After the Armistice Ball (17 page)

An hour later I was striding out along the pavement again, with my head high and a bounce in my step like the first day of spring and I had swung around the corner past the mahogany furniture and begun the uphill climb before I began to falter. It was true that I had performed brilliantly. The jeweller was flattered by my confidences and only too eager to discuss every detail of his meeting with Miss Duffy. He hoped to be struck dead if he breathed a word of such a distressing thought to her family or anyone else and (my final triumph) he made a cup of tea and put my feet up on a stool when I broke down and ‘despite dabbing my eyes’ succumbed to a fit of weeping. However, the thought struck me only now that my visit had in fact been a complete failure. Put simply, I had not found anything out. Miss Duffy had said nothing at all about her reasons for selling up, and remarkably little about the jeweller’s discovery of the fakes. She had seemed neither very surprised nor suspiciously unsurprised but only rather distant, as though unconcerned in the transaction. This, he had assured me, was not uncommon. Ladies selling their jewels often masked the unpleasant feelings it aroused with haughty remoteness. She had not even reacted when told that, had the jewels been genuine, she would have needed to produce proof of ownership before a sale could go through, but the jeweller considered that this might be put down to, as he called it, breeding.

I was forced to stop at the kerb on George Street while a number of taxis passed and, glancing along, I saw a willowy figure dressed in black emerge from a shop on the other side, followed by another, bulkier, outline in deeper and yet more garish mourning. The second was undoubtedly an upper servant of some description but the first, now walking in my direction, was Clemence Duffy. I scuttled across between taxis and, composing my face into friendly sympathy, approached them.

‘Darling,’ I exclaimed, attempting to press Clemence to me, maternally. ‘What happened to the Lake District? Is your mother better? Not worse, I hope. Not too ill to travel?’ Clemence, after recovering from her initial surprise at seeing me and, I expect, at being clasped so inexpertly to my bosom, looked rather pleased, or as pleased as her unanimated face ever did.

‘Mummy and Daddy are still at Grasmere but I came home to pack for Lucerne.’

‘You’re alone?’

‘No,’ she said, waving vaguely behind her. ‘Nanny’s here.’ I nodded towards the elderly servant who hovered nearby clutching a bulky parcel done up in brown paper. ‘I’m to go through Cara’s things before Mummy comes home, and then there are such a lot of letters to be answered.’ I was still puzzled. It was authentic enough that Mrs Duffy might not be up to this, but it looked very odd to leave Clemence to deal with what would have been such upsetting tasks. Even while this fresh evidence that Cara was not really dead cheered me, I suffered exasperation that their act was so unconvincing.

‘Besides,’ Clemence continued, ‘there was something else I particularly wanted to attend to.’ She patted the parcel in Nanny’s arms and then, struck by a thought, she turned back to me with her sleepy, beatific smile. ‘Would you care to join me for luncheon, Dandy? And see it first? It will have to be at home, I’m afraid, because of the mourning, but you’re very welcome.’

We lunched off boiled chicken and asparagus jelly against a background of studied gloom in the dining room at Drummond Place, the shades being half-pulled, the room unadorned by any flowers, and the maid who served us red-eyed and sniffing. The servants at any rate were responding suitably to what they believed about Cara’s death, however bogus the family might appear to my over-informed eye. Afterwards, we carried coffee upstairs to a sitting room which, being at the back of the house, was allowed its full measure of sunlight. It was hardly more comfortable for that, however, being antiseptically modern. The white floor shone like glass, making one fearful to walk upon it too heavily, and it was hard to believe that one might sit on one piece of the gleaming white furniture and put down a coffee cup on another, so like sculpture and so unlike chairs and tables did they seem.

Clemence caught me gaping and said: ‘Mummy just had it done. Isn’t it delightful?’

I thought it looked silly against the Georgian windows and under the Georgian cornice, but could hardly say so. Luckily, Clemence turned from me and pounced on the brown paper parcel laid on a white cube of a table before the Georgian fireplace and began to pull off the wrapping.

It was a large black leather book, wider than it was long, its covers held shut by a ribbon. Untying this and flicking aside a sheet of tissue paper, she pushed it towards me and I saw it was a photograph album. The first photograph was of Cara. I caught my lip in my teeth to stifle a gasp; it was so beautiful, so light and soft-looking, quite unlike the usual snaps in which moon-faced freaks barely recognizable as one’s relations sit propped up like corpses. In this photograph, Cara, close up, only her head and shoulders showing, was standing in a room posed very casually with one elbow leaning on a chimneypiece, and although she was evidently facing the window (for I could see it reflected in the glass above the fireplace behind her) something to do with the light bouncing from behind as well as in front gave her an intensified version of that back-to-the-window glow every woman tries to arrange whenever she can. It was not just the light, though. Cara’s expression, too, was like a distillation of all that was so charming about her. She had her face half-turned away as though shy and was smiling the curling smile I remembered, but with such a serenity that, forgetting for a moment that she was still alive, I felt a lump form in my throat.

‘Look,’ said Clemence, turning the stiff page, ‘they’re not all of her.’ She showed me pictures of Mrs Duffy and of Clemence herself in the same room, sitting in plump armchairs or standing against the windows, sprigged cotton curtains billowing around them.

‘These are heavenly, Clemence,’ I said, turning to the next, which had Mrs Duffy and Clemence sitting at a garden table with teacups. With a jolt, I recognized the shingle path and the white fence in the background and realized that this was the beach cottage. Quite a substantial structure, I saw, almost to the point that calling it a cottage was an affectation, and I thought again about the way it had been reduced to such a small pile of ash. My detective instinct prompted a question.

‘Did someone from the photographer’s shop come down for a visit, then?’ I thought that such an individual would surely have something to tell me, and felt a surge of excitement to think of him five minutes’ walk away in George Street. Alec would be astounded.

‘No,’ said Clemence. ‘These are mine. I mean, I took them.’

‘Well, they’re splendid,’ I said. ‘People usually look like propped-up . . . dolls, don’t they? But these are lovely.’ Clemence’s face does not pucker into easy frowns any more than it breaks into grins, but something did happen in her expression then.

‘I hope Mummy doesn’t mind,’ she said. ‘Only I went to such trouble.’

‘Of course she won’t mind, Clemence dear. She will be delighted. What luck that you should have taken them. And what extraordinary luck that they should not have been lost in the fire too.’

We were both silent for a moment considering this. Then Clemence blinked and her next words came in the quiet, careful voice she had used in the court.

‘I carry all my plates together in a special case – the fresh ones and the ones I’ve used – so naturally I had them with me on our walk.’

‘Naturally,’ I agreed.

Her face smoothed again. ‘I took the plates into Rollins’ when I got home,’ she said. ‘And I didn’t ask them to hurry or anything, so imagine how touching when they telephoned this morning to say they had made them up already. They must have done it because of Cara, don’t you think? They must have heard.’

‘People are sometimes too extraordinarily kind,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Clemence. ‘Only it’s not – I just hope Mummy isn’t angry.’

I could see how one might as easily think it ghoulish as touching, but I gave what I hoped was a reassuring smile, and went back to the topic of the photographs.

‘How did you take the ones with you in them?’ I asked, examining the picture of the garden more closely. Photographic tricks held no interest for me, but I thought a good run on her hobby horse would put Clemence back at her ease. However, when she spoke she sounded strained, starting the speech with a strangulated little laugh.

‘Oh, Cara took that one. She wasn’t very good at it. Look, you can see this is not as clear as some of the others.’ I could indeed. This was much closer to Hugh’s efforts with his Box Brownie, nothing like as beautiful as the picture of Cara in the house. Clemence cleared her throat. ‘She got very cross with me,’ she said, ‘when I tried to explain what she was doing wrong. I suppose I must have been lecturing. One does, doesn’t one, when it’s one’s passion. And then she flounced off. Look.’

The next picture was of the same scene with Cara disappearing into the french windows and Mrs Duffy caught between her camera smile and the expression of annoyance which was just about to replace it.

‘I didn’t really mean for this one to be in the album,’ she said, ‘since we were quarrelling.’

‘Oh, but such a little quarrel,’ I said, meaning it, thinking that this could not possibly be the quarrel of which Agnes Marshall had spoken. Indeed, it was hard to reconcile these touching pictures with the kind of quarrel Mrs Marshall had felt was going on. Perhaps she was a scandal-monger after all in her own small way.

‘Yes,’ said Clemence, still rather brittle. ‘And we made it up beautifully anyway. A man came past walking his dog – hideous little thing – and I asked him if he would take a snap of all three of us together, but he was hopeless! I tried everything except writing it all down for him. After he had wasted three plates we gave up, and by that time Cara had such giggles that she had forgiven me.’ She stopped tittering and sighed. ‘Of course if I had known that it was our very last chance, I should have persevered with the silly man.’ With that, she turned another smile on me, stretched lips and watchful eyes above. Before I was forced to think up something to say, however, we heard the muffled peal of the front doorbell which was clearly bound up in rags for mourning, and Clemence leapt to her feet.

‘Telegrams, she said. ‘Such heaps of telegrams and letters every day. I had better deal with them, if you’ll excuse me, Dandy. The parlour maid was in floods yesterday and forgot to tip the boy.’

‘Can’t your butler –?’ I began, thinking that the paragon of propriety who had admitted me on my first visit would not stand for the young mistress out on the step tipping the telegram boy.

‘He’s not fit to be seen, I’m afraid,’ said Clemence. ‘Drunk. He adored Cara.’ Her voice was cold, although whether from jealousy or from disapproval of the butler’s collapse I could not say.

‘We all did,’ I said, and then grimaced at my own sugariness. ‘She was
-'

‘You hardly knew her,’ said Clemence, startling me with her vehemence, but as I peered into her face to see what she could possibly mean by such a thing, the shutters came down, the bell clanked again, and she left.

This was getting stranger and stranger by the minute. I did not recognize, and nor would anyone who had known Mama and the girls for more than a week, the joyous rustic trinity in these photographs. But there it all was, incontrovertible, interleaved with tissue and bound in leather for all to see. Unless, I thought. Unless . . . Of course! This was part of the cover-up. For after all, was this record of a perfectly ordinary week in the country not somewhat too complete to be believed? Was it not, in fact, a deliberate attempt to construct a fairy tale, told in pretty pictures, of a happy family and especially a happy Cara? And when one thought about it, really, the angelic beam of Cara in that close-up was rather an over-egged pudding. Even some of Clemence’s oddness began to make sense. The album had clearly been planned to dispel any suspicions of suicide. These suspicions had not arisen in the end (except in Alec and me) but Clemence was too proud of her own cleverness to resist showing off to someone. Hence my very warm welcome and invitation for luncheon at a time when one might more naturally have expected her to be shunning all company.

They had all the practical details very much off pat, I thought. But they just did not quite get the emotions right. Either too little, as when Alec and I first came upon them in the parlour at the Murray Arms, or too much as when Mrs Duffy suddenly took to her bed or languished in Grasmere sending her now only daughter home alone. And Clemence today was making the same hash of it: more interested in how her plates had turned out than in the face of her dead sister, and then brusque to the point of rudeness trying to amend things.

I perused the photographs again, this time somewhere between cynicism and a grudging admiration for how it had all been managed. Clemence really was an excellent photographer, and quite an actress besides. The little sisterly quarrel was a nice touch, as was the bumbling man with the dog. I wondered if he was real. Might it be worth going back down to Galloway, or sending Alec, to seek him out? Probably not, since whatever he had to tell us would not answer any of the big questions such as where Cara might have gone. Or where the diamonds had gone for that matter.

Thinking of the diamonds suddenly made me remember Silas and Daisy with a guilty start – I was disgusted with the way I kept forgetting about Silas and Daisy – but with them now in mind, I began to feel less generously disposed to these photographs. And their artistic merit did not actually bear repeated examination, I found, excepting perhaps the one of Cara posed inside the cottage. And something about that was beginning to bother me.

I turned back to the start to look through the whole collection again with an objective eye. There was another of Cara which I now saw for the first time. Another in the same pale dress, but this time leaning, laughing, over a wooden fretwork banister in a painted staircase, her hem drooped to her feet by her stoop, her hair ruffled out of smoothness and glowing as the sun shone through it from the elegant sash window on the landing behind her. In this picture she looked, quite simply, like an angel. A bobbed and shingled angel in a crêpe-de-Chine frock and comfortable shoes, to be sure, but again my conviction of her safety wavered.