‘Tell me,’ said Alec. ‘Tales from the nursery are just what I need for a minute while I try to stop shaking.’ I went on reluctantly, tales from the nursery not being what I liked to think of as my forte.
‘Donald had gone off shooting rabbits after being expressly forbidden to do so, since there was a real shoot that day with several inexperienced guns and we didn’t want the boys getting peppered. Well, they were suspiciously quiet all morning but when Hugh bellowed up the nursery stairs demanding to know if they were there, they answered one after the other that yes they were but they were in a ticklish spot with a recalcitrant engine and couldn’t come down. Imagine our surprise, then, an hour later when Donald arrived in a neighbour’s motor car wrapped in a blanket, having fallen in the burn trying to get home without being seen. Little Teddy had answered for both, you see. “What is it, Daddy, we’re dashed busy.” And then “Yes, Dad, we’re almost there with this blasted engine. Must we come down?”
‘This wouldn’t have been possible before they went off to school. One spoke like Hugh and one spoke like his hero Angus, the cook’s son. Now they both just sound like schoolboys, like every schoolboy, as though they were turned out of a press in the dormitory at the beginning of their first term to be fostered on us.’
Alec looked quite calm again now, even managed a laugh, and I thought it was safe to turn the talk to my eventful morning. The failure of the visit to the jeweller was dealt with first and then I settled with some relish to what came after. I told him, without editorializing in the least, about Clemence being at home with Nanny to ‘take care of things’, and my puzzlement got its corroboration from his.
‘However,’ I said, ‘all that is nothing.’ I hunched forward over the table on my elbows and told him all about the photograph album, my idea about its original purpose, my disquiet about its contents and Clemence’s start of alarm at finding me poring over it.
‘You’re quite right,’ said Alec. ‘There is a strong smell of fish here.’
‘And,’ I said, becoming more sure with the warmth of his agreement, ‘I can’t help but wonder about such a painstaking record of what is ostensibly a very ordinary week in the country en famille. And then the chumminess in the pictures – it’s absolutely at odds with what we’ve heard about the frosty atmosphere.’
‘But what exactly have we heard about the atmosphere?’ said Alec. ‘Remind me what you were told.’
I cast my mind back over the Mrs Marshalls’ accounts and came to a rueful conclusion that I had made a great deal out of very little, merely that Cara and Clemence seemed not to want to be companions to one another and that Clemence was grumpy. Even added to the strange decision to all but dispense with a housekeeper, it did not amount to much. I fell silent, disappointed.
‘But tell me some more about these feelings you had about the photographs,’ said Alec. ‘What did you think was wrong with them?’
‘That’s just it,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. Only that there was something off. Not just the fact of their existence; we agree on that. But something about the photographs themselves just wasn’t right.’
‘Say again what they were,’ said Alec. ‘As much as you can remember.’ To my surprise he got out a pencil and a pad of paper and poised himself to make notes.
‘Well, there were the two portraits of Cara in the crêpe-de-Chine fr -’ I broke off. ‘The two portraits taken inside the cottage, I mean. And some of Clemence and of Lena in the same room, although these were not portraits exactly, more like snaps. So it’s almost as though they knew that the pictures of Cara were the ones that mattered and that’s not right, is it? Then there were some taken in the garden which were very pretty. Everyone under a tree in blossom with the french windows open to the house. Really very happy pictures, except that Cara got cross with Clemence for telling her what to do and flounced off, spoiling one. The only other I remember is of Lena and Cara on a cliff-top with their dresses blowing about in the wind. Clemence must have scrambled down and taken it from the beach, unless Lena and Cara climbed the cliff to have it taken. Oh, Alec, I don’t know. I need to have another look at them.’
‘Hmm. Hard to see how you could do that without making Clemence’s whiskers twitch,’ said Alec.
‘Which is exactly why I want you to pester her for a set of your own. Or at the very least you should take a good look at them to see if you can spot whatever it is that’s bothering me. As a man, you might alight on different aspects of…’ I fell silent, chasing a wisp of thought.
‘What?’ said Alec, but I shushed him.
‘Men and women, what was I thinking? Men and women… Oh!’ I sat up and slapped my hands down on the table. ‘I think I know what it is. Read me back exactly what you wrote down, Alec darling.’ He did so and before he was finished I interrupted him.
‘Yes, I’m sure I’m right. It’s the crêpe-de-Chine dress. They are supposed to be a record of a week in the country. A whole week. But don’t you see? Cara’s wearing the same crêpe-de-Chine afternoon frock in every one of them. And that’s not all.’ I stopped and stared down at the tablecloth trying to summon the pictures back before my eyes.
‘The picture on the cliff-top,’ I said. ‘The picture on the cliff-top has the sun behind them, that is, on the east, making it morning.’ The white cloth was dancing before my eyes, little purple and yellow spots blooming in it as I tried to concentrate. I shut my eyelids tight and thought furiously, trying to call to mind every detail.
‘Were you ever at the cottage?’ I asked. ‘I should love to know where the landing window sat in relation to the compass, because in the photograph with Cara looking over the banisters the sun is simply pouring in.’
Alec shook his head.
‘They’d only just got the place. This was their first visit to it.’
‘Well, Scottish architecture,’ I said. ‘Not exactly varied. I bet the staircase went up from the front and turned making the landing to the back and thus the landing window face east. Morning again, you see. And therefore extremely odd for Cara to be wearing a crêpe-de-Chine dress. That’s it. The pictures were all taken in one frantic session. Now, why should that be?’
Alec whistled softly and clapped his hands.
‘Well done,’ he said. ‘I should never have thought of that. But I wonder why they didn’t? Three ladies. Why didn’t they think to change their clothes?’
‘Perhaps they didn’t have time,’ I said, trying to remember if in fact all three ladies had been in the same clothes in all pictures. I only seemed to remember Cara, gleaming in her pale frock, and could not bring the others to mind.
‘Presumably,’ I went on, ‘they were trying to make a record of Cara’s presence throughout the week when in fact she was leaving in time to get far away before the fire, her “death”, and any investigation. What odds that if we managed to find the man with the dog who botched the picture of them all together, he’d tell us not only that it was morning but that it was the start of the week.’
‘I’ll bet that’s it,’ said Alec. ‘I’ll bet if you went back now, Dandy, and asked your Mrs Marshalls just when they saw Cara, they would tell you they saw a great deal of her at the very start of the visit and then not again. Shades of your little boys, don’t you think?’
‘But how can she have gone?’ I said, coming back down to earth with a thump. ‘Never mind why or where. How can she have got away without anyone seeing her? She had no car and there is no train station within miles and rather few buses, never mind that Cara travelling alone on the Gatehouse bus would have been pretty conspicuous to all the interested locals.’