Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘They were both locked up tight. The key to the door of the little hallway that leads into the dressing room is kept on the lintel and Eldry let herself in with it.’

  ‘One of these Yale locks?’ he said. I nodded. ‘And the key of the main door was on the inside when you got there?’ I nodded again. ‘Good God,’ he said and glared at me. ‘You see what this means, don’t you?’

  ‘I do, sir,’ I replied.

  ‘I’ve been thinking someone must have got in. Even though there’s nothing missing as far as we could see. There was quite a bit of disturbance last night here and there. I suppose I thought some devil had broken in but . . .’

  ‘But only someone who knew the house well would know about the Yale key,’ I finished for him. ‘And actually, Superintendent, the house as a whole was very secure last night. Mr Faulds, the butler, was locking up when I went to bed. He’s a bit of a stickler for it by all accounts.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Hardy again. ‘This is going to be an all-out scandal. This is going to need seeing to.’ He could not have looked less keen to do the seeing if he had sprinted for the door and pounded on it begging for release, but he squared his shoulders and sat up a little straighter. ‘Right then. I’ll need a list of everyone who was in the house and I’ll need to speak to them all. I’ll need your full name to start with.’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ I said. ‘Well, then. I’m employed under the name of Frances Rossiter. Miss.’ Superintendent Hardy looked up at me with his pencil in mid-air. ‘My married name is Gilver,’ I went on. ‘That is to say, my real name is Dandelion Dahlia Gilver. When I took this job, I changed it. My relations would not otherwise countenance my employment, I don’t suppose.’

  ‘Gilver,’ said the superintendent, looking thoughtful ‘Gilver?’

  ‘It’s a prominent name in Perthshire,’ I said and Hardy nodded. ‘I thought it best to change it under the circumstances.’

  Hardy looked at me for a while without speaking and I did my best to meet his gaze square-on. He was not, I thought, an unintelligent man, only rather flustered by this extraordinary day. Perhaps he had come in sideways from the army straight to his desk and had never gathered statements and tracked suspects before. He certainly had nothing cunning about him, but rather the unstoppable look of someone who spent his youth being pushed to the front of the team in games of rugby football. Yes, that was it! If I had passed him on the street I should have guessed that he was a very prosperous and still rather sporting Borders beef farmer; he was completely out of his element sitting here today.

  ‘The circumstances being that you’re working as a maid,’ he said finally.

  ‘Well, a companion is perhaps a better way to express it, Superintendent,’ I replied. ‘Mrs Balfour is not – was not – happily married and she felt herself in need of a champion, while she considered what to do about it, but she felt also that her husband wouldn’t be pleased to think she had turned to someone for help and so I was smuggled in, I suppose you would say. As her maid. To help.’

  There was another long silence to be got through now. I waited it out, trying to look a good deal more confident than I felt.

  ‘And how long have you been here?’ said Hardy at last.

  ‘Since yesterday,’ I replied. ‘I arrived at teatime.’

  He put down his pencil and folded his hands on top of the notebook. His jaw, which was square enough even at rest, now stuck out in the most marked fashion.

  ‘You arrived yesterday, using a false name,’ he said, and I noticed for the first time how deeply shadowed his eyes were under the strong brow, ‘to help Mrs Balfour with the problem of her husband.’

  I often tell myself that after years of constant detecting my days of naivety are in the past, that no longer do I put on my red cloak and set off for my grandmother’s cottage with a basket of treats, but it was not until that very moment that I saw the forest of trees pressing in all around me and realised that being used as an alibi was not the worst suspicion which could fall upon me.

  ‘Superintendent Hardy,’ I said, all thought of subtlety vanished, ‘do you know an inspector called Cruickshank from Linlithgowshire?’

  ‘I’ve heard the name,’ said Hardy. ‘I can’t say I remember ever meeting the fellow.’

  ‘Or how about Inspector Hutchinson, from the Perthshire Force?’ I asked. Superintendent Hardy’s stern face split into a grin.

  ‘Maynard Hutchinson?’ he said. ‘Everybody knows him. The stories I could tell you about him would make your hair curl.’

  ‘Well, then telephone to him and ask him about—’

  ‘Mrs Gilver!’ exclaimed the superintendent. ‘Dandy Gilver?’

  ‘At your service,’ I said, letting out a huge sigh of relief. ‘Truly, Superintendent: at your service and awaiting instructions.’

  ‘So what was all that about a companion?’

  ‘All true,’ I said. ‘More or less. Mrs Balfour called me in to help her. To be a witness to her husband’s behaviour and a champion of her cause. He was a complete brute, you know. I don’t imagine anyone will be mourning him once the shock has passed over.’

  ‘Sounds to me as if she’s dropped you right in it, madam,’ Hardy said.

  I held up my hand.

  ‘Miss Rossiter, Superintendent, please. Not madam. If I’m to stay here and help I need Fanny Rossiter more than ever, wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘Ah now, I don’t know what I think of that,’ said Hardy. ‘You saw him up there – what had been done to him. You could be in grave danger, and I can’t let a civilian – not to mention a lady – risk herself that way.’

  ‘Oh come now, Superintendent,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you just tell us that you had called in all sorts of extraordinary manpower to handle the strike?’

  ‘Retired officers and territorial soldiers and suchlike,’ said Hardy.

  ‘Well, what’s one more? I’ll even sign a contract if it would help.’

  So it was that Superintendent Hardy allowed the ranks of his constabulary to be swelled by one more volunteer and I became a special constable of the Edinburgh City Police. For all I know, I might still be one; I do not recall any formal release from my duties anyway.

  ‘Here, you haven’t got the dog with you, have you?’ asked Hardy. ‘Don’t tell me you brought the dog.’

  ‘I haven’t, in fact,’ I said. I could only imagine what the caustic Mr Hutchinson had said about my beloved Bunty at whatever policemen’s shindig he had enlivened with tales of our adventures.

  ‘Just as well,’ said Hardy, and returned to business, with another great roll of the powerful shoulders and another answering creak from the delicate chair in which he was sitting. ‘So. Miss Rossiter. Do you have your own room or can you account for any of the other maids?’ ‘Other’ was said with a bit of a twinkle, but I knew that my answer would soon snuff that out. If, that was, I could bring myself to deliver it.

  ‘I owe Mrs Balfour whatever loyalty I can give her,’ I said.

  ‘But?’ said Mr Hardy.

  ‘But,’ I went on, ‘as I’ve had occasion to point out to earlier clients in past cases, I am not a “hired gun”.’ Hardy’s eyebrows shot up. ‘My children,’ I said. ‘Dreadful taste in story papers. What I am, come what may and no matter who is paying me, is a servant of truth.’

  ‘So . . . ?’ asked Mr Hardy.

  So . . . I told him, feeling like the worst kind of sneak, especially as he clearly thought that Lollie installing me in her very bedroom was getting on for elaborate and roused suspicion rather than quashing it.

  ‘But I don’t think she could have got out and back without me noticing,’ I said. ‘Although . . .’ A further and even more damning possibility had just occurred to me.

  ‘Although what?’ said Hardy.

  ‘She shoved a nightcap down me with some insistence. If I were to lay my hands on the glass, could it be tested to see if she’d put some kind of sleeping powder in it? I mean, I’m sure she didn’t b
ut it would be good to be able to discount it completely.’

  Hardy gave me a sharp nod of approval and agreement, then rubbed his jaw again.

  ‘What about washing?’ he asked. ‘Even if she had you doped up – and let’s hope not, eh? – could she have run the hot water without waking the house? I know I couldn’t in my bathroom but this place seems pretty plush and maybe the plumbing is silent.’

  ‘Why do you assume . . . ?’ I said and then stopped.

  ‘There would have been a fair amount of blood,’ said Hardy, confirming what I thought. ‘She – or whoever – would have had to wash at least the hands and arms.’

  ‘In that case, I think not,’ I said. ‘Certainly, I don’t think she could have used her own bathroom. And I don’t really think she slipped me a powder and I don’t even think she killed her husband. But . . .’

  ‘But if it’s not her then who is it? I only wish you had been here longer, Miss Rossiter, and could tell me a little about the household.’

  ‘I can tell you a surprising lot,’ I said, and this time I felt no compunction. ‘I only met Mr Balfour briefly and he seemed perfectly pleasant then but – as I say – he was not well loved, Superintendent. Not by the maids anyway.’ Mr Hardy gave me a look which seemed to enquire whether it were the age-old problem. I threw a look back confirming that indeed it was. He sighed. ‘And rather an extreme case,’ I said. ‘There have been two recent departures: a Miss Abbott, my predecessor, and a kitchenmaid, Maggie, who flounced off on Saturday night. Phyllis, the housemaid, is on notice as we speak.’

  ‘On notice, eh?’ said Mr Hardy. ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘But could a woman have done it?’ I asked.

  Hardy shrugged.

  ‘The doctor will be able to tell us more about that,’ he said. ‘Have you heard anything from any of those strapping lads downstairs to make you think one of them might have wanted to kill him?’

  I thought back to the evening before, John teasing Harry about the use of the razor. Surely he was only teasing? Still, I had wondered how someone of Harry’s views could bear to be a servant, and a valet at that – the most intimate of servant–master relationships, surely. And then what had been wrong with Mattie this morning? And why was Mr Faulds so very desperate to get into the murder room and so very angry at my preventing him?

  ‘There’s a lot of chattering,’ I said. ‘Probably nothing more than chattering, but still – I think it would be worth your while interviewing all of the staff very closely.’

  ‘I’ll speak to Mrs Balfour first,’ said Hardy. ‘Then start on the fainting tweenie. If you would just go and tell them? Also, say to that Mrs Whatsername – the cook – to go and join the others, would you? And don’t forget the glass.’

  It was gone from where I had left it on the small table by the chaise, but before I chased after it to the kitchens I pulled back the covers on Lollie’s bed and scrutinised the sheets, top and bottom, for it had occurred to me that I had seen no more of her than her head before she had hurried off to her bath earlier that morning and, if Superintendent Hardy were right about the blood, there might be traces of it here somewhere. But the linen was white and fresh, hardly even creased, and smelling faintly of lavender and of Lollie’s Heure Bleue. The same scents were mingled in her drawers and in the trays of her wardrobe, where nightdresses and underclothes lay in orderly, crisp-edged piles. There was no way she could have stuffed any bloodstained articles in there, even if she could have opened the drawers and doors without wakening me. I went into the bathroom, where there were more neat arrangements, of towels this time, and no sign of anything rolled up or stuffed away where it should not be except my own nightgown. I held her hand towel up to the light from the bedroom doorway and could see not the slightest mark upon it. I turned on the sprinklers of the shower-bath and, as I had suspected, it sounded like rain on a tin roof, impossible for anyone – sleeping powder or none – to sleep through. Even the taps of the hand basin gurgled and spat loud enough to wake anyone in the next room.

  There was a photograph of Pip Balfour in a frame on the little enamelled cupboard where the towels were stored. He was standing on the deck of a yacht, his shirtsleeves rolled high and his collar open, laughing and squinting into the sun.

  ‘I don’t think she did it,’ I said to him. ‘Even if you deserved her to.’ I stood staring at the picture until all the water had drained away and the bathroom was silent again. Then I shook myself back into motion, turned from him and sped down the flights of stairs to the kitchens, hoping I was not too late already.

  ‘And as to what we’re supposed to do for our dinners, Fanny, your guess is as good as mine,’ said Mrs Hepburn, striking in medias res as I entered the main kitchen. ‘If I just sit in the hall all the morning, that is, which I can’t, no more than I can work with the rest of them under my feet in here.’ She glared at a police constable – Morrison, one presumed – who was trying to melt into the wall behind him and failing.

  ‘The super tellt me I was to keep you all together, Mrs Hepburn,’ he said. ‘Just until he’s had a chance to talk to you all. He’ll kill me if he finds out you’re in here and they’re in there.’ He jerked a thumb at the wall which separated the kitchen from the servants’ hall.

  ‘Can’t Sergeant Mackenzie stay with the others?’ I asked.

  ‘Millie, how many times?’ broke in Mrs Hepburn. ‘You flour for dough and grease for pastry. Now wipe that off and try again.’ Millie, dusted with flour all down her apron, in her hair, on both cheeks and one spectacle lens, dropped her ball of pastry back into its bowl, bobbed and scurried out to fetch a cloth. Mrs Hepburn blew upwards into her hair, took hold of the frilled collar of her dress and shook it, letting a draught in about her neck.

  ‘You’ve got me snapping at my own niece now!’ she said to PC Morrison, who ignored her.

  ‘The sarge is away back to the station,’ he said to me. ‘He couldnae get a line to ring them.’

  ‘Are the telephonists on strike?’ I said. ‘I didn’t think so.’

  ‘No,’ said Morrison, ‘but they’re overloaded with everybody ringing everybody else to say how they cannae get to wherever they’re supposed to be with no buses on and the exchange said to the sarge that half of them are telling her they’re the police or a doctor to make her break in and he could go and whistle.’

  ‘I’m sure it will be all right to leave the others in the hall with Mr Faulds to watch them, Constable,’ I said. ‘I think Mr Hardy probably just meant that we shouldn’t be allowed to swarm all over the house.’

  ‘There! See?’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘Miss Rossiter thinks the same as me. So let’s all go through and have a cup of tea and a wee bite and take that blooming helmet off before you melt.’ She picked up an enormous teapot and nodded to PC Morrison to carry a cooling tray of buns, then left at her usual pace.

  ‘Her bark and her bite are both hopeless,’ I told the constable, who nodded, smiling but still looking a little scared. I guessed that Hardy’s bark was deafening and his bite fatal.

  In the scullery, Millie had been distracted and was guddling potatoes in a deep basin of water. The disordered morning was clear to see in the piles of unwashed breakfast dishes ranged about on the wooden draining boards, one plate even still half-covered with rashers of congealing bacon. And there too was what I had been hoping to find: the pair of brandy glasses from Lollie’s imposed nightcap the evening before. I could not tell which was mine and so I took them both, holding them down at my sides to hide them. She had been very insistent upon my drinking up and if she had put some kind of powder in my glass to make me sleep through disruptions, there was bound to be a trace of it left in the dregs at the bottom. I slipped out again without Millie hearing me and flitted down to my own room.

  When I opened the door, it was to the sound of water and I stood still for a moment and listened. This could not be Millie and her potatoes away in the offshoot at the other side of the house. Very quietly, I turned the handle o
f the laundry-room door and looked in. Eldry was there, her arms deep in a sinkful of soap suds. For a moment I watched her in silence, but she must have sensed my presence because suddenly she wheeled around. I started backwards, banging my heel against the door jamb and cracking one of the brandy glasses as my hand clenched around it. Eldry was backing away too, pressing herself up against the sink, wiping her hands on her apron and staring at me like a dog which expects to be kicked.

  ‘Please don’t be angry, Miss Rossiter,’ she said. ‘I would have gone out to the wash-house at the back of the coalhole there, but that first policeman said we were no’ to leave the house.’

  ‘And what about the second policeman?’ I said. ‘He was supposed to be keeping you all together.’

  ‘I slipped out,’ said Eldry, ‘when they were talking in the passageway. He’s no’ really counted us all up yet, I don’t think.’

  ‘I see. And what are you doing, exactly?’

  She glanced back at the soapy water and bit down on her bottom lip, making her teeth more prominent than ever.

  ‘Try – trying to get the blood out,’ she said.

  I felt the hairs move on the back of my neck and I spoke gently.

  ‘What’s got blood on it, Eldry?’

  ‘My clothes,’ she said. ‘My dress and when I took my dress off it got on everything.’

  ‘And how did you get blood on your dress?’ I was clutching the cracked glass even tighter now, wondering if I could bring myself to use it if she were to fly at me.

  ‘From him,’ she said. ‘Upstairs. Master.’

  6

  I stared at Eldry through the shifting steam in the washroom. Her voice was so faint now that I could hardly hear her at all through the muffled air. ‘It must have come off on me when I went to his bedside,’ she said. ‘Or where else could it come fae?’

  I let my breath go. I put the brandy glasses down on the small ironing table behind the door, being careful not to shatter the cracked one, and turned back to her.