‘In the middle of term?’
‘It seems so.’
‘And they just left their budding scholars and university hopefuls in the lurch?’ I said. ‘They could at least have stayed on in the village and given some extra tuition.’
‘I never thought of that, and Miss Bell never mentioned any guilt about the girls, actually. That’s odd too. In fact, she went as far as to say that she and Taylor – that’s how she referred to them both: Taylor and Fielding, like the army! – anyway, she said that she and Taylor felt a measure of relief that they were no longer to be stuffing Newton’s apple and the House of Tudor into the heads of a lot of farmers’ daughters who forgot it all every day over tea.’
‘Academic snobs,’ I said. ‘Some of the St Columba’s girls are really quite bright indeed. Thank goodness, in a way, that I didn’t get a chance to ruin them.’
‘So I’d say that Miss Shanks made a blunder in offloading the two of them,’ Alec went on. ‘But it wasn’t the fevered and frantic business of running away and scrabbling for an agency stand-in that it’s since become.’
‘Odder than odd,’ I said.
‘Passing strange and far from wonderful,’ agreed Alec. ‘But here’s something Miss Bell did say that’s interesting, Dandy. When I told her about Miss Glennie – late of Balmoral, as you say – Miss Bell said something like “maybe Fielding’s ways had rubbed off on Shanks after all”.’
‘What did she mean? Did you ask?’
‘I did, but all she said was that they had never blamed Miss Fielding for wanting a nursing matron she knew right there on the spot but they had always thought it a great lapse of judgement to make Miss Shanks an equal partner.’
‘I agree,’ I said.
Alec crossed his eyes and blew a big breath out of his puffed cheeks.
‘The more I hear the less I know,’ he said. ‘Anyway, the point of tracking them down was to make sure they’re not No. 5 and I’ve done that.’
‘Have you? Absolutely? Can we be sure Miss Taylor didn’t come back from Greece and drown?’
‘Yes,’ Alec said. ‘Miss Taylor apparently is fair-haired and five-foot-three. So No. 5 remains a mystery. How did you get on with No. 3?’
I told him the brief facts: the proximity to the Major’s lodge and the boy being the right sort of age and class to have been Fleur’s lover, but I told him too of the complicating factor of Leigh Audubon, the dead fiancée.
‘But you think no one knew about the engagement until after the deaths?’ Alec said. ‘Well, then. The Audubons would be more than happy to have it put about that the girl was engaged to him, considering she was alone with him in a car at after midnight, especially if they weren’t heading towards her home. And you say it wasn’t Charles Leigh’s Bugatti? And presumably it wasn’t Miss Audubon’s either, or they’d have said so. If it turned out that this car belonged to someone who can connect them with Fleur… or if Fleur was at the party…’
‘Let’s hope Mamma-dearest is in the mood to talk,’ I said.
‘You sound very scathing when you call her that,’ Alec said.
‘I don’t mean to,’ I replied. ‘It’s what the girls always called her. Maybe I’m getting cynical about them all and a note is creeping in.’
The steward came along just then, asking us if we would like the curtains drawn over since we were on the west side of the carriage and whether I would care for a foot-warmer and what we would each like by way of a drink before dinner?
‘We should do more of this, Dan,’ said Alec when the man had gone to fetch a whisky for Alec and a sherry for me. ‘Beats rocketing around in that little Cowley.’
‘Wait until we’ve got to Taunton,’ I said. ‘See if you still think so. One always forgets that the West Country isn’t just round the corner from London.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Alec. ‘I spent my childhood on the Cornwall sleeper getting to school and back again. It holds no secrets from me.’
He was, however, looking shattered and grey (as one always does after a night on a train) rather than pink and refreshed (the way the people look on the railway posters) when we arrived, with the milk, in Somerset the next morning. I had already had more than enough by King’s Cross and would have welcomed a night in an hotel, but there was no stopping Alec: he had bundled me into a taxi and we were at Paddington before I could object, then there were two good first-class sleeper tickets still available, which made it seem meant, and now here we were, flat of hair and gritty of eye, standing in the yellow mist of an early summer morning, wondering how best to get to Pereford and beard Mamma-dearest in her den.
‘Better to hire a motorcar here,’ I said, ‘than get to the nearest station and then find out they haven’t got one.’
‘We’re not in Scotland now, Dandy,’ Alec said. ‘We’re back in the civilised world. Of course they will.’ It should have been touching to see how he drew down deep lungfuls of the air, as though it were his first proper breath since last he was this near home, but after my short and dreadful night’s sleep it was only irritating and I took a mean pleasure in hearing the porter tell him that there were no trains north for a good hour or more and Sir would be better in a motorcar if there were any kind of hurry about it.
‘Marvellous,’ said Alec. ‘Just the kind of cheerful helpfulness I’ve been missing. Not like that old misery on the Portpatrick dog-cart, eh?’
I decided not to tell him that a porter at Stranraer carried the whole timetable of his beloved railway in his head, but only nodded and followed him meekly to the hiring garage to let him pick.
Pereford. I had expected to find it changed; smaller-seeming, perhaps, or even run to seed in some way. I had fully anticipated that I would be forced to smile at my eighteen-year-old self and her besottedness with the place as the humdrum reality quenched the golden remembering. So when we turned off the Dunster road and swept between the gateposts, I steeled myself for disappointment. The avenue was the same, the branches just meeting over our heads and the new leaves exactly the yellow-green of the shoemakers’ elves’ little caps in the book I had read to Fleur at bedtime.
‘It’s just round this corner,’ I said to Alec and then as we turned it I gave a cry.
The roses were blooming, tumbling and scrambling all over the pillars of the verandah, and the path was carpeted with their petals. The lawns, their nap like velvet, rolled away to the edge of the trees and the marks from the gardener’s broom brushing off the dew could be seen in swathes. The pink-painted stone of the house was, as it had always been in early-morning sun, like the inside cheek of a seashell, blushed with peach; and at the windows, already open for the day, cream linen billowed out like the train of a wedding gown so that it seemed the house was waving a welcome at us as we slowed and stopped at the front door.
Our pull of the bell was answered by an elderly and rather stooping butler, who smiled with kindly enquiry.
‘We’ve come to see Mrs Lipscott, with apologies for the hour,’ I said. ‘But if you tell her it’s Mrs Gilver – I’m an old family friend.’
‘Of course you are, Mrs Gilver,’ said the butler. ‘Or Miss Leston, as you’ll always be to me.’ I squinted at him, felt the flicker of recognition and quarried deep and long for his name.
‘Higson?’ I said, at last.
‘Hinckley, madam,’ he replied, ‘but well done after all these years for getting that close! So Mrs Gilver and who shall I say, sir?’
‘Mr Osborne,’ said Alec.