Miss Shanks and I had both scrambled to our feet and Fleur noticed me for the first time.
‘What brought them here?’ said Miss Shanks. Her voice was high and tremulous. ‘Oh my good Lord, it’s not one of the girls, is it? Was anyone missing at breakfast time?’
‘It’s a woman,’ Fleur said. ‘Not a girl. They came here because they thought it might be one of us. One of the mistresses. From the way she was dressed, I suppose.’
‘How long-’ Miss Shanks had to clear her throat and start again. ‘How long has it been in the water, did they say? Which one did they think it might be?’
The room swirled just a little around me then and I put my hand out to steady myself, finding Fleur’s icy fingers under my own. She flinched and then grabbed my wrist.
‘Dandy,’ she said. ‘They – the policemen – want someone to go and look at it – her. I’ll go but only if you come with me.’
Miss Shanks pattered around the side of her desk and came to stand, shifting from foot to foot, between us.
‘It should be me,’ she said, but plaintively with not a shred of determination. ‘As headmistress it falls to me. Oh, how I wish Miss Fielding were here! Perhaps Mrs Brown would… I can’t!’ she said. ‘I can’t do it. The sight and the smell of it. I’ll faint or be sick. I feel ill just thinking about it. How long did they say?’
‘I’ll do it,’ said Fleur. ‘Mrs Gilver will come with me.’
It seemed that I was not to have a say and I was feeling rather green myself at the prospect, especially since Miss Shanks had brought the rude facts of the matter right out into the open that way.
‘I shan’t forget this, Miss Lipscott,’ said the headmistress. ‘I shall never forget that you did this for me.’
Fleur gave her a long cool look which I could not decipher before she turned back to me.
‘Dandy? No time like the present. The policemen have a motorcar with them. They can take us there right away.’
There turned out to be a small cove a mile or two north of Portpatrick. Four of us – Fleur, me, a sergeant and a constable – trundled up out of the village on the road I had taken from the station the evening before and onto a little farm lane before turning to the sea again and following an even smaller lane down through the woods to a headland. The constable pulled off onto a patch of ash beside a cottage and stopped the engine.
‘This is as far as the road goes,’ he said. ‘There’s a wee path’ll take us down from here.’
‘Where is she?’ I asked, horrified to think, no matter how long the body had been in the water, that they had simply hauled her up the beach, covered her with a tarpaulin and left her there.
‘Dinnae worry, miss,’ he replied. ‘She’s inside, decent as decent can be.’
The cottage wife looked with wary interest out of her kitchen window at us all alighting from the motorcar, and a clutch of her children peeped around the side of the house wall, going so far as to follow behind us as we set off two by two towards the track we were to take to the shoreline.
‘Scat!’ said the constable, turning round and stamping his foot at them. ‘Gah!’ The children scattered, giggling. ‘They’d no’ be laughin’ if we let them come with us and they saw her,’ he said. ‘Or smell-’
‘Tsst!’ said the sergeant and his man fell silent, but not soon enough for me. The succession of sugary little pastries and the two cups of coffee-flavoured tar were lurching around inside me. I stole a look over at Fleur but nothing could be gleaned from her pale, set face and her timid posture. She had looked terrified since the first moment I had laid eyes upon her, last night in the staffroom.
The path was not long and within minutes we had come out onto a pebbly cove between rocks, where there was a curious little wooden building like two hexagonal beach huts stuck together, their pointed roofs and arched windows looking straight out of a fairy tale.
‘What is that?’ I said, thinking that if it were my little summerhouse I would not have been best pleased to have had the police commandeer it to lay out a body, new-plucked from its fishy grave.
‘Cable station,’ said the constable. ‘It was built to house the machinery for the telegraph cable. Quite interest-’
‘Tsst,’ said the sergeant again. He had taken off his cap and nodded at the constable to do the same. Then he drew a deep breath and turned to Fleur and me.
‘If you’ve a handkerchief, ladies,’ he said, ‘you might want to…’ He demonstrated with his own large cotton square, clamping it hard over his nose and mouth. I fished my little bit of lace out from my pocket and did the same. Fleur shook her head slightly. The sergeant opened the door and we stepped inside.
On a table against the far side of the room – only seven or eight feet away at that – a humped shape under a sheet lay as still as a stone. I concentrated hard on breathing through my mouth, after hearing a soft groan from Fleur.
I had seen corpses before now. I had watched men become corpses once or twice in the convalescent home during the war, where convalescing was predominant but not guaranteed. And in latter years I had been forced to look at and sometimes touch no fewer than seven dead people, some of them dead by the most violent means that wickedness could bring. But all of these corpses had been newly departed this life, a few hours gone at most since they had been breathing. What awaited me under the sheeting in the cable station that bright May morning was something else again.
The sergeant took another of his enormous breaths and swept back the cover from the remains it had been shrouding.
Fleur let out a shuddering kind of moan and put her hand up to her mouth at last. I stared straight ahead out of the window, attempting to bring my panicky breaths back to something near normal before I tried to look at the thing.
‘Well?’ said the sergeant. I glanced at him. He was talking to Fleur, but as he looked from her face down at the table my eyes, without my bidding, followed his gaze.
‘Oh God,’ I said and then the most surprising thing happened. I was not sickened nor frightened by what was lying there. Instead, I felt a tear bulge up in each of my staring eyes and drop down my cheeks.
Her hair was matted and stiff with salt, straggling over one shoulder and lying in a clump on her breast. Her clothes were dark with the water and twisted around her body from where she had been roughly humped onto the table. Her shoes were gone, her stockings tattered and her feet, puffed up like monstrous toadstools, were mottled with wounds and sores. Her hands were half-hidden in her clothes, but I could see that they looked just like her feet, swollen and nibbled. Terrible to think they had put on those clothes and brushed that sodden hair.
I wiped the tears away from my eyes and looked at her face, or at the dreadful, pitiable sight where her face should be. And finally I felt the floor begin to tilt.
‘Steady there,’ said the constable and put his good strong arm across my back. The sergeant was already holding Fleur by her elbows and I could tell from the grim look upon his face that she was buckling.
‘Is that one of your colleagues, miss?’ he asked her. She shook her head and the movement seemed to strengthen her. The sergeant took his hands away.
‘Do you know who it is?’ said the constable gently. Fleur took a step forward and bent over the body, looking at the buttons on the high-necked dress, staring at the lace around the collar. I could not have put my face so close to that grey skin with the ragged edge where her face should have begun if all our lives had depended upon me.
‘Miss?’ said the constable.
‘It’s not Jeanne Beauclerc,’ said Fleur.
The constable swallowed audibly.
‘Who is it?’ he asked.
‘I – I don’t know her,’ said Fleur.
‘Madam?’ said the sergeant, looking back at me.
‘Nor I.’ My voice sounded thin and high, like a child’s.