Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘You mean this morning?’ I said. ‘When you took the tray in?’ Eldry nodded. ‘I didn’t notice it,’ I said, trying to get a clear picture of her as she had been during those few short and furious moments of confusion. She had had her back turned to me as she banged on the door and she had sunk down with her knees up; I could not remember having seen her front at any time. ‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘How could you have got blood on yourself just from walking up to the bedside and away again?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered, ‘but how else did it get there?’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ I said. Then her eyes opened very wide and she put her hands up to her cheeks.

  ‘You don’t think I hurt him?’ she said. Her hands were very red against her white face and her fingers looked like claws as she pressed them into her flesh. ‘I could never, miss. All that blood. I could never.’ She was swaying slightly and I stepped quickly over towards her and took hold of her hands. They were pulsing with heat, and all of a sudden I was aware of just how steamy and soft the air was here in this little room, and how the distemper on the walls was running with beads of moisture and blistering. I put one finger into the sink of water and yelped.

  ‘Eldry, your hands,’ I said. ‘Come and sit down. Your poor hands!’ I pushed her down into my little armchair and then went back to the laundry room. I pulled on the chain and felt the plug give way at the bottom of the sink. As the water drained, with a horrid sucking sound, a greyish mass rose out of the sinking tide of suds. I turned the cold tap on and once the bundle had cooled a little I began hauling at it, sorting it into pieces. Every stitch she had had on must have been in there. Knickers and vest, bodice and petticoats, stockings, her dress and her apron – white and black, wool and linen all mixed in together. I let the cold tap run and run and when it was icy I filled a deep bowl and carried it very carefully back to the armchair.

  ‘Put them in here,’ I said to her. ‘Silly girl!’ I had decided that brisk but affectionate exasperation was the strong suit here. ‘Apart from anything else, Miss Etheldreda, hot water sets a bloodstain so nothing will ever shift it. A cold water and salt soak is what you need.’ I blessed Grant for my crammer course in laundry work on Sunday, during which I had learned this snippet; not only was it a thrillingly convincing line for Miss Rossiter to deliver but it was also true. If there had ever been blood on those ruined clothes of Eldry’s I should be able to find it. I decided against trying to feed them through the mangle but simply squeezed the worst out of them and hauled them up over the drying rack, and shut the door behind me. Nothing is more depressing than the sound of dripping.

  ‘I don’t want them to think I killed him,’ she said to me when I joined her again. ‘The police. My mammy would never forgive me if it all came out and everybody knew.’

  ‘If it all came out about what kind of man he was?’ I said, guessing. Eldry nodded. ‘Did he make a nuisance of himself with you?’ I said. She nodded again, just a dip of her chin against her chest. She did not raise her head again afterwards.

  ‘I was a good girl,’ she said.

  ‘And a kind girl,’ I agreed. ‘Taking the tray this morning when Clara wasn’t well.’

  ‘We all help each other out,’ she said. ‘We always do. And Mrs Hepburn is like an auntie to us all – not just Millie – and Mr Faulds is a kind man. He’s so fond of Phyllis and he’s been good to me too, miss.’ She was looking a little brighter now; perhaps it was beginning to dawn upon her, with Mr Balfour gone, what a pleasant establishment his widow’s household might be.

  ‘Now, Eldry,’ I said. ‘No more nonsense. You must be brave and sensible because you are going to be interviewed by the police, dear. They will want to know everything about this morning and about last night too. So why don’t we run through it together now and I’ll help you decide what to say.’

  Eldry was adamant that she could not have crept out in the night without Millie hearing her and when I accompanied her to their shared bedroom I agreed. We were at the front of the house and here the sub-basement seemed very different. The only window was high and rather green and one had to stand right up against it and crane one’s neck to see the area steps and the street railings above them. Even in the mid-morning Eldry had to put a light on.

  ‘That’s Millie’s bed,’ she said, pointing towards a rather dishevelled little bedstead with a knitted bear propped up against its pillow. Her own was neater, although by no means the picture of precision mine had been the previous day. Clearly whoever had readied Miss Rossiter’s room for her, it was neither of these two. Between the beds was a box with a candlestick, a small prayer book and a couple of photographs, pasted onto board and propped up using opened hairpins. There was a washstand, a large oak chest standing on its end serving as a wardrobe and a small chest at the end of each bed. The floor was stone, but was covered here and there with rag mats. Under the window in the dankest corner of the room a third bed, stripped bare to its mattress, stood neglected.

  ‘That was Millie’s until Maggie took off,’ Eldry told me, ‘then we had a shift around. I hope she does get the kitchenmaid’s position and doesn’t need to move back again.’ I sat down on Eldry’s bed and bounced up and down a few times, hearing the grating squeak of slightly rusty bedsprings so familiar from the convalescent home in the war. Back then, the damp which caused the rust had come from windows thrown wide summer and winter to the insidious drizzle and driving rain. Here, the window was shut tight and there was a tiny fireplace with evidence of coal having been burned in its grate, but nothing would ever warm and dry such a subterranean room. When Eldry sat down on Millie’s bed, there was another screeching of springs and our knees were practically touching. The girls could have held hands at night without even straightening their arms.

  ‘And I suppose you lock your door?’ I asked her.

  ‘In this house,’ she said, ‘wouldn’t you?’

  I went over to the door and turned the key, with a scrape and a clunk. Clearly, if either of the two lower maids had left in the night, the other one had to be in cahoots and covering for her. I believed Eldry, I thought, although I would still check her clothes very carefully when they were dry, and I could not imagine Millie – that dewy, blinking little baby doll – driving a knife into Pip Balfour’s neck, but I was looking forward to asking her what she made of her master, if indeed she had ever met him to form a view.

  ‘We’d better join the others,’ I said, unlocking the door. ‘If PC Morrison says anything to you just send him to me.’

  Phyllis was skipping down the stairs from the ground floor when we climbed up again.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she said, stopping when she saw Eldry. ‘That big policeman – what’s he? An inspector? – was looking for you, but he took me instead. So I’ve told him what I know which was nothing and now I’m free as a bird.’ She grinned at us and jumped the last few steps down onto the flags then strolled off towards the kitchen. ‘He wants Mrs Hepburn next,’ she said over her shoulder.

  ‘Well, thank all that’s holy for that then,’ said Mrs Hepburn, hearing her. ‘And after I’ve said my piece I can get on without thon big lummock breathing down my neck.’ She appeared in the kitchen doorway unrolling her sleeves. ‘No disrespect meant to you, Jimmy,’ she called back, ‘I know you’re only doing your job, lad. Now come on, Molly-moo. Come with me.’

  ‘Eh, Mrs Hepburn,’ said PC Morrison, hurrying out after her. ‘It’s one at a time. It’s just you the now and Miss eh . . . Miss eh . . . Molly-moo after.’ He was coatless now and had the glossy look about the mouth of someone who had just eaten a liberally buttered bun.

  ‘Away and get,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘My niece Amelia is only sixteen and she needs her auntie.’

  ‘You can mebbes chum along when Superintendent Hardy calls for her,’ said PC Morrison, ‘but he only asked—’

  ‘Aye well, he’s asked and no one can do more,’ said Mrs Hepburn. Millie had joined her and was being firmly brushed
, tweaked and smoothed into presentable shape, submitting with great docility. ‘But I’ve no time to be running up and down stairs. I’ve a fish custard to make for mistress’s luncheon – nothing gentler nor more strengthening after a shock – and the rest of them to feed and you two more than likely. We don’t all have a canteen we can turn to, you know. Come on, Moll.’

  She bore Millie away upstairs leaving PC Morrison mouthing ineffectually after them. Phyllis giggled and stuck out her tongue at him.

  ‘Just as well you’re here and not at the pickets if you can’t stop Mrs Hepburn getting her own way,’ she said. ‘That big man Hardy said I could get on with my duties now I’ve made my statement, and it’s my half-day free today – the first Tuesday of the month – so does that mean I can go out and meet my pal after dinner?’

  ‘I’m not . . . I mean, no,’ said Morrison. He had blushed when Mrs Hepburn was setting him down and was blushing again now as Phyllis twinkled up at him, his voice climbing up the octaves as he struggled to stamp his authority on the scene.

  Phyllis put her hands on her hips and swayed gently from side to side, like a gypsy dancer. All she lacked were the streamers and tambourine.

  ‘We’ll see what Mr Faulds thinks,’ she said and left us.

  ‘I’d better go back up to Mrs Balfour,’ I said, ‘and leave you to . . .’

  ‘Herd cats,’ said PC Morrison, with feeling. ‘It’s like no house of mourning I’ve ever been in before, miss, I can tell you. More like a gala day.’

  One could appreciate his sentiments, what with the buns and with Phyllis skipping around like a spring lamb, but there was Eldry as counterbalance. I looked about myself for her, but she had slipped away again.

  The front door bell clanked as I was passing through the ground floor and I stopped, hoping to hear who it might be arriving. It clanked again but there was no noise from the downstairs region at all. Was no one coming? Surely PC Morrison had to let one of the servants out of his custody to answer the door. I wondered where Phyllis was. Then, with a start, I remembered Miss Rossiter and hurried forwards. I had never in my life opened a front door, my own or another’s, to a visitor and for a second I felt a cold trickle at the thought that it might be a friend of the Balfours, an acquaintance or neighbour, who knew me.

  It was not. It was, in fact, a thin and flustered-looking man in his seventies with a well-polished Gladstone bag in one hand and a slim pocket watch open in his other, the police surgeon, I presumed. Behind him, a young man in a lavishly crumpled suit and wearing a soft hat on the back of his head was leaning against the railings puffing steadily on a cigarette. At his feet sat a large black case of mackintoshed cardboard, bulging out of shape around its contents and held closed by a stout brown leather belt. I could not imagine who he might be.

  ‘About time too,’ said the doctor. ‘Do you know I had to walk here? All the way from Morningside? And I rang twice.’ He had that peculiarly strained sort of Glaswegian voice which makes every utterance sound plaintive. I bobbed at him, which seemed to mollify.

  ‘Please come in, doctor,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you the way. And um . . .’

  The other man hefted his case into his arms, holding it like a football, and trailed.

  ‘Prints,’ he said, with a grin and an eye-roll towards the doctor. I grinned back.

  ‘I should have an assistant too,’ the doctor went on. ‘This is all most irregular. Run and get one of the constables, girl, and he can step in to help me.’

  ‘I can’t, I’m afraid, sir,’ I said. ‘There’s only one and he’s been put to watch over the witnesses until the super’s seen them.’

  ‘This is most unsatisfactory,’ said the doctor, as I led him upstairs. ‘So much for the famous “volunteers”.’

  ‘Well, there’s usually three of me and I’m not whining,’ said the other man. The doctor ignored him and spoke to me.

  ‘Where exactly are we going?’

  ‘I ken,’ said the fingerprint man with a wink. ‘You might at least have seen to it that he got stabbed in the front lobby and saved us all these stairs. Is this what they would call “the servant problem”?’

  I was sorry to see the back of this character, if not of the doctor, when I delivered them to Mr Hardy on the bedroom-floor landing, but Lollie took all my attention when I joined her. Her shock had deepened and was now something I had thought never to see again after the war. She was numb to the point of bonelessness, sitting huddled in bed like a puppet with its strings cut, nursing the photograph of Pip which had been in her bathroom, and so although I longed to be downstairs with the others, I found myself at the little bookcase between the windows looking for something to read aloud as I had done when one of my children had a tooth- or tummy-ache which required distraction. There was a well-thumbed set of Mrs Molesworth and I selected The Carved Lions, my favourite of the lot, opening it at chapter one. Before long Lollie uncurled a little, stretching her legs down under the covers and leaning back more easily on the banked-up pillows behind her. After another half-chapter her eyes were drooping and eventually she began to breathe deeply and let the photograph frame fall softly forward against her chest. I read on, quieter and quieter, slower and slower, and then stopped.

  As I pulled the door shut behind me and let my breath go at last, the doctor was just emerging from Pip’s bedroom, with a roll of oilcloth in his hand and a sour expression on his face.

  ‘Here, girl!’ he said, and his face pursed up even further as I put a finger to my lips and shushed him.

  ‘Beg pardon, doctor,’ I said, ‘but I’ve only just got Mrs Balfour off to sleep.’

  ‘That’s of no interest to me,’ he said, in his complaining voice, clearly not one who felt that his Hippocratic oath covered the whole broad sweep of humanity. ‘Take this to Superintendent Hardy for me and tell him I’ll be with him shortly.’ He thrust the little oilcloth bundle into my hands and wiped his own with a large handkerchief. ‘You might as well make yourself useful.’

  ‘Is it the knife?’

  ‘It’s none of your business what it is,’ he replied.

  ‘Should you be giving it to me?’ I said. ‘Aren’t I a suspect?’

  ‘It’s been dusted,’ he said, forced into an explanation in spite of himself, which made his lips purse so tight they all but disappeared completely, ‘and I’m not going to start running up and down fetching and carrying just because nobody’s seen fit to give me an assistant. So get on with you and less of your lip.’

  With what I hoped was a look of withering pity – for snapping at maidservants really is the mark of a pitiable man – I took the bundle from him and hurried downstairs with it, just in time to see Mrs Hepburn and Millie emerge from the back parlour where Hardy had been interviewing them.

  ‘Much good it did him to put me behind and upset my niece here,’ said the cook when she saw me. I was becoming acclimatised to her style of conversation and joined into the stream of this one without any trouble.

  ‘You couldn’t tell him anything to help him then?’

  ‘I was tucked up in my bed and Millie was tucked up in hers,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘And you can be sure if I’d heard any goings-on I shouldn’t have, I would have been up and at them. It’s a heavy responsibility, Fanny, to be in charge of all these girls, and it’s not only my Millie I watch out for.’ She had been eyeing the oilcloth as she spoke, and I seized the moment.

  ‘You can help though, Mrs Hepburn,’ I said. ‘You’ll never guess what this is. The doctor just gave it to me to bring to the super. It’s the knife.’

  ‘They’ve found it?’ she said in tones of wonder (not knowing, I suppose, that it had been anything but hidden). I nodded.

  ‘Why would he leave it?’ she asked, shaking her head. ‘With all you hear about fingerprints and all-sorts like that. You’d think he’d take it away with him again.’ Clearly, the import of the locked-up house and the hidden Yale key had not struck Mrs Hepburn yet and she was still imagining some kind of fiendish, a
nd remarkably ungreedy, burglar. ‘What did you mean, Fanny, when you said I could help?’

  Carefully, and with a glance at the parlour door, I opened one flap and then the other of the oilcloth wrapping and lifted the knife up into the light.

  ‘Have you ever seen it before?’

  The knife was still crusted and smeared with blood around the hilt, although its blade had come clean as it was removed and now shone dully. The pale bone handle was black with fingerprint powder, which had come off onto the cloth too. All three of us gazed at it. I was no expert but it looked to me to be an ordinary and rather elderly cook’s knife, of the sort used to carve meat in a kitchen or nursery, although not in the dining room. Its blade had been sharpened many times and was now thinner along its length than where it joined the handle.

  ‘That’s your mutton knife, Auntie Kitty,’ said Millie.

  I glanced at Mrs Hepburn to make sure. She swallowed and nodded.

  ‘And when did you last see it?’ I asked her. ‘Where does it belong?’

  ‘I washed it last night with Eldry,’ Millie said. ‘I used it to poke the sausages for the pie. It’s got a lovely sharp point, Miss Rossiter, see?’ She reached out towards it but I drew it swiftly away. ‘And then Eldry dried it and we put it back in the knife cupboard.’

  ‘And I locked it before I went to my bed,’ said Mrs Hepburn, ‘like I always do. Every night without fail and afternoons too when it’s my day out or Mr Faulds’s.’

  ‘Because you can’t be too careful with knives,’ said Millie.

  ‘And the key?’ I asked. Mrs Hepburn was plucking at her collar again, her face reddening.

  ‘Oh, Fan!’ she said. ‘This doesn’t look good, does it? I don’t see how anyone sneaking in through a window could get into my knife cupboard.’

  ‘Who keeps the key?’ I insisted.

  ‘Well, I’ve got one,’ said Mrs Hepburn, patting her key ring, ‘and . . . Oh my!’

  ‘What?’ I asked. I could hear movement inside the parlour and I wrapped the knife up again quickly. ‘What is it?’