Bury Her Deep (17 page)

‘And I’ll help,’ said Alec. ‘I’ll come down with you.’ I quite understood his enthusiasm, but I could not let it pass.

‘Absolutely impossible, darling,’ I said. ‘You can’t go knocking on doors and interviewing women in their kitchens. I have a legitimate reason to be there and a place to stay, even a handy story to trot out should anyone ask what I’m up to. You certainly can’t come galumphing down, bereft of any disguise and ruining mine.’

‘I don’t galumph,’ said Alec. ‘And besides, as those revolting children of yours would say: same to you with knobs on. If I can’t haunt the kitchens you can hardly mount a proper attack on alibis amongst the local men.’

‘But it’s not a local man who’s doing it,’ I insisted. ‘Everyone at Luckenlaw knows everyone else and no one recognises this stranger.’ Alec shook his head looking mutinous.

‘Context, Dandy, context,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you ever passed your barber in the street – well, milliner or something in your case, obviously – and been absolutely unable to place him, out from behind his shop front, stripped of his apron?’

‘I think if my milliner bore down on me and tried to claw my eyes out it would spark some recognition,’ I said. ‘Anyway, where would you stay?’

‘Don’t you have any friends in the area where I could be absorbed into a house party and make no ripple?’

‘Only the Taits,’ I told him. ‘And they’re out of the question. House parties of bright young things are not Lorna Tait’s milieu. There are the Howies, who are rather fun and wouldn’t turn a hair, but it’s as far a leap from their drawing room to a cottage kitchen as it is from here. Really, Alec, you’re going to have to leave this one to me.’

‘I’m not a bright young thing,’ said Alec, rather humourlessly. ‘I’m thirty-three, I’m running two houses and I’m keeping on top of a very difficult new butler as you said yourself.’

‘I’ll send frequent dispatches,’ I assured him. ‘And I’ll telephone to you if I need to mull things over. You’ve been no end of help today.’

9

It has never with any truth been said of me that I am the methodical type. It is my great good fortune to have been born when I was and not any later, for if I had been forced to sit at a desk in an office somewhere threading a typing machine with inky ribbon and shuffling carbons into order, some blameless man of business who had employed me would surely have been driven to distraction and bankruptcy. (Likewise, I count myself very fortunate to have been gently born; never to have grappled with a loom in a dark mill, a gutting knife on a harbourside, or a mangle and irons in a fragrant laundry, for I should certainly have garrotted, disembowelled or strangled myself if I had tried.)

So it was a considerable strain to force myself, upon my return to Luckenlaw the following week, into a visit to Molly of Luck House (as I now thought of it, feeling quite the local) to complete my interviews with the known victims, instead of immediately plunging into the delicious task of sniffing out the others. It had been challenge enough to wait this tantalising week, even though I knew that there was a full month before another attack would happen and I would be far better to stay quietly at home, making notes and getting rosettes for wifely attentiveness, than to charge off again on the instant, putting Hugh’s back up and missing half the clues I was finding for the lack of thoughtful preparation which would help me see them for what they were.

Lorna accompanied me to the Howies’ once more, but in the motor car this time owing to the filthy weather, and so we avoided any more dawdling on the footbridge over the ford and sighing at the abandoned cottage where she and her poet were to have settled to their married bliss. She was, as a matter of fact, in more cheerful spirits than I had ever seen her, much taken with Bunty, who had come back with me, although thrown into a domestic twitter by the arrival of Grant besides (for Grant would not hear of being left behind again, not now that the new items ordered for my winter wardrobe had arrived; it would have been intolerable to her to wait at Gilverton with the boxes and bags while I mucked along at Luckenlaw in my autumn frocks and coats with an extra vest for warmth and last year’s shoes). The Taits had never had a house guest bring a lady’s maid before, and Lorna was concerned that Grant might find the servants’ quarters beneath her or baulk at sharing a bedroom with another maid, but I knew Grant better than that; to get out from under Pallister’s eye would be as good as a week at Eastbourne and the chance to let a poor little maid of all work see her, Grant’s, hand-embroidered underclothes and the tissue-layered packing of them – for she was just as fussy about her own belongings as she was about mine – would be meat and drink to her.

I had made a feeble remark or two about leaving some of the more startling purchases behind, but my mind was taken up with the case and I did not have enough spare attention to win the day. Accordingly, I was headed for tea with the Howies decked out in an ankle-length coat of Persian lamb, with a sable collar like a surgical neck-brace and silver clasps worked in the pattern of Celtic knots holding shut the belt. A hat somewhere between a Beefeater’s pancake and a paper sailing ship in its construction had been firmly jammed onto my head in the spare bedroom before I left the manse.

‘And don’t take it off,’ said Grant. ‘Madam. I’ll look into getting some rainwater for tomorrow morning’ – Grant never trusted the water for hair-washing purposes if we were anywhere near the sea – ‘but for today, please don’t take it off. I’ve packed a turban for this evening.’

I rolled my eyes at her in the mirror. A turban, I knew, meant evening clothes to match it, and there was no way I was sweeping downstairs to dinner with Mr Tait and Lorna in beaded chiffon lounging pyjamas, Ali Baba pantaloons or whatever Turkey-inspired excesses Grant had come up with now. I heartily wished the whole Ottoman adventure in couture would blow over some season very soon.

‘My, my,’ said Vashti Howie as we were shown in, ‘don’t you look splendid.’ She was dressed as usual in a collection of what would have been trailing wisps had they been silk but, since they appeared to be made out of hand-dyed sacking, could be more accurately described as flapping hanks. The hand-dyeing was no more successful than the cut either, with the purple and mustard fighting both each other and Vashti’s sallow skin. I wished Grant were there; if she could have witnessed a sight like Vashti commending me for my style, she might have taken fright and ordered me something more becoming. Nicolette, as ever, was in stiflingly tight, bright tweed and high heels, and I thought that if she were not careful she would end up with those tennis ball calf muscles like a country dancing mistress I once had as a child, whom I admired terrifically for soldiering on with her profession despite the nameless and surely painful condition afflicting her poor bulging legs and her pitiful feet, which arched like leaping salmon when she pointed them.

The Howies, as before, were corralled in their ground-floor drawing room, littered about on sofas and armchairs, and all the signs were that they had spent the day there: there was a barely shifting cloud of cigarette smoke hanging just above the level of the lampshades and the fires were pulsing heaps of orange, having been lit first thing and fed repeatedly as the day wore on. The menfolk remained sunk in torpor despite our entrance, but the ladies sprang very flatteringly to life.

‘Darling Lorna,’ cried Nicolette, throwing down the paper she had been reading. ‘We haven’t seen you in an age and we have so much to talk about.’

‘We’re throwing a little party next month, for Lorna’s birthday,’ Vashti explained to me.

‘I had heard,’ I said. ‘It’s very kind of you.’ Nicolette and Vashti giggled gently.

‘Not at all,’ Vashti said. ‘We’re simply dying to. It’s the culmination of our entire year.’

‘Long time since we had a party,’ said Johnny Howie, with his chin on his chest. ‘Changed days.’

‘Ah, the parties we had at Balnagowan in the old days,’ said Nicolette. ‘Bonfires on every hilltop, pipers on every headland—’

‘I could have done without the pipers, to be brutally honest,’ said Vashti. ‘Oh but remember that midsummer!’

‘We had such swags of flowers hanging from the chandelier chains, Dandy – monstrous great things; it took all the garden staff to lift them – that they brought the house down. Well, a good lot of the plaster anyway.’

‘ . . . said they were too heavy,’ muttered Irvine Howie. ‘ . . . never listen.’

‘And that was the end of that,’ said Vashti. ‘Cousin Sourpuss wouldn’t let us back.’

‘No more parties at Balnagowan,’ sighed Nicolette, in an amused sing-song, sounding like Nanny telling Baby that its bowl of pudding was ‘all-gone’.

‘So you didn’t actually live in the house?’ I asked, pitying the cousin a little.

‘No, more’s the tragedy,’ said Vashti. She was blunter than I had ever heard any woman being about exactly what her unprepossessing husband had to recommend him and had either of the Howie men looked conscious of the insult I should have blushed for all of them, but Irvine was staring straight ahead, at the glowing tip of his cigarette, as though in some kind of Eastern trance, and Johnny had shut his eyes again.

‘ . . . comes of handing it over to the female line,’ said Irvine, after a long silence. ‘And now even that’s withered and died.’

‘Don’t be so disparaging about female lines!’ said Vashti. ‘Remember it was your illustrious ancestress that brought you Vash and me. Have you ever heard of Lady Fowlis, Dandy? Katherine Ross by birth and—’

‘We need to think about the decorations,’ said Nicolette, cutting across her. I supposed there were excesses of snobbery that even the most unashamed social climber could not bear to hear and dropping mentions of one’s grandest forebear really was beyond the pale. I began to wonder about Vashti and Nicolette’s beginnings and then, feeling like Lady Bracknell to be doing so, I put it out of my mind.

‘Of course,’ said Vashti, changing tack smoothly. ‘What are you wearing, Lorna darling? Do you know yet? We need to make sure the whole room is a setting for the jewel that is you.’

‘Like an altar with a bride,’ said Nicolette. ‘Please give us some clues.’

‘Are you holding the party in here?’ I asked, wondering how any decorations could be squeezed in amongst all the furnishings and realising a little too late that I should not have drawn attention to the way they lived, all in one room together like travelling tinkers in their caravan.

‘No, no, no,’ said Vashti. ‘We’re opening up the ballroom for the night. And it’s rather a barn without some frillies. So please tell us what palette we’re working on, Lorna darling, so we can get stuck in.’

‘I don’t want you to go to a lot of’ – I am sure that Lorna was about to say ‘expense’ but she managed to bite her lip on it – ‘bother.’ The subtlety was wasted, however.

‘Don’t worry, darling,’ Nicolette cried. ‘We’re in funds for once in our miserable lives.’

‘Oh?’ said Lorna, trying not to sound too surprised.

‘We’ve let the cottage,’ Vashti said. ‘Can you believe it?’

‘Ford Cottage?’ said Lorna, faltering slightly over the name.

‘Vash, you are a bull in a china shop sometimes,’ said Nicolette. ‘I’m sorry, my darling, but yes. We’ve found a new tenant at last. At least for a while.’

‘Fella needs his head looking at,’ said Johnny Howie. Having seen Ford Cottage, I had to agree.

‘He’s a painter,’ said Nicolette. ‘An artist. He’s taken it for the light, you oaf, not the fixtures and fittings.’

‘Good luck to him,’ said Johnny, unabashed. ‘Precious little light down there in July, never mind the depths of winter.’

‘The quality of light, you double oaf,’ said his wife. Then she began to talk in a throaty voice, waving a hand in languid circles. ‘The soft light through the bare winter trees, the gentle milky light of a foggy afternoon. Anyway,’ she said, her voice changing back to normal, ‘he’s paid up two months in advance and says he might stay until springtime. So don’t worry about a few vases and tassels to make your party a feast to the eyes, darling Lorna. We can afford it.’ She linked arms with Lorna and shook her gently. Vashti beamed at them and I smiled too. Generosity is always attractive, even such reckless generosity as this was.

‘Oh but what a shame it’s such an awkward time of year for flowers,’ Nicolette went on. ‘We have the most beautiful spring flowers here, Dandy. All the usuals, of course, and a sea of those divine white narcissi with the pheasants’ eyes. It’s utterly drunk-making to walk up the drive in April, isn’t it, Vash?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid the decor can’t be predominantly floral, darling, rent or no rent. Not if we’re to have something to drink too. I declare, the twentieth of November must be the most impossible day of the year to try to dream up a theme for a party. Too late for Hallowe’en – no matter what you say, Niccy.’

‘We could always hearken forward to Yuletide and go all out for evergreens,’ said Nicolette. ‘Oh Vash, don’t look so sneering. It’s close enough. We’ve fudged like this who knows how many times.’

‘Only when we’ve had to,’ said Vashti. ‘And it’s an entire month out.’ Lorna too was shaking her head at the idea.

‘Absolutely not,’ I said. ‘It’s unforgivable to lump someone’s birthday in with Christmas even if the poor thing is born on Christmas Day. Out of the question in November.’

‘Pink,’ said Lorna at last. ‘I’m wearing pink. So if you insist, I suppose some pink ribbons would be a pretty touch.’

Nicolette and Vashti looked so aghast at the idea of all their flamboyant plans coming down to a few pink ribbons that it was all I could do not to laugh.

‘Anyway,’ I said, trying to sound natural and probably failing, ‘talking of good fortune and windfalls, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and have a word with your maid.’

All four Howies swivelled their eyes to gape at me.

‘For the household budget talk,’ I supplied. ‘Actually, it’s beginning to look as though it might make a pamphlet. So I thought I’d start by gathering the thoughts of as wide a social sweep as possible. You, obviously, being the first family of the neighbourhood,’ I guessed that a little flattery would do me no harm, ‘and your maid right down at the other end of things.’ That, of course, ruined the flattery completely. It might be true that a girl trying to run this place single-handed was necessarily at the bottom of the heap – and make no mistake, the serving classes have easily as many gradations and nuanced shadings as do we – but it was hardly diplomatic to make such plain reference to it.