Dandy Gilver and the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  The Dandy Gilver Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Postscript

  Facts and Fictions

  About the Author

  Catriona McPherson was born in the village of Queensferry in south-east Scotland in 1965 and educated at Edinburgh University. She divides her time between Scotland and California.

  www.catrionamcpherson.com

  Twitter: @CatrionaMcP

  The Dandy Gilver Series

  After the Armistice Ball

  The Burry Man’s Day

  Bury Her Deep

  The Winter Ground

  Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains

  Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder

  Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses

  Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone

  Dandy Gilver and the Reek of Red Herrings

  DANDY GILVER AND THE UNPLEASANTNESS IN THE BALLROOM

  Catriona McPherson

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

  Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Catriona McPherson 2015

  The right of Catriona McPherson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Ebook ISBN 9781444786095

  Hardback ISBN 9781444786101

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To Rosalind and Malcolm Smith, with love

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank: Suzie Dooré, Francine Toon, Becca Mundy and Jessica Hische; Lisa Moylett; my friends and family; and Sam Hood, who taught me everything I know about ballroom dancing.

  1

  Mrs Woolf and I are hardly kindred souls taken all in all but on a room of one’s own we agree. My sitting room, in the south-east corner of the house, has long been my favourite part of Gilverton. Bright in the morning, cosily lamplit by teatime, looking out over lawns towards the park beyond the ha-ha, it is papered in yellow silk, rather greyed now around a few restful pictures, carpeted in the palest shade of grey-blue, terribly thin these days but still beautiful, and draped and littered with damask curtains and cushions so faded that one has to peer into the folds to see from whence – blue or yellow? – their journey to greyness began. It is as restful as a lily pond and my only sanctuary in that house of mahogany, leather and blood-red velvet. That house of men. Particularly after the telephone was installed at the advent of my detecting career and, more lately, after one of the long windows was turned into a garden door, I used to think I could live there quite contentedly, dining off trays the maids brought me and reading by the fire with my feet up on a stool.

  Now, as I sat at my desk and listened to the empty silence, the tick of my Dresden clock on the chimneypiece only making it seem quieter still, I had never felt less happy to be alone. My eyes strayed, as they were wont to fifty times a day, to the pale blue chair, now without its blanket since now without its dog. I could feel my eyes pricking as I rose and walked over to run my hands over the cool nap of the seat and remember her.

  Bunty. She had clambered into that chair as a leggy puppy three months old, as soon as she was able, and nothing would ever persuade her back to her basket on the hearthrug again. I smiled to remember the way she would curl up when newly asleep and then gradually unwind until she was sprawled with her paws waving and her head hanging down, like one of the carousers in a Hogarth tavern scene. Then, at the sound of the door, she would awaken, flop and lollop herself right side up again and sit up on the chair, nose quivering and half of her body wagging along with her tail.

  The maids had done a good job and there was not a single one of her stiff white hairs left anywhere in the upholstery. I knew because I had sat there and looked for them, weeping like a ninny, in the first few weeks. I was better now. I had taken her collar and lead down from the coat hooks at the garden-room door and had moved the short set of steps back to the library where they belonged, away from the side of my bed where Bunty had used them to help her retire for the night once her hips had started troubling her.

  She had a wonderful life, I told myself sternly. A good innings and more adventures, I would wager, than any Dalmatian since the days they actually ran alongside carriages and bit highwaymen. All of this was true but I was still sitting there when the door opened and Pallister, our butler, prowled in. He looked first at my desk, where I am usually to be found; and then, glancing over and seeing me in Bunty’s chair, he nodded very faintly and tilted his head about ten degrees to one side in a manner that looked a good deal like sympathy. I had to catch my lip and hold my breath so as not to dissolve into sobs at such a display of emotion.

  ‘A letter, madam,’ he said, proffering the salver. ‘It came by special messenger just now.’ I nodded, lifted the envelope and set it down on my lap. ‘Shall I fetch your opener over, madam?’ I nodded again. ‘Rather showy stationery,’ he went on, as I slipped my paperknife under the flap and slit the envelope open. I looked, to be polite, and nodded a third time. It was thick vellum the colour of buttermilk and had a crest stamped in gold on the back. ‘No one I’ve come across before, madam,’ Pallister said. ‘Perhaps it’s from a “client”. Perhaps there’s a “case” coming your way.’

  Even with the rather deafening quotation marks, this was amazing. Pallister’s usual tack – through letters, calls on the telephone, appointments with clients, visits from police, press attention, the arrival of witnesses to be hidden and the departure of paperwork to be burned – was to affect perfect oblivion. Gilver and Osborne could not be countenanced and so did not exist. His aptitude for ignoring unpleasantnesses rivalled that of my grandmother Leston; and she had lived for ten years in India without seeing a single shoeless child.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I agreed faintly.

  As Pallister withdrew, I undertook what amounted to an impromptu séance; I called upon the departed spirits of my mother, my Aunt Hortensi
a and Nanny Palmer herself to help me re-square my shoulders and re-stiffen my lip. Then I shook open the sheet of writing paper with a sharp crack, prepared to forget Bunty and apply myself to whatever adventure was calling me away from her memory and into the lonely future without her.

  The return address, which was “Balmoral”, Manse Road, Bearsden, Glasgow, held out little promise of adventure, it is true. The name of the letter’s sender, which was Sir Percival Stott, almost wrenched a groan of dismay out of me. The first line, which mentioned a beloved daughter and the need for discretion, came within a whisker of causing me to cast the letter into the fire. Such humdrum affairs, I feared, could not put a dent in my grieving.

  I could hardly have been more wrong. Not only did the Stott case – a murder case as it turned out to be – take Alec and me into a world of glitter and glamour, a world steeped in human depravity and conscienceless evil such as we had never encountered before, but it also brought me Bunty the Second, who – as I read Sir Percy’s letter that morning– was four days old, tiny and mewling and tucked under her mother’s flank along with all her littermates, as unaware as I was that she would spend her life with me.

  2

  ‘I’ve never been to Glasgow before,’ said Alec Osborne as we drove sedately through the streets of villas which make up the westerly suburbs.

  ‘The second city of the Empire?’ I said. ‘That’s a shocking admission.’ I was teasing. One of the things I hold in highest affection about Alec is his cheerfulness in the face of any amount of teasing. He is most unlike other men in that regard. Besides, he had not been ignoring Glasgow for long; he had only lived in Scotland for a little over eight years, moving there at the close of our first adventure.

  It had started out with all the appearance of a jewel theft – the Case of the Duffy Diamonds – but really it had been a murder and, as is often the case when death strikes, there was an inheritance. Alec had ended those few turbulent weeks down one fiancée, but up a Perthshire estate and with a devoted friend and colleague thrown in. I dare say it was a net loss but he seems reconciled to it. He was chuckling even now.

  ‘Shocking indeed,’ he was saying. ‘Never been to Liverpool either for that matter.’

  ‘Well, gosh, I’ve never been to Liverpool,’ I said. ‘Why would one have gone to Liverpool?’

  ‘To catch a boat to Ireland,’ Alec suggested.

  ‘Why on earth would one have gone to Ireland?’

  ‘Horses?’ said Alec vaguely. ‘Anyway, I expect it’s just the same as Edinburgh, isn’t it?’

  ‘Don’t let the denizens of either hear that,’ I said. ‘There’d be a riot. Oop, there it is.’ A discreet sign heralded our arrival at the Manse Road turn-off and I wrenched the wheel of my little Morris Cowley hard left, catching it just in time.

  Alec whistled through his teeth. The trim villas we had been passing for the last ten minutes were replaced, on Manse Road, with out-and-out mansion houses, some of them almost as stately as Dunelgar and Gilverton, respectively Alec’s home and mine, albeit set down in grounds of only an acre or two and without a gate lodge to their names.

  ‘I smell money,’ Alec said. ‘Let’s hope for a nice, juicy, time-consuming case and a good dollop of Sir Percival’s loot.’

  ‘You are disgusting,’ I said, for it was easier on my conscience if neither of us said what we were both thinking.

  ‘It’s going to be Mr Birchfield all over again,’ said Alec, rubbing his hands. ‘And about time too.’

  Mr Ernest Birchfield, fish merchant, of Aberdeen was the last client to make any significant contribution to Gilver and Osborne’s coffers. Since the conclusion of that case we had been scraping by, our services sought either by supplicants from the working classes too poor to pay us the going rate but too desperate for us to turn away or – which was worse – supplicants from the upper classes, too feckless to pay us and too likely to be encountered at parties to be refused. The cheek of some of them could hardly be believed: one old pal had even had the gall to try to pay for a week’s investigation of household pilfering by offering to take my elder son to London and wheel him about while she got her daughter launched. As though single young men of good family were not hen’s teeth and welcome everywhere.

  ‘Ah, the middle classes,’ Alec said, sitting forward and peering to right and left, looking out for Balmoral. ‘So punctilious at paying their bills and so anxious to have their indiscretions tidied away. Perhaps we should compose an advertisement or two especially for them, Dandy. Plenty of veiled hints and assurances, nothing vulgar.’

  ‘Here we are,’ I said, spotting the glint of gold lettering on a gatepost. ‘Balmoral.’

  ‘What can he have been thinking when he chose such a name?’ said Alec. ‘He can’t possibly be a sensible man.’

  ‘“Great hopes of finding him quite the reverse”, eh?’ I said.

  But, as ever when I quote Miss Austen, Alec merely grunted and we rolled up the short drive of raked gravel in silence. He was right about the money, I thought to myself, looking around, for the lawns were as carefully swept as the drive was raked, and the roses growing in crescent-shaped beds cut into the turf on either side were lovingly tended; not a speck of rust nor a spent bloom to be seen, and not a single petal lying on the dark earth below them, which is well-nigh impossible in June unless battalions of garden-boys keep vigil. Certainly the rose gardens at Gilverton had been carpeted in a kind of brown confetti, holding open house for any aphid who cared to drop by. My husband, Hugh, mounted the odd dawn raid with a nicotine gun but only when he remembered and never when salmon, stags or grouse were in season.

  ‘Tobacco lord, do you think?’ said Alec as we drew to a halt at the front door. It was freshly painted in a bright sunflower yellow which clashed with the brass work and with the pots of orange and pink begonias ranged on the steps leading up to it. Still, it was a cheerful prospect and went some way to counteract the gloomy elevation of the house overall. I have been more than twenty years in Scotland now, longer here than in Northamptonshire, which shall always be home, but still I miss those low, spreading cottages of ochre stone and the cosy glitter of their little windows. Scotch houses like this one, gaunt and majestic, stare down at one like a minister in his pulpit, their windows so very much taller than they are wide and so very blank and dark, reflecting the cold northern skies.

  ‘The tobacco lords are long gone,’ I said. ‘They’re all living on their estates. Sir Percival is probably a—’

  The door was opened before I could hazard a guess and we were ushered in by a pretty young maid in black and white. Lady Stott, if she existed, rose in my estimation. It is becoming harder and harder to get girls into a cap and cuffs, even in Perthshire, and I imagined it would take a forceful personality to carry the day here in Glasgow.

  She showed us into a sumptuous morning room where a coal fire was leaping in the grate even though the day was so warm that the windows had to be opened to let out the heat. The room had a close-fitting carpet in a most impractical shade of peach and a collection of plush and satin armchairs arranged around a low table where the latest issues of every imaginable magazine were laid out in fans, everything from Woman’s Weekly to Popular Aviation. The Vogue made my fingers twitch; I had stopped taking it because it gave Grant, my maid, alarming ideas.

  Alec gave a look of recognition to something called Parisiana, and leafed through it briefly, before returning it to the bottom of the pile and sherlocking around the room instead, scrutinising the photographs ranged on the piano – ‘I’m pretty sure that’s Haile Selassie’ – and the spines of the books on the tiny oak bookcase behind the door: ‘Scott and Kipling. Sir P is not a scholar.’ I sat with my hands folded and my gloves in my lap, cursing Nanny Palmer although unable to escape her training.

  The Stotts arrived just in time to stop Alec from opening the writing desk and reading letters. Sir Percival was a dapper man of sixty-odd, very correct in his morning coat and striped trousers, although rathe
r more fidgety than a man in his own house should be. His lady was about as fidgety as an ocean liner and just as magnificent. She sailed in, her long skirts sweeping the plush carpet and continuing to eddy about her feet even after she had drawn to a halt before us. She held out a hand, stiff with jewellery; she had to have been wearing seven rings as well as a collection of gold and ivory bangles, a gold and pearl brooch fashioned in the shape of a basket of lily of the valley and what was either two entire triple strands of pearls or a sextuple strand, if such a thing existed. My heart instantly melted. Whatever trouble the Stotts had found themselves in, they were clearly quite at sea and utterly terrified to have called upon Alec and me. They had decked themselves out in all their finery to try to face us down and I only wished I could throw my arms around both of them and tell them, ‘There, there.’

  Alec, as it happens, is Gilver and Osborne’s specialist brow-mopper and he went to work right away.

  ‘Sir Percival,’ he said, ‘and Lady Stott. I hope you will forgive me for plunging in, but I can see how distraught you are and I want to set your minds at ease before another minute passes. Whatever is wrong, whatever is troubling you, we are here to help. We are one hundred per cent confidential, one hundred per cent dedicated and – forgive me, but it must be said – one hundred per cent unsurprisable.’

  I watched them closely while he worked off all this and for a minute I thought he had over-egged the pudding. Assurances that one cannot be shocked do rather suggest that, somewhere near at hand, there is something shocking. In the end, however, relief won out over dignity and Lady Stott plumped down into one of the cushiony armchairs and let out an enormous sigh.

  ‘It’s our daughter,’ she said. ‘Our only one. Our darling girl. We’re so very worried about her.’

  ‘Eunice,’ said her husband mildly. ‘Perhaps you’d let me.’ He himself sat then, with a tweak of his trouser legs and an expert flick of his coat tails to stop them from being trapped underneath him.