‘Really?’ he said. ‘Well, I must say, my dear, you’ve got that toff’s way of speaking off to a tee. My little parlour – I prefer to call it a parlour, don’t you know – is this way.’
Bella Aitken was a faint ghost of herself. I had seen it once or twice and heard of it many more times than that: a person keeping going up to and through a funeral and unravelling like a picked seam thereafter. She was without even her carpet slippers today, but instead shuffled into Trusslove’s pantry in her stockinged soles, not a pair of stockings either: one pale silk one, rather gone at the heel, and one sturdy brown lisle article, which would never go at heel or toe but would live on and on, stretching and sagging and never giving one fair cause to chuck it. I counted it one of the blessings of adulthood that I could choose never to wear lisle stockings ever again, and Bella’s pitiful mismatched ankles brought a lump to my throat and turned me yet more gentle.
‘Mrs Gilver?’ she said, peering through the low light at me.
‘Mrs Aitken, please forgive me for this rather…’ I waved my hands around the little room. ‘And please sit down. You look…’ I left this sentence hanging too, since both ‘ten years older than yesterday’ and ‘about to fall over’ were best left unsaid.
‘Was it Mary you wanted?’ she said, nevertheless sitting down with a great exhalation of breath. She leaned back in the chair, even her head dropping back as though she could not support its weight. ‘Trusslove might be confused; he’s not himself either.’
‘No, no, it was you I asked him to fetch for me.’ I paused, wondering how to go on. ‘I went to see Fiona Haddo yesterday. She told me about your plan – yours and hers – for the young people.’ Bella nodded dully. ‘And it explained to me why you were so cheerful when I first came here and why you were so very shocked by Mirren dying.’ She closed her eyes and was so still that I wondered if she had slipped into sleep, sitting there. ‘Mrs Aitken, you know she had no reason to kill herself.’
‘And yet,’ she said, very quietly, ‘that’s just what she did.’ I could see her eyes moving under their closed lids but they did not open.
‘Your sister-in-law wants me to drop the case now,’ I said. At that she gripped the arms of her chair and hauled herself upright, but what she said was not what I had been expecting.
‘Yes. That’s what to do. Nothing will bring her back.’ Then she let go of the chair arms and dropped back again. ‘Mary is right. Leave it now.’
I sat looking at her, exceedingly puzzled.
‘But don’t you still wonder why Mirren would have done such a thing?’ I asked her.
She shook her head, or rather rolled it to one side and then the other along the back of the chair.
‘No point,’ she said. ‘I did everything I could for her. Nothing will bring her back again. Please just leave us now.’
I rose and tiptoed out of the room, to find Trusslove hovering in the passage. A nearby door was open and there was something about the quivering stillness that made me suspect that a good few more servants were listening in.
‘She’s very tired, Trusslove,’ I said. ‘Perhaps more than tired. Has she been seen by a doctor?’
Trusslove gave a short laugh.
‘Who’s going to get one?’ he said. ‘There’s nobody fit to look after anyone else in this house now. Walking wounded they are. The four of them.’
‘As bad as Mrs John?’ He hesitated then.
‘She’s maybe the worst, right enough,’ he said. ‘Surprised me, I’m telling you. She’s always been so…’ I nodded, remembering the loud laughter and the slightly coarse vitality of the woman I had met just over a week ago. ‘And she kept them all going up to yesterday,’ he went on, ‘then pfft! Out like a wee candle when they came home from the funeral tea.’
I left by the servants’ entrance again and trudged back down the side drive to the street but did not get all the way, stopped by the sound of hurrying footsteps behind me while I was still in sight of the house windows. I guessed who it would be even before I turned; for had not Trusslove told me about the unquiet spirit wandering?
‘Mrs Gilver,’ said Abigail Aitken. ‘My mother isn’t here.’
She had caught up with me on a particularly gloomy patch, with a spreading beech tree on one side and an even more spreading chestnut on the other, so that she was cast into green shade and as a result looked utterly ghastly.
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘it was your mother-in-law I came to see but if I’m to be really thorough perhaps it’s best that I happened to chance upon you too, Mrs Aitken.’
‘Oh?’
‘Your mother told me she wanted no further investigation, but I’d like to be sure she spoke for all of you.’
‘More investigation?’ Abigail Aitken’s voice came out as a rough whisper, almost a croak. ‘Of what?’ She looked about herself in a distracted way and then seeing what she had sought she laid a hand on my arm and drew me off the drive towards a wire bench set up around the base of a large tree. ‘I knew nothing of any “investigation”,’ she said, when we were sitting. ‘I thought my mother had asked you simply to find Mirren.’
‘Yes, yes she did,’ I said.
‘And she was hiding at the store all the while.’
‘Yes,’ I repeated. ‘At least, we can assume so.’
‘So what investigation could there be?’
‘About what happened,’ I said. ‘The deaths. Whether we’ve got a clear picture.’
‘Oh,’ said Abigail and she sat back against the trunk of the tree. ‘Yes, I see. I see what you mean. In case it wasn’t suicide. Well, it was. My Mirren. It was.’
‘You’re very sure.’
‘Who could be surer?’ she said.
‘And Dugald too?’
‘Dear boy.’
I was intrigued to hear her say so since the family had spurned him as a suitor.
‘Did you know Dugald Hepburn then?’ I asked her.
She shook her head. ‘Not at all. I only met him once and even that was not really a meeting. I just saw him with Mirren. They didn’t even know they had been seen. But he must be – must have been – a dear boy, mustn’t he? He couldn’t live without her. Didn’t want to. He must have been a very different sort from the rest of them.’
‘The Hepburns?’
She put her hand up to her mouth as if trying too late to stop the words she had already spoken.
‘I shouldn’t have said that. They are a cruel family. Heartlessly cruel – it’s easy to be heartless when you are so carefree – and I’m envious of them, but I shouldn’t let myself turn cruel too, in my envy.’
‘What is it you envy, Mrs Aitken?’ I said.
‘The children,’ said Abby simply. ‘Hilda Hepburn has three children. Three more, I mean; three still. And Mrs Hepburn had five when all’s said and done and she had the four grandchildren too. Dugald and the girls. But I only had Mirren and if I hadn’t had Mirren I would have had no one. And my mother as well, because I was an only child. Bella had two more sons – Lennox and Arthur – but they were killed in the war and so Mirren was all that any of us had.’ Then she caught her lip in her teeth. ‘I shouldn’t be saying this. You shouldn’t take any notice of what I’m saying, Mrs Gilver.’
With that she stood, picked her way over the roughish ground back to the drive and hurried away in the direction of the house. I followed her as far as the driveway and stood looking after her. She had her head down and her arms clutched about her body and was moving at a kind of harried trot – straight into the arms of her husband, who it seemed had come looking for her. As he had before, that day in the library, he caught her in a strong grip and pulled her close to him. I was too late to duck out of sight and he stood comforting his wife, staring at me with his head high like a sentry, a grim and unreadable look upon his face.