Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder (19 page)

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Authors: Catriona McPherson

BOOK: Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder
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But the quashing down of my finer feelings is only one of the habits I have had to inculcate in the name of detection and one of these girls at least was clearly a gossip, and might be the very one I was seeking. I could not let either of them slip away.
‘I heard,’ I said. ‘Well, actually I was here, you know, on the day of the jubilee. A dreadful thing.’
‘Poor Mirren,’ said the girl. ‘Mr Jack’s only child.’
‘Twenty years old and all her life ahead of her.’ The companion spoke up at last.
‘Dear me,’ I supplied, to keep things going. It was as though I had shovelled coke into a roaring boiler.
‘Here today and gone tomorrow.’
‘Snuffed out like a little candle in a storm.’
‘Broken-hearted and couldn’t go on.’
‘Alone and unloved—’
‘Well, Mima, not exactly unloved,’ said the younger girl. Her friend caught her bottom lip in her teeth and blushed a little. ‘She was engaged, you see, madam.’ The girl hitched up the bulky satchel; she was wearing it across her body like a conductress’s ticket machine and the strap was causing her some discomfort. ‘To a lovely boy.’
‘Lovely boy,’ Mima echoed.
‘Dugald Randall Hepburn. Doesn’t he sound like a film star? Well, he looks like one too and—’
‘
Looked
, Elsie,’ her friend reminded her. Elsie shut her eyes as though a spasm of pain were sweeping over her and then went on in a voice even quieter and flushed with even more glee.
‘Star-crossed they were, madam.’
‘Forbidden love.’
‘Struck asunder.’
‘By cruel cold hearts who’d forgotten what it means to love.’
‘If they ever knew.’
‘And look where it’s got th—’
‘Elsie Dunn,’ said a voice, making us all jump. Mary had done it again. There she was, tiny and furious, dressed in the same columnar black bombazine as the first two times I had met her, her widow’s mourning impossible to deepen even after the recent dreadful loss, but today the spectacles on their black ribbon were joined by a measuring tape which she wore around her neck like a stole and a number of long pins in a sunburst pattern which stretched from the middle of her ribs all the way to one shoulder, wherever she had jabbed them during some task or other. ‘What do you think you’re playing at?’ she spat at poor Elsie. ‘And you should know better too, Jemima. Get in there right now, the pair of you.’ She pointed up the alley with a stabbing finger.
‘Mrs Ninian,’ said Elsie in a tiny voice, all relish gone, ‘we can’t go in. We’re on our way to the bank with the deposit.’
‘On your way?’ The black column spoke in a tone which should have cracked the tiles beneath her feet and caused the plate glass to fall to the pavement in shards like icicles. ‘It would be bad enough loitering on the way back,’ she said, ‘but standing there goss—’ She looked at me again and swallowed her words. ‘Standing anywhere, doing anything with the deposit still on you.’ She snapped her head round and looked along the street to the tolbooth clock which was showing twenty minutes past three. ‘Get there now and get straight back again.’
Mima and Elsie bobbed and scuttled off like a pair of beetles, leaving Mary glaring after them.
‘And I’ll have their half-week’s pay-packet made up for them,’ she said, spitting the words through clenched teeth. I could not let this pass, in all conscience.
‘Please don’t blame the girls,’ I said. ‘I waylaid them. They were most anxious to be on their way but they could hardly cut and run, now could they?’
Mary said nothing.
‘They’ll make it,’ I went on. ‘How far away is the bank?’ I could not help glancing across the street to where there was a branch of the British Linen into which Aitkens’ cashiers could have shied their deposits from the Emporium windows. Mary caught my look and her eyes narrowed to slits.
‘We have nothing to do with that place,’ she hissed – I had never seen such a blameless institution engender such venom – then she blinked.
‘You waylaid them?’ she said. ‘Didn’t you receive my telegram?’
‘Certainly I did,’ I said, thinking furiously. ‘Yes, indeed.’ What excuse could I possibly come up with for being here? Then inspiration dawned upon me. ‘I’m here as a customer today, Mrs Aitken. I waylaid the girls, checking that the store was open.’
Her black eyes could narrow no further but her lips all but disappeared.
‘Really?’ she said.
‘Of course, I feel quite dreadful now,’ I said, truthfully enough as it happened. ‘I never would have dreamed that any of the family would be here.’ I was getting into my stride. ‘In fact, I didn’t suppose for the moment that any of the family actually worked in the store at all.’ I gave the tape measure a little glance and let my gaze travel up the long arc of pins on her bosom.
‘I only came in for Lady Lawson,’ she said, forced into explanation. ‘I take care of a
very
few,
very
special ladies myself.’
‘But Lady Lawson surely can’t have expected you to be here today,’ I said. All the wisps of suspicion I had felt about the pair of them on the day of the jubilee were back, thicker than wisps now.
‘I insisted,’ she said. Was it my imagination that she shifted her feet a little? ‘Lady Lawson herself has been nothing but gracious and kind.’ She spoke in definite, or one might almost say, defiant, tones.
‘Well, it’s very kind of
you
,’ I said, smiling.
‘Not really,’ Mary said. She turned and looked into the window behind her at the empty space and the wreath of flowers where the display of stock should be. ‘They say life goes on, Mrs Gilver,’ she said. ‘And that time heals all ills. But I don’t agree. Time unfilled is a burden. Work is the thing. Work goes on and work fills up time. I am seventy-four years old and I have filled my life with work. It has never failed me. My daughter has never worked, nor Jack, although he is a director, of course. A businessman, like his father. The devil makes work for idle hands.’
I started at that and regarded her very closely.
Did
she know about Jack and Hilda Hepburn?
‘What I mean to say, Mrs Gilver, is that they have no duties to help them through difficult times. If they were kept busy in this place like I am . . .’ She gestured towards the window, looking pained as she did so. I thought the wreaths and black velvet had suddenly reminded her of her loss, but when she spoke again she revealed the true source of her distress; a most surprising one. ‘I let myself be talked into this but I’m not happy. They look too much like those clever-clever windows you see now.’
‘Like Hep—’ I bit it off just in time.
‘One glove and a scrap of chiffon,’ said Mary, with icy scorn. ‘Frenchified. Aitkens’ goes in for a good, honest, selling window, always has done. I like to see them decked out properly, not done up in that wheedling, arty way.’
I recalled the mannequins standing in the sand and although I could not agree with Mary, I did loathe Hilda Hepburn – if it were she behind them – for such teasing of a family she had secretly wronged.
‘And speaking of good honest selling, madam,’ she said, ‘what is it you’re looking for?’ She folded her hands together at one side of her waist and inclined her head, looking every bit the perfect assistant, but the way her eyes glinted showed me that she did not believe for one minute that a shopping list had brought me here today.
I smiled confidently back at her; for I was getting good at this. Then my smile faltered. Actually I was hopeless at it. That is, I was very proud of having hit upon the strategy, thinking it a perfect way to start conversations in quiet shops and tearooms, but the only time I had put it into practice I had asked an antiques dealer if he had such a thing as a tip-top tea-table, while actually resting my elbow on one. I had to pretend I wanted it in oak and Alec had to walk out of the shop to hide his smirking. Surely, though, I could think of something beyond Aitkens’.
‘Opera gloves,’ I said, trying not to show too much of my triumph.
‘Certainly,’ said Mary, not bothering to hide any of hers. ‘Let me show you to our glove department. Miss Torrance will be delighted to take care of you.’ Who would have thought, I asked myself, following her, that one could buy opera gloves in Dunfermline?
I have always had a great affection and affinity for a gloves counter, from the days when I was taken to Liberty’s twice a year to try on white kid and cotton in spring, brown leather and fur-lined velvet in autumn (gloves being the one garment which even my mother conceded could not be run up in the village or by nursemaids at home). I thrilled when the ‘old lady’ as I called her to myself, although she could not have been thirty-five in reality, stepped into the backroom and brought out the high chair for me to sit on during my fitting, and even though it was a sign of approaching maturity and these were usually welcome I was sorry the year I grew tall enough to sit on the ordinary chair like all the grown-up ladies. Only having had two sons of my own, of course, I could not say whether the chair still existed, with its dark green paint, its green and purple striped cushion and the scuff marks on the spars where generations of little girls had wound their feet for purchase as they struggled with those tiny pearl buttons, but I like to think so.
As we swept beyond the haberdashery, through one of the arches, I noticed a stout individual busy at the stationery drawers who had no fewer than three pencils sticking out of her bun and who had tucked a great many paper chits of some kind into the belt of her serge dress in the way a bookie’s runner will stuff tickets into his hatband.
‘Slips, Miss Armstrong,’ Mary snapped as we drew close to her. The woman started, letting a handful of card samples burst out of her grasp and clatter to the floor. They must, I had time to think, be very good quality card to make that sound instead of fluttering. ‘Slips belong in the order book,’ Mary went on to the top of Miss Armstrong’s head as she bent to retrieve them. ‘Not about the person.’
‘Of course, Mrs Ninian,’ said the woman from her position on the floor. ‘Sorry, Mrs Ninian.’ Mary swept past and the woman shot her a look of such dislike that I was startled. I would make sure to talk to Miss Armstrong in the course of my day, I thought, as I hurried on.
‘Madam requires
mousquetaires
, Miss Torrance,’ Mary announced as she arrived at the gloves counter and ushered me into the chair beside the stretcher. Miss Torrance was a woman in her late forties with a pale oval face and a steel-grey bob which hung in long points almost meeting under her chin so that she looked a little like a crusading knight in his chain mail headgear. She looked very surprised to see Mary and glanced between her and me a few times, saying nothing. ‘I’ll leave you in Miss Torrance’s capable hands,’ Mary said. Then, very firmly: ‘Goodbye, Mrs Gilver.’
‘Now then,’ said Miss Torrance. She took hold of my upper arm in both hands and gave it a squeeze as though she were wringing out a flannel. ‘Yes, you have a very slender arm, madam.’
‘Thank you,’ I replied.
‘A wise choice to start covering it now, though,’ she went on, spoiling the compliment completely.
‘Wasn’t it kind of Mrs Ninian to take me under her wing like that,’ I said, getting down to business. ‘I mean, I can understand her not wanting to let Lady Lawson down even today, but she had no need to concern herself with me.’
‘Mrs Ninian has no swank to her,’ said Miss Torrance, ‘I’ll give her that. She runs a tight ship, and doesn’t suffer fools, but I’ve seen her pick up a duster and wipe a display, ring up a purchase and pack it to clear a queue. And I’ll tell you: there’s more than Lady Lawson would like to have Mrs Ninian doing their alterations – well, you only have to look at her own costumes, don’t you? She always says if it fits like a glove it looks like Paris couture.’
‘Mm,’ I said, thinking that Mary’s bombazine fitted like a sausage-skin and did not remind me of Paris at all.
‘And speaking of gloves,’ said Miss Torrance. ‘Do you know your size?’
‘Seven,’ I said. Miss Torrance, I thought to myself, was far too fond and loyal to be of use to me, and I put away all thoughts of detection until I could escape her for Miss Armstrong of the slips.
‘Seven,’ she repeated, pulling off one of my own gloves by pinching at the fingertips and tugging. She spread my hand on the counter and screwed up her nose. ‘I’m sure you were once,’ she said. ‘Are you a horseback rider or is it tennis?’ Thus having informed me that I had the thickened fingers of a hoyden to go with my scrawny arms she took a sizing board out of her counter drawer and got to work on me.
So it was with some satisfaction then that I found myself able to reject the gloves she showed me without a pang. They were elbow-length kid, had cuffs like gauntlets, and were rather yellowed along one edge; I supposed that there was not much turnover and this pair had been in their drawer for some years now with the light getting in through the glass front of it.
‘Besides,’ I said, ‘I was thinking of black satin, actually. Or mauve.’ Miss Torrance physically recoiled. Of course, I would no more wear black opera gloves than I would stick feathers in my hair and dance a can-can but Grant keeps me up to date with the fact that elsewhere, far from Dunfermline and even Perthshire, such shocking articles were being worn.

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