Dandy Gilver and the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom

by Catriona McPherson

  Alec scrambled this way and that, unbuttoning the side flaps and setting about the window winders like a demented lock-keeper. He ended up practically straddling Grant at one point in a way which would have scandalised her if she had been in full possession of her faculties. In fact, that was when I began to hope she and Barrow were recovering. She blinked at Alec’s face inches from her own and roused herself enough to cross her arms over her front and move her ankles tidily to one side instead of sprawling as she had been. A minute later, Barrow sat forward and coughed politely into his handkerchief.

  ‘I must offer my sincerest apologies, sir,’ he said.

  Alec, finished at last with the windows and flaps, dropped into the seat beside Grant with a great puff of exhaled breath.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Grant said. ‘Aren’t you getting a draught, madam? I didn’t dress your hair for this today. Could you pull over to the side and let me tie a scarf over it?’

  I started laughing for sheer relief and, finding a side street, I turned down it and drew into the edge of the road.

  ‘I haven’t the foggiest notion where the nearest hospital is anyway,’ I said. ‘Grant? Barrow? How are you feeling?’

  ‘Perfectly well, thank you for asking, madam,’ said Barrow, as he would if both his legs were hanging off.

  ‘I’ve felt better,’ said Grant. ‘I won’t lie. What happened?’

  ‘You were poisoned,’ said Alec. ‘Gaspers, Dandy.’ He took my cigarettes, lit two and handed one each to Grant and Barrow. Such was Barrow’s state of shock at the news that he took it.

  ‘Poisoned?’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Grant.

  ‘I’m sure of it,’ said Alec. ‘I don’t quite understand why it took so long to act or why fresh air might have stopped it, but—’

  ‘Ah,’ said Grant.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked her.

  She took a deep puff on the cigarette and extinguished it in the little brass ashtray attached to the back of the driver’s seat. Then she bent down and opened the clasp of her capacious handbag. I peered over to see what she was up to and caught sight of something winking and gleaming in the dark down there.

  ‘It’s Tweetie’s headdress,’ she said. ‘I pinched it.’

  Alec whistled, long and low, in admiration and although I already had fears that Grant’s head would swell to such a size that living with her might become unbearable I could not help adding my voice in approbation.

  ‘Bravo,’ I said. ‘Jolly well done. Did you snatch it right off her head?’

  Grant wrung every possible scrap of drama out of the moment. She lifted the headdress reverently out of her bag and slid it onto the seat between Alec and her, arranging it in a circle and tucking in portions of the fastening which were not supposed to be on show.

  ‘I didn’t have to do any snatching,’ she said. ‘Miss Stott had wrenched it off already. She tore it off as if it were scalding her and threw it down so hard it shot away under the stage. I had to fish it out again. I remembered what you said about Mrs Munn’s slip-up, you see. She said “headdress” instead of “hankie”, didn’t she? And so I just thought … To be on the safe side …’

  ‘Good grief!’ I said. ‘I thought Tweetie seemed odd. Even given the shock and distress. She was boiling hot and shaking. Good God above! The poison was in her headdress?’

  ‘If she hadn’t realised something was wrong and ripped it off her head,’ said Grant, ‘she might be as dead as Roly.’

  ‘I can’t quite believe she isn’t anyway,’ I said. ‘Although, I suppose … she was wearing it awfully far back so perhaps none of it reached her nose.’

  ‘Clearly,’ said Alec. ‘Now, let’s see how it was done.’

  But I put my foot down. ‘No!’ I said. ‘I absolutely forbid it. We have no idea whether that thing has any more surprises in store.’

  He looked as crestfallen as a child whose paper boat is sinking.

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said. ‘But shall we take it to the police or to a chemist at the university?’

  ‘I’m not so much of a killjoy as all that,’ I said. ‘I only meant we should get out and examine it on the bonnet instead of here inside in case it goes off again or however it was done.’

  He missed the end of this because he was scrambling down, holding the headdress very lightly with a handkerchief over his bare hand. Barrow slipped out too.

  ‘I thought it was a peculiar design the minute I saw it,’ Grant said. ‘Hardly flattering.’

  This was a joke, for some of the more outré modes into which Grant has tried to coax me over the years have been so hideous that one cannot help believing the whole of Paris fashion is one enormous hoax perpetrated upon the gullible rich. Tweetie’s headdress had not struck me (or Grant either, I should wager) as anything out of the ordinary in that regard. I said nothing and climbed out of the motorcar.

  It would have looked like the adoration of the Magi to a casual observer but thankfully this was a very quiet little side street lined with warehouse buildings and so we were unseen as we all bent over the object.

  ‘It’s changed since yesterday,’ Alec said.

  It certainly had. As well as the droplets at the edge, the headband now had a row of large paste diamonds along its middle, sitting slightly proud. Alec, appointing himself surgeon general, grasped one of them and pulled. It came out very easily, rather too easily; looking closely, we could all see that it really was no more and no less than a long tack or short hatpin attached merely by being stuck in.

  ‘That’s an odd way to do it,’ said Grant, but it was the band itself which, on a second viewing, now struck me as peculiar. It really must have been horribly uncomfortable to wear such a sturdy one while dancing energetically in a crowded room. And the puffed appearance was its oddest feature. Without the stuffing under the cloth it would have been both cooler to wear and prettier to look at. I pulled another of the tacks out and then jabbed it in again, feeling the resistance and then the give as it poked through the cloth.

  ‘Do you have your penknife, Alec?’ I said. ‘Can you slit it and see what’s under there?’

  Alec rummaged and patted and eventually tracked down his little knife. He opened it, selected a blade with maddening deliberation and then carefully made a short slit in the cloth. Inside was what looked like a layer of thick fleecy interlining.

  Alec’s shoulders drooped with disappointment, but Grant and I huddled even closer. I was not privy to Grant’s inner emotion but for my part I felt my pulse begin to bang in my throat. There was no reason whatsoever to interline a dancing cap. I caught Grant’s eye and knew that she thought the same.

  Gingerly – really, one would have thought that we were snipping the fuse of a ticking bomb, but having just seen poor Roly breathe his last I was not inclined to be braver than I had to be – I took off one of my gloves, reached out, poked the flannel and then rubbed my thumb and finger together.

  ‘It’s still wet,’ I said.

  Grant flipped the thing over and together we peered inside the pale lining.

  ‘Oiled backing cloth,’ she said. ‘Someone soaked the whole thing. Put a syringe into the seams probably. Cloth of silver doesn’t show the wet and this waxed cotton kept Tweetie from feeling it damp on her hair, but look at the stains here along the stitching. It’s sopping wet still. What poison is it, madam? Do you know?’

  ‘Cyanide,’ I said.

  Grant’s eyes opened very wide and she immediately began to unbutton her gloves, before pulling them off and dropping them on the pavement beside her. She sniffed her fingertips and then relaxed a little.

  ‘I saw her poking the pins in,’ she said. ‘She was chattering on. Saying what a good idea the extra rhinestones were. She said thank you. I didn’t know which of the others she was talking to.’ Grant’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Someone soaked her little headband in cyanide and gave her those pins and the poor girl did the last of it with her own hand. She pierced the pockets and let
the poison out into the air.’

  Alec was nodding very slowly and steadily as the story began to come together in his memory.

  ‘It was that dratted tango,’ he said. ‘They were pressed so closely together you couldn’t have slid a piece of paper between them. Roly must have been breathing in lungfuls of the stuff.’

  ‘If the poison was strong enough to discommode Miss Grant and myself half an hour later through the walls of a carpet bag,’ said Barrow, ‘I don’t doubt that the gentleman succumbed when it was fresh and it was right under his nose.’

  We stood in glum silence for a moment contemplating this until Grant broke in.

  ‘It’s not a carpet bag,’ she said. ‘It’s a vanity.’

  At times before that day in Glasgow, Alec and I had found ourselves closer to the action in a murder case than any policeman would want a private detective to be. There was always, however, an innocent path to get us there; perhaps the case was cold or the police had missed a clue and could not, in conscience, blame us for uncovering evidence or even villains, much as they might want to. But we had never before been put in such an awkward spot as to have the murder weapon in our hands on the very day of the crime, faced with trying to explain ourselves as we trooped back to the scene to hand it over to them.

  ‘We might be arrested,’ I said.

  ‘I might,’ said Grant. ‘You’ve done nothing wrong. Madam.’

  ‘Do you think you could dream up a reason for having the headdress in your possession, Grant?’ Alec said. ‘If we help you.’

  Grant regarded him with withering scorn and began to talk, as fluently and convincingly as though she were reading a part in a play.

  ‘I saw it being trampled and thought it was such a shame if poor Miss Stott lost a memento of what’s going to be her last happy day as a dancer, you see,’ she said. ‘So I popped it in my bag to return to her and then blow me down if we weren’t hustled out of there without so much as a by your leave and I didn’t get the chance to.’

  ‘Splendid,’ I said, climbing back inside the motorcar. ‘And shall we try to impart some of what we think to that crew of Glasgow’s finest or shall we just hand the bandeau back over and keep our own counsel?’

  ‘What do we think?’ Alec said, not unreasonably.

  I was glad of the need to negotiate a turn in that narrow street and to avoid a flurry of carts as I emerged back on to the road, for it gave me time to think of something to say.

  ‘We think, don’t we, that either Jeanne or Miss Thwaite made that monstrous thing,’ I said. ‘But Julian, we now discover, had a motive and was on the scene.’

  ‘And Beryl, although she had no means to manufacture the cap,’ said Alec, ‘certainly had the opportunity to set about it with a syringe in the cloakroom, and the same motive as last year, and she has scarpered which speaks rather loudly to her guilt.’

  ‘Begging your pardon, madam,’ said Grant, ‘but it can’t be Julian or Jeanne because why would either Julian Armour or Jeanne McNab want to threaten Foxy or kill her partner? It’s only Beryl that has a motive for both.’

  ‘And Miss Thwaite surely has a motive for neither,’ Alec said. ‘Unless it’s just a sort of mania.’

  ‘There must be mania in it somewhere,’ I said. ‘Simply because it’s so … it’s so very … poisoned headdresses? It’s like something from a fairy tale. It’s hardly an efficient way to do away with people.’

  ‘It’s melodramatic in the extreme,’ said Alec. ‘You’re right. And neither Miss Thwaite nor Jeanne strike one as having an ounce of melodrama in them.’

  We were almost back at the Locarno again and, whatever view the others might take of matters, I looked forward to seeing that stubborn policeman squirm when he was forced to accept that we had helped him. I drew into the side of the street and pulled on the handbrake.

  ‘Who’s all coming up?’ said Grant, thus staking her own claim to part of the fun.

  ‘Wait here, Barrow,’ Alec said. ‘You still don’t look too jolly. Open the windows and take it easy.’

  So it was only Grant, Alec and I who traipsed up the stairs to the ballroom, balanced perfectly between anticipatory glee and trepidation in case the policemen found a way to cause unpleasantness for us after all. It was very quiet; clearly all the spectators had long gone, but still I was surprised when we opened the doors to the dance floor itself to see it utterly empty. There were a few disarranged chairs and the bandsmen had left without covering the piano or tidying away their music stands, but of policemen, pathologists and witnesses there was not a one.

  ‘Perhaps they’re through in the office,’ Alec said and so thither we went but there was complete silence in the corridor too and when I knocked on Lorrison’s door no one answered.

  ‘He must be around somewhere,’ I said, ‘or the place would be locked.’ I opened the door and entered.

  Lorrison, all alone, sat at his desk, barely looking up at us as we filed in. His tailcoat was nowhere to be seen and his white tie was loose around his neck. He puffed steadily on a noxious cigarette and the air, blue and shifting in clouds, told us that it was not his first one.

  ‘Mr Lorrison?’ I said. ‘Where is everyone?’

  At last he lifted his head. ‘Who you looking for?’ he said.

  ‘Surely the police haven’t finished already?’ said Alec. ‘The inspector hadn’t even arrived when we left and that was hardly half an hour ago.’

  ‘The inspector never came,’ said Lorrison. ‘He told his men to get back to the station as soon as the body was moved. It’s Friday night coming. We’ll be stretched.’

  I watched as Alec’s jaw dropped open.

  Lorrison stubbed out his cigarette and coughed violently, so violently that he reconsidered lighting another before it was out of the packet.

  ‘Don’t look like that,’ he said. Inspector Todd reckoned that Ronnie Watt can’t get any deader so he can wait till everyone’s home safe and sound after closing time.’

  It made some sort of sense but it did not explain why there was no bobby stationed at the Locarno’s door to keep out sightseers until the place could be gone over properly for clues.

  ‘Aye,’ said Lorrison again, ‘that’s their story and they’re sticking to it.’

  ‘What on earth does that mean?’ I said.

  Lorrison heaved a sigh up from the middle of the earth’s core and regarded me with bleary eyes and as hangdog an expression as any I had ever seen upon his face.

  ‘Truth is,’ he said, ‘nobody wants to risk looking for Beryl until they can be bloody sure they won’t find her. Nobody wants to stir that wasp’s nest and you can’t blame them.’ He huffed out a laugh as he said these words and it was then that I caught a whiff of the whisky, sharp and fresh, on his breath and realised that although he was not slurring his words, he was profoundly drunk and was saying things that his sober self would not so much have whispered in an empty room.

  ‘You suspect Miss Bonnar then?’ said Alec.

  ‘Not me,’ Lorrison said, swinging round and giving him a dreadful grin, almost a leer. ‘I wouldn’t dare. I suspect an unfortunate accident which no one could have foreseen or prevented. Aye, that’s right, a terrible accident.’ He paused. ‘Another one.’

  22

  It was one of those moments, all too rare and much to be cherished, when one thing suddenly becomes very clear and lights up a great many others. Beryl’s amusement at the notion of our interviewing her was explained; and Miss Thwaite’s sudden dismissal too when she dragged up the firmly forgotten story of Leo’s death; now, I knew what was frightening Foxy Trotter and why Lorrison was so defeated, not to mention the reason that everyone from the blustering policemen all the way down to our ragged little friends outside on the pavement seemed to know Beryl Bonnar’s name. Also, I understood at last who the four men in the front row were – or at least who one of them was, the one who spoke and took charge without raising his voice or so much as waving a hand, although I was more puzzled than eve
r by his calm.

  When the realisations had finished washing over me, I was left with a sense of profound irritation. Hugh, drat him, was right again.

  ‘Gangsters?’ said Grant as we hurried back downstairs. ‘I can’t believe it. Those men were honest-to-goodness gangsters? Right here in Glasgow like something off the pictures!’ She held the bag with its noisome contents at arm’s length as though it had become more dangerous by its distant association with such men. Of course, we had decided without discussion not to leave the headdress with Lorrison and it was without further discussion that we went straight back to the Grand Central with it still in our possession instead of finding a police station and handing it in there. If the case was going to proceed in a cloud of favours, denials and backroom deals then we would jolly well hang on to it and use it to solve the murder ourselves.

  ‘I think,’ I said, once the bally thing was locked safely in Alec’s dressing-table drawer along with the vulpine and ornithological objects, ‘that I might telephone to Inspector Hutchinson in Perth and sound him out about all this. Gangsters and the like. It’s hard to believe one is really discussing such things. Later tonight perhaps when he’s off-duty and has had his whisky and soda.’

  Alec nodded uncertainly. We had assisted Mr Hutchinson of the Perthshire Constabulary on a case a few years back and by its end we had both come to regard him as a man of great honour and intelligence. I understood Alec’s qualms, though. Hutchinson had been intractable about the fingerprints and this was even more ticklish. One could not be sure where his native integrity and his loyalty to his brethren might meet at their border and one would hate to witness a man who had served as a shining example of rectitude reveal his feet of clay.

  ‘You never know, Dan,’ Alec said with rather hollow bonhomie, ‘if we’re lucky we might have solved the case by then and only be asking Hutchinson who we should ring up with the name of the guilty party.’

  I raised my eyebrows at him in the glass, where I was standing affixing my hat, a black one, preparatory to setting off for Balmoral to interview Tweetie. We had allowed Grant and Barrow the rest of the day off in recompense for their nasty experience and had bade them ring up a doctor if they should begin to feel woozy.