‘Think very, very carefully,’ I began. ‘You know which Miss Duffy is which, don’t you? Now, when was the last time you saw Cara?’
‘The day before the fire,’ said Mrs Marshall. ‘Her and her mother were out for a walk after their dinner and I heard them laughing away about something and looked up and there they were.’ This was not at all what I wanted to hear and it perplexed me.
‘You’re sure?’ I asked. ‘You’re absolutely sure that all three ladies were at the cottage right up until the day before the fire?’ This would undo my idea about why the photographs had to be taken in just one session.
‘No doubt about it,’ said Mrs Marshall. ‘I even thought there was four of them to start with, till you tellt me that was a maid. Some maid, I thought, you don’t see a lass in service dressed like that round here, but she’d be Edinburgh, eh? However, that’s by the by. There was definitely three right up until the end. I couldn’t get peace for them marching up and down my lane and talk talk talking at the tops of their voices. The mother and the cheery one, then the mother and the miserable one and I thought to myself more than once if those two lassies were mine I’d take the back of my hand to both. The Dear knows why they could not all go out for their walk together and save their mother’s feet. That poor woman must have been worn out by the end of the day.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Or if the lasses were at daggers drawn why could one of them not go out by her own self? Chaperones! I thought we’d got past all that nonsense by now.’
I stared at her, my cup of tea halfway between its saucer and my lips. First one and then the other? I banged down my cup and fished in my pocket for Alec’s snapshot of Cara.
‘Tell me who this is, Mrs Marshall,’ I demanded. She took the snap and holding it at arm’s length for her long sight she scrutinized it for an agonizing time before pronouncing.
‘That’s thon wee maid I saw, and dear God in heaven, this get-up’s even worse than the other one. Where do they get the money to dress like that? I’m wondering if I’m not too old to go into service in Edinburgh myself.’
‘This,’ I said, coming to stand behind her and look over her shoulder at the smiling face under its velvet hat and over its squashy fox fur, ‘this is Cara Duffy. Now, tell me again exactly when you saw her.’
It took a good half-hour and another pot of tea for Mrs Marshall to get off her chest everything that she knew and everything she felt, and to decide whether it was wickedness or merely cheek. The bare bones of it were that she had seen Cara pedalling furiously in the direction of Borgue on Tuesday evening and had not seen her return. No unknown boat and no car at all had been seen or heard. Neither Mrs Marshall nor, we were sure, her daughter-in-law had seen ‘the girls’ together at any time. I cursed my own stupidity as I remembered young Mrs Marshall’s calling them two peas in a pod and old Mrs Marshall herself not being able to tell which was which. Clemence and Cara Duffy were the least like one another of any pair of sisters one could hope to see, and only a dolt like me would not have heard alarm bells long before now.
‘Aye well,’ she concluded at last. ‘It’s a wicked thing to do and I’m glad I’ll never likely see them again for I could not promise to bite my tongue and let them think they’d fooled me. But praise God that lassie didn’t go up in flames after all, madam, and I hope you get to the bottom of it so’s I can tell everyone, for I’m sure I’m not the only one that cannot sleep for thinking about it.’
‘Oh, I’ll get to the bottom, Mrs Marshall,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about that. They’ve made far too many stupid mistakes for me not to. I can hardly believe they let Cara cycle away in full view of whoever happened to look and see her. Such a silly risk to take.’
This thought was still troubling me as I made my way back down the lane at last. Time was getting on, but Drysdale would come and look for me if I missed our rendezvous, I was sure, and I wanted to go and stare. Now I knew for a fact that a fraud had been perpetrated, I felt no concern at all at being seen standing there like a ghoul. I passed Sandy Marshall’s cottage and carried on to the road end and the start of the dunes, then turned left along the path to the Duffys’ cottage gate and stopped. The blackened depression in the earth and sudden cutting off of the bright shingle path seemed even more grotesque than they had before. It ought not to have been so, now that I knew no one had died there, but perhaps it was because I had now seen the place for myself. I had seen the photograph of the tea-table under the tree, the blossom-heavy branches in the foreground half-hiding the cottage behind. Now the tree – cherry, I rather thought – had its blooms and soft green leaf buds shrivelled and browned on one side by the heat of the flames. I felt my mouth twist in distaste and I turned away. Then I turned slowly back, looking at the tree and trying to summon the image of the cottage behind it, with its funny little peaked windows and something else I knew had been there but could not bring to mind. The branches of blossom, the upper part of the house showing through it here and there, and what? I stood opening and shutting my eyes, trying to dredge up the picture as though from my boots, until Bunty, sensing my tension perhaps, or maybe just bored, began to whine.
When I emerged on to the lane again, I noticed a second path leading off directly opposite, suggesting another house. Immediately, I remembered Mrs Marshall’s scorn about ‘they wooden hooses’. There must be another; the Duffys’ was one of a pair. I walked along the narrow path and sure enough around a bend and past a clump of gorse lay another white gate and another shingle path. Even though I had hoped for it, it stopped me short to see a cottage identical to the one I had glimpsed in the photograph album, as though the patch of black earth was a lie. I crept forward and stood at the fence.
It was a pretty house of the kind one must call a cottage despite its size, although a very different sort of cottage from the Marshalls’ homesteads. It had a wide porch, bounded by decorative wood banisters, and the peaked dormer windows I remembered to its upstairs. Most sweetly of all it had a single chimney right in the middle of its roof which made it look like a toffee apple standing on its head with its handle sticking out at the top. I felt a stirring of misgiving again, one that I could not quite place, but before I could give it my attention I was startled by the sound of a door creaking open, and the untidy young man with the cats appeared on the porch.
‘Hello again,’ he said, amicably enough. Certainly as amicably as I deserved, leaning on his gate and staring at his house.
‘I was just admiring your adorable chimney,’ I said, adding nothing to the store of dignity which my earlier ramblings on dogs had left me. However, the young man merely laughed and looked upwards.
‘I think it looks like a sink plunger,’ he said. ‘Rather inconvenient to tell the truth, but even in a wooden house the chimney must be brick and it’s easier to make one stack in the middle and have all the fires opening off it. And fires and wooden houses are rather a hot topic at the moment, aren’t they? If you’ll pardon my pun.’ I flushed, realizing that he thought I was sightseeing, come like some villager to gawp at the nearest thing to the place it all happened.
‘Inconvenient?’ I said, making conversation to show him I was unaffected by his insinuation and plumping for the only bit of his speech which seemed to offer scope for further chat.
‘The central chimney. Having to have all the rooms open off one another without a hallway and having all the fireplaces across the corners.’ He stretched luxuriously, a stretch with just a suggestion of a scratch at the end of it. ‘Not bad for me since I live on my own and can draw up my chair and hog it, but I’d hate to be jostling with a wife and a gaggle of frost-bitten children.’