‘Aye well,’ said Reid. ‘Fine enough. I’m just sayin’.’ Scotch has an inexhaustible supply of quite meaningless little bons mots with which to convey one’s determination to hang onto a huff; Reid seemed to know all of them.
Up at St Columba’s, Saturday afternoon was unfolding in leisurely fashion. The tennis courts were thronged, but for each foursome engaged in patting the ball back and forward, forward and back, sending it sailing over the net into the reach of the waiting racquet, there were at least a dozen lolling on mackintosh squares behind the service lines, chatting desultorily and sipping lemonade. In the rose garden, the girls were soaking up what watery sunshine there was by stretching out on their backs on the wide stone benches and even the narrower terrace balustrades. Their hair fanned out – St Columba’s seemed not to be the firm supporter of pigtails one might look for in a girls’ school – and their arms flopped down, letting their hands graze the ground at their sides. Just for a second that morning’s image swam before my eyes and I shuddered.
‘Aye,’ said Constable Reid. ‘We’ll no’ forget that yet awhile, eh no?’ And, sharing a look, we took the first steps towards cordiality again. ‘Here, youse!’ he said, clapping his hands. ‘Mind out and no’ fall off they banisters.’ It was hardly police business, but his hectoring did the trick, rousing all the girls until they were sitting or at least propped up on their elbows, blinking and scowling and no longer looking like corpses, which was fine by me.
‘And . . . put your hats on,’ I chipped in. ‘Or move into the shade before you all end up as brown as ploughmen.’ Reid nodded and we left the garden, to whispers of ‘Gilver’ and ‘French, I think’ and stifled laughter at how old-fashioned I had shown myself to be.
‘So where is she?’ said Reid, when we had slipped in through the open french windows to the empty dining room. He stood sniffing the air, which was still thick from the luncheon-time cabbage and gravy – the poor girls; small wonder they were drowsing like bumblebees – and looked so very efficient and eager that once again I felt an urge to shield Fleur and none at all to deliver her unto him.
‘I’ll take you to her rooms,’ I said, hardly knowing why I gave the little cell this lordly title – more shielding, probably.
The same cold feeling which had descended upon me at the cove was back again, stronger than ever. I wondered if Reid felt anything of the like and I stole glances at him as we crossed the hall and climbed the stairs. He seemed calm enough, grimly confident if anything, but he was a bright lad and surely he must be wondering if we would find her there. I was long past wondering myself; I was sure. We wended through the corridors, past rooms absolutely silent this sunny afternoon, and stopped at Fleur’s door. Constable Reid rapped on the wood with a firm authority that no one inside could have ignored, not for a pension. There was no answer. He tried the handle, found the door unlocked, glanced at me and just as firmly as he had knocked he swung it open.
The room, needless to say, was empty. Reid let his breath go – the first sign that he had been suffering even the smallest measure of tension.
‘Righty-ho,’ he said. ‘So where will she be if she’s no’ in here, then? Classroom? On a Saturday afternoon?’
I shook my head and gazed at the room that lay before me. It had been so bare before that it was hard to account for what made it barer now. Perhaps there had been a book on the beside table; certainly there was none today. And the water glass had been rinsed out and was resting upside down on a folded flannel facecloth by the washbasin. But perhaps Fleur rinsed her glass and moved her Bible every morning. What was it? Then my eye was caught by the dark lines along the front of the little chest and I bit down on my bottom lip. The drawers were not fully closed – the top one open half an inch, the next an inch and the third an inch and a half, so precise and so familiar. It was what Matron in the convalescent home in the war required us to do when one poor soldier had limped off home and the next had not arrived. The drawers were being aired. The drawers were empty.
And what had happened was my fault, entirely mine. I knew it had happened the moment I turned and saw the empty beach behind me, but I had done nothing. Later I would argue that I had tried and the stupid sergeant had stopped me. Later still, I would tell myself that if I knew the sergeant was stupid then it was up to me to ignore him. She could not have gone far; she had only had a five-minute start at most. I should have searched and listened and called her name and – surely – I would have found her. It was too late now.
Fleur was gone.
5
‘Yep,’ said Constable Reid, slamming shut the wardrobe door which gave an echoing boom. ‘She’s away.’
‘I can furnish you with the address of her family home and those of her sisters and . . .’ I said.
‘Right,’ said Reid, but his tone was not one of huffy offence any more. He stood looking out of the window, tapping a tune with one finger on the hollow of his cheek. ‘Only . . . how come she got packed up and off so quickly?’
‘Maybe,’ I said, slowly, thinking of the bareness of her room the night before and the way she had yelped when I mentioned the possibility, ‘maybe she was planning to go anyway.’
‘Seein’ as how she’d killed somebody?’ he asked. Then he frowned. I frowned.
‘Why would she wait until the body had washed up?’ I said. ‘To see it?’
‘She had a good enough look at it, right enough,’ Reid said. ‘And there’s something no’ right about what she said. It’s like . . .’
‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘It was too . . .’
‘Aye,’ said Reid, staring at me like a cow looking over a fence at another cow staring back. Where, I asked myself, was Alec, when one needed him?
‘Also,’ I went on, ‘why would she pretend it wasn’t Mademoiselle Beauclerc? She’d be so easily caught out.’
‘If it is that French one,’ said Reid. ‘We’ll need to get another one of them up there and see, eh?’
We had left the door open behind us when we entered and now heard footsteps approaching along the passageway; a very steady tread which already I recognised as belonging to the sturdy little booted feet of Miss Shanks. I braced myself for the encounter as she hove into the doorway and stopped there.
‘Aha!’ she said. ‘Miss Gilver and . . . escort. Thank you, young man, for bringing my bonnie back home. Most thoughtful. And I take it the poor unfortunate was no one we know? Since I haven’t heard otherwise? Splendid, splendid, jolly good.’ Reid tried to break into the stream but was unsuccessful and retired into silence.
‘So, my dear Miss Gilver,’ Miss Shanks went on. ‘I thought I’d find you in Miss Lipscott’s rooms. Where is she, by the way? Sad news, I’m afraid. Look who’s here!’ She drew to her side a middle-aged woman dressed in a gunmetal-grey travelling costume whom I had never set eyes upon before in my life.
‘Such a shame,’ she said, ‘I had very high hopes of you, my dear. But Miss Glennie comes with the Lambourne Agency’s highest recommendation and, besides, she has been a governess to— Well, let’s not tell tales in school, eh?’ She broke off to utter a series of whinnying high-pitched giggles with her hand in front of her mouth.
‘How do you do, Miss Glennie,’ I said. ‘Welcome to St Columba’s.’ She nodded slightly. ‘Might I though, Miss Shanks, before I go, have a quiet word?’ I shrank from speaking freely in front of the new mistress of the faceless, handless corpse who might well be the old one.
‘Why certainly, for sure, for sure,’ sang out Miss Shanks. I did not recognise her words as a quotation, but her habit of speech was beginning to make everything she said sound like a snatch of some music-hall ditty, or like the last line of prose in a light operetta just before the band strikes up and the cast bursts into out-and-out song. ‘You’ll find your way back to my sitting room all right, won’t you, Miss Glennie?’ she said, to the new mistress’s astonishment. Miss Glennie blinked and gave half a look over her shoulder at the turn in the passageway.
&nb
sp; ‘Perhaps one of the girls . . .?’ I said, gesturing to the doors on either side. Miss Shanks gave them a swift glance and then shook her head.
‘Just keep turning left, Miss Glennie,’ she said, ‘and you’ll come soon enough to the top of the stairs. It works for mazes too if you’re ever lost in one. I’ll not be a tick.’ She went so far as to give the woman a little shove in the small of her back as she set off, and then she came inside and held the door open like a commissionaire, twinkling at Constable Reid.
‘Thank you again, laddie,’ she said, ‘and give my kind regards to the inspector when you see him.’ She turned to me. ‘Inspector Douglass’s girl comes here, you know. A very promising scholar.’
‘I’m stayin’,’ said Reid, and something in his tone caused Miss Shanks to turn abruptly and shut the door.
‘Don’t tell me!’ she said. ‘It was never? Was it? Wee Mademoiselle?’
‘We don’t know,’ I answered. ‘Miss Lipscott said not.’
‘Well then!’ said Miss Shanks.
‘She was very upset, though, and might have been mistaken.’
‘She’s a steady sort as a rule,’ said the headmistress.
‘Steady!’ said Reid. ‘She’s hooked it.’
‘She’s what?’
‘She’s gone, Miss Shanks,’ I said. ‘And one has to wonder – that is, the police have to consider – I mean to say. A body turns up, dead by some misadventure, and someone runs away. One has to ask oneself whether one is connected to the other. It would be best to have a second witness try to identify the body, don’t you see?’
‘You mean . . .’ said Miss Shanks, ‘that Miss Lipscott feared . . . she might be next?’ This sudden suggestion startled both Reid and me and we opened our mouths to protest. ‘Or even worse! Oh, surely not! You don’t mean you thought Miss Lipscott . . .? You do! I can tell from your faces!’
‘Were they enemies?’ said Reid. ‘Had they fell out?’
‘Certainly not!’ cried Miss Shanks. ‘They were great friends. If Miss Lipscott said the corpse was a stranger then why not leave it at that? If Miss Lipscott chose to go – most inconvenient but there’s no need to make a penny dreadful out of . . . I say! Every cloud, Miss Gilver! How d’ye fancy English instead of French and you don’t have to leave us after all?’
‘Miss Shanks,’ said Constable Reid, barely containing himself. ‘I’m no’ just so sure you appreciate what we’re sayin’. Miss Lipscott has run away. Look.’ He opened the door of the wardrobe upon the pitiful sight of a half a dozen empty coat hangers, padded and covered with cloth, a lavender bag drooping sadly from each.
‘I worked those covers, you know,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘They’re just a nice wee size of job for teatime in the staffroom.’
‘And I’m going to have to ask another of youse to come and say aye or no once and for all about this poor soul we’ve got lying up there.’
‘Miss Barclay,’ said Miss Shanks at once. ‘She has the constitution of an ox. She’d have had a better time of it than poor Miss Christopher with all those nasty dissections. After the science mistress left us, you know.’
‘I wonder you didn’t think of her this morning, then,’ I said. ‘And save poor Miss Lipscott a sight that might well have caused to her to pack her bags and flee.’
‘Oh no,’ said Miss Shanks, turning round and causing us almost to collide with her – we had begun our journey to Miss Barclay’s rooms already. ‘It wasn’t the shock of the corpse, Miss Gilver. And it wasn’t fear for her own skin. Nor that other thing either – what an idea! No, this has been on the cards for a whiley. Quite a wee whiley, aye.’ She beamed at us, turned to face front again and tramped off. Reid lifted one finger and twirled it around by his temple. I nodded. Either that or drink, I was thinking, though her progress up the passageway was as straight as a plumb line.
Miss Barclay gave us a look of pure terror as we entered her room. At least, for a moment I thought so. She was hunched over her desk, a towering pile of test-papers at one elbow and a sliding heap of open textbooks at the other, and she looked up like a rabbit who has seen the shadow of an eagle passing over. She dropped her pen into the inkwell with a little splash and took the red pencil out from behind her ear.
‘Headmistress?’ she said.
‘So sorry, Barclay,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘But don’t look like that, my dearie! I’m not going to bite. You’ll be giving Miss Gilver here the wrong impression of our happy band, so you will. Now, I’ll make the cocoa myself for your return – or chicken broth, if you’ve a mind that way – but I need to ask you to go with this laddie here and look at that body they’ve fished up out of the sea.’
‘You said at lunch Miss Lipscott had done it,’ said Miss Barclay. She stood up and walked away from her desk.
‘She did,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘Then she packed up her troubles in her old kit bag! Leaving our boys in blue not very happy to take her say-so on who the corpse might be.’
‘Gone?’ said Miss Barclay. Her expression, back to the light coming in the window behind her, was unreadable and I started edging round the wall hoping for a better view.
‘But Lambourne have sent us Miss Glennie, like manna from heaven. Miss Thomasina Glennie who used to be an under-governess at Balmoral when—’ Miss Shanks then clamped her hand to her mouth and gave that high-pitched giggle again. ‘I wasn’t supposed to say,’ she said. ‘And so she’s the new French mistress.’
‘Balmoral, eh?’ said Miss Barclay, with shrewdly narrowed eyes. Mine, I suspected, were as round as plates. How could anyone swallow a story like that? Even someone as odd as Miss Shanks had to see it for the trumped-up nonsense it must be.
‘And so Miss Gilver here is the new English mistress.’
‘Um,’ said the new English mistress.
‘Miss Gilver?’ said Miss Barclay.
‘Grammar?’ I said. ‘Or novels and what have you?’ But truth be told, I would gladly have parsed all one hundred stanzas of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight if it meant I could stay put and take a crack at this oddest of cases. (I had been exposed to the thing by a tutor of my brother’s, introduced into the household by my father but shortly expelled from it again when Nanny Palmer saw what he had us reading.)
‘All roll over and one fall out!’ said Miss Shanks, as she had before.
‘You know best, Headmistress,’ said Miss Barclay. She fished her pen back out of the inkwell, wiped it and capped it. Then she stood and followed Constable Reid out of the room.
‘A bit of spelling, a spot of composition,’ said Miss Shanks, once we were alone. She had gone to the window and was gazing down into the grounds. ‘As long as they’ve read some Scott and some Shakespeare their mummies and daddies are happy. Clear lungs and rosy cheeks, that’s the main thing. Just look at them, would you?’
I joined her at the window, which was on the west front and gave a view I had not seen before now: a view of grassy headland with the blue-green sea sparkling in the middle distance and, sparkling in the immediate foreground, a bathing pool of impressive proportions in that shade of turquoise unknown to any sailor of the world’s oceans but apparently very dear to every maker of ceramic tiles. Around the pool were more of the draped and drowsing girls, none of them actually swimming. Those in the water seemed to be floating on rafts, while at the edges girls were stretched out in deckchairs, not quite naked, but close enough so that I felt stupid remembering what I had said to the others regarding hats.
‘Won’t they get cold?’ I said. It was sunny, but it was Scotland.
‘The water’s heated,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘Such a treat to dip into warm water for a wee splash about.’ I nodded, secretly scandalised by the idea of such luxury. Besides, there was no splashing down there, barely a ripple as the little rafts eddied around. ‘Still,’ Miss Shanks said, ‘it’s early in the season and we don’t want them sniffling for Parents’ Day. Just you slip down, Miss Gilver, and tell them to get in to the kitchen for cocoa and I’ll just slip down and
ask our good Mrs Brown to put the milk on.’
Now this was going far beyond the heating of a little bathing water. Every nanny and every girl and boy who had been brought up by one knew that there was only one thing to do when one was cold from languid bathing: one ran up and down until one was warm again. Then one went back to the water until one was blue and shivering, then more running, and so on and so on until teatime. In fact, it was my considered opinion that the wonderful night’s sleep which followed a day at the seaside was nothing to do with fresh air at all but owed itself to athletics alone.
‘And shall we try to find out where Miss Lipscott has gone?’ I said.
‘Oh, I think Miss Lipscott has made it clear she’s done with us, don’t you?’ said Miss Shanks. ‘I had high hopes of her once but she never did shape to the job and this bolt has been a long time coming.’
‘But still—’ I said.
‘If the police want to find her then they can do the searching,’ Miss Shanks said. ‘Finders keepers, losers weepers.’
‘Well, shall we at least ring her sisters and let them know? Shall I? Since I’m acquainted with them?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘Now, go and tell those girls to put on their wraps and come inside.’
I took this to give me carte blanche to do what I chose in the matter of Fleur. And what I chose to do was find her. (Of course, I should also have to spend some little time on the question of why Miss Shanks left it to me, of why she had been so frantic about the mademoiselle and cared not a fig for Miss Lipscott. It was Betty Alder all over again.)
So it was with a great many questions bumping around inside my mind that I let myself out of the front door of the house and made my way around to the bathing pool. It really was getting rather chilly, even though the northern sun was still high in the sky, and my task was being taken out of my hands as the girls themselves variously sat up, stood and tried to rub the goose pimples from their bare arms. In the pool the bathers were slipping off the rafts, out of the cool air and into the warm water.
Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses Page 11