After the Armistice Ball (16 page)

‘But – pardon me, madam – but won’t your friend have read all about it in the papers?’ said the girl.

‘The papers? The newspapers? Oh, yes,’ I gabbled. ‘Well, no, because this friend is very, very sensitive, and in poor health and doesn’t read the newspapers for that reason.’

‘Well, madam,’ she continued, ‘can you telephone to this friend and ask a member of the household whether she has been told?’ I could feel a prickle of perspiration begin at the back of my neck. Confound the girl.

‘I had thought,’ I went on, ‘that if you showed me your list of telegrams sent – you do keep a note of them, don’t you? – I could look and see if there had been anything sent to my friend.’ This was my wonderful plan. My vision had been of the girl, docile and eager to help, sliding a list of names across the counter to me, and of my thus finding out all manner of things.

‘But her father might have sent word from Edinburgh, before he came here, madam,’ the girl persisted. ‘Or he might have telephoned. I don’t mind of him coming in here, but he might have rung her up from the hotel. Or they might have sent letters. We don’t even see the letters, madam. The postman picks them up and they’re sorted and off to Kirkcudbright.’ I nodded, more and more vigorously as she ran through all of these things I had never thought of. ‘What’s your friend’s name, madam?’ she said suddenly. ‘And I’ll check.’

I gaped at her and blushed. ‘Gordon-Strathmurdle,’ I blurted, the least authentic-sounding name of anyone I know in the world.

‘Oh no, madam,’ said the girl. ‘I would have remembered a name like that.’ I blushed even deeper. ‘And besides,’ she said, generous now that we both knew which of us had the upper hand, ‘there were no telegrams sent from the Reiver’s Rest all week except that one to you yourself.’ I smiled my thanks and fled next door to let an ice-cream sundae in Frulliano’s cool my cheeks from the inside out.

Alec had had a rather less eventful day than mine, closer to what we had both foreseen in the way of gently coaxing information from simple bucolics who did not even know it was happening. No dressings down from shop girls for him; no mud nor eggshells. There had been time before our rendezvous, however, to compose a report which skated over these less triumphant episodes. I had even made notes for myself and although I had lost my nerve at the last moment and hidden them amongst my nighties, still I was eager to pass on what I had learned.

‘I’ll begin, shall I?’ I said. ‘I have found out first, that Cara sent no telegrams, nor did Clemence, and Mrs Duffy sent only the one to me that we knew about anyway. Also, that the Duffys were troubled about something and very keen to be alone, to the extent that they did not want their housekeeper to linger in the cottage a moment longer than she had to each day. Lastly, that Clemence and Cara were at odds with one another over something, so perhaps their mother did not want the housekeeper to hear them quarrelling – she’s quite terrifying, by the way.’

‘The telegrams are good work, Dandy,’ said Alec, ‘but forgive me for being frank, won’t you? The rest of what you have just told me are not “findings out” but your interpretations of findings out. I want to hear the facts, not the theories, then we can add them to my facts and build our theories together.’ This last sounded so very enticing that it took away some of the sting. I dashed upstairs, got my notes from my underclothes drawer and started again.

Alec listened in silence, making a great deal of work out of clearing and refilling his pipe, while I relayed Aggie Marshall, old Mrs Marshall and young Miss Telegram in turn, missing out the worst of my blunders, and scrupulously avoiding any reference to cabbages.

He puffed steadily for a long moment after I had finished, and I lit a cigarette of my own, rather wishing I could share his pipe, which smelled mellow and cool against my more acrid smoke (best gaspers from the grocer cum tobacconist up the street). Gentlemen’s brilliantine too always smells so much more dignified than the poisonous cocktail we pour over ourselves in pursuit of a lasting curl. Why did men always keep the best of everything for themselves?

‘So two different people commented on how hot the house was,’ said Alec. ‘Three including Sandy Marshall. I caught up with him myself and that was one of his main themes.’

‘And his mother makes two, and who is the third?’ I asked.

‘His wife,’ Alec said. ‘She told you the range was never cold when she went in in the morning. Yes. That may very well be significant when we put it alongside something else I found out today.’ I noted that Alec did not feel he was compelled to report verbatim what his informants had divulged, not too scared to mess things up with interpretation before
I
could mull them over. ‘Mr McNally, the coalman, had something very interesting to say. I included him in my round-up of possible visitors for the sake of completeness and I’m very glad I did so. Not least because pickings were otherwise rather slim – don’t you think it just a bit suspicious that they seem to have kept themselves quite so utterly to themselves, Dandy? A couple of ladies glimpsed on a distant cliff-top is about it.’

‘Yes, but you were about to tell me something about the coalman?’

‘Quite. Mr McNally delivered five hundredweight of best house coal, as well as two sacks of sticks, the week before the Duffys arrived. It was ordered by letter from Edinburgh. Now, the coal store at Reiver’s Rest – somewhere between a large bunker and a shed proper – sits separate from the house itself, quite some way away, owing I suppose to the local wariness about wooden houses –’

‘Or possibly the complete lack of concern on the part of the builder for the little maid who had to trot back and forth with the buckets,’ I put in.

‘That too,’ said Alec. ‘Well, after much hemming and hawing, Mr McNally admitted to me that he went back to the cottage yesterday, to “check on” the coal. For which I think we can understand “take back and resell”, but why not? Coal would be the last thing on anyone’s mind, and as McNally pointed out to me, a heap of it just sitting there is a temptation to any troop of wee rascals who might happen past with a box of matches and a heidfu’ o’ naethin’.’ Here Alec dropped into a dreadful approximation of a Scots tongue, painful to the ear.

‘Now, the coal shed was kept locked,’ he went on, ‘but Mr McNally has a key and when he opened up yesterday, what do you think he found?’ For a horrid moment my mind ran skittering over some of the things I imagined might be found in a locked coal shed, rats being the very least. Then Alec went on.

‘He found nothing. Nothing. The coal was finished. In one week, enough coal had been used to have kept a family of ten warm all winter.’

‘I’ve just remembered,’ I said. ‘Mrs Marshall – nice Mrs Marshall – told me that one day when she went by she saw that all the doors and windows were thrown open. She remembered particularly, because the new curtains were blowing out against the outside walls getting dirty, and she was puzzled because she knew the fires were hotter than Sandy thought was advisable with new paper.’

‘And yet didn’t Clemence say at the inquiry that the bedroom fires weren’t even lit?’ said Alec. ‘I wonder why no one corrected her? No matter. You know what this means, don’t you, Dandy?’ I thought I did but it seemed not only far-fetched, but beset with problems. ‘All the fires lit, the range stoked and the windows flung open. That little house, that little wooden house, was being dried out like kindling. It was
supposed
to catch fire and it was supposed to burn to the ground when it did.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but there’s a problem, Alec, don’t you see? Cara couldn’t possibly have arranged that and carried it out, could she?’

‘No indeed. Indeed she couldn’t.’ Alec’s voice was grim. ‘Our suicide theory begins to crumble. And anyway, didn’t you say that both the Mrs Marshalls remarked how happy Cara was?’

‘“A cheery wee thing”,’ I agreed. ‘Yet that second letter she sent you seemed anything but cheerful.’

I took a last puff at my cigarette and threw it into the fire. Alec was busy fiddling with his pipe. (Perhaps he was welcome to it; who could be bothered, after all?)

‘The second letter aside,’ I said, ‘if Cara didn’t kill herself, what did happen? Was it an accident after all?’ Alec resettled his pipe, raised his eyebrows and said nothing. I began to shake my head, horrified. ‘No, Alec, no, you can’t mean that. That Mrs Duffy or she and Clemence together . . . and then calmly went for a walk and left her there. And how on earth could Cara be made to stay in the house and let it happen?’ I asked.

‘We said ourselves that she must have hit her head and been unconscious,’ said Alec. ‘And we agreed that people don’t just hit their heads.’

‘But it’s impossible,’ I said. ‘Her mother? Her sister? It’s utterly preposterous. And why?’

‘It would explain their oddness, their watchfulness,’ said Alec. ‘Their peculiar reaction to seeing me. Mrs Duffy’s attempts to quash all hint of trouble at the inquiry.’ I was beginning to feel sick. To think of them (or just her?) banking up fires and stoking the range, the windows open and everyone still sweltering. Wait! No, it couldn’t be. Relief rolled over me like a wave of warm water.

‘It can’t have happened that way,’ I said. ‘Don’t you see? Because how could they have explained it to Cara? She wouldn’t have sat quietly while they made a tinderbox of the cottage around her, would she?’ Alec’s shoulders dropped and he smiled.

‘No, no, of course not.’ He gave a sigh that was almost a laugh. ‘I’m sure we’re right about what all the coal was used for, but it must have happened with the knowledge and acquiescence of everyone in the house. It must have.’

‘And since we can’t countenance the idea that Cara was a willing accomplice in her own death,’ I said, ‘where does that leave us?’

‘You’re wrong,’ said Alec, sitting suddenly upright from where he had slumped down in his chair with relief. ‘That’s exactly what must have happened. Cara, Clemence and their mother were all in it together. It was a deliberate scheme, what the Americans call a frame-up. And what it means – of course! – is that Cara is still alive.’

‘What?’ I said, but the sense of it hit me almost at once. ‘Oh, yes, I see! Oh thank God! She’s not dead. She’s disappeared somewhere and that’s why the house had to burn right to the ground – to make it plausible that nothing remained of her.’ I beamed.

‘And it all went according to plan,’ he said. ‘Including you turning up as a convenient witness, except that I was not supposed to turn up with you and that rattled them.’

‘And do you think that was the secret she wanted to tell you? And do you think that she and her mother couldn’t agree on whether you might be told? And she couldn’t bear you to think she was dead while you were still engaged and that’s why she wrote to break it off?’ Alec nodded faster and faster as I rattled through all this, and as his smile deepened I thought to myself that yes, it must have hurt him at some spot between his heart and his pride to have got that letter, despite how cool he had seemed, and that he was glad to have an explanation of the jilting that was nothing to do with his attractions as a husband, even if we now had more questions, and more puzzling ones, than ever.

‘So . . . why?’ I asked. ‘And how did she get away? And where is she? And how are we even going to
start
to find her?’

Chapter Nine

We could be sure of one thing: there was nothing more to be learned in Galloway. Clearly the Duffys had chosen the spot because they could go about their business unobserved there. So I telephoned to Gilverton, telling Hugh with a nice truthfulness that the Duffys had gone off to the mountains and that I should like Drysdale to fetch me from Edinburgh the following afternoon. I was glad; despite a growing fondness for the peace of my little room with its striped flannel sheets and its view of the barrels in the yard, my lack of success with the locals (around whom Alec seemed able to run the expected rings) was a constant thorn, and I was missing Bunty, growing tired of the clothes I had brought and, after this morning, I needed Grant to attend to my coat and gloves as a matter of urgency.

We spent the journey up to town dividing the tasks ahead. I was to tackle the jeweller who identified the pastes, since both Alec and I felt a lady could best achieve the right combination of tenacious interest and muddle-headedness to find out all there was to know while not putting the man on his guard. Besides, the jewels were my proper concern, being Daisy’s only one. I thought it rather unlikely that Cara would have said anything useful to a jeweller, but thoroughness is to be recommended in most arenas and, also, there was not much else for me to do.

Alec had rather wider scope. Under cover of unbearable grief, he was to make visits to Cara’s closest friends and beg them to talk about her. We both thought it certain that they would speak of the last time they had met, or the last letter they had had, and that something about the pickle she was in might be revealed. I secretly hoped, as I daresay did he, that he should actually discover much more than this; that is, that he should discover Cara herself holed up with a chum somewhere. We did not, however, give voice to this hope.

So, after a blissful night back in my own bed and having submitted myself to one of Grant’s most punitive toilettes – it always incensed her to have me go off on my own – I found myself in Edinburgh again, descending Frederick Street, approaching the jeweller’s with the reluctance of a dog being led to its bath water. Stopping at the corner of the street and pretending to look with interest at a suite of hideous mahogany bedroom furniture in the window of a shop, I ran through my plan once again. I hoped this plan was a wily testament to my growing skills as a detective, but I feared it was another rag-bag of unnecessary lies and pointless indiscretions. Briefly, it was this: I had decided to tell the jeweller that I suspected suicide and was convinced that Cara’s attempt to sell the jewels was connected. I should ask him not to tell the Duffys about my interest, and I felt sure that out of common decency, even if not out of any sense of obligation, he would agree. I should begin calmly but was ready to dissolve into tears if the occasion arose and a corner of my handkerchief was soaked in Thawpit to help with the dissolving.