I was forced to stop at the kerb on George Street while a number of taxis passed and, glancing along, I saw a willowy figure dressed in black emerge from a shop on the other side, followed by another, bulkier, outline in deeper and yet more garish mourning. The second was undoubtedly an upper servant of some description but the first, now walking in my direction, was Clemence Duffy. I scuttled across between taxis and, composing my face into friendly sympathy, approached them.
‘Darling,’ I exclaimed, attempting to press Clemence to me, maternally. ‘What happened to the Lake District? Is your mother better? Not worse, I hope. Not too ill to travel?’ Clemence, after recovering from her initial surprise at seeing me and, I expect, at being clasped so inexpertly to my bosom, looked rather pleased, or as pleased as her unanimated face ever did.
‘Mummy and Daddy are still at Grasmere but I came home to pack for Lucerne.’
‘You’re alone?’
‘No,’ she said, waving vaguely behind her. ‘Nanny’s here.’ I nodded towards the elderly servant who hovered nearby clutching a bulky parcel done up in brown paper. ‘I’m to go through Cara’s things before Mummy comes home, and then there are such a lot of letters to be answered.’ I was still puzzled. It was authentic enough that Mrs Duffy might not be up to this, but it looked very odd to leave Clemence to deal with what would have been such upsetting tasks. Even while this fresh evidence that Cara was not really dead cheered me, I suffered exasperation that their act was so unconvincing.
‘Besides,’ Clemence continued, ‘there was something else I particularly wanted to attend to.’ She patted the parcel in Nanny’s arms and then, struck by a thought, she turned back to me with her sleepy, beatific smile. ‘Would you care to join me for luncheon, Dandy? And see it first? It will have to be at home, I’m afraid, because of the mourning, but you’re very welcome.’
We lunched off boiled chicken and asparagus jelly against a background of studied gloom in the dining room at Drummond Place, the shades being half-pulled, the room unadorned by any flowers, and the maid who served us red-eyed and sniffing. The servants at any rate were responding suitably to what they believed about Cara’s death, however bogus the family might appear to my over-informed eye. Afterwards, we carried coffee upstairs to a sitting room which, being at the back of the house, was allowed its full measure of sunlight. It was hardly more comfortable for that, however, being antiseptically modern. The white floor shone like glass, making one fearful to walk upon it too heavily, and it was hard to believe that one might sit on one piece of the gleaming white furniture and put down a coffee cup on another, so like sculpture and so unlike chairs and tables did they seem.
Clemence caught me gaping and said: ‘Mummy just had it done. Isn’t it delightful?’
I thought it looked silly against the Georgian windows and under the Georgian cornice, but could hardly say so. Luckily, Clemence turned from me and pounced on the brown paper parcel laid on a white cube of a table before the Georgian fireplace and began to pull off the wrapping.
It was a large black leather book, wider than it was long, its covers held shut by a ribbon. Untying this and flicking aside a sheet of tissue paper, she pushed it towards me and I saw it was a photograph album. The first photograph was of Cara. I caught my lip in my teeth to stifle a gasp; it was so beautiful, so light and soft-looking, quite unlike the usual snaps in which moon-faced freaks barely recognizable as one’s relations sit propped up like corpses. In this photograph, Cara, close up, only her head and shoulders showing, was standing in a room posed very casually with one elbow leaning on a chimneypiece, and although she was evidently facing the window (for I could see it reflected in the glass above the fireplace behind her) something to do with the light bouncing from behind as well as in front gave her an intensified version of that back-to-the-window glow every woman tries to arrange whenever she can. It was not just the light, though. Cara’s expression, too, was like a distillation of all that was so charming about her. She had her face half-turned away as though shy and was smiling the curling smile I remembered, but with such a serenity that, forgetting for a moment that she was still alive, I felt a lump form in my throat.
‘Look,’ said Clemence, turning the stiff page, ‘they’re not all of her.’ She showed me pictures of Mrs Duffy and of Clemence herself in the same room, sitting in plump armchairs or standing against the windows, sprigged cotton curtains billowing around them.
‘These are heavenly, Clemence,’ I said, turning to the next, which had Mrs Duffy and Clemence sitting at a garden table with teacups. With a jolt, I recognized the shingle path and the white fence in the background and realized that this was the beach cottage. Quite a substantial structure, I saw, almost to the point that calling it a cottage was an affectation, and I thought again about the way it had been reduced to such a small pile of ash. My detective instinct prompted a question.
‘Did someone from the photographer’s shop come down for a visit, then?’ I thought that such an individual would surely have something to tell me, and felt a surge of excitement to think of him five minutes’ walk away in George Street. Alec would be astounded.
‘No,’ said Clemence. ‘These are mine. I mean, I took them.’
‘Well, they’re splendid,’ I said. ‘People usually look like propped-up… dolls, don’t they? But these are lovely.’ Clemence’s face does not pucker into easy frowns any more than it breaks into grins, but something did happen in her expression then.
‘I hope Mummy doesn’t mind,’ she said. ‘Only I went to such trouble.’
‘Of course she won’t mind, Clemence dear. She will be delighted. What luck that you should have taken them. And what extraordinary luck that they should not have been lost in the fire too.’
We were both silent for a moment considering this. Then Clemence blinked and her next words came in the quiet, careful voice she had used in the court.
‘I carry all my plates together in a special case – the fresh ones and the ones I’ve used – so naturally I had them with me on our walk.’
‘Naturally,’ I agreed.
Her face smoothed again. ‘I took the plates into Rollins’ when I got home,’ she said. ‘And I didn’t ask them to hurry or anything, so imagine how touching when they telephoned this morning to say they had made them up already. They must have done it because of Cara, don’t you think? They must have heard.’
‘People are sometimes too extraordinarily kind,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Clemence. ‘Only it’s not – I just hope Mummy isn’t angry.’
I could see how one might as easily think it ghoulish as touching, but I gave what I hoped was a reassuring smile, and went back to the topic of the photographs.
‘How did you take the ones with you in them?’ I asked, examining the picture of the garden more closely. Photographic tricks held no interest for me, but I thought a good run on her hobby horse would put Clemence back at her ease. However, when she spoke she sounded strained, starting the speech with a strangulated little laugh.