Catriona McPherson
Bothersome Number of Corpses
The seventh book in the Dandy Gilver series, 2012
For Sarah Rizzo
with love and thanks
I would like to thank:
Dave and Sarah Rizzo and Celia and Toni too and Harry, of course, for the granny flat, the piano accompaniment (Celia), the daily runway show (Toni), the inter-species welcome (Harry) and the answers to a thousand questions while I worked on this book.
Connie and Sheldon Berkowitz, Dick Hoenisch and Deborah Golino, Carla Thomas, Karin, Takao and Phoebe Kasuga, and all the faculty and staff of the Plant Pathology Department of UC Davis for their friendly support.
Spring Warren and Eileen Rendahl for their entertaining and outrageous take on life, their understanding and their instant friendship. Sally Madden for fortitude in the face of technology. To these three and also to Stella Ruiz and Katie Howard – thank you for your names.
My family and friends in Scotland for being so patient while I got my act together.
Lisa Moylett, Wonder Agent, for her steady hand on the tiller.
Bronwen Salter-Murison for the Dandy Gilver website – above and beyond.
Suzie Dooré (aka Editrix Lestrange) for the best edit ever – practically co-authoring this time. Francine Toon for her cheerful and organised way with things and for her title-generating skills. Imogen Olsen for a copy-edit that started with a shovel and ended with a scalpel. You have saved my bacon once again.
Marcia Markland, Bridget Hartzler and Kat Brzozowski for inducting me kindly but firmly into the ways of US publishing.
Neil McRoberts. Still. Kind of. No, really.
And thanks again, because once wasn’t enough, to Sarah Rizzo.
Prologue
It was three o’clock in the morning and the moon was a sliver of ice in an ink-blue sky; not a stroke of light in the west to show that the sun had ever set there, nor a hint of dawn in the east where a bank of clouds was gathering, so the darkness was as perfect as midwinter.
The sea had come in silently, waves unrolling like bolts of silk across the sands, and now it was still and full, waiting for the turn, lapping only a little as it slid gently up and down against the base of the cliffs. And so when she reached the break in the rock, a natural cove where men had built a harbour, there was no current to wash her into the welcome of its broad stone arms.
She had always loved the water; a quick swimmer, strong and sure in the warm salty tides, quick and supple like a fish escaping a net. So when she had entered the sea for the last time in her life – when, hours ago now, she had plummeted off the crumbling edge of the headland and come up choking – she had simply flicked her hair out of her eyes, kicked off her shoes and trodden water, looking around, sweeping her arms wide, letting the shock pass through her and her breaths grow calm again. When she was steady, she shrugged out of her jacket and let it float away. She tried for a moment to open her buttons, hoping to get her corset untied and let her lungs fill to the top before she started swimming, but the water was cold and, as she fumbled, twice she felt her chin sink under the surface and had to paddle her arms again.
That was the first fearful moment – as late as that. That was the first time she thought to use her lungs to cry for help and not to power her strong swim back to the shore. Two sheep at the edge of a field raised their bony heads and stared down at her, still chewing, then turned away. She scanned the line where the rock-face met the green pasture and could see nothing, not a house, not a track, not even a gate in the fence to show that the shepherd might pass by, going home at the end of his day.
Then she raised her legs in front of her and let her head drop back, feeling the coldness fill her ears. Perhaps she would find, if she let herself, that she would float to the shore, to the narrow band of boulders at the bottom of the drop, the boulders she might have fallen onto were not God Himself trying so hard to save her that He put His hand under her tumbling body and laid her gently down into His safe blue sea.
But she was floating away. Those sheep were smaller now. So she drove her legs downwards and lifted them behind her, feeling the second flutter of panic at the weight of her skirts and petticoats against the backs of her calves. Then she breathed in hard, the bones of her corset creaking against her ribs, picked a dark patch of gorse on the face of the cliff to fix her gaze upon and set off with a long, sculling stroke which seemed to push five yards of cold water behind her.
A hundred strokes later, when she took a rest, she knew the patch of gorse was no closer, but could not bear to believe it was further away.
A thousand strokes later, when she had stopped looking for the gorse, had stopped looking at the shore at all, terrified to see how distant it had become, she rested again and then turned outwards, thinking about the fishing boats, the way they fanned out of the harbour mouth each morning, blossoming over the sea, and the way they gathered homewards each evening, from every corner of the horizon, as if the boats themselves were drawing the night in after them. One of them would pass her, close enough to hear her cries.
She practised calling, and that was the third pulse of fear. Her voice was ragged, the croak of a crow; it barely reached her own ears even in the stillness this evening. She told herself that if she trod water she would not need to breathe so hard. If she breathed through her nose and kept her mouth closed her throat would soften again and her voice would be clear and loud when she used it, when the fishing boat came.
But waiting was lonely and she was cold, and so later when her mother called out to her and told her to come home, to eat her broth and bread, to take off her wet clothes, get into her warm bed and sleep, she wanted to call back that she was coming, that she would be there soon, but she kept treading water and looking for boats and she saved her voice for the fishermen.
And when her mother scolded her and told her not to shout out to strange men like a gypsy girl, told her to come home this instant, that the broth was hot and the bread was fresh, and there was an extra blanket on her bed and she could sleep until noon, could sleep the clock round, could sleep for ever if she would only come home, at last she answered – just a whisper – that she was coming. She turned her shoulder into the black cradle of the sea and rested and she felt no pain as the water covered her.
1
Hearing her name down the telephone line twitched me away into the past as swiftly as the hook in the cheek of a trout will pluck it out of water into air and leave it gasping. Fleur Lipscott, sweet little Fleur. Husband, children, decades of humdrum adult life were quite gone and there I was again in that first golden summer at Pereford where for ten long lazy weeks the sun rose over the hills, smiled down upon us all day and then sank with a sigh into the warm sea each evening. We paddled and bathed at the little cove, drifted around the lake in a little boat, meandered the cloistered Somerset lanes behind a slow, clopping pony of gentle nature in a cart full of cushions. I could smell the lavender scent of the linen cushion-slips still.
There were three sweet golden Lipscott girls – Pearl, Aurora and little Fleur – each with a silky mass of flaxen curls and a pink rose in each cheek, and had Pereford been a house full of men or of mirrors I might have resented my straight black hair and sallow complexion, being just old enough at eighteen to know that flax and roses were better currency in the business for which we girls had been trained. But ‘the Major’ as his wife and daughters always called him (with inverted commas and capital letter clearly pronounced) had died when Fleur was a baby; and Mamma-dearest (with no inverted commas at all; the endearment was unselfconscious), Batty Aunt Lilah (often addressed just like that, in full) and the three girls themselves lived with a kind of gentle delight in their home and each other, which spread over all their friends. It was most effective at stopping such churlish feelings as envy taking hold, and was not even half as annoying as it sounds.