Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone

by Catriona McPherson

‘What do you mean when you talk that way?’ said Dorothea. ‘You sound dreadful. You’re frightening me.’

  This outburst was greeted with silence. I drew away a little to ease the crick that was developing in my neck, but Alec stayed glued to the panelling. Then, all of a sudden, his eyes flared. He mouthed, ‘Tot!’, grabbed my arm and dragged me around the nearest corner, less than a second, it seemed, before the door opened and closed.

  We waited with breath held and hearts hammering. If he came this way we would be undone.

  ‘Phew,’ I said at last, as the sound of his jaunty footsteps faded away in the other direction.

  ‘If people would only say “lovely chatting to you, see you at luncheon, goodbye, goodbye” at the ends of their conversations,’ Alec said, ‘listening at doors would be much less nerve-racking.’

  ‘So what was all that about?’ I asked.

  ‘Search me,’ Alec said. ‘I thought she wanted to keep going and he wanted to sell up and cut loose. In fact I know she did because she told me and then one of the rubbers told me too. But from what they were saying just now it sounds as though she’s for packing it in and he won’t hear of it.’

  ‘Yet,’ I said. ‘If he’s ready to sell what’s he waiting for? What bits of paper do you think he’s had her signing?’

  ‘He is a gambler,’ said Alec. ‘Perhaps he’s got the place mortgaged and he’s waiting to cash in his chips.’

  ‘Waiting for what?’ I said.

  ‘Well, the market to peak, I suppose,’ Alec said. ‘It’s tremendously exciting what’s happening in New York, Dandy. Did you read the newspaper yesterday? The busiest day on the stock exchange since its beginning. Hugh is going to kill you, you know.’

  ‘But then why would it matter whether the books were up to date?’ I said, ignoring the sideswipe. ‘For a mortgage. And why do you suppose Tot insists that every guest has treatments?’

  ‘Isn’t that Dr Laidlaw?’ Alec said.

  ‘No, I’m sure it’s Tot. One of the bright young things that’s really here for the casino was moaning about it. They’ve even got Grant signed up for galvanic baths, whatever they are.’

  ‘That can’t be related,’ Alec said.

  ‘And what do you suppose he meant by that nasty vague threat about the mediums?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve no idea, but I think we should get Grant safely away before it happens. Terrace or winter gardens?’ Alec said. ‘I need to speak to you.’

  ‘Depends if we need privacy,’ I said. ‘It’s such a lovely day the winter gardens will be deserted.’

  ‘Winter gardens it is,’ he agreed. ‘I’ve got the post-mortem report and I rather think privacy would be a good thing.’

  I would have preferred fresh air, not to say a stiff breeze, if I was to be the audience for a report on livers and kidneys and suchlike, but the terrace was at capacity, muffled figures rolled in blankets on every deckchair, making the most of the brightness even though there was precious little warmth to the sunshine this late in the year. We settled ourselves under one of the open roof-vents, but since the gardeners had been misting the orchids very recently it was a stuffy spot nonetheless, not to mention the faint residue of alcohol and tobacco smoke which I could not miss, now that I had seen all the drinking and carousing which went on in here.

  ‘Well?’ I said. ‘Poison?’

  ‘Not a one,’ Alec replied. ‘Not a trace, not a wisp of anything in any of her organs. Nothing.’

  ‘And her heart was healthy.’

  ‘Her heart was fine.’

  ‘So what did she die of?’

  ‘Dieting?’ said Alec. ‘I’m only half joking. The doctor said again in the report what he said at the graveside. She had nothing in her stomach at all. Or anywhere. She was empty.’

  ‘Well, those bladders and adjacent systems you spoke about often … empty out at the last,’ I said. ‘It never happens in the beautiful death scenes in plays but I learned as much in the convalescent home.’

  ‘As did I in the trenches,’ Alec said. He sat forward and stared at the floor. ‘I feel wretched for the Addies, you know. I persuaded them to dig the poor old girl up and there’s nothing to show for it except a hint that her last few days were a misery for a woman who so much enjoyed her food. I can’t even lay hands on her jewellery and send it back to them.’

  ‘Jewellery?’

  ‘Well, the watch.’

  ‘Jewellery,’ I said again.

  He looked up at me. ‘What is it, Dan?’

  ‘I’ve got it,’ I breathed.

  ‘Oh, at last,’ said Alec. ‘Go on then.’

  ‘It was something Regina said,’ I told him. ‘And I couldn’t remember what it was. I’ve been kicking myself that every time I talk to Regina I’m in a robe and turban without any of my things – my notebook and pencil – and I couldn’t write it down. But it’s not just that, you see. And then watching the librarian locking up yesterday made it even worse. I dreamed about it last night. And then I saw Grant sitting there this morning and she looked so out of place in her outdoor clothes.’

  ‘Well, what is it? Tell me,’ Alec said.

  ‘I know where Mrs Addie’s bag is,’ I said. ‘I never have my things when I speak to Regina because she takes away one’s clothes and folds them and she takes away one’s bag and jewellery and puts them in a sort of … it’s hard to describe but the clasp is very like the one I saw the librarian closing … then into a locked cupboard in return for a ribbon, with a key, which you wear round your wrist.’

  ‘And if Mrs Addie died – of untraceable poison? – in the mud room by the Turkish baths …’ Alec said.

  ‘Her clothes were folded in a neat bundle and could be produced a month later when someone thought of them,’ I said. ‘But her bag must have been locked away in a little pouch in a cupboard. Regina said guests sometimes leave things in there for weeks together, because it’s so secure. I’ll bet you anything you like it’s still there.’

  ‘But why didn’t they think of it?’ Alec said. ‘Whoever it was who killed her. Mrs Cronin, or Regina, or one of the Laidlaws.’

  ‘Definitely not Regina,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because,’ I said, ‘I think Regina probably noticed the clothes. She gave them to … Mrs Cronin, who gave them to Dr Laidlaw or Tot. But they couldn’t explain to the Addies why they weren’t with the rest of their mother’s things so they just hung on to them. Until we came along and they cut their losses. But if Regina had killed her she’d have remembered about the bag too.’

  ‘And why didn’t the real killer remember?’

  ‘Because no one else apart from Regina is as bound up with the question of keys and lockers and so it didn’t occur to them.’

  ‘But why didn’t anyone see the key? On the ribbon? On the corpse?’ Alec asked me, but even as he spoke the answer occurred to him and he groaned.

  ‘The ribbon came off the corpse when they heaved it out of the mud bath,’ I said. ‘If we really want Mrs Addie’s father’s watch back again we need to go to the apple house and start digging.’

  Clearly, it was my turn for a task such as this one, after Alec’s graveside duty the day before, and so it is testament to his character as nothing else could be that he insisted we both go. We took stout waxed gloves and scarves to tie over our faces and we made a silent agreement to forget the emptiness of poor Mrs Addie’s various bodily systems, or not to discuss it anyway.

  Besides, now that I knew that the smell was only more of the Moffat brimstone, along with a few traces of nothing worse than I had encountered during the war, it did not seem to smell quite as bad as it had before.

  ‘Shall we just shovel it out then?’ Alec said. As well as the opening in the top of the bath where one stepped in, there was a trapdoor in the back closed with a pin and sealed with some kind of putty and it looked as though most of the contents might run out quite readily if we got it open.

  ‘You shovel and I’ll go through the shovel
lings,’ I said, claiming the worst of the job for myself. Alec wrenched up the pin and removed it and immediately there was a cracking noise as the putty seal around the little door began to bulge.

  ‘I think you fit the pin in there to act as a handle,’ I said, pointing. Alec nodded and did so. Then he looked at me, pulled the scarf a little higher over his nose and yanked the door open.

  I stepped back, but it was not the volcanic flow of reeking slime I was expecting. Instead, inside the trapdoor was a wall of dried grey clay which hardly moved except for a few flakes falling off and crumbling as they hit the floor. Alec raised his shovel to strike at the block of clay, but I stopped him.

  ‘Wait!’ He froze with his hands above his head. ‘Look!’ I said. I bent in close to the opening, pointing at a crack in the mud. I took my glove off for this was careful work. I picked away at the crack for a minute and then rubbed hard with the pads of my finger and thumb. Where I had rubbed one could see the faint pink colour of a scrap of fabric, less than a quarter-inch across. It was the needle in our particular haystack: the end of the ribbon. I took the scarf away from my face and grinned up at him.

  ‘I declare this key found,’ I said, and pinching the fraying end hard between my nails I pulled, it gave, I pulled some more, I had three inches of it out now and I took a better hold. A firm tug and it was six inches. I wrapped it around my hand.

  ‘Stop!’ Alec cried.

  He was too late. I sat back with the whole length of unknotted ribbon in my hand and looked at the wall of mud somewhere inside of which the tiny key was still hiding.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ said Alec. ‘I always preferred knocking down sandcastles to building them.’ He raised the shovel high over his head again and brought it down cleanly into the middle of the clay.

  Never in all his childhood years of laying waste to castles on the Dorset beaches can he have wielded a shovel to such spectacular ends. The clay shattered and sent a cascade of dust and small cobbles, as hard as rock, all over the apple house, Alec and me. I did not even have a chance to shut my mouth in time and the taste of that eggy, murky powder, coating my teeth and lips and then turning slick as I tried to spit it out again will be with me always. Alec fared rather better. He was still wearing the scarf around his face, for one thing, and he was above the worst of it so that only dust, puffing up, reached his hair and clothes. I, on the other hand, had little flakes and lumps of clay in all the creases of my clothing. I stood up and shook myself like a dog. Alec started laughing.

  ‘Funny now,’ I said. ‘Until we both go down with cholera.’ At least, though, there was no point in daintily picking through the mess, since we could not get any filthier if we tried, so I pulled my gloves back on, shuddering at the way they scraped over the silt on my skin, and plunged both hands into the middle of the cascade, roughly where I thought the key must be.

  In retrospect, given that the key was about the size of a sixpence, knowing how long it can take to find a sixpence in a plum pudding, and allowing that the plum pudding in this case was larger than a whisky barrel, I should have been prepared for how long it took to find it. After another twenty minutes I was looking back ruefully at the moment I had believed we could not get filthier and was rehearsing a theory to put to Alec that the key was taken off the ribbon as the corpse broke the surface of the mud and that we were wasting our time, when suddenly I felt a hard little nub under my fingers. I grasped it and pressed it, expecting it to crumble like the many other little nubs which had fooled me as we crouched there. This time, my fingers felt something more unyielding than clay and I drew my hands out, noting the dust filling my turned-back cuffs, and held it up.

  ‘Oh thank God,’ Alec said. ‘Now where exactly are these lockers, Dan? Let’s go.’

  ‘In the ladies’ Turkish baths,’ I said. ‘We need to wait until night-time at least, if you actually come along at all. But that’s all right, because it will take us until then to get clean again.’

  Before we left we covered our tracks. We scraped most of the clay back inside the barrel and tried to fashion it into the shape it might have assumed if the pin had spontaneously snapped, the door burst open and the contents spilled all on their own. It was not, one had to say, very convincing, especially as we forgot to drop the pin on the floor underneath the spill.

  ‘We could dig a hole and bury it,’ I said, but Alec picked it up and threw it across the room instead.

  ‘I’m not digging another inch in that stuff,’ he said. ‘It shot clear when the thing burst open.’

  ‘Which it wouldn’t do as the mud dried, would it?’ I said. This thought had been troubling me. ‘It would get smaller and shrink.’

  ‘It settled against the door, Dandy,’ Alec said very darkly. ‘And that’s the end of it. Now how are we getting home?’

  The only possible thing, of course, was to go in my beloved little Cowley and we could not even ask for newspapers to cover the seats. Alec spread his handkerchief and I tried to hover as much as possible, hanging onto the steering wheel and not settling my whole weight onto the upholstery. I drove right around to the kitchen door at Auchenlea and Mrs Tilling and Pallister both came to see who it was.

  Mrs Tilling stepped back and put her apron over her nose, but Pallister, to his credit, closed the motorcar door behind me and took the whole disgusting spectacle in his stride.

  ‘I shall fetch a blanket for you to wrap around yourself, madam, while you proceed to your bathroom and then you can lay it down on the floor. If you would care to step into the scullery, Mr Osborne’ – Mrs Tilling rumbled – ‘that is to say, if you would care to step over to the stables, Mr Osborne, we can take a first pass at you there. I shall look out some of Master’s things for you.’

  When the blanket arrived, Mrs Tilling held it out to me at arm’s length as Pallister ushered Alec across the yard, putting his arm behind him without touching, the way a shepherd herds flighty sheep with an outstretched crook.

  ‘My goodness, madam,’ Mrs Tilling said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Just mud,’ I said. ‘Almost entirely mud.’

  ‘Miss Grant’s not here, you know.’ It might have been a warning that I would have to manage on my own, but I did not think so.

  ‘Thank heaven for small mercies,’ I said. ‘I haven’t been put over someone’s knee and spanked with a brush for years.’

  Mrs Tilling laughed and then buried her face in her apron again. ‘Don’t make me laugh, madam,’ she said. ‘It’s worse when you breathe it in deeply. Now, I’ll go and make a nice light luncheon for Mr Osborne and you, shall I?’

  ‘Anything but eggs,’ I said, then I kicked off my shoes, wound myself up in the blanket like a mummy and waddled off to my bathroom and the bliss of the hot water spray.

  15

  Apart from the oddness of Alec in Hugh’s clothes in Hugh’s seat at the table, luncheon was heaven. Simply to be clean and sweet-smelling was rather fine, but to feel for once that we were ahead of ourselves in this case, that we did not need to puzzle and wonder, but could wait for whatever the bag would tell us and talk in the meantime of other things, was a treat indeed. Donald and Teddy were better than I could have hoped for and since it had been their father who had plucked them away from the Hydro they were not, thankfully, complaining much to me. We were almost done before they mentioned it.

  ‘I must say,’ Donald announced, ‘that it’s always nice to know why. If it was the casino why not just say it was the casino and besides, we were always back here by the time it got going.’

  ‘Might have been the type it attracted,’ Teddy said. ‘Flappers and suchlike. What?’ he asked me, for I was staring at him.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Something about what you just … what was it?’

  ‘I don’t think it was that anyway,’ Donald said. ‘I think it was the mediums, actually.’ I had just swallowed a mouthful of cheese and was safe. Alec on the other hand inhaled an oatcake crumb and bega
n coughing determinedly.

  ‘Ugh,’ he said. ‘I can still taste it when I cough, Dan. You know about the mediums then, you two?’

  ‘You can hardly miss them,’ Teddy said. ‘And there’s something about lying in rows of deckchairs all staring the same way that makes people very careless about whispering. We heard about the Big Seance even though it was supposed to be the most tremendous secret.’

  ‘Well, the Big Seance passed off last night without a murmur,’ I said. ‘Grant was there. She stayed at the Hydro to attend it.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Mother,’ Donald said. ‘I mean, I’m sure there was a seance last night – was Miss Grant really there? Why? – because they have one every time the sun goes down instead of cocktails. But the Big Seance is something else again. And it’s not going to be at the Hydro, is it, Ted?’

  ‘Up the hill,’ said Teddy. He was spreading butter on an oatcake and then crumbling cheese on top of the butter.

  ‘Teddy, for heaven’s sake,’ I said. He sighed and scraped the whole mess off again.

  ‘Are you going to be in for lunch every day?’ he asked me. ‘Because I think I’m well enough for picnics as long as the weather holds.’

  So we had something to mull over after all during the afternoon, waiting for the time when we could slip into the ladies’ Turkish and search for the locker which matched the key.

  ‘I wonder if Grant will consent to attending the Big Seance Up the Hill,’ I said, lighting a cigarette. I could not help sniffing my fingers as I lifted the cigarette holder to my lips.

  ‘Do you?’ Alec said. ‘Not I. She’s a game girl, your Grant. She’ll be there.’

  ‘I wonder if they’ll check behind fallen logs for spies,’ I said. Bunty was standing in the doorway peering at me from under her brows with her head down. She had taken great offence to the smell I had brought home with me and had abandoned me for Mrs Tilling and the hope of pastry scraps in the kitchens but she looked almost ready to forgive me now.

  ‘What would you do if the ghosts really came?’ Alec said. ‘What if a spectral gallows appeared and the ghost of William Hare materialised hanging from it?’