Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains (35 page)

‘My dear? Is it his writing?’

I stirred myself and I too had to cough my voice back to life before I could answer.

‘I’m sorry, Superintendent – what?’

‘Is this Stanley’s writing? I’ve never seen it, but perhaps you might have.’

Reluctantly, I edged towards the door and looked in. Hardy had relit the candle and was holding it over the slatted wooden board beyond the sink, peering down at a piece of paper there. He turned round and beckoned to me. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to move it until I have a cloth to wrap it in. We shall need to dust it for fingerprints, naturally.’

I put a hand up to the side of my head to shield my eyes from another sight of Stanley and walked, rather unsteadily, over to Hardy’s side. The paper was a single lined sheet torn from a cheap pad, rather rough, with blue lines across it:

‘I can’t tell you,’ I said. ‘Mr Faulds would know. Shall I . . . shall I fetch him?’

‘No,’ said Hardy, putting a hand under my arm and leading me back out into my bedroom. ‘The fewer people who see all this the better, I think, don’t you? There’s no reason to doubt it anyway.’ He had lowered me into the armchair and now sat down heavily upon the bed. He put his hands up as though to rub his face and then jerked them away again, plucked a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and wiped it over his palms. I put my hand to the place on my sleeve where he had touched me. There was a little dampness there.

‘So,’ I said. ‘I was wrong. I always thought that Stanley hinting and boasting was a mark of innocence on him.’

‘And the blood phobia was nonsense,’ said Hardy. I touched my sleeve again and nodded, shuddering.

‘And no matter what Mattie thinks, Stanley must have known about the key. And used it that night.’

‘Yes,’ said the superintendent, ‘I suppose so.’

‘And he did after all often deal with the post-bag and answer the telephone, so he could easily have fobbed off Mrs Light and the Berwick housekeeper.’

‘Who said – as a matter of fact, madam – that it was a man she spoke to when she rang.’

‘So the only question left is why,’ I said. ‘
Why
?’

‘Well, that sort of character,’ said Hardy, ‘a peeping tom? He wouldn’t need the kind of motive that would make sense to you or me.’

For some reason, I could hear Nanny Palmer’s voice, on the subject of hanging dogs and bad names, which made no sense at all. I shook my head to silence her.

‘Do you know, Superintendent,’ I said, ‘I am probably the only one of the upper servants who doesn’t have a bottle of something handy in my bedroom somewhere.’

Hardy nodded, acknowledging the attempt at a joke, and then looked around.

‘Bedroom?’ he said. ‘Yes, of course. Well, you must gather what things you will need for the night, my dear, because I shall have to lock up at least until the morning.’

The thought was not to be entertained of sleeping here ever again and so it took some effort to prevent myself from bundling up every last stocking and hairpin and fleeing, but I managed to restrict myself to my notebooks, my nightgown and a change of clothes for the following day and followed Superintendent Hardy upstairs again, feeling like a refugee.

We had hardly had time to tell Lollie and Great Aunt Gertrude the news when Alec returned, mounting the stairs at a gallop and bursting into the room.

‘There’s—’ he began and then checked himself when he saw Mrs Lambert-Leslie and Mrs Balfour there as well as Hardy and me. ‘Forgive me, ladies,’ he said.

‘Out with it and never mind your pretty manners,’ said Great Aunt Gertrude. ‘We’re past all that now.’

‘I’ve got some news,’ Alec said. ‘I went to Stanley’s house out at Shandon and they haven’t seen him, not since his last free day – but here’s the thing: I
did
find out that he’s a model of filial devotion, never misses a week, certainly didn’t stay away for any long stretch because his father was ill. They didn’t know what I was talking about when I mentioned it. So I think, I really do, Superintendent, that the whole story about a fear of blood is nonsense and Stanley might well be our man.’

He did not get the expected response at the end of this and when he looked around at our faces to try to find out why, I think he saw them properly for the first time.

‘What’s happened?’ he said. ‘Dan – Miss Rossiter, I mean, are you all right?’

I turned beseeching eyes upon Mr Hardy but before either of us could speak, Great Aunt Gertrude steamed in and summed it up neatly.

‘Stanley’s the one, all right. He confessed and then cut his own throat like a white man.’

Alec frowned at the boorish phrase but said nothing, only turned to me and enquired with a look whether I agreed. I shrugged and nodded.

We arranged that I should spend the night in a room on the third floor of the house, the unused nursery floor, and I left to deposit my bundle of books and clothes there. Alec came out of the drawing room behind me while Mr Hardy stayed to summon mortuary men and a police surgeon to attend Number 31 once more.

‘I don’t like this, Dandy,’ he said, as we climbed the narrow staircase together. ‘In fact, I’m going to have to insist that if you spend another night in this charnel house – and on a deserted floor at that – I do too. I shall bunk down between you and the stairs and I’m bringing the dogs in – don’t tell me otherwise. That lot down in the servants’ hall already think I’m Mrs L-L’s fancy man – you should have heard the maids giggling – so it won’t be any shock to them that I get special favours.’

‘You and I agree then,’ I said. I had put down my things on a blanket box on the landing and was opening doors, looking for a suitable room, feeling a little like Goldilocks in the empty cottage, for Lollie had already fitted up her nurseries for the children who would never be and there were short beds, low to the floor, and a crib with lace hangings, but nowhere that would be just right for me.

‘Agree about what?’ Alec said. ‘Here we go, Dandy. The nursemaid’s room. You and Bunty can sleep here and I’ll take the floor in the outer nursery.’

‘Like a bear at the mouth of a cave,’ I said. ‘You know it too, don’t you? Even though you don’t know how you know or what you know. No, don’t scoff! Listen – if Stanley is the murderer and Stanley is dead then what do I have to fear and what do you have to fear for me and why are you not going off to supper and a night in an hotel?’

‘I’m just rattled,’ said Alec. ‘There’s no rhyme nor reason to it and in the morning it’ll be gone, but I’m spooked by it tonight – please, Dandy; humour me.’

He was not alone. The servants’ hall was the most subdued I had ever seen it once the news spread below stairs. Millie, as might be expected, was quite undone, and sat bellowing like an abandoned calf with tears rushing unchecked over her cheeks and dripping from her chin. At least, though, the sound of her howls drowned out the tramping feet of the doctor and the fingerprint men and, a little later, the heavier tramp of the mortuary attendants as they removed the body. Millie was facing away from the area, thank the Lord, and those of us who were not managed to compose our expressions before she noticed and turned around.

No one objected when Mr Faulds broke up the gathering. He bid Clara make up a cot for Millie beside her Auntie Kitty and – very thoughtfully, in my opinion – told Eldry she could do the same in the housemaids’ bedroom, so that she would not be alone. He even asked me if I thought I would manage to sleep up in the nurseries and did not seem entirely convinced when I assured him that I should be fine.

‘What an end, eh?’ he said, shaking his head in great sorrow. ‘What a waste of a life, Fanny.’

‘Four lives,’ I said without thinking.

‘Four?’ said Mr Faulds, looking at me sharply. ‘I suppose you mean master and mistress? But not Millie, surely. She’ll get over it soon. Kitty will talk her round.’

Mrs Hepburn reappeared at that moment and joined Mr Faulds and me before the embers of the servants’ hall fire.

‘She’s off like a lamb,’ she said. ‘Tired herself out with all that crying, so I’ll just leave her a while and not start creaking and splashing until she’s deeply gone.’ Mrs Hepburn cleared her throat. ‘Well, to tell you the truth, Ernest, I could murder a drop of something and that’s no lie.’

‘Only natural,’ said Mr Faulds. ‘And someone should raise a glass to poor Stanley anyway. No matter what he did. His passing can’t go unmarked.’

Mrs Hepburn closed her eyes and nodded very gravely.

‘Do you really think he
did
do it?’ I said. Mrs Hepburn opened her eyes again. ‘Can you really believe it of him?’

‘It does you great credit that you can’t, Fanny,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘But he left a note. He confessed to it all.’

‘I wish he had said in his note
why
he did it,’ I replied. ‘I think I’d be happier if I had any idea why.’

‘Oh Fanny,’ said Mr Faulds. ‘You’ve led a sheltered life if that can puzzle you. The truth is, when one man sets his mind to murder another, there’s no “reason” anywhere to be found.’ I nodded reluctantly and Mr Faulds carried on. ‘I remember a pair of comics on the halls with me,’ he said. ‘Brothers they were – Valentine and Gallagher O’Malley: Vally and Gally. They toured their cross-talk act for twenty-five years until one night in Swansea they came off after their bow and encore and went to their dressing room and Val killed his brother, strangled him with his dressing-gown cord, and then called the stage-door to get the police and put his hands out for the cuffs to go on them. And when the copper asked why he did it he said Gallagher had dropped fag ash in the cold cream once too often.’ Mrs Hepburn tutted and shook her head. ‘Fag ash in the cold cream, Fanny,’ said Mr Faulds, ‘without a word of a lie.’

‘But we don’t even have that much of a reason in this case,’ I said. ‘I know what Stanley
said
about master, about his cruelty, but it wasn’t true. That’s one thing that’s come out from the police digging around. There’s no reason at all – not a spot of ash or anything.’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Mr Faulds. ‘What’s this the police have dug up?’

‘Oh, Ernest, please,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘And you too, Fan. Can’t we just leave it be? I’ll be greetin’ worse than Millie if I have to keep going over it now.’

Mr Faulds, the thought of his beloved in distress taking precedence over everything else, clapped his hands, stood up and announced that he had a bottle of Rémy Martin in his pantry and we were all to go there now and drink to Stanley’s memory. I tried to demur, not wanting to be a gooseberry, but he would not brook a refusal and in the end Mrs Hepburn left before me, fearing that Millie would waken and find herself alone. I meant to follow on her heels, but somehow the time passed and it must have been long after midnight when, full of brandy and music-hall tales and slightly cloudy, I climbed all the way to the top of the house, bade goodnight to Alec and climbed into the little iron bed to join Bunty.

16

Bunty woke me with one of her most luxurious yawns, one which slid down several octaves from a whine to a growl, and I was glad to be wakened; my sleep had been plagued by the kind of unpleasant dreams one cannot quite remember but cannot quite shake off either. Alec called my name and I opened my eyes and gazed around the little room. It was awash with morning light and alive with dancing dust motes at which Bunty started snapping, trampling over the bed without regard to the tender parts of her mistress under her paws.

‘One moment,’ I called back and sat up, shoving Bunty off the bed with my feet. Perhaps it was not a dream, this thing that was nagging at me, but rather something I had forgotten or something I had to do and deep down was dreading. I looked around the room for clues, but I knew even as I did so that it was not that sort of a something, not a watch I had not wound nor a letter I had to answer. After all, I thought, shaking my head, I did not even know if this nagging something was in the past or the future. It was, somehow, neither. It was, in a very odd way, somewhere else entirely. It must, I decided, be a dream after all.

Besides, my work here at 31 Heriot Row was done. It had not been my finest hour. I had suspected Stanley from the start, had watched him, had become more and more sure of his guilt every day and yet had done nothing about it until it was too late to bring him to justice. Even if I had really been Miss Rossiter, Mrs Balfour’s new maid and nothing more, I should have spoken up and told Superintendent Hardy that very first morning to take Stanley in and press the truth out of him. As a so-called detective, supposed to be helping, I could not account for how I could have let it end this way.

There was a soft knock on the door and Alec put his head around it.

‘Dan?’ he said. ‘Are you all right? I can hear you sighing from out here.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Well, of course, actually, no, I’m not fine. I’m kicking myself.’

‘Can’t think why,’ Alec said, ‘but – having slept on it all – have you at least accepted that the mystery is solved and the case is closed?’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I said. ‘I mean, yes, of course.’

‘So we can go home?’

‘Home?’ I repeated. ‘Yes. Yes, I think perhaps I should. This place . . .’ I looked around myself again. What
was
it?

‘This place what?’ Alec said.

‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘I feel rather odd this morning, that’s all.’

‘Bad dreams?’

‘That’s probably all it is.’

When he had gone, taking Bunty and Millie with him for a turn around the garden, I made every effort to shake myself. (Nanny Palmer, in full epigrammatic flight, had once shared with me the view that if we spent all our time looking back at yesterday, we would be roundly spanked by tomorrow – and although I had had to suppress my giggles at the time, I had come to see the wisdom.) And perhaps Stanley’s guilt had not really been so very clear at the time as it was now, with the glare of hindsight shining upon it. No! I told myself. Stop that! It
was
clear. It had been perfectly obvious to me from the start and I would not allow myself to wriggle out of my discomfort by pretending otherwise. Besides, I could not edit my memories to suit myself because I had a record of them.