‘So there’s nae use gettin’ a third opinion then?’ said Reid. ‘If they’re all as bad as each other.’
‘I’d trust one of the girls,’ I said, ‘but we couldn’t possibly ask it of them. No, I think we just have to try to track down Miss Beauclerc and if we fail to… then track down her family and… no distinguishing marks at all, Constable? Moles, scars, birthmarks?’ Reid, brick-red in the face once more, simply shook his head. ‘Very well then,’ I said. ‘When can I speak to Cissie?’
‘We’re all quits, aren’t we?’ said Reid, rather wary. ‘The police are no’ botherin’ your friend and so you’re no’ tryin’ to set Cissie against me, eh no? Aye, well come and meet us on the links this afternoon then. After three. It’s right behind the school. You can’t miss it.’
‘She’s a golfer too?’ I said. This was surprising in a parlour maid, to my mind.
‘Naw,’ said Reid, blushing a little again. ‘She’s… she just, if I’m playin’ a round she…’
‘You’re not trying to say she caddies for you?’ said Alec.
‘She lugs your clubs around on her afternoon free?’ I said.
‘Naw!’ said Reid. ‘They’re on a wee set o’ trolley wheels. She just pulls them along.’
He retired with a great air of wounded dignity, leaving Alec and me to burst into laughter behind him, like a pair of schoolgirls when a mistress leaves the room.
‘My God,’ I said. ‘This Cissie must be a bit of limp rag.’
‘She seemed lively enough to me,’ Alec said. ‘Perhaps PC Reid has hidden charms. Now, to the part we couldn’t discuss in front of him.’
‘Elf,’ I said. ‘Where does one begin?’
‘With the newspapers of the day and the report of the inquest, I suppose,’ Alec said.
‘But those will only tell you what I’ve told you anyway.’
‘Oh quite, quite, but I was thinking more of gathering names of individuals one might talk to. I still think that’s a better use of my time than haring after Miss Blair in that unlikely way. Either that, or asking around for anyone who might have seen our corpse when she was alive. Under cover of tracing Mrs Aldo, you know. For today at least, since it’s Sunday and I can’t start pestering librarians or teachers’ employment agencies until tomorrow.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said reluctantly. ‘And I could try to think of a way to dig some more without arousing suspicions. If only they hadn’t met me already I could present myself as an inveterate nosy-parker and they’d think nothing of my questions.’
‘Ask the girls,’ said Alec. ‘No one so self-centred as the young. They’ll think nothing at all.’
‘True,’ I said. ‘And I need to establish Fleur’s movements during the time our corpse might have died anyway. I hate having to call her “our corpse”. Can’t we think of something less grisly?’
‘Why don’t we call her No. 5?’ suggested Alec. I stared at him, disbelieving, for what could possibly be more grisly than that?
‘I’ll start with Sabbatina Aldo,’ I said, pulling on my gloves and preparing myself for departure. ‘You never know – she might be able to tell us something about her mother’s movements too.’
‘Onwards, then,’ said Alec, rising as I did.
‘And most certainly upwards,’ I replied, thinking of the cliff steps to St Columba’s, which were not getting any less steep and arduous for the number of times I had climbed them.
It was a pleasant prospect, however, the gusting clouds and the sparkling sea, and I noticed for the first time the golf links on the headland behind the school, where the pancake caps of the men could be seen sprouting on the greens and fairways like mushrooms. I saw, too, a fair few splashes of custard yellow: St Columba’s girls in their shirtsleeves, getting in a round before luncheon on this unusually mild day.
The entrance hall was deserted and the corridors silent, only the good rich smell of roasting beef wafting up from the kitchens to say that anyone was at work inside these walls, so instead of trying to find the needle of Sabbatina Aldo in the haystack of girls around the pool and courts and grounds I set off for Fleur’s classroom – Miss Shanks had given me sketchy directions the evening before – in slim hopes of some letters or papers she might have left behind and in rather plumper dread of what reins, besides Milton, I might discover I had to take up when the following school day dawned.
Her classroom was on the seaward side, long and sunny, with high glittering windows, white-distempered walls and broad black floorboards, surely as Spartan as even the tenant of Fleur’s monastic sleeping cell could desire. There was not a picture, nor a bookshelf, nor the lowliest pot of daisies on the mustard-painted fireplace, just six rows of forms facing a large desk set up on a small dais, with a blackboard behind.
I sat in Fleur’s chair and opened the top of the three desk drawers, finding in there such tidiness and order that my hopes, slender as they had been, dwindled to threads and blew away. Pens and ink, a wiper, fresh sheets for the blotter, a red pencil and its little box sharpener, a cloth-covered block for cleaning the board and a packet of white chalk. In short, nothing.
In the second drawer, however, there was something indeed. I drew it all out and spread it on the desktop, letting my horrified eyes rest on each item in turn until I had been round them all.
Milton, to my creeping dismay, was not the half of it. The lower sixth were engaged, granted, on studying Shakespeare (as Miss Shanks had so airily suggested all her girls might be) but no frothy comedy or worthy history for them! King Lear was the order of the day. Fleur’s copy had girls’ names pasted over the list of dramatis personae, which I took to indicate that it was being read aloud in the classroom, but there were also some beastly comprehension questions scrawled on slips of paper and tucked into the pages here and there.
I turned, faintly, from the long, frantic speech towards the end of Act IV where the volume had fallen open and gave my attention to the books upon which Fleur had decided the budding minds of the middle forms should grow rich and be enlightened. The Pilgrim’s Progress, Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales glared balefully up at me from the desktop and my heart sank deep down into me like a pebble lobbed into a well. The poor girls! I had slogged through The Pilgrim’s Progress myself as a small child, weeping with boredom and hating Christian like poison, but those were the times and that was the excuse for it. These days there could surely be none. As for The Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman, I had managed to stagger thus far through my life without knowledge of a single line of either and, leafing through a little of each, was only sorry that my run of luck had ended. John Donne for the lower fourth seemed a bright spot until I cast my eyes over Fleur’s notes and saw that, of all his works, she had selected the Holy Sonnets, which was tiresomeness beyond imagining.
The first and second forms, in their tender years, had been spared maddened kings, pious allegories and epic poetry and were allotted instead novels, and nineteenth-century novels at that, but of all the wondrous outpourings of that miraculous age Fleur had plumped – as though to quell any danger of enjoyment – for The Water Babies and Silas Marner.
‘Silas Marner?’ I muttered, remembering how I had snorted with impatience at the tiresome old fool and his sickening little darling. I closed it and pinched the pages between my forefinger and thumb. ‘Well, at least it’s short.’ The Water Babies I had, admittedly, loved when I was too young to know better but when I unearthed it to read to my sons in their nursery, I had very soon re-earthed it again, deep into a trunk in an attic, aghast at its feverish insistence on death and sacrifice and its unwholesome obsession with staying pure and clean (and with fish, one has to say). Mr Kingsley would have given those Austrian doctors a good gallop round the paddock if he had ever submitted to them, I remember thinking.