Unsuitable Day for a Murder

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.

‘That you off then, madam?’ said the doorman as I approached him and entered the revolving door. He gave it a nicely judged shove, allowing me to pass through without effort of my own but not causing me to rush to keep up with its revolution. While I was inside he popped out through the ordinary swinging door and was ready to meet me again on the pavement. ‘Can I see if I can flag you down a taxi?’

‘Thank you,’ I said, giving him a half-crown tip, ‘but my own little motorcar is round at the yard.’ He frowned down at his hand, wondering perhaps what the half-crown was for in that case. The answer was that I had remembered my plan to grill him. One of many questions troubling me was how Dugald Hepburn had got into the store when it was closed. ‘I felt for you most dreadfully about yesterday,’ I said, with a nod at the coin, to explain it.

‘Yesterday, madam?’ he echoed. ‘Me?’

‘Being denied the funeral,’ I said ‘And then such a dreadful thing happening while you were here all on your own.’

‘While I was alone here, madam?’ he said. ‘What would that be, then?’

‘Of course, you won’t have heard,’ I answered, kicking myself a little.

‘Heard what?’ said the doorman. ‘What’s happened now? Where’s it going to end?’

‘No, not something new,’ I said, laying a hand on his sleeve; he really was becoming quite agitated at the thought of fresh horrors, ‘only that the police surgeon reckoned poor Dugald died at half past two.’ The doorman frowned, calculating, and then his eyes opened wide.

‘Dear God!’ he said. ‘Half past two? That’s when the poor lad jumped?’ He turned around and looked back into the store. ‘I was right here, right in there, sitting on the chair there, waiting for the first of the staff to come back again after.’

‘A dreadful thing,’ I said.

‘I was that close,’ he said, and he took off his peaked cap and held it in both hands, newly struck by the fact of the death and needing to mark it once more.

‘No one could have expected you to do anything,’ I said. Of course, saying this to the man put exactly the opposite idea into his troubled mind, as I had hoped it would. (What a flinty soul a detective must have to be a successful one.) He began to talk nineteen to the dozen without a trace of artifice or self-regard.

‘I didn’t know a thing about it,’ he said. ‘I never heard a thing. You’d have thought I would, wouldn’t you, madam? But I can assure you I never. Not a single sound. Or else I’d have been away seeing what it was.’

‘You didn’t hear any movement on the stairs or doors opening?’ I asked. ‘Only one does wonder how he got in if the place was locked up.’

‘Maybe he came in the day before when we were open,’ said the doorman. I nodded absently, but I knew that would not do. Fiona Haddo had been very clear about when Dugald had fled Kelso. ‘I can tell you one thing – there was no jemmying locks or climbing in windows during the service, madam. It was as silent as the grave. I even thought that to myself, sitting there. As silent as the grave – and Miss Mirren going into hers and only twenty. On a Thursday afternoon too – that’s usually our busiest day in the week barring Saturday because so many other folk in the town have half-day closing and come in to Aitkens’. I never heard so much as a pin drop. Much less- Of course my hearing’s not as sharp as it was. I’m sixty-five this August and the wife’s never done telling me to turn the wireless down before we getting next door complaining.’ He turned again and looked in through the glass door. ‘A younger man might have-’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Absolutely not.’ It was time for a measure of – belated – humanity. ‘His neck was broken. He would have been dead instantly. There’s nothing you could have done.’ He looked somewhat mollified at this and I should have left it there. ‘Besides, I daresay there was nothing to hear no matter how sharp one’s ears. The lift shaft is a goodly way from the front door and there would only have been very dull sounds anyway. Muffled thumps at most, unless he screamed as he fell, which would resound right enough, so he can’t have.’ The poor doorman physically blanched at that. I pressed a further half-crown into his hand, squeezed his sleeve again and scuttled off with my head down, loathing myself and all my doings.

I was vaguely aware of a lounging figure pushing itself up from where it had been leaning against the window frame of the newspaper office across the way.

‘For the third and last time,’ said Alec’s voice. ‘I feel like your swain, Dandy, meeting you outside Aitkens’ every few days this way.’

I turned to him with a great surge of relief, shading immediately into irritation.

‘I didn’t ask you to meet me outside,’ I said. ‘I could have done with you in there. I could have done with you all day, as it happens.’

‘Why, what have you been doing?’ he said. ‘And where are we going at this brisk pace anyway?’

‘To my motorcar,’ I said. Alec tutted.

‘I’ve driven down too,’ he said. ‘I was going to give you a lift back. We really must get ourselves a bit more organised, Dan.’ I wondered whether now was the moment to tell him about the cards and deduced that it was not. Instead I answered his first question.

‘Hilda Hepburn explained why Mirren and Dugald couldn’t marry,’ I told him. ‘Accounted for her objection and Jack’s – and what Jack’s been hiding, by the way – and perhaps everyone else’s objections too. If they knew. Which she says they didn’t. And actually I believe her.’

‘Dandy, for heaven’s sake,’ said Alec. ‘What are you talking about?’

I told him and he gave a long, low whistle.

‘So what were you doing in Aitkens’?’ he said.

‘I spoke – not quite deliberately – to Miss Torrance of Ladies’ Gloves who told me nothing. Then to Miss Armstrong of Ladies’ Stationery who told me plenty of little bits and bobs, Miss Hutton of Ladies’ Gowns who told me one huge bit and bob which will knock you flat when I pass it on. Then I went rummaging around the attics-’

‘I thought we’d decided against the Abigail-in-gloves theory,’ Alec chipped in. ‘And why would Abigail kill her daughter because Jack had an illegitimate son?’

‘-where I found the gloves,’ I finished, with some triumph for which he would have to forgive me.

‘You never,’ said Alec. ‘Have you got them? Did you bring them out with you?’

‘I left them where they were for the police to find if it comes to that,’ I said.

‘Were they bloodstained? Gunpowder?’ said Alec, but before I could answer, he went on. ‘Hang on, though. Why would you think they’d be left there for the police to find in the sweet by-and-by if they ever get around to it? Won’t she just spirit them away?’ I opened my mouth to answer this and was interrupted again. ‘But wait a minute, why on earth are they still there?’ I drew breath. ‘Where were they?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘They weren’t bloodstained. One of them looked a bit water-spotted but there was no blood or smell of cordite.’

‘Wouldn’t be by now, anyway, now I think of it,’ Alec said.

‘And would they have been bloodstained?’ I asked him. ‘I’ve been trying to work it out – gruesome business! – but I just don’t know.’

Alec, as I had done, put two fingers up to one temple as though holding a gun then touched his other hand to the other temple where the bullet would have come out again.

‘I don’t know either,’ he said.

‘She was pretty close to the wall, I think,’ I said. ‘Judging by the stain there. So I was wondering if perhaps there would be a kind of backwards… even if her head blocked the immediate… dehiscence-’

‘The what?’

‘It’s a botanical term. Hugh taught it me.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘The bursting open of a seedpod and scattering its-’

‘God Almighty, Dandy.’

‘I know. But we have to consider these things. Would the blood and-’

‘Let’s leave it at blood.’

‘Right. Would the blood come back off the wall with enough speed to hit the gloved gun hand once the head had dropped away?’

‘If the head dropped away as fast as all that. People can take a surprising amount of time to fall, you know.’ He knew; he had probably seen soldiers die on their feet at close range. He might even have caused a death that way. Of course, the last thing on his mind if he had would have been where a few drops of blood chose to fall. I decided to change the subject.

‘As for where the gloves were,’ I said, ‘- stuffed into a shoebox in a little room very near the lift. And there was just one pair, with their price ticket on, obviously plucked from the shop floor and taken up there. Most stuff – and there’s a lot of it, I can tell you – can be counted in the dozens if not hundreds: vases, leggings, saucepan lids. And most of it has obviously gone straight from the wholesalers to the attics, unloved and unpriced. So the gloves stuck out most remarkably.’

‘Which brings us back to the question of why she left them there.’

‘Especially since the room where Mirren hid was cleared and scrubbed.’

‘How do you know which room she hid in?’ Alec said.

‘Ah, now, yes. Miss Hutton’s bombshell,’ I replied. ‘Mirren was there the whole time, Alec. She didn’t just creep into the store and up the stairs on jubilee morning. She was staying there. In a little attic room with a fireplace and running water.’

‘I suppose that makes sense,’ Alec said. ‘She had to have been somewhere. I can’t agree about it being a bombshell, Dandy.’

‘And between closing on Saturday and opening up on Monday morning she left a letter for her grandmother, a handwritten note, slipped under Mary’s office door.’

‘Boom!’ Alec said. ‘How do you know?’

‘Because Miss Hutton trod on it when she unlocked the office door early in the morning to leave some papers in there.’

‘Did she read it?’ Alec’s eyes were gleaming with the thrill of the chase. I shook my head. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Sealed, eh? And she didn’t even think of steaming it open over a kettle?’

‘As a matter of fact, she said it was only folded in,’ I said. ‘But she didn’t look at it anyway.’ Alec snorted. ‘I’m quite serious. She’s as innocent as a flower. Worryingly innocent, if you ask me.’

‘Meaning?’ Alec said.

‘She concluded that Mirren left the store after she dropped off the note for Mary, because if not, Mary would have gone looking for her and found her and Miss Mirren would be with us still.’

‘Golly,’ said Alec. ‘Yes, that is an unusual amount of trusting innocence to find in a grown woman these days. What was your conclusion, in contrast, my darling?’

‘That Mary Aitken decided to let Mirren stew up in the attics until her hired detective came to find the girl on a day and at a time of Mary’s choosing. Once the jubilee was safely out of the way. And that after Mirren died, Mary got the attic cleared so that no one would know Mirren had been there.’

‘But Mary didn’t kill her?’

‘I don’t think so, or she’d have dealt with the gloves as part of the general tidy-up.’

‘Back to Abigail,’ Alec said. We went along in silence for a moment, trying hard to think with clarity about it all.

‘I suppose… no,’ said Alec.

‘What?’

‘I suppose they were women’s gloves, were they? Sorry! Of course they were or you’d have said- Oh, Dandy!’

‘Don’t be so superior,’ I said. ‘It’s all very well for you just waiting for my reports and then picking holes in them.’ I blew upwards into my hair trying to cool my blushes.

‘So. Not necessarily back to Abigail after all,’ Alec said. ‘Back perhaps to Mr Hepburn who snatched a pair of gents’ gloves off the shop floor as he was passing, hid them after the dark deed was done so he couldn’t be caught with them about his person and of course can’t just waltz back into the shop to fetch them now, unlike Mary Aitken who needs no excuse to be there scrubbing and clearing away. Although, actually…’

‘Any man who did that must have nerves of iron,’ I said. ‘I mean, he must have been there, hiding while the place was crawling with policemen.’

‘Or have fled immediately and been out of the building before anyone worked out what the noise was.’

‘Down a stair he was sure no one would use to come up.’

‘Having hidden the gloves.’

‘Unseen by Abigail.’

‘Even though he put the revolver in Mirren’s hands.’ I kept walking without noticing that Alec had stopped. Then I turned and stared back at him. ‘What?’

‘We’ve got this all wrong,’ he said. ‘Even if we can bodge together a motive for Hepburn – something in the cuckold line, I suppose – how would he get into Aitkens’? How would he know Mirren was there? And worst of all for us, how could he have killed Mirren with Jack Aitken’s service revolver?’

‘He – he – she could have brought it with her and then… No. He could have come to see her not to kill her but she had planned to kill herself only… No, hang on. If she brought the gun…’

‘He couldn’t,’ Alec said. ‘It makes no sense at all.’

‘But if he was seen,’ I insisted. ‘Alec, there are precious few hard facts to be grabbed hold of in this sorry mess. We can’t afford to go discounting those we have.’

‘You heard Mrs Lumsden say that she heard some unnamed girl say that she had seen one of the Mr Hepburns in the store. But it might have been Dugald Hepburn. It needn’t have been Robin at all.’

‘It couldn’t be Dugald,’ I said. ‘He was in Kelso.’

‘Still, until we find the girl and pin her down to it, it’s not a hard fact as far as I can see.’

‘So let’s find her and pin her.’

‘So why are we walking away from Aitkens’, instead of scouring the Household Department?’

I looked at my wristwatch; it was almost five.

‘We don’t have time to do it today,’ I said. ‘The store will be closing. It’s a pity we can’t blockade the back door and quiz them all as they leave.’

‘Or just ask Mrs Lumsden who it was,’ said Alec, nodding.

‘Well, we can’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve been warned about Mrs Lumsden very specifically. She’s squarely in Mary Aitken’s corner, loyal to the core.’

‘So let’s join her there,’ Alec said. ‘Or pretend to anyway.’ He grabbed me by the elbow, wheeled around and started back towards Aitkens’ again almost at a trot, just as the town hall clock began to strike the hour.

Young men in pairs and threes, all with their black armbands on their overcoat sleeves, came strolling down the alley at the side of the Emporium and dispersed up and down the street, mounting their bicycles or hurrying for their buses and trams, then, when the stream of them had dried to a trickle, the girls began.

‘Dawdlers,’ said Alec. It would not have occurred to him, a bachelor still, how much longer it takes a woman to tidy herself for even the shortest and most everyday outing, but I could see in the newly brushed hair, the rouged lips and the straightened stockings – not just of the elegant creatures from Gowns tripping along on heels far too high for their homeward journeys, but of the plainer girls too in their plainer way – that they had all taken time at the end of their weary day to make sure they were ready for any adventures which might come along; adventures which might take the seat beside a girl on an omnibus and change her life for ever, adventures which might catch a girl’s eye in the park and doff a hat with a smile and an unspoken promise to meet, doff and smile again tomorrow.

‘I suppose you’d recognise Mrs Lumsden all right in her hat and coat, would you?’ Alec said.

‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘I expect the seniors have to stay behind to lock things and- Look, here she comes now.’ Little Mrs Lumsden, in black straw hat, shiny black summer coat and very small and high-heeled black patent shoes, came bundling out – there is no other word for it – of the alley mouth like one of those very busy, bulbous little beetles. Alec had primed me with my lines while we hurried back to wait in the doorway and I stepped forward with an air of confidence I hoped was to be fulfilled.

‘Mrs Gilver?’ she said. ‘Were you waiting for me?’

‘I was, my dear Mrs Lumsden,’ I said. ‘I’m so glad I caught you. I wanted to drop a word in your ear, very softly, if I may.’ Mrs Lumsden, a born gossip, was almost quivering. ‘It’s about Mirren.’

‘I’m afraid there’s been idle talk,’ Alec said. ‘Of the most unpleasant kind.’

‘And we rather think,’ I put in, ‘that it must have come from Aitkens’ by some route or another.’

‘I was just in the pub down the way there,’ Alec said, ‘and a chap at the bar was saying that Miss Mirren wasn’t alone where she died. That she hadn’t been alone, if you take my meaning.’

‘She wasn’t,’ said Mrs Lumsden, who had not taken Alec’s meaning, clearly. ‘You know that, madam. Miss Abigail was close by. Mrs Jack, that is. If that’s the talk it more likely came from the police, not from anyone here.’

‘No, Mrs Lumsden,’ said Alec. ‘It was a man this chap was talking about. That a man had been up there before Miss Aitken took her life in that terrible way.’

‘Well, that’s a story!’ said Mrs Lumsden. ‘That’s just nasty lies. And why you’d think it came from Aitkens’ I don’t know. And why you think it came from me! I would never spread such filth about the family and I know all the secre- I would never say such things about Miss Mirr- About anyone. Even if they were true and they’re not true. Miss Mirren was as innocent as a newborn baby. It’s not her fau-’ With considerable effort, Mrs Lumsden managed to stop talking and just stood with her lips pressed shut glaring at us, her bosom heaving. I took a deep breath and pressed on.

‘It was what you said about one of your girls from Kitchenwares saying she saw young Mr Hepburn upstairs on jubilee day.’

‘What?’ said Mrs Lumsden and the torrent of talk began again. ‘No, no, no. It wasn’t Housewares at all. It was Bessie Millar from Linens. And she’s been here as long as I have and would never run about telling tales.’ I cheered to myself. It had been Alec’s brainwave to mention the wrong department and make a definite accusation about Dugald in hopes that a rush of accurate information would pour out as Mrs Lumsden set the record straight again. ‘And it wasn’t young Mr Hepburn. It was his father. And anyway, she didn’t mean upstairs in the attics. She meant upstairs in the Linens Department, on the second floor. That was all. And besides, she must have been mistaken. Mrs Ninian said. It must have just been someone who looked a bit like him, for there had been no truce. Mrs Ninian told me so. So that can’t be where the talk’s coming from. It’s tired old gossip that’s forgotten. It’s two things mixed up together and making five, madam. I don’t want you thinking one of my girls is behind it. Why, it wasn’t even jubilee day.’

‘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.’