‘Neither does anything else we’ve come up with,’ I pointed out. ‘At least this adds enough stress and strain to explain why his heart might give out.’
Alec merely stared at me.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I’m talking drivel. It’s time for bed. But in the morning I’m going to go and look in the parish register at least.’
Chapter Fifteen
I made another attempt to convince Alec the next day as he, Bunty and I walked down to the Rosebery Hall where the parish registers were stored. We had cooked up a tale about him discovering that he had forebears from this area and wanting to squint through the parish books to see if he could find them and we were hoping that the clerk in charge would let us go through the things in peace and not ask a lot of questions and try to help us.
‘If he does, we can give up and go to Register House in Edinburgh,’ I said, ‘and be sure to pick a name that isn’t actually going to appear. Now, here, in the cold light of day, are my reasons for thinking this is it: one, Mrs Dudgeon knew quite a bit more than we can otherwise explain her knowing about registry office opening hours – or rather thought she did. Two, Mrs Dudgeon was beside herself about the police surgeon going through Robert’s things. Three, Mrs Dudgeon was frightened at the thought of having to produce a marriage certificate in order to register the death. These incontrovertible facts are all neatly handled by the solution that Dudgeon was off to get married that day.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Alec. ‘For one thing, Mrs Dudgeon was wrong about the office being shut on Monday. It was open. Two, she might have any number of other reasons for not wanting the police to go through her husband’s belongings; a natural reticence and desire for privacy would be enough. Three, you don’t know it was the marriage licence that was troubling her. You said you mentioned birth, marriage and passport. It could have been any of them.’
‘Well, I wasn’t really thinking when I said passport,’ I said. ‘I would doubt very much whether he had one. And it doesn’t really matter that she was wrong about the office shutting, does it? It’s the fact that she had an opinion on the matter at all that’s interesting.’
We had arrived at the town hall steps where three little boys playing marbles on the memorial garden to the side were easily persuaded to look after Bunty for a penny each.
‘Only don’t try to ride on her back,’ I said, not liking the way one of them was eyeing her up. His crestfallen look told me I had divined his intention correctly and I followed up my warning with a stern look before following Alec inside.
The records clerk was delighted to oblige us, happily lugging volumes of the old parish registers from some back premises and laying them reverently on the large table in the public consulting room.
‘We have them all here,’ he said. ‘Much better really when you think of the damp in those church vestries. Some of the earlier ones are terribly spotted and foxed as it is, the years they mouldered there. Much better safe here with me.’ There certainly was no chance of them growing damp now, I thought, unwinding my scarf and unbuttoning my cardigan even though they were only silk chiffon, for on this August morning the windows were clamped shut top and bottom and there was a roaring coal fire in the grate. The clerk himself seemed perfectly comfortable, though, in a suit and with a woollen jersey in lieu of a waistcoat. In fact his hand – slightly foxed and spotted itself – was cold when it brushed against mine. Alec shrugged off his own coat and loosened his tie as soon as the old man had left us.
‘Phewf!’ he said. ‘I hope this isn’t going to take too long, Dan. Where should we start? Any point looking at Friday?’
‘No, of course not,’ I told him. ‘If I’m right about what Dudgeon was up to, he certainly wouldn’t have done it here. He’d be away in Edinburgh somewhere where no one knew him. Now, I’d say he was about fifty, and let’s say he would have married at about twenty, after the end of his apprenticeship, but certainly in time to have had a son who was old enough to go off to the war, more’s the pity for them all. So let’s start in ’88 to be on the safe side.’
It was terribly slow going at first, partly because of the crabbed handwriting of the old parish minister and partly, in my case, because I kept being distracted by all the other entries. I found the death of several female de Cassilises – the records of the line dying out which led to Cad, Buttercup and hence me being here in the first place – and some of the names were highly diverting.
‘Pantaloupe?’ I said. ‘Can anyone possibly have called their baby girl Pantaloupe? Isn’t that a fruit of some exotic kind?’
‘Cantaloupe, you’re thinking of,’ said Alec. ‘And I rather think the child was Penelope. The loop of the f above is mixed up in it.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Well, that’s good – they would have been bound to call her Panties at school, poor thing. Where are we now, darling?’
‘1895,’ said Alec. ‘And there they are. 17th April 1895. Robert George Dudgeon born 1st June 1873, Carpenter, 2 New Cottages, Cassilis, Dalmeny to Christina McLelland, spinster of this parish, born 8th May 1875, 17 Clark Place.’
‘Hmph,’ I said, staring at the entry. ‘Well, then. Bang goes my brilliant idea.’ I continued to turn the pages, searching the columns.
‘What now?’ said Alec.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Just looking. There he is. 21st June 1899. Robert George Dudgeon.’
‘Doing what?’ said Alec, looking over my shoulder.
‘Being born,’ I said. ‘This is young Bobby.’ I sighed and shut the book, just as the clerk came back to check on our progress.
‘Can I get you anything else?’ he asked, surprised to see us sitting back from the table with the volumes before us closed.
‘Not today,’ said Alec. ‘But you’ve been most helpful.’
‘There is one thing,’ I said. I could hear barking and shrieks of laughter from outside and I knew I had better not leave Bunty much longer but I was still troubled.
The clerk was looking at me, eagerly helpful, with his hands pressed together.
‘You were open for business yesterday, weren’t you?’ I said.
He gave a tight little sigh, almost a tut, of irritation.
‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine where everyone is getting the idea that we weren’t. You’re the second person to ask, you know. Some foreign gentleman telephoned to the registrar himself and asked the same thing only days ago. I must make a sign for the window, but really I can’t see how it came to be in question.’
I suppose one must have an orderly mind to be a good registrar’s clerk and this wild rumour about odd days of holiday here and there was clearly upsetting him.
‘The notion was that you’d stay open on the bank holiday to give people a chance to conduct their business and then you’d close the week after so that you could have a day off yourself,’ I said. It did not go down at all well.
‘I?’ said the clerk. ‘I? I’ve never agitated for “bank holidays”. I can’t imagine where you would have heard that.’ He spoke as though I had accused him of joining the Workers’ Union as a marching member, and I had to struggle to keep my mouth from curling up at the corners. ‘And besides,’ he went on, ‘our business is not the kind that can be saved up for a holiday. What an idea!’
This made perfect sense, of course, and should have occurred to us earlier. We left him rather despondently and turned down towards the promenade to walk up and down and reconsider, while Bunty rushed at seagulls and chased after stray pieces of picnic litter left over from the weekend and the Fair.
‘We’re not getting anywhere very much, are we?’ I said, leaning against the sea wall and watching the waves lap the rocks below. ‘We still don’t know who X is, or why he was necessary, or how Dudgeon died if it wasn’t a heart attack. How I wish I’d asked Mrs Dudgeon about a flask, Alec.’