by M C Beaton
‘It’s the first time I’ve ever stayed here,’ said Jeremy. He was still smarting over the loss of his toothbrush, but he never had the courage to assert himself over anything. ‘It’ll be the last. I’ve never stayed anywhere quite so cold before. As soon as I bag my birds, I’ll be off.’
‘You might not win,’ said Peter, leaning his broad shoulders against the bathroom wall.
Jeremy shrugged. ‘Clear off, if you’ve finished, old man, and let me have a bath.’
‘Righto,’ said the captain, opening the door out of the bathroom that led to his room.
Jeremy sighed with relief and advanced on the bath. A grey ring marred its white porcelain sides.
‘Dirty sod!’ muttered Jeremy in a fury. ‘Absolute dirty rotter. Complete and utter cad!’
Priscilla put down her hairbrush as she heard a knock at her bedroom door and went to answer it. Henry stood there, smiling apologetically.
‘I am sorry, darling,’ he said, taking her in his arms, and noticing again with irritation that she was several inches taller than he.
Priscilla extricated herself gently and went and sat down again at the dressing table. ‘It was a bit thick,’ she said. ‘Did you have to tell them I’d invited Hamish as soon as we got in the door? I told you they wouldn’t like it.’
‘Yes, but you haven’t yet told me why you were so bloody damned anxious to ask the bobby in the first place.’
‘I like him, that’s all,’ said Priscilla crossly. ‘He’s a human being and that’s more than you can say for most of the guests here. Jessica Villiers and Diana Bryce have never liked me. The Helmsdales are crashing bores. Jeremy’s a twit. I don’t know much about the gallant captain, but it reminds me of that rhyme about knowing two things about the horse, one of them is rather coarse. Prunella and Sir Humphrey are innocent sweeties but hardly strong enough to counteract the rest. Oh, let’s not quarrel about Hamish. He’s not coming and that’s that. Don’t dress for dinner. It’s informal this evening.’
‘Kiss me if you don’t want to quarrel.’
Priscilla smiled and turned up her face. He kissed her warmly, and although she seemed rather to enjoy it, her reaction could hardly be called passionate. But it was not sexual desire that had prompted Henry to propose. Priscilla was, to him, all that a future bride should be. He loved his new fame, he loved the money that came with it, and he loved his press image of being the darling of the upper set. The first moment he had set eyes on Priscilla, he had immediately seen her standing on the church steps beside him dressed in white satin and being photographed by every society magazine. She enhanced his image.
‘Did you want to ask me something?’ asked Priscilla when he had stopped kissing her.
‘Yes, there doesn’t seem to be a bath plug, and Mrs Halburton-Smythe told me not to ring for the servants because they don’t have very many and the ones that she has might give notice if they had to run up and down the stairs too much.’
‘Where is your room?’
‘In the west turret, the one at the front.’
‘Oh, that room. The plug in that bathroom was lost ages ago and we keep meaning to get another. But it’s quite simple. It’s a very small plug hole. You just stick your heel in it.’
‘Not exactly gracious living.’
‘No one really lives very graciously these days, unless you want masses of foreigners as servants, and Daddy is suspicious of anyone from south of Calais. I must say, you have rather grand ideas for an ex-member of the comrades.’
‘I never was a member of the Communist Party.’
‘But what about all those early plays of yours? All that class-war stuff.’
‘It’s the only way you can get a play put on these days,’ said Henry with a tinge of bitterness. ‘The big theatres only want trash. Only the small left-wing theatres will give the newcomer a chance. You’ve never said anything about Duchess Darling. Did you like it?’
‘Yes,’ said Priscilla. She had not liked it at all, thinking it silly and trite, but all her other friends had loved it, and Priscilla was so used to being at odds with them in matters of taste, she had begun to distrust her own judgement.
‘I’ll give you some of my better stuff to read when we get back to London,’ he said eagerly.
He looked down at her with affection, enjoying the cool beauty of her blonde looks. When he received his knighthood, as he was sure he would, she would look regal in the press photographs.
He bent and kissed her again. ‘I shall go and put my heel in the plug hole. I hope your mama has put us together at dinner.’
‘Probably not,’ said Priscilla. ‘But we shall survive.’
Mrs Vera Forbes-Grant, clad only in pink French knickers and transparent bra, was sitting on the end of her bed, painting her toenails scarlet.
Her husband was sitting at the dressing table trying to add some more curl to his large handlebar moustache with his wife’s electric hair curler.
‘Your roots are showing,’ he said, studying the top of his wife’s bent head in the mirror.
‘Well, they’ll just need to show. I once went to the hairdresser here and the girls were so busy gossiping they nearly burned my scalp off. Seen Withering yet?’
‘No,’ said Freddy Forbes-Grant, ‘but I’ve seen that rotter, Bartlett.’
‘Damn!’ Vera’s hand shook suddenly, and the bottle of nail varnish tipped over on the carpet.
‘Used to be pretty thick with him, didn’t you?’ pursued Freddy.
‘Me? Course not. For God’s sake, bring over that bottle of remover and help me clear up this mess.’
‘Peter’s here,’ said Diana Bryce, flouncing into Jessica Villiers’s room and banging the door behind her.
Jessica had been busy applying blusher to her cheeks. She stopped with the brush in mid-air. ‘Awkward for you,’ she said with an ugly laugh.
‘Poor, poor Jessica,’ said Diana sweetly. ‘You will maintain that fiction that Peter ditched me. Everyone knows I ditched him. But you were so crazy about him, poor lamb, you couldn’t believe anyone would want rid of him.’
‘Well, I ditched him before he got engaged to you on the rebound,’ said Jessica breathlessly.
Diana eyed her with malicious amusement. ‘Is that the case? I really must tease him about it.’
‘And I must tease him about being given the push by you.’
Both girls glared at each other, and then Diana gave a little laugh. ‘What nonsense we’re talking. Who cares about him anyway? I thought we came to see the playwright.’
‘Yes,’ said Jessica slowly. ‘I had almost forgotten.’
Henry Withering enjoyed dinner that evening immensely. He enjoyed the excellent food and the fake baronial dining room, hung with medieval banners that had been made in Birmingham twenty years before, when Colonel Halburton-Smythe had decided to redecorate the castle himself. He thought it was like a stage setting. The Halburton-Smythes did not run to footmen, but there were plenty of efficient Highland maids to serve the cold salmon hors d’oeuvres, followed by roast saddle of venison. There was a stately English butler to pour the wine. Lady Helmsdale, who was seated on Henry’s right, did not once look at Captain Bartlett. Henry was rather sorry for Priscilla, who was at the other end of the table, with Lord Helmsdale on one side and old Sir Humphrey on the other. Henry had at first been wary of the good-looking captain, knowing of old his reputation with women, but in the drawing room before dinner, Priscilla had shown not the slightest flicker of interest in Peter Bartlett. Jessica and Diana had made a dead set at Henry, all very flattering and just as it should be. The fameless years of neglect were gone.
Henry was so busy being happily deafened by Lady Helmsdale’s loud and fulsome compliments that he was unaware of any other conversation at the table.
Mrs Halburton-Smythe was a faded blonde woman with quick, timid movements. She was so often dominated by her husband that she rarely voiced an opinion on anything. She would even have allowed Priscilla to invite tha
t dreadful joke of a policeman if her husband had not been so much against it. But it could be said in Mrs Halburton-Smythe’s favour that she hardly ever listened to gossip, and that was why she had seated Captain Peter Bartlett between Jessica and Diana. Jessica tried to ignore the captain by talking to Jeremy, who was on her other side, while Diana picked at her food and stared sulkily in front of her, wondering what on earth Henry Withering found so fascinating about the terrible Lady Helmsdale.
The captain, who had been drinking steadily, glanced to right and left and announced suddenly, ‘Well, I must say you two girls make a lousy pair of po-faced dinner companions.’
Jessica shied like a horse and turned her head away. Diana affected not to hear. Opposite the captain, Mrs Vera Forbes-Grant leaned forward. ‘I’ll entertain you, darling,’ she said in her husky whisky voice, ‘if you don’t think it rude to talk across the table.’
‘I’m rather like you, old girl,’ slurred the captain. ‘Anything’s permissible so long as it don’t frighten the horses.’
‘Oh, Peter.’ Vera gave a nervous laugh. ‘You’re such a little boy when you try to shock. Do you think you’ll get the first brace?’ Word of the bet had already gone around the guests.
‘Who knows?’ said Peter. ‘Damned birds have been dying off like flies. ’S all a Communist plot to ruin sport.’
‘What on earth have the Reds got to do with a lot of game birds?’ asked Vera.
‘I’ll tell you,’ said the captain, leaning forward and putting his elbow in the remains of some cauliflower au gratin. ‘Acid rain.’
‘Acid rain?’
‘Yes, they take it up frozen, see, in planes, above the moors, and they drop out great chunks of frozen acid rain on the grouse.’
‘Oh, I see. They’re stunned to death,’ mocked Vera.
‘Y’know, Vera,’ said the captain, roaring to make himself heard above the boom of Lady Helmsdale’s voice, ‘you are one very dumb blonde . . . or would be if you got your roots done. Never seen them so black.’
‘There’s no need to get so bloody personal,’ snapped Vera.
‘What’s the matter?’ demanded her husband, Freddy, sharply.
‘Peter’s had too much to drink, that’s all,’ whispered Vera. ‘Ignore him.’
But Peter Bartlett had found a new quarry. ‘Turn the volume down a bit, Agatha,’ he shouted suddenly in Lady Helmsdale’s direction. ‘Can’t hear myself think.’
‘You never can,’ roared Lady Helmsdale. ‘Don’t you know it’s because you never think?’
With one of his inexplicable changes of mood, the captain sent Lady Helmsdale an amused wink and then turned to Diana. ‘You are looking very fetching tonight,’ he said. ‘I like that little black number. Suits you.’
Priscilla had met Peter Bartlett before but had never spent more than a few minutes in his company. She was amused to see how the obnoxious captain so easily turned on the charm. Diana was beginning to giggle and blush. Peter then said something across the table to Vera, who looked first startled, then gratified. Then he turned to Jessica and began to whisper in her ear until the frozen look of disapproval left her face and she began to look happy and excited. Priscilla then looked down the table to where Henry was laughing uproariously at something Lady Helmsdale had said.
He really is a pet, thought Priscilla. Mummy and Daddy are so pleased. It’s nice to do the right thing for once. Poor Hamish. I do hope he won’t feel the snub too painfully.
At that moment, Hamish was leaning on his garden gate outside the police station, enjoying the quiet evening. His slavering pet mongrel, Towser, as usual, had flopped down to sleep across his master’s boots. Behind Hamish, from the back of the police station, came the mournful clucking of the hens.
The only thing that worried him was where to find a dinner jacket for the party. He had quickly recovered from the shock of Priscilla’s engagement. Hamish had long ago discovered that it was easier to tuck painful things he could do nothing about at the present away into a far corner of his brain until such time as he could take some action.
He did not know the Halburton-Smythes had written to him not to come. Jessie, their dizzie housemaid, was walking out with Geordie, the baker’s boy, and had met her swain only five yards from the police station. The encounter had made her forget the reason for her having been sent to the village. The housekeeper, Mrs Wilson, had told her to buy a packet of soap powder when she was down in the village, and Jessie remembered only that request. She did not find the note, undelivered, still in her apron pocket until two days later.
Chapter Three
Keep your place and silent be,
Game can hear and game can see.
– Mark Beaufoy
The members of the house party, with the exception of the guest of honour, Henry Withering, and his fiancée, Priscilla Halburton-Smythe, looked rather jaded when they gathered in the dining room of the castle on the following evening for the buffet supper.
Jeremy Pomfret appeared looking like a dissipated cherub, with blue circles under his eyes. His room and Peter’s had originally been one triangular-shaped room. It had been converted into two by a wall of thin plasterboard, and the bathroom had been installed to cut across the point of the triangle. Jeremy’s sleep had been disturbed by sounds of noisy love-making coming from Peter’s room all night long. There had also been a lot of toing and froing, and it had sounded as if the gallant captain had been entertaining more than one lady during the night.
The beginnings of a very deep hatred for Peter Bartlett had begun to burn in Jeremy’s old-fashioned, fastidious soul. That hatred had leaped into a flame that very evening, when Jeremy had gone into the bathroom to wash and shave before dinner. There were sopping-wet towels lying all over the floor, and there was a stomach-churning ring of hair round the bathtub, showing that Captain Peter Bartlett had shaved while he was having his bath.
‘Filthy beast,’ raged Jeremy, glowering at Peter across the room. The captain, lean, handsome, beautifully tailored, was being fawned on by Vera, Jessica, and Diana. How can any woman even tolerate being near the man? thought Jeremy. Tomorrow was the Glorious Twelfth, and Peter had still not yet said at what time he would be going out. It was not as if Jeremy could ask the servants; since it was only the pair of them, there were to be no loaders or beaters or even dogs.
Also looking the worse for wear were Lord and Lady Helmsdale. Both wore men’s pyjamas in bed, and they had discovered last night that someone had poured glue into the crotch of each pair. They had spent hours trying to get the offending mess off the embarrassing places it had stuck to. They both blamed the captain.
Sir Humphrey Throgmorton sat listlessly in a corner. He never slept very well anyway. Prunella Smythe had stayed awake most of the night in a stagestruck fever of excitement. Freddy Forbes-Grant had been awakened by his wife’s getting out of bed at two in the morning, saying she was going down to the kitchens to get a glass of milk. When she had not returned by three, he became anxious and went in search of her. When he had given up the search and returned to the bedroom, it was to find Vera once more in bed and fast asleep. He wondered what she had been up to, and that wonder had kept him awake and in a nasty temper until dawn.
Colonel and Mrs Halburton-Smythe had sat up very late debating whether their daughter actually meant to marry this splendid catch or whether she would change her mind. She had resisted their best efforts and had turned down so many eligibles that they found it hard to believe she meant to meet this one at the altar. They also planned to tell the captain to leave immediately after he had bagged his brace, but as they were both frightened of Peter Bartlett’s erratic bouts of vicious temper, each wanted the other to give the captain his marching orders. They had never entertained him as a house guest before and had not realized until now the full horror of the captain’s behaviour. They at last settled on that well-worn ruse employed by the landed gentry for speeding the unwelcome guest on his way – placing a railway timetable beside his bed
with the soonest, fastest train underlined in red, and instructing the housekeeper to pack his case and leave it in the hall.
Whatever had put the shadows under the eyes of both Diana and Jessica, they were hugging to themselves, occasionally casting triumphant looks at each other, and then turning away puzzled, each obviously wondering what the other had to look triumphant about.
As well as the members of the house party, there was a sprinkling of local notables, now clustered about Henry, asking for his autograph and laughing at his slightest joke.
Priscilla was proud of Henry. He was so good-natured, so likeable, and so much at ease that all her doubts about their engagement had been laid to rest.
He had appeared during the day in respectably worn casual clothes and was now dressed in a beautifully tailored dinner jacket, the only relic of his past reputation for bohemianism being a pink-striped frilled shirt.
And then she looked across the dining room – it was the only large room in the castle, which was why it was being used for the party – and witnessed the full glory of the arrival of PC Macbeth.
Priscilla stifled a sharp exclamation of dismay and crossed the room to join him.
‘Hamish,’ she hissed, ‘where on earth did you get that frightful dinner jacket from?’
‘It’s a wee bit on the short side,’ admitted Hamish ruefully, looking down at his long, lanky figure. ‘But wee Archie was the only waiter at the Lochdubh Hotel who was off duty tonight.’
The dinner jacket hung loosely on him and the sleeves only came three-quarters of the way down his arm, and his trousers were exposing a long length of woolly plaid sock.
‘Come with me quickly,’ urged Priscilla. ‘Uncle Harry often leaves some of his gear here, and he’s tall and thin. Mummy’s glaring already.’
