A Step So Grave
Page 18
Mitten nodded. ‘I reckoned when he heard he had a sort of a brainstorm and blacked out. It happened once before, just after he came home from the war.’
‘And so you suspect him,’ I said. ‘I understand that you suspect him. But do you have any proof?’
‘Yes,’ said Mitten, the word torn from his mouth with him biting at it as if to hold it in. We waited. ‘My mother told me that my father had encouraged Cherry to do the flowers for the party. At breakfast time when she was teasing Lachlan about taking part in a snowball fight and Lach was breathing fire about her “delicate condition”, my father made a strong case to Cherry that she should go to the flower room and do the birthday flowers instead. There was no explanation for that. He has never taken an interest in feminine matters such as party decorations in his life and I don’t think I can remember him ever telling Cherry what to do before or since.’
‘It struck me as odd at the time,’ I said, remembering.
‘My father left Lady Love in the flower room to die and he sent Cherry to “find” her. He didn’t know she’d come round and wandered off. Or – if you’re right – been moved by someone.’
‘But it’s hardly conclusive,’ said Alec. ‘Even if you’re right.’
‘That’s not all,’ said Mitten. ‘He had her woollen necklace in his pocket. It was bloody and soaked but I knew what it was.’
That was rather damning. I struggled to find an innocent explanation and failed. ‘How did you find it?’ I asked him.
‘He collapsed,’ Mitten said. ‘After her body was found in the garden that night. He went to pieces, shaking and … well, drooling, if you must know. It was a terrible sight. He looked like a lunatic, sitting curled up with his hands round his shoulders and his mouth hanging open. Long trails of spit hanging down to his chest.’
‘Steady on,’ Alec said. He still, on occasion, acted as though I were a delicate flower to be protected from life’s ugliness.
‘I found him like that. In his bedroom. Well, the room they sleep in when they stay here overnight. He doesn’t have a dressing room. All these empty rooms and they’re expected to bunk in together.’
‘They have a cottage,’ I said. Perhaps unkindly, but it was hard to take this boy complaining that the Dunnochs’ generosity was not generous enough.
‘And so I put him to bed,’ Mitten said. ‘And it was when I was undressing him that I found the necklet, folded in his shirt pocket – he was still wearing a soft shirt, you know. We hadn’t changed, what with all the worry and upset that day. I didn’t know what was in the pocket at first. It had soaked through and made a stain, but when I drew it out, it was Lady Love’s woollen necklet that Mrs McReadie had given her the night before.’
‘Are you sure about the blood? Might it not have been dye from the wool?’
Mitten shook his head. ‘It was blood. I could smell it.’
‘And it was definitely Lady Love’s necklet?’ I said.
‘Oh yes,’ said Mitten. ‘When Mrs McReadie brought Cherry’s and mine to us the night before, Cherry made a point of looking at what knots Mrs Mac had tied into her mother’s necklet. Since it was her birthday, you see. It was Lach we were supposed to be favouring, but … It’s going to sound quite mad if I tell you.’
‘On her fiftieth birthday, Lady Love would be particularly interesting to all manner of demons and spirits and if she was going to bring herself to their notice by wearing a spell asking for help, then she had to be protected while she did so.’
Mitten stared at me round-eyed and I have to say I was caught between pride and horror at how it had all tripped off my tongue.
‘We spent one wedding season with Aberdeenshire fisherfolk,’ Alec said. ‘They make you Highlanders look like scientists in white coats.’
‘Well, at least you see what I mean,’ said Mitten. ‘I would have recognised Lady Love’s necklet anywhere. It was quite different from the others.’
‘And why do you suppose your father had it in his pocket?’ I said.
‘Because killing someone with it round her neck would bring all the black luck back to the killer,’ said Mitten.
‘So he removed it beforehand.’
Alec whistled.
‘I know it makes him sound like some sort of credulous fool,’ Mitten said. ‘But he had a very hard war and he hasn’t been the same since.’
‘If a man is a murderer, I don’t really worry about how foolish or credulous he is when deciding what I think of him,’ I said. ‘But if your father removed the necklet before the attack, why would it be bloody?’
Mitten sat back again, just as slackly as before, although this time he managed not to knock his head on the wall behind him.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is a very good question, Mrs Gilver. Why would it? That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘So do we have your permission to talk to your father, please?’ I said.
‘Yes!’ Mitten seized on it, as I thought he well might. It did not last, however. ‘Well, no,’ he added. ‘As I told you, he’s not as robust as he looks. It might be better if I took care of it, actually.’
‘Or I,’ Alec said. ‘I think I’m probably the one out of the three of us best qualified for the job, don’t you? Where was Dickie when he picked up his shell shock? Do you know? Does he talk about it?’
Mitten shrugged. ‘France,’ he said.
‘What year?’ said Alec.
‘Fifteen.’
‘Wipers probably,’ Alec said. ‘Don’t worry, Mitten. I won’t add a single iota of upset to what he’s got on his back already. I would never forgive myself for it. And I’ve got about half a platoon of chums who’d come back and haunt me the rest of my days.’
15
In the time we had spent interrogating Mitten in the flower room, Applecross House had shifted into a higher gear on the journey towards the party that evening. I suspected Grant’s hand in much of it; I thought I recognised the dazed look on the faces of the two footmen as they rushed about and my hunch was confirmed by the news that Dickie Tibball – whom we asked after, casually – had gone along to the Clachan manse.
‘To escape the dervish,’ said Lord Ross. ‘Although the official explanation is that I might need me chair before the end of the night and the one along there is less battered and muddy. LL bought me a spanking new one for the new house, don’t you know.’
Cherry and Mallory too were exhibiting the signs of having been whipped up into silliness. Cherry was out of her overalls and wrapped in a white satin robe with her hair wound around rollers and pinned to her head so that she looked a little like a cauliflower. She and Mallory were both sporting blood-red fingernails and when I raised an eyebrow Mallory shook off her slipper and revealed toenails to match.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘They won’t show under my dancing slippers. But it does feel rather delicious. Are all Perthshire ladies’ maids as splendid as Grant? I wasn’t going to bother but look at my eyebrows! I’d put Greta Garbo to shame.’
‘Can I come with you?’ I said to Alec once I had detached myself from the giggling. ‘Or do you think you need to speak to Dickie soldier to solider?’
Alec snorted. He has a marvellous menu of snorts and I had grown to recognise most of them, but this latest was something new.
‘Do you despise me for even asking?’ I said. ‘I apologise in that case. But can I at least ask you to do something for me? Please take notes. Take my notebook, if you like. Take my propelling pencil. But don’t leave it to chance.’
‘You’d trust me with your propelling pencil?’ said Alec, putting a hand to his chest.
‘Oh, shut up,’ I said. ‘Just indulge me.’
‘No need,’ said Alec. ‘I want you to come along. I’m not worried about Dickie Tibball. He’s faking.’
‘What? How do you know? You’ve barely met the man.’
‘He witnessed a great big dog crashing through a closed window and was fine?’ Alec said. ‘He heard a bloodcurdling scream in the n
ight and went rushing straight towards the source of the noise? He committed a murder, then sat calmly at breakfast encouraging his daughter-in-law to go and find the body? I think not, Dandy.’
‘But isn’t it a sort of mounting scale?’ I said. We were on our way northwards round the bay, and I was glad to be out of that house, away from the rooms where dogs crashed through windows and screams were heard; rooms where dolls were hidden in drawers and corpses moved.
‘How do you mean?’ Alec said.
‘Lashing out and then backing away, telling oneself it can’t have been real. He could have managed that. And then at the end, out in the dark and the rain, seeing it again, knowing it was true. That might have just been the straw that broke him. Couldn’t it have happened that way?’
‘We’ll see,’ Alec said and we walked in silence the rest of the way.
The Clachan manse, I saw upon entering it, could not have been more different from Applecross. Instead of ancient stones here was new plaster, freshly distempered. In place of the cavernous fireplaces, here were radiators hanging on the walls and joined together by pipes that snaked round the skirting boards. There were no mouldering Turkey carpets here, nor tapestries, nor crumbling faded curtains needing glass roses in their folds to hide their dusty age. Here the floorboards were pale and polished and the walls were smooth and unmarked by sooty candles. White shutters flanked the windows and the empty rooms smelled of newness and cleanness. Most remarkable of all was that there were no flowers: no chintz, no sprigged muslin, no horticultural wallpaper, no rosebud carpet.
‘I wouldn’t turn this place down if someone offered,’ Alec said.
‘It’s a bit poky,’ I said. ‘A drawing room and dining room and that’s your whack. One would have to be very chummy with one’s family. No separate fiefdoms.’ I saw him grinning. ‘Yes, that is what I mean. Hugh and I wouldn’t last ten minutes. Between his pipe-smoke and my devotion to Bunty we’d be at daggers drawn.’
‘Who is it that sits in a white room without a fire?’ Alec said. He had wandered over to the back of the long dining room and was looking out, presumably at the gardens.
‘Fanny Price,’ I said. ‘Mansfield Park. Insufferable prig, sitting by an empty grate with nothing but her rectitude to keep her warm.’
‘There was one thing Lady Love didn’t want to change,’ Alec said, turning and beckoning me over. I joined him and looked out. There were no apple trees and no labyrinth, but the little patch outside the Clachan manse was an exact replica of the knot garden at the centre of the labyrinth along the way, with a dovecote, a weathervane and numerous little teardrop-shaped flower beds formed by the loops and twists of hazel hurdles ten inches high, there to act their part until the spindly little box hedge got its roots down and spread its arms out. At the moment it was no more than a few well-spaced twigs. In the dark earth of the teardrop beds themselves, the few green nubs of early growth were beginning to burgeon. Nothing could have been more piteous and I heaved a sigh.
‘Is this a tryst?’ came a voice from behind us. Alec and I jumped and turned to see Dickie Tibball sitting in a gleaming basketwork wheeled chair, silhouetted in the doorway. The rubber tyres on its wheels had given him his silent approach.
‘Just checking that it’s in good working order,’ he said, leaping out of it and kicking its brake. ‘Lach thinks he might tire tonight and that chair he uses every day is a disgrace. He has never seen a path or a patch of grass or gravel he doesn’t firmly believe it can traverse. He once persuaded me to wheel him into the river so he could cast for salmon. It was a warm day but Lady Love just about throttled me when she found out.’
‘I’ll bet she did,’ I said. ‘Did he catch anything?’
‘There’s a good reason fisherman usually stand up to cast, even if they settle down to ruminate for quiet hours afterwards,’ said Tibball. ‘It wasn’t successful, no. But the main thing is that we tried. He tried. He kept trying all these years and look at him now. Up on his feet again. He’ll take Mallory down the aisle in June. Just you see if he doesn’t.’ He took a ragged breath at the end of all this.
‘Well, we’ll see,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you must understand, Mr Tibball, that I feel somewhat ambivalent about the wedding at the moment.’
He cocked his head and gave me a sharp look. ‘You think it’s too soon?’ he said. ‘I wondered about that too. But Biddy said I was being Victorian.’
‘I’d listen to Biddy, if I were you, old man,’ Alec said. ‘If one’s lucky enough to have a wife and all that.’
Tibball nodded uncomfortably, but said nothing.
I tried again, turning the tap just a little to let a slightly louder hiss of gas seep out and see if it reached his nose. ‘I wish I could be sure the police had got to the bottom of it, with this tramp story. I think that’s the sticking point for me.’
Perhaps the sanguine reactions of Cherry, Lachlan, Mallory and Mitten had lulled Alec and me into an unwarranted expectation of how my statement would be met. Certainly, what happened next came as a shock to both of us. Dickie Tibball’s face drained until it was an ugly grey and he folded in on himself, crumpling to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut. His eyes fluttered and his head lolled to the side.
‘Would you say that’s a confession?’ I asked Alec in a whisper. Tibball was already coming round. He blinked, then shuffled until he was sitting up, shaking his head and clearing his throat.
Alec put his hand out to the man and pulled him back to his feet, shushing away the mumbled apologies. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Don’t even dream of mentioning it. Is there anything we can do to help? Let me give you an arm over to the … Yes, just sit and rest on the windowsill for a moment. There’s no need to explain. Your son told us, but I’m afraid I didn’t realise the extent …’
‘It’s been twenty years,’ Tibball said. ‘Twenty years and every time I think it’s gone for good, back it comes.’
‘Would you like me to go away?’ I said. ‘I know women are no help at a time like this.’
‘No, no, quite the reverse,’ said Dickie Tibball. ‘You’re quite wrong there, Mrs Gilver. Gosh, there was a time when a man’s voice – the doctors and the orderlies – had me cowering in a corner and only a friendly girl of a nurse could coax me out again. And Biddy—’ His lip trembled. ‘I’d have been carted off to the loony bin long ago if it weren’t for my darling Biddy.’
‘It’s a rum old do, isn’t it?’ Alec said. ‘I keep thinking I’ve seen every kind of shell shock there is. What is it that sets you off, so we know not to do it? Or say it. Or whatever it is. If you know, that is. And just tell me to keep my nose out if you don’t.’
‘Oh, I know,’ said Dickie Tibball. ‘It’s got a fancy name and everything. Agoraphobia. Fear of open spaces.’
‘From the trenches?’ I said. It did not seem to add up.
‘No-man’s-land,’ said Tibball.
‘And – forgive me,’ I went on, ‘but how can you bear to live in this place? It’s all sky and sea and moortop.’
‘I don’t quite know how to explain it,’ Tibball said. ‘It was the name of the place at first. A’ Chomraich. The Sanctuary. And then Biddy told me that there was no road. No way in and no way out except by sea in a little boat. And when the sea is rough even that’s a non-starter. It sounded – when Biddy told me about the place she’d grown up – as if life here would be pretty much as snug as a bug in a rug. And so it was. More so than I imagined. Life at Lachlan’s pace suited me down to the ground, Biddy had Lady Love for fun. I wasn’t much fun in those early years, let me tell you. And when Mitten and Cherry’s eyes met across a turnip field and they married, it was a fairy tale.’
‘Then Lady Love built the bealach na bà,’ I said.
‘But I was so much better by then,’ said Tibball. Alec had produced a flask from his inside pocket and he wrested the stopper off. Dickie accepted it with a grateful nod and took a restoring swig. At last his colour grew a little less ghastly. ‘Besides,
it’s a terrible road! Well, you were on it yesterday; I don’t have to tell you. And it’s useless half the year.’
‘What about the pier?’ Alec said.
Tibball took another swig and nodded as he handed the flask back. ‘Yes, the pier did give me some mild collywobbles,’ he said. ‘But again, I’m rather better than I was. Perhaps it’ll be just what the doctor ordered when the time finally comes.’
‘And – do stop me if I’m prying too much,’ I said, ‘but what was it I said that caused you such anguish today?’
‘Well,’ said Tibball. He swallowed hard. ‘It’s this. If we have to leave. If I have to leave. If I lose Biddy and don’t live here any more I think I’ll be back as bad as I ever was again. Shaking in corners like an ill-used dog.’ He rubbed his hands over his face and then made a noise as though he had just splashed himself with cold water. ‘Of course, the tramp is nonsense. Everyone knows it and no one says it. But when you spoke of it, right out like that, the whole house of cards came tumbling down. Ha! And I with it.’
‘You mean …’said Alec.
‘I mean,’ said Tibball, ‘if the local bobbies actually solved the murder instead of playing along with this mythic tramp idea, I’d be out of here quicker than you could say knife.’
A thought formed in my head and was out of my mouth before I could stop it. ‘But wouldn’t a jail cell suit you down to the ground? One can’t get much more enclosed than that. And a crime of passion with a few doctors to give you a filthy bill of health wouldn’t be a matter of the noose. Would it?’
‘Me in a jail cell?’ said Tibball. ‘As an accessory, you mean? But I wasn’t thinking of myself, Mrs Gilver. I was thinking only of my darling Biddy. And a prison cell wouldn’t do for her at all.’
‘You …’ I said.
‘You think Biddy killed Lady Love?’ said Alec.
‘What have we been talking about for the last five minutes?’ Dickie said. It was, apparently a genuine question. Alec and I stared at one another, each wondering how to escape having to answer. Alec folded first.