Then I remembered Miss Lovage from the evening before – and Miss Shanks with her cloaks – and I shuddered. I had been inoculated against theatricality in dress by my mother’s trailing sleeves and by her penchant for the sort of embroidery that belonged on the back of a kimono, if anywhere. Perhaps Fleur in her beige had it right after all, dressing like the schoolmistress she had become, with not a scrap left about her of the child I remembered so well.
I smiled. Even then, when every girl and boy was beribboned and befrilled to the point of immobility and forced to be good (given the effort required to be naughty when one had so many elaborate garments to haul around with one), Fleur Lipscott had been renowned in the family, the village and beyond for the costumes she concocted day by day. There was a foundation layer – what archaeologists, or quite possibly geologists, call a substratum – of woollen underclothes, linen and lace petticoats, muslin and lawn frocks: the stuff of Edwardian childhood, but to it Fleur added trimmings of her own devising, unearthed and scavenged from all around her domain. She wore camphorous stoles and tippets found in the attic trunks, voluminous plaids spun by the crofter women around the Highland hunting lodge, a cage of crinoline hoops embellished with rag ribbons so that she looked like an enormous birdcage full of fluttering budgerigars. She found amongst the Major’s uniforms more items of interest than might have seemed likely: epaulettes and medal ribbons, sashes and spurs, hat-bands and waistcoats, and a greatcoat of such length and girth and unyielding thickness that she rather inhabited it as a dwelling than wore it like clothes. When she walked in this last item it made one think of how the pyramid stones were moved, impossibly slowly, on rolling logs. She always emerged with hot cheeks and damp hair and to our laughter and quizzical looks she would say that it was indeed rather warm but good for thinking. Then she would resettle her Indian headdress or pirate’s tricorne and sweep grandly off to another adventure.
‘Darling little goose,’ I remember Pearl saying once, gazing after her.
‘And she slogs like a slave at it,’ Aurora had agreed. ‘That hat was miles too big until she put the rats in it.’
Batty Aunt Lilah let out a small shriek and shot to her feet, calling Fleur back and demanding explanations.
‘Not rats, Batty Aunt,’ said Fleur, bowing so that her hat fell off into her hand. ‘Not Rattus rattus, although I don’t hate them like you do.’ She rummaged inside the tricorne and extracted an object which looked distressingly like a member of the Rattus rattus family to me. Batty Aunt Lilah shrieked again and recoiled from it.
‘It’s my hair!’ said Fleur, holding the thing in the palm of her hand to show it clearly. ‘Stitched up in a net. You know I found that old ratter of Granny’s and couldn’t resist it? Still in its box, with instructions and everything. I made three of my own and now I’m doing Aurora and Pearl. Separately, for hygiene, but I must say, Pearl, either you’re not brushing properly or Rora’s going bald, because she’s surging ahead of you. Come to my room and I’ll show you.’
‘You horrid child!’ said Pearl, pretending to shiver although really she was laughing. ‘I knew you’d been skulking in the bathroom. I never dreamed why!’
‘You’ll thank me when fashions change back again and you’re all ready for them,’ said Fleur, carefully inserting the rat back into the crown of the tricorne. ‘It’s not everyone who can be out of fashion and look remarkable instead of just peculiar.’ Then – dressed, under the greatcoat, in pale grey patent skating boots with the blades removed and an old sari – she had gone about her day.
How I wished that little ribbon-ringleted Fleur was here today, prattling on without a care for who heard and what they made of it. Even the second Fleur, the painted and sequinned girl I had met only once and who had left such a searing impression upon me, would have been welcome; for although she was far from that innocent child who spoke without thinking, at least she spoke. She twittered and giggled and made spiked little jibes and, like any flirt, at times she gave away more than she meant to, reaching for a joke, playing out her line to its end to hook the laugh she had spotted there.
Still, I should go up and find her, even the silent self-possessed woman she was now. I turned and leaned my back against the harbour wall, staring up at the school. She must surely be back by now, no matter how rambling a path she had taken home from the cove. With the thought, that sick feeling returned to somewhere deep inside me, but once again I swallowed and let it pass, not giving it form in my mind, not even examining it to see what form it would take. Instead I pushed myself up off the wall and strolled around the arm of the harbour, just like the fisherwives, all of us waiting for our men to return.
Fisherwives, I soon concluded, were better at waiting than me. In less time than it would have taken one of them to retie her shawl, fill her pipe and enquire in that rolling Gallovidian drawl after the health of the next fisherwife along the wall, I had grown bored and was marching back into the heart of the town. I was bound for the kiosk to ring home and tell them all where I was if needed, thence to St Columba’s, but I had hardly begun the long haul up the Main Street when I saw the police motorcar trundling down. Alec’s arm appeared, waving madly, in the side window as he saw me too and he jumped out while Constable Reid was still in the early stages of braking.
‘It’s not her,’ he said, lolloping towards me in enormous strides. ‘It’s not Rosa. Joe was quite certain.’
The motorcar crossed the street and drew up beside us. Constable Reid was in the shadows, but I thought I could still discern a frosty look on his face as he nodded a greeting. I ignored him and leaned in at the back where Joe Aldo was sitting bolt upright with a fist clenched on each knee, staring straight ahead.
‘You’re sure, Mr Aldo?’ I said. He turned his head immeasurably slowly and showed me stricken eyes with black circles under them.
‘My head,’ he said, in a whisper. ‘My head is to break in pieces.’
‘Tension,’ I said. ‘You must go home and rest. It must have been horrid for you until you knew.’
Perhaps his headache was too severe to let him nod, but he squeezed his eyes shut and tilted his head just a fraction.
‘Is not Rosa,’ he said. ‘Dress, hair. I roll her sleeves and is not Rosa’s skin. Rosa has…’ He poked his finger here and there over his other forearm as if to dot it.
‘Freckles?’ I said.
‘From the soap.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘But might not the sea water have…?’
‘Sottoveste,’ said Joe, gesturing. ‘Under. Underneath.’
‘Petticoats?’ I said. He nodded. ‘But-’
‘Dandy,’ said Alec. ‘It’s not her. They were married for fifteen years.’
‘And the lady, poor lady, is too… Rosa is a little apple. My little peach, my little plum.’
But it was what Alec had said that convinced me. I can never understand it when one reads in the Sunday papers that a headless torso has been found sans legs, sans arms, in a suitcase, and no one can guess who it might be. If the torso were part of a husband then I should think the wife would know. I could tell any part of Hugh big enough to fill a suitcase, certainly.
Besides, this tussle between Alec and me was becoming ridiculous. He could carry on alone desiring my client’s sister to be a murderess; I was no longer going to desire his client’s wife to be drowned.
‘If you’re gettin’ out here, Mr Aldo,’ said Constable Reid, ‘I’ll swing round and get up by.’ He jerked his head in the direction of St Columba’s. ‘Are you comin’?’ he asked me. I was not, I noted, worthy of even a ‘missus’ now, never mind a ‘madam’. I hesitated; I did not want to consign Fleur to being arrested without an ally, but I could not promise to be a staunch one. I would not lie.