‘Aye,’ said Constable Reid. ‘We’ll no’ forget that yet awhile, eh no?’ And, sharing a look, we took the first steps towards cordiality again. ‘Here, youse!’ he said, clapping his hands. ‘Mind out and no’ fall off they banisters.’ It was hardly police business, but his hectoring did the trick, rousing all the girls until they were sitting or at least propped up on their elbows, blinking and scowling and no longer looking like corpses, which was fine by me.
‘And… put your hats on,’ I chipped in. ‘Or move into the shade before you all end up as brown as ploughmen.’ Reid nodded and we left the garden, to whispers of ‘Gilver’ and ‘French, I think’ and stifled laughter at how old-fashioned I had shown myself to be.
‘So where is she?’ said Reid, when we had slipped in through the open french windows to the empty dining room. He stood sniffing the air, which was still thick from the luncheon-time cabbage and gravy – the poor girls; small wonder they were drowsing like bumblebees – and looked so very efficient and eager that once again I felt an urge to shield Fleur and none at all to deliver her unto him.
‘I’ll take you to her rooms,’ I said, hardly knowing why I gave the little cell this lordly title – more shielding, probably.
The same cold feeling which had descended upon me at the cove was back again, stronger than ever. I wondered if Reid felt anything of the like and I stole glances at him as we crossed the hall and climbed the stairs. He seemed calm enough, grimly confident if anything, but he was a bright lad and surely he must be wondering if we would find her there. I was long past wondering myself; I was sure. We wended through the corridors, past rooms absolutely silent this sunny afternoon, and stopped at Fleur’s door. Constable Reid rapped on the wood with a firm authority that no one inside could have ignored, not for a pension. There was no answer. He tried the handle, found the door unlocked, glanced at me and just as firmly as he had knocked he swung it open.
The room, needless to say, was empty. Reid let his breath go – the first sign that he had been suffering even the smallest measure of tension.
‘Righty-ho,’ he said. ‘So where will she be if she’s no’ in here, then? Classroom? On a Saturday afternoon?’
I shook my head and gazed at the room that lay before me. It had been so bare before that it was hard to account for what made it barer now. Perhaps there had been a book on the beside table; certainly there was none today. And the water glass had been rinsed out and was resting upside down on a folded flannel facecloth by the washbasin. But perhaps Fleur rinsed her glass and moved her Bible every morning. What was it? Then my eye was caught by the dark lines along the front of the little chest and I bit down on my bottom lip. The drawers were not fully closed – the top one open half an inch, the next an inch and the third an inch and a half, so precise and so familiar. It was what Matron in the convalescent home in the war required us to do when one poor soldier had limped off home and the next had not arrived. The drawers were being aired. The drawers were empty.
And what had happened was my fault, entirely mine. I knew it had happened the moment I turned and saw the empty beach behind me, but I had done nothing. Later I would argue that I had tried and the stupid sergeant had stopped me. Later still, I would tell myself that if I knew the sergeant was stupid then it was up to me to ignore him. She could not have gone far; she had only had a five-minute start at most. I should have searched and listened and called her name and – surely – I would have found her. It was too late now.
Fleur was gone.
5
‘Yep,’ said Constable Reid, slamming shut the wardrobe door which gave an echoing boom. ‘She’s away.’
‘I can furnish you with the address of her family home and those of her sisters and…’ I said.
‘Right,’ said Reid, but his tone was not one of huffy offence any more. He stood looking out of the window, tapping a tune with one finger on the hollow of his cheek. ‘Only… how come she got packed up and off so quickly?’
‘Maybe,’ I said, slowly, thinking of the bareness of her room the night before and the way she had yelped when I mentioned the possibility, ‘maybe she was planning to go anyway.’
‘Seein’ as how she’d killed somebody?’ he asked. Then he frowned. I frowned.
‘Why would she wait until the body had washed up?’ I said. ‘To see it?’
‘She had a good enough look at it, right enough,’ Reid said. ‘And there’s something no’ right about what she said. It’s like…’
‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘It was too…’
‘Aye,’ said Reid, staring at me like a cow looking over a fence at another cow staring back. Where, I asked myself, was Alec, when one needed him?
‘Also,’ I went on, ‘why would she pretend it wasn’t Mademoiselle Beauclerc? She’d be so easily caught out.’
‘If it is that French one,’ said Reid. ‘We’ll need to get another one of them up there and see, eh?’
We had left the door open behind us when we entered and now heard footsteps approaching along the passageway; a very steady tread which already I recognised as belonging to the sturdy little booted feet of Miss Shanks. I braced myself for the encounter as she hove into the doorway and stopped there.
‘Aha!’ she said. ‘Miss Gilver and… escort. Thank you, young man, for bringing my bonnie back home. Most thoughtful. And I take it the poor unfortunate was no one we know? Since I haven’t heard otherwise? Splendid, splendid, jolly good.’ Reid tried to break into the stream but was unsuccessful and retired into silence.
‘So, my dear Miss Gilver,’ Miss Shanks went on. ‘I thought I’d find you in Miss Lipscott’s rooms. Where is she, by the way? Sad news, I’m afraid. Look who’s here!’ She drew to her side a middle-aged woman dressed in a gunmetal-grey travelling costume whom I had never set eyes upon before in my life.
‘Such a shame,’ she said, ‘I had very high hopes of you, my dear. But Miss Glennie comes with the Lambourne Agency’s highest recommendation and, besides, she has been a governess to- Well, let’s not tell tales in school, eh?’ She broke off to utter a series of whinnying high-pitched giggles with her hand in front of her mouth.
‘How do you do, Miss Glennie,’ I said. ‘Welcome to St Columba’s.’ She nodded slightly. ‘Might I though, Miss Shanks, before I go, have a quiet word?’ I shrank from speaking freely in front of the new mistress of the faceless, handless corpse who might well be the old one.
‘Why certainly, for sure, for sure,’ sang out Miss Shanks. I did not recognise her words as a quotation, but her habit of speech was beginning to make everything she said sound like a snatch of some music-hall ditty, or like the last line of prose in a light operetta just before the band strikes up and the cast bursts into out-and-out song. ‘You’ll find your way back to my sitting room all right, won’t you, Miss Glennie?’ she said, to the new mistress’s astonishment. Miss Glennie blinked and gave half a look over her shoulder at the turn in the passageway.
‘Perhaps one of the girls…?’ I said, gesturing to the doors on either side. Miss Shanks gave them a swift glance and then shook her head.
‘Just keep turning left, Miss Glennie,’ she said, ‘and you’ll come soon enough to the top of the stairs. It works for mazes too if you’re ever lost in one. I’ll not be a tick.’ She went so far as to give the woman a little shove in the small of her back as she set off, and then she came inside and held the door open like a commissionaire, twinkling at Constable Reid.