The waltz ended with one last long whine of violin and the couples on the floor sprang apart and clapped desultorily. When the band picked up again, in a lively air almost too fast to imagine dancing to at all, the clapping from the youngsters quickened and a couple of cheers went up. The elders smiled and began to leave the floor, including the village woman who had bumped us. I smiled again but she was frowning and looking about herself, paying no attention to me. Of her partner there was no sign. I scanned the crowd and as I did so, Alec came in at the door, his eyes wide. He shook his head and mouthed something.
‘What’s the matter with Osborne?’ said Hugh, suddenly at my side.
‘He’s been looking for David Spencer,’ I said. ‘And I don’t think he can find him.’
Alec pushed across the floor and spoke in an angry hiss when he reached us. ‘Vanished. I know he didn’t get down the stairs because they’re thronged with people coming up. I checked the bathroom on the landing that’s being used as a gentlemen’s cloakroom. Then I’m afraid I checked the ladies’ cloakroom, which caused rather a stir. I have to say you do yourselves very well in there. He must be somewhere in the bedrooms or up in the attics. How can we organise a search?’
‘Hugh,’ I said, ‘you’re tall enough to see over all these heads. Can you cast your eyes around and just check that Mallory and Cherry are here? Donald? Teddy? Dickie and Lachlan?’
‘All present and correct,’ Hugh said, after a long searching look. There were quite fifty people in the room by now.
‘Biddy,’ I went on, ‘would you be willing to station yourself at this door and make sure none of them leave? Spencer hiding is one thing; Spencer cornered is another. As long as none of the family gets in his way we can search for him and track him down, by hook or by crook.’
‘Not you, Dandy!’ Hugh said. ‘Osborne and I. That is, I take it we’re tracking him down because he’s the murderer? In which case, I must put my foot down and say no.’
I chewed this over briefly, but the memory of how strong Spencer had felt when he hoisted me over his shoulder was hard to dismiss and so, with ill-grace, I nodded. ‘I shall station myself at the head of the staircase,’ I said. ‘If he passes me, I’ll raise the alarm.’
‘Righto,’ Hugh said. ‘No one has noticed anything. Let’s disperse and carry out a clean operation. Osborne, take the attic floor and I’ll sweep round on this one, then we’ll both do the ground together.’
‘And what can I do, madam?’ said Grant. I had not seen her standing by me, attracted like a bear to honey by the unmistakable signs of trouble.
‘You could go and stand unobtrusively by the front gate to see if he takes a motorcar and gets clean away,’ I said.
Grant boggled. ‘It’s coming on heavy rain,’ she said.
‘Oh?’ I answered. ‘Do you feel inappropriately dressed? Do you feel that your wardrobe is unequal to the prospect before you?’
‘Grant would be more use at the foot of the servants’ stairs, checking that he doesn’t slip down that way,’ Hugh said.
I withered him with a look and propelled myself forward, kneecaps first, towards the ballroom door. Hugh got ahead of me in two strides and marched out.
‘We’ll find him, Dan,’ said Alec as he passed me in turn.
I reached my station at the head of the stairs without mishap, after which my biggest problem was resisting efforts to be taken back into the ballroom on someone’s arm or another. The late crowd was just arriving; twenty or more of them, well-refreshed after their late dinners and inclined to be chummy. I pled a need for air, a dancing partner who had stepped away and was soon returning, a promise to my husband to meet him there if we had got separated and, finally, a plan for an engagement surprise that was just about to come off and needed my presence on the landing. These Highlanders, I thought crossly, were far more forward than the Scots I was used to.
When not fending them off, I looked all around me, a bland smile upon my face even though my heart banged so high in my chest it felt as if it was sitting just behind my jaw. There was no sign of David Spencer. I saw Hugh once or twice, flitting across from room to room in the bedroom passageway. I saw Donald and Mallory twirl past the open ballroom doorway on their passage round the dancefloor, still gazing deep into one another’s eyes. I even saw Teddy sweep by, gazing deep into the eyes of what looked horribly like a village girl. At least she had on black leather shoes and wore a hairband with lace flowers stitched to it.
I turned away. Outside the landing window the night was as black as a coalhole but Grant was wrong about the rain. Unless, I thought, catching sight of something, that was rain making the weathervane shine. Certainly, something had glittered down there in the garden suddenly. And there it was again. I turned and put my face close to the glass, cupping my hands to cut out the glow of the lamps. It was a torch. I saw it very clearly this time. A beam of electric torchlight lit up the dovecote and sent the shadow of the weathervane leaping like a witch across the pale bank of apple blossom beyond. He had got himself out to the knot garden. He was getting away. Without thinking, I grabbed the window latch and wrenched it open. ‘Stop!’ I shouted. ‘Stop!’
The torchlight snuffed out and I was staring blankly into perfect darkness again. I swung back. Biddy was out of sight inside the ballroom. The bedroom corridor stretched ahead of me, quite empty. There was no sign of Alec on the stairs leading up again to the second floor. There was nothing for it. I bent, gripped the hem of my frock and ripped a slit in it up to my stocking tops. Then I kicked my dancing slippers off and plunged down the staircase, headed for the nearest door to the outside.
No one saw me except a red-faced old gentleman heading towards the card room who said only, ‘Hijinks starting early,’ and chuckled. I checked my headlong dash, wondering if I could ask him to join me. But it would take too long to explain, so I sped up again, making for the flower room and the garden beyond.
The gravel that looked as smooth as sand was torture under my stockinged feet but I gritted my teeth and raced along. I was certain to be too late, but if there was even a chance of him getting lost in the labyrinth, without his torchlight, it was worth trying. All I had to do was stay on the path all round the outside until I reached the door in the wall at the far side and could lock it. Then all I needed to do was find a rock and hide. Before I could terrify myself with any more details of what I was pelting towards, it was too late. I was there.
And he was there before me. Or so I thought, because I could see movement, faint but unmistakable, at waist height, and could hear stertorous breathing. It was the oddest sound, almost like a snore. I peered desperately into the darkness and saw a faint gleam. It was joined after a second by another gleam and then the two tiny lights remained trained upon my face as the strange rumbling snore grew louder. I was frozen in mystified horror, transfixed by a sight and sound I could not decipher. Then, just as I thought I must shriek aloud from the creeping terror of it, the two pinpricks blinked.
‘Ursus!’ I hissed and lunged forward. The cat sprang down and streaked away as I made sharp contact with the garden roller where he had been perching. It was indeed a raker, as Hugh had said, barbed as well as solid, and one of its teeth pierced my toe. I winced and hopped until the throbbing might recede, but at least that slowed me down enough so that I noticed the shadow of the garden gate gleaming faintly ahead of me, its white paint no more than a ghost of light in the blackness. I slowed and stopped and put my hand out. It was locked. I scrabbled around a bit and my fingers felt the key.
So. He was still in here with me. Silently, not even breathing, I eased the key free and crept away from the gate. I listened so hard, straining against the silence, that my ears crackled and hummed, but there was no sound of footfall, no sound of movement, nothing but the shushing of the night breeze in the apple trees.
I felt the flood of perspiration that had washed over me begin to cool and dry on my skin. It was such an airless night, at least in here where the walls st
illed the air and turned it foetid with the smell of damp grass and rotting blossom.
I blew upwards into my hair for relief and then froze. How could I be gasping in the airlessness while listening to the sound of the breeze?
As if in answer, the rushing changed to a gurgle. Numb with the knowledge I could not deny, even while I refused to give it a name, I blundered forward onto one of the paths leading to the centre of the maze.
I made what felt like fifty wrong turns but must only have been a handful, following that dreadful gasping, gurgling sound to its source. It grew fainter as I got closer and, by the time the clouds had thinned enough for me to see my way, it had stopped. When at last I arrived in the opening, stumbling over one of the little flower beds and then seeing the dim mast of the dovecote and weathervane just ahead, the silence was deafening. I crouched down and groped and there, as I knew it would be, was a shoe with a foot in it, a trousered leg, a stiff shirt front and a wetness spreading down from the collar.
He had killed again.
Reaching for a hand to take his pulse, even though I knew it was too late, I felt cold metal and shrank back, before realising that it was the torch. I scrabbled for it again, turned it on and, steeling myself, trained the beam forward.
David Spencer lay twisted on the ground, awash in blood from a wound across his throat.
A scream escaped me just as a door opened up on the terrace and Hugh’s voice came, barrack-trained, as loud as thunder across the garden.
‘Dandy? Are you out here?’
‘She can’t be,’ came Alec’s voice. ‘She can’t walk in that bloody dress, never mind without her shoes.’
‘Hugh? Alec?’ I said. ‘I’m here. I’m all right. I’m at the middle of the knot. But there’s been a— He’s dead. You need to ring up the police and stop anyone from leaving.’
I heard one set of footsteps ringing out on the wooden boards of the library floor and another set of footsteps crunch and spatter as someone ran across the gravel to the start of the grass paths.
I did not know who had gone to the telephone and who had come straight to me until he rounded the last corner of the apple-tree arbour and into the torchlight at my side.
18
It was not suicide. The local bobby would have loved for it be suicide, clearly. The sergeant from Lochcarron, likewise. The inspector from Inverness would have greeted the possibility of suicide – while the balance of mind was properly disturbed by the remorse that goodness demanded be felt – with profound relief.
Unfortunately for them, it is well-nigh impossible to whack oneself in the front of the throat with a long-handled pruning saw and it is utterly impossible to leave that saw leaning against the wall of the house forty feet from one’s corpse, having done so.
That left no other possibility but that the local bobby, who puffed along from the street on his bicycle while the party guests were still stampeding like frightened horses, the sergeant from Lochcarron, who arrived in a motorcar with the klaxon going while the guests were sitting exhausted but restive all over the ballroom floor with nothing but strong tea and the sad remnants of the party supper to comfort them, and the inspector from Inverness, who tried to sweep in with dignity as the sun came up the next morning but failed, had all let a murderer slip through their hands for the second time.
It was the inspector for whom I felt the hottest anger and the coldest disdain. The bobby, one Constable Petrie, usually concerned himself with Sabbath licensing, stray dogs, children chalking naughty words on the paths when playing hopscotch and the odd case of disputed grazing. He was horrified. His face ran with tears as well as with the perspiration engendered by suddenly pedalling around the bay at top speed after a long day. He stood in the knot garden, wrung his hands and wept openly.
‘I knew it was wrong,’ he said. ‘That’s the worst of it. I knew. What tramp would there be all the way out here in the winter, getting in and getting out again and not a soul to see him? I’ll take this to the gates, I will. St Peter will read this out at my reckoning.’
‘Yes, well that’s as may be,’ I said crisply. ‘But there are pressing matters to attend to before that. The house is full of party guests. Half the county and most of the village is in there. I’m surprised you weren’t here already, Constable.’
‘We’ve a new baby in the house and the other three and my wife are down with laryngitis,’ he said miserably.
‘So you need to get started on witness statements,’ I said, but less crisply perhaps. ‘We can help, can’t we?’ I nodded at Grant, Hugh and Alec, who had all gathered by this time. ‘We were watching the ballroom and we can tell you, categorically, that all the Dunnochs and Tibballs were accounted for when Mr Spencer was attacked.’
‘You were watching?’ said Constable Petrie. ‘Why?’
I frowned at him. It struck me as a stupid question, but if he had a wife and three children ill in bed and an infant besides, his brain was probably fuddled beyond all usefulness from sleepless nights. ‘Because we knew Lavinia’s murderer was still at large and suspected – rightly – that he was probably in the house tonight.’
Petrie did not need to know that we had circled around the entire household and had eventually trained our attention on David Spencer himself.
‘I’ll be glad of your help,’ he said. ‘But won’t you get away in and change your clothes first?’
I looked down and flinched. The ruined dress gaped, showing more of my legs than I had ever displayed outside of my bathroom in my life and, more to the point, both dress and legs were smeared with David Spencer’s blood, from me kneeling at his side, feeling for his pulse and then stretching over him to close his eyes. I looked at my hands and shuddered, seeing blood dried dark in the creases of my palms, caught in among my rings.
‘I didn’t kill him,’ I said, looking up at Petrie.
‘Of course not,’ Petrie said. ‘Why would a lady like you do such a thing? I didn’t mean to suggest it.’
‘No, no, no, this will never do,’ said Alec. ‘That’s what went wrong last time, Constable. You were all far too quick to believe that people “like us” would never commit murder. No convenient tramps this time around. Mrs Gilver is a suspect like any other.’
‘Steady on, old man,’ said Hugh, rather mildly in my view.
Alec smiled. ‘I know Dandy didn’t kill David Spencer,’ he said. ‘But this investigation needs to establish that fact on the grounds of timing, witnesses and other evidence. That’s all I mean.’
‘Thank you for that,’ I said.
‘So maybe you shouldn’t change your clothes just yet,’ said Petrie. ‘Until the sarge gets here and sees the … evidence.’
‘Constable,’ I said, ‘the gravel is extraordinarily smooth and nicely kept and you will notice that I’m not wearing any shoes. You will see, if you look, my footprints on the gravel leading clockwise round the outside of the garden from the flower-room door to the gate at the far side. You will also find the prints of stockinged feet all over the damp grass between the garden gate and this spot of the maze, showing where I ran hither and yon trying to get here, while Mr Spencer lay dying. You will not find any such footprints on the gravel path anywhere between the garden gate and the east wall of the house where the murder weapon has been discarded, nor on the grass path between the dovecote and the house. And you will find neither my fingerprints on the murder weapon, nor any discarded gloves with which I might have disguised them. Do you see?’
‘I see,’ said Petrie.
‘I saw someone out here,’ I said. ‘I saw torchlight. I opened the window and shouted. The torch went out. I left my shoes on the landing, ran downstairs, took the gravel path around to the garden gate, ascertained that it was locked, removed the key, heard the sounds of someone in distress, followed those sounds and found Mr Spencer.’
‘I really do see,’ Petrie said. ‘The murderer did his foul deed, turned on a torch for some reason—’
‘To check that he had made a pro
per job of it,’ Alec said. ‘Or to pick up the weapon if he dropped it.’
‘You opened the window and he ran off,’ Petrie said. ‘He took the weapon with him and went back inside the house to the party.’
‘Leaving the pruning saw on the terrace where I fell over it on my way out,’ said Hugh. ‘Why didn’t he leave it with the body? Or take it away completely?’
‘My guess would be that he took it to wipe fingerprints off it on the way,’ I said. ‘But I imagine it would be somewhat tricky to hold a saw and wipe it, while running in the dark, without leaving at least a smudge behind. So, Constable, it will be worth dusting it very carefully.’
‘It will at that,’ said Petrie.
Alec raised his hand, covered with a white silk handkerchief, the pruning saw dangling from one finger. It was such an innocent object, but with blood darkening its blade and scraps of skin caught in its teeth the sight of it made me suddenly light-headed.
Grant, Hugh and Alec all stepped forward, by which fact I deduced that my face must really be as white as I felt it to be. Grant was quickest. She put an arm across my back and led me away, back the way I had come.
‘The long way round, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘For the footprints, you know. There might be something useful for the police.’
‘Ow,’ I said. The gravel was like shards of glass under my tender soles, all the worse since I could barely see it in the darkness.
‘I’m sorry about the dress,’ said Grant.
‘I’m sorry I ripped it to shreds,’ I said. ‘And splashed it with blood.’
‘I can salvage the bodice and turn it into a little—’ Grant said, then subsided, seeing my face and finding a shred of pity.
The sergeant had arrived by the time I was back downstairs in skirt and jersey and with hands scrubbed and face wiped clean of make-up if not of shock. Lachlan was back in his wheeled chair with Ursus on his lap. Dickie Tibball had been put to bed with a sleeping powder after Constable Petrie took pity on him, shivering and white with shock.
A Step So Grave Page 22