Dandy Gilver and the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Certainly I do,’ said Grant. ‘Haddings. They’re a fine old family firm. My Uncle Timothy’s funeral was handled by them, him being a Glasgow man, and I’ll never forget what a send-off they gave him. Of course that was in the days of horse-drawn hearses but their livery is just as smart now they use motor-vans.’

  ‘Smart livery?’ I said, clutching Alec back.

  Grant spread a hand in front of her as though tracing the elegant coach lines in her mind. ‘A fine gold line on patent black,’ she said, ‘and “Haddings for Service” written in copperplate in a lozenge. With painted plumes.’

  I felt the room move a little as the dizzying shock of it hit me.

  ‘We passed him on the road, Alec,’ I whispered in a sort of moan. ‘The driver recognised us and sped away! We were that close and we let him go.’

  ‘I let him get away,’ Alec said. ‘You were all for giving chase, so don’t berate yourself.’

  ‘Who?’ said Grant. ‘You saw the van driver? Who was it?’

  ‘Well, it must have been Bert by then,’ I said. ‘Getting the body out of the city to dump it somewhere. And how perfect! An undertaker would have half a dozen places to hide a body.’

  ‘But it wasn’t Bert driving away from the alley,’ said Alec. ‘He obviously bundled her out of the ballroom but he must have handed her over pretty much immediately.’

  ‘He couldn’t possibly have got one of his colleagues in on it,’ I said. ‘Too dangerous.’

  ‘Can Miss McNab drive?’ said Barrow. ‘With her hair tucked under a cap maybe.’

  I jumped. He had been so perfectly silent for so very long that I had forgotten he was there.

  ‘Excellent, Barrow!’ said Alec, making the young man smirk with pleasure. ‘That’s how it must have been done.’

  ‘Let’s stop at the telephone kiosk on our way out,’ I said, ‘and just make entirely sure.’

  Mary answered and I should have preferred to ask her the questions, but she really was an excellent maid and she was having none of it.

  ‘I’m sure I couldn’t say, madam,’ she told me in reproving tones. ‘I’ll just run and fetch my mistress for you.’

  So it was Lady Stott with whom I had to deal, picking my way across the delicate ground and trying to tease the useful grains from the cloud of chaff she sent up. She was even more volubly displeased than ever and wanted me to know.

  ‘Are you determined to blacken the names of my entire family?’ she barked down the line at me. ‘I’ve had my sister on the phone to me, weeping. Tweetie came home all upset from the Locarno saying you’ve got some nonsense in your head about her and now you’re making nasty insinuations about my niece!’

  ‘I merely asked where she was on Fri—’

  ‘Merely!’ shrieked Lady Stott. ‘Oh, you merely asked where someone was when a murder was being committed. Is that all?’

  She took her mouth away from the machine but there was no significant reduction in decibels. ‘Bounce?’ she shouted. ‘Bounce! It should be you here listening to this. It’s those detectives you were so clever as to invite into my home and you’ll never guess what they’re saying now!’

  ‘For pity’s sake, woman,’ came Sir Percy’s voice.

  ‘Don’t you dare “woman” me, Percival Stott,’ his wife screeched. ‘It’s not you having to hear wicked lies about your nearest and dearest.’

  ‘I should be your nearest and dearest,’ said Sir Percy, bellowing in an extremely unendearing way, unlikely to draw anyone nearer to him. ‘If you had cleaved unto your husband like you should have, Theresa wouldn’t have been hanging round that flighty piece in the first place.’

  ‘That flighty piece is my sister!’ Lady Stott shouted. ‘How dare you!’

  ‘Lady Stott,’ I said, thinking that at least a woman so angry could not be guarded and if I just asked she might, without thinking, just answer. ‘Does Jeanne know how to drive a motorcar?’

  ‘Jeanne?’ she said. And suddenly she was speaking so quietly and in a voice so puzzled that I could not understand what she was asking me. Then I realised that she was not asking me anything; was not in fact talking to me at all. ‘Jeanne, what are you doing?’ she said. ‘Why are you— No!’

  I was frozen for one second and then I crashed down the earpiece, leapt out of the kiosk and streaked across the lobby to the front door, then I was out of the door and into the Cowley where Alec was waiting.

  ‘Stotts’, as fast you can get there,’ I said and Alec, revving the engine vigorously, nipped out into a tiny space between a brewer’s cart and an omnibus, causing cursing all around. Then he shot straight across to the other side of the road and put his foot down until the pedal touched the floor. I held on hard to the top of the glove box and tried not to see the narrowness of the gap between two trams that we were about to squeeze through. I certainly did not notice that we were not alone, that another car was squeezing through it right on our heels.

  ‘I think I’ve done something very stupid,’ I said. ‘Lady Stott wasn’t very self-contained when I asked her about Jeanne’s movements on Friday and Jeanne overheard enough to put the wind up her. I think she’s either skipping out – I hope she’s skipping out – or she’s … I don’t know what she’s doing. Alec, hurry.’

  We made it to Balmoral in record time, screeched up and stopped in a spray of gravel. The house looked so very ordered and peaceful, with the flowers newly watered and the step newly swept that I could not imagine anything untoward happening there. It was only when no one answered our ring that I truly began to believe, and moreover to face, how badly wrong this day might have gone. I opened the letterbox and bent down, listening.

  It was faint but it was definite. Someone inside was weeping. I gestured to Alec to try the door. Locked. I could not imagine what he was doing when he started to rummage about around the pots of begonias, but Alec is a young man of the world. I have never lived in a house where everyone went out at once and there might be no one to answer the door. In my childhood home as well as Gilverton and the London place when we owned it there was always at least a footman. But Balmoral, for all its comforts, was a Glasgow villa run by a maid or two and so the Stotts, like thousands of others, had a latchkey under a flowerpot at the front door. Alec held it up and grinned at me, then fitted it and opened the door.

  We entered practically on tiptoe and followed the sound of the quiet weeping across the hallway and into the morning room. What a change had been wrought from our first sight of it less than a week ago. Sir Percy and Lady Stott, along with Mary the maid, were together on the floor, clutching one another closely, their faces white and streaked with tears, while on the other side of the room Jeanne McNab stood with Tweetie held in front of her, an enormous knife at the girl’s throat, so close that it made a dent in the skin of her smooth young neck.

  ‘You took your time,’ Jeanne said.

  ‘But,’ I began. She must have tightened her grip or pressed with the knife because a small moan escaped Tweetie and her mother’s weeping grew louder. Sir Percy pulled his wife closer to him, burying her face in his chest and shushing her.

  ‘This is a bluff,’ I said. ‘They’re in it together, Lady Stott. I’m sorry to upset you but it’s the truth.’

  ‘Shut up before you get me killed,’ hissed Tweetie.

  ‘Please, Mrs Gilver,’ said Sir Percy, emotion catching at his voice. ‘You’ve got it wrong.’

  ‘We were in it together,’ said Jeanne, ‘but she double-crossed me.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Tweetie. ‘I keep telling you. I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘What happened?’ said Alec.

  ‘It was the perfect plan,’ Jeanne said. ‘Beryl and Roly out of the way and the police too scared of what they’d find to go looking. That left Tweetie and Bert free for each other and to cap it all, I was supposed to get Julian.’

  ‘Get him how?’ said Alec.

  Jeanne blinked, confused. ‘Get him by telling him I was having him,’ she said. ‘He
could hardly say no given what I know about him, could he? I was going to get married and get out of this house. No more sleeping curled up beside the chimney, you know. No more yes you ridiculous old harridan, no you pathetic old fool, three bags bloody full you spoiled selfish filthy little tart.’

  ‘But he won’t have her,’ said Tweetie. ‘I can’t imagine why.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked her.

  ‘He told me when I broke it off. I hadn’t imagined it would make much difference to him which one of us it was, but with Roly gone he said he didn’t care any more. He’s going to live like a monk, I gather.’

  ‘Tweetie,’ said Lady Stott, with a faint echo of her old mustard. ‘Don’t be coarse, dear.’

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘for you to get Julian and you, Miss Stott, to get Bert, two innocents have died?’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Jeanne.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Alec demanded.

  She turned her amused face to him and gave him a veiled look. ‘Well, what do you think I mean?’ she said. ‘What could I possibly mean? They’re not innocent, are they? Ronald Watt was an unspeakable creature, quite prepared to deliver my cousin into a sham marriage and carry on regardless under her nose.’

  ‘How can you be so lofty about a sham marriage you were happy to enter instead?’ I asked Jeanne. She shook her hair back and stared me down.

  ‘On my terms,’ she said. ‘And by my choice. That’s quite a different thing.’

  ‘How did you find out about the sham?’ asked Alec. He was looking at Tweetie. ‘We thought you twigged after Roly’s death but we were wrong, weren’t we?’

  Tweetie’s anger rose again as she remembered.

  ‘I saw them,’ she said. ‘At the office one day. I was this close to marching in and confronting them, but then an idea just landed in my head. Like a dandelion seed.’

  ‘A dandelion seed,’ I echoed flatly. ‘The idea to keep going along with Julian until you could kill Roly and Beryl and blame one for the other.’

  ‘N—’ Tweetie began, but Jeanne tightened her grip.

  ‘Do shut up, Theresa dearest,’ she said.

  ‘And what of Beryl?’ said Alec. ‘What did she do to you?’

  I happened to glance at the Stotts as he spoke and was astonished to see guilty looks upon both their faces. Only young Mary still appeared to be simply terrified and miserable. Sir Percy and his wife were looking decidedly shifty.

  ‘Her father killed mine,’ said Jeanne, in a voice thrilling with self-righteous anger.

  ‘And once again I shall ask the question,’ said Alec. ‘What did Beryl do to you?’

  ‘Her father killed my father!’ shouted Jeanne.

  Tweetie, feeling the knife bite into her as Jeanne’s hand shook, let out a whimper and begged me with her eyes to make Alec stop the goading. I laid a hand on his arm and shushed him gently.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because he was going to the police,’ said Sir Percy. ‘Butter wouldn’t melt, that was my dear brother-in-law. He found out this and that about a matter of private business, no concern of his at all, and he wouldn’t rest.’

  ‘Are you telling me you knew about it?’ said Jeanne. ‘I never told you of my own suspicions because I feared I wouldn’t be able to convince you of anything so outlandish. And you knew all along?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t know,’ Sir Percy said, but then he added, ‘not the details.’

  His wife struggled out of his grasp then and stared at him in horror. ‘Not the details?’ she said, the ghost of her old self a little less faint now.

  ‘Not even the facts,’ said Sir Percy. ‘Just that he knew what he shouldn’t and before he could act on it, he was dead.’

  ‘He went to warn Bonnar,’ Jeanne said. ‘He gave him a chance to do the right thing.’

  I could imagine it. The lay preacher, wrapped in sanctimony, marching into the gangster’s lair to tick him off. Such foolishness when he had a wife and child depending on him.

  ‘Aye, that sounds like Goldie,’ said Lady Stott. ‘He was too good for this world. You fit right in to it,’ she added, with a look of pure poison fired at her husband. ‘You suspected him of killing my brother and yet you carried on taking his protection and giving him your money?’

  ‘Your blessed sister went rubbing shoulders with his daughter and took our girl along,’ Sir Percy shot back.

  ‘Don’t try to tell me Foxy knew a thing about it!’ said his wife stoutly. ‘You’re the only one here who turned a blind eye.’

  ‘And kept you in the style to which you and our daughter—’

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ said Lady Stott. ‘Don’t you blame me for this. I would have gone back to a room and kitchen in Meadowpark Street to have Goldie alive again. Him and his girl and me and mine; we’d have been quite happy.’

  There was no chorus of agreement from the two girls. I rather thought they were more attached to the easy living at Balmoral than Lady Stott gave them credit for.

  ‘And what about you, Theresa?’ I said. ‘What was your excuse for killing Beryl? Were you such a devoted niece to your uncle as all that?’

  ‘I had no choice,’ said Tweetie. ‘It was either her or Bert.’ She was undoubtedly a selfish and spoiled girl but at that moment I could see that she truly loved him: as she spoke of him her voice softened and she seemed almost to forget the knife at her throat. ‘Beryl coaxed him into the marriage,’ she went on, ‘saying her father would come round to it.’

  ‘He must have loved her,’ I said.

  Tweetie’s face clouded. I guessed she preferred to gloss over that in her reckoning.

  ‘He knows what love is now,’ she said, preening rather. ‘And don’t glower at me; even if Bert and I hadn’t found one another, he would have seen through Beryl’s tricks soon enough. She promised to work on her father, but after nearly a year she was still sleeping in that ludicrous little hovel and acting as an unpaid housekeeper. She’d just started breeding from her silly dog, for goodness’ sake; she’d clearly settled for life. And, every day, she knew that if her father found out he would put Bert at the bottom of the Clyde in a minute.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘That’s enough talk,’ said Jeanne. ‘You.’ She nodded at me. ‘Go and sit over there with them. And you.’ She glared at Alec. ‘You are going to go to wherever you’ve got your little hoard of clues and you’re going to bring them back here to me. How long will it take you?’

  ‘Thirty minutes,’ said Alec.

  ‘So in thirty-one minutes, if you’re not back, you’ll be sorry.’ She thrust Tweetie forward. ‘Take a good look at her and ask if you want her death on your conscience. I want both the notes, both the books, the bird and the fox, but most of all I want the headdresses back. Because no one who hasn’t seen them would ever believe it, would they?’

  After Alec’s and my efforts to make that inspector listen, I could only agree. Especially, I thought, since we would be the only ones saying any of it. Sir Percy, Lady Stott, Foxy and Tweetie all had far too much to hide and the Glasgow police would rather pretend the Bonnars did not exist at all than get anywhere near a scandal surrounding them. And then there was poor Roly, whose family would no doubt let his death go unexplained rather than have his reputation suffer as it must should the truth come about how he had lived and died.

  Alec was drilling into me with his eyes, but I could not tell what he meant to convey.

  ‘And make sure there’s plenty petrol in the tank and two canisters besides,’ Jeanne said. ‘I have a very long way to go.’

  Alec turned on his heel and walked away, his footsteps ringing on the marble floor. I heard the front door open and then a long, long pause. My heart leapt; he had thought of something! He had thought of a way to stop this and was just about to turn around and come back again. I heard the door close and waited for his feet approaching, then I felt a sickening drop inside myself as the engine started up. He really was driving off and, as the sound grew fainter, a
little knot of fear began to smoulder in my chest.

  ‘Where will you go?’ I said to Jeanne when all around us was silent again.

  ‘No talking,’ she barked at me. Then she looked past the four of us huddled on the floor, over towards the door which led to the dining room at the back of the house, and said, ‘Oh.’

  ‘That’s right, Miss McNab,’ said Simon Bonnar’s voice, sending a jolt through all of us. ‘Now, throw the knife away and let Miss Stott go.’

  Jeanne hesitated for just a second and that was all the time it took. A shot rang out, deafening in the close confines of the room.

  Tweetie crumpled to the floor first and Lady Stott shrieked a pure peal of rage and despair, but it was only shock and the sudden relaxing of Jeanne’s arm from around her. She was back up on all fours in time to see Jeanne let the knife fall, begin to sway, then sink to her knees and fall softly sideways, looking so much like Tweetie that first day that I could not bear to see it.

  I scrambled up and rushed over, getting to her just as Simon Bonnar did. He was tucking something away into his pocket – a gun, one supposed – and his men, the same three men, were helping the Stotts and Mary to their feet and guiding them to chairs.

  I bent over Jeanne, ripping her coat open, hoping to staunch the wound, but falling back in hopeless horror at the way the blood poured and bubbled as though it were as endless as water from a spring.

  ‘You … you …’ I said. ‘You shot her!’

  ‘Think she wasn’t going to kill the lot of you if she could manage it?’ Bonnar said.

  I gazed at Jeanne, unable to believe his words and unable to believe what was happening.

  She looked beyond me into Simon Bonnar’s face. ‘Fool,’ she said, her voice somewhere between a gurgle and a croak. ‘I was coming to talk to you.’

  ‘What does—’ said Bonnar, dropping to his knees at her side, but she coughed and made a hideous bubbling sound, then, halfway through a second cough, she stilled.

  ‘What did that mean?’ he said.

  But I barely heard him. Before I had even caught my breath from the shock of watching her die, I heard Alec’s footsteps ringing out again as he sprinted across the hall then across the morning room and dropped down beside me.