Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone (29 page)

It must have been an apple house at some time, I thought as I drew near. A tiny little place – a howf, as they call them in Perthshire – windowless but with slatted openings near the top, built against the wall. I rattled the door handle but of course it was locked. Even if it was not usually kept locked it would have been locked for the last month or so. For the signs were unmistakable here. There were snapped twigs and turned earth and a smear of mud on the lintel of the little door, and I rather thought the object had been badly handled in because the door paint was scraped too and the wood showed fresh and white underneath it. The flakes of paint were still scattered on the slab of sandstone set into the ground for a doorstep.

If only Alec were here. He could grab onto that branch and pull himself up. He could put a foot on the lintel and step over, holding onto the roof, and from there he could squint down through those slats and see what was in there.

I imagined the whole climb in my head, seeing Alec shinning up and shouting down. I imagined asking Hugh to do it for me. Would he be spurred to a second boyhood by the thought that Osborne was not beyond such antics, or would this be more of my silliness at which he would simply lift an eyebrow and turn away? Donald was far too frail still but what about Teddy? Thus finally, I shamed myself into action. My poor sickly sons were not to go climbing trees just because their mother was a ninny. I took off my gloves and laid my hands purposefully against the strongest-looking joint between the trunk and a branch.

‘Heave-ho!’ I said and set my foot against the bark to start scrambling.

I weighed considerably more than I did the last time I climbed a tree and my shoulders were aching when I had got myself up high enough to step over and stand on the door lintel. It looked much further away than it had when viewed from below, but I knew from jumping over burns that distances are deceptive when there is a six-foot drop or rushing cold water and probably I would step over the gap between branch and lintel without a thought if it was a gap between carpet and hearthrug, avoiding nothing more than a cold stone floor. I let go with one hand and stretched one leg over, feeling for a toehold. Something shifted, my foot slipped. For a minute I was hanging by one hand from the tree and then I got both feet back onto the crook of the branch, wrapped both arms tightly round the trunk and stayed there with my heart hammering. I looked down at what had fallen from above the door. Not a stone, not mortar, as I had first thought. I would have laughed if I had not been still so close to crying. It was a key.

When I retell the story of my discovery in the apple house, it is hard to decide what to suppress and what report. On the one hand, I am rather proud of the way I rubbed my hands together and climbed a tree – I do not judge the moments when I contemplated asking my son to take a deep breath through his pleurisy and do it for me as worth sharing – but on the other hand I wish I had thought to feel above the door for a key before I tore my stocking and scraped my cheek on the bark.

Besides, the end of the incident does overshadow whatever one would choose to tell of its beginning.

I found the courage to slither down from my perch in not many more minutes, with a locked door and a key to tempt me. The lock was stiff and the key rusty – I rather thought that whoever had recently opened the door had brought a second key with him and did not know about this one; certainly there had been no oiling for some time. I had to use both hands to get it to turn but, at length, turn it did and I opened the apple-house door with held breath and thumping blood.

It was there! Three feet square by four feet tall, made of wood like a barrel and just sitting there. Not at all, I saw, the new-fangled and dangerous equipment I had counted on finding. I breathed out and it was when I breathed in again, the first time with the door open, that the smell got to me. I retched and stumbled backwards with my hands over my face. That smell! It is conventional to say that an unpleasant odour hits one, but this did so much more. It entered me, it filled my nose and my lungs and my mouth, it made my eyes water, it got among the strands of my hair and the fibres of my clothes and I knew immediately that it would be many days before it left me, if it ever did. I feared immediately that I would dream of this smell as long as I lived.

I could not have entered the little apple house if my life hung from my doing so, but I stayed there with my arm over my face, breathing the smell through the wool of my coat, and tried to look again at what I had found instead of some harmful – fatal! – machinery. It was a crate, a container. I had been looking for clues about what had killed Mrs Addie. I had not found them. Instead – I could not deny it – I had found Mrs Addie herself.

I scrabbled at the door, got it closed, got it locked and put the key back where I had found it. Then I tottered away to rest against another of the gnarled old trees and stood staring.

No one had smelled it because of the slats. Designed to draw all humidity away from the apples and stop them rotting, they had carried the stink of putrefaction up into the air and let it drift away. It was the perfect place to hide a body.

All I now had to decide was whether to telephone to the police right away or speak to Alec, and ask him what he thought the Addies would want to do. I stood up from where I had been slumping against the tree as though my sergeant-major had summoned me to attention. Alec was in Edinburgh engineering the exhumation of Mrs Addie’s body from its Morningside grave. It made no sense at all for me to think that I had found her body in that odd square barrel here in Moffat. If the woman really had been laid out by Regina and carried by an undertaker to her funeral at home then how could she be mouldering so revoltingly in there?

She could not. But then what was it in there?

I have had the experience, not often but each time has been memorable, of vertigo washing over me like a wave. In the early months when the babies were coming I came close to swooning many times. I have been assailed by tidal waves of nausea once or twice too. And recently, since I started detecting, I have undergone great sweeping storms of dread when something I knew deep down was clamouring to be brought into the front of my mind and dealt with there. This was the first time, however, I had ever felt what I was feeling now. An enormous, unstoppable rush of absolute terror, engulfing me entirely and leaving me weak and helpless as it passed.

And all of a sudden, the ghosts were not a nonsense, the mediums not a joke, Loveday Merrick not a charlatan, and Mrs Addie not just a well-loved and much-missed old lady who might have been wronged.

All of a sudden, standing there, everything seemed to skew just a little from what I thought I knew about the world around me and I could feel them all: Effie and Lizzie and Mary and their sins and killers, the ghosts and echoes and whispers, the other world reaching out, pleading, to this one.

Mrs Addie was in her grave in Edinburgh, or near it anyway in mid-exhumation, possibly. In that little apple house, not frail and wispy, not floating in a shift, not a wraith at all, but hulking, stinking and evil, was her ghost.

I stumbled out from the shrubs onto the lawn and made my shaking way around to the terrace steps, desperate to be safely with other people and far away from that crawling madness that threatened to worm its way through me if I stayed there. Hugh hailed me as I passed. He was in his deckchair again.

‘You all right, Dandy?’ he said. ‘You look peaky.’

There was no one in the world who could have done more to bring me back to earth. ‘I found something rather unpleasant in the shrubbery,’ I managed to say. ‘A dead thing. I almost stumbled over it and it’s sickened me.’ Hugh was torn between disappointment at this poor showing and that smugness which even the best of men sometimes display in the face of feminine weakness. ‘Smell,’ I said, holding out my sleeve. He took a deep sniff at the wool of my coat to show what stern stuff he was made of and then wrinkled his nose.

‘Faint hint of something,’ he said. ‘Nothing like that stag that time.’ It was true; the smell of the crate in the apple house had been quite different from the stag which had ruined a delightful picnic one day when the boys were tiny (although only because they had to be spanked and taken home when they would not stop poking it).

‘I’ll see you for tea,’ I said faintly and made my way to the telephone kiosk to speak to Alec who I hoped would have more sympathy for me than to cap my horrors with memories of his own.

I had quite forgotten what story Alec would have to tell me or I would not have rung him at all.

Mrs Bowie was not at her brother’s house and Mr Addie was lying down. I looked at my watch – half past twelve: a very odd time for a nap and my first indication that matters had moved swiftly. Mr Osborne was still here, the maid said, and she would fetch him.

‘Hello, Dandy,’ Alec said, sounding rather flattened. ‘I’m coming back to Moffat on the 2.40. Do you really want to hear this now?’

‘I really do,’ I said. ‘And the first thing I want to hear is this: did either Mr Addie or Mrs Bowie see their mother’s body when it was brought home for the funeral?’

‘Not only then,’ said Alec. ‘But poor Mr Addie had to see it this morning too. When they dug it up again. He managed to hold on to his insides, which is more than can be said for the whole of the party, but he’s taken himself off to bed now and I’d be surprised if he’s seen again today.’

‘Poor man,’ I said. ‘It was definitely her then?’

‘Apparently so,’ Alec said. ‘I wouldn’t have liked to be on oath that what we saw in that coffin was the woman in the picture—’

‘You were
there
?’

‘I was there,’ Alec said. ‘I thought it was the least I could do to stand beside poor Addie since it was me egging him on. I was one of the ones who couldn’t contain himself, I’m afraid. A very poor show.’

‘And is it too soon to know anything?’

‘It’s too soon to know some things,’ Alec said, ‘but did you know that the doctor doing the exhuming just starts in on it right there? He started looking for poisons right away.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing doing,’ Alec said. ‘Because of the stomach contents.’ He swallowed audibly. ‘If you can get a good jugful of stomach contents, then graveside poison tests are easy.’

‘And what was wrong with them?’

‘There were none,’ Alec said. ‘She was empty. Nothing in her stomach, nothing in her bladder or … other areas with similar function nearby. So he’s had to go back to his laboratory to look in her liver and kidneys for arsenic and at her blood for strychnine. Cyanide turns one bright pink – did you know? – so it wasn’t that anyway.’

‘And no other obvious sign of something that could have killed her?’ I asked.

‘None,’ Alec said. ‘No marks of violence. The only thing he ventured – and it’s not much I can tell you – is that she was dehydrated.’

‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

‘She hadn’t drunk anything. It sounds as if this grated carrot diet Dorothea had her on was a pretty tough regime.’ I was interested to note that having to look at a month-old corpse had put Alec into an acerbic mood which did not even sweeten for Dr Laidlaw.

‘Well, I shall be very glad to see you back here again,’ I said. ‘I desperately need to talk to you but only if you promise not to laugh at me.’

‘I’m not finished with
my
report yet,’ he said. ‘I saved the best bit.’

‘Go on.’

‘Whatever the doctor turns up in his laboratory, he knows already it wasn’t a heart attack,’ said Alec. ‘He had a good look at Mrs Addie’s heart this morning as he removed it – so did I, as a matter of fact. It didn’t reveal much to me but the pathologist said there was nothing wrong with it.’

‘Good grief,’ I said. ‘So … did he telephone to the police? Are they coming to arrest the Laidlaws? And Dr Ramsay?’

‘Not a bit of it,’ Alec said. ‘Apparently it’s not unusual. And Dr Ramsay’s certificate said “heart failure following suspected heart attack”. There’s nothing so far to say that wasn’t a perfectly fair conclusion.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘That’s what he said to me. Everyone dies of heart failure in the end.’

‘I came close to it myself this morning when I looked at Mrs Addie’s face,’ Alec said. At least he was almost laughing. ‘Now your turn, Dan. God, I’ve only just stopped feeling sick, you know. You’re a tonic, dearie.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, and then hesitated. How could I add my morning’s nightmares to his own? And besides, now that I had got away from the place I was beginning to doubt the truth of it, hoping that if I hugged the horrid facts to myself they might go away. ‘And look – never mind my stuff just now. You catch your train and we can discuss it later.’

‘All right,’ Alec said. ‘Was it Grant who turned it up for you?’

I laughed. ‘Oh, Grant!’ I said. ‘Grant was wonderful. She thought up the perfect thing to say to be taken right into the mediums’ bosom. She’s having a whale of a time. All news later, darling, hm? Safe journey.’

I went back to Auchenlea then, missing the Hydro luncheon and looking forward to pot luck from Mrs Tilling. She was beginning to settle into this novelty of a ‘holiday’ but even taking things very easy she is still rather marvellous and there were no such horrors as shop bread or tinned soup coming into the dining room. She had dispensed with savouries and it was true that she had asked me only that morning if I would prefer salmon or lamb for dinner when, at Gilverton with Hugh of course, there would be the one and then the other. Besides, I could not possibly stay for the Hydro’s midday feast because I was crawling all over with an itch to be rid of the clothes which had soaked up the smell and I needed to rub my hair with a lavender cloth at least, if not stand under the spray bath and wash it.

The chances of that ending well were greatly increased by my coming upon Grant on the road out of town, clearly heading back to the house herself despite being told she could have the day for her spiritualist venture.

‘I needed a rest from it, madam,’ she said, when she had climbed in and we were under way again. ‘They’re very tiring people to spend your time with, those mediums. And that Loveday one …
Loveday!
’