‘As I was saying yesterday, Mr Aitken,’ I said, taking up – I hoped – Alec’s smooth and unsettling tone, ‘I have strong reason to doubt that Mirren took her own life. I have some reason too to doubt that Dugald Hepburn did so. I intend to get to the bottom of it. If I am wrong, all well and good. I’m no busybody, no gossip. But if I am thwarted, Mr Aitken, if I am denied answers and threatened the way I was yesterday, I shall go to the police and hand the case to them. And they – as I am sure you will agree – are considerably less discreet than Mr Osborne and me.’
‘We were your clients,’ Jack Aitken said, staring horrified at me. ‘If this is how you treat your clients I’m surprised you ever have any.’ I tried not to let my face show that his words had hit home. Indeed, if anyone were ever to find out that Alec and I had come along like a pair of gangsters’ heavies and intimidated a grieving family this way after being told to leave them alone several times now, we would never work again and Gilver and Osborne’s business cards would go straight from the printers to the fire.
‘Now, when we spoke before, Mr Aitken,’ I said, ignoring him, ‘you told me your only misgiving about Mirren and Dugald marrying’ – there was the look again, as though he had bitten down on a bad tooth – ‘was that she was too young to marry at all. At twenty. You said you felt remorseful that your decision to forbid the match had led to Mirren’s suicide. And of course you would; how could you not? But you see, what puzzled me was that when I suggested it could be murder you… took against me, shall we say? Almost it seemed you would rather have your daughter’s death on your hands than on any other’s.’
Jack Aitken made a valiant effort to look composed, but most unfortunately for him he had taken a seat in the window and was sitting in a patch of golden sunlight so that his tie pin twinkled as his chest rose and fell with a series of quickened, panicky breaths he could not control. His voice though, when he finally spoke, was the same old repertory company routine as ever; the juvenile lead lightly tossing off his lines with half a mind on supper after the show.
‘I do apologise for yesterday, Mrs Gilver, I must ask you to forgive me.’ He put a hand to his brow and pressed it there. ‘I have never lost my temper that way in my life.’ Alec and I exchanged a glance. He had come into the room like a bull into the ring not three minutes ago. ‘I thought you were accusing me of killing her. My little Mirren. I saw red, I’m afraid.’
‘Why would you think such a thing?’ I asked him.
‘Because it was me you were telling,’ Jack Aitken said, with a sheepish shrug. ‘I thought to myself, why else would you seek me out and tell me unless it’s me you think did it?’
‘But I was only talking to you because you happened to come looking for your wife,’ I said. ‘And I was only talking to her because she happened to meet me. It was your mother I came to see.’ Before he could compose his next speech I came back at him. ‘And, actually, Mr Aitken, after you had railed at me for the accusation you say you thought I made against you, you railed even more about the idea that – here I quote you – “she would kill a child”.’
‘Once again, Mrs Gilver, I apologise. Such strain, such unbearable strain and I have not held up under it at all well.’ He paused as though for sympathy; receiving none, he continued. ‘Well, it was just that my poor dear Abby was there, with the gun, and was questioned and so of course I did think for a moment it was her you suspected. Gosh, I feel wretched that I might have implicated my dear wife in some way.’
‘You didn’t,’ I said. ‘Not until just now, I mean. Reminding us about the gun that way. “She would never kill a child” doesn’t sound at all like an accusation of a mother. Does it, Mr Osborne?’ Jack turned as Alec shook his head. ‘A child?’ I said. Jack’s head whipped back so he was once more facing me. ‘One doesn’t usually refer to a woman’s own daughter that way.’
‘I was very angry,’ Jack said. ‘Grief takes many forms.’
‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘So you’re sticking to your story, Mr Aitken, that you wouldn’t have minded Dugald Hepburn as a son-in-law a year or two hence and you think Mirren killed herself because she wouldn’t wait for him.’
He nodded, swallowing hard.
‘And what did you make of your mother-in-law’s hopes regarding Roger Lawson?’
Jack Aitken blinked and said nothing.
‘You did know, I assume, that Mary and Lady Lawson were hoping for an engagement?’
‘Roger Lawson?’ said Jack Aitken, then he nodded. ‘I see. Yes, I see. Well, that would have been a very satisfactory arrangement, I imagine.’ Alec and I could not help turning a little towards another to exchange another glance then.
‘Forgive me, Mr Aitken,’ I said, ‘but Mirren would have been the same age marrying Roger Lawson as marrying Dugald, wouldn’t she?’
‘Oh, yes, I suppose, in a sense,’ Jack said. I could see Alec frowning deeper still. Jack Aitken saw it too and from deep within himself he dug out another of his endless little sketch routines. He threw one leg over the other – most unnaturally since his fists were still in his pockets – and chuckled. ‘But you see if Mary organised it, the terms would be very different.’
‘A long engagement, you mean?’ Alec asked.
‘Not a doubt,’ Aiken said. ‘She’s a formidable woman of business as I’m sure you’ve noticed already. The financial arrangements would have been very secure.’
I could not begin to see what he meant; the financial repercussions of Mirren entering the Lawson family would have weighed very heavily on the Aitkens, surely.
‘Mirren was only twenty,’ Jack Aitken said. ‘At twenty-one she was to come into her share of Aitkens’. And because of the fact that Abby and I are cousins and neither of us have siblings surviving, quite a lot of Aitkens’ was coming to Mirren down a funnel, as it were. She would have had a controlling interest. Yes, after her birthday, she would have had outright control of us all. And if she were married her husband might have tried to influence her, but if she stayed unmarried until after she was twenty-one, she could dispose of her shares as she saw fit and then she could have married without her new husband…’ He took one of his hands out of his pocket and waved it in the air.
‘Scooping the lot,’ I finished and something in my tone brought the wary look back into Jack Aitken’s eyes. ‘So really,’ I said, ‘when you talked about your poor little Mirren being too young for marriage and not wanting to lose her, what you really meant was something quite different.’
‘Aitkens’ was built up out of nothing by the sweat of my father’s brow,’ said Jack. ‘And my uncle’s too. We owed it to their hard work and dedication. Our stewardship. Our honouring of their vision.’
‘Mirren did not owe it her life,’ I said. ‘No girl owes any institution that.’
Unbelievably, Jack Aitken gave Alec a man-to-man look then, as though to say that they two understood all about laying down one’s life for glory but that a mere woman could not be expected to feel the swell of pride. Alec returned a blank, dead gaze which made me want to hug him.