‘Of Dorset?’ said Hinckley.
‘Bill Osborne is my brother,’ Alec said, visibly impressed.
‘If you would care to come into the morning room,’ Hinckley said, ‘I’ll tell Mrs Lipscott you are here.’
We followed him across the marble of the hall where more of the pink and yellow roses from outside were gathered together in bowls and in pots on pillars. Their scent – warmed by the light from the cupola floors above – was as sweet as honeysuckle already. I gazed about myself with growing rapture. There was the Fragonard (disputed) which we had all loved with girlish devotion. There was the Staffordshire pig with her ten little pink piglets which stood on the round table in the middle of the hall and under which we used to tuck the edges of notes to stop them blowing away. There were the three sketches of the house done by the three daughters the summer before I came to stay and framed as a triptych to stand on top of the library door.
Alec was in the morning room and had turned to face me.
‘You have a very misty look on your face, Dandy,’ he said.
‘The chairs!’ I cried. ‘The same chairs!’ I rushed over to the ring of armchairs grouped around the fireplace – four of them – where Lilah, Mamma-dearest, Pearl and I would sit, with Fleur on someone’s lap and Aurora, as she preferred it, sprawled on the rug waiting for the carriage to be brought when we were going out for the day.
‘Why shouldn’t they have kept their chairs?’ said Alec. ‘Do you think Mrs Lipscott will receive us or just send a response? I don’t fancy having to get firm with that sweet old butler.’
‘Oh, she’ll come,’ I said. ‘Of course, she won’t be up yet. If it were just me I daresay I’d be taken to her bedroom and have to sit amongst her letters and kittens the same as ever, but I suppose she’ll put on a dressing gown and come downstairs since it’s you too, darling. Alec?’
He was standing with his back to me over by a side-table.
‘Alec?’ I said again.
He turned and I saw that he was holding a photograph frame in his hands. He held it out towards me and I walked over. It was Fleur, grown-up but not yet grown sombre. She was standing with her foot up on the running board of a motorcar and her head flung back, laughing. Her hair was short already and had ruffled up in the breeze so that it was a blur around her.
‘I’d guess that would be about 1918 or so,’ I said. ‘Before.’
‘Oh, it’s certainly before,’ Alec said. ‘Look at the car, Dandy.’ I looked but shook my head. ‘It’s a Bugatti,’ he told me and our eyes met. He was breathing as though he had been running. Perhaps, like me, he had not really believed any of it until now.
‘Dandy?’ said a voice behind us. We turned and I could not help going over with both hands out to clasp those of the woman who had just entered the room. Mamma-dearest was probably older-looking to anyone who could look with an objective eye, but all I saw was the same mass of hair held up in a kind of hammock of net for sleeping, and the same pink flannel nightgown and pink silk dressing gown (cosy for bed and just a hint of decency in case I’m out in the garden and the vicar calls, she always used to say). ‘Dandy, my dearest darling.’ She wrapped me in a hug, smelling of lily-of-the-valley scent and mint tooth-powder. ‘What on earth brings you down here?’ Then she held me at arm’s length and beamed at me. I simply could not bring myself to say any of the things I should have said. Nor could I bear to soften her up with small talk and family news then turn the conversation later. I simply gave a dumb look at Alec.
He walked over and put the photograph between us, right under Mamma-dearest’s nose.
‘We’re here to talk about Charles Leigh,’ he said.
Any hope I had held that we were wrong drained out of me, just as the blood drained out of Mamma-dearest’s plump cheeks.
‘But… Charles was nine years ago,’ she said. All the colour was gone from her voice too and she spoke in a bleak near-whisper.
‘And Elf was eight years ago,’ said Alec. Mamma-dearest squeezed her eyes tight shut.
‘And – I’m so sorry,’ I added, ‘but someone else died last week and Fleur…’
‘Has she gone off the rails again?’ said Mrs Lipscott, opening her eyes. ‘Do the girls know? They haven’t told me.’
‘They wanted to spare you,’ I said.
‘Did they send you to tell me?’ she asked. I started to answer no but Alec cut me off.
‘What happened with Charles Leigh, Mrs Lipscott?’ he said, shaking the photograph a little to make her look.
‘She bought it with her own money,’ said Mamma-dearest, hugging herself, putting her hands right up inside her nightgown sleeves. ‘On her eighteenth birthday when she came into what the Major had settled on her. I knew it was too young to settle money on them, but of course… And you can see how she loved it, can’t you?’
‘And the crash itself?’ I said. ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, miserably. ‘No one knows except Fleur.’
‘Tell us what you do know,’ I said gently. ‘Perhaps we can piece it together from there.’ She walked slowly over to one of the armchairs and dropped down into it. We followed her.
‘Well, after…’ she began, and then she cleared her throat and started again. ‘At the age of about seventeen, of course, Fleur took a great shine to the lodge. Ironic is the word, I think.’
‘Ironic how?’ I asked. Mrs Lipscott opened her eyes very wide in an innocent way and for the first time I did see that she was older now.
‘Oh, you know,’ she said. ‘It was as unlike Pereford as chalk and cheese and it was the Major’s house and Fleur never even met the Major.’ She turned to Alec. ‘My husband died in Africa when Florrie was a little baby,’ she said.
‘So she was at the lodge when Charles Leigh died,’ Alec said.
‘Why do you want to know all this?’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘And Dandy, why do you?’
‘Was she at the party with them?’ Alec said and I found myself wondering if he was always this brusque, if I was too when it was a stranger I was grilling, whether I only saw it now because Mamma-dearest awoke every tender feeling in me and made me see Alec’s manner in a new and unflattering light. It could not be denied, however, that it was working.
‘Yes, she was at that wretched party,’ Mrs Lipscott said. ‘The party Charles and Leigh went racing away from. You see, the thing about the lodge was that she could get up to all sorts of mischief unwitnessed; it was such a long way for us – the girls and me – to haul ourselves up there. Even if we heard tell of her escapades, which usually we didn’t. It’s quite out on its own.’
‘Well I remember,’ I said. ‘Hugh used to shoot with one of the neighbours. Highland neighbours – seven miles of bad road away. He insisted on dragging me along, naturally.’
‘Well I sold it in the end,’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘After the accident – one of these anonymous bidders who buy up everything these days – and I’ve never missed it.’
‘Getting back to the night that Charles Leigh died then,’ I said. ‘Was Fleur engaged to him, as the Forresters think? Or was Leigh the fiancée, as reported?’
‘Oh, you’ve spoken to the Forresters, have you? Was it Aurora who asked you to come and speak to me?’
‘No,’ I said, crossing my fingers and hoping she would assume it was Pearl. ‘Was she?’
‘Well,’ said Mrs Lipscott, ‘I don’t suppose he was actually engaged to either of them. But since he was dead and would be marrying no one, the poor dear sweet boy, and since poor darling Leigh died with him, what would have been the use of exposing her to censure and Fleur to ridicule?’ Alec had been right then.
‘More than ridicule, Mrs Lipscott,’ Alec said. ‘If she killed them.’
‘She didn’t! She couldn’t have.’
‘How can you be sure?’ I said. ‘What do you know?’