And then just when one thought it could get no worse, Clemence laughed. Not a huge laugh, but a giggle which just happened to fall into a momentary pool of perfect silence. Mr Duffy’s head jerked up and he sent a look of pure hatred down the table, the kind of look which in my boys’ weekly papers is depicted as a thick black dotted line. Clemence did not notice and Mrs Duffy stared back at him coldly until his eyelids drooped and he bowed his head again.
Two things were clear: everyone would be desperate to leave as soon as they could after rising, and since we could not all leave at once, one’s best hope was to get right in at the off. But, since Hugh was far too stiff to make the first move and was impervious enough to ‘atmosphere’ to bear it, I foresaw a long wait amongst dwindling numbers before I could escape. A plan occurred, however, and I put it into motion at the earliest opportunity.
‘Alec Osborne has just told me,’ I whispered to Hugh, ‘that he fears he’ll keel over if he doesn’t get some fresh air. And he wonders if you and I would go with him.’ Hugh, bless him, actually took steps backwards, physically recoiled, and I could not resist going on, although I knew it was cruel, ‘Shall I come with you, or will you and he go alone?’
Poor Hugh may still have been babbling: ‘You, Dandy, you go, you two go without me,’ when, having collected Alec with a whispered ‘Come on!’, I descended the front steps and set off.
We walked through the streets in the growing damp of a chilly afternoon – there is nowhere in the world like Edinburgh for making the same cheerless ordeal out of any time of the day or season of the year, even early May. Our obvious mourning clothes matched all too well the deliberation of our pace and the down-turned gravity of both face and voice as I told Alec all that I had learned. Mary’s evidence could not be talked away, and he did not try.
‘Yes, all right,’ he said at last. ‘It was Cara. Splendid work, Dandy.’ This had a bitterness I had not heard in him before, but which was only too easily understood. I could imagine what he felt to find out that his pretty angel of a fiancee had killed herself trying to get rid of a baby that was not his. Whether there was still only sorrow at her death or a sneaking relief beginning to grow that he had avoided marriage to such a girl, his heart must be heavy with some mixture of grief and guilt.
I felt it most grievously myself that we still did not know what had happened to the jewels and so despite all my muck-raking Daisy and Silas were exactly where they had started. And there they would stay, I was sure, since the only way out of it depended on me. Oh yes, I had been all set, that morning, to blackmail – let us call it what it was – to blackmail Lena into silence. Now, though, I felt that had I the nerve to go through with it, I should never be able to look myself in the glass again. And anyway I had not the nerve, I knew.
We were there. Alec looked up as I laid my hand on the gates of the Municipal Cemetery and pushed them open, then bowed his head again while we traversed a network of paths to the back corner where some newly filled plots sat in a row. There were five recent enough. Five, packed so close that there was barely a strip of flat ground between them and they looked more like the furrows of a ploughed field than graves. Three of them had flowers upon them, some florists’ wreaths as well as little hand-picked posies.
‘So it must be one of these two,’ I said, looking first at one and then at the other of the two graves which lay quite unmarked. ‘Oh, Cara.’ I felt a huge bulge of tears revolve somewhere inside me, but bit down hard on my lip to hold them.
‘You’re sure,’ said Alec. It may have been a question.
‘When I was speaking to Mrs Tig – to Mary just now,’ I said, ‘she pinched out her cigarette in her fingertips and didn’t feel a thing. And I thought, those are kitchen maid’s hands, you know, tough as boots. Not scrubbed raw, as Dr Milne said. With bits of metal pot-scourer under her nails. Kitchen maids don’t have nails to get things stuck under.’ Somehow that seemed the worst thing of all, imagining Lena taking her still-warm hands and setting about them with a scourer to add a convincing little touch to the tale.
‘How do you know this is the place?’ said Alec.
‘Dr Milne told me it was in town,’ I said. ‘Then I just telephoned around, pretended I was organizing a little marker of some kind. It’s the sort of thing a kind employer might do – Hugh has done in the past – although not Lena admittedly. I had to gamble that in fact no marker was already arranged.’
‘And was one?’ said Alec, his voice beginning to sound gruff.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Apparently not.’
Chapter Fourteen
There then began a curious stretch of calm that was yet as tiring as any time I have ever endured. The case was closed, I believed, but one might almost have said that other parties disagreed. Had I believed in fate, I might have blamed myself for tempting it with that first nightmare served up to Dr Milne. Had I believed in ghosts, of course, I should have blamed Cara herself for her determined, beseeching presence. Perhaps though it was only the weather, a spell of heavy warmth both day and night; liquid weather, although no rain actually fell. It was as if a flood was held in the sky by a single trembling membrane, pressing dull headaches down upon all beneath it, seeping just enough vapour for one’s clothes to be always limp and one’s hair lank and oppressive against one’s neck.
In the heat each night as I slept, short and furious dreams of Cara raged through me and then wrenched me up and out, leaving me flailing under a soaked sheet listening to the blood thunder in my ears. Night after night I willed my leaden arms and legs back to life, rose, splashed my face and changed my nightie, then lay back down in the cooling damp of my bed, hoping to slip into a gentler sleep without her finding me.
At last the month dragged to a close and I began to look forward to the return of the children for the summer – ‘look forward’, that is, in the sense of knowing that it was sure to happen and had to be prepared for. By and by, it came to me that if I made my final report to Daisy, if my part in the affair could be tied in pink tape and filed, then the dreams might stop. There was a twinge of shame each time I considered how I was shirking my duty to tell Daisy that I had failed. And failed I had, for all thoughts of applying pressure to Lena had wilted and died in me in the Municipal Cemetery weeks before. Admittedly, if Daisy had contacted me in a sudden panic, if Lena had renewed her vague threats, I might have found courage enough in my outrage to do something. But Lena was either biding her good time or had abandoned the plan after Cara’s death or perhaps was to return to extortion only after a proper period of mourning, if such a ludicrous clash of sensibilities were possible.