‘What?’ I said, glancing at Alec and seeing him glancing at me.
‘It wasn’t the jubilee day Bessie Millar saw him,’ she said. ‘It was the day before, maybe even the day before that, the Monday. She just remarked to me that she had seen Mr Hepburn having a good look round the pillowcases. And it’s not as if Bessie was up on a soapbox in the park. She just happened to say to me, in passing.’ The tears were brimming now. ‘And of course I knew it was unlikely. I knew about all the trouble, of course I did. That’s what I said to Mrs Ninian, madam, and you were there.’
‘I remember, Mrs Lumsden,’ I said. ‘You asked if there had been an entente cordiale. I remember it as clear as anything.’
‘Now, you’ll have to let me go,’ Mrs Lumsden said. ‘I’m that upset I hardly know what I’m saying. I don’t understand this, madam. I don’t see how anyone could have worked up old stories and got that out of them. I wouldn’t have Mrs Ninian hurt and humiliated for the world. She’s paid her debts twice over. She’s made everything up to me that she ever— She’s been very good to me. I wouldn’t see her hurt for the world. I’ve got to go.’
‘So,’ I said, as we sat side by side in my motorcar, moments later. ‘What do you make of all that then?’
‘I feel as though I struck a single match and burned the house down. What was she talking about?’
‘We definitely hit some kind of nerve. A story about a man up in the attics where he shouldn’t be . . . an old story, old secrets. Do you think there was gossip about Jack and Hilda when they used to meet there?’
‘That would be a woman where she shouldn’t be,’ Alec said. ‘And Mrs Lumsden was talking about Mary, wasn’t she? Not Jack at all.’
‘Very odd,’ I said. ‘But did the struck match cast light on anything?’
‘If “nothing at all” counts as anything,’ Alec said. ‘It was a case of mistaken identity and two days too early to be significant. Dugald’s father wasn’t seen in Aitkens’ on the fateful day. There’s no reason to think he wore the gloves to kill Mirren. Or that he killed Mirren, in fact.’
‘And we agree that Abigail Aitken wouldn’t have left the gloves in the shoebox to be found. If she’d killed Mirren, she would have gone back and removed them.’
‘Same with Mary,’ said Alec. ‘She’d have taken them away along with everything else.’
‘So the gloves are an irrelevance,’ I said. ‘My one discovery of the day.’
‘Hardly,’ said Alec. ‘You found out about Jack and Hilda.’
‘But it didn’t lead anywhere. Hilda is adamant that no one knew about Dugald except Jack and her. Mirren didn’t know. None of the Aitken women knew. Robin didn’t know.’
‘And you discovered Mirren’s letter to her grandmother.’
‘Again. Nowhere.’ Suddenly, I seemed to have worked very hard for nothing.
‘I don’t like it that we suspect Mary of so much and yet can’t suspect her of murder,’ said Alec.
‘Too bad,’ I said. ‘She was standing right next to me – not to mention the Provost – when the shot was fired.’
‘She could have arranged it,’ Alec said. ‘She strikes me as an arranger. After all, she arranged for someone to clear the attic room. She didn’t personally tie her hair up in a duster and set to.’
‘Didn’t she?’ I said. ‘Miss Torrance on the glove counter told me that Mary quite readily polishes counters and wraps up orders. “No swank to her” was what she said.’
‘Only I was thinking,’ Alec said, ‘that it would be fine for her to tell one of her minions to tidy up, because the fact of Mirren’s having been up there was out in the open after she died. But if Mary was implicated somehow in the murder, she could hardly tell said minion to go hunting for a single pair of gloves and burn them.’
‘But she could have done it herself without any problem,’ I said. ‘She could have slipped into the shoebox room and got the gloves under cover of going to inspect the minion’s work. I can’t see the difficulty.’
‘Only if she had the nerve to show her face in the store,’ Alec said. ‘And would she? Surely not. It would be worth rechecking those gloves after the first day Mary is back in Aitkens’ for a visit, mark my words.’
Had I really not told him? In my recounting of my day had I really missed out the fact that I had met Mary Aitken? I said it all very quickly now, to get it – and whatever was coming after it – over with.
When I stopped talking, Alec shook his head like the affectionate owner of a puppy who has chewed yet another slipper but might still, one day, learn.
‘I despair of you, Dandy,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t that set off a hundred alarm bells in you? Hm? Lady Lawson? You said yourself you thought there was something going on between Mary Aitken and her. Some kind of understanding. And then today of all days they concoct a frankly pretty flimsy excuse to put their heads together and instead of haring off after it like a bloodhound you waste a whole afternoon on gloves that aren’t even bloodstained and a mysterious visitor who wasn’t even there on the right day!’ He shook his head again. If I were a puppy I would bite him, I thought to myself; but I made an effort to speak calmly.
‘Finding the gloves and discounting them, finding the visitor and the day of his visit and discarding him was a perfectly proper use of my time, Alec dear. One has to eliminate all extraneous features of the landscape in an orderly fashion and then what one is left with is the solution.’ I could tell he was smirking even though I was not looking at him; I could practically hear his silent laughter. ‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘It’s the only reliable way and it should be the Gilver and Osborne way. Less plunging about hoping we trip over a clue and more concentrated, purposeful, focused— Oh shut up!’
‘So let’s concentrate on a purposeful visit to Lady Lawson,’ Alec said. ‘Where we shall focus on finding out what’s going on between her and Mary.’
9
It was easy enough to find our way to Lady Lawson; the first person I asked – a working man on his way home, overalls black and expression weary – looked past me where I was hanging out of the driver’s side window having hallooed to him and informed Alec that he should ‘gang straicht oot b’yonder, ken Auchterarder wey, no twae mile and richt aff whaur ye’re gaun. Their po-ists are crummelt awa’, mind, but ye’ll no miss it. Bu’ow, richt? Bu’ow. Aye, ye’re grand.’ He tipped his hat and resumed his journey.
‘Got that?’ I said, trying not to smile, as I got back into gear and pulled away.
‘I bow to your greater experience, Dandy,’ Alec said. ‘I didn’t think anyone could have a thicker Scotch burr than my head groom but this one has defeated me.’
‘The house is called Buttell,’ I translated for him. ‘It lies two miles away, directly off the Auchterarder road, and we won’t miss it, although the gateposts are somewhat tumbledown. And I think, in your defence, there was some Glaswegian in there, which no one would expect you to rise to after only five years of Perthshire for training.’
The gateposts of Buttell House were indeed ‘crummelt awa’ as was the wall into which they were set, the stone rotting away from around the railings, and the drive beyond was deeply potholed, so that I was prepared for the forlorn aspect of the house itself when it came into view: the tussocky grass, the rusty stains which blocked guttering and leaky downpipes had caused to spread over the pale grey stucco, the cracks in that stucco and worse than cracks – patches of bare brick where great damp lumps had fallen clean away. The windows were small-paned and many and so were dusty with neglect (it takes a good many hours or a good many servants to keep dozens of fiddly-paned windows gleaming) and the roof showed more than a dozen crooked slates beginning to slip out of place. It was at the roof that Alec sucked his breath in over his teeth and shook his head slowly.
‘You’re as bad as Hugh these days,’ I told him.
‘Hugh is a very sound chap when it comes to roofs,’ said Alec.
‘Always has been,’ I said. ‘When my mother an
d I paid our one and only visit to Gilverton during my engagement, he took us up into the attics and showed us the sarking. It was an omen.’
‘He probably thought you’d be interested, coming from the Shires,’ Alec said. ‘Sarking is unknown in the south.’
‘That’s exactly what Hugh said,’ I replied. ‘As though he were showing off koala bears or something.’
‘Anyway,’ said Alec as we drew up close to the house, ‘the Lawsons are either utterly feckless or pretty near broke to have let their roof get this way.’
‘Broke,’ I said. ‘I thought so the day of the jubilee.’ We stepped down and mounted the short flight of stairs to the front door.
‘How do we play this then, Dandy?’ said Alec when we were installed in a small sitting room and the maid-of-all-work who had let us in had gone to fetch her mistress.
‘No idea,’ I said. ‘As it lies?’
Lady Lawson joined us in a matter of minutes and greeted us with that vague and fluttery manner of hers, no visible curiosity about what on earth we were doing there.
‘Tea?’ she said, sinking into a chair. ‘A little late, perhaps. And a little early for sherry, but welcome to Buttell all the same. How nice of you to come and see me.’
Thus she managed the problem of refreshments for two unexpected strangers; I would have taken a bet that if we had rolled up bang on four o’clock ‘tea’ would still have been prevented somehow and if we had waited until seven ‘sherry’ would likewise have met a handy obstacle. For the Lawsons were not just broke in the way that almost everyone is broke these days, I thought, looking round at the dark patches on the walls where pictures had been removed for sale – and not large patches either; not grand masterpieces gone to put a boy through Oxford or a girl through her season, but small patches of eighteen inches square, hinting that little prints and watercolours were being sold off now, for grocers’ bills and servants’ wages.
Lady Lawson was telling us that she had only a few minutes before the dressing bell and she hoped that we would forgive her, but she really could not ask us to stay for dinner because there was a small party of intimates gathering.
‘And one of my chums – my dear old chum – is in mourning, strictly speaking. Quite all right to come over to us, you see, but she’s not up to general company.’
Alec made a good selection of understanding noises and I let them go for both of us: I would have eaten my book and a half of pencilled notes if the Lawsons still dressed for dinner or invited friends to join them.
‘We won’t keep you long, Lady Lawson,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I have a question to ask you.’
‘Mrs Gilver, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘A friend of the Aitkens, like me.’ She simpered a little as she said this; as though she found it amusing that she chose such friends, as though it were a sign of her modernity instead of her desperation. But what was she getting out of it? I asked myself. There had to be something.
‘Indeed,’ I replied. ‘Well, I’m more of an agent of the Aitkens, rather than a friend.’ Lady Lawson would never do anything so vulgar as scowl, but her vague, amused expression grew a little pinched at this.
‘An agent?’ she said.
‘I know you went to see Mary Aitken this morning,’ I began, feeling my way.
‘I kept my appointment,’ said Lady Lawson. She rearranged the pleats of her tweed skirt over her knees in a gesture that was almost fidgety. ‘I should not have dreamed of its standing but Mary bade me go and so I went.’ Then she looked over my shoulder and spoke the next part very fast and high. ‘I left her in no doubt as to my thoughts on her proposal and I cannot see why she has sent you. I must beg you to return to her and reiterate my refusal, my most definite refusal, in the firmest terms.’
I was quite at sea now and I could see from the way Alec was frowning that he was even more lost than I.
‘Her proposal?’ I said, and in repeating the word at last a faint idea began to stir in me.
‘I am very sorry about what happened but it did happen and there is an end to our plans and nothing to be done about it.’ Lady Lawson sat back in her chair.
All of a sudden it was clear to me. I had been unable to account for Lady Lawson’s presence that day of the jubilee and I had certainly failed to see why the policeman who had grilled us all in the back offices at the store had leaned so heavily on the oldest Lawson son – what was his name? – Roger. And throughout the whole affair I had been lost as to why the Hepburn boy was not welcomed as a suitor for the Aitkens’ heiress, why Mary Aitken felt she had scope to despise him so. Now, I saw that Mary Aitken had her sights set on a greater prize. Now, sagging wallpaper and threadbare rugs before my eyes, I knew the nature of the understanding between the mother of one and the grandmother of the other. Mary Aitken’s aspirations had reached as high as this and impoverished Lady Lawson had stooped that low – rank given and a load of roof tiles got, along with a roll of banknotes to pay a man to fit them. And the police had guessed or had heard about the trading of the Lawson name for the Aitken money and asked themselves what the boy – one of the parcels of goods in the transaction – might do to break the deal.
‘Roger was supposed to marry Mirren,’ I said.
Never in Lady Lawson’s long life of decorum must she have had to reach so deep inside herself to summon the light smile and airy wave of a hand that she bestowed upon us now. She shook as she did so.
‘He was,’ she said. ‘Are you shocked, Mrs Gilver? My late husband would have been horrified.’
‘But – forgive me, Lady Lawson.’ Alec was speaking now, sliding forward in his seat and staring at her. ‘What proposal of Mary Aitken’s were you refusing just now? What new proposal, I mean. Now that poor Mirren is gone.’
‘I thought she sent you here to press it upon me,’ Lady Lawson said.
‘Press what?’ said Alec. ‘The girl’s dead.’
‘She asked me this morning,’ said Lady Lawson, ‘and I was shaken to my core. She wanted Roger to say he hadn’t thought much of the idea and that he probably wouldn’t have gone through with it. She wants my son to accuse himself – in the eyes of the world – of breach of promise and – in the eyes of God – of ending the poor girl’s life.’ She sat back in her chair as though exhausted. ‘I was not brought up to games of intrigue and I have no skill at them.’ She sighed and there was a tuneful note in it which turned the sigh into a snatch of song. She had been brought up to games of flirtation, I thought to myself, and she was a master of them.
‘Why would she think you’d go along with it?’ I said.
‘Well, the absolute plain bald fact of the matter,’ said Lady Lawson, ‘was that Roger wasn’t terribly keen. And who could blame my poor boy? What man would want to marry such a shrinking, quaking girl? If she had smiled and batted her eyes a little he’d have been pleased enough to put her on his arm and show her off to people, department store or no.’ Alec was looking quite revolted, but not me; I knew of old what underlay the wan and flowery surface of women like Lady Lawson and it was always pretty steely, every time. ‘A courtship, a marriage, a son of his own, a bit of help for his brothers and then a pleasant life filled with his choice of pleasant things. It wasn’t much to ask of him, was it? No more than we all owe our parents and our family name.’ By now, Alec was far beyond revolted, a little sick in fact, and I hid my smiles.
‘So Mary only wants Roger to be honest really,’ I said. Lady Lawson sat bolt upright in her chair.
‘Not a bit of it,’ she said. ‘Mirren Aitken didn’t kill herself because Roger let her down. Oh, he groaned and grumbled, but he would have gone through with it in the end.’
‘Even still,’ I said, ‘wouldn’t you rather have him known as a heartbreaker than as . . .’ She waited, giving me no choice but to go on: ‘. . . as a man a girl would kill herself to escape from?’
At this Lady Lawson burst out in an incoherent stream of denial, but then just as suddenly she stopped again. ‘I never thought of it that way,’
she said. ‘Oh my goodness, you’re right. But it’s nonsense. Everyone knows Mirren wanted to marry the Hepburn boy and Mary wouldn’t let her. No one will believe that her heart broke because of poor Roger. Oh, my poor boy! He’ll be a laughing stock. What was it you said? A man a girl would kill herself to escape from? Poor Roger! Oh, I’m a such a silly woman to have got mixed up in the grubby business in the first place.’
‘Why did you, if you don’t mind my asking?’ said Alec.
‘Well . . .’ Lady Lawson, I assumed, was seeking a euphemism for ‘hard cash’. I thought I would help her by suggesting something even worse, which she could vigorously deny.
‘She wasn’t in a position to put any pressure on you, was she?’
‘Hardly!’ said Lady Lawson. ‘It’s I who know more than I ever wanted to about her, not she me.’ This was interesting and both Alec and I tried to look alert but not so vulturous that we scared her. ‘Mary Aitken has been my personal dressmaker since I was a girl. She knows all my numbers off by heart, carries them in her head, isn’t that touching? We come from the same village, you know, on the other side of the river.’ She waved a hand towards the windows, indicating the Forth, Edinburghshire and the Border country. ‘My mother gave her work when she was trying to eke out her wages from her first job in town and stuck with her when she went to Aitkens’ and so Mary stuck with my mother and me when she married and here we both are. My patronage of her has slowly become hers of me over the years until we found ourselves at the point when she could feel bold enough to look up, with a mouthful of pins, and put such a notion to me, woman to woman, like some kind of business dealing.’ Lady Lawson blinked her pretty eyes very slowly two or three times to show us how overwhelming the thought of business dealings was to a flower of femininity such as she.
Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder Page 18