I knocked. Miss Shanks’s welcome came as a burst of song.
‘Come in, come in, it’s nice to see ye!’
I opened the door and entered, trying hard not to let my eyebrows rise.
‘How’s yersel’, ye’re looking grand!’ she carolled on.
‘Hello again,’ I said.
‘Harry Lauder,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘A wonderful entertainer. I have some gramophone records and I play them for the girls for a treat sometimes.’
‘How delightful,’ I said with a tight smile, thinking how odd her mood was for the current state of her school. One would not have been surprised to find her wringing her hands and tearing at her hair. Skittish hilarity seemed to me to have no place here.
‘And how delightful to have you safely with us after our wee misunderstanding,’ Miss Shanks said. She pointed me into a chair – a miscreant’s chair, clearly, being rather low and set alone before her desk, facing the window. It was a busy, rather messy room: more of the interminable patchwork abandoned on top of a cocktail cabinet and books lying open and face-down on the arms of chairs. There was even a fox’s head, stuffed and mounted, which was serving as a coat hook, scarves and satchels slung over it with abandon. I brought my gaze back to Miss Shanks who was watching me with a small smile curling at her lips.
‘I have no formal qualifications,’ I began.
‘Pouf!’ said Miss Shanks. ‘You speak French, don’t you?’ I nodded. ‘And read it and write it and are familiar with the classics?’ I stopped nodding halfway through this but she did not notice. She sailed on. ‘Then I’m sure you’ll do very nicely. My dear departed Miss Fielding was a great one for certificates and methods and all that, don’t ye know…’
‘Ah, yes, the Froebel method,’ I said. ‘The girls mentioned it to me.’
‘But I have faith in my mistresses no matter what their path to St Columba’s. Once they are here, now that you are here, my dear Miss Gilver, all is sure to be well.’
I nodded even less certainly. Faith in her mistresses? Four of them had deserted her and one had died; her school was surely teetering on the very brink of disaster. And she knew not the first thing about me.
‘Our sixth formers are four weeks from their Higher Cert exams,’ she was saying. I redoubled my efforts at concentration. ‘They must be your particular concern, naturally.’
‘That kind of certificate does interest you then?’ I said. Miss Shanks opened her eyes very wide.
‘Och, but of course,’ she said. ‘Of course, of course. Five of our sixth form are bound for university, Miss Gilver. Five! Out of only twenty. And three of the others could have gone if they’d a mind to. Two off to Edinburgh, one straight to St Andrews, one to St Andrews after a year in Switzerland and one, can you guess?’
‘Oxford?’ I said.
‘Somerville College, Oxford,’ said Miss Shanks in tones of wonder. ‘If my dear Fielding is looking down on us she will be tickled pink.’
‘And are any of them going up to read French?’ I said, resisting with some effort the impulse to cross my fingers for luck.
‘One,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘I forget which one, but one certainly. French, two for history, one for chemistry if you can believe it and one… oh, geography I think. Not that it matters.’
‘I see,’ I said. I was furiously trying to remember what I had ever known of Donald and Teddy’s French at Eton, furiously trying to convince myself either that I could coach one clever girl through the last few weeks – she was surely more or less running under her own steam now? – or that I could fulfil my obligations to Pearl and Aurora in a hundred other ways besides passing myself off as a mistress in this school.
‘Well, I suppose I’ve got until Monday morning to prepare, have I?’ I said.
‘Yes, I’ll show you to Mademoiselle Beauclerc’s room and you can acquaint yourself with her lessons. It makes sense for you just to take over her room, I suppose, although it’s one of the nicest ones and with you being new, strictly speaking, it should be “all roll over and one fall out”, don’t ye know.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘One fell out and so we all roll over and the new girl comes in at the far end. Just my bit of fun, Miss Gilver. I daresay no one will make a fuss for the last few weeks of term and then we can all bags new rooms in September.’
I managed a smile, but my head was reeling. I had fraternised in the course of my detecting career with circus performers and music-hall turns, cottagers and publicans, opium fiends and charlatans and once – frankly – witches, but I had never met anyone whose conversation left me feeling as rudderless as little Miss Shanks. No one even came close to her.
‘Right then,’ I said, and stood.
‘We’ll soon have her things cleared out of your way and everything shipshape.’
‘She…’ I swallowed. ‘She didn’t take her things?’
‘Not all of them,’ Miss Shanks said. ‘Not many, actually. She left in a bit of a rush. But one of the maids will soon get her study and bedroom ready for you. Or one of the girls maybe.’
‘Oh!’ I said, sitting again. ‘I was forgetting. I have a message for one of the girls. Sabbatina Aldo?’ Miss Shanks’s face turned blank and she shook her head.
‘Who?’ she said.
‘Sabbatina? From the village. Her father asked me to say that her mother is unwell – a contagious cold – she is not to visit tomorrow as is usual.’
‘Ah!’ said Miss Shanks. ‘Betty. We call her Betty Alder, Miss Gilver. Much more suitable. I’ll make sure she gets the message.’
‘I look forward to meeting her,’ I said. ‘I take it she studies French, doesn’t she?’
‘I couldn’t say,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘I don’t know the child.’
‘Oh?’ This was odd for two reasons: in a school of one hundred girls one would expect the headmistress to know all of them and, besides, Sabbatina Aldo was hardly run of the mill. ‘Isn’t she a scholarship girl?’ I said.
‘No,’ said Miss Shanks. Her voice was cold and the brogue was quite gone.
‘Oh,’ I said again. ‘I got the impression that she was a tremendously bright pupil. Perhaps I imagined the scholarship angle all on my own.’ I was sure I had not, but there seemed nothing else to say.
‘She is,’ said Miss Shanks, ‘extremely clever and bookish. And here thanks to a wealthy patron. She is of absolutely no interest to me.’
Which, coming out of the mouth of the headmistress of a school which went in for sending its girls to college, was a mystifying remark even set against Miss Shanks’s inexhaustible supply of them. I stared at the woman; quite honestly I gawped at her but, before I could think of a reply, a knock came at the door.
‘Come in, come in, it’s nice to-’ Miss Shanks did not get to the end of her little ditty. The door opened and Fleur Lipscott blundered into the room.
‘Miss Shanks,’ she said. She put both of her hands on the back of my chair and leaned her weight on it. I would not have risked a wager that she even noticed I was sitting there. ‘There are policemen downstairs.’
Miss Shanks said nothing but she sat up very straight and drew in a sharp breath.
‘They were asking Tessie to take them to you but I happened to be passing the door. They’ve found a body. Washed up out of the sea. At Dunskey. A female body.’