‘Miss Hutton,’ I said, ‘did you mention finding the letter? To Mrs Ninian, I mean. Or, I suppose, anyone.’
‘No,’ Miss Hutton said.
‘Why not?’
Miss Hutton blinked again.
‘I suppose,’ she said slowly, ‘I just sort of naturally didn’t. I mean, I just sort of wouldn’t, in case it was awkward for her.’
‘Very discreet of you,’ I said. ‘Most admirable. I expect you must need a great deal of natural discretion to do what you do.’ Miss Hutton looked uncomprehending. ‘Madam looks lovely, and all that,’ I went on. Her rather prim face broke into an unexpected smirk.
‘Oh indeed,’ she said. ‘Ten years younger, perhaps even more slender without the stripes and we seem to have mislaid your measurements, madam, and beg your patience while we take them again.’
‘If she’s twice the size she was last time?’ I guessed. Miss Hutton nodded. ‘Well your discretion will stand you in good stead now.’ She looked puzzled and I saw I would have to spell it out to her. ‘About the letter: perhaps it would be best not to mention it to anyone.’ She nodded again, reassured as easily as that, her innocence making me worry about her more than ever. Did she really not have enough healthy regard for her own safety to see that I was warning her?
‘Do you think Mrs Ninian knows you found it and moved it?’ I asked. The spectre had raised itself in me that if Mary Aitken guessed as much and if Mary Aitken had killed Mirren, she might even now be plotting to tie up a loose end of her own. But did I still suspect Mary Aitken? Was I not leaning towards Robin Hepburn now; an enraged cuckold hitting out at his rival’s child? Miss Hutton was shaking her head.
‘She probably just assumes Miss Mirren put it there herself, if she’s thinking about it at all. And I hope she’s not – brooding about it, making herself ill.’
‘I wonder why Mirren didn’t,’ I said.
‘Well, Mrs Ninian’s door is kept locked usually. I have a key and a few other people too, but Miss Mirren wouldn’t have had one.’
‘A few others?’ I said, relieved. At least if Mary Aitken had worked out that Mirren’s letter had arrived on her desk via an intermediary, she would have a few from which to choose. She could not, surely, kill them all.
8
And so to the attics after all. Not to search for bloodstained gloves but to see what signs if any remained of Mirren’s sojourn there. I was hoping for a note, or, if the gods were smiling, a diary although reason told me that the police must have found it if there were such a thing. I left Miss Hutton in her cubby-hole full of tissue-paper rolls – these, I now realised, were ladies’ paper patterns, cut to fit regular customers and kept for them, until advancing years and an appetite for buns ended their usefulness; I remembered my own stalwart little dressmaker once telling me she had ‘mislaid my numbers’ and would have to beg my patience while she set about me with the tape measure again and I wondered now, after what Miss Hutton had told me. But I am more or less the same girth as when I ordered my trousseau, or at least I always tell myself so, since I can still fit into my wedding gown and into my oldest tweeds without much straining. A more Jesuitical soul (or do I mean less; Jesuitical seems to be one of those insults that two people can hurl at one another each believing stoutly in his own rightness to do so) would remark that elderly tweeds show their age in bagging more than anything and that my wedding gown, following the fashions of the day, was a sack – pouchy on top and with loops of satin hanging from its suggestion of a waist like great swirls of melting cream. Now that tastes have changed, it almost pains me to see my wedding portrait, the waste of my youth that it was to be got up in such an extraordinary way.
Upstairs I strode confidently across the darkened landing to the light switch and clicked it on. The wreath of lilies was still there and the black velvet curtaining but, perhaps from familiarity, I found I could look upon them without my throat contracting. Now, where would one hole up here if one were… if one were what, though?
What was Mirren Aitken’s state of mind when she had left her home and her family and come to the attics above the store to hide herself? It depended whether she knew about her father and Hilda Hepburn, about the impossibility of herself and Dugald marrying. Had she told Mary in the letter? Why would she tell her grandmother, though?
I tried the handle of the nearest door and it opened, but instead of a little attic room, which is what I had been expecting, I found on the other side a long corridor, quite dark, with at least six doors opening off it; this was not going to be a ten-minute job, it seemed, and I wished that I had had some luncheon before beginning, and had brought an electric torch with me, and a scarf to tie over my face against the dust I could smell in the quiet air. On the other hand, I knew that the store was free of Aitkens today – now that Lady Lawson had let poor Mary go home – and I could not miss the chance while I had it.
It was with some relief that behind the first of these new doors which I tried, in a kind of little ante-room, I found three paraffin lamps, full and clean, as well as a large sketching pad which appeared to serve as a stock-plan of the attics with coded notes about what was stored in each of them, and columns marked out to show what was brought in and taken away and when and by whom – initials I could not decipher – and to which department they were bound. Blessing Mary Aitken’s tidy mind, I lit one of the lamps and began.
Soon enough, I was cursing Mary Aitken’s mind, for it transpired that the plan with its columns was an aspiration rather than a reflection of reality and the attics themselves were a perfect chaos of objects and oddities, like a jumble sale after the passing of a tornado. There were crates – the rooms full of closed crates were not too bad, as a matter of fact, for crates must sit on one of their flat sides and the only way to add another one is on top of the first. The rooms where the crates had been plundered, however, were quite another matter. The lids lay about and packing straw covered the floor and miscellaneous items could be seen sticking out of the tops where they had been shoved to get to greater prizes below. Three vases perhaps would bar my way across the floor and a tottering heap of shirt boxes would threaten to fall as I edged past them to get to sets of saucepan lids tied together like castanets, the saucepans themselves nowhere to be seen, but an army of chimney pot nests – too small for any chimney I could imagine and perhaps that was why they languished here – would grab at my stockings as I left again.
There were still some signs that once upon a time these rooms had been staff quarters, as I had heard Bella tell me: fireplaces and dark-stained edges to the floors where linoleum or even rugs had once been put down. Now though there were only bales of mothy tablecloths rolled up like giant cocoons and propped in corners, a bouquet of nasty, shiny bed quilts all squashed together, each one a rosette, and stuffed in the space below a table, its legs wrapped in cardboard and tied with string and another one upside down on top. I glanced at the tables – pickled walnut, it looked to be, but not too successfully pickled because the worm had got into their underside, and little piles of orange dust revealed why they had been forgotten here. I found myself tutting. Those shiny quilts, nasty as they were, would be showered with woodworm dust, not to mention damp too, and they would have fetched – I glanced at one of the price tickets – ten shillings and ninepence apiece in their day, which seemed rather a lot and I assumed they had not been here as long as the yellowed tablecloths nor the millinery skeletons I found in the room next door, poor things, stiffened gauze mushrooms in grey and white and brown, waiting for the winding of silk, the ribbon band and the sprays of cherries which would never come now, since hats like mushrooms had gone the way of pouchy wedding gowns with loops of whipped cream hanging down.