‘Lynne?’ I said, remembering. ‘Were you one of the nymphs?’
Lynne laughed and Miss Hutton tried not to.
‘I was supposed to be a water kelpie, madam,’ Morna said. ‘If my old dad heard you calling me a nymph I’d be pitten oot the hoose.’
‘You’ll be pitten oot the shoap, if you don’t mend your ways, Lynne McWilliam,’ said Miss Hutton, but she was smiling.
‘Anyway,’ Lynne said, ‘I reckon the poor old lift wouldn’t be giving up the ghost like it is if it didn’t have to do so many double journeys, eh no, Miss Hutton?’
Miss Hutton only shook her head.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘I’m very glad to see you, Mrs Gilver. I advised against this party, you know. Most unseemly, but at least if there are guests as well as the staff it will keep the youngsters in some kind of order.’
‘I was touched to be asked,’ I replied, feeling rather uncomfortable. ‘I feel Mirren’s death most dreadfully.’ Miss Hutton raised a polite eyebrow. ‘Oh, not the loss of her – I wouldn’t presume to say so to those of you who’ve known her so long and loved her so well – but the sense of being asked to find her, bring her home safe and sound, and then such a thing happening before I had even got started. I wouldn’t blame her poor parents if they never wanted to lay eyes on me again.’
‘Her parents?’ said Miss Hutton, as though only just remembering that there were such people. ‘Oh well, I shouldn’t think Mr and Mrs Jack will be here. But – forgive me, madam – when you say you were asked to find her…?’
‘Mrs Ninian engaged me,’ I said. ‘I’m a private detective. A staff member, after all, in a way.’ I saw no reason to keep it from Miss Hutton now but she reared backwards as though I had said I was a dancing girl.
‘Mrs Ninian engaged you to find Miss Mirren?’
Now why, I thought to myself, should that be puzzling? Before I could ask her we were distracted by the machinery of the lift starting up again beside us as it heaved another load up from the ground floor.
‘You’re right, Lynne,’ said Miss Hutton, absently. ‘It sounds worse than ever today.’
Indeed, I was almost at the stage of crossing my fingers and holding my breath as we waited for it to arrive. When the doors opened, Bella and Mary Aitken stood there looking very tense and flustered under their veiled mourning hats, their mouths dropping open at the sight of me. They stared and stared until, once again, the lift dropped a sudden lurching inch and they practically jostled one another getting out of the contraption onto solid ground.
‘Mrs Aitken,’ I said, addressing Mary, ‘thank you for asking me along. I’m very honoured to be included.’
‘What-?’ said Mary Aitken.
‘Mary?’ said Bella, turning to look at her. ‘I didn’t know you had invited other people.’
‘I-’ said Mary. For a long, skin-crawling moment we all stood there gawping at one another. My nerve cracked first. I fished in my pocket for the note and pretended to read it again.
‘I’m terribly sorry if I misunderstood,’ I said.
‘Perhaps Mrs Lumsden didn’t quite catch my drift,’ said Mary coldly. I held the note out towards her, but she snapped her eyes away from it and looked hard at me. ‘You are most welcome, of course,’ she said, about as convincingly as a prisoner greeting the hangman.
‘Did you come up on the lift?’ said Bella. I turned to her with gratitude for the change of subject and nodded, grimacing. She looked behind herself at it and then back at me. ‘And did you notice anything… odd about it?’
‘I… um, well, it was a little hair-raising, yes,’ I said.
Bella regarded me for a moment and then nodded. ‘You might help me talk sense into my sister-in-law, then. I think we should ring up the mending man and get him to see to it this afternoon while the store’s closed anyway.’
‘Bella, we can’t,’ said Mary. ‘What will people say?’
‘Mary, for the Lord’s sake,’ Bella answered. ‘No one will think ill of you. And how much worse if someone were to have a mishap.’
‘But we can’t order repairs and have men in overalls in the store today. What will Jack and Abby say?’
‘Come along, Lynne,’ said Miss Hutton, whisking the younger woman away from this scene of family discord. Lynne went with some reluctance and the tilt of her head suggested that she was listening all the way.
‘Jack and Abby?’ said Bella. ‘No need for them to know. And I’d rather offend sensibilities – even theirs – than have blood on my hands if someone ends up injured in that thing. What do you say, Mrs Gilver?’
‘Well,’ I answered, ‘no one need know if your repair man isn’t a talker.’
‘There you go, Mary,’ Bella said. ‘And I’ll take full responsibility if tongues start a-wagging.’
Mary Aitken shook her head again but the fight was out of her and Bella sensed it. It was remarkable the way that the power seemed to have shifted between the two of them. Or perhaps it was just that Bella’s stout practicality stood up better under strain than Mary’s rigid, watchful ways.
‘Right then,’ Bella said, evidently finding agreement in her sister-in-law’s silence. ‘I’ll take it upstairs out of harm’s way and telephone to the chap, then. He’ll be in our address book down in the office, is he?’ She stepped into the lift, shut the carriage door and the shaft door and left us listening to the groans and squeaks of the old lift’s uncertain ascension.
Presently, Mary turned to me and gave a ghost of the old on-and-off smile.
‘I haven’t had a chance yet to tell you how sorry I am,’ I said as we made our way through the Curtain Department towards the sound of conversation and clinking china. ‘Last week things were so very tumbled and confusing. But I truly am, Mrs Aitken, most sorry.’
‘You who have nothing to be sorry for,’ she said, looking straight ahead. ‘Imagine the sorrow I feel.’
I took pity on her then. If she really believed that forbidding Mirren’s engagement had led to the girl’s suicide, she must be wretched now.
‘You can’t possibly have foreseen it,’ I said. ‘We can’t shrink from guiding our children – and grandchildren – in case they…’ And besides, that is not what happened, I wanted to say. But if Mirren had been murdered, Mary Aitken was a suspect and I could not show her my hand. She stopped walking and faced me, then she seemed to lose some of her courage and turned away a little again, smoothing a shelf of folded flannel sheets, tweaking the corners straight and lining up the ribbons which bound each one so that the stripe of blue satin rose up, dead straight, through the pile.
‘I have done things in my life that make me scared of the day I’ll meet my maker,’ she said. I said nothing. ‘“And shall come forth; they that have done good unto the resurrection of life and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of damnation.” I already know what damnation feels like, Mrs Gilver.’
Most assuredly, I said nothing in answer to that.
‘Do you believe what the Bible says about suicides?’ she went on.
‘I’m not sure I know what the Bible says, Mrs Aitken,’ I answered. ‘I know what the churches say, but that’s not the same thing at all.’
‘“Know ye not that ye are not your own, for ye are bought with a price”,’ said Mary. ‘So perhaps I’ve got more chance now of seeing Mirren in the hereafter than I ever did before.’
My childhood inculcation was not notably thorough – my mother had been more interested in Art and Beauty and Nanny Palmer cared only for shining hair and clean fingernails – and my long years in the land of John Knox had left me somewhat between two stools when it came to the details, but I was pretty sure that one could not expect to meet lost loved ones come what may, only the venue undecided until Judgement Day had dawned. Thankfully, Mary Aitken did not seem to notice the lack of an answer. She subjected the stack of sheets she had been tidying to one of her fiercest stares.