After the Armistice Ball

by Catriona McPherson

  Chapter Eighteen

  I was miles from her house before I could stop the cackling laughter ripping around my head, halfway home before my blood stopped thundering. Perhaps it was just as well, for without nerves and shivers to help me I should never have had the strength for another long drive. As it was I just about held together, but my little motor car was fizzing hot and had developed one clank and two different grinds under its bonnet when I hauled into the stable yard again, twenty hours after quitting it. It gave one last smoky bang and came to what felt like a permanent stop.

  Alec, who had evidently been watching for me, came around from the drive with Bunty in tow, and as she and I fussed over each other, I quickly told him the bare bones of my news: the baby from years ago, the desecration of Cara’s body, and a little about Nettle Jennie herself.

  ‘Completely hopeless?’ he asked.

  ‘If you’d only been there,’ I said. ‘With such a witness to lean on, we’d be lucky not to be committed, never mind her. But, speaking of lunatics . . . What she said about Lena can’t be ignored. We shall just have to go to the police on our own and do our best. Let me wash and change and then we’ll talk it through.’

  We entered the house through the gun room door, which was nearest, and as we hurried along the passageway Hugh popped his head out of the library.

  ‘Well?’ he said. ‘How was she?’

  I blinked at him and then at Alec. What had Alec been saying?

  ‘Yes, how was Daisy?’ said Alec with a penetrating look at me.

  ‘Oh! Daisy! She was . . . um.’ A sudden brainwave. ‘She was utterly beside herself. And I think, I really do, that she should go to the police. Don’t you think, Alec? Blackmail, after all, is a crime.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Alec. Then he added stoutly, ‘Absolutely. You should ring her right now and tell her, Dandy.’ We began to walk very fast.

  ‘Blackmail?’ said Hugh’s voice behind us. ‘I thought it was moths.’

  I asked for Croys and waited, drumming my fingers impatiently and staring at Alec without seeing him, while the operator put me through, the bell rang out and the butler answered. Then I fell to earth with a thud as he told me that Mrs Esslemont was away. I sent him to get Silas.

  ‘What will I say?’ I hissed to Alec, with my hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Silas doesn’t know half of what I’ve been up to. Will I try to fill him in?’

  ‘Just ask him where Daisy is,’ said Alec. ‘She may only be out for tea with the vicar. Calm down, Dandy, for God’s sake, and try to sound normal.’

  ‘Hello?’ came Silas’s voice on the line. ‘That you, Dan? You’re out of luck I’m afraid. Daisy’s not here.’

  ‘Where’s she off to, darling?’ I asked, in my best casual drawl. ‘How that baggage does desert you!’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Silas, obviously quite taken with the chance of some unforeseen self-pity. ‘I can’t complain, really. She’s on a mercy mission. Gone to see Lena Duffy.’

  ‘What?’ I breathed.

  ‘I agree,’ Silas went on. ‘After all that nonsense in the spring, I wouldn’t have said Daisy owes Lena any friendship. But Lena rang up this morning and Daisy has gone to help. Something to do with servant problems. No servants at the cottage or something? I wasn’t really listening. And then Daisy said she was off, kiss kiss darling, and see you tonight. You know how she is, lots of noise and no detail, but –’

  ‘Silas, I have to go,’ I said. ‘Stay by the telephone and I shall ring you as soon as I have news.’ I slammed the earpiece into the cradle.

  ‘Daisy has gone to see Lena,’ I said, and I could feel the colour drain out of my face too as I watched Alec pale. ‘She’s walked right into it, Alec, and it’s all my fault.’

  We stared at one another in a lengthening, darkening silence. I was waiting for Alec to say there was no need to worry, not to give way to hysteria. He might have been waiting for me to say the same, but all I could think of was my letter to Daisy, that stupid, cowardly letter, designed only to save my pride. I had told her nothing that could put her on her guard, had primed her with a line which, repeated in all innocence, had delivered her unsuspecting, perhaps feeling confident, straight into Lena’s hands.

  I fumbled the earpiece out of the cradle again and rattled the lever to summon the operator.

  ‘Edinburgh police headquarters, please,’ I said and then shoved the thing into Alec’s hands, knowing I could not rely on myself to form words. I sat down on the arm of the sofa and listened to him trying.

  ‘You have to send someone along there as soon as you can,’ he was saying. ‘I’ll give you the address. What? No, there has been no crime committed, not yet – except, yes, there has but unless you get there in time I – What? My name? Alexander Osborne, but it really doesn’t matter. Dorset, but listen. Listen, the woman’s name is Eleanor Duffy and the address is 28 Drummond Place in Edinburgh. There is a lady visiting there, a Mrs Esslemont . . . Now look, I am trying to tell you in the plainest possible terms, that Mrs Esslemont – This woman has murdered once already and . . . I am not drunk. Please! Someone must go to the house and get her out, before –’

  He crashed the telephone down and shook his head.

  ‘Waste of time,’ he said. ‘If Daisy comes to any harm I shall string that idiot up with my own hands. Ring the Duffy house, Dandy.’

  I summoned the operator again, and with a tut and a sigh, as though for all the world this was not exactly what she was paid for, she put me through. As it rang out, I tried to compose a speech.

  ‘Where is the telephone?’ I said. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘In the hallway,’ Alec said and nodded, knowing exactly what I was thinking. ‘Ask for Daisy,’ he went on, ‘and then tell her simply to walk out of the front door and not stop.’

  And yet, even then, even as late as that, I found myself frowning and felt my face twist into an embarrassed grimace at the thought of Daisy breaking the bounds of convention at my behest, walking away from her hostess’s house without her hat or her gloves and not taking her leave. Had Daisy come to the telephone, I wonder still if I should have been able to issue the command, or whether I should have said that of course she might go and say goodbye to Lena, even finish her tea. Luckily, I was not put to the test.

  ‘Mrs Esslemont, madam?’ asked the butler, coldly. ‘I’m afraid you are mistaken. Mrs Esslemont is not here.’ My heart – I think it was my heart although it seemed rather lower in my body than that, lower certainly than the place one presses when one’s panic is feigned – whatever it was anyway it gave a lurching bump, but I managed to keep my voice light.

  ‘Might I speak to Mrs Duffy then, please?’

  ‘Madam is at the Perthshire house, madam,’ said the butler, if possible even more frostily.

  ‘I – I thought it was shut up,’ I said, relief washing over me in waves of warm and chill. Daisy would find no one at home in Edinburgh and come back safe and sound.

  ‘Madam has gone for the day,’ said the butler, his voice now sharp with disapproval. ‘Gone to meet a friend there.’

  I let the earpiece fall and ran for the front door, leaping down the steps to Alec’s motor car, going over on my ankle in the gravel, but managing to right myself. I got the car into gear first try after Alec, eyes wide with alarm, cranked the starter. We could see Donald and Teddy standing on the lawn, mystified, as we sped down the drive.

  ‘They’re at Dunelgar,’ I said. ‘We can be there in half an hour.’

  That half-hour was the worst experience of my life, childbirth included. We shot along the high-hedged lanes, careening round bends, spraying gravel, churning earth on the verges. My ankle shrieked every time I stepped down on the pedal, but I could not stop. Over and over I heard Silas’s voice in my head: ‘kiss kiss darling, see you tonight, you know how she is’. The affectionate exasperation, something he never troubled to hide and which had always made me feel shut out and envious of her, now hammered at me. I glanced at Alec. His knuckles wer
e as white as gnawed drumsticks where he held on to the dashboard, and his face was stricken, a rictus only just held at bay in his clenched jaw, but he at least had no reason to blame himself for what was happening, might be happening, surely could not be happening. I snapped my eyes back to the road and pressed down harder, wincing.

  Mercifully we met no jostling sheep plugging any of the little roads, no ambling lethal cordons of cows. Only one small child in a grubby pinafore playing at a puddle outside her front gate caused me to swerve and I felt the claws of a hawthorn hedge screech along the paintwork.

  ‘There can’t be . . .’ said Alec at last. ‘Can there be . . . Is there any innocent reason for Lena to meet Daisy in a closed-up house all alone?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘And why on earth would Daisy agree to go?’ he demanded, worry turning him querulous. ‘What is it that Lena knows about Daisy, Dan?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘And that should at least have made me cautious about . . . Oh Alec, if only it weren’t for my letter. Or if only I had rung Daisy sooner, she would never have gone. At least she would have taken Silas or a servant.’ The steering wheel slipped in my hand as a sudden thought crashed in upon me. ‘Perhaps she did. Perhaps she took – oh, what’s his name? – Menzies, the chauffeur. He’s enormous, and he adores Daisy. If Menzies took her perhaps everything will be fine.’

  Shock cannot be sustained for long periods of time. I have found this, and not only shock but any extremes of feeling at all. Perhaps, though, it is only me and perhaps this means there is something vital lacking in me, that I cannot keep being worried or miserable without respite for even half an hour. Anyway, I clutched at the possibility that Daisy, far from being alone in a deserted house with Lena, had rolled up with the burly and devoted Menzies at her side; Menzies, who would surely hear a raised voice resounding through empty rooms.

  Another fact I have learned about shock and panic, however, is that after a rest one can return to them refreshed, as though one had simply spat on one’s hands and taken a better grip. So now the twist and grind of tension simply shifted focus, and instead of yearning just for arrival I could feel myself keening forward in my mind to the sight of Menzies and the Rolls.

  ‘And you’re sure, are you,’ said Alec, ‘about what Lena was holding over Cara? The baby?’

  ‘Nettle Jennie was sure,’ I said, ‘and I’d trust her before Dr Milne any day. Now hold on.’

  We were turning into Dunelgar at last, past the little lodge house with its windows boarded up, through the one gate that lay open, only inches to spare on each side. We roared along the drive, squinting at the cars drawn up by the front door, Lena’s Bentley and what? What was behind it?

  ‘It’s the Vauxhall,’ said Alec. ‘She’s on her own.’

  We skidded to a stop at the far side of the circle, I not trusting myself to steer any closer to the stone parapet and the other cars, my arms now flickering with fright and my fingers slipping numbly over the wheel. Alec sprinted up the steps to the door and I hurried after him, hopping and stumbling now on my swollen ankle. He wrenched the heavy door open – it was not locked – and together we stepped inside.

  The shutters all around the hall were closed and light seeped in around their edges and cut slices through the dark. Reeling from the effort of standing still, we waited and listened, beginning to see shapes in the gloom, sheeted humps of furniture. Beyond them, all the doors were shut and there was not a sound.

  It was almost seven o’clock and we had no idea when Daisy had set out, how long she had been here. The two cars still outside were a good sign, I thought, and it was some crazy kind of comfort to know that Lena was capable of long careful planning. Perhaps we were not too late. I forced back down the thought that came hard on the heels of that one, that we also knew she capable of action, swift and brutal.

  Alec had thrown back the dust sheet on a side table by the door and was rummaging under it. He gave a grunt of satisfaction and straightened, a candlestick in each hand. He held one out to me.

  ‘Gilded bronze,’ he whispered. ‘They weigh a ton.’

  ‘But there are no candles,’ I whispered back. I saw the outline of Alec’s hair move slightly against a thin shaft of light as he shook his head.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I see.’

  ‘Ssh,’ said Alec. ‘Come on.’

  Holding the candlestick across my breast like a shield, I limped after him. The rug was rolled and tied in sacking along one wall and our footsteps sounded as loud as knocks on the bare floor, even louder as we came out into the stairwell and they caught the echo. I strained to hear another sound, a voice or a breath or even the whisper of cloth as someone moved, but all I could hear was the sound of myself listening, a tinny crackle in my ears which – I could not decide – was either my imagination, or was born of the intensity of my concentration, or even was always there but never heeded until this moment.

  Softly we opened door after door, the latches protesting after their long disuse and the dirt in the hinges scraping, but in each room we saw nothing but white shapes and the silent dance of dust. Any of these muffled chairs might have an occupant. Any of these swathed, lumpy tabletops might be concealing Lena, curled and silent, and breathing as shallow as she could with her heart thrilling, or might, I knew, shroud Daisy, more silent still and beyond our help.

  We stepped back to the foot of the stairs and paused before beginning to climb. The carpet on the stairs had been left in place or at any rate the felt backing had and we rose up each step without a sound. I felt my lip start to tremble and sensed the candlestick threaten to slip in my sweaty hands. I let out a breath in the smallest whimper I could, terrified that if I held it in any longer, it would end in a sob.

  ‘Have you seen something?’ said Alec, so quietly it was as though his voice was inside my head.

  ‘No,’ I breathed back. ‘It’s my foot. I twisted it.’

  I suddenly realized that it was my foot and, bending, I set the candlestick down and closed my hand around the worst of the pain. It was hard and hot, bulging up around the top of my shoe. I lifted my heel, but resting all my weight on my toe was worse. Alec crouched beside me and felt first my good ankle and then the other, squeezing a little too hard and making me gasp.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘I’ll go on on my own.’ He must have been able to see me shake my head. ‘Well, all right, but take my arm.’

  Thus we went on, I leaning heavily on Alec’s free arm, clasping his wrist tight and biting down on the knuckle of my other hand to stop the tears. Dread, shame and pain wrestled one another inside me, until each seemed to withdraw to a different part of me and settle there, the pain clenching my jaw, the dread of what was to come pounding an ache like a fence-post into my head behind my eyes, and the shame of it all – Silas’s voice – lodged like sandbags in my guts.

  At the top of the stairs a passageway stretched out in both directions. To our left the meagre light slowly ran out and the corridor sank into gentle gradual darkness like a mouth, like a throat, but to our right we could see the passage turning a corner. We could see the angle of the wall and the sharp shadow it cast reaching towards us; somewhere along that way was an unshuttered window. Without speaking we started to move towards the light, and as we turned the corner, the brilliancy of it shooting out around the door at the end seemed too much to be the mild sunshine we had left outside on the drive. The door seemed to seethe with the effort of holding it and when I reached out and turned the handle it was as though the light itself burst out.

  Almost in the centre of the ballroom, small and dark against the soaring windows and mirrors all around, Daisy sat primly on a wooden chair looking at her feet. I blinked and shook my head, and then I saw that her feet were taped up in what looked like a bandage and bound to one of the chair legs, together and to the side, crossed at the ankle just as we had been taught to sit at school, but her hands were behind her back instead of in her lap and the upright set of her shoulde
rs came from the rope holding her hard to the chair-back, without which not only her head would be drooping.

  I started towards her, with a howl of sour despair rising up inside me, but at my movement her head jerked up, her eyes rolling above the tape on her mouth, and her whole body began to surge, the chair creaking and rocking with each heave against the ropes. Alec got to her before me, worked her mouth free of the gag and knelt to tussle with the cord around her wrists as I took her head in my arms and held it.

  ‘She said no one would ever find me,’ Daisy said, working her face free of my grasp. ‘She told me no one would ever find me and Silas would never prove anything. But she must be mad. I kept telling her half a dozen people knew I was here and she couldn’t hope to get away with it, and that’s when she gagged me.’

  Alec freed her wrists at last and hunched over her ankles.

  ‘Can you walk?’ he said. ‘Has she hurt you? Because as soon as these ropes are off you must run. I shall have to carry Dandy, so you must run along beside us.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll start now. I’ll be out before you. I’ll hop.’

  Alec put out a hand and gripped my arm so tightly my fingers tingled.

  ‘Don’t go out of my sight,’ he said, still working at the bandage with his one free hand. I moved back to stand by Daisy.

  ‘Where is she?’ I asked, but before it was out of my mouth I heard footsteps, brisk, light, tapping towards us. A door in the panelling opened slowly outward and I caught a glimpse of a dark stone-lined corridor, a service corridor. Lena nudged the flap of the door wide with her hip, her eyes down, concentrating on the crowded tray of objects she carried.

  We stood frozen while she negotiated the door, even Alec’s hands stopping their worrying to watch Lena edge into the ballroom and look up from the tray. Slowly, she took in the sight of us. Then she turned with a quickness that startled at least me and hurled the tray back through the gap in the closing door to scatter its contents on the stone floor of the passage.