Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses

by Catriona McPherson

  He started again over breakfast the next morning.

  ‘It’s not at all what we always said we would never do, anyway.’

  Our breakfast table was very small and very close to the breakfast tables of everyone else currently staying at the Crown, to wit: three commercial gentlemen who greeted one another and then retired behind their newspapers, three amateur fishermen who sat together and talked of lines and tides and notable catches of old, and a convalescent widow with a companion, who nibbled daintily at soft-boiled eggs and spoke in murmurs. Alec and I attracted no attention at all from the six men but set the two women quivering with interest. The convalescent widow was in danger of letting her egg grow cold, all forgotten, so much effort was she putting in to catching my eye. Alec, leaning in close across the minuscule table, ignored them all.

  ‘He’s not asking us to check boarding-house registers to help him with a divorce,’ Alec insisted. ‘He just wants her back again. And a name. For his own satisfaction.’

  ‘And if he then decides it would be even more satisfying to go after the fellow with a meat cleaver? That wouldn’t trouble you?’

  ‘Filleting knife, actually,’ Alec said, but absently. He was looking over my shoulder.

  ‘He’s a fisherman?’ I asked, craning to look over it too. There was a mild commotion taking place in the doorway of the dining room. The little maid who had brought our supper last night, decked out to serve breakfast in a sprigged frock and cotton apron, was remonstrating with another figure who seemed determined to enter the room. A round little figure in a voluminous tartan cloak and a green velvet hat shaped like a hot cross bun: it was Miss Shanks and, despite the maid’s best efforts to protect her guests from the intrusion, she was even now striding towards Alec and me, throwing one wing of her cloak back over her shoulder.

  ‘Mrs Gilver,’ she said, arriving at our little table and standing there – still rather swash-bucklingly – with her feet planted far apart and her hands on her hips. ‘And Mr Osborne, I believe.’

  The commercial gentlemen carried on chewing their toast and reading their headlines; the anglers carried on with their reminiscence of some distant whopper; but the convalescent widow and her companion practically fell off their seats with curiosity and I could feel their two pairs of eyes fastened upon me like magnifying glasses in the desert sun, smouldering dry twigs into fire.

  ‘Miss Shanks,’ I said. ‘Alec, dear,’ – a crackle from the twigs as the magnifying glasses flashed in horror – ‘this is Miss Shanks from St Columba’s of whom I told you last evening.’

  Alec half rose and half bowed then sank into his seat again.

  ‘And how can we help you today, Miss Shanks?’ he said.

  She regarded him very thoughtfully for a moment before she answered.

  ‘Lambourne, Mrs Gilver, have let me down,’ she said, flicking a glance to me and then fastening her eyes back on Alec again. ‘And I knew you’d still be here, don’t ye know?’ Miss Shanks’s Scotch brogue was intermittent and utterly bogus, but I was beginning to get a handle on its comings and goings: it carried her over chasms where good taste and fine feeling might send her tumbling. ‘I thought, despite our wee misunderstanding yesterday, that I might persuade you to stay, since you’ve trundled all the way up to us here by the sparkling sea, eh?’

  ‘Down, actually,’ I said. ‘Not that it ma—’

  ‘And since you’re so settled.’ She twinkled at me. ‘Cooried in, ye might say.’

  Alec and I were completely bamboozled.

  ‘But as you yourself pointed out, Miss Shanks,’ I said, ‘my married state is not at all suitable for employment at your establishment.’ I was beginning to sound like the woman, damn her.

  ‘Well, I thought about that, Mrs Gilver,’ said Miss Shanks, attempting a girlish air – mostly made up of swinging her skirts from side to side and looking at me out of the corner of her eye – ‘and talked it over with one of my colleagues, and I decided that if you would submit to being known as Miss Gilver while you’re with us, the girls don’t need to know.’

  ‘Your colleague Miss Lipscott?’ I could not imagine Fleur clamouring for my return but I could not imagine any of the Misses Lovage, Barclay or Christopher caring one way or the other.

  ‘Mrs Brown,’ said Miss Shanks. She stuck her chin in the air and carried on very loftily. ‘She’s on the housekeeping staff.’

  Alec now went so far as to cross his eyes and stick his tongue out to signal his bewilderment to me. Miss Shanks, facing the way she did, missed it but the widow’s companion caught it and turned back to her boiled egg with a look of distaste at such vulgarity.

  ‘I see,’ I lied. Miss Shanks giggled, although at least the skirt-swinging had stopped, I was glad to see.

  ‘I’m sure your husband won’t mind. Since, as you said yourself and as we all can see,’ she jerked her head towards Alec like a farmer at a cattle auction, ‘he is so very understanding.’ She beamed at me. ‘Now you finish up your brekkie and then toddle up to see me, eh? I’ll arrange for Anderson to collect your things.’ She folded herself back into her cloak and beamed again.

  ‘Cheerie-bye,’ she said. ‘À bientôt. Auf Wiedersehen. Toodle-oo.’

  And with that she was gone, leaving the silence ringing behind her.

  We stared at one another and then turned as the little maid arrived beside us and bobbed.

  ‘Beg pardon, madam and sir,’ she said. ‘I tried to stop her. I – em – well, my auntie, you see. With the eggs. Always on a Saturday. Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. But I never— and she wasn’t there anyway,’ after which unhelpful communication she bobbed again and scurried away to her kitchens.

  ‘Well,’ I said. I leaned in close across the marmalade pot and milk jug as Alec had, but the dining room at the Crown was hardly twelve feet square and the six breakfast tables were huddled together in the middle of it, leaving room for monstrous sideboards all around, and Miss Shanks’s performance had gathered the crowd’s attention at last, the maid’s little coda doing nothing to disperse it either. Eight pairs of eyes were watching us now, while eight pairs of ears, I imagined, were twitching with fascination.

  Alec shovelled in the last two forkfuls of scrambled egg and tomato, drained his coffee cup and sat back.

  ‘Care to join me for a stroll around the harbour wall?’ he said. ‘And a chat?’

  I dabbed my lips and stood.

  ‘Excellent suggestion,’ I said and we made a poor show of a casual exit, gathering speed until we were fairly trotting through the narrow passageway, making for the front door.

  ‘What in the blazes?’ I said as we reeled out into a perfect late spring morning, the sea sparkling, a light breeze just ruffling the air and a few white clouds scudding across the sky. It was nine thirty and the harbour was quiet, the fleet gone for the day, only a handful of old men, their seagoing days long past now, standing around, sucking on their pipes and watching the horizon through narrowed eyes. It would be hours on end before any boats returned, but I supposed they might be watching for passing ships; at least, for the sake of their day’s entertainment, I hoped so.

  ‘She leapt away in horror last night when she heard you were married,’ Alec said. He had his pipe lit, having come downstairs with it filled in readiness, as usual. ‘But this morning, after finding out somehow – but how? – that you’re here with me, she decides you’ll do?’

  ‘She and Mrs Brown, the housekeeper,’ I reminded him. ‘And what was the parlour maid on about, for heaven’s sake?’ I took out my cigarette case and turned away from the breeze to light one. The convalescent widow was just descending the steps and she gave an ostentatious and surely ceremonial cough, waving her hand in front of her face as though my little puff of smoke were asphyxiating her.

  ‘Hardly a surprise,’ she said. ‘To find you smoking on the street like a flapper!’ Alec bristled but it did not trouble me. Grant, who despairs of my tweeds at times and wishes fervently that I would take up life in L
ondon where they are unknown, would be delighted to learn that such a word had been used of me.

  ‘I’ve been coming to the Crown every May for twelve years,’ the widow went on, ‘but I should hesitate to return now.’

  ‘Righty-ho,’ I said. The morning was beginning to take on a tinge of unreality for me.

  ‘I’ve never seen such a display,’ she went on.

  ‘Such a display as two people breakfasting together in a public dining room?’ said Alec. ‘Well, I’m glad we could add to your life’s excitements.’

  ‘A hotbed of gossip and intrigue,’ said the widow. Her companion had come out after her with a shawl, and was timidly holding it out towards her employer, almost jabbing her with it, as though she hoped the fleecy wool would simply adhere to the woman’s coat shoulders without the one of them taking the trouble of donning the thing or the other finding the nerve to apply it to her person in the usual way.

  ‘I require new-laid duck eggs,’ she went on.

  ‘For a digestive condition,’ the companion put in.

  ‘Aren’t duck eggs richer than ordinar—?’ said Alec.

  The widow swept on. ‘And the cook at the school—’

  ‘Mrs Brown?’ I fell on this very slight particle of sense.

  ‘Mrs Brown indeed supplies them to her niece who—’

  ‘Ahhhhh!’ said both Alec and I. Then we frowned, in unison, as though we had been practising.

  ‘—repays the favour, it appears, with gossip about her patrons, carried right back up the hill and spread around. Stop dabbing me with that shawl, Enid, do! Give it here, can’t you?’

  The companion buckled and whimpered as the widow snatched the garment out of her hands and wrapped herself very firmly up in it.

  ‘I am most grievously disappointed,’ she announced. ‘And now I’m going for my walk, which I certainly need more than ever today.’

  ‘What an extraordinary person,’ said Alec, looking after her as she sailed away, with the benighted Enid sliding along at her side as invisibly as a rather large young woman in bright rust-red tweeds can ever slide.

  ‘Another one,’ I agreed. ‘So Miss Shanks finds out from Mrs Brown the housekeeper who found out from her niece at the Crown that Mrs Gilver the assumed French mistress is not just unsuitable but actually scandalous and wicked and . . .’

  ‘. . . she hotfoots it down to engage you,’ said Alec. ‘The plot doesn’t exactly thicken but it far from dilutes, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘It curdles,’ I said. ‘But I tell you one thing, I’m going to do my very best to remember my avoir and être and see if I can’t get myself ensconced up there. I don’t know if it’s anything to do with whatever’s up with Fleur—’

  ‘Or the four people she has apparently killed . . .’

  ‘But there’s something very odd about St Columba’s.’ I turned and gazed up at the long grey facade of the place again. It was not looming this morning, for some reason. If common sense and sanity had not prevented me I would have said it had taken a good step back from the edge of the cliff overnight and was now safely set behind its gardens in an unremarkable way. I saw Alec frowning at it too.

  ‘Very changeable light round here,’ he said. ‘Must be what draws the painters.’ He shivered faintly.

  ‘And I take back what I said about your cuckolded fisherman,’ I said. ‘Right now, if I thought you could pass as Miss Osborne, I’d swap cases with you.’

  ‘Well, come and meet my client to be going along with,’ Alec said. ‘He’s an interesting chap, and not a fisherman, by the way.’

  He pointed me on the right course, along under the St Columba’s cliff and out around the natural arm of the harbour until we were opposite the main street and could look back over at the Crown, at the housemaids shaking eiderdowns out of the upstairs windows and the grocer’s shop two doors down. The grocer was unwinding his awning against the sun for the day and the delivery boy was packing his basket with brown parcels, whistling the same snatch of song over and over again, quite tunelessly. Behind the main street, where a few cottage rows clung to the hillside, washing was being pegged out – heavy overalls and school pinafores on this Saturday morning when the working week was done – and in one front garden a stout housewife was scattering scraps to a small flock of chickens. At one of the villas perched on the high road, a matron in a blue coat and a matching hat (with a feather we could see all the way from the far harbour wall) let herself out at her garden gate and turned to walk briskly towards the station, stepping up her pace even more as the whistle sounded to tell of an approaching train.

  ‘Here we are then,’ Alec said and I turned back to face him, then raised my eyebrows.

  ‘I wondered what that was,’ I said. ‘I smelled it last night.’

  ‘I tasted it last night,’ Alec said. ‘And very delicious it was too.’

  We were standing in front of a rather commodious brick shack of the kind often found at harboursides; an erstwhile boathouse perhaps, or a lifeboat station abandoned when a grateful village or a wealthy patron stumped up for a grander one. They often see out their lives as storehouses for nets in winter or lowly shelters for lobster pots in the off-season. This particular shack, however, had gone on from its beginnings to bigger and better things. Its walls had been whitewashed and its window frames painted a cheerful shade of green. A pillar-box-red door stood open, allowing us a glimpse of shining cream-coloured linoleum, a high counter made out of glass and more of the green-painted wood. A sign above the door said Aldo’s Fish Bar in red writing, with little flags decorating the corners.

  ‘You dined off fried fish last night?’ I asked Alec.

  ‘And fried chips,’ he said.

  ‘And then two tongue sandwiches and milky coffee at supper time,’ I said. ‘You should have the figure of Henry VIII by rights.’

  ‘Come in and meet Joe,’ Alec said, and disappeared into the darkened doorway.

  I followed, leaving behind the scent of seaweed and yesterday’s catch and stepping into a rich, grease-laden, savoury fog so thick one could feel it settle on one’s skin. It must, I thought to myself looking around, be impregnated into the very walls, for there was no food in evidence, nor was there any sign of its being on its way or traces of it left over from the night before. The glass counter shone like the windows of an excellent housekeeper, as though vinegar and brown paper had only just been applied, and the metal grilles beneath the counter, where one assumed the hot food waited to be sold, glittered like the radiator of a beloved and expensive motorcar.

  Alec had disappeared behind the counter, passing the empty frying vessels and disappearing through a door into the back premises.

  ‘Buongiorno, my friend! Good morning. Good to see you. Avanti! Benvenuto! Come in!’

  The voice was as rich and warm as the thick scents that filled the room and must surely have been by far the most exotic sound ever to have boomed out around Portpatrick harbour. Feeling suddenly shy, I peeped around the doorway. On a stool in the middle of a tiny scullery, peeling potatoes into a tub the size of a dustbin clamped between his knees, was a black-haired, cherry-cheeked man, broad-shouldered and thickened with middle age, dressed in a collarless shirt, cambric trousers like a fisherman and a butcher’s striped apron.

  ‘You sound pretty chipper,’ I heard Alec say to him. ‘Is she back then?’

  ‘Cheep-ah?’ said Joe. He wiped his face with a forearm as though he had been sweating, even this early on such a fresh spring day; and then, holding his knife like a fairground thrower, he flicked it into the barrel of peeled potatoes. It entered one of them with a whistling sound and a small splash of water.

  ‘Happy,’ said Alec. ‘You sound happy. Has your wife come home?’

  ‘No, no, no, no, no,’ said Joe. ‘Not a sight, not a sound. Niente. I am happy because you are here to help me. Now I have a friend.’ He beamed at Alec, and since the beaming entailed an expansive sweeping glance around the room, at last he spotted me and shot to his
feet, wiping his face again and tearing off the blue cotton cook’s cap he had been wearing.

  ‘Scusi, signorina,’ he said. ‘How I can help you? The cafe she is closed, but how I can help you? Only say. Giuseppe Aldo is your servant.’

  ‘How do you do?’ I said and then immediately blushed to hear such primness responding to his torrent of chivalry.

  ‘Mrs Gilver is a friend of mine,’ said Alec. ‘My business partner, actually. Also a detective, don’t you know.’

  ‘A lady detective . . .’ said Joe, or Giuseppe as he seemed to be. He sat back down again at his stool, motioning me into one of the three wooden chairs set around the little table in the scullery. Once there he gazed at me, letting out a long low whistle. ‘Okay-dokey, so you breakfass? You hungry? Hah?’

  ‘I could manage a little something,’ said Alec, ignoring my look. He had eaten a heartier breakfast than someone who had had two dinners might have been expected to, and not a half-hour before.

  ‘I make you caffé and zeppole,’ said Joe. ‘Mos’ delectable food you ever have in your life before. Coming up!’ He stood and took the two paces needed over to a cooking stove set under the window. There he pulled a heavy, high-sided pot onto the ring and lit the gas with a match. I suspected from the look of the pot’s outside what it contained, and very soon my nostrils told me my guess was accurate. It was a pan of beef dripping slowly warming up for things to fry in.

  As to what might be fried, once Joe had changed his striped blue apron for a white one, long enough to reach the top of his boots and wide enough to meet at the back of his considerable girth, he fetched an enormous bowl from the cold larder, washed his fingers in water from a kettle – hot enough to make Alec and me both wince, although Joe just chuckled and shook his reddened hand dry – and started breaking off little pieces from a mound of dough which was mushrooming inside the mixing bowl like a puffball.