Nanny put on an excellent performance.
She was as chilly and poised and regal as Mary Queen of Scots on trial. Though Inspector Milne was irritatingly low-voiced, we were able to judge by Solange’s answers that he asked her all the expected questions about where and when we’d found the note, and if she recognised Hugh Housman’s cap and the broken piece of his spectacles, and whether she had reason to believe Housman was of volatile character. But it was when Milne started prying into the nature of her, ah, friendship with the scholar that she truly shone like a star.
SOLANGE [frostily]: I am offended at your suggestion that our liaison was not proper. We are not children, Inspector Milne, exchanging sordid kisses in the darkness of the cinema! [Sound of nose-blowing into presumably lace-edged imported French handkerchief.] Dr Housman was a fluent speaker of the French language.
INSPECTOR DUNCAN MILNE: [mutter, mutter, snort]
SOLANGE: [sulking silence]
INSPECTOR MILNE [in loud tones apologetic]: Perhaps, Mademoiselle Lavergne, you do not understand the significance of your friendship with Dr Housman in the event there need be a hearing at Sheriff Court as to the nature of his death.
SOLANGE [loudly]: I understand its significance perfectly. I could not hear your question.
INSPECTOR MILNE [just as loudly]: Was there an exchange of physical affection between you?
SOLANGE [with queenly chill]: It would have been a poor affair if there had not.
(‘One for the French!’ Jamie hissed in my ear, and I had to smack him because he made me snigger inappropriately and miss Milne’s response. Mémère threatened in a stage whisper that she would not let us be her spies if we couldn’t do it quietly.)
SOLANGE: … Between us, yes, not secretly, but in private. And the physical exchange of affection does not prove itself only in the touch of bodies, Inspector Milne. There are other small kindnesses a person can do to show affection. I saw to it there were always fresh flowers in his room at the day’s end. He made me a gift of a pair of earrings, pearls he’d found himself in the river here – he had them set at MacGregor’s.
(Of course all of this took place before I arrived at Strathfearn. I feel sure that if I’d been there I would have sniffed out the romantic hanky-panky sooner than Mummy, possibly preventing the fatal tiff.)
‘And yet you feel Dr Housman may have had reason to end his life, as this letter to you suggests?’ came the dry, relentless voice of the interviewing police inspector.
‘We fought,’ Solange said simply. ‘And I do not mind saying why. He tried to turn me against my dear Lady Craigie. He also made remarks about her mother, Lady Strathfearn, which I found coarse and tasteless; about her age and her sanity, criticising the way she has run the estate since her husband’s death …’
Jamie and I, face-to-face as we listened through the folding wall, caught each other’s eye at exactly the same moment in silent agreement not to pass this insulting gossip on to our grandmother.
‘I was angry and did not speak to him for several days. When he approached me he made no apology and I found his physical advances …’ She struggled for a word and came up with, ‘inappropriate. After more rebuffs than I can count he took my lack of response for coyness and when he would not stop, I struck him.’
She paused, then added remorsefully, ‘I struck him quite hard.’
‘How hard?’
‘I broke his spectacles.’
‘Ah. That was the last you saw of him, was it?’
At this point Solange lost control of her carefully maintained hauteur, and burst into loud tears, and began theorising rather hysterically as to what might have happened to me, which really did not count as factual information pertinent to a precognition. And her interview came to an end.
Then it was Mother’s turn.
She was queenly in a different way to Solange. She had none of Solange’s frost or magnificence; Mother was simply in control. She stood up and let Sergeant Henderson escort her next door without the least fuss or drama. Jamie and I had our ears pressed to the glass tumblers against the wood panelling the second the door to the passage had closed behind her.
‘Please sit, Lady Craigie.’ Inspector Milne was as dry as ever. This time, irritatingly, it was Mother who spoke in such a low voice that we couldn’t make out her answers. Of course that was because she was wise to us. After quite a lot of unintelligible mumbling from them both, Jamie rolled his eyes at me and put his tumbler down on the floor.
So I was the only one who was listening when the inspector, quite clearly, asked my mother an absolutely outrageous question.
‘Is your daughter intact?’
It was like being brutally smacked across the face. I felt myself burning with indignation. Just the asking of it made me feel filthy, and I wasn’t even in the room.
Mother’s voice went up too. ‘Really, Inspector Milne, I fail to see what such a thing has to do with Housman’s death.’
‘Your daughter was the last to see him alive. She recalls that he was fully unclothed when she met him, alone on the riverbank, and she can remember nothing of the night she then spent in the company of the travelling tinkers. What happened to her in those hours, or what she did, is surely of relevance to this investigation. I want to know if you are aware of any misfortune she may have encountered that is not yet on record. Was she not examined in the hospital?’
Mother didn’t say anything for a moment.
She thought Jamie was listening, which was partly why she was embarrassed about answering the question.
But something in her absolute silence made me aware that yes, medical staff had checked me over very carefully in the two days I’d been unconscious, and Mother knew what they’d been looking for and what they’d found, and hadn’t told me.
I tried to imagine my senseless anonymous stripped self in that hospital bed behind the rail curtain, being examined for signs of assault. And felt violated even though I hadn’t been.
‘It’s a delicate question,’ the dry man acknowledged, prompting her. ‘Was there evidence of an attack of a sexual nature?’
Mother spoke with the presence of an advocate defending a case. ‘Notwithstanding his courtship with Mam’selle Lavergne, Dr Housman was a respectable and temperate man and I have no reason to believe he would have assaulted my daughter.’
‘I was not thinking of him. I was thinking of the tinker family with whom she spent the night.’
I felt my face go incandescent with embarrassment, and no small amount of horror at how the inspector’s mind was painting the McEwens.
But Mother never lost her sangfroid.