I leapt on this suggestion. Even if it meant that the girl was Cara, I should almost prefer the idea of her drifting off on laudanum than anyone, alone and wretched, bleeding to death at her own hand.
‘You need to speak to Dr Milne,’ said Alec. ‘Find out, as I say, whether he knew Cara. If not, find out if he had ever seen the maid before. If not again, then find out just exactly how closely he examined her body.’
‘Me?’ I said, aghast. ‘It can’t possibly be me, Alec. I couldn’t.’
‘Well, I can’t,’ said Alec as though this should have been obvious and reminding me just a little for the first time in our short acquaintance of Hugh in particular and men in general.
‘I don’t see why not,’ I said. ‘Man to man. And if you’re about to say it’s a woman’s concern, may I just remind you that the poor girl – if such she was – didn’t get herself into that state on her own and I doubt that the other party has perished in an attic for shame.’ We walked along in silence for a bit after that. Furious huffy silence on my part and, I hoped, newly conscious and heartily ashamed silence on Alec’s. In we went at one end of the peach houses, trudge trudge trudge along the slatted walkway over the pipes, green with moss and treacherously slippy, then out again.
‘And anyway,’ I said at last, ‘I can’t go gallivanting off to Gatehouse again. You heard Hugh at breakfast. What would I tell him this time?’
‘You might say Mrs McCall’s famous mouser of a cat is just about to have kittens,’ Alec said, resisting my attempts to elbow him off the path into a soggy patch of that decayed matter that gardeners are so fond of heaping up everywhere. ‘Yes, all right, all right. Does Dr Milne shoot? Might you invite him here? He needn’t bring his wife, you know.’
‘Impossible. There’s nothing to shoot. Not a stag to be had these days. I could always write to him.’
‘Impossible yourself,’ said Alec. ‘A letter couldn’t be casual enough not to raise suspicions. Besides, we’ll be skirting very close to slander if we need to ask about the death certificate, you know. The last thing we need is to write it down and turn it into libel.’
This sobered me again. One of the most striking aspects of being caught up in all of this, I was beginning to find, was the sudden giddy lurches between blood-curdling horrors and a feeling that we were at some kind of parlour game. Perhaps one caused the other: the reality too awful to bear so that one constantly retreated into one’s intellect and let it become a mere puzzle.
In the end, I came around to the idea that Dr Milne must come and stay. Living where he did, he had to be a fisherman, I decided, and so I would get Hugh to include him in a fishing party. I could then feign some indisposition and do a little fishing of my own. How though to get Hugh to use up some of his precious fish on a country doctor he had never met? Even coarse fish; salmon would have been unthinkable. I myself quailed at the thought of entertaining a Mrs Milne if she existed, but ducking out of my part of the fixture turned out to be my masterstroke. Hugh was so delighted to have me suggest, for the first time ever in our married life, that a party of fishermen might come to stay without their wives and to suggest further that I should be quite happy to dine off a tray in my room to avoid the imbalance of a dinner table with just one lady to go around, that he swallowed the slightly odd inclusion of a mysterious Dr Milne from Gatehouse with scarcely a murmur. I felt a little pity, truth to tell, that he could not see through me more easily than that. He actually thought I was being generous offering to forgo a dining room full of men talking of nothing but fish and probably still smelling of it a little.
Alec was to be of the party, for Dr Milne was being presented as a particular friend of his. So when he left Gilverton on the evening of our walk, bearing the album to return to Clemence, it was with his quick return guaranteed.
In the dull meantime, all I could think of to do was write a long-overdue letter of progress to Daisy. Swearing her to strict secrecy, Silas apart, I told her what we had discovered about Clemence’s impersonation of Cara, the deception of the photographs, the deliberate setting of the fire and the pains taken to make sure it burned like the bottom pit of Hades. I glossed over the fact that it seemed Cara had not been in on the plan, feeling (or perhaps more honestly hoping) that this apparent anomaly would soon be explained. I outlined my belief that Cara had stolen the diamonds and absconded with them, and that her mother knew. I admitted that I had not yet discovered whether Mr Duffy’s allowing the insurance to lapse constituted an unforeseen hitch or whether setting up Daisy and Silas to make good the loss was part of the original plan, designed to keep the police away. I also admitted with admirable frankness (I thought) that I did not know why Cara, or Cara and her mother, or Cara and her mother and Clemence together, had planned the disappearance in the first place. The letter finished with my assurances that I was just about to double-check for my own satisfaction the last plausible scenario in which Cara had actually died at the cottage.
I had no pang submitting my account of lodgings and travel to Daisy’s scrutiny along with my report but my nerve deserted me a bit, I must own, when by return of post there came back a cheque lavish beyond my initial comprehension, representing not only my expenses and retainer but half my fee and a sizeable bonus. My hands were damp with guilt as I read the accompanying note.
Darling Dan,
Wonder of wonders! I hope you don’t think my astonishment is any slur on your abilities, darling, only when we heard about poor, darling Cara we naturally thought that there was an end to your investigations and our hopes of an answer. Do you think me a hag from hell if I admit it crossed my mind that her death, poor darling, might also bring an end to Lena’s machinations? I never should have dreamed in a hundred million years that it was simply the plot thickening. How dared you, Dan? What resolve you must have needed to stick to your guns and keep Sherlocking away regardless! But what vindication! One can scarcely believe one is in the presence of such scheming – I’m talking about Lena now, darling, not you, although…!! – and really I think it almost amounts to wickedness, when it gets to putting the death notice in (although I suppose they could hardly not) and sending out invitations for a memorial service – have you got yours yet, darling? – in fact the memorial service makes my absolute blood boil, doesn’t it yours? Because they might perfectly easily have said they were much too upset and since there’s nothing to bury anyway… I don’t know how I shall get through it without being sick, darling, but do let’s sit together,
Yours very impressed indeed and agog for more,
D xxx
I had been invited to the memorial service and had been facing it with as little relish as Daisy. Now, as well as the general disinclination, I had the worry that Daisy would blurt out, as established fact, in front of Alec, some part of what I had told her in my letter and she had swallowed whole. (It was chastening to realize just how strongly I had played the suit of Cara’s still being alive.) Well, I certainly would not meet trouble halfway, by showing him what she had written. Apart from anything else one should shield Daisy’s stylistics from the gaze of strangers; I like her letters myself but I wonder if she ever reads them through.
Presiding over my most enormous silver teapot on the day the fishing party assembled, I hoped to fix such an image of my fragrant presence in the minds of Hugh’s cronies that they would overlook hardly seeing me again for the rest of their stay. Dr Milne appeared with Alec and seemed quite equal to his company, droning away about rods and flies and the poundage of his last triumph, neither listening to the droning on either side of him nor caring that his fellows droners were not listening to him. I foresaw success and a few days of peace for me, and that evening I put on my smoking suit and listened to dance music on the wireless, as happy a pike widow as ever there was. Grant checked on me just once to see that I was lounging as decadently as the smoking suit demanded and she seemed quite pleased. She was waiting for the day I dared to wear this costume at a party, and waiting very patiently – that is, she always packed it for me when I went away but hardly ever suggested it out loud.