Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone (11 page)

‘A friend who used to come here. Before she died.’ Dr Laidlaw considered this, as one would consider a rattlesnake in one’s bed with one.

‘Can you give me any idea as to what ails your sons?’ she said, in a wavering voice, as I stood and brushed the dust from my coat. ‘So I know what to bring, you know. I don’t travel with a Gladstone bag every day like Dr Ramsay.’

‘Pleurisy and pneumonia after flu,’ I said. ‘Nothing serious like weak hearts or anything. In fact, let’s not pander to them with a house call after all. What was I thinking? I, like you, Dr Laidlaw, believe in fresh air and exercise. And yes, it
was
Dr Ramsay. How did you know?’

The putty had faded to chalk, leaving her lips blue – rather prettily bowed lips, dimpling in at the corners; I had not noticed them before, unpainted as they were – and her eyes dark and enormous, with purple smudges around them. I felt a familiar thrill as I let myself out and made my way to the front hall to meet the others. It was becoming clearer and clearer that the Addies were not imagining things. Their dear dead mother had been wronged in some way, I was sure of it, and we would avenge her.

Naturally, Hugh and the boys were nowhere to be seen when I got there, Hugh’s stringent punctuality being reserved for beaters, chauffeurs, ministers of the kirk and fellow officers, not for the likes of me. Whenever he saunters in late to some rendezvous we have arranged, he looks at his watch and says, ‘Good, good. Let’s make an early start then since you’re here in nice time,’ as though I have come up to scratch for once in a blue moon and surprised him. Today I was glad of it, because an opportune meeting came my way. There was an inopportune one first, though.

As I waited, installed in one of those throne-like chairs with which hallways come equipped, seat-cushions stuffed with something which gives them that stodgy and unyielding consistency, like fudge, I was far from delighted to hear whistling and see a silhouette sauntering towards me along the passageway with its hands in its trouser pockets. Thomas Laidlaw; I could not take to the man.

‘Well, well, well,’ he said, when he reached me. He took his hands out of his pockets but only to rub them together as though with vast relish of unknown source, hardly more civil than if he had left them there. ‘Off already, Mrs Gilver?’

‘For the evening, Mr Laidlaw,’ I said. ‘In the morning I shall return.’

‘Once the sun is safely up, eh?’ he said, giving me a solemn look. ‘I think you’ll have to summon more courage than that, Mrs Gilver, if your trip’s not to be a wasted one.’

I stared and summoned, not courage, but my haughtiest voice and my most disdainful expression.

‘I do not have the pleasure of understanding you, Mr Laidlaw,’ I said. ‘You speak in riddles.’

‘Can I ask who recommended us to you?’ he said. ‘A family who hails from Perthshire needn’t by any means come as far as Moffat to a hydro.’ They were almost the words Mrs Cronin had spoken to me. ‘Any particular reason we took your fancy?’

‘Your sister – such a scholar – has no equal in Crieff,’ I said and I was intrigued to see him lift his chin up and away to the side to give me a narrow look from the corner of his eye. He reminded me of an archer sighting prey along his drawn bow. Then, at a sound from outside on the drive, he spun around on the balls of his feet to face the door.

‘Reinforcements,’ he said. ‘Who do you suppose this will be?’

It was only to be expected that the owner of such a large hotel in such a dull spot would be charmed by arriving guests, but I found myself paying more attention than Nanny Palmer would have called polite as the door opened and the newcomers entered. I was agog to see if these would be more of the solid but sickly bourgeoisie I took to be the doctor’s lot or more of the vacuous crew I had filed under her brother’s name.

I had momentarily forgotten my overhearings, but as soon as I saw the little caravan which hove through the baronial doors of the Hydro with bags and boxes aplenty as though planning to stay for a month I thought to myself: Aha! Class 3. For if Mrs Scott, Mrs Davies and Mrs Riddle – those odd, earnest ladies in the steam room – had had clothes on I was sure the clothes would be these.

They were five in number, two men and three women all somewhere in the sixties or beyond. The men were dressed with outlandish – one might almost say Dickensian – extravagance in their tall hats, velvet facings, satin pipings and brocade upon any garment that brocade could applied to. I could not help but conclude they must be sorry that old-fashioned garb could only, at its farthest stretch, take them back that far, and that cut-away tailcoats and neck cloths of white silk would have been out-and-out fancy dress and would have brought the whistle to a constable’s lips if he had seen them.

The women were even more extraordinary. To be sure, one was of a sort to be seen in village streets throughout the land, only not often in the lobbies of large hotels. She had stuck with the fashions of her youth throughout the fifty years since its passing and was therefore dressed in skirts which trailed the ground with a lace cap over her white hair. She had on a travelling cape of wool with a red flannel lining and a red-silk-lined hood, and if she had held out an apple and invited me to take a bite of it I might not have run, but I would certainly have broken into a trot in the opposite direction.

The younger companion at her side, most solicitously offering her arm and helping the old woman up the stone steps from the vestibule to the lobby proper, was another sort entirely. Her hair, brownish-grey and wiry with it, was drawn straight back from her forehead and hung down almost to her waist. Her dress, of a greyish-brown one might imagine had been chosen to match her hair, except that no one would look so grimly drab on purpose, hung straight from her shoulders to her calves, like a sack, and the overcoat on top was of a navy serge I had not seen since the last time a troupe of Girl Guides had chosen an inclement day to storm the park at Gilverton and huddle around their campfires until the charabanc returned to fetch them home again.

The final member of the coven was comparatively unremarkable set against the rest: hair of a somewhat suspicious bright brown given the wrinkles which striped her forehead and fanned from the corners of her eyes, and an outfit of military cut, the jacket well served with pockets and the skirt reminiscent of a lady’s riding costume with its clever deep pleats and moleskin touches. She took off her hat, threw her gloves into it and looked around for a servant who would take it away. Tot Laidlaw obliged, rushing forward and bowing to them all, but looking at them very hard all the while.

At that interesting moment Hugh arrived, with the boys in tow, just in time to see me gawking at strangers like a guttersnipe. I think I may even have had my mouth open, and he let the spirit of Nanny Palmer live in the glare he gave me.

‘We got tired of waiting for you on the terrace,’ he said with astounding cheek. ‘Thought we’d try here. Good, good. Let’s be off then.’ As an apology for lateness it failed on every count but I saved my breath, simply rolling my eyes and standing to follow him. He held the door open for me – what manners were drummed in by his own nanny and the subsequent schoolmasters are unshakeable – and I swept out, managing to pick up a mention of ‘late booking’ and ‘lucky cancellation’ on my way past the new arrivals.

I had expected to need a long quiet evening to creep my way towards the fact of Alec, his presence in the Hydro, the coincidence of our arrival there and the thorny question of whether I had dragged my loved ones into a case or an assignation, but we were still on the drive heading back to the road when Hugh broached it himself.

‘You didn’t know Osborne was headed here, did you, Dandy?’

‘Oh, yes, that’s right, Mummy,’ said Teddy. ‘We saw him again. I told you he got off the train.’

‘I did not,’ I said. ‘Is he really here then? At the Hydro? What fun.’

‘Bit odd,’ said Donald. ‘Why didn’t he tell you?’ Hugh was not exactly watching carefully but he was far from looking out of the window.

‘He told me about the Hydro,’ I said. ‘It was his praise of the place that put me in mind to come here. But when he said he was going away, I somehow got the idea that it was London.’

‘Hope he doesn’t mind you rolling up,’ said Hugh. He gave me that same amused look as before.

‘I’m sure he doesn’t mind any of us “rolling up”,’ I said. ‘Why should he? Unless you think he left Perthshire to escape us.’

At this Teddy snorted. It was an ugly noise, with a good deal of the after-effects of flu about it, and both Hugh and I frowned.

‘Sorry,’ Teddy said. ‘Just, well. Gilver and Osborne. In that order, Mummy. Sort of makes you Mr Osborne’s boss. And he’s skipped off on a spree and now his boss has come along and caught him.’

‘I’m not Mr Osborne’s “boss”, Teddy,’ I said. ‘What a nasty, slangy word.’

‘What other word
is
there for it?’ asked Teddy, with a fair to middling innocent look, not the full-force cherub he sometimes employs, but a lot of round blue eye and round pink mouth nonetheless for a boy of sixteen. ‘I’m simply calling a spade a spade.’

‘Superior officer,’ said Hugh. In Hugh’s world, there was only one job his boys could ever conceivably do, and that was how to describe the men under whom they would do it.

‘I am glad to say I have never seen a spade,’ said Donald in a trilling voice, making us all giggle, except Hugh, naturally.

‘What?’

‘Oscar Wilde,’ I told him. ‘Cecily.’

‘
Gwendolen
,’ said both boys.

Hugh was so disgusted that his children – not to mention his wife – could quote from this oeuvre that he said nothing, just drove the car steadily along the lane and swung it down the hill towards the town.

‘He’s got a point, mind you,’ said Donald, although whether he meant Teddy or Oscar was unclear. ‘You have dragged us down, Mother, where Teddy needs words like “boss” to describe the world around him.’

‘There is nothing more vulgar than a snob, Donald dear,’ I shot back.

‘Good grief,’ said Hugh. It is almost his strongest epithet and we all quieted on hearing it. ‘I wouldn’t blame Osborne if his heart
did
sink to see you as large as life at his journey’s end. What nonsense you speak, all three of you.’

‘Hugh,’ I said. ‘Alec Osborne is a dear friend who can speak nonsense like a drunken parrot. If he came to the Hydro I am sure it was because he is feeling a little under the weather and needs a pick-me-up – the same as you. I have no more intention of interrupting his treatment than I have yours.’

Hugh raised an eyebrow and one side of his mouth.

‘He looked perfectly healthy to me,’ he said.

‘Perhaps he’s here to woo a Moffat maiden,’ said Donald. ‘Just as you said, Mother.’

‘Best not get in the way of that then,’ Teddy said.

‘I doubt it,’ said Hugh. His air of mystery was becoming too irritating to bear. ‘It’s possible, but I doubt it.’

At that moment, when all three of them were making me want to spank them with a slipper, I spied, out of the motorcar window, distraction and diversion.

‘Pull over, please, Hugh,’ I said. ‘I’ve just remembered an errand. I’ll make my own way back to the house from here.’

‘Sure?’ said Hugh, chivalry spilling out of him again as it does when he is not concentrating. ‘It’s no trouble for us to park and wait. Help you carry things.’

‘Quite sure,’ I said. ‘Don’t hold tea. If you happen to see Grant—’

‘Gosh, yes, Mummy, we’ll give her warning,’ Teddy said. Donald laughed and even Hugh smiled as they pulled away. I tugged down hard on my hat, hoping to hide as much of the trouble as I could, and made my way to where I had seen the police lamp.

I have no fondness for police stations any more – not since I was required to sit alone in a small room inside one, friendless and anxious, for hours on end while a nasty piece of work of an inspector pretended to suspect me of murder – and although my chin was high and my shoulders back as I marched in, my heart let the side down miserably, thumping away like a trapped rabbit in my chest. I hoped my voice would be steady, but I did not count on it.

‘I should like to speak to a sergeant or inspector if there is one,’ I asked of the child at the desk. He was surely only just tall enough to make a policeman at all, and was as smooth of cheek as Teddy even this late in the day.

‘Certainly, madam,’ he said, as meek as a lamb. ‘Who can I tell the sergeant it is, please? The inspector is in Dumfries and won’t be back round here until Friday.’

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Mrs Gilver of Perthshire.’ I had decided that a private detective might raise hackles and be kept waiting but a woman of my sort, started on the path towards being a dowager, although thankfully far from its end, would elicit exactly this forelock-tugging and prompt service.

It was only minutes later then that I was shown into a shabby but comfortable office, lamps and rugs and cushions in the chairs to soften the municipal green distemper and brown paint, and introduced to a uniformed sergeant who rose from behind the desk and held out a hand to greet me.

‘Sergeant Simpson, Mrs Gilver,’ he said, sitting down again as I settled myself. ‘What can I do for you? I trust you’ve come to no harm on your visit here, have you?’

‘Thank you, Sergeant, no. I am quite well. I have a little matter to discuss with you. A matter of protocol, I suppose you would say. A point of procedure.’

‘I’m all ears,’ said Sergeant Simpson. I smiled at him and had to work not to do more than smile; this was unfortunately true and the red mark around his head where his cap must sit when he was out patrolling the streets of the town only drew attention to it. He smiled back, in on the joke, and I decided I liked him.

‘If there were a death …’ I said and his smile snapped off. ‘I don’t know if you’d say a sudden death or a suspicious death, but one where the Fiscal was involved before it was all sorted out and the body returned for burying …’ I drew breath. ‘What I’d like to know is, would the matter pass through the hands of the police on its way?’

‘Which case is this you’re referring to, madam?’ said Sergeant Simpson, seeing through my ruse right away. He even drew out a small notebook and snapped it open on itself with a terrific crack of its India-rubber band.