‘Not that it would matter now anyway,’ I said. It was time to tell her. ‘Because he told me that the doctor says it was a man who did it. He could tell from the body that a woman couldn’t have.’
‘A man?’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘What man?’ Once again as I had seen her do before she took her collar and shook it as though trying to fan away a sudden flush. ‘Dear goodness, they never think there was some devil in creeping around! We could all of us have been killed in our beds. Does mistress know?’
‘I think so,’ I said, ‘but actually – this is going to come as a nasty shock, Mrs Hepburn, but actually, Mr Hardy suspects Mr Faulds.’
Mrs Hepburn let go of her collar and patted it smooth, frowning.
‘Of what?’ she said. ‘Does he think Ernest didn’t lock up properly? Are they blaming him for somebody getting in?’ I hesitated and saw her face fall. ‘No, never!’ she said. ‘Ernest? He couldn’t have. He didn’t – he couldn’t have.’
‘That’s very loyal of you, Mrs Hepburn,’ I said. ‘Even I think it seems most unlikely and after the length of time you’ve known-’
‘No, no, you misunderstand me,’ she said. ‘I know he didn’t. No one could know surer than me.’
‘Because… you did?’ I breathed.
Mrs Hepburn stared at me and made a kind of choking noise that might have been a gasp of laughter.
‘Lord, no! God love you, Fanny, what an imagination! No, not that bad.’ Now she really did laugh, albeit in a flustered way. ‘Bad enough, mind,’ she said, and with a glance into the scullery, she went on in a low voice, ‘I know he didn’t do it because I was with him. All night – and he never left the room.’
‘Y-you were… ahem… I see,’ I said. ‘Gosh, yes, I see.’
‘No, you don’t,’ she said. ‘I can see in your face you don’t. I don’t myself, come to that. A cook has to be above reproach, looking after all these young girls like I am, and you’d think I’d know better.’
‘Well, I must congratulate you on your discretion at least, Mrs Hepburn,’ I said. ‘Both of you. I should never have guessed, and I don’t think the youngsters know.’
‘It’s not discretion,’ said the cook. ‘And there’s nothing much for them to know. We don’t have an understanding as such. Not an engagement, anyway. Oh, we get on well enough and he’s a nice enough man and a lot less snooty than some butlers I’ve known, even if his training isn’t all it might be, but that’s all. Except that a few times, at night, I suppose you’d say our natures have just… got the better of us. And then in the morning it’s back to normal and almost like nothing happened at all.’
‘Mm,’ I said, trying not to smile, for really the thought of the ruddy-cheeked and hefty-shouldered Mrs Hepburn being transported to some netherworld where passion reigned and then returning at dawn to start the breakfasts was highly distracting. ‘Well, it’s very fortunate, Kitty.’ I had no hesitation in employing her Christian name now. ‘Mr Hardy has taken him to the police station but with such an alibi he’ll be out again in no time.’
Mrs Hepburn dropped down into a chair with her hands covering her mouth. When she took them away her lips were trembling.
‘They’ve taken him?’ she breathed.
‘Yes, but don’t worry. When he tells them you were with him, they’ll soon-’
‘I know him,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘He’ll not save himself. He’s too much of the gentleman to save himself.’ She clapped her hands on her knees, rose from her seat and started to untie her apron. ‘I’d better get down there,’ she said. ‘Millie! Come through here and keep an eye on the pots. Auntie’s just popping out. Bring your trotters with you if you’ve finished cleaning them and you can get them split in here on the table.’ Millie appeared at the scullery door. Her apron was splattered with blood and soaked with water so that some of the red stains had paled to pink, and I found myself taking a step backwards at the sight of her.
‘Where are you going, Auntie Kitty?’ she said.
‘Just running a wee message for Mr Faulds,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘You know what you’re doing now, don’t you?’
With that she was off. I caught sight of her flying along the passageway to the front area door a moment later with her hat jammed on tight but her coat still open and streaming behind her.
‘Auntie Kitty’s in a right hurry,’ Millie said. She was ferrying a large colander full of pigs’ feet to the kitchen table, dripping watery spots of blood on the floor all around her. She tipped them out and they rolled onto the table, one coming to rest against a sugar dredger.
‘I’ll just tidy up a bit,’ I said, hastily moving the dredger, a leather-covered grocer’s book and a pile of clean cloths to one of the sideboards.
‘Is mistress feeling better today?’ said Millie. ‘She was all upset yesterday, wasn’t she?’ With great concentration she set a small saw against one of the feet just where skin met horn and began scraping it back and forward. Her tongue was peeping out and her eyes were squeezed half-shut with concentration. When the saw dropped through and hit the table underneath, she dropped it and winced. ‘I should have put a tablet down,’ she said, examining the scar on the scrubbed boards. ‘Auntie Kitty’s told me half a dozen times.’ Then she turned to the stove and dropped the sawn-off trotter into one of the pots bubbling there. ‘Oh!’ she said, looking into the water. ‘What’s that in there? I thought it was stock.’
‘It’s a ham,’ I told her and she grinned.
‘Oh well, that’s all right then,’ she said. ‘That was lucky.’
I had been wondering how to lead her towards the topic of interest to me, but now I thought that surely such a featherhead as this, one who puddled her way through life cushioned against its cares by her own innocence of them, must often find that questions loomed up at her out of nowhere.
‘What did you think of Mr Balfour, Millie?’ I said. ‘Did you see much of him?’
Millie disappeared into the scullery and when she returned she was carrying a cleaver in her hand and looking as stern as her pink and white face and round cheeks would allow.
‘Too much, miss,’ she said. ‘He was a bad man and he did silly things that he shouldn’t have.’ My stomach turned inside me. Not Millie too! She was a child and had not half the guile of some children one has encountered.
‘To you, Millie?’ I said, hoping that perhaps she was merely repeating gossip.
‘Auntie Kitty said to me not to say,’ she said. ‘Because what you don’t know can’t hurt you and if Stanl- I mean, if a nice boy one day asked you anything, then he wouldn’t want to know the nasty things that you had done.’
With a sinking certainty, I knew that Millie’s hopes regarding Stanley were doomed; he was a young man of great ambition and even greater self-satisfaction and his plans, whatever they were, would not include taking the hand of a simple scullerymaid and making her dreams come true. As I watched Millie centre one of the trimmed trotters on the table and take aim, I wondered suddenly how long she would be able to hang on to that simplicity, where there were good men and bad men and simple right and wrong and what one did not know could not harm one. She raised the cleaver to her shoulder and brought it down so fast that the blade whistled before it split the bone apart with a crack like a gunshot. The two halves dropped away and the cleaver was left sticking up out of the table. Millie bit her lip and gasped.
‘I’ll get one of the boys to wrench it out for…’ I began, but Millie had splayed one hand on the table, gripped the handle hard with the other and, after one mighty tug, pulled the cleaver out again. I could not take my eyes away from her hand – spread out broad and strong on the table-top – and could not help hearing again in my mind what she had said about making sure a nice boy never knew the nasty things one might have done. Did Stanley have a reason to hate Pip Balfour, as had so many of the others? Would Millie, blind with love, have gone as far as avenging her beloved footman?