One could appreciate his sentiments, what with the buns and with Phyllis skipping around like a spring lamb, but there was Eldry as counterbalance. I looked about myself for her, but she had slipped away again.
The front door bell clanked as I was passing through the ground floor and I stopped, hoping to hear who it might be arriving. It clanked again but there was no noise from the downstairs region at all. Was no one coming? Surely PC Morrison had to let one of the servants out of his custody to answer the door. I wondered where Phyllis was. Then, with a start, I remembered Miss Rossiter and hurried forwards. I had never in my life opened a front door, my own or another’s, to a visitor and for a second I felt a cold trickle at the thought that it might be a friend of the Balfours, an acquaintance or neighbour, who knew me.
It was not. It was, in fact, a thin and flustered-looking man in his seventies with a well-polished Gladstone bag in one hand and a slim pocket watch open in his other, the police surgeon, I presumed. Behind him, a young man in a lavishly crumpled suit and wearing a soft hat on the back of his head was leaning against the railings puffing steadily on a cigarette. At his feet sat a large black case of mackintoshed cardboard, bulging out of shape around its contents and held closed by a stout brown leather belt. I could not imagine who he might be.
‘About time too,’ said the doctor. ‘Do you know I had to walk here? All the way from Morningside? And I rang twice.’ He had that peculiarly strained sort of Glaswegian voice which makes every utterance sound plaintive. I bobbed at him, which seemed to mollify.
‘Please come in, doctor,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you the way. And um…’
The other man hefted his case into his arms, holding it like a football, and trailed.
‘Prints,’ he said, with a grin and an eye-roll towards the doctor. I grinned back.
‘I should have an assistant too,’ the doctor went on. ‘This is all most irregular. Run and get one of the constables, girl, and he can step in to help me.’
‘I can’t, I’m afraid, sir,’ I said. ‘There’s only one and he’s been put to watch over the witnesses until the super’s seen them.’
‘This is most unsatisfactory,’ said the doctor, as I led him upstairs. ‘So much for the famous “volunteers”.’
‘Well, there’s usually three of me and I’m not whining,’ said the other man. The doctor ignored him and spoke to me.
‘Where exactly are we going?’
‘I ken,’ said the fingerprint man with a wink. ‘You might at least have seen to it that he got stabbed in the front lobby and saved us all these stairs. Is this what they would call “the servant problem”?’
I was sorry to see the back of this character, if not of the doctor, when I delivered them to Mr Hardy on the bedroom-floor landing, but Lollie took all my attention when I joined her. Her shock had deepened and was now something I had thought never to see again after the war. She was numb to the point of bonelessness, sitting huddled in bed like a puppet with its strings cut, nursing the photograph of Pip which had been in her bathroom, and so although I longed to be downstairs with the others, I found myself at the little bookcase between the windows looking for something to read aloud as I had done when one of my children had a tooth- or tummy-ache which required distraction. There was a well-thumbed set of Mrs Molesworth and I selected The Carved Lions, my favourite of the lot, opening it at chapter one. Before long Lollie uncurled a little, stretching her legs down under the covers and leaning back more easily on the banked-up pillows behind her. After another half-chapter her eyes were drooping and eventually she began to breathe deeply and let the photograph frame fall softly forward against her chest. I read on, quieter and quieter, slower and slower, and then stopped.
As I pulled the door shut behind me and let my breath go at last, the doctor was just emerging from Pip’s bedroom, with a roll of oilcloth in his hand and a sour expression on his face.
‘Here, girl!’ he said, and his face pursed up even further as I put a finger to my lips and shushed him.
‘Beg pardon, doctor,’ I said, ‘but I’ve only just got Mrs Balfour off to sleep.’
‘That’s of no interest to me,’ he said, in his complaining voice, clearly not one who felt that his Hippocratic oath covered the whole broad sweep of humanity. ‘Take this to Superintendent Hardy for me and tell him I’ll be with him shortly.’ He thrust the little oilcloth bundle into my hands and wiped his own with a large handkerchief. ‘You might as well make yourself useful.’
‘Is it the knife?’
‘It’s none of your business what it is,’ he replied.
‘Should you be giving it to me?’ I said. ‘Aren’t I a suspect?’
‘It’s been dusted,’ he said, forced into an explanation in spite of himself, which made his lips purse so tight they all but disappeared completely, ‘and I’m not going to start running up and down fetching and carrying just because nobody’s seen fit to give me an assistant. So get on with you and less of your lip.’
With what I hoped was a look of withering pity – for snapping at maidservants really is the mark of a pitiable man – I took the bundle from him and hurried downstairs with it, just in time to see Mrs Hepburn and Millie emerge from the back parlour where Hardy had been interviewing them.
‘Much good it did him to put me behind and upset my niece here,’ said the cook when she saw me. I was becoming acclimatised to her style of conversation and joined into the stream of this one without any trouble.
‘You couldn’t tell him anything to help him then?’
‘I was tucked up in my bed and Millie was tucked up in hers,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘And you can be sure if I’d heard any goings-on I shouldn’t have, I would have been up and at them. It’s a heavy responsibility, Fanny, to be in charge of all these girls, and it’s not only my Millie I watch out for.’ She had been eyeing the oilcloth as she spoke, and I seized the moment.
‘You can help though, Mrs Hepburn,’ I said. ‘You’ll never guess what this is. The doctor just gave it to me to bring to the super. It’s the knife.’
‘They’ve found it?’ she said in tones of wonder (not knowing, I suppose, that it had been anything but hidden). I nodded.
‘Why would he leave it?’ she asked, shaking her head. ‘With all you hear about fingerprints and all-sorts like that. You’d think he’d take it away with him again.’ Clearly, the import of the locked-up house and the hidden Yale key had not struck Mrs Hepburn yet and she was still imagining some kind of fiendish, and remarkably ungreedy, burglar. ‘What did you mean, Fanny, when you said I could help?’
Carefully, and with a glance at the parlour door, I opened one flap and then the other of the oilcloth wrapping and lifted the knife up into the light.
‘Have you ever seen it before?’
The knife was still crusted and smeared with blood around the hilt, although its blade had come clean as it was removed and now shone dully. The pale bone handle was black with fingerprint powder, which had come off onto the cloth too. All three of us gazed at it. I was no expert but it looked to me to be an ordinary and rather elderly cook’s knife, of the sort used to carve meat in a kitchen or nursery, although not in the dining room. Its blade had been sharpened many times and was now thinner along its length than where it joined the handle.
‘That’s your mutton knife, Auntie Kitty,’ said Millie.
I glanced at Mrs Hepburn to make sure. She swallowed and nodded.
‘And when did you last see it?’ I asked her. ‘Where does it belong?’
‘I washed it last night with Eldry,’ Millie said. ‘I used it to poke the sausages for the pie. It’s got a lovely sharp point, Miss Rossiter, see?’ She reached out towards it but I drew it swiftly away. ‘And then Eldry dried it and we put it back in the knife cupboard.’