Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone (23 page)

‘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.’

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 perhaps 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.

I blamed this unwrapped, unfettered heap of toffee pieces for the thick buttery sweetness in the air, almost heavy enough to taste. It was either that, the tray of toffee-apples sitting on top of the counter, plump and shining, or possibly the neat packages of tablet, tied with string, and showing with a slight translucence in their paper that they had been wrapped very recently, while still warm.

‘A quarter of your famous Moffat toffee, please,’ Alec said to the woman behind the counter. She was dressed in an apron and cap which mirrored the company livery of black and white with bright red trim and looked, therefore, like something from a pantomime. Fifty if a day, she nevertheless dimpled a little at Alec’s voice. I decided to hang back and let him have his way.

‘Right you are, sir,’ she said. ‘And is that what brought you here to Moffat?’ She must have noticed my arched brow, for she gave me a cold look before turning back to Alec and switching on the twinkle again. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ she confided.

‘I’m sure,’ Alec said. ‘No, I’m at the Hydro for a few days, but a late friend of mine told me to be sure and stop by.’ He had let his voice fall and now his head drooped a little too.

‘A Moffat man?’ asked the shopkeeper, busily trying to think what gentleman had recently been called to his rest, I imagine.

‘An Edinburgh lady,’ Alec replied. ‘And a great devotee of yours. A Mrs Addie. She was often at the Hydro. I wonder if you know who I mean.’

‘Mrs Addie?’ cried the shopkeeper, pressing a hand to her breast. ‘A
late
friend, did you say, sir? Oh mercy, I’m sorry to hear that now!’

‘As am I to have broken sad news in such an unfeeling way,’ Alec said. The undertaker was back at his post.

‘Not at all,’ said the shopkeeper. She rummaged under the counter and brought up a doilied plate with a small heap of toffees on it. She took one for herself, her manners all departed with the shock of the news perhaps, and then held it out to Alec the way one would offer a cigarette. He took one and unwrapped it as solemnly as one can.

‘It should be tablet, really,’ said the shopkeeper with a sad smile. ‘Mrs Addie was a one for my mother’s tablet. She’d take a toffee if one was offered but it was tablet she bought for herself and tablet she always sent to her daughter.’

‘Ah, dear Mrs Bowie,’ Alec said. ‘She’s bearing up well but she feels it.’

‘I never met the young lady,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘Mrs always came in alone.’

‘And when was it that you last saw her?’ Alec said. The door behind us had tinkled and he spoke rather quickly in case she was about to dismiss him and all his questions and go back to plying her trade.

‘Oh, the last time she was here,’ came the reply, spoken at a very comfortable pace; there was all the time in the world to discuss poor Mrs Addie, no matter that even now the door tinkled again. ‘Last summer. I did wonder if she wasn’t coming back again – changed days up there since the old doctor passed – but there! If she wasn’t well that’ll have been at the bottom of it.’

Here Alec had no choice but to turn to me, even if my insinuation into his tête-à-tête was not to his new friend’s liking, for he had not been in Scotland long enough to navigate his way to an understanding of ‘last summer’ spoken in October. I, in contrast, knew right away that we had scored a crucial point in our game. ‘Last summer’ to this Moffat worthy could not include the most recent September; it was over a year ago. ‘This summer past’, ‘that summer there’ and ‘summer just gone’ would have answered the case, but ‘last summer’ was unequivocally nothing to do with Mrs Addie’s final trip to the Hydro.

‘She
was
back, though,’ I said. ‘The dear lady.’ I should not try that stuff; it does not come naturally and I saw Alec biting his cheeks to hear me. ‘Just for a couple of nights, mind you. I wonder that she didn’t make it into the shop. I’m sure I would have made a beeline.’ I looked around the place and tried to make my eyes shine with greed, or at least to look as though my stomach were not roiling.

The shopkeeper decided to forgive my sin – which was, I expected, chiefly made up of my not being Alec – since I had brought hard news, and she gave a chuckle.

‘Oh, Mrs Addie never came to the shop until she’d been a good week with the doctor,’ she said. ‘She came and did her treatments and as soon as she was able she came down here and undid them all again.’

‘I’m not sure I follow,’ Alec said.

The woman pulled her face out of its grin and lowered her eyes. ‘I meant no disrespect, sir.’

‘I shouldn’t imagine it for a minute,’ he assured her. ‘But how could your toffee undo a cured back?’ I kicked him gently and he took his cue and changed course like a dressage pony. ‘Ah, well. Water under the bridge. Let’s just both be thankful we knew her and let’s never forget her, eh? Now, to business.’ He rubbed his hands together and began a protracted series of negotiations into the differences between toffee, tablet and fudge, the comparative ‘nippiness’ of pan drops, oddfellows and humbugs and an enquiry into the healthful properties of liquorice sticks which only ended when the queue which had built up behind him reached the door and was letting a draught in.