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

think of Phyllis giggling and stitching her embroidery and comforting poor Mattie with cuddles. A snooper? It did not seem likely.
    Which left those two boys: John and Harry. John, being the chauffeur, could certainly – easily – be sent off on errands by his master without the other servants missing him. And I knew from my own experience how much time Grant spends mysteriously employed away from the house, even with only a dressmaker in the village to absorb her attentions. If we lived in a town she would never be out of the shops, buying up yards of ribbon and stockings by the score, and I imagined the same was true of a valet, if not even more so, what with shaving soap and tobacco and hair brilliantine. Again though, apart from the free time at their disposal, neither of them seemed all that likely: John had the easy, open manners which come from good looks and early advancement and Harry the brusque insolence of plain features and too much politics, but of watchful cunning and furtiveness I had seen not a whisker.
    Lollie’s thoughts must have been running along the same lines as my own.
    ‘It never occurred to me it was one of the servants,’ she said, rousing me from them. She had got herself out of her shirt and skirt and had wrapped herself up in a dressing gown to sit at her table.
    ‘Who else?’ I asked her. ‘It was the first thing that occurred to me.’
    ‘I suppose a private detective?’ said Lollie. ‘Someone could easily wait across the road for me to come out.’
    I stepped over to the windows and looked out. Her bedroom was at the front, on the sunny side, and had an excellent view over Queen Street Gardens where a private detective might indeed pass endless unseen hours behind a tree watching her, so long as he had a key. These gardens were not open to the hoi polloi, naturally, but kept scrupulously for the use of the residents, even nannies with perambulators being frowned on in some of the grander squares and crescents in the town. I turned back to the room.
    ‘I’m not even sure it’s the same person every time,’ said Lollie, who had started brushing her hair.
    ‘Here, let me do that.’ I came back from the window, took her hairbrush out of her hands and set to work with it.
    ‘And doesn’t that suggest a firm of detectives, rather than a servant?’ she asked.
    I did not answer; her fine, silky hair had responded to my brushing by flying up in a cloud like a dandelion head all around her parting. I dabbed the brush at it trying to make it flatten down again and caught her eye in the mirror.
    ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Do you have a rose-water spray? I’m almost sure I could make some little waves if we dampen it.’
    We went together to look and see what there might be in her bathroom, Lollie saying it was a good idea for me to get the lie of the land.
    ‘And don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Pip won’t be up for half an hour.’
    It had once been the dressing room and – although windowless in the middle of the building and surely rather stuffy as a result – made a very comfortable bathroom now. I looked with interest at the little hooded alcove on one end of the bath, something between a sedan chair cover and a grotto.
    ‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘A stand-up shower-bath! How lovely.’
    ‘Yes, we had them in our suite in Turkey on our honeymoon,’ said Lollie, ‘and Pip put one in for me. It’s rather delicious, except when the hot water suddenly runs out. I don’t think I’ll chance it while our coal’s being rationed. Now come and see my boudoir.’
    She cannot have needed it, what with four rooms downstairs and the ground-floor parlour too, but there it was: a little oasis of satin- and tulip-wood, with Louis XIV salon chairs and floral plaques stuck on to any cabinet, cupboard front or sewing table which presented a flat space for the sticking.
    Across the landing to the back, Pip had the larger of the two bedrooms, north-facing like Miss Rossiter’s room four floors