‘What are you talking about?’ said Mr Faulds. ‘What’s this the police have dug up?’
‘Oh, Ernest, please,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘And you too, Fan. Can’t we just leave it be? I’ll be greetin’ worse than Millie if I have to keep going over it now.’
Mr Faulds, the thought of his beloved in distress taking precedence over everything else, clapped his hands, stood up and announced that he had a bottle of Rémy Martin in his pantry and we were all to go there now and drink to Stanley’s memory. I tried to demur, not wanting to be a gooseberry, but he would not brook a refusal and in the end Mrs Hepburn left before me, fearing that Millie would waken and find herself alone. I meant to follow on her heels, but somehow the time passed and it must have been long after midnight when, full of brandy and music-hall tales and slightly cloudy, I climbed all the way to the top of the house, bade goodnight to Alec and climbed into the little iron bed to join Bunty.
16
Bunty woke me with one of her most luxurious yawns, one which slid down several octaves from a whine to a growl, and I was glad to be wakened; my sleep had been plagued by the kind of unpleasant dreams one cannot quite remember but cannot quite shake off either. Alec called my name and I opened my eyes and gazed around the little room. It was awash with morning light and alive with dancing dust motes at which Bunty started snapping, trampling over the bed without regard to the tender parts of her mistress under her paws.
‘One moment,’ I called back and sat up, shoving Bunty off the bed with my feet. Perhaps it was not a dream, this thing that was nagging at me, but rather something I had forgotten or something I had to do and deep down was dreading. I looked around the room for clues, but I knew even as I did so that it was not that sort of a something, not a watch I had not wound nor a letter I had to answer. After all, I thought, shaking my head, I did not even know if this nagging something was in the past or the future. It was, somehow, neither. It was, in a very odd way, somewhere else entirely. It must, I decided, be a dream after all.
Besides, my work here at 31 Heriot Row was done. It had not been my finest hour. I had suspected Stanley from the start, had watched him, had become more and more sure of his guilt every day and yet had done nothing about it until it was too late to bring him to justice. Even if I had really been Miss Rossiter, Mrs Balfour’s new maid and nothing more, I should have spoken up and told Superintendent Hardy that very first morning to take Stanley in and press the truth out of him. As a so-called detective, supposed to be helping, I could not account for how I could have let it end this way.
There was a soft knock on the door and Alec put his head around it.
‘Dan?’ he said. ‘Are you all right? I can hear you sighing from out here.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Well, of course, actually, no, I’m not fine. I’m kicking myself.’
‘Can’t think why,’ Alec said, ‘but – having slept on it all – have you at least accepted that the mystery is solved and the case is closed?’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I said. ‘I mean, yes, of course.’
‘So we can go home?’
‘Home?’ I repeated. ‘Yes. Yes, I think perhaps I should. This place…’ I looked around myself again. What was it?
‘This place what?’ Alec said.
‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘I feel rather odd this morning, that’s all.’
‘Bad dreams?’
‘That’s probably all it is.’
When he had gone, taking Bunty and Millie with him for a turn around the garden, I made every effort to shake myself. (Nanny Palmer, in full epigrammatic flight, had once shared with me the view that if we spent all our time looking back at yesterday, we would be roundly spanked by tomorrow – and although I had had to suppress my giggles at the time, I had come to see the wisdom.) And perhaps Stanley’s guilt had not really been so very clear at the time as it was now, with the glare of hindsight shining upon it. No! I told myself. Stop that! It was clear. It had been perfectly obvious to me from the start and I would not allow myself to wriggle out of my discomfort by pretending otherwise. Besides, I could not edit my memories to suit myself because I had a record of them.
I laid a hand out and picked the topmost book from where I had left them on my nightstand. My much-ridiculed notebooks, I thought, as I flipped through the pages. There were my first impressions of the household: Lollie – sweet and confused, inclined not to believe her own experiences but rather to cling on to her hopes even in the face of bitter experience to the contrary; Mrs Hepburn – sharp-tongued but good-hearted, kind to her charges and a later note squeezed in – food sent back and tricks played – soup/water, goose/mouse; Eldry – shy, easily frightened, PF foisted attentions against will. Unstable – stains/washing find out more?; and Pip Balfour himself - unassuming, friendly, shirtsleeves! Model yacht!! Hard to see beast L. speaks of. Seems absol. unexceptional & pleasant yg man. Brilliant actor???
Stanley must be further on. Yes, that was right, I had not set down my thoughts about him until after the meeting in the carriage house that day. I picked up a second and a third notebook and found it at last. I turned the page towards the window and began reading.
Stanley. Footman. Smug, boastful (esp. re superior training), ingratiating, hates blood. Hints but knows nothing of import. Hates PB, because father/TB/visit. This had been scored out and changed to: would never pay TB visit – fears blood. Could not stab someone. Conclude: innocent as has always seemed (more’s the pity). I stared at the page in front of me. I traced the words with my finger and spoke them under my breath. ‘Innocent as has always seemed’?
So where were the notes about my suspicions? About what I had thought of Stanley all along? I got out of bed and walked up and down the bare floor staring at the journal in my hands. How could such lies be there in my book, in my writing, when I had not written them and never would write them, and where was what I had written, what I must have written, about all of his blunders and my growing certainty? I stopped pacing and threw the book down onto the bedcovers.
I was still standing in the middle of the floor when Alec came back to the door again.
‘Dan?’ he said. ‘Are you still in h-?’ He came right into the room and took my arms in his hands. ‘Dandy?’
‘Alec,’ I said, and I was surprised at the smallness of the voice that came out of me. ‘Something is wrong.’ I led him over to the bed and sat him down on it, opening the notebook and laying it on his lap.
‘I didn’t write that,’ I said, pointing.
Alec skimmed the page quickly and then looked up at me.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure.’
Alec shut the book and looked closely at the cover.
‘It’s your book, though, isn’t it? I recognise it.’ I nodded. It was certainly mine. Alec opened it again and peered at the binding. ‘It’s a proper page,’ he said. ‘It hasn’t been bodged in with glue. And it’s your writing, darling. I’d know it anywhere. I always said you take too many notes. And now there are so many you can’t even remember writing them. Lesson for next time: less writing.’
I nodded. Writing, I thought. Handwriting. Names signed in writing. I was close to it now; I had almost caught hold of the end of it. And yes! There it was.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Listen to this.’ A will in Pip Balfour’s writing, referring to a cousin no one has ever heard of and a wife who probably did not exist, and bearing the signatures of two women who cannot be found. And a note in Stanley’s writing accusing himself of a crime he could not have committed – because of the blood – and left to prove a suicide he could not have committed – more blood – and now this. A journal entry in my own writing which I did not write, saying things I did not think and omitting things I did.’