Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone (21 page)

‘Does everyone sign?’ he said, looking up.

‘As can,’ said the keeper.

‘Only …’ Alec turned to me.

‘We’re interested in finding out if someone we know came up here while she was visiting the town,’ I said. ‘She insists she did, but I suspect her of sticking to the pump room and giving herself airs, you know.’

‘And her name’s no’ in there?’ asked the young man.

‘Can’t spot it,’ Alec said. ‘A Mrs Addie. Lady in her sixties. Edinburgh.’

‘When was this?’ said the young man.

‘A month ago,’ said Alec. The well-keeper was shaking his head.

‘I’d mind of an old lady all alone, no fae here,’ he said. ‘Sure and I would.’

‘You seem very certain,’ I said.

‘That’s why I’m here,’ he replied. ‘You’ll no ken Yellow Mary, eh no? Not being local.’

‘I think I might have heard of her,’ I said.

‘She was my granny,’ he said. ‘Fell in the well and drowned. That was when they started paying a well-keeper again.’

‘Why was she called Yellow Mary?’ I asked him.

‘When they drug her oot,’ he said. ‘Yellow and puffed up like a toadstool she was. I’ll never forget the sight of it. Days in this water’ll dae that to you.’

‘And when was this?’ I was calculating furiously. If he was thirty and remembered the day his grandmother died, the longest ago it could be was twenty-five years or so. I felt the cup of water shift inside me. I had assumed a ghost of long ago and to think that I had drunk water a woman had drowned in in my own lifetime was much more disgusting somehow.

‘A year past Christmas,’ he said. I rather thought even Alec blanched a little at
this
news. Certainly he shot a glance at the black well water and the mossy walls. It was only too easy to believe that some of this depthless vat had been there a year past Christmas, at least a cupful anyway.

‘Aye, it was terrible,’ the young man went on. ‘The Laird was dead against lanterns, up on the hills. Said it feart the birds, stopped them nesting. And so Granny was coming home in the dark and tripped and tumbled and in she went. And the Laird felt so bad, he built this new wee housie and in the summer when the visitors are here I’ve a job pays me better money as I would get at anything else I could manage.’

‘But isn’t it terribly dull?’ I said.

He smiled at that, a sudden bonny grin that made him look as young as Teddy, and beckoned us around the far end of the well house to where he had set up a little lean-to with an old armchair and a box for a table. There was a spirit lamp and a kettle, just keeping warm. And open on the chair was a volume of – I squinted – Walter Scott.

‘Beats workin’,’ he said, still grinning. ‘There’s four bairns in the house. I’m better off out here.’

‘Good for you, Mr …?’ I said.

‘Milne,’ he supplied.

‘And although I’m sorry to hear about Mrs Milne – was she your father’s mother?’ He nodded. ‘At least some good has come of it.’ I gave him another shilling, Alec gave a folded note of a denomination I could not see and we made our way back to the motorcar.

‘One down, two to go,’ I said, throwing it into reversing gear. ‘Golly, I never thought about turning when I drove up here.’ Bunty, who is always delighted when I am reversing, stuck her snout into the crook of my neck and poured out her love for me, in deep groans.

‘Of course, these settled places don’t refer to a married woman by her married name,’ Alec said. ‘Yellow Mary Milne could be Mary Patterson, as easy as anything.’

‘Yes, but if she died at Christmas-time then the mediums would hardly be gathering for an anniversary in October, would they? One down. Quite a remarkable young man, wasn’t he?’

‘Unfortunately not,’ said Alec. Then he laughed. ‘Except that he’s reading Walter Scott and no one’s making him,’ he said. ‘I’d rather brave the house and the four bairns. Fearful stuff. Right, then, Dandy. Where is the Devil’s Beef Tub?’

I had reached a gate and I swung back into it thankfully, emerging to drive the rest of the way facing forward. I wiped my neck with my handkerchief, told myself to remember not to dab my mouth with it, for no matter what Hugh says I am not silly when it comes to dogs and their germs.

‘Back through the town and out to the north past the Hydro,’ I said. ‘Keep going until you see the unquiet ghosts of a dozen murderous Reivers. Pity there won’t be a tub-keeper to tell us if they did for anyone in the last month or so.’

Long before we arrived at the Beef Tub, however, we had both decided it was out of the question. The librarian’s map had put it just beyond the northern edge of the town but we trundled along five miles or so, forging into the crease in the hills which would eventually become that blind, deep valley, and we knew there was no way a large lady of sixty who lived in a villa in the city could possibly have come so far.

‘And she made her journey down here on a train,’ I said, ‘so she can’t have driven. If she even knows how to. If she had hired a taxi or a dogcart then the driver would have been with her when she collapsed and we’d know it … There’s no way she could have got here.’

‘I agree,’ Alec said. ‘My God, what a dreary spot. It must get no sun at all from October to May.’

The track was worse with each yard, in fact was now more or less a rocky river bed, and I feared for the underside of my dear little Cowley. Nevertheless I kept driving. Not that Alec was wrong; great lumpen hills bare of trees, bare of gorse, bare even of bracken as far as I could tell, were closing in on us from both sides and all of the light had long disappeared behind the highest of them. As we took a turn to the west the valley narrowed yet further, and I could see what a wonderful spot it must have been for the Reivers, as snug as a key in a keyhole, hiding here.

‘I’ll turn at the end,’ I said. ‘Perhaps we can ask at the last farm or cottage, just to make sure.’

‘Ask what?’ said Alec.

‘Well, you might not like it,’ I said. ‘What I wanted to ask is if they heard a motorcar. Does Dr Laidlaw have a motorcar?’

‘I don’t know why you keep maligning my impartiality this way,’ Alec said. ‘Why wouldn’t I like it? And I’ve no idea, by the way.’

‘Only, I’m still bothered by the story that she “found” Mrs Addie. What if they saw the ghost together – Dr Laidlaw was very odd to me when I brought up the subject, you know – and what if she brought her back again to look for the lost bag?’

‘She would have returned the next day and found it,’ Alec said. ‘And sent it to the Addies.’ I felt myself deflate a bit.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing to ask even if we find someone of whom to ask it. Ah, at last.’ Up ahead there was a farmhouse and some buildings, surely the last steading. I reversed into the yard gateway and looked for a place to turn and suddenly it seemed that every door in the place had opened. A woman stood in one wiping her hands on a cloth. An old man came to the large doors of the byre and started towards us, a young man emerged from a shed halfway up the hill behind the steading and numerous children appeared from behind walls and under hedges. Even a sheepdog planted its front paws on the bars of a gate and stared.

‘No chance of drivers-by not being noticed here,’ I said. ‘I give in. Whatever ghost Mrs Addie saw it wasn’t one of the Johnstone Reivers.’

‘Let’s find a spot with a blink of sunshine and start in on that pie,’ Alec said. I heard again the echo of his voice, ‘not so bad once the rations started up again’, and bit my lip on the teasing I might have given him only yesterday, then I waved at the advancing farming folk and gave them a toot of my horn as I drove away.

Our hopes of sunshine – even a blink of it – were folly, but we drew off the road onto a grassy holm just as the valley opened out again and spread the mackintosh squares on a couple of boulders. The grass was nibbled close by sheep, the air was rich with the smell of peat and crushed heather gusting down from the hilltops and a nearby burn chuckled companionably along behind us. In my stout shoes, felt hat, fox fur and driving gloves, and with Bunty settled like a blanket over my feet, it was almost comfortable, but I would not care to have been there any later in the day or when October turned to November either and, although I ventured to remove a glove, I was happy to have a hot beaker of coffee to hold. Alec cut two hearty wedges out of the pigeon pie and handed one to me.

‘We should have brought the boys,’ I said. ‘They love eating like savages. They’d never sit in a dining room again if I didn’t make them.’

‘You’ll have to get to work on Donald,’ Alec said.

He was right; we had spared Donald London this last summer, for he was far too callow to enjoy it and far too raw to be any value, but by the coming May he would be nineteen. Still too raw and too callow, of course, but I had been rung up by more than one despairing mother of girls, telling me of the uneven numbers at her daughter’s dance and scolding me for keeping a young man like Donald away.

‘Lord,’ I said, ‘it seems ten minutes since Nanny had to check that he’d cleaned his nails and behind his ears before a party. I can’t imagine him bringing back a wife to Benachally. Or perhaps he’ll be another who refuses to rush into things. Like you.’

‘Let’s see if he wants to come up the Gallow Hill this afternoon with us to start with,’ Alec said, ignoring me. ‘Teddy too. Four pairs of eyes and all that. We can say you’re looking for something someone dropped this morning and happened to mention to you.’

‘He’d never make it,’ I said. ‘Unless this morning’s steam and mustard have had a marked effect on his lungs, anyway.’ I ate a bite of pie and drank some coffee, to be sure to get the tremor out of my voice. ‘So we’re pressing on, are we?’ I continued in a brighter tone.

‘Absolutely,’ Alec said. ‘I’ve been thinking that we should have gone straight for the Gallow Hill at the outset actually.’

‘Oh?’

‘As I said, Mary Milne could have been Mary Patterson for all we know. But the Johnstone Reivers would be Johnstones, wouldn’t they – so where would a Patterson come in to that?’

‘The throats they cut could have been Patterson throats,’ I said.

‘But they’d have been men’s throats, wouldn’t they? Not women and children and grandmammas. No – a crowd of twenty ghosts all together – a job lot, if you please – must surely be connected to the Gallow Hill. Where else would so many have met their end and hung around haunting?’

‘And whatever it was that Mary Patterson repented might well have got her hanged!’ I said. I squeezed my handful of pie a little too hard in my enthusiasm and the crust shattered. Mrs Tilling’s pastry is always very short; delicious, but dangerous to pale clothing. I heaved Bunty off my feet, stood up and wriggled until all the flakes had fallen off my skirt and onto the ground, where she ran them down and consumed them with snapping teeth and much licking.

‘I shan’t join you in your dance of joy just yet, Dandy,’ Alec said. ‘But if we find the bag, just try and stop me.’

‘Come on then. If I don’t move after Mrs Tilling’s pie I get drowsy. Let’s walk it off. We might even see the sun if we’re quick about it.’

The Gallow Hill was a gentle delight after the stern soaring faces of the Beef Tub fells and if it had been clothed in elms and oaks, and had a few pretty cottages around its base, it might almost have been at home in the Cotswolds. As it was, the cottages were grey and mean-looking and the trees were the spindly larches and lichened beeches which cling onto Scotch hillsides long after they have ceased to have any value in the landscape. Constable himself would have left them out and just painted the sky behind them.

We left the motorcar tucked safely into the side of the lane where it could come to no harm and Alec lifted the latch of the gate to a path and ushered me through. Immediately we were enveloped in silence, none of the noises of life from the town managing to penetrate the high walls of brambles and dog rose which closed around us, darkening and scenting the air with a sweet dampness. Ahead, the path led straight and only slightly upwards for twenty yards and then the hill rose and the path disappeared in a way that reminded me of yew mazes and of being lost and tear-stained as a tiny child.

‘I’m glad I don’t believe in ghosts,’ I said.

‘What’s the handbag made of?’ said Alec. He was already looking studiously at the ground on either side.

‘Oh, best brown leather, I have no doubt,’ I said. ‘Absolutely invisible in this leaf litter. I suppose we must just hope for a glint off the clasp or something. Or Bunty might sniff it out if there are peppermints.’

‘Wouldn’t any dog in the last month have done the same?’ Alec sounded troubled. ‘I suppose we
are
hoping for rather a lot, expecting it still to be here, aren’t we? Look for signs that Mrs Addie passed along. What size feet would you say?’

‘I can never take us seriously when we go all out for snapped twigs and footprints,’ I said. ‘Have we ever found a footprint, Alec dear?’

He ignored me and so I trained my attention towards the ground at my side of the path and kept walking.

I held out no great hopes; unless Mrs Addie had thrashed her way through the brambles with a stick, it was hard to see how she could have left the path. On the other hand, her bag, if dropped
on
the path, could surely not have lain a night there, never mind a month. And it was the same all the way to the top: a winding track, close growth on either side, a few tree roots underneath, a pleasant smell of earth and the odd wink of light where a branch had broken off and left a chink in the canopy. All in all, if one went in for country walks I could see that this was a charming one, but I could not help but feel that our quest was pointless.

Well, at least it was dry and not too cold and at its end was not a grouse drive and an endless tramp to the next one, but a view, a descent and a cup of tea. We were drawing near the summit now, the beeches and brambles growing sparser and the ground underfoot changing from leaves and dryish mud to blades and then tussocks of grass. At the top we found ourselves in a clearing of sorts, with a view through the treetops to the Hydro chimneys. I made a movement to step forward, but Alec put out an arm to stop me.