Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains (16 page)

Mr Faulds shuddered.

‘I’ve never been any good with the likes of that,’ he said. ‘Not as bad as poor Stanley, but bad enough. I saw a man hang himself – by accident, this was – in the backstage at the Bristol Hippodrome in my performing days, caught himself up in the ropes and couldn’t get free and it was the only time in my life I couldn’t go on. I was in my dressing room as grey as a ghost and put to shame with all the chorus and the dancing girls getting on with the show.’ Mrs Hepburn tutted again and offered him a toffee.

As I made my way up the steps and along the pavement minutes later, I considered the point; one which had not struck me before. One thinks often of the evil required to do murder and – for want of a better word – the courage, but one cannot ignore the fact that a would-be murderer must also have the stomach for it, at least where a stabbing is concerned. Firing off a pistol at a distant figure or tipping a packet of powder into a glass before melting away are one thing, but driving a kitchen knife into the neck of a man while he looks one in the eye . . . surely I could take at least the screaming Eldry, the gulping Stanley and the quavering Mattie off the list of possible suspects, unless one of them was a very accomplished actor indeed? And Mr Faulds, so he claimed, could not have done it without fainting dead away. Then again Millie, the superintendent’s rather peculiar ideas about her placidity notwithstanding, was hardly my idea of a murdering fiend. As to the other three: to have met Clara, Phyllis and Mrs Hepburn in the street and supposed any of them capable of such an act would be hard enough; to entertain the notion after twenty-four hours at close quarters with them was beyond ridiculous. And yet it
had
happened; still whenever I closed my eyes I could see that white face rising up out of a sea of red, beseeching me.

So, here I was, doing what I was ever wont to do: that is, turning to Alec Osborne to beg him to help me. I only hoped, as I let myself into the kiosk at the corner of Darnaway Street and piled up my collection of pennies, that the extra bustle of the morning had died down so that the telephone lines were there for the asking again.

There was a little delay, as it happened, a few extra ticks and thumps and one or two sighs from the girl at the exchange. She asked me if I would not rather try later; I assured her that I had chosen to telephone just when I wanted to. She sighed again, said something I affected not to hear and then at last I heard ringing.

‘It’s Mrs Gilver, Mr Barrow, for master,’ I said, before I could help myself. ‘For Mr Osborne, I mean, Barrow, if you’d fetch him.’ There was a long, windy silence down the line. Barrow, Alec’s valet and, in the absence of a housekeeper, the self-appointed boss of Dunelgar, takes himself inordinately seriously for a man of his age. As well as that, I am never very certain what he thinks of me. Perhaps he is an empire-builder, who looks forward to the day when Alec’s household will swell and he will be borne along on the rising tide and finish as butler with valets and footmen to jump when he clicks his fingers. If so, then no doubt he blames me for Alec’s continued bachelorhood – a ridiculous notion, for I have been most encouraging on the topic of Alec’s settling down, except when I have been downright bossy. There was a whisper of an alliance only the previous winter and I had cosseted it as though it were a kindling fire which I had lit with my last match, but it came to nothing.

Alec picked up the earpiece at the other end and broke in on my meandering thoughts.

‘Dandy,’ he said, and I heard the click of him resettling his pipe, which meant he was prepared for a long and luxurious chat, if the girl on the exchange would let us have one. ‘How goes it across the great divide?’ he said. ‘Have they seen through you yet? Bunty has settled in like a daughter of the house, by the way. Not fretting at all.’

‘There’s been a murder,’ I announced and managed to get quite a chunk of the pertinent history across in the ensuing silence before Alec came to himself again and started badgering me.

‘But the men were all locked out apart from this Faulds character?’ he said, cutting me off from explaining that very fact with great clarity. I sighed.

‘Yes, and the maids are all two to a room and, as I say, I’m pretty sure Lollie couldn’t have done it without me hearing although I’m getting the brandy glass checked to be sure. So I’m stumped and begging you to come and help me.’

‘Well, ordinarily, of course,’ Alec said. ‘Ordinarily try and stop me, but I’m stranded, Dan. I’ve got enough petrol in the Vauxhall to get down there but not back again, and some of the garages are closed already.’

‘But surely garage mechanics are their own bosses?’ I said. ‘Why should they shut the pumps, for heaven’s sake?’

‘They’ve run dry from everyone stocking up,’ Alec said.

‘Panic buying?’ I said. ‘How disgusting. How selfish people are. They’ve forgotten all our lessons from the war already.’

‘Quite,’ said Alec. ‘Also, I never thought of it in time. No, we are
not
finished,’ he said in his most commanding voice as the pips sounded and the girl broke in. ‘At least another three minutes. At least.’ The line changed back from breathy to muffled as she left us again. ‘Is there any sign of a motive, Dan? From anyone except the wife, that is?’

‘Hah!’ I said. ‘The place is bristling with motives like a porcupine. You were wrong when you thought him a ninny, you know. Lollie’s summing-up was much nearer the mark: a cruel, vindictive, philandering pig. A seducer of the maids and a brute to the menservants. Some of the things he did, Alec, one wonders how he ever dreamed them up they’re so lavishly nasty. And Clara the parlourmaid can’t bring herself to speak of whatever he did to her even now, so it must be extra specially horrid. No one is sorry he’s gone.’

‘Still,’ said Alec.

‘Oh yes, I know,’ I said. ‘And Lollie at least is keen for me to stay and try to get to the bottom of it for her.’

‘Well, if it makes more sense to come at it from this end,’ said Alec, ‘is there anyone you can put out of the running? Anyone who
didn’t
have a motive?’

‘I haven’t heard anything from Mr Faulds on his own account,’ I said, ‘although he hated him with a passion in comradeship, certainly. And . . . let me see . . . Mrs Hepburn dropped a very vague hint yesterday but I need to press her. And then there’s Millie, the scullerymaid – kitchenmaid in waiting – but I can’t think that she would have much to do with him.’

‘Oh?’ said Alec.

‘Have you ever met yours?’ I said.

‘Good point,’ Alec said. ‘No, indeed. Although I daresay there is such a creature about the place somewhere. What about the rest of the men?’

‘I’ve yet to speak to John and Stanley,’ I said, ‘but the thing is that the men are in the clear anyway, because they were locked out, remember?’

‘Doors can be unlocked,’ said Alec. ‘You must be thorough about this, Dan.’

I considered trying to explain to him the difference between his bedroom, muffled with carpet and curtains, miles from any door, and the maids’ and cook’s rooms with their linoleum over stone, their echoing bareness and the sound ringing along the empty passageways of scraping locks and iron bolts and wooden soles and marble steps.

‘Hm,’ I said in the end.

‘And on another note, what are the police making of it?’ said Alec. ‘And of you, come to that?’

‘Very little so far,’ I replied. ‘They’re rather stretched with all the picket duty – or is it the strikers who one says are on picket duty? Well, you know what I mean – so it was a superintendent who poled up this morning, very flustered and very displeased to be flustered – he is formed for gravitas, really – but he practically had his Big Blue Book for Policemen in his hand, folded open at Murder. So when I debunked Fanny Rossiter and waved Hutchinson’s name in front of him he rather fell on my neck.’

‘
Fanny
?’ said Alec. ‘And
debunked
? Where do you get these words? Do you have to pay a subscription?’

‘You’ll find,’ I said, trying to sound withering, ‘that debunking comes from Oscar Wilde. When they find out that Algy’s dying friend isn’t dying.’

‘That would be de-Bunburying,’ said Alec. ‘Do you know when the post-mortem’s going to—’

‘Phyllis!’ I said. I put my hand up to the glass to screen my eyes and peered out along the street. Phyllis the housemaid, unmissable in her yellow coat-dress, was walking smartly along towards India Street carrying a medium-sized suitcase. I spoke into the mouthpiece again. ‘Alec, I’ve just seen one of the other maids with rather more luggage than she would need on an afternoon off. She’s making her way towards the tram stop, bold as brass. I think she’s heading for the hills.’

‘Not by tram she’s not,’ said Alec. ‘But you’d better ring off and give chase anyway.’

I crashed the earpiece back into the cradle and – as I realised later – leaving tenpenceworth of pennies behind me, I slipped out of the kiosk and streaked across the road to the corner where Phyllis had disappeared. Hoping that no one could see me, I flattened myself against the wall and poked my head around to peep down the street after her. She was nowhere to be seen. I stepped away from the wall and rounded the corner properly, looking up and down each side, but there was no mistaking it. There were no carts, motor lorries or trees for her to be hidden behind, no more kiosks or even pillar boxes, no shops she might have stepped inside. She was gone. She must have started running, I realised. Perhaps she saw me peering out of the kiosk at her. I went at a very fast walk, almost running myself, to the corner of Jamaica Street and then to the next corner again, where Gloucester Place and Circus Gardens just fail to meet, and looked around in all directions. There was no sign of her anywhere. She could not possibly have rounded two corners in the time it took me to get here and there were no alleys or lanes for her to have dodged into; Edinburgh’s New Town is well known for the endlessness and unbrokenness of its many stretches of Georgian splendour.

There was only one explanation, I thought, as I stood there with my hands on my hips letting my breath slow down again. She had gone into one of the houses. Perhaps she had given notice and left, or had simply left – ‘flitted’, like Maggie – to a new situation already lined up before the events of the morning, in response to Pip’s threats of dismissal. But would a maid roll up to her new position in that coat and that hat, looking as though she were going for a walk along a promenade with her young man? Hard on the heels of that thought came another. What if she were indeed going to join a young man, in a flat in one of those houses, escaping from what she had done? What if she had robbed Pip Balfour of some valuable item that no one yet realised was missing and was making off, dressed up to the nines and sure she had got away with it?

‘Everything all right, miss?’ said a voice. I started and turned to see a rather elderly-looking policeman standing at my side. He was regarding me with an expression more quizzical than helpful.

‘Absolutely fine,’ I said. ‘I was supposed to meet up with a friend of mine but she’s given me the slip somehow.’ The policeman had reared backwards somewhat when I spoke and was looking at me with outright hostility now.

‘Just the one friend was it, miss?’ he said. I stared at him.

‘As it happens,’ I answered. ‘Why?’

‘Fine and well,’ he said. ‘I’ll take your name just the same though.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ I said. ‘You most certainly shall not.’

‘Oh, is that right then?’ said the policeman, squaring up.

‘It is,’ I replied. ‘I’ve done absolutely nothing wrong and I’m surprised, I must say, to find you hanging around here harassing innocent passers-by when your fellow officers are stretched to breaking point with the strikers.’ He took a step or two backwards, I am pleased to say. ‘Do you know Superintendent Hardy?’ I demanded. He nodded, swallowing hard and making his prominent and rather ill-shaven Adam’s apple sink into his collar and bob up again. ‘Well, so do I.’

‘I beg your pardon, miss,’ said the constable, who had instinctively pulled at his coat to smarten himself when he heard Hardy’s name. ‘Only I
am
minding out for the strike. I’m back in for it – been retired five years, properly. There’s trouble down on Princes Street and we’re trying to see where it is the gangs are forming. I thought you were standing there in the middle of the junction like that waiting for your pals.’

‘Gangs?’ I said. ‘On Princes Street?’

‘By the station there,’ said the policeman. ‘And a big crowd at the Tron too. Five arrests already and a policeman in the infirmary.’ I said nothing. ‘And what with you dressed so plain but speaking so fancy – if you’ll forgive me – I put you down for one of they intellectuals.’

‘I assure you, my dear fellow,’ I said, ‘that I am neither an intellectual nor a Bolshevist nor any kind of sympathiser.’ At that moment, I caught sight of a flash of yellow out of the corner of my eye and turned towards it. Phyllis was shutting an area gate about halfway up India Street. ‘There she is now!’ I said to the constable. Phyllis hefted her suitcase more comfortably into her grip and made her way back the way she had come.

‘Oh, really?’ he replied with what seemed to me to be an unwarranted level of interest.

‘I’ll just run after her, if that’s all right,’ I said, already beginning to move. ‘Keep up the good work, Constable.’

He gave me a knowing look and turned away.

Of course I had no intention of sprinting after Phyllis really, but I did want to see where she had been and try to work out what she might have been doing there. She had definitely come up from below stairs, but if she were merely visiting a friend why had she only stayed a minute and what was in the suitcase? Bloodied clothes would be my first guess and I should like to get inside the place before they were put into a furnace by her accomplice.

It was a grey stone house like any other in the streets surrounding, not so grand as the Balfours’ in Heriot Row and ill-kept in a vague way; as I drew nearer, the collection of bright new bell pushes set in by the front door revealed that it had lately been divided into flats. The basement windows were dusty, the area flags brown with dead moss which had been sluiced with ammonia but not scrubbed clear. An unprepossessing place, in all, but it had one feature of great interest to me. In the fanlight above the basement door, there was a crude painting of three brass-coloured balls. Without thinking about what I should do once inside, I opened the gate and descended.