‘No,’ I said. ‘Let me see her.’ So he faced around the way he was going again and down we went towards Lena.
One of her hands was hooked through the banister rail by a snapped wrist and her head lay crushed against her shoulder. Her face was hidden, only the nape of her neck showing. I could see pins sticking out from under her old-fashioned bun, plain metal pins never meant to be seen, and I was surprised by the skin on her neck, soft and plumply crumpled, with some sparse downy hair, too short for the hairpins, which had sprung into curls.
Daisy stopped as she drew level and crouched down to look at her.
‘Are you sure?’ she said.
‘Absolutely,’ said Alec. ‘We must go and find a telephone and ring the police. I’ll put Dandy in the car and come back for you.’
‘We can’t just leave her here alone,’ said Daisy. ‘Take Dandy to a doctor, Alec darling, and telephone from there. I shall wait here and keep watch. Yes, yes, I promise not to touch anything. But we can’t leave her alone.’
I should have offered to stay. I did not know then that my ankle was broken, and Daisy had had it much worse than me, tied up and thinking she was going to be hurt. I should have insisted that I stay with Lena’s body. Why did I not? Simple: I was scared. I still did not feel safe. But safe from what? From the horror of what we thought she had done? That was what I told myself. That was how I explained why I still felt lost and how I made sense of the shifting inside me, slow but relentless, like sand on the ocean floor.
Chapter Nineteen
‘And what was the candlestick doing on the stairs?’ asked Inspector MacAlpine, yet again. Even the constable in the corner, taking laborious notes of my answers, looked up with an exasperated sigh and flicked back in his pad to read what I had said last time.
‘I put it down because my ankle made it difficult to climb the stairs without holding on,’ I said.
‘And you picked it up because…?’
‘We didn’t know who was there or what to expect. For all we knew there was a gang of thugs around every corner.’
‘And you were there because…?’
‘We were concerned about Mrs Esslemont. When we found out she had agreed to meet Mrs Duffy in a deserted house we thought undue pressure might be brought to bear. As it was. I told you, when we arrived Mrs Esslemont was tied to a chair.’
‘And you broke your ankle…?’
‘I cracked a small bone in it getting into the car. I slipped on the gravel. But I didn’t even notice until I was halfway up the stairs.’
‘Didn’t notice a broken ankle,’ said the inspector blandly but quite firmly.
‘Chipped,’ I said, just as firmly. ‘A very small bone.’ It was too exasperating the way he kept worrying over the one thing that was absolutely true while missing the great gaping holes, but I could hardly point that out.
‘And what happened next, Mrs Gilver?’
The constable sighed yet more audibly, loud enough for his superior officer to throw him a glance from the corner of his eye. Hugh, stolid and dumbstruck beside me, followed the glance and blinked at the sight of the uniform as he had every time he had looked at every uniform in the last week. He was there ostensibly to be my supporter and protector but he looked so poleaxed that, if anything, I tried not to speak too bluntly for fear of upsetting him.
‘We found Mrs Esslemont in the ballroom and untied her and Mrs Duffy ran away, tripped on the candlestick and fell down the stairs.’ The servants’ passage, its doorway well concealed in the panelling, had not been found in the police examination of the scene and so the scattered contents of the tray had escaped the need for explanation.
One thing should be made quite plain: Alec and I had not cooked anything up on that first journey in search of a doctor and a telephone. It just so happened that in answering the questions put to us, in separate rooms, by a startled sergeant in Alec’s case and a bewildered constable in mine, we did not chance to mention Cara. I was horribly aware even then, of course, that while my interrogator might think he was being so rigorous as to be forced to offer two apologies for every one question, I knew that he was merely nibbling around edges of what would choke him if he were to take a proper bite.
I think it was the fact of Daisy that allowed us, in conscience, just to answer each question as it came and resist pouring out the whole story. We did not see Daisy before her first interview, in her hospital bed in a private room with what she reported to be a very dashing Chief Superintendent (Daisy always does land on her feet), and she might easily have reported word-for-word everything that passed between Lena and me. At that point I should have resigned myself to telling all to Inspector MacAlpine and should have excused myself for not having done so before by pointing out truthfully that I had answered every question asked. That was the other point which helped Alec and me repress any guilt: we managed interview after interview, day after day, not to lie. The Silas, Daisy and the diamonds end of the affair held together so well on its own, you see, that nothing alerted the policemen to something’s being hidden and Daisy, although quite without any natural reticence, presumably still had an eye on Silas’s flotation and wanted to side-step as much scandal as she could. I expect that is how it was, although we have never spoken of it.
And so, the records show, no crime was committed. At least not by anyone in a position to be brought to book for it. Lena’s death was found to have been an accident, as indeed it was. As for her attempt at extortion, even had Silas and Daisy been minded to drag it all out, the general assumption that she had planned it all alone meant that her death put an end to any thoughts of redress. And as Lena herself had pointed out, since one cannot steal what is already one’s possession, the theft of the Duffy diamonds turned out not to be a theft at all, but only one of many instances that year of an old family attempting to shed some of its assets in unsettled times.
If somewhere in a police station in Edinburgh an officer scratched his head and wondered whether the name of the poor lady who fell down the stairs in a country house in Perthshire was not the same name that had been shouted down the telephone to him by some madman gibbering about a murder in Drummond Place, then we can be sure that he did no more than scratch his head before he put it out of his mind.
Hugh remained as perplexed as ever about how I had got myself mixed up in it all. Yet more evidence of my silliness, I expect he thought, if he thought. Silas had to be told everything, of course, and when my cheque came it bore his signature. Furthermore, Daisy, who answered the telephone when I rang to protest about the shameful enormity of the sum, said that was Silas’s doing too and if I felt like talking to a brick wall she would call him to the telephone, but really darling, there was no point, as he was determined to reward me for saving her life and if one looked at it that way, wasn’t it rather insultingly stingy.
‘You sound cross,’ I said, wondering whether I shouldn’t repay something after all, if it was causing trouble between them.
‘As well I might,’ Daisy said. ‘Not only have I saved our flotation – through your genius, darling, of course – but I have almost been killed too and one would think Silas owed me some extravagant gift or at least that I should have my every heart’s desire for a while. As it turns out, however, it’s quite the reverse. I am to present him with yet another son in the spring. Don’t laugh, Dandy, it’s too bad. Relief and too much champagne, you see. Oh well, I suppose it might be a daughter.’ She sobered, with a sigh. ‘Speaking of daughters,’ she said but stopped, and so when the girl cut in to tell us our time was up there was silence on the line and we felt too foolish to ask for another three minutes.