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Authors: Catriona McPherson

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‘Roger was supposed to marry Mirren,’ I said.

Never in Lady Lawson’s long life of decorum must she have had to reach so deep inside herself to summon the light smile and airy wave of a hand that she bestowed upon us now. She shook as she did so.

‘He was,’ she said. ‘Are you shocked, Mrs Gilver? My late husband would have been
horrified
.’

‘But – forgive me, Lady Lawson.’ Alec was speaking now, sliding forward in his seat and staring at her. ‘What proposal of Mary Aitken’s were you refusing just now? What new proposal, I mean. Now that poor Mirren is gone.’

‘I thought she sent you here to press it upon me,’ Lady Lawson said.

‘Press what?’ said Alec. ‘The girl’s dead.’

‘She asked me this morning,’ said Lady Lawson, ‘and I was shaken to my core. She wanted Roger to say he hadn’t thought much of the idea and that he probably wouldn’t have gone through with it. She wants my son to accuse himself – in the eyes of the world – of breach of promise and – in the eyes of God – of ending the poor girl’s life.’ She sat back in her chair as though exhausted. ‘I was not brought up to games of intrigue and I have no skill at them.’ She sighed and there was a tuneful note in it which turned the sigh into a snatch of song. She had been brought up to games of flirtation, I thought to myself, and she was a master of
them
.

‘Why would she think you’d go along with it?’ I said.

‘Well, the absolute plain bald fact of the matter,’ said Lady Lawson, ‘was that Roger
wasn’t
terribly keen. And who could blame my poor boy? What man would want to marry such a shrinking, quaking girl? If she had smiled and batted her eyes a little he’d have been pleased enough to put her on his arm and show her off to people, department store or no.’ Alec was looking quite revolted, but not me; I knew of old what underlay the wan and flowery surface of women like Lady Lawson and it was always pretty steely, every time. ‘A courtship, a marriage, a son of his own, a bit of help for his brothers and then a pleasant life filled with his choice of pleasant things. It wasn’t much to ask of him, was it? No more than we all owe our parents and our family name.’ By now, Alec was far beyond revolted, a little sick in fact, and I hid my smiles.

‘So Mary only wants Roger to be honest really,’ I said. Lady Lawson sat bolt upright in her chair.

‘Not a bit of it,’ she said. ‘Mirren Aitken didn’t kill herself because Roger let her down. Oh, he groaned and grumbled, but he would have gone through with it in the end.’

‘Even still,’ I said, ‘wouldn’t you rather have him known as a heartbreaker than as . . .’ She waited, giving me no choice but to go on: ‘. . . as a man a girl would kill herself to escape from?’

At this Lady Lawson burst out in an incoherent stream of denial, but then just as suddenly she stopped again. ‘I never thought of it that way,’ she said. ‘Oh my goodness, you’re right. But it’s nonsense. Everyone knows Mirren wanted to marry the Hepburn boy and Mary wouldn’t let her. No one will believe that her heart broke because of poor Roger. Oh, my poor boy! He’ll be a laughing stock. What was it you said? A man a girl would kill herself to escape from?
Poor
Roger! Oh, I’m a such a silly woman to have got mixed up in the grubby business in the first place.’

‘Why did you, if you don’t mind my asking?’ said Alec.

‘Well . . .’ Lady Lawson, I assumed, was seeking a euphemism for ‘hard cash’. I thought I would help her by suggesting something even worse, which she could vigorously deny.

‘She wasn’t in a position to put any pressure on you, was she?’

‘Hardly!’ said Lady Lawson. ‘It’s I who know more than I ever wanted to about her, not she me.’ This was interesting and both Alec and I tried to look alert but not so vulturous that we scared her. ‘Mary Aitken has been my personal dressmaker since I was a girl. She knows all my numbers off by heart, carries them in her head, isn’t that touching? We come from the same village, you know, on the other side of the river.’ She waved a hand towards the windows, indicating the Forth, Edinburghshire and the Border country. ‘My mother gave her work when she was trying to eke out her wages from her first job in town and stuck with her when she went to Aitkens’ and so Mary stuck with my mother and me when she married and here we both are. My patronage of her has slowly become hers of me over the years until we found ourselves at the point when she could feel bold enough to look up, with a mouthful of pins, and put such a notion to me, woman to woman, like some kind of business dealing.’ Lady Lawson blinked her pretty eyes very slowly two or three times to show us how overwhelming the thought of
business dealings
was to a flower of femininity such as she.

‘But – once again, forgive me, Lady Lawson,’ I said, ‘but Mary makes no secret of her humble beginnings. Why should you call all that “knowing more than you want to”?’

‘It’s not her beginnings, Mrs Gilver,’ Lady Lawson said. ‘It was her route out of them. Such scheming, such naked ambition – most unseemly. She snared poor Mr Aitken like a rabbit in a trap, you know. And he wasn’t the first one she had set her sights on either.’

‘Dear me,’ I said, thinking I could easily believe it of Mary.

‘And then marrying off Abigail to her cousin that way? Too dreadful. I couldn’t understand it. There was no reason for it. Abby was a lively pretty girl and could have had her pick of the young men. She had a fortune, you know.’

‘It certainly does seem a little . . . careless,’ I said.

‘And then so scrupulous about a match with the Hepburn boy for Mirren.’ Lady Lawson lowered her voice. ‘You know about the Hepburn girls, I suppose?’ Alec’s shoes squeaked as he writhed in discomfort.

‘A little. You think that was Mary’s objection? I thought it was business rivalry.’

‘Oh well, yes, that too. She certainly resented them. But if she ever got on to the subject of the sisters she was quite frightening. And to think I was going to marry my son into such a family. Cousin marriage, and suicide, and spite so bitter that it twisted her up into knots sometimes. What kind of mother must I be? Oh, my poor boy.’

And so on and so forth for quite some time, while Alec and I sat squirming. When at last she ran out of exclamations, or perhaps breath, she left us with a faint allusion to a headache and an ethereal farewell. We stayed behind in the little sitting room, puffed out a few good breaths between us and reviewed the interview.

‘That’s how I was supposed to be brought up,’ I said. ‘It’s exhausting, isn’t it?’

‘Damned irritating,’ said Alec. ‘Makes me feel like Professor Higgins. Makes me want to throw things. How did you escape it, darling? Not that you never make me want to throw things, but not in the same way.’

‘I’m not quite sure,’ I said. I was always wont to sum up my mother as a dreamer, slightly to despise her aesthetic bent and her enthralment when it came to nature and freedom and even less slightly to scorn her passionate declarations on them, but when faced with the kind of fluttering
she
had despised I did begin to see how stoutly she had held against
her
mother’s expectations and how valiant she been in her way. Then I remembered that the fresh air she so loved was the air of spring and that she kept to the fireside in her shawls at the slightest drizzle and disappeared under a parasol in the summer sun; that the nature she adored was the nature of rose petals and bluebell woods not the nature which will swell a turnip and feed a family on it; that a beautiful death had had so much more allure than precious life got by sullying herself with the ugly words doctors use and the ugly things they do. Besides, it should not be forgotten that my mother had produced my sister Mavis as well as me.

‘Nanny Palmer,’ I said to Alec, realising that of course this was the key. ‘Nanny Palmer never would have any truck with the vapours – everything from squealing at mice to getting seasick was “the vapours” to her, you know – and then of course it would have been wasted on Hugh all these years anyway, and no daughters, and now the casework . . . who knows where it will end.’

A memory came back to me unbidden of Mavis, on her wedding day, sitting at her looking glass as my mother lowered the coronet of flowers onto her hair. They looked at one another in the glass and exchanged misty smiles. Then Mavis caught my eye and the smile died. ‘What is it?’ she had said. I replied truthfully that it was nothing, but she was not to be denied, not on her wedding day. ‘Go on,’ she had said. ‘Tell me what you were thinking. I insist that you tell me.’ I had assured her that I was thinking nothing at all, only how pretty she looked in her frock, which was very drooping and medieval with long points to the bell-sleeves and a low girdle of plaited silks with ends as long as her train, but the truth was that I had looked at those pointed sleeves and wondered if at the wedding breakfast she would be able to help them going in her soup.

‘Alec,’ I said, ‘tell me something – and I’m serious, I assure you. Would you describe me as “hearty”?’

‘Hearty?’ said Alec. ‘No. Why?’

‘Because that’s what lies at the other end of the line from Lady Lawson and the likes of her and much as I loathe one, I do dread the other. My sister called me hearty once and it still pricks me.’

‘It wouldn’t prick at you if you were hearty,’ said Alec with great kindness.

‘Thank you, darling.’

‘Don’t mention it. And let’s get back to the case, for God’s sake,’ he said. ‘Right. Lady Lawson has given us an embarrassment of reasons for Mary Aitken to deny Mirren the right to marry Dugald. Jack and Hilda we knew about anyway. And I suppose the business rivalry – feud, call it what you like – might just explain Robin and his father being against the match.’

‘We haven’t accounted for Abigail’s misgivings yet. And we haven’t got a motive for Mirren’s suicide except jilting, in which case we haven’t got a motive for Dugald’s.’

‘Mirren first,’ said Alec. ‘She didn’t know about Jack and Hilda. Did she know about Roger Lawson? Did she care about the Aitken–Hepburn feud? Would she have resisted eloping because of it? I wonder what caused the feud, by the way. Mrs Lumsden seemed to hint that it wasn’t always this way between them.’

‘I wish we could just barge in like the police and demand that everyone answer our questions,’ I said, dragging up another hefty sigh and letting it out. ‘We can’t even threaten them with the police!’

‘Why not?’ said Alec. He had been stretched out in his chair, practically horizontal in that way of his, but he hauled himself upright and his eyes were alight again. ‘Why can’t we?’

‘Because if I go back to Inspector Stinky, Hugh will be clapped in irons.’

‘But no one knows that,’ said Alec. ‘We can threaten ourselves blue, Dandy. Of course we can.’ I clapped my hands together with glee.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘We really can! Of course we couldn’t actually carry
out
the threat if it doesn’t work, but let’s cross our fingers we don’t need to.’

‘Who do we start with?’ said Alec. ‘Bright and early tomorrow morning, I think. And bring an overnight bag along too. I don’t know about you but I’m getting heartily sick of that road here and back again.’

‘Abigail Aitken,’ I said. ‘If we find out that she knew about Jack and Hilda and told Mirren, then we have a motive for Mirren’s suicide and enough reasons for the marriage ban to go around everyone. Then we can assume Dugald killed himself out of grief and the case is closed. We won’t need the overnight bag after all.’

‘What about the inspector?’ said Alec. ‘Are we saying that he somehow knew about Jack and Hilda? Knew that Mirren and Dugald were siblings? How could he?’ I said nothing. ‘Put your toothbrush in a little bag and bring it with you, Dandy. We’re not done yet awhile, if you ask me.’

It was bright and early indeed the following morning when Alec’s motorcar swung into the front drive at Abbey Park and rolled up to the house. We stepped down, two of us all swagger and determination and one of us all wagging tail and snuffling with excitement at the new scents in this new place. Alec had raised a sardonic eyebrow when he saw Bunty on the end of her lead, but I had insisted.

‘She can still put up a pretty chilling growl and quivering lip if someone shouts at me,’ I said. ‘And she’s a good intimidating size, especially in a drawing room, and don’t forget that time last year.’ That had been my darling Bunty’s finest hour; she had gone for a villain with her lips drawn back and her teeth gnashing, snarling like a wolf. If she did the same to Jack Aitken he would never chase me down the drive again.

‘Well, thanks for the vote of confidence,’ said Alec, but he had opened the door for her and whistled her in.

Down at Dunfermline, Trusslove greeted me like an old friend.

‘Thank the Lord,’ he said. ‘Good news, is it? I’ve told all the staff you’re helping, dear, and we’re sending up prayers. I only wish we could do more, but nobody downstairs knows anything worth telling.’ He looked at Alec. ‘And are you another of them, my friend? Good. More power to your elbow.’ He beckoned us in and made off ahead of us to the library. ‘My friend?’ Alec mouthed to me, behind his back.

‘Right then,’ Trusslove said. ‘And who is it you’re after today?’

‘Mr Aitken,’ I replied. ‘Mr Jack, if he’s here, Trusslove, please.’

BOOK: Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder

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