Clara disappeared into an empty cubicle and pulled the door closed behind her. I sat down on one of the wooden folding chairs laid out for spectators and prepared to wait and then to watch Clara for a polite few minutes before leaving but, when an arc of water sent up by some athletic girl diving in a few feet away from me soaked my skirt through, I thought the better of hanging around at all. I could see Clara’s head over the door of her cubicle and, since she was already wearing her cap – dark red and most unbecoming, I surmised that she had finished changing and went over to say goodbye to her. When I popped my head over the door, however, it was to discover that, to my horror, she had put her hat on first and was only now struggling into her suit, had in dreadful fact only got it unrolled as far as her hips. I stepped back very sharply, almost skidding on the wet floor.
‘Oh my dear! I do apologise. How dreadful you must think me.’
‘Eh?’ said Clara, peering out at me over the top of the door, her bare shoulders just visible. ‘Why? What have you done?’
‘I – um – I didn’t mean, that is, well, if you are not the modest sort, then nothing. Forgive me.’ Clara only laughed and shook her head and I felt all of a sudden very old. I remembered clearly the river bathing with my sister at home, as naked as eels in the sunshine, and the late-night sessions in the dorms at finishing school in Paris with Daisy and Freddy, which we spent ‘trying on’: trying on one another’s dresses and shoes and nightgowns and even underclothes, for my own calico shifts and knickers – my mother’s penchant for Nature stopped at no threshold – sent the other two into shrieks of laughter as they paraded up and down in them and I, of course, thrilled to the unaccustomed touch of machine lace and milanaise as I modelled theirs. But it had been years since anyone except Grant had witnessed my dressing and undressing, and she with a sheet held high between us and her face turned away from the sight of me, and I had forgotten the easy ways of girls.
I had not, however, forgotten everything about girls. I had not forgotten what they looked like, and as I left the echoing hall and the damp corridors and re-emerged onto the Glenogle Road I was slowly coming to terms with what I had just seen in the changing cubicle. That girl, Clara, had never had a child. She had the untried, untrammelled body of a child herself, a bud, still waiting for flowering and fruitfulness but untouched by it so far.
And so, I thought to myself as I paced along, not one single one of the stories of Pip Balfour’s treachery was left standing.
I listened at Lollie’s boudoir door for a long time before knocking, thinking that if Mr Hardy were not in there I would rather not announce myself and get embroiled with Great Aunt Goitre. It was impossible to tell, however, whether anyone else was in there with the lady: her voice boomed on and on, asking no questions and pausing for no replies. She might have been talking to her own extraordinary reflection in the glass, for all one could say. When at last I tapped and entered, though, she did draw breath.
‘Knocking on doors, Walburga?’ she said in tones of high astonishment. ‘Where do you find these servants of yours?’ Lollie did not reply (from her wan face and unfocused gaze I could guess that the endless pronouncements and rambling anecdotes had long since beaten her into hopeless silence). Of course, I could not come back with a retort although I had to bite my cheeks to prevent one, for a boudoir on the bedroom floor is not a public reception room and knocking on its door is perfectly proper. I scowled at Great Aunt Goitre who, unfortunately, saw me.
‘And don’t you give me that kind of look, young woman,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly what I was saying, Walburga, my point in a nutshell. The very reason I’ve always resisted hiring a companion. The only ones I’ve ever come across are pert and lazy and I’m not the woman to pay good money and see nothing for it.’
‘No, Aunt,’ said Lollie.
‘So you see, when you come to make your home with me we shall both be the better for it,’ continued Great Aunt Gertrude. ‘And I shan’t expect any more than the most ordinary gratitude. Nor shall I be selfish, my dear.’ Here she gave a simpering little smile, quite horrid to behold. ‘I still move in the highest Episcopalian circles and there’s many a curate and vicar sent overseas all alone who’d be happy to have a steady wife along with him.’
I cleared my throat and broke into the stream then, thinking that I had to crack that will and save Lollie from such a future.
‘Can you tell me where Superintendent Hardy is, madam?’ I said.
‘Pip’s room,’ whispered Lollie. I bobbed and opened the door to leave.
‘Oh, and… can you tell me, madam, where did Miss Abbott go when she left? Do you know?’
‘What? What?’ said Great Aunt Gertrude, unable to bear having to listen to snippets of conversation she could not join.
‘Abbott?’ said Lollie. ‘Why…?’
‘I have some of her belongings to send on,’ I said.
‘Can’t you ask one of the other maids?’ said her aunt, almost at a roar. ‘Where were you trained, girl?’
‘Mrs Ruthven,’ Lollie said to me, ignoring her aunt. ‘In the Braids.’
I entered Pip’s bedroom with some diffidence, expecting to find the superintendent standing there, communing with the spirit of the dead and hoping for inspiration, and unsure whether he would want a witness while he did so. The room, though, was empty, the bed bare, even the mattress gone. I shivered, not just from the cold – the window was thrown wide to air the place – but because ever since the wards a stripped bed means death and looks both pitiful and brutal in its bareness, conceding defeat and moving hygienically on to other things.
I finally ran Hardy to ground in Pip’s other room, the library on the first floor, following the scent of his cigarette smoke and finding him seated behind a desk which was strewn with papers he was studiously ignoring. He lay back in the chair and blew smoke straight up at the ceiling.
‘Miss Rossiter,’ he said, looking down his nose and making great exhausted-sounding hisses out of both parts of my assumed name.
‘Mr Hardy,’ I said. ‘How goes the investigation? Have you discovered anything new? Have you found a George Pollard?’
‘Hah,’ said the superintendent. ‘A George Pollard? A George Pollard. I found six and then I stopped looking.’
‘Where?’ I said. He clearly thought that the unearthing of six suspects was an embarrassment of riches, but to my mind having only six suspects when that morning we suspected the population at large was a great stride forward.
‘Well, when I say I’ve found them, I mean I’ve found their names. Found out that they exist. But not in Gloucester. Oh, no, that would be far too easy. Where did I put my notes?’ He stirred the papers on the desk with his pen and picked out a loose sheet covered in inky scribbles. His neat notebook was forgotten, it seemed. ‘Now then. Balfour’s great great great great grandfather, James-’
‘The banker?’ I said.
‘Just so,’ said Hardy. ‘He had a brother who moved away to take care of one of the family’s many business interests, and this brother had a daughter who married a Pollard and had a son named George. This George Pollard had a George of his own, as well as a Philip, who himself had a son named after his brother: George.’
‘But they’ll all be long dead, Superintendent,’ I said. ‘You just need to follow the pieces of string to the end and see where they lead you.’ He was shaking his head, and so I subsided.