Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains (20 page)

‘Mm,’ I said, trying not to smile, for really the thought of the ruddy-cheeked and hefty-shouldered Mrs Hepburn being transported to some netherworld where passion reigned and then returning at dawn to start the breakfasts was highly distracting. ‘Well, it’s very fortunate, Kitty.’ I had no hesitation in employing her Christian name now. ‘Mr Hardy has taken him to the police station but with such an alibi he’ll be out again in no time.’

Mrs Hepburn dropped down into a chair with her hands covering her mouth. When she took them away her lips were trembling.

‘They’ve taken him?’ she breathed.

‘Yes, but don’t worry. When he tells them you were with him, they’ll soon—’

‘I know him,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘He’ll not save himself. He’s too much of the gentleman to save himself.’ She clapped her hands on her knees, rose from her seat and started to untie her apron. ‘I’d better get down there,’ she said. ‘Millie! Come through here and keep an eye on the pots. Auntie’s just popping out. Bring your trotters with you if you’ve finished cleaning them and you can get them split in here on the table.’ Millie appeared at the scullery door. Her apron was splattered with blood and soaked with water so that some of the red stains had paled to pink, and I found myself taking a step backwards at the sight of her.

‘Where are you going, Auntie Kitty?’ she said.

‘Just running a wee message for Mr Faulds,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘You know what you’re doing now, don’t you?’

With that she was off. I caught sight of her flying along the passageway to the front area door a moment later with her hat jammed on tight but her coat still open and streaming behind her.

‘Auntie Kitty’s in a right hurry,’ Millie said. She was ferrying a large colander full of pigs’ feet to the kitchen table, dripping watery spots of blood on the floor all around her. She tipped them out and they rolled onto the table, one coming to rest against a sugar dredger.

‘I’ll just tidy up a bit,’ I said, hastily moving the dredger, a leather-covered grocer’s book and a pile of clean cloths to one of the sideboards.

‘Is mistress feeling better today?’ said Millie. ‘She was all upset yesterday, wasn’t she?’ With great concentration she set a small saw against one of the feet just where skin met horn and began scraping it back and forward. Her tongue was peeping out and her eyes were squeezed half-shut with concentration. When the saw dropped through and hit the table underneath, she dropped it and winced. ‘I should have put a tablet down,’ she said, examining the scar on the scrubbed boards. ‘Auntie Kitty’s told me half a dozen times.’ Then she turned to the stove and dropped the sawn-off trotter into one of the pots bubbling there. ‘Oh!’ she said, looking into the water. ‘What’s that in there? I thought it was stock.’

‘It’s a ham,’ I told her and she grinned.

‘Oh well, that’s all right then,’ she said. ‘That was lucky.’

I had been wondering how to lead her towards the topic of interest to me, but now I thought that surely such a featherhead as this, one who puddled her way through life cushioned against its cares by her own innocence of them, must often find that questions loomed up at her out of nowhere.

‘What did you think of Mr Balfour, Millie?’ I said. ‘Did you see much of him?’

Millie disappeared into the scullery and when she returned she was carrying a cleaver in her hand and looking as stern as her pink and white face and round cheeks would allow.

‘Too much, miss,’ she said. ‘He was a bad man and he did silly things that he shouldn’t have.’ My stomach turned inside me. Not Millie too! She was a child and had not half the guile of some children one has encountered.

‘To you, Millie?’ I said, hoping that perhaps she was merely repeating gossip.

‘Auntie Kitty said to me not to say,’ she said. ‘Because what you don’t know can’t hurt you and if Stanl— I mean, if a nice boy one day asked you anything, then he wouldn’t want to know the nasty things that you had done.’

With a sinking certainty, I knew that Millie’s hopes regarding Stanley were doomed; he was a young man of great ambition and even greater self-satisfaction and his plans, whatever they were, would not include taking the hand of a simple scullerymaid and making her dreams come true. As I watched Millie centre one of the trimmed trotters on the table and take aim, I wondered suddenly how long she would be able to hang on to that simplicity, where there were good men and bad men and simple right and wrong and what one did not know could not harm one. She raised the cleaver to her shoulder and brought it down so fast that the blade whistled before it split the bone apart with a crack like a gunshot. The two halves dropped away and the cleaver was left sticking up out of the table. Millie bit her lip and gasped.

‘I’ll get one of the boys to wrench it out for . . .’ I began, but Millie had splayed one hand on the table, gripped the handle hard with the other and, after one mighty tug, pulled the cleaver out again. I could not take my eyes away from her hand – spread out broad and strong on the table-top – and could not help hearing again in my mind what she had said about making sure a nice boy never knew the nasty things one might have done. Did Stanley have a reason to hate Pip Balfour, as had so many of the others? Would Millie, blind with love, have gone as far as avenging her beloved footman?

‘Now you really must get a board, Molly-moo,’ I said. ‘Or that table will be kindling by the time you’re done.’ Millie giggled and wiped her cheek, leaving a smear of blood there, then went to the scullery to fetch one.

9

Lollie was in brighter spirits by the evening. The police had given permission for the funeral arrangements to proceed on the understanding that cremation was out of the question; the will was to be read the next day, allowing Lollie thereafter to begin to make plans for her widowhood; and as for her state of lonely isolation, Great Aunt Gertrude was on her way. How exactly the old lady expected to get from Inverness to Edinburgh, when the nation was at a standstill and strike officials were stopping motorcars left and right to check that they were not carrying blackleg goods, was unclear. It seemed she had left home without maid or chauffeur, but with a full tank of petrol, two cans in the dicky and an unshakeable belief that her long lifetime of getting exactly what she wanted when she wanted it would hold good, whatever pickets, blockades and rioting gangs might be doing to disrupt the lives of lesser mortals than she.

Downstairs, Mr Faulds was safely back in the bosom of the household after Mrs Hepburn’s selfless dash to the police station to gather him home, and the amazing news of their tryst (which, to give the two principals their due, they did not attempt to rise above but instead acknowledged with throat-clearings and jaw-scratchings on the butler’s side and with blushing smiles from his beloved) gave a larky air to the servants’ hall which an uninformed guest would have found quite appalling.

Miss Rossiter’s position as a newcomer was most welcome, as it conferred upon her the opportunity to sit rather quietly in the midst of the party (and a party it almost was) watching faces, chasing down glances and listening to anything which was not quite being said. The rest of the servants were gathered around the piano, beer glasses in hand, singing an endless selection of popular melodies from the music halls, and rather saltier ones than Mr Faulds had hinted were in their repertoire too: even as far as something apparently called ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay’ in which each verse was worse than the last.

‘You certainly
have
been practising, Mattie,’ said Mr Faulds when the hall boy had got through a complicated run of trills in the lead-in to a love song.

‘Aye, I have,’ said Mattie, ‘but it’s more fun to play out loud and no’ fret that I’m gonny disturb anybody.’ He pressed down the loud pedal and fairly banged the notes out of the thing, and Clara and Phyllis pressed their hands together under their hearts, fluttered their eyelids and began singing.

‘Take the man’s part, Mr Faulds,’ said Mrs Hepburn when the girls had got through the first verse and the others had joined them for the chorus (
Oh, pluck my heart out now, why don’t you, for everything else you could pluck is away
), but Mr Faulds shook his head and held his hands up, protesting.

‘I’m no singer,’ he said, ‘and John knows this one.’ John straightened up and cleared his throat.

he sang in a fair approximation of the most affected music-hall swain. All he needed was a straw boater on the back of his head and a cane to twirl.

sang the company. I wondered if Millie, carolling away merrily, understood the import of this lyric, if anyone did, and I found myself sharing a little sympathy with the only member of our number who was
not
lifting his voice in song; Harry, hunched over his latest strike bulletin, scowling at the din.

‘I’m worried that mistress will hear them,’ I said to him, going to sit on the next seat to his at the long table. ‘It doesn’t seem right.’

‘She won’t,’ said Harry, ‘she’ll either be in her boudoir or in that wee parlour at the back. As long as they pipe down before she goes to her bedroom,’ he pointed straight up with his thumb, ‘we’ll be all right. And anyway, do her some good for a change to see the world getting on without a care when she’s miserable.’

This was remarkably callous, I thought, and I could not let it pass unchallenged.

‘What has she done to deserve such scorn?’ I said.

He had the grace to look uncomfortable as he answered.

‘Not her in particular, miss,’ he said. ‘Just her sort. People like her in general, I mean.’

‘Oh Harry,’ I said, ‘there is no such thing as people in general. Everyone is someone very particular.’

He argued on – his sort will always argue on – but I had stopped listening because a thought which had been nudging gently against me all day now struck me square. Everyone had agreed that no one could open a locked and bolted door without being heard by those in the rooms nearby. Miss Rossiter, however, was not where she should have been that night, close by the sub-basement door. And Mrs Hepburn and Mr Faulds – who ought to have been asleep, one beside each of the other doors – had been cavorting together. Now, had Mrs Hepburn said where they were? I concentrated hard to bring the memory of the conversation back to mind, and I was almost certain that she had used the phrase ‘I was with him’. Yes, she had said, ‘I was with him,’ definitely not ‘He was with me,’ which meant that her room, above mine, was empty. I sat back.

Of course that still left Phyllis and Clara who would hear the back door, but then Phyllis had come into that seventeen pounds somehow, and perhaps Clara was an unusually deep sleeper and Phyllis knew it – had not Phyllis complained of how Clara snored? – but how could Phyllis know that Mrs Hepburn was at the front of the house, tucked in with Mr Faulds under the red chenille bedspread, and that I was four flights up on Lollie’s chaise?

‘Are you all right, Miss Rossiter?’ said Harry, who had stopped talking quite some time ago.

‘Fine, Harry,’ I said. ‘I think, though, that I shall say goodnight.’ I needed at least notes if not diagrams for this.

Despite the lusty singing and the glasses of beer which were going strong when I left the room, I had not been in bed long when I heard the party dispersing. Indeed, Harry, Stanley, John and Mattie leaving by the kitchen door sounded like an army on manoeuvres. Mr Faulds locked up after them and shot the bolts with his usual gusto and then I heard Mrs Hepburn enter her room above my head. Mr Faulds and the girls descending the stairs on the other side of the wall was enough to make the water tremble in my bedside glass and, when he secured the sub-basement door, once again the bolts going home rang out all around and above like a hammer on an anvil. I shook my head. No one could possibly have breached this citadel without someone knowing.

Mr Faulds strode away and there was silence, except for the sound of Mrs Hepburn moving around in her stockinged feet, then I heard someone scamper down towards me from the kitchen level. I sprang out of bed and opened my door a crack. Clara was rounding the corner of the passage with her shoes in one hand and a candle in the other, unguarded and guttering.

‘Oh! Miss Rossiter,’ she said. ‘You nearly made me jump out my skin.’

‘Everything all right?’ I asked her.

‘Fine,’ she said, her little eyes as wide as she could make them. ‘I just had to – you know – go a place before I turned in.’

I frowned at her.

‘But Mr Faulds has locked up,’ I said. ‘If you went to the lavatory, Clara dear, how did you get back in?’

She flushed slightly, I could just see it in the light of the candle.

‘Oh well, you know,’ she said and started sidling towards her door.

‘Didn’t he lock up?’ I persisted. ‘I was sure I heard him. Perhaps I should go up and check.’

‘No!’ said Clara, taking a step towards me. ‘Don’t . . . I mean . . . I’m sorry, Miss Rossiter, but that was a wee fib there.’

‘A fib?’

‘Not a bad one,’ she said. ‘Nothing to do with . . . what’s been happening, I mean.’

I wondered if I could carry off the command that had sprung to my mind. I decided to try it.

‘Tell the truth, Clara,’ I said. ‘And shame the devil.’

She stared helplessly at me for a moment and then, as though giving up some internal struggle, she lifted her hands and let them fall again.

‘Come in, dear,’ I said, stepping aside and opening the door wider. ‘Sit down and tell me what you wouldn’t yesterday.’