Free Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses by Catriona McPherson

can’t you?’
    The companion buckled and whimpered as the widow snatched the garment out of her hands and wrapped herself very firmly up in it.
    ‘I am most grievously disappointed,’ she announced. ‘And now I’m going for my walk, which I certainly need more than ever today.’
    ‘What an extraordinary person,’ said Alec, looking after her as she sailed away, with the benighted Enid sliding along at her side as invisibly as a rather large young woman in bright rust-red tweeds can ever slide.
    ‘Another one,’ I agreed. ‘So Miss Shanks finds out from Mrs Brown the housekeeper who found out from her niece at the Crown that Mrs Gilver the assumed French mistress is not just unsuitable but actually scandalous and wicked and . . .’
    ‘. . . she hotfoots it down to engage you,’ said Alec. ‘The plot doesn’t exactly thicken but it far from dilutes, wouldn’t you say?’
    ‘It curdles,’ I said. ‘But I tell you one thing, I’m going to do my very best to remember my
avoir
and
être
and see if I can’t get myself ensconced up there. I don’t know if it’s anything to do with whatever’s up with Fleur—’
    ‘Or the four people she has apparently killed . . .’
    ‘But there’s something very odd about St Columba’s.’ I turned and gazed up at the long grey facade of the place again. It was not looming this morning, for some reason. If common sense and sanity had not prevented me I would have said it had taken a good step back from the edge of the cliff overnight and was now safely set behind its gardens in an unremarkable way. I saw Alec frowning at it too.
    ‘Very changeable light round here,’ he said. ‘Must be what draws the painters.’ He shivered faintly.
    ‘And I take back what I said about your cuckolded fisherman,’ I said. ‘Right now, if I thought you could pass as
Miss
Osborne, I’d swap cases with you.’
    ‘Well, come and meet my client to be going along with,’ Alec said. ‘He’s an interesting chap, and not a fisherman, by the way.’
    He pointed me on the right course, along under the St Columba’s cliff and out around the natural arm of the harbour until we were opposite the main street and could look back over at the Crown, at the housemaids shaking eiderdowns out of the upstairs windows and the grocer’s shop two doors down. The grocer was unwinding his awning against the sun for the day and the delivery boy was packing his basket with brown parcels, whistling the same snatch of song over and over again, quite tunelessly. Behind the main street, where a few cottage rows clung to the hillside, washing was being pegged out – heavy overalls and school pinafores on this Saturday morning when the working week was done – and in one front garden a stout housewife was scattering scraps to a small flock of chickens. At one of the villas perched on the high road, a matron in a blue coat and a matching hat (with a feather we could see all the way from the far harbour wall) let herself out at her garden gate and turned to walk briskly towards the station, stepping up her pace even more as the whistle sounded to tell of an approaching train.
    ‘Here we are then,’ Alec said and I turned back to face him, then raised my eyebrows.
    ‘I wondered what that was,’ I said. ‘I smelled it last night.’
    ‘I tasted it last night,’ Alec said. ‘And very delicious it was too.’
    We were standing in front of a rather commodious brick shack of the kind often found at harboursides; an erstwhile boathouse perhaps, or a lifeboat station abandoned when a grateful village or a wealthy patron stumped up for a grander one. They often see out their lives as storehouses for nets in winter or lowly shelters for lobster pots in the off-season. This particular shack, however, had gone on from its beginnings to bigger and better things. Its walls had been whitewashed and its window frames painted a cheerful shade of green. A pillar-box-red door stood open, allowing us a glimpse