‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ I said. ‘I promised your sisters I would come and see that you were all right.’
‘And I am. It’s my choice not to see them. I send letters. I’m fine.’
‘Yes, well, clearly that’s nonsense,’ I answered. ‘Clearly you’re not. Fleur? Darling, what’s wrong?’
‘Nothing!’ Fleur said, bending over towards me at the waist to make her whisper do instead of shouting. ‘I’m quite quite content and perfectly well and I kept telling them that but they wouldn’t stop ringing up and bothering me and that’s precisely why I don’t want to talk to them any more.’ She swallowed hard at the end of all this and then straightened up, breathing in a long gathering breath and blowing it out slowly again like someone trying not to panic. I shook my head at her.
‘That’s not at all what Pearl told me,’ I said. ‘She told me you were indeed fine for a long time and she and the others knew it, but that something else has gone wrong now and they’re worried again. As they were before. They’re worried you’re going to bolt.’
‘What?’ said Fleur. It was the loudest she had spoken and I thought I heard the creak of a chair as someone in the next room overheard and turned to listen. Just in that creak and its timing I felt I could see the head raised from study and the shoulders twisted round, the enquiring glance at the wall shared with Miss Lipscott. Fleur had heard it too and when she spoke again she was whispering as she had before, harsh and sibilant.
‘Leave me alone,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand and neither do Pearl, Aurora or Mother.’ I almost gasped. For one of the Lipscott girls to call Mamma-dearest ‘Mother’ was like one of my children calling me ‘you there’.
‘Well, I don’t understand yet,’ I said, ‘because I haven’t heard the story, but I’m very understanding as a rule.’ Fleur closed her eyes and murmured through lips barely moving.
‘Stay away from me,’ she said. ‘For your own good. I told them too. Stay away. For their own good.’
‘Why?’ I said. ‘What on earth do you mean?’ Fleur swallowed hard. I could hear her dry throat clicking.
‘I have killed four people,’ she said.
Outside, a barn owl gave its unearthly shriek. I jumped, heart hammering, and was sure that the listening neighbour through the wall jumped too. I had heard the knocking sound of someone startled letting her knee or foot bang against a table leg. I even thought I heard a soft groaning. Fleur did not so much as flinch.
‘I have killed four people,’ she repeated. ‘And no matter how hard I try I have no way of knowing when it will happen again.’
3
‘Four?’ said Alec. He did not notice as the sandwich he was holding flopped open and a slice of tongue dropped out onto the carpet.
‘Four,’ I said.
We were sitting in his room at the Crown (his rather than mine because it had a sweet little corner bow with armchairs which looked out over the harbour and seemed made for chatting) to where he had ordered up coffee and sandwiches, thinking my pallor when I banged on his door owed itself to hunger and exhaustion. In fact the exhaustion was not too far from the mark: it had been a long day on the trains and dinner with a hundred clamouring schoolgirls had taken its toll. Of course, the cold-water shock of Fleur’s announcement, swiftly followed by my stumbling, skidding descent of the cliff path in the bad light, had not helped matters any.
‘I’ve eaten,’ I had managed to say after he had replaced the house telephone.
‘It doesn’t seem to have agreed with you,’ Alec had said in reply.
Then I told the entire tale, beginning with Miss Shanks, taking in the missing mistresses and the startling change in Fleur – here we were interrupted by the sandwiches’ arrival, the girl’s eyes out on organ stops at the sight of me in Alec’s room, still in my hat and coat – and finishing up with Fleur’s whispered pleas for me to leave, her shouting out that odd way at the mention of bolting and finally her bombshell, the words which were still ringing in my ears even now.
‘She just said it, right out? “I’ve killed four people”?’ I nodded. ‘Then what?’
‘Not another word. Well, actually then she said she couldn’t say when it might happen again.’
‘My, my,’ said Alec. ‘And then?’
‘Nothing further.’
‘No, I mean what did you say?’
‘Nothing. Or maybe a few incoherent mumbles. I left. I fled.’
‘Hmph,’ said Alec, and it did seem pretty feeble sitting there in his room with a hot cup of coffee warming my fingers and the faint sounds of the public bar wafting up through the floor and in at the open windows.
‘Fair point,’ I said, although he had not precisely made one. ‘There were scores of girls who would have overheard a scuffle even if the mistresses were all still in the common room miles away. And I suppose there must be matrons and maids and what have you. Yes, all right then, I should have stayed put and grilled her. Perhaps next time.’
‘Mistresses,’ said Alec. ‘How many have gone again?’ I gave him a grateful smile: he had already forgiven me and moved on.
‘Five,’ I said. ‘That occurred to me too. But five mistresses have disappeared and Fleur definitely said her total – my God, how horrid – was four.’
‘So no reason to make the connection.’ Alec shivered too. ‘I suppose you believed her?’
I thought hard for a moment before answering and then nodded.
‘I believe she wasn’t lying,’ I said. ‘She might be mistaken – out of her wits – but it wasn’t mischief when she told me. It was more like a warning.’
‘Although,’ Alec said, ‘there is the point of her sister’s mysterious message. “Trouble in the past” that they thought Fleur had got over by now and a great dread that it would flare up again. I always wondered why they didn’t tell you straight what kind of trouble it was, but if it was four murders then it’s less of a puzzle.’
I gave a grunt that was as close as I could get to laughter. ‘Yes, I shall be having a sharp word with Pearl if I find out she sent me off to see if a murderer was about to murder again.’ Then I shook my head to rattle the idea out of it. ‘She can’t be, Alec. She simply can’t be. She used to decorate her dolls’ house for Christmas. How could she kill anyone? And how could she possibly get a job in a good school if she had been in prison for murder? And if she had done it four times why wasn’t she hanged? And why haven’t we heard about her? She’d be more famous than Dr Crippen.’
‘Only if she were caught,’ Alec said. ‘And is it a good school?’
I opened my mouth to answer and then stopped.
‘It has some awfully grand pupils for a bad one,’ I said. ‘And yet… five mistresses gone and the head is a funny little creature more like a… who she actually reminds me of is Batty Aunt Lilah. Almost one of the girls herself, and not at all suited to being in loco parentis.’
‘The way she bundled you in and let you loose on them in the dining room certainly doesn’t inspire much confidence in her judgement. No reflection on you, you understand, but you know what I mean.’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘Well, perhaps she was the matronly one and Fräulein Whatshername was the brains of the outfit.’
‘Who?’
‘The other headmistress,’ I said. ‘There used to be two until she died.’
‘Lifting our total to six?’ said Alec. ‘Six mistresses a-vanishing?’
‘No, she’s one of the five. She was the Latin mistress as well.’
‘So what are you going to do?’ Alec said. ‘What next? What first?’
Before I could answer there came a timid knock at the door and the same maid who had brought our supper entered.
‘Just – eh – wondered if you needed anything else, sir,’ she said. ‘And madam.’ Her eyes were rounder than ever.