Dandy Gilver and the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘The grandest ballroom is still no place for our daughter, Eunice. The grandest public house, the grandest dog-racing track—’

  ‘I keep telling you – I really do keep telling him – dancing is harmless fun that does wonders for your health and yet he turns round and accuses his own daughter of drinking and gambling.’

  ‘It’s not harmless fun, Mother,’ said Tweetie. ‘It’s very serious.’

  ‘I must apologise,’ I said. ‘Ballroom, of course. I meant nothing by my unfortunate mistake and I don’t doubt for a moment, Miss Stott, that your interest in dancing is as harmless and healthy as hunting and skiing and everything that any young girl might do to turn her father’s hair white with worry. And I think it’s marvellous that you apply yourself to it seriously. We should always do our best in every endeavour, shouldn’t we?’ I stopped just short of babbling. I had mollified all three Stotts, though, even Sir Percy, and they each beamed at me.

  Then Jeanne spoke up. ‘It didn’t do much for Leo Mayne’s health,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’ asked Alec.

  ‘No one at all,’ said Sir Percy.

  ‘Don’t be naughty, Jeanne,’ said his wife, rising and making for the servant’s bell at some speed. ‘The detectives don’t need to hear your nonsense.’

  ‘Lady Stott,’ I said, ‘please don’t worry about wasting our time. We’d far rather know too much than too little.’

  ‘Was Leo Mayne injured?’ Alec said.

  Lady Stott was tugging on the bell rope like a navvy.

  ‘Injured?’ said Jeanne, smirking. ‘That’s hardly the word I’d use.’

  Then Mary answered the bell and all but hustled us out. If she had taken a broom to our heels we could hardly have landed back on the gravel with more of a thump: Sir Percy said we should let him know our terms; Lady Stott invented an entirely fictitious and entirely unconvincing luncheon date; Theresa dragged Jeanne away, whispering furiously. Then the yellow front door with its shining brasses slammed shut behind us.

  ‘Right then,’ said Alec. ‘The Locarno Ballroom in Sauchiehall Street, I think. Don’t you? To ask after the health of Leo Mayne.’

  5

  Sauchiehall Street is to Glasgow what Princes Street is to Edinburgh, and Bond Street is to London. It spoke volumes about the Locarno Ballroom’s claims to respectability that it was situated there. And when we rolled up and parked the motorcar outside twenty minutes later we saw a façade sufficiently grand to do away with my lingering worries about what we might be getting ourselves into. I had been imagining telling Hugh that I had spent the day in a Glasgow dance-hall and not been enjoying what the imaginary Hugh had to say.

  ‘Rather swish,’ said Alec, craning out of the side window at three storeys of good red Glasgow sandstone, pillared, pedimented and porticoed, and at the gilt paint of the sign – quite five feet tall and ten feet long – which proclaimed that there was DANCING! nightly. There were gold posts and gold tasselled ropes, drawn aside in the daytime but clearly intended to give the impression of a ballroom in a mansion in Berkeley Square. There was even a rolled-up carpet there too, its woven backing facing out but the brilliant red of its pile showing like the jam in a pudding.

  ‘But oh my goodness!’ I said. ‘Look at that. Do you think the Stotts know?’

  In the curved windows flanking the grand entrance to the ballroom, like the playbills in a theatre’s foyer or the ‘posters’ (as they are called by those in the know) which entice audiences into cinemas to see the latest moving pictures, there were enormous tinted photographs of the Locarno’s attractions. On one side, ‘Miss Beryl Bonnar and Mr Beau Montaigne’ were captured in the midst of a spin, their feet crossed at the ankles and Miss Bonnar’s head thrown back and to the left at such an extreme angle that I winced to see her. On the other side, looking straight out at us, clearly engaged in a tango – for why else would they be joined at cheek and hip that way – were ‘Miss Tweetie Bird and Mr Roland Wentworth’. Their front shoulders were hunched up and their joined hands were driven down in an attitude which was no doubt thrillingly dramatic as part of that most dramatic of dances. Caught in stasis by the camera, however, they looked as though they were trying to share a golf club during a tricky putt. And their raised front legs, no doubt caught in the process of unfurling with all the sultry grace of a panther about to strike, nevertheless made me think a little of dogs begging for biscuits.

  ‘I take it dear Julian’s office is nowhere near here,’ Alec said.

  I shrugged. ‘He probably wouldn’t recognise her. I shouldn’t have, if we’d happened just to walk past.’ For Tweetie Bird in full feather bore almost no resemblance to Miss Theresa Stott, even in her practice clothes. The fan of black hair was concealed under a close-fitting cap and the pretty face under lash-black, kohl pencil, rouge, lipstick and a beauty patch which had been coloured in bottle green to match the spangles on her dress and to echo the peacock feathers and paste emeralds on her headdress.

  ‘She must be good,’ said Alec. ‘And there must surely be some rivalry with Big—’

  ‘Alec!’ I said.

  ‘With Miss Bonnar,’ he corrected himself.

  There was nothing in the photograph – large as it was – to explain the nickname Theresa had bestowed upon Beryl Bonnar. She was not a sylph but she was far from the plough ox I had begun to construct in my imagination, after hearing about the striped pinafores and the way she reportedly steered ‘poor Beau’ around the floor. In fact, or at least in photography, she was a fine, handsome girl of a type one encounters often in Scotland and rarely so well executed. That is to say, she had abundant sandy hair, waved and shining, and soft pale skin, milky and dimpling on her arms and shoulders, plump and rosy on her cheeks. Her eyes had been tinted brown by whatever photographer’s assistant had set to with his paintbox on these enormous portraits and I looked forward to finding out if such an unlikelihood could be true.

  We stepped down from the motorcar and prepared to enter.

  ‘I’ll mind your car for sixpence,’ said a voice behind us and I turned to see two children of about eight and six, the boy in shorts and jersey with a large cap on his head, the smaller girl in a cotton dress with a shawl pinned over it and a knitted bonnet tied under her chin. I was silenced by the sight of them.

  ‘Tuppence then, if you’re short,’ the boy said.

  But he had mistaken the reason for my pause. It was their feet which had rendered me dumb. They were bare, filthy and blue with cold this chilly morning, when the barometer defied the calendar as Scotch barometers so often do.

  ‘I accept your original terms,’ said Alec. ‘Sixpence each it is, when we come out again.’

  The boy showed no sign of his surprise at the sudden doubling of their fee, for of course the price had been for the job and not for the labourers. The girl, younger and less poker-faced, was unable not to beam with pleasure.

  ‘Can we sit inside?’ she asked. I took a swift look under the edge of her bonnet at the curls, dark and dull with dirt, and managed to squash my sentiments. I had had a flea or two in my time and had not enjoyed them.

  I opened the boot and drew out a picnic rug, which could be washed in Lysol if need be.

  ‘Sit on this,’ I said, spreading it on the pavement. I tried not to notice how gratefully they wrapped themselves up like two little caterpillars in a shared cocoon.

  Inside, the Locarno Ballroom was as dowdy as any place whose life is lived in the evening always looks in the cold light of day. The walls, papered in a kind of figured velvet, showed every scuff and the glass chandeliers above us in the foyer and stair were dull under the dust. Even the carpet, plum-coloured and once sumptuous I am sure, was flat and dark in the middle of the steps where countless feet passed every night. As we ascended, we could hear a piano being played very loudly, with great emphasis on the marked beat and none at all on phrasing or melody.

  When we were almost at the double doors into the ballroom itself, the music broke off to be replaced
by the sound of laughter.

  ‘Well, don’t look then!’ called a woman’s voice.

  ‘I can’t dance with my eyes shut,’ called another. ‘Not waltzing anyway. I get that dizzy.’

  ‘You’re swooning in my arms,’ said a man’s voice and the laughter broke out again.

  When it had quieted, Alec knocked on one of the double doors and, not waiting for a reply, swept it open. We entered to see, in that enormous echoing space, the very last of a swift movement. I filed it away for later; one of the two young couples in the room had sprung apart when they heard someone coming.

  ‘Mr Lorrison!’ shouted one of the young men. He was dressed very oddly in some kind of knitted long-sleeved vest, enormously wide trousers with yellow braces and very shiny shoes.

  ‘Can I help youse?’ said one of the women, after glaring at him. She had her hair tied up in a scarf and, standing foursquare with her hands on her hips, she looked very different from the spinning elegance of her picture in the window. The striped pinafore over a plain navy-blue jersey, however, told me that this was Beryl Bonnar. She grinned at us. ‘Are youse after lessons?’ she said. ‘We’re sort of closed today. Getting ready for the Champs. Youse can watch, but, if youse promise not to listen to the language!’

  The other young woman, a pretty little fair-haired thing, put up a hand and tittered behind it.

  ‘I’m sorry, Beryl,’ she said. ‘I just can’t get my feet to do a forward change after a double reverse and swearing helps.’

  ‘Mr Lorrison!’ shouted the same young man again. ‘Customers!’ He was standing beside Miss Bonnar, actually with one hand still at the small of her back and I deduced that this must be poor Beau, even though he looked as unlike his posed and tinted picture downstairs as did Miss Bonnar.

  ‘Ordinarily, I’d love to watch,’ I said. I saw each one of them note my voice and make their adjustments to me. It is a perennial irritation that I cannot smooth away the history of my life when I am detecting. Of course, it is splendid to have the patrician tones at my disposal. Sometimes they draw out exactly the obedience and eagerness to comply they used to when my mother or even I was a girl. More and more, however, in these changed days, it would be marvellous to sound like a schoolteacher or a farmer’s wife or even a typing clerkess, to meet other teachers, clerks or farmers on level ground where they are all beginning to feel they have some God-given right to be.

  I suppressed a sigh – it was not an effort, for I am no snob – and took note of what adjustments the four young people made when they suddenly found a lady in their midst. Miss Bonnar’s partner narrowed his eyes as though at something unsettling. The other young man swallowed and darted a quick look over to the girl who had sprung away from him. She simply drank us in as though we were exhibits, on show but unseeing, giving me a sweeping look from hat to shoe-soles before turning to Alec and doing the same again. Beryl Bonnar looked neither aggrieved, alarmed or agog; she acknowledged the oddity with a little cock of her head and then stepped forward, holding out her hand to shake mine.

  ‘But what can we do for you today?’ she said.

  Before I could answer, a door banged open and we all turned. At one end of the ballroom, there was a half-circular stage for the orchestra and in the middle of its flat back wall, in a doorway, stood a tall thin man dressed in a loudly striped suit, with a soft hat on the back of his head.

  ‘Whit?’ he said, spitting the word across the space between him and the rest of us.

  ‘Visitors,’ said Beryl’s partner.

  ‘I thought you said customers,’ said the thin man. ‘If they’re customers they can come back when we’re open. If they’re not they can get lost.’

  ‘Mr Lorrison?’ said Alec. ‘Are you the owner of this establishment?’

  ‘I’m the manager,’ he shot back, ‘and the owner’s not to be fashed no matter what youse are after. It’s not for sale, it’s come one come all and we’re closed today.’ He turned as though to leave again, but Alec stopped him.

  ‘We are here as the representatives of Sir Percy and Lady Stott,’ he said. ‘Mrs Gilver and Mr Osborne. And we’re private detectives, actually, which probably puts us in the category of visitor and the subcategory of “unwelcome”. We’re investigating the series of threats suffered by Miss Stott here at the Locarno. We haven’t contacted the authorities yet and we’d be delighted if we managed not to. We thought if we interviewed everyone who was here earlier today we might bring something to light that’ll solve the puzzle.’

  ‘You … you …?’ said Mr Lorrison. He walked rather distractedly to the front of the stage and leapt down, showing great agility for a man of his age, which I took to be over sixty. Perhaps he had been a dancer in his youth and had never lost his edge.

  One could forgive the manager of any going concern for being nonplussed at the sudden appearance of professional nosey-parkers, threatening him with police. What was interesting were the reactions of the others in the room. The fair-haired young woman who had been drinking us in blushed deep pink with excitement and pleasure. Drama had announced itself in her life and she was delighted. The young man who stood alone went through another bout of darting looks. Poor Beau rolled his eyes, sighed, and gave a pointed look at Miss Bonnar. Miss Bonnar herself blinked once or twice, shook her head and then took another step forward.

  ‘Interview me?’ she said.

  ‘Beryl, I can give you my word of honour,’ Mr Lorrison began.

  ‘Interview everyone, Miss Bonnar,’ I said. ‘You included, if you would be so kind.’

  A frisson, whispers perhaps or maybe just pent-up breaths let go, ran around the room. Beryl grinned and shook her head again.

  ‘Youse know my name then,’ she said. She giggled. ‘Aye, g’on yourself. Interview away. Why not, eh?’

  6

  There was a little room to the side of the main dance floor – a ladies’ withdrawing room, I should have called it, if it had been anywhere except in a Glasgow dance-hall – and it was to there that Miss Bonnar led us. We were not, it appeared, in charge of who was to be interviewed first, although we did manage to impose our authority as far as preventing Mr Lorrison from tagging along.

  When we were settled into three of the shabby armchairs and had lit our cigarettes, Alec – at a glance from me – relenting in the matter of his pipe for the room was windowless and hardly ten feet square, Miss Bonnar gave us a steady look, smiling and open. I met it with another the same and drew out my little notebook and propelling pencil.

  ‘Miss Bonnar,’ I began. ‘Won’t you begin by telling us what you know about the distressing events?’

  ‘Distressing?’ said Beryl. ‘Tweetie loved every minute.’

  Her words summed up so perfectly the swooning and sobbing that Alec and I could not prevent a chuckle.

  ‘I only heard about the prayer card after the wee book turned up,’ she went on. ‘So I can’t help you with that.’

  ‘Starting with the “wee book” then,’ I said.

  Alec cleared his throat and sat forward. ‘You sound rather different, Miss Bonnar,’ he said.

  I flushed for I should have noticed. Beryl did not flush, not even the slightest heightening in her milk and roses colour, but she twinkled and blew out in a little carillon of short puffs as though smoking were laughing.

  ‘Ah’m fain tae git aboon ma freens,’ she said.

  Alec frowned and I, feeling my stock rising again, translated for him. ‘One doesn’t care to be above one’s company,’ I said. ‘But back to Cock Robin, Miss Bonnar. It was nicely judged, was it not? Nursery terrors are so very persistent.’

  Miss Bonnar twinkled again. ‘But I won’t pretend to be what I’m not either,’ she said. ‘I never had a nursery. I for sure never had a book!’ Neither Alec nor I managed to fill the pause which followed and Miss Bonnar took pity on us and returned to the business at hand. ‘It was a Thursday afternoon, our practice day. Mondays is Beginners’ Competitive, Tuesdays is Beginners’ Social, Wedn
esdays is the open tea-dance, Fridays is Advanced Competitive. Saturdays is the ticketed tea-dance. Closed on Sundays – officially anyway, but we need all the practice time we can get coming up to the Champs. Theresa found the wee book on a Thursday. Definitely.’

  ‘And who was there when it happened?’ I said. ‘Assuming that no one who had been at the tea-dance the day before could have left it. It was in a bag Miss Stott brought with her on the day, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Aye, but …’ said Miss Bonnar. She screwed up her nose and gazed off to one corner of the room, thinking hard. ‘There’s people in and out in the mornings when the lessons are held.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Alec. ‘I assumed that Beginners’ Teas and the rest of it were lessons. I’m not with you.’

  Beryl stubbed out her cigarette, only half-smoked, and took a compact and lipstick out of her pinafore pocket to effect repairs. It was done without self-consciousness or simpering.

  ‘They’re classes,’ she said. ‘Beginners, Advanced and the dances. The lessons are private. A lady might pay for an hour of Bert’s time or a gent might pay for an hour of mine. Or more than likely a couple’ll pay for both of us to knock both of them into shape. By the hour. Theresa doesn’t do it.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Yes, I see. The classes are for fun and the lessons are for serious competitors. I see. It seems rather churlish of Miss Stott not to lend a hand to her fellows when presumably she benefited from the system when she was rising through the ranks.’

  ‘No,’ said Miss Bonnar, smiling wider than ever, ‘none of the young contenders could afford a private hour with Bert and me. The competitors come to the classes. The lessons are for anyone who can pay for your time and wants to spend an hour in your arms.’

  Alec, mid-smoke, coughed suddenly.

  ‘And now I’ve shocked you,’ Miss Bonnar said. ‘But nothing of that sort goes on at the Locarno. I can’t answer for every backstreet hall in the city or every young couple who’d do anything for a regular booking.’