After the Armistice Ball (25 page)

At a little after nine that evening when my supper had been cleared and I was tucked up on a sofa with Mr Pickwick to jolly me along until bedtime, Alec appeared with a soft knock and slithered almost furtively into my room.

‘Hugh’s taking a contingent to look out of a telescope and I’ve peeled off,’ he said.

‘Quite right, too,’ I said, putting my feet to the floor and closing my book. ‘The tower room will be freezing.’

‘Aren’t you feeling well?’ Alec asked. ‘Are you just off to bed? I don’t want to disturb you.’

‘It’s a smoking suit,’ I said, trying for haughtiness. ‘Right. Report from Dr Milne. Has he said anything, by the way, to the rest of you, about my mental state? He thinks I’m slightly mad after this morning.’ I told Alec with as few grisly embellishments as I thought I could get away with, just what Dr Milne had told me: that he had never met either this child or Cara but that given the thoroughness of his examination there was no doubt about the creature’s class nor her condition.

‘That’s that then,’ said Alec, when I was finished. ‘I still can’t believe it though. A theft, a suicide or whatever you want to call it, and a fire all happening to the same family in such quick succession and none of them connected to any of the others?’

‘Well, in my version,’ I said, ‘the theft and the fire are connected, and it’s just the poor maid that’s the unforeseen catastrophe. And I still think there’s something fishy about that. Why on earth would they take a kitchen maid away with them in the first place? I mean to say, the rough work of the kitchen is the one thing they could be sure to have done daily by some local woman. A lady’s maid, I should have thought.’

‘Who said she
was
a kitchen maid?’ asked Alec.

‘Good point,’ I said. ‘It was Dr Milne, and I don’t suppose he really knew, just placed the poor creature as low as he could on the scale to match his distaste for what she had done. You should have heard him this morning, Alec. Nothing but disdain for the type of “creature” who would do such a thing. I wish we knew her name. It’s hateful to keep calling her a creature. It makes me no better than he is.’

‘But she really is a distraction, Dandy dear,’ said Alec. ‘Your concern for the poor cr– for the girl does you credit, but it’s Cara we need to think about.’

I sighed and said nothing. It still bothered me greatly that Cara, Cara, Cara mattered so much and the other little girl not at all. I was sure that Dr Milne’s revulsion was not only for her desperate action – an unusual one to be sure – but for the all too common action which led to it. I was sure as well that if poor dear darling Cara had found herself in a similar spot . . .

Alec started to speak but I held up my hand to silence him while I followed this sudden thought through to its conclusion. Cara had something momentous to tell Alec and was sure that Alec would not mind. She might have dealt with it, had she been able to raise the money, but since the jewels were fakes she was stuck with it. Her mother did not want Alec to be told, even to the point of getting Clemence to break things off on Cara’s behalf. How stupid we had been. It was obvious now.

‘Alec,’ I said, with great reluctance. ‘Did you and Cara . . . Did you and Cara go to bed?’ This was no time for skirting around the thing, I was sure.

‘No,’ said Alec. ‘Why do you ask?’ He had clearly decided to be as businesslike as me about this unexpected turn.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you are not at all going to like where this is leading, but I suddenly saw right now that the poor unfortunate creature could be Cara after all, and could have died in just the way we know the poor thing did. In short, I think Cara was pregnant. Listen to me, listen to me, hear me out,’ I protested, as he began to interrupt. ‘Had the child been yours –’

‘It couldn’t have been.’

‘No, I believe you,’ I said. ‘Because if it had been, or even if it might have been, then why would Mrs Duffy be so terrified of Cara telling you? Do you remember the letter? The first letter I mean? “Mummy is cross” and “I think she’s being ridiculous” and “I trust in your love”. Do you see? Cara knew that they were going to force her to break it off with you and disappear and that’s why she decided to try to get rid of it.’

Alec held his head in his hands, either to block out the horrible idea or simply because he was trying to mesh this new theory with all the facts and near-facts we already had spinning around us.

‘What about the diamonds?’ he said, and I knew he was trying to think it out.

‘Well, perhaps Cara meant to sell the diamonds to raise money for a doctor.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Alec. ‘Surely it would take a piddling fraction of what she could raise.’

‘But she can’t have been thinking very clearly. I know she was almost beside herself the day we spoke at Croys. And don’t you remember me telling you – she was talking about the fakes and she said she thought perhaps now the wedding wouldn’t go ahead? We were puzzled at the time, do you remember, trying to see a connection. So then she decided to throw herself upon your mercy, but her mother and Clemence were terrified that you would chuck her and ruin her reputation and so she was whisked off to the cottage, and her disappearance was to be masked by the fire, and Clemence wrote to you breaking it off and so poor, poor Cara tried to . . . Oh God, Alec this must be right, mustn’t it? It all fits.’

‘Do you have any brandy in here, Dan?’ said Alec. It was the first time he had called me that, although I felt a heel for noticing when I should only have been thinking about how upset he was. I poured him a glass of cognac and one for myself then stood by his chair with my hand on his bowed head as he drank it.

‘What about the diamonds, really, though?’ Alec persisted. ‘Where does the theft fit into this?’ After scarcely being willing to mention the diamonds before, he would not leave them alone now.

‘It doesn’t. If Cara stole them, she would hardly have tried to sell them too. But she
did
try to sell them and I think she became desperate when she failed.’

‘Why not sell something else?’ said Alec. ‘Or why not ask someone for money? There must have been heaps of people who would have given Cara anything she asked for without a murmur. She was adored.
Is
adored. Was.’ I could tell by the slump of his shoulders that I had convinced him, and now I was almost sorry I had. I sat back down at my end of the sofa and sipped my drink in silence.

‘What would you have done?’ I said presently. ‘If Cara had told you.’

Alec looked up at me with a bleak expression on his face which made me want to take the words and stuff them back into my mouth.

‘With hindsight?’ he said. ‘To prevent such an end for her? If she had told me she was . . . with child, I should have married her, adopted her triplets and let their father sleep in my dressing room, of course. Without hindsight, I really can’t say.’

It was just at that moment that Hugh walked into my room and found us there (no knocking and keeping his feet on the carpet for him) but he clearly had no difficulty in assigning a meaning to Alec’s drained and desperate face and my look of embarrassed glumness, and he withdrew tactfully, going to tell the others that young Osborne, for all that his upper lip was as stiff as anyone could ask, was really quite undone about the whole thing in a quiet way.

Chapter Thirteen

Could it possibly have happened like that? I could believe it of Lena that she would stage her daughter’s death as a respectable way out of the wedding and at least if that were true one did not have to believe the even more monstrous idea that she had actually killed her child to save her own reputation. Whether she meant Cara to reappear at some time in the future with a fantastical tale of kidnap or amnesia I did not know, nor had I any clue why Cara had changed her mind about leaving and tried with such terrible determination to put things right. Wait, though. Something was wrong with that. Cara did not know about the plan, we had decided that she could not. So kidnap was not after all so far from the truth.

Of one thing I was sure: this was cooked up by the women alone. I remembered the way Cara’s father had looked at her down the dinner table at Croys, and not one man in a million would look that way at a girl three weeks from marrying his heir and carrying another man’s child. A mother, though, was a different quantity altogether. A mother – a woman herself for one thing, who knew the way the world could turn on a girl – might quite easily do what Lena had done to get her daughter out of shame’s way.

The question remained whether we should tell Mr Duffy now, shrivel his rosy memories in the harsh light of ugly facts, and shine the same light on his wife and elder child so that he would be left with nothing. It had been such a shabby little scheme, all the desperation one associates with people straining to keep a skin of respectability where none is deserved, and it had gone so horribly and obscenely wrong. I could not see any good coming of making him face it.

Besides, the only good I should be concerned with was Silas and Daisy’s. And I knew that the only way to keep Lena from putting the squeeze on Silas was for me to squeeze her, first and harder. I was not proud of this as a plan. It was not lost on me that when there is no decent way to express an action, then the action itself is probably shameful. Still, it was the best I could come up with. Lena thought she knew something dreadful about the Esslemonts? Well, now I knew something dreadful about the Duffys, and although I had not a clue what Lena’s knowledge actually was, I was sure it could not be worse than mine. I had trumped her.

I needed some more proof, of course – Mr McNally’s empty coal hole, Mr Marshall’s paint and paper, and old Mrs Marshall’s girl on a bicycle amounted to almost nothing – and I had an idea of how I might get it, but as I regarded myself sternly in the glass on the morning of Cara’s memorial service, as Grant lowered the huge black hat on to my head, I wondered if I dared. Had I lost all my humanity in the short duration of my detective career? It seemed no time since I thought I was going to find out what had happened to the diamonds and simply show Lena that the Armistice Anniversary Ball was neither here nor there. Such an innocent task! And now a few weeks later I had come to contemplate something scarcely less shabby than what had been planned at Reiver’s Rest. Grant sniffed expressively and my attention returned to the present.

‘More rouge, madam,’ she said.

I shook my head.

‘And a little something around the eyes,’ she added.

‘Grant, it’s nine o’clock in the morning. I am not going to have a little anything around my eyes, nor more rouge.’

‘You can’t carry off all this black, madam,’ said Grant. ‘Not any more.’

‘I never could,’ I said. ‘And I’m not trying to carry it off. It’s a memorial service, practically a funeral. Anyway, I don’t foresee being able to get through the day without tears and then I should look like a panda. A panda with white streaks through its rouge.’

That swung it.

‘I wish you would learn to cry out of the corners of your eyes, madam, I do,’ said Grant and swept out. I was left feeling a lot less charitable after this prickly exchange and besides, Grant’s easy scorn of me and all my works made me want to prove to myself that I had talents, even if neat weeping was not one of them. I decided to swallow my scruples and use the day well.

‘Man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble,’ intoned the minister and from my position halfway back in the church I could see a collective droop of shoulders in the pews in front of me. I have always thought that the jolly, celebratory funerals one comes across in Scotland (whose Church is fearfully Low) are more depressing than doleful High Anglicanism, but today of all days I should have welcomed a fat little man beaming as he spread the good news from behind the coffin, instead of this shockingly empty altar and the cadaverous individual before it telling us adenoidally that each of us was doomed. Beside me, Daisy inspected her nails surreptitiously, and on my other side I could feel Hugh remove himself mentally to the riverbank, or it might have been the stable yard. Curious, that sense one gets of the moods of one’s husband through the long years of habitual proximity, like the way one knows exactly the moment when he has fallen asleep and so will not be going back to his dressing room and leaving one in peace to read. I wondered idly if the flow of intuition went all one way or if Hugh could tell that I was busily thinking instead of praying like a good girl.

Still the minister droned. He was on to an appreciation of Cara’s life now, and far from giving voice to the howl of anger which would be any right-thinking person’s view when a young girl of twenty-two dies weeks before her wedding, he was tucking a blanket of euphemism over the whole sorry mess. I thought of what Hugh had told me about the native villagers in East Africa, how they sit on the ground screeching and wailing, none of this cloying acceptance. Or now I came to think of it, perhaps it was only the women who wailed. Hugh had not said what the menfolk got up to; presumably they blustered on just like this. Men. One good thing about speaking to Dr Milne had been that he told me what he knew in the straightest possible terms. ‘Clear signs of pregnancy’, he had said, and ‘miscarriage’, not like Alec gulping and stammering and only managing to say ‘with child’. Such a silly expression. Like the minister’s ‘born of woman’. Although to be fair Dr Milne had said it too, had he not? That a medical man could tell with one eye shut when a woman was with child.

I sat bolt upright in my pew and my prayer book fell to the floor, landing on the edge of its spine with a sharp crack. I am sure too that I said something, although I do not know what, because Daisy came out of her daydream with a jolt to stare at me and Hugh stiffened with instant embarrassment. Even the woman in front, although she would not crane round to look, was transfixed – I could tell by the sudden quivering attentiveness of the feathers on her hat.

Had I merely been drifting off to sleep? One often thinks one has had tremendous ideas then, ideas which turn out to be not only worthless, but barely expressible in anything but gibberish. But this time I was almost sure. I put my head back down again, concentrating on the wood grain to help me block out the voice of the minister, and started to think. Now, of course, I fell asleep for real and the next thing I knew was that Hugh had gripped my arm rather firmly and hauled me to my feet for the beginning of the final hymn.