‘When I told you they were part of the Murray Estate you said you thought they’d been sold. Even my mother didn’t remember those pearls. How did you know about them?’
He hesitated for half a second. ‘Dr Housman told me, of course.’
‘Why would he have told you anything about them?’
This time his hesitation was damningly long.
At last Dunbar answered with even care, ‘He talked about the collection all the time. I’d helped him move it from the Big House to the library; he knew I was interested –’
‘Yes, but he wouldn’t have said anything to you about the pearls because he was going to steal them.’
Dunbar’s invading hands tightened, involuntarily gripping me in a new way.
He whispered, ‘You know.’
‘Of course I know – I found them! We all know, me and Jamie and Ellen and Euan! We found the Murray pearls where Housman left them, all three hundred and twenty-seven of them – we counted them on the riverbank!’
‘You don’t … you don’t remember?’
‘Remember what?’
He shook his head just once, his face serious. ‘Julie, it doesn’t matter.’
Just like it didn’t matter how old I was, except this time he was bluffing. His voice was hollow; his grip still tense and harsh. He wasn’t worshipping me any more. He was still bent on seduction, but for a different reason now, and in a different way. I had woken him up.
‘You knew! You were in on it!’ I accused. ‘You were going to share those pearls with him! You found them when you were moving the things to the library, and you must have hidden them together …’
I’d overheard Dunbar talking to Housman on my first day in the house; I remembered how Dunbar’s voice had brightened. The words came tumbling out almost faster than I could throw them at him.
‘That telephone call – Housman rang to call you out to help him! He’d found the perfect hiding place – he’d been talking to Alan McEwen, and he knew the McEwens would never go near the foot of the Drookit Stane. You must have gone to the library just after I did – you knew the Water Bailiff would be busy with the McEwens, and Mary was away, and you thought no one would notice you hiding the pearls. And afterwards you knew Housman wasn’t dead –’
The pieces were clicking into place in my head as if by clockwork.
‘That ancient body was a godsend for you both! It made it look as if Hugh Housman really had drowned! And when he stole my kilt and left his trousers by the river to make people think it was him they’d found, you knew – you knew he’d done it! You were angry about it! You were helping him –’
‘Julie, don’t. Please stop.’
‘You helped him hide! I’ll bet you slipped that dreadful suicide note under our carpet for him. You let him creep into your study at night – you left food for him! I saw him trying to get in. What a flipping bungler he is – he came to the wrong door! And now you’ve let him hang about the house for the past week because you both think you’re going to go back there at the end of the summer, when the rest of us are gone, and get the pearls back –’
Francis Dunbar pulled me tight against his body, crushing our ribs together, and I could do nothing to separate my mouth from his, and the suffocating kiss was meant to silence me.
But my arm was free and I could see the jar with the rest of the pearls in it out of the corner of my eye. I reached for it and grabbed.
And in a flashing instant I knew where I’d seen that jar in the first place. I’d seen it out of the corner of my eye on that first morning at Strathfearn. Sitting on the flat stone where I’d been guddling for trout, laughing at Hugh Housman splashing about in the river with no clothes on, I’d heard the bramble and elder rustling behind me; and I’d turned my head a fraction just in time to catch, in the corner of my eye, a glimpse of that stoneware Keiller jar descending at speed towards the back of my skull.
The blasted thing was too heavy and smooth to pick up with one hand gloved in slippery silk. I shoved the jar off the table and it landed on the floor with a clunk. Dunbar raised his head and glanced over his shoulder.
‘My God, is that –?’
‘You hit me!’ I gasped. ‘It wasn’t the river watcher with his cromach. You hit me with that jar full of pearls!’
‘They’re here?’ he gasped in return.
‘You snake!’
He was holding on to me so tightly it was making my ribs ache.
‘Yes, they’re here! Not just that necklace but all the rest of them too, all three hundred and twenty-seven of them – so what? What about my head?’
He relaxed his grip on me a little, and I managed to wrench myself sideways and dive under the table. I bowled the jar across the floor like a football and emerged on the other side of the table. I picked up the jar in both hands and scrambled to my feet.
‘You recognise it, don’t you? This jar full of pearls. They’re all still here in this jam pot, except the ones I was wearing –’
‘Julie, I didn’t mean to … I thought you were one of the tinkers, and you’d seen Housman –’
‘You ran away! At least Housman stuck around for a minute wondering if I was dead or alive. Anyway, couldn’t you just have gone off without hitting me and come back later to hide your stupid jar? I didn’t know what was in it or what you were up to! You didn’t need to smash my head in – even if I had been a tinker, you didn’t need to smash my head in!’
‘I panicked.’
‘So am I panicking!’
I flung the jar at the window. The casement was propped halfway, and the jar went straight through the leaded panes with a satisfying crash.
Dunbar cried out, ‘You – you didn’t!’
He came tearing around the table.
I bolted. I ducked under the table again, hurled myself across the room and vaulted pell-mell down the stairs, screeching Mary’s name – but she’d heard the glass breaking right above her room, and the jar smashing on the gravel outside her window. She came running with her shotgun just the way she’d done when I first broke one of her library windows three years earlier. For a moment we were wedged breast to breast on the narrow spiral stair: Mary on the way up in her nightgown and bare feet; I on the way down in an evening frock of chartreuse-coloured silk and long gloves, like Cinderella at midnight.
‘Julia! What’s happened?’
‘Francis Dunbar. Still there,’ I gasped, pointing her upward.
She didn’t hesitate. We squeezed past each other and I skidded and bumped the rest of the way down on my silk-clad bottom.
I picked myself up, gathered the stupid dress around my waist and tore outside.
The open-topped Magnette stood waiting for me. I vaulted in over the door the way my brothers do; the blessed motor, still warm, started right away. Over the engine I heard people yelling a selection of my names as Dunbar and Mary called out to me, side by side in the smashed window of the Upper Reading Room.