Solange handed her the note. Mother waved me and Jamie away in irritation as we crowded in on both sides of her to try to read along. Colette stood behind our grandmother with her hands on Mémère’s shoulders; we all knew how much Mémère dreaded a thorough police investigation in her house. But she just sat like a statue beneath the electric lamp, stoic and calm.
There were too many of us in the room. Mother told us sharply, ‘Go outside, the pair of you.’
Jamie stepped out through the open French doors and crossed the terrace to lean against the stone railing, waiting for the storm to calm. I followed him. We felt terrible for Solange, but also I think we were both a little embarrassed.
‘It’s so still when the work stops,’ Jamie said irrelevantly, looking out over the lawn. ‘Makes it feel a bit like it’s summer ten years ago.’
‘But not really. Because the grounds weren’t covered with diggers and wheelbarrows and tips full of concrete when we were little.’
I sat down on the terrace railing.
‘I suppose we’d better not show Nanny the piece of Dr Housman’s specs you found this morning,’ I said. ‘It would just cause more hysterics.’
‘We’ll have to show the police though.’
Something occurred to me.
‘What happened to the rest of his clothes?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Hugh Housman wasn’t wearing any clothes when I saw him. The McEwens found his cap; and I saw him lose it, so that makes sense. Where are the clothes he was wearing when he left the door open at the Inverfearnie Library? Why’d he take them off to drown himself, anyway?’
Jamie thought for a moment. Finally, he said quietly, ‘Don’t tinkers collect old clothes? Sheep’s wool and coal and old clothes?’
‘You’re not the least bit funny!’
‘I wasn’t trying to be funny.’
We looked at each other, and I knew what he was thinking. The McEwens were in for it.
Now began a time of protracted gloom and torrential rain. It was heralded by Inspector Duncan Milne, the policeman who’d been appointed by the Procurator Fiscal to grill us all about Housman’s declaration of intent to drown himself. This time he didn’t warn us he was coming. When he turned up at Strathfearn House no one answered the wide-open door, and no one heard him when he shouted. He stomped back out to his car and sat leaning over the driver and blasting on the horn until Jamie and I came tearing out to see what was going on.
The police took their time getting out of the car, the driver opening the door for Inspector Duncan Milne and for Angus Henderson, whom they’d brought along in the back. Then they all lined up facing me and Jamie, as though we were about to begin a football match. Both other men were rather dwarfed by Sergeant Henderson. They looked faintly absurd lined up against the dripping roses in the French garden.
Inspector Milne stepped forward. He raised his peaked cap and nodded to me. But it was Jamie he addressed, in a cool, dry voice: ‘Mr Beaufort-Stuart? Your mother Lady Craigie is in, I hope? I’ve been appointed to make a precognition for the Procurator Fiscal.’
‘What’s that?’ Jamie drawled amiably, hands in his pockets, every inch the Earl of Craigie’s son. ‘The precognition, I mean.’
The dry, thin man looked him up and down indifferently. ‘Mere gathering of facts,’ he explained. ‘At this time, we’re interviewing known witnesses. No formal statement is needed yet. The Procurator Fiscal may refer to the precognition to make a ruling as to cause of death, or to determine if a hearing is necessary.’ He paused patiently, as if this were an explanation he gave on a regular basis and he knew he had to wait a moment or two before it stuck. Then he finished, ‘It’s principally Lady Craigie and her maid with whom I’d like to speak today, though I understand Lady Julia has remembered a few more details. There will be an interview with Miss Kinnaird tomorrow. Mr Dunbar was kind enough to come in to our premises this morning.’
‘Julie, can you get Mother? And Solange,’ Jamie suggested neutrally. ‘I’ll show these gentlemen in.’
Inspector Duncan Milne of the Perthshire and Kinross-shire Constabulary established himself in Frank Dunbar’s study.
My own session with him went very quickly; all he wanted was for me to add a description of Dr Housman’s state of undress to my original interview.
Jamie, of course, had nothing to say except that he’d found the piece of Housman’s spectacles. He hadn’t even been at Strathfearn when Dr Housman first went missing.
While the interviews were going on, Sergeant Henderson stood guard to prevent anyone trying to eavesdrop through the door in the corridor. Mémère posted Colette to stand guard outside our door, next along the corridor, so that no one could eavesdrop there, either, and after Milne had finished with me and Jamie, this arrangement of course allowed us to eavesdrop through the folding wall in the morning room. Mémère provided us with the glass tumblers necessary to amplify the sound through the panelling. Mother sat like Patience on a monument staring out over the wet terrace, trying to pretend the eavesdropping wasn’t happening.
It was nearly as good as listening to a BBC radio play on the wireless. We couldn’t quite hear the police inspector’s questions, but to begin with he had his assistant read aloud the whole of Housman’s pathetic letter to Solange. The policeman’s halting matter-of-fact voice uttering this tragic statement gave it the faintest taste of farce, and as Jamie and I listened, I could see my own astonishment mirrored in his face. In our wildest dreams I don’t think we could have ever imagined our dear nanny entangled with anyone – and what a splendid entanglement this had been!
‘“My sweet Solange,”’ the officer read. ‘“It has broken my heart that you are so im–”’ he coughed in embarrassment, ‘“immovable, that you have so little belief in me. I swear I can give you no answers, no details, no measure of my worth. I can only give my promise. How I long to be able to offer more than mere promise! But if you cannot take my hand on trust alone, there is no other woman …”’ another choke of embarrassment, ‘“… no other woman alive to whom I would ever turn.”’
The officer plunged on, ‘“I so longed for a new life with you. I cannot bear to think it cannot be …”’
Here Mémère, growing impatient at our enraptured listening faces when she couldn’t hear what was going on herself, hissed, ‘What are they saying?’
And Jamie actually shushed her.
‘“… What new worlds we could have known together! How different, how empty my own new world will be when I enter it alone …”’ (And so forth.) ‘“And now, I return to the river I know so well, where you know you can find me, the river whose gifts are …”’
I thought the poor constable fellow was going to choke himself with the clearing of his throat it took to gird his loins for reading the end of the letter.
‘“… the river whose gifts are more eternal than the fleeting gifts of the flesh. I beg you to forgive me …”’ harrumph, ‘“my darling.”’
Dr Housman had signed it Your Hugh.