Catriona McPherson
Bury Her Deep
The third book in the Dandy Gilver series, 2007
For my sisters,
Sheila, Audrey and Wendy
with all my love.
1
Pallister the butler swept into the dining room with platter aloft and glided to the side of our luncheon guest where he proffered the dish with unimpeachable propriety but with every muscle of his face sending the silent message: ‘Don’t blame me.’ (It is miraculous how, with never a frown nor a smile, Pallister manages to carry a tray of brandies to Hugh’s library like a godmother bearing an infant to the altar, and a tray of tea to my sitting room like a maid with a shovel clearing up after a dog.) The Reverend Mr Tait eyed the dish, first through his spectacles and then over the top of them, and his hands twitched a little but he was clearly stumped. I managed to suppress a sigh.
One of the more unforeseen consequences of my recent expansion into the realm of private detecting was the problem of what to do with my fees. I had bought a little motor car with the spoils of my first case two years before but since then I had been reduced to burying parcels of the loot here and there in the household economy and I had developed a new-found regard for the worries of Chicago racketeers. Laundry work, I was fast learning, is no picnic. Grant, my maid, effortlessly absorbed a good chunk of it into my wardrobe and relations between her and me became, as a result, warmer than they had ever been since the days of my trousseau. Grant satisfied, my next thought had been Mrs Tilling, my beloved cook, the only soul under my roof who I could be sure loved and admired me with all of her heart, excepting Bunty of course and even Bunty if given a choice between me and a marrow-bone would, I fear, show her true colours.
Accordingly, I had increased Mrs Tilling’s grocery account and reinstated the office of second kitchen maid which had disappeared in the general retrenchment after the war. I had expected these two augmentations to lead Mrs Tilling back to the good old days of plenty, sloshing around lots of cream and Persian cherries and never troubling with rissoles, but I had reckoned without the influence of the cooking columns recently sprung up in even the best newspapers and the endless reams of ‘clever’ recipes churned out by the new Good Housekeeping magazine, which Mrs Tilling devoured in gulps every month and out of which she had quickly amassed a formidable scrapbook. In short, with an extra girl to help and money to spare, Mrs Tilling’s kitchen had taken a reckless leap into the twentieth century and the results were quite something, the current luncheon menu being a case in point.
Mrs Tilling’s saddle of mutton had long been a fixture of our table in the colder months; indeed, I think roast saddle of mutton was wheeled out at the very first meal to which Hugh and I ever sat down together in this house, eighteen years before, while Grant unpacked my honeymoon trunks upstairs and the maids peeped curiously at their new mistress and tried not to giggle as they handed the sauces. More than anything else, more than the ring upon my finger, more than the presents heaped in my sitting room demanding thanks, more even than the honeymoon itself, it was that saddle of roast mutton which persuaded me that I really was married and for good. It was, however, delicious and I had come to welcome the sight of it and even the thick, engulfing smell of it on chilly mornings as I came in from my walk.
How I should have welcomed the sight and the smell of it now. Instead, what Pallister proffered with his air of being somewhere else entirely, engaged on quite some other task, was a saddle of mutton only in the sense that a smoked salmon soufflé is eggs and fish. I squinted at it down the table and tried to piece together its history. The fillets had been removed, leaving the backbone and ribcage as a frame for Mrs Tilling’s art; the whole had then been covered in a cloud of mousse – one would guess at mutton mousse, although it pained one to imagine those fillets being pounded to paste and mixed with whatever bottled horrors the recipe described – which had been piped back onto the carcass from a bag to resemble a woolly sheepskin coat; a few slivers of fillet, left intact, had been rolled into rosettes to be tucked all around under the thing like flowers in a meadow, or rather like flowers in a florist’s.
‘It’s mutton, Mr Tait,’ I supplied, despairing of his ever working this out. ‘Just dig in with a spoon.’
Hugh almost always remembers not to scold me when we have guests and he would certainly never lament my management of the household in front of them, even when tried to the extent that this concoction was trying him, but he treated me to a glare which promised me an unenticing conversation when Mr Tait had left.
I felt rather sorry for Hugh, truth be told. Had I come clean to him about my new source of income we could easily have spent the lot long before he had finished appointing the garden boys and under-stewards his beloved estate so desperately required, but then if Hugh knew about it I should not be reduced to laundering it through the household accounts at all and we could put it to better use, making sure that our own two sons did not leave school to become gardeners and under-stewards themselves. Of course, if Hugh knew about it he might well put an instant stop to it, and the question of what to do with the money would disappear, to be replaced by the question – mine alone – of what to do with the days and months and years stretching emptily ahead without it.
So I kept my mouth shut, opening it only to add to the ever taller, ever more rickety edifice of lies necessary to keep the whole thing rolling along. My first two cases, and the only two so far of any length and complexity, had arisen amongst the members of my own set, more or less, and Hugh had been almost insultingly pleased to wave me off on visits and remain at home with his dykers and grooms and visiting fruit-tree-pruning experts, engaged in those mystifying enthusiasms of his, all out of doors and most perfectly filthy, which I think of collectively as ‘making mud pies’. As well as those two major cases, murders no less, I had taken on a few lesser problems: a thief at the Overseas League in Edinburgh and a terribly enterprising blackmailer (so enterprising and so nicely judged in her attempts that one almost regretted catching her). For these and other minor engagements which took me briefly from home I had found that Hugh could be persuaded to swallow cover stories of pitiful thinness, so long as I was careful to make my supposed mission appear sufficiently dull. So, I should never tell him that I was off to luncheon at the Overseas League for the third time in a fortnight; that would cause a great deal too much huffing into the moustache and muttering about tying up the chauffeur (as though I did not always drive myself and as though he, Hugh, ever went anywhere anyway), but if I told him I was going to the League to sort clothes donations for some African mission he sent me on my way smiling.
Recently, however, I had wondered whether he was beginning to smell a rat. He had taken to eyeing me very speculatively when he believed I was not watching and he had made more than one rather pointed remark, not quite compliments, about my clothes; my new fur-trimmed evening coat attracting particular attention of a rather sharp kind. I had gone so far as to ask Alec Osborne, dear friend and frequent Watson to my Holmes, whether I should make a clean breast of it. After lengthy consideration, Alec had advised continued secrecy, regular reviews, and a measure of wifely sucking up for, as he had pointed out, if something juicy came along it would be cruel torment to have to wave it by simply to keep on Hugh’s right side. Far better, Alec thought and I agreed, to get squarely in his good books in advance and then spend the capital when it was needed. My presence at this luncheon with the Reverend Mr Tait, whose yearly visits I usually avoided, was to be seen as laying down a stiff deposit.