Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses

by Catriona McPherson

  All the time he worked he was talking, and soon the strange sing-song of his voice, as odd as it had sounded when first I had heard it, came to seem quite natural so that I would not have said he had any accent at all.

  ‘She is gone like the setting sun,’ he said. ‘Like the sun she will return, but I cannot deny she is gone. Gone from my arms but not from my heart. I work too hard. I leave her too long and she is lonely. I do not blame the poor child. She is a child to me. Fifteen years since I marry my sweetheart and she is still that sweet girl to me. So, my friend, you will find her and bring her home and I will rejoice and I will never again work so hard and let my sweet love be lonely. Eat, eat, eat, eat!’

  For the fat had got hot and into it he had dropped little spoonfuls of his mixture, watching them (as tenderly as any mother watching her children at play) before fishing them out again and laying them down gently on a plate of sugar. He rolled the plate around until the sugar was crusted all over the little puffs of pastry, and then he tipped the first one onto a clean plate for me.

  ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait,’ he said. He poured me a tiny cup of evil-looking black coffee from a fat little pot which had been spluttering on another gas ring, then he swept his arm down like a starter at a race meet and said it again. ‘Eat, eat, eat, eat. Buon appetito. Enjoy!’

  And despite the fact that I knew it was fried in dripping, and the fact that I had eaten my breakfast along with Alec and that the coffee was strong enough to give me goose pimples, I did eat – and it was the tastiest little pastry I had ever had in my life. Light, warm, sweet, almost salty – just far enough from being salty to make one yearn for another bite to see if the salt was there. I finished it, licked my sugary fingers as delicately as I could, and craned forward to peer at the pan of hot oil.

  Joe Aldo burst into a cascade of delighted laughter.

  ‘That is it!’ he said. ‘That is the secret. The genius in the lamp, and only a true cook can rub it! I make them one little bite too small. Just one tiny little bite too small and no one, no one, no one, no one ever refuses another. Hah!’

  Alec wagged his finger at me and laughed along and I managed to muster a sheepish smile too. I sipped another incendiary mouthful of the black tar Joe Aldo called coffee and asked for a second pastry like a good girl, not wanting to spoil his fun.

  When there was a pyramid of them on a plate between us and the fat little coffee pot was sitting on the table too, at last Joe moved the shimmering pan of fat back from the gas ring (setting it on the windowsill, I noticed, where it was sure to taint the wash hung on a rope in the tiny back yard). He removed his white apron, put on the striped one again and went back to his potato peeling, flicking the potato off the knife with an expert twist and plunging his hand into the bucket up to his elbow, wetting his rolled shirtsleeve and not noticing.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘I am a bad husband, working and working and never a rose, never a song, never a dance in the moonlight for my lovely wife. Not since her birthday, February, have we danced together in an empty room.’ I took in my stride this hint about the home life of the Aldos and its distance and different nature from my own. ‘And someone saw her, her beautiful black hair and her eyes like rubies. Ah! No – sapphires. And her cheeks like peaches in the evening. I can’t tell you in English how beautiful is my wife. If you spoke my language . . .’ He decided, apparently, to try it anyway and spent the next minute regaling us about the many wondrous charms of his wife in swooping, elated Italian of which we understood nothing except – in my case – the oft-repeated ‘-issima’s, which gave one the distinct impression that he really meant it.

  ‘And you’re sure it’s someone in the town?’ said Alec when Joe finally stopped talking.

  ‘She never get letters I don’t see. She never leave the village. It must be someone she met here.’

  ‘But you don’t know who?’ said Alec. ‘You weren’t able to think of anyone?’

  ‘Most of the time she see only ladies. Washing, see?’ He pointed out of the window at the waggling rope of laundry. ‘Rosa can wash the lace as fine as web of a spider. She can wash wool as soft as the day the lamb is born.’ I looked askance at the washing outside, just beyond the reach (I hoped) of the oily smoke from Joe’s cooking pan. It looked to be plain yellow cotton shirts and white calico underclothes to me, and I wondered if Rosa’s beauty and prowess in laundry were to be believed. But then, the pastries had been as delicious as their advance press, so perhaps I was being unfair to him.

  ‘She must see some men,’ said Alec.

  ‘She see postman, milkman, grocer boy, farmer on top of the hill. He kill a lamb for us and butcher it just how we like it, Rosa and me. I fry fish for my living, bella signora, but my wife Rosa she is the cook. She make a two-day pot of lamb and tomato would raise the dead from their graves. A pollo con funghi could cure a plague.’ He turned back to Alec again. ‘But it could be anyone. Bank manager, fisherman, pub landlord, anyone who ever see her face or hear her voice. I not angry. How he help it, this man, whoever he is? But she has to come home. She will come home. And before Sabbatina even knows she is gone.’

  ‘Sabbatina?’ I said.

  ‘It would break her heart. And so also mine. Sabbatina is our daughter. A beautiful child and a genius, una prodigia, a student of the arts and the sciences. Rosa and me so very proud of our girl.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, nodding out of the window. I had thought there was a preponderance of yellow amongst the family wash and it was a shade of yellow, very buttery, that had seemed familiar to me. Now I understood: Sabbatina Aldo went to school at the top of the hill.

  ‘Yes, signora,’ said Joe. ‘Sabbatina is a student at St Columba’s College for the Young Ladies! Can you believe? Hah? Hah? Can you?’

  Frankly, I could not. And I was sure that Basil and Candide Rowe-Issing could not possibly know that young Stella was at school with the child of a fish fryer and a washerwoman.

  ‘A scholarship, I presume?’ I murmured.

  ‘A scholar of such promise and so very young,’ said her father, perhaps misunderstanding or perhaps unable to resist another chance, however tiny, to brag. I would not know. Poor dear Donald has never given Hugh or me anything to brag about, being dimwitted, gawky, and shy amongst strangers. It is too soon to tell with Teddy, or at least I dearly hope so.

  ‘But how can you hope to hide the fact that her mother is missing?’ said Alec.

  ‘She is full scholar, see?’ said Joe. ‘Sleep up there, eat with the girls, that terrible food. Study in her evenings in the common room of the girls. She will visit tomorrow for dinner with her family – cena in famiglia – unless I stop her. Today I will send note to say Rosa is ill, very catching cold, and Sabbatina must stay away.’

  ‘Giving me a week to find her and persuade her home,’ Alec said.

  ‘And if you like,’ I offered, ‘I’ll take the note. Sabbatina might know something.’ Joe rumbled a little and I fell over myself to reassure him. ‘I’ll be very subtle, Mr Aldo. I won’t arouse any suspicions.’

  ‘She love her mother so very very much and I love both of them so very very very—’

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ I said. I had not heard such sustained protestations of love and affection since my Pereford summer and it was beginning to grate upon my nerves.

  Back up at St Columba’s twenty minutes later, I marched right in at the front door like the welcome guest I evidently was (though the reason for my welcome was a continuing mystery to me) and collared a passing twelve-year-old.

  ‘Where would I find Sabbatina Aldo at this moment, child?’ I said. The little girl encouraged her spectacles back up her nose by means of a most unattractive screwing up of her face and pouting out of her lips before she answered.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sabbatina,’ I said, slower. Surely there could not be more than one.

  ‘What form’s she in?’ said the girl. She was sidling away as she spoke, clearly bent on getting to wherever she had been headed whe
n I stopped her.

  ‘Stand still when I’m addressing you, please,’ I said. ‘I’m Miss Gilver, the new French mistress. Now, take your hands out of your tunic pockets and show me the way to Miss Shanks’s study.’

  ‘Oh, Miss!’ said the child, instantly woebegone. ‘I’ve got thirty-five minutes of tennis before I have to start horrid Latin with old Plumface and the big girls said last night you were nice. Please?’

  ‘Don’t say Plumface,’ I said, even though my lips were twitching.

  ‘Goody Gilver, Eileen Rendall said.’ The little minx was practically batting her eyelids at me now and I am afraid to say that I succumbed to it.

  ‘Oh, go on then. Point me in the right direction and then run along.’

  I had to raise my voice towards the end of it, because at the first hint of relenting she was running already.

  ‘West stairs,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘First floor. The one with all the chairs!’ And she was gone.

  A child after Hugh’s heart, I thought bitterly, turning around on the spot and trying to deduce which way west might lie. I closed my eyes. The sun set over the sea, beyond the far harbour wall, and the school faced the harbour mouth and since it was May and the sun was setting to the north-west, that meant that the west stair was probably . . . I set off rather uncertainly towards the farthest corner of the building from the carriage entrance and climbed a set of broad oak stairs I found there.

  The first floor – the drawing-room floor in the heyday of the house, one supposed – was quite a good bit grander than the labyrinth of corridors upstairs where Fleur had her little bolthole and had suffered less in the metamorphosis from manor house to boarding school than had the ground floor with its noticeboards and clattering canteen of a dining room. Here was a wide corridor with Palladian over-lintels to its doors – or perhaps Palladian-style would be more accurate, Palladian-esque, even Palladian-ish (for it seemed that the architect had been more entranced by ornament than he had been constrained by authenticity), plasterwork niches so highly decorated they were almost grottoes punctuating its walls, and pelmets above its windows encrusted with bosses and curlicues like a barnacled wreck on the bed of the sea.

  With that weight of unavoidable decoration, the thin school carpet and drab school curtains did little to reduce the overall splendour and also there was no need for occasional furniture to break up the yawning blankness as one sometimes sees in plainer houses, where the corridors become a slalom of tables, long-case clocks and even suits of armour. Here it was easy to tell that I had arrived at Miss Shanks’s room, from – as the tennis-bound child had shouted to me – all the chairs. A row of mismatched dining chairs stood along the wall on either side of her door, awaiting, one would surmise, the bottoms of miscreants sent to be dealt with and left simmering so that the prospect of punishment delayed might be half the punishment all on its own.

  I knocked. Miss Shanks’s welcome came as a burst of song.

  ‘Come in, come in, it’s nice to see ye!’

  I opened the door and entered, trying hard not to let my eyebrows rise.

  ‘How’s yersel’, ye’re looking grand!’ she carolled on.

  ‘Hello again,’ I said.

  ‘Harry Lauder,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘A wonderful entertainer. I have some gramophone records and I play them for the girls for a treat sometimes.’

  ‘How delightful,’ I said with a tight smile, thinking how odd her mood was for the current state of her school. One would not have been surprised to find her wringing her hands and tearing at her hair. Skittish hilarity seemed to me to have no place here.

  ‘And how delightful to have you safely with us after our wee misunderstanding,’ Miss Shanks said. She pointed me into a chair – a miscreant’s chair, clearly, being rather low and set alone before her desk, facing the window. It was a busy, rather messy room: more of the interminable patchwork abandoned on top of a cocktail cabinet and books lying open and face-down on the arms of chairs. There was even a fox’s head, stuffed and mounted, which was serving as a coat hook, scarves and satchels slung over it with abandon. I brought my gaze back to Miss Shanks who was watching me with a small smile curling at her lips.

  ‘I have no formal qualifications,’ I began.

  ‘Pouf!’ said Miss Shanks. ‘You speak French, don’t you?’ I nodded. ‘And read it and write it and are familiar with the classics?’ I stopped nodding halfway through this but she did not notice. She sailed on. ‘Then I’m sure you’ll do very nicely. My dear departed Miss Fielding was a great one for certificates and methods and all that, don’t ye know . . .’

  ‘Ah, yes, the Froebel method,’ I said. ‘The girls mentioned it to me.’

  ‘But I have faith in my mistresses no matter what their path to St Columba’s. Once they are here, now that you are here, my dear Miss Gilver, all is sure to be well.’

  I nodded even less certainly. Faith in her mistresses? Four of them had deserted her and one had died; her school was surely teetering on the very brink of disaster. And she knew not the first thing about me.

  ‘Our sixth formers are four weeks from their Higher Cert exams,’ she was saying. I redoubled my efforts at concentration. ‘They must be your particular concern, naturally.’

  ‘That kind of certificate does interest you then?’ I said. Miss Shanks opened her eyes very wide.

  ‘Och, but of course,’ she said. ‘Of course, of course. Five of our sixth form are bound for university, Miss Gilver. Five! Out of only twenty. And three of the others could have gone if they’d a mind to. Two off to Edinburgh, one straight to St Andrews, one to St Andrews after a year in Switzerland and one, can you guess?’

  ‘Oxford?’ I said.

  ‘Somerville College, Oxford,’ said Miss Shanks in tones of wonder. ‘If my dear Fielding is looking down on us she will be tickled pink.’

  ‘And are any of them going up to read French?’ I said, resisting with some effort the impulse to cross my fingers for luck.

  ‘One,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘I forget which one, but one certainly. French, two for history, one for chemistry if you can believe it and one . . . oh, geography I think. Not that it matters.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. I was furiously trying to remember what I had ever known of Donald and Teddy’s French at Eton, furiously trying to convince myself either that I could coach one clever girl through the last few weeks – she was surely more or less running under her own steam now? – or that I could fulfil my obligations to Pearl and Aurora in a hundred other ways besides passing myself off as a mistress in this school.

  ‘Well, I suppose I’ve got until Monday morning to prepare, have I?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I’ll show you to Mademoiselle Beauclerc’s room and you can acquaint yourself with her lessons. It makes sense for you just to take over her room, I suppose, although it’s one of the nicest ones and with you being new, strictly speaking, it should be “all roll over and one fall out”, don’t ye know.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘One fell out and so we all roll over and the new girl comes in at the far end. Just my bit of fun, Miss Gilver. I daresay no one will make a fuss for the last few weeks of term and then we can all bags new rooms in September.’

  I managed a smile, but my head was reeling. I had fraternised in the course of my detecting career with circus performers and music-hall turns, cottagers and publicans, opium fiends and charlatans and once – frankly – witches, but I had never met anyone whose conversation left me feeling as rudderless as little Miss Shanks. No one even came close to her.

  ‘Right then,’ I said, and stood.

  ‘We’ll soon have her things cleared out of your way and everything shipshape.’

  ‘She . . .’ I swallowed. ‘She didn’t take her things?’

  ‘Not all of them,’ Miss Shanks said. ‘Not many, actually. She left in a bit of a rush. But one of the maids will soon get her study and bedroom ready for you. Or one of the girls maybe.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said, sitt
ing again. ‘I was forgetting. I have a message for one of the girls. Sabbatina Aldo?’ Miss Shanks’s face turned blank and she shook her head.

  ‘Who?’ she said.

  ‘Sabbatina? From the village. Her father asked me to say that her mother is unwell – a contagious cold – she is not to visit tomorrow as is usual.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Miss Shanks. ‘Betty. We call her Betty Alder, Miss Gilver. Much more suitable. I’ll make sure she gets the message.’

  ‘I look forward to meeting her,’ I said. ‘I take it she studies French, doesn’t she?’

  ‘I couldn’t say,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘I don’t know the child.’

  ‘Oh?’ This was odd for two reasons: in a school of one hundred girls one would expect the headmistress to know all of them and, besides, Sabbatina Aldo was hardly run of the mill. ‘Isn’t she a scholarship girl?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Miss Shanks. Her voice was cold and the brogue was quite gone.

  ‘Oh,’ I said again. ‘I got the impression that she was a tremendously bright pupil. Perhaps I imagined the scholarship angle all on my own.’ I was sure I had not, but there seemed nothing else to say.

  ‘She is,’ said Miss Shanks, ‘extremely clever and bookish. And here thanks to a wealthy patron. She is of absolutely no interest to me.’

  Which, coming out of the mouth of the headmistress of a school which went in for sending its girls to college, was a mystifying remark even set against Miss Shanks’s inexhaustible supply of them. I stared at the woman; quite honestly I gawped at her but, before I could think of a reply, a knock came at the door.

  ‘Come in, come in, it’s nice to—’ Miss Shanks did not get to the end of her little ditty. The door opened and Fleur Lipscott blundered into the room.

  ‘Miss Shanks,’ she said. She put both of her hands on the back of my chair and leaned her weight on it. I would not have risked a wager that she even noticed I was sitting there. ‘There are policemen downstairs.’

  Miss Shanks said nothing but she sat up very straight and drew in a sharp breath.