She had reached another of the many curtains with which Aitkens’ was so liberally festooned, this one hiding a shut door. She knocked on it and called out.
‘Visitor for you, Miss Hutton.’ Then she opened the door and left me there.
Miss Hutton was sitting in a tiny office, a cubby-hole really, with just a desk and a rack stretching from floor to ceiling with quite a hundred little pigeonholes in it, all stuffed with bundles of yellowing tissue paper. She was opening letters and she looked up with great relief from them.
‘Oh! Mrs Gilver,’ she said. ‘I’m answering condolence cards. Is there anything more draining?’ She hauled herself to her feet and from behind the door she drew a folding chair, cracked it open and set it down at the side of the desk. There was just room to sweep the door closed again. I sat down – there was nowhere to stand – and Miss Hutton shoved the heap of unopened envelopes away from her.
‘Is it really your job?’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t one of the family…?’
‘In a family business,’ Miss Hutton said, ‘things do get a wee bit mixed in together sometimes. I offered, anyway. Just a first pass through them. I’ll let Mrs Ninian see all the important ones.’ She nodded towards a small pile, mostly letters, and then gave a rueful look at the much larger piles of letter and cards at its side. ‘And don’t you think it shocking, Mrs Gilver,’ she said, her bony nose pinching with disapproval, ‘how many of them…’ She held up one card and another and a third, all of the same design – an improbable church on a hillside with an improbable sunset going on behind. ‘These are ours,’ she said. ‘We sell them downstairs. You’d think people would have bought a different one to send us, wouldn’t you?’
I could not imagine anything more vulgar than a condolence card of any sort, to be honest, and I could not resist taking one and opening it.
A golden Treasure in your heart
The dear Lord loved it too
And so has gathered it to Him,
Sweet mem’ries left to you.
I closed it again, thinking that I would have hit anyone who sent me such an article if a child of mine had died.
‘I wanted to speak to you today, Miss Hutton,’ I said, ‘because I find myself still with a few loose ends to tie in. For my own satisfaction, you understand. Mrs Ninian has made it very clear that my formal engagement in the matter is over now.’ I waited a bit, thinking that now was her chance to freeze me with a glare if she cared to.
Far from it; she continued regarding me with a calm, expectant look.
‘Anything I can do to help,’ she said. A singularly unhelpful remark as it happened, since I still could not remember what it was that I wanted to ask her. Alec disparages what he calls my excessive note-taking – and to be frank, I have ended some cases with enough scribbled-over paper to support a bonfire while chestnuts are roasted upon it – but better that surely than this: sitting gazing blankly back at an important witness as she gazed at me. And looking at her, I remembered a very different expression of hers, puzzled and troubled, and that must have connected to the thing I wanted to ask her; it was tantalisingly close but still out of reach of me.
‘Would you mind, Miss Hutton,’ I said, ‘if I just sat here for a moment and gathered my thoughts?’ She glanced back at the piles of correspondence on her desk and I hurried to reassure her that I did not need her attention.
‘Please do carry on with your work. So long as I won’t distract you. I would even offer to help, but I wouldn’t like to…’ I made a fastidious expression and nodded to the letter she was even now slitting open. It was addressed to Mr and Mrs J.B. Aitken. Miss Hutton scanned it quickly and set it upon the pile to be passed along. The next envelope she glanced at and added to the same pile without opening. Then came a card which she opened, frowned at – it was the church at sunset – and placed on top of her stack. Then another unopened envelope onto the family pile.
‘Do you recognise the handwriting?’ I asked. A pained expression flashed over her.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it’s just that I wouldn’t open anything addressed to Mrs Ninian herself, madam, until she’s seen it. She wouldn’t like that.’ She held up the last envelope and I nodded, reading the name there. Miss Hutton sighed. ‘I wish I’d broken my own rule last week, I can tell you.’
‘Oh?’
‘There was a letter for Mrs Ninian and it wasn’t even sealed, just tucked over, you know, and maybe if I’d opened it I could have helped in some way.’
‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ I said.
‘But then again maybe not,’ said Miss Hutton. ‘Most certainly not. Because you said Mrs Ninian asked you to find Miss Mirren, didn’t you?’
‘That’s it,’ I said, sitting upright in my chair. My voice had been far too loud for such a small room and Miss Hutton looked startled. ‘That’s what you said, that’s been niggling at me,’ I went on. ‘You seemed surprised, the day of the funeral, when I told you what I had been asked to do.’
‘I was surprised,’ Miss Hutton said.
‘Yes, but why?’ I asked her. She hesitated, turning an envelope over and over in her hands. It was another condolatory church – I was beginning to recognise them. Then she began speaking in a great rush, like a dam bursting.
‘I take Mrs Ninian’s appointment list into her office at the start of every week,’ she said. ‘Just to help her. Everyone thinks she’s such a tower of strength but I know what it takes out of her, what a toll. Anyway, when I went in on that Monday morning, I tripped over an envelope on the floor. It had been slipped under the door and it was addressed to Mrs Ninian and I was sure it was Miss Mirren’s handwriting. She used to play at shops here when she was a little girl, you know. Writing out orders and receipts – she had her own little set of books and stamps and everything – and I know her writing. She never went to school to learn that same hand they teach them all, so I’d know her own writing anywhere. I’m sure it was hers. I know it was.’
‘How did it get there?’ I said. ‘Surely the post isn’t generally slipped under doors.’
‘Oh no, madam, I don’t mean a posted letter,’ Miss Hutton said. ‘I mean hand-delivered. It just said Mrs N.L. Aitken.’
‘In Mirren’s writing?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Revealing that Mirren had been here, in the store?’
‘Yes,’ said Miss Hutton, and she looked pained again. ‘I even smiled when I saw it. We had all heard on the Saturday that Miss Mirren had run off and we were worried about her. Well, those of us who weren’t cheering her on, you know. Quite a few of them thought she had eloped and all the best to her. But when I saw the letter, I thought: Ah! She’s here. Hiding out in the store. And then I thought: Well, of course she is. Where else? Because whenever she wasn’t playing at shops in the departments years ago, she was playing at houses up in those attics. So I put the letter on Mrs Ninian’s desk with her other papers and thought we would soon all be back to normal again. So I couldn’t understand why Mrs Ninian had engaged you. She knew where Miss Mirren was. I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t just gone to get her. Unless Miss Mirren left again.’
Not a natural detective, our Miss Hutton; no nasty habit of suspicion to stop her taking the facts at face value and trusting everyone. I had quite a different view. I thought nothing more likely than that, on finding the letter, Mary Aitken deduced where Mirren was hiding, perhaps even went to check, then decided to leave her there stewing in her own juices until after the jubilee, whereupon a detective summoned for the purpose would ‘find’ her. That, finally, explained the day’s delay.
And certainly if Mary knew where the missing girl was and did nothing it would explain her self-flagellating guilt and her conviction that she was damned