Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘How did it get there?’ I said. ‘Surely the post isn’t generally slipped under doors.’

  ‘Oh no, madam, I don’t mean a posted letter,’ Miss Hutton said. ‘I mean hand-delivered. It just said Mrs N.L. Aitken.’

  ‘In Mirren’s writing?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Revealing that Mirren had been here, in the store?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Miss Hutton, and she looked pained again. ‘I even smiled when I saw it. We had all heard on the Saturday that Miss Mirren had run off and we were worried about her. Well, those of us who weren’t cheering her on, you know. Quite a few of them thought she had eloped and all the best to her. But when I saw the letter, I thought: Ah! She’s here. Hiding out in the store. And then I thought: Well, of course she is. Where else? Because whenever she wasn’t playing at shops in the departments years ago, she was playing at houses up in those attics. So I put the letter on Mrs Ninian’s desk with her other papers and thought we would soon all be back to normal again. So I couldn’t understand why Mrs Ninian had engaged you. She knew where Miss Mirren was. I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t just gone to get her. Unless Miss Mirren left again.’

  Not a natural detective, our Miss Hutton; no nasty habit of suspicion to stop her taking the facts at face value and trusting everyone. I had quite a different view. I thought nothing more likely than that, on finding the letter, Mary Aitken deduced where Mirren was hiding, perhaps even went to check, then decided to leave her there stewing in her own juices until after the jubilee, whereupon a detective summoned for the purpose would ‘find’ her. That, finally, explained the day’s delay.

  And certainly if Mary knew where the missing girl was and did nothing it would explain her self-flagellating guilt and her conviction that she was damned

  ‘Miss Hutton,’ I said, ‘did you mention finding the letter? To Mrs Ninian, I mean. Or, I suppose, anyone.’

  ‘No,’ Miss Hutton said.

  ‘Why not?’

  Miss Hutton blinked again.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said slowly, ‘I just sort of naturally didn’t. I mean, I just sort of wouldn’t, in case it was awkward for her.’

  ‘Very discreet of you,’ I said. ‘Most admirable. I expect you must need a great deal of natural discretion to do what you do.’ Miss Hutton looked uncomprehending. ‘Madam looks lovely, and all that,’ I went on. Her rather prim face broke into an unexpected smirk.

  ‘Oh indeed,’ she said. ‘Ten years younger, perhaps even more slender without the stripes and we seem to have mislaid your measurements, madam, and beg your patience while we take them again.’

  ‘If she’s twice the size she was last time?’ I guessed. Miss Hutton nodded. ‘Well your discretion will stand you in good stead now.’ She looked puzzled and I saw I would have to spell it out to her. ‘About the letter: perhaps it would be best not to mention it to anyone.’ She nodded again, reassured as easily as that, her innocence making me worry about her more than ever. Did she really not have enough healthy regard for her own safety to see that I was warning her?

  ‘Do you think Mrs Ninian knows you found it and moved it?’ I asked. The spectre had raised itself in me that if Mary Aitken guessed as much and if Mary Aitken had killed Mirren, she might even now be plotting to tie up a loose end of her own. But did I still suspect Mary Aitken? Was I not leaning towards Robin Hepburn now; an enraged cuckold hitting out at his rival’s child? Miss Hutton was shaking her head.

  ‘She probably just assumes Miss Mirren put it there herself, if she’s thinking about it at all. And I hope she’s not – brooding about it, making herself ill.’

  ‘I wonder why Mirren didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘Well, Mrs Ninian’s door is kept locked usually. I have a key and a few other people too, but Miss Mirren wouldn’t have had one.’

  ‘A few others?’ I said, relieved. At least if Mary Aitken had worked out that Mirren’s letter had arrived on her desk via an intermediary, she would have a few from which to choose. She could not, surely, kill them all.

  8

  And so to the attics after all. Not to search for bloodstained gloves but to see what signs if any remained of Mirren’s sojourn there. I was hoping for a note, or, if the gods were smiling, a diary although reason told me that the police must have found it if there were such a thing. I left Miss Hutton in her cubby-hole full of tissue-paper rolls – these, I now realised, were ladies’ paper patterns, cut to fit regular customers and kept for them, until advancing years and an appetite for buns ended their usefulness; I remembered my own stalwart little dressmaker once telling me she had ‘mislaid my numbers’ and would have to beg my patience while she set about me with the tape measure again and I wondered now, after what Miss Hutton had told me. But I am more or less the same girth as when I ordered my trousseau, or at least I always tell myself so, since I can still fit into my wedding gown and into my oldest tweeds without much straining. A more Jesuitical soul (or do I mean less; Jesuitical seems to be one of those insults that two people can hurl at one another each believing stoutly in his own rightness to do so) would remark that elderly tweeds show their age in bagging more than anything and that my wedding gown, following the fashions of the day, was a sack – pouchy on top and with loops of satin hanging from its suggestion of a waist like great swirls of melting cream. Now that tastes have changed, it almost pains me to see my wedding portrait, the waste of my youth that it was to be got up in such an extraordinary way.

  Upstairs I strode confidently across the darkened landing to the light switch and clicked it on. The wreath of lilies was still there and the black velvet curtaining but, perhaps from familiarity, I found I could look upon them without my throat contracting. Now, where would one hole up here if one were . . . if one were what, though?

  What was Mirren Aitken’s state of mind when she had left her home and her family and come to the attics above the store to hide herself? It depended whether she knew about her father and Hilda Hepburn, about the impossibility of herself and Dugald marrying. Had she told Mary in the letter? Why would she tell her grandmother, though?

  I tried the handle of the nearest door and it opened, but instead of a little attic room, which is what I had been expecting, I found on the other side a long corridor, quite dark, with at least six doors opening off it; this was not going to be a ten-minute job, it seemed, and I wished that I had had some luncheon before beginning, and had brought an electric torch with me, and a scarf to tie over my face against the dust I could smell in the quiet air. On the other hand, I knew that the store was free of Aitkens today – now that Lady Lawson had let poor Mary go home – and I could not miss the chance while I had it.

  It was with some relief that behind the first of these new doors which I tried, in a kind of little ante-room, I found three paraffin lamps, full and clean, as well as a large sketching pad which appeared to serve as a stock-plan of the attics with coded notes about what was stored in each of them, and columns marked out to show what was brought in and taken away and when and by whom – initials I could not decipher – and to which department they were bound. Blessing Mary Aitken’s tidy mind, I lit one of the lamps and began.

  Soon enough, I was cursing Mary Aitken’s mind, for it transpired that the plan with its columns was an aspiration rather than a reflection of reality and the attics themselves were a perfect chaos of objects and oddities, like a jumble sale after the passing of a tornado. There were crates – the rooms full of closed crates were not too bad, as a matter of fact, for crates must sit on one of their flat sides and the only way to add another one is on top of the first. The rooms where the crates had been plundered, however, were quite another matter. The lids lay about and packing straw covered the floor and miscellaneous items could be seen sticking out of the tops where they had been shoved to get to greater prizes below. Three vases perhaps would bar my way across the floor and a tottering heap of shirt boxes would threaten to fall as I edged past them to get to sets of saucepan lids tied together
like castanets, the saucepans themselves nowhere to be seen, but an army of chimney pot nests – too small for any chimney I could imagine and perhaps that was why they languished here – would grab at my stockings as I left again.

  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.