The Winter Ground (23 page)

‘How is Mrs Wilson this morning?’ I said as I followed him up the short half flight of marble steps to the level of the great hall.

‘She’s fine, thank you, madam,’ he said with just a touch of emphasis on the first word.

In the hall, Ina did indeed look fine, the chalky pallor of the previous evening quite driven away and replaced not by the flush which might be expected (for the hall was still rather stuffy from the evening before and both fires were once again burning high up into the chimneys) but by rosy cheeks and clear, sparkling eyes, and to see such a marked change, given my current mission, made me rather uneasy. If one comes delicately to enquire where a friend was when death was being dealt, one does not welcome the sight of that friend transformed. I told myself sternly that the transformation – if indeed one should call it that and might it not be less fancifully described as a good mood? – could easily arise from a certainty that the travesty of the circus party would have seen off Robin Laurie from their door for ever, or could even be owing to the nasty events of the evening before making Ina, not to mention Albert, forget about her years-old and let us face it rather distant brush with death and just think about something else for a change.

Albert was certainly distracted, I could be sure. He was pacing up and down in front of the nearer of the two fireplaces, with his hands laced together behind him under his coat flaps, staring at the rug as he crossed it. Ina sat at the piano against the far wall. There was a great jumbled heap of sheet music on top of it and spilling on to the floor as though she had spent hours searching for just the right piece to suit the occasion. Since what she was still fingering away at in a desultory fashion was a Strauss polka, however, one could only conclude that she had given up.

‘Ah, Mrs Gilver,’ said Albert. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’ He had clearly suffered a great downturn in his view of himself since yesterday and there was to be no more ‘Dear Dandy’. On the other hand, he was too preoccupied to simper and the result, overall, was the most sensible speech I had ever heard fall from his lips. True, it was nothing of any import and could have been replaced by a smile and a wave but it was a refreshing change not to be tired of him already. ‘Have you come from the winter ground?’ he went on. ‘We have just had a visit from that dreadful man, Sergeant McClennan, and he said the circus folk are being questioned.’

Ina stopped playing and looked up.

‘You didn’t tell me that, Albert,’ she said. ‘Sergeant McClennan didn’t mention it either.’

‘You didn’t speak to the sergeant together?’ I asked, thinking it a very bad thing for the Wilsons if McClennan had deliberately separated them to go through his questions. That fate had befallen Alec and me once, in the past, and nothing I could imagine was more designed to make one feel shifty. Of course, when Alec and I had spent our uncomfortable spells in separate back rooms of an Edinburgh police station we had rather better reasons for feeling shifty than the policemen’s caution. I hoped that the same was not true of the Wilsons today.

‘If I had had my way my dear wife would not have had to speak to the man at all,’ said Wilson. ‘But he insisted she join us and give her impressions. I congratulate myself on keeping her away from the worst of it, though. Yes, I congratulate myself heartily on that.’ Then came the customary pause, presumably so that I could congratulate him too. Albert Wilson’s short leave from duty as an oddity was over.

‘Well, my dear,’ said Ina, ‘no one could say you haven’t taken excellent care of me throughout the whole sorry episode and since Mrs Gilver is here now – if you’ll stay and have some coffee with me, Dandy? – I think you would be more than justified if you returned to your own concerns.’

‘I have nothing pressing on me, my love,’ said Albert.

‘And would not tell me if you did,’ said Ina, bestowing a sweet smile on him.

‘That I should not.’

‘So, you see, I cannot help but worry that you are neglecting it all,’ Ina said, and she knitted her brow and pouted like a child in a soapflakes advertisement. It was sickening to see. ‘And then I worry that when it does catch up with you, you will be so busy that you’ll tire yourself and become ill and then I shall have to do without you more than I could bear or can bear even to imagine.’

Albert Wilson, as might be expected unless one knew in advance that he was a very unusual type of man, lapped all of this up and then trotted out of the room like a well-schooled pony. Ina and I listened to his footsteps crossing the dining room and then pattering away up a distant flight of stone steps – Benachally is one of those fearfully inconvenient houses with a spiral staircase at every corner and every bedroom leading out of another one. Eventually the sound reached us of a far-off door slamming shut and we both sat back, I against the plump velvet cushion at my back – and it always amazes me how the Wilsons’ cushions are never damp or musty despite that barn of a hall – and Ina against the open piano, her elbows crashing a jagged chord out of the keys.

‘Have you come from the circus now?’ she asked me. ‘This minute? Have you seen them this morning? How are they all?’

I nodded. This was heartening: if she had quizzed me on what the police were up to and what the gossip was, I should have worried even more than I was worrying, but a sweet concern for how her circus friends were bearing up under their misfortune was a relief to behold.

‘I’ve seen Ma Cooke and Charlie,’ I told her.

‘No one else?’

‘Alec managed a quick word with … one of the clowns.’ I was not about to get embroiled in Miles Fanshawe’s rebirth as Merryman. ‘And he went to visit Harlequin too. There at least the news is all good – calm as a millpond and full of breakfast, apparently.’

‘And what are the police making of it?’ Ina asked. ‘Sergeant McClennan wouldn’t tell us a thing, no matter what Albert says about having to shield me.’

‘Inspector Hutchinson is making plenty of it,’ I said and she sat forward, jangling the piano keys again. ‘That grey hair and grey face are a brilliant disguise. He’s actually a remarkable man, rather terrifyingly so, spouting new suspects and new theories like mushrooms – one shrinks from mentioning a name to him.’

‘But whose name have you mentioned?’ said Ina, looking alarmed. ‘Dandy, what have you done?’

‘Oh well, Topsy’s – inadvertently – and my sons are in for a roasting too, I rather think.’ I was looking around the room as I spoke, very airy, but I did manage to see Ina sit back, just a little.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘That’s all right then. I mean, Topsy and your two were in the ring when it happened, weren’t they?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and speaking of who was where …’

‘If only it had happened earlier,’ said Ina, speaking over me. ‘While
everyone
was still in the ring, then there would be no suspicion at all and the police wouldn’t even
be
here. It’s so horrid to know that they’re all being pestered by that nasty sergeant and if Inspector Hutchinson really is as fanciful as you say then goodness knows what he’ll come up with and how they’ll suffer.’

I felt myself forming the words to ask her who would suffer more than Anastasia had, but they sounded waspish even in the planning and I felt sure that waspishness was not the best tone to adopt since I had questions needing answers.

‘Hmm,’ I contented myself with saying and when I continued I tried very hard to speak gently. ‘Anyway, Ma and the Wolfs were back there throughout, so there would always have been someone under suspicion. And besides, nasty as it is – and I quite agree about the sergeant, what a terror – one can hardly let it pass unchallenged. Ana died, my dear Ina, a young girl died.’

‘Don’t,’ said Ina, her eyes filling. ‘It was a horrid accident. Let’s not think about it. Don’t make me.’

‘How can you be so sure it was?’ I asked. ‘Did you see something?’

‘What do you mean?’ she said, stopping with her handkerchief up to her eyes and staring past it at me. ‘I saw what you saw. Less, even. I thank the Lord I did not see what happened … behind … afterwards. I couldn’t bear to see the things you have to look at, Dandy. I do think you’re wonderful for being able to face it.’

I felt myself rise up from in my middle and sit six inches straighter in my seat, as though Nanny Palmer had just – as once she used to, twenty years ago – put her knee in the small of my back and pulled hard on my stays. It might work on Albert Wilson, I thought, but it would never work on me.

‘I am glad, for your sake, that you didn’t go around and see anything horrid,’ I said. ‘Where
did
you go?’

Now Ina rose and straightened.

‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.

‘When you left your seat,’ I reminded her. ‘Where did you go?’

‘Oh, you mean earlier!’ she exclaimed. ‘Yes, I did slip out a little earlier, just for a moment.’

‘Well, I don’t like to argue with you, my dear,’ I said, not meaning a word of it, ‘but you weren’t back when Inya screamed, were you? You might have left earlier, but it can’t have been for a moment, because you weren’t there. When she screamed.’

‘Dandy!’ said Ina, laughing and shaking her head. ‘Can you really be saying this? Can you seriously be saying these things to me?’ She was an excellent actress, having had to learn the skill to survive her marriage and not run mad, but it was only acting.

‘Of course not, you goose,’ I cooed back, no mean actress myself and trained at the same school, ‘what an idea! But I just wanted to know if you
saw
anything or anyone – anything out of place or anyone creeping around … or anything really. Where were you? Where did you go?’

‘It’s going to sound so silly,’ Ina said, dipping her head and looking up at me shyly, ‘but I went out and came back in, that’s all. Went outside and stood in the dark, looking at the stars, and then came back in again.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, that will sound even sillier.’ I noticed, however, that she did not redden as she spoke.

‘Please don’t worry about looking silly in front of me,’ I assured her. ‘I look silly at least once every time I leave the house.’

‘Well, those awful people had ruined it for me, rather,’ she said. ‘Robin Laurie and the rest of them, and then Albert was fussing as usual and I thought if I went outside into the dark and then stole back in on tiptoe, I should be able to feel the magic of it – properly – the way I was so looking forward to. See? Silly.’

Indisputably, I thought, and all the more plausible for it, but not actually true.

‘I looked around and couldn’t see you,’ I said. ‘And then when Inya screamed, Alec Osborne and I rushed across the ring and went out through the curtains – the ring doors – to the backstage. Halfway across, I turned around and called to everyone to stay put. You would know I did, my dear, if you had been there, which you weren’t, as I know, because I didn’t see you.’

I was rather proud of this, but it cut no ice at all with Ina.

‘I know what you did and what you said,’ she told me. ‘You shouted “Keep to your seats” and I remember thinking what a very forthright way it was of speaking. I wondered if it came from the army or something.’

I could not bring to mind exactly what I said the previous evening. ‘Keep to your seats’ did not strike me as something too alien ever to have fallen from my lips although I agreed with Ina that it was brusque and none too feminine an expression. Had she accused me of saying ‘Don’t move or else’ I should have known she was lying, but this was either a lucky guess or it was true.

‘But I couldn’t see you,’ I said.

‘I told you,’ said Ina, ‘I could never do what you do. I thought I was going to faint, even without seeing a thing, even without knowing what was there to be seen. I felt my eyes begin to roll up and so I …’ I knew what she was going to say before she said it. ‘… I put my head down, in between my knees.’ She did it again, there on the piano stool, folding herself flat and letting her arms brush against the tops of her shoes. Rather spry for an invalid, I thought.

‘Ah well, that explains it,’ I said, once she had sat up again. ‘I do apologise. But I really was only trying to pump you for clues about the others, you know. I didn’t imagine that you harboured murderous thoughts of Ana.’

‘Well, you were pretty fierce then,’ said Ina. ‘I’d hate to see you when you
were
suspicious. You could give Sergeant McClennan a run for his money, any day.’

I laughed along with her, feeling sheepish.

‘It would have been a foolish story to tell anyway,’ I said. ‘Robin Laurie was right there – you were in plain sight of him – and I don’t think he’d have been overcome by chivalry, do you?’

Ina Wilson’s smile left her face at that. It would not be true to say that it faded or even that it died upon her lips; it went like a lizard’s tongue, or a bullfrog’s wattle – snap!

‘Why do you loathe him so?’ I asked her. ‘He’s a bit of a blister, I grant you, and I don’t imagine that his suddenly chumming up with your husband springs from any well of brotherly friendship, but he’s … Oh, how does one put it? He’s not a serious individual, do you see? Like a little boy, really, and – like a little boy – the best thing to do is to ignore him, no matter how much one’s hand itches to give him a sound spanking.’

‘I agree,’ said Ina. ‘I’d rather never think about him.’ She spoke so vehemently that I blinked.

‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘I had no idea that you really knew him.’

‘We shared a nurse,’ said Ina, startling me. I had shared a nurse, in a way, as a tiny child. That is to say, one had been poached from a neighbour, enticed into my parents’ house and up the nursery staircase with promises of undreamed-of freedom – bottles of stout after lights out every evening and my mother encouraging all the maids to throw away their corsets and take up cycling. The trouble was that Henry Elder, the smallest son of the neighbour, had been inconsolable with grief at the loss of this nurse – she was a darling – and had practically moved in with us for a whole summer until he was sent away to school.

‘You shared a nurse?’ I echoed, trying to imagine how the nursery wing of the seat of the Marquis of Buckie could have shared its staff with the West End flat of a minor Glasgow don.