‘Who knows how to work this thing?’ I called back to the little gathering in the middle of the floor. ‘Mr Aitken?’ Jack simply stared at me.
‘There’s a boy who works it,’ Mary said, frowning at me.
‘Good Lord, Mary, needs must,’ said Bella. ‘Jack, help Mrs Gilver, won’t you?’
But Mary put her hand on his arm and gripped it tightly.
‘Find Abigail,’ she said. ‘Keep her out of the way while we see what’s happened.’
‘Can you make it go?’ I asked Bella, thinking that I could have been halfway up the stairs by now. She nodded, strode over the floor towards me, rattled open the door of the lift shaft and the door of the carriage itself and slammed both shut again behind us.
‘It came from the top, don’t you think?’ she said. ‘Above the galleries?’
‘I think so,’ I said.
‘Good,’ said Bella. ‘I’m no expert with this contraption but the attics are as far as it can go.’ She tugged hard on the rope and the lift groaned, slowly starting to rise. I would most definitely have been better on the stairs, I thought, listening to the creaks of the pulley winding.
‘It was a gun, wasn’t it?’ said Bella. Her voice was under commendable control.
‘Yes, I think so,’ I said again. ‘The noise and the smell of cordite together. I’m almost sure it must have been.’
The lift wheezed and slowed, then shuddered to a halt. Bella tugged the rope again, securing us up there, then she hauled back the carriage door and reached across the gap to the door of the lift shaft. It was solid up here, not the glittering concertina of the public floors, and when she had got it open I saw that nothing up here was the same. We were on a sort of landing or lobby of some kind open to the atrium at one side, but there were no polished railings; instead I saw a safety wall made of crude board painted brown and a ledge jutting in at the top so that no one could approach the edge and be seen by the customers below. It was curiously dark too, but then the ceiling was very low, the walls distempered a dull drab, the floor dark red linoleum of great age, worn to the weave from scrubbing. There was even a trace in the air of the strong floor soap used to scrub it; just a trace, and under it even fainter still there was gunpowder, catching the back of my throat and making me swallow, so that I tasted it too.
Bella Aitken was running her hands over the walls, searching for a light switch.
‘I don’t even know if there is electric light,’ she said. ‘It’s been years since I was up here. Ah!’ There was a snap as she threw the switch and revealed the landing in the cold plain light of an unshaded bulb near the ceiling.
Someone – a woman – was lying crumpled on the floor at the base of the opposite wall, with her head propped up at an awkward angle on the skirting board. She was looking at the open lift door, or so it seemed until I stepped closer and saw that her eyes were dull and blank, and then I noticed that her head, one side of her head, was wrong in a way I did not want to look at after the glance that made me flick my eyes away. They took in a dark stain blooming on the brown distempered wall above her and running in trickles down towards the floor.
Stupidly I thought to myself, if she fell against the wall and cut her head, what was that noise? For some reason I was creeping up to her on tiptoe and I was right beside her before I took in what was on the other side of her face: a round dark hole in her temple, and some strands of hair had fallen against it and were clinging there.
‘Mirren,’ said Bella’s voice behind me, almost as quiet as breathing.
Both of the girl’s hands were empty, lying there flung out with the fingers curled up. I knelt and felt under her skirt at the right side but there was nothing there.
‘Is she… was she left-handed?’ I asked. Bella Aitken said nothing. So, holding my breath, I reached under her body at the left side trying not to look at where drops of blood had fallen. I could feel her warmth through her clothes as I scrabbled around under her. She shifted a little, slumping further towards the floor, and I drew my hand away, knowing that the police would not want to hear that I had moved her.
‘Mirren,’ said Bella, just as quiet but with a high, strained note as if she were very softly singing. I looked round at her and saw that she was swaying back and forward.
‘Mrs Aitken,’ I said, ‘please don’t faint. Please go back down and tell…’ I ran over them all in my mind. ‘… Tell Mr Muir to telephone to the police, and see if you can stop anyone else coming up here. Do you understand?’
The firm voice, or perhaps just being given a job to do, rallied her and she tottered back to the lift, hauled the door closed and took the groaning old carriage on its way.
In the silence I made myself look at Mirren Aitken’s face again. She was – or had been – very pretty, the sort of girl suited to the fashions of the day, with a heart-shaped face, softly waving hair and a slight, supple figure. Only now that figure was bent at ugly and impossible angles, the soft hair was matted with blood and worse than blood, and the face was a mask carved from bleached wood, unmoving.
‘You poor child,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said a voice, very quietly. I leapt backwards, only just managing not to fall, and peered at where it had come from: a dark corner beyond the reach of the feeble light bulb.
‘Mrs Jack?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said the voice again. I reached up to the bulb and swung it on its cord, trying to see her. She was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall and her legs splayed out like those of a rag doll.
‘Mrs Aitken,’ I said. ‘What happened?’
Abigail Aitken lifted her hand and showed me a revolver, so heavy for her that it wagged from side to side in her grip. She looked at it as though seeing it for the first time.
‘It’s Jack’s,’ she said. ‘I shot Mirren and now she is dead and they’ll hang me and I shall be dead too.’
‘Put it down, Mrs Aitken,’ I said, concentrating on keeping my voice very gentle and steady. ‘Put the gun down on the floor.’
‘You don’t need to worry,’ she said, looking at the revolver again. ‘I can’t turn it on myself. I tried and I don’t have the courage.’
‘So can you put it down and just slide it away? I’ll take care of it for you.’
‘No, I want to hold on to it for now,’ she said, but at least she put her hand back down into her lap and I thought I could see that her grip loosened. ‘That would be the best thing.’
I kept my eyes on her, but I cocked my head up to the side and felt a warm rush of relief pass through me, leaving me tingling. Very faintly, in the distance, the piercing squeals of police whistles had begun.
3
Then followed an endless carnival of horrors, staged in three new galleried circles of hell and peopled by grotesques and ghouls too many to count. Or so it seemed as I lived through it and remembered it later. The Dunfermline City Police had turned out in their entirety and would not let anyone leave until all had been questioned, so the crowds continued to mill, weeping and shrieking, craning and muttering, some of them still trying to swap those tokens for jubilee prizes from the roulette wheels. Then as the afternoon wore on they grew restive, beginning to complain, beginning to make up their own stories since no one would tell them what had happened. Grimly, the constables wrote out names and addresses, double-checked who had been where and what they had heard and seen, until slowly, eventually, Aitkens’ revolving door began to turn again, spitting out chagrined witnesses in weary ones and twos, to take the news and all the stories they had made out into the town and spread them there.
The family, exalted guests and staff were treated rather better but for all of that fared rather worse, corralled first in the haberdashery and then in the back office regions, with glasses of water and talk of tea, but with two constables watching them and deaf ears listening to their fading pleas and their growing anger.