Deadly Measure of Brimstone

Postscript

I would greatly have preferred it had the Addies been willing to send a cheque through the post, for the thought of facing them once the endless grisly details came out was not an easy one. As Sergeant Simpson had said, all we ever want to hear is that death was instantaneous and our loved one did not suffer a moment’s pain, but that soothing tale was never going to do in this instance.

Unfortunately Mr Addie was immovable on the point. Alec and I were summoned back to Fairways to give our report and receive our dues and as we stood on the doorstep one bright, crisp November day, the grin he gave me was as sickly as the one I returned. When the door opened, however, our reception was not at all what we had been dreading.

Mrs Bowie née Addie had beaten the housemaid to the tape. She surged across the doorstep, pressed me to her bosom and then threw out an arm to haul Alec into an uncomfortable and somewhat excruciating three-way hug. Over her shoulder I saw the housemaid boggle, shrug and turn back to the baize door, leaving us to it.

‘How will we ever thank you?’ said Mrs Bowie, almost shrieking but muffled quite a bit against Alec’s coat and my fox fur. She stood back at last, just holding on to one hand of each, and beamed. Never had an Edinburgh matron acted more like a West End starlet on an opening night.

Now Mr Addie joined us too, coming halfway along the hall from the drawing-room door and shifting from foot to foot, saying:

‘Hear, hear. Yes, indeed. I quite agree. Now away and let our guests in the door, Margaret. We’ve many things to say.’

Mrs Bowie gave us both one last squeeze of the hand and then switched to ushering us inside, taking coats, offering coffee and fussing about the fire, the sunlight coming through the blinds and the comfort of the chairs. Anyone would think we had brought her mother back to her and Alec and I shared more than one puzzled glance, before the coffee and plain biscuits were served and the four of us were settled.

‘I’d a letter from the Dumfries Fiscal you wouldn’t believe,’ said Mr Addie. ‘Grovel? What? He tied himself in a sailor’s knot apologising. And another from the Chief Constable. A telegram, no less, from the Edinburgh pathologist and, ahem-’ He broke off and smoothed his moustache before continuing. ‘An invitation to dine with the Fiscal here in Edinburgh.’

‘Both of us,’ said Mrs Bowie. ‘To dine with him and his wife.’

‘Of course, I know him from the golf club,’ said her brother, playing it down, but I could see what a leap it was from two men drinking in a clubhouse to Mrs Bowie putting her pearls on and climbing into a taxi for dinner at eight. The Addies, it would appear, were being wooed out of plans to write to The Scotsman or instruct a lawyer.

‘And all because of you,’ said Mrs Bowie. ‘If it weren’t for you two dear people, the story of Mother’s death would have stood forever quite quite wrong, and her troubled spirit would never have found its rest.’

‘And for that we are most grateful of all,’ Mr Addie said. ‘It’s a new world to me, I must say, and I’m a plain man for the most part, but your associate has opened my eyes as well as calmed my mind.’

‘Ah,’ I said. I could think of nothing more, but threw a frantic glance at Alec for aid.

‘I’ll just fetch him in,’ said Mrs Bowie. ‘He stepped out to take a turn in the fresh air. It’s that draining, you know.’ And she bustled off through the double doors to the adjoining room and then out of the french windows into the garden. Alec and I both sipped coffee the better to cover our total bewilderment and within a minute Mrs Bowie was back, skipping up the stone steps like a girl and holding the french window wide. I only just began to realise who was about to step through it as he appeared: leonine and magnificent, the sunlight giving him a kind of halo in his full regalia of astrakhan coat, silk scarf and silver-topped cane, Loveday Merrick strode into the room.

‘Mrs Gilver, Mr Osborne,’ he said.

‘Mr Merrick. What are- What a pleasant surprise.’ Alec had found his voice first.

‘I had to come,’ said the great man. ‘Mrs Addie would not be denied.’

‘Marvellous,’ said Mrs Bowie. ‘I always believed there was something, but I never dreamed to have it proven to me.’

‘Proven?’ I said, unable to help myself.

‘Beyond all doubt,’ said Mr Addie. ‘Mr Merrick seems to know my mother better nearly than I do myself. And it’s not at all a case of – ahem – crossing the palm with silver, for he has refused to take a penny piece and has told us from Mother in the strongest terms that she’s going to her rest now and if anyone else comes around saying they’ve a message we’ve not to listen.’

‘Marvellous indeed,’ said Alec. ‘It’s good to hear that she’s… in such good… after her ordeal.’

‘Oh, but that’s what she was so very determined to tell us,’ Mrs Bowie said. ‘There was no ordeal.’

‘Really?’ I said.

‘She was warm and comfortable and she drifted off to sleep,’ Mr Addie said.

‘And when she awoke she was surrounded by soft white light and she was floating, quite weightless, above the ground, looking down but feeling nothing but calm.’

‘Remarkable,’ I said. ‘She wasn’t at all distressed by what she saw whilst “looking down”?’ Both Addies looked puzzled and Loveday swept in.

‘There was indeed great wickedness,’ he said. ‘Thomas Laidlaw was a man lost to all goodness. But none of his capers had the power to touch Mrs Addie by then. And good may come of evil, you know.’

‘This is the most wonderful bit of all,’ Mrs Bowie said. ‘And there’s no way Mr Merrick could have known of it unless Mother told him. So we know we can trust him.’

‘I see,’ I said and waited. If Loveday Merrick had found good in any of what had happened at the Hydro I was more than keen to hear.

‘Mother’s sore back,’ Mrs Bowie said. ‘It wasn’t the old trouble after all. It was something else.’

‘And if she hadn’t passed when she did,’ said Mr Addie, ‘how she did, drifting off that way, she would have been in for a very unpleasant time of it.’

‘What was it?’ Alec asked, rather baldly. I had already guessed; their very reluctance to say it screamed its name.

‘A growth,’ said Mrs Bowie in hushed tones. ‘Of the spine. Advanced and unstoppable. Mr Merrick told us.’

‘After Mrs Addie told you?’ I asked Loveday, turning a face I was keeping carefully blank towards him.

‘And so good came of evil, you see,’ Loveday Merrick repeated. ‘A calm, easeful death instead of the suffering that was coming.’

‘But wouldn’t the post-mort-’ Alec began, but he caught himself just in time.

‘And no,’ Loveday said later when he, Alec and I were walking back down through the city towards the railway station together, ‘the post-mortem wouldn’t. If it had been an organ, then certainly, but a growth in the muscle tissue around the spine? It could easily be missed. There are no holes in my story for the Addies to fall through. I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’m rather good at it now.’

He had tucked my hand under his arm in an avuncular way, shepherding me safely through the drifts of fallen leaves and over the cobbles slick with the last of the morning’s frost, and now he gave me a squeeze with his elbow as well as a slight wink. I was instantly his ally and found myself speaking up.

‘Where’s the harm, Alec, really? If Mr Merrick has brought comfort to the poor Addies and proofed them against being picked off by music-hall mediums in future, where’s the harm?’

‘Gilver and Osborne, servants of truth,’ muttered Alec. I could see what he meant and when he shot rather a poisonous look at the way my gloved hand was nestled in the crook of Merrick’s arm I could see what he meant there too.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Merrick. ‘Truth. I’m glad you mentioned it and I’m very glad we have this chance to speak plainly away from the family and their sensitivities. Now, I don’t know how much you’ve been told about what Tot’s been coming out with.’

‘Nothing,’ I said, astonished. ‘Told by whom?’

‘Oh, I’ve found Sergeant Simpson pretty forthcoming,’ Merrick said. In other words, he had the police eating out of his hand as well as the family. Thank goodness, I thought to myself, that his intentions were pure, for Svengali had nothing on him. Under cover of getting a handkerchief out of my pocket to dab at a smut on my cheek, I got my hand away and moved to walk a little closer to Alec, who was persuasive at times, but never actually mesmerising.

‘And I think,’ Merrick went on, ‘that Laidlaw simply can’t resist showing off, telling how clever he’s been.’

‘How clever?’ I said. ‘The man’s in jail, his sister dead, his hotel burned down and his reputation in shreds.’

‘But for a while there,’ said Merrick, ‘oh, for a while there it looked so promising. It was high stakes, but Tot Laidlaw’s nothing if not a player. The insurance was all stoked up, although it took his last pennies to stoke it, it seems. The guests were taking treatments to keep the books square – Dorothea would have got a tidy sum for the loss of such a successful clinic, you know. The casino was only open to the kind of hard-bitten gambler who’d keep his mouth shut so long as the cards were dealt.’ Alec caught my eye a little at that, but we said nothing, although I tucked the phrase away to use on Hugh sometime when I needed to.

‘What about Dr Ramsay?’ Alec said.

‘Yes, using Dr Ramsay was a mistake,’ said Merrick, ‘but one that Laidlaw almost managed to put right – dragging that infernal mud bath back to the Turkish, tricking the poor fool into it.’

‘Was he counting on it burning to ash and hiding his crime?’ I asked.

‘I don’t think he could have been thinking very clearly at all by then,’ said Merrick. ‘But he was certainly planning a hero’s death for Ramsay: a doctor going in to save souls with no thought for his own neck.’

‘And what of Laidlaw’s neck?’ Alec asked. ‘Will he hang?’

Merrick shook his head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘He didn’t kill Mrs Addie and he didn’t kill his sister.’

‘But he threw that poor woman’s body in the water and hid what killed her – it was him, wasn’t it?’

Alec and I had spent long hours discussing exactly what happened after Mrs Addie entered her mud bath that Sunday night in September. One thing we had agreed on was that Regina and Mrs Cronin were innocents in the matter, or at least guilty of no more than an abundance of loyalty. Regina was horrified when the truth finally dawned upon her, and Mrs Cronin had spent the last month at the Hydro trying to be everywhere at once in case Dorothea forgot someone again. No good would come of pointing the police in their direction, besmirching their good names and thrilling the newspapers.

When it came to the Laidlaws, however, we found it harder to see eye to eye. I blamed Tot for just about everything; Dorothea forgot her patient and failed to tell the truth about it, swept up in her brother’s schemes. But I was sure it was Tot who found the body, washed it, handed it to Regina, signed up Dr Ramsay and lied to the police about the outing and the ghost. At some point in the grisly process, Dorothea found out what he was doing, certainly, but whether she happened upon him at the pool, actually dousing the poor dead Mrs Addie in cold water, or answered the door to Dr Ramsay and wondered what he was doing there, Tot was the engineer of it all.

Alec did not agree. He made the admittedly compelling point that Tot’s usual round would not suddenly take him into the ladies’ baths one evening and that Dorothea must at least have found the body and turned to him for help in dealing with it. I argued him down: he might well have gone there looking for his sister; knowing the kind of man he was, he might have gone looking for someone who was not his sister. But, in the end, Dorothea Laidlaw was too sensitive a topic for Alec and me to argue for long.

I returned my attention to Merrick, who had got on to Ramsay himself by this time.

‘Although Laidlaw’s at least partly responsible for what happened to Ramsay in the end,’ he was saying.

‘Wholly responsible,’ said Alec fiercely. ‘Tot killed Ramsay plain and simple.’ He suspected me of blaming myself for Dr Ramsay’s death and was always most vociferous about Laidlaw’s guilt any time the matter arose between us.

‘Ah, but Ramsay’s never going to melt a jury’s hearts,’ Merrick said. ‘He put his name to the death certificate of a murder victim to escape his gambling debts. And he spun ghost stories. Some of my “colleagues” are easily angry enough to give Laidlaw’s lawyers chapter and verse on that one. And then Ramsay isn’t a local man and the Laidlaws are Moffat from generations back. I can’t see fifteen good Dumfries men letting him swing.’

‘But he’s a fiend,’ I said. ‘He’s brought nothing but shame on the town and the county.’

‘It would be shame to you, Mrs Gilver, and to me,’ Merrick said. ‘But others have a taste for notoriety we don’t share. He’s brought high drama, filled all the inns with newspapermen, he’s rid the place of a white elephant and made space to build some neat wee houses instead, and it’ll be a long while again before Moffat sees its next casino.’

‘You really think Laidlaw will have the gall to play his lovable scamp act again after all of this?’ I said. ‘To a jury?’

‘I’ve no doubt,’ said Merrick. ‘Of course he’ll never see the outside of a prison cell but he’ll not be short of visitors either.’

We had arrived at Morningside Road, bustling with motorcars, carriages, carts and trams, bicycles, pedestrians and omnibuses, all surging up from the city or pressing down there. Mr Merrick stopped outside a small tearoom and consulted his watch.

‘I believe I shall rest a while here and take refreshment,’ he said. ‘I’ve time before my train and the Addies, with their grief, were rather trying.’ He took his leave, then ducked inside the tearoom door and left Alec and me to carry on alone.

‘I’m almost glad our acquaintance with Loveday Merrick is drawing to a close,’ I said presently. ‘I find him more than a little unnerving.’

‘Yes, I know what you mean,’ Alec said. ‘That sensation of having one’s strings pulled and not quite being able to resist him. For all he said about Tot Laidlaw winning over juries I think Merrick is the real snake-charmer of this case, don’t you?’

‘I certainly never found Tot irresistible,’ I said, shuddering.

‘Ah, but your senses are honed from years of sniffing out tricksters,’ Alec said. ‘I say, Dandy?’

‘Hm?’ I said. We were passing one of those little hat shops one finds in places like Morningside. Just one rather dashing evening cap on a stand in a chiffon-draped window.

‘You don’t suppose there’s anything in it after all, do you? Merrick’s peculiar talent, I mean. I mean, who’s to say what Mrs Addie’s sore back was? I would never have believed her son and daughter could be taken in before I saw it this morning. So maybe they weren’t taken in after all. Maybe Merrick isn’t just an uncoverer of charlatans. Maybe he’s the one nugget of gold amongst the dross. And maybe that’s why he dedicates his life to showing the dross for what it is.’

This was quite a long speech for Alec and an even more remarkably candid one. I said nothing for a while. He had seen more death than I ever would if I lived to be ninety and kept detecting until I dropped. If he could bring himself to believe in a soft white light and kindly spirits looking down he might be able to lay who knew what old worries to rest and face the future. He might even be able to contemplate a wife who was more than a sensible girl who wanted a family. He would give his heart, newly minted, to his own true love and not mind the silly nonsense for a minute.

On the other hand, he had just muttered about servants of truth and he had made a clear distinction between dross and gold. And so it was my turn to risk ridicule.

‘There’s good news and bad on that score, darling,’ I said, and I tucked my hand into his arm where it fitted very well indeed. ‘I’m sorry to say that Loveday Merrick wouldn’t know an actual ghost if it walked up and spoke to him. That’s the bad news. On the other hand…’ I took a deep breath and told him how it was I came to know.