Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Today I was invited to an interview with Mrs Haddo—’

  ‘And your next of kin?’

  ‘—Dugald Hepburn’s grandmother—’

  ‘Or someone of good standing who might be persuaded to vouch for you?’

  ‘—who wanted my help in finding him.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the inspector. ‘You were asked along by two families who were having trouble with their youngsters and now, it’s safe to say, their youngsters will trouble them no more.’

  I gaped at him.

  ‘That’s an extraordinary insinuation,’ I said.

  ‘Two young people dead, the same stranger present both times, unexpected, uninvited. There’s extraordinary for you.’

  It was ludicrous, preposterous, as impertinent as it was baseless and actually, surely, not even coherent on its own terms when one faced it squarely. What had he just said?

  ‘Uninvited,’ I repeated to him.

  ‘Mrs Aitken told me last week that she didn’t ask you to the jubilee. She didn’t know why you were there that day at all, she said to me.’

  ‘And today?’

  ‘Nobody up in that tearoom could tell me what you were doing there.’

  I nodded. ‘Very well, let me see if I understand you, Inspector. After – one assumes – too many evenings in the cinema gallery, you are accusing me of killing two innocents and making it look like suicide?’ He said nothing. ‘And the central plank of my guilt is that I insinuated myself into the jubilee and the funeral tea without the families’ blessing and perhaps even against their wishes.’ Again he was silent. ‘So, tell me, am I supposed to have been hired specifically to kill the children? Are the Aitkens denying inviting me to cover their guilt? Wouldn’t they deny all knowledge of me in that case? Would they have invited me to the house, for luncheon?’ He frowned. ‘Or did they engage me in good faith to find Mirren and Dugald? Do I just happen – most unfortunately for them – to be some kind of homicidal maniac who killed them for reasons of my own?’

  ‘You were there,’ he said, in very firm tones although his expression was more troubled than I had yet seen it. ‘Both times. Right there. And it’s all just a bit too convenient for everybody, if you ask me.’

  I took my time before answering. It was not clear to me whether this man were a fiend or a fool but I knew I had to tread carefully around him.

  ‘Very many people were there when Mirren died,’ I said at last. ‘Most of us in the presence of most others. And who can say who was there when Dugald met his end, Inspector? We don’t know when it— Hah! Your young constable said he thought an hour or two, didn’t he?’

  ‘He’d no business sticking his—’

  ‘And I expect the doctor is making the same calculation right now if he hasn’t already. Well, then, two hours before I found Dugald’s body I was . . .’ I looked at my wristwatch. ‘. . . I was at Roseville at number one hundred and twenty Pilmuir Street, talking to Mrs Haddo.’

  ‘I’ll be asking her about all of this too,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, back to your dramatic conspiracy again,’ I said. The look that flashed across his face then startled me and at last I stopped thinking about my own plight and my outrage over it and began to think of it from the inspector’s point of view. That is, I tried to do so, but there was a great gaping hole in the middle of his theory and I had nothing with which to fill it.

  ‘What do you know?’ I said. My tone must have been very different, all inquisitiveness and no annoyance now. Was I imagining that he shifted a little in his seat? Could that be a sheen of sweat suddenly on his brow? I sat forward and stared hard at him. ‘You do know something, don’t you?’ I said. ‘Two young lovers kept apart, both go missing, a detective is employed to find them, one kills herself – as far as we all know – and then the other, broken-hearted, does the same. That story sounds well rounded enough to me. What is it you know that’s making you baulk at it?’

  ‘I’m the one asking the questions,’ he said, rather late in the day if anyone were keeping tally.

  ‘Do you have children?’ I said. ‘I have two. I cannot imagine a state of affairs where the death of my child could be – as you said – “convenient for everyone”.’

  He hesitated, as though considering.

  ‘Tell me,’ I breathed. ‘Perhaps I could help if you tell me.’

  He got as far as taking a breath, readying himself to begin speaking, and then we both jumped as a sharp rap sounded on the door. The inspector barked out a short word I did not understand – it sounded like the code a shepherd might use to keep his dogs in order – but it must have been an invitation to enter for the handle turned and the doctor stuck his head around the door. His eyes flared at the sight of me.

  ‘A minute of your time,’ he said to the inspector.

  ‘First reckonings?’ the inspector said. The doctor nodded.

  ‘You wait here, you,’ said the inspector to me as he rose. Perhaps I had been imagining the wavering towards sharing what he knew, then. Perhaps he had been gathering breath for a fresh onslaught of insults.

  They went outside and pulled the door closed behind them, but I was very gratified to see that the handle, perhaps exhausted by years of being wrenched and rattled by angry prisoners, had failed to latch. Silently, the door swung open about three inches and I could see the dark line of the inspector’s shoulder in the gap.

  ‘Broken neck, broken vertebrae, one leg, a wrist and minor abrasions,’ the doctor said.

  ‘Any sign of struggle before the fall?’

  ‘If you’re asking about handprints on his back,’ said the doctor, ‘there’s nothing. I’d say he either fell or jumped, facing the way he was going, about sixty feet, which would easily take him from the top landing to the roof of the lift on the ground floor.’

  ‘And can you tell me when?’

  ‘From the temperature of the body, in that cold lift shaft, assuming he hadn’t been taking any strenuous exercise just before he died, and before I’ve had a chance to look at his medical records,’ said the doctor – the inspector gave an audible sigh – ‘about half past two o’clock, I’d say.’

  I am sure I saw the inspector’s shoulder stiffen.

  ‘Half two?’

  ‘Between two and three, let’s say.’

  ‘Right,’ said the inspector. He glanced behind him, saw the door sitting ajar and closed it. I could just hear the sound of his footsteps and the doctor’s moving away.

  I smoothed my hair and resettled my hat, jabbing the pin in very firmly. Then I opened my bag and took out my gloves. I was still working them on – Grant is very fussy about well-fitting gloves and it takes me an age when she is not there to help me – when a constable knocked and entered, looking up at me from under his brows.

  ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’ he said. I stared pointedly at the cup on the table in front of me, which now had a disc of congealed milk floating on top and a dark orange tidemark round the edge.

  ‘You can get me a taxi,’ I said. He gave me a pained look and left again. I waited. Various footsteps passed along the corridor outside in either direction. I took my gloves off again. I put my bag back on the floor. Presently I moved the teacup down onto the floor too; the sight of it was beginning to repulse me and I was getting thirsty enough to wish I had drunk it while it was warm.

  I was starting to imagine that I could see a difference in the quality of the light, and to assure myself that I would not, could not possibly, be spending the night there when the same soft knock came again. The same constable, still looking at the ground, entered the room.

  ‘Inspector Smellie says you’re free to go, Mrs Gilver.’

  I let my breath go, picked up my bag and, standing, set the chair back tidily under the table. Then his words sank in.

  ‘Smellie?’ I almost shouted it. ‘Oh, how splendid. How absolutely perfect for him. No wonder, then.’

  Alec was waiting on the bench in the front office and he leapt to his feet when
he saw me.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he said. ‘I was hustled away and no one would tell a thing except that you were “helping with the inquiry”. What happened to you?’

  ‘Same as you, darling,’ I said. ‘Hustled away and grilled. And something very—’

  ‘Until now?’ said Alec, turning and glaring at the blameless desk sergeant. ‘I only gave my name and address and they spat me out again. I’ve been going absolutely frantic with worry and . . .’ He gave me a sheepish look.

  ‘And what?’ I said.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I rang Hugh. To see if you had rung him. See if he could tell me what was happening to you. He seemed a bit put out.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said and even as I said it, at that very moment, we heard the heavy front door of the police station being wrenched open and banging back on its hinges as it was flung wide. The same treatment was meted out to the inner door and Hugh, dressed in gumboots and britches, barrelled into the office as though he had been shot from a cannon. When he saw me he stopped dead. His nostrils were doing something I had never seen them do before today, turning white and thin as he dragged in every breath and flaring wide as he forced it out again.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said to him, willing myself not to take a step backwards. ‘They’ve let me go.’

  ‘They’ve just let you go now?’ he said. He was wrestling with his coat buttons and trying to get shaking fingers into his watch pocket. ‘Osborne rang me almost three hours ago. What the dickens is this about?’

  ‘They wanted to ask me a few things,’ I said. ‘Really, Hugh, perhaps we should discuss this at home.’ I had though, as I was soon to see, quite misread the nostrils and shaking fingers.

  ‘They wanted? They who?’ said Hugh, looking wildly around him. ‘Who did this? What’s the man’s name and where is he?’

  ‘Inspector Smellie,’ I said.

  ‘And where’s he hiding himself?’ Hugh’s voice, naturally quite loud to begin with and then honed by years of bellowing across moorland to beaters and ghillies, not to mention years of bellowing up and down staircases to wife and servants, was shaking the very rafters of Dunfermline police station now.

  In reply, a frosted glass door behind the counter opened and Inspector Smellie swept into the room, looking at Hugh with a measure of disdain similarly honed by the years he had spent despising ne’er-do-wells and cracking alibis.

  ‘Smellie?’ Hugh boomed. The inspector nodded. Then so fast that I hardly saw it happen, Hugh stepped up to the desk, drew back his right fist and drove it hard into the side of Inspector Smellie’s face. There was a sharp crack, a short silence and the inspector dropped out of view.

  Alec stepped forward to look over the countertop, Hugh swung round and left the way he had come, but the sergeant and I simply stood staring at one another.

  ‘Aren’t you going to arrest my husband for that?’ I said.

  A groan came from near the sergeant’s feet. He glanced down then looked back at me and mouthed his words almost without a sound.

  ‘Had it coming,’ he said.

  The inspector rose, clambering up with both hands clutching the edge of the counter. He worked his jaw to one side and then the other. It gave a couple of blood-curdling clicks but came to rest somewhere near the middle. Now it was time for me to be brave.

  ‘I won’t make any formal complaints about my treatment this afternoon,’ I said, ‘if you agree to call that quits.’

  ‘Get out and don’t come back,’ the inspector said. ‘If I see you again or hear your name . . .’ Then he turned on his heel and disappeared once more into the back regions. Stumbling a little, for this day’s alarums were mounting up by now, I allowed Alec to usher me out onto the street.

  Hugh was sitting bolt upright in the driving seat of his Rolls, staring straight ahead, looking like a chauffeur, but it was what I saw in the back seat that finally, after all that I had been through, brought tears to my eyes.

  ‘I brought your dog, Dandy,’ said Hugh. ‘Thought you might like its company on the way home.’

  ‘Oh Hugh!’ I said. ‘Oh Bunty! Oh!’

  ‘You tuck up in the back and Osborne can keep me company in the front here,’ Hugh said. ‘You came on the train, didn’t you, old man?’

  I climbed in and put my arms around Bunty’s neck, letting my tears fall on her and not even trying to stop the howling sobs that holding her wrenched out of me. Bunty started howling too; she is always a very gratifying companion to misery.

  By the time we had cleared the suburbs of the town, though, I was feeling rather better and I sat forward and slid open the little window.

  ‘Alec?’ I said. ‘I want to talk to you about a very strange hint I got from Smellie. Hugh, can you pull over and let Alec nip in the back, please?’

  ‘No,’ said Hugh. ‘Not tonight. You are going to rest and think pleasant thoughts after your ordeal, Dandy. And, besides, I believe I need Osborne to take over the wheel. It might be staved, but I don’t think so – I think that policeman’s jaw broke my finger for me.’

  6

  Hugh had never seemed so much like Nanny Palmer in all the years I had known him, but he was right. I was taken home, only very blearily aware of having dropped Alec off at Dunelgar on the way, and was deposited straight into bed without so much as my face being washed, since the bathrooms at Gilverton are amongst the chilliest bits of that chilly house and June is always the coldest month of all; we give up on the groaning, clanking radiators after Easter whenever it falls and the servants have an unshakeable penchant for throwing windows wide as part of their big spring cleaning. I sometimes think, in a spirit of mutiny, that if we hoarded the hard-won warmth of the winter fires a little more jealously we might, in those odd years when the weather is kind, float all the way to summertime with the house snug about us like a tippet, instead of spending May and June noting that every day a little more comfort seeps out of the old stone walls until at last it is colder inside than out in the garden.

  Mrs Tilling, briefed by Hugh one assumes although I cannot imagine the scene, sent up supper in the shape of egg and bread in a cup and a flask of cocoa and Grant, heaven be praised, left my clothes overnight on a chair. All in all, I do not think I have been so comprehensively coddled by the members of my household in the entire course of my life, and as the dire warnings always have it, it very quickly spoiled me: the next morning, lying stretching deliciously in my warm bed with Bunty rolling and moaning just as deliciously beside me, the thought crossed my mind that if only I had a telephone in my bedroom as they do in pictures from Hollywood I could ring Alec and begin to chew things over without the nasty preliminaries of cold floor, uncertain bath water, wet neck and draughty corridors. In my imagination, my bedroom was flooded with light, my bed jacket trimmed with swansdown and my bed itself was oval in shape and raised up on a platform like a sacrificial altar in a jungle clearing. I looked around and sighed. My bedroom faced due west and was as gloomy as a cave in the morning, my dressing gown hanging on the back of the door was best tartan felt with buttons from neck to ankle and my bed was one I rather suspected Hugh might have been born in; I had always been very careful not to find out for sure.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said to Bunty, who recognised my tone of voice and slithered onto the floor, stretched and shook herself all over, ‘what possesses a person to sleep on a platform? And how does one tuck in the sheets on an oval bed?’

  At my desk, after breakfast, safely back on the solid ground of real life – for Hugh had skipped off early to some distant part of the new estate which was his current pleasure ground, thus avoiding any unseemly affectionate gratitude the way that a small boy will avoid a grandmother’s kiss or a mother’s scrub with a wetted hanky, and Mrs Tilling had sent up only porridge because ‘I wouldn’t want another egg so soon after my late supper, surely’ – I noticed two telegrams amongst my morning’s budget and fell on them.

  I read one – Appreciate no mention of visit yesterday. No case now. F
iona Haddo – and then the other – Send bill at convenience. No further need for services. Mrs N.L. Aitken, laid them side by side and stared hard at both for so long that Bunty had time to fall into the deep, snoring sleep for which she needs perfect silence. When finally I stirred myself to reach for the telephone, it rang just as my hand touched it, and I smiled.

  ‘You woke Bunty,’ I said.

  ‘I left it until now so as not to wake you,’ said Alec. ‘How are you this morning, darling?’

  ‘Itching,’ I said. ‘Listen to these telegrams and see if you don’t start itching too.’

  He was silent for a moment after I read them.

  ‘Who’s N.L. Aitken?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Mary. Mrs Ninian. Is that all you’ve got to say?’

  ‘Sorry. I can’t see whatever you’re seeing, I’m afraid. Lay it out for me.’

  Now this gave me a moment’s pause, for it is more usually the case that Alec’s thoughts and mine march in step, or at least stagger along in a three-legged race together. If he had not leapt to the same conclusion as had I, perhaps I had been wrong to.

  ‘Very well,’ I began. ‘All right. Yesterday Fiona Haddo thought that Mirren had been murdered. Now that murder has cost her beloved Googie his life, wouldn’t she be more keen than ever to get to the bottom of things?’

  ‘No,’ said Alec. ‘She was spurred into action by worry about Googie – do we really have to call him that? – when he disappeared, in case harm came to him. Well, now harm has come and there’s nothing to fight for.’

  ‘What about justice?’ I said. ‘And why would she say there was no case? That’s very different from saying she wanted the case dropped, isn’t it?’

  ‘It was a telegram, Dandy. She was trying to save words.’

  ‘And as for the other one,’ I went on, ‘could anything read more like a satisfied customer whose object has been achieved?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘No further need for your services, please send your bill? Sounds like job well done, thank you and goodnight, to me.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Dandy?’ Alec said. ‘You can’t subject telegrams to literary criticism and hang people for them. I can easily imagine that both families want only to close the shutters and never speak to another soul about any of it ever again.’