Then, all of a sudden, I felt Mrs Dudgeon give way like a sandcastle breached by the tide. I thought I must have missed a sound and I looked wildly around at the doors and windows, heart hammering, but there was nothing to be seen, no one there. Mrs Dudgeon lay back in her chair with eyes closed.
‘Are you -’ I began, suddenly convinced that what I had felt was the life escaping her.
She opened her eyes and smiled at me.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That wis a great kindness, madam. To sit wi’ me like that. I thank ye. Now!’ She rose to her feet, slowly and with all the marks of extreme tiredness, but with a calm determination which I could not begin to interpret. ‘Will ye take a cup o’ tea?’ she said. ‘For yer pains. Or a wee nip o’ somethin’ maybe?’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what just happened.’ As far as I could tell, nothing had happened, and yet suddenly she was released from the prison of worry she had been in for the last four days. Was she mad after all, then? Was she communing with spirits here? Or imagining herself to be?
‘Thank ye for tellin’ me aboot the police comin’,’ she said as she filled her kettle from a jug and drew it forward on to the grate. ‘I’ll need tae make sure and be ready fur them. No’ that I’m carin’ whit happens now. No’ really.’
‘Mrs Dudgeon, I do wish you would tell me what it’s all about,’ I said. ‘I’ll find out, one way or another in the end, I’m sure I will, but if you told me we could put our heads together and keep the police out of it.’
‘And why would you do that for me, madam,’ she said, ‘when ye dinnae even ken whit it is ye’re asking me to tell ye?’
‘Because I trust you,’ I said. ‘Because I’m sure that whatever it is that’s wrong, I’d be on your side.’
‘Mebbes if you were standin’ where I am,’ she said, her face hardening. ‘But ye’re not.’
‘I don’t have to be,’ I told her. ‘It’s no more than common humanity to feel compassion for your suffering. Sorrow for your losses.’
She frowned at me when I said that and her body sagged, just a little, as though someone had let the tiniest peep of air out of a balloon.
‘My losses,’ she said, and she turned away from me, burying her face into the teacloth she had taken to wipe out the cups. ‘Oh, Robert. Oh, God help me. I’m all alone now.’
‘For all the world as though she had only just remembered that he’d died,’ I told Alec, half an hour later, sitting in the firelight in the library once more. Cad and Buttercup had retired for the night but Alec had waited up for me and was now listening raptly, sucking on yet another pipe and scratching Bunty between the ears as she rested her chin on his thigh. She had gone straight to him as soon as I let her off her leash, craving some solid, masculine calm after the hysteria of the little scene in the cottage, the turncoat.
‘And what on earth could have put the thought of her husband’s death out of her head, on the day of his funeral no less, with all the plates of drying sandwiches still littered around?’
‘The more I hear about this the less sense any of it makes,’ Alec said. ‘Are you sure she’s not just insane?’
‘Absolutely not,’ I said. ‘There was something definite and – if I’m not mistaken – something rather horrid due to happen at ten o’clock and when it didn’t materialize, Mrs Dudgeon felt her first moment’s peace since Friday.’
‘Just as well for her that it didn’t happen,’ said Alec, rather grimly. ‘You don’t seem to feel any of the anger you’d be perfectly justified in feeling, that she was apparently ready to let you sit there and get swept up in it, whatever it was.’
‘It wasn’t like that, Alec,’ I said. ‘I’m still absolutely convinced that she’s innocent of any real wrongdoing in this. She said I would understand and sympathize if I were standing in her shoes. She’d hardly say that if it were something shabby.’
‘Perhaps she just meant you’d understand if you were a poor woman like her instead of a rich woman like you, then you’d understand the lengths someone might go to.’
I shook my head with impatience. ‘She’s not a poor woman, Alec. She’s a perfectly snug, secure, working man’s wife. Or at least she was. And I can’t foresee that she’ll be turned out of her cottage just because her husband is gone.’
‘By Cad and Buttercup?’ said Alec, eyebrows raised. ‘Hardly.’
‘Anyway, it wasn’t like that, I keep trying to tell you. I was talking to her about fellow feeling and the brotherhood of man – that kind of sympathy. I said I was on her side out of sorrow for her losses. That’s what reminded her that her husband had just died in fact.’
‘Losses?’ said Alec. ‘Plural?’
‘Her son died in the war,’ I said.
‘And what was his name?’ said Alec. I screwed up my face trying to remember.
‘Young Bobby, I think,’ I said. ‘At least I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it were, with Donald and wee Donald and Isobel and wee Isobel next door. Not forgetting Bel’s wee Bella, and young Tina, Tina’s lassie. They are a family of little imagination, either that or monstrous egos.’
‘Well, there you are then,’ said Alec. ‘She hadn’t forgotten about her husband at all, but when you said losses plural it reminded her about her son too. And that cry of “Robert” was for him.’
‘Well, I feel an absolute heel now,’ I said, convinced that he was right. ‘I’m going to go to bed and pick away at that like a sore all night, darling. Thank you.’
‘You’ll do no such thing,’ said Alec. ‘Look.’ He reached down beside his armchair, dislodging Bunty who had fallen asleep sitting up with her head in his lap. She gave a long two-note moan from deep in her throat and after circling twice curled up to sleep in earnest. With an equally heartfelt groan, Alec heaved an armload of newspapers on to his lap and patted them.
‘Scotsmans and Evening Newses for Saturday, yesterday and today,’ he said. ‘I’ve scoured the household for them while you were out. We’re looking for anything that Dudgeon might have been mixed up in. Anything that happened on Friday.’
‘Oh, not tonight,’ I pleaded. ‘I’m absolutely all in.’
‘Certainly tonight,’ said Alec. ‘There’s not much else that we can do until the sun is up and the world is open for business again. So let’s get started and with luck, before the morning comes, we’ll have something to lay before the inspector.’
‘Such as what?’ I asked.
‘Any odd happenings, any other unexplained deaths, anything at all.’
‘Dudgeon’s death isn’t unexplained,’ I said. ‘Damn!’
‘What?’
‘Oh, just that I wish I’d remembered to ask Mrs Dudgeon tonight if Robert did indeed take a great draught of whisky at the end of the day. She might have told me straight out if I’d asked her tonight. But she’s dedicating herself to getting a story all ready for the police even as we speak – I myself suggested that she should, no less! – so if I ask her tomorrow there’s no reason to think she’ll tell the truth.’
‘Time to make up for that blunder with a bit of solid detective work, then,’ said Alec. It was quite sickening the way he was plugging this task, just because he had been the one to find the newspapers.
‘Well, pour me a drink,’ I said. ‘And bags me the Evening News. Not so many long words.’