‘In here, Dandy,’ she hissed. She drew me into the room beside her and closed and locked the door. ‘How was it?’ she said, looking searchingly at me, ‘I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you down there. Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I like your Mrs Hepburn, Lollie dear. She calls me Fanny and plies me with drink. And the girls and boys are all very lively. I slightly let Miss Rossiter’s accent fall by the wayside, but they’ve decided en masse to treat it as a sort of joke, so there’s nothing to worry about on that score.’
‘Splendid,’ said Lollie. She crossed the room and sat at her dressing table where an overflowing ashtray spoke of her nervous afternoon. ‘It’s just a couple of Pip’s friends for dinner tonight – nothing too fancy. But let’s talk while I change.’ I thought of Mrs Hepburn’s spun toffee nests and the coconut ice she had been finishing off to fill them with when I had left her, and I wondered what ‘fancy’ would have looked like.
‘Very well, then,’ I said, taking out my little notebook and sitting down on the end of her bed. ‘First of alclass="underline" do you have any suspicions about who it is that’s following you when you go out?’
‘None,’ said Lollie, stopping with her shirt halfway off over her head and staring at me.
‘Male or female, even?’
‘Why?’
‘I was trying to think who it might be myself,’ I told her. ‘Some of them are absolutely impossible: Millie and Mattie, for instance. Their innocence shines out of them.’ I nodded to myself. Of course, it was terrible detective work to discount a person on that score but, more pertinently, a scullerymaid is always under the eye of the cook and a hall and boot boy hardly less so; harried and chivvied and nagged and kept up to the mark with endless little jobs all day. I could not imagine that young Mattie could easily slip away.
So perhaps the only candidates were Mrs Hepburn or Mr Faulds, with no one above them to check their movements and demand accounts of missing time? But as soon as I had thought it I could see how hopeless it was, for a butler is always there, upstairs and down, drawing room and servants’ hall, always at the other end of a rung bell, opening doors, bearing trays, bowing over salvers. If Pallister, at home at Gilverton, were to take up secret missions the very walls would crumble by teatime. And if a butler is the walls and floors and door bells of a house then a cook is the foundation stone, square and solid and always down there, in the kitchens, toiling away. I am not often in the kitchens at Gilverton, it is true, but I had certainly never been there when Mrs Tilling was not, could scarcely imagine such a thing.
No, if anyone were slipping out and following Lollie it was to the middle ranks I should be looking. Not perhaps the footman, for footmen are as visible as butlers all day long, and not the tweenie who, even though she spent half her time above stairs and half below, had a daily round not of her own devising. Besides, poor shy Eldry, biting her lip and blushing, did not seem the girl to dash out and then cover her tracks upon her return. The two upper maids, languorous Clara and pert little Phyllis, were a livelier pair of prospects; I should have thought either of them quite equal to a bit of spying. But then I thought again of Clara’s flouncing huff over Miss Rossiter’s Christian name. Surely that sprang from some quite solid sense of fair play? And then think of Phyllis giggling and stitching her embroidery and comforting poor Mattie with cuddles. A snooper? It did not seem likely.
Which left those two boys: John and Harry. John, being the chauffeur, could certainly – easily – be sent off on errands by his master without the other servants missing him. And I knew from my own experience how much time Grant spends mysteriously employed away from the house, even with only a dressmaker in the village to absorb her attentions. If we lived in a town she would never be out of the shops, buying up yards of ribbon and stockings by the score, and I imagined the same was true of a valet, if not even more so, what with shaving soap and tobacco and hair brilliantine. Again though, apart from the free time at their disposal, neither of them seemed all that likely: John had the easy, open manners which come from good looks and early advancement and Harry the brusque insolence of plain features and too much politics, but of watchful cunning and furtiveness I had seen not a whisker.
Lollie’s thoughts must have been running along the same lines as my own.
‘It never occurred to me it was one of the servants,’ she said, rousing me from them. She had got herself out of her shirt and skirt and had wrapped herself up in a dressing gown to sit at her table.
‘Who else?’ I asked her. ‘It was the first thing that occurred to me.’
‘I suppose a private detective?’ said Lollie. ‘Someone could easily wait across the road for me to come out.’
I stepped over to the windows and looked out. Her bedroom was at the front, on the sunny side, and had an excellent view over Queen Street Gardens where a private detective might indeed pass endless unseen hours behind a tree watching her, so long as he had a key. These gardens were not open to the hoi polloi, naturally, but kept scrupulously for the use of the residents, even nannies with perambulators being frowned on in some of the grander squares and crescents in the town. I turned back to the room.
‘I’m not even sure it’s the same person every time,’ said Lollie, who had started brushing her hair.
‘Here, let me do that.’ I came back from the window, took her hairbrush out of her hands and set to work with it.
‘And doesn’t that suggest a firm of detectives, rather than a servant?’ she asked.
I did not answer; her fine, silky hair had responded to my brushing by flying up in a cloud like a dandelion head all around her parting. I dabbed the brush at it trying to make it flatten down again and caught her eye in the mirror.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Do you have a rose-water spray? I’m almost sure I could make some little waves if we dampen it.’
We went together to look and see what there might be in her bathroom, Lollie saying it was a good idea for me to get the lie of the land.
‘And don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Pip won’t be up for half an hour.’
It had once been the dressing room and – although windowless in the middle of the building and surely rather stuffy as a result – made a very comfortable bathroom now. I looked with interest at the little hooded alcove on one end of the bath, something between a sedan chair cover and a grotto.
‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘A stand-up shower-bath! How lovely.’
‘Yes, we had them in our suite in Turkey on our honeymoon,’ said Lollie, ‘and Pip put one in for me. It’s rather delicious, except when the hot water suddenly runs out. I don’t think I’ll chance it while our coal’s being rationed. Now come and see my boudoir.’
She cannot have needed it, what with four rooms downstairs and the ground-floor parlour too, but there it was: a little oasis of satin- and tulip-wood, with Louis XIV salon chairs and floral plaques stuck on to any cabinet, cupboard front or sewing table which presented a flat space for the sticking.
Across the landing to the back, Pip had the larger of the two bedrooms, north-facing like Miss Rossiter’s room four floors beneath it, but with a view down over the Forth to the hills of Fife. I stepped close to the glass and peered downwards, seeing my little cherry tree and patch of grass far below. Then I turned around and studied the room closely. One could surely learn a great deal about a person from his bedroom.