Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder (21 page)

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Authors: Catriona McPherson

BOOK: Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder
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‘Is it really your job?’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t one of the family . . . ?’
‘In a family business,’ Miss Hutton said, ‘things do get a wee bit mixed in together sometimes. I offered, anyway. Just a first pass through them. I’ll let Mrs Ninian see all the important ones.’ She nodded towards a small pile, mostly letters, and then gave a rueful look at the much larger piles of letter and cards at its side. ‘And don’t you think it shocking, Mrs Gilver,’ she said, her bony nose pinching with disapproval, ‘how many of them . . .’ She held up one card and another and a third, all of the same design – an improbable church on a hillside with an improbable sunset going on behind. ‘These are ours,’ she said. ‘We sell them downstairs. You’d think people would have bought a different one to send us, wouldn’t you?’
I could not imagine anything more vulgar than a condolence card of any sort, to be honest, and I could not resist taking one and opening it.
A golden Treasure in your heart
The dear Lord loved it too
And so has gathered it to Him,
Sweet mem’ries left to you
.
I closed it again, thinking that I would have hit anyone who sent me such an article if a child of mine had died.
‘I wanted to speak to you today, Miss Hutton,’ I said, ‘because I find myself still with a few loose ends to tie in. For my own satisfaction, you understand. Mrs Ninian has made it very clear that my formal engagement in the matter is over now.’ I waited a bit, thinking that now was her chance to freeze me with a glare if she cared to.
Far from it; she continued regarding me with a calm, expectant look.
‘Anything I can do to help,’ she said. A singularly
un
helpful remark as it happened, since I still could not remember what it was that I wanted to ask her. Alec disparages what he calls my excessive note-taking – and to be frank, I have ended some cases with enough scribbled-over paper to support a bonfire while chestnuts are roasted upon it – but better that surely than this: sitting gazing blankly back at an important witness as she gazed at me. And looking at her, I remembered a very different expression of hers, puzzled and troubled, and that must have connected to the thing I wanted to ask her; it was tantalisingly close but still out of reach of me.
‘Would you mind, Miss Hutton,’ I said, ‘if I just sat here for a moment and gathered my thoughts?’ She glanced back at the piles of correspondence on her desk and I hurried to reassure her that I did not need her attention.
‘Please do carry on with your work. So long as I won’t distract you. I would even offer to help, but I wouldn’t like to . . .’ I made a fastidious expression and nodded to the letter she was even now slitting open. It was addressed to Mr and Mrs J.B. Aitken. Miss Hutton scanned it quickly and set it upon the pile to be passed along. The next envelope she glanced at and added to the same pile without opening. Then came a card which she opened, frowned at – it was the church at sunset – and placed on top of her stack. Then another unopened envelope onto the family pile.
‘Do you recognise the handwriting?’ I asked. A pained expression flashed over her.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it’s just that I wouldn’t open anything addressed to Mrs Ninian herself, madam, until she’s seen it. She wouldn’t like that.’ She held up the last envelope and I nodded, reading the name there. Miss Hutton sighed. ‘I wish I’d broken my own rule last week, I can tell you.’
‘Oh?’
‘There was a letter for Mrs Ninian and it wasn’t even sealed, just tucked over, you know, and maybe if I’d opened it I could have helped in some way.’
‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ I said.
‘But then again maybe not,’ said Miss Hutton. ‘Most certainly not. Because you said Mrs Ninian asked you to find Miss Mirren, didn’t you?’
‘That’s it,’ I said, sitting upright in my chair. My voice had been far too loud for such a small room and Miss Hutton looked startled. ‘That’s what you said, that’s been niggling at me,’ I went on. ‘You seemed surprised, the day of the funeral, when I told you what I had been asked to do.’
‘I
was
surprised,’ Miss Hutton said.
‘Yes, but why?’ I asked her. She hesitated, turning an envelope over and over in her hands. It was another condolatory church – I was beginning to recognise them. Then she began speaking in a great rush, like a dam bursting.
‘I take Mrs Ninian’s appointment list into her office at the start of every week,’ she said. ‘Just to help her. Everyone thinks she’s such a tower of strength but I know what it takes out of her, what a toll. Anyway, when I went in on that Monday morning, I tripped over an envelope on the floor. It had been slipped under the door and it was addressed to Mrs Ninian and I was sure it was Miss Mirren’s handwriting. She used to play at shops here when she was a little girl, you know. Writing out orders and receipts – she had her own little set of books and stamps and everything – and I know her writing. She never went to school to learn that same hand they teach them all, so I’d know her own writing anywhere. I’m sure it was hers. I know it was.’
‘How did it get there?’ I said. ‘Surely the post isn’t generally slipped under doors.’
‘Oh no, madam, I don’t mean a posted letter,’ Miss Hutton said. ‘I mean hand-delivered. It just said Mrs N.L. Aitken.’
‘In Mirren’s writing?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Revealing that Mirren had been here, in the store?’
‘Yes,’ said Miss Hutton, and she looked pained again. ‘I even smiled when I saw it. We had all heard on the Saturday that Miss Mirren had run off and we were worried about her. Well, those of us who weren’t cheering her on, you know. Quite a few of them thought she had eloped and all the best to her. But when I saw the letter, I thought: Ah! She’s here. Hiding out in the store. And then I thought: Well, of course she is. Where else? Because whenever she wasn’t playing at shops in the departments years ago, she was playing at houses up in those attics. So I put the letter on Mrs Ninian’s desk with her other papers and thought we would soon all be back to normal again. So I couldn’t understand why Mrs Ninian had engaged you. She knew where Miss Mirren was. I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t just gone to get her. Unless Miss Mirren left again.’
Not a natural detective, our Miss Hutton; no nasty habit of suspicion to stop her taking the facts at face value and trusting everyone. I had quite a different view. I thought nothing more likely than that, on finding the letter, Mary Aitken deduced where Mirren was hiding, perhaps even went to check, then decided to leave her there stewing in her own juices until after the jubilee, whereupon a detective summoned for the purpose would ‘find’ her. That, finally, explained the day’s delay.
And certainly if Mary knew where the missing girl was and did nothing it would explain her self-flagellating guilt and her conviction that she was damned
‘Miss Hutton,’ I said, ‘did you mention finding the letter? To Mrs Ninian, I mean. Or, I suppose, anyone.’
‘No,’ Miss Hutton said.
‘Why not?’
Miss Hutton blinked again.
‘I suppose,’ she said slowly, ‘I just sort of naturally didn’t. I mean, I just sort of wouldn’t, in case it was awkward for her.’
‘Very discreet of you,’ I said. ‘Most admirable. I expect you must need a great deal of natural discretion to do what you do.’ Miss Hutton looked uncomprehending. ‘Madam looks lovely, and all that,’ I went on. Her rather prim face broke into an unexpected smirk.
‘Oh indeed,’ she said. ‘Ten years younger, perhaps even more slender without the stripes and we seem to have mislaid your measurements, madam, and beg your patience while we take them again.’
‘If she’s twice the size she was last time?’ I guessed. Miss Hutton nodded. ‘Well your discretion will stand you in good stead now.’ She looked puzzled and I saw I would have to spell it out to her. ‘About the letter: perhaps it would be best
not
to mention it to anyone.’ She nodded again, reassured as easily as that, her innocence making me worry about her more than ever. Did she really not have enough healthy regard for her own safety to see that I was warning her?
‘Do you think Mrs Ninian knows you found it and moved it?’ I asked. The spectre had raised itself in me that if Mary Aitken guessed as much and if Mary Aitken had killed Mirren, she might even now be plotting to tie up a loose end of her own. But did I still suspect Mary Aitken? Was I not leaning towards Robin Hepburn now; an enraged cuckold hitting out at his rival’s child? Miss Hutton was shaking her head.
‘She probably just assumes Miss Mirren put it there herself, if she’s thinking about it at all. And I hope she’s not – brooding about it, making herself ill.’
‘I wonder why Mirren didn’t,’ I said.
‘Well, Mrs Ninian’s door is kept locked usually. I have a key and a few other people too, but Miss Mirren wouldn’t have had one.’
‘A few others?’ I said, relieved. At least if Mary Aitken had worked out that Mirren’s letter had arrived on her desk via an intermediary, she would have a few from which to choose. She could not, surely, kill them all.
8
And so to the attics after all. Not to search for bloodstained gloves but to see what signs if any remained of Mirren’s sojourn there. I was hoping for a note, or, if the gods were smiling, a diary although reason told me that the police must have found it if there were such a thing. I left Miss Hutton in her cubby-hole full of tissue-paper rolls – these, I now realised, were ladies’ paper patterns, cut to fit regular customers and kept for them, until advancing years and an appetite for buns ended their usefulness; I remembered my own stalwart little dressmaker once telling me she had ‘mislaid my numbers’ and would have to beg my patience while she set about me with the tape measure again and I wondered now, after what Miss Hutton had told me. But I am more or less the same girth as when I ordered my trousseau, or at least I always tell myself so, since I can still fit into my wedding gown and into my oldest tweeds without much straining. A more Jesuitical soul (or do I mean less; Jesuitical seems to be one of those insults that two people can hurl at one another each believing stoutly in his own rightness to do so) would remark that elderly tweeds show their age in bagging more than anything and that my wedding gown, following the fashions of the day, was a sack – pouchy on top and with loops of satin hanging from its suggestion of a waist like great swirls of melting cream. Now that tastes have changed, it almost pains me to see my wedding portrait, the waste of my youth that it was to be got up in such an extraordinary way.
Upstairs I strode confidently across the darkened landing to the light switch and clicked it on. The wreath of lilies was still there and the black velvet curtaining but, perhaps from familiarity, I found I could look upon them without my throat contracting. Now, where would one hole up here if one were . . . if one were what, though?
What
was
Mirren Aitken’s state of mind when she had left her home and her family and come to the attics above the store to hide herself? It depended whether she knew about her father and Hilda Hepburn, about the impossibility of herself and Dugald marrying. Had she told Mary in the letter? Why would she tell her grandmother, though?
I tried the handle of the nearest door and it opened, but instead of a little attic room, which is what I had been expecting, I found on the other side a long corridor, quite dark, with at least six doors opening off it; this was not going to be a ten-minute job, it seemed, and I wished that I had had some luncheon before beginning, and had brought an electric torch with me, and a scarf to tie over my face against the dust I could smell in the quiet air. On the other hand, I knew that the store was free of Aitkens today – now that Lady Lawson had let poor Mary go home – and I could not miss the chance while I had it.
It was with some relief that behind the first of these new doors which I tried, in a kind of little ante-room, I found three paraffin lamps, full and clean, as well as a large sketching pad which appeared to serve as a stock-plan of the attics with coded notes about what was stored in each of them, and columns marked out to show what was brought in and taken away and when and by whom – initials I could not decipher – and to which department they were bound. Blessing Mary Aitken’s tidy mind, I lit one of the lamps and began.
Soon enough, I was cursing Mary Aitken’s mind, for it transpired that the plan with its columns was an aspiration rather than a reflection of reality and the attics themselves were a perfect chaos of objects and oddities, like a jumble sale after the passing of a tornado. There were crates – the rooms full of closed crates were not too bad, as a matter of fact, for crates must sit on one of their flat sides and the only way to add another one is on top of the first. The rooms where the crates had been plundered, however, were quite another matter. The lids lay about and packing straw covered the floor and miscellaneous items could be seen sticking out of the tops where they had been shoved to get to greater prizes below. Three vases perhaps would bar my way across the floor and a tottering heap of shirt boxes would threaten to fall as I edged past them to get to sets of saucepan lids tied together like castanets, the saucepans themselves nowhere to be seen, but an army of chimney pot nests – too small for any chimney I could imagine and perhaps that was why they languished here – would grab at my stockings as I left again.

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