Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder (33 page)

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Authors: Catriona McPherson

BOOK: Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder
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‘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.

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