Going right instead of left this time, I found myself out on the landing very near the lift, but on the far side from the stairway – I had evidently come around in a loop from where I had begun. Quickly I re-entered the little ante-room, put the lamp back where I had found it and stole away down the stairs, listening at every bend in case I should hear someone coming. I managed to descend all the way and emerge into the back of the ‘fancy notions’ department at the ground floor without being spotted and I hurried towards the front foyer and the revolving door; the discovery of the gloves had put all else out of my mind.
‘That you off then, madam?’ said the doorman as I approached him and entered the revolving door. He gave it a nicely judged shove, allowing me to pass through without effort of my own but not causing me to rush to keep up with its revolution. While I was inside he popped out through the ordinary swinging door and was ready to meet me again on the pavement. ‘Can I see if I can flag you down a taxi?’
‘Thank you,’ I said, giving him a half-crown tip, ‘but my own little motorcar is round at the yard.’ He frowned down at his hand, wondering perhaps what the half-crown was for in that case. The answer was that I had remembered my plan to grill him. One of many questions troubling me was how Dugald Hepburn had got into the store when it was closed. ‘I felt for you most dreadfully about yesterday,’ I said, with a nod at the coin, to explain it.
‘Yesterday, madam?’ he echoed. ‘Me?’
‘Being denied the funeral,’ I said ‘And then such a dreadful thing happening while you were here all on your own.’
‘While I was alone here, madam?’ he said. ‘What would that be, then?’
‘Of course, you won’t have heard,’ I answered, kicking myself a little.
‘Heard what?’ said the doorman. ‘What’s happened now? Where’s it going to end?’
‘No, not something new,’ I said, laying a hand on his sleeve; he really was becoming quite agitated at the thought of fresh horrors, ‘only that the police surgeon reckoned poor Dugald died at half past two.’ The doorman frowned, calculating, and then his eyes opened wide.
‘Dear God!’ he said. ‘Half past two? That’s when the poor lad jumped?’ He turned around and looked back into the store. ‘I was right here, right in there, sitting on the chair there, waiting for the first of the staff to come back again after.’
‘A dreadful thing,’ I said.
‘I was that close,’ he said, and he took off his peaked cap and held it in both hands, newly struck by the fact of the death and needing to mark it once more.
‘No one could have expected you to do anything,’ I said. Of course, saying this to the man put exactly the opposite idea into his troubled mind, as I had hoped it would. (What a flinty soul a detective must have to be a successful one.) He began to talk nineteen to the dozen without a trace of artifice or self-regard.
‘I didn’t know a thing about it,’ he said. ‘I never heard a thing. You’d have thought I would, wouldn’t you, madam? But I can assure you I never. Not a single sound. Or else I’d have been away seeing what it was.’
‘You didn’t hear any movement on the stairs or doors opening?’ I asked. ‘Only one does wonder how he got in if the place was locked up.’
‘Maybe he came in the day before when we were open,’ said the doorman. I nodded absently, but I knew that would not do. Fiona Haddo had been very clear about when Dugald had fled Kelso. ‘I can tell you one thing – there was no jemmying locks or climbing in windows during the service, madam. It was as silent as the grave. I even thought that to myself, sitting there. As silent as the grave – and Miss Mirren going into hers and only twenty. On a Thursday afternoon too – that’s usually our busiest day in the week barring Saturday because so many other folk in the town have half-day closing and come in to Aitkens’. I never heard so much as a pin drop. Much less- Of course my hearing’s not as sharp as it was. I’m sixty-five this August and the wife’s never done telling me to turn the wireless down before we getting next door complaining.’ He turned again and looked in through the glass door. ‘A younger man might have-’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Absolutely not.’ It was time for a measure of – belated – humanity. ‘His neck was broken. He would have been dead instantly. There’s nothing you could have done.’ He looked somewhat mollified at this and I should have left it there. ‘Besides, I daresay there was nothing to hear no matter how sharp one’s ears. The lift shaft is a goodly way from the front door and there would only have been very dull sounds anyway. Muffled thumps at most, unless he screamed as he fell, which would resound right enough, so he can’t have.’ The poor doorman physically blanched at that. I pressed a further half-crown into his hand, squeezed his sleeve again and scuttled off with my head down, loathing myself and all my doings.
I was vaguely aware of a lounging figure pushing itself up from where it had been leaning against the window frame of the newspaper office across the way.
‘For the third and last time,’ said Alec’s voice. ‘I feel like your swain, Dandy, meeting you outside Aitkens’ every few days this way.’
I turned to him with a great surge of relief, shading immediately into irritation.
‘I didn’t ask you to meet me outside,’ I said. ‘I could have done with you in there. I could have done with you all day, as it happens.’
‘Why, what have you been doing?’ he said. ‘And where are we going at this brisk pace anyway?’
‘To my motorcar,’ I said. Alec tutted.
‘I’ve driven down too,’ he said. ‘I was going to give you a lift back. We really must get ourselves a bit more organised, Dan.’ I wondered whether now was the moment to tell him about the cards and deduced that it was not. Instead I answered his first question.
‘Hilda Hepburn explained why Mirren and Dugald couldn’t marry,’ I told him. ‘Accounted for her objection and Jack’s – and what Jack’s been hiding, by the way – and perhaps everyone else’s objections too. If they knew. Which she says they didn’t. And actually I believe her.’
‘Dandy, for heaven’s sake,’ said Alec. ‘What are you talking about?’
I told him and he gave a long, low whistle.
‘So what were you doing in Aitkens’?’ he said.
‘I spoke – not quite deliberately – to Miss Torrance of Ladies’ Gloves who told me nothing. Then to Miss Armstrong of Ladies’ Stationery who told me plenty of little bits and bobs, Miss Hutton of Ladies’ Gowns who told me one huge bit and bob which will knock you flat when I pass it on. Then I went rummaging around the attics-’
‘I thought we’d decided against the Abigail-in-gloves theory,’ Alec chipped in. ‘And why would Abigail kill her daughter because Jack had an illegitimate son?’
‘-where I found the gloves,’ I finished, with some triumph for which he would have to forgive me.
‘You never,’ said Alec. ‘Have you got them? Did you bring them out with you?’
‘I left them where they were for the police to find if it comes to that,’ I said.
‘Were they bloodstained? Gunpowder?’ said Alec, but before I could answer, he went on. ‘Hang on, though. Why would you think they’d be left there for the police to find in the sweet by-and-by if they ever get around to it? Won’t she just spirit them away?’ I opened my mouth to answer this and was interrupted again. ‘But wait a minute, why on earth are they still there?’ I drew breath. ‘Where were they?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘They weren’t bloodstained. One of them looked a bit water-spotted but there was no blood or smell of cordite.’
‘Wouldn’t be by now, anyway, now I think of it,’ Alec said.
‘And would they have been bloodstained?’ I asked him. ‘I’ve been trying to work it out – gruesome business! – but I just don’t know.’