‘Thank you again, laddie,’ she said, ‘and give my kind regards to the inspector when you see him.’ She turned to me. ‘Inspector Douglass’s girl comes here, you know. A very promising scholar.’
‘I’m stayin’,’ said Reid, and something in his tone caused Miss Shanks to turn abruptly and shut the door.
‘Don’t tell me!’ she said. ‘It was never? Was it? Wee Mademoiselle?’
‘We don’t know,’ I answered. ‘Miss Lipscott said not.’
‘Well then!’ said Miss Shanks.
‘She was very upset, though, and might have been mistaken.’
‘She’s a steady sort as a rule,’ said the headmistress.
‘Steady!’ said Reid. ‘She’s hooked it.’
‘She’s what?’
‘She’s gone, Miss Shanks,’ I said. ‘And one has to wonder – that is, the police have to consider – I mean to say. A body turns up, dead by some misadventure, and someone runs away. One has to ask oneself whether one is connected to the other. It would be best to have a second witness try to identify the body, don’t you see?’
‘You mean…’ said Miss Shanks, ‘that Miss Lipscott feared… she might be next?’ This sudden suggestion startled both Reid and me and we opened our mouths to protest. ‘Or even worse! Oh, surely not! You don’t mean you thought Miss Lipscott…? You do! I can tell from your faces!’
‘Were they enemies?’ said Reid. ‘Had they fell out?’
‘Certainly not!’ cried Miss Shanks. ‘They were great friends. If Miss Lipscott said the corpse was a stranger then why not leave it at that? If Miss Lipscott chose to go – most inconvenient but there’s no need to make a penny dreadful out of… I say! Every cloud, Miss Gilver! How d’ye fancy English instead of French and you don’t have to leave us after all?’
‘Miss Shanks,’ said Constable Reid, barely containing himself. ‘I’m no’ just so sure you appreciate what we’re sayin’. Miss Lipscott has run away. Look.’ He opened the door of the wardrobe upon the pitiful sight of a half a dozen empty coat hangers, padded and covered with cloth, a lavender bag drooping sadly from each.
‘I worked those covers, you know,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘They’re just a nice wee size of job for teatime in the staffroom.’
‘And I’m going to have to ask another of youse to come and say aye or no once and for all about this poor soul we’ve got lying up there.’
‘Miss Barclay,’ said Miss Shanks at once. ‘She has the constitution of an ox. She’d have had a better time of it than poor Miss Christopher with all those nasty dissections. After the science mistress left us, you know.’
‘I wonder you didn’t think of her this morning, then,’ I said. ‘And save poor Miss Lipscott a sight that might well have caused to her to pack her bags and flee.’
‘Oh no,’ said Miss Shanks, turning round and causing us almost to collide with her – we had begun our journey to Miss Barclay’s rooms already. ‘It wasn’t the shock of the corpse, Miss Gilver. And it wasn’t fear for her own skin. Nor that other thing either – what an idea! No, this has been on the cards for a whiley. Quite a wee whiley, aye.’ She beamed at us, turned to face front again and tramped off. Reid lifted one finger and twirled it around by his temple. I nodded. Either that or drink, I was thinking, though her progress up the passageway was as straight as a plumb line.
Miss Barclay gave us a look of pure terror as we entered her room. At least, for a moment I thought so. She was hunched over her desk, a towering pile of test-papers at one elbow and a sliding heap of open textbooks at the other, and she looked up like a rabbit who has seen the shadow of an eagle passing over. She dropped her pen into the inkwell with a little splash and took the red pencil out from behind her ear.
‘Headmistress?’ she said.
‘So sorry, Barclay,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘But don’t look like that, my dearie! I’m not going to bite. You’ll be giving Miss Gilver here the wrong impression of our happy band, so you will. Now, I’ll make the cocoa myself for your return – or chicken broth, if you’ve a mind that way – but I need to ask you to go with this laddie here and look at that body they’ve fished up out of the sea.’
‘You said at lunch Miss Lipscott had done it,’ said Miss Barclay. She stood up and walked away from her desk.
‘She did,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘Then she packed up her troubles in her old kit bag! Leaving our boys in blue not very happy to take her say-so on who the corpse might be.’
‘Gone?’ said Miss Barclay. Her expression, back to the light coming in the window behind her, was unreadable and I started edging round the wall hoping for a better view.
‘But Lambourne have sent us Miss Glennie, like manna from heaven. Miss Thomasina Glennie who used to be an under-governess at Balmoral when-’ Miss Shanks then clamped her hand to her mouth and gave that high-pitched giggle again. ‘I wasn’t supposed to say,’ she said. ‘And so she’s the new French mistress.’
‘Balmoral, eh?’ said Miss Barclay, with shrewdly narrowed eyes. Mine, I suspected, were as round as plates. How could anyone swallow a story like that? Even someone as odd as Miss Shanks had to see it for the trumped-up nonsense it must be.
‘And so Miss Gilver here is the new English mistress.’
‘Um,’ said the new English mistress.
‘Miss Gilver?’ said Miss Barclay.
‘Grammar?’ I said. ‘Or novels and what have you?’ But truth be told, I would gladly have parsed all one hundred stanzas of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight if it meant I could stay put and take a crack at this oddest of cases. (I had been exposed to the thing by a tutor of my brother’s, introduced into the household by my father but shortly expelled from it again when Nanny Palmer saw what he had us reading.)
‘All roll over and one fall out!’ said Miss Shanks, as she had before.
‘You know best, Headmistress,’ said Miss Barclay. She fished her pen back out of the inkwell, wiped it and capped it. Then she stood and followed Constable Reid out of the room.
‘A bit of spelling, a spot of composition,’ said Miss Shanks, once we were alone. She had gone to the window and was gazing down into the grounds. ‘As long as they’ve read some Scott and some Shakespeare their mummies and daddies are happy. Clear lungs and rosy cheeks, that’s the main thing. Just look at them, would you?’
I joined her at the window, which was on the west front and gave a view I had not seen before now: a view of grassy headland with the blue-green sea sparkling in the middle distance and, sparkling in the immediate foreground, a bathing pool of impressive proportions in that shade of turquoise unknown to any sailor of the world’s oceans but apparently very dear to every maker of ceramic tiles. Around the pool were more of the draped and drowsing girls, none of them actually swimming. Those in the water seemed to be floating on rafts, while at the edges girls were stretched out in deckchairs, not quite naked, but close enough so that I felt stupid remembering what I had said to the others regarding hats.
‘Won’t they get cold?’ I said. It was sunny, but it was Scotland.
‘The water’s heated,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘Such a treat to dip into warm water for a wee splash about.’ I nodded, secretly scandalised by the idea of such luxury. Besides, there was no splashing down there, barely a ripple as the little rafts eddied around. ‘Still,’ Miss Shanks said, ‘it’s early in the season and we don’t want them sniffling for Parents’ Day. Just you slip down, Miss Gilver, and tell them to get in to the kitchen for cocoa and I’ll just slip down and ask our good Mrs Brown to put the milk on.’
Now this was going far beyond the heating of a little bathing water. Every nanny and every girl and boy who had been brought up by one knew that there was only one thing to do when one was cold from languid bathing: one ran up and down until one was warm again. Then one went back to the water until one was blue and shivering, then more running, and so on and so on until teatime. In fact, it was my considered opinion that the wonderful night’s sleep which followed a day at the seaside was nothing to do with fresh air at all but owed itself to athletics alone.