The Pearl Thief

My brothers and I took refuge in the library from the ghoulish onlookers, and so did Ellen.

It was Sandy who threw together the opposing forces of Ellen and Mary. He wanted Ellen to make clean copies of the boat sketches she’d done earlier in the week, and poor Mary – so resentful, but of stalwart conscience – was too enamoured of my big brother to do anything other than allow his gentle requests to be accommodated.

I met Ellen and Pinkie in front of the library on the first morning of this assignment; Pinkie, realising Ellen was without the rest of her family, now stuck to her like glue. Ellen looked most unlike herself, dressed in a respectable tweed skirt and an almost-new navy wool cardigan. She’d put her hair up in exact imitation of Mary.

‘You look like a proper countrywoman!’ I said.

‘Not a librarian?’ Ellen prompted gently.

It took me a moment to realise she meant the question in earnest.

‘Or a librarian,’ I agreed.

‘Miss Kinnaird won’t be able to fault my manners,’ Ellen said, with the faintest hint of defiance. ‘But I’ll maybe have to leave the dog with you while I go in to see her the first time.’

‘Don’t you want me to come along?’

She cocked her head, gazing at me fondly.

‘I do,’ she said. ‘But I think I should go alone. Just this once, to set myself right with Miss Kinnaird, without the Lady of the Manor about the place arranging things for us.’

Ellen smiled at me, waiting for me to back down.

‘All right, Lady Julia?’

‘Oh, all right.’

I let her go alone.

I felt very proud of her, and of Mary, and a little ashamed of myself for considering their uneasy truce to be any of my business.

Now the Procurator Fiscal was forced to demand an inquiry after all, since as a murder the case would have to go to the High Court in Edinburgh rather than the local Sheriff Court. Everyone had to be interviewed all over again – including Ellen, who was with us when we found Housman’s head and shoulders (which had been whisked away to the mortuary to join his legs).

The same dreadful trio of driver, Water Bailiff and Inspector Duncan Milne turned up at the library to question Mary and Ellen. After grilling Mary in her own study for half an hour, they sent her back upstairs and the inspector dragged Ellen down.

As had happened over at the Big House, Inspector Milne posted bulldogs at the door and window to stop us listening in. Thank God Mary had established that alibi for Euan, but now I found myself panicking lest they try to pin something on Ellen instead.

Sandy and Jamie and Mary and I waited in the Upper Reading Room, where we couldn’t hear a thing. Jamie, just as fearful as I was, slumped miserably in one of the library chairs, drumming his fingers against his thigh.

After a minute or so I said, ‘Mary, can I borrow your horn?’

She’d been flustered enough by her own interrogation that she handed the trumpet over without arguing.

I lay on the smooth floor over her study with the bell of the horn pressed flat on the old dark wood.

‘Anything?’ Jamie asked.

‘Not a whisper,’ I said in annoyance. ‘It’s seventeenth-century solid.’

‘You need a conduit for the sound,’ Jamie began. Then he continued excitedly, ‘Oh, I say, try listening at the fire. The chimney downstairs probably has a flue that joins up with this one.’

Mary cried, ‘Darling, be careful with my trumpet!’

All four of us (Sandy too) knelt with our heads practically in the grate, eavesdropping on Ellen’s precognition.

Inspector Milne pestered her about where she was living. Of course she was staying by herself at Inchfort Field, where her family always camped when they were there, with one small bow tent just big enough to sit up in. Everything she had with her came on the bicycle. Milne asked her question after question about who might visit her there, and for how long, until she began to get angry.

She finally exclaimed heatedly, so loudly that Jamie and Sandy heard it too, even without the aid of Mary’s horn, ‘Naebody is in about wi’ me! Nae man is in about with me! And if there were a man wi’ me, what would be the wrong in it – or the business of yours?’

‘I must be aware of anyone who might have had river access at the time of Dr Housman’s disappearance. Or who might have reason to return there. We need to be aware of anything that might have motivated this act of violence – a secret shared? A debt left unpaid? A fight over a woman?’

‘Well, nae man I’d have about me is a hangman!’ Ellen snarled.

She didn’t have anything to tell them. She didn’t know a thing about Hugh Housman – she’d never even seen him. And for all their bullying, even I could tell they didn’t have anything to pin on her.

That didn’t stop Sergeant Angus Henderson from giving her bicycle a good seeing-to on their way out, prodding its tyres with his cromach and testing the brakes. The bicycle, which was leaning against the stone bridge as if it were embarrassed, suffered these indignities in silence.

Ellen joined us at the upstairs casement window to watch the policemen leave. They were supposed to come back to the Big House the next day to have a go at me again, and Jamie too.

‘I swear that gadgie thinks I’m here after the salmon,’ Ellen said as Inspector Milne’s car bumped over the stone bridge. ‘He’s treating me like a poacher.’

‘Maybe he thinks you’re after pearls,’ I said.

‘There’s no law against me taking pearls –’ She stopped abruptly.

We had the same thought. We, and we alone, knew what Hugh Housman might have been murdered for: a Keiller jam pot full of treasure.

‘A secret shared,’ Jamie quoted softly, under his breath as though he were swearing.

We knew now we had to turn in the pearls we’d found.

But there in front of the library, on our own, Ellen and Jamie and I made a vow to get them out of the dovecote first. We weren’t going to share the chimneys of Aberfearn Castle with the Perthshire and Kinross-shire Constabulary.

I did not at all like the thought of someone coming back for them.

Nor of Ellen being up at Inchfort by herself.





15


EATING PEOPLE UP

Another interview with Inspector Milne. He didn’t ask about the pearls so I put off mentioning them. I felt I was getting good at this.

And I accepted the tickets offered to me by Frank Dunbar, and I took – not Jamie – I took Ellen to the variety show.

I wanted to do something for her. I wanted to distract her from the horror that infected us all now – and to distract me too. Frank had given me two tickets and I couldn’t go with him, of course; but if I went with Jamie, Ellen would be spending Saturday night alone up at Inchfort Field with the Salmon Stane and Hugh Housman’s most unnatural ghost, and nobody but the cowardly Pinkie for company.