The Winter Ground

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Albert Wilson?’ said Alec, grinning. ‘A ravager of maidens and a murderer of them? Come off it, darling. Robin Laurie, perhaps, but not little Mr Wilson.’

  ‘But it can’t have been Robin,’ I said, ‘because even though Ina slipped out for a moment she would have seen him either going or coming back again, wouldn’t she? And actually, she’d have seen Albert too. And anyway, why would Robin Laurie kill a circus rider?’

  ‘Why would anyone? Why would Ina Wilson? Or Albert? But there at least your point about his wife seeing him can be batted away. Wouldn’t she lie for him? If Albert Wilson enticed the circus here to bump off Anastasia – another fragrant expression, Dandy; I do cherish them – perhaps his wife knew and approved the plan.’

  ‘But why on earth would they let Robin Laurie fill the place with guests? And why would Albert pick such a moment to do it? And such an unlikely way too.’

  Alec lifted his hand and shushed me, frowning as he does to let me know that he is thinking.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said at last, ‘Albert Wilson planned to kill Anastasia. Ina knew and approved. Albert saw Laurie and Co. as just what they were – distractions, camouflage – and that’s why Ina was so livid to have Laurie arrive! But it worked and Ana is dead and that’s why Ina is full of the joys.’

  ‘But Robin Laurie would have seen Albert leave the tent. And anyway, no one in his right mind would hatch a plan to kill someone bare-handed by bashing her head against the frozen ground.’

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t,’ said Alec. ‘Perhaps he had a knife or a rope but he didn’t need to use them. Perhaps he is hugging himself in delight at his luck.’

  ‘Revolting!’ I said. ‘And why exactly would Robin keep quiet?’

  ‘No reason at all that I can imagine,’ said Alec. ‘But we’re going round in circles, Dandy. Let’s at least find out if the Wilsons had met her. And she them.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘I need to go to the castle anyway. I want to borrow their telephone and ring home.’

  Alec looked enquiringly at me.

  ‘I need to speak to … Oh Lord, a groom, really. But how could one engineer that? I suppose it’ll have to be Grant, sworn to secrecy. As though she needed another stick to beat me with.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Alec said.

  ‘Harlequin is coming to stay with us until all of this is over,’ I explained. ‘But to spare Pa’s blushes, he’s being removed from Benachally in the knacker’s van.’

  ‘Is there such a thing?’ said Alec.

  ‘A splendid one,’ I told him. ‘Peter McTurk – a black van with gold writing. You must have seen it. He ranges the length and breadth of the county but he lives in Bridge of Cally not five miles away. So I need to warn the head groom and beg him to keep quiet for me.’

  ‘I should say you do,’ said Alec, wide-eyed, highly diverted. ‘A pony being delivered out of the knacker’s van and into the stables at Gilverton? Hugh would explode, darling. Literally explode. You’d be a widow by tea.’

  * * *

  Albert was at home and so Ina, inevitably, was in her chair, under her rug, with her shawl about her shoulders and her feet up on a stool. Even still, how could Albert Wilson fail to see the change in her? Not only were her cheeks still blooming, her movements had an animation about them I had never seen; she plaited the fringes of her rug and polished the gilt studs on the scrolls of her chair arm with a restless fingertip and was altogether quite unlike the girl who always before had lain on her chaise like a length of dough in its tin, her hands in her lap as dead as a pair of empty gloves forgotten there.

  Albert smiled cautiously at Alec and me but, for a wriggling, awkward moment, no one spoke.

  ‘Any news of a funeral?’ said Alec at last. As an opener in the general sense it was a bit of a brick, but for our purposes I thought it an excellent one.

  ‘Poor girl,’ said Albert. ‘Thursday. Christmas Eve. Of course, I’m going to foot the bill and she will be buried here.’

  ‘That’s extraordinarily generous of you,’ I said, grasping the opportunity to get straight to the point. ‘You had got to know her well, then?’

  ‘No,’ said Albert Wilson. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘You mean you’d never seen her before the show that night?’

  ‘Oh, I’d seen her. I had a short conversation with her one day. I asked about her horse and she was quite rude in reply. Really most impolite which … why?’ he finished abruptly, staring at me. It was quite a convincing tack: if guilty, surely he would either have refused to answer or have demanded an explanation for the question right away. This had the air of him thinking on his feet and voicing his thoughts innocently as they came.

  I wished I had had the chance to mull over my next move with Alec in private, but I was almost sure I was right. I saw no reason that an innocent Wilson should not hear the truth and, on the other hand, if he did have something to hide his reaction would be worth getting. So I cleared my throat and spoke up.

  ‘I’m investigating the murder,’ I said. ‘For the Cookes.’ And I let it settle, watching Albert very closely, before going on. ‘I was engaged to investigate another, although possibly related matter, but then the murder happened and I … folded it into my brief.’

  ‘You’re invest …’ said Wilson. He was gaping like a cod. ‘Murder? But it was an accident. The police have gone. We’re having the funeral and Mr Cooke has even said that he’ll put on another show. How can you be speaking of murder and why would you … even if … what …?’ He ran out of breath or ideas, or perhaps both.

  ‘I think the police have got it wrong,’ I told him cheerfully. ‘And if I find any solid evidence I shall go and tell them so.’

  ‘You astonish me,’ Wilson said. ‘I can hardly credit it.’ He stared and blinked for a bit, but went on at last: ‘As I’m sure you will appreciate, I sincerely hope the police are right and you are mistaken, but I shall give you every assistance.’ There was something almost noble about the way he said it. ‘Now, why did you want to know if I was acquainted with— Oh, my!’ Albert Wilson rose to his feet as the penny dropped as though he and it were on a see-saw. ‘Oh, dear! Oh, my!’

  ‘Just to strike you off the list of suspects, naturally,’ said Alec, which only upset Wilson even more.

  ‘List of suspects?’ he wailed and sank back down. It was quite some time before he roused himself, but when he did the noble note was back mixed with just a pinch of petulance. ‘I cannot tell you anything about the unfortunate girl. I didn’t know her at all, only spoke to her that once. I don’t remember anything else. Mrs Cooke told me about the artistes – she’s a prodigious talker – but there were no introductions.’

  ‘As we thought,’ I said, still very brisk. ‘Well, thank you, Mr Wilson. That’s no end of help.’ I had been hoping that my tone of dismissal would see him off even though I was the guest in his house and indeed he rose to his feet again and, bowing slightly, took off at a trot to where the spiral staircase led to the sanctuary of his business room. I caught Alec’s eye as he left and we exchanged an agreement. That, we were both assured, had been completely genuine. Albert Wilson was not our man.

  ‘Poor Albert,’ said Ina, when he was gone. ‘You have a mischievous streak, Dandy, don’t you.’

  ‘And now, for the sake of completeness, you understand,’ said Alec, ‘how about you, Mrs Wilson, if you don’t mind? What can you tell us about Anastasia?’

  ‘I adored her,’ said Ina. ‘I adore all of them.’

  ‘You did know her then? You had talked to her and she to you?’

  ‘Of course,’ Ina said, looking rather puzzled at the question. ‘I had become very close to her, as a matter of fact. She and I could have been great friends.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘I found her difficult the only time I spoke to her at length.’

  ‘She was circus,’ said Ina. ‘No less part of it for not being born there. More so, if anything. It takes a splendid kind of girl to do what she did, wouldn’
t you say?’

  ‘So,’ said Alec, when we were alone again. ‘We believe Albert.’

  ‘Oh, Albert!’ I said, unable not to laugh at the memory.

  ‘Do we believe Ina?’

  ‘I’m less sure,’ I admitted. ‘There was something very odd about what she said, or at least about the way she said it, and I never saw any sign of this bosom friendship. Over-egging the pudding, if you ask me, and only making herself look more suspicious in the end.’

  ‘It’s easy enough to check,’ said Alec. ‘Someone must have seen them if they had been together enough to get as chummy as all that.’

  I could hardly remember the time when I had looked around the little ring of wagons and found it so cosy and charming. Now, they pressed inwards, each little window like a single eye watching the others. The circus people were going about their business with their heads bent and their mouths drawn down and every door was closed tight. My hand shook as I knocked at the Wolfs’ wagon, the nearest to Ana’s and the obvious place to start.

  Lally Wolf was sitting on her heels in the middle of the floor rummaging in a small trunk and sending wafts of camphor into the air.

  ‘Here they are,’ she said, dragging out a pair of enormous black trousers and holding them up. ‘I’ll get a suit for Tom out of these no trouble. Funeral’s tomorrow and my babbies haven’t a stitch of black to their names.’

  ‘I’m sorry to be disturbing you, Mrs Wolf.’

  ‘No, you’re fine there,’ she said. ‘Life goes on. We’ve a show to do right after we lay her, you know. Life goes on with the good and the bad all mixed in together.’

  ‘A show?’

  ‘Our show,’ said Mrs Wolf. ‘For them Wilsons. Like what we was always meant to.’

  ‘Actually, it was the Wilsons I wanted to ask you about. Well, Mrs Wilson, anyway. About her friendship with Anastasia.’

  ‘What friendship’s that?’ said Mrs Wolf. ‘My wagon looks right over at Ana’s and I never saw that Wilson donah going round there, and no more did Bill neither, because he’d of said – gossip that he is and he took an interest in the lass. Too much of a one, if anyone’s asking me.’

  Bill Wolf treated me to a long and speculative look, when I approached him.

  ‘The Tober-omey’s donah?’ he said. ‘What’s got you on to that?’

  ‘Do you know anything?’ I asked him. ‘If you really know something for sure, Bill, you must tell me. In all conscience, you must.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I know plenty and I say nothing,’ he rumbled. ‘I’ve learned my lesson. You stick your neck out and it gets you that.’ He snapped his fingers in my face, turned on his heel and left me. ‘Anyway,’ he said, over his shoulder, ‘Charlie Cooke’s the one to ask about Ana. Not me.’

  * * *

  ‘Oh, can you not just leave us be?’ said Charlie. ‘Let us lay her to her rest. It’s bad enough having to go straight from the graveside to do a show.’

  ‘It does seem callous of Mr Wilson to ask you,’ I said. ‘And if Mrs Wilson was fond of Ana I can’t understand her letting it happen.’

  ‘Never you mind about Wilson,’ said Charlie. ‘It’ll not be him making us all jump.’

  ‘Your brother?’ I guessed.

  ‘He thinks he’s showing himself strong,’ said Charlie. ‘Same as with those lads of his – down on them so hard, he lost them. And that prad. The whole show.’

  ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves,’ I said half to myself.

  ‘That’s it exactly, missus,’ said Charlie, and his eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Mr Cooke,’ I said. ‘If you know something definite, you can tell me in the strictest confidence, but you must tell me. I can tell Inspector Hutchinson and we can stop the funeral.’

  That made him look up at me. His eyes were still shining but he smiled.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘That’s your way, isn’t it? Killing each other for a sideways look. But it’s not circus.’

  ‘Well, to be fair,’ I said, ‘it’s not anyone.’

  ‘What? I read the papers, you know. Affairs, inheritance, insurance, blackmail. Never a Sunday goes by but there’s not some babby killing its own pa for money or some chav squeezing the life out of his lady love for dancing with a sailor. But it’s not the circus way.’

  With some difficulty, I swallowed my affront.

  ‘So what did you mean?’ I said.

  ‘I’m a disappointed man, missus,’ he said, ‘never married and never will now, and I’m old enough to know that life isn’t a fairy tale. Or I should be anyway. My brother’s the boss of this show and if I can’t give him all the loyalty and buttoned lips he deserves then who can, eh? I’m old enough to know better.’

  ‘Rather older than him, in fact,’ I said as gently as I could. ‘Actually the head of the family, isn’t that so?’

  ‘Oh, you heard that, did you?’ said Charlie Cooke. ‘Well, it’s no secret. Aye, and I thought as late as this it might all come good for me.’

  ‘How’s that, Mr Cooke?’ I asked him, but he only shook his head and sighed.

  ‘No fool like an old fool,’ he said.

  At first I could not see Topsy; the ring was empty, the air still, and then I jumped at the sound of her voice floating down from the dome of the roof.

  ‘Are you after me, madam?’ She was knotting ropes on to the beam.

  ‘A brief word,’ I said. My voice sounded strange from the way my head was thrown back, very deep and threatening, not at all conducive to a fruitful interview. ‘Are you up there for the duration?’ I said. ‘Or can you come down?’

  ‘If only,’ said Topsy. ‘Way things are these days I wish I could just stay up here out of it all. Mind out there, madam, a minute.’

  I stepped back towards the ring fence and Topsy sent two ropes tumbling down to hang with their looped ends dancing above the ring. Then she shuffled along the beam and grasped the pole to climb down to me.

  ‘Trouble is,’ she went on, joining me on the ground and going to tug on the ropes, ‘you still see it all even if you’re up and away. See even more of it from up there sometimes.’

  She spoke carelessly enough, but her words struck me.

  ‘You don’t mean …? You didn’t see what happened to Ana that night, did you?’

  ‘No,’ said Topsy. ‘Don’t know whether to say “worse luck” or “thank God”, mind. If I’d have turned me round I could have seen it, but I was facing out. Never saw a thing. And I was down before anyone knew what had happened.’

  ‘A pity,’ I said. ‘Anyway, what I wanted to ask you, Topsy, was something else you might have seen, actually. Mrs Wilson and Anastasia. Did you ever see them together?’

  ‘Mrs Wilson?’ said Topsy. She had been tying wooden rings to the ends of her ropes with a series of complicated knots, but she stopped now and stared at me. ‘Sure it makes more sense than any of us, but why?’

  ‘I’m only asking if they knew one another,’ I insisted, but there was no fooling Topsy.

  ‘I’m keeping out of it,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what happened or what’s happening now or what’s going to, but I’ve done enough.’

  ‘What have you done?’

  She shook her head until her curls bounced.

  ‘I thought I was so smart and I’ve just made a mess of everything.’ She was beginning to sound ragged and looked as though she might cry. ‘I can’t help you, madam. I never saw a thing.’

  I was getting precisely nowhere and was stirring up not even hornets’ nests, for at least hornets come right out and sting one in an honest fashion, but rather wisps of ghosts of hornets which threatened to sting but disappeared when one swatted at them. So I rapped rather more sharply than was warranted on Andrew Merryman’s door and could hardly blame him for opening the top half and peering out rather than calling a welcome. When he saw who it was, though, he unfastened the bottom and waved me inside where, sitting down again, he looked like some kind of giant insect, his knee
s around his ears and his elbows out to the sides, while he stitched at an enormous patchwork garment with a tiny needle. There seemed to be much more sewing involved in a circus life than I could easily manage, even if I ever got used to the box-beds and ashy potatoes.

  ‘A quick question, Mr Merryman,’ I said. ‘It’s about Mrs Wilson and Anastasia, and how well they knew one another.’

  ‘Hardly at all,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘You know that for a fact?’

  ‘Yes. Why? Do you think Mrs Wilson would be in danger if Ana had confided something to her before she died?’

  ‘Confided what?’ I asked, astonished.

  ‘I’ve no idea but why else would you be asking?’

  I had to disagree with Alec; this was no dwam and the briskness seemed to strike up an answering briskness in me.

  ‘I’m asking because despite the fact that the police have given up on Ana and she is to be buried and forgotten and all as you were, I’m still trying to solve a murder.’

  ‘No one would have murdered her,’ he said. ‘It’s not circus.’

  ‘Good Lord, not you too!’ I cried.

  ‘It’s a hard thing to explain to an outsider,’ he began.

  ‘Oh, come now, Mr Fanshawe,’ I said. ‘If I am an outsider then so are you. And, more to the point, so is Mrs Wilson.’

  ‘Mrs Wilson?’ he said, looking puzzled. Then his mouth dropped open. ‘Is that why you’re asking about her? What on earth would make you think that Mrs Wilson had anything to do with it?’

  ‘Honestly?’ I asked. ‘It’s a straw and I’m clutching at it. Mrs Wilson … is not being herself. But then, no one is. You’re not, Bill, Topsy, Pa, Charlie – everyone is hiding something.’

  ‘How true,’ said Andrew. ‘And you missed out Tiny.’

  ‘You’ve come from Andrew’s, han’t you?’ said Tiny, crinkling his eyes at me. ‘I can always tell. We’ve got a trick we play in t’big towns, sometimes. We put on our checked suits and yellow bowlers and do quick swaps in café windows. Get it? Some flatty looks over, sees Andrew, looks away and back, sees me, goes to get his mates and we swaps again. Nearabout caused a tram crash one time.’