‘Well, if it makes more sense to come at it from this end,’ said Alec, ‘is there anyone you can put out of the running? Anyone who didn’t have a motive?’
‘I haven’t heard anything from Mr Faulds on his own account,’ I said, ‘although he hated him with a passion in comradeship, certainly. And . . . let me see . . . Mrs Hepburn dropped a very vague hint yesterday but I need to press her. And then there’s Millie, the scullerymaid – kitchenmaid in waiting – but I can’t think that she would have much to do with him.’
‘Oh?’ said Alec.
‘Have you ever met yours?’ I said.
‘Good point,’ Alec said. ‘No, indeed. Although I daresay there is such a creature about the place somewhere. What about the rest of the men?’
‘I’ve yet to speak to John and Stanley,’ I said, ‘but the thing is that the men are in the clear anyway, because they were locked out, remember?’
‘Doors can be unlocked,’ said Alec. ‘You must be thorough about this, Dan.’
I considered trying to explain to him the difference between his bedroom, muffled with carpet and curtains, miles from any door, and the maids’ and cook’s rooms with their linoleum over stone, their echoing bareness and the sound ringing along the empty passageways of scraping locks and iron bolts and wooden soles and marble steps.
‘Hm,’ I said in the end.
‘And on another note, what are the police making of it?’ said Alec. ‘And of you, come to that?’
‘Very little so far,’ I replied. ‘They’re rather stretched with all the picket duty – or is it the strikers who one says are on picket duty? Well, you know what I mean – so it was a superintendent who poled up this morning, very flustered and very displeased to be flustered – he is formed for gravitas, really – but he practically had his Big Blue Book for Policemen in his hand, folded open at Murder. So when I debunked Fanny Rossiter and waved Hutchinson’s name in front of him he rather fell on my neck.’
‘Fanny?’ said Alec. ‘And debunked? Where do you get these words? Do you have to pay a subscription?’
‘You’ll find,’ I said, trying to sound withering, ‘that debunking comes from Oscar Wilde. When they find out that Algy’s dying friend isn’t dying.’
‘That would be de-Bunburying,’ said Alec. ‘Do you know when the post-mortem’s going to—’
‘Phyllis!’ I said. I put my hand up to the glass to screen my eyes and peered out along the street. Phyllis the housemaid, unmissable in her yellow coat-dress, was walking smartly along towards India Street carrying a medium-sized suitcase. I spoke into the mouthpiece again. ‘Alec, I’ve just seen one of the other maids with rather more luggage than she would need on an afternoon off. She’s making her way towards the tram stop, bold as brass. I think she’s heading for the hills.’
‘Not by tram she’s not,’ said Alec. ‘But you’d better ring off and give chase anyway.’
I crashed the earpiece back into the cradle and – as I realised later – leaving tenpenceworth of pennies behind me, I slipped out of the kiosk and streaked across the road to the corner where Phyllis had disappeared. Hoping that no one could see me, I flattened myself against the wall and poked my head around to peep down the street after her. She was nowhere to be seen. I stepped away from the wall and rounded the corner properly, looking up and down each side, but there was no mistaking it. There were no carts, motor lorries or trees for her to be hidden behind, no more kiosks or even pillar boxes, no shops she might have stepped inside. She was gone. She must have started running, I realised. Perhaps she saw me peering out of the kiosk at her. I went at a very fast walk, almost running myself, to the corner of Jamaica Street and then to the next corner again, where Gloucester Place and Circus Gardens just fail to meet, and looked around in all directions. There was no sign of her anywhere. She could not possibly have rounded two corners in the time it took me to get here and there were no alleys or lanes for her to have dodged into; Edinburgh’s New Town is well known for the endlessness and unbrokenness of its many stretches of Georgian splendour.
There was only one explanation, I thought, as I stood there with my hands on my hips letting my breath slow down again. She had gone into one of the houses. Perhaps she had given notice and left, or had simply left – ‘flitted’, like Maggie – to a new situation already lined up before the events of the morning, in response to Pip’s threats of dismissal. But would a maid roll up to her new position in that coat and that hat, looking as though she were going for a walk along a promenade with her young man? Hard on the heels of that thought came another. What if she were indeed going to join a young man, in a flat in one of those houses, escaping from what she had done? What if she had robbed Pip Balfour of some valuable item that no one yet realised was missing and was making off, dressed up to the nines and sure she had got away with it?
‘Everything all right, miss?’ said a voice. I started and turned to see a rather elderly-looking policeman standing at my side. He was regarding me with an expression more quizzical than helpful.
‘Absolutely fine,’ I said. ‘I was supposed to meet up with a friend of mine but she’s given me the slip somehow.’ The policeman had reared backwards somewhat when I spoke and was looking at me with outright hostility now.
‘Just the one friend was it, miss?’ he said. I stared at him.
‘As it happens,’ I answered. ‘Why?’
‘Fine and well,’ he said. ‘I’ll take your name just the same though.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ I said. ‘You most certainly shall not.’
‘Oh, is that right then?’ said the policeman, squaring up.
‘It is,’ I replied. ‘I’ve done absolutely nothing wrong and I’m surprised, I must say, to find you hanging around here harassing innocent passers-by when your fellow officers are stretched to breaking point with the strikers.’ He took a step or two backwards, I am pleased to say. ‘Do you know Superintendent Hardy?’ I demanded. He nodded, swallowing hard and making his prominent and rather ill-shaven Adam’s apple sink into his collar and bob up again. ‘Well, so do I.’
‘I beg your pardon, miss,’ said the constable, who had instinctively pulled at his coat to smarten himself when he heard Hardy’s name. ‘Only I am minding out for the strike. I’m back in for it – been retired five years, properly. There’s trouble down on Princes Street and we’re trying to see where it is the gangs are forming. I thought you were standing there in the middle of the junction like that waiting for your pals.’
‘Gangs?’ I said. ‘On Princes Street?’
‘By the station there,’ said the policeman. ‘And a big crowd at the Tron too. Five arrests already and a policeman in the infirmary.’ I said nothing. ‘And what with you dressed so plain but speaking so fancy – if you’ll forgive me – I put you down for one of they intellectuals.’
‘I assure you, my dear fellow,’ I said, ‘that I am neither an intellectual nor a Bolshevist nor any kind of sympathiser.’ At that moment, I caught sight of a flash of yellow out of the corner of my eye and turned towards it. Phyllis was shutting an area gate about halfway up India Street. ‘There she is now!’ I said to the constable. Phyllis hefted her suitcase more comfortably into her grip and made her way back the way she had come.
‘Oh, really?’ he replied with what seemed to me to be an unwarranted level of interest.
‘I’ll just run after her, if that’s all right,’ I said, already beginning to move. ‘Keep up the good work, Constable.’
He gave me a knowing look and turned away.
Of course I had no intention of sprinting after Phyllis really, but I did want to see where she had been and try to work out what she might have been doing there. She had definitely come up from below stairs, but if she were merely visiting a friend why had she only stayed a minute and what was in the suitcase? Bloodied clothes would be my first guess and I should like to get inside the place before they were put into a furnace by her accomplice.
It was a grey stone house like
any other in the streets surrounding, not so grand as the Balfours’ in Heriot Row and ill-kept in a vague way; as I drew nearer, the collection of bright new bell pushes set in by the front door revealed that it had lately been divided into flats. The basement windows were dusty, the area flags brown with dead moss which had been sluiced with ammonia but not scrubbed clear. An unprepossessing place, in all, but it had one feature of great interest to me. In the fanlight above the basement door, there was a crude painting of three brass-coloured balls. Without thinking about what I should do once inside, I opened the gate and descended.
The door was unlocked, but whoever waited inside was well warned of any visitor, for a string of tiny gold bells hanging behind it were set tinkling as I entered. A long passageway distempered in a tobacco colour stretched away in front of me, but on the nearest door, sitting ajar, a cardboard sign proclaimed it to be the Reception & Showroom.
A counter had been erected, cutting the room in half, and behind it were countless tiers of shelves, all around and above the fireplace, where the elaborate black-leaded range from when this room was a kitchen still crouched, glowing orange and radiating a most unwelcome heat for such a warm day. The shelves were stacked with brown-paper parcels, done up with string and bearing labels which hung down and fluttered in the rising heat.
On my side of the counter, in contrast to the neat shelves, was such a profusion of objects that one hardly knew where to rest one’s eyes. There was a rack of fur coats on wooden hangers, very rusty and stiff-looking fur coats too, with the large flat collars of twenty years ago. There were three tailors’ dummies, each dressed in a greying wedding gown and with a hat sitting on its shoulders and a pair of satin slippers resting against its solitary leg. There were glass cases of jewellery: barnacled brooches, dented watches and wedding rings, thin from wear, all set out against velvet. There were tea-chests full of odd golf clubs and a battalion of perambulators each piled high with folded linens. In pride of place were four wireless sets on a walnut table, and around the top of the room – on the high shelf where one would look for the largest of the pie dishes and trenchers, the rarely used platters and pans – there were perhaps a hundred dusty hatboxes, joined together with ropes of spider-web like bunting.
‘Help you?’ said a voice.
I stepped towards the counter and saw sitting in a low, armless chair with a knitted cover – a nursery chair, I suspected – a small woman in her mid-thirties, but dressed like a grandmother with a piecrust top to her collar and ropes of suspiciously large white pearls hanging down over her boned bodice and pooling amongst her spreading skirts. My first thought was that she was in fancy dress for some reason, but as I noticed the profusion of brooches behind the pearls and the number of mismatched rings on her fingers I realised that she was simply dressed from stock. She was smoothing flat a sheet of brown paper on her lap.
‘First time?’ she said. I nodded. ‘Well, what have you brought me?’ She got to her feet and as she came forward at least the spreading skirts were explained for she walked with the rolling gait of someone with one leg much shorter than the other and I guessed that there was a block-soled boot hidden under her hemline.
‘What have I brought you?’ I said and then hesitated. She regarded me calmly from under a fringe of tight brown curls, slowly winding some string into a figure of eight and stowing it away in a drawer under the counter. I opened my bag, hoping to see something I could press into use to get things started, but it was Miss Rossiter’s bag and was empty except for a handkerchief and a purse of money. I took out a ten-shilling note and put it on the counter. The little woman spread her arms wide, showing off the bounty of golf clubs and perambulators behind me.
‘Take your time,’ she said. ‘Jist whistle if you want a case opened.’ She was turning away when I spoke.
‘I’m not looking for trinkets,’ I said. ‘I need your help with something and I would like to pay you.’
‘Can’t help you there, doll,’ she said. ‘I don’t deal in the sticky stuff. Fifty with a chit or twenty-five, sign on the line.’
I did not understand a word of this and told her so.
‘I don’t have anything to do with stolen goods,’ she said, speaking slowly as though to an idiot. ‘You can get half the value of your item if you have a receipt to prove you own it or a quarter if you just sign your name and leave an address. You’d be better off doon Leith if that’s not to your fancy.’
I took another ten-shilling note out of my purse and put it on the counter.
‘The young woman who was just here,’ I said, ‘the girl in yellow. What did she bring you?’ The little woman shook her head, her small brown eyes quite flat with lack of interest in the banknotes. I thought for a moment. If Phyllis had pawned something of Pip’s I had to know. If she had pawned something of her own, one had to wonder why she suddenly needed money and to ask oneself if it were perhaps because someone had seen her do something and that someone had to be paid to keep quiet about it. Clara was the obvious candidate for the role, for she alone could have witnessed Phyllis leave her room in the night, but Clara hated Pip enough to forgive his murder and besides, she was not a blackmailer, surely. Hot-tempered, perhaps, and inclined to be huffy, but she was not the kind to sneak and threaten.
‘I’ll bet,’ I said to the little woman, ‘that she took twenty-five and signed for it.’ Her face remained inscrutable, so I tried another tack. ‘She is in my employment, you know,’ I said, hoping that my voice would trump Miss Rossiter’s good grey serge, ‘and I suspect her of stealing from me.’
‘That lassie works to Mrs Balfour,’ said the pawnbroker. ‘What are you at?’
I reasoned to myself that since I would be telling Superintendent Hardy about Phyllis’s visit and he would come and get it out of this remarkably stubborn little person in the end anyway, I would be saving him some of his meagre time if I took care of it now.
‘You’ve not heard what happened at the Balfours’ today?’ I said. ‘Phyllis didn’t tell you?’ She shook her head. ‘Mr Balfour is dead,’ I said. ‘He was found this morning with a knife in his throat and nobody knows who did it, but all suspicious behaviour needs to be explained, don’t you see? Now, will you tell me what Phyllis pawned?’
‘Nothing,’ said the woman, who had paled at the news. ‘She was in to redeem today.’
‘You mean to take her belongings out again?’
‘Aye, that’s it,’ said the woman. She had opened another drawer under the counter and lifted out a sheaf of paper labels. ‘She’s a regular here, madam. She has a taste for nice things – well, you can tell that from looking at her – and she’s not good at waiting for them either. Here we are.’ She had found the label she was looking for and turned it towards me. The pencilled writing on it had been rubbed off to let the label be used again but was still faintly visible.
‘One gold ring,’ I said, squinting at it. ‘Ladies? Lace? What does it say here?’
‘One gold ring, large. One gold ring, small. Her ma and pa’s, most likely, or grandma’s maybe. One silver-gilt prayer book. One black coat, one tweed rug, one set silk nightclothes duchesse satin peach, coffee lace,’ said the woman. ‘I’d say the nightie and the rug were maybe lifted from the house, would you no’? But I like to give folks the benefit and say they were passed on.’
‘And can you tell me,’ I said, speaking rather softly as though that meant I were not really asking, ‘how much she paid to redeem them?’
‘I shouldn’t really,’ she said. ‘And if my ma was here she’d take her hand off me . . .’
‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘before she comes back . . .’
The little woman gave me a sad smile.
‘Oh, there’s no coming back from where she’s gone, madam,’ she said. ‘It was seventeen pounds Miss McInnes gave me today for redemption.’
‘Gosh,’ I said, thinking that if this were the going rate for a few baubles and old nighties, there had been times in the past when I could have furn
ished myself with very useful amounts of pocket money if I had had the nerve to shove some of my treasures over a pawnshop counter. There is a set of Sèvres too hideous to display, much less eat off, which is seeing out its days in a crate in an attic; and much of my grandmother’s jewellery is wilfully ugly and just shy of being worth resetting in wearable form. The pawnbroker read my mind and set me straight.
‘That’s got a fair bit of interest on it, mind,’ she said. ‘I’ve had it a good while.’ I looked again at the upper shelves of parcels, where the paper was sun-bleached even in this basement room and the labels were curled up like autumn leaves.
‘Of course,’ I said, hoping that I was not blushing. ‘Well, thank you. I shall try to keep Superintendent Hardy from troubling you.’
‘No odds to me,’ said the woman. ‘I’ve nothing to hide from the coppers.’ She gave me a shrewd look as she sat herself down again, gripping the edge of a shelf and kicking her lame leg out as she fell backwards. I wished I had given her more than a pound, suddenly, and did not like to leave such a good little person, all alone in this frankly quite depressing setting. As I let myself out into the passageway, however, I met a youngish man in his shirtsleeves carrying in his arms a fat toddler with tight brown curls and round brown eyes.
‘Afternoon,’ he said to me, and then to the child, ‘Let’s see if Mammy’s got the kettle on yet, Daisy, eh?’
I put my unneeded sympathy away again and retraced my steps to the kiosk. Inside, seven of the pennies had gone but three were still where I had left them.
‘Me again, Barrow,’ I said, and then, ‘Alec, darling, do you think you might answer the telephone yourself for a while? It’s not very sensible to be using up my three minuteses waiting for Barrow to track you down.’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Alec. ‘Stop nagging. What happened?’
‘Well, I’ve had my assumptions about the nature of humanity pleasantly overturned,’ I said, thinking of the strapping young man and his crippled wife, and of the two remaining thruppence bits, ‘but as far as Phyllis goes, it seems she has suddenly come into funds. Petty cash to the likes of you, guv’nor, but quite a tidy sum to a housemaid. Seventeen pounds, at least. I need to ask Lollie whether Pip kept that kind of money in his pockets and if not we must ask ourselves where else she could have got it from.’ Hanging a dog on the strength of a bad name and the sudden acquisition of seventeen pounds is not good detecting, of course, but one could not help the idea that a girl who was fond enough of finery to pawn her grandmother’s wedding ring, who could be in as jolly spirits as Phyllis was today when all around was death and calamity, had just the kind of single-minded toughness required of a murderer or indeed a blackmailer of murderers. Who in the house had seventeen pounds lying around to have blackmailed out of him – or her – was another question.
Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains Page 13
