The Pearl Thief

  ‘They’ll dry.’

  Eventually I won, thanks to the moth-eaten kilt from the nursery bathroom, which we used to line the passenger seat.

  ‘Did you see anything?’ I asked. ‘Did you see any of it yourself – what they found?’

  ‘Aye, but I’ll not tell you about it.’

  And I didn’t try to get it out of him. After that, Euan sat in absolute silence the whole way back to Inchfort Field. The morning in the sun with Ellen seemed a very long time ago.

  I pulled up in front of the field gate. It is easier to turn around in the gravel drive in front of the library than in the narrow lane that runs past Inchfort on its way to Inverfearnie, but I didn’t want to risk getting Euan in trouble with Mary again just by being in the car with me as I reversed, so I dropped him off first.

  He started to get out.

  ‘Euan …’

  He waited, sitting next to me with the door open and one leg out of the car.

  ‘Euan, now that they’ve found Dr Housman and it’s officially an accidental death, the Procurator Fiscal might decide there needs to be an inquiry. If there’s blame to be found, I know they’re going to try to blame you.’

  After a moment of absolute silence I heard him swallow.

  ‘That day you found me – that last time anyone saw Dr Housman alive,’ I reminded him. ‘Do you remember what you did that day?’

  Euan nodded.

  ‘I’ll swear you did nothing but help me,’ I said fiercely. ‘I’ll swear you had nothing to do with whatever happened to Hugh Housman.’

  ‘I’ll swear you did nothing but fall on your face at my feet,’ Euan said shakily.

  We sat quietly for another moment.

  ‘Meanwhile we just go on as usual,’ I said finally. ‘Shall I come for you tomorrow morning? I wouldn’t blame you if you never went back.’

  ‘The work’s worthwhile,’ Euan said. ‘And I’ve done nothing wrong. I’ll be waiting for you.’

  The next morning, the kilt I’d left in Mummy’s car in the garages overnight had disappeared.

  A good many of the lads working on the building site were more ragged than any of the McEwens, and could probably use a well-made kilt, regardless of the moth holes. I was damned if I’d be the one to cast aspersions at anyone. I just knew that the second I said something had gone missing, someone would point a finger at Euan again.

  Bloody hypocrites. It made me furious to think that the Glenfearn School builders were blaming Euan for stolen cigarettes. But in the uproar over Hugh Housman’s mutilated body, disappearing kilts and cigarettes didn’t attract the attention of anyone in authority.

  Still, I’d miss that kilt. Father mentioned on the ’phone that my trunk had turned up at last, but of course, it was sent home to Craig Castle instead of to Strathfearn. Blast it.

  10

  LYING ABOUT ONE’S AGE CAN BE A FORM OF ART

  Three days after my outing with Ellen I acquired a DRIVING LICENCE. Quite illegally, as I was not yet seventeen (or even sixteen for another month), and it was all down to Mummy. Inspector Milne’s suspicious prying appeared to have awakened her inner Bolshevik, and so I discovered my own lady mother is not above quietly circumventing the law.

  ‘I wouldn’t do this for just anyone,’ she told me. ‘But Jean McEwen is a good woman and we’ll help her son in any way we can.’

  Mummy had the driving examiner from Perth meet us at the Brig O’Fearn railway station. Then she waited on the station platform with Lisette Romilly’s latest novel (in French, of course) for half an hour while I took the examiner for a sedate tour of Brig O’Fearn village. I thought Mother was probably very happy to get a quiet half-hour alone with a book.

  She knew I’d pass because she’d already tested me herself. Mother was very thorough. We spent the entire day on the road practising on Sunday; we drove all the way home to Craig Castle and back, had a lovely lunch with Father, and – hurrah! – collected my clothes. Not my trunk, obviously, as it couldn’t possibly go in the Magnette. But proper ordinary clothes that actually fit me. I had no excuse for being Davie Balfour any more.

  Driving for twelve hours in a single day, or whatever it was in total, was shattering. I slept most soundly the night before my examination.

  Thus, mirabile dictu, I now had documentary proof that I was ‘seventeen’ – apparently approaching my eighteenth birthday – in case Frank Dunbar ever had any serious doubts. I was grown up and comfortable all in an instant, a proper young lady, appropriately dressed, at the wheel of a racing car.

  Sandy came up on the train that night. Mummy let me collect him from the railway station when he arrived on Tuesday morning.

  He looked straight over my head as he tried to hail a taxi.

  ‘Sandy!’ I cried.

  Surprised, my big brother looked down and found me sitting not ten steps away from him at the wheel of our mother’s motor car.

  ‘Julie! Great Scott! I didn’t see you!’

  ‘I’m not as insignificant as that!’ I parried.

  ‘I saw the car, but it wasn’t Mother driving it, so I thought it couldn’t be hers … Does she know you’ve taken it?’

  ‘She certainly does,’ I said with pride. ‘She even fibbed to the examiner himself when I got my licence yesterday. For the “Age” box on the form she told him, “Put seventeen – Julia will be seventeen in August”.’

  Sandy burst out laughing. ‘That is not technically untrue.’ He bent to kiss me on top of my head. Even up close I don’t think he noticed my hair at all. He hopped irreverently over the side of the car without opening the door, a habit all my brothers share, and rode balancing his worn leather valise on his knees.

  I had hoped it would even up the sides in terms of youth and age to have another of my brothers about the place, but in truth Sandy might as well have stayed in London for all we saw of him after that. He stopped in to sleep (up in the former servant’s room in the attic with Jamie), but spent every waking second organising the Murray Hoard at the Inverfearnie Library. He even took his meals there. I couldn’t tell if it was the collection itself, or Mary Kinnaird, that he was so enchanted by. Possibly both.

  I had not yet made peace with her.

  On the Wednesday after Sandy arrived, the fourth day of Euan’s ditch-digging work, Euan and I passed Mary on her bicycle on the Perth Road as I drove Euan the long way round from Inchfort Field to Strathfearn House. She had her head down, focused on the road ahead of her, and didn’t recognise me at the wheel of Mother’s car.

  I didn’t recognise her either; I mean, I didn’t notice. I wasn’t paying attention. But Euan noticed her right away.

  ‘There’s the librarian getting her messages.’

  ‘She always does that on a Wednesday morning. She’s early today.’

  ‘Aye, we’ve seen her before. Dad and I passed her on the day we found you. We were in Brig O’Fearn that morning collecting tin.’

  ‘You were?’ I stared at him instead of ahead of me, thinking hard.

  ‘The road!’ he cried as the Magnette sashayed a bit.

  ‘Fiddle, that was nothing.’ I straightened up.

  It was time to visit Mary.

  I was fed up with being angry with her. Sulking wasn’t mending things for anyone. I needed her help and I was going to get it.

  I caught Mary in her study the next morning. Sandy was upstairs beavering away at the Murray Hoard, and Mary’s face lit up unguardedly when she saw me, then fell again as she immediately remembered the disaster of our last meeting.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mary,’ I said simply.

  ‘Oh, darling!’ She leaped up from her desk to embrace me with fond arms. ‘Julia, I have been meaning to come to see you …’

  I saw that because I’d made the first move I was now playing a strong hand. By God, I was going to play it carefully.

  ‘Sit down, sit down.’ Mary fluttered. ‘I want to know how you’re feeling …’

  She made me wait in her red leather armchai
r while she bustled about with tea and shortbread. I felt disloyal, between knowing that Sandy’s there all the time, and my fury over what Mary did to the McEwens. I knew she hadn’t many friends. But I wouldn’t pretend I wasn’t friends with the McEwens as well.

  I needn’t have worried. She was glowing. She wasn’t thinking about the McEwens and she was scarcely aware of the sordid business which the Perth Mercury was now calling ‘the Strathfearn Suicide’. All she wanted to talk about was Sandy.

  ‘He works so hard, it’s a pleasure to be able to help him,’ she twittered. ‘And he’s so respectful of my own work. But the nicest thing for me is that it’s lovely to have company after supper. We’ve been reading to each other in the evenings, Burns’s poetry and Dickens – Our Mutual Friend. When Dr Housman was here, I always felt I was on my own. Isn’t that strange? Yet I’m constantly aware of Sandy upstairs, even though I can’t hear him. I so enjoy having him here.’

  She poured tea and sat down on the footstool beside me, clasping her hands around her knees. I’d never considered what a world of difference it must be for Mary to have swapped Dr Housman for Sandy. I wondered if it had made her uneasy having Hugh Housman coming and going, right there near the rooms where she lived and undressed and slept all by herself.

  ‘What was Dr Housman like?’ I asked.

  ‘He was really very patronising, you know, Julia. He was dismissive of my interest in the catalogue and didn’t welcome suggestions. He made me feel a bit like a charwoman, there to bring him cups of tea and fresh pencils, rather than a trained librarian. It was the way he avoided looking at me when he spoke to me …’

  ‘What did you –’

  She turned abruptly towards the window, so suddenly it made the gold pencil and the ear trumpet clatter together.

  No, I’d better not ask that question yet. I could see she wasn’t ready for it.

  Of course I knew why people avoided looking at her. But I realised suddenly that when she avoided looking at you it was like she was sticking her fingers in her ears, making it so that she didn’t have to know what you were going to say. Like Mémère, who has a trick of going foreign and feminine in situations requiring mental acumen, which shifts the difficult work on to other people.

  I waited for Mary to turn back so she could see me speaking.

  ‘It’s good having people about you though,’ I said. ‘The river watcher isn’t here all the time.’

  Mary nodded in fervent agreement. ‘I don’t like the tinkers being here. Every year they make me uncomfortable, me here all alone and them up at Inchfort piping and drinking into the wee hours.’

  Ah, hurrah, I’d got Mary to bring up the McEwens herself.

  ‘You know those Traveller folk at Inchfort Field are part of Strathfearn just as much as my grandfather was,’ I said, still being cautious. ‘They own the willow beds at the mouth of the Fearn. They’ve been coming here for hundreds of years. Maybe longer than the library’s been here. My mother and Jean McEwen used to play together when they were wee.’

  Mary looked away again. I reached across to pick up the trumpet and offer it to her so she could listen to me without having to look at me. After a moment she twitched it sharply out of my hand and I thought she was angry, but she held it to her ear and let me continue.

  ‘Mary, the McEwens love this place. And Ellen McEwen is a great deal like you. She helped Grandad with the typology he made for his spear tips. You must have seen those drawings – Ellen did them herself! She knows so much about the estate and its past, the land and – and the way the land has its own story. She just didn’t get to learn it at university like you did.’

  Mary lowered the ear trumpet and turned back to look at me once more. Her smooth face was still expressionless.

  ‘It’s true not many young women are as lucky as I was about university,’ she said. ‘But I shouldn’t think tinker folk care for that kind of study.’

  I gazed down into my teacup. I held my breath for a moment. I couldn’t allow myself to get angry with her again. And truthfully, I didn’t like it that the McEwens muttered superstitiously to bless themselves and make Mary feel self-conscious and peculiar.

  ‘You set an example for everybody, Mary,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if my folk care for that kind of study either – not for me. But I’m going to go to university. I love to read. I don’t want to run shooting parties all my life until my husband dies and makes me sell everything. I want to be like you.’

  ‘Oh, Julia.’

  Her eyes were brimming. I felt cheap and manipulative, because although I’d meant it – I’d meant it with all my heart! – I had been trying to hit her hard, and I could see that I’d succeeded.

  Mary said, ‘Julia, mine is a very solitary existence.’

  ‘All the more reason to let some more interesting people into it!’ I added warmly, ‘You let Sandy in.’

  Mary stood up. She went to her desk and fiddled with the inkwell, very deliberately dropping blobs on to her big desk blotting pad.

  ‘It’s not been an easy summer for me, Julia,’ she said.

  And here was the other opening I’d been waiting for.

  ‘All those police interviews! It must be dreadful for you. But they’re finished with you now, aren’t they?’

  ‘I might have to act as a witness if there’s an inquiry,’ she said unhappily. ‘I was the last to see Dr Housman alive, other than you.’

  ‘What did you tell Inspector Milne about that day?’ I asked.

  She drew in a sharp breath.

  ‘Oh, Julia, why do you want to know more about that unfortunate incident?’

  I answered with a fair amount of honesty: ‘I just wish I knew what happened to me!’

  She sighed. She sipped her tea.

  Finally, she said cautiously, ‘I saw Dr Housman come in that morning. I … I went out on my bicycle to shop in Brig O’Fearn village. The library is closed to the public on Wednesdays but Dr Housman had often been on his own there and I’d left the back door on the latch for him; that’s how you got in.’

  ‘He left the back door standing open,’ I remembered.

  ‘Yes,’ Mary agreed softly. ‘Anyone could have got in. There are all sorts of people about.’

  ‘Do you really believe any of the McEwens would come in here when the library was closed?’ I asked. ‘Even if the back door was open? Without me and Jamie to encourage them? Have they ever before?’

  She didn’t say anything for a bit. At last, being as honest and straightforward as only Mary can be, she admitted, ‘No.’

  Now to finish my hand.

  ‘Were they about the place?’ I asked. ‘Did you see them at all that morning?’

  She frowned. ‘I didn’t see them here. But …’

  I held my breath. I cocked my head a little, gazing out of the window, feigning nonchalance. I didn’t want her to know how much I cared about her answer to this question: how important it was for Euan McEwen that she answered as I hoped she was going to.

  ‘I suppose I did see the McEwen lad that morning. In fact, he wasn’t alone … He was with his father. I passed them twice, coming and going, in Brig O’Fearn village. They’d a cartload of scrap tin.’

  ‘You passed them twice!’ I exclaimed, unable to suppress my excitement. This was more than I’d hoped for.

  ‘Well, they were there the whole morning,’ Mary said with a small huff of irritation. ‘They were going door to door along the High Street, collecting tin.’

  ‘Door to door along the High Street!’

  ‘It’s what they do, Julia,’ Mary said patiently, as if she were instructing a small child. ‘Didn’t you know?’

  If they’d been going door to door through Brig O’Fearn, and Mary had passed them coming and going, they had a whole village full of witnesses to prove they hadn’t been anywhere near the library or Hugh Housman that morning. Mary had arrived back at Inverfearnie after whatever had happened to Hugh Housman – and to me. If Euan and Alan McEwen had been in t
he village all that time they couldn’t possibly have been involved. Even the police would have to agree.

  ‘I do know, Mary,’ I agreed rather breathlessly, trying not to give away my elation. ‘Oh, I’m so glad we’ve had this talk!’

  And I put down my teacup and saucer and got up so I could squeeze her warmly in my arms.

  ‘I hate for us to be angry with each other. Please do agree with me that Euan and Ellen McEwen weren’t trespassing before,’ I said. ‘I like them and I’m friends with them. I can make sure Euan won’t bother you here, if only you’ll let him cross over to Strathfearn by the Inverfearnie footbridge.’

  Mary scowled.

  ‘Really, Julia. You are very manipulative.’

  I laughed. She didn’t have any idea to what extent I’d manipulated her.

  ‘Well, perhaps so, but it’s a little thing, Mary!’ I confessed. ‘A little thing mended. I know you don’t want to have to mix with the Travellers, but I’d so like you not to be afraid of them, either. I want you to feel at ease.’

  ‘Well.’ She sniffed. ‘Only for you, my dear. I will try to be brave!’

  ‘You’re the bravest person in the world,’ I swore.

  It was some time after I left her, when I was once again alone along the river on my way back to Strathfearn, that it occurred to me I still didn’t know how I’d ended up lying on the path near Inchfort Field where Euan had found me later.

  When I got back to Strathfearn and started to cross the lawn up to the Big House, Frank Dunbar was pacing around the edge of the newly tiled swimming pool, sucking furiously at a cigarette and leaving behind him a trail of smoke like a steam engine. He was alone, and I was decently and girlishly attired in my own summery flower-print cotton dress; I couldn’t resist a diversion in his direction.

  ‘Hello,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Hello! How are you?’ I asked.

  ‘As miserable as I know how to be,’ he answered honestly, but shrugging. ‘Cigarette?’

  ‘Not out in the open, I won’t. But thank you.’

  He blushed.

  ‘I can never get it right.’

  ‘Frank by name, Frank by nature,’ I teased, which coaxed a smile out of him. ‘What are you doing?’