Dandy Gilver and the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom Page 10

  ‘There,’ she said, pointing.

  I felt sure this was the original of a photograph like those that adorned the foyer windows at the Locarno. The tinting was the same and the backdrop was similar. What was different was that even though this couple – Leo and Foxy – were quite still, frozen in their pose for the camera, there somehow seemed to be something of the dance left about them, almost as though the figures in the photograph were still spinning.

  ‘What happened?’ said Alec gently.

  Mrs Munn took her seat again and this time she eased back until she was comfortable.

  ‘He fell down the stairs,’ she said. ‘It was right in the middle of the competition, still in the knock-out rounds, and we were dancing the tango.’ She gestured to the album. ‘We would never have won a tango round,’ she said. ‘It was our weakest competition dance. I could never get the movements sharp enough. It’s supposed to look as much like a fight as a dance, properly. But in Leo’s arms I melted. Look for yourself.’

  I found the photograph of them in the throes of a tango and it looked aggressive enough to me. They were glaring daggers at one another, drawn back like vipers about to strike.

  ‘Far too mushy,’ said Mrs Munn. ‘Look at my top line! I’m like a shepherdess sitting on a tussock. Anyway, we thought we’d get through it and whatever marks we dropped there we’d make up for in the foxtrot.’

  ‘From where you got your name,’ I said, smiling.

  ‘No,’ she said, smiling back, ‘but the foxtrot suited Leo and me. Suited our style of dancing. We weren’t too shabby at the quickstep and waltz either.’

  ‘But what happened in the middle of the tango?’ I said. She was as bad as Beryl Bonnar, just as single-minded when it came to dancing.

  ‘Leo was taken ill,’ she said. ‘He said he needed some air. I went with him, meaning to go down to the street, and at the top of the stairs he just tripped and went top to bottom.’

  She was staring straight ahead as she spoke and from the stricken look on her face it was very clear that she was playing the scene over again as she described it. She even reached out, clutching at nothing, then let her hands drop into her lap.

  ‘And was his death instant?’ said Alec.

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Munn. ‘We got him home.’

  ‘From the hospital?’ I said.

  For the first time she looked uncomfortable as well as anguished. ‘He wanted to come home,’ she said. ‘I brought him home, put him to bed and sat with him. I called the doctor late the next night when he seemed to be slipping in and out. But it was too late.’

  ‘What did the doctor say?’ I asked her.

  Her voice was a ragged whisper now. ‘Bleeding on the brain. He’d cracked his skull when he fell down the stairs and his brain was bleeding. I knew something was wrong. His eyes were getting bloodshot. There was nothing anyone could have done. Even if I’d taken him to hospital. He would have died in hospital with strangers around him instead of here at home with me holding his hand. There was nothing to be done about it. As soon as he tripped at the top of the stairs, his fate was sealed.’

  Something about what she was saying was troubling me but I could not put my finger on it. I turned to Alec for help and saw him looking equally troubled.

  ‘Was the doctor able to say what might have been ailing your husband?’ he said.

  ‘What?’ said Mrs Munn, a sharp stab of sound. ‘What do you mean “ailing”?’

  ‘Earlier in the evening. You mentioned that he was feeling ill.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I see.’ She put a hand up and patted at her hair, tidying a few strands back into place. It was flame-red hair, helped along surely at her age, and although it suited her pale complexion well enough ordinarily, just at that moment it clashed rather horridly with a sudden flush. ‘I can’t remember if I even mentioned it to him,’ she said, trying for an airy tone. ‘It was a moment of extreme distress, as I’m sure you can imagine. It didn’t really matter why Leo left the dance floor, did it, not by then. It was tripping at the top of the stairs that did it. Hitting his head. The doctor signed the certificate and that was that.’

  That appeared to be that again. I could not think of a single additional question to ask her, even though nothing she had told us made any sense of Jeanne’s sly comment about Mayne dying, or of Miss Thwaite’s sacking when she mentioned his name. I closed the album, with a last look at the tango picture. Again, a faint idea stirred in me, something about the way they were glaring at one another, this pair of married lovers, with the husband coldly smouldering and the wife gimlet-eyed. I shook my head, for the thought would not form, and rose to leave.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Mrs Munn. ‘You never said why you were asking.’

  ‘Mr Munn’s name came up once or twice in the course of quite another matter,’ I said. ‘We’re investigating a case of poison-pen letters being sent to one of the Locarno dancers.’

  ‘Poison pen?’ said Mrs Munn. ‘Who’s been getting them?’

  ‘Miss Stott,’ said Alec. ‘We’re working for her parents, Sir Percy and Lady Stott – I don’t expect you know them.’

  ‘Oh, don’t you?’ said Mrs Munn, drawing herself up.

  ‘We know you know Tweetie,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you’re wrong,’ she said, ignoring me. ‘I do know the Stotts.’

  ‘I apol—’ said Alec, but she cut him off.

  ‘I’m not received in their drawing room, of course. I don’t move in the right circles for Sir Percy Stott and his lady. I’m just a dancer, an artiste. And no one’s ever accused a Stott of that.’

  We discussed this last, rather puzzling remark on the way back downstairs to the street and had not finished discussing it by the time we had arrived at the motorcar. I was happy to chalk it up to Mrs Munn – Foxy Trotter – feeling very keenly that she was not a lady, despite her poise and the soigné robe and the elegant world in which she used to live, with her devoted swain. Alec tended towards a much wilder idea.

  ‘Didn’t Sir Percy’s scorn for dancing seem a little overdone to you?’ he said. ‘Almost as though he’s covering up something even more unseemly.’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘I think Tweetie being mixed up with Lorrison and Beryl is unseemly enough by far.’

  ‘And wouldn’t you say that Foxy felt more scorn for the lady than the gentleman?’

  ‘Granted. There is a type of woman who always does.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Alec said. ‘That’s the question. What “type of woman” is Foxy Trotter?’

  ‘Well, not that sort,’ I said, unable to stop my jaw from dropping open. ‘Good grief, Alec.’

  ‘Would you know a woman of “that sort” if you met her, Dandy? Listen, hear me out. Beryl said it was men of her father’s generation who had money to pay for lessons, didn’t she?’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re getting at,’ I said, staring at him over the bonnet of the motorcar.

  ‘She knows the Stotts but not from being admitted to Balmoral.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘And Lady Stott and Mrs Munn are of much the same type except that one is a little younger than the other and has sent the pudding trolley away a good deal more often.’

  ‘What does that have to do with anything?’

  ‘I’ve had a flash of inspiration,’ Alec said. ‘It doesn’t happen often and I’m always very patient when you have yours as you do with sickening regularity. So don’t be mean, please.’

  ‘I’m never mean!’ I said.

  ‘I think Sir Percy is down on Tweetie like a ton of bricks about her dancing because …’ he paused dramatically ‘… she might run into his mistress.’

  ‘That’s ridic—’ I said, before remembering the promise he had extracted from me.

  ‘It would explain the flap about Leo Mayne,’ Alec said. ‘Since he’s her partner.’

  ‘It wouldn’t explain Miss Thwaite’s “flap”,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Let’s go to Balmoral, drop her name
and see what happens,’ Alec said.

  When we arrived, however, we found it impossible to think of anyone except Tweetie. The whole house was reverberating to the strains of an orchestral gramophone record being played very loudly but not loudly enough to cover the sound of thumping footfalls.

  ‘No need to ask if she’s in,’ growled Sir Percy, when we had been shown into the morning room.

  ‘There’s no pleasing some people,’ said Lady Stott. ‘He wasn’t happy when she was out and he’s not happy that she’s here.’

  ‘In the arms of a young man who is not her fiancé,’ said Sir Percy.

  ‘You admitted Roland then?’ I said.

  ‘Roland!’ scoffed Sir Percy. ‘His name is Ronald Watt.’

  ‘He’s never tried to hide that fact, Bounce,’ said Lady Stott. ‘You needn’t sound as if you’ve caught him out at something underhand.’

  ‘What could be more underhand than dancing with his boss’s fiancée behind his boss’s back?’ Sir Percy asked her.

  ‘Come to think of it,’ said Alec, cutting in as we were learning to do when the Stotts started quarrelling, ‘why is he not at work? I don’t quite understand how he can practise on a Wednesday morning if he’s a clerk in an office.’

  I saw an opening and pounced upon it. ‘Different if they were taking hourly pupils,’ I said. I watched Sir Percy carefully as I said the next bit, wondering if he would blanch or redden. ‘As Miss Bonnar’s partner does and Miss Trotter’s partner used to.’

  I need not have worried. One did not have to have a magnifying glass trained on either of the Stotts to notice the effect of my words. Their argument was quite forgotten as they turned fearful eyes on each other, Lady Stott flashing a plea and Sir Percy unmistakably flashing a warning.

  ‘Miss Bonnar,’ said Lady Stott, ‘is not a person we choose to know.’

  ‘And she has nothing in common with our darling Theresa,’ said Sir Percy.

  ‘I wish her no ill,’ said Lady Stott, and her husband spluttered in his eagerness to echo her words.

  ‘Good heavens, no. No ill at all. She has done very well for herself, lifting herself out of the circumstances of her birth and by all accounts she’s a nice enough girl. We needn’t talk of her, though. We needn’t let talk of the Bonnars into this house.’

  I was kicking myself. Now, even if they admitted they had been flustered, they could say it was Miss Bonnar with her pinafores and her bookless childhood who had rattled them and not talk of the ever more mysterious Leo and his widow.

  We left them there, still ruffled though calming themselves with extra cups of coffee, and followed the noise of the gramophone upstairs and out along a passage to a set of double doors, which led to the usual ballroom wing, built out on top of the billiards room wing, I supposed, and for a while every householder’s pride and joy.

  I had wondered how a gramophone could possibly be so loud but when I saw the size of the trumpet on it, I began instead to wonder that we had not heard it driving along the street, and also slightly to wonder why it did not topple over and dent the floor. It was a fearsome thing, elephantine compared with Donald and Teddy’s, which one can take out on the loch in a rowing boat for picnics if one has a mind to. This would sink any rowing boat I have ever seen and would put many a tug below the Plimsoll line too.

  Theresa and Roland, owing to the racket coming out of the gramophone, did not notice us. They were doing the quickstep, I rather thought; at least, they were dancing something we had not yet seen and dancing it very fast indeed, ripping across the floor like smoke flares until in unison they groaned and broke apart.

  ‘Sorry,’ Roland said and as he turned away to wipe his brow with his handkerchief he saw us.

  ‘You again,’ he called over the din. ‘What do you want now?’

  Theresa had been too nicely brought up to be quite so rude as all that, but she gave us a look no less welcoming.

  ‘All serene, Miss Stott?’ shouted Alec.

  ‘Did you manage to get Lorrison to give Miss Thwaite her job back?’ said Theresa, coming over. ‘It’s jolly unhelpful to me for her to have gone.’

  She was utterly self-centred, not a thought in her beautiful head about how unhelpful the sacking would be to Miss Thwaite. While I was gobbling and searching for an answer that did not sound too governess-like, she dismissed us by turning away and clicking her fingers, actually clicking her fingers, in Roland’s face.

  ‘Put the needle back to the slow section and we’ll try to get those syncopated steps,’ she said.

  Roland to his credit took none of it. ‘I’ve got them,’ he said, ‘and if you’d let me lead, you’d have them too. But aye, all right, let’s practise from here to the end of the record and then once more straight through.’

  Theresa screwed her face this way and that while she considered arguing but in the end she simply walked back into his arms and they re-started dancing. It was rather impressive the way they picked it up again in perfect time, no waiting and no counting. They seemed to be perfectly attuned to one another and for a moment I forgot the case, the mystery of poor Leonard Mayne, and the irritation of Theresa’s rudeness, and simply watched them as they tripped and skipped across the floor, building up to what I believe is called ‘the big finish’.

  We could not help clapping as they held the final pose like a tableau in a music-hall show, while the needle ran round and round, scraping on the paper middle in that way which sets my teeth on edge as does little else in this world.

  They had just broken out of their stance and Alec and I had just stopped clapping when there was a shriek from downstairs and the sound of thunderous footsteps approaching.

  ‘Tweetie!’ came Lady Stott’s voice. ‘Tweetie! Julian is here! Julian is walking up the steps right this minute.’ She burst into the room, panting hard, her bosom heaving like a jam pan on a rolling boil. ‘Tweetie, come away,’ she said, ‘and put a frock on, and some stockings for the Lord’s sake and you!’ She turned on Roland. ‘You stay here and don’t you dare make a sound or move an inch if it takes till midnight.’ She turned to us. ‘You two, keep him up here or you’re sacked.’ Then she clamped a hand on Theresa, who was giggling and tossing her hair like a schoolgirl, and stamped out.

  12

  The three of us were left standing rather witlessly staring at one another, until I broke away to rescue the gramophone record from the ravages of that endless needle.

  ‘Put it back on if you like and we’ll have a turn,’ said Roland.

  ‘I think gramophone music wafting through the house might excite suspicions in the visitor, don’t you?’ said Alec.

  Roland laughed. ‘Aye, no doubt you’re right there,’ he said.

  He appeared to be very far from anxious, despite the potential catastrophe of his boss being in the house. It was quite puzzling when one considered the lather he had been in at the Locarno, jumping like a rabbit at the man’s name, barely making sense.

  ‘Instead,’ said Alec, ‘let’s see if we can shed any more light on what’s been going on, shall we?’

  ‘Please yourself,’ said Roland brusquely. He swaggered over to one of the windows and hitched himself comfortably on to the sill, then took his cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one.

  ‘Which way does that wall face?’ I said, joining him. I glanced out and saw the back gardens of Balmoral, terraced lawns and a tennis court. ‘Well, I don’t suppose Mr Armour will go outside. There’s no French window that gives on to this side of the house, is there?’

  ‘By jings, you’re keen to keep your job,’ Roland said.

  ‘We both are,’ said Alec. ‘Our cases can be dull enough usually but this is one I’d like to get to the bottom of. Wouldn’t you?’

  He shrugged. ‘I can’t see what difference it makes,’ he said. ‘A wee bit of paper and a wee bird can’t stop you dancing.’

  I wondered if he realised that to be so sanguine was to draw suspicion on to himself.

  ‘What are you going
to do for a partner after Miss Stott’s wedding?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t she rather leaving you in the lurch?’

  He shrugged again. ‘I’ll find someone,’ he said. ‘There’s always more lassies than laddies wanting to dance and I can train one up easy enough.’

  ‘That does make one wonder why you got mixed up with your boss’s fiancée at all,’ said Alec. ‘If girls are ten a penny and easy to “train up”, as you put it.’

  At last, we had found a chink in Mr Roland Wentworth’s suit of insouciant armour. He put a finger inside his collar and eased it away from his neck before he answered.

  ‘She wasn’t his fiancée then,’ he said. ‘Nobody could have seen that coming.’

  ‘Forgive me, Mr Watt,’ I said, no longer disposed to flatter him with his choice of name, ‘but Miss Stott getting engaged to a solicitor is a great deal more predictable than her deciding to go dancing with one of his clerks.’

  This stung him. ‘Naw, naw,’ he said. ‘This might be Tweetie and me’s first Champs but we’ve been dancing longer than that. It was a good year with me before she ever clapped eyes on Julian. If it hadn’t been for me she’d never have met him and she’d not be getting married at all.’

  ‘What?’ I said and I shared a look of astonishment with Alec. ‘Lady Stott told us she came to the office to meet Mr Armour and fell in with you there.’

  ‘Naw, naw,’ he said again and, to be honest now that I considered it, I did not understand how that could be. ‘She came to meet me from my work one night when we were all getting a bus together to a dance out Lomond way, and Julian saw her sitting there.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I see.’ He gave me a very searching look then, wondering what I saw, I supposed. There seemed no reason not to tell him, in hopes of shaking out something useful, as one would bang a pepper pot hard on the tabletop to dislodge its contents. Life in a damp Scottish house had taught me many such tricks. ‘She was yours first then, was she?’