‘And shall we try to find out where Miss Lipscott has gone?’ I said.
‘Oh, I think Miss Lipscott has made it clear she’s done with us, don’t you?’ said Miss Shanks. ‘I had high hopes of her once but she never did shape to the job and this bolt has been a long time coming.’
‘But still-’ I said.
‘If the police want to find her then they can do the searching,’ Miss Shanks said. ‘Finders keepers, losers weepers.’
‘Well, shall we at least ring her sisters and let them know? Shall I? Since I’m acquainted with them?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘Now, go and tell those girls to put on their wraps and come inside.’
I took this to give me carte blanche to do what I chose in the matter of Fleur. And what I chose to do was find her. (Of course, I should also have to spend some little time on the question of why Miss Shanks left it to me, of why she had been so frantic about the mademoiselle and cared not a fig for Miss Lipscott. It was Betty Alder all over again.)
So it was with a great many questions bumping around inside my mind that I let myself out of the front door of the house and made my way around to the bathing pool. It really was getting rather chilly, even though the northern sun was still high in the sky, and my task was being taken out of my hands as the girls themselves variously sat up, stood and tried to rub the goose pimples from their bare arms. In the pool the bathers were slipping off the rafts, out of the cool air and into the warm water.
‘Jolly good,’ I called to them. ‘Hurry up and get dry and there’s cocoa in the kitchens for you.’
Then there came again the rustle of whispers – ‘Who’s that?’, ‘Miss Gilver’, ‘French mistress’ – as they folded their deckchairs and leaned them together like playing cards (in Scotland, even on an afternoon where the sky is clear to the far horizon, one is always preparing for rain).
It was a very pleasant scene, the mild sunshine and the girls in their colourful bathing suits; even the pool itself was not so monstrous viewed from down here. The steps and rails were of painted wood and not the nasty chromium of a common lido and the turquoise-blue tiles stopped at the water’s edge; the lounging terrace around it was good grey granite and weathering nicely. I stepped over to read the inscription carved into an especially large granite slab. The Rowe-Issing Bathing Pool, it read. By the kindness of Cmdr and Mrs B. T. H. Rowe-Issing. Opened 21st June 1925.
I stared until my watering eyes reminded me to blink. It was unthinkable that Basil and Candide Rowe-Issing had given Miss Shanks’s funny little school a bathing pool. For one thing, they had no money these days. For another, what bent pennies they ever did find down the backs of sofas were spent on their son, as could only be expected. And finally, even had they no son and had they pots of money as before, a garish blue bathing pool with their names etched in black on a granite slab by the deep end… nothing would have possessed them. I could picture Candide’s little shudder and the pursed little moue of her mouth at anything half so vulgar.
It was hardly less unthinkable, though, that there could be two Commander B.T.H. Rowe-Issings and that one would donate a pool to the school where the other’s daughter happened to be boarding.
Such a puzzle, and such a delicious morsel too. Not that I was a gossip; at least, I had not been until I took up detective work, but of late I had begun to wonder. Perhaps the very habit of sleuthing was working on some neglected part of me, like eurhythmics for posture, causing it to grow brawny from frequent use. Perhaps, on the other hand, the question of the Rowe-Issing bathing pool would have piqued the interest of a swami sitting cross-legged in a tree. In either case, for the first time that day I did not wish that Alec was there to listen and enlighten. For the first time in my professional life, I think, I simply longed for Hugh.
The longing passed and when Alec arrived at my side I was as happy as ever to see him, bursting with news and questions after a frankly rather lonely early evening. Saturday supper at St Columba’s was a kind of picnic cum buffet, it appeared; the kitchen staff loading up the long refectory tables with boiled eggs, cold ham and salad and the girls drifting in to fill their plates, pour themselves lemonade from the tall jugs set on the sideboards and drift out again. One could hear them giggling and yelling inside all the dorms and studies as one passed. Indeed, going by one particularly raucous gathering I felt the spirit of Nanny Palmer move within me and I opened the door after one sharp rap.
Five small girls in pyjamas, their mouths full and their eyes wide, turned to stare at me.
‘Simmer down a little, please,’ I said in my best attempt at clipped exasperation.
‘What…?’
‘Who…?’
‘It’s Saturday night!’ This was from a child eating her supper sprawled on her bed like a Roman at a Bacchanalia, except that such a Roman would not be absorbing a wedge of bacon and egg pie.
‘You’ll get a sore tummy if you eat lying down like that,’ I said to her. ‘Not to mention the crumbs.’
‘But it’s Saturday night!’ she said again.
‘Well, be sure to put on your dressing gowns and slippers before you take your plates back down,’ I said. ‘It’s getting chilly in the passageways.’ For the sight of their bare feet, little toes either red or white with cold, was bothering me and they were at the age where frequent spurts of growth ensured that there were stretches of bare leg at the bottoms of their pyjamas and draughty little gaps between jackets and trousers too.
‘Oh, we don’t take them down, Miss Gilver,’ said another. She was sitting on a dressing-table top with her plate of ham and salad resting in amongst the hairbrushes in a most unsavoury way. ‘We just stick them outside for the maids in the morning.’
‘You…?’ I was rendered quite speechless with disapproval, and did not know whence the worst of the shock hit me. Such indolence in the young, such sloppy housekeeping and such inconsideration towards one’s maids were neck, neck and neck. I left them to it and ignored the surge of giggles which followed upon my closing the door.
I might even have dipped a careful toe into the subject with my fellow mistresses but when I edged open the staff room door, holding my own supper plate, it was to find the room empty and the fire cold. When I happened to pass Miss Christopher’s rooms on my way to Fleur’s (which were now to be mine) I saw a light under the door and, listening a little, heard the scrape of a pen and the crunch of an apple being eaten. The maths and science mistress was hard at work. Saturday evening, evidently, was a jamboree for the girls and another night in the salt mines for everyone else; maids and mistresses, anyway.
So when the knock came at my own door a short while later I was glad at the prospect of company.
‘Come in,’ I said.
It was Mrs Brown, and I was pleased to see her.
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Good, I was wondering… Might I trouble you to have my things sent up from the Crown, Mrs Brown? I know you’re in frequent contact with your niece. Perhaps you would ring down to her? And then I wonder too if I might ask for the bed to made up in here? And perhaps an armchair or two? Unless the English mistress has a study elsewhere?’
She was nodding.
‘Surely, surely,’ she said. ‘Of course, but I’m here, Miss Gilver, to bring you a visitor.’ And with that she stepped back and let Alec fill the doorway. He paused on the threshold and Mrs Brown, from behind him, spoke again.