12
My fingers ached all the way up to my shoulders from gripping the back of the seat in front of me as the little motorcar swung around the bends and sailed up and over the bumps in the road.
‘You all right back there, Dan?’ said Alec, looking over his shoulder. I nodded.
‘I’m too tense to be sick,’ I said, ‘and I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday anyway.’
‘Mind and not faint on us, then,’ said Reid. His eyes were trained on the road ahead, peering into the small patch of light his headlamps made on this twisted lane under the trees.
We flashed past a sign for Ullapool, the white wood just gleaming enough for the black letters to show up against it.
‘Not far now,’ I said. ‘How could anyone live all the way out here without a telephone these days?’
‘And no answer to the telegram boy,’ Alec reminded me.
For all our desperate efforts to get to Fleur some way – any way – quicker than chasing off in belated pursuit of Aldo had failed. Sergeant Turner stared us down to sheepish silence when we tried to tell him that the corpse was Mrs Aldo, that both the witnesses who claimed not to know it had known it perfectly well, that the lover on the headland was the husband, that the wife on the telephone was the lover, that the girl whose family sold the house had bought it…
‘Oh aye?’ he had said. ‘And where does the French one in the farmhouse fit in?’
‘I don’t know,’ I had said.
‘She doesn’t,’ said Alec. ‘That’s a separate matter completely.’
‘Oh aye?’ said Sergeant Turner again. ‘See, to my mind, when you’ve finished a puzzle – a jigsaw puzzle, say – you’ve no bits left over. That’s how you know you’re done.’
So he would not telephone to the nearest constabulary and have them send a man to the lodge and he would not countenance a trip in his precious police car and he would not give Reid a sudden afternoon free. He fixed the lad with his terrier-like scowl, brows down and eyes glinting, and told him to get himself round to the grocer’s shop at the bottom of Main Street where a parcel of bacon had gone missing from the boy’s basket and was yet to be found.
Alec and I had been waiting at the station for the next train to Stranraer and the hope of another hiring garage when Reid had hurtled up in an ancient little Mercury and summoned us with a long blast on the horn.
‘Whose is this?’ I asked, scrambling myself into the tight space of the spare seat behind the driver. There was no chance that Alec could fold himself into it, I knew.
‘Mrs Turner’s,’ said Reid. ‘Cissie pinched the key to the garage door for me.’
‘You’ll both be sacked for sure now,’ I said.
‘Yup,’ said Reid and, turning out of the station brae, he roared off up the hill to join the road to Stranraer, Girvan and points north as if the hounds of hell – and not just Sergeant Turner and his formidable wife – might be after him.
There had been moments of calm, even passages of conversation, and in the course of bumping along the terrible Highland roads, at last the pieces of the St Columba’s puzzle had fallen into place. With nothing left over, as Sergeant Turner so rightly decreed was the way of things.
‘It was nothing to do with Fleur and the murders,’ I told Reid and Alec. ‘Not really. Except that Fleur’s guilt was why she was there. She wanted to get away from men. She thinks she killed her father and two lovers, remember.’
‘Thinks she did?’ said Reid. I ignored him.
‘And Miss Fielding took in waifs and strays. She took in a girl who said she’d killed her lovers and she took in the daughter of a noble French family who’s done something naughty enough to be disowned. Second chances, see? The key is that the women at that school either brought money – Shanks, Lovage and Fielding – or they brought learning – Taylor, Bell and Blair. Or they were waifs and strays. That’s Fleur and Jeanne. And recently Miss Glennie, too. The Lambourne Agency is obviously in on the operation, seeking out likely candidates for Miss Shanks. And the Misses Christopher and Barclay are very much her lieutenants in it all. The point wasn’t that Miss Glennie used to work at Balmoral, you see. The point is that she was sacked from Balmoral. For something. Something that means she doesn’t have up-to-date photographs of her mother and father even though they’re still alive.’
‘Disowned again?’ Alec said. ‘What for this time?’
‘Well, she has lots of snaps of a child,’ I said. ‘She said it was her brother but now I think it was most likely her son.’
‘That would get a governess sacked right enough,’ Alec said. ‘But why would it get her a job in a school?’
‘Blackmail,’ I said. ‘Plain and simple. Barclay and Christopher are doing something for Miss Shanks that Miss Taylor and Miss Bell – scholars of depthless integrity – would never do. And something Miss Blair – as the PE mistress – couldn’t do. Once Miss Glennie submits, they’ll have such a hold over her that she’ll work for nothing. Shanks thought Jeanne and Fleur could be persuaded to do the same but it turns out she was wrong. They were made of finer stuff; they held out as long as they could and then, when Jeanne could bear it no longer, they hatched a plan to escape from her.’
‘Ah,’ Alec said. ‘That’s why they had to go away and hide. She would have told the world of their sins if they’d just resigned.’
‘Exactly,’ I said.
‘But what did she blackmail them into doin’?’ said Reid.
‘I didn’t work it out until Parents’ Day, today,’ I said. ‘They were doing various things. Or at least two different sorts of things for two different sorts of girls. And it all begins with cheating.’
‘Girls cheating?’ said Alec.
‘No, but parents being told that girls cheat,’ I said. ‘Parents like the Rowe-Issings and the Duncans being told that their daughters are cheats, but that Miss Shanks will keep it quiet in return for testimonials, swimming pools and stables, that kind of thing.’
‘But some of the girls are genuinely bright, aren’t they?’ Alec said.
‘Yes, some are,’ I answered. ‘Sabbatina Aldo is and she’s of no interest to Ivy Shanks at all. I never could work that out. Why a scholarship girl with a fine brain was not the toast of the staffroom. Now, you see, the girls who’re going to university from St Columba’s all come from very solid middle-class backgrounds. Those parents wouldn’t drop dead at the thought of cheating as Basil and Candide would (not to a man, anyway) but they’d happily shell out for a bit of swanky advantage.’
‘That’s not fair, Dandy,’ said Alec. ‘You don’t even know any middle-class people. They’re the salt of the earth usually.’
‘I do!’ I said. ‘I know Inspector Hutchinson from Perth and I know Hugh’s estate factor. And I’m not saying all of them. No doubt Ivy Shanks has to go very gently to see who will be amenable and who would go to the police and daughter be damned.’
‘But you’re sure about the operation overall?’ Alec said.
‘I am. Because listen: the college-bound girls are going to read geography and history (Miss Barclay), science (Miss Christopher), and French. Hence the huge panic when Jeanne disappeared. No one is up for English – hence the huge lack of panic over the English mistress. Until, that is, Miss Shanks thought she had another sitting duck in me – wickedly living in an inn with a young man – and decided that Clothilde Simmons might be a whizz at English. Oh God!’
‘What?’ said Alec.
‘I accused that dratted widow of writing a poison-pen letter to Hugh,’ I said. ‘But of course it was Ivy Shanks testing the waters. It was when she realised that Hugh couldn’t care less and neither could I that she sacked me. Oh my God, Alec! That widow-woman must think I’m insane!’