Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains by Catriona McPherson Page A

marble stairs with the gilded banisters, across the gleaming parquet of the drawing-room floor, up the carpeted stairs with the ebony banisters, all the way to where Lollie waited, peeping around her door, looking out for me, and when I arrived it took a moment for the idea to fall away that I was simply going to help her into an evening frock, stud her hair with a few ornaments and take her stockings away to rinse out for the morning. Miss Rossiter had possessed me body and soul.
    ‘In here, Dandy,’ she hissed. She drew me into the room beside her and closed and locked the door. ‘How was it?’ she said, looking searchingly at me, ‘I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you down there. Are you all right?’
    ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I like your Mrs Hepburn, Lollie dear. She calls me Fanny and plies me with drink. And the girls and boys are all very lively. I slightly let Miss Rossiter’s accent fall by the wayside, but they’ve decided en masse to treat it as a sort of joke, so there’s nothing to worry about on that score.’
    ‘Splendid,’ said Lollie. She crossed the room and sat at her dressing table where an overflowing ashtray spoke of her nervous afternoon. ‘It’s just a couple of Pip’s friends for dinner tonight – nothing too fancy. But let’s talk while I change.’ I thought of Mrs Hepburn’s spun toffee nests and the coconut ice she had been finishing off to fill them with when I had left her, and I wondered what ‘fancy’ would have looked like.
    ‘Very well, then,’ I said, taking out my little notebook and sitting down on the end of her bed. ‘First of all: do you have any suspicions about who it is that’s following you when you go out?’
    ‘None,’ said Lollie, stopping with her shirt halfway off over her head and staring at me.
    ‘Male or female, even?’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘I was trying to think who it might be myself,’ I told her. ‘Some of them are absolutely impossible: Millie and Mattie, for instance. Their innocence shines out of them.’ I nodded to myself. Of course, it was terrible detective work to discount a person on that score but, more pertinently, a scullerymaid is always under the eye of the cook and a hall and boot boy hardly less so; harried and chivvied and nagged and kept up to the mark with endless little jobs all day. I could not imagine that young Mattie could easily slip away.
    So perhaps the only candidates were Mrs Hepburn or Mr Faulds, with no one above them to check their movements and demand accounts of missing time? But as soon as I had thought it I could see how hopeless it was, for a butler is always there, upstairs and down, drawing room and servants’ hall, always at the other end of a rung bell, opening doors, bearing trays, bowing over salvers. If Pallister, at home at Gilverton, were to take up secret missions the very walls would crumble by teatime. And if a butler is the walls and floors and door bells of a house then a cook is the foundation stone, square and solid and always down there, in the kitchens, toiling away. I am not often in the kitchens at Gilverton, it is true, but I had certainly never been there when Mrs Tilling was not, could scarcely imagine such a thing.
    No, if anyone were slipping out and following Lollie it was to the middle ranks I should be looking. Not perhaps the footman, for footmen are as visible as butlers all day long, and not the tweenie who, even though she spent half her time above stairs and half below, had a daily round not of her own devising. Besides, poor shy Eldry, biting her lip and blushing, did not seem the girl to dash out and then cover her tracks upon her return. The two upper maids, languorous Clara and pert little Phyllis, were a livelier pair of prospects; I should have thought either of them quite equal to a bit of spying. But then I thought again of Clara’s flouncing huff over Miss Rossiter’s Christian name. Surely that sprang from some quite solid sense of fair play? And then