Catriona McPherson [Catriona McPherson] - A Step So Grave

Contents

After the Armistice Ball

The Burry Mans Day

Bury Her Deep

The Winter Ground

Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains

Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder

Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses

Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone

Dandy Gilver and the Reek of Red Herrings

Dandy Gilver and the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom

Dandy Gilver and a Most Misleading Habit

Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright Catriona McPherson 2018

The right of Catriona McPherson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 9781473682375

Hardback ISBN 9781473682351

Paperback ISBN 9781473682368

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

This is for Lori Rader-Day,
with love and thanks

In Perthshire

Dandy Gilver, detective

Hugh Gilver, Dandys husband

Donald Gilver, elder son

Teddy Gilver, younger son

Bunty, Dandys Dalmatian

Miss Cordelia Grant, Dandys maid

Mr Pallister, the Gilverton butler

Mrs Tilling, the Gilverton cook

Becky, head housemaid

Alec Osborne, Dandys Watson

Barrow, Alecs valet cum butler

Inspector Hutcheson, of the Perthshire Constabulary

Rev. and Mrs Arnethy, of Dunkeld

At Applecross

Lachlan Dunnoch, Viscount Ross

Lavinia, Lady Dunnoch, Viscountess Ross, ne Mallory.

The Hon. Miss Mallory Dunnoch, elder daughter

Mrs Cherry Tibball, younger daughter

Martin Tibball, her husband

Biddy Tibball, Martins mother, secretary to Lavinia

Dickie Tibball, Martins father, nurse to Lord Ross

Captain David Spencer, a guest in the house

Samuel McReadie, gardener

Mrs McReadie, his wife, the cook

Roddy McReadie, son

Lairdie, footman

Mackie, footman

Ursus, Lord Rosss cat

AChomraich : old name for Applecross. Lit. sanctuary

Aporcrosan : Gaelic origin for Applecross. Lit. the meeting of two rivers

bealach na b : pass of the cattle, the new road from Lochcarron to Applecross

bean-nighe : washerwoman a harbinger of doom

bodach: old man

cailleach : old woman

ciste-ulaidh : Lit. treasure chest, the sea.

c sith : black dog a harbinger of doom

eolas : knowledge of charms

feannag an dubh : black crow a harbinger of doom

mo ghoal : darling. Lit: my girl

sithichean : fairies

Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque

See how love and murder will out.

William Congreve, The Double Dealer

Snow lay, faint as feathers, each flake alighting by one tip upon the flakes below, making lace. Under the lace, the earlier snow nestled like a quilt, blue in its shadows. Under the quilt, the first fall grew heavy and wet in the dark.

Hard against the cold ground, the corpse lay hidden. Blood fanned out across unyielding earth, seeping upwards and blooming. Rose-red turned rose-pink as gently as a petal fades. Rose-pink became the faintest blush of apple blossom as softly as a season slips away.

And all around, above the stain, the snow lay in its perfection, lace over quilt over carapace. Undisturbed, untouched, unstepped-upon, it hugged its secret close until the first drips melting from the branches of the trees began to tell.

Lavinia, Lady Dunnoch, Viscountess Ross, ne Mallory, was loved by everyone. Those who knew her well, those who encountered her now and again, those who merely caught a glimpse of her angelic face and beatific smile in passing: all were in thrall. All but me.

My hatred was quite unfounded which dented it not one whit for no one chooses when to be born. I daresay that even Lady Love herself would have preferred a birthday in the gentler months, when she might have celebrated with picnics and garden parties. Be that as it may, Lavinia Mallory had been born upon St Valentines Day and so it was in February that I journeyed, along with Hugh, my husband of over twenty years, and Donald and Teddy, our two grown-up sons, to Wester Ross, first by terrible road in the midst of hammering rain and now by rickety boat in the teeth of a howling gale, to mark her fiftieth birthday.

Lady Love indeed! I said, through clenched jaws, both my hands clamped on the lip of the bench and both my feet braced hard against the gapped floorboards that made up the deck, as the little vessel creaked and yawed and splats of rain came straight at me from her portside. If I had seen rain like this on a picture show I should have laughed. I should have scoffed at the notion that stagehands heaving buckets of water across in front of a camera would fool anyone. As another couple of gallons were heaved with gusto towards the side of my head, I only wished I were at the pictures. I could have got up and left.

Ah, but wait till you meet her, Dandy, said Hugh. The boys were standing at the prow, sodden and frozen and loving every minute. Hugh cast the odd wistful look in their direction, but stuck by my side from some mixture of duty and contrition. He had told me that we were to embark at Plockton on the banks of a sea loch and traverse something he called the inner sound to land in Applecross Bay and so I had been expecting a boating pond. In truth, the sea loch was choppy, the height of the waves in the inner sound made me quake to think of the outer sound, and if the skipper managed to find the mouth of a bay and insert his craft into it, I would doff my drenched hat to him. I shot him a quick glance, there in the wheelhouse. He was standing with his feet so far spread that, when one added the tall hat and sturdy coat, one was somewhat reminded of Toulouse-Lautrec; hardly the last word in reliability. On the other hand, I could still see steady puffs of smoke rising from him and surely an imminent shipwreck would cause the captain to knock out his pipe.

The other passengers did not look concerned. Three of them were sheep, to be fair, and sheep are famously stoical, but there were four women as well all dressed in black from boot-soles to headsquares wedged in a row onto the opposite bench, holding parcels and packages on their laps and conversing in low voices. Such low voices, indeed, I wondered they could hear one another at all. I should almost have said they were muttering prayers to themselves if their eyes had been closed and if any Scot would have given way to such excess as public prayer outside a church or, in a pinch, a graveyard. Besides, every so often one of them would hiss with suppressed laughter at something another had said. They did not actually look at Hugh and me as they delivered their bon mots, but I had my suspicions.