The Winter Ground

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Confirmation,’ Alec murmured at my side. ‘Oh, very clever.’

  And indeed the hint that the inspector knew everything already and that denials would be useless and make Pa look a fool did the trick rather neatly.

  ‘I asked them if they’d lifted the box,’ he said.

  ‘I know you did,’ said the inspector. ‘Little Sallie heard you. She’s a delightful unspoiled little lass, isn’t she? And what about you, Mother dear? Can you bring to mind what you said to your lads in preparation for them speaking to me?’

  ‘Now, come, please, Inspector,’ I said. ‘Yes, I spoke to them but I will not agree to “preparation”.’

  ‘My apologies,’ said Hutchinson. ‘I’m afraid in my line of work I do get in the habit of talking very plainly and I forget what’s expected in polite company sometimes.’ This, of course, was no apology at all but I settled for it.

  ‘I asked them whether they thought Anastasia had decided to leave the ring or whether her pony had run off with her,’ I said, which was true, to the best of my memory.

  ‘And they told you what they’ve just told all of us here now?’ said the inspector. ‘Ears back, eyes rolling, bit between the teeth.’ One knew he was talking about the pony but one had to marvel.

  ‘More or less,’ I said, but then something got the better of me. I like to think it was sheer selfless integrity and honour. ‘Less,’ I said. ‘Much, much less. They did think, on reflection, that Harlequin was the one who decided to leave, not Ana, but there was none of the …’

  ‘Incidental colour,’ finished the inspector. ‘I thought as much.’

  Donald and Teddy did not quite seem to be following all of this, but they understood enough to know they were in trouble and they each pulled their trick of choice. Teddy looked younger in that way he still can; a remarkably effective talent which stays Hugh’s hand and Nanny’s tongue. Donald, years past such ploys, put all his efforts into such a look of cow-eyed innocence that he took on the appearance of a halfwit.

  ‘Now, listen to me and listen well,’ Inspector Hutchinson said to them, ‘I’m going to forget everything you’ve told me and we’ll start on a fresh page. Agreed?’

  The boys nodded, looks of youth and innocence going strong.

  ‘Very good. Did the pony run off with that poor girl last night or not?’ said the inspector, breaking his own rule of how to ask questions.

  ‘Yes,’ said my sons, in unison.

  ‘Just as well for you,’ thundered Hutchinson; the fresh sheet had clearly been a ploy.

  Before he could continue, although he looked as though he would have had plenty more to say to fill a silence if he had to, we were all distracted by the sound of a motor car approaching and drawing up outside.

  ‘Reinforcements, Inspector?’ Alec said, but it sounded to me like a far more expensive engine than that of the policemen’s Belsize, sounded rather horribly familiar in fact. I excused myself to the others and made my way to the door.

  Hugh was standing with one foot still inside the Rolls, but with his arms crossed, which made him look rather insecurely balanced, like one of those rugby football players posing with a ball, except that they are usually flanked by supporting team mates and so less likely to topple.

  ‘Hugh!’ I said. ‘What brings—’

  ‘Is it true?’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry, Hugh, is what true?’ I answered, but a sickly feeling was beginning to grow in me, starting in the middle and spreading rapidly outwards.

  ‘Was someone really murdered here last night?’

  ‘The police are tending towards an acci—’ I bit my lip. ‘I mean, yes. Possibly. At least, she did die.’

  ‘And the boys?’ said Hugh, his voice cold enough to freeze the rum coffee in the flask in my pocket at ten paces.

  ‘Are quite well,’ I replied. ‘They’ve been jolly helpful, actually. They saw something useful and have told the inspector all about it.’

  ‘They saw it?’ It might have been my imagination but I thought he swayed slightly.

  ‘No, of course not! Honestly, Hugh. The girl died in the backstage area and the boys were in the ring.’ Too late, I remembered that I had not, in the end, told him this. ‘… side seats, watching the show,’ I added, and it would have been unconvincing even if I had been able to meet his eye while I said it.

  ‘I cannot believe it of you,’ Hugh said, shaking his head slowly. ‘That you would come home alone and leave them here in this den of—’

  ‘Den of nothing,’ I said, hotly. ‘Den of perfectly charming people who happen not to be lairds of estates but clowns and acrobats instead.’

  ‘Den of tricksters and sharpers,’ continued Hugh, ‘and at least one out and out rogue, one murderer, Dandy, for God’s sake, and you left them absolutely unprotected in a flimsy little shepherds’ hut.’

  ‘It was robust enough when you suggested it,’ I reminded him. ‘And they weren’t unprotected – they had Bunty – and besides, they weren’t in the shepherds’ hut last night anyway. They were with the Prebrezhenskys.’

  ‘The who?’ squeaked Hugh. I felt I had landed what I believe is known in sporting circles as a knock-out punch and I sailed on.

  ‘Zoya and Kolya Prebrezhensky. The Russian foot-jugglers. They were well looked after and breakfasted off … Oh God.’ I may even have take a step backwards.

  ‘Russians?’ said Hugh. He uncrossed his arms at last and gripped the top of the motor-car door for support. ‘Russians?’

  ‘I’ll just fetch the boys,’ I said. ‘And you can run them home.’

  Surprisingly to me, they were only too willing to comply, almost eager to be gone actually. Perhaps the gravity of what had passed here had finally struck them, nailed home by the inspector.

  I tried to encourage Bunty into the motor car after them, meaning it as a gesture of affection and generosity. Hugh, of course, took it as an impudent assumption that I could offload my dog on him without even asking and shot me a glare.

  ‘I’ll follow on as soon as I can,’ I said as the boys were shutting themselves in.

  ‘No rush,’ said Hugh.

  ‘Now look,’ I began, for out and out rudeness in the boys’ hearing was stepping beyond our unwritten rule. Hugh slammed the door shut and walked around to stand beside me. I stretched up and pecked him on the cheek – for the benefit of the many eyes I felt sure were watching from behind lace curtains – and he managed not to recoil although his face darkened. ‘Look,’ I repeated, ‘I can see where your feelings have sprung from.’ Hugh dislikes accusations of emotion almost as much as he dislikes implications that he is an open book to me, and I knew it. ‘I admit, I did feel a twinge of something much the same.’ Shared feelings now; he would not stand for much of this. ‘But the very fact I could forget the boys last night means that deep down I knew they were fine. If I hadn’t known the circus folk were all good eggs, bricks and fine fellows, I daresay I should have been as rattled as you.’

  There were so very many sources of offence in this short speech that Hugh was still working his mouth silently, trying to choose an opener, when Inspector Hutchinson drew up beside us.

  ‘That you off, sir?’ he said, affably. ‘Fair enough, I know where they are if I need them. And I’ll try not to keep your good lady from you any longer than I have to. I’m just grateful you’re not whisking her home right now. Thank you.’

  ‘You’re very welcome,’ said Hugh, and his meaning was clear.

  ‘Ah well,’ said the inspector, as we stood watching the Rolls pull away. ‘Understandable, eh? It must have sounded bad repeated at third hand from the back of the butcher’s van or whatever.’

  ‘I wonder how he did hear?’ I said, this thought occurring to me for the first time.

  ‘Well, however it was, you can be sure it got embellished in the telling. She’ll have had a dagger through her heart by teatime. And I’ll not get my quiet pint of stout tonight.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You can be
sure every roofer and carter in the Royal will have a better idea than me of what’s happened and they won’t stand for “an accident”, by Jove they won’t. See, if it was the superintendent who had to listen to all the experts in the public bar he’d not be so quick to haul me back to the station and get me on to the next thing, would he? But he’s a teetotaller, and you just don’t get the same dedication to gossip in a church choir. And he’s not married either, so he won’t be hearing about it when he gets home.’

  ‘Has your superintendent hauled you?’ I said. ‘When? Has he telephoned to the castle?’

  ‘Not him,’ said Hutchinson. ‘He’d never pester the big house. But I can feel it coming like thunder.’

  ‘How could he?’

  ‘Surgeon’s report,’ said Inspector Hutchinson. ‘That and the fact that it’s circus folk, I’m sorry to say. Different if it was locals, respectable types, with their birth and marriage lines and all their school reports tied up in a bow. We can’t even get a name for this poor girl.’

  ‘Really? Nothing amongst her things?’

  ‘Not a sausage. Not so much as a letter from an old chum to be found and it’s bothering my super’s tidy mind. He’ll be glad to close the door on the whole thing.’

  ‘Do you think he’s right?’

  ‘No fear,’ said the inspector with a dry bark of a laugh. ‘I can feel that too, more like an earthquake than thunder – rumbling away underneath us. Not that I’ve ever felt an earthquake, mind, but you know what I mean. You’ll not give up, madam, will you?’

  ‘I certainly will not,’ I assured him.

  ‘But for all the underground turmoil,’ the inspector went on, ‘I can’t believe it was any of them that was off when it happened.’

  ‘Did you look for a trip or trap of any kind?’ I asked.

  ‘Sergeant McClellan did,’ Hutchinson said. ‘He couldn’t find a sniff of one and sniffing things out’s his party turn.’

  ‘If you could be said to have a party turn,’ I replied, ‘although it’s rather disrespectful to put it that way, I should have said it was … intuiting with such perspicacity as to appear psychic.’

  ‘Some parties you must go to, madam,’ the inspector said. ‘Aye well, there’s not much springs to my mind out of the spirit world or anywhere else. Except for this: Topsy’s stuff was slashed and then hidden or swapped. Ana’s stuff was swapped only – no damage done. That seems significant to me. And I’d like to know why old Ma Cooke and Charlie are in cahoots, wouldn’t you? The boss man has got wind of it, if you ask me, whatever it is. He’s a wee thundercloud all of his own.’

  ‘Thank you, Inspector,’ I said. ‘That gives me something to start on.’

  ‘That’s my—’ He broke off, but I should not have been offended to have been called his girl. Very far from it. I felt my chest swell.

  ‘And I assume that if I uncover anything incontrovertible, you’ll be ready to rejoin the fray.’

  ‘Just whistle,’ he said.

  ‘I’m surprised, though, Inspector Hutchinson, that you can’t talk your boss round. I should have said – and I mean this most admiringly, I assure you – that you could talk him off the edge of a cliff if need be.’

  ‘Oh, I could, I could,’ said Hutchinson. ‘Of course. Only I like to play my cards a wee bit closer. If I told him everything, the jail would be full and the caravans empty and I don’t want that.’

  I nodded.

  ‘That’s exactly what I was just trying to tell my husband,’ I said. ‘As bad as it looks, these circus folk are decent, honest – well, honest-ish and if not then it’s for noble reasons – and don’t deserve any of this really. They don’t even suspect one another. They can’t quite believe she fell either, mind you. It’s left them utterly bewildered.’

  ‘Aye, either that or we’re a pair of fools,’ Inspector Hutchinson said and, tipping his hat, he left me.

  I told myself that, while no one would ever find the notion outlandish when applied to me, Inspector Hutchinson was so very far from being a fool on his own that even with me beside him we did not add up to a pair and so I managed a very confident smile with which to greet Alec as he joined me.

  ‘Thought it best to lie low during the touching family reunion,’ he murmured. ‘Is he in a complete rage then?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ I said.

  ‘He does have a point, you know,’ Alec reasoned. It is one of the more annoying of his habits to champion Hugh to me at odd moments. I briefly considered trying to construct a defence but there were far more serious matters at hand.

  ‘So where are we?’ I said. ‘What do we think about Ina after what the inspector told us? Are you persuaded?’

  ‘Not entirely,’ Alec said.

  ‘Me too. Neither, I mean. Except that she did seem to know what it was that I shouted out while I was crossing the ring.’

  ‘I was puzzling about that,’ said Alec, ‘then I realised that she would still have heard you from outside the tent or round the back somewhere. Canvas, darling, you see? Anyway, we can check.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, that’s the bad news – Robin Laurie, I’m afraid. He must have seen her leave and return. He’d be able to pin it down for us. And he could confirm whether she really did put her head down. But you’ll have to get off after him as soon as you possibly can because the memory won’t be a significant one and it will start to fade very quickly.’

  ‘I?’ I said, crossing my arms. ‘I’ll have to go running after him? Why not you?’

  ‘Because I’m going to stay here and use my old chumship with Miles Fanshawe to get closer than ever to the rest of them.’ This was unanswerable and Alec, knowing as much, gave me a rather sly grin. ‘I’m pretty sure I can reignite the old school spirit and turn it to good use.’

  ‘What is the old school spirit?’ I asked. ‘What’s the battle cry of the Harrovian?’

  ‘Let fortune attend those who dwell here,’ cried Alec, brandishing an imaginary and rather inapposite sword.

  ‘Hmph,’ I said. ‘Not exactly to the current point, is it?’

  ‘More impressive in Latin too,’ said Alec, putting the sword away. ‘But still, Miles for me and Robin Laurie for you.’

  ‘If I can even find him,’ I said. ‘He gets about, you know.’

  ‘He’s at Buckie,’ said Alec. ‘At the deathbed. And you’d better hurry, because as bad as it’s going to be for you to roll up now, crashing the funeral would be in very poor taste, don’t you agree?’

  12

  I still felt most acutely that I was being shunted offstage and leaving Alec in the thick of the action when I set out on the long drive north the next day. His central point could not be argued – I could certainly confirm Ina’s story by asking Robin Laurie – but, suspicious as her behaviour and her explanation for it were, I did not seriously entertain any idea that she was bound up in Ana’s death. Even if there had been time, there was no motive, and even if there were some motive I could not imagine, the act itself – the only act Ina could have performed – was so unlikely to have had the outcome it did that surely she would not have risked it: a circus girl shoved off her pony should have, would have in nine cases out of ten, simply rolled over and leapt to her feet, blazing angry and shouting the name of her attacker to the top of the king pole. If the act had been more than that, if Anastasia had been grabbed off her pony and her poor head deliberately struck against that cold, hard ground (I shrank from the very thought of it), then I was far from sure that it could have been the wan and willowy Mrs Wilson behind it.

  All in all, then, a day’s drive and my uncomfortable insinuation of myself into a house of illness gearing up to be a house of mourning appeared to be taking diligence to its farthest point, and I was sulking. To be sure, I relished the prospect of keeping out of Hugh’s way for another day; I had stayed out late the night before, scratching supper with Alec at Dunelgar, and had risen long before dawn to get away before the household was stirring. I was mildly inter
ested, too, to have another crack at the puzzle of Robin Laurie and Ina Wilson, for the animosity of the one made no more sense than the leering familiarity of the other. Still, I could not help but feel that Alec had kept the plum for himself and was worming his way into it in rather a selfish way, while I was being sent packing with a pat and a sandwich like an unwelcome child, not to return before bedtime.

  I had forewarned them of my visit, stopping just short of actually asking permission to arrive (in case I was refused), and since this necessitated a telephone call it was hard to resist the temptation to let the telephone call take care of the entire business.

  ‘Be my guest,’ Alec had said – had drawled, in fact – lying back in his chair and stretching his legs out in front of him. He applied a match to his pipe and disappeared behind belching plumes of smoke, looking quite diabolical. ‘If you can work a telephone call around to the point and get the matter tied up neatly then three hurrahs for you. I shall listen and learn.’

  Of course, he was right. I ascertained from the butler that there was no blanket ban on visitors and when Robin was summoned to the telephone I delivered the little speech Alec and I had concocted about my passing Cullen on my way to a visit at Cairnbulg and my wondering if I might stop in.

  ‘But of course,’ said Robin Laurie. ‘Of course.’ He spoke with such an air of understanding and with so little surprise that one could not miss the implication: that of course I wanted to see him; that ladies begging to see him was a cross which manfully he bore. On the other hand the implication was so subtly laid down that one could not counter it – to deny it would be to confirm it.

  ‘Latish on tomorrow then,’ I said. ‘I shan’t want dinner,’ and, blushing, I rang off. ‘Oh, shut up,’ I said to Alec, who had not spoken.

  Cullen, the estate of the lords of Banff and Buckie, unrivalled bosses of this particular corner of the eastern Highlands, at least since the MacDuff family, earls of Fife, had turned up their toes centuries before (for reasons never quite clear to me despite Hugh’s retellings, although I could not help slightly blaming Shakespeare), was a large square block of uninspiring scrub farmland bound on the north by battered coast, where grey villages alternated with grey cliffs, and unleavened by anything so dashing as a glen, a forest or even a heathery moor. (And when one finds oneself regretting the absence of a heathery moor, one knows one has arrived somewhere one should not linger.) The first time I had ever endured the endless slog up the side of the Spey and the even more endless chug along the coast road eastwards to Cairnbulg – for the friends were true, except in that they were Hugh’s friends and I would not voluntarily have paid them a visit if they had been giving away mink coats and diamonds – I had remarked aloud that the north coast was not actually that much worse than Perthshire. This was in the early years of my marriage before, by a combination of my learning some tact and Hugh’s stopping listening, I ceased giving daily affront. Hugh, who had not yet given up trying to educate me, informed me in clipped tones that we were not currently on the north coast, that the north coast was a hundred miles further up and was perfectly charming although not quite as lush as this, the Grampian coast. I had looked around at the dried-out grass, the sheep – who seemed, even for sheep, quite remarkably forlorn – and the few stunted trees, leafless already in September and bent over like crones by the ceaseless howling winds, and had said nothing.