Read Online Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses by Catriona McPherson - Free Book Online

do,’ I said once she had gone. ‘Am I to take it then that your desire to be part of the case has waned as the casualty list has swollen?’
    ‘Not at all,’ Alec said. ‘Not a bit of it. Only I can see now that you’re right. You’re much better able to infiltrate a girls’ boarding school than I.’
    ‘The pisky vicar has been roped in as Latin master,’ I said. ‘Could you turn your hand to . . . what was it . . . science or history, I think?’ Alec snorted. ‘French is taken. Music and PE. Well, I can see the problem with you teaching the girls PE. I don’t think the Rowe-Issings would stand for Stella learning rugger. Music?’
    ‘Triangle,’ said Alec. ‘And I sometimes got that wrong. And anyway, the fact is . . . while you were out I snagged a case of my own.’
    ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Do tell.’
    Alec rubbed his nose and did not quite meet my eye.
    ‘It doesn’t have the thrill of yours, but then I didn’t know how thrilling yours would be when I agreed to take on mine. A schoolmistress in low spirits didn’t sound like too much fun, frankly. My case is much more tempestuous than that. Not than five missing persons and four murders, obviously. How untidy to have them not match up.’
    ‘Tempestuous?’ I said, cutting through the babble.
    ‘There is a seething tangle of dark passion here in Portpatrick,’ Alec said.
    ‘Hang on,’ I said, stretching out a toe and poking him. ‘A tangle of passion sounds exactly like the kind of case we said Gilver and Osborne would never stoop to.’
    ‘Needs must,’ Alec said. ‘Since I’m here. One of the good burghers of this fair town wants very much to know which other good burgher has stolen his wife’s heart from him.’
    ‘But we agreed!’
    ‘We might have said it would be nice if every case was a juicy one,’ Alec said. ‘But we never agreed to turn away business. I didn’t anyway.’ His look of triumph was not to be borne and I took myself off to bed in disgust, not missing the sudden scuffle that told me someone was waiting in the passage to see me go.
    He started again over breakfast the next morning.
    ‘It’s not at all what we always said we would never do, anyway.’
    Our breakfast table was very small and very close to the breakfast tables of everyone else currently staying at the Crown, to wit: three commercial gentlemen who greeted one another and then retired behind their newspapers, three amateur fishermen who sat together and talked of lines and tides and notable catches of old, and a convalescent widow with a companion, who nibbled daintily at soft-boiled eggs and spoke in murmurs. Alec and I attracted no attention at all from the six men but set the two women quivering with interest. The convalescent widow was in danger of letting her egg grow cold, all forgotten, so much effort was she putting in to catching my eye. Alec, leaning in close across the minuscule table, ignored them all.
    ‘He’s not asking us to check boarding-house registers to help him with a divorce,’ Alec insisted. ‘He just wants her back again. And a name. For his own satisfaction.’
    ‘And if he then decides it would be even more satisfying to go after the fellow with a meat cleaver? That wouldn’t trouble you?’
    ‘Filleting knife, actually,’ Alec said, but absently. He was looking over my shoulder.
    ‘He’s a fisherman?’ I asked, craning to look over it too. There was a mild commotion taking place in the doorway of the dining room. The little maid who had brought our supper last night, decked out to serve breakfast in a sprigged frock and cotton apron, was remonstrating with another figure who seemed determined to enter the room. A round little figure in a voluminous tartan cloak and a green velvet hat shaped like a hot cross bun: it was Miss Shanks and, despite the maid’s best efforts to protect her guests from the intrusion, she was even now striding towards Alec and me, throwing one wing of her cloak back over her