‘You’re on, my lady, he said, cheerfully. ‘’Ere, Barty,’ he called. ‘Put that maid down and come over ’ere a mo.’
Barty Dunn disentangled himself from the Dora’s flirtatious attentions and joined his friend, who explained their good fortune. Dunn, was as effusively grateful as his friend and they both left to get themselves packed.
Skins had only taken a few steps when he turned back and said, ‘There is just one thing that never got resolved.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Lady Hardcastle.
He turned to me. ‘Did you ever decide what I can call you?’
I smiled. ‘You, Mr Skins, may call me Flo.’
‘Righto, Flo,’ he said, and hurried off to join his friend.
‘I suppose, my dear Flo,’ said Lady Hardcastle, ‘that we probably ought to get going, too. Leave the poor Farley-Strouds to try to get things back to normal.’
And so we said our goodbyes and slipped away.
Our evening with the two musicians had been an unqualified success. They had arrived with all their traps just as I was putting the finishing touches to dinner and they had joined us for what they both proclaimed was the best meal they had eaten for weeks.
We had adjourned to the drawing room where we pushed the furniture to the walls so that Skins could set up his drums and we had the most enjoyably entertaining time. They proved themselves extremely versatile musicians and managed to turn their hands to almost every musical style that Lady Hardcastle threw at them. By the time we had finished, following a spiritedly syncopated version of Chopin’s Nocturne No. 2 which had left us all laughing with the joy and silliness of it all, Skins had assured us that if ever times were hard, we should get in touch with them. He knew a few clubs, he said, that would “love a bit of that”.
We had managed to secure a carriage to take the boys and their instruments to the station at Chipping Bevington and they had left with our good wishes ringing in their ears and a few rounds of sandwiches in their pockets.
And now we were back to normal. The mystery was solved, the culprit was dead, the Inspector had returned to Bristol and we… we were once again at something of a loose end.
There was plenty for me to do, of course – we’d not been in the house for a few days and there were chores aplenty simply waiting for the attentions of a diligent maid – but it all seemed a bit mundane after the excitement of the past few days.
‘What we need, Flo dear,’ said Lady Hardcastle as I tidied up around her. ‘Is to take a holiday. We should get away for a few days, take the air.’
‘Is there not sufficient air here, my lady?’ I said.
‘There’s an abundance of air, and it’s as fresh and clean as one could wish. Apart from the dismaying smell of dung when one ventures too close to a farm. But I was thinking of the seaside, perhaps. Brighton? Or a nice spa. Harrogate? We haven’t been to Harrogate for simply ages.’
‘It sounds lovely, my lady. Will there be hotels with cooks and waiters and chamber maids?’
‘I should think so. Or we could rent a little cottage.’
‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure that your idea of “taking a holiday” quite matches mine.’
‘Oh pish.’
‘And fiddlesticks, my lady. Yes, I know.’
The doorbell rang.
I returned with a telegram which she read with growing alarm.
‘Pack, Flo. Now. We need to get to London on the next train. Harry will meet us at Paddington.’ She scribbled a reply on the reply form and handed it to me with some change for the boy.
When I came back she showed me the telegram.
HONEST - MAN - ARRIVED - SOUTHAMPTON - YESTERDAY - STOP - SEEN - BOARDING - TRAIN - BRISTOL - THIS - MORNING - STOP - GET - OUT - STOP - WILL - MEET - YOU - PADDINGTON - STOP - HARRY
We packed in a rush, stuffing a change of clothes and some toilet things into two Gladstone bags and were out of the door in less than twenty minutes. We hurried into the village and managed to catch Constable Hancock in the police station. Lady Hardcastle explained that we were going away for a few days and asked him to keep an eye on the house for her. She didn’t tell him where we were going, nor why, though she did say that a German man might arrive in the village looking for us. If he did, she said, it was imperative that the constable say nothing about our having left.
‘Right you are, m’lady,’ he said, somewhat uncomfortably. ‘Is this fellow dangerous?’
‘Extremely dangerous, Constable,’ she said.
‘Oh. Right. Do you need a carriage? I think Ned’s back from taking those two lads to the station earlier.’
‘Oh, Constable, that would be marvellous,’ said Lady Hardcastle, and within ten more minutes we were on our way to Chipping Bevington.
FOUR
The Half Death of Günther Ehrlichmann
I was born on the 23rd of March, 1877, in Aberdare in South Wales, the youngest (by 20 minutes) of seven children born to Gwilym Armstrong and his wife Marged (whom everyone knew as Meg). Ours was a happy childhood, on the whole. We had little, but we had enough, and amid the chaos and the rough-and-tumble, the hand-me-down clothes and the making-do, we enjoyed a carefree life.
Aberdare was a mining town and my father, my six uncles (on both sides of the family) and two of my brothers all worked in the pits. My father lost his left leg in an accident in 1873, but he had a quick mind and a facility with numbers which, combined with his long experience at the coal face, made him a useful man to have in the office, and so by the time I was born he worked above ground. My mother, meanwhile, somehow managed to raise seven children as well as working long days in the grocer’s shop. She had been a housemaid when she met my father, so she was no stranger to hard work, and she always managed to keep us clean and happy with a smile on her face. There was always food on the table, clean clothes on our backs, and laughter filling the little house that we all somehow managed to cram into.