Deadly Measure of Brimstone

2

Of course, I did not mean actually to deposit Hugh and the boys in the Hydro itself to take their chances; I am far from the doting domestic angel of popular imagining but there are limits. Besides, Hugh would not stand for it. He detests hotels and since I guessed that a hydropathic one would also be devoted to the doctrine of temperance there was not a chance of getting him to stay there. Surely though, I told myself, there would be a house somewhere in the environs that we could have on a short let. If Moffat were anything like Crieff and Peebles, or indeed Harrogate or Buxton or Bath, or any town where sulphurous waters bubbled up and Victorian merchants got rich from them, there would be any number of sandstone villas left over from the heyday. I would set Gilchrist, Hugh’s factor, on it in the morning.

Before retiring, I composed a letter to Mr Addie, stipulating terms as he had asked but also requesting a meeting, for his to me had been as short on useful detail as it was long on epithets. At the beginning of the third paragraph I hesitated long enough to make a blot and then plunged on. It was easier in writing than face-to-face and if I offended him it would save me the trip on the train.

‘Mr Osborne and I will carry out our investigations with the utmost rigour and attention,’ I wrote. ‘If we find cause to question the Fiscal’s findings we shall report to you with all possible haste and shall stand by our conclusions as far as testifying in a court of law or at a second inquiry. Furthermore, in this case as in any, if we discover evidence of a crime we shall turn it over to the proper authorities as any responsible citizen would.’

Nice and pompous. My hope was that he would be so impressed with the rectitude of my expression that he would miss the veiled rebuke. I signed myself D.D. Gilver, thinking that there was no point in meeting trouble at the gate, and took myself off to bed, walking at Bunty’s pace and listening outside all three bedroom doors on the way. Pages were turning in Teddy’s room but his breathing was too quiet to be heard through mahogany; Donald was wheezing a bit in his sleep but it was nothing to the dreadful gurgling and rattling one might have heard even a week ago, and Hugh was snoring with rampant abandon. No one who was not well on the mend could snore that way without coughing, surely.

In my room, I dragged the low stool from my dressing table over to the side of my bed and Bunty ascended in her new stately way, like a dowager clambering into her carriage. I banished from my mind the memory of her taking the width of the room in three bounds and sailing through the air to land in the middle of my counterpane with feet splayed and tail whipping strongly enough to flutter the curtains.

It took over a fortnight, in the end, to arrange our removal to Moffat but the delay was propitious in a number of ways. First, it gave me plenty of time to commune with plumbers by letter and on the telephone. Also, Hugh and the boys were at the perfect pitch of convalescence, rallied enough to be ready for a change of scene after weeks of their bedroom walls and the west terrace on warm afternoons with many blankets, but not so far recovered as to impose their masculine wills and drag the party off northwards to a moor or river to start the whole exercise again. What is more, the short wait for quarters meant that we could take Pallister and Mrs Tilling with us. They could hardly have come along in their dressing gowns when they were utterly bedridden and they would have baulked at missing out on the joys of Gilverton sans Gilvers in the ordinary way of things, but when I floated the notion of the healing waters and the sitz baths they each got a wistful, yearning sort of look in their eyes, never mind that neither they nor I knew what a sitz bath might be. (I have since learned that it is a fussy arrangement of large and small tubs filled with hot and cold water, between which one hops about, feet in the hot, seat in the cold, then seat in the hot, feet in the cold, until the doctor declares the process complete. It seems designed to frustrate the very reasonable hopes one might have that a bath will provide relaxation and comfort and it is one of the many aspects of hydropathy which led me to conclude that the doctors, despite the white coats and multisyllabic descriptions, are sadists and jokers and that their patients are credulous chumps.)

But all of that came later. On the day when Pallister and Mrs Tilling agreed to form part of our expedition to the southern hills and Grant got down my trunk and started packing, I had high hopes of killing two plump birds with one well-aimed stone.

After all, we had come through that tricky visit to the Addies without being stripped of our commission.

They were exactly as thrilled as I had foreseen upon discovering that Gilver was a scandalous female and not a respectable retired police inspector, a northern Holmes with an air of genius, or whatever they had been expecting when they rolled my name around and decided they trusted it.

Alec made up for me a little, as far as I could tell, when we were shown into Fairways’ parlour three days after receiving the Addies’ letter. I had decided that toughing it out was my best hope and, accordingly, I strode forward and thrust my hand out to the female of the pair.

‘Mrs Bowie? Mrs Gilver,’ I said. ‘And this is Mr Osborne.’

‘Mrs Bowie,’ said Alec, with a little bow. ‘How d’you do? And you, sir.’

‘Mrs Gilver?’ said the brother in a dazed sort of way.

‘Mr Addie,’ I concluded. ‘And that’s the lot.’ I beamed at him and then adjusted my expression in accordance with the remarks to follow. ‘First of all, let us offer you both our condolences.’ This observance of convention seemed to soothe them; Mrs Bowie lowered her eyes and nodded and Mr Addie twisted up his face into a look of masculine stoicism. It was very similar to the look one would have if standing on a headland facing into a biting wind and, as they would have there, his eyes watered.

‘And be assured,’ said Alec, taking up the baton, ‘that we will do our utmost to assuage your concerns about the manner of your dear mother’s passing.’ It was his ‘endeavour to give satisfaction’ speech, tinged with a little undertaker’s mummery as this occasion demanded. I cannot deliver it with a straight face, but Alec is a marvel.

‘I shall take you at your word, Mr Osborne,’ said Mr Addie. He looked rather sharply at me and then back at Alec. ‘As one gentleman always can for another.’

‘Mrs Gilver,’ said Mrs Bowie, as one lady to another perhaps, hoping to smooth the slight away. ‘Do sit down and I’ll ring for tea.’

Before the pot was empty we were well acquainted with the late Mrs Addie. She had been a widow of the sort that always makes me imagine she viewed the marriage itself as an irksome hors d’oeuvre. She had sewn hassocks, bred Sealyhams, terrorised troupes of little girls through their Brownie badges and generally kept a good slice of the world around her bowling along in proper order. When she had put her back out pitching tents at a Brownie camp in the Pentland Hills she had, according to her practical nature, taken to bed with unguents and embrocations to spare; and when these had failed her, she had rung up that nice Dr Laidlaw at Moffat and booked her usual room.

‘For she was subject to it,’ said Mrs Bowie, ‘but Dr Laidlaw always cured her before.’ She rose and came to stand behind my chair to look at the portrait photograph which had been fetched for us. Mrs Addie had been a solid woman of strong features and very smooth skin. These attributes, along with her little dark eyes, lent her what can only be described as a porcine countenance. Her children had inherited her looks, as is always the way when a parent is as plain as pudding, and Mrs Bowie had, besides, come in for her mother’s scant and colourless hair. (Mr Addie had got himself a head of thick dark locks, but had let most of them go.)

‘So your mother knew and trusted this doctor?’ I said.

‘She did,’ said Mr Addie, darkly. ‘She was quite taken in by it all. Always running off there.’ He caught himself just before he absolutely started speaking ill of the dead. ‘However,’ he went on, ‘Dr Laidlaw is gone.’

‘And the place came under new management?’ asked Alec.

‘His children,’ said Mrs Bowie. ‘They inherited it. His daughter…’

‘Oh, he died,’ I said and, although there is no shame in dying, for it happens repeatedly in the best of families, one could not help seeing a little unflattering light cast on the spa.

‘And they’re… what? Attempting to run the place without his medical know-how?’ Alec said. ‘That should have caused questions to be asked, surely.’

‘From what my mother said,’ Mrs Bowie volunteered, ‘it seems to be going along the same as before. After a little initial… They had opposing views on whether to sell up but their father’s will split everything two ways and so they carried on. Some of the treatments had changed, but that’s progress, I suppose.’ She lifted her chin and gave her brother a defiant look as she spoke. I noticed it and Alec did too.

‘They still have a hydropathic doctor on the premises then?’ he said. ‘Overseeing the… what have you… that goes on.’

‘They do,’ said Mrs Bowie.

‘Of sorts,’ said Mr Addie.

‘What do you mean, sir?’ I asked. ‘Do you have reason to doubt the man’s credentials?’

He stared at me, breathing out and in as if it cost him some effort.

‘I couldn’t say,’ he said. ‘Besides, it was a local man, a Moffat GP, who signed the certificate. Then the police, as we said. And the Fiscal. Passed the buck all the way. And now, sir,’ he turned to Alec again, ‘it falls to you.’

‘And stops here,’ Alec assured him. Then he added firmly, ‘With Mrs Gilver and me.’

‘Now, Mrs Bowie,’ I said, ‘you mentioned just now that your mother reported continued satisfaction with the Hydro. Did she write to you? Might I see the letter if you’ve kept it? Or the relevant portions if there are private matters therein?’

‘She rang me,’ Mrs Bowie said. ‘On the Sunday. A very quick word, after her supper and before her bath.’

‘Did she now?’ I said, sitting forward and readying myself to take notes. Alec is wont to smile at my little block of paper and my pencil, but my notes have helped us many times. ‘On the very last evening? What – to the best of your remembering, Mrs Bowie – did she say?’

The poor woman tried her best but, having retrod the ground countless times in the weeks of mourning, she remembered it only too well: the portents unleashed by the very ringing of the telephone bell; the darkening tone in her mother’s voice; the sudden chill as they said goodbye. I managed to glean that Mrs Addie had reported a comfortable journey down in the train, had been pleased to be shown to her favourite room and happy that it had not been redecorated since her last visit. She had detected a falling off of quality in the cooking, with a greater emphasis on grated raw vegetables and lemon juice than she could greet with enthusiasm, but overall she was home-from-home again and her back was aching a little less even before the first splash of magical water was felt upon it. By that Sunday bath-time she was already anticipating putting on her outdoor shoes and taking a stroll into town for a cup of tea in the near future. Not on the Monday, because of her ‘treatment’, but very soon; and she would buy a picture postcard of the well or the bath house and send it to her daughter with her love.

‘And she said she would post me off a box of tablet,’ said Mrs Bowie. ‘From the toffee shop.’

‘What treatment would that have been?’ I asked, with my pencil poised.

Mrs Bowie stared at her brother with wide eyes.

‘Oh, I’m not an educated woman,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t tell you all the fancy names and what they mean.’

‘But nothing, one assumes, that would have put her heart under strain,’ I said. ‘Surely the Fiscal must have considered that.’

‘We shall ask him,’ said Alec, rather grandly. I resented a little the air of him sweeping in and summing up after his secretary had fussed on with her questions and her pencil. On the other hand, it was a competent way to bring matters to a close and one should be glad, I daresay, whenever Gilver and Osborne or either of its parts looks competent. Lord knows, we display other qualities often enough.

Our decampment to the Moffat hills was not as orderly as one might have hoped. My packing caused Grant no trouble, for she is an old hand, and with almost a whole motorcar at her disposal – since Hugh was neither hunting nor dancing and needed only tweeds, flannels and something for dinner – she did not need to pare her selections down. Indeed, I noticed three hatboxes being carried downstairs but said nothing. Donald and Teddy, along with Bunty, were going by train; Donald because he had never grown out of his childhood’s carsickness and Teddy to keep him company. They were recovered enough to pack their own trunks with Becky’s help and I kept them on their honour by requiring them to tick items off a list and sign it at the end. It had worked while they were at school and continued to work now; they are good boys really. The problem arose with Pallister and Mrs Tilling, for he could no more imagine serving us dinner without his silver spoons, wine without his decanters or tea without his pot than she could envision a distant kitchen having its own sharp knives, fish kettle and marble pastry board. When I saw her wrapping a rolling pin in brown paper, though, I had to protest.

‘I like my own pin, madam,’ she said. ‘That there pin might be wood. There might be weevils.’

I declined to point out that weevils do not bore into wood and set up home there.

‘We could run to a new one if so,’ I said. ‘Or – the cook at home when I was a child used a wine bottle filled with crushed ice. I used to help fill it. You really can’t take everything, you know.’

Mrs Tilling gave a smirk of triumph whose source I could not immediately locate and unwrapped a corner of the rolling pin from its paper covering.

‘There,’ she said. ‘That’s a rubber stopper, madam, for the ice water to go in.’

I left her to it. Pallister and she were following with Drysdale in my motorcar and, although they outranked him, in this one respect he had final authority. He alone was responsible for the Cowley and he was quite firm enough to throw Pallister’s wooden boxes or Mrs Tilling’s rush baskets out onto the gravel if he felt the suspension was in danger.

Auchenlea House, where we were bound, was a whitewashed villa with red sandstone round its windows, sitting on an east slope with a view over the valley towards the Moffat hills. It was only two miles from the town and its bath house by road, less than that on the footpath, and from its drawing-room window the chimneys of the Hydro could just be seen above the tops of a pine and larch wood. It occurred to me, gazing across on that first afternoon, that looking due west towards trees was not the prospect I should have chosen for a healthful place such as I imagined hydros to be. A cliff top, I should have thought, or at least rolling downs, with morning sun to get the invalids in the mood for the new day. But then I was forgetting that the spas grow up around the springs and the springs bubble up where they please. I turned from the window and surveyed my lodging. It was commodious enough as a drawing room, well served with sofas and chairs, these in turn well served with tables and lamps. The fireplace was a good size too and there were radiators besides, but when I considered that this was it for sitting rooms – no library, no morning room, no billiards room even – I rather quailed. Hugh, Donald, Teddy and I would be in here all day every day when we were not actually eating or over at the Hydro, and I could not imagine it. I foresaw a lot of walks and tearooms if Alec and I were to discuss this case the way that we usually do.

For Alec had abandoned the planned hunt the minute he heard the word ‘murder’ and was even now on a train, taking his hastily concocted bad back and tingling legs to a private suite with bath at the Hydropathic to see what they could do for him.

‘Are you sure?’ I had said. ‘You’re not worried that it might really have been a murder then?’

‘Nice try, Dandy,’ he had replied. ‘But there’s no way I’m letting this pass me by.’ He referred, cynically in my view, to the fact that our last few cases had put me – by no efforts of my own – squarely in the middle of the action and had left him rather clinging to the side. That business at Portpatrick had merely been the last and worst of it. Even Alec had conceded that if one of us were to infiltrate a girls’ school it would have to be me, but before that I had forged my way deep into a ladies’ dress department in a High Street emporium and before that we had had to choose which one would sleep in a client’s bedroom with her, pretending to be a maid. It was Alec’s turn now without a doubt, and I was happy for him. He would worm his way into the heart of the Hydro and find the truth there and I would trail about the offices of the town officials checking their statements and putting their backs up. It was a sorely overdue rebalancing of the scales.

‘Are you quite well?’ said Grant, coming into the drawing room. ‘Madam. You’re frowning like anything. No point spending all that money on vanishing cream if you’re going to scowl, you know. There isn’t a cream invented that could smooth that out.’

‘I’ve been looking into the sun,’ I told her, flustered. Grant glanced out of the window, where thick banks of grey cloud filled the sky, but said nothing. ‘Did you want something?’

‘Oh yes!’ she said. ‘The master wants you. He’s in a right old-’

I quelled her with a look; Hugh is quite wrong about the disposition of power between us.

‘He has something he would like to discuss upstairs,’ she went on, then bobbed, turned and left. ‘Before he bursts,’ she said as she passed through the door and her footsteps quickened as she hurried away.

Thinking that I might as well get it over with right away, I followed her. The hallway of Auchenlea House was square and imposing with a stone fireplace and a suit of armour at the bottom of the stairs. The dining room was across it on the other side of the front door, a mirror image of the drawing room, and the stairs went up the back with soaring stone-mullioned windows at each landing. It was a perfectly pleasant, solid, comfortable house. I squared my shoulders and went to find Hugh.

He was standing in the middle of my bedroom, with Pallister at his side. I blinked, but I suppose it was not actually my bedroom just yet. It was still, strictly speaking, one of the rooms in a house we had let, albeit the best one which was why Grant had ordered my trunk to be deposited there and had put all three of my hatboxes on the bed.

‘Thank you, Pallister,’ said Hugh.

Pallister bowed his head and left, no parting shot from him on his way out, I noticed.

‘Dandy,’ said Hugh. ‘Pallister is displeased.’

‘Pallister is always displeased, ‘I said. ‘The last thing that pleased him was the Jubilee.’

‘I too am a little surprised,’ said Hugh. ‘This house doesn’t seem at all up to scratch.’ I blinked again and looked around me. The bedroom had windows on two sides, four in all, looking out to the hills, and was big enough to hold a dance in. In fact, I glanced around it, it must have been the same size as the drawing room beneath it. It had a pale Aubusson carpet and pale green wallpaper. The hangings were green and white stripes and what with the dark mahogany furniture, the whole room reminded me of nothing so much as a chocolate peppermint cream.

‘I think it’s lovely,’ I said. ‘Much prettier than I dared to anticipate.’

‘Four bedrooms,’ said Hugh. I nodded. This one, its opposite number above the dining room and another two on top of these. And in between, on each landing, what had been dressing rooms were now beautifully cosy bathrooms, with gleaming pipes and the untold luxury of sheepskin rugs on the floor. I was already imagining stepping out of my bath onto sheepskin and was planning to buy some for Gilverton when we returned home to enter into the new era of luxury. On the other hand, this house with its radiators and bathrooms was supposed to be softening Hugh up for the unannounced changes. He looked about as soft as flint just now.

‘Four of us, four bedrooms,’ I said. ‘What’s the problem?’

‘Pallister,’ said Hugh. ‘There is no basement, Dandy, beyond a sort of cellar. No butler’s pantry. Just three servants’ rooms above the kitchen wing.’

‘Have you been scampering up stairs and down, Hugh?’ I interrupted. ‘You must be feeling better.’

‘All very well for Grant and Mrs Tilling and the girl,’ Hugh went on. ‘But is Pallister to doss down with Drysdale in the stable loft?’

‘Well, Grant doesn’t mind sharing with the local girl,’ I said. ‘It won’t be the-’

‘Interlocking rooms, Dandy,’ said Hugh. ‘Three in a row.’

‘Ah,’ I said. I thought about it for a moment, wondering if there was some way to work it. If Pallister was in the outermost room then the women would be trapped until he was up in the morning. That would never do. If, on the other hand, he was in the innermost room, he would have three slumbering females to get past if he should need to. Worse and worse. ‘I don’t suppose there’s an outside door?’

‘To the roof?’

‘Or Pallister could have one of the rooms upstairs and Donald and Teddy can share.’

‘One bed in each,’ said Hugh.

‘Well, then there’s only one thing for it,’ I said. I felt my colour rising and I attempted a light laugh. ‘It’ll be quite a second honeymoon.’ Hugh did not return my smile. In fact, his mouth formed a grim line as we both heard the sound of Bunty’s toenails on the stairs. She appeared around the edge of the door, wagged her tail at me, gave Hugh a cold look and then made her way to the bed. It was lower than my bed at home and she managed without any difficulty to clamber onto it. She pawed at the counterpane, turned around twice and lay down, heaving a sigh and stretching.

‘I shall inform Pallister that the matter is resolved,’ Hugh said and stalked out.

I should have liked to avoid him for a few hours but if Bunty was here that meant the boys were too and I was anxious to see how Donald fared after his journey. I changed my shoes and hurried downstairs. They were in the drawing room, to where Mrs Tilling had already brought in the tea-things, having somehow managed to conjure bread-and-butter, scones and sugary cakes from somewhere. I subsided into the chair nearest the teapot and beamed at all three of my menfolk.

‘You look all right,’ I told Donald. ‘Not too tired?’

‘I fell asleep,’ Donald said, causing me a pang. An eighteen-year-old boy should not fall asleep on a two-hours train journey during the day.

‘Which made it pretty dull for me,’ Teddy said. ‘I had brought a pack of cards.’

‘One doesn’t play at cards on a train, Teddy,’ I said. ‘Who put that idea into your head?’

‘You did,’ he said, his eyes wide. He looked cherubic; it has always been a talent of his to be able to look that way. ‘Going to Granny’s. Snap.’

‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Snap. I see.’

‘You live in a very different world from us now, don’t you, Dandy?’ said Hugh. ‘It would never have occurred to me to suspect my sons of setting up a poker school on a railway train.’ For all the world as though gambling at poker – indeed, at anything – were not his favourite indoor pursuit in the world.

‘Speaking of your world, Mother,’ said Donald, ‘guess who we saw.’ He rolled a slice of buttered bread into a cigar-shape and bit the end off it.

‘I can’t imagine,’ I said. I could imagine, of course, even if I lamented the rotten luck that put him on the very same train with the boys.

‘Mr Osborne,’ said Donald. I frowned at his cigar, offered the scones to Teddy and handed Hugh his cup.

‘Hah,’ I said. ‘He must be on his way to London.’

‘On this line?’ said Hugh. Railways and their efficient use were an interest of his.

‘No, he got off,’ said Teddy. ‘Of course he might have been stretching his legs,’ he added helpfully. ‘The train did stop for ages.’

‘Although,’ I said, ‘I seem to remember we had a letter from Moffat recently. Perhaps he’s decided to look into the case.’

‘What was it?’ asked Teddy, swallowing a huge mouthful of scone to allow himself to speak. He was twelve before we broke his habit of speaking with his mouth full and his new habit of half choking himself so that he got a share of the conversation was not much of an improvement. ‘Burglary, blackmail, kidnap, murder?’

Hugh regarded me over the rim of his teacup. He did not frown or scowl, but just looked at me very smoothly. Grant would have been delighted with him.

‘My dear Teddy,’ I said. ‘Most of my work is straightening out very dull grown-up misunderstandings. Sad and painful for those concerned, of course, but nothing to gloat over.’

‘I wouldn’t say dull, Mother,’ said Donald. ‘Not when you look back over all of them.’ He put his cup down and sticking out the index finger of one hand and the little finger of the other he drew breath to begin to recall them.

‘Or perhaps he’s making a visit to someone in the vicinity,’ I said. ‘I do have a piece of news of the kind it’s quite all right to pore over, you know. Mr Osborne is seeking a wife.’ That arrested all of them. ‘Perhaps he’s visiting Moffat with matrimonial intent.’

Donald and Teddy were, as boys always are, mortified by this turn of the conversation. Teddy turned crimson to the tips of his ears and Donald simply rolled his eyes. He had had a terrible habit of chasing little girls, all through the pigtail-pulling years and well into the years of more dangerous attentions, but he had been cured of it by a hard-bitten Frenchwoman who had unveiled the mysteries of love and broken his tender heart. Teddy, at sixteen, was entering the eleventh year of finding girls and talk of girls quite simply ghastly.

Hugh loaded a plate with two scones and a cake, refilled his teacup, and made it to the door before he remembered that there was nowhere for him to go. He plumped down into a chair by the front window.

‘Nice view,’ he said. ‘Too hot over there with that enormous fire. Think we were roasting an ox.’

‘It is very warm, Mummy,’ said Teddy. ‘Sort of stuffy.’

‘It’s the hot pipes blasting away,’ said Hugh. ‘I’ll investigate the boiler and try to temper the heat before we’re all ill again.’

Yet another part of my plan, so neat on paper, seemed to be unravelling in messy reality. If Hugh and the boys did not glory in the warmth of Auchenlea House, I was in for some trouble when they got home to Gilverton and saw what had happened there. With relief, I turned my thoughts away from such domestic trivia and towards the case. Mrs Enid Addie and her heart attack (alleged) were what I had to pay attention to now.