‘Bran would like have made a better job,’ said Mr Laming. ‘Stopped the pulley deid, or made the rope jump.’
‘My God,’ I said. ‘The rope might have jumped?’ I remembered Lynne and me going up in the lift that day, listening to the creaks, and how it lurched an inch down once she had stopped it.
‘And she left it in that state when all the staff were coming along to the party.’ Alec’s face was pale
‘Aye, but there’s clamps that stop it dropping if the ropes go,’ Laming said. ‘It’s a grand bit o’ engineering that lift, for all it’s an auld cuddy noo.’
He failed, though, to comfort us and a rising tide of anger helped to carry us back through the town to Abbey Park Place and would perhaps have seen us storm in, find Bella and shake her by the shoulders until she confessed, but on the pavement outside the garden wall, our onward charge was interrupted by young Constable McCann. He was in his uniform now, evidently working on his own time no more, but had none of his brother officers with him. His eyes opened very wide when he saw us and then his rather stricken-looking face broke into a grin.
‘Grand!’ he said. ‘I came on my own instead of tipping the wink to the boss cos I was thinkin’ how come should I hand it all over and watch him get the glory. But I’ll tell you this for nothin’, I’m glad to have a wee bit at my back just the same.’
‘You’re going to arrest her?’ said Alec.
‘My first arrest,’ said McCann, squaring his shoulders. ‘Unless you count market night drinkin’ and fightin’ after dances anyway.’
I felt rather splendid as we set off up the drive, Alec and I flanking young McCann, but had begun to feel ridiculous and more than a little twitchy before we had climbed the steps and pulled the doorbell, not to mention the mounting feeling of unease at what we were about to visit upon an elderly lady whom I had never seen being anything but amusing and friendly. I tried to remind myself of Dugald Hepburn’s face disappearing down into the darkness out of view that day.
Trusslove’s smile of welcome died on his face as he looked around the three of us.
‘Not suicide then,’ he said. I shook my head and he half-turned towards the interior of the house, his grip on the door tightening as though he meant to bar our way. Then he let go and pushed the door wide.
‘Who?’ he said. ‘Surely not Mrs Ninian. Not as she is now. You couldn’t.’
‘It’s Bella, Trusslove,’ said Alec. ‘Mrs John – if you wouldn’t mind fetching her.’
‘She’s sitting at the bedside,’ Trusslove said. ‘She’s never away from it.’
‘Tryin’ to atone,’ said McCann.
Trusslove shook his head and ushered us into the library to wait.
‘And are you quite sure?’ he said, as we walked. Alec and McCann had gone ahead and Trusslove and I fell in naturally together. ‘How could she do such a thing?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘And I don’t know why either. That’s one of the things I want to ask her. Trusslove, you will just tell her that someone wants to see her, won’t you? You’re not going to warn her?’
He certainly did not warn her; Bella Aitken, when she swept into the room minutes later to see the three of us standing there, was almost her old self again, shoulders back, arms swinging, large feet turned out. She stopped and put her hands on her hips, frowning. Trusslove slipped in behind her and closed the door.
‘I’m sorry aboot this, Mrs Aitken,’ said Constable McCann. ‘But I need to ask you to come along with me.’
Bella took a couple of deep breaths in and out, with her lips pressed hard together. Then she nodded.
‘It was always going to be a risk,’ she said. ‘I knew that. What was it that undid me?’
‘The oats,’ said Alec.
‘Oats?’ said Trusslove, wonderingly.
‘And the gloves,’ I said. ‘The hot bottles and quilts and the tea urn.’
‘Lord, you really have seen through me,’ Bella said. ‘I thought I was being so clever.’
‘What have quilts and tea got to do with shooting Miss Mirren?’ said Trusslove.
Bella rounded on him. ‘How dare you!’ she said. ‘How could you think such a thing? It was the boy, you fool. Only the boy. I could never have harmed a hair on Mirren’s head. She was my grandchild. What kind of monster do you think I am?’
Of course, Mirren was not Bella’s grandchild and she had indeed murdered her own flesh and blood when she pushed Dugald Hepburn down the lift shaft. But if she did not know that, then what part of the web of secrets was it that led her to murder at all?
‘Mrs Aitken,’ I said, ‘can I ask you why you did it?’
‘What?’ said Bella. ‘What do you mean, why?’
Constable McCann was frowning at me too. I glanced at Alec, but he only shrugged.
‘We cannae really stand around chatting,’ said McCann. ‘Mrs Aitken, if you’ll come quietly I’d be greatly obliged. I dinnae want a scene and a load of trouble.’
‘Of course,’ Bella said. ‘I don’t want trouble either. Mary’s sleeping.’
Alec and I left quietly too, McCann asking us in a whisper if we would meet him after his shift so he could say a proper thank you. And so we were parked at the end of his street, at five o’clock as waves of men and boys in their overalls and caps, women and girls in their rough aprons and headscarves, returned soiled and weary from the works to the long rows of little terraced houses, their boots and clogs on the dry packed road making one think a beaten infantry was retreating. There was no sign of young McCann among them for the longest time, until at almost six, when I had sunk into a torporous near doze, Alec sat up suddenly waking both me and Bunty.
‘Hello, hello!’ he said. ‘Here he comes, Dandy.’
Down the street, still in his uniform, came Constable McCann, looking like a man who had just won fifty pounds on the derby. I leapt out of the motorcar and hurried to meet them.
‘All done and dusted,’ he said. ‘Away you come in and get some tea then, and I’ll tell you the finish o’ it.’
Mrs McCann, a born hostess, took only a minute to greet us, survey her pots and pans and quickly reconfigure tea into a meal for seven instead of five. There were ten sausages frying in a pan – three each for the men, two for mother and one apiece for the small sisters already at the table – which she quickly chopped into pieces with a bread knife. She added the boiled potatoes to them, turned up the gas to brown the edges, shredded a spare half-cabbage and started frying bread. By the time the constable had been upstairs to shed his tunic and returned again, seven brimming plates and seven brimming tea mugs were waiting. Mrs McCann banged a wooden spoon on the kitchen wall, which brought her husband from the parlour in his slippers with his newspaper tucked under one arm.
‘Company, Faither,’ she said and her husband discarded the newspaper and took off his cap before sitting.
The smaller sister said grace and all eight of us – I include Bunty, to whom I fed a piece of sausage until I had tasted another and found out how delicious they were (after which she had to get by with bread) – tucked in.
‘So what’s the occasion?’ said Mr McCann with a glance at Alec and me.
‘I’ve made an arrest,’ said his son. ‘A big one.’
‘What’s a rest?’ said the smaller of the two sisters. Her mother swiftly made two fried bread sandwiches out of her daughters’ remaining dinners, handed one to each of them and sent them outside.
‘And nae fightin’ and finish yer greens and I’ll check the midden,’ she called after them.
‘Bella Aitken,’ said McCann when his sisters were well gone. ‘For murder, Mammy. She killt the Hepburn boy.’
‘She nivver did,’ said his father, struck to stone with a forkful of potato halfway between plate and mouth.
‘She did,’ McCann said. ‘She got him on the phone and lured him back to toon here, said she had something to tell him. Oh, it all came pouring oot when I got her started. She met him in Aitkens’ the day o’ the lass’s funeral and she shoved him doon the lift shaft where they found him.’