‘He was never,’ said June. ‘Was he, Poll?’ Her friend shook her head. Both of them were staring at me as though they had found me under a rock and wanted to drop it back on top of me. ‘I don’t know who’s been saying such things, madam, but you don’t want to listen.’
‘No one said which Mr Hepburn,’ I told them. ‘No one suggested for a minute that it was Dugald.’
‘Dugald?’ said Poll, her eyes just about popping out of their sockets. ‘That’s a story, madam, and a gey cruel one too.’
‘Because she only did what she did because they were kept apart,’ said June. ‘If he’d come to get her she’d still be here now.’
‘Stands to reason.’
‘If he knew she was here.’
‘And no one did.’
So whoever it was who had spied whichever Mr Hepburn it was, Poll and June it was not, but I could not stop them talking now. The ripples of my heaved boulder were sloshing around the banks as though they would never settle. Worse, Mary and Mrs Lumsden were walking towards us.
‘Sssh!’ I breathed, through still lips.
Thankfully, some sense of decorum or perhaps a healthy desire not to be sacked came to the fore and June piped up in quite a different voice:
‘Miss Shields says it used to be tallow candles, madam, when they came in farthing boxes. She says she couldn’t keep them on the shelves.’
‘But everyone in Dunfermline’s got the electric light now, so it’s bulbs these days,’ said Poll.
‘And Miss Shields always says it was a whatchoocallit that pinched everything,’ said the basement maiden.
‘Wheesht, Addie,’ hissed June.
‘Miss Shields,’ said Mary, drawing near, ‘has too much imagination for her own good.’ June and Poll dropped their eyes but poor Addie did not appear to have that talent which senses trouble and changes flight to dodge it.
‘Right, Mrs Ninian,’ she said. ‘Because why would a whatchoocallit need candles? What do you call it again? I cannae mind.’
‘Can’t remember, Adelaide,’ said Mrs Lumsden. ‘If you don’t speak nice you’ll be back in the stockroom.’
‘And if you don’t stop spreading tales you’ll wish you were back in the stockroom because you’ll be out on your stupid ear.’ Mary delivered this in a cold, low monotone which made me tremble in my shoes, let alone the shopgirls. Then she turned and stalked away, so stiffly that she made me think of a clockwork soldier.
Adelaide’s eyes were brimming.
‘I didnae mean no harm, Mrs Lumsden,’ she said. ‘We were all talking about it. The poultry ghost. That’s it! Poultry ghost. It was Miss Shields that told me.’
‘Poltergeist, ye wee daftie,’ said June. ‘And it was never, anyway. Eh no, Mrs Lumsden?’
‘It was donkey’s years ago,’ said Mrs Lumsden. ‘And it was tramps. And if you don’t have the sense to see that poor Mrs Ninian doesn’t want to be thinking about ghosts in the attics today of all days, Adelaide McVitie, then you’ve even less sense than I’ve seen in you and that’s saying something.’ She shook her head at the poor girl, almost really angry, perhaps as near it as she ever was. ‘Now get away into the kitchen and help the girls dry up the cake forks. Don’t touch anything china and stop that petted lip before I skelp you.’
Adelaide fled.
‘Mrs Ninian was just coming to speak to you, Mrs Gilver,’ Mrs Lumsden went on. She shooed away the other two girls, who looked glad enough to go. Once they were out of earshot Mrs Lumsden gave something between a laugh and a sigh. ‘I know I’m too soft with my girls. That Addie McVitie’ll never make a sales assistant if she lives to be a hundred, but her father has no work and her mother’s got a bad chest and five more of them at home.’
‘Stockroom?’ I said.
‘The lassie can’t add two and two and get four.’ This time the sigh was a sigh, nothing more. ‘Mrs Ninian has been good to me, keeping me on, and I try to do the same. Addie was getting a shilling a week in the council laundry when I found her.’ I gave an understanding nod, but in truth I thought that Adelaide would be happier in a laundry where she understood what was required of her and then perhaps some bright girl could leave the laundry behind and flourish at Aitkens’, rising from the basement buckets to the heights of the cutting counter on the curtain floor. And to be entirely honest, since sweet bright pretty Mirren Aitken had been snuffed out at twenty I had precious little sympathy left for laundry girls of any stamp who could still step out into the fresh air at the end of their shift and go dancing.
‘What did Mrs Ninian want me for, Mrs Lumsden?’ I asked ‘Should I go after her?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Lumsden, putting out a hand to stay me. ‘It was just to apologise, really. She meant to say a few words to the staff, you know. But she doesn’t think she’ll be able to, as it turns out. She’s taken this so hard, just gone to pieces really. So Mrs John’s going to take her home.’
‘She certainly doesn’t need to apologise to me,’ I said, feeling very uncomfortable. What Mrs Lumsden said next hardly helped.
‘Well, she knew you must be expecting an audience with her a wee bit later,’ she said. ‘You know – to settle up – but she’ll have to ask you to wait for another time.’ I could feel myself blushing. ‘And to be honest, Mrs Gilver, Mrs Ninian was surprised to see you here – they both were, her and Mrs John. She said to me she didn’t mean her note that way at all. And I can’t think what I wrote because my mind was on ten other things and I just scribbled it. But there’s proof of the state she’s in right there, not saying exactly what she means. Not like her. Not like her at all and I’ve known her woman and girl.’
I was squirming by now, as can well be imagined, with a horrible wriggling guilt which crept in at my collar and scuttled up and down my spine, even though I told myself that it was exactly like Mary, for had she not written the wrong date on her first postcard to me? To salve my conscience, I told myself that the least I could do was carry out the plan for which I had infiltrated this wake in the first place. I only hoped I had the chance before it ended.
‘Are you going to switch off the urn and send them all home?’ I asked.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Mrs Lumsden. ‘In fact between you, me and the gatepost, Mrs Gilver, I think I might just slip through to the food hall for a couple of bottles of sherry. They look like they need it.’ Indeed, the few dozen men and women, the handfuls of boys and girls were looking pretty woebegone, standing around with their cups of tea. ‘Anyway, we need to wait for Laming now.’
‘Who?’ I said.
‘Mr Laming, the lift fixer. Well, locksmith and small engine and anything else he can turn his hand to. Oh my goodness, but Mrs Ninian wasn’t pleased about that, madam, was she now? She’ll not be sorry to be away out of it and missing him.’ She nodded as she spoke and I turned to see Bella and Mary Aitken making a slow path to the head of the stairs which led out of the tearoom. When they had descended out of view, the first of the young men began to slide into seats on the long banquette and a few of the bolder girls – I noticed June and Poll among them – perched on the wooden chairs opposite and started giving out smiles.
‘I’ll need to judge this sherry carefully, eh?’ said Mrs Lumsden with raised eyebrows. ‘I don’t want to be ringing the polis to help me clear the place later.’
Her words were prophetic, as we were soon to know.
5
Between the rise in spirits which Bella and Mary’s departure could not help but cause, cats and mice being what they are, and the introduction into the party of two bottles of cream sherry and one of whisky, I was not lamented as I slipped away to the back stairs and crept up to the attics to search for clues.