‘And you heard nothing either?’ She shook her head. ‘And I don’t suppose you were there on Monday and Wednesday.’ Cissie took great offence at this, as though one unchaperoned walk a week was blameless but three would ruin her.
‘I was not, madam,’ she said. ‘And I tell you somethin’ else too. I wish I hadn’t gone the night I did. I’ve had it up to here wi’ all these questions.’
And so since there was really no point in badgering her – she had been at only one of the places on the cliffs where No. 5 might have gone over, and at only one time when it might have happened – I let her go back to the honour of trundling ‘Wullie’s’ golf clubs around all afternoon and turned my own steps to the school.
What I really wanted was to find the mistresses in their staffroom together and in the mood for chatting. How difficult could it be to get them talking about their departed colleagues? How I should love to be able to present Alec, in the morning, with a list of their full names and approximate home addresses. My quick peek around the staffroom door, however, revealed that chamber empty of grate and of armchair again, and my surreptitious pause outside Miss Christopher’s door yielded only the scratch of a pen and the rustle of paper. I abandoned the plan, grabbed a passing child and demanded that she find Betty Alder and send her to my classroom to meet me.
If it were not for my hidden but primary purpose – were I in reality only the new English mistress and not a detective as well, I thought – I should be at a pretty loose end by now and rather disappointed by my welcome. This thought brought another on its heels. What of Miss Glennie, who was not (presumably) sleuthing and skulking like me, but really had just joined the happy band of mistresses? What must she make of the utter lack of collegiate chumminess I had found here?
‘Here, little girl,’ I called out to a figure crossing the end of the passageway. To my astonishment, instead of meekly trotting up to see what I wanted, she put on a spurt of speed and disappeared from sight. ‘Hey! Young lady!’ I shouted after her and marched to the corner to find her dragging herself back as though she had weights attached to her ankles.
‘Yes, Miss Gilver?’ she said.
‘That was very naughty of you,’ I scolded. ‘I’m half-inclined to hand out…’ My voice trailed off as I realised I did not know whether St Columba’s went in for demerits, detentions or the slipper. ‘Anyway, don’t do it again.’
‘You know what the girls are calling you, don’t you?’ said the child with blithe impertinence.
‘I do,’ I replied. ‘Goody Gilver, but I’m willing to relinquish the honour.’
‘Grabber,’ she said. ‘Grabber Gilver. Always collaring us and sending us on errands quite out of our way.’
‘Well, I’m only after information this time, you little scamp,’ I said, secretly quite pleased to have got a nickname already and one I did not make up for myself, not to mention one which made me sound so efficacious as a moderator of youthful indiscipline. I only hoped I was not noticeably beaming. ‘Where is Miss Beauclerc’s old room?’
‘Oh! All right then. It’s up those stairs at the end there and halfway along the land-side passage. Just beyond the horrible picture.’
‘Thank you, peculiar child,’ I said. ‘And run along.’
One could see what she meant, I thought, as I drew even with the painting, in which Ophelia floated rather smugly in what looked like a fishpond; a paean to suicide which surely had no place in a girls’ school. (Although if the artist had painted what a young woman really looked like once good and drowned, one would no more have hung the results on the wall.)
Passing by it, I stopped at Miss Glennie’s door, which still bore the name of Mademoiselle Beauclerc, and knocked. There was a pause, a scuffle and then a reply.
‘Yes?’
I opened the door and leaned in with a friendly smile arranged on my face.
‘Miss Gilver, Miss Glennie,’ I said. ‘The other new girl. Just wondering how you’re getting on?’ Then my smile faltered a little. Miss Glennie was getting on, or so it would seem, a lot better than me. She had a pile of jotters on her table and a large dictionary with gold-edged pages open on the floor at her side, and it occurred to me that there might be all manner of things I should have been busy doing yesterday and today.
‘Oh, I’m fine,’ said Miss Glennie. She did not look fine. She looked as though she had recently had some dreadful shock and was still reeling.
‘Had you far to come?’ I asked her. ‘Shouldn’t you be resting today after your journey?
‘Only Edinburgh,’ she replied. ‘And I’d rather not fall behind.’
‘And you’re new at this schoolmistressing lark, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘Miss Shanks said something about your having been a governess before?’
Miss Glennie looked less fine than ever on hearing me mention what I was still sure must be her fictitious royal past.
‘I told the Lambourne Agency only with great reluctance,’ she said, ‘and they promised not to divulge my personal affairs to anyone.’
Or rather, I thought drily, she had made up a silly story that she heartily wished would go away and stop following her around.
‘One would think you’d be proud of such a connection,’ I said, smiling, ‘hardly ashamed.’
‘We’re not supposed to talk about it,’ she said miserably. ‘That was always made very clear.’ I nodded but said nothing. Teddy had been a one for tall tales set about by secrets when he was a child (a Foreign Office appointment requiring him to spy on the Germans with a secret radio he was not allowed to show us; this was one notable episode from wartime) but he had been six and Miss Glennie was forty-five if a day. ‘And now, Miss Gilver, I really am grateful but I must get on with all of this. Do you know there’s a girl going up to Edinburgh to read French? But only if she passes her Higher Cert.’ I nodded, but now it occurred to me that I could not remember whether Miss Shanks had said one of the crop of scholars currently incubating in St Columba’s bosom was bound for a degree in English. Chemistry she had mentioned, and I rather thought geography and history were the others, but I had not been thinking of English then, during my interregnum as the French mistress. I took my leave and hurried away to Fleur’s classroom, thinking there would be some note of such a scholar in the papers there. It was only when I opened the door and entered that I remembered having summoned Sabbatina Aldo, who was waiting in a desk in the front row and stood politely on seeing me.
‘Miss Gilver?’ she said. ‘I’m… Betty. You wanted me?’ Her voice was a curious mixture: the village Scotch of her early youth overlaid by a smattering of the Queen’s English, no doubt copied from her new school friends and her mistresses in admiration or to allay the teasing which must have come her way, and somewhere in there too was a trace – just a trace – of her Italian roots, in a kind of emphatic landing on the consonants and a slight reluctance to leave them behind.
‘Yes indeed, Betty,’ I said. ‘You don’t mind ‘Betty’? Sabbatina is a beautiful name.’
‘Sabbatina is a beautiful name for a Sabbatina,’ she replied, and her voice was pure Italian as she repeated the melodious word. ‘I am a Betty, though. You can have no idea, Miss Gilver, what a trial it is to have a name so at odds with your life.’
‘My Christian name is Dandelion,’ I said and was gratified to see a spark jump up and dance in her eyes. ‘You have my permission to chortle.’ Good child that she was, she only gave a very small smile before composing herself again.
‘Now, Sabbatina,’ I went on. ‘You know that Miss Lipscott is gone, don’t you? And I am the new English mistress?’ She nodded. I hesitated. All of a sudden I could not quite remember why I had thought I should speak to this girl at all. Or rather I had imagined a casual conversation somewhere, not this stark interview in an empty room.