilver Series

  After the Armistice Ball

  The Burry Man’s Day

  Bury Her Deep

  The Winter Ground

  Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains

  Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder

  DANDY GILVER AND A BOTHERSOME NUMBER OF CORPSES

  Catriona McPherson

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Catriona McPherson 2012

  The right of Catriona McPherson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Ebook ISBN 978 1 444 73186 6

  Hardback ISBN 978 1 444 73185 9

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Sarah Rizzo

  with love and thanks

  I would like to thank:

  Dave and Sarah Rizzo and Celia and Toni too and Harry, of course, for the granny flat, the piano accompaniment (Celia), the daily runway show (Toni), the inter-species welcome (Harry) and the answers to a thousand questions while I worked on this book.

  Connie and Sheldon Berkowitz, Dick Hoenisch and Deborah Golino, Carla Thomas, Karin, Takao and Phoebe Kasuga, and all the faculty and staff of the Plant Pathology Department of UC Davis for their friendly support.

  Spring Warren and Eileen Rendahl for their entertaining and outrageous take on life, their understanding and their instant friendship. Sally Madden for fortitude in the face of technology. To these three and also to Stella Ruiz and Katie Howard – thank you for your names.

  My family and friends in Scotland for being so patient while I got my act together.

  Lisa Moylett, Wonder Agent, for her steady hand on the tiller.

  Bronwen Salter-Murison for the Dandy Gilver website – above and beyond.

  Suzie Dooré (aka Editrix Lestrange) for the best edit ever – practically co-authoring this time. Francine Toon for her cheerful and organised way with things and for her title-generating skills. Imogen Olsen for a copy-edit that started with a shovel and ended with a scalpel. You have saved my bacon once again.

  Marcia Markland, Bridget Hartzler and Kat Brzozowski for inducting me kindly but firmly into the ways of US publishing.

  Neil McRoberts. Still. Kind of. No, really.

  And thanks again, because once wasn’t enough, to Sarah Rizzo.

  Prologue

  It was three o’clock in the morning and the moon was a sliver of ice in an ink-blue sky; not a stroke of light in the west to show that the sun had ever set there, nor a hint of dawn in the east where a bank of clouds was gathering, so the darkness was as perfect as midwinter.

  The sea had come in silently, waves unrolling like bolts of silk across the sands, and now it was still and full, waiting for the turn, lapping only a little as it slid gently up and down against the base of the cliffs. And so when she reached the break in the rock, a natural cove where men had built a harbour, there was no current to wash her into the welcome of its broad stone arms.

  She had always loved the water; a quick swimmer, strong and sure in the warm salty tides, quick and supple like a fish escaping a net. So when she had entered the sea for the last time in her life – when, hours ago now, she had plummeted off the crumbling edge of the headland and come up choking – she had simply flicked her hair out of her eyes, kicked off her shoes and trodden water, looking around, sweeping her arms wide, letting the shock pass through her and her breaths grow calm again. When she was steady, she shrugged out of her jacket and let it float away. She tried for a moment to open her buttons, hoping to get her corset untied and let her lungs fill to the top before she started swimming, but the water was cold and, as she fumbled, twice she felt her chin sink under the surface and had to paddle her arms again.

  That was the first fearful moment – as late as that. That was the first time she thought to use her lungs to cry for help and not to power her strong swim back to the shore. Two sheep at the edge of a field raised their bony heads and stared down at her, still chewing, then turned away. She scanned the line where the rock-face met the green pasture and could see nothing, not a house, not a track, not even a gate in the fence to show that the shepherd might pass by, going home at the end of his day.

  Then she raised her legs in front of her and let her head drop back, feeling the coldness fill her ears. Perhaps she would find, if she let herself, that she would float to the shore, to the narrow band of boulders at the bottom of the drop, the boulders she might have fallen onto were not God Himself trying so hard to save her that He put His hand under her tumbling body and laid her gently down into His safe blue sea.

  But she was floating away. Those sheep were smaller now. So she drove her legs downwards and lifted them behind her, feeling the second flutter of panic at the weight of her skirts and petticoats against the backs of her calves. Then she breathed in hard, the bones of her corset creaking against her ribs, picked a dark patch of gorse on the face of the cliff to fix her gaze upon and set off with a long, sculling stroke which seemed to push five yards of cold water behind her.

  A hundred strokes later, when she took a rest, she knew the patch of gorse was no closer, but could not bear to believe it was further away.

  A thousand strokes later, when she had stopped looking for the gorse, had stopped looking at the shore at all, terrified to see how distant it had become, she rested again and then turned outwards, thinking about the fishing boats, the way they fanned out of the harbour mouth each morning, blossoming over the sea, and the way they gathered homewards each evening, from every corner of the horizon, as if the boats themselves were drawing the night in after them. One of them would pass her, close enough to hear her cries.

  She practised calling, and that was the third pulse of fear. Her voice was ragged, the croak of a crow; it barely reached her own ears even in the stillness this evening. She told herself that if she trod water she would not need to breathe so hard. If she breathed through her nose and kept her mouth closed her throat would soften again and her voice would be clear and loud when she used it, when the fishing boat came.

  But waiting was lonely and she was cold, and so later when her mother called out to her and told her to come home, to eat her broth and bread, to take off her wet clothes, ge
t into her warm bed and sleep, she wanted to call back that she was coming, that she would be there soon, but she kept treading water and looking for boats and she saved her voice for the fishermen.

  And when her mother scolded her and told her not to shout out to strange men like a gypsy girl, told her to come home this instant, that the broth was hot and the bread was fresh, and there was an extra blanket on her bed and she could sleep until noon, could sleep the clock round, could sleep for ever if she would only come home, at last she answered – just a whisper – that she was coming. She turned her shoulder into the black cradle of the sea and rested and she felt no pain as the water covered her.

  1

  Hearing her name down the telephone line twitched me away into the past as swiftly as the hook in the cheek of a trout will pluck it out of water into air and leave it gasping. Fleur Lipscott, sweet little Fleur. Husband, children, decades of humdrum adult life were quite gone and there I was again in that first golden summer at Pereford where for ten long lazy weeks the sun rose over the hills, smiled down upon us all day and then sank with a sigh into the warm sea each evening. We paddled and bathed at the little cove, drifted around the lake in a little boat, meandered the cloistered Somerset lanes behind a slow, clopping pony of gentle nature in a cart full of cushions. I could smell the lavender scent of the linen cushion-slips still.

  There were three sweet golden Lipscott girls – Pearl, Aurora and little Fleur – each with a silky mass of flaxen curls and a pink rose in each cheek, and had Pereford been a house full of men or of mirrors I might have resented my straight black hair and sallow complexion, being just old enough at eighteen to know that flax and roses were better currency in the business for which we girls had been trained. But ‘the Major’ as his wife and daughters always called him (with inverted commas and capital letter clearly pronounced) had died when Fleur was a baby; and Mamma-dearest (with no inverted commas at all; the endearment was unselfconscious), Batty Aunt Lilah (often addressed just like that, in full) and the three girls themselves lived with a kind of gentle delight in their home and each other, which spread over all their friends. It was most effective at stopping such churlish feelings as envy taking hold, and was not even half as annoying as it sounds.

  The Major had spent a great deal of time at his Highland lodge, even when alive, and so was not much missed when he died. His death was one of glory at Spion Kop, on that fatal night of pass the parcel, gamely taking command for half an hour or so after the last available colonel perished before handing on to the next major in line; but from the easy circumstances of his widow and orphans, tucked up in that cosy old house of theirs with loyal servants all around, one would have thought he had expired at eighty after six months’ advice from good lawyers about his arrangements. Of course, none of this occurred to me that summer, not at eighteen; it was my husband Hugh – much later, when George at the club had regaled him with news of Aurora’s engagement – who spent a bitter evening mulling over the settlements of these three girls and lamenting that not even Fleur was young enough ever to make a lucrative wife for one of our sons.

  ‘Oh Hugh, for goodness’ sake!’ I said at last. ‘The boys are two and one. They’re babies!’

  ‘And she’s fourteen,’ said Hugh, misunderstanding completely. ‘I know. By the time Donald is twenty-one she’ll be thirty-three. It would cause comment. No, I’m afraid I can’t see my way clear, Dandy. You shall just have to put it out of your mind.’

  ‘I give up,’ I said. ‘I really do.’

  ‘Although if this Aurora one is your sort of age, they obviously don’t marry young.’

  For a moment, I almost wished that I had taken Nanny’s gentle hints about how nice it would be for Mother to have nursery tea with the boys now they were sitting up in high chairs and using spoons since, although they were noisy and messy as dining companions go, they had not yet developed a capacity for active rudeness. I glared at Hugh and consoled myself with a sip of wine and a mouthful of devilled mushroom (Nanny would never admit either of these treats to her nursery, I knew).

  He had, however, made a point worth making. Aurora, newly betrothed to Drew Forrester, was twenty-nine, and even Pearl had held out much longer than I should have dared, only succumbing at almost twenty-five, and what with their dowries and their beauty, the world at large was puzzled by the delay. I was not, knowing that had I lived in that house with Mamma-dearest and Batty Aunt Lilah I should have been in no hurry to leave it either.

  For it was a house without horsehair, without porridge, a house where carbolic soap was unknown and dinner gongs went unstruck. At Pereford, we slept on featherbeds and breakfasted on peaches. The maids scooped great handfuls of pink salts into our bathwater and dinner was heralded with a carillon upon a little glockenspiel of the sweetest tone.

  Furthermore, Mamma-dearest’s greatest delight was to lie in a hammock strung between two plum trees and spin tales for her girls, never forgetting me, and so a good part of what I remembered of Pereford was not Pereford at all but pictures from my mind’s eye of her girlhood in Haryana where her hammock was hung from banyan trees and her linen was scented with patchouli mint; pictures of the endless fairy tale she wove of our delightful futures, of heroic suitors and the balls at which they would sweep us up in their arms and tell of their love, and all with the dappled sunlight winking through the leaves of the plum tree and the hammock strings creaking like the rigging of a clipper as she rocked to and fro.

  I was only ever there in the summertime, starting with that first summer on the way home from Paris where I had met Pearl and made friends with her. In winter it might have been different, I suppose, but I doubt it, for the fireplaces – filled with flowers in July – were enormous and the white muslin curtains which billowed at the open windows, wafting the scent of roses into the rooms, were hung from mahogany curtain rods as thick as telegraph poles which hinted at a high measure of velvety sumptuousness in the colder months of the year. Then, in an attic where we went to play hide-and-seek (humouring Fleur, although we were much too old for it), there was the clincher: great squashy bales of calico – the sumptuous curtains stitched up tight for the summer against the moth – stacked on top of log-piles of rolled Turkey carpets and, all around, a veritable souk of coal scuttles, log baskets and peat barrels.

  ‘Heavens, what a lot you’ve got,’ I said to Pearl.

  ‘One for each fireplace,’ she said, and began counting: ‘The outside hall, the inside hall, the upstairs landing. The far end of the drawing room, the near end of the drawing room. This little one is for Mamma-dear’s bathroom and isn’t it lovely. She always has cherry logs in there and the time it took her to teach the fire boy to tell the difference!’

  ‘You have a boy just for that?’ I could not help boggling, having been brought up in a house where the maids set the fires in the morning and one held off and held off lighting them since to ring for more coal was such extravagance that we often found ourselves going to bed just to avoid it, cursing that reckless moment at seven o’clock when we had thought we were cold, which we now knew was nothing compared to the shivering that set in at eleven when the embers were growing grey.

  ‘Mahmout,’ Pearl said. ‘Dearest Mamma-darling brought him home with her. He was the son of her ayah and she says he’s the perfect fire boy because he’s always trying to get Pereford as warm as Haryana.’

  ‘He’ll set the place alight or die trying,’ said Batty Aunt Lilah, who was playing with us, or at any rate was pattering around in nearby rooms while we played, not ever getting quite to grips with the rules.

  ‘I haven’t noticed him about,’ I said, feeling sure that an Indian in a white loincloth (for thus I had imagined him) would have stuck out enough to be noticed in Somerset.

  ‘Oh, no, he’s not here now,’ Aurora said. ‘He’s on his summer holidays. Mamma-dearest sends him to London every year where he has some family connections. She says he’d go into a decline if he didn’t get to speak Hindustani and eat spi
ces for a while.’

  Mrs Lipscott, it will be understood, was never likely to suffer from ‘the servant problem’. My own mother did not even allow her daughter to go to London every year, never mind her servant boys.

  ‘He sits in the palm house at Kew,’ said Lilah. ‘Warming his bones.’ Then she let herself fall backwards onto one of the stitched-up calico bundles of winter curtains, landing with a pouf! and lying there staring up at the joists of the ceiling.

  ‘You’ll have to find a better hiding place than that, Batty Aunt,’ said Aurora. ‘I can hear Fleur coming already.’

  ‘Throw a sheet over me and if she looks my way I’ll freeze,’ said Lilah. Then the rest of us huddled behind the enormous log boxes, breathing in quietly the scent of cherry wood and that of the resinous green pine branches used for kindling.

  ‘Once upon a time,’ Fleur said, opening the attic door and coming inside, ‘there was a beautiful little girl named Flower or Flora or Fleur. And she lived in a fairy castle with her two beautiful sisters, Aurora or Sunrise or Dawn and Pearl . . .’ The three of us held our breaths, trying not to giggle. Fleur’s Fairy Tales were held in high regard in the Lipscott family, even against the general background of delighted appreciation of absolutely anything, and they were the reason we all hid together (lest one of us miss something).

  ‘. . . Pearl,’ Fleur said again, ‘or Grit or Dirty Oyster.’ At this Batty Aunt Lilah snorted and Fleur lifted the sheet and pounced on her.

  ‘You forgot all about me, you little brigand,’ Lilah said, tickling Fleur. ‘What about the beautiful aunt?’

  ‘There isn’t an aunt,’ Fleur said. ‘But help me look for the others and I might add you in.’

  ‘And what about that other girl?’ said Lilah. She always referred to me this way.

  ‘Oh, she’s in it,’ said Fleur. She was unbuckling the straps of a wicker hamper to look inside. ‘She’s the dark queen. Dandy or . . . Actually, she can’t be called Dandy if she’s a dark queen.’