There was a photograph of Pip Balfour in a frame on the little enamelled cupboard where the towels were stored. He was standing on the deck of a yacht, his shirtsleeves rolled high and his collar open, laughing and squinting into the sun.
‘I don’t think she did it,’ I said to him. ‘Even if you deserved her to.’ I stood staring at the picture until all the water had drained away and the bathroom was silent again. Then I shook myself back into motion, turned from him and sped down the flights of stairs to the kitchens, hoping I was not too late already.
‘And as to what we’re supposed to do for our dinners, Fanny, your guess is as good as mine,’ said Mrs Hepburn, striking in medias res as I entered the main kitchen. ‘If I just sit in the hall all the morning, that is, which I can’t, no more than I can work with the rest of them under my feet in here.’ She glared at a police constable – Morrison, one presumed – who was trying to melt into the wall behind him and failing.
‘The super tellt me I was to keep you all together, Mrs Hepburn,’ he said. ‘Just until he’s had a chance to talk to you all. He’ll kill me if he finds out you’re in here and they’re in there.’ He jerked a thumb at the wall which separated the kitchen from the servants’ hall.
‘Can’t Sergeant Mackenzie stay with the others?’ I asked.
‘Millie, how many times?’ broke in Mrs Hepburn. ‘You flour for dough and grease for pastry. Now wipe that off and try again.’ Millie, dusted with flour all down her apron, in her hair, on both cheeks and one spectacle lens, dropped her ball of pastry back into its bowl, bobbed and scurried out to fetch a cloth. Mrs Hepburn blew upwards into her hair, took hold of the frilled collar of her dress and shook it, letting a draught in about her neck.
‘You’ve got me snapping at my own niece now!’ she said to PC Morrison, who ignored her.
‘The sarge is away back to the station,’ he said to me. ‘He couldnae get a line to ring them.’
‘Are the telephonists on strike?’ I said. ‘I didn’t think so.’
‘No,’ said Morrison, ‘but they’re overloaded with everybody ringing everybody else to say how they cannae get to wherever they’re supposed to be with no buses on and the exchange said to the sarge that half of them are telling her they’re the police or a doctor to make her break in and he could go and whistle.’
‘I’m sure it will be all right to leave the others in the hall with Mr Faulds to watch them, Constable,’ I said. ‘I think Mr Hardy probably just meant that we shouldn’t be allowed to swarm all over the house.’
‘There! See?’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘Miss Rossiter thinks the same as me. So let’s all go through and have a cup of tea and a wee bite and take that blooming helmet off before you melt.’ She picked up an enormous teapot and nodded to PC Morrison to carry a cooling tray of buns, then left at her usual pace.
‘Her bark and her bite are both hopeless,’ I told the constable, who nodded, smiling but still looking a little scared. I guessed that Hardy’s bark was deafening and his bite fatal.
In the scullery, Millie had been distracted and was guddling potatoes in a deep basin of water. The disordered morning was clear to see in the piles of unwashed breakfast dishes ranged about on the wooden draining boards, one plate even still half-covered with rashers of congealing bacon. And there too was what I had been hoping to find: the pair of brandy glasses from Lollie’s imposed nightcap the evening before. I could not tell which was mine and so I took them both, holding them down at my sides to hide them. She had been very insistent upon my drinking up and if she had put some kind of powder in my glass to make me sleep through disruptions, there was bound to be a trace of it left in the dregs at the bottom. I slipped out again without Millie hearing me and flitted down to my own room.
When I opened the door, it was to the sound of water and I stood still for a moment and listened. This could not be Millie and her potatoes away in the offshoot at the other side of the house. Very quietly, I turned the handle of the laundry-room door and looked in. Eldry was there, her arms deep in a sinkful of soap suds. For a moment I watched her in silence, but she must have sensed my presence because suddenly she wheeled around. I started backwards, banging my heel against the door jamb and cracking one of the brandy glasses as my hand clenched around it. Eldry was backing away too, pressing herself up against the sink, wiping her hands on her apron and staring at me like a dog which expects to be kicked.
‘Please don’t be angry, Miss Rossiter,’ she said. ‘I would have gone out to the wash-house at the back of the coalhole there, but that first policeman said we were no’ to leave the house.’
‘And what about the second policeman?’ I said. ‘He was supposed to be keeping you all together.’
‘I slipped out,’ said Eldry, ‘when they were talking in the passageway. He’s no’ really counted us all up yet, I don’t think.’
‘I see. And what are you doing, exactly?’
She glanced back at the soapy water and bit down on her bottom lip, making her teeth more prominent than ever.
‘Try – trying to get the blood out,’ she said.
I felt the hairs move on the back of my neck and I spoke gently.
‘What’s got blood on it, Eldry?’
‘My clothes,’ she said. ‘My dress and when I took my dress off it got on everything.’
‘And how did you get blood on your dress?’ I was clutching the cracked glass even tighter now, wondering if I could bring myself to use it if she were to fly at me.
‘From him,’ she said. ‘Upstairs. Master.’
6
I stared at Eldry through the shifting steam in the washroom. Her voice was so faint now that I could hardly hear her at all through the muffled air. ‘It must have come off on me when I went to his bedside,’ she said. ‘Or where else could it come fae?’
I let my breath go. I put the brandy glasses down on the small ironing table behind the door, being careful not to shatter the cracked one, and turned back to her.
‘You mean this morning?’ I said. ‘When you took the tray in?’ Eldry nodded. ‘I didn’t notice it,’ I said, trying to get a clear picture of her as she had been during those few short and furious moments of confusion. She had had her back turned to me as she banged on the door and she had sunk down with her knees up; I could not remember having seen her front at any time. ‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘How could you have got blood on yourself just from walking up to the bedside and away again?’
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered, ‘but how else did it get there?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ I said. Then her eyes opened very wide and she put her hands up to her cheeks.
‘You don’t think I hurt him?’ she said. Her hands were very red against her white face and her fingers looked like claws as she pressed them into her flesh. ‘I could never, miss. All that blood. I could never.’ She was swaying slightly and I stepped quickly over towards her and took hold of her hands. They were pulsing with heat, and all of a sudden I was aware of just how steamy and soft the air was here in this little room, and how the distemper on the walls was running with beads of moisture and blistering. I put one finger into the sink of water and yelped.
‘Eldry, your hands,’ I said. ‘Come and sit down. Your poor hands!’ I pushed her down into my little armchair and then went back to the laundry room. I pulled on the chain and felt the plug give way at the bottom of the sink. As the water drained, with a horrid sucking sound, a greyish mass rose out of the sinking tide of suds. I turned the cold tap on and once the bundle had cooled a little I began hauling at it, sorting it into pieces. Every stitch she had had on must have been in there. Knickers and vest, bodice and petticoats, stockings, her dress and her apron – white and black, wool and linen all mixed in together. I let the cold tap run and run and when it was icy I filled a deep bowl and carried it very carefully back to the armchair.