‘No thank you,’ Alec said. ‘Here, take the tray, but I’ll keep the plate in case I’m peckish later.’
‘And can I turn down your bed while I’m about it?’ she said, blushing a little and somehow giving off the strong impression that she had been put up to this by a third party.
‘No thanks,’ said Alec again.
‘You could turn mine down,’ I said, losing patience with it all. ‘Two doors along. And I’d like some hot water too if it’s not too late in the evening.’ The maid bobbed and disappeared.
‘You asked me what I was going to do,’ I said once she had gone. ‘Am I to take it then that your desire to be part of the case has waned as the casualty list has swollen?’
‘Not at all,’ Alec said. ‘Not a bit of it. Only I can see now that you’re right. You’re much better able to infiltrate a girls’ boarding school than I.’
‘The pisky vicar has been roped in as Latin master,’ I said. ‘Could you turn your hand to… what was it… science or history, I think?’ Alec snorted. ‘French is taken. Music and PE. Well, I can see the problem with you teaching the girls PE. I don’t think the Rowe-Issings would stand for Stella learning rugger. Music?’
‘Triangle,’ said Alec. ‘And I sometimes got that wrong. And anyway, the fact is… while you were out I snagged a case of my own.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Do tell.’
Alec rubbed his nose and did not quite meet my eye.
‘It doesn’t have the thrill of yours, but then I didn’t know how thrilling yours would be when I agreed to take on mine. A schoolmistress in low spirits didn’t sound like too much fun, frankly. My case is much more tempestuous than that. Not than five missing persons and four murders, obviously. How untidy to have them not match up.’
‘Tempestuous?’ I said, cutting through the babble.
‘There is a seething tangle of dark passion here in Portpatrick,’ Alec said.
‘Hang on,’ I said, stretching out a toe and poking him. ‘A tangle of passion sounds exactly like the kind of case we said Gilver and Osborne would never stoop to.’
‘Needs must,’ Alec said. ‘Since I’m here. One of the good burghers of this fair town wants very much to know which other good burgher has stolen his wife’s heart from him.’
‘But we agreed!’
‘We might have said it would be nice if every case was a juicy one,’ Alec said. ‘But we never agreed to turn away business. I didn’t anyway.’ His look of triumph was not to be borne and I took myself off to bed in disgust, not missing the sudden scuffle that told me someone was waiting in the passage to see me go.
He started again over breakfast the next morning.
‘It’s not at all what we always said we would never do, anyway.’
Our breakfast table was very small and very close to the breakfast tables of everyone else currently staying at the Crown, to wit: three commercial gentlemen who greeted one another and then retired behind their newspapers, three amateur fishermen who sat together and talked of lines and tides and notable catches of old, and a convalescent widow with a companion, who nibbled daintily at soft-boiled eggs and spoke in murmurs. Alec and I attracted no attention at all from the six men but set the two women quivering with interest. The convalescent widow was in danger of letting her egg grow cold, all forgotten, so much effort was she putting in to catching my eye. Alec, leaning in close across the minuscule table, ignored them all.
‘He’s not asking us to check boarding-house registers to help him with a divorce,’ Alec insisted. ‘He just wants her back again. And a name. For his own satisfaction.’
‘And if he then decides it would be even more satisfying to go after the fellow with a meat cleaver? That wouldn’t trouble you?’
‘Filleting knife, actually,’ Alec said, but absently. He was looking over my shoulder.
‘He’s a fisherman?’ I asked, craning to look over it too. There was a mild commotion taking place in the doorway of the dining room. The little maid who had brought our supper last night, decked out to serve breakfast in a sprigged frock and cotton apron, was remonstrating with another figure who seemed determined to enter the room. A round little figure in a voluminous tartan cloak and a green velvet hat shaped like a hot cross bun: it was Miss Shanks and, despite the maid’s best efforts to protect her guests from the intrusion, she was even now striding towards Alec and me, throwing one wing of her cloak back over her shoulder.
‘Mrs Gilver,’ she said, arriving at our little table and standing there – still rather swash-bucklingly – with her feet planted far apart and her hands on her hips. ‘And Mr Osborne, I believe.’
The commercial gentlemen carried on chewing their toast and reading their headlines; the anglers carried on with their reminiscence of some distant whopper; but the convalescent widow and her companion practically fell off their seats with curiosity and I could feel their two pairs of eyes fastened upon me like magnifying glasses in the desert sun, smouldering dry twigs into fire.
‘Miss Shanks,’ I said. ‘Alec, dear,’ – a crackle from the twigs as the magnifying glasses flashed in horror – ‘this is Miss Shanks from St Columba’s of whom I told you last evening.’
Alec half rose and half bowed then sank into his seat again.
‘And how can we help you today, Miss Shanks?’ he said.
She regarded him very thoughtfully for a moment before she answered.
‘Lambourne, Mrs Gilver, have let me down,’ she said, flicking a glance to me and then fastening her eyes back on Alec again. ‘And I knew you’d still be here, don’t ye know?’ Miss Shanks’s Scotch brogue was intermittent and utterly bogus, but I was beginning to get a handle on its comings and goings: it carried her over chasms where good taste and fine feeling might send her tumbling. ‘I thought, despite our wee misunderstanding yesterday, that I might persuade you to stay, since you’ve trundled all the way up to us here by the sparkling sea, eh?’
‘Down, actually,’ I said. ‘Not that it ma-’
‘And since you’re so settled.’ She twinkled at me. ‘Cooried in, ye might say.’
Alec and I were completely bamboozled.
‘But as you yourself pointed out, Miss Shanks,’ I said, ‘my married state is not at all suitable for employment at your establishment.’ I was beginning to sound like the woman, damn her.
‘Well, I thought about that, Mrs Gilver,’ said Miss Shanks, attempting a girlish air – mostly made up of swinging her skirts from side to side and looking at me out of the corner of her eye – ‘and talked it over with one of my colleagues, and I decided that if you would submit to being known as Miss Gilver while you’re with us, the girls don’t need to know.’
‘Your colleague Miss Lipscott?’ I could not imagine Fleur clamouring for my return but I could not imagine any of the Misses Lovage, Barclay or Christopher caring one way or the other.
‘Mrs Brown,’ said Miss Shanks. She stuck her chin in the air and carried on very loftily. ‘She’s on the housekeeping staff.’
Alec now went so far as to cross his eyes and stick his tongue out to signal his bewilderment to me. Miss Shanks, facing the way she did, missed it but the widow’s companion caught it and turned back to her boiled egg with a look of distaste at such vulgarity.
‘I see,’ I lied. Miss Shanks giggled, although at least the skirt-swinging had stopped, I was glad to see.
‘I’m sure your husband won’t mind. Since, as you said yourself and as we all can see,’ she jerked her head towards Alec like a farmer at a cattle auction, ‘he is so very understanding.’ She beamed at me. ‘Now you finish up your brekkie and then toddle up to see me, eh? I’ll arrange for Anderson to collect your things.’ She folded herself back into her cloak and beamed again.
‘Cheerie-bye,’ she said. ‘À bientôt. Auf Wiedersehen. Toodle-oo.’