Deadly Measure of Brimstone

1

Thursday, 26th September 1929

Dante believed, and has had some success dragging public opinion after him, that the ninth circle of hell, the last and lowest, the blackest and bleakest, the icy innards of Lucifer’s mouth itself, would be the worst one. After recent events, I am unconvinced. Once having been besieged by foul weather with the gluttons, and sunk in ordure with the flatterers, could one really raise a shriek about a serpent or two? One would be numb, surely, long before one were bound in chains with those giants down there – poor giants, anyway: hardly their fault – and long past caring.

So it was with me by late September of 1929. Hugh and the boys had been ill with influenza for more than a month. Or rather, they had all started off with flu but had soon parted company: Hugh to a rumbling bronchial cough, Teddy to the sharp hack of pleurisy and Donald, always so much more trouble than his brother, to a full-blown case of putrid pneumonia which melted the flesh from his frame like candle wax and left him tottering.

I resisted all infection but not, more’s the pity, because I had swept off to an hotel at the first sniffle (as had been my unmaternal and unconjugal impulse). No indeed, I had remained, mopping fevered brows, holding cups of broth to trembling lips and even removing noxious handkerchiefs with laundry tongs to carry them out to the boiler, but my eyes were as bright and my cheeks as rosy as ever. Which is to say, rather sallow, but rouge is a wonderful thing.

Not everyone was so stalwart. A few weeks in, maids and footmen were dropping like grouse on the Twelfth and even village women began refusing to come in and do the rough lest they succumb to our pestilence.

‘Good thing,’ croaked my husband when I told him. ‘This accursed germ must have come from the village in the first place. Let them keep it there.’

I set down the cup of broth smartly enough to make a little of it slop onto his bedclothes and then hurriedly dipped the corner of his napkin in his water jug to dab it away, for washing blankets was far beyond the current skeleton crew.

‘Honestly, Hugh,’ I said. ‘You spent eight hours out-of-doors on the filthiest day of the year and refused to wear mackintoshes. You have no one to blame but yourselves.’

‘Mackintoshes on a grouse moor!’ said Hugh. ‘Why not umbrellas?’

‘Why not umbrellas?’ I snapped back. ‘I put Donald on the bathroom scales this morning and he weighed nine stone three.’

‘What bathroom scales?’ replied Hugh, shamelessly changing the subject.

‘Nine stone three at six foot one,’ I said. ‘Which-’

‘News to me we had such an article,’ he went on. ‘Mind you-’

I did not like the glance he cast at my frame as he said this and, although I knew very well he was baiting me, I rose.

‘They are Grant’s. I borrowed them.’

Hugh said nothing, but settled back against his pillows with both hands cupped around the broth and a look on his face that one could only call mischievous. My husband cannot hide his views of Grant, my maid, and my dealings with her: he thinks her above herself and me under her thumb; he deplores her taste in modish clothes and despises me for wearing them; he thrills to remember the many times in our early married life when he instructed me on the dangers of getting chummy with the servants. He imagines (I imagine) that I regret not listening and obeying and that I try to hide my regret to lessen his triumph. Marriage would be so exhausting if I really gave it my all but I rather let things wash over me, from maid and husband both, and find life easier that way.

Besides, Grant was another who had remained in peak form through the plague and I was feeling very kindly disposed towards her just then. She had taken on all manner of unseemly duties and the previous afternoon I had actually seen her carry a bucket of coal.

By such means had the household limped along for a month – soup at luncheon and the like – until without warning lightning struck us. Pallister, the butler, Gilverton’s lynchpin, was seen to be red-faced and glassy-eyed one night at dinner and was heard at breakfast the next morning to issue four or five great whumphing sneezes. By tea he was in his pantry, wrapped in a shawl and shivering.

I went to the kitchen to tell Mrs Tilling and there found that the lightning had struck twice. She was blowing her nose into a linen square big enough to line a picnic basket, and was coughing carefully with a hand pressed against her bosom, a pleuritic cough if ever I heard one (and by then I had cause to know).

‘My dear Mrs Tilling!’ I cried, sweeping across the floor and pressing her into the Windsor chair by the range. ‘You must- Gosh!’ I had put the back of my hand against her forehead – the household had become a sort of Russian commune in the last few weeks, where such liberties were taken and no one to blink at them – and was rattled to feel the waves of heat and the high drumming pulse in her temple. ‘Off with you!’ I commanded. ‘Straight to bed with a hot bottle.’

‘Dinner…’ she said in the weak voice of high fever.

‘Rarebit for the invalids, and I shall go to Mr Osborne’s,’ I replied. ‘Now not another word out of you.’

She filled a bottle and one for Pallister and took herself off towards the servants’ staircase and the steep climb to her bedroom, leaving me standing in the silent kitchen meeting the huge startled eyes of the scullery maid with, I suspect, a huge startled look of my own.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Now then. Go and see that Mrs Tilling has a fire in her room, please, Norah, and then send Becky to see me in my sitting room.’ Becky, the head parlourmaid, was unbowed. I had moved the other two maids out of the room they shared with her as soon as temperatures started climbing, had instituted, in fact, a ruthless quarantine all round. There were all manner of bunk-ups going on in the attics now – that Russian commune again – and pride was going to have to be restored by a perfect flurry of extra wages and little gifts when we were on our collective feet again, but the segregation was working.

At least, I thought with a groan, sinking down into Mrs Tilling’s chair, it had been. Without her and Pallister, we might as well be rats in a sewer.

Upstairs in my sitting room, therefore, I tried to make myself ring the agency in Edinburgh again, to beg a cook, a housekeeper, even an extra maid or two, but I held out no great hopes of success. The gorgon in charge of the telephone knew how things stood at Gilverton and appeared to view the girls on her books as orchids to be tended, not as labour for hire at all. It was too disheartening to be borne and in the end I rang the doctor instead, to arrange what was beginning to feel like a standing order.

It was then, at that moment, that the ninth circle of hell was unleashed upon me and, as I say, benumbed by misfortune, I took it calmly.

‘He’s no’ in, Mrs Gilver,’ said his housekeeper. ‘Have you no’ heard?’

‘Heard what? I don’t think so,’ I said, suspecting misfortune.

‘It’s all over Dunkeld. Scarlet fever. Thirteen cases and that was this morning.’

‘Thirteen?’

‘It was a birthday party. And one poor wee soul has been carried away.’

‘Dreadful.’

‘But she’d been bad with the flu already. Laid low, you know. And it’s a terrible fearsome strain of it, I’m thinking.’

Whether she meant the fever or the flu I could not say for sure, but I withdrew my appeal for the doctor’s attention – pressed it hard upon her that he was not required – and rang off. Neither Donald nor Teddy had had scarlet fever and, while I would not ordinarily worry about great lumps of eighteen and sixteen, I could not get the picture out of my mind of Donald shivering in his pyjamas as he stood on those bathroom scales.

‘Come on then, my darling girl,’ I said to Bunty. ‘Let’s walk down and shut the gates, eh?’ She was fourteen now, a tremendous age for a Dalmatian, and the loss of her daily romp while I was nursing had not been the privation it should have been to her even a year ago. Still, she got to her feet, stretched, shook her ears and came to lean against my legs with her tail waving. I put a hand down and felt the just of her pelvis under her warm fur, the slight scrape of bone against bone where all other tissue was gone. As Alec had said, ‘if you boiled her for stock these days, she wouldn’t set to jelly’. Just the sort of remark that the owner of a five-year-old dog will let drop unthinking. I had stored it up meanly deep inside and planned to use it on him when Millie, his spaniel, was toothless and threadbare, that way that spaniels go.

‘Not like you, my love,’ I said, letting her step ahead of me into the breakfast room, off which my sitting room opens. ‘You are as beautiful as ever. Aren’t you, my darling? Hm?’

‘Oh, madam!’ Becky had entered the breakfast room by the other door. ‘She is that but she’s awful stiff in the mornings. And when you think!’

She referred to an incident early in Bunty’s life when she had just grown from a fat bundle of puppy to a lolloping, seemingly boneless creature with easily eight enormous paws, three tails and half a dozen affectionate tongues. Becky had opened the garden door at dawn one day and Bunty had jumped clean over her head to escape, knocking Becky flat on her back and out cold when her head hit the flagstones. This was better than the garden, of course, and Bunty wheeled round to make the most of it – a human who lay there obligingly to be trampled over and saluted with the moistest kisses a dog could muster. When Becky came round she was bruised but giggling.

‘I can’t bear to contemplate it,’ I said. ‘Well, Becky, it looks as though you’re in charge. I won’t be in for dinner, so eggs on trays or whatever seems best, and no visitors, I’m afraid. There’s scarlet fever in the village.’

‘I’ve had it,’ said Becky.

‘Good. I’ll cancel all deliveries and perhaps you could go down in the dogcart and collect them instead.’

‘It’s just the fish tomorrow,’ said Becky. ‘Will I tell Miss Grant you’re away a walk then, madam? She was getting ready to come up to you.’

‘I shan’t be dressing,’ I said. ‘Tell Grant she’s free.’

Alec Osborne rarely uses his dining room. It’s a miserable crypt of a place (even as dining rooms go, and they are, to my mind, the least inviting chamber of any house) with dark oak panels to its ceiling, mossy green wallpaper all round, and only two small windows facing due east on its short side. Add to that the usual measure of ancestors in oils and sideboards like mastodons, and a party would be stone dead before it had half begun. For that reason, Alec times what few dinners he cannot escape hosting for the summertime and spreads his board in a little temple by a pond with room to seat twelve in comfort and a fireplace which throws out heat like a steam engine. (I wish the mason who built that summerhouse chimney had built a few of ours, is all I can say.) Out of season he restricts himself to cocktails in his drawing room and on ordinary evenings Barrow, his valet, sets a table for one or two in the library as cosy as cosy can be.

‘Still,’ Alec said, as Barrow withdrew and left us with the soup, ‘I usually manage to wriggle out of my tweeds, Dandy. Are you making a point?’ He raised his eyebrows at my coat and skirt and then at his own smoking jacket.

‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘When did I ever do anything so mealy-mouthed as that? I’ve just crossed some kind of Rubicon. Be glad I crossed it after tea or I might be here in my bedroom slippers and nightgown.’

‘Better than poor Miss Havisham at least,’ Alec said. ‘She’d have been much more comfortable over the years if the clock had stopped when she was in her nightie. What’s shoved you over the line then?’

‘Scarlet fever,’ I said. ‘The boys haven’t had it and it’s all over the village, so the butcher and baker are forbidden the gates and I’m going to have to go shopping for pounds of tea and legs of lamb like a housewife.’

‘Is every maid down?’ said Alec.

‘Not quite but they always make such a jaunt of it whenever they get away and Pallister and Mrs Tilling have got the flu.’

He dropped his spoon, but it was a plum-coloured smoker and Alec’s valet-cum-cook doesn’t allow so much as a sprig of parsley into the consommé so no harm came to him.

‘Remus and Romulus have crumbled?’ he said. ‘You seem remarkably calm.’

‘Yes. Good soup.’

‘You can take it home in a jar if they haven’t finished it up in the kitchen.’

‘That’s about the size of it,’ I agreed. ‘The kindness of my neighbours is all that stands between me and destitution now. I only hope the range doesn’t go out because no one left standing knows how to relight it.’

‘Mrs Tilling won’t be off her feet for long,’ said Alec. ‘She’s an ox. And Pallister…’

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Pallister ill is so far outside human understanding that no one could hazard a guess as to how it might go. Like those tiny objects the physicists keep falling over that are never doing what they ought to be. My worry is that as soon as they’re better the winter will set in and you know what that house is like in winter.’

‘Bracing,’ said Alec.

‘Bracing to the hale and hearty,’ I said. ‘Flattening to the convalescent.’

‘Are you thinking of going away?’ Alec had an odd tone in his voice, hopeful-seeming in a rather unflattering way. ‘Taking them off to the seaside and building them up with salt air and beef jelly?’

‘It’s a thought,’ I replied. ‘It would get us away from the scarlet fever and actually it might go along very well with what I was intending.’

‘Which was?’

‘Although we’d have to go a long way south to find seaside that wasn’t a trial in October. France, perhaps? The mountains? But I’d spend all the money I’m hoping to use for my grand idea.’

‘Which is?’

‘Central heating,’ I proclaimed. ‘A boiler and pipes and radiators and every room in the house like a fireside nook from wall to wall and floor to ceiling.’

‘Hugh must be ill,’ said Alec.

‘Hugh doesn’t know,’ I told him. ‘So you see, getting him out of the house would be pretty handy.’

‘Can you afford it?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘the thing is, you see, that Hugh has just offloaded some shares.’

‘Really?’ Alec cocked his head. ‘He’s selling? Everyone’s buying.’

‘That’s what Hugh says too, but he won’t tell me what. What are you buying?’

‘Oh Dandy, join the modern age,’ Alec said. ‘One doesn’t buy shares in things any more. One buys securities on margin with a broker’s loan.’

‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Alec. ‘I think it’s an American invention.’

‘Aha! Then you are both at the same game. Hugh offloaded these shares, as I said – ancient old things he’s been holding for sentimental reasons more than anything; I think his father first bought them – and he offloaded his London broker too and got one in New York.’

‘Sounds like it then,’ said Alec. ‘Good for Hugh.’

‘So we’re sloshing in actual cash for a change, until he spends it on these New York securities. Only with the flu and bronchitis it’s been the last thing on his mind. Or maybe he thinks I’ve done it for him. I couldn’t say.’

Alec’s face betrayed a not uncommon mix of emotions; he is my friend – mine, not ours – and his loyalties lie properly with me, but every so often when it comes to such things as farming, shooting and evidently money too some deep masculine chord begins to thrum in harmony with Hugh.

‘You can’t possibly be serious, Dan,’ he said. ‘Hugh thinks you’ve stepped in and carried out his business for him whilst he was ill – as he has every right to expect you to, by the way – and instead you’re planning to fritter away shares in a gold mine just so you can waft about in backless frocks and not get gooseflesh?’

‘I don’t see it that way at all,’ I said. ‘I think if I choose to spend money wisely on solid goods instead of gambling on ticker-tape fairy tales Hugh should be thankful for my sound sense.’

‘Sound sense?’ Alec cried. ‘Dandy, this is the biggest year the stock market’s ever seen!’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘I haven’t a clue,’ said Alec. ‘But the brokers and bankers do. That’s good enough for me.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I hope your trust in them is warranted.’

We tore bread, drank soup and glared for a minute. Alec gave in first.

‘The mountains? The Alps, you mean? For the air?’

‘The mountain air does the same job as ozone, doesn’t it? Not to mention all the clinics and tonics and what have you.’ I hoped he would not notice the inconsistency of my advocating cold mountain breezes while I was plotting to banish the fresh air of a thousand draughts from Gilverton for ever.

‘And I’d take over Gilver and Osborne, would I?’ said Alec. ‘While you’re away.’

‘If a case comes in,’ I said. ‘It’s been rather quiet.’

‘Only…’ He drank soup, then sherry, then a mouthful of water. ‘I might be busy.’

‘I can always have my post forwarded,’ I said. ‘If I go at all, darling. It was only a thought.’

‘The thing is,’ said Alec, ‘I’m thinking of taking a wife.’

To my great satisfaction I did not drop my spoon, inhale a crumb or utter a gasp. With perfect honesty, however, that was because my thought when I heard him was ‘Whose wife? Take her where?’ and by the time I had properly parsed his odd phrasing I was past the danger.

‘Well, let me be the first to offer my congratulations,’ I said.

‘And so I’m going to have to put a bit of effort into finding one.’

‘You- You mean- You’re planning to marry someone but-’

‘I need a wife,’ he said, like someone telling a waiter he needed a fork. ‘I need an heir. I’d quite like a daughter or two. A family, I suppose you’d say.’

‘You’ve picked a funny time to start the auditions,’ I said and my tone of amusement, my air of calm interest, was quite a feat, even though I myself say so. ‘Why not wait until next season? You’d not get in the door of the first ball before one of the mammas picked you off.’

Alec shuddered.

‘I can’t face a season and the mammas,’ he said. ‘Not to mention some drip of a girl making eyes at me. I’d like to marry a woman who wants a home and a family of her own and won’t pester me with a lot of silly nonsense beforehand.’

‘You want to marry Hugh,’ I said. ‘If only he had a sister. Or a niece, I suppose.’

‘Sister,’ said Alec. ‘Someone over thirty and past all the lovey-dovey stuff would be ideal.’

‘Well,’ I said briskly, ‘I shouldn’t have thought you’d have any trouble. A personable young man under forty, good family, nice estate, reasonable income.’

‘Would you like to tap my ribs with a rubber hammer, Dan?’ he said. ‘I told you I couldn’t face the mammas and you instantly become one.’

I laughed and he laughed with me and Barrow came in for the soup plates and the evening passed away on teasing and stock market gossip. It wasn’t until I was in my little motorcar driving home that I let the mask fall and plunged into mourning. It was over then, Gilver and Osborne, Alec and me. Whatever he said about a sensible girl and life going on as usual except punctuated by babies, there was not the faintest chance that our pleasant round would survive the advent of a wife. I could picture her already and, try as I might, I did not care for her.

So I stopped in on Hugh, instead of making straight for my sitting room.

‘How would you like to go away for a bit?’ I said. ‘A change of air, build you up again.’

‘Bournemouth kind of thing?’ said Hugh. ‘Rather late in the year, isn’t it? Last thing Donald needs is a sea fog seeping in at his bedroom window. I just paid him a visit and I see what you mean.’

‘How about mountain air?’ I said. ‘Some crisp mountain air and those clever doctors?’

‘Germans?’

‘Swiss, I was thinking.’

‘Same thing,’ said Hugh. ‘Can’t say I could face the journey anyway.’

‘Then put it out of your mind,’ I said, bending to peck his cheek. ‘Goodnight, dear.’

‘Are you all right, Dandy?’ he said, understandably startled. ‘I didn’t mean to shoot the idea out of the sky, you know. I’m with you as far as the clever doctors anyway. Marvellous what they can do with salts and hot towels and electrical currents these days.’

By which I took it that Hugh had been reading the back pages of old Blackwood’s Magazines again. I left him to his amusements and retired to mine, and to my daily duties too.

It was a good thing that Gilver and Osborne had been enjoying a peaceful spell because this evening, when I did not even open my correspondence until bedtime, was typical. We had caught a thief in March, unmasked a poison pen in June and then apart from Alec tracking down a bad debtor in August – this being quite a speciality of his these days, much less sordid to have someone like him tap the shoulder and ‘old man’ and ‘dear chap’ his way to a settlement than to have bailiffs calling – our little operation had been in dry dock. That was about to change.

‘Dear Messrs Gilver and Osborne,’ the letter began. ‘We would like to engage you to solve a murder which has been grossly mishandled by the Dumfriesshire Constabulary and scandalously hushed up by the Dumfries Procurator, leaving our dear departed mother without justice and letting a brutal killer go free.’

I turned up the lamp and put my feet back down on the floor; I had tucked them under me, but this letter needed a straight back.

‘Our mother was a guest at Laidlaw’s Hydropathic Establishment in Moffat during the late summer, there to take the waters for a recurring back complaint. She was recovering nicely and was otherwise in excellent health, being a sensible lady of quiet habits. Her heart was perfectly sound. The doctor’s diagnosis of acute heart failure was nonsense and the Fiscal’s capitulation is an outrage. We await notice of your terms and remain, sincerely yours, Herbert Addie and Mrs Jas. Bowie (née Addie), “Fairways”, Braid Road, Edinburgh.’

Well.

On the one hand, murder is the gold standard for a detective and any of that ilk who says otherwise is afraid of sounding callous and so is lying. On the other hand, these Addies – or rather this Addie and Bowie née – sounded like the very worst sort of client. They had already made up their minds and looked to Gilver and Osborne for corroboration; I would be forced to warn them, along with sending our terms, that we were servants of truth and that our fee only paid for us finding out whether, finding out what. No treasures on earth could buy our agreement to finding out that, dear dead mother or no.

However, the Addies were only part of the picture here. Fate, or coincidence as she is known in these rational days, had painted rather more, in the form of a hydropathic hotel with, one assumed, salts and hot towels and electrical currents, whither a loving wife and mother could remove her convalescing household while the plumbers were in. So long as she did not mention the brutal killer still at large, anyway.