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Authors: Catriona McPherson

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BOOK: Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder
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‘Out too,’ said Trusslove, reappearing in the hallway. ‘He went off in one of the cars after he spoke to you. Ah, here’s some hot tea for you, Miss Abby. This’ll help you.’
As the servant girl aided Abigail up onto her feet and took her to sit on the dressing chair, sounds came to us of the front door far below, quick footsteps on the stairway and then two St Andrew’s ambulance men were in the room in their blessed smart dark uniforms, looking mercifully calm and competent as they eased me out of the way. They lifted Mary effortlessly onto a stretcher, one tucking a red blanket around her and one measuring her pulse against his fob watch, then the first deftly removing her shoes, chafing her feet and talking all the while to her in a bright, kindly voice.
‘Right then,’ said the other, putting his fob away. ‘Who laid her down then and loosened her dress?’
‘That was me,’ I said, hunching a little in case he were about to scold me.
‘Well, there’s a good sensible girl,’ he said. ‘Well done. Are you coming in the ambulance with us or following on?’ He was looking at me, but I turned to Abigail. Unbelievably she was sipping at her cup of tea, staring straight ahead.
‘Mrs Jack?’ I said. ‘Abby? Are you going with your mother or would you rather the chauffeur drove you?’
‘Both cars are out, madam,’ said Trusslove.
‘Not in the ambulance,’ said Abigail, shrinking into the back of her chair. ‘What if she dies?’
‘Alone?’ I said.
The St Andrew’s men had Mary out of the room and halfway down the first flight of stairs, not waiting on our decisions.
‘I couldn’t,’ said Abigail.
‘You go, Dan,’ said Alec. ‘I’ll bring Mrs Jack along.’
I had never been terribly keen on hospitals even before the war years when day after day I willed myself to drive over to that godforsaken officers’ convalescent home for another seven hours of severed limbs, oozing stitches and shot nerves, but I sent up prayers of thankfulness when the ambulance stilled its siren and drew up beside the large double doors of the emergency entrance at the Dunfermline Cottage Hospital, not least because the name was a misnomer if ever there were one; the hospital was as grand and imposing as every other of Dunfermline’s many public buildings and it was a great comfort to be arriving there. Running like an automaton in Mirren’s bedroom, I had without thinking done the right things and had perhaps helped a little, even if I could wish to have been less harsh to poor Abigail about the blanket and pillows, but crouched in the ambulance all competence deserted me and I turned fluttery and tearful, dreading that indeed Mary Aitken would die as we swung around the roads at top speed, for she had sunk into a deep torpor and the ambulance man who sat beside her was frowning hard and had stopped all his kindly banter.
At the hospital doors, we were met by a nurse in a blue dress with a clean white apron pinned on top and white cuffs holding her sleeves up above her elbows. She was impossibly young but looked very strong and certain, with that extra-clean look of nurses as though they washed their faces with Lysol and a stiff brush instead of soap and a flannel.
‘Stroke,’ said the man who had made the journey in the back with Mary and me.
‘Name?’ said the nurse. She was looking at Mary as we trotted along in step with the men carrying the stretcher, but I guessed that she was talking to me.
‘Mrs Aitken,’ I said.
‘From Aitkens’?’ said the nurse, peering with greater interest at Mary. Then she remembered herself. ‘Age?’ she snapped.
‘Seventy . . . four . . . ish,’ I said, hoping that I had remembered accurately.
‘First stroke?’
‘I think so.’
‘And were you with her when it happened?’
‘I wasn’t, Sister,’ I said, thinking that even if she were only a staff nurse she would not mind a sudden promotion and better that than the other way. ‘Her daughter was though. She’s following along behind. She should soon be here.’
‘Her daughter?’ The nurse stopped. ‘Who are you?’
‘A friend,’ I began, but the nurse stopped me.
‘Back to the waiting room with you,’ she said. ‘You can’t be in here out of visiting time.’ I knew there was no point in arguing; everything about her tone, her looks and her firmly folded elbows as she turned, physically barring my way, said that she would win her point. The stretcher had arrived at a curtained cubicle and the ambulance men set it down with groans of relief.
‘I shall send Mrs Aitken back here when she comes, shall I?’ I said.
‘We’ll take care of things from here,’ said the nurse, not even willing to discuss that small matter with me now. She marched smartly up to the bedside, twitched the curtains shut behind her and left me standing there.
I took a deep breath to steady myself, and felt goose pimples spring up on my arms at the smell, that unforgettable cocktail of chlorine bleach, disinfectant and strong soap which is almost as much part of a hospital as the starched white sheets and starched blue nurses.
Alec and Abigail arrived just as I had got back to the large double doors and been told by a porter in a cubby-hole there that this was the emergency entrance and I should come and go – although it was not visiting time, not nearly – by the front door like everyone else managed to do.
‘How is she?’ said Abigail. ‘Where have they taken her?’
I turned an inquiring face to the porter.
‘Admissions,’ he said, ‘but you can’t come in through here. You’ll need to go round to the front.’
‘She was asleep when they took her out of the ambulance,’ I told Abigail, ‘but they whisked her straight in, a very competent nurse—’
‘No doctor?’
‘And I’m sure a doctor will be with her now. Let’s go round and see if we can’t get you to her, Mrs Aitken, shall we?’ I threw A Look at the porter who affected not to notice and we left, working our way around the complicated set of alleys and in-shoots to the front of the building where we mounted the stairs and entered the foyer.
It was quite impossible, it seemed, to add a bedside companion to an admission which was already under way; the uniformed volunteer who manned a desk at the door, a nurse we waylaid and any number of passing porters agreed. So the three of us milled around, wishing for a seat and some tea, but when I asked the volunteer if a folding chair might be found for Abigail, I was treated to Another Look which suggested that my effort to the emergency door porter would have made no impression (not if the current effort was hospital standard) and which told me that there was no point even mentioning the tea.
‘What happened, Mrs Aitken?’ I said, as I rejoined Alec and her. She was leaning up against the wall with her eyes closed.
‘She collapsed,’ said Abigail, without opening her eyes. ‘We were quarrelling.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She struck you.’
Abigail opened her mouth wide as though to test the feeling in her cheek, and nodded.
‘You had told her?’ I asked. ‘The thing you said you had decided to tell her?’
As I watched, the lines of Abigail’s lashes started to glitter and a second later two tears had formed, detached and rolled down her cheeks. She felt up her sleeve for her handkerchief and then, remembering that she had given it away, she lifted a hand and roughly wiped the tears away with her fingers.
‘I thought it would help,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand why it upset her so.’
‘If you would tell us what it was, Mrs Aitken,’ said Alec in his lowest, most gentle voice; trying, I think, to sound like a lullaby. I nodded at him, encouraging the effort, for I was beginning to wonder why Mary would strike Abigail over such a thing.
‘Was it just the fact that you’d kept it quiet?’ I asked. ‘Or was it the secret itself that was so upsetting?’
Abigail shook her head so forcefully that the newest tears flew off to either side.
‘She wasn’t herself,’ she whispered. ‘Just like the last time. She wasn’t well. I should have known she couldn’t be expected to bear confidences.’
Alec and I were gazing helplessly at one another when the front door banged open and Bella Aitken came in at speed, one of the Aitken chauffeurs in his mauve and gold livery trotting behind her. She had made some effort with her appearance today, to visit the Emporium and hand out the staff’s favours, but she was still very dishevelled, coat buttoned crookedly and only one glove on, and her face was every bit as stricken as it had been during our interview in Trusslove’s pantry the day before. She saw us and bustled over, putting out her hands to clasp Abigail to her.
‘Is she dead?’ she said. ‘Please tell me she hasn’t died. Abigail? Trusslove rang me up at the store. They said she had been taken away in an ambulance. She isn’t dead, is she?’
‘She had a stroke, Mrs Aitken,’ I said. ‘She was alive but unconscious when I last saw her.’
‘You said asleep,’ said Abigail, struggling out of her mother-in-law’s embrace and turning fearful eyes to me.
‘Her breathing was very steady,’ I said. ‘And she’s in the best place, in very safe hands.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Bella Aitken, looking around, ‘None of us has ever been in this place before. Did someone ring up Dr Hill? Wasn’t he there?’
‘We thought it best to summon an ambulance,’ Alec said. ‘Get her here as soon as possible, you know.’
‘A stroke,’ said Bella Aitken, letting go of Abigail and rubbing her hands over her own face. ‘A stroke? Mary? She has always had the best of health. Healthier than me – physically anyway.’
‘She does live a little on her nerves, Aunt Bella,’ Abigail said. ‘It wouldn’t be wrong to say she was “highly strung”.’
‘No, I won’t hear that of her,’ said Bella. ‘I’ve known your mother forty-nine years, Abigail, and she is as strong as an ox. Always has been. It’s Mirren dying that’s done this to her. It’s Mirren that’s brought Mary this low.’ There was a curious, triumphant note in her voice. ‘Losing that girl of ours has broken us all to bits. I’ll tell anyone the same and there’s no shame in it, if you ask me.’
‘Aunt Bella, please,’ said Abigail. ‘Please don’t blame Mirren. Mother and I were quarrelling. She was very upset and I did nothing to help calm her. If anything I made it worse. Don’t heap this on my poor child.’
So intent were they on jockeying for blame – and it struck me, and Alec too to judge from his expression, as a most peculiar way to be carrying on – that they did not notice the approach of a white-coated doctor who strode up to our little group with his stethoscope still attached to one ear and his spectacles pulled far down on his long nose so that he could look at us over the top of them.
‘Are you with Mrs Aitken?’ he said. Bella turned. ‘Ah, Mrs John!’
‘Dr Spencer!’ she said. ‘How is she? Please don’t tell me she’s gone.’
‘She’s resting,’ said Dr Spencer, with a slight frown (at the histrionics, I assumed; I suppose it is not the done thing to mention death so gratuitously to a doctor, who spends his days pitted against it). ‘We’ll ring Dr Hill to come in and see her now, but you did the right thing sending her to us without delay.’
‘Can I see her?’ said Abigail.
‘Certainly, Mrs Jack,’ said Dr Spencer. ‘If you would care to sit with her and hold her hand and talk gently.’
‘I need to apologise for something,’ said Abigail and the tears were beginning to flow again. ‘I must speak to her. In case it’s my only chance, you see.’
Dr Spencer frowned again. ‘She’s not to be upset though,’ he said. ‘And perhaps – after your recent . . . perhaps it would be better if Mrs John here were to step in. She will forgive me for saying it but she has lived longer than you and learned how to weather life’s storms.’ He gave Bella a tight smile.
‘It’s my mother,’ said Abigail. ‘I must go to her.’
‘A brief visit,’ said the doctor. ‘A
quiet
word.’ With some reluctance he tucked her arm under his and led her away.
‘Weather life’s storms!’ said Bella Aitken when they had gone. ‘I’m not so sure about that. It was ten years ago when my boys died. Three months apart, separate campaigns, separate battles, but three months apart. I couldn’t have faced a deathbed the next week, my own mother or no. Sickbed, I mean. Oh Lord, sickbed, let’s pray.’ Then with that utter lack of self-consciousness that had been behind the carpet slippers, the pinned curls and the mismatched stockings, she slid her back down the wall until she was resting on her haunches.
At least this indecorous display had the result that the volunteer summoned a porter who brought a chair and Bella sat down, unclasped the large black handbag which swung from one elbow and drew out a commodious flask, battered silver in a leather case. The porter looked back and scowled at the sound of the stopper popping out but did not come back to remonstrate with her. Bella took a long swig, wiped her lips and offered the flask to me.
I took it. It was whisky, but still I took it, helped myself to a good mouthful, and handed it to Alec. He took a goodly glug too and returned it to its owner. One final swig and Bella stowed the thing back in her bag again.
Then we all three turned at the sound of heels clopping briskly along one of the corridors which led off this foyer. A little nurse, even younger than the first and with her sleeves buttoned to the wrist – perhaps for this trip to front of house – came up and spoke diffidently.
BOOK: Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder
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