Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder

by Catriona McPherson

  I smiled uncertainly, not sure if she really meant to suggest that onlookers would mistake me for a twenty-year-old girl and let the awkward absence go unremarked.

  ‘And if anyone else is going to be in the first car it should be Jack,’ said Bella Aitken, sotto voce to her sister-in-law. She was not quite above all scrabbling for precedence then; she had an eye on her son’s deserts as the Aitken heir.

  ‘I’ll be very happy to,’ I said to Abigail, judging that more might be learned in a journey with her than with her mother. ‘Good to see you’ve decided to go after all.’ For she had substituted a short linen coat for the shawl and had most of the misrule which reigned in place of her crowning glory hidden with a straw hat, but it had to be admitted that these efforts seemed to have sapped her and she was paler than ever and wavering a little as she stood there.

  ‘Good,’ said Bella Aitken. ‘Right then, Mary.’ She too had tidied herself a little; the pins were gone, although the curls they had been holding were still in place in a row across her head under the brim of a hat which looked to be an old friend. The carpet slippers were gone too and she stumped away across the hall in a stout pair of gunmetal-grey shoes which managed to make her feet look bigger than ever.

  A pair of liveried chauffeurs had brought around to the front door two large motorcars of some American provenance. They had their tops thrown back in that way that made me think of perambulators on a sunny day in the park and there were quantities of mauve and gold ribbon festooned around them in the manner of royal carriages. Mary Aitken gave another of her lizard smiles as she saw them and then she frowned.

  ‘Those rosettes,’ she said. ‘They’re covering the coats of arms. Couldn’t we tuck them up somehow?’ She began to shove some trailing ends of ribbon up away from the plaques on the motorcar doors – peacock feathers and shoals of little fishes, I saw.

  ‘For the Lord’s sake,’ said her sister-in-law. ‘You’ll have the whole lot undone if you’re not wary.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone will be wondering who we are, Aunt M,’ said Jack, who was standing on the steps with his hat on the back of his head staring rather aghast at the motorcars. His eyebrows rose even further as one of the chauffeurs climbed down and began fixing little purple flags to the wing mirrors. I cleared my throat and pulled my mouth down hard at the corners, trying not to smile.

  ‘And you’ll go the right way,’ said Mary Aitken to one of the chauffeurs. ‘The way I told you.’

  ‘Round and up the wynd, madam,’ said the man.

  ‘Nice and slow,’ said Mary and turned to let Trusslove hand her in. Bella opened the other door and climbed in herself. Jack handed Abigail in, then me and then let himself in beside me. I shuffled over to the middle of the seat, nudging up against Abigail, an old chagrin smouldering in my bosom. At home, going visiting or to church in our landau, my mother and father always faced forward and the three of us sat with our backs to the driver, my younger brother and sister each with a side seat and a good view of what was passing – for my mother was as sentimental about early childhood as she was practical about travel-sickness – and me stuck in the middle with not enough room for my feet and nothing to look at except my mother looking back at me. It cannot have been for long, despite the fierce impression of injustice it had left upon me, because I was eight by the time my brother was old enough to sit up on his own and he went off to school when I was thirteen. After that, even in the holidays, there was no jostling, because my parents gave up the tradition of taking a footman with them and Edward instantly promoted himself to the seat beside the driver and a chance of holding the reins.

  I blinked. It had been years since I had thought about that old feud over the carriage seats; these Aitkens, these fifty-year-old Aitkens still under their mothers’ rule, were a bad influence on me.

  ‘Clearly,’ I began, as soon as we were under way, pulling out of the drive onto the shady quiet of Abbey Park Place, ‘you have reservations about the alliance with the Hepburn family, but might I just ask, is the boy – this Dugald – is he himself unsatisfactory? Some kind of a wrong ’un?’

  Abigail continued to stare glumly over the side of the motorcar door, as though she hadn’t heard me, but Jack himself shook his head. He also recrossed his legs and wiped his hands one against the other and in all could hardly have done any more to shake my words away from him.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Not so far as I know.’

  His tone did not invite further questioning and so I was quiet for a while. We were taking a most senseless route to the High Street, setting off in quite the wrong direction, and I had already toured Dunfermline once today. Still, it gave me some thinking time and this tour had been planned by one who knew the town’s best side; the low, looping road which meandered past portions of ruined palace or cloister was extremely scenic, even with the Abbey glowering down from our other side as we skirted it, much to be preferred to the narrow streets of hat shops and cigar merchants I had found. All too soon, though, we turned and began to make our way hat-shop-ward once more. I tried again with Jack Aitken.

  ‘The objections to his family must be weighty ones indeed, then,’ I said. ‘If it’s not the boy himself.’ I could not imagine the objections, truth be told. The hints at luncheon had been lurid but unhelpful and the couple seemed beautifully matched to me: the son of a merchant and the daughter of a merchant, of the same class, from the same town.

  ‘Ha ha ha,’ said Jack, although I had said nothing very clever or witty. ‘My mother and aunt are pretty fierce about Aitkens’. Well, I mean, look at all this.’ He flicked at a piece of the mauve and gold ribbon and shook his head again. ‘Comes from being left to run it on their own, I suppose you’d say.’

  We were turning into the High Street now and I could see that there were people collected along the pavement’s edge. More of the mauve and gold flags had been handed out and the onlookers were waving them and cheering us as we swept by.

  ‘And here we are,’ I said, spying once more the frolicking mannequins in the shop window. ‘Those tableaux are quite something, I must say. Your mother and aunt have excelled themselves.’ I had gathered myself to alight but the motorcar slid past the last of the windows without stopping.

  ‘That’s Hepburns’,’ Jack Aitken said.

  ‘Gosh,’ I replied, craning back to look at the sand and hampers. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Talk about upstaging,’ he went on. ‘Aunt Mary must be spitting if she noticed them, but no doubt she was looking the other way.’

  ‘Quite right,’ I said. ‘Very provoking. So, is it professional rivalry that’s the trouble?’ I hoped that he would not suddenly shut like a clam under my probing. A bad liar who thinks he is a good one is treasure trove to an investigator and Jack Aitken had more baseless belief in the misleading power of his own charm than anyone I had met in recent memory.

  ‘For my part, I just don’t want my little girl to grow up so fast,’ he said. He was wiping his hands on his trouser legs now. ‘She’s not ready for marriage. And marriage to a boy of just twenty who’s no more ready for it than she . . .’ He shook his head again, more slowly, and made a fond sort of laughing noise by breathing down his nose in short bursts. ‘I was twenty-two and that was young enough.’

  ‘When she comes home, then,’ I said, ‘when I find her, perhaps you could persuade them into a long engagement. A twenty-year-old boy is far too young, I agree.’

  ‘No.’ Abigail had spoken without turning, but she turned now. ‘Mirren doesn’t want to marry Dugald Hepburn any more. She changed her mind.’

  ‘She told you that?’ I said. Jack Aitken had craned forward to look past me at his wife.

  ‘She doesn’t want to marry him,’ Abigail said again. ‘She wouldn’t marry him for a king’s fortune. She’d rather—’ She bit off her words, turned away and shifted even further round in her seat so that her husband and I could not see so much as the curve of her cheek.

  Matters took on a positively surr
eal tinge halfway up the High Street (and, incidentally, about two minutes’ drive from Abbey Park) when we pulled up at Aitkens’. The flag-wavers were four and five deep here and were held back by more gold rope, of which the Emporium seemed to have an endless supply. A pair of . . . one can only call them nymphs . . . in mauve togas with gold leaves in their hair were handing out sweets to children and paper tickets to adults, and a doorman whose finery would not have shamed the Dorchester stood ready to open the motorcar doors and help us down.

  ‘God in heaven,’ said Jack Aitken and, although I did not answer, privately I agreed.

  Mary and Bella stood waiting on a piece of carpet which had been laid down beside the revolving door, Mary looking around the gathered crowd with fierce triumph in her eyes and Bella dealing with the horror of it all by gazing into the middle distance and pretending she was not really there. I stood watching the crowds clamouring for the paper tickets, waving them in triumph once they had secured one.

  ‘They are fifty-shilling notes, Mrs Gilver,’ Mary said, drawing up to me. I glanced sharply at the nearer of the two nymphs. ‘Let Mrs Gilver see, Lynne.’ The girl handed me one of the slips, on which had been embossed a large gilt 50 over a ground of the inevitable mauve feathers and little fish.

  ‘And these are . . . ?’ I said, turning the ticket over in my hands. ‘These are currency?’

  ‘Just for the day,’ said Mary.

  ‘Two pounds and ten shillings?’ I said. ‘That’s extremely generous of you.’

  Bella at my side gave a snort of laughter. ‘Not currency exactly, Mrs Gilver. More like tokens. Redeemable against a—’

  ‘—select range of specially chosen jubilee notions,’ Mary finished in a hissing whisper. There was a very impressive closed motorcar drawing up now. Perhaps the Provost, I thought, or Lady Whatsername; in any case, Mary Aitken glided forward to offer a greeting. Bella leaned towards me.

  ‘—job lot of pre-war overstock we’d never shift any other way,’ she said. ‘Some of it might be fifty years old, I daresay. Lord, here’s the Provost too! Let’s go in now and dodge them. Mary won’t want me diluting her, anyway.’

  Aitkens’ Emporium had an inside to match its parade of windows and all the more so for being still and empty, poised for the show about to begin. The floor of the foyer was marble, or at any rate good enough linoleum well-laid over stone to look and feel like marble as one crossed it; the counters when we reached them were mahogany – or oak perhaps, stained with something treacly – and, as well as the vastness and splendour of the Haberdashery Department where we were standing with its scores and hundreds of little drawers and slides everywhere, there were archways leading away in three directions hinting at even more. In one back corner there was a staircase of some width and grandeur and in the other was what I came to understand as Aitkens’ pride and joy, Aitkens’ unanswerable poke in the eye to Hepburns’: the lift.

  It was a very impressive one. The metalwork of the shaft doors was as richly decorated and as glittering as a birdcage from a lady’s boudoir and the way the shining polished lift carriage itself could just be glimpsed, nestled inside, put me in mind for some reason of an eye twinkling behind lowered lashes, especially when the light shifted, as it was doing now.

  I glanced upwards to discover how the light could shift inside a building and saw that there was no upper floor above us, here at the centre of the store; only galleries around an atrium. Over our heads, at least three floors up, glass panes formed a roof, but a cat’s cradle of ribbons and banners had been slung from gallery to gallery below, cutting out the sun which otherwise would have drenched us in warmth and light. It was, I supposed, these banners stirring in a draught which had sent shadows flitting and scattered the light.

  As I brought my gaze back down again I saw that, despite the hush, Bella Aitken and I were no longer alone on the floor of the atrium. Behind each of the maybe mahogany counters, girls and women had come to stand silently to attention, as uniform as so many tin soldiers. That is, some of them were freshly minted and some battle-scarred but they were turned out of just one mould. They were dressed, encased is perhaps a better way of phrasing it, in the kind of simple black frocks easily run up at home from a paper pattern and I wondered if they were handed bolts of cloth and told to make their own uniforms like the housemaids in my mother’s day. If so, then for the jubilee they had evidently been given extra rations. Some of them had run up ruffled collars, some had fashioned corsages, the less adept had plumped for sashes and bows in their hair, but one and all had touches of mauve and gold. I felt that I would see mauve and gold in my sleep that night, swimming and fluttering before my eyes in fish and feather form.

  Little did I know what sight would indeed flash behind my closed eyelids that night and for many nights to come. In the first of my detecting adventures, one which I would hardly call a case since I slipped into it and was bobbing out of my depth before I had realised it had begun, I remember that there was an air of dread hanging around like the pall from a snuffed tallow candle, and it began long before the events which should have instigated it. I was almost tempted to call it a premonition once it had come true, but I resisted. For surely it is the mark of a fool to trumpet premonitions once they have been fulfilled. Surely, unless one has taken out a half-page announcement in advance, one really does have to keep one’s lip firmly buttoned afterwards too.

  I digress. Alec is wont to murmur, ‘Yes, darling, you do rather,’ in response to that comment and so I try not to give him an opening. My point is that while in the first case there was dread far in advance of anything dreadful, the beginning of the Aitken affair – a young girl missing, her mother awash with unspoken terrors and her father so well-hidden behind his own secrets that all one could really see was the hiding – found me no more than intrigued and diverted by the prospect before me. Mary and Bella Aitken were entertaining, the jubilee promised more entertainment still of one sort or another, Dunfermline’s holiday mood was catching (and I was glad to know that flags and bunting still stirred a small corner of my girlish soul; of course, one must put away childish things as one is bidden, but I would not like to be quite beyond the reach of bunting).

  Nor was I quite past being seduced by a wrapped and beribboned parcel, and the ‘pre-war overstock’ – I had been impressed by the way the term slipped from Bella’s tongue – was heaped up in tantalising abundance like fruit outside a greengrocer’s, except that instead of being in chip baskets at hip height – at Dalmatian’s muzzle height as I had had brought home to me one day when Bunty snaffled a ripe pear in Dunkeld’s High Street – the boxes were set out upon high circular stands, something like roulette wheels.

  ‘Lord above us,’ said Bella, ‘where did she unearth these, I wonder.’

  ‘What are they?’ I asked.

  ‘From the old food hall, I think,’ Bella said. ‘Repainted for the day. They must have been mouldering away up in the attics for twenty years at least.’

  I tipped my head back to look at the ceiling again. I had never thought of a department store as a place which would have attics.

  ‘From the old days when the clerks lived in,’ said Bella. ‘A warren of nasty little cells and now they’re stuffed to the rafters with whatever Mary thinks she’ll find a use for one day.’ She stirred the heap of boxes in the roulette wheel and shook her head, laughing. They were, to be frank, a little battered-looking, slightly worn on the corners and slightly warped with damp or age. The ribbons tied around them, needless to say, were new. ‘At a guess,’ said Bella, ‘I’d say these are probably braces, or collars, or possibly sock suspenders. Jubilee notions!’

  ‘Mrs Aitken does seem to have a great deal of . . . um . . . zeal for . . . um . . .’ I said, a new low even for me, who am often pressed into impromptu diplomacy and found wanting. Bella Aitken gave me a conspiratorial look and leaned in closer before speaking again.

  ‘Forty-eight years since her ascension and she still can’t believe her luck,’ sh
e said, in a murmur. I felt my eyes widen, but did not have time to pursue the hint, because Mary Aitken was crossing the shop floor towards us – the very shop floor from which I inferred she had been elevated to her current reign. She brought with her two groups of honoured guests. One group consisted of the Provost, red-faced, beaming, barrel-chested and in all his robes and chains, his good lady wife, equally red-faced, equally barrel-chested, in a costume and wearing a smile which put her husband’s ceremonial garments and expression effortlessly in the shade, and two youths who must be their sons – plain, round, tricked out in boys’ brigade uniforms for reasons best understood by their mama, and both with the same black hair as the Provost, flattened to their heads with such quantities of pomade that they appeared to be wearing little Bakelite skullcaps, with not a suggestion of individual strands of hair.

  The other party were of quite a different order but were no less exemplars of their type; Lady Lawson and her three sons were very tall, very thin and had that worn, straggly look which comes either from avoiding any appearance of effort or from real hardship, gently being borne. I guessed that the Lawson specimens were probably impoverished rather than too grand to be seen trying; for why else would they be here if not for the buns?

  There was a flurry of introductions and then a repetition of them all as Jack and Abigail arrived with yet more favoured guests. I nodded and smiled and was aware that all around us the haberdashery floor and the galleries above were filling with onlookers. The flag-wavers, the bearers of fifty-shilling tokens, were jostling for a view with much respectful whispering and smothered giggles, but it was with some surprise I realised that what they were jostling for a view of was us, standing there in the middle of the floor. There did not seem to be any dais or other indication that this spot was one where a drama was to be played, or so I thought until I saw, wound around a brass hook screwed into the edge of one of the old food-hall wheels, the tasselled end of a cord. Its other end was lost amongst the banners high above us. Balloons, I thought, or possibly confetti; someone would pull it and the jubilee would begin.