Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Why shouldn’t they have kept their chairs?’ said Alec. ‘Do you think Mrs Lipscott will receive us or just send a response? I don’t fancy having to get firm with that sweet old butler.’

  ‘Oh, she’ll come,’ I said. ‘Of course, she won’t be up yet. If it were just me I daresay I’d be taken to her bedroom and have to sit amongst her letters and kittens the same as ever, but I suppose she’ll put on a dressing gown and come downstairs since it’s you too, darling. Alec?’

  He was standing with his back to me over by a side-table.

  ‘Alec?’ I said again.

  He turned and I saw that he was holding a photograph frame in his hands. He held it out towards me and I walked over. It was Fleur, grown-up but not yet grown sombre. She was standing with her foot up on the running board of a motorcar and her head flung back, laughing. Her hair was short already and had ruffled up in the breeze so that it was a blur around her.

  ‘I’d guess that would be about 1918 or so,’ I said. ‘Before.’

  ‘Oh, it’s certainly before,’ Alec said. ‘Look at the car, Dandy.’ I looked but shook my head. ‘It’s a Bugatti,’ he told me and our eyes met. He was breathing as though he had been running. Perhaps, like me, he had not really believed any of it until now.

  ‘Dandy?’ said a voice behind us. We turned and I could not help going over with both hands out to clasp those of the woman who had just entered the room. Mamma-dearest was probably older-looking to anyone who could look with an objective eye, but all I saw was the same mass of hair held up in a kind of hammock of net for sleeping, and the same pink flannel nightgown and pink silk dressing gown (cosy for bed and just a hint of decency in case I’m out in the garden and the vicar calls, she always used to say). ‘Dandy, my dearest darling.’ She wrapped me in a hug, smelling of lily-of-the-valley scent and mint tooth-powder. ‘What on earth brings you down here?’ Then she held me at arm’s length and beamed at me. I simply could not bring myself to say any of the things I should have said. Nor could I bear to soften her up with small talk and family news then turn the conversation later. I simply gave a dumb look at Alec.

  He walked over and put the photograph between us, right under Mamma-dearest’s nose.

  ‘We’re here to talk about Charles Leigh,’ he said.

  Any hope I had held that we were wrong drained out of me, just as the blood drained out of Mamma-dearest’s plump cheeks.

  ‘But . . . Charles was nine years ago,’ she said. All the colour was gone from her voice too and she spoke in a bleak near-whisper.

  ‘And Elf was eight years ago,’ said Alec. Mamma-dearest squeezed her eyes tight shut.

  ‘And – I’m so sorry,’ I added, ‘but someone else died last week and Fleur . . .’

  ‘Has she gone off the rails again?’ said Mrs Lipscott, opening her eyes. ‘Do the girls know? They haven’t told me.’

  ‘They wanted to spare you,’ I said.

  ‘Did they send you to tell me?’ she asked. I started to answer no but Alec cut me off.

  ‘What happened with Charles Leigh, Mrs Lipscott?’ he said, shaking the photograph a little to make her look.

  ‘She bought it with her own money,’ said Mamma-dearest, hugging herself, putting her hands right up inside her nightgown sleeves. ‘On her eighteenth birthday when she came into what the Major had settled on her. I knew it was too young to settle money on them, but of course . . . And you can see how she loved it, can’t you?’

  ‘And the crash itself?’ I said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, miserably. ‘No one knows except Fleur.’

  ‘Tell us what you do know,’ I said gently. ‘Perhaps we can piece it together from there.’ She walked slowly over to one of the armchairs and dropped down into it. We followed her.

  ‘Well, after . . .’ she began, and then she cleared her throat and started again. ‘At the age of about seventeen, of course, Fleur took a great shine to the lodge. Ironic is the word, I think.’

  ‘Ironic how?’ I asked. Mrs Lipscott opened her eyes very wide in an innocent way and for the first time I did see that she was older now.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ she said. ‘It was as unlike Pereford as chalk and cheese and it was the Major’s house and Fleur never even met the Major.’ She turned to Alec. ‘My husband died in Africa when Florrie was a little baby,’ she said.

  ‘So she was at the lodge when Charles Leigh died,’ Alec said.

  ‘Why do you want to know all this?’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘And Dandy, why do you?’

  ‘Was she at the party with them?’ Alec said and I found myself wondering if he was always this brusque, if I was too when it was a stranger I was grilling, whether I only saw it now because Mamma-dearest awoke every tender feeling in me and made me see Alec’s manner in a new and unflattering light. It could not be denied, however, that it was working.

  ‘Yes, she was at that wretched party,’ Mrs Lipscott said. ‘The party Charles and Leigh went racing away from. You see, the thing about the lodge was that she could get up to all sorts of mischief unwitnessed; it was such a long way for us – the girls and me – to haul ourselves up there. Even if we heard tell of her escapades, which usually we didn’t. It’s quite out on its own.’

  ‘Well I remember,’ I said. ‘Hugh used to shoot with one of the neighbours. Highland neighbours – seven miles of bad road away. He insisted on dragging me along, naturally.’

  ‘Well I sold it in the end,’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘After the accident – one of these anonymous bidders who buy up everything these days – and I’ve never missed it.’

  ‘Getting back to the night that Charles Leigh died then,’ I said. ‘Was Fleur engaged to him, as the Forresters think? Or was Leigh the fiancée, as reported?’

  ‘Oh, you’ve spoken to the Forresters, have you? Was it Aurora who asked you to come and speak to me?’

  ‘No,’ I said, crossing my fingers and hoping she would assume it was Pearl. ‘Was she?’

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Lipscott, ‘I don’t suppose he was actually engaged to either of them. But since he was dead and would be marrying no one, the poor dear sweet boy, and since poor darling Leigh died with him, what would have been the use of exposing her to censure and Fleur to ridicule?’ Alec had been right then.

  ‘More than ridicule, Mrs Lipscott,’ Alec said. ‘If she killed them.’

  ‘She didn’t! She couldn’t have.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’ I said. ‘What do you know?’

  ‘Only that they were all together at the party, and that Fleur didn’t turn up at home until six in the morning and she was very bedraggled and smelling of smoke.’

  ‘Smoke?’ I said. ‘Cigarette smoke?’

  Mamma-dearest gave me a look of fond pity. ‘Filthy black oily smoke, Dandy my love.’

  ‘And what did she say about it?’ said Alec. ‘That she remembered nothing?’

  ‘No, Mr Osborne,’ she said in the crispest tone I had ever heard her use. ‘She said she had killed them both. She said she was guilty of another two murders and she wanted to tell the police and go to court and be hanged.’

  Alec had the grace to lower his head and after a quiet moment she spoke again.

  ‘But it was nonsense, of course. Apart from anything else, how could one person out of three make sure she survived an accident that killed the others? Anyway, we sent her away to rest and before too long she was better again.’

  ‘But not her old self,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘She hadn’t been her old self for a while, but she wasn’t even her new self after Charles. She was . . .’

  ‘I saw her last Saturday,’ I said. ‘I know.’

  ‘Oh, my poor naughty little sprite,’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘My cherub, my little pixie. Do you have children, Mr Osborne?’

  ‘We really don’t want to upset you,’ I said to her before Alec could answer, acknowledging with a rueful smile that we were a little late to avoid it now: her eyes were swimming
with unshed tears and her hand shook as she put it to her throat. ‘But I must just ask one more thing. Fleur said on Saturday that she had killed five people. Charles and Leigh are two, Elf makes three and this last one is four. You yourself just said, of the crash, “another two murders”. So, who was the first?’

  ‘We know when it was,’ said Alec. I nodded and tried to look wise, even though I did not know what he meant. ‘It happened when she was seventeen, didn’t it? When she started staying away from home? And it was afterwards that she bought herself the motorcar and turned into a bit of a scamp by all accounts. That was what made her “her new self”, as you put it.’ I was nodding more eagerly now. ‘But who was it, Mrs Lipscott? Who did Fleur kill when she was seventeen?’ Mamma-dearest was shaking her head and her tears had dried again. ‘If we look through a year’s worth of newspapers,’ Alec went on, ‘will we find another death notice of a family friend? If we spoke to her acquaintances from that time and asked them if someone died unexpectedly, what would they tell us?’

  Mamma-dearest was almost smiling now as she continued to shake her head.

  ‘My daughter killed no one,’ she said.

  ‘You’re very sure considering you don’t know the first thing about this latest corpse,’ I put in, and her smile was gone.

  ‘She didn’t, Dandy,’ she said. ‘Tell me it’s not true. Tell me that you don’t understand why she’s claiming any such thing and you can’t see how it was done.’

  I glanced at Alec and although he told me, with a tiny shake of his head, to refuse to comfort her, I could not oblige him.

  ‘That’s more or less true,’ I said. ‘I mean she could have done it, but we don’t have the first inkling as to why. We don’t even know who it was.’

  ‘She didn’t do it then,’ said Mrs Lipscott and she sat back with a great rush of relief. ‘So is she still teaching? Or has she gone to rest for a while? It’s always so very upsetting for her.’

  ‘She’s . . . um . . . yes, she’s taken off for a bit,’ I said. ‘I gather you don’t speak every week on the telephone then? Or exchange frequent letters?’

  ‘I have had to let my little bird go, Dandy,’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘I stand with my arm outstretched and my hand open and I pray that one day she’ll come flitting back again. It’s the hardest thing any mother ever has to do. To love and love and know that her child is alone and scared and won’t take comfort.’

  ‘It sounds absolutely unspeakable,’ I said. Not that my boys ever took much in the way of comfort anyway and if they knew that they were ‘loved and loved’ from near or from far they would make sick-noises and laugh at me; but sometimes in the night, when I could not quite silence Hugh’s voice in my head, I imagined one or both of them not in their dorm at school but in khaki in a foreign land with the sound of shells going off. Then I would remember the soldiers in the convalescent home – the ones who sat frozen, staring ahead (the ones who cried and accepted soothing words and pats on the arm were easy). I could rattle myself so badly that I would have to get up and go into their bedrooms and remind myself from all the model aeroplanes and frogspawn and cricket bats there that they were children, not soldiers, not yet; and since Hugh was wrong, not ever.

  ‘And now you must excuse me,’ said Mamma-dearest. ‘I am going to go to my room. I’ve just enough time for a good cry before breakfast. Nine-ish, Dandy darling, as ever.’ I had risen to my feet and made some ineffectual noises. ‘No, certainly not,’ she said. ‘A woman my age weeping is not a pretty sight. Take a walk in the garden, hm? The roses are lovely just now.’ She stood. ‘Of course, last week they were lovelier but that’s the way of it with roses.’

  We did, in fact, step out of the french windows of the morning room and walk over the brushed grass to the rose garden. We went in silence but once we were through the arch in the yew hedge and strolling up and down the paths drinking in the scent, Alec started again.

  ‘Of course you could walk away from a crash that killed two,’ he said. ‘Drive the car quite gently into a tree and set light to the petrol tank with the others still in it.’

  ‘Oh, stop,’ I said. ‘I feel unspeakable, Alec. She obviously thinks her daughters sent me to help.’

  ‘You’ve investigated acquaintances before,’ Alec said.

  ‘These Lipscotts aren’t acquaintances,’ I told him. ‘They’re my dear, dear friends. And this place is . . . I can’t explain it, but I feel as though I’m trampling something precious underfoot.’

  ‘Best concentrate on the case then,’ Alec said. ‘Take your mind off it. Do you agree that Fleur could have caused the crash?’

  I sighed. Of course, he was right.

  ‘Why wouldn’t Charles and Leigh just get out?’ I said. ‘They’d have to be drugged or extremely drunk.’

  ‘And of course no one ever leaves a party that way,’ said Alec. ‘I wish Mrs Lipscott would just tell us what she knows about No. 1, don’t you?’

  ‘I do. Then at least I could stop poking her with a stick and feeling as if I were baiting a wounded bear.’

  ‘Dandy,’ said Alec, in warning.

  ‘Yes, all right. Good work for knitting together all those little half-hints and catching her out that way. I knew something must have happened to turn Fleur into the little minx I saw at the party on Armistice night.’

  ‘Sh,’ said Alec, cocking his head. ‘She’s coming back. Maybe she’s changed her mind.’

  But the woman who came round the corner was not Mamma-dearest, the same as ever in her pink flannel nightie. It was a woman of great age and great dishevelment with long grey hair hanging down her back in rats’ tails and an outfit composed of men’s twill overalls with a bathing suit underneath and down-at-heel dancing slippers on her feet.

  ‘You!’ she said. ‘You’re back. They’ve all gone now.’

  ‘Lilah?’ I said. ‘Batty Aunt?’ She gave me an enormous grin. Quite terrifying, since her teeth were few now and those remaining were not the teeth of which dentists dream. Her face was purple and pouchy with a wattle under the chin and fat yellow bags under each eye, and it occurred to me for the first time that she might not have been batty all those years ago, but sozzled. She was steady enough now, however, as she trotted up to us in her slippers and held out a hand to Alec.

  ‘Aunt Lilah,’ she said to him. They shook and then she clasped me to her and planted a kiss on my cheek which I could feel drying there and which made me itch to take out my handkerchief and scrub it away.

  ‘So what brings you back down here?’ she said. She had been fishing in the bib pocket of her dungarees and now she drew out a pair of secateurs and set to on the nearest rose bush. She was not exactly deadheading, since the blooms she snipped off were not at all faded. But neither was she gathering flowers for the house in any way that made sense, since the heads were let fall to the ground and then kicked away.

  Alec waved his hand to get my attention and then gestured to Aunt Lilah in a very urgent-seeming way. I shook my head vehemently, determined that I would not grill this wandered (or drunk) old lady for secrets while her niece and protector was out of the way.

  ‘We came to talk about Fleur,’ I said and ignored Alec’s scowl. That was as far as I would go.

  ‘Oh, Fleur!’ said Lilah. She moved on to a second bush and attacked it with zeal.

  ‘Should you be doing that?’ I asked mildly.

  ‘She’s gone,’ said Lilah. ‘She left long, long ago.’ Then she held her secateurs up high in the air and snipped them together a few times before putting them back in her pocket and turning round. ‘She killed her father, you know.’ This was delivered in the blithe tone of someone imparting news that a friend had moved to town, or got a puppy, then she took off around the corner of the path, leaving us in dumb silence. After a moment the sound of snipping started up again. Slowly, Alec and I followed her.

  ‘Fleur killed her father?’ I said. ‘The Major?’

  ‘That’s him,’ said Lilah. ‘Johnny Lipscott. Yes, he die
d.’

  ‘But Fleur was a baby,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, a little baby girl,’ Lilah said.

  ‘And the Major died in Africa in the war,’ said Alec.

  ‘Oh, you knew that too?’ said Lilah, glancing round. ‘Yes, he did. Terribly dangerous place, Africa. You wouldn’t catch me there even for the elephants.’ In the distance the glockenspiel sounded its trill of notes. ‘Breakfast!’ she cried gaily, and again put her secateurs away. ‘Hope there’s some kedge.’ She left the way she had come.

  ‘What a very unsettling person,’ said Alec. ‘And what on earth did she mean?’

  ‘Let’s go and ask Mrs Lipscott,’ I said. ‘It does make sense of one thing though – why it should be “ironic” that Fleur took a shine to the Major’s hunting lodge.’

  ‘But he died in battle,’ said Alec. ‘That’s not the kind of thing you can make mistakes about.’

  ‘What if he was missing, or if his body was misidentified and he made it home and lay low and years later . . .’

  ‘I’ve been in the army, Dandy. If they list someone as dead, he’s dead. Let’s go and see what his widow has to say.’

  They were in the little breakfast room with the Chinese wallpaper of yellow pears and blue doves, and there was indeed kedgeree into which Batty Aunt Lilah was tucking with enormous relish.

  ‘Coffee, eggs and things . . .’ said Mrs Lipscott waving a vague hand. ‘Are you staying, Dandy? Would you like your old room? And you, Mr Osborne?’ She blinked. ‘I haven’t quite accounted for you yet, I must say, but you’re very welcome, naturally.’

  I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down opposite her. Again her hand fluttered at her throat, nicely dressed in pearls now above a very pale pink jersey of soft wool. She was right about the crying, though: her face was sodden and crumpled and looked ten years older than it had when we arrived, no matter the soft pink wool and pearls chosen to help it.