Dandy Gilver and the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom

by Catriona McPherson

‘Could you not just get her told?’ said Lorrison. ‘Just tell that Tweetie Stott to sling her hook and leave us be? If she pulls out, what’s lost? A spoiled wee besom has to give up dancing and get on with her ladies’ luncheons and her soirées. And them that’s left get a crack at a title. I can’t stick the way she’s just dabbling, just for fun, and taking away a prize that would mean the world to them that’s losing it.’

  ‘So it’s one of the other dancers?’ I said. ‘We believed that jealousy was behind the threats too but we did wonder whether Jeanne McNab was the one.’

  Lorrison, who had been hunched forward as though his worries were causing physical pain, suddenly unbent and sat tall in his chair again.

  ‘Jeannie McNab?’ he said. ‘Aye, aye, it could well be.’

  ‘But what on earth would she have against Foxy and Leo?’ I said. ‘Why would Miss McNab have tried to spoil things for them?’

  Lorrison now had a grin spreading over his face. His thin lips stretched wide and revealed long, yellow, tobacco-stained teeth.

  ‘Are youse really trying to tell me youse don’t know?’ he said. ‘Some detectives!’

  ‘This, Mr Lorrison, is how detection is done,’ said Alec, clearly stung by the man’s scoffing. ‘We have just found out that there is something to be learned and now, if you’d be so kind, we shall learn it.’

  But Lorrison would not budge. He grinned and hugged his secret knowledge to him like a teddy bear. So I saved myself the time and trouble of pestering him and came at it from another quarter.

  ‘Who won last year, Mr Lorrison?’ I said. ‘Once Foxy and Leo were out of the way?’ Of course I knew; I had read it in the press clippings at the Mitchell Library. Lorrison, however, was unaware of that.

  Alec nodded; I could just see him from the corner of my eye.

  ‘That’s neither here nor there,’ said Lorrison, all his glee gone in an instant and the old watchful look back in his eye.

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Alec, rather triumphantly for him; I guessed he had disliked being jeered at by this man just about as much as I had. ‘“Who benefits?” is always the first question.’

  ‘Because it was our understanding that they were in with a real chance until the “accident”,’ I said.

  ‘Never,’ said Lorrison. ‘Foxy’s fifty if she’s a day and Len Munn was never a Latin dancer.’

  ‘We can take soundings out there,’ said Alec. ‘Ask around. And even if no one wants to say Leo might have won, we’ll soon find out who did.’

  At that Lorrison leapt to his feet again and jabbed a finger across the desk. ‘Just leave it,’ he said. ‘It was Bert and Beryl, if you must know. They swept the board. Highest score of the night for their foxtrot. So there. There’s no need to go asking.’

  ‘All the same,’ I said. ‘Since Jamesie and Alicia strike me as the sort of youngsters who’re without an ounce of ill-will to anyone, I think I shall go to them for a second opinion.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Lorrison, subsiding into his seat. ‘You do that. Ask Jamesie and Alicia. See what they say.’

  16

  ‘In other words,’ I muttered to Alec as we made our way back out to the floor, ‘Jamesie and Alicia know nothing of any use to us or danger to him and it’s Bert and Beryl he’s trying to keep us away from.’

  ‘Bert or Beryl anyway,’ Alec said. ‘So shall we tackle them together or take one each and pool our findings later?’

  We were lucky enough to catch them at a good time. The pianist, who went by the unlikely name of Boris, had stepped outside to finish smoking a cigar which Beryl and Alicia had found unbearable inside even such a large room and so the dancers were taking a short rest and looking, to my eyes, as though they needed it. Bert was sitting in a chair turned backwards, his upper torso draped over it with his hands hanging down, while Beryl, at his side, worked to explain some point, with a great deal of gesturing and banging her foot hard on the floor to signify the timing. He listened, shook his head and ran a hand through his damp hair. Beryl blew upwards into her fringe, which had dropped out of its wave and was obscuring the top half of her face, and began gesturing and stamping her foot again.

  Jamesie and Alicia had gone right off the floor to sit in the front row of spectators’ seats and share sweet nothings and it occurred to me that if Beryl and Bert did win again this year it was no more than they deserved for their dedication. Still, it was easier to interrupt a lecture, which it was draining one of the pair to deliver and which showed no sign of doing the other any good, than it was to break into the cooing of the lovebirds. I strode forward and hailed them.

  ‘A minute of your time, Miss Bonnar?’

  ‘We’re up to our eyes, missus,’ Beryl said.

  ‘Oh, have a care,’ said Bert to her. ‘It’s too late to be adding new steps anyway. The judges can tell a new step that’s not bedded in right and they’ll slam us for it.’

  ‘I’m not giving you any more new steps than I ever have before,’ said Beryl. ‘It’s not my fault if you’re mixing them up. You’re not usually a scatterbrain.’

  I had been feeling impatient about what seemed like empty chatter, champing for my chance to cut in and start the interview, but Alec had seen something I had missed in all this.

  ‘Is there anything in particular worrying you, Mr Bunyan?’ he said. ‘Beyond the usual anticipation, I mean. I find that I get terribly scatterbrained whenever something’s preying on me.’

  Beryl looked merely amused by this and, to be sure, Alec’s attempt to be blokish and chummy was as unexpected as it was unsuccessful, but the expression on Bert’s face turned her instantly sombre. His mouth was a thin line and the open collar of his shirt was trembling as a pulse in his neck raced, fast and high.

  ‘Bert?’ she said. As he turned to face her we could see a film of greasy-looking sweat on his brow, quite different from Beryl’s high blush, got from exertion and not nerves.

  ‘Whit?’ he said, a mean bite of sound.

  ‘Bert, what’s wrong with you?’ said Beryl.

  ‘What’s wrong with me?’ he said, running his hands through his hair. ‘It’s nearly round to where somebody dropped dead last year. Our accompanist has got the sack, two of the professionals are not even here and Lorrison’s like a bairn with a boil on his—’

  Beryl was laughing again. ‘You daftie,’ she said. ‘You don’t think there’s a curse on us, do you?’

  ‘What’s wrong with you that you don’t?’ said Bert. ‘You never used to be such a cold-hearted woman, Beryl.’

  I should not have been pleased to have such a verdict passed upon me and could not blame Beryl for the way her face darkened, as though a second flush, this of chagrin, joined the healthy bloom that her dancing had given her.

  ‘I’m sorry about Len Munn,’ she said. ‘Of course I am. But the anniversary rolling round is nothing to fear. And the rest’s just … Don’t worry yourself about Billy Lorrison and Effie Thwaite. And as for Tweetie, don’t you tell me life’s not easier without all her nonsense.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt,’ came a voice, ringing out from the doorway. Theresa was making another of her dramatic entrances. ‘But since we have a pianist again, I rather thought I’d make use of the ballroom, just like the other hopeful entrants. Sorry, Beryl. You won’t be having it all your own way after all.’

  ‘Who told you?’ Beryl said. ‘He’s not been here more than an hour or two.’

  ‘I have my allies,’ said Theresa, so darkly that I expected Beryl, once more, to laugh.

  In this instance, however, she narrowed her eyes and shot a look of great interest around the room. Bert did not meet her gaze. Jamesie and Alicia, still giggling together over at the side of the room, picked up enough of the atmosphere to raise their heads and glance over.

  ‘Oh, there!’ Jamesie said. ‘Here we’re all back together again like one big happy family. Now we can really get our last bit of polishing done and give them a right good show tomorrow, can’t we?’

  Alici
a clapped her hands, delighted, and his words raised a grin from Beryl and a faint smile from Roly, who was skulking at Theresa’s back, but Bert looked glummer than ever and Theresa shot such a withering look at Jamesie that all his happy chatter died in his throat. I could hardly bring myself to blame her, for there comes a point when cheerfulness shades into inanity and young Jamesie had found it and set up his stall there.

  Beryl stood up and addressed Alec and me. I had all but forgotten our request for an interview.

  ‘Youse can have five minutes while I get a wash,’ she said, striding off the floor towards the ladies’ cloakroom. ‘Then I’ll be back out whether you’ve done pestering me or not.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I’m not letting that Tweetie get in about Boris and flatter him.’

  ‘A wash?’ said Alec warily as we followed her in, clearly hoping that the word was being used in some heretofore unknown northern sense.

  The fact that Beryl took a fresh cotton shirt from a bag on her coat hook and unrolled a towel from beside her outdoor shoes in the cubby-hole underneath suggested otherwise. As we watched, she retied the girdle of her pinafore, the better to stop it from sliding down, and then wriggled out of the shoulder straps and began unbuttoning the limp shirt she was wearing.

  ‘Dandy, I think I’ll—’ said Alec, and almost wrenched the cloakroom door off its hinges while escaping.

  Beryl laughed richly, rolled the discarded shirt into a ball and stuffed it in beside her shoes. ‘It’s well seen he’s not Glasgow,’ she said. ‘I’m decent, am I not? I’m more covered now than many’s a woman he’ll see tomorrow at the Champs.’

  It was a point of some validity; her chemise was made of sturdy linen, almost tough enough to be called canvas, and the straps were an inch across. I had appeared at balls and in opera boxes much more naked in my day. Still, I found it disconcerting to watch her run a basinful of warm water and begin scrubbing at her arms with a bar of green soap. If it was a tactic designed to distract and get rid of me the way it had seen off Alec, I was determined that she would not prevail.

  ‘Tweetie won’t “get in about” Boris any more than you have in the last hour, will she?’ I began, reminding Beryl that she had had the advantage and that losing it was fairer play.

  She grinned at me. ‘I never tried,’ she said. ‘Bert and me just dance. It’s Tweetie that wants thon blessed “jazz phrasings” as she cries them.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Ocht, every note hanging like a widow’s tears while she’s shaping.’

  The first part of this so perfectly summed up the overly dramatic sort of rendition currently in vogue that I could not help smiling. As to Tweetie’s ‘shaping’ I was at sea until Beryl obliged with a dumb show, clasping an imaginary partner around the shoulder with her left arm and dropping into something between a curtsey and the crouch of a serious athlete before the starting pistol of a sprint race while her right arm described an arch above her head. Then, as it occurred to me that once again she had managed to deflect my attention from its target, I deliberately withdrew my gaze from her nakedness, her posing and her friendly face – most distracting of all – and studied my notebook, screwing a good purposeful inch of lead out of my propelling pencil.

  ‘You won the Championship last year, Miss Bonnar,’ I said. ‘Might I give you congratulations, even this late in the day?’

  ‘Just in time!’ said Beryl. She pulled the plug out of the basin and let the water go but did not reach for her towel.

  ‘Were you happy with your score? I believe forty is the aim, is it not?’

  ‘Aye, forty’s the magic number,’ she said. She was running the tap again, just the hot this time and the steam rolled up and obscured her reflection in the mirror.

  ‘Did you achieve a forty that day?’ I asked.

  ‘A thirty-nine for the foxtrot was as close as we got.’

  ‘And do you blame the upset for that?’ I said. The entire surface of the mirror was fogged now and I could not see so much as a shadow of her expression but she had grown very still. A last drop of water plinked into the basin as I waited for her to speak.

  ‘Naw,’ she said and the silence resumed. She was gripping the edge of the sink and her knuckles were white.

  ‘You don’t think Foxy and Leo withdrawing and then Leo’s fall might have knocked the rest of you off your game?’ Another drip fell into the filled basin. Beryl glanced down at it and then turned to face me.

  ‘It was our best ever score in a competition yet,’ she said. ‘I never even thought of that before. That’s awfy.’ She ran a hand over her mouth, keeping her eyes locked on mine with a searching gaze as though I could unravel some mystery for her.

  ‘I’m not sure I—’ I began but as she turned back to face herself in the mirror, she interrupted me.

  ‘I just carried on as if nothing had happened,’ she said. ‘I got my best score and won the cup and was happy. Mrs Gilver, I honestly thought I was kinder than that. I don’t half give myself airs.’ She swiped at the steam on the mirror and stared at her own reflection. If she were acting then she was an actress of distinction, giving a performance easily worth a perfect score. I struggled for a few moments, torn between pressing my advantage and reassuring her, then with a jolt I saw an unmissable opening.

  ‘Nonsense,’ I began. ‘Being a professional does not make you hard-hearted, Miss Bonnar. And dancing badly would hardly have helped poor Leo.’ Then I paused, gave a little laugh I hoped sounded rueful and carried on in a vein I hoped sounded sincere. ‘It is a great deal harder to forgive oneself unkindness – even if only imaginary – than it is to seek absolution, Miss Bonnar. My husband is your countryman, you know, but I’ve never been tempted to join his Church and lose the comforts of the confessional.’

  As I had expected they might, her eyebrows shot up under her fringe.

  ‘You’re a pape, Mrs Gilver,’ she said. ‘Ma faither would have a fit if he knew I was getting this chummy with you.’

  ‘Anglican,’ I said. ‘But rather high. Heavens, no! I’m not an RC. My own father would have plenty to say about that, I assure you.’

  She bowed down and sluiced her face with the hot water and I could not help feeling that she did so to cover her confusion, but as to what had confused her, what misstep she felt she had taken, I could not say. When she stood up again, she was smiling and mistress of herself once more.

  ‘Thank you for saying that,’ she said, ‘about letting myself off with it. That was nice of you.’

  ‘Not as nice as all that,’ I said, smiling back. ‘I’m just about to ask you to repay me with information, or at least to ask you to search your memory in case you can find some.’

  She was rubbing the green soap briskly in her hands again, working up a lather, apparently about to wash her face with it. Grant would have had fifty fits if she could have seen this, being strict to the point of turning rather peculiar on the evils of soap applied to a lady’s complexion.

  ‘It’s about Leo’s handkerchief,’ I said. ‘I want you to cast your mind back a year and ask yourself if you saw anyone tamper with it, if you saw anyone going through his pockets, or messing about at his spot in the cloakroom – I suppose that’s hardly likely, mind you.’

  ‘His hankie?’ said Beryl, with her eyes screwed tight shut against the soap as she scrubbed at her face and neck. ‘What’s his hankie got to do with anything?’

  ‘I wondered if you knew,’ I said. ‘I mean, I know that the incident was kept out of the papers but I did wonder if the dancers knew. Leo’s hankie was doused in chloroform that day. That’s why he felt faint and left the dance floor. That’s why he fell down the stairs. It was another piece of sabotage like the fox fur and the other nasty things. Someone killed him, Miss Bonnar. Whoever it was might only have meant to nobble him, might never have meant it to go so far, but someone did it.’

  She finished rinsing her face and applied the towel, wiping herself dry. When she turned to face me she was calmer than I had ever
seen her. But I did not miss the redness around her eyes and the single fat tear rolling down one of her cheeks. I had shocked her badly enough to make her open her eyes when that horrid green soap was all over her face. Most certainly, I had shocked her.

  ‘I thought it was an accident,’ she whispered. ‘I knew about the threats but I never put two and two together, except maybe to think they’d made Len nervous enough to get dizzy. Are you sure?’

  ‘We have the handkerchief in our possession,’ I lied, but only slightly. ‘We shall be sending it for analysis shortly to make doubly certain, but yes I am sure.’

  ‘And it never got as far as the police?’ she went on. Her voice was a little louder and indescribably grim. ‘It’s been put down as an accident and nothing in the papers, eh?’

  I nodded, watching.

  ‘Right,’ she said. She snapped out her fresh shirt, put it on and without even pausing to fasten the buttons she shrugged herself back into the top half of her pinafore and stalked out of the cloakroom before I could properly gather myself to follow her.

  She was already talking by the time I got back to the dance floor.

  ‘… was no accident,’ she was saying. ‘Mrs Gilver here told me and I believe her for she’s no reason to be lying. Some wicked devil put chloroform on his hankie and guddled him that badly he fell down and died.’

  Bert, Jamesie and Alicia stood frozen in their tracks. Alec, who had been dancing the gentleman’s steps to Bert’s lady again, stepped away from him and raised his eyebrows at me. Before either one of us could speak Beryl went on.

  ‘Theresa, this is a piece of damned nonsense now, hen.’

  Theresa stuck her chin in the air and stared at Beryl down the length of her nose.

  ‘You can’t risk it,’ Beryl said. ‘You’ve got to pull out – naw, listen to me. Listen, will you? For God’s sake, you’re an only one and your mammy and daddy would break their two hearts.’

  ‘If you think for one minute I’m going to step aside and leave the way clear for your triumph,’ said Tweetie.

  Roly shifted his feet and spoke up. ‘It wasn’t Foxy that died, Tweet,’ he said. ‘Do you not think maybe you should ask me what I think?’