‘Your brother’s whisky?’ I said, trying to speak as gently as I could. ‘The special bottle your father keeps for your brother? Only I can’t see it now. Was it drunk? Please don’t tell me someone stole it – I understand it was rather a special one. I do hope no one was so disrespectful as to…’
Joey Brown had been blinking faster and faster and rocking on her heels as I spoke, and at this point she broke away and fled into the back shop bumping hard off the door lintel and stumbling. I bit my lip and looked at Alec, horrified. The two old-timers were looking most uncomfortable.
‘Ye’re right enough, though, missus,’ said the friendly one, after an awkward pause. ‘Take a look, Sandy. It’s away again.’
Sandy screwed up his face and squinted at the top shelf, then nodded.
‘Ye’re right,’ he said. ‘It used to sit in the middle there between the… Och, but they’re a’ jumbled up from Joey cleanin’.’
‘Aye well,’ said his friend. ‘It’s for the best, doubtless, don’t you think?’
‘I do indeed,’ I said to him. ‘Although one can hardly imagine how much it must hurt his father to give up after all this time.’
‘He tried before, ye ken,’ said Sandy. ‘Took the bottle away without a word. This was years back. Four or five years now.’
‘Four, it’ll be, Sandy,’ said the other. ‘I mind it was just about a year after the end o’ it all. The bottle was gone and then it was back again. Mebbes this time, though, eh?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Alec. ‘Although Miss Joey still seems considerably upset.’ There was still neither sight nor sound of Joey Brown returning.
‘I’d better go after her,’ I said. ‘Since it was me who put my foot in it. I can’t just leave her to weep.’
Alec gave me a shrewd look and I knew what he was thinking. Part of me wanted to comfort Joey, it was true, but there was another part of me which knew if I comforted her into a proper lull I could then ask some questions with a hope of a plain answer. Hardly something to be proud of but there it was. Alec lifted the wooden flap of the bar and I stepped behind and through the doorway to the passage.
There was no sign of the girl in the back kitchen or in the passageway where I threaded my way along beside crates of empties and boxes tied shut with twine, but a door at the end was ajar. I knocked softly and pushed it open a little more.
‘Miss Brown?’ I called. There was no answer. I was at the head of a set of stairs leading down and although the steps themselves were in darkness there was a suggestion of a light on somewhere below. I began to feel my way down carefully. Five days at Cassilis Castle had fitted me well to tackle strange stairways in the dark and these were wooden and straight; I reached the bottom without mishap and set off towards the light, passing various dungeons where barrels rested and pipes gurgled. I knocked again on the door with the light behind it and then went in.
It was a large, square cellar with a door open to the back yard. Shinie Brown was in there, standing in the middle of the floor with a polishing cloth in one hand and an empty bottle in the other looking between me and the corner of the room, frozen in astonishment. I followed his gaze and there sat Joey huddled on a brick ledge in the wall, half-hidden by the wash copper, as though trying to stay warm.
‘I’m so sorry to be barging about like this,’ I said, dividing the apology between the father and daughter, ‘but I’ve upset you, Miss Brown, and I wanted to come to apologize.’
‘I broke it,’ said Joey Brown. It took me a couple of minutes to understand her meaning.
‘I broke it when I was cleaning, Burry Man’s night,’ she said. She threw a terrified glance towards her father as she said this, and I looked too, hoping that he was not going to fly into a rage with her and force me to leap in to her defence. He was still staring at me, however, an amused glint beginning to mingle with the amazement in his eyes. Eventually he turned towards the girl and spoke.
‘That’s right, lass,’ he said. He went over towards Joey and drew her away from the corner, tidying up as he did so, shifting the lid of the copper into place and tucking the hose pipes in neatly underneath it out of the way. If Joey was halfway through a wash she seemed to have forgotten it, and she followed her father meekly out into the centre of the room.
‘It’s time to put that behind us,’ he said. ‘I could never have taken it doon myself and got rid o’ it, madam, but when Joey here said tae me she’d broke it, I found I wisnae angered nor sad, I was jist relieved. It’s time tae put a’ that ahint us.’
Joey Brown seemed to take no comfort from any of this, however, but searched her father’s face as though he spoke in some code she could not decipher.
‘I’ll take you back upstairs,’ I said. I was sure being down here among the fumes of this noxious chamber could not be good for her, upset as she was. ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Mr Brown,’ I said. ‘I can see you’re busy.’
Shinie Brown shrugged with a gesture of great magnanimity and again the look of amusement danced in his eyes. I could see that I must be a ridiculous figure to him, bumbling around, no sense at all of how to behave, and I was glad to draw Joey Brown’s arm into mine and lead her away.
‘I found out about Bobby Dudgeon and you,’ I told her as we mounted the dark stairs again, ‘since we spoke last, and I wanted to say how sorry I was. I understand now why you were so very upset at Mr Dudgeon’s death.’ We edged our way back along the passageway and into the kitchen, where Joey Brown turned to face me.
‘I don’t know what you mean, madam,’ she said.
‘I mean I know you were engaged,’ I said, thinking how very childlike she seemed with her blanket denials, like a toddler standing over the bits of a broken vase insisting she never touched it.
‘I never said that,’ she whispered, glancing back the way we had come as though frightened her father would hear.
‘Mrs Dudgeon’s sisters told me,’ I said to her. ‘I know it wasn’t universally welcomed. I’m so sorry.’
‘I don’t know who you’re talking about, madam,’ said Joey, the toddler and the broken vase going strong.
‘But you’ve obviously been a great comfort to his parents,’ I said. ‘And now to his mother alone. You’ve been a good girl.’
‘I don’t… I don’t…’ said Joey, but her voice quavered and failed.
I hated myself for it, but we were right here, just the two of us, face to face, and I might never get another chance to ask. Alec and I were getting nowhere with the case, I thought, and surely if someone was in a position to help I had to swallow my scruples and plunge in.
‘I know you must have spent some considerable time with the Dudgeons, Joey,’ I said. ‘Long enough to know that it wasn’t Robert Dudgeon in the burry suit on Friday, when you looked at his hands, was it? Or when you looked into his eyes?’
She was shaking her head, quickly enough to make herself dizzy I thought, and I put out a hand to try to calm her.
‘Inspector Cruickshank knows,’ I said. ‘But he doesn’t know who it was in there or why they swapped.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Joey.
‘So if you recognized who it was as well as who it wasn’t,’ I said, ‘it’s your duty to tell the police.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said again and I gave up.
‘It’s absolutely infuriating,’ I said to Alec as we left the bar minutes later. ‘Just saying: I don’t know what you mean, I don’t understand, I don’t know who that is. I mean – I said, “Mrs Dudgeon’s sisters” and she said, “I don’t know who you’re talking about.” Ridiculous girl. She didn’t quite have the gall to claim no knowledge of the Dudgeons themselves and she let a reference to Inspector Cruickshank go past without wondering aloud who he was, but apart from that it was a perfect festival of denial.’