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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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For Alec and I had decided on the journey to give Jack Aitken a shot at chivalry, a chance to save his wife the humiliation of confirming to us that she knew of his affair.
Less than a minute after Trusslove left us we heard Jack Aitken coming from the other side of the marble hallway and he entered the room like a rocket, ready for a fight, fists bunched and chin stuck forward, but evidently Trusslove had announced only me because when Aitken caught sight of Alec he stopped so abruptly that he had to take a step to the side to get his balance back again.
‘Mr Aitken,’ said Alec smoothly. ‘Let me introduce myself. My name is Osborne, I’m an associate of Mrs Gilver, and I’ve come along this morning to see if I can’t help matters run a little more easily than I heard they did yesterday.’ He had not rehearsed this speech in my hearing and I tried very hard to take it in my stride, but I was most deeply impressed and gratified by it and in danger of beaming, because I could not imagine anything more subtly menacing if I tried. ‘First of all, though,’ Alec was saying, ‘I must give you my most heartfelt condolences on the death of your daughter, sir. I am very sorry to have heard of such a loss.’ This only bewildered Jack Aitken even more. He came over to where we were at a much reduced pace and sat down in the chair Alec had placed for him, giving Bunty a perplexed look as he did so. ‘Mrs Gilver?’ Alec said, opening a courteous hand to me. ‘If you would care to continue.’
‘As I was saying yesterday, Mr Aitken,’ I said, taking up – I hoped – Alec’s smooth and unsettling tone, ‘I have strong reason to doubt that Mirren took her own life. I have some reason too to doubt that Dugald Hepburn did so. I intend to get to the bottom of it. If I am wrong, all well and good. I’m no busybody, no gossip. But if I am thwarted, Mr Aitken, if I am denied answers and threatened the way I was yesterday, I shall go to the police and hand the case to them. And they – as I am sure you will agree – are considerably less discreet than Mr Osborne and me.’
‘We were your clients,’ Jack Aitken said, staring horrified at me. ‘If this is how you treat your clients I’m surprised you ever have any.’ I tried not to let my face show that his words had hit home. Indeed, if anyone were ever to find out that Alec and I had come along like a pair of gangsters’ heavies and intimidated a grieving family this way after being told to leave them alone several times now, we would never work again and Gilver and Osborne’s business cards would go straight from the printers to the fire.
‘Now, when we spoke before, Mr Aitken,’ I said, ignoring him, ‘you told me your only misgiving about Mirren and Dugald marrying’ – there was the look again, as though he had bitten down on a bad tooth – ‘was that she was too young to marry at all. At twenty. You said you felt remorseful that your decision to forbid the match had led to Mirren’s suicide. And of course you would; how could you not? But you see, what puzzled me was that when I suggested it could be murder you . . . took against me, shall we say? Almost it seemed you would rather have your daughter’s death on your hands than on any other’s.’
Jack Aitken made a valiant effort to look composed, but most unfortunately for him he had taken a seat in the window and was sitting in a patch of golden sunlight so that his tie pin twinkled as his chest rose and fell with a series of quickened, panicky breaths he could not control. His voice though, when he finally spoke, was the same old repertory company routine as ever; the juvenile lead lightly tossing off his lines with half a mind on supper after the show.
‘I do apologise for yesterday, Mrs Gilver, I must ask you to forgive me.’ He put a hand to his brow and pressed it there. ‘I have never lost my temper that way in my life.’ Alec and I exchanged a glance. He had come into the room like a bull into the ring not three minutes ago. ‘I thought you were accusing me of killing her. My little Mirren. I saw red, I’m afraid.’
‘Why would you think such a thing?’ I asked him.
‘Because it was me you were telling,’ Jack Aitken said, with a sheepish shrug. ‘I thought to myself, why else would you seek me out and tell me unless it’s me you think did it?’
‘But I was only talking to you because you happened to come looking for your wife,’ I said. ‘And I was only talking to her because she happened to meet me. It was your mother I came to see.’ Before he could compose his next speech I came back at him. ‘And, actually, Mr Aitken, after you had railed at me for the accusation you say you thought I made against you, you railed even more about the idea that – here I quote you – “she would kill a child”.’
‘Once again, Mrs Gilver, I apologise. Such strain, such unbearable strain and I have not held up under it at all well.’ He paused as though for sympathy; receiving none, he continued. ‘Well, it was just that my poor dear Abby was there, with the gun, and was questioned and so of course I did think for a moment it was her you suspected. Gosh, I feel wretched that I might have implicated my dear wife in some way.’
‘You didn’t,’ I said. ‘Not until just now, I mean. Reminding us about the gun that way. “She would never kill a child” doesn’t sound at all like an accusation of a mother. Does it, Mr Osborne?’ Jack turned as Alec shook his head. ‘
A
child?’ I said. Jack’s head whipped back so he was once more facing me. ‘One doesn’t usually refer to a woman’s own daughter that way.’
‘I was very angry,’ Jack said. ‘Grief takes many forms.’
‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘So you’re sticking to your story, Mr Aitken, that you wouldn’t have minded Dugald Hepburn as a son-in-law a year or two hence and you think Mirren killed herself because she wouldn’t wait for him.’
He nodded, swallowing hard.
‘And what did you make of your mother-in-law’s hopes regarding Roger Lawson?’
Jack Aitken blinked and said nothing.
‘You did know, I assume, that Mary and Lady Lawson were hoping for an engagement?’
‘Roger Lawson?’ said Jack Aitken, then he nodded. ‘I see. Yes, I see. Well, that would have been a very satisfactory arrangement, I imagine.’ Alec and I could not help turning a little towards another to exchange another glance then.
‘Forgive me, Mr Aitken,’ I said, ‘but Mirren would have been the same age marrying Roger Lawson as marrying Dugald, wouldn’t she?’
‘Oh, yes, I suppose, in a sense,’ Jack said. I could see Alec frowning deeper still. Jack Aitken saw it too and from deep within himself he dug out another of his endless little sketch routines. He threw one leg over the other – most unnaturally since his fists were still in his pockets – and chuckled. ‘But you see if Mary organised it, the terms would be very different.’
‘A long engagement, you mean?’ Alec asked.
‘Not a doubt,’ Aiken said. ‘She’s a formidable woman of business as I’m sure you’ve noticed already. The financial arrangements would have been very secure.’
I could not begin to see what he meant; the financial repercussions of Mirren entering the Lawson family would have weighed very heavily on the Aitkens, surely.
‘Mirren was only twenty,’ Jack Aitken said. ‘At twenty-one she was to come into her share of Aitkens’. And because of the fact that Abby and I are cousins and neither of us have siblings surviving, quite a lot of Aitkens’ was coming to Mirren down a funnel, as it were. She would have had a controlling interest. Yes, after her birthday, she would have had outright control of us all. And if she were married her husband might have tried to influence her, but if she stayed unmarried until after she was twenty-one, she could dispose of her shares as she saw fit and
then
she could have married without her new husband . . .’ He took one of his hands out of his pocket and waved it in the air.
‘Scooping the lot,’ I finished and something in my tone brought the wary look back into Jack Aitken’s eyes. ‘So really,’ I said, ‘when you talked about your poor little Mirren being too young for marriage and not wanting to lose her, what you really meant was something quite different.’
‘Aitkens’ was built up out of nothing by the sweat of my father’s brow,’ said Jack. ‘And my uncle’s too. We owed it to their hard work and dedication. Our stewardship. Our honouring of their vision.’
‘Mirren did not owe it her life,’ I said. ‘No girl owes any institution
that
.’
Unbelievably, Jack Aitken gave Alec a man-to-man look then, as though to say that they two understood all about laying down one’s life for glory but that a mere woman could not be expected to feel the swell of pride. Alec returned a blank, dead gaze which made me want to hug him.
‘And besides,’ I said, ‘we know that wasn’t what troubled you about Mirren and Dugald. That was a remarkable tale you dreamed up, Mr Aitken, and you told it well, but we know exactly why you were against the marriage.’
He stared hard at me, without answering, probably trying to work out if I were bluffing.
‘Mrs Hepburn told us yesterday,’ said Alec. Jack Aitken did not turn to him and did not answer. He simply deflated and his eyes dropped until he was staring at the floor.
‘What we want to know, really, is if your wife found out.’ Again there was no answer. ‘If perhaps she told Mirren.’ Yet more silence. ‘If that perhaps was why Mirren—’
‘No!’ said Jack, his head jerking back up. ‘Abby doesn’t know. And Mirren certainly didn’t know. I told you, she was so kind to me the last weeks, she can’t have known about my . . . lapse.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I’d forgotten. Well, in that case, can you explain why Abby was against the marriage?’
‘She’s a dutiful daughter.’
‘And why she was so sure Mirren wouldn’t elope?’
‘So was Mirren,’ he said. The look that crossed his face was the genuine one I had seen once or twice before. When all was said and done, he was not a monster and his child had died. Not his only child, since he had at least one (and possibly four) with Hilda, but his child, all the same.
‘We won’t detain you any longer,’ I said, trying to speak kindly.
‘Let me see you out,’ Jack said, standing.
‘Oh, we’re not finished,’ said Alec, who had clearly not been entertaining any such sentimental thoughts as mine. ‘We’ll ring the bell for Trusslove when we’re ready to speak to your wife.’
‘You won’t tell her, will you?’ said Aitken.
‘Not if we can avoid it,’ I said. ‘I’m not in the business of doling out gratuitous pain.’
Jack Aitken crumpled at that – sagged anyway – he was no match for Alec and me. He nodded his head wearily and went on his way.
‘Well,’ I said when he was gone. ‘He is the worst and yet the most dedicated liar I have ever seen. One almost wants to laugh. Does he think we can’t see the joins, between one posture and the next? Are we supposed to forget the last mood when he clicks his fingers and moves on to the next one? Grieving father, man of the world, fierce protecting husband, loyal son . . .’
‘You can’t see whatever it is that Hilda Hepburn sees in him then?’
‘Not a bit,’ I said. ‘She called him as tricky as a bag of monkeys. She finds it entertaining but it makes me sick.’
‘I especially didn’t swallow the act of protective husband,’ said Alec. ‘Well done, Dandy, spotting the flaw. You’re right of course. He would have said “her child” or “her own child”. It was Hilda who was making him so fierce, not his poor wife.’
‘And speaking of his poor wife,’ I said, ‘shall I ring for Trusslove to fetch her? I have to know why she banned the marriage. I’ll never sleep again otherwise. And, besides, I’d like to ask her about what happened up on that landing. She was right there. If there’s any chance a murderer was there too, surely she’d know.’
The butler’s good, kind face clouded a little at our request but he went just the same.
‘This is quite a place,’ Alec said, looking around himself as we waited.
‘The house, you mean? Or the library?’
‘Well, both,’ Alec said, ‘but especially the library. If we can call it that. Where are the books?’
‘In those glass cases,’ I said. ‘All five hundred years old and worth a fortune. They must keep the almanacs and three-volume novels elsewhere.’
The door opened and Abigail Aitken came in.
‘Again?’ she said. ‘More questions? I’ve told you everything I know.’
Alec stood and guided her to a chair. Dear man, he could not help it; she looked even more frail today and she looked, too, as unkempt as Bella, her great mane of hair dull and greasy at the roots and the shawl which once more she hugged about herself giving off the kind of stale, sour odour I had only ever smelled in two-room cottages before.
‘My dear Mrs Aitken,’ I said to her, ‘I am more sorry than I can tell you, but I have no choice but to come again. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t try to get to the bottom of what happened here.’
There was just one quick glint in her eyes then.
‘You would be surprised, Mrs Gilver,’ she said. ‘You would be very surprised to find how able we are to live with ourselves. What choice do we have after all? Our eyes close at night and open the next day and we are still here. We breathe in and out and we drink water and eat food and our eyes blink and we shiver in the cold and squint in the sun and go on and on and on.’ Her head had fallen as she spoke but now she looked up at me again. ‘And after an eternity, we add up the days and it has been ten. Ten days since she died. Fifteen since I saw her alive. And we go on some more.’
BOOK: Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder
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