Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘It doesn’t smell nearly as bad,’ I said. ‘I wonder why.’

  ‘Familiarity breeding the contempt out of us,’ Alec said.

  ‘I do know I’m probably being silly,’ I went on. ‘It’s sat there for over a month. There’s no reason to suppose it won’t sit there overnight until the police can come.’

  Alec nodded absently but he also reached the key down and turned it in the lock. He opened the door. I held my breath for a wave of stink which never came.

  ‘Your instincts are sound, Dandy,’ he said. ‘But your timing is terrible. It’s gone.’

  He struck a match and held it up and we looked together at the inside of the little room, empty except for an elderly apple crate or two. The floor was rather dusty, but for all ordinary purposes quite bare.

  ‘Someone’s onto us,’ I said. ‘Did Tot Laidlaw drum up that silly excuse to come to your room just so he could sniff you?’

  ‘Possibly, possibly,’ Alec said. ‘I wonder where they took it, whoever spirited it away.’

  ‘Back to the place it came from,’ I said. ‘To make us look like idiots when the police come.’

  ‘But who knew that we were getting close?’ Alec said.

  ‘Well, I was fairly outspoken to Mrs Cronin this morning. Good God, Alec, I said I was going to Dr Laidlaw to complain that patients were not taken care of. Was that it?’

  ‘Whatever it was, we can’t do any more here tonight,’ Alec said. ‘We can confirm one another’s stories if it comes to that anyway. Why on earth would we lie? And unless Mrs Tilling or Mr Pallister has been feeling very assiduous …’

  ‘Oh wonder of wonders! Of course. All the dust. No, I’m pretty sure they’re leaving our clothes tied up in sacks in the stables until Grant can cast her expert eye. And we have the ribbon and the key.’

  ‘So let’s get up the hill and behind our log before the crowd starts to gather,’ Alec said. ‘I suppose we had better walk all the way. Hugh’s Rolls-Royce pulled onto the verge would attract comment.’

  ‘And nothing would persuade me back into my poor little motorcar until Drysdale has had a go at it,’ I said. ‘We’re walking.’

  One would have thought we would be talking nineteen to the dozen as we tramped along the lanes and onto the dark path through the trees, but the prospect facing us had perhaps begun to needle Alec as it certainly had me. I do not believe in ghosts, not even a little, that one lurid episode under the trees notwithstanding, and I knew that the portents leading to this seance of seances were all dropped in by Grant at Hugh’s prompting and were counterfeit to their core. Except that the mediums and the murder had to be connected. It was simply too much of a coincidence for the Laidlaws to cover the tracks of a murder with talk of a ghost and then for mediums to gather from all the four corners with talk of more. No, it was perfectly clear: a man – a gentleman or professional man, a respectable sort anyway – had sent a letter to the mediums’ magazine right at the beginning and a gentleman had asked at the library for all the grisly details of Burke and Hare. It was Tot Laidlaw, it must be. Starting rumours and planting clues. To shore up the story of Mrs Addie’s death? But he had suppressed that story, got the doctor to all but lie on the death certificate, told her family nothing. Why would he hush it up and then turn around and start to shout it from the rooftops? Embellish it, even?

  ‘You’re blowing like a whale, Dandy,’ said Alec softly. ‘Shall I slow down?’

  ‘I’m thinking,’ I said. ‘I hope Tot Laidlaw has something planned for this jamboree and we catch him at it.’

  ‘You’re still sure it’s him then?’ Alec said.

  ‘More and more. But don’t ask me why. Or why he killed Mrs Addie.’

  ‘What sort of thing do you see him planning?’ Alec said.

  ‘Ghostly lights?’ I said. ‘Blowing in bottle tops to make spooky noises, I don’t know. But he did say he wouldn’t be at the casino much tonight. Maybe he’s up the hill already.’

  ‘We should stop speaking then, and tread very softly,’ Alec said.

  Accordingly, we crept up the rising path as quiet as two ghosts ourselves. It was possible that Tot Laidlaw was hiding behind one of the trees, I supposed, but the darkness was so complete and the silence so deep that I felt sure we were here alone. We reached the clearing and crossed it, picked our way through the trees and settled down behind the fallen trunk. No mackintosh squares today, but if Grant found the heart to complain about some earth on the knees of my stockings considering what was waiting bundled up for her in the stables I should take my scolding in honour of her dedication.

  ‘Have you ever been to a seance?’ Alec said, presently. I heard the familiar sound of him taking out his pipe and settling it in his mouth, even though he could not light it.

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I was present at one, if one wants to be precise about it, but only because it was held in my night nursery while I was sleeping there. My mother sacked the nurses, as you can well imagine.’

  ‘I can’t believe Nanny Whats-her-name would put up with such a thing,’ said Alec.

  ‘Palmer,’ I said. ‘She was at her sister’s in Norwich for a confinement. I slept through the whole thing – not least because the nurses put rum in my milk at bedtime. Ssh!’

  Very faintly in the distance we could hear the rustling of leaves and a sound like far-off bees humming. It was the same murmuring as before, only this time there were more of them; the tramp of feet sounded like an army battalion and the bees were an angry swarm long before we saw the first of the torches. They were proper flaming torches, soaked rags wound round long sticks, and my heart flipped and leapt like a fish at the sight of them. For flaming torches turn a crowd into a mob, and I was astonished to see what a crowd of mediums there was now. There had to be twenty of them, young and old, male and female, all walking in step and murmuring in time. And at the head of them was Grant in her grey dress and white neckpiece, her face a mask of pure terror in the light of the burning torch she carried wavering in her hands.

  ‘Oh Alec,’ I breathed. ‘She’s petrified. Let’s just go and stop this nonsense right now.’

  ‘She’s acting, Dan,’ said Alec. ‘Look at her now.’

  Grant had surged ahead of the rest of the procession so that none of the mediums could see her face, which had split into a grin. With the torch held under her chin it was quite the scariest thing I had ever seen. It was, however, swiftly outrun by what was to follow.

  16

  My detecting career has put me in the way of several experiences – scenes witnessed, persons met, tasks undertaken – which my parents, Nanny Palmer, Mademoiselle Toulemonde, and the staff of my finishing school never foresaw and for which they failed to equip me. None of it, not the bodies plummeting from heights with firm hands at their backs, not the circus midgets in their caravans, not the digging of graves in the moonlight, rattled me as thoroughly, sent as many goose pimples marching over my flesh like an army of ants and left me as waxen and trembling as the night of the Big Seance.

  It started quietly enough. The mediums stood in a circle all around the edge of the clearing, muttering their endless chant. Between the bodies of the two standing closest to Alec and me I could see that Grant was in the middle, with Loveday Merrick at her side. He thumped his cane on the ground and the muttering stopped.

  ‘Extinguish the torches,’ he commanded in that booming voice of his and the mediums clustered around a fire bucket someone must have brought up the hill. One by one they dipped the torches, setting off a sizzling loud enough in the quiet night to sound like the devil’s own firebrand, and sending a cloud of smoke up into the air. When the dowsed torches emerged from the water, however, they were still alight and within moments were burning as bright as ever again.

  ‘They’ve used sulphur and lime instead of tar,’ Alec whispered. ‘They’ll never get them out that way.’

  There was silence in the clearing except for sounds of blowing as some of the mediums tried and failed to
puff out the flaming rags as one would a birthday candle. I could feel a surge of laughter bubbling up inside me and I concentrated on containing it. After an awkward moment, one of the mediums piped up.

  ‘How do we do it, Loveday?’ Alec’s shoulders were shaking now too.

  ‘Roll them on the ground,’ he said. ‘And stamp on them.’

  The few men in the crowd did just that but most of the women dabbed uselessly at the grass with theirs and made little darting movements with their feet, and all in all it took a full five minutes before every last one of the torches was out. Even at that there was some ominous glowing and when a gust of wind swept across the clearing several of them reignited for a second time and had to be rolled and stamped on again.

  At last, though, there was darkness and silence and, with a few deep breaths, we quenched our threatened giggles. I could just about make out the white gleam of Grant’s neckpiece although my eyes watered and ached from the strain of looking. There came a muffled sound which I took to be Loveday’s cane again and then some movement I could not clearly see.

  ‘We are gathered here,’ said Merrick, sounding exactly like a minister at the start of a wedding, ‘on this twenty-sixth night of October in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-nine, one hundred years to the night since the black devil himself, William Hare, was sent to his eternal punishment. We come to honour the souls of his victims who became his avengers, to seek intercourse with them, to be the bearers of their messages from the world beyond to the world of the living. Most humbly we offer ourselves in service to them.’

  It was all I could do not to whisper ‘Amen’.

  Nothing happened for perhaps a minute. An owl hooted. Down in the town a door slammed, but up here on the hill all was quiet and still until the cane thumped again.

  ‘Be not afraid, gentle spirits,’ said Loveday’s voice. ‘We call upon you in peace and friendship to make yourselves known. We offer you this channel, pure and clean, and we beg you to come to us. Come down through the higher planes to our lowly sphere.’ He paused. ‘Speak!’ I am sure I was not the only one who jumped at the sudden bellow. ‘Speak, Jamie! We shall not mock you here. Speak, Mary! Your sins are forgiven here! Speak, thou poor blind child! You will be given an audience here with us tonight.’

  ‘What a load of complete tommyrot,’ Alec breathed in my ear.

  There was a low moaning out in the clearing.

  ‘I feel them, Loveday,’ said a voice. It was perhaps Mrs Molyneaux’s, but it was set so sepulchrally low and was so bursting with portent it was hard to say. ‘They are close, but they are frightened to appear.’

  ‘He’s here!’ The voice was a pure peal of sound, pitched as high as the cry of a newborn. It was Grant. There was a ripple of interest all around the ring of mediums then Grant spoke again in her everyday voice. ‘They’re scared, Mr Merrick, because the bad man’s here.’

  ‘William?’ said Merrick.

  ‘Aye, that’s me,’ said Grant, low and guttural now and completely terrifying.

  ‘Evil, evil, evil creature,’ said a female’s voice from somewhere to our left. ‘I can feel him. My skin’s crawling, my stomach’s heaving.’ She made a few half-hearted sick-noises but she did not have Grant’s talent for it and sounded more as though she were trying to keep from swallowing a fly.

  ‘Get away fro—’ said a voice which had not spoken before.

  ‘No!’ said Merrick. ‘William, if you can hear me. What is your full name?’

  Grant rumbled and groaned a bit and then spoke in the low voice again. This time we could all hear the rather chewed-up vowels of a strong Irish brogue about the words.

  ‘I am the ghost of William Burke, wrongly judged and wrongly hanged, I come to wreak revenge on them as left me.’

  Whispers of ‘Burke!’, ‘It’s Burke!’ went around the ring. Even Alec leaned in close to me and whispered: ‘Why did she go for Burke?’ I shrugged and shushed him. Grant was speaking again.

  ‘Twas him, twas all him and yet I hanged and not he. And her with her nagging and goading me on and I hanged and not she. And so I shall be with him always and I’ll haunt him and harry his soul to the end of days.’

  ‘William!’ said Merrick. His voice was set for a parade ground, a bark of sound. ‘William, you were wronged. Four of you did the deed and one of you paid the price. You were wronged. But the others …’

  ‘Give not thy soul unto a woman,’ said Burke’s voice. ‘Faithless and treacherous creatures, tricking us and blinding us to goodness with their wiles.’

  ‘Typical,’ I muttered.

  ‘Mr Merrick?’ Grant was speaking for herself now. ‘Why don’t I take William away? If he’s gone perhaps the others will come.’

  Sensation! The mediums broke into such a storm of chatter that I could not hear a single word. At length, however, Mrs Scott’s voice rose clear of the others.

  ‘Are you telling us that you are a drawer as well as a channel?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know what you’d call it,’ said Grant, faltering very convincingly. ‘This curse of mine … I try not to think of it and never speak of it. But I … There was this room in a house in the village when I was a child. No one would go in and so I went and found out what the trouble was and I took the poor spirit out and down to the river and …’

  ‘And what, girl?’ said Merrick. He sounded as though he were smiling.

  ‘I sent her away,’ said Grant.

  Sensation upon sensation! This time I did pick out a word from the crowd, because they were all repeating the same one. It appeared that Grant was not only a medium, a channel and a drawer. She was a quencher too.

  ‘If you’re sure, Miss Grant,’ said Mr Merrick.

  ‘He doesn’t belong here,’ Grant said. She raised her voice. ‘William Burke, William Burke, I command you to follow me.’ The white of her neckpiece disappeared as she turned around and I could not see or hear her walk away.

  ‘Where will she go?’ Alec said.

  ‘Home for a bath and cocoa if she’s got any sense,’ I answered. ‘At least I hope so. Because we can’t follow her to make sure she’s all right, can we?’

  It took a moment for the seance to get under way again after Grant’s spectacular exit, but in time muttering resumed and swaying too. The mediums, holding hands around the circle like a giant game of ring-a-roses, began to get into the swing of things.

  ‘I see a child,’ said a piping voice. Olivia Gooseberry, I thought. ‘Come, child. Oh, oh, he’s leading an old woman by the hand. And he’s not blind! He can see. Let me listen.’ There was a long silence. ‘Yes, yes, he can see!’

  ‘I hear him,’ said a nearby voice. ‘Oh, there he is. Oh bonny, beautiful boy! So happy.’ Beside me, Alec groaned quietly. I turned and smiled at the look of disgust on his face. Then I frowned.

  ‘Is it my imagination or is it getting lighter?’ I breathed. I turned back to the circle. It was definitely lighter now. I could see their linked hands and I could see light reflected on the pink faces of the ones at the far side.

  ‘The clouds must be lifting,’ Alec said. But to me it looked like the light of dawn. How long had we been here? It must surely not even be two o’clock in the morning yet and while Scotland in June is a great trial one can at least be sure of a good night’s sleep in the darkness by the end of October. I shrank down further behind the log, feeling my shoes sinking into the earth but not caring. If I could see the mediums, then they could see me.

  ‘Mary, Mary,’ one of them was saying. ‘Oh, how beautiful you look. See how her hair shines and see the cross around her neck!’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ Alec muttered.

  ‘I see her,’ said another. ‘And Lizzie and Peggy too.’

  ‘Ahhhhhh,’ said Loveday Merrick. There was instant silence. ‘Davey Riley. And Josephine Riley too. How wonderful to meet you both at last. And who is that with you? Mrs Ritchie! Welcome, dear lady.’

  ‘It’s the last three with no names,’ someone said. �
�Oh Loveday, you are wonderful. Mr and Mrs Riley and Mrs Ritchie, we welcome your spirits and offer ourselves to serve you.’

  ‘There they are!’ said Mrs Molyneaux. ‘Oh, there they are, holding hands. Oh welcome, welcome, dear friends.’

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ said Mr Merrick, suddenly turning and directing his gaze to a woman and man at the right side of the clearing. They had not joined in the greeting. I could see them – it was lighter than ever – shuffle their feet and look at the ground.

  ‘I haven’t heard a thing, Mr Merrick,’ said the female half of the pair. ‘I haven’t been chosen.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said the man. ‘I’ve not pleased the spirits tonight.’

  ‘Mrs Riley has a message for her grandchild,’ came a cry from opposite. Mr Merrick swung round.

  ‘Ah, well done,’ he said. ‘You are a true and faithful servant …?’

  ‘Anne Tasker,’ said the woman, sounding thrilled.

  ‘And what is the message, Anne Tasker?’ he said. Then he turned our way, looking past us towards the Hydro. ‘What …?’

  ‘That light’s beginning to get quite—’ Alec said. He turned and at the same moment so did I and together, in the warm glow of the sky to the west of us, we saw a tiny orange fleck rise up from behind the trees of the Hydro grounds and wisp off into the dark. A second later, before we could move, footsteps came pounding back into the clearing. It was Grant.

  ‘Fire,’ she shouted, rushing back into the middle of the clearing and pointing. ‘There’s a fire! Look behind yourselves! Can’t you see?’

  ‘It’s the Hydro!’ I shouted, standing up and scrambling through the trees for a better view, all thoughts of secrecy gone. Alec was at my side and I could hear footsteps as some of the mediums came behind us. Ahead, glowing between the tree trunks, the light grew brighter and now we could smell it too, the sweet pleasant smell of smoke on a chilly night. I plunged onward and at last could feel the slope steepening under my feet. I crashed on, down another few feet, through the brambles, snagged my coat on a branch, struggled and then shrugged out of it. Alec caught my arm.