Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘And what would you suggest as a method?’ Alec said. ‘Moral high ground? Flirting? Like Joe?’ He gave me a sly look, still teasing.

  ‘God, no,’ I said. ‘Fenella Forrester is a formidable woman of the old school – absolutely no nonsense about her. If I had to get her talking I’d go along the . . . good plain commonsensical route.’ Alec looked puzzled. ‘You know: it’s all a bit of a mess and too silly for words so we’d better tidy it up before someone trips and turns an ankle.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can pull that off,’ Alec said. ‘Not sure any man could.’

  ‘I shall treat that as a compliment to my sex,’ I said. ‘No doubt wrongly. Also, if you do get hold of Aurora – and she’s a much better bet than Pearl, which is probably why it’s been Pearl who was delegated to speak to us; Aurora’s far from bright and therefore easier to winkle things out of – you should use a modified version of the same thing. All too silly and let’s get it straightened out for poor Fleur.’

  ‘And there’s no way on earth I can pull off that one,’ Alec said. ‘Really, Dandy, I was feeling tiptop and all go until you started helping. Now I doubt whether it’s worth the train fare.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going,’ I said, standing up and pummelling myself where I had been resting against the numbing stone of the parapet. ‘I’ve got the third form for Tam o’Shanter any min—’ I was interrupted by the clang of the lesson bell and immediately upon it came the now familiar sound of girls’ feet tramping and girls’ voices clamouring. ‘And someone in this place must know something about why the mistresses are scattering to the four winds and be willing to tell me.’

  ‘Not to worry,’ said Alec. ‘I’m sure Miss Blair will have no hesitation in telling me.’ With that he and I both sprang from our marks and set out to learn more and faster than the other, thinking only of winning and crowing and not at all of poor Fleur or No. 5 or any of the vanishing mistresses or putative murders. One wonders at times whether this constant – or at any rate, frequent – immersion in crime and brutality is good for one. I was thankful that my two boys were going to be ‘farmers’ like their father and that neither of them would follow in my footsteps, for even amongst the constabulary of Portpatrick I could trace the path downwards from the open heart and clear head of a Constable Reid to the hard-bitten mien and flinty soul of a Sergeant Turner. Perhaps, I mused to myself as I followed the corridor to Fleur’s classroom, here was the explanation for the nature of the sergeant which had always puzzled me: quite simply, it was the low point on the journey through the heart of darkness, inspectors having survived it and emerged on the other side and the lowly ranks having not yet reached its black depths.

  I swung into the English classroom and saw twelve little girls staring down a heart of darkness all of their own. Twelve copies of Chaucer were open on their desks and twelve pairs of eyes looked lifelessly up from them as I entered.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘Now—’ but I had forgotten to leave time for the answering chorus, slow as a dirge.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Gilver.’

  ‘Yes, quite, thank you. Now, girls, close your books, please, and pass them along to the ends. We’re having a change.’ I swept into the book cupboard with the not inconsiderable pile of Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and emerged again with the much more modest pile of Complete Works of Robert Burns. I suppose had he lived to see forty he might have run to a thicker volume, but I could not help but attribute my lighter load at that moment to his bonny nature rather than his sickly lungs.

  ‘Open up to page one hundred and forty-three, please, girls,’ I said. ‘And . . . you there. Start reading.’

  ‘Marion, Miss Gilver,’ said the child I had picked upon. She fluttered the pages and stood up, clearing her throat.

  ‘Tam o’Shanter,’ she announced. ‘When chapman . . .’ She put her finger on the page and looked up. ‘What does chapman mean, Miss Gilver?’

  ‘An excellent question, Marion,’ I replied. ‘Does anyone know?’ There were blank looks all around. ‘And what do we do if there’s a word we don’t know?’ I continued, riffling hastily to the back of the book to check. ‘We look it up in the Glossary, don’t we? Look it up in the Glossary, Marion.’ Not only did she but so did the rest of them, keen little scholars all, and the turning pages caused a breeze for a moment until they all found what they were looking for and their arms started to wave like ears of wheat. I nodded towards the nearest waving arm.

  ‘Pedlar, Miss Gilver,’ called out the child, as she shot to her feet and sank back down again. I could see that this off-the-cuff translation of Burns’ Scots was going to be a good dose of healthy exercise for their arms and legs as well as their tongues and brains.

  ‘Good girl,’ I said.

  ‘When chapman billies fill the street,’ Marion resumed. ‘And drouthy . . .’

  The pages were fluttering again.

  ‘Thirsty, Miss Gilver.’

  ‘Splendid.’

  ‘. . . neighbours neighbours meet.’

  If this were all there was to it, I thought to myself, sitting back and almost enjoying the halting recital and the punctuating translations, then I was a marvellous teacher.

  I thought too that I agreed with Giuseppe Aldo about his daughter’s talents and not at all with Miss Shanks’s dismissal of them, for when it came time for Sabbatina to stand and recite, she did so in a clear and pleasing voice and showed in her phrasing that she understood exactly what the words conveyed (unlike some of the girls who rumty-tummed their way through the lines regardless of their meaning). I was a little unsettled by hearing her describe Tam and the married landlady of the inn sharing their ‘secret, sweet and precious favours’, unable not to think of her mother and the nameless suitor who had charmed her away from her husband and home, dreading to hear one of the other girls whisper or giggle behind her hand. But either none of Sabbatina’s classmates knew of the scandal, or they were too innocent to draw the grubby connection which sprang to my mind. Or, I allowed myself to think, they were too enthralled by the exciting material so skilfully chosen by their new favourite mistress.

  By morning coffee time, however, when the girls went outside to run around for ten minutes, I was back on solid ground with my heels still ringing from how hard I had hit it. For the fifth form were lolling in a haystack with Piers Plowman as he dreamed one of his unfathomable dreams and while, to the casual glance, it was less terrifying than Tam’s escapade with the ghosties and ghoulies it struck terror into me, for I knew not how to pronounce it, parse it, gloss it, or imagine what examination questions might have been set upon it or how in heaven I was ever to mark the answers to them.

  ‘Um,’ I had said in desperation, ‘translate the next thirty lines, girls.’

  ‘Thirty, Miss Gilver?’ they had groaned as one.

  I glanced at the gobbledygook stretching down the page.

  ‘All right, twenty,’ I said. ‘And keep very quiet, on your honour, please. I’ve just got to slip out and see Miss Shanks about something.’

  Thankfully she was not out on the cliff in her underclothes leading a class in callisthenics, or marking worn linen in a cupboard somewhere – I had not forgotten that she was a matron at heart (indeed, perhaps it explained why she was such a very peculiar headmistress, in a way) – but was sitting quietly in her study with fat ledgers open before her.

  ‘Fielding always used to take care of the accounts,’ she said, slamming a ledger shut with a sharp smack and a puff of dust. ‘It’s Greek to me.’

  ‘School Certificate papers, Miss Shanks,’ I said. ‘I shall need to have a look at them if I’m to know what the girls should be swotting up – I mean, studying. And if I’m to be quite sure that I’m all set to mark them too.’ I tried to make this second consideration sound very airy.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ said Miss Shanks. She stood and went over to a picture on her wall – an unfeasibly highly coloured print of cattle standing knee deep in a loch with glowering mounta
ins behind them – unhooked it and set about opening the safe it was hiding with the largest of the bristling bunch of keys she wore at her belt.

  ‘Now then, now then,’ she said, stirring the papers inside the safe’s modest chamber with perfect unconcern for their disarrangement. ‘School Cert English . . .’ She plucked a pale green sheet from amongst the mess she had made. ‘And you might as well take the Higher Cert paper too, while you’re at it.’ A pale pink sheet joined the other. ‘Bob’s your uncle and Fanny’s your aunt.’ She lifted a knee to stop a small pile of letters from cascading out of the safe door onto the floor and managed to pin two or three to the wall. I shot forward and retrieved the rest. I shuffled them back into a bundle and exchanged them for the exam papers. Miss Shanks grinned at me, threw the letters back inside and closed the safe door with a clang.

  ‘And when do you need the papers for the other forms?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, there’s a whiley yet,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘Exams start in late June – along with the hay fever, you know. If we leave the doors open to the rose gardens half the wee souls have sneezing fits and if we shut them there’s always one or two take to fainting. The examination hall was a ballroom, you know; faces due south, and was never meant to be used during the day.’

  ‘Well, I’d better get back to my girls,’ I said. ‘Thank you for the papers. I assure you I’ll keep them very safe and return them very soon.’

  ‘Och, hang on to them if it’ll help,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘I’m sure I can trust you with a wee question paper or two, Miss Gilver.’ She gave me quite the most twinkling, glittering look I had yet seen from amongst her collection. ‘Oh, and while we’re on the fifth form – I want you to keep an eye on Clothilde Simmons. She seems a very bright girl. Might be worth some extra tutoring.’

  ‘Has she just joined the school?’ I said, puzzled as to how a girl could have reached the fifth form and only now be tapped as a scholar.

  ‘No, she’s been with us since she was an eleven-year-old with scraped knees and a lollipop,’ Miss Shanks said. ‘She’s been hiding her light under a bushel, that’s all. Naughty child!’

  When I took in the jotters at the end of the hour I paid particular note to that of Clothilde Simmons, but could not see in the laboured and much rubbed-out and rewritten translation – all fifteen lines of it, since Clothilde was one of the handful who did not make it through to the end – any particular glow of brilliance. And leafing back through the pages that Fleur had marked I saw a great deal of red pencil and a progression of solid Bs and Cs. Perhaps she was a whizz at chemistry or something quite removed from English literature, hence Miss Shanks’s prod about the coaching to round her out and tempt a university to give her a place there.

  Piers Plowman, happily, was the low tide of that long first day. After lunch the lower sixth took to Macbeth with an almost unseemly relish, begging and pleading to be the witches, auditioning from their seats with much cackling and hunching of their lithe young forms into the twisted shapes of crones over a cauldron. Needless to say, Rob Roy was greeted by the second form like the Young Pretender arriving from across the sea: one girl threw Silas Marner into the air and shouted hurrah at the news that she need not read another word of it, and only the fact that she caught the book again, firmly, by its cloth covers and did not so much as crease a page saved me from delivering a lecture about the sanctity of the printed word in general and school property in particular.

  Still, by the time three o’clock came – for such was the surprisingly early hour at which the St Columba’s girls broke off from their short day of study and flooded back out into the grounds to take up their extra-curricular lolling – my head was awash with new names and old stories and my ears rang with piping voices clamouring ‘Miss Gilver, Miss Gilver’ so that the only thing for it was to take myself off all alone into the sea air and try to walk myself back to my own quiet thoughts and some semblance of tranquillity.

  Besides, I had still not seen the cliff top along which Rosa Aldo, her fancy man, Cissie and Willie all had strolled on that fateful evening and from which Constable Reid was so sure No. 5 had tumbled, the cliff top which also led to Low Merrick Farm and the inhospitable farmer’s wife who lived there. I was not sure I could summon the courage to follow Alec up its drive – for I, unlike him, could not vault a gate at a pinch – nor was I so conceited as to think I might find a clue at the castle that others had missed, but I could not help looking carefully at my feet and around the gorse and grass as I went along, with the ruin in view and the sound of the wheeling gulls replacing the girls’ voices with their even more insistent cries.

  Of course, there was nothing to be found: cigarette ends and flattened places in what Cissie had called ‘the dips’, corroborating her tale of courting couples holing up there; a few scuffed patches at the edge of the path which might have been places where someone lost her footing and fell, but might have been a hundred other things besides, and all more likely. There were no broken gorse branches where a murderer might have crouched, uncomfortably but discreetly, until a victim appeared; and there was nothing of any interest stashed anywhere either, just endless discarded sweet wrappers and matches, orange peels and apple cores as well as the grubby flags of wool which accumulate wherever sheep and gorse share a breezy headland and the equal weight (it always seems to me) of string and twine and sacking which farmers shed like snake skins in the course of their day.

  At Dunskey Castle, I sheltered from the wind long enough to add my budget of match and cigarette end to the trove and then contemplated the journey back again. As is so often the case (but not often enough to inure one to the shock of it), turning around and facing the other way put the sun painfully in my eyes instead of comfortingly at my back. It set the wind against me too, making my nose run and my eyes water; gusting behind me, it had seemed a pleasant helping hand, urging me along. I sniffed, pulled my hat down harder over my forehead and looked about myself. There was Low Merrick Farm, a few fields over, just beyond a little railway bridge, and I knew that where there is a railway bridge (not to mention a farm) there must be a road. I had no desire, anyway, to scramble back over the tracks as I had had to do on my outward journey; although the trains, as Alec attested, were slow and few, the average passenger’s wishes regarding speed and frequency are not those of a trespasser upon the lines and Hugh would never forgive me for being killed in such an unnecessary and bothersome (to the railway company) fashion. His sympathies whenever he heard of a body – be it human or bovine – falling onto a line were always firmly with the upset driver and delayed travellers, and there was nothing to spare for the flattened departed.

  On the other hand, I had no particular desire to encounter the pack of ravening collies, but the prospect which did entice me was that of announcing to Alec that I had done so. I suppose, too, that a small part of me did not quite believe the tale of the mysterious arm and hand and the advance of the beasts. It sounded quite unlike sheepdogs, farmers’ wives and in particular anyone who offered home cooking to paying guests.

  I was decided, and set off across the sheep-cropped turf to the first of the gates with a swing in my step which belied the way my heart was thudding.

  The first of the gates had latches and hinges, despite its share of barbed wire, and the second had hinges and not too nasty a knot holding it closed, so I made it to the last one without having to climb or wriggle. This, however, was a beast of a thing, tied in three places with baling twine and leaning into the field at an alarming angle. I studied it. And while I stood there, I saw something move from the corner of my eye. A dark figure was flitting up the farmhouse garden, racing towards the house. It disappeared around the corner leading to the yard and I heard a door bang. Sure that I was safe from the dogs, for no farmer’s wife alive would let them into her garden, I squeezed through the gap between the gatepost and the wall and crept closer. She had been hanging out washing; a basket of linen sat in the middle of the patch of grass and a pair of underdrawers hun
g by one leg where she had abandoned them. Rather a splendid garment for a sheep farmer’s wife, I thought, studying the satin waist-tape and the lace trim. And next to them on the line . . . I blinked.

  ‘Never,’ I said out loud. ‘Preposterous.’

  For next along the clothes line to the splendid underdrawers was a bandeau brassiere in the same white linen with straps of the same satin tape and no Scottish farmer’s wife from Gretna Green to John o’ Groats could possibly possess such a thing. Not only was it a bandeau instead of a chemise, but a bandeau of a texture and outline that was positively . . .

  ‘Parisian,’ I said, and I was over the wall and round the corner before any thought of a collie with ice-pick teeth could stop me.

  ‘Mademoiselle Beauclerc?’ I called out, banging on the door she must have gone through. ‘Est-ce que vous êtes Mademoiselle Jeanne Beauclerc, la maîtresse?’ There was only silence. ‘Miss Beauclerc?’ I called out again in an even louder voice, and this time I tried the handle. I heard the creak of a floorboard first and then saw a shadow behind the muslin of an open upstairs window.

  ‘Who is this, please?’ said a timid voice.

  ‘A friend,’ I said. ‘An old friend of Fleur Lipscott and a friend of yours, too, if I can be of any assistance.’

  The shadow moved again and at last she came into plain view, a pale young woman dressed in black.

  ‘You came over the fields?’ she said.

  ‘From the headlands, yes,’ I answered. ‘Miss Beauclerc, is it you?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘And you say Fleur sent you?’

  ‘Perhaps you could come down,’ I said. ‘Or could I come in? I feel a bit like Romeo calling up to your window like this. It never seemed to me to be conducive to a proper discussion.’

  She moved away from the window and from deep inside the house – Scotch farmhouses are extremely solid – I could hear the faint sounds of movement, receding along an upstairs passage, advancing down a staircase and then approaching a door near where I was standing. Bolts were drawn, keys turned and at last it opened.