A Step So Grave Read online

  Contents

  The Dandy Gilver Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  List of Characters

  Gaelic Glossary

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part 1: Winter

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part 2: Spring

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part 3: Summer

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Facts and Fictions

  Acknowledgements

  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

  Dandy Gilver and a Most Misleading Habit

  Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Catriona McPherson 2018

  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 9781473682375

  Hardback ISBN 9781473682351

  Paperback ISBN 9781473682368

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  This is for Lori Rader-Day,

  with love and thanks

  List of Characters

  In Perthshire

  Dandy Gilver, detective

  Hugh Gilver, Dandy’s husband

  Donald Gilver, elder son

  Teddy Gilver, younger son

  Bunty, Dandy’s Dalmatian

  Miss Cordelia Grant, Dandy’s maid

  Mr Pallister, the Gilverton butler

  Mrs Tilling, the Gilverton cook

  Becky, head housemaid

  Alec Osborne, Dandy’s Watson

  Barrow, Alec’s valet cum butler

  Inspector Hutcheson, of the Perthshire Constabulary

  Rev. and Mrs Arnethy, of Dunkeld

  At Applecross

  Lachlan Dunnoch, Viscount Ross

  Lavinia, Lady Dunnoch, Viscountess Ross, née Mallory.

  The Hon. Miss Mallory Dunnoch, elder daughter

  Mrs Cherry Tibball, younger daughter

  Martin Tibball, her husband

  Biddy Tibball, Martin’s mother, secretary to Lavinia

  Dickie Tibball, Martin’s father, nurse to Lord Ross

  Captain David Spencer, a guest in the house

  Samuel McReadie, gardener

  Mrs McReadie, his wife, the cook

  Roddy McReadie, son

  Lairdie, footman

  Mackie, footman

  Ursus, Lord Ross’s cat

  Gaelic Glossary

  A’Chomraich: old name for Applecross. Lit. ‘sanctuary’

  Aporcrosan: Gaelic origin for ‘Applecross’. Lit. ‘the meeting of two rivers’

  bealach na bà: pass of the cattle, the new road from Lochcarron to Applecross

  bean-nighe: washerwoman – a harbinger of doom

  bodach: old man

  cailleach: old woman

  ciste-ulaidh: Lit. ‘treasure chest’, the sea.

  cú sith: black dog – a harbinger of doom

  eolas: knowledge of charms

  feannag an dubh: black crow – a harbinger of doom

  mo ghoal: darling. Lit: ‘my girl’

  sithichean: fairies

  ‘Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.’

  Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque

  ‘See how love and murder will out.’

  William Congreve, The Double Dealer

  Prologue

  Snow lay, faint as feathers, each flake alighting by one tip upon the flakes below, making lace. Under the lace, the earlier snow nestled like a quilt, blue in its shadows. Under the quilt, the first fall grew heavy and wet in the dark.

  Hard against the cold ground, the corpse lay hidden. Blood fanned out across unyielding earth, seeping upwards and blooming. Rose-red turned rose-pink as gently as a petal fades. Rose-pink became the faintest blush of apple blossom as softly as a season slips away.

  And all around, above the stain, the snow lay in its perfection, lace over quilt over carapace. Undisturbed, untouched, unstepped-upon, it hugged its secret close until the first drips melting from the branches of the trees began to tell.

  PART 1

  Winter

  1

  13 February 1935

  Lavinia, Lady Dunnoch, Viscountess Ross, née Mallory, was loved by everyone. Those who knew her well, those who encountered her now and again, those who merely caught a glimpse of her angelic face and beatific smile in passing: all were in thrall. All but me.

  My hatred was quite unfounded – which dented it not one whit – for no one chooses when to be born. I daresay that even Lady Love herself would have preferred a birthday in the gentler months, when she might have celebrated with picnics and garden parties. Be that as it may, Lavinia Mallory had been born upon St Valentine’s Day and so it was in February that I journeyed, along with Hugh, my husband of over twenty years, and Donald and Teddy, our two grown-up sons, to Wester Ross, first by terrible road in the midst of hammering rain and now by rickety boat in the teeth of a howling gale, to mark her fiftieth birthday.

  ‘Lady Love indeed!’ I said, through clenched jaws, both my hands clamped on the lip of the bench and both my feet braced hard against the gapped floorboards that made up the deck, as the little vessel creaked and yawed and splats of rain came straight at me from her portside. If I had seen rain like this on a picture show I should have laughed. I should have scoffed at the notion that stagehands heaving buckets of water across in front of a camera would fool anyone. As another couple of gallons were heaved with gusto towards the side of my head, I only wished I were at the pictures. I could have got up and left.

  ‘Ah, but wait till you meet her, Dandy,’ said Hugh. The boys were standing at the prow, sodden and frozen and loving every minute. Hugh cast the odd wistful look in their direction, but stuck by my side from some mixture of duty and con
trition. He had told me that we were to embark at Plockton on the banks of a sea loch and traverse something he called ‘the inner sound’ to land in Applecross Bay and so I had been expecting a boating pond. In truth, the sea loch was choppy, the height of the waves in the ‘inner sound’ made me quake to think of the ‘outer sound’, and if the skipper managed to find the mouth of a bay and insert his craft into it, I would doff my drenched hat to him. I shot him a quick glance, there in the wheelhouse. He was standing with his feet so far spread that, when one added the tall hat and sturdy coat, one was somewhat reminded of Toulouse-Lautrec; hardly the last word in reliability. On the other hand, I could still see steady puffs of smoke rising from him and surely an imminent shipwreck would cause the captain to knock out his pipe.

  The other passengers did not look concerned. Three of them were sheep, to be fair, and sheep are famously stoical, but there were four women as well – all dressed in black from boot-soles to headsquares – wedged in a row onto the opposite bench, holding parcels and packages on their laps and conversing in low voices. Such low voices, indeed, I wondered they could hear one another at all. I should almost have said they were muttering prayers to themselves if their eyes had been closed and if any Scot would have given way to such excess as public prayer outside a church or, in a pinch, a graveyard. Besides, every so often one of them would hiss with suppressed laughter at something another had said. They did not actually look at Hugh and me as they delivered their bon mots, but I had my suspicions.

  ‘Do tell,’ I said to Hugh. ‘Regale me with the source of Lady Love’s belovedness. Take my mind off my innards.’

  ‘Well, you know,’ said Hugh uselessly. I moaned low in my throat, by way of encouragement. ‘She was just a very jolly, pretty, friendly sort of girl.’

  I snorted and immediately regretted it, for my face was wet with rain and salt spray and introducing a snortful of it to my nasal passages did not add to my comfort. But really! We were all jolly, pretty, friendly girls. We had had the jollity and friendliness ground into our fibres by battalions of nannies, governesses and tutors until any of us being trampled by a runaway horse would shrug off all enquiries and leap up to check that the poor dear thing had not loosened a shoe. As for the prettiness: we were eighteen and had maids. We were at our prettiest whether we knew it or not. We should have listened to those who tried to tell us so.

  I sighed and closed my eyes. Perhaps Hugh was right that there was something special about Miss Mallory as was; she had been snapped up quick enough, at any rate. Therefore, while she was the same age as Hugh, married at eighteen and long gone before I came out, she now had a child of thirty.

  Well, I knew she had a child of thirty, for that was the reason I was in this soap dish being buffeted and lashed and half-wishing we would capsize and sink to the peace of the bottom of the sea. The Hon. Miss Mallory Dunnoch, if you please, thirty or not, had captured the unguarded heart of my dear daffy Donald. The purpose of this visit was to see what could be done about it.

  That is to say: the Dunnochs’ purpose in inviting us all was to take stock of Donald and the rest of the Gilvers before the engagement was announced. Hugh’s purpose was to talk settlements with Lord Ross. My purpose was to find out Miss Dunnoch’s darkest secrets and put him off her, or even to share a few of Donald’s less edifying exploits and see if her ardour could be cooled.

  The trouble was, Donald had so few unedifying exploits from which to choose. (If it had been Teddy now …) He was not the sharpest pin in the cushion; even as his own mother I could not deny that much. But if Mallory Dunnoch and he had spent half an hour tête-à-tête she must know it already. He was very young at twenty-three to be marrying at all, even absent the age difference, which was a gaping chasm. But I could hardly argue that he was too inexperienced, for his romantic life had begun when he was a tiny little boy in his sailor suit. He had marched up to an equally tiny little girl after church one spring morning, handed her a fresh-picked daffodil and planted a kiss on her mouth before she could stop him. After that, he lurched from one passion to the next, eternally lovesick for some village girl, chum’s sister or film star. He had been lucky so far – which is to say we had never had an awkward audience with a burgeoning girl and her furious parents – and it occurred to me that perhaps I should fold my hand while I had some chips left. If I detached Donald from the elderly Miss Dunnoch and the next passion he lurched to was even older – or a barmaid or something – I would look back on this day and kick myself for ever.

  I sighed and opened my eyes again. Something had changed while my mind was wandering. The roar of wind, wave and boat engine had lost a note from its chord. As I looked around myself, the skipper turned from the wheelhouse and grappled with an anchor, heaving it up and over the side. It sent up a great spout of water that missed me by an inch as it fell back down onto the deck. My shoes caught a little of the resulting flood washing by on its journey to the stern and a little more on its return journey to the prow again. I noticed that the four women opposite had snatched their feet up out of harm’s way and were tittering again. The skipper pulled on his foghorn, three long blasts, and then came towards us.

  ‘Here we are!’ he said, a toothy grin showing amid his beard and around his pipe. He pegged about in front of me like a drunkard as the boat pitched and rolled. The anchor, in my view, was doing precisely nothing.

  ‘Where?’ I said, turning into the wind and searching in vain for a harbour mouth or jetty anywhere in the endless grey.

  ‘Applecross!’ said the skipper. Then he added an utterance that sounded like a sneeze. It was, I would shortly learn, Applecross’s Gaelic name, spelled A’Chomraich, and it was pronounced exactly like a sneeze; there really is no more helpful way to describe it.

  I peered around again, bewildered. The four women were on their feet and Donald and Teddy were racketing along the side of the wheelhouse, with great shouts of hilarity about the way the deck twitched and bucked under their feet and the likelihood that one or both of them might be pitched over the side at any moment.

  ‘We’ve arrived?’ I said. I tried standing, as though a bay and a village might be hidden from view by the side of the boat somehow.

  ‘Aye,’ said the skipper. ‘Here comes the wee boaty to fetch you in.’

  I twisted round, squinted into the murk and could just glimpse a couple of darkish blobs I might have taken to be shadows on the undersides of the highest waves, except that there was not enough sunlight penetrating the storm clouds to throw shadows on this wretched morning. As I watched I saw one of the blobs grow a crest or plume of some strange kind, and with one blink I finally understood I was looking at a man waving his arm at us from a dinghy that was just about to draw up alongside the soap dish and into which Hugh, Donald, Teddy, the four women in black, the three sheep and I were expected to descend.

  I turned to Hugh in disbelief. ‘Did you know about this?’ I said. ‘Did you know, from your maps, that Applecross has no harbour?’

  ‘One of Lady Love’s current good works is a pier for the village, you know,’ said Hugh. ‘They hope to dedicate it before the year is out. Of course, the building work can’t start until spring. One couldn’t bring the necessary iron and stone by sea in the winter—’ He bit off his words.

  ‘God forbid,’ I said. ‘Heaven forfend! I’d hate to think of great lumps of stone or loads of iron girders being risked. Wives, though? Wives are a different matter.’

  ‘Dandy,’ said Hugh, ‘children take this boat to school every week. Those crofters’s wives have taken it to market and back their whole lives. And look at the boys!’

  That was my undoing. I could have stuck like a barnacle to my suddenly precious bench on this suddenly acceptable boat until the skipper delivered me back to Plockton, were it not for the sight of my firstborn son straddling a rail on its starboard side, then disappearing. Teddy was after him like a ferret, of course, and then there was nothing for it. A sharp maternal tug somewhere in my middle, that port
ion of myself already thoroughly discomfited by the journey, drew me to the rail, the ladder, the dinghy and quite the most wretched ten minutes of my entire life. Teddy and Donald, in contrast to me, were even more exhilarated by the rearing and slapping of this even more minuscule vessel. They shouted with joy all the way to shore. The sheep took it quietly. The four black-clad women carried on their murmured gossiping. I kept my eyes and mouth closed and sent up silent pleas. Hugh, I am delighted to recount, was sick.

  2

  The means of disembarkation from ‘the wee boaty’ was yet another surprise. I had expected us to pull up to a jetty of some kind – perhaps an inadequate jetty, given the current plans for a new one, but a jetty nonetheless – and was prepared to scramble up some slippery stone steps, skidding on seaweed and ruining my gloves by clutching the rusty bar that served as a banister. I have clambered out of vessels by means of many sets of slimy green steps in my years of Scottish life. What I had never done, before that grim morning at Applecross, was wait in a dinghy that had been grounded on a beach and then been lifted over the side into the arms of a burly stranger, to be carried ashore like a damsel in distress, or rather – I suspect – like a week’s washing.

  ‘How d’you do?’ I said from under my hat to under his. We both had our heads bowed, he to watch his step in the shallows and I to avoid giving him a crack in the bridge of the nose; my hat brim was stiff and had a peak at just the wrong point on its circumference.

  ‘Ach bash mash buch,’ said the burly stranger.

  ‘Indeed,’ I said, to the luxurious red sideburn half-obscuring his right ear. ‘Well, thank you awfully much. Gosh, how strong you are. Thank you.’ That got us to dry land, or at least far enough up the beach that the water was all rain puddles and no waves. He set me down, touched a gloved hand to his hat brim and waded back in to fetch the next one. I trudged up the beach and across a muddy track to take shelter under the eaves of a stone shed. From the acrid smell and the blackened earth criss-crossed with footsteps that led to its locked door, I guessed it was a coal store and I spent the minutes it took Hugh, the boys and our luggage to be brought ashore daydreaming of the fires fed by all that coal, fires that would warm my bathwater, my bedroom and my winter nightclothes just as soon as we could get to Applecross House and put this dreadful day behind us. I had quite forgotten it was not yet luncheon time.