The Burry Man's Day (15 page)

‘That’s a thought, Chrissie,’ said the woman called Tina, at last. ‘You were asking, sir, if there’s anything you could do?’

‘Anything at all. Name it,’ said Cad.

‘Well, someone’ll need to take thon,’ she gestured to the envelope on the sideboard, ‘to the toon hall.’

Cadwallader blinked at me for a translation.

‘Someone has to take the doctor’s certificate to the registrar’s tomorrow and register Mr Dudgeon’s . . .’ Thankfully Cad was nodding along with me by then and I could lapse into a gentle silence before the end.

‘Of course,’ said Cad.

‘Not tomorrow,’ said Mrs Dudgeon. ‘And it has to be a relative.’

‘Surely there’s someone,’ I said. ‘A male relative?’

‘I’ll do it,’ said the widow.

‘A brother-in-law?’ I insisted.

I looked around the bevy of sisters, thinking that surely one of their husbands could get some time off his work.

‘Donald would do it if I asked him,’ said Mrs Dudgeon. ‘But I just want to take care of it myself.’ She was working herself up again. ‘I’ll do it myself, first thing Tuesday.’

‘Well, it’s for you to say, Chrissie,’ said a voice. ‘But if you ask me, you’d better get it over and then your mind’ll be easy.’

Mrs Dudgeon threatened to laugh or perhaps to shriek at this, and I could not quite see how anyone looking at her now, half-mad with anguish, could foresee ease for her any time soon.

‘I can’t go tomorrow because it’s closed,’ she said at last through gritted teeth.

‘No, it’s never,’ said a young woman – Bet’s wee Betty, I think. ‘The morn’s Monday, Chris.’

‘Aye but the days jist run in together at a time like this,’ said another, reaching out and patting Mrs Dudgeon’s arm.

‘It’s closed this Monday for the August Bank Holiday,’ said Mrs Dudgeon. ‘I
ken
it was last weekend,’ she almost shouted this over the voices raised in denial, ‘I ken it was last weekend, but they stay open the bank holidays to let folk that’s off their work get their business done and they close the next. It’s closed.’ She was almost shouting and had to take three or four huge, groaning breaths before her voice was back under her command. When she spoke again, she sounded exhausted. ‘I’ll have to go on Tuesday. Tomorrow it’s closed.’

‘We’ll take care of everything,’ said one of the sisters, laying a hand upon Mrs Dudgeon’s shoulder. ‘We can look out his papers and someone’ll go with you.’

‘What papers?’ said Mrs Dudgeon, clutching at the woman’s hand.

‘Just his birth certificate,’ I told her, ‘and his marriage certificate and passport. Or no, sorry, I suppose he wouldn’t have a passport, but the other two . . .’

‘You never need to take all them,’ said Mrs Dudgeon. ‘Mr Faichen never told me you needed all them.’

‘Haven’t you got them?’ said one of the sisters. ‘Have you lost them, Chrissie?’

Mrs Dudgeon put her head in her hands and began to rock back and forward.

‘We can look them out for you, Chris,’ said a soothing voice. ‘We’ll find them.’ She was beginning to moan as she rocked and I glanced at Cadwallader in trepidation.

‘Mrs Dudgeon,’ he said, loudly. ‘I shall telephone the registrar himself, at home tonight if I have to, and ask whether it matters that Robert’s birth certificate is lost, and if it does, I shall take care of it all. I’ll pick you up in the motor car on Tuesday, whenever you like, take you there, and bring you home.’

Mrs Dudgeon stared at him for a moment and then spoke.

‘Or let me walk home by myself?’

The sisters set up a new protest at this, but Cad had the right idea.

‘Or let you walk home if that’s what you want,’ he said, nodding.

At that, we rose to go, while the sisters rallied around Mrs Dudgeon, the starling rustle starting up again:

‘. . . the doctor . . .’

‘Just so’s you get rest . . .’

‘ . . . do yourself harm if you go on like . . .’

‘Goodbye, Mrs Dudgeon, ladies,’ I said, but we were quite forgotten and we let ourselves out.

‘Not to say I wouldn’t be half mad if that lot were buzzing round me,’ said Cadwallader, stopping on the doorstep, ‘but . . .’

‘Yes, I hope they
do
get the doctor,’ I said. ‘A state of nerves like that can’t be sustained for long without trouble. It would only take one more thing to tip her right over the edge.’

‘And not a big thing,’ said Cad. ‘Did you see how she took the news of having to look out a mere certificate?’

‘But you were wonderful,’ I told him. ‘Very calming. Well done. Only, you’re not really going to let her walk three miles home from the registrar’s all alone, are you?’

‘Of course not,’ said Cad. ‘But I thought if someone didn’t stop shushing her and start agreeing with her, she was going to have a fit.’

‘Still keen to be laird of the estate?’ I asked him. ‘Now that you see what it entails?’

‘Absolutely,’ he said firmly. ‘You said yourself I was wonderful back there. Although, it certainly does have more to it than I could have dreamt of, when I used to sit in the lawyer’s office in Manhattan signing papers and dreaming.

‘It’s all in such a godawful mess, Dandy. Not just the castle falling down around us, but farms running at a loss, rents unpaid for decades on the town properties, untold complications from some failed mining speculation back in the boom years. And now, just as I was beginning to get on top of it all, I’ve lost my carpenter.’ He sighed. ‘I must remember to get on to someone this evening and find out about this certificate question. Who do you think I should ask?’

That was more like it, I thought. For the first time since I had met him Cad sounded just like a husband; moaning about rents and business failures for one thing, and for another giving his word that he would attend to some matter then promptly turning to the nearest female to sort out the details for him. He was learning at last.

I regaled Alec with it all over a drink together in the drawing room later. He had been hanging around purposelessly for much of the day since, for all the beer shops and alehouses in Queensferry, there was only one establishment calling itself an hotel which could therefore offer refreshment on the Sabbath. There he had taken himself and, telling the landlord with hand on heart that he was a genuine traveller come down from Perthshire that morning, he had been supplied with a pint of seventy shilling ale at the counter in the lounge bar. Only then had it struck him that the labyrinthine licensing laws ensured that none of his fellow drinkers could possibly be a local man with anything to tell him of the Burry Man’s day.

‘I did get a few scraps from the barman,’ he told me, ‘but I think we had better take it with a pinch of salt.’

‘Oh?’ I said. ‘Why so?’

‘Well, he was much too keen on muscling in to the centre of the story. Very full of this funny feeling he said he had that something was amiss. You know the kind of thing: “Soon as I saw him in the doorway, guvner, a goose walked over my grave and I knew there was trouble a-brewing.” The usual nonsense.’

‘A ghost,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it a ghost that walks over one’s grave?’

‘Why would a ghost give you goose pimples?’ Alec asked, reasonably enough. ‘Anyway, I shall have better luck tomorrow, I expect. Now what of you? You say she’s definitely still worried about something?’

‘Worried is hardly the word,’ I said. ‘If you could have
seen
her, Alec. And it wasn’t . . . Oh, it’s so hard to explain. It wasn’t the nagging kind of worry that one feels if one fears that something dreadful
might
happen. It wasn’t that. And it wasn’t the grind of waiting to hear something; we shall never forget what that looks like after all. This was . . . I don’t know.’

‘That’s simply not good enough, Dandy,’ said Alec. ‘You must try.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘but don’t smile at me for being fanciful. Here goes. It was . . . Imagine . . . Imagine someone you care deeply about. Your mother, say. Imagine that your mother was tied to the railway line with a train coming and no one around you spoke English or understood your frantic gestures and no one would show you where the points were, or for some reason you did not dare to ask. It looked like that would. Worse, even. Horrid.’

‘It sounds like a nightmare,’ said Alec.

‘Yes!’ I yelled. ‘Exactly. She looked as though she were stuck in a nightmare with no one to turn to, even though we were all there trying to help.’

‘And does it fit in at all with our best guess as to what might be troubling her?’ said Alec. ‘Doesn’t sound it. We thought perhaps Dudgeon had been nobbled and had gone back on the deal and now Mrs Dudgeon might have to carry the can. What you’re describing doesn’t chime with that at all.’

I shook my head in agreement. ‘And the things she actually said didn’t seem at all as though they could be troubling on their own account. Bank holidays, and lost documents. Trivial things really. And then this ardent desire to be alone. First she was beside herself with the need to have her husband’s body back and now all she wants is for everyone to go away and leave her alone. I begin to wonder if she was quite normal before all this, because really she hardly seems sane now.’

I heard the ching! of the telephone being hung up in the library next door and then the sound of Cadwallader’s footsteps crossing the floor and advancing along the corridor towards us.

‘Good news,’ he said, entering. ‘She doesn’t need the birth and marriage certificates after all. I got it straight from the horse’s mouth. Well, the registrar’s. As long as the contents are known and there’s no doubt over identification, which there isn’t, she can just walk in and do it. Even better, he
is
open for business tomorrow, so we can get the whole thing under way. I’m going to slip back round to the cottage now and spread the tidings.’

‘Oh Cad, don’t descend again,’ I told him. ‘They’ll only get into another flap about feeding you. Send a footman, darling, much easier.’ Cad nodded his acquiescence and pulled the bell-rope to summon the maid.

‘I wonder what made Mrs Dudgeon so adamant that tomorrow was out,’ I said. ‘She was fierce about it, wasn’t she, Cad? Can she be quite normal? Have you ever heard any rumours that she wasn’t?’

Cadwallader shook his head. ‘Not that I would have,’ he said, which was a very good point.

‘I wish I knew where to look for a good old-fashioned malicious gossip,’ I said. ‘You must do what you can in the pubs tomorrow, Alec, but mental trouble is not really an interest of men’s.’

‘Well, haul yourself around the teashops and drapers,’ said Alec.

‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘But I daren’t simply plunge in and start asking. Far too many branches of the family. Anyone I quiz is bound to be a relative.’

‘Really?’ said Cad. ‘I haven’t begun to sort the locals out yet. Well done you.’

‘Oh, I haven’t sorted them
out,’
I said. ‘The most I could do is attach offspring to parent and only that because they seem to employ so little imagination when it comes to naming them. Bet’s wee Betty, and young Tina that’s Tina’s lassie. Not forgetting young Izzy who’s such a help to Mammy Izzy, of course.’

‘Yes, there are teeming millions of nephews and nieces, certainly,’ said Cad. ‘You could hardly miss
them.’

Chapter Seven

Of the three of us, Alec certainly had the best of it the next day. Cad was to take the widow to town, I was to sit with the sisters in her absence, since with Mrs Dudgeon gone their tongues would surely be loosened, and Alec was to start his round of the hostelries.

At eleven in the morning then, we scattered to our tasks, Alec taking my motor car to the first pub on his list, Cad setting off with black hat and solemn face in Buttercup’s Austin to pick up Mrs Dudgeon, and I beginning my solitary tramp through the woods. Solitary, because Buttercup had once again declined to have any part in the day’s adventures and had avoided being press-ganged by the simple but effective method of not getting dressed. She had still been in curling-pins and cold cream, propped up in bed when I had swept into her room half an hour before to drag her with me and her smile had been triumphant as she watched me concluding that I didn’t have time to wait for her. She merely gave a happy sigh and turned the page of her
Tatler
as I glared and marched out again and worst of all, because of the luscious pile of her bedroom carpet, I could not even slam the door.

Hopeless as she was though, I began fervently to wish as I made my way into the woods that I had insisted she come with me. It was another beautiful day, getting hot as noon approached, but sweet and fresh in the trees, at least in this part of the forest where the ground was dry under birch and spruce. Elsewhere, no doubt, streams, bogs and years of broad leaves rotting would make the woodland unpleasantly rank as August sweltered on, but here was a carpet of needles and patches of sunshine. What could be more cheerful? What could be farther from mould and cobwebs? And yet, as I say, I found myself wishing heartily as I advanced that Buttercup was there, or even better that I had Bunty with me and, despite the dappling sunshine and trilling birds, my pulse was knocking by the time the edge of the wood was out of sight behind me.

Once or twice I fancied I heard footsteps, but then I was just as sure that I heard breathing, and
that
could hardly be so. Oh, for Bunty! The value of a dog, when one is walking through woods getting spooked for no reason at all, is that a dog has keener hearing but a much duller imagination than oneself and so will mooch along nose to the ground no matter what horrors one’s fancy conjures, and it is only when the ears prick and the nose quivers that one can be sure there is something going on outside one’s own head, and even then it is most likely a rabbit. I shook myself, firmly telling myself that there was no such thing as ghosts, that there was no one creeping along beside me breathing heavily and watching me and, although the jitters did not leave me, I at least managed to keep going and not bolt back to the castle in fright.

However, I was so thoroughly rattled by the time I arrived at the clearing that on seeing someone emerge around the corner of the Dudgeons’ cottage six feet away from me as I came at the building from the side, I jumped clear off the ground and shrieked. The other person shrieked too, even louder, and it took each of us a moment to register who it was who had so alarmed the other. At last, though, I recognized Miss Joey Brown the barmaid, round-eyed and with her hand pressed to her heart, shrinking back against the cottage wall and staring, whereupon I gave a fluttering laugh to excuse myself and cover my embarrassment. Much to my surprise, however, although Miss Brown soon recovered from her initial fright, she grew no more calm; she nodded to me politely enough and murmured a greeting, but she kept making darting glances back the way she had come, and when I followed her looks with my own, she grew even more flustered, standing square before me blocking the path, as though I would want to go around to the back of the cottage and it was her duty to stop me. Then, seeming to realize how foolish she was being, she gave it up and attempted to look casual as she strolled towards the front door, only ruining it with one more fearful look over her shoulder. I stood my ground for a moment, but I knew I could not go squirrelling about the back regions of Mrs Dudgeon’s house, not with the place full of mourners as it was, so I met Miss Brown’s backward glance with a frank smile and followed her around the path to the front. She disappeared inside without knocking and went into the room on the left where the coffin lay, but I rapped on the open door and waited.