Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses

by Catriona McPherson

  She sounded, as Donald and Teddy say, as though she had swallowed a dictionary.

  ‘Miss Blair was hardly a stranger to you,’ I insisted, ‘and although she and I did not overlap, as a new mistress where she was an old one, I’m naturally interested in what became of her.’

  ‘What do you mean “new mistress”?’ said Miss Lovage, quite forgetting to drawl and letting her face fall into its natural lines, without arched eyebrows or stretched neck. ‘Miss Shanks said a French mistress of impeccable pedigree had arrived from the agency.’

  ‘Oh, she did,’ I said. ‘Incredible pedigree, really. But haven’t you heard? Miss Lipscott is gone. I’m taking over English for her.’ Miss Lovage reared backwards like an adder about to strike. ‘For a while anyway,’ I said.

  ‘But how can you switch from French to English?’ she said. ‘Which are you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m a . . .’ I sought desperately for some phrase other than that – jack of all trades – which had sprung to my mind. ‘I’m a generalist, Miss Lovage.’

  ‘This is an outrage,’ Miss Lovage said, rather rudely to say the least. ‘Excuse me, Miss Gilver. I must speak to the headmistress right away.’

  With that, she shot forward to where Miss Shanks was stumping along and I dropped back and fell into step with Miss Barclay and Miss Christopher, together again like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

  ‘I’ve upset Miss Lovage,’ I told them.

  ‘Not difficult,’ said Miss Barclay, with a world of scorn in her voice for artists and their flighty ways.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ said Miss Christopher.

  ‘Well, I was asking about Miss Blair to start with,’ I said. ‘Which she didn’t like at all.’ The chalky little titter of Miss Barclay and the rattling chuckle of Miss Christopher were loud enough to cause some of the girls to turn and stare.

  ‘Hardly a surprise!’ said Miss Barclay. ‘Not much kindred spirit there.’

  ‘Because of the cricket?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, you heard about the cricket, did you?’ said Miss Christopher. ‘Some of the mummies and daddies didn’t think it was quite nice. And such a waste of the lovely new tennis courts too. Not to mention her taste in music.’

  ‘Violins?’ I asked. I could think of nothing worse than the sound of children learning to play the violin.

  ‘Bagpipes,’ said Miss Barclay.

  ‘Dear God!’

  ‘But Miss Shanks took over when Blair left us in the lurch, and the girls are just as well off with callisthenics and country walks. And Mrs Tully in the village is happy to listen to them playing their scales.’

  We were at the church gate now, joining the rest of the flock being gathered in under the stern eye of a black-garbed minister who stood on the step, and it was impossible to resist the unspoken command to stop talking and stare at the ground as one passed him. Just as well, I daresay, for how could I relate Miss Lovage’s horror at the makeshift way I had dropped French and taken up English to two women who were cribbing science and history by staying one page ahead of the girls in the textbooks?

  During the service I had plenty of time for quiet reflection, for the rites of the Church of Scotland – in which there are no kneeling and no responses and what little standing is required is heavily cued by the organ – give one’s mind a blissful chance to wander with no one able to tell. Actual snoring is frowned upon, but pew after pew of glazed, slumping parishioners dreaming of their dinners is the sight which greets many a minister of that kirk every week, I am sure.

  And so after the service, when I excused myself from the walk along the promenade and dodged into the Crown by the back way, I felt I had plenty to tell.

  To my surprise and slight annoyance, Alec was not alone in the parlour but was sharing a glass of beer and a plate of sandwiches with an off-duty Constable Reid, rather resplendent in britches and a golfing jersey and with a pancake of a golfing cap lying beside him on the settle.

  ‘The sarge’s no’ buying it,’ he said. ‘Good news for you, missus.’

  ‘Buying what?’ I asked.

  Constable Reid took a pull at his pint glass before replying.

  ‘Five murders. Or even one murder. I’ve telt him all about Miss Lipscott – good family, went off the rails, teachin’ in a school, livin’ like a nun – and he reckons she’s likely a wee bit’ – he twirled his hand beside his head and whistled – ‘and no need to listen to her.’

  ‘But she has to be found!’ I said. I had had a complete change of heart in the matter of Fleur’s protection, thinking that if the police wanted her for murder, they would work all the more for her safe return.

  ‘We don’t know how she got away,’ said Reid. ‘She didn’t get on the train here nor Stranraer nor Glenluce as far as the station masters can recall – and she’d have had a wheen of luggage, mind.’

  ‘Stranraer?’ I said.

  ‘I already asked about a ferry-boat,’ said Alec. ‘No joy. And she didn’t hire a car or ring anybody to come and get her.’

  ‘And she’s no’ holed up in any wee place in town or in Portlogan that takes in guests unless they’re lyin’ and why would they? So there you have it. She’s gone.’

  ‘And Sergeant Turner is simply washing his hands of her?’ I said.

  ‘I told him what you told me,’ said Reid. ‘That they women are always taking off. He’ll send her lines out – her description – to the other forces but nobody’s reported her missin’ and so . . .’ He shrugged.

  ‘Can I report her missing?’ He was shaking his head already. ‘Her headmistress? Or one of her sisters?’

  ‘Aye, a sister for sure,’ said Reid. ‘Then we’ll have another wee look-see.’

  ‘But in the meantime, Dandy,’ said Alec, ‘it’s you and me.’

  ‘And what about the corpse?’ I said.

  ‘It’ll be in tomorrow’s paper,’ said Reid. ‘We’re asking the ferries and the fishing boats – no’ that our fishermen would have a woman aboard, mind – and asking down the coast if anyone’s missin’ and we’ll just need to wait till somebody pipes up.’

  ‘And no clues from the body itself?’ I said. ‘Did someone search the headland?’ Reid was nodding. ‘And question passers-by?’ Now his eyes flashed. ‘Yes, I do mean Cissie,’ I said. ‘If she was there on her own, noticing Mrs Aldo with her mysterious companion, she might have noticed someone else too.’

  ‘But only on Tuesday evening and only at that spot, Dan,’ said Alec.

  ‘Better than nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ll talk to the girl and do it gently.’

  ‘Or me,’ Alec said.

  ‘I think you’ll have other fish to fry,’ I said. ‘Do you suppose you could impersonate a distressed headmaster, or a doting and wealthy father of at least five?’ I sailed on without waiting for a reply. ‘Here’s what I’m thinking. How many gym-cum-music mistresses can there possibly be in this rather small country – Scotland, that is – who like to get their charges playing cricket and bagpipes?’ Neither man answered. ‘Now, if Miss Blair left suddenly in the middle of a term – and I think she did – wouldn’t she most likely apply with some haste to an agency to find work? And even if she didn’t, mightn’t an agency know her of old?’

  ‘And I what?’ said Alec. ‘I ring up pretending to want a woman to teach cricket?’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be easier for you simply to keep digging for a home address or something?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘On two counts, no. First, if I “dig” they’ll get suspicious, and secondly you can do this right now instead of waiting. And if you find one ex-mistress you can ask her about the others.’

  ‘But why start with Blair?’ said Alec.

  ‘The other two have even more dispiritingly ordinary names – Taylor and Bell.’

  ‘What’s ordinary about Lipscott and Bow-clark?’ said Reid, making me flush.

  ‘Very sound point, Constable,’ I said. ‘Although it’s a bit quick to expe
ct Fleur to be back on the books.’

  ‘I’ll eat my hat if she turns up on agency books at all,’ said Alec. ‘She’s lying low, mark my words. Mademoiselle Beauclerc though . . . could be.’ He thought for a moment, sucking on his unlit pipe in that disgusting way (the very thought of what it must taste like made me grimace). ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘not getting a whiff of them doesn’t mean anything. They might have gone home to their people.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘But if we did find Miss Blair, for instance, happily coaching some pigtailed first eleven somewhere, we could stop worrying that she’d been murdered.’

  ‘No’ that again,’ said Reid. ‘If the body we’ve got the now isn’t the French one, why think there’s anything in it that four other teachers went away?’

  ‘Because I still don’t believe we can be sure that the corpse isn’t Miss Beauclerc,’ I said, to a chorus of their groans. ‘I know Miss Lipscott said not, but she ran away straight afterwards. And I know Miss Barclay said not, but . . .’ Both of them sat forward and opened their eyes very wide. ‘I don’t trust her,’ I finished lamely. ‘I don’t trust anyone in that place.’

  ‘So there’s nae use gettin’ a third opinion then?’ said Reid. ‘If they’re all as bad as each other.’

  ‘I’d trust one of the girls,’ I said, ‘but we couldn’t possibly ask it of them. No, I think we just have to try to track down Miss Beauclerc and if we fail to . . . then track down her family and . . . no distinguishing marks at all, Constable? Moles, scars, birthmarks?’ Reid, brick-red in the face once more, simply shook his head. ‘Very well then,’ I said. ‘When can I speak to Cissie?’

  ‘We’re all quits, aren’t we?’ said Reid, rather wary. ‘The police are no’ botherin’ your friend and so you’re no’ tryin’ to set Cissie against me, eh no? Aye, well come and meet us on the links this afternoon then. After three. It’s right behind the school. You can’t miss it.’

  ‘She’s a golfer too?’ I said. This was surprising in a parlour maid, to my mind.

  ‘Naw,’ said Reid, blushing a little again. ‘She’s . . . she just, if I’m playin’ a round she . . .’

  ‘You’re not trying to say she caddies for you?’ said Alec.

  ‘She lugs your clubs around on her afternoon free?’ I said.

  ‘Naw!’ said Reid. ‘They’re on a wee set o’ trolley wheels. She just pulls them along.’

  He retired with a great air of wounded dignity, leaving Alec and me to burst into laughter behind him, like a pair of schoolgirls when a mistress leaves the room.

  ‘My God,’ I said. ‘This Cissie must be a bit of limp rag.’

  ‘She seemed lively enough to me,’ Alec said. ‘Perhaps PC Reid has hidden charms. Now, to the part we couldn’t discuss in front of him.’

  ‘Elf,’ I said. ‘Where does one begin?’

  ‘With the newspapers of the day and the report of the inquest, I suppose,’ Alec said.

  ‘But those will only tell you what I’ve told you anyway.’

  ‘Oh quite, quite, but I was thinking more of gathering names of individuals one might talk to. I still think that’s a better use of my time than haring after Miss Blair in that unlikely way. Either that, or asking around for anyone who might have seen our corpse when she was alive. Under cover of tracing Mrs Aldo, you know. For today at least, since it’s Sunday and I can’t start pestering librarians or teachers’ employment agencies until tomorrow.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said reluctantly. ‘And I could try to think of a way to dig some more without arousing suspicions. If only they hadn’t met me already I could present myself as an inveterate nosy-parker and they’d think nothing of my questions.’

  ‘Ask the girls,’ said Alec. ‘No one so self-centred as the young. They’ll think nothing at all.’

  ‘True,’ I said. ‘And I need to establish Fleur’s movements during the time our corpse might have died anyway. I hate having to call her “our corpse”. Can’t we think of something less grisly?’

  ‘Why don’t we call her No. 5?’ suggested Alec. I stared at him, disbelieving, for what could possibly be more grisly than that?

  ‘I’ll start with Sabbatina Aldo,’ I said, pulling on my gloves and preparing myself for departure. ‘You never know – she might be able to tell us something about her mother’s movements too.’

  ‘Onwards, then,’ said Alec, rising as I did.

  ‘And most certainly upwards,’ I replied, thinking of the cliff steps to St Columba’s, which were not getting any less steep and arduous for the number of times I had climbed them.

  It was a pleasant prospect, however, the gusting clouds and the sparkling sea, and I noticed for the first time the golf links on the headland behind the school, where the pancake caps of the men could be seen sprouting on the greens and fairways like mushrooms. I saw, too, a fair few splashes of custard yellow: St Columba’s girls in their shirtsleeves, getting in a round before luncheon on this unusually mild day.

  The entrance hall was deserted and the corridors silent, only the good rich smell of roasting beef wafting up from the kitchens to say that anyone was at work inside these walls, so instead of trying to find the needle of Sabbatina Aldo in the haystack of girls around the pool and courts and grounds I set off for Fleur’s classroom – Miss Shanks had given me sketchy directions the evening before – in slim hopes of some letters or papers she might have left behind and in rather plumper dread of what reins, besides Milton, I might discover I had to take up when the following school day dawned.

  Her classroom was on the seaward side, long and sunny, with high glittering windows, white-distempered walls and broad black floorboards, surely as Spartan as even the tenant of Fleur’s monastic sleeping cell could desire. There was not a picture, nor a bookshelf, nor the lowliest pot of daisies on the mustard-painted fireplace, just six rows of forms facing a large desk set up on a small dais, with a blackboard behind.

  I sat in Fleur’s chair and opened the top of the three desk drawers, finding in there such tidiness and order that my hopes, slender as they had been, dwindled to threads and blew away. Pens and ink, a wiper, fresh sheets for the blotter, a red pencil and its little box sharpener, a cloth-covered block for cleaning the board and a packet of white chalk. In short, nothing.

  In the second drawer, however, there was something indeed. I drew it all out and spread it on the desktop, letting my horrified eyes rest on each item in turn until I had been round them all.

  Milton, to my creeping dismay, was not the half of it. The lower sixth were engaged, granted, on studying Shakespeare (as Miss Shanks had so airily suggested all her girls might be) but no frothy comedy or worthy history for them! King Lear was the order of the day. Fleur’s copy had girls’ names pasted over the list of dramatis personae, which I took to indicate that it was being read aloud in the classroom, but there were also some beastly comprehension questions scrawled on slips of paper and tucked into the pages here and there.

  I turned, faintly, from the long, frantic speech towards the end of Act IV where the volume had fallen open and gave my attention to the books upon which Fleur had decided the budding minds of the middle forms should grow rich and be enlightened. The Pilgrim’s Progress, Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales glared balefully up at me from the desktop and my heart sank deep down into me like a pebble lobbed into a well. The poor girls! I had slogged through The Pilgrim’s Progress myself as a small child, weeping with boredom and hating Christian like poison, but those were the times and that was the excuse for it. These days there could surely be none. As for The Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman, I had managed to stagger thus far through my life without knowledge of a single line of either and, leafing through a little of each, was only sorry that my run of luck had ended. John Donne for the lower fourth seemed a bright spot until I cast my eyes over Fleur’s notes and saw that, of all his works, she had selected the Holy Sonnets, which was tiresomeness beyond imagining.

  The first and second forms, in
their tender years, had been spared maddened kings, pious allegories and epic poetry and were allotted instead novels, and nineteenth-century novels at that, but of all the wondrous outpourings of that miraculous age Fleur had plumped – as though to quell any danger of enjoyment – for The Water Babies and Silas Marner.

  ‘Silas Marner?’ I muttered, remembering how I had snorted with impatience at the tiresome old fool and his sickening little darling. I closed it and pinched the pages between my forefinger and thumb. ‘Well, at least it’s short.’ The Water Babies I had, admittedly, loved when I was too young to know better but when I unearthed it to read to my sons in their nursery, I had very soon re-earthed it again, deep into a trunk in an attic, aghast at its feverish insistence on death and sacrifice and its unwholesome obsession with staying pure and clean (and with fish, one has to say). Mr Kingsley would have given those Austrian doctors a good gallop round the paddock if he had ever submitted to them, I remember thinking.

  And so this was what little Fleur Lipscott had picked to share with the poor unfortunate girls. I could hardly believe it. Where was Robinson Crusoe? Where Gulliver? Where Oliver and Pip and Alice and Cathy and all her friends from childhood? For Fleur had spent all day every rainy day – and portions even of fine ones – holed up in a loft with a bag of toffees, and I recalled her emerging with shining eyes and demanding paper and pens and solitude while she began her Great Novel.

  ‘With islands and pirates and pickpockets and a raging fire and orphans and a stolen inheritance and a wedding,’ she had announced to us all. ‘And a ghost. Don’t disturb me until it’s done.’

  I cast my eyes over the seven volumes before me on the desk, doubting whether there was a single pirate amongst the lot of them, and went on a treasure hunt for what I was sure must exist somewhere.

  I was right: in the big cupboard built into the corner of the room, where exercise books and bottles of ink were stored (and also, I noticed, a large trunk full of veils and swords and the like to help with the acting out of the plays), there was a bookcase, and upon that bookcase by the mercy of Providence were still ranged the books which had held sway in the English classroom of St Columba’s before the strange Miss Lipscott had swept them away.