The Mirror Dance

by Catriona McPherson

Genres: Cozy Mystery; Female Sleuths; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

' The ever-witty McPherson has outdone herself ' Scottish Field 'All the wit and clever plotting fans of Christie could want.' My Weekly Special *Winner of Left Coast Crime's Lefty Award for Best Historical Mystery Novel* Something sinister is afoot in the streets of Dundee, when a puppeteer is found murdered behind his striped Punch and Judy stand, as children sit cross-legged drinking ginger beer. At once, Dandy Gilver 's seemingly-innocuous investigation into plagiarism takes a darker turn. The gruesome death seems to be inextricably bound to the gloomy offices of Doig's Publishers, its secrets hidden in the real stories behind their girls' magazines The Rosie Cheek and The Freckle. On meeting a mysterious professor from St Andrews, Dandy and her faithful colleague Alex Osbourne are flung into the worlds of academia, the theatre and publishing. Nothing is quite as it seems, and behind the cheerful facades of puppets and comic books, is a troubled history has begun to repeat itself.

Release date: January 21, 2021

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 288

Sample

August Sunday afternoons, in my fond childhood memories and therefore still in my hankerings, are golden, with lawn chairs – nay, hammocks – set out in the graceful shade of a beech tree and bumblebees providing a lullaby. Full of lunch, one waits for tea, turning the pages of a book and banishing all thoughts of Monday.

On this Sunday afternoon, the first day of August, I was huddled over a fire in my sitting room with the windows shut tight against a squall of chilly rain, lamps lit already and the next day, a bank holiday, promising the same again. What is more, since no one expects to light a fire in August, the wood was not quite seasoned and offered more smoke than warmth.

I clicked my tongue to encourage Bunty, my Dalmatian, to join me on the sofa. She is large and Grant, my maid, tells me her stiff white hairs are the very devil to brush out of tweed, but she is a furnace in any weather and marvellously comforting. At that moment she remained on the hearthrug, curled into as small a ball as a spoiled Dalmatian can curl into, grunting a little as her well-fed middle constricted her lungs, not deigning to move away from the fire despite my entreaties, although she gave me a regretful look from under wrinkled brows, in compensation.

The telephone bell was a welcome intrusion. I stood and fairly scuttled over to my desk. Reaching for the earpiece, I expected to hear the voice of Mallory, my daughter-in-law, with a plea for help. Her twins, at fourteen months, had just got their legs under them and were now proving daily that Mallory and Donald’s modern view of child rearing was exactly the muddle-headed nonsense I had known it to be from the day the twins were born and she began rumbling about their swaddling clothes. It was all very well when they could be put on a blanket and left to kick their legs, and it was hardly more trouble when the worst they could do was shuffle around the parquet on well-padded bottoms, gazing at stairs and doors as though at iron gates. Now, though, all was lost. As soon as Lavinia first hauled herself to her feet with fistfuls of curtain silk clutched in her fat little hands and took a wavering, staggering step towards her brother, the need for a sharp nanny increased threefold. These days, hand in hand and thereby acting as mutual ballast, they charged about day nursery, night nursery, downstairs and garden like a four-legged dervish, Mallory trotting after them, issuing ineffectual threats that sometimes shaded into begging. I had given both Mary Poppins books as presents, one for each twin on the first birthday, but the hint was too oblique.

‘Hello?’ I said kindly but firmly into the mouthpiece. It was quite a revolution in life at Gilverton when Pallister, our butler, decided he did not mind the master, and even the mistress, answering the telephone after all. When we had first installed the contraption years ago, he would not have countenanced such a thing.

‘Is that Mrs Gilver?’ The voice was brisk and cheerful, easy to place in the upper-middle-class of Scotland.

‘It is,’ I said. ‘To whom—’

‘Thank the Lord. I’m Miss Bissett, Sandy Bissett, ringing you from Dundee with a job, if you’ll take it.’

‘Go on,’ I said, winding a bit of lead out of the end of my propelling pencil and turning over a fresh sheet in my writing pad.

‘You wouldn’t mind if it were tomorrow?’ Miss Bissett went on. ‘August bank and all that, you know.’

‘What’s the nature of the investigation?’ I said. How contrary we are. I had been lamenting the tedium of the Monday holiday a moment before – servants on a jolly, cold luncheon, shops shut and no post – but here I was resenting an offer of work to get in its way.

‘Not really an investigation,’ Miss Bissett said. ‘More a scolding. I thought I could take care of it myself but I’m quailing.’

‘And whom would I be scolding?’

‘There’s a puppet show in Dudhope Park,’ she said, ‘a mean little thing really. Punch and Judy. Only the chap’s got a wheeze. I imagine he does it wherever he tramps to, but I don’t care about anyone else. I care about what he’s got up to here. He has worked a couple of my characters into his play and I want him to stop. Or pay me royalties, but I wouldn’t imagine he could afford it out of the coins in the hat.’

‘Your characters?’ I said.

‘Rosie Cheeke and her little sister.’ There was a pause. ‘You know.’

‘I’m not sure I do,’ I said. In truth, I was certain I did not.

‘He tried Oor Wullie and The Broons first. Last weekend this was.’

‘Ah! Now, I’m with you,’ I said. ‘Rosie Cheeke is a comic character from the Sunday Post?’

‘No,’ said Miss Bissett. ‘But the principle is the same. As I was saying, he had an Oor Wullie and a Maw Broon puppet when he got here last weekend but someone from the legal department at D.C.T. was round there before you could say knife and got it shut down. That’s when he moved on to us. So now I’d like you to go and shut him down again. Cease and desist.’

‘Wouldn’t you be better with a lawyer?’ I said, even though no solicitor I had ever met would be willing to wander a municipal park on a wet bank holiday to deliver a threat.

‘Can’t afford a lawyer,’ Miss Bissett said. She had not paused, which is admirable, but the embarrassment of her admission had turned her voice gruff.

‘Would you like an estimate of my fee?’ I asked, hurriedly. I am no fan of not being paid for my work.

Miss Bissett made a sound that might have been a sniff and might have been a dry laugh. ‘If I was planning not to pay I’d not pay the lawyer,’ she said, which made me laugh too.

‘Dudhope Park, in Dundee,’ I said. ‘And you’re sure he’ll be there tomorrow? It’s not forecast to be much of a day.’

‘He was there yesterday and he’s there now,’ she said. ‘Hiding in his little tent, leering out at everyone. He’s a rather nasty piece of work, but it’s not just you, is it? Your partner is a gentleman?’

‘Alec Osborne,’ I said. ‘Nasty pieces of work a speciality. Don’t worry about me.’

‘Thank you,’ said Miss Bissett. ‘Very well then. Miss Bissett of Doig’s, number three Overgate, Dundee. Cease and desist the wrongful appropriation of copyrighted property.’

I was scribbling madly, knowing that I could not come up with any better-sounding words on my own. ‘Might I have your telephone number, Miss Bissett?’ I said. ‘To report at the end of the day.’

‘Why not pop round?’ she said. ‘I can write you a cheque on the spot if you bring an invoice. Until then, then. Goodbye.’

‘Until wh—’ I managed to get out before she rang off, leaving me wondering.

Oor Wullie and The Broons had begun appearing in one of the lower Sunday papers some time last year, and I had seen them peeping out from under the kindling on Tuesday mornings, so hoped that someone in my household had the relevant subscription. Therefore I made my way to the servants’ door. Perhaps no one on the other side would have given it a moment’s thought but these were the rules I lived by. If I wanted tea, coal or sherry I rang for Becky. If I wanted to pick the brains of one of my staff in the course of detective work I went to them, just as I would go to any other witness. Besides, the kitchen and servants’ hall are always warm and cosy.

Even at that, I hesitated to disturb them as I looked at them through the half-glass. Pallister was at the head of the table, in his shirtsleeves with his waistcoat hanging open and a pair of very small gold-framed glasses clinging to his nose as he perused a book review; Grant sat with her back to the fire and her writing case open before her, a pen in one hand and a cigarette in the other, gazing at her half-written letter as she composed her next thought; Becky, still known as head housemaid even though there was nothing but a regiment of daily women for her to be head of these days, was leafing through a picture paper. She had her shoes off and her feet up on an empty chair that would once have held an under housemaid. She scratched one instep with the toes of her other foot and looked the picture of ease.

Drysdale, the chauffeur, was nowhere in evidence; keeping Hugh’s Rolls on the road was a labour of love that stretched over most Sundays and into the evenings too. My little Morris Cowley had not begun to cause much trouble yet, but when it did we would either have to start using a garage in Dunkeld or accept that Hugh’s time as the owner of a Rolls Royce was over.

Strangely enough, despite the fact that the retrenchments we had made heretofore had fallen on me – closing then selling our London house, giving up Paris trips, sacking maids – I dreaded Hugh’s first true step towards the harshness of the modern age. To date, he retained his steward, his farmer tenants, his gamekeeper, his butler and Drysdale and, so long as he never caught sight of Mrs McSomeone in her pinny and hat sweeping the stairs, he did not have to face much in the way of reality. One did wonder how it would take him, when the day came.

As I touched the door handle to let myself in to the servants’ hall, my good Mrs Tilling entered at the other side, rather hot and dishevelled from her kitchen.

‘Madam,’ she said, spying me.

‘Don’t get up,’ I told the others. Pallister alone did not heed me. He shot to his feet and started fumbling with his waistcoat buttons, the gold-rimmed glasses trembling on the very point of his nose in a way that made me want to cup my hands to catch them. I sat down in one of the empty seats. ‘Does anyone know who Rosie Cheeke is?’ I asked.

Pallister frowned but the three women nodded and Becky started stirring the heap of discarded papers and magazines that had colonised the table over the course of the day.

‘She’s …’ said Mrs Tilling. ‘It’s hard to explain. She’s not real. Is someone teasing you, madam?’

‘There she is,’ Becky said, plucking a coloured paper out of the pile and pushing it towards me. The magazine was one of those strenuously cheerful organs, promising thrift without want and entertainment without corruption: drying flowers and quiet games for after tea were mentioned on the cover of the current issue, the type running along under an illustration of a young woman of thumping good health. Her hair was red and curled into glossy billows under a straw hat; her eyes were green and dancing; her teeth were pure dazzling white and rather large; and her cheeks were indeed as red and as round as two apples. The Rosy Cheek was written above her in twining letters, which looked as though they had been formed by manipulating a length of red ribbon.

‘There’s always a strip cartoon about her inside the front page,’ Becky said. ‘Not much in the way of a story, but you know how it is.’

I did not know how it was. My sons’ fierce devotion to Buck Rogers and Popeye had been as bewildering to me as it was tiresome. I had even tried waving Rupert Bear, that odd little creature, under their noses for a while, thinking at least he was English.

I now ran my eyes over the page of squares depicting Rosie Cheeke’s latest adventure and discovered, to my amazement, that she was Scottish! In the first little box she was setting off on a walk in the Lomond Hills. In the last, she was back home in a grey sandstone villa with a saved puppy.

‘And the woman I spoke to mentioned a sister?’ I said, looking up.

‘Freckle,’ said Grant. ‘It’s a girls’ comic. There’s sometimes an advertisement for it in the back of the Cheek.’

I turned to the inside of the back cover and saw that she was right. There was indeed a black-and-white but otherwise very splashy whole page devoted to enticing readers to buy or subscribe to The Freckle for some young relative. ‘Wholesome, cheerful, Scottish fun!’ it declared in a banner along the top above a portrait of a child clearly related to the cover girl of the Rosy Cheek, only with curlier hair, pinker skin, dimples and, right enough, a dark smattering across her upturned nose.

‘Has someone been teasing you, Mrs Gilver?’ Mrs Tilling said. She had begun to return to her normal brick-red complexion now that she was away from the range that had seen her grow as purple as a turnip and as shiny as a billiard ball.

‘Not at all,’ I assured her. ‘Someone has been intruding on the ownership of these fictional girls and the writer, or artist perhaps – well, in any case, the copyright holder – has asked me to step in and see if I can’t stop him.’

‘Forgery?’ said Grant.

‘Plagiarism, they call it,’ Becky put in.

‘Theft by any name,’ added Mrs Tilling.

Pallister had kept his own counsel throughout the discussion, perhaps deeming women’s picture papers and girls’ comics beneath his attention, but he unbent now. ‘Something quite different for you, madam,’ he said. ‘I don’t recall such a case coming under Gilver and Osborne’s purview before today.’

‘You don’t know the half of it, Pallister,’ I said. ‘The plagiarists are not publishers; they’re puppeteers. I’m engaged to go to Dudhope Park in Dundee tomorrow to persuade a travelling puppet man to stop – to cease and desist, in fact – from featuring Rosie and Freckle in his show.’

‘Truly?’ Grant said.

‘Quite,’ I assured her. ‘He started with Oor Wullie and The Broons, apparently, but the might of D.C. Thomson’s lawyers cooked that goose quick enough, so he’s lowered his sights a bit.’ I was looking closely at the magazine again, searching for a publisher’s address. It was a matter I had never considered before and so I did not know where such a thing might be found.

‘Oh!’ Becky said. ‘I’d have loved to see a puppet of Joe Broon. And Maggie.’

‘But the Cheeke sisters would be a treat too,’ Grant said. ‘I shall come with you, madam.’

‘We could make a day of it,’ Mrs Tilling said. ‘Eh, Becky? We’re all promised a half-holiday, Mrs Gilver. Cold cuts of what I’m busy with right now.’ She consulted the fob watch on her apron and, assured that nothing needed her urgent attention, sat back again.

‘Yes, yes, that sounds lovely,’ I said. ‘A day at a park on an August bank holiday Monday. Except that it’s raining cats and dogs and chilly with it and I’m going expressly to shut the thing down, not to watch from the stalls.’

‘But you’d have to watch for a bit to be sure there was a case to answer,’ Grant said. ‘Otherwise how do you know that this chap who rang you isn’t a rival puppet man making mischief?’

‘Trying to use you – excuse me, madam – to queer his rival’s pitch,’ Becky added.

‘Now, now,’ Pallister said, very mildly for him. I had never expected him to mellow; he was terrifying at the age of forty and, as middle age began to add the gravitas of silver hair and a frontage, I had expected him to end up quite Zeus-like. In the face of my detective agency, however, he was close to surrender.

‘Very well then,’ I said. ‘After luncheon. We can go in the Cowley. There’s no need to trouble Mr Osborne with such small fry, I shouldn’t think.’

The look that passed among the women was mostly anticipation, but it was mixed with just a pinch of amusement, which I decided not to see.

For the truth of it all was that Alec Osborne was otherwise engaged that summer. Not quite literally yet but I could see the path ahead of him and I was keeping off it, keeping out of his way. It was fifteen years now since the beginning of our professional collaboration and personal friendship, on the case during which his fiancée had died and her father had left him the neighbouring estate to Hugh’s and my own. In that fifteen years, there had been many attempts on his bachelorhood – from what Teddy, my younger son, calls ‘the near Misses’ – as why should there not be, for Alec was presentable, comfortable and available (which was all the mamas cared about) and was also clever, funny and kind, which was more and more what made the Misses themselves take an interest these modern days.

Just after Easter this year, over a great deal of throat-clearing and easing of his collar with a finger as though it were strangling him, he responded to my casual dinner invitation – such an invitation as I offered twice a week, an invitation that barely needed to be made at all – by asking if he could add another to my table.

‘Unless it’s pigeons and they’re already dressed,’ he said. ‘Fools in their cups and counted.’

‘Mrs Tilling would gladly turn dressed pigeons into a stew for you, Alec dear,’ I said. ‘And fools to trifle. Who is it?’

‘Her name’s Poppy,’ said Alec. ‘She’s the niece of a neighbour of my brother in Dorset. She’s stopping in tomorrow on the way to some shooting.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘You needn’t have asked. Lucky for you to be able to offer some entertainment, such as it is. I shall ask Donald and Mallory over too and see if I can’t scare up a girl for Teddy to ignore. Make a party of it.’

‘Well,’ Alec said. ‘Of course it’s up to you, Dan. But I’d actually rather we were en famille.’

‘Is she in mourning?’ I asked, wondering why she was headed to the Highlands for a shooting party if so.

‘No, no, nothing like that,’ Alec said. ‘Her parents are barely fifty. It’s more that … well, I’d like you to meet her. Properly. Take a sounding. Tell me what you think. I value your opinion greatly, as you know.’

‘Oh?’ I said, then all in a rush the truth about this young woman broke over me; her significance in my future and the favour conferred by Alec bringing her here for inspection. He had finally taken the plunge. ‘Oh! Oh well then yes of course certainly.’ I said it just like that, in one long string of tumbling words. They rang again and again in my memory all the rest of the day, warming my cheeks. Meantime, I spent an hour with Mrs Tilling planning a menu at once fit for a king and at the same time casual enough to pass as nothing special. I spent much more than an hour with Grant, discussing my frock and letting her pluck quite five hundred hairs out of my eyebrows as she had long been pleading to.

‘I look astonished,’ I said when I viewed the result.

‘You and me both, madam,’ said Grant. ‘I never thought I’d see the day.’

It was an excruciating evening. The food was delightful and Miss Lanville ate sensibly and conversed with Hugh about country matters. Alec conversed with me and at no point turned cow eyes across the table or fell silent while he gazed upon her perfection. He might have; she was certainly perfect enough. She had black hair, sleek and polished, and olive skin so carefully protected that she looked like a geisha – I have noticed some olive-skinned girls recently grown as dark as gypsies, what with tennis and the lido – and she was dressed in one of those bias-cut gowns that look like nighties, with no more than a clip in her hair and a single gold bangle around one wrist as adornment. She made a fuss of Bunty, and no fuss at all at the mention of twin babies, and asked questions about Europe that caused Hugh to nod approvingly before he answered her. The excruciation arose from quite another quarter. In short, she spent the evening being kind. She gave me an excess of kindly attention that was both familiar, from when I used to have quiet dinners with elderly acquaintances, and quite horribly new, for no one – not even Mallory – had ever before treated me that way.

As I sat at my dressing table, wiping off my pitiful attempts at beauty with a smear of cold cream, Hugh walked in.

‘Fine girl,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you think so?’

‘Perfect,’ I said. ‘A poppet. A catch. It’s a terrific idea.’

Hugh sat down on the stool at the end of my bed and regarded me in silence for a while.

‘She looks like you, you know,’ he said in the end. ‘Same colouring, same way about her.’

‘I didn’t notice it,’ I said, beginning to pat vanishing cream under my chin as Poppy Lanville might have to do in about twenty years.

‘Oh yes,’ Hugh said. ‘I thought so right off. Quite a compliment, I thought. And you know, Dandy, I’d make the most of it if I were you. Because that’s going to have to do.’

I looked down into my lap and willed the two tears that had formed in my eyes not to fall. ‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘What rot are you peddling to tease me?’

‘I wouldn’t tease you,’ said Hugh. ‘Not tonight. But I did want to say this.’ Then he stopped for so long that in the end I looked up again and caught his eye. ‘Poppy or no Poppy, it would never have come to pass.’

‘Good God!’ I said. ‘Do you think I don’t know I’m fifty? There’s no need to rub it in. Especially tonight.’

Hugh rose and came towards me. This was becoming rather a torrid scene, for us.

‘You misunderstand me,’ he said. ‘What I meant was I wouldn’t have it. I wouldn’t have taken it. Pistols at dawn, if need be.’ He put his hands on my shoulders and patted them. ‘I thought you’d like to know.’

So there had been not just a coolness between Alec and me, born of delicate feelings on his part and tact on mine, but a matching coolness between Hugh and me too, born of mortification. I barely saw him some days unless the babies were there; they made a very effective solid little buffer.

After luncheon the next day, which I took alone in the dining room and Hugh took out of waxed paper standing up in a distant field, I asked Drysdale to bring the Cowley to the back door, for a change, and the four of us women packed ourselves into it with a measure of holiday spirits to go along with our picnic tea, Mrs Tilling having proved unable to foresee a trip even as far as Dundee without some catering of provisions. They bickered a little over the front passenger seat, Grant pressing the question of hat size since hers was a cartwheel, but Mrs Tilling pointing out the inarguable fact that she would have some trouble stuffing herself into the back, even if they all took their hats off and put them in the boot with the picnic.

‘Look, I’ll go in the back if I must,’ I said in the end. ‘Grant, you’ve often said you’d like to try your hand.’

‘Can you try for the first time when I’m not here, Delia?’ Becky piped up. ‘I’m all my mum’s got now after my brother went in the war and I’d hate her to be left with no one.’

Grant was still sulking when we arrived an hour later on Dudhope Terrace and I pulled into the kerb outside the smart park railings. I still did not believe that a puppeteer would be plying his trade this cheerless Monday afternoon. It was not quite raining – a category of weather that Scotland has raised to a fine art – but rolling banks of thick grey cloud were showing their displeasure at the holiday and the gay display of summer bedding just inside the railings was being threshed like cornstalks by a stiff wind. I saw a shower of petals, blown clean off the marguerites, go scudding off down the slope of lawn, for Dudhope Park had a fair rake to it, here in surely the hilliest little city north of Rome.

Despite the inclemency, a fair few of Dundee’s townspeople who were lucky enough to be given a holiday from their work were taking the air. Kites were being flown, hopscotch beds were being chalked into paths (surely until the park keeper saw them and ordered them to be rubbed off again), and indeed an audience was beginning to gather upon thrupenny deckchairs and ha’penny benches set on a particularly steep slope with the red-and-white Punch and Judy tent at its foot. The flags atop it cracked in the wind, and its striped skirts were flapping too, showing the wooden substructure as a thin frock shows off a girl’s legs on a windy day.

‘Deckchair, madam?’ Grant said, with an innocent air, gesturing to four empty seats in the front row.

I dug a shilling out of my bag and handed it to the chap who was jingling a coin bag and ripping little pink tickets off a roll. ‘These will do nicely,’ I said. Grant is beyond a joke but it did gladden me to see how much pleasure Becky took in plumping down in the front row with a glance behind at the lesser mortals. Mrs Tilling let herself drop, causing an alarming creak in the skeleton of the deckchair, and set the picnic basket on her lap with the air of a court reporter ready for the proceedings.

‘Ten minutes,’ the ticket man said. I gave him a close look, wondering whether he was an employee of the park or was attached to the puppet show. He wore no uniform; he was dressed in barely respectable corduroy working trousers and a knitted jersey, with a scarf around his neck in lieu of a collar and tie. On the other hand, surely an itinerant puppet show could not travel the roads with this collection of benches and chairs. It would take a motorvan at least to haul it around, if not an out-and-out lorry.

Ten minute. . .