Thankfully, the after-effects of a night on the sleeper descended within minutes of the first train moving and it was not until we were slowing at Paddington that I lifted my head from Alec’s shoulder and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘My neck seized up at Frome but I didn’t like to disturb you. Are you feeling any better?’
‘No,’ I croaked. ‘Worse.’ I sat up and stretched. ‘And the only thing to be done about it is to solve the case and restore poor Fleur to her family.’
‘And if solving the case sends her to the gallows?’
‘Let’s cross our fingers that it won’t,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing else for it.’
So on the Flying Scotsman, once the pudding plates were cleared after luncheon, I took out a notebook and spread it on the tablecloth beside my coffee. I ignored Alec’s groans of protest.
‘Yes, I know what you think,’ I said, ‘but it helps me organise things.’
‘No wonder you took to the classroom with such gusto,’ he said. ‘What things are you organising anyway? Nos. 1 to 5?’
‘You do the corpses,’ I said, opening the book to the middle and tearing out a double sheet from around the stitches. ‘I’m going to concentrate on the mistresses.’
‘What about them?’ Alec said. ‘Beauclerc, Blair, Taylor and Bell are accounted for. Do you mean Fleur?’
‘I don’t know what I mean,’ I said. ‘And I hate that. Now, keep quiet and let me think, please.’
‘I will in a minute,’ Alec said. ‘But when you say “do the corpses” what do you mean? Do what with the corpses?’
‘Tabulate,’ I said. ‘Cross-refer. You know… organise.’
Miss Fielding, I wrote in my book, Miss Taylor and Miss Bell. Three members of Somerville College. Miss Fielding and Miss Shanks, two friends who started a school. Miss Lipscott and Miss Beauclerc, whom Miss Fielding employed and who stayed for some time after her death. Miss Blair whom Miss Fielding employed and whom Miss Shanks sacked. Miss Barclay and Miss Christopher whom no one sacked. Miss Glennie whom Miss Shanks employed and had not sacked yet, unlike Miss Gilver who found favour and lost it again in a day. And Miss Lovage, with money invested. And Anderson the handyman, who wanted to keep his cottage. And Mrs Brown the housekeeper and cook, friend of Miss Shanks and known to Miss Fielding, who was very solidly still there and going nowhere.
I stared at the list of names.
Who employed Miss Barclay and Miss Christopher? I wrote. I did not know but I made a private bet with myself that it was Ivy Shanks who introduced them. They, like she, were comfortable and happy there. Mrs Brown was too. Miss Glennie was not and to say that Fleur and Jeanne had been uncomfortable was rather understating matters.
Waifs and strays, I wrote. Glennie, Beauclerc, Lipscott.
Independents, I wrote. Lovage, Taylor, Bell. Blair? Brown?
I turned to a fresh page and set down in thick capital letters the central puzzle of St Columba’s School. IVY SHANKS. And the floodgates were opened.
Why does IS keep letters in her safe?
Why did IS employ DG and then sack her?
Why is IS not suspicious of Miss Glennie’s supposed history?
Why was IS in a tizz about French and not about science or history (or English)?
For she had been. That first night I met Miss Shanks on the terrace she had been beside herself over the emergency of finding a new French mistress and there was Fleur Lipscott who spoke perfectly good French and knew how to teach. Why could she not take over ‘double duties’ as Miss Lovage called it, just as Barclay and Christopher had had to do?
Questions beginning with ‘why’, however, were not the sort which could be cracked on a train with paper and pencil. Organising was no good for why.
Order of departure, I tried next. Fielding, Blair, Taylor/Bell, Beauclerc/Lipscott (planned), Beauclerc, Lipscott (actual).
The order of arrival I did not know.
How about subjects? Latin was lost when Fielding died. Science and history and PE with the first round of sackings. French and English with the hasty departures. Geography and maths had suffered no interruptions at all. I put down my pen and stared out of the window at the rolling green hills sweeping by.
What had I seen and forgotten at St Columba’s? What had struck me in the subconscious when I was thinking of other things and was now lurking unobtainable in some dusty corner of my brain?
I picked up my pencil again and began a list of oddities, hoping that one of them would snag the memory and bring it to the surface again.
Grace, bathing pool, cocoa, late start, supper in dorms, loafing around in gardens, teachers making own beds. In fact, teachers appearing to work a great deal harder than any of the girls, as far as I could see.
‘Good grief, Dandy,’ Alec said. ‘Do you know you’re huffing and puffing like a hippo in a mud wallow?’
‘How are you getting on?’ I asked him.
‘Dreadfully, I think,’ Alec replied. ‘Although since I don’t know what I’m supposed to be achieving, perhaps I’m getting on quite wonderfully.’
‘Well, what have you got?’
‘I’ve set out cause of death, characteristics of victim, relation to suspect and suspect’s reaction,’ he said. ‘For instance, battle, fire, fire, drowned, drowned. Man, man and woman, man, woman. Is this the sort of thing you mean? Father, lover and friend, lover, who knows.’
‘Suitor not lover,’ I said. ‘For Elf.’
‘Off the rails, threat to confess, claim of amnesia, flight. If there are patterns there I can’t find them.’
‘Africa, Highlands, Somerset, South of Scotland,’ I added.
‘Well, Irish Sea,’ said Alec. ‘There’s nothing there, is there?’
‘Not much,’ I admitted. ‘Except you didn’t really go far enough with Fleur’s reaction to events. When she heard about the Major she went off the rails, that’s true. When Charles and Leigh died, drunk in a fast car after a fast party – a very off-the-rails death – she went back to her family. Elf died while she was with her family and she left them, went to where there were hardly any men at all and no chance of romantic entanglements, and when No. 5 happened there…’
‘She went somewhere we don’t know,’ Alec said. ‘Not back to her family – that didn’t work last time. And presumably not to another girls’ school since it didn’t break the curse either. And she’s hardly likely to go on another bender like a flapper girl. Not at thirty. By golly, Dan, I think I’m beginning to see the point of this. It does help one…’
‘Organise?’ I said, trying to make my smile not too smug.
‘So where would she go to be even more safe and cloistered than she was at St Columba’s?’
‘Cloistered. Hm,’ I said. ‘An out-and-out nunnery? More Ophelia than Juliet, after all?’
‘I wonder which heartbreak it was that earned her the nickname,’ Alec said. ‘Charles or Elf?’
‘Sorry?’ I said. ‘Listen, darling, I’m thinking. I know I was very offhand about suicide – God, I’ll never forgive myself for Mamma-dearest hearing me! – but something’s occurred to me. She fled.’
‘Yes,’ Alec said.
‘She took flight. She’s never done that before. I mean, removing herself from her family’s care and starting her wild time must have been a gradual thing, mustn’t it? She didn’t go to bed a good girl the night she found out about the Major and wake up a bad girl in the morning. And she went to a sanatorium after Charles and after Elf. Presumably she took a bit of time deciding to be a schoolmistress too and did some rudimentary preparation for it. This time, though, new future planned, all set to take Jeanne Beauclerc home to Pereford (I wonder why she didn’t tell her mother?), she abandoned everything and simply fled. That can’t have been guilt.’