Deadly Measure of Brimstone

3

Monday, 21st October 1929

I had jotted down the details from Mrs Addie’s death certificate, with her grieving offspring watching me closely lest I make a mark upon it, and my first unenviable task was to track down the doctor who signed it. (I counted myself lucky that I had come this far in my detecting career without ever before having been pitched into this particular nest of vipers, for I could not see how a doctor could take such an enquiry as anything but a slur. I only hoped I could escape from his surgery without a threat of slander chasing after me.)

Escaping him, however, was not my only difficulty. Effecting an excuse to visit him was giving me some trouble too. Hugh and the boys awoke on the morning after our first night at Auchenlea House eager to plunge into their watery new pastime and appeared to take it for granted that I would be their handmaiden for the duration.

‘I’d like to go to the well itself,’ said Teddy. ‘It’s only a bit up into the hills and there’s a path.’ He was making a good breakfast, despite the extra solidity that had come of Mrs Tilling attempting porridge on an electric stove whose efficiency had clearly caught her unawares. I grimaced to see him hack off a mouthful with the edge of his spoon and literally chew it before swallowing. ‘But Donald’s being a ninny.’

Donald did not throw anything, raise his voice, call Teddy worse or badger me to punish him and I glanced with real concern at him.

‘Don’t be rotten, Teddy,’ I said. ‘Neither of you is tramping the hills and sharing water with sheep when there is a perfectly good bath house in the town, where the water is served in glasses. In fact, I would imagine that the Hydro has its own supply of the water and there’s no need to go to the public room at all.’

‘Might be fun at the pump room,’ said Donald. ‘Might meet people there.’

Had I not been sure that my elder son was a stranger to the novels of Miss Austen, and had his heart not still been bruised by its recent travails, I would have worried that he expected an Isabella Thorpe to be promenading the pump room in a bonnet and waiting only for Donald Gilver to make her morning perfect. As it was, I took it as a good sign for him to be showing interest in society at all, even if he was not well enough to have taken up his lifelong war with his little brother again.

‘There will be lots of people at the Hydro too,’ I said.

‘Ancient invalids,’ said Donald.

‘In bath chairs,’ added Teddy, giggling.

‘Interestingly enough,’ I said, ‘if there are, that’s because the bath chair gets its name from the city of Bath where the hot springs drew the very invalids you dread, Teddy.’

‘Gosh, let’s get up there,’ Teddy said. This was outrageously rude but, seeing Donald smirk at it, I let it pass.

‘Hugh?’ I said. ‘Pump room, Hydro or hillside for you?’

Hugh was behind his newspaper. I held out no substantial hope that he would be impressed by there being a newspaper for him to be behind on this first morning. He spoke without lowering it.

‘I don’t intend to drink the local brew,’ he said. ‘I’m here for science, not magic.’

A devoted wife would have believed him. I, on the other hand, suspected that he knew what to expect from a glass of healing spring water and hoped to dodge it. In contrast, I am sure that my sons had in their minds something delicious; a kind of icy, sparkling cordial. Well, they would soon see.

‘Let’s stop off at the pump room,’ I said. ‘Just to see what it’s like and then on to the Hydro for luncheon. You all have consultations booked with the doctor this afternoon and your treatments begin tomorrow. Back here for an early dinner and a quiet evening, I think.’

‘What do you think the treatments will be, Mummy?’ said Teddy.

‘Oh, tremendous fun,’ I said. ‘Lots of splashing about. No mixtures, I assure you.’

For Teddy was the ninny when it came to anything in a brown bottle to be taken off a spoon. I had once seen Nanny and two nursemaids beaten when trying to get him to swallow castor oil. He wriggled out of the arms of the nurses and sent the bottle flying out of Nanny’s hand before running off to hide in an attic. All I could say was that given the mess castor oil makes of carpets and polished wood I was not at all sure he was wrong in feeling it had no business in his insides.

The card propped up by the counter in the bath-house refreshment room – ‘First glass 6d. Later glasses free.’ – did not augur well for the stuff (no one would ever offer ginger beer on those terms) but the boys did not have enough experience of disappointment to be warned by it. The first sign that they were in for a nasty time came when the glasses were placed in their hands and they felt the warmth and saw the cloudy swirling. I took mine and glared at Hugh, standing there with his hands clasped behind his back and a smile on his face, then said a rousing ‘Cheers’ and toasted the boys’ health.

No one else in the place seemed to be making a fuss about it. In fact, looking around at the other people settled at tables, sipping slowly, I thought that the Gilvers were probably the only newcomers. One old woman in long skirts and a shawl had come in, paid her sixpence, swallowed her measure and left with a promise to ‘be back the morra’. She had not so much as glanced at her surroundings and I guessed that she had been coming here for all of her considerable years. If it was good stuff perhaps she was ninety-nine and past counting, had stopped looking round at the place decades ago. It was diverting enough for me, though. A grand room on a miniature scale, making me think of those gatehouses which mimic the splendours of the palaces they serve. Partly, it was the fact that the bath house was built in stone for even after all these years in Scotland, far from the softness of Northamptonshire, it still surprises me sometimes to see the lowly structures which are made of great square lumps of the stuff. Banks, charity schools, bowling clubhouses, public facilities of the very humblest kind, are all set to stand a thousand years as though they were castles for kings. It is very worthy, I suppose, but I still yearn for the ochre lime, horsehair plaster and crumbling ginger brick of home.

Inside was a miniature replica of the assembly rooms at Bath itself: a large chamber for promenading and doubtless for dancing too, a reading room, a discreet door to the closets where one might actually bathe, and all decked out in Adam plaster and sugared-almond paint from ceiling to floor. The decoration of the ceiling was particularly welcome: something distracting for when one tipped one’s head back and took a good deep swallow.

Sulphur is a very necessary element, I am sure, for God would not have gone to the bother of it otherwise, but between the taste, the smell and the yellow tinge, it takes a worshipful frame of mind to thank Him for it when one is drinking a lukewarm quarter-pint of the stuff. I drained my glass and set it down.

‘Goodness,’ said Donald. ‘It must be awfully beneficial.’ I smiled at his composure.

‘Ugh,’ said Teddy. ‘That’s disgusting! Mummy, that’s absolutely disgusting. Why didn’t you tell me?’ The other tables of patrons tittered softly at his ringing tone and look of outrage. ‘This is mixture of the worst sort. And a whole cup of it too, instead of a spoon.’ He put his half-full glass down on the counter and went to stand beside his father. The lines, I could see, were drawn.

‘I’ll have another glass, please,’ Donald said to the grey-coated attendant who plied the ladle. He flicked the merest glance at Teddy and went on. ‘It’s a curious thing, isn’t it, Mother, how late in one’s maturity one gets a taste for such things as olives and whisky?’ These were high-scoring cards, close to trumping his brother, for Teddy had felt the two years between them like a thorn his whole life through.

Donald accepted his second glass and sipped it as though it were nectar. He had, however, goose pimples of disgust all over his neck and I was sure he was paling.

‘Sit down at a table and take your time, Donald,’ I said. ‘I have a little errand on the High Street but I’ll be back directly. Hugh? Don’t let him drown in the stuff, will you?’

My first enquiry, of a drayman stopped at the Star Hotel, furnished me with directions to the surgery of Dr Ramsay, which was a short stroll along the High Street and another up a narrow street running off it. I set off still with a sense of foreboding and turning the corner caused an extra jolt, for while Moffat High Street is wide, pleasant and Georgian, Well Street is a perfect microcosm of that sort of Dickensian city which puts one in mind of gin shops and pie shops and blue-legged urchins. To go along with this impression, Dr Ramsay’s brass plate was on a narrow door beside a bowed shop front and his surgery was up a steep staircase in what I assumed was a converted tenement flat.

The doctor of my imagining was out on his rounds in a pony and trap and I would need an appointment to see him, an appointment I would make with a fierce secretary who guarded him like Cerberus at the jetty. Dr Ramsay, in reality, answered his door himself and waved me right in to his consulting room, seeming glad of the custom, almost of the company.

He settled himself back down in his chair, a leather affair on wheels, allowing him to whizz about between desk, patient and medicine chest (doctors these days are in thrall to the machines), and I took the chance to study him. He was a thin young man but with an air of repose which would have suited an older, larger person. He certainly had none of that nervous energy which might have explained his gaunt frame.

‘Now then,’ he said. ‘And what can I do for you?’

‘Yes,’ I began. ‘Well, my name is Gilver. I don’t live here; I have my own doctor at home in Perthshire, but I’m staying here a while.’ Dr Ramsay nodded.

‘At the Hydro,’ he said, which I supposed would be the usual thing.

‘Actually, we’ve taken a house, but for the Hydro, certainly.’ He kept nodding. ‘And I have a question to put to you. I believe you are… connected to the place?’

‘Not… no,’ he said. ‘Not officially, no. Although I know the Laidlaws, of course. Now, what can I tell you? I am anxious to set your mind at ease.’

There was no real reason not to forge ahead with my questions; they were few and they were straightforward enough, but something about his manner arrested me. ‘Set my mind at ease’? What made him think my mind was uneasy?

‘Are you the attending doctor for the Hydro?’ I asked. ‘If that is the correct expression.’

‘They have no need of one,’ he replied. ‘Hydropathy is…’ He drew a deep breath and opened his eyes very wide. ‘… a specialism beyond the norm, but Dr Laidlaw is a medical doctor.’

‘But Dr Laidlaw is dead, isn’t he?’ I said.

‘Dr Laidlaw Jr, I should say,’ he replied.

‘Ah!’ I said. ‘The King is dead, long live the King.’

‘Almost,’ said Dr Ramsay with a slight smile.

‘But then,’ I began, for this was puzzling, ‘if Dr Laidlaw is a real doctor and was in attendance…’

Dr Ramsay had been reclining as far as his chair would let him, as though to take a long view of me, but now he sat up straight.

‘Attending whom, Mrs Gilver?’ he said.

‘A friend of mine,’ I lied in response. ‘She was staying there recently.’

‘What a remarkable coincidence,’ he said.

I did not see what made it so, since I had sought him out. Different if we were in London and had bumped elbows at a party. My sense was growing that something was amiss here.

‘Yes,’ I said, making sure that none of that sense showed on my face or in my voice. ‘A Mrs Addie, you might remember.’ He sat up even straighter and became even more remarkably still. ‘And her daughter is so very distraught. It often happens, doesn’t it, with a sudden death when the loved one is far from home. I said I would have a word while I was down here, just to be able to reassure her that there was no need to worry.’

‘And you are able to do so,’ he said, sitting back again. ‘There isn’t. You have my word.’

‘But why yours?’ I asked him, innocent tone and expression going strong. ‘Why didn’t Dr Laidlaw sign the death certificate, Dr Ramsay? I always thought it was preferred for a doctor who knew the patient to take care of these things.’

‘It is, it certainly is,’ said Dr Ramsay. ‘In this case, Dr Laidlaw chose not to.’

‘But why?’ I said.

‘You would have to ask Dr Laidlaw that,’ he said. I was surprised to see that there was a glint of amusement in his eyes. He put his foot up on the bar of his desk and leaned further backwards than ever.

‘It didn’t worry you to be asked?’ I said. ‘You didn’t hesitate?’

‘Clearly not,’ said Dr Ramsay, with a smile. ‘I was happy to help.’

‘Of course,’ I said, smiling back and hoping he would not see past it. Dr Laidlaw could not possibly have any innocent reason for refusing to sign a death certificate of a patient actually living at the Hydro. Far from Dr Ramsay’s word being an assurance, the very fact that he was dragged into the business was extremely fishy. ‘Well, acute heart failure is probably something you cover in chapter one,’ I went on breezily. He frowned. ‘Of your big red book of medicine.’

‘Mrs Gilver,’ he said. ‘What laymen such as yourself often seem to forget is that everyone dies of heart failure in the end. That’s the only cause of death there is, really, when you strip away all the secondary considerations.’

I nodded slowly for a bit as though digesting this. In truth, my thoughts were rattling about like those Mexican jumping beans one sees in the little snippets between the newsreel and the main feature.

‘You are right, of course,’ I said at last. ‘I think my friend, Mrs Addie’s daughter, would have preferred one of these secondary considerations, that’s all. She was sure that her mother’s heart was fine.’

‘If her heart had been fine she would still be with us,’ said the doctor. He spoke kindly as though to an imbecile. ‘Healthy hearts don’t just stop beating, you know.’

I could barely contain my astonishment. Healthy hearts stop beating all the time. They stop when someone jumps off a cliff, for instance, or drinks a bedtime cup of strychnine. Contain it I did, though, and forged on.

‘I suppose – forgive me for this – there’s no chance that you missed something, is there?’

‘None,’ said the doctor. ‘She bore all the signs of having suffered a severe heart attack. And do you know what the chief of these is?’ He was truly patronising me now. Had I been twelve and in cotton socks and had he been sixty and grizzled I might have been able to stomach it. As it was, it took all my effort not to draw myself up and squash him. With difficulty, I kept the annoyance off my face and simply shook my head.

‘Being dead,’ he said, very proud of the sound of it. ‘It’s a sad fact that dying of a heart attack is often the first clue that your heart wasn’t healthy. And the last one.’

I nodded and even managed another smile, in acknowledgement of the clever points he was making, but inside I was reeling. Nonsense that a woman who had just been carefully attended through a bout of crippling back pain would not have had her heartbeat listened to! Nonsense that it would not, under the strain of illness, show signs of the weakness which was going to overcome it only weeks in the future! I could not understand why no one had thought it except me. He was speaking again and I snapped my attention back to him.

‘I’m sure if you go to the Hydro,’ he was saying, ‘you’ll soon be able to fill in any troubling little details. Beyond the medical facts, I mean.’

‘Troubling little details’? Had the man any idea how suspicious he seemed? I supposed not or he would surely have shut up, and yet he was still talking.

‘What she’d been up to,’ he was saying. ‘How she spent her last hours. All that – very soothing to the family that’ll be.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, Dr Ramsay,’ I said. ‘Thank you for speaking to me.’

‘Happy to help,’ he said. It appeared to be his response to anything. A fellow doctor asking for his signature after a death with no visible cause? Happy to help! A perfect stranger asking questions about it? Happy to help her too. The man was a fool.

So I took my leave, descended the narrow stairs, hurried down the narrow street and emerged into the blustery morning again, just in time to see Hugh and the boys coming out of the bath house and beginning to look around for me. I waved and picked my way across the road between carts and bicycles and a motorbus which was wheezing away from the stop. I could not wait to get to the Hydro now. I had half thought the Addies were simply baulking at unwelcome reality, setting their faces against a natural death because they would rather it was not so. Dr Ramsay had changed everything.

It was with some initial difficulty that I put it out of my mind and tried to concentrate on my family as we drove from the High Street up out of the town towards the Hydro, but we were all impressed with our first sight of the place. Even Donald, who had been rather white and preoccupied-looking on the journey, as might be expected of someone who suddenly found himself two pints of sulphurous warm water the better just after breakfast one day, was distracted from his suffering. It was quite simply huge, much bigger than the place in Crieff and dwarfing Peebles’ effort, more like a Russian palace than something Swiss-trained doctors would dream up to plant on a Scottish hillside, and as ornate as a Russian palace too. It was missing the onion domes and stained glass, but more than fully compensated with turrets, moulding, escutcheons, and the like.

The drive led along the hillside and behind the building, meeting it halfway up, and I assumed that there would be garden floors below with windows opening onto the terraces the brochure had promised. I had been right about the situation, though. It might be pleasant later if the clouds cleared before the sun went down but on a typical autumn morning it was gloomy beyond belief and, looking up at the forbidding bulk of it, counting the windows and considering how unlikely it was that any boiler known to man could heat so many rooms well enough to call them cosy, I was suddenly glad of my fox fur and drew it closer around me.

There were Turkish baths in there too, I thought, and steam rooms, unless they were the same things, and the famous sitz baths of which the brochure barely shut up for a single page and, all in all, I did not see how so much steam and hot water could be contained in a Scottish house without the whole of it being beset by seeping damp.

As we entered, I was half looking to see if the wallpapers were curling away from the plaster beneath and if the grain on the wood was rising.

As is so often the case, I was quite wrong and all was well inside the Moffat Hydro. The vestibule, entrance and hall were warm, dry, sweet-smelling – I saw a towering container of lilies on each of the side tables as we passed – and hushed. Hugh looked around himself with interest, evidently finding the place gratifyingly un-hotel-like. I saw Donald’s expression clear as he relinquished his quiet foreboding that it would be some sort of hospital in all but name. He loathes hospitals even more than the generality and no one, let us face it, ever wants to go on a picnic there. Teddy’s attention was caught by one feature only and that was the two-storey-high, coiling, gleaming, unbroken banister rail which, to judge by the way he was gazing, clearly sang to him.

‘No,’ I said.

‘No what?’ said Donald. Teddy did not turn from the siren song.

‘No?’ said Hugh. ‘I like the look of it so far. Beats me why you took that so-called house if this is what’s on offer.’ I shook my head and said nothing, although I dearly wanted to know how Hugh slept at night with tenants living in cottages of three rooms in total, if Auchenlea with its seven bedrooms and three bathrooms was a ‘so-called house’, for Grant had regaled me that morning with news of the servants’ facilities: hot and cold taps and a snake with a rose on the end for rinsing one’s hair with jets of clean water.

‘Think what your hair could look like,’ she said, ‘rinsed in pure clean cold water.’

‘Cold?’ I said.

‘Good for the scalp,’ said Grant.

‘In fact…’ Hugh was walking about the hall with a very proprietorial air, a few steps this way and then a few steps that, looking up the stairwell and all but testing the floor under his feet with little stamps as though to see if it was sprung for dancing. ‘Well, we shall see.’

I could not pursue the hints because we were being borne down upon by a magnificent figure. She was quite six feet tall in her flat shoes and tremendously ill served as to ligne by her plain white dress, poor thing. On her head was a confection of starched linen, twisted and folded into a fantastical shape. (I only knew it had started as a linen square because I had seen the nurses in the convalescent home during the war constructing these sculpted enormities with my own eyes. They made them up seven at a time, deft and distracted, while smoking and laughing with their friends, and I had always thought they should do it out on the street corners for sixpences.)

‘Matron?’ I said, guessing.

‘Well,’ said the impressive individual, ‘I suppose so, but I don’t insist on it. Mrs Cronin will do nicely. And you must be the Gilvers.’

We admitted as much and before Mrs Cronin could do more than gather breath to begin her welcome, we were hallooed from above by a voice as loud as it was fruity.

‘Welcome one, welcome all. Welcome to Laidlaw’s House of Potions,’ it said, and then a trousered bottom appeared hanging over the banister rail and shot downwards towards us. The owner of voice and bottom jumped clear of the finial, garnering Teddy’s instant admiration (the dismount of a finialled banister is what separates the real daredevils from the pretenders), and bent himself double in a bow.

When he rose, it was with an extravagant gesture, flicking back his butter-coloured hair into perfect place. He smoothed it once with a hand, shot his cuff deftly and stepped forward to shake hands.

‘Thomas Laidlaw,’ he said. ‘How d’you do.’

‘How d’you do,’ said Hugh, baffled.

As was I. The banister trick and low bow were at one with the man’s costume: black tie before luncheon, like a conjuror. But the easy smile upon his sleek, pink face, his confident manner, almost over-confident for one who surely could not yet be thirty-five, and that fruity voice said otherwise. His greeting of me was impeccable too, a nod and a handshake in place of the kiss and smirk for which I had steeled myself. The boys shook hands and murmured their ‘sir’s and Laidlaw turned and presented his sister to me. I had not noticed her joining us; who would have while the brother whizzed down and vaulted clear?

‘Dorothea Laidlaw, Mrs Gilver,’ he said to me. The female half of the operation was not decked out in matching form, no evening gown nor spangles here. Instead she was dressed in rather plain tweeds and one of those very soft felt hats which look as though a limp lettuce leaf has been laid on one’s head and left to wilt there. She resembled her brother in the usual way – the same nose (a family nose is hard to escape; when bemoaning my inheritance of straight hair and sallow skin I try to be thankful that the Lestons do not have one), the same lean figure, although hers looked set to remain lean whereas his was softening, the same hazel eyes except that hers were wide and clear and gazed at one with an engaging frankness while his were crinkled up at the edges in merriment or mischief.

‘Shall we divide and conquer, Dot?’ he went on. I saw her wince and did not blame her. ‘Oops!’ he said, without any attempt to make it convincing. ‘We were Dot and Tot as children and these things do tend to stick, don’t they?’

‘Yes, Mrs Gilver,’ said Miss Laidlaw. ‘Let me show you around the hotel and-’

‘Tut, tut, Dorothea,’ her brother said. ‘Hotel? Laidlaw’s Hydropathic Establishment is not a hotel.’

‘-my brother can take care of the rest of the party,’ she went on, ignoring his interjection absolutely. ‘Is it too late for coffee? Let’s say coffee in the drawing room in twenty minutes then, Mrs Cronin, shall we?’ She had a pleasant voice and an easy way with herself and, as I followed her out of the grand entrance hall into a passageway, I was forced to smile at the thought which had popped unbidden into my mind: to wit, that she was a lady. I suppose it was possible, for some doctors are gentlemen and her father had been a proper doctor and not a mere salesman of patent cures and odd contraptions, but somehow one put hydropathists, or hydropathologists, or whatever they were called, into the same drawer as lay-preachers and prison visitors, nonconformists all and not likely to come from the highest tier, whose members are usually, for obvious reasons, quite content with the status quo. Perhaps her father had used his money to buy his children into society, but then what of the dinner jacket and black tie at half past eleven on a Monday morning? What of Tot altogether?

Miss Laidlaw was pointing out ‘treatment rooms’ on either side of the passageway and I peered into one or two to be polite. In each there was a bier or couch arrangement covered in snowy bath towels and a smaller handcart, two-tiered like an hotel pudding trolley, upon which bottles and jars were laid as though to hand for operations at whose nature I could not guess. In one room there were contraptions, equally unguessable, drawn up on either side of the couch and in another, sturdy lamps mounted on tripods were trained on the empty bed. It all looked rather gruesome.

‘You seem very well fitted-up,’ I said, withdrawing my head again. ‘It really is rather more than an hotel.’ Rotten of me to return to the unpleasant moment, but I was interested in any sort of trouble here at the Hydro, sibling quarrels and all.

Miss Laidlaw, in reply, trailed a hand along the dado rail of the corridor, a fancy in ceramic, which formed rolling green waves, one after another, like pin curls, stretching all the way to double glass doors at the end.

‘And rather less too,’ she said. ‘My father was a great deal more interested in the therapeutic side than in the question of bed and board. Tot was aghast when he saw the spartan state of the bedrooms. He was ready to give up before we even started. And I suppose, you do have to offer some comforts and entertainments as well as the actual… that’s very true.’ Then she gathered herself with a slight sniff and a rise of the chin. ‘Father would be entranced to see the modern improvements in electric heat particularly, but through here, it’s all as he envisioned it. Exactly as he laid it out.’ She opened one of the double doors and ushered me into Equatorial Africa.

It was the changing room for the Turkish and Russian baths, I discovered, a short corridor lined on both sides with cubicles, wooden shelves and lockers at the near end. At the far end was another doorway covered over by a curtain and there were no words for the heat which rolled out as we passed through.

‘Phew,’ I said, letting my fur slip down to my elbows.

‘This is the cool room,’ said Miss Laidlaw. ‘One hundred and twenty degrees.’

I sank down onto one of the beds arranged about the walls of the ‘cool’ room and looked around while I waited to become accustomed to it. The place was beautifully appointed: mosaic underfoot and colourful china tiles depicting Roman scenes on all the walls. At the far end, more of the heavy velvet curtains were drawn across a second doorway.

‘The warm room,’ said Miss Laidlaw. ‘One hundred and thirty-five. Let’s walk through quite quickly, since you’re dressed in outdoor things.’ She held one of the curtains aside and I followed her into the warm room, across it into the hot room – an unspeakable hundred and seventy – and across that, at a trot, but still sure my hair was dropping out of set and my face-powder caking, through the last set of velvet curtains and into the delicious coolth of a marble chamber like a little temple, with niches all around and beyond it, steps leading down into a long bathing pond surrounded by silk ferns and soft lamplight.

‘The plunging pool,’ said Miss Laidlaw. ‘Dip your wrists, Mrs Gilver, and you will be refreshed.’

I shrugged off my gloves, pushed back my sleeves and sitting on the lip of the pool reached my hands down into the water.

‘Oh!’ I could not help exclaiming. It was icy cold, as cold as the burn water in Perthshire. ‘Gosh, how do you keep it like this?’

‘It’s from the upper spring,’ said Miss Laidlaw. ‘It comes straight to us, beautifully cool.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I suppose it’s healthier freezing cold than warm, anyway. Dirt and all that, I mean.’

‘Dirt?’ said Miss Laidlaw, looking rather startled.

‘Not to say dirt, exactly. But don’t germs at least do rather better in warm water?’ I gabbled on, making it worse than ever. ‘And I’m sure you’re never done draining it and cleaning.’

Her face now was quite frozen, as well it might be at this blatant and clumsy meddling in her business. She said no more on the subject but only offered me a small towel to dry my hands and went on. ‘Through there is the Turkish bath or steam room.’ She indicated an etched glass door with a chromium handle. ‘And just here you see the beds for salt rubs and oil rubs.’ She had waved a hand back at the little temple and I thought to myself that she might call them beds but in fact they were marble slabs with water sprays looming above them. I felt quite sure too that it would be ‘cool’ spring water which would come spouting out of these sprays to finish one off after the pummelling.

‘Wonderful,’ I said, thanking God in His Heaven that I was well and needed none of it. ‘And do you advise the patients on how long to stay in and what have you?’

‘No, no,’ said Miss Laidlaw, ‘the Turkish and Russian baths are open to all our guests at their discretion.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘They’re… closed just now?’ I looked around the empty beds and still water.

‘Um, no,’ said Miss Laidlaw. ‘I expect everyone is having treatments.’ There was a pause while she and I both remembered the long passageway with empty treatment rooms on either side. ‘Or getting ready for luncheon.’

I gave her a bright smile and then, to help the moment pass away, I strolled over to a second door leading out of the spray-bath temple and put my hand on its chromium handle.

‘And what-?’ I began, but stopped as I met resistance.

‘We don’t use all the facilities any more,’ she said. She glanced at the door and her face clouded briefly. ‘There’s a great deal of research being done all the time on hydropathy and physiology. Some of the earlier treatments have been superseded by others. And to be honest, fresh air and exercise are a lot more use than some of the more…’

‘I see,’ I said. I noticed that as I let go of the handle and moved away, the little bit of tension which had hitched her shoulders up left her and she smiled again. ‘Do you have trouble persuading your regular guests to move with the times?’ I asked. I was inching my way towards Mrs Addie. She frowned politely, not understanding me. Perhaps I needed to inch a little more boldly. ‘I would imagine that any of your father’s patients who had always enjoyed “the old ways” would be hard to dissuade of their benefits.’

She threw another look at the locked door, her eyes showing a lot of white like those of a nervous horse.

‘People can grow very attached to ideas,’ she said quietly. Then with a valiant lift of her chin, she went on in quite a different tone. ‘So, these are the medical facilities. I’ll just take you up the ladies’ stair and show you the private rooms.’ She was off. ‘You’ll see the ladies’ drawing room when we rejoin the rest of your party. As well as that we have a gentlemen’s billiards room, a gentlemen’s smoking room, the winter gardens and the dining room. But we encourage all our guests to be outdoors all day if the weather is even slightly cooperative.’

She had galloped up a staircase as she spoke, with me puffing along behind her, still feeling the effects of the stultifying heat, and now we found ourselves on a bedroom corridor, with carpeted floor and satiny papered walls covered with pictures of roses and fat children in aprons.

‘I did a little redecorating,’ said Miss Laidlaw. ‘Not that that’s my particular… but as I said, my father… And I did so want to be able to keep it going after he died.’ She threw open a door.

I stepped forward to see what she meant and found myself in yet another world, far from carpets and watercolours. The walls, curtains and linens were blinding white, the floor stained almost black and the furniture – the high narrow bed, the bare dressing table, the small hanging cupboard and the inevitable towel-draped couch – were made of plain oak without the slightest adornment. It was a wonder Miss Laidlaw’s father had managed to find such stuff: the Victorians were not known for their love of clean lines and the kind of beds one could sweep under with a broad broom.

‘How delightful,’ I said. ‘And how amusing that what must have seemed very peculiar when your father chose it is now slap bang in the fashion.’ I told the truth about being amused; I was not, however, delighted for I am a Victorian – I have given up pretending otherwise – and to sleep in such a room would make me feel either as though I had taken the veil or had been found guilty and was serving it out in solitary confinement.

One thing which did strike me as we made our way down the main – shared, one assumes – staircase was that Hugh would love it. He prefers his quarters barrack-like and added to the fact that the billiards room was for gentlemen alone at the Hydro (and the smoking room too), and that the ladies could be hounded out into their own drawing room with glares and snubs, he would have been as happy as a sandboy here.

When we arrived in the drawing room, which was an unremarkable enough apartment, only a good deal larger than normal and with more pillows strewn in the chairs and chaises (one assumed for the comfort of rheumatic guests), Hugh, the boys and the other Laidlaw were already there. As well as, I was happy finally to see, a few other residents, perhaps as many as five – and this in a room which could hold fifty without it showing.

‘Dandy,’ said Hugh, rising. ‘I’ve made a decision.’ I managed to contain my amazement as he laid out the many sound reasons for it. ‘Right on the spot,’ he said. ‘And you’ll be much more comfortable too. And Laidlaw here tells me that he’s a great believer in port wine and stout as tools of convalescence.’ Laidlaw, looking more like a waiter than ever, gave a short bow and clicked his heels. I wondered if he had a medical excuse to serve whisky too, for Hugh could not survive an evening without at least one glass of the filthy stuff. ‘In fact, perhaps the boys could join me.’

I did not answer at once because, looking around following Hugh’s gesturing wave, my attention had been caught by one of the other few guests present in the drawing room. I could see nothing more than a pair of crossed ankles and a pair of brown brogues, the rest being hidden behind a Scotsman (held in a grip rather tighter than its customary editorial style could explain). But I knew those ankles well and recognised the easy way one was slung across the other.

‘Not the boys,’ I said. The Laidlaws took my pronouncement without any show of emotion beyond a faint smile on her part and a sentimental dip of the head on his. ‘Mother love’, his face seemed to say. And ‘typical female’ was what I took from hers. The boys themselves, with the perfect self-absorption of the young, accepted their parents’ clamouring for the honour of their company without turning a hair. It was Hugh who skewered me with one of his best looks. No chance of getting ‘mother love’ past him unexamined.

‘Let’s not discuss it now,’ he said, loath to pitch into a domestic dispute in public, although I foresaw that there would be no avoiding one in private later. ‘Now we three fellows all have medical examinations this afternoon, I believe? In the meantime, I think I’ll take a stroll down the path you mentioned, Laidlaw, and have a look at the river. Ash path, Dandy, perfectly dry underfoot, in case you’re worried. Donald? Teddy?’ They rose; a river, even one which could only offer a lowly trout, and that to three gentlemen without a rod amongst them, was still a draw. Hugh would inspect the banks and plantings, scrutinise the water for gravel clarity or peaty opacity, scramble down and tug out scraps of the very water weeds to determine whether and how well this river was managed and discover exactly how short its management fell of his own of the rivers at home. Donald would listen and offer thoughts about the rivers of Benachally. Teddy would throw pebbles and, if there was an overhanging tree-limb, might climb out along it and dangle there.

‘I shall see you at luncheon,’ I said, waving them off, and then wandered over to sink into an armchair beside the brogues and wait for the newspaper guard to be lowered. Alec gave me his most impish smile but did not mention the awkwardness.

The first thing he did say to me was as much a surprise as a disappointment.

‘Pretty clear why Ramsay got in on things then. Poor Dr Laidlaw couldn’t even sign the death certificate, much less get a fool like Addie to face simple facts head-on.’

‘Why couldn’t he?’ I said.

‘Blind prejudice,’ said Alec. ‘Although I’ve always wondered how prejudice can be blind if justice is too. Blind to different things perhaps? Funny sort of blindness, though.’

‘Alec,’ I said. ‘You’re wittering. Why couldn’t he?’

‘I’m musing,’ said Alec. ‘Perhaps even philosophising. I don’t, my dear Dandy, witter. She, by the way.’

‘Ahhh,’ I said. ‘Dr Dorothea Laidlaw. I see. I didn’t think that peculiar man looked much like one. What does he mean by such a get-up in the middle of the day?’

‘He hasn’t been to bed yet,’ Alec said. ‘The get-up’s left over from last evening.’

‘Why on earth-’ I began and then Alec’s bombshell, which had rolled across the carpet intact, burst at last. ‘Medical examinations!’ I said. ‘Dr Laidlaw’s going to examine Hugh? He’ll curl up and die!’

‘Only his chest,’ said Alec. ‘When I found out the doctor was a female I made sure my back trouble was in the shoulder blades – I had been tending towards the lumbar region; that’s where I always feel it after a day’s hunting – and only my shirt was disarranged. My trousers-’

‘He’ll die,’ I said.

‘-passed through the exam without a glance from her.’

‘The boys are used to Matron, but Hugh will climb out of the window and down a drainpipe to get away.’

‘Didn’t he have a Matron of his own in his day?’

‘A retired sergeant!’ I said. ‘Sergeant Black. Poor little boys of eight and suddenly only Sergeant Black instead of Mummy.’ We spent a moment thinking – I was anyway – what a lot that explained if you went in for such things and then got down, at long last, to business.

‘If Mr Addie’s mistrust of a lady doctor is all that’s afoot here,’ I said, ‘then you could melt away before Hugh sees you.’

‘Would that it were, would that I could,’ Alec said, sounding like someone translating Latin verb tables.

‘You said Dr Ramsay got wheeled on out of blind-’

‘Exactly!’ said Alec. ‘The Laidlaws must have thought the Addies would swallow his certificate with less of a gulp than they’d take to swallow hers. But don’t you see? They’d only care about having the death cert. spat out if they had something to hide. And they do have something to hide. I know it.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I got a strong whiff of something fishy during my tour with Miss- Dr Laidlaw. I couldn’t say what exactly. What about you?’

‘I couldn’t say what at all,’ Alec answered. ‘Not even a fishy whiff. I just…’

‘Hah!’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve had a hunch. After all the sneering you’ve done about hunches to me over the years.’

‘I don’t sneer, Dandy,’ Alec said. ‘I tease. And it’s not a hunch. It’s a proper hydropathic clue.’

‘Oh?’ I said, sitting forward. Of course, he had been here overnight and might well have uncovered something already. ‘What do you mean?’

Alec grinned. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘I feel it in me water.’

I told myself that they would have all sorts of salves and mechanicals here with which to treat bruises and so I kicked him.