Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder (2 page)

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Authors: Catriona McPherson

BOOK: Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder
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‘From my mother,’ she said. ‘My goodness, my mother actually wrote to . . . Who are you?’
‘I do apologise, Mrs Jack,’ I answered. ‘My name is Dandy Gilver. I asked for the lady of the house, you see. Perhaps someone might fetch your mother now?’
‘But who are you?’ she said again, all politeness, all decorum driven away by whatever suffering had caused the careless hairdressing and the shawl.
I hesitated. It would be monstrously unprofessional to discuss a case with anyone but my client in person and ordinarily I would not have dreamt of doing so, but surely her worry sprang from the same source as her mother’s card.
‘I’m a detective,’ I said. ‘Now, someone’s missing?’
‘A detective,’ she echoed, going over to a chair against the wall and sinking into it. She nodded slowly. ‘Yes, that would make a great deal of sense. That would be exactly what— My daughter.’ She looked up at me with a new, clear look in her eyes. ‘My daughter Mirren has been missing for five days. Since Saturday.’
‘Well, Mrs Jack, your mother got her postcard off to me in admirable time.’
‘It’s not Mrs Jack,’ she said, and for the first time a ghost of a smile passed across her. ‘Trusslove has known me since I was a child, you see. It’s Mrs Aitken.’
‘Aitken?’ I said, trying to remember where I had just come across that name.
‘My husband is Jack Aitken and so, in the family, I am Mrs Jack.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘And your daughter went missing five days ago. Do you have any idea where she might have gone? Did you have any warning? Had you quarrelled? Or do you – forgive me, but your distress is only too clear and it leads me to wonder – do you fear that she might have come to harm?’ I had not thought it possible for Mrs Aitken to increase her look of wretchedness but she did so now.
‘The very gravest fear,’ she whispered, sending shivers through me. ‘Unspeakable harm.’
Before I could respond there came the sound of hurried footsteps across the marble floor of the hall and an elderly lady entered the room at some speed.
‘Abigail? Is that Mirren? She’s not back, is sh—’ She stopped dead, seeing me, and pressed a hand to her heart, breathing hard. ‘Sorry, dear,’ she said to the other woman. ‘I heard voices and thought she’d come back again. Phewf!’ She eased herself down into another chair and sat panting, her feet set well apart and her hands braced on her knees.
‘Do forgive me,’ she said, cocking her head up in my direction. ‘We’re having quite a time of it here just now.’ I smiled, uncertainly. Her mood did not at all match that of the younger woman’s. If anything, she seemed diverted by the problem of the missing Mirren, nowhere near as distraught as the girl’s mother.
‘This is Mrs Gilver,’ said Mrs Aitken. ‘She’s a detective. Mother sent for her.’
I frowned, because of course I had assumed that this new arrival was the grandmother in the case and the sender of my card. She was the right sort of age and she obviously lived here in the house; she was wearing bedroom slippers and still had some pins keeping in place the curls across her forehead, while the rest of her ensemble – a voluminous day-dress cut for comfort and a long string of very white beads trying, although not hard, to look like pearls – was just conventional enough to persuade me that its wearer would not go a-visiting in slippers and pin curls. On the other hand, I thought, looking more closely at her, there was no family resemblance: Mrs Jack was a sweet, plump thing with a face like a little pansy and that extravagance of crinkly russet hair. The newcomer, in contrast, was very tall with large hands and feet and the kind of strong plain features which must have released her from all vanity at an early age and given her lots of time for other things.
‘I’m Mrs Aitken,’ she said. ‘Bella. Widow of John. Jack’s mother. You don’t look much like a detective.’ She fished in her dress pocket for her cigarette case, waving them at me before selecting one and lighting up.
‘I was just beginning to ask your . . . daughter-in-law, whether she had any idea where Mirren might have gone,’ I said.
‘Good heavens!’ said Mrs John Aitken, staring at me with the match still burning. ‘You don’t sound like a detective either.’ And because a large proportion of my instinctive bristling took the form of trying to decide what
she
sounded like, her loud, easy voice with its good round vowels and its crisp, clear consonants, and concluding that she sounded like the wife of a very comfortable merchant, at last I made the connection.
‘Aitken!’ I said. ‘As in House of Aitken?’ It might have sounded insufferably rude and so I was lucky that Mrs John took no offence but said only:
‘Emporium, my dear. House Of is – ahem – the other lot.’
Mrs Jack said nothing at all and registered no offence either; she had withdrawn from us entirely, returned to her inner woe like a horse with colic.
‘So what do you do?’ said her mother-in-law. ‘Where do you start looking?’
‘I’m not sure I do anything,’ I replied. I turned to the other woman again. ‘You mentioned “grave fears”, Mrs Aitken. If you think your daughter’s life is in danger you must summon the police.’
Again young Mrs Aitken said nothing, but I thought I could see that mention of the police had caused a slight shrinking. Her face looked more than ever like a little flower as her chin dipped and her eyes fluttered.
‘No, no, no,’ said the elder woman, shaking her head emphatically. I noticed that the row of curls did not budge; those pins had to be very firmly anchored. ‘You’ve got the wrong end of the wrong stick, my dear.’ She laughed. ‘Abigail thinks she knows exactly what’s in danger.’
Mrs Jack, hearing this, was roused at last.
‘Aunt Bella, really!’ she said, flushing.
‘We think she’s eloped,’ the other went on. ‘
I’m
sure she has.’
I felt a flush blooming in
my
cheeks now, but not a flush of embarrassment at the woman’s coarseness, rather one of anger.
‘I see,’ I said. ‘In that case, I’m afraid I shan’t be able to help you, ladies. I’m not that sort of a detective.’
Then all three of us jumped.
‘I don’t know
what
sort of detective you think you are,’ said a voice. Someone had entered the room and come right up beside us without being heard. ‘What are you doing here?’ She was a woman in her seventies, I guessed, very small and neat, encased from neck to knee in a column of the stiffest, tightest, blackest imaginable bombazine, which made her look like a downpipe. Her white hair was arranged on her head in up-to-the minute style – a spiral of flat coils like seaweed at low tide – and on her breast, heaving hard against the restrictions of her costume, was a pair of spectacles on a black ribbon.
‘Mother!’ said Abigail. ‘You
asked
Mrs Gilver to come. I saw the card you wrote out to her.’
‘I asked Mrs Gilver to come tomorrow,’ said the new arrival. ‘When I would have been looking out for her, to greet her and enter the
private
discussion to which I thought my invitation would entitle me.’ Her voice was icy, her vowels constricted by rage and refinement.
I took the – by now rather battered – little postcard back out of my bag and held it out to her.
‘Eleven o’clock in the morning on the twenty-fifth of May,’ I said. She flicked it a glance and drew herself up to her insignificant but somehow still very impressive height. Or perhaps it was just the bombazine; her dress was quite ludicrously tight, like a horse bandage.
‘You’re a whole day early,’ she said.
I looked at the card again.
‘It’s quite clear, Mrs . . .’
‘Aitken,’ she said. ‘Mrs Ninian Lennox Aitken.’ I frowned and turned to look at her daughter. ‘My husband was John Aitken’s elder brother.’ John Aitken’s widow rolled her eyes; at the ‘elder’, I guessed, and since it seemed that both men were dead it
was
rather pointless still to mark precedence between them. ‘I seem to have made a mistake with the date.’ She coloured and her hand rose to the collar of her dress and fluttered there. ‘Understandable at such an anxious time. I meant the twenty-sixth. And today is not suitable at all.’
‘Anyway, you just said you wouldn’t touch it with a pole,’ said her sister-in-law, stubbing out her cigarette on the sole of her slipper. ‘I don’t blame you. Anyone can see you weren’t brought up to go grubbing round guesthouses checking the register.’
‘Mirren did not elope,’ said the senior Mrs Aitken, Mrs Ninian I shall have to call her, following family tradition, if I am ever to keep them all in order. ‘I can guarantee it.’
‘As can I,’ said Abigail very faintly. Her mother glanced at her but said nothing.
‘Well then, time might well be of the essence, mightn’t it?’ I said, wondering at a grandmother who would send off a postcard to a detective so hastily that she made a mistake on it but delay the start of the searching.
‘Yes, but today,’ said Mrs John, then she lay back in her chair and twirled her string of beads like a propeller. ‘Lord, it’s like a comic operetta.’
‘Today is our golden jubilee,’ said Mrs Ninian, and she spat the words out as I am sure they have never been spat before, not being made for spitting. ‘Aitkens’ is fifty today, Mrs Gilver.’ She gave me a smile so swift and unconvincing that it was more like the flick of a lizard’s tongue to catch a fly than an expression of any human emotion. ‘And we owe it to the memories of John and Ninian not to let that little minx spoil it for everyone.’
2
‘Ah,’ I said, nodding. ‘A jubilee. I thought there was something in the air.’
‘Festivities begin at one o’clock,’ said Mrs Ninian. She threw a look towards her daughter. ‘One sharp, Abigail.’
Again it took a moment for young Mrs Jack to grasp the fact that she was being spoken to and then another to comprehend the words. Eventually, though, she shook her head.
‘I can’t, Mother,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you understand that? I can’t go.’
‘You must,’ said Mrs Ninian, her words more clipped than ever. ‘I will not thole this day being spoiled. We have gone to a great deal of trouble and expense, Abigail. The Provost is making a speech. Our very best customers have been invited. Lady Lawson is coming. And a photographer from the
Herald
— Oh, stop shaking your head that way, you stupid girl. And stop that idiotic moaning. You’re like a lowing cow!’
‘Mary!’ Bella had risen from her chair and stepped in between the two women with one hand out towards her sister-in-law in the manner of a policeman holding up traffic and one hand reaching back towards her daughter-in-law as though to cup her cheek or stroke her shoulder.
In times gone by, I should not have known – as my maid Grant says – ‘where to put myself’. Things being what they were these days, of course, I watched all three of them with my piercing detective’s eye, wondering how the disappearance of a girl could produce three such very different reactions amongst a mother and two grandmothers, one fondly exasperated, one faint with terror and one so angry that I almost expected steam to hiss from her ears.
‘Abby dear,’ Bella went on, turning her back on the black pillar of fury and kneeling in front of Abigail, with some effort and some cracking at the knees, ‘listen to me. Mirren will be fine. She’ll turn up again. All will be well.’
Abigail lifted her head at these soothing words.
‘There,’ said Bella. ‘That’s better. Now, come along and get ready like a good girl. Mirren wouldn’t want you to miss the frolics.’ She sat back on her heels and smiled. ‘We’ll laugh about all this one day, you’ll see. One of Mirren’s children will ask how Mummy and Daddy met and we’ll regale them with the scandalous tale. Abby!’
Abigail had surged to her feet and now pushed past her mother-in-law, knocking the old lady off balance and landing her on the hard floor with a thump. She stumbled towards the door and would have fled had not at that moment a man appeared there and gripped her firmly around the upper arms.
‘What the devil?’ he said.
‘I can’t do it,’ said Abigail, burying her face against his chest. ‘I can’t go. I can’t face everyone. Tell them. They can’t make me.’
‘This is my nephew, Jack,’ said Mrs Ninian. I nodded, having guessed as much, but could not help feeling some surprise at her choice of words. Surely it was unseemly to advertise the very close connection quite so baldly, especially when the cousins were, as at the present moment, in one another’s arms. Or perhaps it was unremarkable to the Aitkens by now.
Jack Aitken looked at me with some interest, clearly wondering who I was, pitched into the middle of the family drama this way, then turned his wife back towards the room and, with one arm around her shoulder and the other hand patting one of hers, brought her towards us again.
‘Silly!’ he said. ‘No one knows yet. Of course you can “face them”. We’ll say Mirren has a cold.’
‘I don’t know why you say no one knows “yet”, Jack,’ said Mrs Ninian. ‘There’s no reason for anyone to find out at all. Ever.’
‘We won’t be able to hide a marriage,’ said Bella. ‘It’ll get out in the end. And even if they never came back, people would put two and two together. Stands to reason.’

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