Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder (32 page)

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Authors: Catriona McPherson

BOOK: Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder
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‘Well, I’m glad all that meant something to you, Dan,’ Alec said.
‘Not all of it,’ I answered. ‘The thing Abby told her can’t have been what we thought. How could the Hepburns know about it?’
‘But you understand what she wants you to do?’
‘Yes. She’s willing to strike a bargain with the Hepburns. Whatever they know, whatever they did, Mary is asking for silence from them, offering silence from the Aitkens and ready at that to call it quits.’
‘More or less what the inspector insinuated to you then,’ Alec said. He was looking very troubled.
‘Yes, two dead children and best for everyone to leave it there.’
‘Can I make one request?’ Alec said. ‘Let’s not start tonight. I don’t think I’ve got the energy for any more dramatic scenes today. Let’s march in and demand the Hepburns’ silence tomorrow.’
‘Agreed,’ I said.
‘As to how we can command them to keep quiet, when we don’t know what the secret is . . .’
‘I have no earthly idea,’ I said. ‘But at least we go invested with some moral authority.’
‘We do?’
‘Yes, darling. We go to carry out the wishes of a – possibly – dying woman. That’s a lot better than: “Answer our questions or we’re telling on you”.’
11
Dinner at St Margaret’s Hotel was thick oyster soup, stuffed and be-crumbed cutlets and a concoction going by the name of Empress Rice, which appeared to be rice pudding made fit for company by the addition of a lot of unnecessary eggs, sherry and jam. After it I could have spent a comfortable night on a park bench, stoked by inner fires and in no danger of coming to harm even without the lightest covering of newspaper. As it was, in a vast, hot, plushy bedroom I felt I did not so much sleep as lie stupefied until morning.
The room smelled of mothballs, which mystified me; an hotel is after all under continuous occupation (I have to will myself not to think of that fact whenever I get into bed in one on the first night of a stay and, should I ever find evidence of the
last
occupant, I have to summon all my early lessons not to run away shrieking). The bed was very large and soft and groaned under a generous budget of blankets, which had been so expertly tucked in – I imagined a crack team of brawny chambermaids with their teeth gritted – as to be immovable, so that one had to insert oneself like a handkerchief into a breast pocket and resign oneself to be pressed there like a flower until one slithered out again, for there was no give which might allow tossing and turning. Indeed, the only moving part of the whole apparatus – the pillows and bolster tended towards the solid too – was one of those shiny quilts, neither use nor ornament, which slipped off if one so much as breathed. It was hideous, brick-coloured and glistening, but it looked fairly new – clearly not the source of the camphor smell – and so I wondered again why that great heap of the things had been whisked off Aitkens’ shop floor to languish unloved alongside the woollen leggings of yesteryear.
The next morning, hotel life seduced me with the lure of a bathroom through a private door, no need to scuttle along the corridor meeting travelling salesmen in their dressing gowns, and since it too was quite amazingly hot and had, apparently, an endless supply of even hotter water, I slopped around for quite half an hour, topping up the water twice, so that it was a quarter to ten when I finally joined Alec in the breakfast room. He did not comment on my frizzed hair and pink glow although I am sure he noticed them.
‘Thoroughly recommend the hot dishes,’ he said, pointing to the sideboard.
I took a plate and went to peer under the covers. Indeed, the devilled kidneys were plump and glossy, the kedgeree bright gold and heavy with fish, not the salty porridge one always dreads and often finds, and there was a natty little toasting machine into which one could slip triangles of thin bread and out of which, moments later, popped crisp slices of practically melba toast.
‘What a waste,’ I said, bringing a piece of the toast and a cup of chocolate back to the table. ‘If I’d known last night, I’d have hung fire with scrambled eggs and stoked up this morning.’
‘You might have lost your appetite anyway,’ Alec said. He had opened a Sunday paper and now folded it and showed it to me.
A
CURSE
ON BOTH THEIR HOUSES
DOUBLE
TRAGEDY
FOR MOURNING MERCHANTS
the headline read and below it were two photographs; one of Mirren Aitken, under a banner, smiling, with orchids in her hair, and a suggestion of a dark shoulder to one side where a companion in his dinner jacket had been excised. The other picture was of a serious young man, looking straight into the camera from under a campaign hat with a glimpse of striped neckerchief at his throat. I felt a prickle of unwelcome memory; the last time – the only time – I had seen that face it had been sinking slowly past me on the roof of the lift, blank-eyed and dreadful in death.
‘Very clever,’ Alec said, tapping both photographs with the tines of his fork. ‘She’s at a party and this is obviously a scout troop portrait so no one will ever pin down which so-called friend provided them.’
‘Pass it over,’ I said.
‘It’s muck,’ said Alec, keeping a tight hold.
‘I’m not going to read it,’ I assured him, ‘I just want to look more closely at them.’ With some reluctance, Alec handed me the paper. The article began,
Prominent Dunfermline merchants, strangers to scandal, living under a cloak of respectability until now, today we bring shocking news to our readers of . . 
.‘Hmph,’ I said. ‘If they can’t even sort out their participles who would take their word on anything?’ Then I sipped my cocoa and stared at the two photographs, Dugald first with his large, round, slightly bottom-heavy eyes and shadowed, sallow skin. I thought I could see just a trace of Bella Aitken there, a family resemblance anyway, if one knew the connection and were looking.
‘His father – Robin Hepburn, I mean – has snow white hair and a white moustache,’ said Alec. ‘Pure white before fifty. I wonder if he’d have been suspicious in a few years if Duglad had stayed dark.’
I shook my head. ‘There are always so many forebears to blame a child’s looks on,’ I said. ‘It would only have been those who knew, or suddenly saw Dugald and Bella standing together. And even then, one is an elderly lady and the other a boy.’ I sighed and turned to the picture of Mirren. Again there was an unpleasant flash of remembering.
‘
She
was a lovely little thing,’ Alec said. ‘Like a flower.’
I had forgotten that he had never seen her before.
‘I thought that about her mother the first time I met her,’ I said. ‘Like a little flower in the rain with its head bowed. But Mirren, to me, is more like a bird.’
‘Yes,’ said Alec. ‘At least it’s hard to tell from one photograph but she has a sharper look than Abigail. A bit of Mary in there?’
‘Nothing like so sharp as all that!’
‘Mind you, we’ve only seen Abby very cowed,’ Alec said. I nodded and started carefully tearing around the picture of Mirren. ‘Are you really going to take that and wave it under the Hepburn noses?’ he asked me.
‘We’ll see,’ I answered. ‘Well, no, of course not. I was only going to wave when I wanted answers. Now we’re extracting promises – like gangsters – I don’t suppose we’ll need it.’
‘And do we really need to go round all of them?’ Alec said.
I thought for a minute and then shook my head. ‘Hilda and Fiona hardly need to have promises extracted. They have secrets of their own to keep. If they even know Mirren’s secret – which I doubt, don’t you? – they can be trusted with it. But we certainly need to speak to the menfolk and I suppose for the sake of completeness the other grandmother, Dulcie. It might be that no one knows anything anyway. Let’s hope so.’
‘Shall we start at Roseville, with Robin?’ said Alec. I was still staring at Mirren’s picture.
‘I’ll keep this with me,’ I said. ‘I’ll wave it in front of my own eyes if my resolve falters. Look at her, Alec!’
But looking at her turned him so glum that I folded the picture away into my notebook to let him finish his breakfast without feeling like a monster for being able to do so.
Since it was a Sabbath morning between a death and a funeral we knew better than just to roll up and expect to find the master at home. Instead, we rang after breakfast and inquired of the parlourmaid who answered the telephone what time Mr Hepburn would be back after church.
‘Mr Hepburn won’t be coming here, madam,’ said the maid in that refined shriek with which servants mistrustful of the new contraption conduct all telephone conversations. ‘He’ll be going to number eighty-six.’
‘Number eighty-six?’ I said.
‘High Street,’ said the maid. ‘The old house. Mistress Dulcie’s.’
‘Ah, of course,’ I said, bluffing. ‘Thank you. We’ll catch him there.’
‘I’m glad we saved ourselves Pilmuir Street anyway,’ Alec said, as we puffed up the hill from the hotel. ‘The High Street’s bad enough after that breakfast.’
‘Easily,’ I said, panting.
‘So where’s eighty-six then?’ said Alec. We had emerged at the mouth of Guildhall Street and stood looking up and down the quiet stretch of shuttered shops and empty pavements.
‘Close by,’ I said, nodding at the other side. ‘Those are the high seventies.’
‘Which way does it go?’ said Alec, strolling a little way down towards the tolbooth. ‘No, this is wrong. Uphill, Dandy.’
‘But can that be right?’ I said, trailing after him and looking around myself with some puzzlement. ‘It’s all shops and we’re practically at Aitkens’.’
‘Eighty,’ said Alec. ‘Eighty-two, eighty-four is the bank.’ Here he crossed the end of a narrow lane which led away up the hill beyond the High Street. ‘So this must be . . . hmph. Eighty-eight.’ He stopped, and looked back down the street with his hands on his hips.
‘Could there be another High Street?’ I said. ‘It seems odd that the Hepburn house would be right here in the hurly-burly.’ Alec had gone up the narrow lane and now he beckoned to me.
‘Here it is,’ he said. The number, burnished brass, was attached to an iron gate on the side of the bank building and the same number was painted in gold on the fanlight above an imposing door, just inside.
‘A manager’s flat?’ said Alec.
I walked back around the corner, crossed the road, stopped outside Aitkens’ plate-glass window – still bearing only some flowers – and simply stared.
‘My God,’ I said, looking up at the three floors of house windows above the branch of the British Linen Bank.
‘That’s spite, surely,’ said Alec. ‘Or something very peculiar anyway.’
For number eighty-six High Street was directly opposite Aitkens’ Emporium and looked across the narrow stretch right into its upper windows.
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I remember Mary Aitken being most odd – even for her – when I queried her sending a pair of girls off down the street with the deposit. I couldn’t imagine what such a blameless institution could have done to upset her so.’
‘So Robert and Dulcie Hepburn live right opposite their arch-enemy,’ said Alec. ‘And in a flat? While Robin and Hilda swan around in Roseville.’
‘Well, as to that,’ I said, ‘I’ve been in a manager’s house above a bank branch once before. Upstairs here might surprise you.’
We recrossed the road, tried the iron gate and, finding it open, entered and pulled on the bright polished handle of the doorbell. A maid with a black cap and a red nose answered and nodded, sniffing, when we said we had come to see Mr Hepburn if he was there. She led us up the stairs, which were exactly as prosperous and substantial as I had expected, easily as broad and shallow as our back stairs at home, and into the upstairs hall which was quite twelve feet square and lit by a cupola, spangles of red and blue scattering down from its panes and dotting the good plain carpet and gleaming mahogany.
We waited in an equally plain but gleaming morning room, I on the edge of my seat although Alec managed to look as though he were not thrumming with nerves at the thought of the coming interview.
Mr Hepburn did not keep us waiting long. He entered the room slowly, looking rather stooped, and closed the door behind him before he turned to us.
‘Yes?’ he said, looking at Alec and me without recognition. I glanced at Alec, shocked. This was Hilda Hepburn’s husband? He looked seventy. Had grief done this to the man?
‘Mr Hepburn,’ said Alec. ‘Excuse us, sir, there has been a mix-up. We were hoping to speak to your son.’
‘Robin?’ said the old man. I could see now that he was an old man, not just tired and sad, but truly old. Robin Hepburn might well have white hair but this man’s hair and his moustache too were thinning, his chin hanging in a wattle and his eyes creased and pouchy behind his pince-nez. It was only because I had expected Robin that I had assumed this was he. ‘Robin is at home, young man. And perhaps as well you didn’t find him. Today is a very bad day to seek out my son. He has had a dreadful thing just happen to him.’

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