Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains (12 page)

‘The doctor will be able to tell us more about that,’ he said. ‘Have you heard anything from any of those strapping lads downstairs to make you think one of
them
might have wanted to kill him?’

I thought back to the evening before, John teasing Harry about the use of the razor. Surely he
was
only teasing? Still, I had wondered how someone of Harry’s views could bear to be a servant, and a valet at that – the most intimate of servant–master relationships, surely. And then what had been wrong with Mattie this morning? And why was Mr Faulds so very desperate to get into the murder room and so very angry at my preventing him?

‘There’s a lot of chattering,’ I said. ‘Probably nothing more than chattering, but still – I think it would be worth your while interviewing
all
of the staff very closely.’

‘I’ll speak to Mrs Balfour first,’ said Hardy. ‘Then start on the fainting tweenie. If you would just go and tell them? Also, say to that Mrs Whatsername – the cook – to go and join the others, would you? And don’t forget the glass.’

It was gone from where I had left it on the small table by the chaise, but before I chased after it to the kitchens I pulled back the covers on Lollie’s bed and scrutinised the sheets, top and bottom, for it had occurred to me that I had seen no more of her than her head before she had hurried off to her bath earlier that morning and, if Superintendent Hardy were right about the blood, there might be traces of it here somewhere. But the linen was white and fresh, hardly even creased, and smelling faintly of lavender and of Lollie’s Heure Bleue. The same scents were mingled in her drawers and in the trays of her wardrobe, where nightdresses and underclothes lay in orderly, crisp-edged piles. There was no way she could have stuffed any bloodstained articles in there, even if she could have opened the drawers and doors without wakening me. I went into the bathroom, where there were more neat arrangements, of towels this time, and no sign of anything rolled up or stuffed away where it should not be except my own nightgown. I held her hand towel up to the light from the bedroom doorway and could see not the slightest mark upon it. I turned on the sprinklers of the shower-bath and, as I had suspected, it sounded like rain on a tin roof, impossible for anyone – sleeping powder or none – to sleep through. Even the taps of the hand basin gurgled and spat loud enough to wake anyone in the next room.

There was a photograph of Pip Balfour in a frame on the little enamelled cupboard where the towels were stored. He was standing on the deck of a yacht, his shirtsleeves rolled high and his collar open, laughing and squinting into the sun.

‘I don’t think she did it,’ I said to him. ‘Even if you deserved her to.’ I stood staring at the picture until all the water had drained away and the bathroom was silent again. Then I shook myself back into motion, turned from him and sped down the flights of stairs to the kitchens, hoping I was not too late already.

‘And as to what we’re supposed to do for our dinners, Fanny, your guess is as good as mine,’ said Mrs Hepburn, striking
in medias res
as I entered the main kitchen. ‘If I just sit in the hall all the morning, that is, which I can’t, no more than I can work with the rest of them under my feet in here.’ She glared at a police constable – Morrison, one presumed – who was trying to melt into the wall behind him and failing.

‘The super tellt me I was to keep you all together, Mrs Hepburn,’ he said. ‘Just until he’s had a chance to talk to you all. He’ll kill me if he finds out you’re in here and they’re in there.’ He jerked a thumb at the wall which separated the kitchen from the servants’ hall.

‘Can’t Sergeant Mackenzie stay with the others?’ I asked.

‘Millie, how many times?’ broke in Mrs Hepburn. ‘You flour for dough and grease for pastry. Now wipe that off and try again.’ Millie, dusted with flour all down her apron, in her hair, on both cheeks and one spectacle lens, dropped her ball of pastry back into its bowl, bobbed and scurried out to fetch a cloth. Mrs Hepburn blew upwards into her hair, took hold of the frilled collar of her dress and shook it, letting a draught in about her neck.

‘You’ve got me snapping at my own niece now!’ she said to PC Morrison, who ignored her.

‘The sarge is away back to the station,’ he said to me. ‘He couldnae get a line to ring them.’

‘Are the telephonists on strike?’ I said. ‘I didn’t think so.’

‘No,’ said Morrison, ‘but they’re overloaded with everybody ringing everybody else to say how they cannae get to wherever they’re supposed to be with no buses on and the exchange said to the sarge that half of them are telling her they’re the police or a doctor to make her break in and he could go and whistle.’

‘I’m sure it will be all right to leave the others in the hall with Mr Faulds to watch them, Constable,’ I said. ‘I think Mr Hardy probably just meant that we shouldn’t be allowed to swarm all over the house.’

‘There! See?’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘Miss Rossiter thinks the same as me. So let’s all go through and have a cup of tea and a wee bite and take that blooming helmet off before you melt.’ She picked up an enormous teapot and nodded to PC Morrison to carry a cooling tray of buns, then left at her usual pace.

‘Her bark and her bite are both hopeless,’ I told the constable, who nodded, smiling but still looking a little scared. I guessed that Hardy’s bark was deafening and his bite fatal.

In the scullery, Millie had been distracted and was guddling potatoes in a deep basin of water. The disordered morning was clear to see in the piles of unwashed breakfast dishes ranged about on the wooden draining boards, one plate even still half-covered with rashers of congealing bacon. And there too was what I had been hoping to find: the pair of brandy glasses from Lollie’s imposed nightcap the evening before. I could not tell which was mine and so I took them both, holding them down at my sides to hide them. She had been very insistent upon my drinking up and if she had put some kind of powder in my glass to make me sleep through disruptions, there was bound to be a trace of it left in the dregs at the bottom. I slipped out again without Millie hearing me and flitted down to my own room.

When I opened the door, it was to the sound of water and I stood still for a moment and listened. This could not be Millie and her potatoes away in the offshoot at the other side of the house. Very quietly, I turned the handle of the laundry-room door and looked in. Eldry was there, her arms deep in a sinkful of soap suds. For a moment I watched her in silence, but she must have sensed my presence because suddenly she wheeled around. I started backwards, banging my heel against the door jamb and cracking one of the brandy glasses as my hand clenched around it. Eldry was backing away too, pressing herself up against the sink, wiping her hands on her apron and staring at me like a dog which expects to be kicked.

‘Please don’t be angry, Miss Rossiter,’ she said. ‘I would have gone out to the wash-house at the back of the coalhole there, but that first policeman said we were no’ to leave the house.’

‘And what about the second policeman?’ I said. ‘He was supposed to be keeping you all together.’

‘I slipped out,’ said Eldry, ‘when they were talking in the passageway. He’s no’ really counted us all up yet, I don’t think.’

‘I see. And what are you doing, exactly?’

She glanced back at the soapy water and bit down on her bottom lip, making her teeth more prominent than ever.

‘Try – trying to get the blood out,’ she said.

I felt the hairs move on the back of my neck and I spoke gently.

‘What’s got blood on it, Eldry?’

‘My clothes,’ she said. ‘My dress and when I took my dress off it got on everything.’

‘And how did you get blood on your dress?’ I was clutching the cracked glass even tighter now, wondering if I could bring myself to use it if she were to fly at me.

‘From him,’ she said. ‘Upstairs. Master.’

6

I stared at Eldry through the shifting steam in the washroom. Her voice was so faint now that I could hardly hear her at all through the muffled air. ‘It must have come off on me when I went to his bedside,’ she said. ‘Or where else could it come fae?’

I let my breath go. I put the brandy glasses down on the small ironing table behind the door, being careful not to shatter the cracked one, and turned back to her.

‘You mean this morning?’ I said. ‘When you took the tray in?’ Eldry nodded. ‘I didn’t notice it,’ I said, trying to get a clear picture of her as she had been during those few short and furious moments of confusion. She had had her back turned to me as she banged on the door and she had sunk down with her knees up; I could not remember having seen her front at any time. ‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘How could you have got blood on yourself just from walking up to the bedside and away again?’

‘I don’t know,’ she whispered, ‘but how else did it get there?’

‘I’m sure
I
don’t know,’ I said. Then her eyes opened very wide and she put her hands up to her cheeks.

‘You don’t think I hurt him?’ she said. Her hands were very red against her white face and her fingers looked like claws as she pressed them into her flesh. ‘I could never, miss. All that blood. I could never.’ She was swaying slightly and I stepped quickly over towards her and took hold of her hands. They were pulsing with heat, and all of a sudden I was aware of just how steamy and soft the air was here in this little room, and how the distemper on the walls was running with beads of moisture and blistering. I put one finger into the sink of water and yelped.

‘Eldry, your hands,’ I said. ‘Come and sit down. Your poor hands!’ I pushed her down into my little armchair and then went back to the laundry room. I pulled on the chain and felt the plug give way at the bottom of the sink. As the water drained, with a horrid sucking sound, a greyish mass rose out of the sinking tide of suds. I turned the cold tap on and once the bundle had cooled a little I began hauling at it, sorting it into pieces. Every stitch she had had on must have been in there. Knickers and vest, bodice and petticoats, stockings, her dress and her apron – white and black, wool and linen all mixed in together. I let the cold tap run and run and when it was icy I filled a deep bowl and carried it very carefully back to the armchair.

‘Put them in here,’ I said to her. ‘Silly girl!’ I had decided that brisk but affectionate exasperation was the strong suit here. ‘Apart from anything else, Miss Etheldreda, hot water
sets
a bloodstain so nothing will
ever
shift it. A cold water and salt soak is what you need.’ I blessed Grant for my crammer course in laundry work on Sunday, during which I had learned this snippet; not only was it a thrillingly convincing line for Miss Rossiter to deliver but it was also true. If there had ever been blood on those ruined clothes of Eldry’s I should be able to find it. I decided against trying to feed them through the mangle but simply squeezed the worst out of them and hauled them up over the drying rack, and shut the door behind me. Nothing is more depressing than the sound of dripping.

‘I don’t want them to think I killed him,’ she said to me when I joined her again. ‘The police. My mammy would never forgive me if it all came out and everybody knew.’

‘If it all came out about what kind of man he was?’ I said, guessing. Eldry nodded. ‘Did he make a nuisance of himself with you?’ I said. She nodded again, just a dip of her chin against her chest. She did not raise her head again afterwards.

‘I was a good girl,’ she said.

‘And a kind girl,’ I agreed. ‘Taking the tray this morning when Clara wasn’t well.’

‘We all help each other out,’ she said. ‘We always do. And Mrs Hepburn is like an auntie to us all – not just Millie – and Mr Faulds is a kind man. He’s so fond of Phyllis and he’s been good to me too, miss.’ She was looking a little brighter now; perhaps it was beginning to dawn upon her, with Mr Balfour gone, what a pleasant establishment his widow’s household might be.

‘Now, Eldry,’ I said. ‘No more nonsense. You must be brave and sensible because you are going to be interviewed by the police, dear. They will want to know everything about this morning and about last night too. So why don’t we run through it together now and I’ll help you decide what to say.’

Eldry was adamant that she could not have crept out in the night without Millie hearing her and when I accompanied her to their shared bedroom I agreed. We were at the front of the house and here the sub-basement seemed very different. The only window was high and rather green and one had to stand right up against it and crane one’s neck to see the area steps and the street railings above them. Even in the mid-morning Eldry had to put a light on.

‘That’s Millie’s bed,’ she said, pointing towards a rather dishevelled little bedstead with a knitted bear propped up against its pillow. Her own was neater, although by no means the picture of precision mine had been the previous day. Clearly whoever had readied Miss Rossiter’s room for her, it was neither of these two. Between the beds was a box with a candlestick, a small prayer book and a couple of photographs, pasted onto board and propped up using opened hairpins. There was a washstand, a large oak chest standing on its end serving as a wardrobe and a small chest at the end of each bed. The floor was stone, but was covered here and there with rag mats. Under the window in the dankest corner of the room a third bed, stripped bare to its mattress, stood neglected.

‘That was Millie’s until Maggie took off,’ Eldry told me, ‘then we had a shift around. I hope she does get the kitchenmaid’s position and doesn’t need to move back again.’ I sat down on Eldry’s bed and bounced up and down a few times, hearing the grating squeak of slightly rusty bedsprings so familiar from the convalescent home in the war. Back then, the damp which caused the rust had come from windows thrown wide summer and winter to the insidious drizzle and driving rain. Here, the window was shut tight and there was a tiny fireplace with evidence of coal having been burned in its grate, but nothing would ever warm and dry such a subterranean room. When Eldry sat down on Millie’s bed, there was another screeching of springs and our knees were practically touching. The girls could have held hands at night without even straightening their arms.