Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘And Dugald too?’

  ‘Dear boy.’

  I was intrigued to hear her say so since the family had spurned him as a suitor.

  ‘Did you know Dugald Hepburn then?’ I asked her.

  She shook her head. ‘Not at all. I only met him once and even that was not really a meeting. I just saw him with Mirren. They didn’t even know they had been seen. But he must be – must have been – a dear boy, mustn’t he? He couldn’t live without her. Didn’t want to. He must have been a very different sort from the rest of them.’

  ‘The Hepburns?’

  She put her hand up to her mouth as if trying too late to stop the words she had already spoken.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said that. They are a cruel family. Heartlessly cruel – it’s easy to be heartless when you are so carefree – and I’m envious of them, but I shouldn’t let myself turn cruel too, in my envy.’

  ‘What is it you envy, Mrs Aitken?’ I said.

  ‘The children,’ said Abby simply. ‘Hilda Hepburn has three children. Three more, I mean; three still. And Mrs Hepburn had five when all’s said and done and she had the four grandchildren too. Dugald and the girls. But I only had Mirren and if I hadn’t had Mirren I would have had no one. And my mother as well, because I was an only child. Bella had two more sons – Lennox and Arthur – but they were killed in the war and so Mirren was all that any of us had.’ Then she caught her lip in her teeth. ‘I shouldn’t be saying this. You shouldn’t take any notice of what I’m saying, Mrs Gilver.’

  With that she stood, picked her way over the roughish ground back to the drive and hurried away in the direction of the house. I followed her as far as the driveway and stood looking after her. She had her head down and her arms clutched about her body and was moving at a kind of harried trot – straight into the arms of her husband, who it seemed had come looking for her. As he had before, that day in the library, he caught her in a strong grip and pulled her close to him. I was too late to duck out of sight and he stood comforting his wife, staring at me with his head high like a sentry, a grim and unreadable look upon his face.

  I could hardly wave goodbye and leave, nor could I approach the mournful little marital scene and join in, so I stood there, kicking at the beech cobs under my feet until, with a fond pat and a little pinch of the chin such as one would give to a child, Jack Aitken sent his wife back to the house and came to join me.

  ‘What have you been saying to her?’ he asked when he was close enough to talk without shouting. ‘She’s very, very upset about something.’

  I stared at him. Of course a mother, a week after the death of her only child, was ‘upset’ and surely her husband, the child’s father, should not wonder what about, should he? As though he read my thoughts, Jack Aitken cleared his throat and rubbed at his face with the side of his hand.

  ‘I was just making quite sure that she didn’t want me to carry on trying to piece together exactly what happened with Dugald and Mirren,’ I said. His eyes flashed, black and sparkling, and for some reason the thought which popped into my head was that John Aitken must have been a handsome man, for Jack was quite unlike poor Bella. ‘Would you like me to carry on, Mr Aitken?’

  ‘I thought Mary . . .’

  ‘Called me off?’ I supplied. ‘Yes, she did. Twice. She most certainly doesn’t want any more meddling. But I thought it might be a comfort to a mother to know as much as possible. A father too.’

  ‘And what did Abby say?’ he asked, looking over his shoulder towards where she had gone.

  ‘Plenty,’ I replied. ‘Mostly about the Hepburns.’ He tried to look interested and unconcerned but failed rather spectacularly, a muscle dancing in one cheek and those black eyes wide open again.

  ‘She barely knows them,’ he said. ‘Couple of committees, a few church bazaars, that kind of thing. We don’t fraternise.’ He bit this off rather and was right to do so, since the non-fraternising of the Aitkens and Hepburns intrigued me; birds of a feather being what they were when it came to flocking.

  ‘Yes, your rivalry looks almost like a feud sometimes,’ I said.

  ‘Is that what Abby told you?’

  ‘She said they were cruel people,’ I replied. ‘I think she meant callous. But that Dugald was a dear boy, quite unlike the rest of them. That he must have been to have loved her so.’

  Jack Aitken smiled absently and then his face twisted into a sudden spasm of pain. I started forward, unable not to; no one would have been able not to, for at that moment there was no filmy curtain up between Jack Aitken and his audience, no performance going on. He was white with shock, as wretched as a man could be. He waved me away with one hand and put the other out to brace himself against the sturdy weight of the nearest tree.

  ‘I keep forgetting,’ he said. ‘With everything so topsy-turvy and everyone upset and angry. I keep forgetting what it’s all about and then I remember again. And it’s like a knife.’

  ‘I’m so very sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Mirren forgave me for forbidding the marriage, you know,’ he went on. ‘She was sweeter and more loving in the last two months than she had been since she was a child in ringlets. She seemed almost grateful to me – well, terribly kind and affectionate, anyway. That’s why I was so sure she wouldn’t elope. As for killing herself, I still can’t believe it.’

  ‘Nor can I,’ I said. ‘I’m so far from believing that she did it, Mr Aitken, that here I am, seeking permission to prove that she didn’t. Dugald too.’

  ‘What?’ he said. He was staring at me then he blinked twice in quick succession and swallowed very hard. ‘That’s what you meant?’ he said. ‘When you said “piece things together”? You meant how they died? Whether they killed themselves or . . .’

  ‘If someone murdered them.’

  ‘Who would . . . who would ever dream of . . . what would ever have made you imagine . . . What are you accusing her of? You think she would kill a child? You – you – witch. You – twisted . . . get away from here. Don’t you ever, ever, dare to show your face here again or I will strangle you with these two hands.’

  I could only imagine the gesture that went along with the last words, for I was off, sprinting down the drive towards the gates and my motorcar with my heart hammering.

  What the hangment is going on, I asked myself, driving off rather jerkily – for my hands were far from steady. I rattled up to top gear and threaded my way through the streets to the other side of the town trying to sort it all through: Bella’s collapse, Abigail’s odd hints and Jack’s extraordinary outburst. When at last I spotted a telephone kiosk at the side of the road I pulled over and hurried towards it, scrabbling for tuppences.

  ‘Alec, listen,’ I said. ‘First of all, here is the number of the kiosk. Ring me back when this three minutes is up if I haven’t convinced you by then. But listen. I’ve just been run off Abbey Park on pain of having my neck wrung for me.’

  ‘Dear me,’ said Alec. ‘Dunfermline has been no friend to you, Dandy.’

  ‘I wasn’t exaggerating, darling,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t a metaphor. I’ve collected the full set to go with Mary. Bella Aitken, who must know that Mirren had no motive for suicide, wants me to leave it alone. Abigail Aitken spoke a great deal about the Hepburns being callous and cruel but wants me to leave the whole thing alone. Jack Aitken was wringing his hands with guilt about having caused Mirren’s suicide yet when I suggested that it might not have been suicide he reacted, as I say, by charging at me with bloodcurdling threats and accompanying gestures, which I took to be an indication that he wanted me to leave matters well alone.’ I took a deep breath. ‘What do you say to that then?’

  ‘What do you think I say?’ said Alec. ‘Get back in that silly little car and come home. Get out of there, Dandy. You have been sacked by the entire family now, arrested, imprisoned, threatened and almost assaulted. Go for a nice quiet walk in the jungles of Borneo if you will, but for God’s sake get out of Dunfermline.’

  ‘But there’s
something wrong,’ I said. ‘There must be. What kind of people would rather have the stain of suicide upon their family than try to uncover their daughter’s murderer and have him hanged?’

  ‘Dangerous people,’ Alec said. ‘Really, Dandy, come home. Probably they all know exactly what happened and they have closed ranks to protect someone and there’s an end of it.’

  ‘To protect whom?’ I said. ‘Who do you think is behind it? Why didn’t you tell me you had a suspect?’

  ‘I don’t,’ Alec said.

  ‘But if you had to make a guess?’

  ‘Mary Aitken,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what and why but she’s the one pulling all the strings, isn’t she?’

  I was silent for a moment and then nodded, although he could not see me.

  ‘She practically had kittens yesterday when Bella took over for once and steamrollered her into getting that man to look at the lift,’ I said. Then I gasped. ‘Alec! You don’t think she knew about Dugald Hepburn too, do you? As well as Mirren. Knew he was there? His body. Killed him, even?’

  ‘She can’t have,’ Alec said. ‘She was in the Abbey with everyone else, remember. Dugald Hepburn killed himself in an empty building when anyone with reason to hate him was in view of a hundred strangers. And he killed himself because his sweetheart was dead. That seems very clear. But there is something rather fishy about how Mirren died. And why. That I’ll give you.’

  ‘I tell you what I’d dearly like to know,’ I said. ‘I’d dearly like to know whether there’s the same unanimity chez Hepburn as I found chez Aitken this morning. Because there shouldn’t be.’

  ‘Dandy, you can’t go barging in the day after the boy died when Mrs Haddo was so clear about not wanting you.’

  ‘I must do something,’ I said. ‘I can’t just leave things be. Alec, I’m more sure than I’ve ever been about anything that . . . Well, actually I’m not sure what I’m sure of but I am sure.’

  ‘I believe you,’ Alec said. ‘But you have no authority, Dan. We have no client and you have no evidence. Come home.’

  Alec had often laughed at me for the way I could think of something while saying it, and I did wish that I had come up with a different summary of the process, but it was about to happen again. I started up a defence of my position with nothing behind its robustness except my own conviction but while I was speaking the sense appeared that supported it.

  ‘We have a huge heap of evidence,’ I began hotly. ‘We have a crowd of grieving relatives whose attitudes only make sense if we posit at least one murder if not two. Look at the facts. The Hepburns don’t want their son to marry the Aitken girl and she conveniently dies. Then the Hepburn boy follows her. Both families want nothing said and nothing done, even those – like Bella and Fiona – who must suspect the truth. It’s a stand-off, Alec. Tit-for-tat. An eye for an eye.’

  ‘One of the Hepburns killed Mirren?’

  ‘Fiona Haddo thought so. And one of them was seen in the store, remember?’

  ‘And one of the Aitkens killed Dugald?’

  ‘Mary, you said. She arranged it anyway.’

  ‘That’s monstrous.’

  ‘Well,’ I said slyly, ‘the inspector certainly thought so.’

  I heard Alec take a sharp breath.

  ‘I’m going to Roseville to quiz the Hepburns,’ I said. ‘I’ll speak to you later, Alec dear.’

  Although the house was in the deepest mourning I gained entry without difficulty, recognised by the little maid from the day before. I asked for Mrs Haddo and was ushered into the same sitting room to wait for her there.

  The woman who entered the room minutes later was quite simply Fiona Haddo thirty years ago. Hilda, Mrs Robin Hepburn, was her mother’s double; the elegant limbs, the fine long neck, the strong lean features which managed to be feminine without any weakness about them and managed, which was more remarkable, to be handsome even today, when she was stricken with grief and pale from weeping.

  ‘Mrs Gilver,’ she said, sitting and taking a black-edged handkerchief from the belt of her black dress which she pressed against her eyes to soak up the tears that had sprung there. ‘I must try hard not to cry,’ she said. ‘The girls are coming home from school and I don’t want to upset them. Dulcie went to fetch them for me from the station. Wasn’t that kind? Would you like some coffee? The house is in disarray – the servants were all so very fond – but I’m sure some coffee could be had.’

  ‘Mrs Hepburn,’ I said. ‘It was your mother I asked for. Perhaps the servants— Oh, I feel wretched to be here on such a day.’

  ‘My mother has sent me in her place,’ said Mrs Hepburn, with a very odd note in her voice. ‘She won’t be joining us. She warned me that the telegram she sent this morning probably wouldn’t do the job. She said if you arrived here, asking questions, I would have to answer them.’

  ‘That seems very strange,’ I said. ‘One would have expected your mother to be sparing you all possible burdens.’ I frowned at her, very puzzled.

  ‘My mother and I had a talk last night, in the middle of the night,’ she said. ‘She told me about the plan for the elopement. And I told her why it couldn’t have happened.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me?’ I said. ‘Why you disapproved of Mirren Aitken so?’

  Hilda blinked. ‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘Charming girl. Sweet little thing.’

  ‘Well, why you disapproved of the family then?’ I asked, trying to hide my exasperation.

  ‘I didn’t,’ she said again. ‘I don’t. I mean Abigail is hard work, by all accounts. She wasn’t always, you know, but she has turned heavy-hearted in her middle years, so they tell me. But I always liked Jack a great deal.’ My eyebrows rose and she saw them; she was as noticing as her mother. ‘Oh, I know. He’s as tricky as a bag of monkeys, but entertaining – sometimes even deliberately so. Mind you, perhaps a lifetime of that sort of entertainment has made Abigail turn into the lump she is today. And then poor Jack grumbles and Abigail sinks a little more.’

  Abigail Aitken was right, I thought, regarding her. This was a callous and rather cruel woman to be speaking that way today.

  ‘Mrs Aitken is certainly heavy-hearted now,’ I said. ‘Her daughter gone. Her only child.’

  ‘And she was lovely, wasn’t she?’ said Hilda. ‘Poor thing. Poor Aitkens. She was perfect really. I’d have liked such a daughter.’

  ‘So why not welcome her into your family?’ I said. ‘It seemed a perfect match to everyone looking on.’

  ‘A perfect match!’ said Hilda, and her eyebrows were as high as a clown’s painted arcs, her forehead rippled above them. ‘Well, not really. I liked the individual Aitkens, as I said, some more than others and I don’t include Mary, but it was the family as a whole.’ She dropped her voice and looked away to the side. ‘Cousins,’ she said. ‘Full cousins. And Mirren the only child, simply years into the marriage too. Weak blood.’

  ‘Ah, yes, weak blood,’ I said, remembering Mary Aitken saying the same about the Hepburns while we were having luncheon in the garden room on jubilee day. ‘On both sides?’

  Hilda stared and a blot of colour somewhere between pink and purple – an angry, ugly colour – rose up out of her collar and crept over her jaw and her cheeks leaving just her eyes still pale.

  ‘You know about Robin’s sisters then?’ she said. I inclined my head as if to suggest that I knew everything. The ploy worked. The angry colour deepened. ‘I didn’t, when I married Robin. Mummy didn’t. If either of us had known there was such a stain on the family . . . but one didn’t expect it. Sturdy merchant stock, one would have thought. It’s supposed to be the Haddos and their like who have relations not to be spoken of in polite company.’ She was making an attempt at lightness but her voice was brittle.

  ‘Well,’ I said, rather at a loss and rather disgusted by the agricultural turn the conversation was taking, ‘I suppose I can understand your anxiety. But on the other hand . . . Mirren was a bonny healthy girl and your husband and children a
re all hale and hearty, aren’t they? I don’t quite see the need for such excessive scruples, if I’m honest.’

  Hilda Haddo blew out hard and gave me a considering look.

  ‘Mother told me you wouldn’t be put off,’ she said. ‘Very well. My scruples, as you put it, my anxiety, got the better of me twenty years ago. I was angry when I found out about Robin’s sisters and I decided not to risk it.’ Mrs Hepburn stuck her elegant chin in the air and spoke as though to the back of the balcony. ‘Dugald was Jack Aitken’s son, Mrs Gilver. Mirren was his half-sister.’

  Her words seemed to reverberate in the following silence. I felt myself flush and waited until my blood had subsided again before I spoke.

  ‘I didn’t think you even knew one another.’

  ‘Oh, we were very chummy for a while when Robert and Dulcie first dragged us all here,’ she said.

  ‘And does he know? Jack Aitken?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hilda. ‘Apart from anything else, Dugald looked more and more like Bella with every passing year. Robin never noticed but when one was guiltily watching for it, it was plain enough to see.’

  ‘So your husband doesn’t know then?’ I said. It was not quite a question.

  ‘Good God, no!’ said Hilda. ‘Jack and I always kept scrupulously apart in public and, given the rift, there’s never been any danger of us all coming upon one another.’

  ‘So that’s not what caused the rift?’ I had thought at least to have got to the bottom of that little mystery.

  ‘Heavens, no. That’s ancient history. Shop business. Nothing to do with Jack and me, but it did mean that we couldn’t sneak off at parties like ordinary people.’ I raised my eyebrows, but Hilda sailed blithely on. ‘We met in Aitkens’. After hours. It was like a game. Pinching a bottle of this or that from the food hall and a couple of glasses. We made a sort of little hidey-hole. Goodness knows what the floor staff used to think the next day.’

  ‘They probably thought it was a poltergeist,’ I said, and Hilda Hepburn laughed, carelessly. ‘So if Mr Hepburn doesn’t know . . . ?’

  ‘Robin?’ said Hilda.