Deadly Measure of Brimstone

13

Friday, 25th October 1929

I was lucky enough to witness her arrival too. Mrs Scott, Mrs Davies and the gooseberry-eyed girl, who I had discovered was called Olivia, were taking morning coffee in the ladies’ drawing room, no sign of Mr Merrick, and I was waiting there to see Donald and Teddy safely out of their respective Faradaic heat bath and ten lengths of breaststroke, install them on the terrace with hot bottles and then begin my search for the missing yard-square object. As I sat there I saw a mousy figure enter at the double doors, hesitate and then come creeping towards the party of ladies who were just one table away from me, reading luridly coloured picture papers which I did not recognise – Spiritualists’ Weekly, perhaps. Grant was wearing something close to a novice’s habit, a plain grey pinafore dress and white neckpiece underneath it, and had straightened her hair and scraped it to either side of her head. Her hands were clasped in front of her and she made only darting glances up to see where she was going, keeping her head for the most part decently bowed.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, bobbing a curtsy when Mrs Scott deigned to notice her. ‘Are you the… Someone told me I should speak to you. I’m in need of counsel. I just don’t know what to do.’ Before any of the women could answer, Grant seemed to buckle at the knees and she sank into a chair, raising a shaking hand to her brow. ‘I feel sick,’ she said. ‘Oh my, I feel so very sick. Such great evil. I don’t think I can bear it.’ She went so far as to make a couple of rather convincing noises which caused Mrs Scott to edge away as far as she could without leaving her chair. The gooseberry-eyed girl, Olivia, put a hand out and touched Grant’s arm. Grant immediately raised her head and smiled. I would have said that roses bloomed in her cheeks but no one, even from a theatrical background, even a Barrymore, could change colour at will.

‘Thank you,’ Grant said. Then she frowned a little and looked at the girl’s hand on her arm. ‘What did you do?’

‘I am at peace with my gift,’ said Olivia. ‘I simply shared my peace with you.’

‘Gift!’ said Grant. ‘It’s a curse! I pray and pray for it to be taken away and I pray for forgiveness for whatever I did to bring it down upon my wicked head.’

‘My dear girl,’ said Mrs Scott. I was surprised to hear Grant addressed this way. She is slightly older than me and it has been a while since I was a ‘girl’, dear or otherwise. But something about the white collar and meekly parted hair had taken years off her. ‘My dear girl, you have not been among friends. You are among them now. Please, tell us what’s troubling you.’

‘I’m staying in the town with my lady – I’m a maid, you see – and oh, there’s such great evil. I can’t sleep! That voice! I wish I could believe I’m dreaming, but it’s real. And the look of him. I asked for help at the church but the minister scorned me. Then – I’m ashamed to admit it – but I stepped into the Crown for a glass of port, just to help me sleep; because we’re right next door and the sound of the men in the bar put the notion in my head, and someone there was saying that up at the Hydro there was a convention of spiritualists. I thought maybe you could help me.’

‘I’m sure we can,’ said Mrs Davies. ‘This voice, what does it say? And what is it that you see?’

‘Oh, a terrible sight,’ said Grant. ‘A rough, low beast of a man and… harmed. Not right at all. His neck!’ All three mediums were sitting on the edges of their seats now and no one could blame them. It was a bravura performance.

‘And what does he say?’ said Olivia Gooseberry. I hoped that Grant would not unleash the dreadful rumbling sound of her ghost. Not here in the ladies’ drawing room. I felt my shoulders rise as I braced myself for it, but I should have trusted her.

‘He says…’ Grant hesitated. ‘It doesn’t come through my ears, you know. It’s as though I’m speaking it, only not in my voice – oh, it’s too hard to explain.’

‘A channel!’ said Mrs Scott. ‘Don’t fret, my dear. We understand completely. What does he say?’

‘He says…’ She stopped again. ‘It’s such wickedness, I hardly want to tell you.’ All three were wound like springs now. If Grant did not tell them at her next approach, one of them would pinch her.

‘He says, “I am William.” He never says a surname. “I was wrongly judged and wrongly hanged. I am come to wreak my revenge.” And some other things I can never make out and something about his mother but he’s always crying by then.’

The three mediums were dumbfounded, a tableau of rapt stupefaction which lasted so long that Grant raised her head and took a surreptitious peek at them.

Mrs Scott was the first to find her voice.

‘No surname?’ she asked weakly. ‘Not even an initial?’ I thought I could see Grant considering the initial. ‘M’ was always a good bet in Scotland as were ‘O’ in Ireland and ‘T’ in Cornwall, but very sensibly she shook her head no.

‘What does it mean, Mrs Scott?’ asked Olivia.

‘Something stupendous,’ Mrs Scott replied. ‘Something unhoped-for and almost undreamed-of. We must find Mrs Molyneaux, ladies. Or perhaps… dare we… Yes! We must take this straight to Mr Merrick himself.’ She rose. ‘Stay here, my dear. Help yourself to a cup of coffee. Ring for a fresh pot. Tell them to put it on Mrs Scott’s bill if it’s extra. We shall return.’

They stood and sailed out of the room with the wind behind them and the harbour in view, leaving Grant and me gazing at one another over the empty chairs.

‘That seems to have gone down rather well then,’ I said softly.

‘I wonder which part of what I said convinced them,’ said Grant. ‘I hope they tell me. I can suddenly make out the mumbled words if they let me in on what I’m supposed to be hearing, can’t I?’

‘Practise some restraint for now,’ I answered. ‘That would be my advice anyway. You seem to have done plenty to get their attention.’

It was with the greatest reluctance that I managed to drag myself away, for I wanted nothing more than to skulk in my chair and overhear what happened when Mr Merrick appeared on the scene. But generals do not skulk about the front line once the orders are given and I had tasks of my own.

Attics or basement, I wondered as I made my way across the hall to the servants’ door. If the missing object was as heavy as all that I imagined it would be no small matter to lug it up to the attics, even using the invalid lift by which the frailer Hydro guests made their way between bedroom and baths. I would start in the basement, and it seemed sensible to start in the very corridor where Regina, Mrs Cronin and I had all converged that day. There had been doors on either side of it and what could they be except boxrooms? Or possibly boiler rooms, for all that steam had to have its source somewhere.

Finding the place was not going to be easy, though. I could go to the Turkish baths and start from there, but if anyone saw me I could not claim to be lost. If I started at the other end I could, with a little more plausibility, say that I was taking a short cut and had misplaced myself.

I skirted the kitchens, the sculleries and laundry, a boot room, the wine cellar and a boxroom where the casino tables stood waiting for nightfall under their baize covers. What is more, I did it without a single servant seeing me. I even found time to congratulate myself on how much improved in stealth I was these days. When I reached the less populous and well-utilised areas of below stairs, I began to pay close attention to the floor, looking for scraping marks, and I began to try the handles of the doors. Most were locked and I regretted the impulsive way I had thrust Dr Laidlaw’s keys into her hands as she rushed past me the evening before. Those few doors which were unlocked opened to show me guests’ luggage, old deckchairs with their canvas faded and fraying, a collection of toboggans awaiting the winter, a heap of rusting bicycles from early in the century, and any number of moth-eaten tennis nets rolled up and stuffed into tea chests.

At the end of a short corridor leading off the main one, outside yet another locked door, I thought I saw some scratch marks but could not be sure. I put my eye to the keyhole and saw nothing except grey light with strings of cobweb floating in it. I straightened and sneezed, deadening the sound with my finger and thumb pinched around my nose, the way that Nanny Palmer always told me would burst my ear drums, then I lit a match and took a closer look at the scratch marks on the floor. I was almost sure they were about as far apart as the marks on the tiled floor of the empty room last night. Did I dare go back to Dr Laidlaw’s office and re-steal her keys to get through this door? I did not; and besides, she would surely not have returned the keys to the dish from which they had been taken. I was at a loss as to how else I could gain entry to a locked windowless basement, short of hacking the door down with an axe, when I stopped short. It was not windowless, there was grey light and cobwebs in there. If I could work out where on the outside of the building that room lay then I could peer in at the window.

I sighed. My accomplishments were over for the day then: I am pitifully incapable of finding my way around strange houses. Outside, if the sun is shining and it is not noon at the equator, I can navigate as well as anyone else who was taught geography along with her letters and numbers as a child. It is not much help in Perthshire, where the admittedly long hours of daylight in the short months of summer are usually filled with driving rain, but at least the capacity is there if the conditions allow. Inside houses it is another matter and I have been given lewd winks more than once before now because I was wandering a corridor at a house party where I had no reason to be.

I did not even try to form a plan in my head of the Hydro interior today. Instead, I used a mental version of the unravelling jersey method. Back on the main corridor I went along muttering ‘left, left, left’ to myself until I found a staircase. I went up to the ground floor and walked along the corridor I found there saying ‘right, right, right’. At the end I emerged into a corner of the dining room. I crossed it and the hall and emerged from the front door, walked round to the dining-room window, kept walking saying ‘left, left, left’ which took me to the corner of the lawn and then, still saying ‘right, right, right’, I fought my way through the dense shrubbery which screened off the servants’ area from the lawns below the terrace where, for the first time in my life, I was pleased to have to brush cobwebs from my face.

Here there were dusty windows a plenty. I peered in at them, seeing the same tennis nets, bicycles and toboggans I had seen before. I passed a garden door, moved on, and saw deckchairs and luggage. I had seen all of these things from the corridor. Where was the room behind the locked one at the end of the offshoot?

And then it struck me. That short offshoot of corridor led to the outside wall. That door didn’t open onto a room. It opened onto this path and the grey light I had seen was filtering through these rhododendrons. I had just brushed away the very strings of cobweb I had seen through the keyhole. I went back and looked at the mossy bricks and, right enough, there were faint but unmistakable scratches there. Darkened now after a few weeks in the weather, but still clear. And the moss had been ripped out too and lay shrivelling.

I followed the path, navigating by the scraped bricks, until I came to a break in the shrubs. The path carried on but led only to the laundry yard and back into the house again. Through the gap in the rhododendrons, however, was the side lawn, rather neglected – no clock golf or croquet here – and shaded by spreading cedars. Was it my imagination, I wondered, or were there faint depressions in the grass? It was not the gardeners’ pride, this unused patch of lawn, being rather spongy with more of the moss and rather sparse under the cedars where the long needles had fallen and never been raked away, and I was almost sure that I could see the traces of two wheels – a sack barrow, perhaps – which had crossed it recently. I set off in pursuit of them.

Halfway over I began to fear that the traces were my imagination, nothing more. They disappeared completely for yards at a time and when I fancied I saw them again they were fainter than ever. I had almost given up when, under the massiest of the cedars in the densest shade, I saw a patch about six feet long where the brittle needles had snapped and sprung up at either end: a clear and undeniable imprint of two wheels, not my imagination at all. I skirted them carefully and then stood beyond them gazing ahead at where they could have been going.

I was near the edge of the grounds now and could see portions of the high grey garden wall between the trees and bushes which bordered them. Then, behind some sort of apple or cherry tree, its leaves just beginning to yellow, I saw what I had not realised I was looking for but realised now that I must have been: the smooth, rounded shape of a ridge tile. There was a roof over there, and where there is a roof there is a building below it and where there is a building there is somewhere to wheel a heavy object and try to hide it. I glanced about me but this was a desolate spot, away from the terrace and the sunshine, so I picked up my pace and made for the shadows.

It must have been an apple house at some time, I thought as I drew near. A tiny little place – a howf, as they call them in Perthshire – windowless but with slatted openings near the top, built against the wall. I rattled the door handle but of course it was locked. Even if it was not usually kept locked it would have been locked for the last month or so. For the signs were unmistakable here. There were snapped twigs and turned earth and a smear of mud on the lintel of the little door, and I rather thought the object had been badly handled in because the door paint was scraped too and the wood showed fresh and white underneath it. The flakes of paint were still scattered on the slab of sandstone set into the ground for a doorstep.

If only Alec were here. He could grab onto that branch and pull himself up. He could put a foot on the lintel and step over, holding onto the roof, and from there he could squint down through those slats and see what was in there.

I imagined the whole climb in my head, seeing Alec shinning up and shouting down. I imagined asking Hugh to do it for me. Would he be spurred to a second boyhood by the thought that Osborne was not beyond such antics, or would this be more of my silliness at which he would simply lift an eyebrow and turn away? Donald was far too frail still but what about Teddy? Thus finally, I shamed myself into action. My poor sickly sons were not to go climbing trees just because their mother was a ninny. I took off my gloves and laid my hands purposefully against the strongest-looking joint between the trunk and a branch.

‘Heave-ho!’ I said and set my foot against the bark to start scrambling.

I weighed considerably more than I did the last time I climbed a tree and my shoulders were aching when I had got myself up high enough to step over and stand on the door lintel. It looked much further away than it had when viewed from below, but I knew from jumping over burns that distances are deceptive when there is a six-foot drop or rushing cold water and probably I would step over the gap between branch and lintel without a thought if it was a gap between carpet and hearthrug, avoiding nothing more than a cold stone floor. I let go with one hand and stretched one leg over, feeling for a toehold. Something shifted, my foot slipped. For a minute I was hanging by one hand from the tree and then I got both feet back onto the crook of the branch, wrapped both arms tightly round the trunk and stayed there with my heart hammering. I looked down at what had fallen from above the door. Not a stone, not mortar, as I had first thought. I would have laughed if I had not been still so close to crying. It was a key.

When I retell the story of my discovery in the apple house, it is hard to decide what to suppress and what report. On the one hand, I am rather proud of the way I rubbed my hands together and climbed a tree – I do not judge the moments when I contemplated asking my son to take a deep breath through his pleurisy and do it for me as worth sharing – but on the other hand I wish I had thought to feel above the door for a key before I tore my stocking and scraped my cheek on the bark.

Besides, the end of the incident does overshadow whatever one would choose to tell of its beginning.

I found the courage to slither down from my perch in not many more minutes, with a locked door and a key to tempt me. The lock was stiff and the key rusty – I rather thought that whoever had recently opened the door had brought a second key with him and did not know about this one; certainly there had been no oiling for some time. I had to use both hands to get it to turn but, at length, turn it did and I opened the apple-house door with held breath and thumping blood.

It was there! Three feet square by four feet tall, made of wood like a barrel and just sitting there. Not at all, I saw, the new-fangled and dangerous equipment I had counted on finding. I breathed out and it was when I breathed in again, the first time with the door open, that the smell got to me. I retched and stumbled backwards with my hands over my face. That smell! It is conventional to say that an unpleasant odour hits one, but this did so much more. It entered me, it filled my nose and my lungs and my mouth, it made my eyes water, it got among the strands of my hair and the fibres of my clothes and I knew immediately that it would be many days before it left me, if it ever did. I feared immediately that I would dream of this smell as long as I lived.

I could not have entered the little apple house if my life hung from my doing so, but I stayed there with my arm over my face, breathing the smell through the wool of my coat, and tried to look again at what I had found instead of some harmful – fatal! – machinery. It was a crate, a container. I had been looking for clues about what had killed Mrs Addie. I had not found them. Instead – I could not deny it – I had found Mrs Addie herself.

I scrabbled at the door, got it closed, got it locked and put the key back where I had found it. Then I tottered away to rest against another of the gnarled old trees and stood staring.

No one had smelled it because of the slats. Designed to draw all humidity away from the apples and stop them rotting, they had carried the stink of putrefaction up into the air and let it drift away. It was the perfect place to hide a body.

All I now had to decide was whether to telephone to the police right away or speak to Alec, and ask him what he thought the Addies would want to do. I stood up from where I had been slumping against the tree as though my sergeant-major had summoned me to attention. Alec was in Edinburgh engineering the exhumation of Mrs Addie’s body from its Morningside grave. It made no sense at all for me to think that I had found her body in that odd square barrel here in Moffat. If the woman really had been laid out by Regina and carried by an undertaker to her funeral at home then how could she be mouldering so revoltingly in there?

She could not. But then what was it in there?

I have had the experience, not often but each time has been memorable, of vertigo washing over me like a wave. In the early months when the babies were coming I came close to swooning many times. I have been assailed by tidal waves of nausea once or twice too. And recently, since I started detecting, I have undergone great sweeping storms of dread when something I knew deep down was clamouring to be brought into the front of my mind and dealt with there. This was the first time, however, I had ever felt what I was feeling now. An enormous, unstoppable rush of absolute terror, engulfing me entirely and leaving me weak and helpless as it passed.

And all of a sudden, the ghosts were not a nonsense, the mediums not a joke, Loveday Merrick not a charlatan, and Mrs Addie not just a well-loved and much-missed old lady who might have been wronged.

All of a sudden, standing there, everything seemed to skew just a little from what I thought I knew about the world around me and I could feel them all: Effie and Lizzie and Mary and their sins and killers, the ghosts and echoes and whispers, the other world reaching out, pleading, to this one.

Mrs Addie was in her grave in Edinburgh, or near it anyway in mid-exhumation, possibly. In that little apple house, not frail and wispy, not floating in a shift, not a wraith at all, but hulking, stinking and evil, was her ghost.

I stumbled out from the shrubs onto the lawn and made my shaking way around to the terrace steps, desperate to be safely with other people and far away from that crawling madness that threatened to worm its way through me if I stayed there. Hugh hailed me as I passed. He was in his deckchair again.

‘You all right, Dandy?’ he said. ‘You look peaky.’

There was no one in the world who could have done more to bring me back to earth. ‘I found something rather unpleasant in the shrubbery,’ I managed to say. ‘A dead thing. I almost stumbled over it and it’s sickened me.’ Hugh was torn between disappointment at this poor showing and that smugness which even the best of men sometimes display in the face of feminine weakness. ‘Smell,’ I said, holding out my sleeve. He took a deep sniff at the wool of my coat to show what stern stuff he was made of and then wrinkled his nose.

‘Faint hint of something,’ he said. ‘Nothing like that stag that time.’ It was true; the smell of the crate in the apple house had been quite different from the stag which had ruined a delightful picnic one day when the boys were tiny (although only because they had to be spanked and taken home when they would not stop poking it).

‘I’ll see you for tea,’ I said faintly and made my way to the telephone kiosk to speak to Alec who I hoped would have more sympathy for me than to cap my horrors with memories of his own.

I had quite forgotten what story Alec would have to tell me or I would not have rung him at all.

Mrs Bowie was not at her brother’s house and Mr Addie was lying down. I looked at my watch – half past twelve: a very odd time for a nap and my first indication that matters had moved swiftly. Mr Osborne was still here, the maid said, and she would fetch him.

‘Hello, Dandy,’ Alec said, sounding rather flattened. ‘I’m coming back to Moffat on the 2.40. Do you really want to hear this now?’

‘I really do,’ I said. ‘And the first thing I want to hear is this: did either Mr Addie or Mrs Bowie see their mother’s body when it was brought home for the funeral?’

‘Not only then,’ said Alec. ‘But poor Mr Addie had to see it this morning too. When they dug it up again. He managed to hold on to his insides, which is more than can be said for the whole of the party, but he’s taken himself off to bed now and I’d be surprised if he’s seen again today.’

‘Poor man,’ I said. ‘It was definitely her then?’

‘Apparently so,’ Alec said. ‘I wouldn’t have liked to be on oath that what we saw in that coffin was the woman in the picture-’

‘You were there?’

‘I was there,’ Alec said. ‘I thought it was the least I could do to stand beside poor Addie since it was me egging him on. I was one of the ones who couldn’t contain himself, I’m afraid. A very poor show.’

‘And is it too soon to know anything?’

‘It’s too soon to know some things,’ Alec said, ‘but did you know that the doctor doing the exhuming just starts in on it right there? He started looking for poisons right away.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing doing,’ Alec said. ‘Because of the stomach contents.’ He swallowed audibly. ‘If you can get a good jugful of stomach contents, then graveside poison tests are easy.’

‘And what was wrong with them?’

‘There were none,’ Alec said. ‘She was empty. Nothing in her stomach, nothing in her bladder or… other areas with similar function nearby. So he’s had to go back to his laboratory to look in her liver and kidneys for arsenic and at her blood for strychnine. Cyanide turns one bright pink – did you know? – so it wasn’t that anyway.’

‘And no other obvious sign of something that could have killed her?’ I asked.

‘None,’ Alec said. ‘No marks of violence. The only thing he ventured – and it’s not much I can tell you – is that she was dehydrated.’

‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

‘She hadn’t drunk anything. It sounds as if this grated carrot diet Dorothea had her on was a pretty tough regime.’ I was interested to note that having to look at a month-old corpse had put Alec into an acerbic mood which did not even sweeten for Dr Laidlaw.

‘Well, I shall be very glad to see you back here again,’ I said. ‘I desperately need to talk to you but only if you promise not to laugh at me.’

‘I’m not finished with my report yet,’ he said. ‘I saved the best bit.’

‘Go on.’

‘Whatever the doctor turns up in his laboratory, he knows already it wasn’t a heart attack,’ said Alec. ‘He had a good look at Mrs Addie’s heart this morning as he removed it – so did I, as a matter of fact. It didn’t reveal much to me but the pathologist said there was nothing wrong with it.’

‘Good grief,’ I said. ‘So… did he telephone to the police? Are they coming to arrest the Laidlaws? And Dr Ramsay?’

‘Not a bit of it,’ Alec said. ‘Apparently it’s not unusual. And Dr Ramsay’s certificate said “heart failure following suspected heart attack”. There’s nothing so far to say that wasn’t a perfectly fair conclusion.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘That’s what he said to me. Everyone dies of heart failure in the end.’

‘I came close to it myself this morning when I looked at Mrs Addie’s face,’ Alec said. At least he was almost laughing. ‘Now your turn, Dan. God, I’ve only just stopped feeling sick, you know. You’re a tonic, dearie.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, and then hesitated. How could I add my morning’s nightmares to his own? And besides, now that I had got away from the place I was beginning to doubt the truth of it, hoping that if I hugged the horrid facts to myself they might go away. ‘And look – never mind my stuff just now. You catch your train and we can discuss it later.’

‘All right,’ Alec said. ‘Was it Grant who turned it up for you?’

I laughed. ‘Oh, Grant!’ I said. ‘Grant was wonderful. She thought up the perfect thing to say to be taken right into the mediums’ bosom. She’s having a whale of a time. All news later, darling, hm? Safe journey.’

I went back to Auchenlea then, missing the Hydro luncheon and looking forward to pot luck from Mrs Tilling. She was beginning to settle into this novelty of a ‘holiday’ but even taking things very easy she is still rather marvellous and there were no such horrors as shop bread or tinned soup coming into the dining room. She had dispensed with savouries and it was true that she had asked me only that morning if I would prefer salmon or lamb for dinner when, at Gilverton with Hugh of course, there would be the one and then the other. Besides, I could not possibly stay for the Hydro’s midday feast because I was crawling all over with an itch to be rid of the clothes which had soaked up the smell and I needed to rub my hair with a lavender cloth at least, if not stand under the spray bath and wash it.

The chances of that ending well were greatly increased by my coming upon Grant on the road out of town, clearly heading back to the house herself despite being told she could have the day for her spiritualist venture.

‘I needed a rest from it, madam,’ she said, when she had climbed in and we were under way again. ‘They’re very tiring people to spend your time with, those mediums. And that Loveday one… Loveday!’

‘My thoughts exactly, Grant,’ I said, hoping that I sounded convincing. They had been my thoughts, my whole life through, up until that morning. ‘What has he been up to?’

‘He sat me in a chair and chanted at me until my eyes were crossed. It didn’t do any good, because I was reciting poetry in my head all the time and he’d no chance of mesmerising me.’

‘Just as well. Did you pretend?’

‘Of course,’ said Grant. ‘What was William’s surname, he wanted to know. And where did he die and what was his message for his mother?’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘I didn’t venture so much as an initial for the surname,’ she said. ‘I said he’d died in Scotland and that he wanted to tell his mother he was sorry.’

‘They can’t have liked the “Scotland” bit,’ I said, chuckling.

‘Not much. Anyway, madam, I’ve managed to find out a wee bit more than I’ve given away, if you’d like me to tell you.’

We were at Auchenlea now and I urged her to accompany me to my bedroom and discuss things as I changed.

‘Why’s that then?’ she asked with a touch of the old Grant. ‘Madam.’ She had chosen my clothes that morning.

‘Smell,’ I said, shrugging out of my coat and handing it to her. She sniffed very gingerly.

‘Just smells like the well, but worse,’ she said. I sniffed at it again. Was she right? The morning’s sudden rush of terror had receded even further and I was almost ready to dismiss it as pure fancy. Still, the smell was real. I shuddered and set a good pace upstairs to get rid of it.

‘Here’s what I’ve found out,’ Grant said, as I was undressing. ‘All the while saying I don’t want to know and it’s wickedness and why won’t the good Lord take this curse off of my head.’

‘Which I did think was jolly clever, I must say. You seemed absolutely not one bit as though you were trying to find things out from them.’

‘And so I found out all the more,’ Grant said. ‘And here it is. It started about a month ago.’ That was no surprise. ‘And it started in a very small way too. The usual thing; a snippet in Spiritualists’ Weekly’ – it appeared that such was indeed the name of the coloured paper Mrs Scott had been reading – ‘saying that a lady had died of fright at the Moffat Hydro after seeing a ghost. It was just a report, a letter from a respectable person, a professional man, and they get them all the time. Who would have thought it, eh?’

‘Not I.’ I picked up a tea dress but at Grant’s frown and small shake of the head I put it back again.

‘So one medium came to the Hydro to see what she could see. Very discreetly.’

‘Not discreetly enough though, I’ll bet. Do you think if I rub my hair with lavender it will do?’ Grant sniffed my head and stood up sharply.

‘I see what you mean, actually, madam,’ she said. ‘That’s really quite nasty. Anyway, to go on with my report, it was when this first medium was here that one of the other guests mentioned a second ghost, and this one by name, and it was a name the medium knew. So she ups and writes to that Mrs Scott who is a very big noise in Glasgow and by sheer chance Mrs Scott has had a letter of her own, quoting the name of a third ghost, and she was just on the point of trying to decide whether to pack her traps and come to investigate it.’

‘Ah yes, I think I heard a veiled mention of that,’ I said.

‘And by the time she got here, there was another of her acquaintances just arriving – it’s a small world I daresay – because she had actually been rung up on the telephone all the way in Carlisle by someone who had been staying here and had left early because Lizzie Haldane was in her bedroom and wouldn’t go away even when she – the guest this is – shook a Bible at her.’

‘How did you get all of this out of them, Grant?’

‘Och, they’re trying to convince me to stay and be part of it,’ she said. ‘They’re talking about the centennial and how it’s the biggest thing there’s been in spiritualists’ circles since that automatic writing in America that got them all birling.’

‘Now that is very interesting,’ I said. ‘A centennial, eh? I think I had only heard the word anniversary up until now. A centennial of what, I wonder.’

‘Not the last hanging at the Gallow Hill anyway,’ Grant said. ‘I made sure and asked about that on account of what “William” is saying. They stopped hanging in Moffat a lot of years ago. It’s all down in Dumfries now. I’ll run you a bath, madam, and tell Mrs Tilling to hold back luncheon.’

I dropped Grant at the end of the Hydro drive in the afternoon and watched with wonder as she assumed the character of the devout little mouse who was cursed with a gift of seeing. She put her head down, clasped her hands in front of her and managed to shrink her shoulders until they were almost gone completely. She turned her toes inwards from their usual confident ten-to-two and began to creep towards the hotel.

I was there to try to decide my next step. If Alec had been around, perhaps I could have summoned the courage to return to the apple house and face whatever was waiting for me. As it was I ended up back on the terrace again, sitting with Hugh.

‘Feeling better, Dandy?’ he asked. ‘You look it.’

‘Mrs Tilling has cured me,’ I said. ‘With clear soup and cold chicken.’

‘Ah,’ said Hugh. ‘Yes, it was mutton stew and batter pudding here. It wouldn’t have been good for you.’ We sat a while. ‘So,’ he continued at last, ‘how’s it all going?’

‘It’s very hard to say,’ I told him. ‘The family exhumed the body and tested it for poison but thus far there’s nothing doing.’ He looked somewhere between startled and flabbergasted at this news. I am sure he put my detecting down under ‘dabbles’ for the most part and so hearing that doctors and Fiscals and pathologists jumped when Alec and I clicked our fingers – or so it might have seemed – was an arresting idea. ‘And I thought I had tracked down a missing piece of equipment which might have gone wrong and caused the death even if the body didn’t show signs of violence. But it turned out to be… something else.’ I could not possibly tell him, but if I did not tell someone I would burst with it.

Hugh was nodding in that way of his when he is only half listening to me. Then, still not paying full attention, he turned and spoke.

‘Can’t you use the brochure?’ he said.

‘What’s that?’ I looked at his breast pocket, from where as ever the folded catalogue of delights was peeping out. He removed it and handed it over.

‘If you went through the brochure and cross-checked it with the typed sheet they hand out to the day-guests to say what’s on offer, wouldn’t that tell you what they’ve ditched?’

I was aware of the flush rising up through my neck and settling in two spots on my face.

‘Didn’t you think of that?’ Hugh said. ‘I hope you’ve not been chasing around on needless adventures, Dandy, when the answer was right here in my breast pocket.’ I said nothing. He looked more closely at me. ‘You’ve got a little blemish on your cheek,’ he said. ‘I can see it quite clearly now that you’ve – ahem – got your colour back.’

Ah yes, I thought. A blemish on my cheek. Or rather a graze from hugging a tree when I almost fell out of it because I did not think to look in the usual place for a key to open a door. ‘As I say, though,’ I told him, with an attempt at dignity, ‘it wasn’t equipment gone wrong at all.’

‘Still,’ said Hugh. ‘Worth it, perhaps. Just to be thorough.’

‘Oh, I suppose so,’ I said, with little grace. At least if I stayed there humouring Hugh I would be far away from the apple house.

‘I shall go and fetch today’s sheet for you right now,’ Hugh said, unwinding his blanket and standing. ‘Glad to help when I can.’

I had started in on the easy ones before he returned. The Turkish and Russian baths were available, as I knew only too well. Salt rubs, oil rubs and mustard wraps too.

‘Here we go then,’ he said, striding along the terrace towards me. He looked in peak form again, although whether from rest and hydropathy or from besting his wife at her own business it was hard to say. ‘You read them off, Dandy, and I’ll see if they’re on here.’

‘Electric heat baths,’ I began. ‘Faradaic, galvanic, diathermic, ultraviolet and ionised.’

‘All present and correct,’ said Hugh. ‘Speak up though, won’t you?’

‘No, dear, I won’t,’ I said. ‘We are trying to catch a possible murderer, remember? Nauheim, including nascent carbonic and Schott exercises, plombiers, pine bath – at last something one can understand: although how one bathes in pine…? – Aix douche and Vichy douche.’

‘All here,’ said Hugh. ‘And the pine bath is quite lovely, I can tell you.’

‘Hydropathic baths then,’ I said, turning the page. ‘Or what you and I would call water at home. Needle, spray, sitz, long. Is a long bath just a bath?’

‘In the waters,’ said Hugh.

‘Head, eye, ear and nose sprays, ugh. Ascending sprays.’ Hugh cleared his throat and frowned. ‘Wave baths, Turkish baths, steam baths, plunging pool, swimming baths – we knew about all of these – and that’s just about it.’ I turned another page.

‘And that’s it here too,’ Hugh said. ‘Now, at least you can discount the theory of a treatment gone wrong. I still say this was well worthwhile, don’t you? Dandy?’ He turned to look at me. ‘Dandy?’

‘There’s one more,’ I said. I had let the brochure fall open on my lap.

‘You’ve gone pale again,’ said Hugh. ‘Shall I fetch you a glass of water?’

‘Not Moffat water,’ I said. ‘That smell.’

‘What have you read that’s upset you so?’ Hugh said. He went as far as to reach out a hand towards me.

‘Mud,’ I said. ‘A mud bath. Not… what I imagined at all.’

‘Ah, I asked about the mud bath,’ said Hugh, taking the brochure and flipping through its pages. ‘They’ve only got one in the ladies’ side, since it’s mostly good for shedding weight, I believe. And even the ladies’ one is-’ He broke off.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s a little barrel sort of thing about three feet square and four feet tall, and one sits in it, up to one’s neck in sulphurous mud. And I would imagine one comes out really quite filthy so that even if one washes and washes one would still have dirt under one’s nails and so on.’

‘Hmph. Sounds nasty,’ said Hugh, ‘but I don’t quite see why it’s upsetting you so. Not really.’

‘It’s the smell,’ I said again. ‘Imagine sitting in a stinking vat of sulphurous mud, and dying there.’ Hugh looked up sharply and his face, as mine had, turned pale. ‘What could anyone ever have done to deserve to die in a place like that?’

‘I can’t imagine,’ Hugh said. He remained pale but he stood up very decisively and looked around him, like an officer surveying a battlefield, or a matron a ward. ‘Will you be all right for a bit, Dandy my dear?’ I nodded. ‘I’m going to find the boys and take them away,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I really believed it until now.’

‘Shall I just come too?’ I said. ‘If we’re leaving.’ He wheeled round and fixed me with a look which would have done either matron or officer proud.

‘We’re not leaving,’ he said. ‘You and Alec are staying to solve this outrage and I shall help you. But it’s no place for the boys. Only I don’t like leaving you alone when you look absol-’ He stopped, with his mouth open, staring into the open french window of the drawing room. ‘Is that Grant?’ he said. ‘What on earth is she doing here? And what on earth is she wearing? She looks as though she’s joined a nunnery.’

‘She’ll be very pleased to hear that you think so,’ I said. ‘It’s exactly the impression she was hoping to give. Fetch her, would you, if you can do it discreetly, not if she’s with the mediums. She can sit with me while you get the boys to Auchenlea. We can always pretend just to have started chatting.’

‘Did you say “mediums”?’ asked Hugh. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Oh, that’s quite another part of the forest,’ I said. ‘Or possibly another forest entirely. At least I think so.’

‘Spirit mediums?’ said Hugh. ‘Oh, she’s seen us. She’s coming over.’

‘Madam, sir,’ said Grant. She would say no more until she knew for sure whether Hugh was to be trusted with whatever she had to tell me.

‘I know what’s going on, Grant,’ Hugh said. ‘Or at least I know that something is.’

‘Mr Merrick has offered up a sprat to catch a mackerel, madam,’ she said. ‘He wants me to ask if there’s a James here. Someone almost said the full name but he shushed her. I think they’re testing me.’

‘Grant,’ said Hugh, ‘please sit down and tell me what is going on. You are here disguised as a nun’ – Grant beamed – ‘to be tested by spirit mediums? I’m not sure I follow you.’

‘Oh,’ I said. I was exhausted by it all suddenly. ‘There’s some kind of ghost hunters’ gathering going on. There’s a centennial anniversary of… something bad and the ghosts are amassing.’ Grant had sat down on the edge of Hugh’s deckchair so he had no choice but to sink down beside me on mine. ‘Various people have reported being contacted by an assortment of ghosts but they’re still short of the number they’re expecting which is either fifteen or seventeen depending how you count them. Don’t look at me like that, Hugh. I’m only reporting what I’ve been told. Or what I’ve overhead, mostly.’

‘Now, some of the ghosts have names, sir,’ Grant chipped in. ‘And some of them don’t. So Madam’s idea was that I would think up a common name and say I’d been contacted and they’d believe it was one of the nameless ones introducing himself at last.’

‘I see,’ said Hugh. ‘Fifteen ghosts with names.’

‘Seventeen possibly,’ I said. ‘Big Effie, Marjorie Docherty, Old Abigail Simpson. I’ve got them written down but I can’t remember them all. Mary Patterson who repents of her sins. Lizzie and Peggy.’

‘Haldane,’ said Hugh. ‘Elizabeth and Peggy Haldane.’

‘That’s right, madam,’ said Grant, boggling at him. ‘That’s what Mrs Scott said this morning. Haldane.’

‘How in the blazes do you know that, Hugh?’ I said. ‘Good God, don’t tell me they’ve appeared to you.’

‘Merciful heavens,’ said Grant.

Hugh shook his head at both of us. ‘I know the name because I study my Scottish history,’ he said. ‘Or rather in this case because I listened to the ghost stories at my nurse’s knee. Those people you mentioned and several more were killed in Edinburgh by Burke and Hare. Almost exactly a hundred years ago.’