Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains (26 page)

Of course, both policemen stepped aside and one touched his hat as we passed them, and we descended to the lower level and claimed an empty bench, one looking down over the railway lines which emerge from the glass roof of the station and briefly bisect a portion of the gardens before disappearing into a tunnel which runs under the rest of them. Princes Street Gardens, I thought as I looked around, are at their best in May, crowded with tulips and pansies and wearing fresh new cloaks of green on the ground and in the air. (Later in the summer the green grass would turn yellow if it were dry or wear through to the earth from the tramp of feet if it were rainy, the green leaves of the trees would darken with smuts from the trains, the growers of the bedding plants would have outdone themselves for double and treble and quadruple begonias all of monstrous size and unlikely colour, and the benches would be dusty and sticky so that even if one were not actually sitting amongst picnic litter with spilled lemonade under one’s feet, it always felt that way.)

‘Very odd with no trains, isn’t it?’ said Alec. ‘You get used to there always being a few chuffing away at the platforms. It’s like being in a summer meadow today.’

‘Apart from the shouting,’ I said. From the station I could hear voices and what sounded like a drum being beaten in slow threatening time. I jumped as a particularly lusty yell reached our ears.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Alec. ‘There are so many special constables in the station there’s hardly room on the tracks for the strikers and they were sharing out cigarettes and playing cards together when I looked in on them.’

‘You went down there!’

Alec grinned at me. ‘I told the bobbies I was a volunteer.’

‘
Are
you going to volunteer?’ I said. ‘Do be careful.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Alec. ‘I just put a ten-shilling note in the strikers’ collecting tin at Platform 3, so it would be rather inconsistent. Oh, don’t look at me like that! The Prince of Wales sent them a tenner. Now, Dandy – fill me in.’

I heaved in a huge breath, planning to expend it on the start of my tale, but long before I had decided where to begin I had to let it go all in a rush, for fear of bursting. The same thing happened with the second breath. Bunty, who had come to rest her muzzle in my lap, looked up at me with wrinkled brows and blinked at the draught.

‘A hippo in a mudhole,’ said Alec. ‘Top marks.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Very well, I shall try and you must make of it what you can. You knew already what sort of husband Pip Balfour was, but what I’ve discovered is that it wasn’t just Lollie.
Everyone
hated him, with very good reason too, except . . .’

‘Except?’

‘Except . . . I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it. Look, he forced his beastly attentions on several of the maids. Clara, the parlourmaid, a high-spirited colt of a girl, long legs, long nose – prettier than I’m making her sound, though – got the worst of it, since she, as she put it, “fell”.’ I saw Alec’s puzzled frown and translated. ‘Was made with-child, darling, which – at Pip’s insistence, I should add – she successfully concealed with tightened corsets and bigger aprons.’

‘Really? Is that possible?’

‘You’d be surprised,’ I told him.

‘And what happened to . . . it?’

‘It was stillborn. She crept off on her own to the attics, Alec, and never told a soul.’

‘Dear God.’

‘He also pounced on Eldry, the tweenie,’ I continued. ‘Rather an unfortunate girl. Pitifully plain, all bones and teeth. Edith Sitwell, except that she arranges her hair like a character from Beatrix Potter and so only draws attention to herself. Also Millie, the scullerymaid,
truly
a character from Beatrix Potter – round and pink and guileless, and by the way absolutely besotted by the most unattractive young man – Stanley, the footman.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘Fastidious,’ I said. ‘Faints at the sight of blood or the mention of it.’

‘He can’t help that,’ said Alec.

‘Also pompous, boastful, ostentatiously servile, insinuating and sanctimonious. I’d love to be able to suspect him, but no one who pales at a drop of blood on a pricked finger could have wielded that mutton knife, you know. And no one who wasn’t innocent would dare to drone on so about what he knows and could tell.’

‘What
does
he know?’ said Alec. ‘What
could
he tell?’

‘Nothing, he’s just one of those annoying hinters. He had good reason to revile Pip, all the same. Pip refused him leave to visit his father when everyone thought he was just about to peg out from TB. And threatened him with the sack if he went AWOL. And he’d do it too, because Phyllis, the housemaid – she of the pawnshop visit – was on warning for cheek and would have been out on her ear if Pip hadn’t died. That was Phyllis’s particular complaint. She can’t even say, with any certainty, what it was she did, so one suspects she did nothing.’

‘He just wanted rid of her? What’s she like?’

‘Delightful,’ I said. ‘Little impish, freckly thing with those very round blue eyes. Irish, perhaps.’

‘Doesn’t sound like the kind of girl one would cast easily aside,’ said Alec, with rather unguarded honesty it seemed to me. ‘Do you really believe she can’t think what she did? Clumsiness? Breaking the Meissen? Pilfering? Corrupting the grocer’s boy?’

‘Well, pilfering is a possibility,’ I said. ‘I never did manage to work out where she got that seventeen pounds, after all.’

‘That’s not pilfering,’ said Alec. ‘That’s theft. Fingers as sticky as all that would have got her much more than a warning.’

‘Yes, but I wondered if perhaps she was in the habit of a little very minor pinching – the pawnbroker thought the rug and nightie – and then after Pip’s death she swooped in and pocketed the seventeen pounds she knew was lying around.’

‘But that would be senseless,’ Alec said. ‘To do something to draw suspicion towards one when one knew there would be policemen sniffing about.’

It did sound unlikely when he put it that way.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘perhaps she did it to get the rug and nightie back, in case there was a search and they were missed. And then found. In the pawnbroker’s.’

This sounded even less convincing and Alec was kind enough to pass on without commenting.

‘So that’s the young girls,’ he said. ‘And Stanley.’

‘So let’s have the rest of the men. Mr Faulds is more discreet about Pip’s deeds than the rest but he didn’t hide his feelings for a minute. Good news about the death, let’s all stand together and what’s next, was the order of the day.’

‘Who’s Mr Faulds?’ said Alec.

‘Oh! The butler,’ I said. ‘Faulds. Ernest. He’s a dear. He lays down the law to the youngsters when he remembers but his heart isn’t in it. Mostly he hands out drinks and instigates sing-songs. He has a music-hall background, you know, and is teaching young Mattie to play the piano. Now, Mattie is the hall boy, also a dear. White-blond hair, deep dimples and a stammer when he’s nervous. He comes from a family of miners but had to give it up after an accident. Can you imagine, Alec, being trapped down a mine for hours? It’s left him with a crippling fear of being alone in the dark and yet Balfour – blister that he was – insisted on Mattie waiting up in the dark hall to let his master in on late nights out. Similarly, John the chauffeur was left to sleep in the car countless times when Balfour might easily have organised for him to have a bed wherever. And he’s the usual strapping type that people employ as chauffeurs too – not built for curling up on the back seat. And as for Harry, Balfour’s valet – well, there the tricks begin to get so silly they seem quite mad. Balfour stole the poor chap’s clothes and gave them back with the pockets cut out.’

‘Eh?’ said Alec.

‘I know. It’s like something from a fairy tale. But actually, it makes some kind of sense when one considers that Harry is the resident communist.’

‘Does it?’

‘Well, you know, can’t really make a fuss about his possessions since he thinks no one should have any.’

‘A communist valet,’ said Alec, as wonderingly as I had. ‘Rather an odd choice of occupation, isn’t it? Odd enough to be suspicious, do you think?’

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I’ve forgotten someone. Faulds, Harry, John, Stanley, Mattie. Clara, Phyllis, Eldry, Millie and . . . Oh! Mrs Hepburn. Of course. Kitty Hepburn, the cook.’

‘Interfered with like the rest of the girls?’ said Alec.

‘Not by Balfour,’ I said. ‘But she and Faulds have a bit of an understanding. In fact, they were together on the night in question and provided one another with alibis.’

‘So does she have some other reason to have loathed Balfour?’

With a shudder I told him about the dead mouse in the goose and the other insults to her cooking.

‘Hm,’ said Alec. ‘It’s nasty – especially the mouse, which you might easily have kept to yourself, Dandy; I may never eat roast goose again – but it’s better than what happened to all the young ones.’

‘Ah, yes,’ I said, ‘but there’s the thing, Alec. One of the many things. It didn’t.’ Alec waited, eyebrows up and head cocked to one side. ‘It didn’t happen to all the girls. It didn’t happen to Phyllis. The prettiest one and one who – as housemaid – would have been in and out of the family rooms all day every day and would have been readily . . . well, accessible, I suppose, if that weren’t a repugnant thing to say.’

‘And yet, Edith Sitwell . . .’ said Alec.

‘Eldry, yes. Far less attractive and – since she was the tweenie – hardly ever in any place where Pip Balfour could pounce on her except in the early mornings to light the fires. Not to mention Millie, who was
never
anywhere he could easily have found her. She spends her days in the scullery with the cook – her Auntie Kitty, no less – planted in the kitchen between Millie and the rest of the world.’

‘Auntie Kitty?’ said Alec. ‘Is that a term of affection?’

‘Well, Mrs Hepburn is kind to all of them, but she is actually Millie’s aunt.’

‘And yet she brought her niece into a household where the master was known to be a ravager of maidens and kept her there?’

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Another thing that makes no sense at all. As well as the question of how he got close enough to Eldry and Millie and, in poor Eldry’s case, why? And if Eldry then why not Phyllis? And . . . and . . .’

‘What?’ said Alec. ‘What is it? You’re having one of your ideas, Dandy, I can tell. Start speaking before it goes away again.’

‘Shut up before you chase it away!’ I said. ‘It was what I just said about how he got close enough to the girls to . . . Aha! That’s it. It’s Mattie. How on earth would the master of the house come to know that the hall boy was afraid of the dark? How could that be? What do you know of your hall boy’s fears and demons, Alec? Hm?’

‘I don’t have a hall boy,’ said Alec. ‘What about you?’

‘Well, hall, boots and under-footman combined,’ I said. ‘And all I know is that his name is George and he sniffs. Do you see?’

‘I do,’ Alec said. ‘There’s something very odd about all of this.’

I was nodding furiously.

‘The story of the stolen clothes too,’ I said. ‘Even if Balfour got into the carriage house and out again with his valet’s clothes, where would he put them so that his valet couldn’t just take them back? Are we saying he hid them in the attics? Or got a luggage locker at the station or something? The whole story just makes no sense.’

‘No more sense than the idea of a communist sympathiser being a valet in the first place,’ Alec said. ‘This Harry might be making up his story to fall in with the others. And doing a pretty poor job of it.’

‘But it’s not only Harry,’ I said. ‘That’s the point. It’s all of them. Take Stanley and his father.’

‘No, no, I must disagree with you there,’ said Alec. ‘That little tale was only too believable. Oh, what is it?’ I had clearly been unable to prevent a look of smug triumph from spreading over me.

‘Just this. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that Stanley would have gone within a mile of someone with consumption. Stanley? Clamouring to go to the bedside of someone coughing up blood into a hanky? Never. I mean, have you ever seen anyone with advanced TB?’

‘Of course I have,’ Alec said. ‘And I can imagine what it’s like to be stuck in a dark mine too. Except in my case it was a dark foxhole and it wasn’t TB making my sergeant cough up blood and he didn’t have a hanky either. And we were being shelled, just to add to the fun.’

‘Sorry,’ I said, reaching out and giving his arm a quick squeeze. Bunty put her paw up on my knee. If ever there are tokens of affection being handed out, she likes to make sure she gets one. ‘I had no idea. You never speak of it.’

‘Would
you
?’ Alec said. ‘But at least we got called heroes for it. And given medals and parades. Not like Mattie and his brethren – told to do it again, for longer hours and less pay, and called nasty names for objecting.’

‘Have I told you recently what a lovely man you are?’

‘You hardly ever tell me,’ said Alec. ‘And very sketchily when you do – no details. So Mattie has my commiserations for his long nights in the dark alone and even the chauffeur – nothing makes one as miserable as trying to sleep when one is really chilled to the bone.’

‘Hah!’ I said. Bunty took her paw back and sat with it in mid-air watching me.

‘A problem?’ asked Alec.

‘It’s all beginning to fall into place,’ I said. ‘Or out of it rather. I
knew
there was something wrong when John told me. And it’s this: Lollie said that she and Pip had only spent one night apart in all the time they were married and that was when he went to Paris in an aeroplane. Unless she’s lying I don’t see how he can have left John languishing in the motorcar all these times he’s supposed to have. And Lollie said something else to me in the same conversation. What was it? Oh, why don’t I write things down?’

Alec laughed, sharply enough to wake the placid Millie who was lying over his feet.