A Step So Grave

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A Step So Grave Page 20

by Catriona McPherson


  ‘Have you brought another frock?’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you brought anything that can be ripped up and made into side gussets so I can walk in this frock?’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Very well then,’ I said. ‘This is an extremely difficult evening for me, Grant. It would have been a difficult evening in a bathrobe and slippers. I am juggling a good many different calls on my ingenuity: to act the proud mother, the innocent bystander and the willing recent recipient of more confidences than I can even remember. Not to mention the detective who is still trying to get hard evidence about a murder and has more or less promised not to rock the boat until tomorrow despite the fact that a cold-blooded murderess is going to be at this bloody party with me. Doing it trussed up like a string of onions is not going to help.’

  ‘Murderess?’ said Grant.

  ‘Biddy,’ I told her.

  ‘A lifetime of jealous envy bubbling up and boiling over?’

  I sank down onto the dressing stool and sighed. ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘What a sorry mess. For the proverbial two pins, I’d stay up here with Bunty and a chocolate pot.’ Bunty thumped her tail at the sound of her name but the fight had gone out of me. I would wear the ridiculous garment. I would let Grant do whatever she wanted to my hair. I would even let her paint my face as she deemed necessary. I just wanted to be done with it.

  Hugh, edging round the connecting door after a perfunctory knock, addressed me in a bewildered voice

  ‘Was that you cursing, Dandy?’ he said. ‘Have you decided I’m right to be angry after all? Because I’ve spent the whole afternoon trying to see it from your point of view. And, I have to say, failing.’

  ‘What?’ I said, trying to work my way back through the maze to whatever state of affairs Hugh and I had last discussed. ‘Oh. Well, yes. I mean, no. There’s no need to get Donald to jilt Mallory after all. Look, I’ll explain everything tomorrow. We need to get through tonight first.’ I could not bear the idea of telling Hugh about Biddy Tibball and having him lurk at her elbow glowering the whole evening through.

  ‘And is that what you’re planning to wear?’ he said, picking up the frock. ‘Won’t you be chilly?’ Grant gave a snort that she turned into a sneeze. ‘Especially if there are colds going about,’ Hugh added and withdrew to his dressing room again.

  I was chilly. I was, frankly, frozen to the marrow by the time I was dressed. For one thing, the hot-water boiler at Applecross House was not equal to the number of baths suddenly required to get all the Dunnochs, Tibballs and Gilvers ready for the ball. Mine, rather late in the running, was tepid and then Grant took an age to set my hair. When at last I wriggled into the mermaid frock my arms were mottled gooseflesh and the tip of my nose was pink. Even given that, though, it was spectacular. The shoulder ruffles made me look like a Hollywood star and the way the skirt clung to my hips and the tops of my legs made me blush, which at least warmed me up a little.

  ‘You’re going to make such an entrance,’ Grant said, working a bracelet over my hand and then, for some reason, shoving it up my forearm until it stuck.

  ‘So I imagine,’ I said, ‘given that the only way I can hope to get to the ground floor is to lie on the landing and roll down the stairs. And anyway, it’s Mallory’s night. I shouldn’t be taking any attention away from her.’

  Grant gave an entirely unconvincing start of surprise. ‘Didn’t you know I’ve been in correspondence with Miss Dunnoch about her dress for tonight?’ she said.

  ‘What have you done to the poor girl?’ I asked. ‘Is that where you’ve been until now? Is that why I hung about until the hot water was finished, waiting? Because you were dressing Mallory?’

  ‘As you said, madam, it’s her night,’ replied Grant. ‘Go down and see for yourself. And it’s perfectly simple to descend the stairs, by the way. You just turn about forty-five degrees to the left, to make use of the bias, and go down right foot first onto each step, with a good firm grip on the banister in case you forget.’

  ‘Oh, is that all?’ I said. ‘Silly me.’ But I did want to see Mallory; that much was true. So I set off across my bedroom and along the corridor, flinging each leg forward from the knee and feeling the unaccustomed but unmistakable sensation of my rear end twitching from side to side as I did so. Another, deeper, blush saw off my goose bumps before I was halfway to the stairs.

  I descended them with a lack of speed and an excess of wariness I had never seen outside an egg and spoon race and was thankful no one was around in the hall to watch me. Back on solid ground again I wiggled off in the direction of the dining room, where the cold cuts were to have been laid out. I tried not to think about how to get back up the stairs to the ballroom. Grant had not touched on that and I could not imagine.

  ‘Good Lord above,’ was Hugh’s pronouncement as I shimmered towards him. He was sitting in the middle of a group of men who had gathered at the north-east corner of the long table, putting much distance between themselves and the group of women gathered in the south-west near the fire. Cherry was in an empire line frock of an attractive deep coral that brought out the chestnut glints in her hair and took the top off her sunburn. Biddy was in the sort of matronly frock, solid and comfortable-looking, that I wished I was wearing. Mallory, though, was a wonderment. She was standing eating from a small plate on the mantelpiece, either because she could not sit without creasing her frock or, more likely, because she simply could not sit. Grant had triumphed. Her dress was paler than mine, more see-through than mine and clung even harder to her for even longer. She was encased like a sausage from rib to calf and there were no ruffles. The dress simply had a low cowl of fabric – exceedingly low! – across her décolletage and a slit up the front to let her fling her legs in front of her and approximate something that might be called walking. Her hair was pulled over from just above one ear and had been worked into something like a lotus blossom just above the other. Her eyes were twice their natural size and her lips were claret coloured and sharper than daggers.

  Donald stared at her, apparently astonished by the disappearance of the chummy, friendly girl he cared for in his way and the advent of this silver-screen vision sprung to implausible life before his eyes. Despite the fact that he was steadily forking folded slices of mustard-slathered roast beef into his mouth and could not possibly be feeling hungry, hungrily was the only word for the way he was looking at Mallory.

  ‘Can you sit, Dandy?’ Mallory said. ‘Or will you join me at the other end of the mantelpiece?’

  Biddy Tibball got fussily to her feet and started loading a plate for me from the sideboard. ‘Charred end or rare middle?’ she said, with a serving fork hovering over the beef plate.

  ‘Oh, whatever’s there,’ I said. ‘And not too much. I’m short of space.’

  ‘You do look lovely,’ Biddy said, so cravenly I wondered if Dickie had tipped her the wink and she thought sucking up would endear her despite everything. ‘And look at Mallory! She looks like an angel, doesn’t she? Oh, my heart breaks that her mother’s not here to see her.’

  I craned over one shoulder – much easier than trying to turn my body unless I was prepared to hop – and caught Alec’s eye. He nodded imperceptibly. Too far, his expression said. We could barely stomach it anyway, but if she was really going to wring her hands about the woman she had killed she really had gone a step too far.

  Accordingly, as we filed out of the dining room again – after the cold beef and a dish of stewed gooseberries that made me hope Mrs McReadie was saving her efforts for the party and that this was not an indication of the supper tables to come – I put a hand on Biddy’s arm.

  ‘Might I have a quiet word?’

  She turned on me a look so open, so frank, so friendly, that I wavered in my suspicions. Alec approaching from her other side, however, looked steely enough for both of us.

  ‘How can I help you?’ she said. ‘Oh. It’s not …? I mean, do you need to pay a visit? Do you need assistance?�
��

  I had not even considered that aspect of my incarceration in this silken straitjacket and my face fell. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks, actually. They’re very clever, these fashion designers, you know.’ It was a bare-faced lie. Whoever had designed this dress and Mallory’s was a practical joker whose victims were women and whose final triumph was that we paid him. ‘No, it’s just that we feel, Alec and I, increasingly uncomfortable about the way matters have been left.’

  Biddy had heard Alec coming up behind her and she turned to include him in her question.

  ‘Matters?’ she said. ‘What “matters”?’

  ‘We don’t believe, you see,’ said Alec, ‘that Lady Love was killed by a passing tramp. We believe that you know rather more about it than you have said.’

  Biddy’s face fell, the innocent curling smile replaced by welling tears and whitening cheeks. ‘Yes, you’re right. I do,’ she said. ‘Please let Mallory have tonight. If you let her have tonight, he will be gone in the morning.’

  ‘Who will?’ I said. ‘Death? One of its harbingers? Another crow? A bigger, blacker dog? A prefigurative vision of the next corpse?’

  Biddy blinked at me. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Are you feeling quite well, Dandy? You’re talking wildly.’

  I shook my head. ‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘That vision out on the moor was Lachlan himself, wasn’t it?’ Was it? It still troubled me that Cherry had called her father ‘fit as a fiddle’ on Valentine’s Day. ‘Who will be gone?’

  ‘The killer of course,’ Biddy said. ‘David Spencer.’

  I could not speak but Alec was made of sterner stuff.

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ he hissed. ‘The man’s still crossing the hall. He’ll hear you. But for God’s sake tell us what you know.’

  ‘Why would David Spencer kill Lady Love?’ I asked. ‘What would he care if she sold the estate?’

  ‘Sold the …?’ said Biddy. ‘Have you been talking to Dickie? He’s convinced I’m in a rage about Lady Love’s latest scheme. He never can believe that I adore him and wouldn’t change a thing if I had my life over again.’ She smiled, then grew solemn. ‘He wanted her to go away with him,’ she said. ‘That’s why he came. I – it’s terrible to admit it, I know – but I overheard them talking in the knot garden the day before her birthday. He was trying to persuade her. Oh he didn’t call it that. He said she had to see sense, face facts, admit that she had made a mistake, not let pride ruin the whole of her life but have the courage to call it quits. He told her he loved her. And she said she knew he did, had always known, and loved him too.’

  ‘He was rather cagey about why he had come all the way up in such treacherous weather,’ said Alec. ‘But we’d put him down as a friend of the family, hadn’t we Dandy? Or at least no more devoted to Lady Love than anyone else.’

  ‘He asked her to meet him at the dovecote after dark on the eve of her birthday, once everyone else was in bed.’ Tears gathered in Biddy’s eyes as she remembered. ‘I thought, when she was missing and yet he was still here – on the morning of her birthday itself, you know – that she had gone away to think it over. Packed her bags in case she decided to go through with the scheme and then curled up somewhere quiet to ponder it. When I heard the scream coming out of the dark that night, my first thought was that she’d met him at the dovecote like he asked, albeit a day late, but that she’d said no and he’d flown into a rage and set upon her.’

  ‘That’s why you knew where to run to!’ I said. ‘Straight out of the library to the dovecote like a homing pigeon. We thought that was suspicious, you see. We thought the only reason you’d know where to go was that you knew where the body was.’

  ‘I?’ said Biddy. ‘You thought I knew that my dearest LL was lying there in the cold and wet and I just left her? Why on earth would I? How could anyone who loved her do such a cruel heartless thing?’ She looked between Alec and me beseechingly, the tears in her eyes now so many that they sparkled. ‘Oh!’ she said, far too loud. She clapped her hands to her face. ‘You thought I killed her? You thought I killed my best friend? My oldest friend? The warmest, kindest, most beloved woman I have ever known in my life?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, and it sounded so ludicrously inadequate that I almost laughed. ‘We didn’t believe that she was still alive when you seemed to suggest that she was still alive, you see. We thought you wrote the notes saying she wanted dinner in her room and then breakfast in bed.’

  ‘No,’ said Biddy. ‘No, I didn’t write them. I mean, I could have, of course. Our handwriting is very similar, and I’ve seen enough of it over the years to be able to mimic her style, but I didn’t. I can’t prove it. You’ll just have to believe me. Or not. But it would be wonderful if you would believe me. Because then there would be three of us keeping an eye on him tonight. Instead of me alone.’

  That was inarguable. I nodded and glared at Alec, who nodded too.

  ‘Do you have any evidence that it was David Spencer?’ I said. ‘It’s a compelling motive, but unless there’s hard evidence about the deed itself to back it up, we can’t really let a motive sway us. There are, after all, motives everywhere we turn.’

  ‘Are there?’ said Biddy. I opened my mouth but she put her hand up. ‘Don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear it. I loved LL like a sister and I don’t want to hear ill of her.’

  ‘Your husband said you were angry when you found out she stole Lachlan from you,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, squirming a bit. ‘That’s what I said to Dickie and he believed me.’

  ‘When in fact?’ said Alec.

  ‘I did find something out, but it wasn’t that.’

  We waited but she shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter now. Spencer is the thing.’ She shook her head even more vigorously, as though driving all extraneous nonsense from it. ‘And I don’t have any “hard evidence”, as you put it. All I’ve got is more motive. His wife died recently, you see. He took a young wife in a bid to get LL out of his heart once and for all. And she died. That was why he came north when he did, to try again.’

  ‘And when you say she died,’ Alec said. ‘You don’t mean that he killed her to get her out of the way, do you?’

  ‘No!’ said Biddy. ‘She was expecting a baby and she caught a severe chill and it went to her blood and she died. He told Mitten about it. He was dead set on getting Mitten to cancel the plan for us all to go along to the church that night before LL’s birthday. And that was the reason. The thought of Cherry out in the cold in her condition brought back all his dreadful memories, you see.’

  ‘I don’t see,’ I said. ‘I think Lady Love was already dead by then. I think he went to her room and killed her. I think he had to quash the church expedition because Lady Love would have been part of it and her absence could not be explained. If it was just dinner and then breakfast she missed, no one would be worried. She often dined off a tray and breakfasted in bed, didn’t she? But the church service was something else again.’

  ‘But,’ said Biddy, ‘even if he had some sort of mania for LL and even if he struck out when she refused him, that’s not to say he’s a cold-hearted monster. He probably did mourn when his wife died and the baby with her. He probably did feel a twinge of worry at the thought of Cherry going out that night.’

  Alec gave her a kindly look. This woman was a goose. She was telling us more clearly than we could have desired that she did not have the wit to plan and stage and then hide a murder. ‘Biddy,’ he said. ‘I rather think the tale of the wife who died of a cold was made up out of whole cloth to get Mitten to cancel the church service. Do you see?’

  ‘Oh!’ said Biddy again. ‘Yes. But that’s a terrible thing to say if it’s not true. And it’s rather awful to be able to think up something like that. I mean, if I had gone into a blind rage and whacked someone with a peat-cutter, I’d be a jelly. I wouldn’t be able to make up stories to help cover my tracks.’

  ‘No, I don’t believe you would,’ I said. ‘But I bel
ieve David Spencer did some very quick thinking. I think he almost managed to persuade Lady Love to go. I think she packed her bags and wrote a couple of notes to go on her door, saying she wanted dinner and breakfast alone. But then, for some reason we may never know, she changed her mind. And when she changed her mind, Spencer saw his chance. He could take her bags away, put one note then the other on her door. Perhaps he even cleared the dinner tray that must have been delivered, making it look as though she’d eaten. All this to convince the servants and her daughters that she was still alive.’

  ‘Still alive when though?’ Alec said. ‘All of that only makes sense if he also manufactured an alibi for the supposed time of the killing.’

  ‘He was away all day on Lady Love’s birthday,’ I said. ‘Until the late boat.’

  ‘Does anyone know why?’ said Alec. ‘Where he was supposed to be?’

  ‘We can ask him,’ I said. ‘It would be odd if we didn’t interview him, when we’re interviewing everyone else.’

  ‘We’ll have to be quick,’ Alec said. ‘If Biddy’s right about him leaving tomorrow. But, Biddy, what makes you think so? What makes you think he will leave tomorrow when he has stayed on since Valentine’s Day? Why wouldn’t he just stay indefinitely, making sure no one starts to pick at his story and unravel it?’

  ‘He told me,’ she said. ‘Well, he told all of us. He’s going to take LL’s place on this plant-hunting expedition she was so excited about. He leaves tomorrow. He’s going to New Zealand to search for this fabled true black lily to add to their score of discoveries.’

 

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