Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone (27 page)

The keyhole was fairly large and so I immediately discounted all the littlest of the keys in my bunch. The first one I tried went in halfway and then stuck. I pulled it out again and picked over the bunch looking for one slightly smaller. Then my fingers froze. I was sure I had heard a scuffling from inside the room. Well, perhaps I had, for an unused room in any house will attract scuffling things. I chose another key and tried again. This one went all the way in but would not turn. Nor when I pulled at it would it come out again. I jiggled it this way and that and felt something give. It was not the key in the lock, though; it was the latch. This door was open.

Using the bunch of keys as a handle I twisted and pushed and the door swung wide. I was ready for anything: a new victim; Tot Laidlaw coming at me with a piece of iron piping; even, I am ashamed to say, the sturdy spectre of Mrs Addie in her robe, hovering three feet above the floor and moaning at me.

What I saw was none of these things. At first I thought the room was absolutely empty, no furniture, no equipment, no fittings of any kind. Nothing more than the marks on the floor where something heavy had been standing and the deep scores across it where the thing had been dragged away. I was staring at these scratches, trying to make sense of them, when I saw a movement from near the far wall.

‘Tot?’ said a small, broken voice.

I felt beside me on the wall for a light switch and when my fingers met it I did not hesitate but snapped it on.

Dr Laidlaw was huddled on the bare floor of the empty room, hugging her arms about herself and stricken from weeping.

‘Shall I fetch him?’ I said. She sat up and wiped the tears away with her sleeve.

‘No!’ she sobbed, and shrank even further into the corner where she was cowering.

‘Did he put you in here?’ I asked. Nothing Tot did would shock me and I was at a loss as to explain her horror at hearing his name.

‘No,’ she said again but this time it was a low groan as though she spoke through great exhaustion. ‘Please leave us alone, I beg you.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ I went on, ‘how did you get in, since I have your keys?’ I did not really believe in the possibility of secret passageways and hidden doors in the panelling, but thought it best to make sure.

Dr Laidlaw roused herself so far as to look at the key ring I waved and then she sank back again. ‘Those are spares,’ she said. ‘Please, please, just leave us alone.’

‘But why are you protecting him?’ I said. It went against every one of my finer feelings to keep on pestering her while she begged me to stop but I hardened my heart, even as she began crying again. ‘I know you want to carry on with your work,’ I said. The sobs grew louder. ‘But do you need your brother for it? Really and truly, do you?’

‘You don’t understand,’ Dr Laidlaw wailed. ‘My brother is very good to me.’

‘I
do
understand,’ I said. ‘He’s thought of a way of drawing a crowd of guests for you to work on. But whatever happened to Mrs Addie will come out in the end. This can’t go on. And anyway, you refused to sign the death certificate, didn’t you? You are blameless. Why not come with me to Sergeant Simpson now and tell him the whole thing.’

‘Please,’ she begged me, crying harder than ever. ‘Please leave me alone. Just leave me.’

Clearly though, she had despaired of my ever relenting, for she sprang up suddenly, rushed past me and was gone.

When I set off to the winter gardens, no doubt well into their night shift as an outpost of Monte Carlo by now, I had no further thought than to see if Tot was there and if I could rattle him again by telling him his sister was sobbing in the locked room. On the way, however, it occurred to me that I could also look around for the tantalising stranger who had entered by the terrace doors. It was bothering me that I could not place him. I turned the corner at the end of the corridor and began to hear the first faint sounds of music and laughter. At the door, a young man dressed like a waiter bowed and ushered me in. I strode ahead with confidence but then faltered at the very oddness of it. That same soaring glass ceiling which filled it with light in the daytime rendered it glamorously dark in the night, the glass gleaming blackly far above the low lamps which lit the tables. Around the tables was the familiar scene: gentlemen in dinner jackets smoking and drinking and concentrating on the dice and cards, and ladies – girls these, mostly – peeping over shoulders and trying to distract them. There were ladies’ games going on as well; at least one roulette wheel in the distance and a poker game where a slightly older clutch of females showed every bit as much concentration as the men and smoked, if anything, even harder. I remembered blaming the orchids and their attendants for the fug in here and thinking the ventilation inadequate. In fact, the fans and skylights must work some kind of miracle in the early hours to turn the place back to garden again every day.

The smoke was not the worst of it; over the whole of the room, too, there was that hum of excitement and anxiety which I dislike to the point of loathing, not being hard-hearted enough to view others’ losing streaks as entertainments or optimistic enough to view their winning streaks as promises of my own.

I took a glass of champagne from another waiter who was passing with a tray and, sipping at it, I began on a course about the room, looking for Tot or for a familiar outline. The bright young things were like a chorus of starlings.

‘—down to my last chip, and it’s such a pretty colour I can’t bear to bet it.’

‘—taken up in a bath chair if I have another cocktail.’

‘—give you her address, if you like. She’s wonderfully cheap but you have to buy the material yourself and take it in a taxi to Battersea of all places.’

Implausible as it might sound, it was only when I heard my name that I remembered who else I was bound to run into.

‘Dandy?’ came Hugh’s voice. He had half stood but sounded disapproving, of course; that is always where he begins with me. I turned and saw him at one of the card tables. He had a whisky glass and a miniature metropolis of stacks of poker chips in front of him. The men in the other four seats had the familiar half-sick look men get when they play cards with Hugh.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Are the boys all right?’ he demanded.

‘The boys are fine,’ I assured him.

‘Sir?’ said the dealer.

‘See you in the morning,’ I said and began to edge away. I had seen Tot Laidlaw at last. He was just entering the room from a small doorway set into the inside wall, slapping shoulders and kissing hands, nodding and bowing so much that he hardly had time to stand up straight in between. He stood up straight enough when he saw me, though. He jerked upright as though he had been kicked hard on the bottom and he began to weave between the tables to come and meet me just as I was weaving to get to him. We both noticed Dorothea at the same time. It was the spreading quiet which alerted me, a wave of whispering and nudging as the bright young things pointed her out to one another. She had dried her eyes and smoothed her hair, but in her tweed skirt and knitted jersey she stood out amongst the sequins and silk like a sparrow among peacocks. Tot feinted towards her and then resumed course for me. She reached me long before he did, coming right up and standing in front of me, laying a hand on my arm even.

‘How did you know about the death certificate?’ she said. ‘And about Sergeant Simpson?’

I was momentarily stumped for an answer and when one dawned upon me I almost dared not give it for I knew it would be her undoing. ‘Mrs Addie told me.’

Dr Laidlaw gave a shriek of pure anguish.

‘Are you one of them?’ she said. ‘Is she talking to
all
of you?’

‘I expect so,’ I said. ‘And I’m sure in time she’ll tell me or someone else how she died too.’ Tot was closing in on me but I dodged to the side of his sister and nipped away before he could catch me. There was nothing for him now, if he wanted to avoid a scene, but to take Dorothea by the arm and draw her gently away. The look he aimed at me across the room, meanwhile, would have curdled milk and withered posies, as Nanny Palmer used to say. He kept it up for quite a few moments too, but as Dorothea whispered to him his expression changed until his face was the perfect mirror of his sister’s, each with that terrified, wide-eyed gaze.

‘Good Lord above,’ Alec said, on the telephone the next morning. ‘If Mrs Bowie knew the half of it
she’d
drop down dead. I’m trying to make it sound so clean and simple and respectable, as if an exhumation these days is no grubbier than a trip to the dentist or having a horse shod. If she could hear the torrid horrors that her mother’s taking part in at your end … Still, good work, Dandy.’

‘And do you think you’ll prevail in the end?’ I asked him.

‘Oh, I think so,’ Alec said. ‘Not least because I’ve had a stroke of great good fortune. Mr Addie is a member of the Royal Burgess Golf Club. No, not a member – a pillar. And guess who else is a member? Unsurprisingly, I must say.’

‘Ohhh!’ I said. ‘The Fiscal.’

‘You are a very rewarding audience for snippets of good news, Dan, I must say. Yes, indeed, the Edinburgh Fiscal stands Mr Addie a stiff whisky in the spike bar most Sundays and the odd Thursday evening in the lighter nights too.’

‘Joy of joys,’ I said. ‘That’s got to help us.’

‘Even so, I think I shall have to stay and do a measure of hand-holding. So you’re on your own for a bit yet. What’s next?’

‘As far as Mrs Addie goes,’ I said, ‘I’d dearly love to find out what was in that room before they emptied it. There were quite pronounced discoloured dents where something had sat – not one of the ubiquitous couches; it was the wrong shape – and there were scraping marks where it had been moved. Recently too. So I’m looking for something three feet square and extremely heavy. And I’m thinking if it was moved then it must have something to do with her death and if they wanted to keep it under wraps they’d hardly have hoyed it into a cart and paraded it through town, so it must be stashed somewhere. I’m going to search for it.’

‘Three feet square?’ Alec said. ‘Did you get out your tape and measure it while you were chatting to the doctor?’

‘I paced it,’ I said. ‘My feet are nine inches long. And the doctor had rushed off by then. She was rather upset, I’m afraid.’ Alec was silent. ‘I know you think I’m being hard on her, Alec dear. But the fact is that she’s hiding something for that brother of hers.’

‘You’ll be careful, Dandy, won’t you?’ Alec said. ‘Prowling about searching where you shouldn’t be. Be very careful of Tot. And Merrick’s lot too.’

‘Ah well now,’ I said. ‘When it comes to the mediums, I’ve had a brainwave.’

‘Oh dear,’ Alec said.

‘And I shall be quite safe. Like a general, sitting back and sending the troops to the front. I’ve drafted reinforcements, you see.’

It had taken very little in the way of persuasion. Grant comes from a theatrical background, as is sometimes obvious from the way she paints my face and arranges my hair, and when I had put my plan to her at bedtime the evening before, her face had lit as though all the limelight in the West End had just been shone on it.

‘Now, you must think it over very carefully before you agree, Grant,’ I said. ‘It is far beyond the call of duty.’

‘I’m only sorry it’s taken so long, madam,’ she said. ‘I told Becky right from the start that I expected Gilver and Osborne would call on my services. I thought maybe that business with the circus, but this is nearly as good. Spirit mediums? I wonder if there’s a sewing machine in the house.’ She carried on blithely brushing my hair as I gaped at her in the glass. That circus business, as she called it, had been four years ago and I had thought, back then, that my detecting adventures were a secret all my own.

‘I’m slightly feeling my way about what your story’s to be,’ I told her when she finally stopped planning her costumes, ‘but I thought perhaps we could mix a bit of truth in with the lies. We can say that you are here with your employers – as you are – while they’re taking the waters – as they are – but that after you arrived you felt a tremendous whatever it is you’d feel.’

‘Vibration, madam,’ said Grant. She was pinning the side curls into my hair for the night and spoke quite casually.

‘I bow to your unexpected greater knowledge,’ I said. ‘Now, since you are not known in spiritualists’ circles …’ I paused a moment in case she was about to correct me, ‘I think you should say that you are a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter or whatever but that you had such upsetting experiences when you first tried to direct your powers, that these days you try to avoid …’

‘Contact with the other world,’ said Grant.

‘Quite. Now, as to what was vibrating. I wondered about Mrs Addie, but perhaps you should steer clear of her. So tell me what you make of this instead: the mediums are conversing with – we think, Mr Osborne and I – the spirits of hanged prisoners from the Gallow Hill.’ Grant nodded calmly. ‘That is to say, they’re pretending to. Or are deluded into thinking they are. Just to make it clear that I don’t believe any of this.’

‘I’ll need to see when I get there,’ said Grant.

‘And the reason we think this,’ I said, passing swiftly on, ‘is that they’re meeting at the hanging place on the hill and also that one of them – actually it wasn’t one of them; it was another guest who was going to tell them about it, now that I remember – said that Mary Patterson – when she appeared – was speaking of repenting her sins and forgiving her killers. The judge and the hangman, this would be.’

‘That’s nice of her,’ Grant said. She had finished pinning my hair and was dabbing it with lotion to keep it safe through the night.

‘Well, anyway, the mediums seem to know how many they’re expecting – either fifteen or seventeen anyway – and they know some of the names but not all. From piecing together old court records, I suppose. They’ve got some already.’ I opened my dressing-table drawer and took out my notebook, leafing through it to the right page. ‘Lizzie, Peggy, Marjorie Docherty, Ann Dougal, Big Effie, Mary Patterson, Abigail Simpson, Joseph the Miller and a grandmother with a blind grandson.’