Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder (14 page)

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Authors: Catriona McPherson

BOOK: Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder
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‘I’ll come with you, Alec,’ I said, and I was aware that my lips felt rather peculiar as I formed the words.
‘Don’t you move,
lady
,’ the inspector said, and with those brutal words, so harshly fired at me, finally I began to make sense of what he was saying and Alec’s protests and the strange sensation of my lips and legs knowing better than my brain what was happening to me.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ I said, faintly. Alec put out a hand of restraint, because of course this was no way to be speaking to the man. ‘You can’t seriously . . . what are you . . .’
As I saw the dim foyer grow even dimmer and felt the air around me begin to roll past with a rushing sound, the last thing I heard was that ugly voice, uglier than ever.
‘Oh, that’s right! Treat yourself to a wee swoon, why don’t you?’
I came round with a dull headache and a feeling of nausea just short of making me check my surroundings for suitable containers. Then memory flooded in and I sat bolt upright, headache sharper, nausea gone. I was still in Aitkens’ foyer, sitting on one of the taxi chairs just inside the door. Alec and the inspector were gone and one of the second lot of constables, the ones I had thought of as the inspector’s henchmen, was standing firmly planted in front of me, his face quite impassive under his hat.
I made as if to stand but he stopped me with a practised gesture, formed I suppose to keep motorists out of busy street junctions but just as effective at keeping me in my chair.
‘You’re to stay put till the doctor gets here and has a wee look at you,’ he informed me.
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘It’s perhaps not a bad idea. I don’t make a habit of fainting, you know.’ At that I remembered the inspector’s last words and a surge of fury gave me back every bit of the vigour which had temporarily deserted me.
‘Here he’s now,’ said the constable as a man let himself in the front door. ‘Doctor!’ The doctor hurried towards us, frowning. ‘This . . . witness fainted and the boss wants you to give her the all-clear before we shift her.’ I blinked at his choice of words but before I could answer the doctor was upon us. He was a harried-looking sort who held himself at a forty-five-degree forward angle as though using gravity to keep himself moving at the pace he had set. He peered at me.
‘Fainted, eh?’ he said. ‘You saw the body?’ I resented the implication but it seemed easier than trying to explain and so I nodded. ‘And how are you feeling now?’ he said.
‘Quite well, thank you,’ I said. This was the answer I had been brought up to give and it came out of me without prompting.
‘Fine, then,’ said the doctor and he turned and propelled himself towards his real business at the back of the store. The constable and I watched him go and then caught one another’s eye.
‘Right,’ I said, tucking my feet under me in preparation to stand. ‘Thank you for waiting with me, young man. And do pass on my thanks to the inspector. It was most thoughtful of him to ask the doctor to have a word. Now, can you tell me where Mr Osborne went when he left us so that I can . . . What is it?’ The constable had begun shifting his feet and was darting glances at me as though not quite able to look me straight in the eye.
‘I’m sorry about this, Mrs Gilver,’ he said, fumbling at his pocket or his tunic belt; I could not quite see. ‘But it’s my orders and I cannae help it.’
‘Help what?’ I said, but then I saw what he had been fumbling for; they glinted as they swung free, the two solid rings bright with polish and the chain between them sparkling. I stood up and looked him straight in the eye, pleased to see that he cringed a little under my gaze. ‘Your inspector,’ I said, in a voice I will never cease to be proud of summoning at such a moment, ‘is an oaf and a bully and since you choose to emulate him, I expect you will go far. But your mother will be ashamed of you for this and rightly so.’ Then I turned, very slowly, and keeping my eyes locked on his as long as I could.
‘It disnae have to be behind you,’ he said, in a mournful voice.
‘No, no!’ I said, rubbing it in hard. ‘I would hate the inspector to suspect you of chivalry.’ And I thrust my hands upwards, wrenching my shoulders horribly. Silently, he clicked the handcuffs closed about my wrists and then guided me to the door and out onto the street, where a small knot of onlookers, attracted by the commotion, were well rewarded for their wait; a thrill which was almost a shriek ran through them at the sight of me. I kept my chin very level, resisting the temptation either to bow my head or to stick my nose in the air, and stepped into a waiting motorcar. It was no mean achievement, what with having no hands to help and with my legs weak from rage and fear, but I made it and I slid onto the seat, crossing my legs at the ankles and letting my shoulders rest lightly against the seatback as the driver started the motor and we pulled away.
At the police station, minutes away down the High Street, I began to shake and I had to clench my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering for I half-suspected that I would be thrown into a cell and, trying to picture it, I could not decide which would be worse between the prospect of being all alone behind bars in a little cell of my own or of being cast into a crowd of the sort of women I thought might be there already.
In the end it was not so bad as all that; perhaps Dunfermline did not possess those sorts of women anyway. I was taken straight from the motorcar into the type of little room I had seen before in my few visits to police stations; a bleak enough place, furnished with three hard chairs, one very plain table and an empty waste basket, but at least it had an ordinary door with a handle, no bars, no shackles and no grilled window to the street through which my loved ones would have to feed me titbits to keep me alive. (My imagination had soared away from all controls during the short trip and had left me somewhere between Marie-Antoinette and the Pankhursts for pathos and hopeless damnation.)
I was given a disgusting cup of dark brown tea and was left alone to stare at it for almost an hour until the inspector opened the door, entered and sat down opposite me.
I pushed the cup towards him.
‘I’m finished with this, thank you, Mr . . . ?’ I said, but I did not succeed in making him angry. He was used to insolence from his captives, I supposed. ‘Now,’ I went on. ‘You’ve been very clever and if this is the sort of nonsense the Fife Constabulary go in for, I’m sure you’ll be due a medal at the end-of-year party, but it’s gone on long enough. Ask me what you would like to know and then be kind enough to telephone a taxicab for me. I don’t feel up to walking to the station, as I’m sure you can appreciate.’
‘I’ll give you this,’ he said, ‘you didn’t go straight to the county.’ I frowned. ‘Your pal’s been dropping names like autumn leaves, threatening me with every top brass that ever walked a golf course.’
‘My good man,’ I said, ‘– since you won’t introduce yourself properly to me – you are being so ridiculous that I begin to suspect some political motivation. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve discovered rabble-rousers where I’d least suspect them. But let me say this as slowly and clearly as I can.’
‘I have a few questions for you, Mrs Gilver,’ he said, opening a notebook and unscrewing the cap on his pen.
‘I am a detective,’ I went on, ‘brought here last week by Mrs Ninian Aitken to help find her missing granddaughter. Your surgeon decided that the girl died by her own hand and I was in full view of the Provost, Lady Lawson, and Mrs Aitken herself when it happ—’
‘What is your full name and address, first of all?’
‘Today I was invited to an interview with Mrs Haddo—’
‘And your next of kin?’
‘—Dugald Hepburn’s grandmother—’
‘Or someone of good standing who might be persuaded to vouch for you?’
‘—who wanted my help in finding
him
.’
‘That’s right,’ said the inspector. ‘You were asked along by two families who were having trouble with their youngsters and now, it’s safe to say, their youngsters will trouble them no more.’
I gaped at him.
‘That’s an extraordinary insinuation,’ I said.
‘Two young people dead, the same stranger present both times, unexpected, uninvited. There’s extraordinary for you.’
It was ludicrous, preposterous, as impertinent as it was baseless and actually, surely, not even coherent on its own terms when one faced it squarely. What had he just said?
‘Uninvited,’ I repeated to him.
‘Mrs Aitken told me last week that she didn’t ask you to the jubilee. She didn’t know why you were there that day at all, she said to me.’
‘And today?’
‘Nobody up in that tearoom could tell me what you were doing there.’
I nodded. ‘Very well, let me see if I understand you, Inspector. After – one assumes – too many evenings in the cinema gallery, you are accusing me of killing two innocents and making it look like suicide?’ He said nothing. ‘And the central plank of my guilt is that I insinuated myself into the jubilee and the funeral tea without the families’ blessing and perhaps even against their wishes.’ Again he was silent. ‘So, tell me, am I supposed to have been hired specifically to kill the children? Are the Aitkens denying inviting me to cover their guilt? Wouldn’t they deny all knowledge of me in that case? Would they have invited me to the house, for luncheon?’ He frowned. ‘Or did they engage me in good faith to find Mirren and Dugald? Do I just happen – most unfortunately for them – to be some kind of homicidal maniac who killed them for reasons of my own?’
‘You were there,’ he said, in very firm tones although his expression was more troubled than I had yet seen it. ‘Both times. Right there. And it’s all just a bit too convenient for everybody, if you ask me.’
I took my time before answering. It was not clear to me whether this man were a fiend or a fool but I knew I had to tread carefully around him.
‘Very many people were there when Mirren died,’ I said at last. ‘Most of us in the presence of most others. And who can say who was there when Dugald met his end, Inspector? We don’t know when it— Hah! Your young constable said he thought an hour or two, didn’t he?’
‘He’d no business sticking his—’
‘And I expect the doctor is making the same calculation right now if he hasn’t already. Well, then, two hours before I found Dugald’s body I was . . .’ I looked at my wristwatch. ‘. . . I was at Roseville at number one hundred and twenty Pilmuir Street, talking to Mrs Haddo.’
‘I’ll be asking her about all of this too,’ he said.
‘Ah, back to your dramatic conspiracy again,’ I said. The look that flashed across his face then startled me and at last I stopped thinking about my own plight and my outrage over it and began to think of it from the inspector’s point of view. That is, I tried to do so, but there was a great gaping hole in the middle of his theory and I had nothing with which to fill it.
‘What do you know?’ I said. My tone must have been very different, all inquisitiveness and no annoyance now. Was I imagining that he shifted a little in his seat? Could that be a sheen of sweat suddenly on his brow? I sat forward and stared hard at him. ‘You do know something, don’t you?’ I said. ‘Two young lovers kept apart, both go missing, a detective is employed to find them, one kills herself – as far as we all know – and then the other, broken-hearted, does the same. That story sounds well rounded enough to me. What is it you know that’s making you baulk at it?’
‘I’m the one asking the questions,’ he said, rather late in the day if anyone were keeping tally.
‘Do you have children?’ I said. ‘I have two. I cannot imagine a state of affairs where the death of my child could be – as you said – “convenient for everyone”.’
He hesitated, as though considering.
‘Tell me,’ I breathed. ‘Perhaps I could help if you tell me.’
He got as far as taking a breath, readying himself to begin speaking, and then we both jumped as a sharp rap sounded on the door. The inspector barked out a short word I did not understand – it sounded like the code a shepherd might use to keep his dogs in order – but it must have been an invitation to enter for the handle turned and the doctor stuck his head around the door. His eyes flared at the sight of me.
‘A minute of your time,’ he said to the inspector.
‘First reckonings?’ the inspector said. The doctor nodded.
‘You wait here, you,’ said the inspector to me as he rose. Perhaps I had been imagining the wavering towards sharing what he knew, then. Perhaps he had been gathering breath for a fresh onslaught of insults.
They went outside and pulled the door closed behind them, but I was very gratified to see that the handle, perhaps exhausted by years of being wrenched and rattled by angry prisoners, had failed to latch. Silently, the door swung open about three inches and I could see the dark line of the inspector’s shoulder in the gap.
‘Broken neck, broken vertebrae, one leg, a wrist and minor abrasions,’ the doctor said.
‘Any sign of struggle before the fall?’
‘If you’re asking about handprints on his back,’ said the doctor, ‘there’s nothing. I’d say he either fell or jumped, facing the way he was going, about sixty feet, which would easily take him from the top landing to the roof of the lift on the ground floor.’

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