Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains (17 page)

The door was unlocked, but whoever waited inside was well warned of any visitor, for a string of tiny gold bells hanging behind it were set tinkling as I entered. A long passageway distempered in a tobacco colour stretched away in front of me, but on the nearest door, sitting ajar, a cardboard sign proclaimed it to be the
Reception & Showroom
.

A counter had been erected, cutting the room in half, and behind it were countless tiers of shelves, all around and above the fireplace, where the elaborate black-leaded range from when this room was a kitchen still crouched, glowing orange and radiating a most unwelcome heat for such a warm day. The shelves were stacked with brown-paper parcels, done up with string and bearing labels which hung down and fluttered in the rising heat.

On my side of the counter, in contrast to the neat shelves, was such a profusion of objects that one hardly knew where to rest one’s eyes. There was a rack of fur coats on wooden hangers, very rusty and stiff-looking fur coats too, with the large flat collars of twenty years ago. There were three tailors’ dummies, each dressed in a greying wedding gown and with a hat sitting on its shoulders and a pair of satin slippers resting against its solitary leg. There were glass cases of jewellery: barnacled brooches, dented watches and wedding rings, thin from wear, all set out against velvet. There were tea-chests full of odd golf clubs and a battalion of perambulators each piled high with folded linens. In pride of place were four wireless sets on a walnut table, and around the top of the room – on the high shelf where one would look for the largest of the pie dishes and trenchers, the rarely used platters and pans – there were perhaps a hundred dusty hatboxes, joined together with ropes of spider-web like bunting.

‘Help you?’ said a voice.

I stepped towards the counter and saw sitting in a low, armless chair with a knitted cover – a nursery chair, I suspected – a small woman in her mid-thirties, but dressed like a grandmother with a piecrust top to her collar and ropes of suspiciously large white pearls hanging down over her boned bodice and pooling amongst her spreading skirts. My first thought was that she was in fancy dress for some reason, but as I noticed the profusion of brooches behind the pearls and the number of mismatched rings on her fingers I realised that she was simply dressed from stock. She was smoothing flat a sheet of brown paper on her lap.

‘First time?’ she said. I nodded. ‘Well, what have you brought me?’ She got to her feet and as she came forward at least the spreading skirts were explained for she walked with the rolling gait of someone with one leg much shorter than the other and I guessed that there was a block-soled boot hidden under her hemline.

‘What have I brought you?’ I said and then hesitated. She regarded me calmly from under a fringe of tight brown curls, slowly winding some string into a figure of eight and stowing it away in a drawer under the counter. I opened my bag, hoping to see something I could press into use to get things started, but it was Miss Rossiter’s bag and was empty except for a handkerchief and a purse of money. I took out a ten-shilling note and put it on the counter. The little woman spread her arms wide, showing off the bounty of golf clubs and perambulators behind me.

‘Take your time,’ she said. ‘Jist whistle if you want a case opened.’ She was turning away when I spoke.

‘I’m not looking for trinkets,’ I said. ‘I need your help with something and I would like to pay you.’

‘Can’t help you there, doll,’ she said. ‘I don’t deal in the sticky stuff. Fifty with a chit or twenty-five, sign on the line.’

I did not understand a word of this and told her so.

‘I don’t have anything to do with stolen goods,’ she said, speaking slowly as though to an idiot. ‘You can get half the value of your item if you have a receipt to prove you own it or a quarter if you just sign your name and leave an address. You’d be better off doon Leith if that’s not to your fancy.’

I took another ten-shilling note out of my purse and put it on the counter.

‘The young woman who was just here,’ I said, ‘the girl in yellow. What did she bring you?’ The little woman shook her head, her small brown eyes quite flat with lack of interest in the banknotes. I thought for a moment. If Phyllis had pawned something of Pip’s I had to know. If she had pawned something of her own, one had to wonder why she suddenly needed money and to ask oneself if it were perhaps because someone had seen her do something and that someone had to be paid to keep quiet about it. Clara was the obvious candidate for the role, for she alone could have witnessed Phyllis leave her room in the night, but Clara hated Pip enough to forgive his murder and besides, she was not a blackmailer, surely. Hot-tempered, perhaps, and inclined to be huffy, but she was not the kind to sneak and threaten.

‘I’ll bet,’ I said to the little woman, ‘that she took twenty-five and signed for it.’ Her face remained inscrutable, so I tried another tack. ‘She is in my employment, you know,’ I said, hoping that my voice would trump Miss Rossiter’s good grey serge, ‘and I suspect her of stealing from me.’

‘That lassie works to Mrs Balfour,’ said the pawnbroker. ‘What are you at?’

I reasoned to myself that since I would be telling Superintendent Hardy about Phyllis’s visit and he would come and get it out of this remarkably stubborn little person in the end anyway, I would be saving him some of his meagre time if I took care of it now.

‘You’ve not heard what happened at the Balfours’ today?’ I said. ‘Phyllis didn’t tell you?’ She shook her head. ‘Mr Balfour is dead,’ I said. ‘He was found this morning with a knife in his throat and nobody knows who did it, but all suspicious behaviour needs to be explained, don’t you see? Now, will you tell me what Phyllis pawned?’

‘Nothing,’ said the woman, who had paled at the news. ‘She was in to redeem today.’

‘You mean to take her belongings out again?’

‘Aye, that’s it,’ said the woman. She had opened another drawer under the counter and lifted out a sheaf of paper labels. ‘She’s a regular here, madam. She has a taste for nice things – well, you can tell that from looking at her – and she’s not good at waiting for them either. Here we are.’ She had found the label she was looking for and turned it towards me. The pencilled writing on it had been rubbed off to let the label be used again but was still faintly visible.

‘One gold ring,’ I said, squinting at it. ‘Ladies? Lace? What does it say here?’

‘One gold ring, large. One gold ring, small. Her ma and pa’s, most likely, or grandma’s maybe. One silver-gilt prayer book. One black coat, one tweed rug, one set silk nightclothes duchesse satin peach, coffee lace,’ said the woman. ‘I’d say the nightie and the rug were maybe lifted from the house, would you no’? But I like to give folks the benefit and say they were passed on.’

‘And can you tell me,’ I said, speaking rather softly as though that meant I were not really asking, ‘how much she paid to redeem them?’

‘I shouldn’t really,’ she said. ‘And if my ma was here she’d take her hand off me . . .’

‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘before she comes back . . .’

The little woman gave me a sad smile.

‘Oh, there’s no coming back from where she’s gone, madam,’ she said. ‘It was seventeen pounds Miss McInnes gave me today for redemption.’

‘Gosh,’ I said, thinking that if this were the going rate for a few baubles and old nighties, there had been times in the past when I could have furnished myself with very useful amounts of pocket money if I had had the nerve to shove some of my treasures over a pawnshop counter. There is a set of Sèvres too hideous to display, much less eat off, which is seeing out its days in a crate in an attic; and much of my grandmother’s jewellery is wilfully ugly and just shy of being worth resetting in wearable form. The pawnbroker read my mind and set me straight.

‘That’s got a fair bit of interest on it, mind,’ she said. ‘I’ve had it a good while.’ I looked again at the upper shelves of parcels, where the paper was sun-bleached even in this basement room and the labels were curled up like autumn leaves.

‘Of course,’ I said, hoping that I was not blushing. ‘Well, thank you. I shall try to keep Superintendent Hardy from troubling you.’

‘No odds to me,’ said the woman. ‘I’ve nothing to hide from the coppers.’ She gave me a shrewd look as she sat herself down again, gripping the edge of a shelf and kicking her lame leg out as she fell backwards. I wished I had given her more than a pound, suddenly, and did not like to leave such a good little person, all alone in this frankly quite depressing setting. As I let myself out into the passageway, however, I met a youngish man in his shirtsleeves carrying in his arms a fat toddler with tight brown curls and round brown eyes.

‘Afternoon,’ he said to me, and then to the child, ‘Let’s see if Mammy’s got the kettle on yet, Daisy, eh?’

I put my unneeded sympathy away again and retraced my steps to the kiosk. Inside, seven of the pennies had gone but three were still where I had left them.

‘Me again, Barrow,’ I said, and then, ‘Alec, darling, do you think you might answer the telephone yourself for a while? It’s not very sensible to be using up my three minuteses waiting for Barrow to track you down.’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Alec. ‘Stop nagging. What happened?’

‘Well, I’ve had my assumptions about the nature of humanity pleasantly overturned,’ I said, thinking of the strapping young man and his crippled wife, and of the two remaining thruppence bits, ‘but as far as Phyllis goes, it seems she has suddenly come into funds. Petty cash to the likes of you, guv’nor, but quite a tidy sum to a housemaid. Seventeen pounds, at least. I need to ask Lollie whether Pip kept that kind of money in his pockets and if not we must ask ourselves where else she could have got it from.’ Hanging a dog on the strength of a bad name and the sudden acquisition of seventeen pounds is not good detecting, of course, but one could not help the idea that a girl who was fond enough of finery to pawn her grandmother’s wedding ring, who could be in as jolly spirits as Phyllis was today when all around was death and calamity, had just the kind of single-minded toughness required of a murderer or indeed a blackmailer of murderers. Who in the house had seventeen pounds lying around to have blackmailed out of him – or her – was another question.

8

Skulking around the streets of the New Town like a private eye in a Brighton guesthouse, I had missed the removal of Pip Balfour’s body, but I came upon the rest of the household restoring itself around an open bottle of rum and the inevitable pot of tea.

‘A terrible thing,’ said Stanley, with his mouth pushed out and his ample chin sunk on his chest. Millie nodded, biting her lip, but Mrs Hepburn flicked him an irritated glance and Clara rolled her eyes at Eldry.

‘It’s not something I ever thought to do,’ said Mr Faulds, ‘hold the front door open for my master to be carried out in a black box and put on a cart like something for the rag and bone man.’

‘And all them next door out on their steps watching,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘That’s the last time I find a packet of butter for her when she’s not sent her note in to the dairy in time. The besom! But I daresay I’d have been keen enough to see what was to do if it had been in their house and I shouldn’t call her for the same. I’ll take some biscuits through to her when they’re cooled.’

‘I’d better get back up to mistress,’ I said, but Mrs Hepburn waved me into my chair.

‘You take your rest while you can, Fanny. We’ve been popping up, the girls and me, off and on, and she’s dead to the world. Sleep’s the best thing for her today. I’ve got a jug of toast tea making and I’ve ordered in some calves’ feet for jelly, be ready by tomorrow night. That’ll set her right again.’

‘Toast tea?’ I said and there were a few giggles from the younger servants until Mrs Hepburn fixed them with a glare.

‘Just burnt toast steeped in water while it cools and then strained through,’ she said. ‘And don’t you go sniggering, John Petty, because you were happy enough to have it that time you caught the gastric flu and couldn’t keep a boiled egg down.’

‘Mrs Hepburn, please,’ said Mr Faulds, ‘don’t remind us of it. We were a sorry crew that week, Fanny. Harry and Maggie didn’t succumb but the rest of us were laid flat. I couldn’t lift my head from the pillow. Ah, but mistress was like a mother to us all, remember, Kitty?’

‘Aye, and she made that stew – as if we weren’t sick enough already,’ said Eldry, to a gale of laughter and a few groans, and then they settled back into a comfortable silence again. I looked around them. No one was tense, no one was anxious. Now that Eldry had recovered her spirits and Mattie had cheered up there was nothing to show that this was not an ordinary afternoon in a well-staffed and under-stretched establishment. The clock ticked, the fire crackled and the only other sound was the click of Millie’s knitting needles and the occasional snip of scissors as Clara unpicked a hem for restitching.

‘By, but I’m missing my
News
,’ said Mrs Hepburn presently. ‘It feels that funny not to be catching up with the world at teatime.’

‘More power to their elbows,’ said Harry. ‘And we’ve got our news anyway.’ He waved a printed sheet in the air. ‘Official strike bulletin, straight from the TUC District Committee. So we won’t need to let another copy of that scab rag over the door.’ He gave a pointed look to Mattie who ducked his head.

‘I didnae ken,’ he said. ‘It was for master, not for me.’

‘Give it a rest, Harry,’ Clara said. ‘It’s not as if it was Churchill’s bloomin’
Gazette
. You’ll no’ catch germs off it.’

‘And I cannae see mistress wanting one of your bulletins,’ said John.

‘Besides, there’s more going on than the blessed strike,’ said Mr Faulds. ‘I’d like to see what they’re going to print about our do today for a start.’

‘I won’t sit and have it read out to me,’ said Harry. ‘Nor Mattie.’

‘And I won’t,’ said Eldry, gazing at Harry as she spoke. John snorted, but Harry himself affected to notice nothing.