After the Armistice Ball

by Catriona McPherson

  I never knew what she had planned for Daisy, never saw what was on the tray, but the sounds it made when it fell stayed with me for years no matter how I tried to keep them out of my ears, and more especially my dreams. Metal rang on stone, glass shattered and heavy, dull objects thumped and rolled away. Lena smoothed down her apron – it was not until then that I noticed she wore an enveloping white apron – and walked towards us. She looked quite as tranquil as I had ever seen her. More so perhaps, I thought, as she drew near. Her face had a limpid serenity that I had never seen there before, and it was more grotesque than rolling eyes and drooling mouth would have been. I thought again of Alec and his pie and the headless Sergeant Pinner, imagining that Alec would have had just this smooth look on his face as he ate. It was the look of madness, when all the guy-ropes of the everyday have finally been shrugged off and the mind floats up and is gone.

  Lena looked at each of us in turn, smiling gently, then rested her gaze on me and spoke.

  ‘Tell me then, my dear. Have you been watching me?’

  I nodded, and Lena nodded along with me, still smiling.

  ‘I thought so. I thought so,’ she said. ‘And so it is all my own doing. I tried to use you, my dear Mrs Gilver. Perhaps if I hadn’t invited you to Kirkandrews to witness our tragedy . . .? Tell me, what did I do wrong?’

  I gaped at her but then it dawned upon me that this was not meant to open a moral debate but merely to ask where she had betrayed herself to me, and when I tried to think of an answer I found I could not. Where had she gone wrong? Where had the suspicion come from, seeping invisibly like gas, until one was enveloped in the miasma, cut off from all the sight, sound and smell of the world but still unable to believe any of it was real?

  Smiling, she waited for me to speak and as she did the smile changed, becoming as gaudy and jagged as a lizard’s fan.

  ‘You don’t even know, do you?’ she said, speaking now through clenched teeth, making thick white spots of saliva gather at the corners of her mouth. ‘Bumbling cow of a woman that you are. I chose the stupidest person in the room. So stupid. How I should hate to be you – Dandelion Gilver – bumping around in the fog like a sheep, too stupid to see how stupid you are . . .’

  ‘No need to run through the whole farmyard,’ said Alec’s voice, steady but strained. ‘And you’re wrong as it happens. It’s not stupidity, it’s goodness.’

  Lena threw back her head and whooped.

  ‘Goodness? Goodness?’

  ‘Goodness,’ said Alec, ‘which could not help but see evil in front of it. Dandy’s goodness meant that she could smell you like a rotting corpse. I don’t expect you to understand. Something as vile as you are can’t hope to recognize it.’

  I wished he would stop. Lena was beginning to seethe, visibly, rocking back and forward on her heels. I had no fear that she would overpower Alec and escape but I wanted desperately to talk to her and get some answers before she crawled into her madness and pulled it over herself for good.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ I asked, my voice loud enough to cut through Alec’s hectoring. She rounded on me, but I refused to flinch.

  I asked her again.

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  ‘Are you too “good” even to imagine, then, Mrs Gilver?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said, surprising myself with the level drawl I managed to get into my voice. ‘Only I should like to know if my theories are accurate. Why did you do it? Why did you start it?’

  ‘Because,’ she said, stepping very close to me so that the spittle fell on my face as she spoke. Alec rose and moved towards us, but I put up a hand to stop him.

  ‘Because,’ she said again, ‘they were mine.’

  ‘Of course they were yours,’ I whispered, sickened, amazed that I could still be sickened by anything. ‘But why would you want to hurt them?’

  ‘You stupid woman,’ she said. ‘You stupid, blind pig of a woman. Not the girls. The diamonds. Those diamonds were mine. I loved them and they were nothing to him, just as they should have been nothing to you.’ She rounded on Alec and, unable to meet his eyes, glared at his chest. ‘You and that little tart and all the little tarts you would have bred. It was an outrage to think he could give them to you when they were mine.’

  ‘So you stole them,’ I said. ‘But –’

  ‘I didn’t steal them,’ said Lena, suddenly very loud. ‘You can’t steal what is already yours. I simply took them. He would have left them to that little tart along with everything else and I couldn’t stand for that.’

  ‘But then you went too far,’ I said. ‘You tried to steal them twice and when it seemed as though nothing would ever bring it to light you told Cara to sell them.’

  ‘She couldn’t have anyway,’ said Daisy. ‘They belonged to her father.’

  ‘They belonged to me,’ said Lena. ‘They were mine. They have belonged to the ladies of the Duffy family, generation after generation for three hundred years.’

  ‘Cara was a lady of the Duffy family, you old fool,’ said Daisy.

  ‘Oh yes,’ screamed Lena. ‘Cara, precious Cara, precious Cara Duffy. Little tart.’

  ‘And why pick on us?’ Daisy demanded. ‘What have I ever done? What has Silas?’

  ‘Filth,’ spat Lena. ‘Parading around all that money and underneath, nothing but filth.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ said Daisy. ‘You’re not even making any sense.’

  Lena’s eyes rolled.

  ‘So you told her to sell them,’ I insisted, laying a hand on Daisy’s shoulder trying to quiet her, trying to keep Lena with us. ‘And then what?’

  ‘She couldn’t be trusted,’ said Lena. ‘Much better, really. Much neater that way. I had the use of her and then she could go. She was going to get all of it, you know. He just couldn’t see past his precious little darling. He didn’t know her like I did. What a dirty little slut she was. She had to go.’

  There was one question I knew I must ask.

  ‘Could you have done it? Could you have killed your own child in cold blood?’

  ‘Is it too awful for you to imagine?’ said Lena. ‘With all your goodness. Could I? Of course I could. I’m vile and evil, Mrs Gilver, I’m wicked and mad. So my own child doesn’t matter any more to me than an ant under my shoe. Weren’t you listening?’ Her eyes were glittering with amusement now.

  ‘But you didn’t get the chance,’ I said, and I saw her face flash with something I did not understand, just for a moment.

  ‘Of course I had the chance,’ she said. ‘What are you talking about? I made the chance, and I took the chance.’

  ‘But something went wrong,’ I insisted. Her eyes flashed again.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Something changed your plans. What happened? What did she tell you to make you so angry?’ Lena’s eyes were still huge with fear but her shoulders dropped a little.

  ‘She told me what she had done. What she was. Who could bear to hear what a stinking, filthy tart she was all along?’

  ‘But you knew that,’ I said. ‘You said you knew what she was.’ Lena looked away from me and I saw a cold resolve settle into her face. Then she took a huge breath, threw back her head and shrieked.

  Still screeching, she took three enormous steps backwards so that all of us were in the sweep of her gaze. There was something ridiculous about the extravagance of the steps, like a second-rate Shakespearean actor of the old school, or like the game I used to play as a child. Giants’ Steps and Babies’ Steps, it was called, and that was what Lena’s giant steps looked like, as unreal and yet as deliberate as that.

  ‘I killed her,’ she screamed. ‘Do you hear me? I killed her and if I hang it will still be worth it.’ She spoke as though she were Boadicea giving her battle cry, as though she were Joan of Arc declaiming her creed, triumph in her voice and her shoulders thrown back to take the arrows in her breast, but her eyes were the eyes of an animal threshing in a snare as the gamekeeper draws near it. I stepped towards
her, staring, peering deep into that animal’s eyes.

  ‘How could you?’ I said. ‘How could you do that to your own child?’ The fear flared again; I saw it. Something small inside her had leapt up and just managed to see out of her eyes for one second before it fell back down. Then she regarded me with some of the old calmness, and she spoke softly to me, just to me, too soft for the others to hear.

  ‘You stupid woman,’ she said.

  I stared at her, feeling something shift, but it was far too deep to tell what it was, and then she turned on her heels and ran.

  Alec took two steps after her, stopped, wheeled back, swayed for a second. We could hear Lena’s footsteps racing away.

  ‘Go,’ I yelled at him.

  He skidded over the ballroom floor and was gone. The ring of his shoes on the bare floor joined the clatter of Lena’s heels and then both became muffled as they reached the top of the stairs and flew down over the felted treads. A scream, then a confusion of thumps and knocks, a shout from Alec, and silence. I knew at once what had happened.

  Carefully, I lowered myself beside Daisy and stretched out my throbbing foot before bending over the ropes.

  ‘I left my candlestick on the stairs,’ I said. Then I looked down and smiled as the tangle under my fingers began to loosen. ‘Typical. Boys are never any good at untying knots.’

  ‘Hence penknives,’ said Daisy, getting stiffly to her feet and shaking herself free of the coils. ‘Now, put your hands around my neck, darling, and let me help you up.’

  We had just begun to limp across what looked like an acre of gleaming floor, her two numbed legs about as useful as my good one, when Alec appeared in the doorway, his face puckered, one of Lena’s shoes dangling from his hand.

  ‘She tripped,’ he said, walking slowly towards us. ‘I tried to catch her. I almost caught her.’ He looked down at the shoe, regarded it for a long time, then set it carefully on the floor and swung me up into his arms.

  ‘I can offer you an arm,’ he said to Daisy, but his voice was strained, and even as he spoke he braced his legs – I am no sylph, even had he not been shaking with exhaustion – and so Daisy assured him that she was fine.

  At the head of the stairs he turned and began to shuffle down awkwardly sideways, almost pressing me against the banisters.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Let me see her.’ So he faced around the way he was going again and down we went towards Lena.

  One of her hands was hooked through the banister rail by a snapped wrist and her head lay crushed against her shoulder. Her face was hidden, only the nape of her neck showing. I could see pins sticking out from under her old-fashioned bun, plain metal pins never meant to be seen, and I was surprised by the skin on her neck, soft and plumply crumpled, with some sparse downy hair, too short for the hairpins, which had sprung into curls.

  Daisy stopped as she drew level and crouched down to look at her.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she said.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Alec. ‘We must go and find a telephone and ring the police. I’ll put Dandy in the car and come back for you.’

  ‘We can’t just leave her here alone,’ said Daisy. ‘Take Dandy to a doctor, Alec darling, and telephone from there. I shall wait here and keep watch. Yes, yes, I promise not to touch anything. But we can’t leave her alone.’

  I should have offered to stay. I did not know then that my ankle was broken, and Daisy had had it much worse than me, tied up and thinking she was going to be hurt. I should have insisted that I stay with Lena’s body. Why did I not? Simple: I was scared. I still did not feel safe. But safe from what? From the horror of what we thought she had done? That was what I told myself. That was how I explained why I still felt lost and how I made sense of the shifting inside me, slow but relentless, like sand on the ocean floor.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘And what was the candlestick doing on the stairs?’ asked Inspector MacAlpine, yet again. Even the constable in the corner, taking laborious notes of my answers, looked up with an exasperated sigh and flicked back in his pad to read what I had said last time.

  ‘I put it down because my ankle made it difficult to climb the stairs without holding on,’ I said.

  ‘And you picked it up because . . .?’

  ‘We didn’t know who was there or what to expect. For all we knew there was a gang of thugs around every corner.’

  ‘And you were there because . . .?’

  ‘We were concerned about Mrs Esslemont. When we found out she had agreed to meet Mrs Duffy in a deserted house we thought undue pressure might be brought to bear. As it was. I told you, when we arrived Mrs Esslemont was tied to a chair.’

  ‘And you broke your ankle . . .?’

  ‘I cracked a small bone in it getting into the car. I slipped on the gravel. But I didn’t even notice until I was halfway up the stairs.’

  ‘Didn’t notice a broken ankle,’ said the inspector blandly but quite firmly.

  ‘Chipped,’ I said, just as firmly. ‘A very small bone.’ It was too exasperating the way he kept worrying over the one thing that was absolutely true while missing the great gaping holes, but I could hardly point that out.

  ‘And what happened next, Mrs Gilver?’

  The constable sighed yet more audibly, loud enough for his superior officer to throw him a glance from the corner of his eye. Hugh, stolid and dumbstruck beside me, followed the glance and blinked at the sight of the uniform as he had every time he had looked at every uniform in the last week. He was there ostensibly to be my supporter and protector but he looked so poleaxed that, if anything, I tried not to speak too bluntly for fear of upsetting him.

  ‘We found Mrs Esslemont in the ballroom and untied her and Mrs Duffy ran away, tripped on the candlestick and fell down the stairs.’ The servants’ passage, its doorway well concealed in the panelling, had not been found in the police examination of the scene and so the scattered contents of the tray had escaped the need for explanation.

  One thing should be made quite plain: Alec and I had not cooked anything up on that first journey in search of a doctor and a telephone. It just so happened that in answering the questions put to us, in separate rooms, by a startled sergeant in Alec’s case and a bewildered constable in mine, we did not chance to mention Cara. I was horribly aware even then, of course, that while my interrogator might think he was being so rigorous as to be forced to offer two apologies for every one question, I knew that he was merely nibbling around edges of what would choke him if he were to take a proper bite.

  I think it was the fact of Daisy that allowed us, in conscience, just to answer each question as it came and resist pouring out the whole story. We did not see Daisy before her first interview, in her hospital bed in a private room with what she reported to be a very dashing Chief Superintendent (Daisy always does land on her feet), and she might easily have reported word-for-word everything that passed between Lena and me. At that point I should have resigned myself to telling all to Inspector MacAlpine and should have excused myself for not having done so before by pointing out truthfully that I had answered every question asked. That was the other point which helped Alec and me repress any guilt: we managed interview after interview, day after day, not to lie. The Silas, Daisy and the diamonds end of the affair held together so well on its own, you see, that nothing alerted the policemen to something’s being hidden and Daisy, although quite without any natural reticence, presumably still had an eye on Silas’s flotation and wanted to side-step as much scandal as she could. I expect that is how it was, although we have never spoken of it.

  And so, the records show, no crime was committed. At least not by anyone in a position to be brought to book for it. Lena’s death was found to have been an accident, as indeed it was. As for her attempt at extortion, even had Silas and Daisy been minded to drag it all out, the general assumption that she had planned it all alone meant that her death put an end to any thoughts of redress. And as Lena herself had pointed out, since one cannot steal what is al
ready one’s possession, the theft of the Duffy diamonds turned out not to be a theft at all, but only one of many instances that year of an old family attempting to shed some of its assets in unsettled times.

  If somewhere in a police station in Edinburgh an officer scratched his head and wondered whether the name of the poor lady who fell down the stairs in a country house in Perthshire was not the same name that had been shouted down the telephone to him by some madman gibbering about a murder in Drummond Place, then we can be sure that he did no more than scratch his head before he put it out of his mind.

  Hugh remained as perplexed as ever about how I had got myself mixed up in it all. Yet more evidence of my silliness, I expect he thought, if he thought. Silas had to be told everything, of course, and when my cheque came it bore his signature. Furthermore, Daisy, who answered the telephone when I rang to protest about the shameful enormity of the sum, said that was Silas’s doing too and if I felt like talking to a brick wall she would call him to the telephone, but really darling, there was no point, as he was determined to reward me for saving her life and if one looked at it that way, wasn’t it rather insultingly stingy.

  ‘You sound cross,’ I said, wondering whether I shouldn’t repay something after all, if it was causing trouble between them.

  ‘As well I might,’ Daisy said. ‘Not only have I saved our flotation – through your genius, darling, of course – but I have almost been killed too and one would think Silas owed me some extravagant gift or at least that I should have my every heart’s desire for a while. As it turns out, however, it’s quite the reverse. I am to present him with yet another son in the spring. Don’t laugh, Dandy, it’s too bad. Relief and too much champagne, you see. Oh well, I suppose it might be a daughter.’ She sobered, with a sigh. ‘Speaking of daughters,’ she said but stopped, and so when the girl cut in to tell us our time was up there was silence on the line and we felt too foolish to ask for another three minutes.