Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder (22 page)

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Authors: Catriona McPherson

BOOK: Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder
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There were still some signs that once upon a time these rooms had been staff quarters, as I had heard Bella tell me: fireplaces and dark-stained edges to the floors where linoleum or even rugs had once been put down. Now though there were only bales of mothy tablecloths rolled up like giant cocoons and propped in corners, a bouquet of nasty, shiny bed quilts all squashed together, each one a rosette, and stuffed in the space below a table, its legs wrapped in cardboard and tied with string and another one upside down on top. I glanced at the tables – pickled walnut, it looked to be, but not too successfully pickled because the worm had got into their underside, and little piles of orange dust revealed why they had been forgotten here. I found myself tutting. Those shiny quilts, nasty as they were, would be showered with woodworm dust, not to mention damp too, and they would have fetched – I glanced at one of the price tickets – ten shillings and ninepence apiece in their day, which seemed rather a lot and I assumed they had not been here as long as the yellowed tablecloths nor the millinery skeletons I found in the room next door, poor things, stiffened gauze mushrooms in grey and white and brown, waiting for the winding of silk, the ribbon band and the sprays of cherries which would never come now, since hats like mushrooms had gone the way of pouchy wedding gowns with loops of whipped cream hanging down.
And there was more of it, and more still; in the next room, the sudden macabre sight of plaster legs, arms and heads sticking all anyhow out of a heap of dismembered mannequins, looking like the fall of the rebel angels, and next door again countless drums of Dundee marmalade with ominously bulging tops and a sliding heap of India-rubber hot water bags with their stoppers swinging free and the ink on their labels all run into nonsense from wetting. But at least the smell was not too bad anywhere, just dust and a little damp, a smoky, almost bacony whiff in the room with the hot bottles and marmalade, burnt rubber probably, and the equally unmistakable pungent odour of lanolin hanging around a sizeable room where I found more woollen leggings than one could credit ever being purchased together at whatever wholesaler had supplied them; more woollen leggings, almost, than one might guess had ever been knitted up in the history of the northern hemisphere that had invented them; more, certainly, than I could have imagined in my childhood, when I was forced to wear the horrid itchy things from October to April, buttoned firmly to my vest and fastened under my instep with those woollen straps which somehow managed at once to be so tight they made my feet ache and too loose to stop the hated leggings creep up my legs so that the ankle cuff – the itchiest part of all – chafed at my plump calves and brought me many a tut and spank for scratching.
And another door and another room and I stopped on the threshold, disbelieving. This place was empty. A small room of perhaps eight feet square, with sloping ceilings and a tiny dormer window, a fireplace with an empty grate, a washbasin with a cold tap in one corner and nothing else at all. Not so much as a wisp of packing straw and it smelled of floor soap. I walked around it, wondering, and then understanding. If I had had to choose a little room to spend some days in, out of all these rooms up here, I should have chosen this one with the basin and the window. And if I had wanted to hide any signs of someone having been here, I would have emptied the room out completely and scrubbed it with soap until all traces of its occupation were gone.
I poked my head around the doors of the few remaining rooms for the sake of completeness and then began to retrace my steps to the landing. Having been so fixed upon the rooms’ contents and not at all upon the labyrinthine layout of the accommodations, however, I took a wrong turn once or twice, confidently opening a door expecting a corridor and finding the dead-end of an inner chamber instead. When it happened for the third time, I stopped, stood quite still, squeezed my eyes shut and tried to
feel
the position of the building around me, the street and the alley, and the afternoon light from the west. Hugh, with his hands on his hips, used to stand and glare at me on foggy hilltops and in drizzly forests, back in the early days when he believed I would grow a passion matching his for sloshing about the countryside in the freezing rain. It doesn’t matter if the sun isn’t shining, he would say, shut your eyes and
feel
north. Feel it! I would shut my eyes tight and
feel
cold, wet, tired, hungry and sorry I had ever agreed to the outing, but north escaped me.
I opened my eyes and shuffled round so that I was facing into the corner of the room – I suppose I thought that since north was always drawn as a point there was more chance of
feeling
it with the help of a corner straight ahead. I closed my eyes again, but then snapped them open, overwhelmed suddenly by a wave of nostalgia. This room was full of old shoeboxes, rather good quality ones too: cardboard but covered over with that shiny coating of Rexine which makes cheap suitcases look a little like leather. I had forgotten that good shoeboxes used to be made that way and the sight of them took me straight back to childhood and the floor of my grandmother’s clothes closet where I used to spend happy hours unhooking the catches on such boxes, lifting off the lids, working open the drawstring of the chamois bags and gloating over the fabulous objects inside them, patent, satin, velvet, silk and that stiffened lace which I loved best of all. Every year on our visit I would prise out the shoetrees – made to match and almost as richly bejewelled as the evening slippers themselves – and slide in my foot, thinking almost there, sometime soon, until the year when I looked at the slippers with a sinking feeling, removed the tree and worked my toes under the strap, knowing that I had missed my chance and would never wear one of these glorious little confections now. And actually, on closer inspection I could see that they were rather turned up at the toes – matching trees or no – and the paler ones showed the signs of clumsy dancing partners scuffing at them. I had closed the boxes for the last time and turned away, tramping back through the house in my sensible brogues, very much the ugly sister.
Perhaps, though, these boxes in Aitkens’ attic were left over because they were unusual sizes; perhaps I might find a pair to fit me, or almost as good, find a pair miles too big and feel like a child again. The nearest box on the top of the pile was not even properly fastened, the little string hanging down and a corner of chamois peeping out. I stepped over and lifted the lid.
My first thought was that I would never again berate myself for being a shallow, silly woman concerned only with trivial fripperies and indifferent to the solid meat of life, for there in the shoebox, stuffed between the two chamois leather shoe bags, balled up and half inside out, clearly hastily removed and just as hastily hidden, was a pair of gloves; the gloves I had given up all thoughts of finding.
They were driving gauntlets, brand new and with their price ticket still pinned to one cuff. I held up the paraffin lamp and scrutinised them without touching, looking for a spot of anything that might be blood, but so far as I could tell the gloves were unmarked. They were that very pale mouse colour which driving gloves tend to be and there was no possibility that a drop of blood would not be seen if it had fallen there. I leaned in close and sniffed, but there was nothing to smell except, faintly, unused leather. Even if hands had worn these gloves to fire a revolver, though, would there be a trace of cordite more than a week later? Gingerly, I lifted out the right-hand glove and smoothed it back into shape for closer inspection. It was a man’s glove, that was clear; not one woman in a hundred would need gloves this size, but that did not mean that Abigail had not worn it on her little hand while she shot her daughter, since the last thing she would have wanted was to be struggling with tight gloves in the few seconds she had to remove them, hide them and sit back down with the gun. Still, I could not believe that she had done all this, because even now I could not see so much as a pinprick of blood or a smudge of gunpowder anywhere on the article, front or back, cuff to fingertip, nowhere. I lifted the left glove out, smoothed it too and subjected it to the same close study, practically touching my nose against it. Again there were no bloodstains and no black marks, but this glove was not so pristine as its mate somehow; it seemed a little bedraggled here and there, with flat spots on the nap of the kidskin, watermarks I should have said if guessing. Might there have been tiny spots of blood which had been wiped away leaving water stains behind them? But Abigail Aitken would not have had time and if she had come back later to do it, would she not have simply taken the gloves away? Would not anyone?
Taking care to make a proper job of it, I crumpled the gloves back up and replaced them in the box then, resisting the temptation to look over my shoulder before I did so, I wiped the edge of the box with my coat sleeve where I had touched it and left the way I had come.
Going right instead of left this time, I found myself out on the landing very near the lift, but on the far side from the stairway – I had evidently come around in a loop from where I had begun. Quickly I re-entered the little ante-room, put the lamp back where I had found it and stole away down the stairs, listening at every bend in case I should hear someone coming. I managed to descend all the way and emerge into the back of the ‘fancy notions’ department at the ground floor without being spotted and I hurried towards the front foyer and the revolving door; the discovery of the gloves had put all else out of my mind.
‘That you off then, madam?’ said the doorman as I approached him and entered the revolving door. He gave it a nicely judged shove, allowing me to pass through without effort of my own but not causing me to rush to keep up with its revolution. While I was inside he popped out through the ordinary swinging door and was ready to meet me again on the pavement. ‘Can I see if I can flag you down a taxi?’
‘Thank you,’ I said, giving him a half-crown tip, ‘but my own little motorcar is round at the yard.’ He frowned down at his hand, wondering perhaps what the half-crown was for in that case. The answer was that I had remembered my plan to grill him. One of many questions troubling me was how Dugald Hepburn had got into the store when it was closed. ‘I felt for you most dreadfully about yesterday,’ I said, with a nod at the coin, to explain it.
‘Yesterday, madam?’ he echoed. ‘Me?’
‘Being denied the funeral,’ I said ‘And then such a dreadful thing happening while you were here all on your own.’
‘While I was alone here, madam?’ he said. ‘What would that be, then?’
‘Of course, you won’t have heard,’ I answered, kicking myself a little.
‘Heard what?’ said the doorman. ‘What’s happened now? Where’s it going to end?’
‘No, not something new,’ I said, laying a hand on his sleeve; he really was becoming quite agitated at the thought of fresh horrors, ‘only that the police surgeon reckoned poor Dugald died at half past two.’ The doorman frowned, calculating, and then his eyes opened wide.
‘Dear God!’ he said. ‘Half past two? That’s when the poor lad jumped?’ He turned around and looked back into the store. ‘I was right here, right in there, sitting on the chair there, waiting for the first of the staff to come back again after.’
‘A dreadful thing,’ I said.
‘I was that close,’ he said, and he took off his peaked cap and held it in both hands, newly struck by the fact of the death and needing to mark it once more.
‘No one could have expected you to do anything,’ I said. Of course, saying this to the man put exactly the opposite idea into his troubled mind, as I had hoped it would. (What a flinty soul a detective must have to be a successful one.) He began to talk nineteen to the dozen without a trace of artifice or self-regard.
‘I didn’t know a thing about it,’ he said. ‘I never heard a thing. You’d have thought I would, wouldn’t you, madam? But I can assure you I never. Not a single sound. Or else I’d have been away seeing what it was.’
‘You didn’t hear any movement on the stairs or doors opening?’ I asked. ‘Only one does wonder how he got in if the place was locked up.’
‘Maybe he came in the day before when we were open,’ said the doorman. I nodded absently, but I knew that would not do. Fiona Haddo had been very clear about when Dugald had fled Kelso. ‘I can tell you one thing – there was no jemmying locks or climbing in windows during the service, madam. It was as silent as the grave. I even thought that to myself, sitting there. As silent as the grave – and Miss Mirren going into hers and only twenty. On a Thursday afternoon too – that’s usually our busiest day in the week barring Saturday because so many other folk in the town have half-day closing and come in to Aitkens’. I never heard so much as a pin drop. Much less— Of course my hearing’s not as sharp as it was. I’m sixty-five this August and the wife’s never done telling me to turn the wireless down before we getting next door complaining.’ He turned again and looked in through the glass door. ‘A younger man might have—’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Absolutely not.’ It was time for a measure of – belated – humanity. ‘His neck was broken. He would have been dead instantly. There’s nothing you could have done.’ He looked somewhat mollified at this and I should have left it there. ‘Besides, I daresay there was nothing to hear no matter how sharp one’s ears. The lift shaft is a goodly way from the front door and there would only have been very dull sounds anyway. Muffled thumps at most, unless he screamed as he fell, which would resound right enough, so he can’t have.’ The poor doorman physically blanched at that. I pressed a further half-crown into his hand, squeezed his sleeve again and scuttled off with my head down, loathing myself and all my doings.

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