Deadly Measure of Brimstone

7

One thing that can be said for scares and alarums is that they take one’s mind off missed meals wonderfully. I had not eaten a bite since my poached egg at breakfast and yet when I climbed back into my clothes again for the third time that day, I did not go straight to the drawing room to wait for tea. I carried on past the doorway, noting that most of the other guests had begun to assemble, and made straight for the telephone in the front hall. It was in a comfortable little kiosk just opposite the door and commanded a moderate amount of privacy. I did not lift the earpiece right away. I needed a moment to marshal my thoughts.

Was Mrs Addie hunting for ghosts? Regina thought not and Alec would soon be able to add her family’s views on the matter. Very well then, was she out and about on some other errand and happened simply to see one? Why did she return at night? And where did she return to? Did she bring anything back with her? How did Dr Laidlaw happen to follow her there? Only one of these questions had I the least chance of answering.

‘Mrs Bowie,’ I said, when the call had been put through and the servant had summoned her. ‘I am so pleased to be able to have a word with you, but it is actually Mr Osborne I’m hoping to catch.’

‘Oh Mrs Gilver, you missed him!’ said Mrs Bowie. There was no outrage in her voice, no disapproval. I guessed that Alec had managed to ascertain Mrs Addie’s views on the spirit world without offending her daughter to the point of sulking. ‘He was here a good couple of hours but he’s away to catch his train now. He’ll be back with you before much longer.’ I heard her voice grow strained as she twisted her neck, I guessed, to see a clock in the room where she was speaking.

‘Oh, dash it,’ I said. ‘I so much wanted to ask him to raise a few more questions with you than he went away armed with. Our investigation goes on apace, Mrs Bowie, and I have made some pertinent discoveries today.’

‘Can you not just ask me yourself?’ she said, falling neatly into my plan.

‘Well, how very accommodating of you,’ I said. ‘I should not for the world have asked you to hang on a telephone and be interviewed but if you are sure…’

‘For my dear mother’s rest, anything,’ said Mrs Bowie. She would bend over backwards head to heels now that this telephone interview was her own idea. My devious tricks shock me sometimes.

‘We are trying to piece together your mother’s last day,’ I said. ‘And I wondered-’

‘Oh, but dear Mr Osborne thought of that,’ said Mrs Bowie. I noted the adjective with interest. Not only had he not offended the woman; he had made a conquest of her. ‘He said it occurred to him coming up on the train.’

‘And could you help him with it?’ I said.

‘Not with much more than we could tell you at our first meeting,’ she said. ‘She wasn’t going to go out for a few days yet. She had treatments planned for all day every day and it was going to be later in the week before she could get down to the town to get some tablet and send a postcard. That’s what we told you, if you remember.’

‘I certainly do,’ I said. ‘But did Mr Osborne happen to mention that we think your mother’s plans might have changed? We think she did indeed go out that day. The day she died – I’m so sorry to speak baldly, I mean no incivility by it.’ This was me trying too late and most likely in vain to match what I am sure had been Alec’s Arthurian heights of tender chivalry.

‘He did say as much,’ said Mrs Bowie, ‘but my brother and I are quite in agreement that he – you both, pardon me – are mistaken. If Mother went out she’d have sent me a card, if not a wee parcel, and well…’

‘Yes?’

‘It wouldn’t be like her. She always adhered to her treatment diary. It was like a sacred duty to her. She had such regard for old Dr Laidlaw; she’d never have gone against what the Hydro told her to do.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘I do see, and I daresay you’re right, Mrs Bowie. But there’s one last thing that Mr Osborne might have neglected to ask. I wonder – I’ve no desire to upset you – but when your mother’s effects came back to you, did you happen to go through them? Did you look through her pockets? Tidy out cloakroom receipts and suchlike. And I wonder – this must seem like awful cheek – but have you sorted through her clothes and shoes and things? Laundered them or sent them for cleaning?’

There was a long silence at the other end. I thought I had horrified the woman, harping on about the clothes and shoes and the very bus tickets of the dead woman. But when eventually she drew breath and spoke again it was not that at all.

‘Now, fancy you thinking of that, Mrs Gilver,’ she said. ‘You really are a pair of wonders, Mr Osborne and you. I’ve been meaning to write to Dr Laidlaw and ask about Mother’s bag and about the clothes she was wearing that day. Her trunk came back right enough on the train, all clean and tidy, and her overnight bag too with her nightgowns. And of course her earthly remains themselves came back. We had the funeral right here in Morningside. But her things from that last day are missing.’

Quietly to myself in the kiosk I mimed whipping a hat off my head and throwing it in the air. Huzzah! I was willing to bet they were missing. I was absolutely willing to bet they were. They must have been filthy.

‘Not that we’re making a fuss over a suit of clothes,’ Mrs Bowie was saying now. No Eliza Doolittle she, caring about what had happened to a new straw hat what should have come to her. ‘It’s just that she always carried her father’s watch in her bag.’

‘Her bag’s missing?’ I said, astonished that they would accept such a thing.

‘Oh, not her proper handbag,’ said Mrs Bowie. ‘Just her little bag that she kept with her and took out on wee short walks and so on.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I see.’

‘It’s just that it had a lock of hair from our brother who died, inside the watch-case you see… and there were some very precious letters too that she always kept with her. I’d like to have them again if we could find them. Only with all the ill feeling after the police and the Fiscal and all of that, it never did seem like the right time to write and ask and…’

‘Leave it to me, Mrs Bowie,’ I said. ‘Put it right out of your mind and leave it to me.’ What I really meant was ‘For heaven’s sake don’t write now and go mucking everything up for us’ but one cannot talk to clients that way.

‘I shall, Mrs Gilver,’ she said, ‘most thankfully.’ With that we made our farewells and I hung up the earpiece and sat back. I had gone panning for silver and found gold.

It was the bag. The Laidlaws and Dr Ramsay and Sergeant Simpson together had decided not to upset the Addies with talk of their mother crashing through undergrowth, chasing ghosts, and tumbling to her death, and so they must have packed her dirty clothes and shoes away, hoping that her son and daughter would never think to ask for them. Perhaps they had even burned them in the boiler if they were really ruined. But they would never have kept or burned a woman’s handbag, not even a little indoor bag, surely, with her husband’s watch and her cache of letters, presumably tied with a red ribbon and unmistakably precious to the most casual glance. That would have been returned with her trunk and case and her ‘proper bag’, surely. The only explanation I could come up with was that when she was brought home that night, she had no longer had her bag with her. She had dropped it, lost it somewhere. And if we were lucky and searched very hard it might still be there, lying where it fell.

A shaft of sunlight broke over my head and a choir of angels sang my name in a sweet piping soprano. If one drops a bag somewhere, one returns to search for it. Hallelujah. I might not know why Mrs Addie went out on a spree in the afternoon instead of submitting to her heat lamps and mustard wraps, but I thought I knew why she went back again at night. She was not a ghost hunter hoping to see better against a dark sky than the glimpse she had caught in the daytime. She was a woman with a bundle of precious letters and a lock of precious hair who would venture out to find them even if a ghost was in the offing.

I stood at last – it was my day for huddling in little booths until I was cramped – and as I stretched I heard footsteps and, although there is nothing illicit in making a telephone call from a telephone kiosk, I shrank from emerging but sidled forward and peeped out instead, remaining hidden.

It was two guests, small cases in hand, clearly departing. A couple of Tot’s bright young things in their short skirts, high-heels and fox furs.

‘Thanks ever so for giving me a lift, ducks,’ said one in that infuriating mock-cockney that was all the rage.

‘You shouldn’t use that accent at the meeting,’ said the other. ‘They’ll think you’re teasing. And I’d happily give you a lift all the way to town if you like, not just the station.’

‘Oh no, I’m as sick as a kitten in motorcars,’ said the first. ‘Much better on trains. And of course, I shan’t play-act at the meeting. It’s serious stuff.’

‘What are you going to say? I’d be terrified even to go in the door! They must be monsters.’

‘Perfectly respectable men and women, I think,’ said her friend. ‘I’m going to tell them that Mary Patterson visited me. That she stood by my bed and spoke.’

‘What did she say?’ The woman’s voice was soft, like a child, all the idiot chirping stopped for a moment.

‘That she forgave her killers and repented of all her sins.’

‘Too absolutely shivery-making for words. How can you?’

‘Why not,’ said the other. ‘After all, that’s what happened.’

‘Stop it!’

‘I opened my eyes and there she was and she looked at me out of her black, black eyes and said, “I am Mary Patterson. I forgive my killers and repent of my sins.”’

‘Stop, you beast!’

And then both of them shrieked as outside on the drive a motorcar parped its horn. Then they giggled and tripped off down the steps in their silly heels and their silly hats towards the door.

‘Ladies,’ said a voice. I stuck my head out of the kiosk. Alec Osborne was holding the door open for them, bowing them on their way. ‘Hello, Dandy,’ he said as he trotted up the steps towards me. ‘Have you been there all day since I left? Pining? Well, I’m back now and I have interesting news.’

‘Hello, Alec darling,’ I said. ‘So do I but it’s not the sort that can be delivered on the doorstep. It needs a fireside and a glass of something sustaining.’

‘Ah, your signature rambling,’ said Alec. ‘I’m very fond of it, but I warn you it might act as a lullaby after a day like today.’

‘Well, deliver your headline then,’ I said.

‘Mrs Addie didn’t believe in ghosts,’ he said.

‘I know,’ I answered. ‘In fact, she showed a great deal more courage in the face of one than I could be sure to.’

‘You are absolutely infuriating, Dandy,’ he said. ‘Four bloody hours on a train with no dining carriage it took me to glean that from the Addies. Tinned soup for lunch and no tea.’

‘You haven’t missed tea,’ I said. ‘Stop moaning and let’s find Hugh and the boys.’

His spirits recovered over Whitstable sandwiches, ginger buns and orange syrup cake and the boys at their most amusing and least annoying. Afterwards, he, I and they set off for Auchenlea leaving Hugh alone, looking like the cat that ate canary in cream sauce. He rippled his eyebrows at me as we were leaving for all the world as though he did not mind Alec and me working, but rather was glad to see me go.

Back at the house, the boys were packed off to their rooms to rest and change for dinner (and were glad to go after a day of the strenuous treatments Dr Laidlaw had decreed for them), Bunty was prised from the kitchen to my side where she belonged, and Alec and I settled in by the drawing-room fire with sherry. It really was the most pleasant room, deep chairs with high backs and some of the least draughty windows I had ever come across in Scotland. For a moment I wondered if I would have been better to summon a glazier to Gilverton instead of a plumber, then I thought of turning a tap and having a torrent of hot water come gushing out and decided I would put up with a lot of draughts along with that delight. Besides, it is dark twelve hours a day, six months a year and one can close shutters and draw curtains over the rattling windows. I put Gilverton out of my mind and smiled at Alec.

‘There is an enormous and unspeakable thing we must discuss,’ I said, ‘but let’s leave it aside as long we can. So instead: how did you manage to broach the question and keep in Mrs Bowie’s good books? I’m most impressed.’ This was true, but he saw through my ruse in reporting it. He sat up straight and held his hands under his chin, letting his tongue loll out and panting like a puppy.

‘Don’t patronise me, Dandy,’ he said. ‘I thought of something else I wanted to ask and managed to slip it in.’ Then he sat back again. I cocked my head and waited. ‘I told them there was some sort of spiritualists’ jamboree going on – a bit of poetic licence as to time and place, you know – and would their mother be likely to duck out of any of her treatments to go and see the fun.’

‘I don’t follow,’ I said.

‘Because I’d hate to accuse the Laidlaws of harming the old lady with some electric bath or whatever if she had been out on the town and never gone near the thing.’

‘Oh, very twisty,’ I said. ‘Well done you. And Mrs Bowie said her mother didn’t hold with ghosts?’

‘She did.’

‘Well, it’s funny you should have happened to talk of Mrs Addie bunking off,’ I said, ‘because – here is my news – she was outside when she collapsed. Possibly even when she died.’

‘Outside?’ Alec said. ‘In the grounds, you mean? I’m not sure I see why you stopped the presses for that, Dan.’

‘Not in the grounds and you will,’ I replied and went on to relate Regina’s evidence in the matter of her dirty nails and grimy knees. ‘And not only can I explain why she went back out at night, I think we might be able to prove it.’ Now Alec cocked his head. I sailed on.

‘I can’t say I’m keen,’ he concluded when I was done. ‘We could spend a fair old time thrashing about looking for a little handbag with two long paths and a high hill to choose from.’

‘But if we found it,’ I persisted. ‘If we proved that she wasn’t here when she died.’

‘What if we did?’ said Alec. ‘The tiniest of white lies to spare her children pain. Why don’t we just tell Dr Laidlaw that the Addies are suspicious. Tell her that her discretion has backfired and ask her to write to them and set out the whole story? Why not do that? Aren’t we making a lot of bother for ourselves over nothing?’

I shook my head. ‘I would love to get her talking, but only if I could do it without showing my hand. I’m sure I could trip her up if I could just get started on it somehow.’

‘You’re convinced that there’s something for her to trip over then?’ Alec said.

‘Completely convinced,’ I said. ‘How did Dr Laidlaw manage to find Mrs Addie for one thing? What was she doing out in the night where the ghosties are? There’s something very wrong with that story somewhere. Not to mention the fact that she wouldn’t sign the death certificate and pushed it off onto Ramsay instead.’

‘And then also,’ said Alec, ‘according to you anyway, there’s the mystery of the locked room. Didn’t you say she gave it fearful looks and went pale?’

I clicked my fingers and tutted. ‘Yes. And so did Regina and I meant to ask her about it. After how I scared her today she’ll never let me ask her anything ever again.’

‘I just find it very hard to believe that Dr Laidlaw is a killer somehow,’ Alec said. ‘Her brother now…’

‘I know,’ I agreed. ‘I found myself thinking that too. It’s hardly fair but if something nefarious is going on here I would bet Tot Laidlaw’s at the bottom of it. He dropped a couple of very mysterious hints to me, you know. Said I’d have to summon courage to make my trip worthwhile and spoke rather archly of how many hydros we had to drive past to get to this one. Almost as though he knows we’re not here as patients.’ ‘The boys’ chests will back it up,’ said Alec. ‘Hugh’s too.’

‘And he wasn’t twinkling and winking when he said it either. Ugh, I loathe hinters. I can’t fathom why Hugh seems to have taken to him.’

Alec laughed and went to pour himself another glass of sherry. ‘This is lovely wine,’ he said. ‘You surely didn’t find it in the Moffat licensed victuallers.’

‘Pallister brought it with him,’ I said. ‘Why were you laughing?’

‘I’m not surprised Hugh has fallen on Tot like a long-lost brother,’ he said. ‘This whole excursion picked up no end for Hugh when Tot came on the scene.’

‘He does seem – Laidlaw, I mean – to have drawn a more glamorous crowd than I was expecting.’

Alec was shaking his head and laughing silently. ‘Oh, I know he’s beyond the pale, but you have to hand it to him. For years on end Thomas Laidlaw was supposed to be training in hydropathy in the Alps, like his father before him and his sister too, but he bunked off. He went to Monte Carlo and made a fortune there. Then when his father died and left him the Hydro, he came home to sell up, couldn’t get Dorothea to agree and found a way to turn it to hand. Now, he’s making a fortune here. Or was for a while. I rather think he’s in deep water now and only just breaking even.’

‘How?’

‘My dear Dandy, he’s running a casino.’ My mouth fell open and I had to scramble to stop my cigarette falling into my lap and burning me. ‘After midnight,’ Alec said, ‘when all of Dr Laidlaw’s patients are tucked up in their little beds, the winter gardens are transformed. The doors to the terrace are bolted, there’s a doorman on the only door to the passageway and the respectable majority know nothing.’ He laughed again, but he laughed alone.

‘Hugh!’ I said. ‘All those sly looks and that smirking!’ For Hugh loves nothing more on earth than a casino, or rather he loves a casino with a passion equal to his love for grouse, stags, well-managed woodlands and tidy farms running at profit and giving work to his men. I have known him take estate plans to Monaco and spend the days in his room poring over them while the sun shines and the sea sparkles outside, whiling away the hours until darkness falls and the croupiers split their decks for the evening. Finding a casino in a Scottish valley with forests and moors and pheasant outside must have seemed to him like a dream come true.

‘It’s always been an unaccountable quirk of his to me,’ I said. ‘I like a game of cards at home with friends, but one meets such dreadful people in public casinos. The sort of people who would give Hugh toothache if he had to share their carriage on a train.’

‘But taking their money must be lovely,’ Alec said. I had to laugh and nod at that, for while Hugh loves to gamble he does not suffer from the gambler’s usual complaint of loss and remorse and threatened penury. He is either lucky or brilliant or has an iron will because he always walks away from the roulette wheel and the rouge-et-noir where chance is all, as well as from the poker table and the vingt-et-un where skill can help one, better off than when he arrived; and what losses he has endured over the years have been of the size which can be met with a shrug and an extra glass of whisky before bedtime. It is intensely irritating to me, not least since on the few occasions when I have joined him I quickly lost my all and wanted nothing more than to keep going and win it back again.

‘That certainly explains the bright young things,’ I said, shoving thoughts of Hugh aside. ‘But why do they have to subject themselves to the salts and waters? If it’s supposed to convince the staff and other guests that they are patients, it’s not working. You said on the first day that there were two camps.’

Alec shook his head.

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘Something to do with tax, maybe? Tot Laidlaw is what my father used to call a warm man. Onto anything that offers a profit.’

‘I wonder if he’s charging the ghost hunters a premium for the entertainments,’ I said. We gave one another a long and sober look.

‘Ah yes,’ Alec said. ‘The enormous and unspeakable thing. Are you going to say it or shall I?’

‘Oh, I don’t mind saying it. I just don’t know what to make of it.’

‘Go on then.’

‘Very well. The Moffat Hydro is a honey pot which draws not bees but spiritualists, mediums and witchety-woos as though it’s Hallowe’en at Alloway Kirk.’

‘And our suspicious death was apparently caused by a ghostly visitation.’

‘These two things must be related.’

‘But not in the most obvious way.’

‘Which is?’

‘That Mrs Addie saw a ghost and the mediums coming to see it too is no different from archaeologists high-tailing it to Egypt because the Earl has found a new tomb.’

‘Poor Porchy,’ I said. ‘He was a sweet man.’ Alec was giving me a very hard look. I sighed and relented. ‘No, I can’t countenance any of that. It troubles me how detailed things are getting, mind you. Some of the ghosts have names.’

‘Some?’ said Alec. ‘How many are there?’

‘I overheard someone saying seven had been sighted, or heard tapping or whatever ghosts do. And another dozen were in the offing.’

‘Seven?’ said Alec. ‘With names and everything? That can’t be a mistake about a piece of flapping cloth on a lonely fencepost then. Someone must be deliberately making it up. In careful detail, as you say.’ I was nodding.

‘Extremely careful,’ I agreed. ‘Because actually it wasn’t “another dozen or so”. There were four with names or descriptions, and another either eleven or thirteen. As though two schools of thought were having a little academic wrangle. And it seems – again from my overhearings: Nanny Palmer would spank me – that some great personage is coming from London, some panjandrum of the spirit world, to subject the goings-on to serious study. The underlings are all atwitter.’

We sat in silence for a short while, turning it over. It is not a pleasant thing suddenly to have one’s solemn and serious work made into a nonsense that way.

‘So…’ said Alec at last, ‘do we think then that the Laidlaws believe the Hydro is haunted and they wanted to keep it quiet and that’s why they suppressed so many of the facts surrounding Mrs Addie dying?’

‘Bad for business?’ I said. ‘Only it’s not, is it? The place is filling up like a pub on market day.’

‘And I wish it weren’t,’ Alec said. ‘I don’t like those mediums. One of them that passed me in the corridor yesterday had the creepiest eyes I’ve ever seen outside a fairground. Not that we actually believe…’

‘Of course not!’ I said stoutly.

‘So what do we think?’

‘We think someone is making mischief, Mrs Addie caught wind of it and went to see for herself. That’s all. And dropped her bag and went back to find it.’

‘And died of fright. But we don’t believe there was anything to die of fright of. Does that actually make sense, Dandy, when you get right down to it?’

‘Yes,’ I said, stouter still. ‘She could have got a fright from something she imagined. Easily.’ I drained my glass in a most unladylike way. ‘Or the whole story of the fright and the heart attack could be covering up murder, it’s true. But let’s not jump down that hole until we have to.’

‘I still think we could just tell Dr Laidlaw that we know her patient went out and collapsed somewhere.’

‘I’d rather find the bag and not get Regina into trouble,’ I said.

‘Because if she was unscrupulous,’ Alec persisted, ‘she’d have signed that certificate. Why can’t we at least just ask her about Mrs Addie and see what she says?’

‘We can,’ I said. I sat straight up in my chair from where I had been slumping in the aftermath of all our good ideas. Here was the best idea I had had all day. ‘Oh, it’s delicious, of course we can! Well, you can, anyway.’

‘Happy to oblige,’ Alec said. ‘But how can I?’

‘It’ll be a bit of a performance – laurels galore if you pull it off. What you do is let on to someone – the doctor herself, Tot, Mrs Cronin-’

‘The doctor,’ said Alec. ‘Mrs Cronin is far too strait-laced to perform to. Do you know she doesn’t approve of Sunday bathing? Everyone in the Hydro’s supposed to just sit and read the Bible from Saturday teatime through to Monday.’

‘Very well, the doctor then. And tell her that an apparition came to you in the night. A Mrs A-. That her spirit is troubled. That she is cold and she needs her clothes. That there is something she wants her dear son and daughter to know.’

‘Good God, Dandy.’

‘It’s perfect!’ I insisted. ‘One ghost among so many? What better place than a haystack to claim that you’ve seen a straw of hay?’

‘Mother?’ We both jumped. Donald and Teddy were standing just inside the doorway, dressed in the dinner jackets that still made me blink: where were the little boys whose shirts buttoned onto their britches?

‘Are there ghosts in the Hydro?’ said Donald.

‘Is that why you didn’t want us staying there?’

‘But you don’t care if Daddy gets haunted?’

I could tell them there were no such things as ghosts. I could tell them that the Hydro was unsuitable on account of the illicit casino and that I did not want them growing up to be gamblers like their father in case they had not inherited his luck and ended by ruining us all. Or I could tell them there might be a murderer at large there and that Daddy could take his chances so long as the three of us were safely miles away. None of it cast me in favourable light.

‘There seem to be a fair few ghosts floating around, it’s true,’ I said.

‘Are you and Mr Osborne going to catch them?’

‘Can we help you?’

‘There are a fair few ghost stories floating around,’ Alec said, shaking his head at me. ‘Your mother and I are going to catch the rascal that’s spreading them. And you are forbidden to meddle in any way.’

‘Hear, hear,’ I said.

‘Does Father know?’ said Donald.

‘Your father doesn’t believe in ghosts,’ I said, hoping that my sleight of hand would go unnoticed. It did not.

‘Does Father know about the rascal spreading stories?’ Donald said.

‘He doesn’t, as it happens,’ I replied. ‘He has been very ill and needs to rest, like the two of you. Now pour yourselves two small sherries – very small for you, Donald dear, for you’re to have more port after dinner.’ The prospect of strong drink distracted them as I knew it would, and it took the attention of both, for despite the dinner jackets they were still boys and if one was pouring the other would have to watch and see fair measures.

‘Well?’ I asked Alec softly. ‘What do you think of my idea? Will you ask Dr Laidlaw in the morning?’

‘It’s your turn, strictly speaking,’ he replied. ‘Since I went to the Addies.’ This was not at all my view of it. He had gone to the Addies as a forfeit and his paying a forfeit conferred no debt upon me.

‘I can’t say I saw a ghost in the night,’ I whispered. ‘I’m not sleeping there.’

‘Say you saw her in the steam room,’ Alec said. ‘Say she came floating through the locked door.’ The mediums in the Turkish bath had said phantasms did not care for steam but the thought of mentioning the door to Dr Laidlaw was enticing. For that reason and to keep from squabbling like the boys over the sherry glasses I threw up my hands in defeat.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I give in. But the next two nasty jobs shall fall to you.’