‘Miss Rossiter!’ Mr Faulds was in the dining-room doorway, having entered it from the servants’ door in the breakfast parlour. He had a piece of the elephant train centrepiece in each chamois-gloved hand, and looked so aghast that he was lucky not to have dropped them. Stanley, hovering behind him, pulled a frown of which Superintendent Hardy would have been proud.
‘Oh, Mr Faulds,’ I said, and I could hear Alec laughing as I crashed the earpiece back down and leapt away from the telephone. ‘Please forgive me. I don’t know what came over me. I was speaking on the telephone to mistress’s aunt and when she rang off, I just… called up my young man. I can’t account for it.’
‘Mrs L-L was this?’ said Faulds, his face softening. ‘Well, she’d send anyone flying to the arms – or even the ears – of a protector.’ Stanley, by the looks of him, was more shocked by Faulds’s calm reaction than by my outrage itself. He stared at the butler’s back, shaking his head in a kind of delighted disgust, his eyes threatening to pop right out of his head and roll away.
‘She’s coming,’ I said to Faulds. ‘She’s in Perthshire. She’ll be here by tonight.’
‘Lord love us, as if we hadn’t got enough on our plates,’ said Faulds. ‘Well, you run and tell Phyllis to air the back bedroom and get a fire lit for her.’
‘Certainly, Mr Faulds,’ I said, happy to ignore the cheek of a butler telling a lady’s maid to ‘run and’ do anything, if it would put me in the black again. Stanley did not miss the impropriety, though. He tutted in a very missish way. ‘Then, I’m going to want to speak to you.’
‘To me?’ said Faulds. Stanley was quivering with interest.
‘To everyone. At tea. I’ve got to tell you all something that I heard today.’
But before that, I had my sleuthing to do. I left Phyllis and Clara at the linen closet, looking out the best guest sheets and groaning at the prospect of Great Aunt Gertrude, and after a quick look into the servants’ hall which showed me John and Harry sitting down in their shirtsleeves, I stole downstairs and out of the garden door. There was no one on the walkway above and the scullery window was misted up with steam, so Millie would not see me even if she were bent over her sinks as ever. From the coalhole, directly under the scullery, there came the rhythmic sound of a cob-hammer. Mattie must be busy in there, although it occurred to me that if I were in charge of the household I should have suspended the practice of breaking coal cobs into dainty little pieces for the drawing-room scuttle while we were held to a hundredweight a week (and who knew when it would be reduced even further). Great lumps like boulders might be inelegant but they burned with a marvellous lack of speed, and it was May after all; no one was going to catch cold for want of a good blaze.
Beyond the cherry tree, a grass path led between washing ropes where the long aprons of the kitchen staff and the rough shirts and undershirts of the male servants were pegged out in the sunshine. Then there was a little garden, ten feet square, of brick paths and flowerbeds, which must have been a herbiary in the first days of the house but was now left to its own devices and growing a profusion of weeds with one or two leggy shrubs struggling through them. Further on again through a gate lay a small yard centred around a pump and drinking trough, with room around its rim for half a dozen horses – although the clean cobbles and the layer of weed on the surface of the water spoke of how long it had been since any carriage horses stood to refresh themselves there.
At the far end of the yard, the carriage house closed off the garden completely from the mews. The stable doors were boarded up but there was a small door to one side still usable and I tried its handle. It opened onto a passageway with a staircase leading up to the sleeping level, a door on each side and a door at the far end, along the bottom edge of which I could see a slit of light. The door on my left was half-open and the edge of a roller towel rail hinted that this was the ‘men’s arrangements’. The door on the right was just ajar too, and when I stepped towards it I saw a large dim space and the bonnet of the motorcar from that morning. The big garage doors, I could see, were shut and bolted. The door at the far end of the passageway with the light showing beneath it was not bolted, although it was locked – the key hung on the inevitable high hook to one side – but the bolts were shiny from touch and ran easily when I tried them, suggesting that the carriage house was kept fast at night. Could one of the maids have come all the way to this door to let in a murderer? Would she not have been heard? I looked up at the ceiling over my head, wondering if any of the boys slept right above this bolted door.
The stairs creaked horribly as I went up them, and my feet sounded like clapping coconut shells on the bare boards above. There were only two rooms up here, each with a window onto the mews and another into the gardens. They had no fireplaces and I thought that these days, not a single horse downstairs warming the air with its breath, winter would be without much comfort. As to who slept where, it was hard to say; there was a bottle of brilliantine in one of the rooms which might have been Harry’s, and, near one of the beds, an elderly coachman’s cape which was surely John’s by rights was hanging on a nail, but in any case the partition walls were simple lath and plaster and even the wall which divided this carriage house from the one next door and the servants of another household sounded, when I knocked it, like a single layer of brick. If someone had got in through the mews, I did not see how all of the menservants could have failed to hear him.
I had not glanced out of the garden window during my time upstairs and had not seen the figure coming down the drying green, along the brick path and over the yard, and so the sound of him entering the passageway beneath me set my heart hammering. There was no way out and nowhere to hide so I stood my ground, feet planted stoutly, and it was Stanley who jumped and gasped when we met, not me.
‘Miss Rossiter?’ he said, his pop eyes rolling about this way and that as he tried to see what I might have been doing. It did not appear to take him very long to come to a view. ‘Leaving a little note on his pillow, are we?’ he said, nodding at the bed nearest to where I stood. ‘Couldn’t you get his attention away from the bulletin any other way?’
‘I don’t appreciate your tone, Stanley,’ I said. ‘You have a very impertinent manner and I would remind you that a footman owes respect to a lady’s maid.’
‘You’re no more a lady’s maid than he is a valet,’ said Stanley. ‘I’m the only true-trained servant in the place, I think sometimes.’
I rose up.
‘If you can’t keep a civil tongue in your head I shall be forced to speak to Mr Faulds about you,’ I said.
‘Mr Faulds?’ said Stanley. ‘Oh yes! A great head of staff he is.’
‘Don’t be such a prig,’ I said.
Stanley put his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat and rocked back and forwards on the balls of his feet.
‘I wasn’t talking about the famous liaison,’ he said. ‘But now you mention it, it’s-’
‘A private matter,’ I finished, ‘and one I have no desire to discuss.’
‘But they didn’t keep it private, did they?’ said Stanley, growing almost oily in his glee, and quite repulsive.
‘They were overtaken by events,’ I said. ‘I think Mrs Hepburn should be applauded, actually, in not letting any silly modesty deflect her from doing the right thing. I found it courageous. There’s more to life than a petty guarding of one’s reputation. And if you really want to know what I’m doing here in the carriage house – not that I owe you an explanation – I was trying to see if the murderer might have got in this way.’