Unsuitable Day for a Murder

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. ‘Those 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.

‘Foul creature,’ he said. ‘They’re all the same.’

‘Yes,’ I hissed at him. ‘They are. Her mother is a poor, sweet, broken-hearted woman who deserves all our pity. Her grandmother is nothing worse than a ruthless businesswoman and I daresay if she had joined forces with you you’d have been grateful for the very things you’re reviling in her now. Not a single one of them is any of the things you called them, and this child,’ – I shook the photograph – ‘whatever the history between her family and yours, deserves to be spoken of with respect.’

At last, he had managed to tear his eyes away from the picture. He looked up at me.

‘A ruthless businesswoman,’ he repeated. ‘And much good it did her in the end, eh? Look what she’s come to now for all her scrabbling.’ His words dripped icily from his mouth and I put a hand out to stop him speaking. He would surely hate himself for it when he heard about poor Mary now. ‘Have you seen that so-called library of hers?’ he said, with a note of real glee. I wanted to ignore him, but in fact the gleaming honey-coloured library with no books in it had intrigued me. It had puzzled Alec too and it was he who answered.

‘What about it?’ he said.

‘All very fancy and no books,’ said Mr Hepburn, and he was laughing to himself at some private joke.

‘Beautiful books, actually,’ I said. ‘Incunabula worthy of a museum.’

‘Incu-what?’ said Robert Hepburn.

‘The illustrated manuscripts,’ I said.

‘Aye, that’s right.’ He was smiling again. ‘Books with pretty pictures. That would do Mary Lance down to the ground.’ He was teasing us and loving every minute of it too. ‘She can’t read,’ he said. ‘She can’t read or write. Acting like the Queen of Sheba.’

I stared at him. ‘Of course, she can,’ I said. ‘She sent me a postcard.’

‘Aye, that’ll have taken her a night’s work with a pencil,’ he said. ‘Any mistakes on it?’ I couldn’t help glancing at Alec. This did explain the mistake in the date on that first postcard. And the second time she communicated with me it was a telegram. And also I thought of Miss Hutton, loyally dealing with the post that way.

‘Lady Lawson,’ said Mr Hepburn, ‘came to us once and she was full of how “wonderful Mary” never just left a note and fobbed her off onto an assistant. How she dealt with her personally and kept all her measurements in her head. Aye well, she would, wouldn’t she? Keeping her wee secret and passing it off as a favour!’ Again I tried to stop the man; he was pitiless and would rue it once he knew.

‘Don’t say such things,’ I said. ‘Yesterday, Mary-’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I heard at the kirk.’ Unbelievably he smiled. ‘Her sins have found her out.’

‘You haven’t accused her of any sins,’ Alec said. His voice was trembling with fury. ‘You’ve simply spoken of her in the foulest and most unwarranted terms, and gloated over her weaknesses, sounding – if you’ll forgive me – like a sore loser.’

‘Oh, she sinned,’ said Mr Hepburn. ‘She sinned all right. She left her husband once when times were hard. Did you know that? She came back to me.’ He stopped for a moment, enjoying the effect he had had on us, then his eyes clouded. ‘And like a fool I let her. I blamed Ninian for it all and thought he’d turned her head. I took her back, shop-soiled, you might say. Then I met a real lady. A proper, modest, respectable woman and I made her my wife and with her I’ve enjoyed the kind of decent, honourable life that hussy could only dream of.’ He sat back, folded his arms and nodded, smiling with satisfaction at the effect of his words.

‘Can I ask you one thing?’ I said. ‘And then we’ll leave you.’ He inclined his head. ‘Could you just forget all the old history now? Just say nothing about it to anyone and let it die?’

‘I’ve no interest in any of that family or their doings,’ he said – all very lofty and completely untrue; his cheeks were only now returning to their usual hue after his near apoplexy – but I believed that he would say nothing.

‘And can I ask something?’ said Alec. ‘Why, in the name of heaven, after all that had passed, did you ever come here to set up your store? Why choose this town of all places?’

Mr Hepburn smiled again. ‘To pay her back,’ he said, and his voice sent goose bumps down my spine. ‘To ruin it all for them.’

‘My God,’ said Alec. We were downstairs, in the cool darkness of the alley at the side of the bank, leaning back against the wall. ‘What an absolute horror of an old man. Wouldn’t you hope to be past such passions at his age?’

I nodded, but distasteful as the recent scene had been, something else was troubling me.

‘That mix-up is very odd,’ I said. ‘Did I say old Mr Hepburn on the telephone earlier, Alec? Why would the maid at Roseville think “Mr Hepburn” meant the grandfather rather than her own master?’

Alec shrugged. ‘It was lucky she did,’ he said. ‘We’ve added another big chunk to the story of the great feud, haven’t we?’

‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘And I can quite believe there was enough bitterness to explain why Robert and Mary didn’t want an alliance between their grandchildren. I think the cousin marriage and the unfortunate sisters are just a nasty red herring, don’t you? An excuse for each lot to sneer at the others.’

‘God, if he knew that Jack Aitken had cuckolded his son!’ said Alec. ‘If he knew that Dugald had Aitken blood in him, he would…’

‘Explode,’ I said. ‘Burst with fury and ruin all those good Turkey carpets. He went absolutely purple at one point up there.’

Alec gave a short laugh. ‘I haven’t seen that since my brother was small. He had a talent for tantrums that had to be seen to be believed.’ He laughed again. ‘And my colouring. He used to go so black in the face that his freckles looked yellow. Very unnerving.’

‘Which brother was that?’

‘Ed,’ said Alec, and the abruptness of that one syllable told me not to say any more. I tried not to mind how much more he had said to Abigail in the hospital yesterday than he ever had to me in the five years I had known him, but instead turned my mind back to the case again.

‘I wish I knew why the mix-up was bothering me,’ I said. ‘This feeling is usually a sign that I’ve forgotten something. Is it bothering you too?’

Alec only shrugged again. ‘Roseville now?’ he said. ‘Get to work on Robin? I’d like to be able to go back to Mary and tell her that the Hepburns, to a man, either don’t know or have their lips buttoned.’

‘On whatever it is,’ I said. ‘The thing Abby told her mother yesterday can’t have anything to do with Mary and Robert’s ancient history.’

‘Yes, it’s very frustrating, isn’t it, to keep uncovering secrets and yet be sure that none of them is the secret we’re after. The one at the bottom of it all. Oh, let’s at least get out of here, Dandy. Let’s go.’

When the door of Roseville opened on us twenty minutes later it was not a servant who stood silhouetted against the light there, but an old woman dressed in black who peered up at us and cleared her throat with a fussy little sound. Without understanding why, I found myself clutching Alec’s arm, my heart suddenly hammering. Then in a moment the odd panic passed as she moved forward into the light of day.

She was a very small woman, neat and precise in her movements, and she fixed us with a bright, shrewd gaze that made me think of a robin, her head slightly on one side and the effect completed by a pronounced cupid’s bow in her mouth, so pronounced that when it was pursed, as it was now, it really did look like a beak, like the beak of a budgerigar or perhaps a canary.

‘Who are you?’ I said. Alec glanced at me, puzzled by my tone.

‘I beg your pardon?’ she said, rather clipped but not angry. ‘Can I ask the same of you? I’m afraid this isn’t a good day for visiting.’

‘Mrs Hepburn?’ I said, guessing. ‘We’re not visiting, exactly. We’ve just been to see your husband.’ Her head inclined even more to one side as she heard this and her bright eye glinted. ‘I’m Mrs Gilver and this is Mr Osborne. I wonder if we might have a word with you.’

‘Ah, the detectives,’ she said. ‘I heard about you. Come away in, then.’ She swept the door wide and we entered the hallway.

‘Please accept our condolences,’ I said.

Little Dulcie Hepburn nodded her head thoughtfully and her eyes brightened further as tears sprang into them.

‘It’s a sad finish,’ she said, ‘the two of them so young. They’d have got over it as well – that’s the worst thing. Nothing hurts more than first love, but live as long as me and you’ll surprise yourself what you can get over.’

‘You’re quite sure that it was suicide then?’ said Alec. ‘In both cases?’ His voice was low but Mrs Hepburn still shushed him.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course it was.’ Then she looked at Alec with a new, wary expression. ‘But why is it you need to see me?’

‘Mary Aitken sent us,’ Alec said and I did not miss the quick puckering frown that hearing the name caused.

‘She thinks you know something,’ I went on, ‘and she wants you to keep it-’

Again she shushed, peering at the doors around the hallway and up the stairs, her head making little pecking movements as she checked the corners and shadows.

‘Not here,’ she said, ‘but I will talk to you.’ She stepped very lightly across the floor and poked her head around a door, then, finding the room empty, she beckoned us and closed the door very softly behind us with one careful hand on the plate, shutting us all in.

It was another room very like the first I had seen at Roseville, with satiny little settees and gilt and white chairs and writing tables. Dulcie Hepburn rubbed the arm of her chair as she sat down and she smiled.

‘Fiona has a right way with a room,’ she said. ‘But it would never do Bob and me.’ She looked up at us again. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘No one will disturb us here. Bob would like burst in to see what was to do if I closed a door on him in his own house. He’s not a trusting man. Not easy in his own mind and it makes him restless. He always has to know what’s to do.’

‘We don’t want to pry, Mrs Hepburn,’ I said. ‘I just want to be able to assure Mary-’

‘Poor Mary,’ said Dulcie. ‘She was more sinned against than sinning, if you ask me. And if I can say it I don’t see who in the world should disagree.’

‘We know about her affair with your husband,’ I told her gently.

‘I don’t begrudge my husband any comforts,’ she said, and a swift look of pain flitted across her face and disappeared again. ‘We’ve not had our troubles to seek and he’s been very good to me. Stood by me and we have our son and our grandchildren. Still got our granddaughters even with Dougie gone. You can tell Mary Aitken her secret’s safe with me.’

‘I don’t think she meant that secret,’ I said.

‘No, I’m sure she didn’t,’ said Mrs Hepburn and she gave a small, knowing smile. I could not help myself. In fact, I did not even try.

‘I wish you would talk a little less obliquely, Mrs Hepburn,’ I said. ‘More straightforwardly. Tell us what the secret is.’ She only smiled again.

‘Aye, you say you’re not prying,’ she said, ‘but I’ll bet you’d like to know.’

‘We might have to insist,’ I went on. ‘There’s something not right here. Something I just can’t put my finger on. And when that happens, I can’t rest until I’ve straightened the whole thing out. Or until I hand it over to the police and they do. So if you won’t tell us what it is we might have to turn to the police to carry on the interview.’

‘The police?’ said Dulcie. ‘Away! You can’t go to the police. You know you can’t, Mrs Gilver. Especially not when Mary’s begging you to make sure things stay “under wraps”. Now can you? Besides,’ she said, and once again she rubbed her sleeve on the gilt arm of her chair making it shine, ‘it’s not a police matter.’ She sniffed. ‘See my good oak and mahogany isn’t as fancy as this here, but it takes a better polishing. Or maybe just gets it. Fiona and Hilda are more caring about flowers changed every day than the likes of dusting. Do you know Fiona’s maid has a wee comb to comb out the cushion tassels? Did you ever hear of such a thing?’

‘What’s not a police matter?’ I said, hardening my heart. Perhaps Alec was right about this case toughening me.

‘Very well,’ said Dulcie. ‘On the understanding of your complete discretion?’ Alec and I nodded. ‘You’ll have heard about my daughters?’ she said. She twinkled at Alec and me as we nodded again. ‘My girls. They were bonny happy babies, but as soft as rag dolls and we’d to feed them milk off a spoon they were so weak. Notice I call them my girls. Robin is our son, but the girls are mine.’ She gave a pretty, chirping little laugh at the looks on our faces. ‘I don’t mean what you think,’ she said. ‘Dear me, no. I call them mine because I know whatever it is that ails them came through me. And how do I know that?’ She gave us that bright, robin-like look again and waited. Something was shifting deep inside my mind and perhaps I would have got there in the end, but she told us before all the pieces were joined together.

‘I know that because Mary had Abigail and Abigail was a fine girl and is a fine woman still.’

I could not help a little gasp escaping me.

‘Abigail is your husband’s child?’

‘She tricked him,’ Dulcie said. ‘Desperate for a baby, she was. She said she loved him, said she had made a mistake going off with Ninian Aitken that way.’

‘Your husband implied that his affair with Mary was before he met you,’ said Alec.

‘My husband is good at that sort of thing,’ said Dulcie. ‘No, we were years wed when Mary snapped her fingers and got him sitting up begging again. We had our girls already. Not that she knew that, I daresay.’

‘She didn’t,’ I said, remembering this. ‘She said she found out about them when she was lying in for her confinement. I wondered why it had incensed her so.’

‘And so you see the problem with the two bairns,’ said Dulcie. ‘Mirren was Dougie’s cousin and with such weak blood in the family, that marriage could never be, no matter how much they loved each other. And if it had ever come out why we banned it, we’d have been the scandal of the decade, wouldn’t we? Poor Mary, me and my girls.’

‘I suppose so,’ I said slowly. Dulcie Hepburn did not know the worst of it. Dugald and Mirren were not cousins at all. Through Jack Aitken, they were brother and sister. The trouble with their marriage was nothing to do with Dulcie and her poor girls. What I could not decide was whether to tell her. No more could I decide whether anything about Mary and Robert’s old affair could possibly be what Abby had suddenly revealed to her mother yesterday.

‘You don’t think so?’ said Dulcie. ‘You think we should have let them marry?’ I could not help a shudder at the thought and Dulcie nodded, almost triumphantly. ‘You do agree,’ she said. ‘I know it was the right thing to do. I knew in my heart and someone I trust completely told me so too.’

‘Oh? Who was that?’ said Alec.

‘My milliner,’ said Dulcie. ‘Margaret-Ann for Hats. You’ll have seen her shop in Bridge Street. Well, she does the special work at House of Hepburn too. And at Aitkens’.’

‘Aitkens’ and Hepburns’ share a milliner?’ I said. ‘That’s surprising.’

‘Oh, she’s an artist with hats,’ said Dulcie. ‘We wouldn’t give her up and neither would they. She’s a treasure and a friend. She knows about Robert and Mary, about Abigail being Robert’s child, and when I told her about Dougie asking to marry Mirren she grabbed my hands in hers and shook them. I’ll never forget it, for it wasn’t like her to be so fierce. She grabbed me and shook me and said: It can’t happen, Dulcie-bella – that’s what she calls me – promise me you won’t let them.’

‘She sounds like a gypsy fortune-teller,’ I said, thinking that somehow Margaret-Ann for Hats must know about Jack Aitken being the father of both children. That grabbing and shaking was not over the prospect of cousin marrying cousin, I was sure. And I still failed to see how Abigail could announce her own parentage to her own mother and shock her mother into collapsing by doing so.

We left Dulcie then, thanking her for her candour and promising to convey her good wishes to Mary.

‘Which of course we shall not,’ said Alec, once we were out of the house. ‘She’d choke on them.’

‘You sound rather fierce, darling,’ I said. ‘I rather took to little Dulcie. Brave in her own way and, as she said herself, she hasn’t had her troubles to seek.’

‘Hm,’ said Alec. ‘I can’t get rid of the idea that she was laughing at us, just a little. For instance, when she said she knew we couldn’t go to the police. She was twinkling away like anything. What was that about, Dandy?’

‘She saw through my bluster,’ I said. ‘She knew I didn’t mean it. Because of Mary.’

‘But she said especially given Mary. Especially, do you see?’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘And speaking of Mary, shall we go and see how she is? We can tell her Fiona, Hilda, Robert and Dulcie are ticked off the list. That should give her some peace of mind.’

‘If we wait until after Robin that’s the whole boiling,’ Alec said.

‘But Robin can’t possibly know anything,’ I said. ‘He’s hardly going to know about his father’s infidelity, and he certainly doesn’t know about his wife’s.’

‘But are either of those two matters the thing Mary is desperate to keep secret? And he knows something. I told you about the way he galloped off to the telephone to make sure Dugald hadn’t run off with Mirren. He was all of a twitter when he got back again.’

‘All right then,’ I said. ‘But after lunch. And let’s find somewhere other than St Margaver’s Hotel to have it. And then pick up Bunty. She can’t stay with the Aitkens for ever.’

Bunty, however, was lying on a folded blanket in front of the range in the Abbey Park kitchen and showed no signs of wanting to shift from it. When she rolled onto her back and waggled herself in greeting I saw that her stomach was as round as a beach ball.

‘What have you been feeding her?’ I asked of the cook who was smiling fondly down and now kicked off her clog and rubbed her stockinged toe up and down Bunty’s breastbone.

‘Oh, she’s just had a wee bite of chicken and rice,’ said the cook. ‘And some broken meringue.’

‘Lucky Bunty,’ said Alec, with feeling. He and I had made do with sandwiches cut from very tough, day-old bread (it was Sunday, I suppose) and filled with bright orange cheese and thick slices of Spanish onion, washed down with bottled coffee.

‘And how is Mrs Ninian today?’ I asked the cook. ‘Has there been news from the infirmary?’

‘Mrs John said she slept right through and when she woke up this morning she wasn’t so dribbly,’ the cook said. It was to the point, if rather indelicate as bulletins go. ‘Mrs John had stayed all night, madam. She only come home when Mrs Jack went in after breakfast to relieve her.’

‘A good sister-in-law indeed,’ I said.

‘This last day or two,’ said the cook, and a kitchenmaid engaged with pastry at the work-table murmured her agreement. ‘I never knew how fond Mrs John was of Mrs Ninian before now.’

‘Never knew how fond we all were,’ said the kitchenmaid. ‘Not that- I mean to say-’

‘Wheesht your cheeky tongue, Elizabeth Rose!’ said the cook.

‘Oh my,’ the maid said, quite unaffected. ‘I get Lizzie usually, you know. It’s only the full whack o’ Elizabeth Rose when somebody’s angry.’

The cook tutted good-naturedly and smiled.

‘It’ll come in handy if you ever start a little teashop,’ I said. ‘Like Margaret-Ann for Hats. We’ve just been talking about her.’

The kitchenmaid snorted and the cook tittered with one hand over her mouth.

‘Well, you know why that is, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Her right name’s Mrs Smellie and nobody would buy a fancy new hat from that.’

‘Smellie as in Inspector Smellie?’ said Alec. He was staring at me and I was staring back at him.

‘That’s her husband,’ said the kitchenmaid. ‘He’s a big man at the tolbooth but it’s Maggie that’s in charge when he gets home. Or so they say.’

‘And he tells her everything,’ said the cook. ‘Confidential police business or no. I know that for a fact because she – well, she let my friend Nannie off with a big bill when Nannie’s man was up to his neck in bad debts and in a load of bother with pawning stuff he shouldn’t have, and the only way she knew was the inspector telling her. But she’s a good woman. Knows it all and says nothing.’

Alec and I had risen, he shrugging himself back into his overcoat and I pulling on my gloves.

‘If you really don’t mind the dog trespassing on your hospitality a little longer then,’ I said, making for the door with as much casual ease as I could muster. Alec was on my heels.

‘Not a bit of it,’ said the cook. ‘I like a dog about the place, me.’

She was still saying goodbye when the servants’ door banged shut behind us.

‘At last!’ Alec said. ‘Whatever Margaret-Ann knows is what the inspector knows. The thing that made the inspector believe in murder, in the teeth of all the evidence. I told you Dulcie was laughing at us.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You threatened her with the police and she said, “Oh, come now, Mrs Gilver, you can’t go to the police, can you?” She knows about Hugh. Inspector Smellie told his wife and she told Dulcie. He tells her everything. He certainly told her something that made her go off like a rocket at the thought of Dugald and Mirren marrying, didn’t he?’

‘And it’s not something we’ve heard already, is it?’ I said, with a sickly feeling spreading through me.

‘As dreadful as the things we’ve heard already are,’ said Alec. ‘I’m very much afraid not, no.’