After the Armistice Ball

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘I don’t think she knew she had to tell me to hurry,’ said Alec. ‘I don’t think she knew. Back to your reasons for faking the pictures – she was there and if they were all done on the same day, they could easily have been done at the start of the week while she was still there. So it must be the third reason. They had to be done without her knowledge. She didn’t know what was going on.’

  ‘But the second letter?’ I said, but even while I was speaking I began to wonder. ‘She did write it, didn’t she?’ Alec shook his head.

  ‘No. Clemence wrote the second letter.’

  ‘But it’s so perfectly identical,’ I said.

  ‘As was Chrissie Dalrymple’s letter of condolence,’ said Alec. ‘They all were at school together. Why did we not think of it that day at the George when Chrissie’s letter came? And I should have known from that “C”. Cara always signed herself “Cara” even on a note, but I suppose . . .’

  ‘Clemence knew that her handwriting would convince but she wasn’t so sure about attempting a signature?’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Alec. ‘Now where does that leave us? What exactly are we saying?’

  ‘We seem to be saying,’ I said, ‘that Cara was not in on the plot. That’s good, in one way, isn’t it? From your point of view, I mean. Doesn’t it make you feel a little better to know that your wife-to-be was innocent – at least to begin with? I do hope she was filled in at some point, though. I mean, I hope Lena and Clemence and whoever came to take Cara away told her what it was all about and got her consent, because otherwise . . . Well, it sounds too silly for words, but otherwise it’s kidnap.’

  ‘I have the most dreadful feeling,’ said Alec, ‘that I’d be quite happy to settle for kidnap, Dandy, right at this moment.’

  I got up to throw logs on to the fire and was astonished to find, glancing at the clock, that it was after eleven. Hugh, it seemed, would not be joining us at all. I sat down again, rather heavily, and scrubbed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets, doing who knew what to my makeup, but the lights were low.

  ‘So, what if the plan was to kill her?’ said Alec. ‘Let’s just allow ourselves to think it for a while, think it through.’ For I was shaking my head already. ‘Just go along with it, Dandy, please. Kill her at the beginning of the week, dry out the cottage, fake the pictures, fake her presence and make sure the fire was so severe that no one could tell she was dead before it began. That would explain why she didn’t take part in the fakery.’

  ‘But why?’ I breathed, trying and failing to stop myself from believing such a repulsive idea. ‘Never mind how – and Alec, my dear, the how is a huge obstacle. I don’t mean how was it managed? I mean how could she? It’s unspeakable.’

  ‘Unspeakable things happen, Dandy. Every day they do. And as for why: to stop Cara from telling me she had stolen the diamonds. To stop me from telling the police. To save the family name –’

  ‘To cover up a theft!’ I said. ‘For pride? Alec, please listen to me. A mother, any mother, and God knows I’m far from being the Madonna in modern form, but any mother would rather have her two daughters at her side in the workhouse than that one should die so she could hold her head up.’

  ‘Your opinion does you credit,’ he said. ‘Do you have a better theory?’

  ‘How about this?’ I said. ‘Cara stole the jewels. Mrs Duffy and Clemence planned the fire to cover her disappearance and were to collect the insurance money for the diamonds. Cara, though, was not convinced until the very last minute that she had to disappear, hence her letter to you saying that she thought she might be able to talk you round.’

  ‘And did Cara have to get away because she stole the jewels or did she steal the jewels to fund an escape? In which case what did she have to get away from?’

  ‘Well, I suppose the obvious thing is you,’ I said. ‘Her engagement.’

  There was a very long silence at this, and one for which I could hardly blame him.

  ‘Why not just break it off?’ he said at last.

  ‘Because you are her father’s heir. We keep forgetting about Cara’s father in all of this, because we’re so sure her mother and sister worked the whole thing themselves. Perhaps she dared not tell her father she wouldn’t marry you.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Alec. ‘Cara could wind Gregory around her finger and frequently did. And why wasn’t she in on the faked photographs? Can you explain that?’

  No,’ I said. ‘I can’t. I’m too tired. In fact, we’re both exhausted; we’re probably just seeing shadows.’ Alec shook his head.

  ‘This isn’t going to go away,’ he said. ‘But you’re right – we are tired. Let’s sleep on it.’

  Leaving him to finish his pipe I retired. I had indeed rendered myself comical with eye-rubbing and I was glad Grant wasn’t there to pour silent scorn upon me. (Our arrangement was that on ordinary evenings if I stayed up after eleven I shifted for myself.) I left my frock inside out on a chair in a small act of defiance, and got into bed to lie on my back while my cold cream soaked in, glad to have a little thinking time without Alec there to sway me.

  He was leading me off the track, I was sure, because he would not pay attention to the diamonds, discomfited perhaps about being Mr Duffy’s heir and fearing that any concern on his part towards the question of the diamonds might be mistaken as self-interest. I felt it increasingly, though, that he was letting his squeamishness overcome his judgement. They had to be important. I had to be able to come up with a solution to the mystery which took the diamonds into account. I resolved not to sleep until I had done so.

  Cara, dressed in a frock of pale, striped wallpaper, was up to her elbows in a washtub, suds spilling over the top and down the sides washing the gold colour off the brass bandings. I stepped closer to see what she was washing. Under the water, clear now, the bubbles magically gone, she was rubbing handfuls of diamonds together as small children do with shells on the beach.

  ‘You see,’ she said, turning towards me and smiling, with the sun glinting through the stray golden hairs which had risen from the sleek cap of her bob in the steam, ‘gone. Quite gone.’ I looked back into the tub and saw that indeed the diamonds were melting in the water, disappearing. And as I watched Cara’s hands, too, were beginning to wear away, until they were down to fingerless stumps like the hands of a burned child I had seen once and never forgotten.

  I sat up in bed, glad of the moonlight, glad not to be in the dark where that image might linger, but still I jumped and clutched the covers under my chin as my bedroom door opened a crack. There was a soft knock before it opened further.

  ‘Dandy?’ Alec whispered, coming right inside and waiting a bit for his eyes to adjust before he moved again. Still groggy and rattled as one is after waking from a dream, I was unable to speak and only blinked and gulped as Alec came to sit on the edge of my bed. He started with a reassurance.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he said. ‘And don’t be alarmed: it’s not a social call.’

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked, recovering my sangfroid. ‘Can’t it wait till morning?’

  ‘No.’ He stopped and ran his hands over his face, and I could hear the rasp of the stubble which somehow made him sound even more tired than his weary voice.

  ‘Do you have a glass of water there?’ he asked. I passed it to him and waited for him to speak again.

  ‘I think I’ve had the whole thing wrong,’ he said.

  I sank back on to my pillows with relief, but worse was to come than I had even imagined up to now.

  ‘This evening,’ he went on, ‘I was arguing that Lena and Clemence killed her, kept the body somewhere, faked their record of a happy holiday with the photographs, and then set the fire to explain her death. But . . . Well, they’re hardly seasoned arsonists, are they? If there had been a sudden downpour, or if the men managed to put it out and there was a body left to be examined, it would have been obvious that the fire was a cover-up job, and that would mean the noose, for one or both of them.


  ‘However, if they tried to burn an empty house and put it about that Cara was in there, all they would have to say – if the house didn’t burn, you understand – all they would have to say was that she couldn’t have been there after all. They could even say that she must have started the fire and run away.’ He reached out both his hands towards me and I put mine into them.

  ‘Tell me about this maid,’ he said. ‘This poor girl who was supposed to have committed suicide most conveniently for everyone and who seems to have departed her life leaving not a ripple.’

  ‘What about her?’ I asked, whispering again and fighting against the idea forming in my mind.

  ‘Two things,’ said Alec. ‘Had Dr Milne ever seen her before? And more to the point, did Dr Milne ever meet Cara?’

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘You look knocked up,’ said Hugh, as I went in to breakfast the next morning. He has a particular way of saying this, not quite accusing, not triumphant exactly (and I should be thankful he says anything, I suppose) but there is a silent coda to the remark that always puts me on the defensive.

  ‘I didn’t sleep very well,’ I said, not looking at Alec but seeing him anyway shifting uneasily in his seat.

  ‘Well, all this chasing about,’ said Hugh. ‘You should go out for a good long walk with the dog you already have.’ He broke off and began again in much the same vein but in rather gentler tones, as befitting the presence of a guest. ‘Yes, a good walk in the fresh spring air, my dear, and you’ll be right as rain by luncheon.’

  ‘That would be lovely,’ I said. ‘Are you offering an arm? Or are you busy?’

  This suggestion produced the desired result: Hugh huffed, puffed, turned to Alec and said: ‘Would you think me a boor if I showed you the mare after luncheon, Osborne? And asked you to wheel Dandy round the park this morning?’

  ‘I should be delighted,’ said Alec, and his politeness seemed to sting Hugh into further explanation.

  ‘Only I must just get my contractors off on the right foot,’ he said. ‘Wonderful chaps once they’re set on their way, you know, but they do need a firm early hand or God knows what might come of it all.’

  With everyone thus satisfied, Hugh dropped back behind his newspaper as Pallister came in. Mrs Tilling, our cook, sends up two eggs freshly poached every morning just as I arrive in the breakfast room. I do not know how she gauges the moment of my arrival, for I am often unwitnessed and I trigger no obvious trip-wire en route from my bedroom to the ground floor, but every morning Pallister appears with a chafing dish just as I’m sitting. His disapproval at my being coddled and his being put to such trouble when there are perfectly good eggs under a hot cover on the sideboard is mammoth (as is Hugh’s irritation at the performance, but Hugh always makes sure he is behind his newspaper and no doubt tells himself it is not happening). I cannot remember why and when this ritual began, which probably means it was while I was pregnant and inattentive on account of the all-enveloping haze of nausea, but I look forward to it. I smiled at Alec as I scooped the eggs on to my plate, feeling what a good light it cast me in that my cook loved me even if my husband would rather play in the drains than wheel me about, as he so charmingly put it.

  An hour later, we let ourselves into the walled garden. My recent toils in Mrs Marshall’s cabbage patch led me to look at the ground around me with greater interest than I could remember having felt before but April, while so pretty in woods and parkland, is unrewarding otherwise and the borders on either side of the gravel path were in a most undignified state. Great hoops of wire were waiting above the budding plants, great swathes of net suspended between sturdy poles, and bare canes everywhere, so that one felt one had come crashing into an actress’s dressing room and caught her in only her corsets.

  ‘Now Alec,’ I began, firmly. ‘You had me at a disadvantage last night – I was half asleep, but now I am going to convince you you’re wrong. I left out a few of the more unpleasant details about this servant girl, you see.’ Alec waited silently for me to continue, and I tucked my arm into his before I did, a very mild embrace and one sanctioned by my husband, besides.

  ‘I’m glad I’m not looking at you while I say this!’ I exclaimed and then I cleared my throat and plunged in.

  ‘I see,’ said Alec, when I had finished. ‘Yes, I see. But consider this, Dandy. You already know that Dr Milne has been grossly less than thorough in his dealings with this unfortunate creature. Why, there should have been policemen and a proper investigation. So how far do you think he would go? As far as accepting Mrs Duffy’s account of what had happened and dispensing with any examination at all? Might he have done no more than enter a servant’s bedroom, glance at the unknown girl lying there under a sheet and sign a certificate?’

  I leapt on this suggestion. Even if it meant that the girl was Cara, I should almost prefer the idea of her drifting off on laudanum than anyone, alone and wretched, bleeding to death at her own hand.

  ‘You need to speak to Dr Milne,’ said Alec. ‘Find out, as I say, whether he knew Cara. If not, find out if he had ever seen the maid before. If not again, then find out just exactly how closely he examined her body.’

  ‘Me?’ I said, aghast. ‘It can’t possibly be me, Alec. I couldn’t.’

  ‘Well, I can’t,’ said Alec as though this should have been obvious and reminding me just a little for the first time in our short acquaintance of Hugh in particular and men in general.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ I said. ‘Man to man. And if you’re about to say it’s a woman’s concern, may I just remind you that the poor girl – if such she was – didn’t get herself into that state on her own and I doubt that the other party has perished in an attic for shame.’ We walked along in silence for a bit after that. Furious huffy silence on my part and, I hoped, newly conscious and heartily ashamed silence on Alec’s. In we went at one end of the peach houses, trudge trudge trudge along the slatted walkway over the pipes, green with moss and treacherously slippy, then out again.

  ‘And anyway,’ I said at last, ‘I can’t go gallivanting off to Gatehouse again. You heard Hugh at breakfast. What would I tell him this time?’

  ‘You might say Mrs McCall’s famous mouser of a cat is just about to have kittens,’ Alec said, resisting my attempts to elbow him off the path into a soggy patch of that decayed matter that gardeners are so fond of heaping up everywhere. ‘Yes, all right, all right. Does Dr Milne shoot? Might you invite him here? He needn’t bring his wife, you know.’

  ‘Impossible. There’s nothing to shoot. Not a stag to be had these days. I could always write to him.’

  ‘Impossible yourself,’ said Alec. ‘A letter couldn’t be casual enough not to raise suspicions. Besides, we’ll be skirting very close to slander if we need to ask about the death certificate, you know. The last thing we need is to write it down and turn it into libel.’

  This sobered me again. One of the most striking aspects of being caught up in all of this, I was beginning to find, was the sudden giddy lurches between blood-curdling horrors and a feeling that we were at some kind of parlour game. Perhaps one caused the other: the reality too awful to bear so that one constantly retreated into one’s intellect and let it become a mere puzzle.

  In the end, I came around to the idea that Dr Milne must come and stay. Living where he did, he had to be a fisherman, I decided, and so I would get Hugh to include him in a fishing party. I could then feign some indisposition and do a little fishing of my own. How though to get Hugh to use up some of his precious fish on a country doctor he had never met? Even coarse fish; salmon would have been unthinkable. I myself quailed at the thought of entertaining a Mrs Milne if she existed, but ducking out of my part of the fixture turned out to be my masterstroke. Hugh was so delighted to have me suggest, for the first time ever in our married life, that a party of fishermen might come to stay without their wives and to suggest further that I should be quite happy to dine off a tray in my room to avoid the imbalance of a dinner table with just one
lady to go around, that he swallowed the slightly odd inclusion of a mysterious Dr Milne from Gatehouse with scarcely a murmur. I felt a little pity, truth to tell, that he could not see through me more easily than that. He actually thought I was being generous offering to forgo a dining room full of men talking of nothing but fish and probably still smelling of it a little.

  Alec was to be of the party, for Dr Milne was being presented as a particular friend of his. So when he left Gilverton on the evening of our walk, bearing the album to return to Clemence, it was with his quick return guaranteed.

  In the dull meantime, all I could think of to do was write a long-overdue letter of progress to Daisy. Swearing her to strict secrecy, Silas apart, I told her what we had discovered about Clemence’s impersonation of Cara, the deception of the photographs, the deliberate setting of the fire and the pains taken to make sure it burned like the bottom pit of Hades. I glossed over the fact that it seemed Cara had not been in on the plan, feeling (or perhaps more honestly hoping) that this apparent anomaly would soon be explained. I outlined my belief that Cara had stolen the diamonds and absconded with them, and that her mother knew. I admitted that I had not yet discovered whether Mr Duffy’s allowing the insurance to lapse constituted an unforeseen hitch or whether setting up Daisy and Silas to make good the loss was part of the original plan, designed to keep the police away. I also admitted with admirable frankness (I thought) that I did not know why Cara, or Cara and her mother, or Cara and her mother and Clemence together, had planned the disappearance in the first place. The letter finished with my assurances that I was just about to double-check for my own satisfaction the last plausible scenario in which Cara had actually died at the cottage.

  I had no pang submitting my account of lodgings and travel to Daisy’s scrutiny along with my report but my nerve deserted me a bit, I must own, when by return of post there came back a cheque lavish beyond my initial comprehension, representing not only my expenses and retainer but half my fee and a sizeable bonus. My hands were damp with guilt as I read the accompanying note.