I sighed. My accomplishments were over for the day then: I am pitifully incapable of finding my way around strange houses. Outside, if the sun is shining and it is not noon at the equator, I can navigate as well as anyone else who was taught geography along with her letters and numbers as a child. It is not much help in Perthshire, where the admittedly long hours of daylight in the short months of summer are usually filled with driving rain, but at least the capacity is there if the conditions allow. Inside houses it is another matter and I have been given lewd winks more than once before now because I was wandering a corridor at a house party where I had no reason to be.
I did not even try to form a plan in my head of the Hydro interior today. Instead, I used a mental version of the unravelling jersey method. Back on the main corridor I went along muttering ‘left, left, left’ to myself until I found a staircase. I went up to the ground floor and walked along the corridor I found there saying ‘right, right, right’. At the end I emerged into a corner of the dining room. I crossed it and the hall and emerged from the front door, walked round to the dining-room window, kept walking saying ‘left, left, left’ which took me to the corner of the lawn and then, still saying ‘right, right, right’, I fought my way through the dense shrubbery which screened off the servants’ area from the lawns below the terrace where, for the first time in my life, I was pleased to have to brush cobwebs from my face.
Here there were dusty windows a plenty. I peered in at them, seeing the same tennis nets, bicycles and toboggans I had seen before. I passed a garden door, moved on, and saw deckchairs and luggage. I had seen all of these things from the corridor. Where was the room behind the locked one at the end of the offshoot?
And then it struck me. That short offshoot of corridor led to the outside wall. That door didn’t open onto a room. It opened onto this path and the grey light I had seen was filtering through these rhododendrons. I had just brushed away the very strings of cobweb I had seen through the keyhole. I went back and looked at the mossy bricks and, right enough, there were faint but unmistakable scratches there. Darkened now after a few weeks in the weather, but still clear. And the moss had been ripped out too and lay shrivelling.
I followed the path, navigating by the scraped bricks, until I came to a break in the shrubs. The path carried on but led only to the laundry yard and back into the house again. Through the gap in the rhododendrons, however, was the side lawn, rather neglected – no clock golf or croquet here – and shaded by spreading cedars. Was it my imagination, I wondered, or were there faint depressions in the grass? It was not the gardeners’ pride, this unused patch of lawn, being rather spongy with more of the moss and rather sparse under the cedars where the long needles had fallen and never been raked away, and I was almost sure that I could see the traces of two wheels – a sack barrow, perhaps – which had crossed it recently. I set off in pursuit of them.
Halfway over I began to fear that the traces were my imagination, nothing more. They disappeared completely for yards at a time and when I fancied I saw them again they were fainter than ever. I had almost given up when, under the massiest of the cedars in the densest shade, I saw a patch about six feet long where the brittle needles had snapped and sprung up at either end: a clear and undeniable imprint of two wheels, not my imagination at all. I skirted them carefully and then stood beyond them gazing ahead at where they could have been going.
I was near the edge of the grounds now and could see portions of the high grey garden wall between the trees and bushes which bordered them. Then, behind some sort of apple or cherry tree, its leaves just beginning to yellow, I saw what I had not realised I was looking for but realised now that I must have been: the smooth, rounded shape of a ridge tile. There was a roof over there, and where there is a roof there is a building below it and where there is a building there is somewhere to wheel a heavy object and try to hide it. I glanced about me but this was a desolate spot, away from the terrace and the sunshine, so I picked up my pace and made for the shadows.
It must have been an apple house at some time, I thought as I drew near. A tiny little place – a howf, as they call them in Perthshire – windowless but with slatted openings near the top, built against the wall. I rattled the door handle but of course it was locked. Even if it was not usually kept locked it would have been locked for the last month or so. For the signs were unmistakable here. There were snapped twigs and turned earth and a smear of mud on the lintel of the little door, and I rather thought the object had been badly handled in because the door paint was scraped too and the wood showed fresh and white underneath it. The flakes of paint were still scattered on the slab of sandstone set into the ground for a doorstep.
If only Alec were here. He could grab onto that branch and pull himself up. He could put a foot on the lintel and step over, holding onto the roof, and from there he could squint down through those slats and see what was in there.
I imagined the whole climb in my head, seeing Alec shinning up and shouting down. I imagined asking Hugh to do it for me. Would he be spurred to a second boyhood by the thought that Osborne was not beyond such antics, or would this be more of my silliness at which he would simply lift an eyebrow and turn away? Donald was far too frail still but what about Teddy? Thus finally, I shamed myself into action. My poor sickly sons were not to go climbing trees just because their mother was a ninny. I took off my gloves and laid my hands purposefully against the strongest-looking joint between the trunk and a branch.
‘Heave-ho!’ I said and set my foot against the bark to start scrambling.
I weighed considerably more than I did the last time I climbed a tree and my shoulders were aching when I had got myself up high enough to step over and stand on the door lintel. It looked much further away than it had when viewed from below, but I knew from jumping over burns that distances are deceptive when there is a six-foot drop or rushing cold water and probably I would step over the gap between branch and lintel without a thought if it was a gap between carpet and hearthrug, avoiding nothing more than a cold stone floor. I let go with one hand and stretched one leg over, feeling for a toehold. Something shifted, my foot slipped. For a minute I was hanging by one hand from the tree and then I got both feet back onto the crook of the branch, wrapped both arms tightly round the trunk and stayed there with my heart hammering. I looked down at what had fallen from above the door. Not a stone, not mortar, as I had first thought. I would have laughed if I had not been still so close to crying. It was a key.
When I retell the story of my discovery in the apple house, it is hard to decide what to suppress and what report. On the one hand, I am rather proud of the way I rubbed my hands together and climbed a tree – I do not judge the moments when I contemplated asking my son to take a deep breath through his pleurisy and do it for me as worth sharing – but on the other hand I wish I had thought to feel above the door for a key before I tore my stocking and scraped my cheek on the bark.
Besides, the end of the incident does overshadow whatever one would choose to tell of its beginning.
I found the courage to slither down from my perch in not many more minutes, with a locked door and a key to tempt me. The lock was stiff and the key rusty – I rather thought that whoever had recently opened the door had brought a second key with him and did not know about this one; certainly there had been no oiling for some time. I had to use both hands to get it to turn but, at length, turn it did and I opened the apple-house door with held breath and thumping blood.
It was there! Three feet square by four feet tall, made of wood like a barrel and just sitting there. Not at all, I saw, the new-fangled and dangerous equipment I had counted on finding. I breathed out and it was when I breathed in again, the first time with the door open, that the smell got to me. I retched and stumbled backwards with my hands over my face. That smell! It is conventional to say that an unpleasant odour hits one, but this did so much more. It entered me, it filled my nose and my lungs and my mouth, it made my eyes water, it got among th
e strands of my hair and the fibres of my clothes and I knew immediately that it would be many days before it left me, if it ever did. I feared immediately that I would dream of this smell as long as I lived.
I could not have entered the little apple house if my life hung from my doing so, but I stayed there with my arm over my face, breathing the smell through the wool of my coat, and tried to look again at what I had found instead of some harmful – fatal! – machinery. It was a crate, a container. I had been looking for clues about what had killed Mrs Addie. I had not found them. Instead – I could not deny it – I had found Mrs Addie herself.
I scrabbled at the door, got it closed, got it locked and put the key back where I had found it. Then I tottered away to rest against another of the gnarled old trees and stood staring.
No one had smelled it because of the slats. Designed to draw all humidity away from the apples and stop them rotting, they had carried the stink of putrefaction up into the air and let it drift away. It was the perfect place to hide a body.
All I now had to decide was whether to telephone to the police right away or speak to Alec, and ask him what he thought the Addies would want to do. I stood up from where I had been slumping against the tree as though my sergeant-major had summoned me to attention. Alec was in Edinburgh engineering the exhumation of Mrs Addie’s body from its Morningside grave. It made no sense at all for me to think that I had found her body in that odd square barrel here in Moffat. If the woman really had been laid out by Regina and carried by an undertaker to her funeral at home then how could she be mouldering so revoltingly in there?
She could not. But then what was it in there?
I have had the experience, not often but each time has been memorable, of vertigo washing over me like a wave. In the early months when the babies were coming I came close to swooning many times. I have been assailed by tidal waves of nausea once or twice too. And recently, since I started detecting, I have undergone great sweeping storms of dread when something I knew deep down was clamouring to be brought into the front of my mind and dealt with there. This was the first time, however, I had ever felt what I was feeling now. An enormous, unstoppable rush of absolute terror, engulfing me entirely and leaving me weak and helpless as it passed.
And all of a sudden, the ghosts were not a nonsense, the mediums not a joke, Loveday Merrick not a charlatan, and Mrs Addie not just a well-loved and much-missed old lady who might have been wronged.
All of a sudden, standing there, everything seemed to skew just a little from what I thought I knew about the world around me and I could feel them all: Effie and Lizzie and Mary and their sins and killers, the ghosts and echoes and whispers, the other world reaching out, pleading, to this one.
Mrs Addie was in her grave in Edinburgh, or near it anyway in mid-exhumation, possibly. In that little apple house, not frail and wispy, not floating in a shift, not a wraith at all, but hulking, stinking and evil, was her ghost.
I stumbled out from the shrubs onto the lawn and made my shaking way around to the terrace steps, desperate to be safely with other people and far away from that crawling madness that threatened to worm its way through me if I stayed there. Hugh hailed me as I passed. He was in his deckchair again.
‘You all right, Dandy?’ he said. ‘You look peaky.’
There was no one in the world who could have done more to bring me back to earth. ‘I found something rather unpleasant in the shrubbery,’ I managed to say. ‘A dead thing. I almost stumbled over it and it’s sickened me.’ Hugh was torn between disappointment at this poor showing and that smugness which even the best of men sometimes display in the face of feminine weakness. ‘Smell,’ I said, holding out my sleeve. He took a deep sniff at the wool of my coat to show what stern stuff he was made of and then wrinkled his nose.
‘Faint hint of something,’ he said. ‘Nothing like that stag that time.’ It was true; the smell of the crate in the apple house had been quite different from the stag which had ruined a delightful picnic one day when the boys were tiny (although only because they had to be spanked and taken home when they would not stop poking it).
‘I’ll see you for tea,’ I said faintly and made my way to the telephone kiosk to speak to Alec who I hoped would have more sympathy for me than to cap my horrors with memories of his own.
I had quite forgotten what story Alec would have to tell me or I would not have rung him at all.
Mrs Bowie was not at her brother’s house and Mr Addie was lying down. I looked at my watch – half past twelve: a very odd time for a nap and my first indication that matters had moved swiftly. Mr Osborne was still here, the maid said, and she would fetch him.
‘Hello, Dandy,’ Alec said, sounding rather flattened. ‘I’m coming back to Moffat on the 2.40. Do you really want to hear this now?’
‘I really do,’ I said. ‘And the first thing I want to hear is this: did either Mr Addie or Mrs Bowie see their mother’s body when it was brought home for the funeral?’
‘Not only then,’ said Alec. ‘But poor Mr Addie had to see it this morning too. When they dug it up again. He managed to hold on to his insides, which is more than can be said for the whole of the party, but he’s taken himself off to bed now and I’d be surprised if he’s seen again today.’
‘Poor man,’ I said. ‘It was definitely her then?’
‘Apparently so,’ Alec said. ‘I wouldn’t have liked to be on oath that what we saw in that coffin was the woman in the picture—’
‘You were there?’
‘I was there,’ Alec said. ‘I thought it was the least I could do to stand beside poor Addie since it was me egging him on. I was one of the ones who couldn’t contain himself, I’m afraid. A very poor show.’
‘And is it too soon to know anything?’
‘It’s too soon to know some things,’ Alec said, ‘but did you know that the doctor doing the exhuming just starts in on it right there? He started looking for poisons right away.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing doing,’ Alec said. ‘Because of the stomach contents.’ He swallowed audibly. ‘If you can get a good jugful of stomach contents, then graveside poison tests are easy.’
‘And what was wrong with them?’
‘There were none,’ Alec said. ‘She was empty. Nothing in her stomach, nothing in her bladder or … other areas with similar function nearby. So he’s had to go back to his laboratory to look in her liver and kidneys for arsenic and at her blood for strychnine. Cyanide turns one bright pink – did you know? – so it wasn’t that anyway.’
‘And no other obvious sign of something that could have killed her?’ I asked.
‘None,’ Alec said. ‘No marks of violence. The only thing he ventured – and it’s not much I can tell you – is that she was dehydrated.’
‘What does that mean?’ I asked.
‘She hadn’t drunk anything. It sounds as if this grated carrot diet Dorothea had her on was a pretty tough regime.’ I was interested to note that having to look at a month-old corpse had put Alec into an acerbic mood which did not even sweeten for Dr Laidlaw.
‘Well, I shall be very glad to see you back here again,’ I said. ‘I desperately need to talk to you but only if you promise not to laugh at me.’
‘I’m not finished with my report yet,’ he said. ‘I saved the best bit.’
‘Go on.’
‘Whatever the doctor turns up in his laboratory, he knows already it wasn’t a heart attack,’ said Alec. ‘He had a good look at Mrs Addie’s heart this morning as he removed it – so did I, as a matter of fact. It didn’t reveal much to me but the pathologist said there was nothing wrong with it.’
‘Good grief,’ I said. ‘So … did he telephone to the police? Are they coming to arrest the Laidlaws? And Dr Ramsay?’
‘Not a bit of it,’ Alec said. ‘Apparently it’s not unusual. And Dr Ramsay’s certificate said “heart failure following suspected heart attack”. There’s nothing so far to say that wasn’t a perfectly fair concl
usion.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘That’s what he said to me. Everyone dies of heart failure in the end.’
‘I came close to it myself this morning when I looked at Mrs Addie’s face,’ Alec said. At least he was almost laughing. ‘Now your turn, Dan. God, I’ve only just stopped feeling sick, you know. You’re a tonic, dearie.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, and then hesitated. How could I add my morning’s nightmares to his own? And besides, now that I had got away from the place I was beginning to doubt the truth of it, hoping that if I hugged the horrid facts to myself they might go away. ‘And look – never mind my stuff just now. You catch your train and we can discuss it later.’
‘All right,’ Alec said. ‘Was it Grant who turned it up for you?’
I laughed. ‘Oh, Grant!’ I said. ‘Grant was wonderful. She thought up the perfect thing to say to be taken right into the mediums’ bosom. She’s having a whale of a time. All news later, darling, hm? Safe journey.’
I went back to Auchenlea then, missing the Hydro luncheon and looking forward to pot luck from Mrs Tilling. She was beginning to settle into this novelty of a ‘holiday’ but even taking things very easy she is still rather marvellous and there were no such horrors as shop bread or tinned soup coming into the dining room. She had dispensed with savouries and it was true that she had asked me only that morning if I would prefer salmon or lamb for dinner when, at Gilverton with Hugh of course, there would be the one and then the other. Besides, I could not possibly stay for the Hydro’s midday feast because I was crawling all over with an itch to be rid of the clothes which had soaked up the smell and I needed to rub my hair with a lavender cloth at least, if not stand under the spray bath and wash it.
Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone Page 23
