‘Only that they were all together at the party, and that Fleur didn’t turn up at home until six in the morning and she was very bedraggled and smelling of smoke.’
‘Smoke?’ I said. ‘Cigarette smoke?’
Mamma-dearest gave me a look of fond pity. ‘Filthy black oily smoke, Dandy my love.’
‘And what did she say about it?’ said Alec. ‘That she remembered nothing?’
‘No, Mr Osborne,’ she said in the crispest tone I had ever heard her use. ‘She said she had killed them both. She said she was guilty of another two murders and she wanted to tell the police and go to court and be hanged.’
Alec had the grace to lower his head and after a quiet moment she spoke again.
‘But it was nonsense, of course. Apart from anything else, how could one person out of three make sure she survived an accident that killed the others? Anyway, we sent her away to rest and before too long she was better again.’
‘But not her old self,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘She hadn’t been her old self for a while, but she wasn’t even her new self after Charles. She was…’
‘I saw her last Saturday,’ I said. ‘I know.’
‘Oh, my poor naughty little sprite,’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘My cherub, my little pixie. Do you have children, Mr Osborne?’
‘We really don’t want to upset you,’ I said to her before Alec could answer, acknowledging with a rueful smile that we were a little late to avoid it now: her eyes were swimming with unshed tears and her hand shook as she put it to her throat. ‘But I must just ask one more thing. Fleur said on Saturday that she had killed five people. Charles and Leigh are two, Elf makes three and this last one is four. You yourself just said, of the crash, “another two murders”. So, who was the first?’
‘We know when it was,’ said Alec. I nodded and tried to look wise, even though I did not know what he meant. ‘It happened when she was seventeen, didn’t it? When she started staying away from home? And it was afterwards that she bought herself the motorcar and turned into a bit of a scamp by all accounts. That was what made her “her new self”, as you put it.’ I was nodding more eagerly now. ‘But who was it, Mrs Lipscott? Who did Fleur kill when she was seventeen?’ Mamma-dearest was shaking her head and her tears had dried again. ‘If we look through a year’s worth of newspapers,’ Alec went on, ‘will we find another death notice of a family friend? If we spoke to her acquaintances from that time and asked them if someone died unexpectedly, what would they tell us?’
Mamma-dearest was almost smiling now as she continued to shake her head.
‘My daughter killed no one,’ she said.
‘You’re very sure considering you don’t know the first thing about this latest corpse,’ I put in, and her smile was gone.
‘She didn’t, Dandy,’ she said. ‘Tell me it’s not true. Tell me that you don’t understand why she’s claiming any such thing and you can’t see how it was done.’
I glanced at Alec and although he told me, with a tiny shake of his head, to refuse to comfort her, I could not oblige him.
‘That’s more or less true,’ I said. ‘I mean she could have done it, but we don’t have the first inkling as to why. We don’t even know who it was.’
‘She didn’t do it then,’ said Mrs Lipscott and she sat back with a great rush of relief. ‘So is she still teaching? Or has she gone to rest for a while? It’s always so very upsetting for her.’
‘She’s… um… yes, she’s taken off for a bit,’ I said. ‘I gather you don’t speak every week on the telephone then? Or exchange frequent letters?’
‘I have had to let my little bird go, Dandy,’ said Mrs Lipscott. ‘I stand with my arm outstretched and my hand open and I pray that one day she’ll come flitting back again. It’s the hardest thing any mother ever has to do. To love and love and know that her child is alone and scared and won’t take comfort.’
‘It sounds absolutely unspeakable,’ I said. Not that my boys ever took much in the way of comfort anyway and if they knew that they were ‘loved and loved’ from near or from far they would make sick-noises and laugh at me; but sometimes in the night, when I could not quite silence Hugh’s voice in my head, I imagined one or both of them not in their dorm at school but in khaki in a foreign land with the sound of shells going off. Then I would remember the soldiers in the convalescent home – the ones who sat frozen, staring ahead (the ones who cried and accepted soothing words and pats on the arm were easy). I could rattle myself so badly that I would have to get up and go into their bedrooms and remind myself from all the model aeroplanes and frogspawn and cricket bats there that they were children, not soldiers, not yet; and since Hugh was wrong, not ever.
‘And now you must excuse me,’ said Mamma-dearest. ‘I am going to go to my room. I’ve just enough time for a good cry before breakfast. Nine-ish, Dandy darling, as ever.’ I had risen to my feet and made some ineffectual noises. ‘No, certainly not,’ she said. ‘A woman my age weeping is not a pretty sight. Take a walk in the garden, hm? The roses are lovely just now.’ She stood. ‘Of course, last week they were lovelier but that’s the way of it with roses.’
We did, in fact, step out of the french windows of the morning room and walk over the brushed grass to the rose garden. We went in silence but once we were through the arch in the yew hedge and strolling up and down the paths drinking in the scent, Alec started again.
‘Of course you could walk away from a crash that killed two,’ he said. ‘Drive the car quite gently into a tree and set light to the petrol tank with the others still in it.’
‘Oh, stop,’ I said. ‘I feel unspeakable, Alec. She obviously thinks her daughters sent me to help.’
‘You’ve investigated acquaintances before,’ Alec said.
‘These Lipscotts aren’t acquaintances,’ I told him. ‘They’re my dear, dear friends. And this place is… I can’t explain it, but I feel as though I’m trampling something precious underfoot.’
‘Best concentrate on the case then,’ Alec said. ‘Take your mind off it. Do you agree that Fleur could have caused the crash?’
I sighed. Of course, he was right.
‘Why wouldn’t Charles and Leigh just get out?’ I said. ‘They’d have to be drugged or extremely drunk.’
‘And of course no one ever leaves a party that way,’ said Alec. ‘I wish Mrs Lipscott would just tell us what she knows about No. 1, don’t you?’
‘I do. Then at least I could stop poking her with a stick and feeling as if I were baiting a wounded bear.’
‘Dandy,’ said Alec, in warning.
‘Yes, all right. Good work for knitting together all those little half-hints and catching her out that way. I knew something must have happened to turn Fleur into the little minx I saw at the party on Armistice night.’
‘Sh,’ said Alec, cocking his head. ‘She’s coming back. Maybe she’s changed her mind.’
But the woman who came round the corner was not Mamma-dearest, the same as ever in her pink flannel nightie. It was a woman of great age and great dishevelment with long grey hair hanging down her back in rats’ tails and an outfit composed of men’s twill overalls with a bathing suit underneath and down-at-heel dancing slippers on her feet.
‘You!’ she said. ‘You’re back. They’ve all gone now.’
‘Lilah?’ I said. ‘Batty Aunt?’ She gave me an enormous grin. Quite terrifying, since her teeth were few now and those remaining were not the teeth of which dentists dream. Her face was purple and pouchy with a wattle under the chin and fat yellow bags under each eye, and it occurred to me for the first time that she might not have been batty all those years ago, but sozzled. She was steady enough now, however, as she trotted up to us in her slippers and held out a hand to Alec.
‘Aunt Lilah,’ she said to him. They shook and then she clasped me to her and planted a kiss on my cheek which I could feel drying there and which made me itch to take out my handkerchief and scrub it away.