‘The sarge’ however was immovable. I petitioned as a witness, as a family friend, as a prominent member of society who could command an audience with the Chief Constable at a click of the fingers, as a licensed private detective (the licence was fantasy, of course; if such things exist I certainly did not possess one) and finally as a subject of His Majesty and citizen of what I believed to be a free democracy and not the kind of totalitarian state where he would clearly be more at home, but there was no budging him. I was just gathering myself to deliver a farewell tirade which I hoped would spoil his dinner and his night’s sleep even if it got me nothing much, when Alec cleared his throat and tapped the side of my shoe with the side of his. I turned. Someone was signalling to me from the street door, a young man in grey flannel trousers and a knitted pullover whom it took me a moment to recognise as Constable McCann. I shut my mouth, tirade undelivered, and followed Alec outside to where McCann was waiting.
‘I dinnae ken why they’re being so close wi’ it,’ he said. ‘Mrs Aitken is away hame. It’s no’ a secret.’
‘Out on bail, eh?’ said Alec. ‘Perhaps they fear a mob descending if it’s generally known.’
At that moment another pair of young officers in their civvies came out of the station and stared hard at us in passing.
‘I cannae talk here,’ said McCann. ‘I’ll meet youse roond at the park gates on Pittencrieff Street.’ He pointed. ‘None o’ my brother officers stay oot that way.’
He took off at a good pace and Alec and I followed casually, after an interval. When we reconvened, Constable McCann asked us to walk along with him, saying that his mother would have his tea ready and the dog would get the lot if he was late again.
‘It’s no’ bail she’s got,’ he said when we were under way. ‘She’s let go. She’s innocent. Wee Mirren killt herself, so the doc said anyway.’
‘But I saw her,’ I said, stopping walking until Alec put a hand under my elbow to get me moving again. ‘She was sitting there with the gun in her hand and the blood still dripping. Besides, she confessed.’
‘Aye well,’ said Constable McCann. ‘The thing is, see, the police surgeon took – what d’ye cry them? – swabs. From Mrs Aitken’s hands and from Mirren’s hands an’ a’ and it turns oot they can tell fae the gunpowder how Mirren had fired the gun and her mother hadnae. So there it is.’
‘And the confession?’ I said. We had arrived at McCann’s house it seemed: a small grey cottage in a long terraced row. He stopped at the open front door. From behind a fringed fly curtain, there drifted the smell of bacon and the sound of a wireless.
‘Dr Stott said it happens all the time,’ he said. ‘A suicide and the mammy pretending she did murder.’ He touched his cap and disappeared behind the coloured beads of the curtain.
‘Can you believe that?’ Alec said, looking after him.
I nodded. ‘Thinking back, you know, she practically told me. In subtle code, but all the same. She said she didn’t have the courage to turn the gun upon herself, but she wanted to sit there holding it until the police came, because Mirren was dead and only if they hanged her could she be dead too.’
Alec heaved a sigh up from his boots.
‘What a god-awful mess,’ he said. ‘Poor Aitkens. I wouldn’t be in that house right now for a pension.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I was just going to suggest we paid them a visit.’ Alec looked suitably horrified and I hastened to explain.
‘I was supposed to find her, Alec. I was charged with finding her and bringing her home. As awkward as it’s going to be socially-’
‘Awkward!’ Alec squawked and I grimaced, agreeing with him.
‘-professionally, the least I can do is go and acknowledge… my complete failure.’
Abbey Park, however, was shut tight against all comers. The gate by which I had entered that morning was closed – locked and padlocked – and the tradesmen’s gate the same. The little lodge had its door locked and windows shuttered, and the house itself was hidden behind its walls.
‘I’ll write to her, then,’ I said, standing peering up at the chimneys, unable to help imagining what scenes of despair might be playing out in those rooms now. I hoped perhaps that Mary would be comforting Abigail, that Bella might have found it in herself to succour Jack, but when I remembered them all at the Emporium, stunned and crumpled by the shock of it, it was only too easy to think that each of the four would be curled up alone in some separate quiet corner, silently aching.
4
One could hardly believe it was the same town. The sun was shining as it had a week before and there was nothing the park-keepers could do about the beds of tulips and pansies but otherwise, when I emerged from the station on the day of Mirren Aitken’s funeral, it was into a very different Dunfermline. Black ribbon wreaths were pinned to the doors of the Carnegie Library and, as far as I could tell all the civic buildings with which this tiny city is so lavishly endowed. All the shops in the High Street had their shades half-lowered and were displaying in their windows only the soberest and most blameless of wares: dark clothes, tartan carriage rugs and luggage; for some reason every shop which could muster it had filled its windows with luggage. The protocols and etiquettes of the merchant trade, I thought (not for the first time), were a mystery to me.
Needless to say, Aitkens’ long row of plate glass was covered completely over with what looked like best black velvet. It must have cost them a pretty penny and I wondered idly if the bolts would be rewound and go back on the shelves to be sold afterwards or if the sunshine would have streaked it to uselessness. It was slightly out of my way but I could not resist walking down as far as Hepburns’ to see how their window trimmers had responded to the tragedy. With a dignified restraint which was somehow more excruciating than respectful, was the answer: the sporting young couple and the backdrops of their leisured life had been removed and in their place was set a single dark hat on a milliner’s stand just off centre in each window.
The investigation had been completed within days, the inquiry satisfied in a few days more and, although the procurator fiscal had mouthed familiar words about the balance of her mind, he had also taken his chance of a swipe at her family for their part in the sad affair and thus had appeared to align himself with the newspapers and the gossips in the streets, where revulsion at the families’ behaviour was the dominant note in the chord.
It was reported with the most bitter relish of all in the News of the World from which Grant had read it out to me. To be fair, though, the Scotsman had also let out quite a bit of line in its editorial, judging the rivalry of the Aitkens and Hepburns an indulgence for which the life of a pretty young girl was far too high a price to pay. The Times meanwhile had reported the matter with a disdainful loftiness which must have hurt more than the gossip in its way, and I hoped the families had not seen it and did not have the sorts of friends who would summarise the articles at future meetings, or indeed clip them and read them out, or even – as one of my great aunts used to do in the name of helpfulness, but really out of devilry – clip them and actually post them to the parties in question with biblical verses printed out on little cards.
All that was left now was the funeral and it was set for two o’clock in the afternoon. Yet here I was at just gone eleven in the morning, retracing my steps of a week before. I had an address written on a card in my hand (although it was my butler’s own clear writing, since the message had come by telephone) and had been engaged by a lady I did not know to discuss the matter of Miss Aitken in a professional capacity.