Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder

by Catriona McPherson

  11

  Dinner at St Margaret’s Hotel was thick oyster soup, stuffed and be-crumbed cutlets and a concoction going by the name of Empress Rice, which appeared to be rice pudding made fit for company by the addition of a lot of unnecessary eggs, sherry and jam. After it I could have spent a comfortable night on a park bench, stoked by inner fires and in no danger of coming to harm even without the lightest covering of newspaper. As it was, in a vast, hot, plushy bedroom I felt I did not so much sleep as lie stupefied until morning.

  The room smelled of mothballs, which mystified me; an hotel is after all under continuous occupation (I have to will myself not to think of that fact whenever I get into bed in one on the first night of a stay and, should I ever find evidence of the last occupant, I have to summon all my early lessons not to run away shrieking). The bed was very large and soft and groaned under a generous budget of blankets, which had been so expertly tucked in – I imagined a crack team of brawny chambermaids with their teeth gritted – as to be immovable, so that one had to insert oneself like a handkerchief into a breast pocket and resign oneself to be pressed there like a flower until one slithered out again, for there was no give which might allow tossing and turning. Indeed, the only moving part of the whole apparatus – the pillows and bolster tended towards the solid too – was one of those shiny quilts, neither use nor ornament, which slipped off if one so much as breathed. It was hideous, brick-coloured and glistening, but it looked fairly new – clearly not the source of the camphor smell – and so I wondered again why that great heap of the things had been whisked off Aitkens’ shop floor to languish unloved alongside the woollen leggings of yesteryear.

  The next morning, hotel life seduced me with the lure of a bathroom through a private door, no need to scuttle along the corridor meeting travelling salesmen in their dressing gowns, and since it too was quite amazingly hot and had, apparently, an endless supply of even hotter water, I slopped around for quite half an hour, topping up the water twice, so that it was a quarter to ten when I finally joined Alec in the breakfast room. He did not comment on my frizzed hair and pink glow although I am sure he noticed them.

  ‘Thoroughly recommend the hot dishes,’ he said, pointing to the sideboard.

  I took a plate and went to peer under the covers. Indeed, the devilled kidneys were plump and glossy, the kedgeree bright gold and heavy with fish, not the salty porridge one always dreads and often finds, and there was a natty little toasting machine into which one could slip triangles of thin bread and out of which, moments later, popped crisp slices of practically melba toast.

  ‘What a waste,’ I said, bringing a piece of the toast and a cup of chocolate back to the table. ‘If I’d known last night, I’d have hung fire with scrambled eggs and stoked up this morning.’

  ‘You might have lost your appetite anyway,’ Alec said. He had opened a Sunday paper and now folded it and showed it to me.

  A CURSE ON BOTH THEIR HOUSES

  DOUBLE TRAGEDY FOR MOURNING MERCHANTS

  the headline read and below it were two photographs; one of Mirren Aitken, under a banner, smiling, with orchids in her hair, and a suggestion of a dark shoulder to one side where a companion in his dinner jacket had been excised. The other picture was of a serious young man, looking straight into the camera from under a campaign hat with a glimpse of striped neckerchief at his throat. I felt a prickle of unwelcome memory; the last time – the only time – I had seen that face it had been sinking slowly past me on the roof of the lift, blank-eyed and dreadful in death.

  ‘Very clever,’ Alec said, tapping both photographs with the tines of his fork. ‘She’s at a party and this is obviously a scout troop portrait so no one will ever pin down which so-called friend provided them.’

  ‘Pass it over,’ I said.

  ‘It’s muck,’ said Alec, keeping a tight hold.

  ‘I’m not going to read it,’ I assured him, ‘I just want to look more closely at them.’ With some reluctance, Alec handed me the paper. The article began, Prominent Dunfermline merchants, strangers to scandal, living under a cloak of respectability until now, today we bring shocking news to our readers of . . .‘Hmph,’ I said. ‘If they can’t even sort out their participles who would take their word on anything?’ Then I sipped my cocoa and stared at the two photographs, Dugald first with his large, round, slightly bottom-heavy eyes and shadowed, sallow skin. I thought I could see just a trace of Bella Aitken there, a family resemblance anyway, if one knew the connection and were looking.

  ‘His father – Robin Hepburn, I mean – has snow white hair and a white moustache,’ said Alec. ‘Pure white before fifty. I wonder if he’d have been suspicious in a few years if Duglad had stayed dark.’

  I shook my head. ‘There are always so many forebears to blame a child’s looks on,’ I said. ‘It would only have been those who knew, or suddenly saw Dugald and Bella standing together. And even then, one is an elderly lady and the other a boy.’ I sighed and turned to the picture of Mirren. Again there was an unpleasant flash of remembering.

  ‘She was a lovely little thing,’ Alec said. ‘Like a flower.’

  I had forgotten that he had never seen her before.

  ‘I thought that about her mother the first time I met her,’ I said. ‘Like a little flower in the rain with its head bowed. But Mirren, to me, is more like a bird.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alec. ‘At least it’s hard to tell from one photograph but she has a sharper look than Abigail. A bit of Mary in there?’

  ‘Nothing like so sharp as all that!’

  ‘Mind you, we’ve only seen Abby very cowed,’ Alec said. I nodded and started carefully tearing around the picture of Mirren. ‘Are you really going to take that and wave it under the Hepburn noses?’ he asked me.

  ‘We’ll see,’ I answered. ‘Well, no, of course not. I was only going to wave when I wanted answers. Now we’re extracting promises – like gangsters – I don’t suppose we’ll need it.’

  ‘And do we really need to go round all of them?’ Alec said.

  I thought for a minute and then shook my head. ‘Hilda and Fiona hardly need to have promises extracted. They have secrets of their own to keep. If they even know Mirren’s secret – which I doubt, don’t you? – they can be trusted with it. But we certainly need to speak to the menfolk and I suppose for the sake of completeness the other grandmother, Dulcie. It might be that no one knows anything anyway. Let’s hope so.’

  ‘Shall we start at Roseville, with Robin?’ said Alec. I was still staring at Mirren’s picture.

  ‘I’ll keep this with me,’ I said. ‘I’ll wave it in front of my own eyes if my resolve falters. Look at her, Alec!’

  But looking at her turned him so glum that I folded the picture away into my notebook to let him finish his breakfast without feeling like a monster for being able to do so.

  Since it was a Sabbath morning between a death and a funeral we knew better than just to roll up and expect to find the master at home. Instead, we rang after breakfast and inquired of the parlourmaid who answered the telephone what time Mr Hepburn would be back after church.

  ‘Mr Hepburn won’t be coming here, madam,’ said the maid in that refined shriek with which servants mistrustful of the new contraption conduct all telephone conversations. ‘He’ll be going to number eighty-six.’

  ‘Number eighty-six?’ I said.

  ‘High Street,’ said the maid. ‘The old house. Mistress Dulcie’s.’

  ‘Ah, of course,’ I said, bluffing. ‘Thank you. We’ll catch him there.’

  ‘I’m glad we saved ourselves Pilmuir Street anyway,’ Alec said, as we puffed up the hill from the hotel. ‘The High Street’s bad enough after that breakfast.’

  ‘Easily,’ I said, panting.

  ‘So where’s eighty-six then?’ said Alec. We had emerged at the mouth of Guildhall Street and stood looking up and down the quiet stretch of shuttered shops and empty pavements.

  ‘Close by,’ I said, nodding at the other side. ‘Thos
e are the high seventies.’

  ‘Which way does it go?’ said Alec, strolling a little way down towards the tolbooth. ‘No, this is wrong. Uphill, Dandy.’

  ‘But can that be right?’ I said, trailing after him and looking around myself with some puzzlement. ‘It’s all shops and we’re practically at Aitkens’.’

  ‘Eighty,’ said Alec. ‘Eighty-two, eighty-four is the bank.’ Here he crossed the end of a narrow lane which led away up the hill beyond the High Street. ‘So this must be . . . hmph. Eighty-eight.’ He stopped, and looked back down the street with his hands on his hips.

  ‘Could there be another High Street?’ I said. ‘It seems odd that the Hepburn house would be right here in the hurly-burly.’ Alec had gone up the narrow lane and now he beckoned to me.

  ‘Here it is,’ he said. The number, burnished brass, was attached to an iron gate on the side of the bank building and the same number was painted in gold on the fanlight above an imposing door, just inside.

  ‘A manager’s flat?’ said Alec.

  I walked back around the corner, crossed the road, stopped outside Aitkens’ plate-glass window – still bearing only some flowers – and simply stared.

  ‘My God,’ I said, looking up at the three floors of house windows above the branch of the British Linen Bank.

  ‘That’s spite, surely,’ said Alec. ‘Or something very peculiar anyway.’

  For number eighty-six High Street was directly opposite Aitkens’ Emporium and looked across the narrow stretch right into its upper windows.

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I remember Mary Aitken being most odd – even for her – when I queried her sending a pair of girls off down the street with the deposit. I couldn’t imagine what such a blameless institution could have done to upset her so.’

  ‘So Robert and Dulcie Hepburn live right opposite their arch-enemy,’ said Alec. ‘And in a flat? While Robin and Hilda swan around in Roseville.’

  ‘Well, as to that,’ I said, ‘I’ve been in a manager’s house above a bank branch once before. Upstairs here might surprise you.’

  We recrossed the road, tried the iron gate and, finding it open, entered and pulled on the bright polished handle of the doorbell. A maid with a black cap and a red nose answered and nodded, sniffing, when we said we had come to see Mr Hepburn if he was there. She led us up the stairs, which were exactly as prosperous and substantial as I had expected, easily as broad and shallow as our back stairs at home, and into the upstairs hall which was quite twelve feet square and lit by a cupola, spangles of red and blue scattering down from its panes and dotting the good plain carpet and gleaming mahogany.

  We waited in an equally plain but gleaming morning room, I on the edge of my seat although Alec managed to look as though he were not thrumming with nerves at the thought of the coming interview.

  Mr Hepburn did not keep us waiting long. He entered the room slowly, looking rather stooped, and closed the door behind him before he turned to us.

  ‘Yes?’ he said, looking at Alec and me without recognition. I glanced at Alec, shocked. This was Hilda Hepburn’s husband? He looked seventy. Had grief done this to the man?

  ‘Mr Hepburn,’ said Alec. ‘Excuse us, sir, there has been a mix-up. We were hoping to speak to your son.’

  ‘Robin?’ said the old man. I could see now that he was an old man, not just tired and sad, but truly old. Robin Hepburn might well have white hair but this man’s hair and his moustache too were thinning, his chin hanging in a wattle and his eyes creased and pouchy behind his pince-nez. It was only because I had expected Robin that I had assumed this was he. ‘Robin is at home, young man. And perhaps as well you didn’t find him. Today is a very bad day to seek out my son. He has had a dreadful thing just happen to him.’

  ‘We know about Dugald,’ I said, and my voice shook from fear of my own temerity. ‘It was on that subject we wanted to speak to him.’ I swallowed. ‘That subject’ sounded horribly cold when I heard it. Mr Hepburn Senior frowned but it was with puzzlement, not displeasure. He came over slowly and eased himself into a chair, looking at Alec and me thoughtfully.

  ‘And what’s your interest in my grandson’s death?’ he said.

  ‘We have been trying to puzzle out what happened,’ I said. ‘There are some things that don’t make sense, you see. We’ve even gone as far as to think, in fact, that Dugald might have been killed. By another person, I mean.’ In fact, of course, we no longer thought any such thing, but it had been our opening to every interview and I could not drum up another one on the spot while he sat there looking at me that way.

  Unlike Bella, unlike Abigail and most certainly unlike Jack, Mr Hepburn did not start up in violence or moan in agony at my words. He just nodded slowly again and waited for me to continue.

  ‘We understand you were against the match between Dugald and Mirren,’ I went on. He frowned very sharply at my words, but surely he did not know that Jack Aitken was Dugald’s father as well as Mirren’s? Surely such a paterfamilias would not have suffered Hilda for a moment if he knew. So did he know Mirren’s secret, whatever it was? Or was it only the bitter rivalry with the Aitkens that had set him against the alliance with them? ‘Can you tell us why?’ I said.

  ‘On what authority do you ask?’ he said. It was a very proper response and delivered calmly.

  ‘Mrs Ninian Aitken wanted us to,’ said Alec, and at the mention of her name all the measured calmness was gone.

  ‘Oh, she did, did she?’ said the old man with the energy of someone half his age. ‘Did she really? Well, you can go and tell her that she’s had all the favours out of me she’ll ever see in this life or the next.’ I stared at him. ‘And as to your question: I wouldn’t stain my grandson by letting him marry into a family like that.’

  ‘Like what?’ said Alec and he sounded, as I felt, genuinely lost in the face of such sudden fury.

  ‘Cousin marriage,’ said Mr Hepburn, as though the words soiled his tongue. ‘Weak blood. Poor stock. Quite apart from anything else, the cousin marriage meant it would never have done.’

  ‘But there is something else?’ Alec said.

  ‘Of course there is,’ barked the old man. ‘I would no more let my grandson get mixed up with one of those Aitken floozies than I’d have let him pick up a tart at the docks of Leith.’

  ‘Please, Mr Hepburn sir,’ said Alec, protecting my modesty.

  ‘I mean it,’ he thundered. ‘She was reaching, getting to the shop floor of PTs,’ he said. ‘But scum rises, and look where she ended up, eh?’

  ‘But you were there too,’ I said. ‘I thought you all started out in the same place together and rose.’

  ‘I rose by the sweat of my brow,’ he said. It was exactly the expression Mary had used, eulogising the departed Ninian and John Aitken. ‘Ninian just hung on to his big brother’s coat tails, and as for her! All she did was follow her scheming, greedy, grasping nose to wherever the money was. Off with Ninian, off to the new store and then wheedling into his affections until she got in with him. And him supposed to be my friend!’

  I was momentarily puzzled; he had not accused Ninian of any breach of friendship as far as I could see. Then suddenly an idea came to me.

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Ninian was your friend and Mary . . .’ I wondered if he would say it for me.

  ‘Mary was my girl,’ said Mr Hepburn. ‘It should have been her and me, and Ninian was going to work for us. It was all my ideas, hers and mine, that she took to Aitkens’ and gave to Ninian. It was my ideas that bought her her gold ring and her name. As soon as John Aitken got his hands on the money and opened his store, the pair of them were off.’ I nodded. I could believe it even of the Mary Aitken I knew, in her seventies, her place in the world secure. As a young woman, desperate to rise, of course she would have done as Mr Hepburn accused her: following the money, in his brutal and undeniable phrase.

  ‘Believing that Ninian Aitken was my friend was not the first mistake I made in my life nor the last, but it was the one
and only time I ever made that one, I can tell you.’ He sounded very proud. ‘I’ve never made another friend since. I have my wife, my son and my granddaughters.’

  ‘And daughters,’ I said, for I felt it most unfair that he maligned the ‘weak, bad blood’ of a cousin marriage in the Aitken family when he had unfortunate family history of his own. And as for Mary’s treachery, he had paid that back ten times over, surely, living here opposite her pride and joy, opening up in competition with her.

  ‘My daughters?’ said Mr Hepburn, and he blinked and frowned as though he were trying to recollect who such people might be, as though the knowledge of their existence had to come from a long way off or a great depth down. Slowly his face began to flush with colour in great mottled blotches and he sat forward and fixed me with a stare which it took all my courage to meet. ‘What do you know about my daughters?’ he said in a low voice, far more frightening than a raised one.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Only that there’s weakness on both sides, isn’t there?’

  ‘Both sides?’ he said, the livid patches spreading and darkening. ‘Who the blazes are you to come here and rake up my mistakes? Who told you anyway?’

  ‘Mary,’ I said, with a cold fury in my voice which I hoped matched his own. How could he call his daughters ‘mistakes’ in that heartless way?

  ‘She knows?’ he said. ‘How did she find out? Well, you tell her from me—’ He was so angry now that he choked over the words and when he began speaking again, he made no sense at all. ‘Jezebel, harlot, common, wanton slut. All of them. Aitken whores.’

  ‘Mr Hepburn, really!’ said Alec, but I was not offended; I was incensed. Fumbling a little, I got my bag open and my notebook out. I held the picture of Mirren out to him.

  ‘How dare you,’ I said. ‘Look at the girl.’ He had fixed his eyes on the picture before he could stop himself. ‘An innocent child,’ I went on. He was staring at the photograph with some kind of horrified fascination, tears forming in his eyes.