Deadly Measure of Brimstone

17

The police, in the persons of Sergeant Simpson and the same smooth-cheeked boy I had met before, were on the scene now and, although all I wanted to do in the world was peel off my soaking, stinking clothes and fall into my bed with my arms around Bunty, I veered over to the sergeant on my way to the drive and Hugh’s motorcar and stood squarely in front of him.

‘This fire wasn’t an accident,’ I said.

‘No need to convince me, madam,’ said Sergeant Simpson. ‘A great white elephant like this going up just as business is going down. I wasn’t born yesterday.’

‘And two people at least have lost their lives in it,’ I said. ‘One was deliberately shut up so he couldn’t escape. Dr Ramsay from Well Street.’ The sergeant’s eyebrows rose and he swept off his cap.

‘Right enough?’ he said. ‘Well, that puts a very different face on things. By all accounts the Laidlaw woman was a suicide but what you’ve just told me is murder, plain and simple. If you’ll come down to the station and make a statement, madam.’ I could feel my face fall.

‘Could I do it tomorrow, Sergeant Simpson?’ I pleaded. ‘I’m dead on my feet. Couldn’t you just put Tot Laidlaw in jail tonight anyway?’ The sergeant was shaking his head. ‘Where is he?’ Simpson nodded over my shoulder and I turned. Across at the fountain, where the benches were set in rows with blanketed figures resting on them, Tot Laidlaw was very much in evidence, walking to and fro with towels and mugs of tea – I was right; someone somehow had got a kettle going – and stopping to lay his hand on shoulders and once even a brow.

‘Would you have a man to spare to send over to Auchenlea?’ I asked. Sergeant Simpson thought a moment and then nodded. I crossed to Laidlaw and took him by the arm.

‘My dear Mr Laidlaw,’ I said. ‘I am so very sorry about your poor sister.’ Tot switched his expression from cod sympathy to cod anguish as though he had turned a dial. ‘Now, you must get some rest tonight somehow,’ I said. ‘Whenever you feel you can leave, I insist you come to Auchenlea and spend a few hours at ease. Tomorrow will be a trial and you need to prepare for it.’

‘Mrs Gilver, I couldn’t possibly,’ he began. ‘I have no means of getting there. My motorcar has taken some of the wounded to Dumfries to the infirmary already.’

‘I’ve thought of that,’ I said. ‘One of Sergeant Simpson’s men is going to drive you.’ His eyes flashed but he could hardly show his hand by refusing. Instead he gave me one of his sweeping bows.

‘If I can,’ he said. ‘And thank you.’

Then I saw Hugh standing waving at me from the rhododendrons which bordered the drive and, gratefully, I left it all behind me.

Hugh’s face was thunderous and what with the soot and the sheen of heat he looked like the very devil. Normal service had evidently been resumed.

‘Why are all those people in my Rolls?’ he said.

‘We’re taking them home and giving them succour,’ I told him. ‘It’s the least we can do.’

Somehow the word had got to Pallister and Mrs Tilling in advance of our arrival and, when we entered the hall at almost half past three, the fire was burning there and blankets were set ready in the armchairs. The drawing-room fire was just as high and there beds had been made on the sofas and footstools drawn up to the chairs to fashion more. In the dining room soup was keeping warm in an electric contraption and as soon as she heard us coming Mrs Tilling appeared with two tall jugs of cocoa.

Mr Loveday and the four elderly ladies we had brought along sank down into chairs and let Mrs Tilling and Grant begin to fuss over them.

‘How many guests, sir?’ said Pallister.

‘Five,’ said Hugh.

‘We’re ready for eleven,’ Pallister replied. ‘I took the liberty of asking Master Teddy to move into Master Donald’s room an hour or so ago. I’ve vacated my own quarters – I shan’t be retiring tonight, of course – and the female servants have managed to make room for three women in their quarters. So perhaps I could ask Drysdale to return for another carload?’

‘Very good, Pallister,’ said Hugh. He stalked off to the stairs and, I suspected, the bathroom, but not before Mrs Tilling called out.

‘I’ve put sacks for sooty clothes in all three of the bathrooms and laid out dressing gowns. It would help a great deal if you just used the sprays and don’t fill the bath itself and put the boiler under strain.’

Hugh stopped as though he had been shot in the back and when he began again climbing the stairs he was a broken man. To be forbidden a proper bath, and urged instead into one of these new-fangled operations so that a load of strangers could use his hot water was the final straw on this dreadful night.

‘Poor old Hugh,’ Alec said. ‘He didn’t cash his chips, you know.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Or at least I’m not surprised. A gentleman doesn’t cash his chips until he’s leaving. But money won and lost isn’t really money lost, is it? He’s finished no worse than he started, I daresay.’ I made a move towards the nearest armchair and then stopped myself. ‘Where can we sit when we’re so filthy?’ I said. ‘I feel as though I shall fall over if I try to stay standing.’

‘Let’s nab the bathrooms first while the guests are drinking their soup,’ Alec said. And dreadful hostess though it made me, I agreed.

Half an hour later, clean and warm, although oddly attired for a social gathering, Alec, Loveday Merrick and I had found a quiet spot and sat down at last to make sense of the puzzle as best we might. I was sitting on my bed with Bunty at my back like a pillow. Alec was on the dressing-table stool and Mr Merrick, the oldest among us, and the most undone by the night’s exertions, was in the little upholstered chair by the window, telling all and making Alec’s jaw and mine drop to our laps in wonder.

‘So I suppose the best sort of way to describe what I am,’ he said, ‘is a professional sceptic. I keep my reputation with the snake oil peddlers by dint of very cautious balancing. Someone has to be most egregious – most egregious indeed – before I’ll go all out and expose them. And even then I don’t do it myself. None of the debunking is ever traced back to me. On the other hand, if it’s just the usual comforting nonsense I have a quiet word and they respect me all the more for it. I couldn’t resist this Burke and Hare caper when it met my ears. Never thought it would end like this, I can tell you.’

‘I don’t actually think the ghosts and the fire are connected,’ I said. ‘Not closely anyway. The fire wasn’t started to kill Dr Ramsay, it was just a convenient way for him to go since it was planned.’

‘So Dr Laidlaw started the fire to kill herself?’ Mr Merrick said. ‘Such wickedness! She could have taken twenty souls with her.’

‘No, no, no,’ I said. ‘Dorothea Laidlaw would never have done such a thing. She didn’t start the fire at all.’

‘But you said something to me, Dandy,’ said Alec, ‘suggesting there was something about her I wouldn’t care to know.’

I submitted him to very close attention, trying to decide what to say. Unfortunately he caught me at it.

‘You’re not about to break my heart,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you listen to a thing I told you. I admired her, but that’s all.’

I was not half so sure as he seemed to be, but I took his words at face value.

‘Mrs Addie,’ I said. ‘It was Dr Laidlaw who killed her. She put the poor woman in the mud bath on Sunday evening and then went back to her study to her precious work.’

‘Oh dear God,’ said Alec. ‘She forgot?’

‘Not the sort of woman you’d want in charge of your children, eh?’

Alec took a mighty breath in, held it for a long moment during which Merrick and I watched him anxiously, and then let it go in a great rush which left him slumped against the dressing table behind him.

‘The prospect of marriage doesn’t seem to agree with me,’ he said. He was beyond being embarrassed by Merrick’s presence. ‘She seemed ideal. A rational, educated woman happy to pursue her own… I took to her at once. And it was hard to resist the prospect of slaying the dragon, of course. Or at least getting her away from that brother of hers. Ah, well.’ He grinned at us. ‘Onward and upward. Third time lucky maybe.’

‘It wasn’t the first time or the last that she’d forgotten a patient,’ I said. ‘Usually, Mrs Cronin checked and double-checked. But Monday was Mrs Cronin’s day off. I knew it was. I should have paid attention to the way her coat and outdoor shoes kept bothering me. So on a Monday the baths were very quiet. This was before Tot started the new regime of insisting everyone had treatments, you see.’

‘So she just sat there until Monday night,’ Alec said. ‘Forgotten.’

‘And I think somehow it was Tot who found her,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he went looking for Dorothea – she loved the plunging pool and only ever went in it when the baths were closed and empty. At any rate, it was Tot who thought up the cover story of the ghost and the fright and it was he who got Dr Ramsay to sign the certificate in return for forgiving the gambling debts. He washed the body. Perhaps he tipped it into the plunging pool and that’s why they had to clean it out all of a sudden. And he either told Dorothea, or she found out somehow. Perhaps she caught him at it even.’

‘I don’t suppose we shall ever know,’ Alec said.

‘Anyway,’ I went on, ‘he gave the body to Regina to lay out and talked that fool of a sergeant round and the only way for Dorothea to have stopped it all would be for her to admit to something which would have her struck off and disgraced and prevent her from doing the one thing she cared about. Her damned precious working. That’s the main thing to remember. She was taking care of her own interests all the way.’

‘That’s not quite fair, Dandy,’ Alec said. ‘That was when she started asking Tot to close the Hydro. She must have been terrified she’d forget again.’

‘Oh, Tot’s the real villain of the piece, I’ll grant you,’ I said.

‘Because the forms he made her sign were insurance forms, weren’t they? He insured the hotel to the hilt and started planning the fire. Planned it for the middle of the night when all his chums would be in the casino too and if some poor invalid slept through it and died – too bad!’

‘Why did he insist on all the treatments, I wonder?’ asked Merrick.

‘Same reason he blew a gasket if one called the Hydro an hotel,’ I said. ‘Presumably the insurance for hotels isn’t as good as for hospitals. He needed all of his chums to say with their hands on their hearts that they had been undergoing treatments at the time of the fire. They knew the names and everything – heat lamps and sitz baths. I mean, even Sergeant Simpson knew that a huge hotel going up in flames must be an insurance job, didn’t he?’

‘Why did Laidlaw start the rumours about Burke and Hare?’ Alec said. ‘You’d think he’d want the death of Mrs Addie to die down, not to become notorious.’

‘Ah yes,’ I said. ‘You didn’t hear that bit. He didn’t start them. That was Dr Ramsay’s big tease. He was giving Tot Laidlaw a taste of his own medicine. At least, partly that and partly sucking up in a strange way. I think he always very much wanted to be one of Tot’s set, you know. And Tot was such a joker: the story of Mrs Addie dying of fright had at least a bit of a tease in it. But not only was Tot unwilling to take what he dished out, very soon it got completely out of hand. Especially after your entrance, Mr Merrick. Not to mention Grant’s.’

Merrick chuckled. ‘She was very good,’ he said. ‘For a minute, she almost convinced me. I mean, she wasn’t known in the trade and I couldn’t see what her angle was at all.’

‘You really don’t believe a scrap of it then?’ I said.

‘Good grief, of course not,’ Merrick replied. And because there could have been any number of women of any size milling about the grounds of the Hydro in robes and turbans after the fire, I did not tell him.

‘That sounds like a car,’ said Alec, cocking his ear. ‘It might be Laidlaw now.’ I stood and crossed to the window.

‘It’s Drysdale with the next batch,’ I said. ‘I should go down and see to them.’

‘Go to bed,’ Alec said. ‘Mrs Tilling is in her element down there. You’d only get in the way.’

I took no more than that rather graceless persuasion. I climbed under the covers, and I think I had fallen asleep before the door had softly closed behind them.

Sunday, 27th October 1929

It was Hugh who woke me, at daybreak, the blank grey light of steady rain falling from thick cloud, just the weather one would want to put out the last smoking ember of a fire.

‘Damn dog,’ Hugh was saying. I felt a tug on the covers as he tried and failed to make Bunty shift.

‘Good morning, dear,’ I said, sitting up. ‘Thank you for not waking me when you came up.’

‘A bomb wouldn’t have woken you,’ Hugh said. ‘I waited up until Laidlaw arrived, about five, but by then everyone was settled in their billets. It looks like a field hospital downstairs, Dandy. If we can’t get shot of them today, I’m for taking the boys and going home.’

‘I’ll go and see what’s what now,’ I said, carefully not responding to the suggestion.

The blankets were rolled and the furniture put back in the drawing room, but I could hear low voices in the dining room and so I made my way there with Bunty padding in her stiff morning way beside me.

Ten people were sitting at the dining table, eating porridge, while Pallister stood like a formal footman on one side of the door and the constable stood like a bad copy of him at the other. Some of the guests looked perfectly at home – the bright young things – but a few of the Hydro’s long-time patients were turning huge eyes on Pallister as though he was their headmaster and might at any moment decide to cane them. One could hardly blame them; even after all these years he sometimes produces just those feelings in me.

Alec was there, Donald and Teddy too, and Merrick, and at the head of the table was Tot Laidlaw, slightly weary about the eyes and blue about the chin, but holding his audience in the palm of his hand with all his usual brio.

‘My poor sister,’ he said, ‘my poor dear sister. Well, I hardly have to tell all of you who loved her too. She was just so very absent-minded. I’m sure when the firemen look through the wreckage they’ll find it started in her study. That paraffin heater of hers, probably. Poor Dot. But what she did to Dr Ramsay… Well, she must have lost her mind.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ one of the older women was saying. ‘A terrible shocking thing.’ But her eyes were wide with delight.

‘She loved him,’ Laidlaw said. ‘And he just didn’t love her back. Any excuse to get him up there and talk to him, you know. She even dragged him out of bed one time to sign a death certificate she could have signed herself. Poor Dottie. And poor Dr Ramsay. She must have tricked him into a windowless room and locked him there. She must have lost her mind.’

‘I think she possibly did lose her mind at the end, Mr Laidlaw,’ I said. ‘But she didn’t kill Dr Ramsay.’

Tot Laidlaw raised his head and stared at me.

‘Aren’t you wondering why my face looks this way?’ said Alec. He was indeed a dreadful sight this morning, shining with ointment and blistered where he wasn’t raw. ‘I tried to get to Dr Ramsay.’

‘But you failed,’ said Laidlaw. The relief in his voice was unmistakable.

‘He did,’ I said. I drew out the last remaining chair at the foot of the table and sat down. ‘But I didn’t. I had a very interesting talk with him before he died.’

There was a moment of perfect stillness and then Tot Laidlaw leapt to his feet and raced for the door. The young constable was after him like a dog at the track, but it was Loveday Merrick who foiled his plan. He stuck out his silver-topped cane and when Laidlaw sprawled on the carpet, Merrick planted one of his enormous feet squarely in the middle of his back and leaned enough of his weight on it to start Laidlaw squealing.

‘Ladies,’ I said, ‘coffee will be served in the other room.’ The women stood – I have always been excellent at drawing off the ladies, even inexperienced ones such as some of these – and began to shuffle around the far side of the table to avoid the squirming Laidlaw and the young constable who was advancing with his handcuffs open.

‘I’m stopping here, though,’ Donald said.

‘Yes, me too,’ said Teddy.

I threw them a glance. Perhaps it was because the rest of us were wan from exhaustion and adventures but they really did look a lot better than they had a week ago, rosy and bright-eyed, the Moffat Hydro’s last two satisfied customers.

In the drawing room, Hugh was sitting behind a newspaper with a cigarette in his mouth. This was very odd, for he normally does not smoke until at least luncheon-time. He took one glance at the party of women and raised the newspaper higher than ever.

The women began to twitter like a flock of little birds.

‘Old Dr Laidlaw must be turning in his grave!’

‘-been coming here for twenty-three years. I’ll have to go to Peebles now.’

‘-never have dreamed Tot could be such a sewer.’

‘-sister was dull but she didn’t deserve that, darling.’

‘And why did he do it?’

‘Yes, why would you burn down your own hotel and destroy your livelihood?’

‘For the insurance, of course. Now that doesn’t surprise me about dear old Tot at all.’

Hugh cleared his throat and spoke from behind his newspaper barricade.

‘He’d better get onto his insurance broker quickly then, because if they’ve been buying common stocks like the rest of us he’ll be lucky to see a farthing.’

I walked across and peered over the top of the newspaper.

‘Hugh?’ I said. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘Just reading the news from America, Dandy,’ he said. ‘I’d like a quiet word, please.’

I left the guests as Mrs Tilling advanced with a laden coffee tray and followed Hugh upstairs to our bedroom again. He shut the door and rubbed his face hard with his hands. I had not seen him indulge in such a gesture since the night when Teddy was small and his temperature from measles went higher than Nanny’s thermometer would show.

‘Hugh, what is it?’ I said.

‘While we’ve been here in a little world of our own,’ he said, ‘the American stock market has crashed, Dandy. Through the floor. I’m very sorry to tell you this, my dear, but we’ve taken heavy losses.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, money won and lost isn’t really lost at all, is it?’

‘Did you read any of those papers I asked you to sign and post to the broker?’ Hugh said.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘Should I have?’

He did not answer. He turned and looked at the room, surprised I think to see that it was a strange one.

‘If we leave Mrs Tilling and Pallister here to hold the fort,’ he said, ‘and Drysdale to bring them home whenever these walking wounded are off our hands, can we just go home this morning, please? You and me? Home to Gilverton, while we can.’

‘Well, actually, Hugh, I said, ‘there’s some good news and some bad news. About those papers. I didn’t want to release the funds from the stuff you sold because I had plans for them, you see. But I didn’t have time to look those particular ones out from that enormous bundle. I was nursing all of you and half the servants, remember. And so I didn’t post them. The papers. To the broker. They’re in my desk in my sitting room at home.’

‘You didn’t post any of them?’ Hugh said.

‘Not a one.’

He strode over and took a firm hold of my upper arms as though he were about to shake me. Instead, he made an announcement.

‘I’m going to buy you a sable coat, Dandy,’ he said. ‘And a mink one too.’

‘You might not want to,’ I answered. ‘That was the good news. The bad news is that we might not be able to go home just now.’

‘Oh?’ he said. ‘Why not?’ I wriggled out of his grasp before continuing. Hugh had never shaken me like a rag doll until my teeth rattled, of course, and never would. Still.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘the plumbers are in. I’ve spent that money on central heating radiators and new bathrooms for Gilverton and Benachally.’

‘Pipes and taps and radiators?’ said Hugh. ‘At Gilverton?’

‘And Benachally, yes. And Gilchrist said they’d finished with one house but not started on the next yet. So depending on which one it is we might not be able to go home. Just yet. Until they’re done. But I must say for them to have done one in a week is a miracle so it shouldn’t be long.’

He had, I realised, stopped listening a while ago. I think he stopped listening when I said ‘Gilchrist’.

‘My factor,’ he said and his voice was shaking. ‘My factor knew about this and never told me?’

‘You were ill, Hugh,’ I said. He marched across the room to the little desk where there was a telephone and fumed and swore until the call had been connected and Gilchrist – I assumed – was on the line. There were a few sharp exchanges and then the earpiece was banged into the cradle.

‘Well, at least we can go home,’ he said.

‘They did Gilverton first?’ I said. I hated it when he was this angry, but the thought of my new bathroom and the delicious warmth in my bedroom lifted my spirits anyway.

‘In a week, Dandy? Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Hugh. ‘They started with Woods Cottage. The factor’s house. Well, that’s all to the good in a way. When we advertise for a new man we can say the house is modern, can’t we?’

‘You’re not sacking him!’ I said. ‘Hugh, it was my fault. And you stopped it in time. And think if we’d crashed with the stock exchange. How can you be angry with anyone today?’

There was a soft knock at the door and we both composed our faces.

‘Come in,’ I called.

It was Grant.

‘I’m sorry I’m so late,’ she said. ‘Madam. Only every stitch you had on last night is ruined and Mrs Tilling tells me your pale grey is in a bad way too. And I can’t even find your good coat.’ It was snagged on a bush on the Gallow Hill, so one could hardly blame her. ‘So I’ve been down to the town to Irene’s, which is not a bad little dress shop for a place of this size, and I’ve bought you something new.’ She turned in the doorway, picked up three enormous parcels done up with pale yellow paper and tied with dark brown ribbon. ‘Now, they’re quite daring for you, madam,’ she said, heaping them on the bed beside Bunty, ‘but they don’t carry a wide stock. You’ll need to stop in and pay the bill, by the way, and just remember when you do that these are London modes. She goes down on buying trips three times a year.’

I turned to see what Hugh was making of all this.

‘I shall have Gilchrist and you shall have Grant,’ he said softly and left the room. I was delighted to note that he was whistling.