‘Mrs Gilver,’ I said, ‘to see the lady of the house.’ And I waved the card in his direction. He recognised it, but continued frowning.
‘To see… Mrs Jack?’ he asked. I gave a nod that might have cracked a walnut under my chin; a gesture I had seen in a police superintendent of my acquaintance and had at once decided to add to my own repertoire. ‘Step this way, madam,’ said the butler and swept me inside.
As we clacked across the tiles of the porch, under a soaring arch, across an expanse of pillared hall and under a second soaring arch I peered at the signature, trying and failing to resolve that final initial into a J, then my attention was caught by the sudden blaze of light as we entered a library. The butler left me and I wandered over to the windows, the card – for the moment – forgotten.
The room faced due south and was bowed out at the far side, with the three tall windows of the bow looking over the lawns I had glimpsed while arriving. And the light simply poured in – warm, thick, honey-coloured light – rolling lazily in through the rippled old glass and washing the room in gold, making it pulse and gleam.
Perhaps it was not a library at all, I judged at a second glance around. To be sure, it was panelled from floor to ceiling and the ceiling itself was covered with panels too, but the wood was some species unknown to me – a rich glossy amber, smelling of wax and resin in the sunshine, and as far from the good dark oak of libraries as could be imagined. Add to this the fact that there were no bookshelves and it seemed less of a library still.
Then, lifting up the velvet cover from one of a number of shrouded tables, I saw that there were books after all. The cover had been guarding a glass-topped case, flattish but tilted a little for display, and in it was what looked to be a book of hours, open at a calendar page. I bent over this surprising item the better to study its decoration and marvel at its obvious antiquity and was still in that undignified position – stooped and snooping – when a gentle cough from the doorway caused me to drop the cover back again. The brass rod along its edge clattered onto the frame and, turning, I banged my ankle against one of the table legs.
‘Mrs Gilver?’ said a voice.
‘Mrs Jack?’ She had stopped in the doorway and stood there for a moment in a frame of that glowing, honeyed wood like a painted saint in an altar panel. It would have been a comely setting for ninety-nine women out of a hundred but it did not flatter this one, at least not today. She was about fifty, I guessed, but anxiety or exhaustion had further aged her; her face was tight, her skin pale and her long dark-red hair was bundled back into an inexpert knot from which great hanks of it were escaping. She wore a wool shawl over her dress and tugged it closer around herself as she moved towards me.
‘Have you brought news?’ she said, searching my face. Her eyes were drawn up into diamond shapes, red-rimmed.
‘I-’ I began, but she interrupted me.
‘Have you discovered her? Has she been found?’
‘I-’ I said again and then mutely held out the postcard for her to see. She blinked at it and then looked back at me.
‘From my mother,’ she said. ‘My goodness, my mother actually wrote to… Who are you?’
‘I do apologise, Mrs Jack,’ I answered. ‘My name is Dandy Gilver. I asked for the lady of the house, you see. Perhaps someone might fetch your mother now?’
‘But who are you?’ she said again, all politeness, all decorum driven away by whatever suffering had caused the careless hairdressing and the shawl.
I hesitated. It would be monstrously unprofessional to discuss a case with anyone but my client in person and ordinarily I would not have dreamt of doing so, but surely her worry sprang from the same source as her mother’s card.
‘I’m a detective,’ I said. ‘Now, someone’s missing?’
‘A detective,’ she echoed, going over to a chair against the wall and sinking into it. She nodded slowly. ‘Yes, that would make a great deal of sense. That would be exactly what- My daughter.’ She looked up at me with a new, clear look in her eyes. ‘My daughter Mirren has been missing for five days. Since Saturday.’
‘Well, Mrs Jack, your mother got her postcard off to me in admirable time.’
‘It’s not Mrs Jack,’ she said, and for the first time a ghost of a smile passed across her. ‘Trusslove has known me since I was a child, you see. It’s Mrs Aitken.’
‘Aitken?’ I said, trying to remember where I had just come across that name.
‘My husband is Jack Aitken and so, in the family, I am Mrs Jack.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘And your daughter went missing five days ago. Do you have any idea where she might have gone? Did you have any warning? Had you quarrelled? Or do you – forgive me, but your distress is only too clear and it leads me to wonder – do you fear that she might have come to harm?’ I had not thought it possible for Mrs Aitken to increase her look of wretchedness but she did so now.
‘The very gravest fear,’ she whispered, sending shivers through me. ‘Unspeakable harm.’
Before I could respond there came the sound of hurried footsteps across the marble floor of the hall and an elderly lady entered the room at some speed.
‘Abigail? Is that Mirren? She’s not back, is sh-’ She stopped dead, seeing me, and pressed a hand to her heart, breathing hard. ‘Sorry, dear,’ she said to the other woman. ‘I heard voices and thought she’d come back again. Phewf!’ She eased herself down into another chair and sat panting, her feet set well apart and her hands braced on her knees.
‘Do forgive me,’ she said, cocking her head up in my direction. ‘We’re having quite a time of it here just now.’ I smiled, uncertainly. Her mood did not at all match that of the younger woman’s. If anything, she seemed diverted by the problem of the missing Mirren, nowhere near as distraught as the girl’s mother.
‘This is Mrs Gilver,’ said Mrs Aitken. ‘She’s a detective. Mother sent for her.’
I frowned, because of course I had assumed that this new arrival was the grandmother in the case and the sender of my card. She was the right sort of age and she obviously lived here in the house; she was wearing bedroom slippers and still had some pins keeping in place the curls across her forehead, while the rest of her ensemble – a voluminous day-dress cut for comfort and a long string of very white beads trying, although not hard, to look like pearls – was just conventional enough to persuade me that its wearer would not go a-visiting in slippers and pin curls. On the other hand, I thought, looking more closely at her, there was no family resemblance: Mrs Jack was a sweet, plump thing with a face like a little pansy and that extravagance of crinkly russet hair. The newcomer, in contrast, was very tall with large hands and feet and the kind of strong plain features which must have released her from all vanity at an early age and given her lots of time for other things.
‘I’m Mrs Aitken,’ she said. ‘Bella. Widow of John. Jack’s mother. You don’t look much like a detective.’ She fished in her dress pocket for her cigarette case, waving them at me before selecting one and lighting up.
‘I was just beginning to ask your… daughter-in-law, whether she had any idea where Mirren might have gone,’ I said.
‘Good heavens!’ said Mrs John Aitken, staring at me with the match still burning. ‘You don’t sound like a detective either.’ And because a large proportion of my instinctive bristling took the form of trying to decide what she sounded like, her loud, easy voice with its good round vowels and its crisp, clear consonants, and concluding that she sounded like the wife of a very comfortable merchant, at last I made the connection.
‘Aitken!’ I said. ‘As in House of Aitken?’ It might have sounded insufferably rude and so I was lucky that Mrs John took no offence but said only: