‘Poor Charlie,’ I said. ‘No wonder he’s so touchy about it all.’
‘But really, when you think about the way Ma clicked her fingers and got him to lie to the inspector about seeing Ana fall, you can see he’s not the commanding type.’
‘How did you know he lied? Where are you getting all of this?’
‘Miles Fanshawe told me,’ said Alec, enjoying the bewildered look on my face. Fanshawe was ringing a faint bell. ‘Remember, Dandy? Fanshawe from school, who growed and growed? It’s him.’ Illumination shone on me at last.
‘Andrew Merryman?’
‘And you have to admit that he was right to go for the change of name, wasn’t he? Tumbling Miles Fanshawe would be too silly for words.’
‘Amazing!’ I said. ‘My goodness, you must have been thunderstruck to see him.’
‘Didn’t recognise him,’ said Alec. ‘Believe it or not he’s filled out since schooldays and Fanshawe would never have had that look of … what would you call it? Quiet confidence? Manly competence? Fanshawe was a bit of a ninny, truth be told.’
I was having trouble reconciling any kind of confidence or competence with the wavering, blushing Andrew Merryman and my doubt must have shown.
‘Ah,’ said Alec, ‘no less hopeless in the presence of girls, eh? He spent one Easter with a pal we shared and hardly came out of his bedroom on account of an overdose of giggling sisters. Still, I think we can safely accept his word and his judgement, don’t you?’
I suppressed a snort of laughter.
‘Certainly not!’ I said. ‘Because he’s an old Harrovian? Because he’s “people like us, darling”? Of course not.’
Alec was staring at me, rather red, and he is always at his most endearingly peculiar-looking when he has turned red. It clashes so dreadfully with his tawny hair and makes his freckles look yellow.
‘Well, I think that’s a bit much,’ he said. ‘Miles – Fanshawe – Merryman,’ he announced this last with an air of finality, ‘Merryman wasn’t on our list of suspects for anything at all yesterday. And we already knew he was “people like us” as you so revoltingly put it – what a snob you are, Dandy – so the only thing we’ve found out really is that yes, he went to my school, and was in my house, and now all of a sudden he’s more suspicious than before? All of a sudden, he’s the one we need to keep our eye on? I just think that’s a bit much.’
I sensed that it was best to move to other matters. ‘And what about Topsy Turvy?’ I said. ‘Has one been insulting her dignity calling her that all this time?’
‘Strange to tell,’ said Alec, ‘Turvy is her family name and she was christened Topsy. One of a long line of Topsies, if you can credit it.’
‘I can. The circus is wrote through her like Blackpool through rock,’ I said. ‘And such sound knowledge of where one belongs is not be sniffed at, Alec dear. Ma is all too convincing on that score.’
‘Well, in any case,’ said Alec, uninterested in my quoting new friends if I would not listen to what he had got from his old ones, ‘whether Harlequin took it upon himself to leap the ring fence or Ana made him leave, it brings us back to the idea of an accident.’
‘Why?’
‘Because how could anyone know that she was going to be backstage when she shouldn’t have been?’
‘But darling, that’s the thing,’ I said. ‘She should have been. She was a tiny little bit early but she was just about to go off anyway and everyone in the circus knew it. Come with me.’ I stepped down from the motor car and made my way to the back door of the tent.
‘I’m not sure I see the import of that,’ Alec said, following me.
‘It was the inspector’s idea – one of the many, just mentioned in passing. A booby trap. A trip wire.’
‘When could it have been done?’ Alec asked. ‘It would have to be after the animals came in or they’d have broken it going the other way.’
‘But they came in first. There would have been heaps of time for anyone to stretch a rope across the passageway afterwards. And I just wondered … wouldn’t it leave a trace, a mark of some kind?’We had arrived. I could not help a shiver as I looked around, for that drab little corner was so familiar to me after the long wait for the police with Ma that I was sure I should never forget an inch of the canvas, a plank of its gangway or a single blade of the trodden, deadening grass.
‘This is the spot here, isn’t it?’ said Alec, nudging with his toe a place where the grass had been killed, scoured away, by – one guessed – a scrubbing brush and some fearsome caustic solution.
‘So if that’s where she fell,’ I said, ‘where would she have come off? Where would Harlequin have had to stumble for Ana to end up there? Would she fall forward, Alec, or backwards? How far?’
‘Forward,’ he said. ‘Just like a refusal.’
‘Of course.’ My first ever experience of carrying on without a pony who had decided to stop was over thirty years ago now, but I still remembered the sudden weightlessness, the seemingly endless flight over the spurned hedge and the sharp drop into the nettles beyond. ‘So let’s say between here and there,’ I said, pointing. Alec did a couple of knee-bends as though warming up for a PT display and then crouched down at one side of the passageway. I turned my attention to the other.
‘If we do find something,’ I said, presently, ‘let’s say a pair of stout nails with shreds of rope still clinging to them, we mustn’t touch anything. We must hand it straight over to the police.’
‘Who have probably already checked,’ said Alec. ‘And wouldn’t whoever put the rope across have made sure to come back and remove the nails afterwards?’
I sat back on my heels and looked over at him.
‘Would you? If you had got away with it, would you risk being seen tidying things away?’
‘Excellent point, Dan,’ said Alec and bent his head again.
The canvas walling of the tent was tacked every five feet or so to a thick post and while these posts bore all the marks of a long hard life, the only nails I could find were ancient, rusted and hammered in hard to the wood out of harm’s way.
‘I don’t think much of the tent men,’ said Alec. ‘Leaving so many good nails behind them instead of prying them out and keeping them in a jar for next time.’
I had never been convinced of the moral necessity to gather jars of old nails about one, even if one did not have to cart them around the country between standings, so I said nothing.
When we had worked our way back farther than remotely plausible, I stood up at last. There had not been a single new bruise showing white on the dirty wood, not a single new nail hole and not even any suspiciously soiled patches where someone might have ground in mud to hide them. I looked up, wondering if anything could have been rigged from above. Alec’s eyes followed mine. The roof of the tent was dizzyingly high and my shoulders and spirits slumped at the thought of clambering up somehow and inching around up there, fruitlessly searching.
‘It would have been nice to find something,’ said Alec, ‘but the absence of physical clues doesn’t prove that you’re wrong. You’ve always scoffed at the idea of them before.’
‘I’ve scoffed at inch-square swatches of unusual tweed smelling of unusual tobacco,’ I said, ‘but I think if there had been a trap rigged here we would have found something.’
‘Not if the cord or whatever was tied to a stake that was banged in and then pulled out again.’ Alec looked about as enthusiastic as I felt about the idea of crawling around the grass looking for holes or plugs of mud where holes had been and gone. ‘I’ll ask the tent men if they saw anything odd. It’ll give me an excuse to get talking to them – most welcome. What a great pity Donald and Teddy couldn’t be more firm about what they saw. But they hadn’t been briefed, had they?’
‘Alec, please,’ I said. ‘Of course they hadn’t been briefed. They are only here to lend my presence a respectable justification in the eyes of Hugh and the world at large. I’m hardly going to draft them on to my staff l
ike …’
‘Special constables?’
‘Quite.’
‘Has Inspector Hutchinson grilled them yet? Lord – grilled? Skinned, filleted, diced and fried: I felt five years old last night when he started in on us, didn’t you?’
‘They are certainly in his sights,’ I said. ‘He’s already made short work of Charlie.’
‘And who’s next on your list?’ Alec asked.
‘I’m going to tackle Ina,’ I said, ‘which is a job best done by me alone, I’m sure you’ll agree.’
‘Tackle her about what?’
‘She wasn’t in her seat last night when Inya screamed, when you and I raced across the ring. I need to know where she had got to.’
Alec whistled and raised his eyebrows.
‘Ina Wilson?’ he said.
‘Well, no, not really, not for any reason that I can imagine. Apart from anything else she couldn’t possibly have known when Ana was going to leave the ring. But I need to check, don’t you agree?’
We parted company at that, Alec leaving by the back doors for the stable tent and I making my way to the front doors to begin my walk to the castle. It was rather a splendid winter’s day, half past eleven the very peak of it. The worst of the overnight chill was gone and the low sun was doing its best, dazzling through the tree branches and melting a little of the frost off the grass here and there. In another two hours it would give up the fight again, of course, and the cold would creep back across the lawns from where the shadows had hoarded it all day, but now was the moment to be out in it if one had to be out at all.
The sweet butler looked troubled when he answered the door and I suppose the very fact that he was on duty there instead of one of the maids, like a bear in the mouth of his cave ready to repel all invaders, was more evidence of the mood in the house.
‘How is Mrs Wilson this morning?’ I said as I followed him up the short half flight of marble steps to the level of the great hall.
‘She’s fine, thank you, madam,’ he said with just a touch of emphasis on the first word.
In the hall, Ina did indeed look fine, the chalky pallor of the previous evening quite driven away and replaced not by the flush which might be expected (for the hall was still rather stuffy from the evening before and both fires were once again burning high up into the chimneys) but by rosy cheeks and clear, sparkling eyes, and to see such a marked change, given my current mission, made me rather uneasy. If one comes delicately to enquire where a friend was when death was being dealt, one does not welcome the sight of that friend transformed. I told myself sternly that the transformation – if indeed one should call it that and might it not be less fancifully described as a good mood? – could easily arise from a certainty that the travesty of the circus party would have seen off Robin Laurie from their door for ever, or could even be owing to the nasty events of the evening before making Ina, not to mention Albert, forget about her years-old and let us face it rather distant brush with death and just think about something else for a change.
Albert was certainly distracted, I could be sure. He was pacing up and down in front of the nearer of the two fireplaces, with his hands laced together behind him under his coat flaps, staring at the rug as he crossed it. Ina sat at the piano against the far wall. There was a great jumbled heap of sheet music on top of it and spilling on to the floor as though she had spent hours searching for just the right piece to suit the occasion. Since what she was still fingering away at in a desultory fashion was a Strauss polka, however, one could only conclude that she had given up.
‘Ah, Mrs Gilver,’ said Albert. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’ He had clearly suffered a great downturn in his view of himself since yesterday and there was to be no more ‘Dear Dandy’. On the other hand, he was too preoccupied to simper and the result, overall, was the most sensible speech I had ever heard fall from his lips. True, it was nothing of any import and could have been replaced by a smile and a wave but it was a refreshing change not to be tired of him already. ‘Have you come from the winter ground?’ he went on. ‘We have just had a visit from that dreadful man, Sergeant McClennan, and he said the circus folk are being questioned.’
Ina stopped playing and looked up.
‘You didn’t tell me that, Albert,’ she said. ‘Sergeant McClennan didn’t mention it either.’
‘You didn’t speak to the sergeant together?’ I asked, thinking it a very bad thing for the Wilsons if McClennan had deliberately separated them to go through his questions. That fate had befallen Alec and me once, in the past, and nothing I could imagine was more designed to make one feel shifty. Of course, when Alec and I had spent our uncomfortable spells in separate back rooms of an Edinburgh police station we had rather better reasons for feeling shifty than the policemen’s caution. I hoped that the same was not true of the Wilsons today.
‘If I had had my way my dear wife would not have had to speak to the man at all,’ said Wilson. ‘But he insisted she join us and give her impressions. I congratulate myself on keeping her away from the worst of it, though. Yes, I congratulate myself heartily on that.’ Then came the customary pause, presumably so that I could congratulate him too. Albert Wilson’s short leave from duty as an oddity was over.
‘Well, my dear,’ said Ina, ‘no one could say you haven’t taken excellent care of me throughout the whole sorry episode and since Mrs Gilver is here now – if you’ll stay and have some coffee with me, Dandy? – I think you would be more than justified if you returned to your own concerns.’
‘I have nothing pressing on me, my love,’ said Albert.
‘And would not tell me if you did,’ said Ina, bestowing a sweet smile on him.
‘That I should not.’
‘So, you see, I cannot help but worry that you are neglecting it all,’ Ina said, and she knitted her brow and pouted like a child in a soapflakes advertisement. It was sickening to see. ‘And then I worry that when it does catch up with you, you will be so busy that you’ll tire yourself and become ill and then I shall have to do without you more than I could bear or can bear even to imagine.’
Albert Wilson, as might be expected unless one knew in advance that he was a very unusual type of man, lapped all of this up and then trotted out of the room like a well-schooled pony. Ina and I listened to his footsteps crossing the dining room and then pattering away up a distant flight of stone steps – Benachally is one of those fearfully inconvenient houses with a spiral staircase at every corner and every bedroom leading out of another one. Eventually the sound reached us of a far-off door slamming shut and we both sat back, I against the plump velvet cushion at my back – and it always amazes me how the Wilsons’ cushions are never damp or musty despite that barn of a hall – and Ina against the open piano, her elbows crashing a jagged chord out of the keys.
‘Have you come from the circus now?’ she asked me. ‘This minute? Have you seen them this morning? How are they all?’
I nodded. This was heartening: if she had quizzed me on what the police were up to and what the gossip was, I should have worried even more than I was worrying, but a sweet concern for how her circus friends were bearing up under their misfortune was a relief to behold.
‘I’ve seen Ma Cooke and Charlie,’ I told her.
‘No one else?’
‘Alec managed a quick word with … one of the clowns.’ I was not about to get embroiled in Miles Fanshawe’s rebirth as Merryman. ‘And he went to visit Harlequin too. There at least the news is all good – calm as a millpond and full of breakfast, apparently.’
‘And what are the police making of it?’ Ina asked. ‘Sergeant McClennan wouldn’t tell us a thing, no matter what Albert says about having to shield me.’
‘Inspector Hutchinson is making plenty of it,’ I said and she sat forward, jangling the piano keys again. ‘That grey hair and grey face are a brilliant disguise. He’s actually a remarkable man, rather terrifyingly so, spouting new suspects and new theories like mushrooms – one shrinks from mentioning a
name to him.’
‘But whose name have you mentioned?’ said Ina, looking alarmed. ‘Dandy, what have you done?’
‘Oh well, Topsy’s – inadvertently – and my sons are in for a roasting too, I rather think.’ I was looking around the room as I spoke, very airy, but I did manage to see Ina sit back, just a little.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘That’s all right then. I mean, Topsy and your two were in the ring when it happened, weren’t they?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and speaking of who was where …’
‘If only it had happened earlier,’ said Ina, speaking over me. ‘While everyone was still in the ring, then there would be no suspicion at all and the police wouldn’t even be here. It’s so horrid to know that they’re all being pestered by that nasty sergeant and if Inspector Hutchinson really is as fanciful as you say then goodness knows what he’ll come up with and how they’ll suffer.’
I felt myself forming the words to ask her who would suffer more than Anastasia had, but they sounded waspish even in the planning and I felt sure that waspishness was not the best tone to adopt since I had questions needing answers.
‘Hmm,’ I contented myself with saying and when I continued I tried very hard to speak gently. ‘Anyway, Ma and the Wolfs were back there throughout, so there would always have been someone under suspicion. And besides, nasty as it is – and I quite agree about the sergeant, what a terror – one can hardly let it pass unchallenged. Ana died, my dear Ina, a young girl died.’
‘Don’t,’ said Ina, her eyes filling. ‘It was a horrid accident. Let’s not think about it. Don’t make me.’
‘How can you be so sure it was?’ I asked. ‘Did you see something?’
‘What do you mean?’ she said, stopping with her handkerchief up to her eyes and staring past it at me. ‘I saw what you saw. Less, even. I thank the Lord I did not see what happened … behind … afterwards. I couldn’t bear to see the things you have to look at, Dandy. I do think you’re wonderful for being able to face it.’
The Winter Ground Page 18