Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone

by Catriona McPherson

  The cane toppled, the great man crumpled, the companions rushed forward and stopped him from falling. Behind our log Alec and I turned flabbergasted faces to each other. I started to whisper but Alec held a finger to his lips. Out in the clearing, Mr Merrick had recovered. He picked up his cane, swept his hair back into some kind of order and took a flask out of his inside pocket. After a good swig from it, he spoke in what passed for his normal voice again. Still rather grand but not absolutely set to part the clouds and bring God’s ear to the opening.

  ‘Now then, my dear friends, what did I say?’

  There was a clamour of voices, shouting the names. Loveday Merrick counted them off on his fingers. Hastily scrabbling in my bag for a slip of paper and a stub of pencil, I jotted them down too, as best I could.

  ‘Ten,’ he announced at last when he was finished counting. ‘Ten of them. This is inarguable evidence, my dear friends. This will set the world on its ears. And those who have laughed will be humbled and those who have scorned will be filled with awe.’ He looked around at the upturned faces and clasped hands all about him. ‘Now, let’s go back to the Hydro for a nice cup of tea.’

  Alec spluttered, the inevitable consequence of holding one’s breath and then suddenly laughing.

  ‘What was that?’ It was the gooseberry-eyed girl. She turned those pale green orbs towards the log where we were hiding and all the others followed, swivelling and craning and making me feel like a hare sitting up in a field. I ducked, waiting for the shot to ring. Loveday Merrick strode to the edge of the trees and, shading his eyes, looked straight towards our hiding place.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘A bird turning the litter. Nothing at all.’ Then he strode off, his little band of acolytes following after. We waited until we could no longer hear even the echo of their tramping feet before we moved.

  ‘Did he see us?’ Alec said.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I answered. ‘He certainly made that up about the bird anyway. But why would he not stride over here with his big stick, demanding to know what we were doing?’

  ‘Because it’s common land and he wouldn’t have the authority?’ Alec screwed up his nose even as he said this. ‘Not that he’s a man who has trouble assuming authority. What on earth was all that?’

  ‘Poppycock and tommyrot,’ I said. ‘I’m ashamed of myself for being rattled earlier. What an old fraud.’

  ‘I agree, naturally,’ Alec said. ‘But what in particular is it that’s riled you?’

  ‘The initial D!’ I said. ‘It’s a music hall trick. Someone here has lost a loved one. Name begins with D. “Oh, that must be old uncle Deuteronomy” pipes up a voice from the second row. “That’s right, lovey. Deuteronomy. He’s looking for his niece.” Sensation all round. I’m just surprised he had the gall to wheel it out amongst his own people. One would think they’d see through it, since they must use exactly the same stuff in music halls of their own.’

  ‘The excitement seemed genuine enough,’ Alec said. ‘And they seemed to recognise the names he was spouting.’

  I read them from my slip of paper, once out loud and once to myself.

  ‘They don’t mean anything to me,’ I said. ‘But one thing does strike me. I don’t see how they could be the ghosts of people who were hanged here.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Alec.

  ‘Too many women. Not to say that no women were ever executed but they were the unusual cases. If these ghosts were the spirits of the hanged there’d be Williams and Georges and Jameses to spare instead of all these Anns and Lizzies – I mean, you know, not that we actually believe any of it.’

  ‘We really should just take that point as established once and for all,’ Alec said. ‘And not repeat it ten times a day. Of course, either someone is causing mischief or these mediums are just making it up entirely, but as to what Mrs Addie came in search of and what she thought she saw … I don’t agree that it couldn’t be the spirits of hanged men, just because so many of them are women.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I think it strengthens the argument if anything. These are the wronged, Dandy. Not the murderers and brigands who deserved their fate, but innocents, wrongly convicted and wrongly hanged. Perhaps that’s why Mrs Addie wasn’t scared to come back for her bag – which I wish we’d found, by the way. So I should say of course lots of them are women. Perhaps they were wise women hanged for witchcraft.’

  ‘And children,’ I reminded him. ‘Would a blind child have been hanged with his grandmother?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Alec. ‘If it was long enough ago. I’m not going to let you spoil my theory with that.’

  I did not need to; its despoliation was waiting for us back at the Hydro.

  Mrs Cronin must have been watching for our arrival for she was bearing down on us along the passageway when we climbed the steps into the hall.

  ‘Mrs Gilver, Mr Osborne,’ she said. ‘I’m glad to have run into you. Look what I’ve found.’ She was carrying some sort of bundle, laid across her arms the way that page boys carry cushions with coronets upon them. This was no velvet and gilt-braided object, though. It was a heap of brown tweed with a chamois leather shoe bag balanced on top. ‘Mrs Addie’s clothes,’ she said. ‘After what you told me this morning, I got to thinking.’ The colloquial phrase sounded wooden in her mouth, for her tone was very clipped and formal. ‘And it occurred to me that Mrs Addie’s things must have been sent to the laundry and maybe they’d got forgotten about there. It wasn’t the regular day, you see. And so I checked, and there they were! We can send them to her family now.’

  ‘Splendid,’ I said. I did not believe a word of it and felt embarrassed for her having to speak the lines.

  ‘I’m just going to tell Dr Laidlaw,’ she went on. ‘But I have patients waiting, as a matter of fact. So, I wonder if you would be so kind.’ With that she held out the bundle. We are brought up to accept whatever is offered – thus gypsies trick us into buying violets at the railway station and climbers we intended to cut manage still to give us their hands – and so, astonished as I was, I held my arms out like a godmother at the altar and accepted the bundle. Mrs Cronin thanked me, turned on her heels and hurried away. Alec and I were left gazing at the pleats and ruffles of her cap until she whisked around the corner and was gone. Alec was first back into the swing.

  ‘Quick, Dandy, before someone sees us!’ he said. ‘Let’s get the swag to my room.’

  We hurried along the corridor to the stairs, up two flights and round to the west side, Alec fumbling his key out of his trouser pocket as we went along. Once inside his room I tipped my armful onto the bed and stared at it. Everything was there: shirt, petticoat, stockings, vest, chemise, brassiere and underdrawers – the lot.

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘Tweeds, cotton underthings and corsetry go to completely different bits of a laundry, as I well know.’ I had spent nine days on a case once pretending to be a lady’s maid, and none of the arcane lore I had amassed would ever desert me. ‘How could they all be lost together and then found again?’

  Alec picked up the coat part of the tweeds and held it against him. It was gargantuan, looking as though it would wrap twice round Alec’s frame. He let it drop and lifted the skirt, which was easily a yard wide.

  ‘Everyone kept saying she was a sizeable lady,’ he said. ‘They were being kind.’

  I was unfastening the drawstring of the shoe bag. I drew out one wide leather brogue, turned it up and peered at it.

  ‘Look, Dan,’ Alec said. ‘A walk up a hill could easily have killed a woman this size.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ I said. I put the shoe down and took the skirt from Alec’s hands.

  ‘The woman who fitted these clothes should never have been sent out climbing hills for exercise,’ he persisted. ‘We’ve cracked it. Dr Laidlaw prescribed it and it did for her. That’s what they’re hiding.’

  I was examining the skirt, rubbing the material through my fingers. I sniffed the cuffs of the coat too.

&n
bsp; ‘But it’s nonsense,’ I said.

  ‘They’re not hers?’ said Alec.

  ‘They might be,’ I replied. ‘I can telephone to Mrs Bowie and ask her what dress size her mother took. But these clothes weren’t worn outside on a muddy hillside. She had dirt under her nails, but her coat cuffs are clean and don’t smell of benzene. They smell of lily-of-the-valley cologne.’ I put the coat down and sorted through the pile of smaller garments, lifting a stocking. ‘She had dirt ground into her knees, Regina said. But look at this stocking. It should be torn, or snagged at least, and it’s perfect.’

  ‘Maybe—’

  ‘No, look at it, Alec.’ I held it up and let it dangle. ‘It hasn’t been washed. Look.’

  ‘It looks clean to me,’ Alec said.

  ‘It’s still got the shape of the leg in it,’ I insisted. ‘Clean stockings look like sausage skins, you know. Worn stockings have the ghost of the leg in them.’ I had not chosen my words wisely and I let the stocking drop again, unnerved. Alec was rummaging in the coat pockets, or trying to, anyway, but looking for pockets where he would in a coat of his own and not finding any. When he finally plunged his hand into the only two there were in women’s suiting, his eyes widened and he drew something out and showed it to me.

  ‘The lack of muck and benzene is a puzzle,’ he said, ‘but look at this. Proof positive, at least, that she went out that last day.’

  In his hand was a striped paper bag, twisted shut at the corners, bearing the name and black-and-white livery of the Moffat Toffee Shop. That, more than the pitiful stocking with the ghost of Mrs Addie’s sturdy leg inside it, melted my heart. I picked the bag up and twirled it around to open it.

  ‘Poor thing,’ I said, ‘she didn’t even have one.’ For it certainly looked like a full quarter-pound of wrapped toffees in there and the bag had the pristine look that never lasts long after leaving the sweetshop. I glanced up at Alec. He was frowning down at me. He looked to the coat which lay on the bed and back again.

  ‘Doesn’t seem all that likely,’ he said. ‘How do you get to be the size of those tweeds if you don’t dip into your toffees as soon as you’ve bought them?’

  ‘Tablet,’ I said. Alec looked into the bag.

  ‘Toffee,’ he insisted.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I agreed. ‘And it shouldn’t be. Mrs Bowie told us when we were there and she said it again on the telephone. Her mother loved the tablet from the Moffat Toffee Shop. Presumably whoever bought these and put them in the pocket of her coat didn’t know that.’

  ‘This is very bad,’ Alec said. He was trying to refold the skirt and coat into neat squares, hating all of a sudden, I think, to be touching her things.

  ‘That’s why Mrs Cronin shoved them at us,’ I went on. ‘Perhaps we were meant to do what we did or perhaps I was just supposed to witness Dr Laidlaw discovering the bag of sweets. Well, I’m not going to play their game. I shall ring for a maid to deliver them. Someone’s laying a false scent, Alec, and I don’t want them to know whether or not we’ve got a sniff of it.’

  ‘A false scent,’ Alec said. ‘Yes, I see. It wasn’t that she went out and they pretended she didn’t.’ He nodded as he thought his way through the thicket. ‘Far from it. She went nowhere and someone is pretending she did.’

  ‘Regina must have been told to say Mrs Addie was a bit grubby and she went much too far.’

  ‘Just as the ghosts are going too far now also,’ Alec said. ‘All those mediums. It’s completely out of hand.’

  ‘Isn’t it worrying that there are two stories?’ I asked him.

  He was nodding faster now. ‘The one where she went out and collapsed. And one where she saw a ghost here and died of fright. But there’s as much effort going into suppressing the stories as there is to spreading them. Sergeant Simpson, Dr Ramsay, and the Addies all think different things. I don’t understand at all.’

  ‘And all of a sudden, I do,’ I said. ‘They couldn’t agree on one. They can’t agree on anything much, after all – whether this place is a hospital or a casino, for instance. Whether to sell up or keep going. Even whether these clothes were supposed to have been to the laundry and back or had been put away at day’s end with a bag of toffees in the pocket! There are two stories, Alec, because there are two Laidlaws, and they can’t agree.’

  ‘And even if it’s not the two Laidlaws,’ Alec said. ‘If it’s Tot and someone else, or if it’s Tot changing his mind. The ghosts are attracting too much attention so he’s switched to a new tale. No, don’t shake your head at me that way. It makes no difference. Competing stories or successive stories, Dandy – either way when there’s so much effort going into covering something up, it rather looks as though that something might be murder.’

  11

  The Hydro guests, at least the doctor’s devotees and Tot Laidlaw’s bright young things, were making the most of this afternoon of Indian summer, the way Scots will always do. Heaven knew in what dark dungeon the mediums were gathered to stir chickens’ entrails and cast knuckle bones in the dust – or was I mixing up mediums with some other species of ghoul? – but everyone else was on the terrace, the clock golf course or the croquet lawn, or could be heard at the tennis courts and bowling greens, in the swish and whack of gut against sheepskin or the soft knock of ebony upon ebony and the ripple of applause.

  Alec and I had the winter gardens to ourselves, then, and thankfully so given the discussion which needed to be had there.

  ‘What in the name of blazes method of murder fools a doctor and a policeman?’ Alec said.

  ‘An untraceable poison?’ I suggested. ‘Or not even untraceable, when I come to think of it, since there wasn’t a proper post-mortem. A perfectly traceable poison. Or smothering.’

  ‘Doesn’t smothering turn one’s face black?’ Alec said. ‘And anyway I’d have hated to be the one to overcome Mrs Addie and hold her down. Unless she was restrained somehow.’

  ‘Strangulation turns the face black, not smothering,’ I said. ‘But restraints would certainly show – rings of bruises on the wrists and ankles, mostly likely.’

  ‘And Dr Ramsay and Sergeant Simpson could hardly miss those.’

  ‘But if Laidlaw was saying she had collapsed and his sister had seen her do so and if she looked like someone who’d had a heart attack … It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? A little lie from a respectable person who is a good liar?’

  ‘The doctor this would be,’ Alec said. ‘I’m sure Sergeant Simpson wouldn’t have taken Tot’s word for anything. The man breaks ten laws every night when the sun goes down.’

  ‘Presumably Simpson doesn’t know that,’ I said. ‘I shall be sure and tell him. He is, after all, my next port of call. Or yours, darling. I shan’t fight you for the honour.’

  ‘What we need is an exhumation,’ Alec said. ‘How does one go about that in these parts? Not the Home Secretary, I don’t suppose.’

  ‘I shall ask Simpson that too. Ask about exhumation, tell him we don’t trust Tot, tell him about the clothes, ask him about the bag – to be on the safe side.’

  ‘I wish I could believe I’d make a better job of it than you, Dandy,’ Alec put a great deal of sincerity into the claim and I did not believe a syllable of it, naturally. ‘I’d gladly take it off your hands. But I’d bungle it. Sure to.’

  ‘Let’s go together,’ I suggested smoothly. ‘A united front. I’ll start talking – thank you for your kind words – and you can pitch in as and when.’

  Alec pushed out his pursed lips and considered my offer from every angle but could see no way of wriggling out of the hole into which he had talked himself.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Jolly good. Let’s be off then.’ It occurred to him no more than it did to me that what we were setting out to do was march into a police station, announce that the bumbling rustics within had plodded down the wrong road once again and then ask them to follow Alec and me to enlightenment.

  Sergeant Simpson, on behalf of the Moffat office and pe
rhaps the entirety of the Dumfriesshire Constabulary as far as we knew, declined with some vigour. We re-emerged onto the High Street half an hour later, not exactly with a foot in the seat to send us on our way but certainly we were moving smartly.

  ‘Phew,’ Alec said.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Well, at least we didn’t lead with it. We got some good stuff out of him before the portcullis came down.’

  Alec was standing with his hat on the back of his head and his hands on his hips, looking up and down the street. He nodded vaguely and gave the rolling wave of the hand he uses to indicate that he wants me to prattle on while he is thinking. It is intensely annoying but prattling while Alec thinks had led to great moments of eureka before and so, through slightly gritted teeth, I obliged him, falling into step as he strode along.

  ‘No handbag, for one,’ I said. ‘With or without watch and letters. That’s worth knowing. Bad news of course that he wouldn’t countenance a word with the Fiscal but if I’m not much mistaken, he won’t need to. Where are we going?’

  ‘We’re here,’ Alec said. ‘The Moffat Toffee Shop. Just to make doubly trebly sure. Because they’re bound to have remembered a woman the size of Mrs Addie, aren’t they? What was that about the Fiscal?’ He held the door open, and as it dinged with the happy sound of sweetshops everywhere I passed through.

  It was enough to rot one’s teeth simply to stand and breathe the air. As well as the glittering glass jars of boiled sweets set on shelves behind the counter and the trays of sugar mice and chocolates laid out on waxed paper in the shelves beneath it, there was a sort of shrine to toffee all along one wall. There were bars of toffee wrapped in printed paper, individual toffee morsels done up in coloured twists, tins and boxes of toffee with lurid scenes of Moffat painted upon them – everything from the Ram to the bath house to the municipal gardens complete with bandstand – and a vat of broken toffee pieces into which one could dip a little enamel shovel and fill a bag for tuppence.