Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains Page 18

  ‘It seems perfectly in character to me, Lollie dear,’ I said. She and Hardy both turned towards me. ‘He did have a weakness for rather cruel little practical jokes, didn’t he? The goose with mouse stuffing? Perhaps this will was another of them. Perhaps he meant to show it to you. He can’t have expected to die at twenty-six, after all. He probably meant to enjoy your distress then tear it up and write a new one, a real one.’

  ‘What goose?’ Lollie said, and I found it far from reassuring that out of all I had said, this was the point she chose to question. With relief, I saw out of the corner of my eye a tall man with a large leather bag striding confidently along the road. He took the steps to the front door of Number 31 at a bound and as he disappeared from my view I heard the unmelodious clank of the bell sounding far below.

  ‘That’s the doctor,’ I said. ‘I’ll go down and meet him.’

  But outside the door, Hardy laid an arm on mine and drew me into the boudoir.

  ‘Let one of the maids go tripping up and downstairs with the doc,’ he said. ‘You’ve more important business to see to. Now, as Mrs Balfour asked you: what goose?’

  I told him as briefly and as dispassionately as I could, about the mouse in the goose, the chopped-out pockets in Harry’s clothes, the nasty way Pip Balfour had had of stranding people alone at night in the dark and the cold. ‘I don’t think there’s a single person in the household to whom he wasn’t thoroughly callous at some time,’ I said, counting them off on my fingers. ‘Actually, I don’t know about Stanley, the footman. I haven’t spoken to him. But the men are immaterial. It’s the girls we need to worry about. They were in the house.’

  ‘But Dr Glenning said a girl couldn’t have done it,’ Hardy reminded me.

  ‘A typical girl couldn’t have, perhaps,’ I said, thinking of Millie, ‘but that’s not the point. I was already thinking that one of the girls might have let someone in, let him in the back door unheard by Mrs Hepburn and unheard by me, since neither of us were where we should have been. Only I didn’t know which girl and couldn’t imagine who she had let in. I was thinking along the lines of a swain come to avenge her honour, I suppose. But we can cast the role now, Superintendent, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘George Pollard?’ said the superintendent. ‘Does he even exist? I thought you didn’t believe in that will. I thought you said it was a joke.’

  ‘There’s something very odd about it,’ I said. ‘Something I can’t quite put my finger on, but I’m afraid when I dismissed it I was only trying to calm Mrs Balfour. I think it’s real enough. And if Pip Balfour’s cousin knew its terms, then he had the strongest possible motive to persuade someone in this house to open up the back door one night and let him in.’

  ‘But would he know?’ said Hardy.

  ‘He might have,’ I answered. ‘There’s something . . . I’m sure he might have but I don’t know why I’m sure.’

  This was just the kind of Easter egg hunt in which Alec and I revelled – chasing down a little wisp of an idea one knew was there – but Superintendent Hardy plucked at his watch cover and kneaded his hat brim as though in some kind of unbearable distress as he waited. Then of course, he tried to argue.

  ‘I don’t agree,’ he said. ‘There had been a rift in the family. You said yourself Pollard was identified by a former address. The two men might not even have known one another.’

  ‘That’s it!’ I said. ‘Oh, thank you, Superintendent. That’s what’s been nibbling at me. Pip Balfour knew George Pollard. Definitely.’

  ‘How do you know?’ said Hardy. ‘What told you?’

  ‘The will itself,’ I said. ‘Balfour referred to Pollard as “my esteemed cousin” and talked about “affection” and one can’t esteem someone one doesn’t know, much less feel affection for him. Clearly, Lollie knew nothing of him, but Pip certainly did.’

  Hardy sat back in his seat, causing some creaking in the delicate silk panels which formed its sides, and gave a nod firm enough to crack a walnut under his chin.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘We can go on that.’ Then he blew out hard. ‘You wouldn’t catch me telling some cousin that I had left him my fortune,’ he said. ‘Asking for . . . well, a knife in the neck, in this case, don’t you think?’

  I nodded, but I was still feeling troubled. I had relieved for a moment the little tickle at the back of my mind which always tells me I am missing something, but it had already returned; clearly, I had not thought my way through to the end of this yet. Alec would have read my face and doubled back to meet me but Hardy was another matter.

  ‘So you were just making sympathetic noises to poor Mrs Balfour?’ he was saying now. ‘I can see your reasoning – she’s in a bad way – but it’s going to be harder for her in the end.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ I said. ‘If the whole thing is a joke – if the will’s invalid – then Pip Balfour died intestate and . . .’

  ‘Ah,’ said Hardy. ‘Mrs Balfour inherits.’ He gave another final sort of nod.

  ‘And if the will is good and if Cousin George, with the help of someone in this house, did for Cousin Philip, then he – George, I mean – can’t benefit from his crime, and once again Lollie scoops the lot.’

  ‘Right,’ said Hardy. ‘That’s all tied up then.’

  ‘Except for this Josephine person,’ I said. ‘The first wife. The only wife if the dates are right.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Hardy. ‘Her.’ He sounded pained again.

  ‘Although . . .’ I said, thinking it all over. ‘I shall have to check, or perhaps you might, but I think, as long as George Pollard is guilty and is cut out of the will because of that, and since Josephine Carson is dead, and so long as she and Pip had no children . . .’

  ‘Lord, that’s a thought!’ said Hardy.

  ‘But there’s nothing to suggest that they did,’ I reminded him. ‘So, Pollard guilty, a childless Josephine long gone, even without a will Lollie inherits. I’m almost sure she does. On account of her irregular marriage. What’s called in England a common-law marriage.’

  ‘They don’t exist,’ said Hardy. ‘There’s no such thing.’ The definite nature of this point seemed to please him.

  ‘They don’t,’ I said, ‘but Scottish irregular marriages certainly do. By declaration, by habit and repute or by consummation. I should say Lollie has two out of the three, wouldn’t you?’

  Mr Hardy blushed at that but I sailed on.

  ‘I daresay a judge would look most favourably on Lollie’s claim, especially in a case like this, where if she doesn’t get it there’s no one else it can go to except the Crown.’

  ‘Good luck to the poor judge who had to pick his way through it,’ Hardy said.

  As I passed the telephone in the hallway on the ground floor minutes later, I felt a sudden wild desire to ring up Hugh and tell him that I had just astounded a police superintendent with my superior grasp of Scots Law. I fought it.

  Hardy had gone, in faint hope, to look for a George Pollard who might, despite that ‘formerly’, still be lingering in St Mary’s Square, Gloucester, and if not to order a search for Pollards with a Balfour connection and track down marriages of Balfours to Carsons. He was thus playing to his strengths. And I to mine: I was to hand-feed a few carefully selected titbits of news to the others and had also been set the task of a little actual, Holmesian, sleuthing, not quite with a magnifying glass and a tin of fingerprint powder but very much along those lines. I looked forward to it; perhaps after a short interlude of snooping around for clues with my mind engaged on such tangible matters as gates and walls and doors and keys, whatever it was that was troubling me would dislodge itself from the recesses where it was lurking and allow me to . . . cough it into my hand and see what it was? I really had to find a different way to describe it to myself before I tried it out loud.

  At that thought, my shoulders drooped a little, for there was only one individual imaginable to whom I might ever relate it. If I could only have ten minutes with Alec, I thought, then th
e niggle of the will, the tangle of the servants and their alliances, and the various other cobwebs which had brushed lightly against the edge of my attention for a moment each before falling away again would all be brought to bright light and clarity. Of course, I was romanticising; Alec and I can blunder around together in the twilight, beset by cobwebs, as readily as can I alone, but two heads, as Nanny Palmer always used to say, are better for knocking together than only one.

  I was still staring at the telephone when it rang, and when my feet touched the floor again after a short leap into the air I was convinced it would be Alec at the other end, somehow coming to help me.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ I said, in my most carefully modulated accent. ‘The Balfour residence.’

  ‘The what?’ said a penetrating voice. ‘Who the dickens is this? And who taught you how to answer a telephone? Balfour residence indeed! Who are you?’

  ‘Mi-iss Rossiter, madam,’ I said, for whoever this was it was most definitely a madam.

  ‘Who?’ bellowed the voice. ‘Where’s Faulds? And where’s my niece?’

  Illumination spread over me. It was Great Aunt Gertrude.

  ‘Mrs Hampton-Hayley,’ I said, sure of my recollection, ‘I’m afraid Mrs Balfour is seriously indisposed this afternoon. Would you like to—’

  ‘Who? What’s going on? This is Mrs Lambert-Leslie speaking.’ I had been close but hardly accurate, then. ‘With great reluctance, I might add, because I detest these damnable machines. Fetch my niece at once.’

  ‘As I was saying, madam.’ I had an aunt of my own for whom I had perfected the technique I was now employing: that of holding the earpiece a foot from my head to dull the booming and putting my face very close to the mouthpiece to try to break through it. ‘Mrs Balfour has her doctor with her just now and she’s very unwell indeed. If I might take a message, perhaps?’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Great Aunt Gertrude, although I was unsure which part of my contribution she was dismissing. ‘This is becoming utterly farcical. I’m ringing to say that I’ve run out of petroleum and I’m only halfway there.’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry to hear that, madam,’ I said. ‘Mrs Balfour is in great need of succour.’

  ‘Can’t think why,’ said Aunt Gertrude. ‘My second husband came off and went half a mile with his foot caught in the stirrup, bashed to bloody bits, and I watched the whole thing through my field glasses and didn’t go looking for any succour. What she needs is jollying up and setting straight. But I’m stuck halfway, and not a drop of petrol to be had. I’ll tell you, young woman, I wish I’d brought my gun.’

  The words, when she repeated them, went in at last.

  ‘Halfway?’ I said. ‘Halfway between Inverness and here? Where exactly are you, Mrs Lambert-Leslie?’ She drew away from the mouthpiece and I heard her shouting to someone in the distance. I did not hear the reply, but when she spoke into the telephone again, the sun shone. ‘Ballinluig,’ she roared. ‘God-forsaken spot. I thought Inverness was bad but this is worse, I can tell you.’

  ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘you are in luck. You are five short miles from some petrol, if you will consent to carry a passenger to town.’

  It took rather more explaining than one might have imagined, because Great Aunt Gertrude was one of those individuals who, rather than be told what the teller knows and she does not, fires questions, guesses and objections as rapidly as she can think them up and listens to nothing. Eventually, however, we established to her grudging satisfaction Alec’s name, address, school, regiment, father, mother and – crucially – grandmother’s sister, whom Great Aunt Gertrude had met in the days of her youth and remembered fondly.

  Alec Osborne is the other kind, in this as in every respect, and he took less than a minute to cotton on.

  ‘Gertrude Lambert-Leslie,’ he said. ‘Battleaxe. Arriving in ten minutes. Right-ho. I’ll pack for a week, Dan, because God knows how I shall ever get home again. Now what about the dogs? Shall I bring them?’

  ‘Don’t tease me,’ I said. ‘How can you? But if she’s there, right there, right now, put her on for a moment, would you?’ There was some scuffling and whistling at the other end and the sound of extravagant sniffing came down the line to me. ‘Bunty?’ I said. She whined. ‘Oh, darling! Hello! Hello, my darling!’

  ‘Miss Rossiter!’ Mr Faulds was in the dining-room doorway, having entered it from the servants’ door in the breakfast parlour. He had a piece of the elephant train centrepiece in each chamois-gloved hand, and looked so aghast that he was lucky not to have dropped them. Stanley, hovering behind him, pulled a frown of which Superintendent Hardy would have been proud.

  ‘Oh, Mr Faulds,’ I said, and I could hear Alec laughing as I crashed the earpiece back down and leapt away from the telephone. ‘Please forgive me. I don’t know what came over me. I was speaking on the telephone to mistress’s aunt and when she rang off, I just . . . called up my young man. I can’t account for it.’

  ‘Mrs L-L was this?’ said Faulds, his face softening. ‘Well, she’d send anyone flying to the arms – or even the ears – of a protector.’ Stanley, by the looks of him, was more shocked by Faulds’s calm reaction than by my outrage itself. He stared at the butler’s back, shaking his head in a kind of delighted disgust, his eyes threatening to pop right out of his head and roll away.

  ‘She’s coming,’ I said to Faulds. ‘She’s in Perthshire. She’ll be here by tonight.’

  ‘Lord love us, as if we hadn’t got enough on our plates,’ said Faulds. ‘Well, you run and tell Phyllis to air the back bedroom and get a fire lit for her.’

  ‘Certainly, Mr Faulds,’ I said, happy to ignore the cheek of a butler telling a lady’s maid to ‘run and’ do anything, if it would put me in the black again. Stanley did not miss the impropriety, though. He tutted in a very missish way. ‘Then, I’m going to want to speak to you.’

  ‘To me?’ said Faulds. Stanley was quivering with interest.

  ‘To everyone. At tea. I’ve got to tell you all something that I heard today.’

  But before that, I had my sleuthing to do. I left Phyllis and Clara at the linen closet, looking out the best guest sheets and groaning at the prospect of Great Aunt Gertrude, and after a quick look into the servants’ hall which showed me John and Harry sitting down in their shirtsleeves, I stole downstairs and out of the garden door. There was no one on the walkway above and the scullery window was misted up with steam, so Millie would not see me even if she were bent over her sinks as ever. From the coalhole, directly under the scullery, there came the rhythmic sound of a cob-hammer. Mattie must be busy in there, although it occurred to me that if I were in charge of the household I should have suspended the practice of breaking coal cobs into dainty little pieces for the drawing-room scuttle while we were held to a hundredweight a week (and who knew when it would be reduced even further). Great lumps like boulders might be inelegant but they burned with a marvellous lack of speed, and it was May after all; no one was going to catch cold for want of a good blaze.

  Beyond the cherry tree, a grass path led between washing ropes where the long aprons of the kitchen staff and the rough shirts and undershirts of the male servants were pegged out in the sunshine. Then there was a little garden, ten feet square, of brick paths and flowerbeds, which must have been a herbiary in the first days of the house but was now left to its own devices and growing a profusion of weeds with one or two leggy shrubs struggling through them. Further on again through a gate lay a small yard centred around a pump and drinking trough, with room around its rim for half a dozen horses – although the clean cobbles and the layer of weed on the surface of the water spoke of how long it had been since any carriage horses stood to refresh themselves there.

  At the far end of the yard, the carriage house closed off the garden completely from the mews. The stable doors were boarded up but there was a small door to one side still usable and I tried its handle. It opened onto a passageway with a staircase leading up to the sleeping level, a door on
each side and a door at the far end, along the bottom edge of which I could see a slit of light. The door on my left was half-open and the edge of a roller towel rail hinted that this was the ‘men’s arrangements’. The door on the right was just ajar too, and when I stepped towards it I saw a large dim space and the bonnet of the motorcar from that morning. The big garage doors, I could see, were shut and bolted. The door at the far end of the passageway with the light showing beneath it was not bolted, although it was locked – the key hung on the inevitable high hook to one side – but the bolts were shiny from touch and ran easily when I tried them, suggesting that the carriage house was kept fast at night. Could one of the maids have come all the way to this door to let in a murderer? Would she not have been heard? I looked up at the ceiling over my head, wondering if any of the boys slept right above this bolted door.

  The stairs creaked horribly as I went up them, and my feet sounded like clapping coconut shells on the bare boards above. There were only two rooms up here, each with a window onto the mews and another into the gardens. They had no fireplaces and I thought that these days, not a single horse downstairs warming the air with its breath, winter would be without much comfort. As to who slept where, it was hard to say; there was a bottle of brilliantine in one of the rooms which might have been Harry’s, and, near one of the beds, an elderly coachman’s cape which was surely John’s by rights was hanging on a nail, but in any case the partition walls were simple lath and plaster and even the wall which divided this carriage house from the one next door and the servants of another household sounded, when I knocked it, like a single layer of brick. If someone had got in through the mews, I did not see how all of the menservants could have failed to hear him.

  I had not glanced out of the garden window during my time upstairs and had not seen the figure coming down the drying green, along the brick path and over the yard, and so the sound of him entering the passageway beneath me set my heart hammering. There was no way out and nowhere to hide so I stood my ground, feet planted stoutly, and it was Stanley who jumped and gasped when we met, not me.