Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘I’d be glad to have something to tell the Addies,’ I said. ‘Even if I had to forfeit our fee to excuse the nonsense.’ I clicked my fingers and Bunty took another couple of steps towards me. Rather a nerve to be so princess and pea-ish when one considered what she rolled in on walks if I did not manage to stop her. ‘That’s a thought though, Alec, isn’t it? How exactly were fifteen – or even seventeen – ghosts supposed to lay their hands on enough good timber and nails to make a gallows? How would they hold the hammer? That seems rather a weak point in the argument, if you ask me.’

  ‘Oh, that seems weak,’ Alec said, laughing. ‘If they persuaded a living carpenter to take the job you’d think all questions were answered then?’

  ‘I suppose they could have scared William Hare to death the way they’re supposed to have scared Mrs Addie. But how would they have buried the body? I’m doing it again.’

  ‘Speaking of bending workmen to your will,’ Alec said, ‘how goes Gilverton?’

  I shook my head. The last time I had spoken to Gilchrist he had talked vaguely of one of the houses being finished and looking very good but when I asked if it was Gilverton or Benachally which was ready he had somehow managed not to answer.

  ‘And Hugh hasn’t been in touch with his American broker?’

  ‘I don’t think he’s given it a thought,’ I answered. ‘I’m not sure he’s even looking at the newspaper now. Why?’

  ‘Oh, rumblings,’ Alec said. ‘I’ve sold this and that actually.’

  ‘At last!’ I said as Bunty crossed the final few feet of carpet and put her head on my lap. ‘Good girl. I’m sorry about that nasty smell. Who’s a good old girl then?’

  ‘I miss Millie,’ Alec said. ‘I’d have brought her and left her here if I’d thought Hugh would be in on it. I really do hope we get this thing solved and off our hands soon, Dandy.’

  ‘A rough draft of a blackmail letter in Mrs Addie’s handbag would be good,’ I said. ‘And then the police would have the trouble of finding out how it was done.’

  ‘Or an empty poison phial marked “untraceable”,’ Alec said. ‘And then the police could try to find out why.’

  ‘Fingers crossed,’ I said. ‘We’ll know soon enough.’

  He waited for me in his room, in the end, judging it too risky to be found in the ladies’ Turkish after hours, so it was I alone who slipped in and, with an ear cocked for anyone else who might be skulking where she had no business to be, flitted along the cubicle corridor to the little square room at the end where the lockers were. The clothes shelves were open – Mrs Addie’s things could never have languished a month there – but there were two rows of little cubby holes with doors and locks running along above them. My key, Mrs Addie’s key, was number twenty-three and I struck a match and peered at the brass numbers on the little doors. It was only a minute before I had the door open and was reaching for the familiar lead-and-velvet boxing glove. I grabbed it, locked the door, dropped the key in my pocket and fled to Alec’s room, praying that none of the Hydro staff would see me.

  None did. I was only seen by one person the whole of the way. He was standing at a landing window on the second floor looking out into the night. It was Loveday Merrick, without his entourage for once, just standing there staring out at the Gallow Hill, all alone.

  ‘Mrs Gilver,’ he said, touching his temple with his finger. ‘We meet again. I in the calm before my storm, you in the thick of yours.’

  ‘Good evening, Mr Merrick,’ I said and scuttled past him. I repeated it word for word to Alec but he was just as stumped as me.

  ‘Never mind him, anyway,’ he said. ‘Did you get it?’ He locked the door behind me as I opened my coat and let the lead-lined bag fall onto his bed.

  ‘Of course I did,’ I said. ‘I don’t generally walk around clutching my middle like that. Now, since you missed out on fetching it, you are to open it up. I insist. You have had the short end of every stick so far. Time for a lollipop instead.’

  Alec gladly took the key from me and opened the clasp. He wrenched the hinge open and peered inside.

  ‘One very small brown bag, good quality but mended in the handles,’ he said. ‘At last. And inside …’ He fumbled a little with the fastening, being unused to opening women’s handbags, I presume, but got there in the end. ‘Inside, for example but without prejudice to the generality: Father’s watch.’ He sprang the casing and tipped the watch itself forward. ‘Complete with lock of hair.’ He delved back into the bag again. ‘And a bundle of precious letters, tied up as you prophesied, Dandy, with ribbon.’

  ‘I think I prophesied red ribbon though,’ I said, ‘and this is blue.’

  ‘Sherlock Holmes would be ashamed of you,’ Alec said. ‘Now, let’s see. What else is in here? Oh, my word! Is it? It is. This might be something useful.’

  He held up a small, narrow black book, with gilt edges to its pages and a pencil with a tassel fitted down its spine. It was a diary.

  ‘In which I very much hope Mrs Enid Addie wrote down all her suspicions about the individual who had threatened to do her harm,’ Alec said.

  ‘Oh, you’re in favour of women scribbling lots of silly notes now, are you?’ I said. Alec was riffling through it, squinting. ‘Can’t you read her writing?’ I guessed. ‘Oh well then. I suppose you’d better give it to me.’

  It was not the prize for which I had been hoping. Mrs Addie was a woman of orderly mind who used her diary to record appointments and anniversaries and to remind herself to pay bills. The only longer items than these were Bible passages, entered each Monday as she turned over a new page, anything from ‘A faithful friend is the medicine of life’ to ‘Better a dinner of herbs’ which was hard to take from a woman of her size.

  ‘Hmph, nothing on the last day,’ said Alec, looking over my shoulder. I had gone quickly, of course, to September and the clues I hoped to find there and it was troubling indeed to see the blank pages after all the luncheons and dinners and meetings at clubs. She had jotted down her daughter’s birthday in December. ‘Lace?’ she had written, and had marked the day of her Ladies’ Circle Christmas entertainment in good time too. ‘King’s Theatre!’ she had written, but nothing could have spoken more eloquently of a life snuffed out than the way the pencilled notes got to September the eighth and then all but stopped.

  ‘I wonder why she didn’t put in the Bible passage on the last Monday,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe she did it in the evening,’ Alec said. ‘And she was dead by then.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘If you’re going to write something in your diary every week when you turn over the fresh page, you’d do it on Monday morning when you sat down at your writing table to prepare for what was coming.’

  ‘Well, perhaps it was because she was away from home,’ Alec said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said. I continued turning the pages. ‘Look here though. In June she was at a friend’s in Inverness. Look, all week. But she still filled in her passage. “The eternal God is thy refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms.” Doesn’t seem as though she expected to enjoy the visit much if she needed that to comfort her. And look again in February. She was in the sleeper train coming back from London. “And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them the way” etc, etc. Oh Alec, look at this one! “Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.” For the week of the church jumble sale. It’s priceless. I like Mrs Addie more and more.’

  Alec was nodding. ‘You’re right, Dan. She’d have loved to have thought up a good passage to go along with a spell in the Hydro. Something with a bit of anointing, perhaps. Or even “Physician, heal thyself” at a pinch.’

  ‘So why didn’t she do it?’

  ‘Maybe … if she died of natural causes,’ Alec said. ‘If we’re wrong about murder and misadventure and it was all perfectly innocent … maybe she was already feeling rotten on Monday morning, which is why she didn’t eat or drink anything, and she felt too bad to pore ove
r a Bible. They’ve always got such tiny print. If it was a sick headache …’

  I had already had one beam of sunshine and choir of angels in this case. As Alec spoke, the beam of sunshine returned and threatened to blind me. The choir thundered and bellowed until I was deafened too.

  ‘I know how she died,’ I said. ‘I know what killed her. And, Alec, it’s beastly.’

  Alec started up with a jolt. ‘I got some brandy sent up,’ he said. ‘Only I forgot to offer you one with all the excitement of the bag. Have one now, Dan. You’ve gone an awfully funny colour.’ When he had given me a large glassful and I had taken two sips I felt rather better again and I laid out my revelation.

  ‘She didn’t write in the diary on Monday morning because she was in the mud bath,’ I said. ‘She went in the mud bath on Sunday. She even said it to Mrs Bowie on the telephone. She was ringing off because she was going for her bath. And I thought she meant a bath with ducks and bubbles. But everything is a bath here. Hot lamps and salt is bath. Faradaic rays is a bath. She went in her bath on Sunday evening. And by Monday evening she was dead. Dehydrated, empty, starved and thirsty, and finally dead.

  ‘And the point of planting toffees in her bag wasn’t to make us think she’d been out – not particularly – it was to make us think she had been around at all on the Monday when the shops are open and had some sort of ordinary day.’

  ‘Dear God, Dandy,’ Alec said. ‘I’m very sorry to say I think you’re right.’

  ‘What a horrible, wicked way to kill someone. What a wicked, wicked thing to do. And to this woman.’ I waved the diary at him. ‘A woman who helps out at jumble sales and buys lace for her daughter. A woman who makes daring little jests with Bible passages that no one except herself will ever see. How could anyone have done that to her?’ Alec refilled my glass even though it was hardly started. I think he had to do something.

  ‘We will avenge her,’ he said. ‘At least whoever it was isn’t going to get away with it, eh?’

  I took another swallow – one really could not call it a sip – and nodded.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Just all of a sudden …’

  ‘I know,’ said Alec. ‘So. Who was it?’

  ‘We agree that it wasn’t Regina?’ I said. ‘She’d never have left the bag in the locker if she had known Mrs Addie died in the mud room.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Alec. ‘And not the doctor. Apart from the fact that she is a doctor, she’s too upset about it. Horrified. I mean if you murder someone you don’t go and weep in the room where you did it, do you?’

  ‘One might want to,’ I said, ‘but one would probably resist, it’s true. But why would Tot kill a blameless Edinburgh matron like Mrs Addie? I can imagine him doing someone down for monetary gain. I can imagine him shoving a girl off a cliff if she had got her hooks into him. But why would he pick one of the Hydro guests and kill her?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Alec. ‘Mrs Cronin?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, nodding slowly. ‘There’s something about Mrs Cronin. Something about whether it was Sunday or Monday or …’

  ‘She doesn’t approve of treatments on Sunday,’ Alec said. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘So it couldn’t have been her, you mean? But could someone plan a murder but not want to do it on the Sabbath day? That’s an odd conjunction of sin and piety, surely.’

  ‘And besides,’ Alec said, ‘Mrs Addie had been coming to the Hydro for years. Why would Mrs Cronin suddenly kill her now?’

  ‘Tot, then,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe. Mrs Addie could have found out about the casino and threatened him.’

  ‘But how could Tot get a woman like Mrs Addie – any woman really – into a mud bath? She’d shriek the place down.’

  ‘Well, it had to be someone who could get in and out of that mud room,’ said Alec. ‘Someone with a key.’

  ‘Only if she died in the bath before it left the mud room,’ I said. ‘What if she was waylaid in the grounds and dragged off to the apple house and killed there? What if the bath had already been moved by the time Mrs Addie died in it? It could have been anyone in that case. It could have been a wandering maniac.’

  ‘But the Laidlaws covered it up and got Regina to wash her and got Dr Ramsay to sign a certificate,’ Alec said. ‘Why would they do that if she had been murdered by a wandering lunatic?’

  ‘To save the reputation of the Hydro while continuing to run a casino that destroys it? I don’t understand their feelings about the Hydro at all. Dot wants to run it and Tot wants to sell. Then Tot wants to keep it and Dot wants to sell. What changed? And now they seem to be in agreement that their time here is almost done, but they’re still arguing as much as ever.’

  ‘I think the moment has arrived,’ Alec said, ‘to hand all of this over to the police. We’ve got plenty of evidence now. If I telephone to the Edinburgh pathologist tomorrow and tell him about the mud bath he’ll be on to the Fiscal like a bullet. He hated having to conclude “natural causes”, you know, but there was nothing else he could do.’

  ‘All right then,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow we hand it all over. To the Edinburgh Fiscal, via the pathologist. Agreed. Just one thing I want to do tonight, though. I’ve got a padlock on my spare wheel. I’d like to go and padlock up the apple house. Just in case. Just to be on the safe side.’

  Alec stood and held out a hand to me, smiling with great affection – perhaps I still looked ghastly – and then jumped clear into the air at the sound of a knock on his door.

  ‘Who is it?’ Alec said, opening the door just a little.

  ‘Ah, Mr Osborne,’ said the oily, chuckling voice. ‘Good, good. We’re missing you downstairs, you know. The poker table’s not the same without you and I knew you weren’t away on another of your mysterious jaunts tonight again. Just wanted to make sure you weren’t asleep. Make sure you were coming.’

  ‘I’m not sure, Laidlaw,’ Alec said. ‘I’m rather tired this evening.’

  I saw a quick movement as Laidlaw darted to the side to see past Alec into the room. I do not think he saw me; it was just a flash of the side of his head that I caught before Alec pulled the door to.

  ‘Not going to bed, are you?’ Laidlaw said, with another burbling chuckle in his voice. ‘What a waste of an evening that is! Come on down, old chap, and I’ll stand you a round. I shan’t be there myself tonight – well, off and on, you know – but I just wanted to see that everything’s shipshape. Come on down, eh?’

  ‘I’ll see,’ Alec said. ‘I’ll sit and read awhile and then I’ll see.’

  ‘Ha-ha-ha,’ said Laidlaw. ‘Yes, nothing like a spot of “reading”.’ Even able to see only a slice of his shoulder, still I knew he was winking. Alec was flushed dark when he closed the door and turned to me.

  ‘Odious creature,’ he said.

  ‘Have you been losing lots of money?’ I said. ‘Why is he so desperate for you to be there?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Alec. ‘And there’s something up with him tonight. He was doing his act, but the strain was showi—’ He was interrupted by a second knock at the door, this one very different from the first: timid and soft.

  ‘And now Dorothea!’ I said. But I was wrong. When Alec opened the door a crack this time he said a startled hello, then swung it wide and pulled Grant inside.

  ‘Oh, sir!’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry to—’ Then she saw me. ‘Oh, thank goodness you’re here, madam. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘What is it, Grant?’ I said. ‘Alec, give her a brandy.’ Grant took the glass and swallowed a goodly measure without so much as blinking.

  ‘It’s tonight, madam,’ she said. ‘The anniversary. The centennial. That Loveday Merrick has decided it’s tonight and it’s all my fault!’

  ‘The Big Seance?’ I said. ‘How is it your fault? They’ve been talking about it since before you got here. Donald and Teddy overheard about it days ago.’

  ‘But I gave them the last name,’ Grant said. ‘Mr Gilver told me another one – Mrs Ostler �
�� and I said she’d come to me and that’s it. Fifteen of them. Joseph the Miller, Old Abigail Simpson, Mary Patterson, Big Effie, the grandmother, the blind child, Ann Dougal, the Haldane sisters, Marjorie Docherty, Daft Jamie, one man nobody knows, two nameless women and now Mrs Ostler and that’s the lot.’

  ‘You’ve been doing your homework,’ I said.

  ‘It was the master,’ said Grant. ‘He told me all about it and made me learn the names.’ I could believe it too. ‘And now they want me to go up the Gallow Hill with them and be the channel!’

  ‘You could always say that a sixteenth has been in touch,’ Alec said. ‘And then wait around for the seventeenth who never shows up.’

  ‘Mr Merrick doesn’t think the last two are coming,’ Grant said. ‘He reckons if corpses who’d never been buried right made ghosts …’ She flushed, darted a glance at Alec and then looked away again. I did not follow her but he seemed to.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘No one would get a night’s sleep in Flanders, eh?’

  ‘That makes sense,’ I said. ‘It’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard out of any of them. How would you feel about going if you knew Mr Osborne and I were nearby, Grant?’

  ‘Nearby where?’ she said.

  ‘In the trees, in earshot,’ Alec said. ‘Hiding behind a fallen log on the far side of the clearing. And if you start to worry then just say a word … pick a word, Dandy.’

  ‘Resurrection,’ I said.

  ‘A word that wouldn’t happen to come up any other way,’ Alec said patiently.

  ‘Oh. Yes, I see. Mohair.’

  ‘Perfect,’ said Alec. ‘If you feel frightened, Grant, or just want to stop, say “mohair”, loud and clear, and we’ll swoop in and get you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Grant said. ‘That’s a great comfort, sir. Can we make it cashmere, please?’

  The Big Seance, as I could not help calling it to myself, was set for midnight – of course – and so Alec and I had plenty of time to unfasten the padlock from my spare wheel and make our careful way over the dark lawns to the apple house. The key was where we had left it above the lintel and I had remembered correctly that there was a hasp set into the edge of the door.