The Winter Ground

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Mrs Tilling said your cook would know,’ I said, thinking it a great brainwave.

  ‘Ah, the almond tart!’ said Lord Buckie.

  ‘Indeed.’

  Nurse Currie, I learned in the kitchen, had left Glasgow after ‘thon dreadful winter’ and, unable to face again the kind of emptiness she had found on the Grampian shores, had plumped for a happy medium and was now settled in Stirlingshire, working – so Mrs Mallen told me – in a ‘very nice’ mother and baby nursing home and walking out with a builder.

  ‘Not, you understand, m’lady, a home for mothers, dear me no’ – Mrs Mallen lowered her voice even at that to prevent the scullery maid, a girl of very tender years, from hearing – ‘but a lying-in hospital for ladies. Happier work she said in her letter to me when she took up the position there, much happier work bringing babies into the world than easing souls out of it. She was shaken to her marrow that terrible Christmas time she was here with us, m’lady.’

  I had encountered Mrs Mallens and their m’ladying before in my time and they always amused me. The idea was – in so far as I had ever been able to pin it down firmly – that they had spent so long so deeply embedded in such an exalted household that they had quite forgotten there were such things as commoners in the world and every female guest was an automatic m’lady. Of course, the expectation was that one would correct them and then endure the look of surprised pity as they adjusted one in their view. If, as I did now, one let the matter hang, one put the poor fools in a state of impotent torment from which there was no escape.

  ‘And so you have her address, Mrs Mallen?’ I said.

  She did and, with a great show of effort and much stertorous breathing, she removed her apron and cuffs, washed her hands under the cold tap and stumped off upstairs to her bedroom to copy it out for me. This took an unconscionable length of time but eventually I rejoined Alec and the inspector on the drive and there had been time for the interior of the motor car to heat through beautifully and for Bunty and Milly to recover from the excitement of the reunion and fall back to sleep.

  ‘Well, he certainly had a motive for that one,’ said the inspector, when I had relayed my discoveries. ‘It beggars belief, this nurse keeping her lip buttoned. Wonder if she’s on the take? Or I tell you what – you said this Laurie character has women stashed here, there and yonder. She might be another of them.’

  ‘What I said was that he has an understanding with a piano teacher who lives on the estate,’ I reminded him.

  ‘And there was the low-born woman he ditched years back, when the title bobbed to the surface.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s Miss Currie who is to be elevated when Lord Buckie pops off,’ said Alec. ‘Perhaps she’s waiting in Stirlingshire like a princess in a tower for her prince to come.’

  ‘Perhaps she killed the lot of them.’

  ‘Perhaps she was never a nurse and Laurie brought her in to see if she could polish them all off for him.’

  It was rather like listening to my sons.

  ‘I have a serious point to make,’ I said, and then I regretted the way they instantly sobered, with twitching lips and brows pulled ostentatiously downwards – why does any pair of male creatures always gang up on and make ridiculous a solitary female who comes to join them? ‘This low-born female. The ordinary Miss as Hugh called her: what if it were Anastasia? What if Robin recognised her and she recognised him and that’s why she left the ring and that’s why he killed her?’

  ‘Why, exactly?’ said Alec. ‘I agree about the recognising. But why would she have to die?’

  ‘And didn’t she leave the ring because her pony threw a wobbler?’ said Hutchinson. I looked away from him. I had not, as yet, come clean about Donald and Teddy.

  ‘His “wobbler”, Inspector,’ said Alec valiantly, ‘could have been caused by her reaction to seeing Laurie. I mean surely he must have been even more attuned than an ordinary pony to her every twitch and shudder, and I remember being thrown off a very well-schooled mount once, just for sneezing.’

  Inspector Hutchinson answered Alec although his eyes were trained on me.

  ‘Very nicely argued, sir,’ he said.

  ‘My sons were fibbing,’ I said, glad to have got it off my chest at long last. ‘Pa Cooke terrified them and they panicked.’

  There was a long silence, during which the picture of Donald and Teddy in arrow-patterned suits, familiar from the Cinerama, pressed in on me.

  ‘Well, I did say I wasn’t in the business of collecting scalps,’ said the inspector at long last. ‘Good to have it straight in the end, though.’ I was blushing furiously and I busied myself with a non-existent problem in the area of my glove-buttons until the blush subsided. ‘But we all agree,’ he went on, ‘that it’s a country mile more likely he’d kill someone he knew than a complete stranger?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘but we need something more than his knowing the girl to serve as a motive proper.’

  ‘Well, having knowledge of women is very often at the root of things, madam,’ said Hutchinson, ‘I’ve seen it more times than I can tell you. Murder is hardly ever a damned thing to do with hate, if I might speak so plainly. Oh no. Love and money is what it comes down to. And drink. But this kind of murder that we’re looking at here? Love and money, mark my words.’

  Then, like the barrels of a lock holding the safe door closed, all the pieces fell in together with a click.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ I said. ‘He married her. He married his ordinary Miss, when it looked as though there was no reason for him not to. His brother had heirs and successors coming out of his ears and Robin married his girlfriend without his brother’s approval or consent. Then …’

  ‘Then came the ’flu,’ said Alec, taking up the tale, ‘and down went the heirs, with Robin helping the last one on her way. Now everything was different. Now his brother’s blessing was make-or-break and such a marriage would have broken it to bits but it was too late. The deed was done. Then what?’

  ‘Then what?’ cried Hutchinson, so sharply that Alec swerved off the lane and we bumped along in a soft verge for an exciting moment until his wheels found the ash again. ‘Then his young wife, who saw him kill the niece, or maybe heard that he had, had a sensible think to herself and realised that she was next for the shove off the cliff top and she hooked it.’

  ‘To the circus?’

  ‘Maybe that’s where he found her in the first place,’ I said. ‘That would explain why he’d be so sure his brother wouldn’t accept the creature.’

  ‘And he’s been looking for her ever since?’ said Alec. ‘Scouring every show in the land?’

  ‘Trying to find her and persuade her into a divorce – let’s give him the benefit, eh? – or find her and do away with her before his brother hears about it. If his brother dies and she comes out of the woodwork there’d be an almighty scandal.’

  ‘But would Robin care about a scandal?’ I said.

  ‘Maybe what’s worrying him is that she would hold the drowned niece over his head and take him for his last penny,’ said Alec.

  ‘And you know what it does help us with, all of this?’ said the inspector. ‘It explains why he would sneak out right there and then and bash her head in on the ground. No time to lose, see? His brother was sinking. Hang the consequences if it all went wrong.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time he’d leapt into action,’ said Alec. ‘I mean, we don’t think he dragged his niece to the cliff top and threw her over, do we? We think she set out to kill herself and he helped. Or he happened to find her at the edge of the cliff and gave her a timely shove.’

  ‘Oh, don’t say it like that,’ I begged him. ‘Don’t let’s speculate at all. Nurse Currie is going to tell us the worst soon enough.’

  * * *

  It was dark before we reached Stirling, the three of us gaunt with exhaustion – Alec actually asleep – although Inspector Hutchinson was revelling in his turn at the wheel.

  ‘I learned to drive in a Vau
xhall,’ he said, polishing a portion of the woodwork with his coat sleeve, and not for the first time. ‘An old Prince Henry and I always say, if it was good enough for His Majesty it’s good enough for me. Now, madam, what’s that address you’ve got there? What are we looking for?’

  By the light of Alec’s electric torch I could just make out Mrs Mallen’s laborious pencilled printing, but we had to stop and ask for directions from a newspaperman on a street corner who came out of his kiosk to peer into the car at the lady and gentleman who some copper was taking to the baby hospital. What was the story here, then, his face seemed to say as he told us the way.

  ‘No better than you should be,’ said Hutchinson when he climbed back in and we set off again, ‘that’s what he’s decided, madam. He’ll be telling that tale till closing time.’

  The practised eye of the nurse who answered the bell at Campsie Grange was not taken in for a second, though. Even in my bulky Persian lamb I presented an outline far too svelte for a customer and she was at a loss. When Inspector Hutchinson introduced himself and showed his card with his policeman’s number, however, her look of fascination knocked that of the newspaper seller’s for an effortless six.

  ‘If you could fetch Nurse Currie then, miss?’ said Hutchinson. ‘And if you could just say she has a visitor, please? I don’t want her alarmed. Now, is there a sitting room or some such where we could speak to her?’

  There was rather a splendid nurses’ sitting room, in fact, out of which three off-duty girls in curlpapers and knitted slippers were unceremoniously bundled to make way for us.

  ‘Well, go and sit in the doctor’s room,’ hissed our guide. ‘There’s nobody in there tonight.’ To further grumbling we heard an exasperated ‘Well, light it then. It’ll soon warm up. Or fill a bottle. Now, let me go and get Susan for these … people.’

  Feeling rather guilty, Alec and I tucked ourselves on to a sofa by the fire, which had been burning all day and was a pulsating heap of orange, delicious after the endless drive. The inspector strode about the room, whistling, flipping through picture papers lying on the desk and even, I was rather shocked to see, poking his pen into a pile of letters and reading the names on the envelopes. Then quickly, as the door opened, he turned.

  Nurse Currie was a woman of forty, small and with a mass of dark curls which hugged her white cap and tumbled over her forehead, despite attempts at the back to tame them with pins and netting. She had the bloom that most girls have in their youth but only the very lucky or very healthy retain throughout their middle years, pink lips, pink cheeks, clear eyes and a softness of skin one usually associates with woodcutters’ wives who live in clearings in the forest, rather than working nurses in the middle of their shift. Surely they should look either wan or ruddy from toil? For a moment, Alec’s idea of Nurse Currie as Robin’s abandoned Miss reared its head again.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she said, sitting down very neatly in a small chair just inside the door. I supposed nurses must need to work up a neat way of sitting, for what could be more unseemly than a birth-room, or indeed a deathbed, sprawl?

  Inspector Hutchinson introduced himself and the two of us to her and she looked puzzled, as how could she not, but her wide eyes showed no scheming; there was no leap of guilt or flare of fear.

  ‘We would like to talk to you about a young lady you nursed a few years ago,’ Hutchinson began. ‘A Miss Ambrosine Laurie.’

  ‘Lady Ambrosine Buckie,’ I corrected.

  ‘Aye, right,’ said the inspector. ‘No one like the aristocracy for collecting names. Outside of the circus, anyway.’

  ‘I’m sure, Nurse Currie,’ I said, ‘that even in the course of a long career, you will remember this case.’

  She nodded, pursing her mouth slightly. ‘Robert, Thomas, Charlotte, little Victoria, then Her Ladyship, until there was only Amber left. That’s what the family called her, madam – Amber – and I did the same.’

  ‘Yes, well, it’s Lady Amber that we need to ask you about most particularly,’ said Hutchinson. ‘It’s recently come to my attention that you might know more about her death than almost anyone.’

  Now Nurse Currie’s eyes did just cloud over slightly and she bowed her head before she spoke again.

  ‘It’s a thing I’ve never done before or since,’ she said, ‘and you’ll just have to take my word for it. You’ve been speaking to that Mrs Wilson, haven’t you?’

  Inspector Hutchinson nodded.

  ‘Well, there’s proof of it,’ she said. ‘I knew it would be her you’d got it from because I’ve never told another living soul. The things I’ve heard in sickrooms and I’ve been twenty-two years nursing this Easter. That was the only time I talked and I had to, sir. Had to.’ She spoke with great emphasis. ‘Because I didn’t know what to do for the best and it would have pressed on me like a knife if I’d tried to ignore it.’

  ‘You didn’t know what to do for the best?’ echoed the inspector. ‘Where was the puzzle? If there’s been a crime, you report it. That’s what’s best, every time.’

  ‘But I’m not sure that it was a crime,’ she said, the anguish beginning to sound in her voice. ‘That’s what I couldn’t decide. And Mrs Wilson told me the best thing to do was just try to forget about it and not let it eat away at me.’

  ‘I’ll bet she did!’ said Alec, grimly.

  ‘But what was there to decide?’ I said. ‘Robin Laurie drowned his niece. Isn’t that so? Whether he threw her into the water or held her under or even just stood on the cliff and did nothing. He killed her. Ina Wilson told us that.’

  ‘No,’ said Nurse Currie, ‘that’s not what happened at all and it’s not what I said. Mrs Wilson is misremembering, or at least maybe she never understood properly in the first place. She was ill, weak, and she only let me say it once then she just insisted that we both forget it and never mention it again.’

  ‘That sounds about right,’ Alec said.

  ‘So what did happen?’ said Hutchinson.

  ‘Amber didn’t catch the ’flu that winter, not like all the others did,’ Nurse Currie began. ‘She was just her own same self, playing her games and telling her wild tales – she was a girl like no other one I’ve ever seen; her father used to say she was a changeling.’ I nodded, encouraging. ‘But when her little brothers and little sisters died and then her mother that she loved so much, for they were the closest of families, unusual for people of that station in life—’ Here she stumbled over her words and coloured a little, realising her audience. ‘Well, anyway. She crumpled up. The sorriest thing you could ever hope to see. And when her mother was gone, Amber left a note and then she went too. I saw the note, sitting against her bedroom mirror – I was done with nursing by then, because there were no children left to nurse and half the maids were sick so I was helping. I was putting pressed linens away and I saw it. “To the finest father I could ever have hoped for,” it said on the envelope. I didn’t know where to put myself, what to do. I must have stood there for ten minutes together, just saying “Think, Susan, think” to myself but unable to move. When I finally came to again, I went round the grounds, round the gardens, the park, down to the beach, to her favourite little place where she played at palaces and pirate ships and crusaders – even though it was only a little shack really – and that’s where I saw him. He was looking for her too – her uncle was – and he had the letter in his hand. He came out of the shack and stood on the beach then he took a match from his pocket – I was hiding behind a tree watching him – he took a match from his pocket and he lit that letter on fire and dropped it on the sand.’

  She stopped, her eyes straining at the effort of dragging the memory up and into the room for us. Inspector Hutchinson delved into an inside pocket and drew out a slim flask. He offered it to Nurse Currie but she only frowned at him, smoothed her uniform skirt over her knees and carried on.

  ‘I thought maybe he had read it and had thought it best his brother never saw what she’d written there. I just waited, scared to
move in case he saw me, waited for him to leave the beach first, but then what did he do? He ran into the sea, clothes, boots and all, in he went. I was just going to run out and go after him, try to call to him, tell him not to do it, when he turned and came out on his own. Then off he went, up to the house, and that night they told the staff. Told all of us. Amber had drowned. Amber was gone and even her uncle hadn’t managed to save her.’

  She could not have asked for a more rapt audience than the three of us; we sat like stone, each of us thinking.

  ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ Nurse Currie said. ‘If her letter had told her poor daddy that she was running off and leaving him, then her uncle did a kind thing, didn’t he? But would it be better for His Lordship to have hope and a reason to search for her?’

  ‘But why are you so sure she ran off?’ I said. ‘Why don’t you believe she really did jump into the sea? A note can just as easily mean suicide as it can a runaway and you say yourself you didn’t read it.’

  Nurse Currie nodded. ‘But she just wouldn’t, madam, you’d have to have known her. She was as lively as ten monkeys; she’d have rallied again and been back to all her daft ways. Joan of Arc with her sword, Marie Antoinette in her tower, Empress Anastasia hiding in the palace till the murdering rascals were gone. That was her favourite game of all.’

  ‘Anastasia!’ said the inspector, sitting back so suddenly that the word was forced out of him in a rush.

  ‘See, that’s how I knew she’d not kill herself just because her mother and all the little ones were gone. She had played that game with me, in the very sickroom, if you believe it. She told me that Anastasia was strong and she had fought for her life and not lain down and died with the others. “That’s the kind of girl I want to be, Nurse Susan,” she said to me. “I’m going to have adventures and be thrilling and people will clap and cheer when they see me.” How could that girl have thrown herself into the sea?’