‘Don’t you worry,’ said the butler, seeing my sudden movement, ‘you’ll be all right.’
‘What’s she like?’ I asked, hoping that this was not too familiar. Evidently not.
‘No trouble,’ he said. ‘Just a kid, really. She married well – it’s him that’s got the money and the family, you know.’
A door opened and a stout girl in grey serge, holding her bag up under her chin, emerged. A voice drifted out from behind her.
‘If you would see Miss Allan out, Faulds. Is the next… Oh, splendid.’
The butler, hands out of pockets, both feet flat on the floor, and nose as long as he could make it, swept away towards the hall doors. I shared a look with Miss Allan as she passed me and then turned to the voice.
‘Miss Rossiter, mem,’ I said.
‘Indeed,’ said the young woman in the doorway. ‘Please come on through.’
She ushered me into a morning room, where another of the plain wooden chairs was set at an intimidating distance in front of a small papier mâché writing desk. It was a typical Edinburgh room, so recently decorated that the fussy Adams plasterwork which picked out the cornice and the chimneypiece in green and white had not yet had time to grow sooty. There was a very fine carpet – the thin kind which is treacherous if wrinkled, but which here was as smooth as a pond – and some good but dull pictures, badly hung. An exquisite long-case clock, gleaming with polish, ticked away a kind of endless bass lullaby.
Mrs Balfour herself, when I took a good look at her, struck me – thankfully – as a sensible sort of girl. (The letter had been so extraordinary that I had half suspected an hysteric, but there was no hectic flush nor twitch of unease about her.) She was in her mid-twenties, with a healthy figure just too full to be coltish, although there was something equine about it somewhere, and had that light Scotch hair which is not quite red and that thin Scotch skin which is not quite freckled. These are looks which go over very quickly, but for now she was pretty enough in an unremarkable way. As she folded herself into the seat at the desk she smiled at me.
‘Mrs Gilver,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much for coming.’
I sat back in my seat, put Miss Rossiter’s bag down on the floor and crossed my ankles.
‘I could hardly do otherwise,’ I said. ‘Your letter was… rather compelling.’
‘I didn’t know where to turn,’ said Mrs Balfour. ‘But I remembered reading about that terrible business last winter.’
I could feel my face twist at the memory; it would be a long time before I stopped going over the Castle Benachally affair every night in bed and it was a source of pain that the first of my cases to be trumpeted in the newspapers should also have been the one where I stood by and watched murder be done. Alec Osborne, my friend and Watson, always squashes me flat when I describe it that way (and I cannot help thinking that being firmly shut up, whenever one tries to talk about what is troubling one, is pretty cold comfort and not likely to bring a speedy end to the fretting).
‘Sorry,’ said Mrs Balfour, seeing the look. ‘I’ve put my foot in it, but what I meant was that it would have been so much more terrible but for you that I was sure you’d be able to help me now.’
‘Tell me about it,’ I said, mentally shaking myself. I might have my regrets but this poor girl had a husband plotting her grisly end and deserved all of my attention.
‘Yes, of course. Well, I’ve been married for five years and my husband is…’ She stopped and looked around herself at the apartment. I waited. ‘My husband is…’ she said, and looked around again. I sat forward a little and looked around too. Of good fortune, I thought, judging by the clock and the pictures. Yet I had never heard of him, so he probably was not a gentleman as such, but then Edinburgh has lots of not gentlemen as such who have been beyond question for generations. A banker, perhaps.
Mrs Balfour sat up a little straighter in her seat.
‘My husband is… a devil.’ She gave a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. ‘There. I’ve said it. And finding out was so unexpected that it still seems not quite real. I didn’t know him for long before we got engaged but I could see straight away – or thought I could – that he was a poppet. I mean to say, his name’s Pip.’
‘And when you say he’s… unsatisfactory,’ I prompted, but Mrs Balfour laughed and shook her head.
‘He’s a monster, Mrs Gilver. A nasty, brutish, bullying, philandering, dishonest, beastly… pig.’
‘And you think he’s going to kill you?’
‘Oh, I’m sure of it,’ she replied. ‘He told me so.’
‘I see. And can I ask why?’ She stared dumbly back at me. ‘Does he want to marry someone else?’
‘That’s an idea,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen any signs of it, mind you.’
‘You said – just now – that he was a philanderer,’ I reminded her.
‘Yes,’ she said, frowning. ‘Yes, I did, didn’t I? He is. Faithless, adulterous, underhand… it must be that. Why else, if not?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘to quote a police acquaintance of mine on the subject of murder: it’s either love or money.’
‘I haven’t a bean.’
‘Are you insured?’ Mrs Balfour looked rather startled. It is difficult always to remember how far I have travelled along the road from where I used to be, where she still was, in that warm glade of gentle womanhood where such things would never occur to one. I felt as though I should have narrowed eyes and a cigarette in one corner of my red lips as I grilled her.
‘I’ve no idea,’ she said, blinking, ‘but Pip has heaps of his own anyway.’
This was interesting; it is always interesting to hear how anyone manages still to have ‘heaps of his own’ in these dark days, but it was probably not to the point and so I passed on.
‘And when you say he told you, do you mean he threatened you? Might he merely have been blustering? Was he very angry about something at the time? Or – forgive me – had he been drinking?’
Mrs Balfour laughed again.
‘Pip? Drunk? No, that’s not the kind of man he is at all. I shall try to explain.’ She picked up a pen from her desk and fiddled with it as she spoke, gouging the nib into her blotter.
‘It was at Christmas-time when it started – really started, I mean. It was Boxing Day, the servants’ party, and if anyone had had too much “good cheer” I think it was me, because my memory of it is very peculiar, somehow. Mrs Hepburn had made her hot punch and I wonder if perhaps one of the other servants might have embellished it. Our chauffeur is a bit of a scamp. Anyway, the party was in its last stages, everyone rather hot and getting too tired for more dancing, and all of a sudden there was some kind of trouble with one of the maids – lots of shrieking – and Faulds, the butler… Oh, but of course you met him, didn’t you?… had to haul her off and give her a talking-to. He was most displeased. And we all went to bed a bit flattened. But I couldn’t get to sleep and I certainly couldn’t face ringing down for someone to bring tea – it had all been so unseemly and embarrassing – so I went to fetch some for myself, or milk anyway which is easier, and when I got back up to my room, Pip was there, and he was… Well, he was… He was like a man possessed. He was in a complete rage and that’s when he told me for the first time that he was going to kill me.’
I considered the story in silence. If I had heard it the morning after the events took place, I should have brushed it off without a murmur: servants’ parties are notoriously ticklish affairs even without the adulterated punch, and what with maids and masters dancing together – mistresses and scamps of chauffeurs too, if I were reading correctly between the lines – then the lady of the house creeping back down in her nightgown, a husband breathing fire was hardly astonishing. However…
‘For the first time?’ I repeated.