Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone (3 page)

Of course, I did not mean actually to deposit Hugh and the boys in the Hydro itself to take their chances; I am far from the doting domestic angel of popular imagining but there are limits. Besides, Hugh would not stand for it. He detests hotels and since I guessed that a hydropathic one would also be devoted to the doctrine of temperance there was not a chance of getting him to stay there. Surely though, I told myself, there would be a house somewhere in the environs that we could have on a short let. If Moffat were anything like Crieff and Peebles, or indeed Harrogate or Buxton or Bath, or
any
town where sulphurous waters bubbled up and Victorian merchants got rich from them, there would be any number of sandstone villas left over from the heyday. I would set Gilchrist, Hugh’s factor, on it in the morning.

Before retiring, I composed a letter to Mr Addie, stipulating terms as he had asked but also requesting a meeting, for his to me had been as short on useful detail as it was long on epithets. At the beginning of the third paragraph I hesitated long enough to make a blot and then plunged on. It was easier in writing than face-to-face and if I offended him it would save me the trip on the train.

‘Mr Osborne and I will carry out our investigations with the utmost rigour and attention,’ I wrote. ‘If we find cause to question the Fiscal’s findings we shall report to you with all possible haste and shall stand by our conclusions as far as testifying in a court of law or at a second inquiry. Furthermore, in this case as in any, if we discover evidence of a crime we shall turn it over to the proper authorities as any responsible citizen would.’

Nice and pompous. My hope was that he would be so impressed with the rectitude of my expression that he would miss the veiled rebuke. I signed myself D.D. Gilver, thinking that there was no point in meeting trouble at the gate, and took myself off to bed, walking at Bunty’s pace and listening outside all three bedroom doors on the way. Pages were turning in Teddy’s room but his breathing was too quiet to be heard through mahogany; Donald was wheezing a bit in his sleep but it was nothing to the dreadful gurgling and rattling one might have heard even a week ago, and Hugh was snoring with rampant abandon. No one who was not well on the mend could snore that way without coughing, surely.

In my room, I dragged the low stool from my dressing table over to the side of my bed and Bunty ascended in her new stately way, like a dowager clambering into her carriage. I banished from my mind the memory of her taking the width of the room in three bounds and sailing through the air to land in the middle of my counterpane with feet splayed and tail whipping strongly enough to flutter the curtains.

It took over a fortnight, in the end, to arrange our removal to Moffat but the delay was propitious in a number of ways. First, it gave me plenty of time to commune with plumbers by letter and on the telephone. Also, Hugh and the boys were at the perfect pitch of convalescence, rallied enough to be ready for a change of scene after weeks of their bedroom walls and the west terrace on warm afternoons with many blankets, but not so far recovered as to impose their masculine wills and drag the party off northwards to a moor or river to start the whole exercise again. What is more, the short wait for quarters meant that we could take Pallister and Mrs Tilling with us. They could hardly have come along in their dressing gowns when they were utterly bedridden and they would have baulked at missing out on the joys of Gilverton sans Gilvers in the ordinary way of things, but when I floated the notion of the healing waters and the sitz baths they each got a wistful, yearning sort of look in their eyes, never mind that neither they nor I knew what a sitz bath might be. (I have since learned that it is a fussy arrangement of large and small tubs filled with hot and cold water, between which one hops about, feet in the hot, seat in the cold, then seat in the hot, feet in the cold, until the doctor declares the process complete. It seems designed to frustrate the very reasonable hopes one might have that a bath will provide relaxation and comfort and it is one of the many aspects of hydropathy which led me to conclude that the doctors, despite the white coats and multisyllabic descriptions, are sadists and jokers and that their patients are credulous chumps.)

But all of that came later. On the day when Pallister and Mrs Tilling agreed to form part of our expedition to the southern hills and Grant got down my trunk and started packing, I had high hopes of killing two plump birds with one well-aimed stone.

After all, we had come through that tricky visit to the Addies without being stripped of our commission.

They were exactly as thrilled as I had foreseen upon discovering that Gilver was a scandalous female and not a respectable retired police inspector, a northern Holmes with an air of genius, or whatever they had been expecting when they rolled my name around and decided they trusted it.

Alec made up for me a little, as far as I could tell, when we were shown into Fairways’ parlour three days after receiving the Addies’ letter. I had decided that toughing it out was my best hope and, accordingly, I strode forward and thrust my hand out to the female of the pair.

‘Mrs Bowie? Mrs Gilver,’ I said. ‘And this is Mr Osborne.’

‘Mrs Bowie,’ said Alec, with a little bow. ‘How d’you do? And you, sir.’

‘
Mrs
Gilver?’ said the brother in a dazed sort of way.

‘Mr Addie,’ I concluded. ‘And that’s the lot.’ I beamed at him and then adjusted my expression in accordance with the remarks to follow. ‘First of all, let us offer you both our condolences.’ This observance of convention seemed to soothe them; Mrs Bowie lowered her eyes and nodded and Mr Addie twisted up his face into a look of masculine stoicism. It was very similar to the look one would have if standing on a headland facing into a biting wind and, as they would have there, his eyes watered.

‘And be assured,’ said Alec, taking up the baton, ‘that we will do our utmost to assuage your concerns about the manner of your dear mother’s passing.’ It was his ‘endeavour to give satisfaction’ speech, tinged with a little undertaker’s mummery as this occasion demanded. I cannot deliver it with a straight face, but Alec is a marvel.

‘I shall take you at your word, Mr Osborne,’ said Mr Addie. He looked rather sharply at me and then back at Alec. ‘As one gentleman always can for another.’

‘Mrs Gilver,’ said Mrs Bowie, as one lady to another perhaps, hoping to smooth the slight away. ‘Do sit down and I’ll ring for tea.’

Before the pot was empty we were well acquainted with the late Mrs Addie. She had been a widow of the sort that always makes me imagine she viewed the marriage itself as an irksome hors d’oeuvre. She had sewn hassocks, bred Sealyhams, terrorised troupes of little girls through their Brownie badges and generally kept a good slice of the world around her bowling along in proper order. When she had put her back out pitching tents at a Brownie camp in the Pentland Hills she had, according to her practical nature, taken to bed with unguents and embrocations to spare; and when these had failed her, she had rung up that nice Dr Laidlaw at Moffat and booked her usual room.

‘For she was subject to it,’ said Mrs Bowie, ‘but Dr Laidlaw always cured her before.’ She rose and came to stand behind my chair to look at the portrait photograph which had been fetched for us. Mrs Addie had been a solid woman of strong features and very smooth skin. These attributes, along with her little dark eyes, lent her what can only be described as a porcine countenance. Her children had inherited her looks, as is always the way when a parent is as plain as pudding, and Mrs Bowie had, besides, come in for her mother’s scant and colourless hair. (Mr Addie had got himself a head of thick dark locks, but had let most of them go.)

‘So your mother knew and trusted this doctor?’ I said.

‘She did,’ said Mr Addie, darkly. ‘She was quite taken in by it all. Always running off there.’ He caught himself just before he absolutely started speaking ill of the dead. ‘However,’ he went on, ‘Dr Laidlaw is gone.’

‘And the place came under new management?’ asked Alec.

‘His children,’ said Mrs Bowie. ‘They inherited it. His daughter …’

‘Oh, he
died
,’ I said and, although there is no shame in dying, for it happens repeatedly in the best of families, one could not help seeing a little unflattering light cast on the spa.

‘And they’re … what? Attempting to run the place without his medical know-how?’ Alec said. ‘That should have caused questions to be asked, surely.’

‘From what my mother said,’ Mrs Bowie volunteered, ‘it seems to be going along the same as before. After a little initial … They had opposing views on whether to sell up but their father’s will split everything two ways and so they carried on. Some of the treatments had changed, but that’s progress, I suppose.’ She lifted her chin and gave her brother a defiant look as she spoke. I noticed it and Alec did too.

‘They still have a hydropathic doctor on the premises then?’ he said. ‘Overseeing the … what have you … that goes on.’

‘They do,’ said Mrs Bowie.

‘Of sorts,’ said Mr Addie.

‘What do you mean, sir?’ I asked. ‘Do you have reason to doubt the man’s credentials?’

He stared at me, breathing out and in as if it cost him some effort.

‘I couldn’t say,’ he said. ‘Besides, it was a local man, a Moffat GP, who signed the certificate. Then the police, as we said. And the Fiscal. Passed the buck all the way. And now, sir,’ he turned to Alec again, ‘it falls to you.’

‘And stops here,’ Alec assured him. Then he added firmly, ‘With Mrs Gilver and me.’

‘Now, Mrs Bowie,’ I said, ‘you mentioned just now that your mother reported continued satisfaction with the Hydro. Did she write to you? Might I see the letter if you’ve kept it? Or the relevant portions if there are private matters therein?’

‘She rang me,’ Mrs Bowie said. ‘On the Sunday. A very quick word, after her supper and before her bath.’

‘Did she now?’ I said, sitting forward and readying myself to take notes. Alec is wont to smile at my little block of paper and my pencil, but my notes have helped us many times. ‘On the very last evening? What – to the best of your remembering, Mrs Bowie – did she say?’

The poor woman tried her best but, having retrod the ground countless times in the weeks of mourning, she remembered it only too well: the portents unleashed by the very ringing of the telephone bell; the darkening tone in her mother’s voice; the sudden chill as they said goodbye. I managed to glean that Mrs Addie had reported a comfortable journey down in the train, had been pleased to be shown to her favourite room and happy that it had not been redecorated since her last visit. She had detected a falling off of quality in the cooking, with a greater emphasis on grated raw vegetables and lemon juice than she could greet with enthusiasm, but overall she was home-from-home again and her back was aching a little less even before the first splash of magical water was felt upon it. By that Sunday bath-time she was already anticipating putting on her outdoor shoes and taking a stroll into town for a cup of tea in the near future. Not on the Monday, because of her ‘treatment’, but very soon; and she would buy a picture postcard of the well or the bath house and send it to her daughter with her love.

‘And she said she would post me off a box of tablet,’ said Mrs Bowie. ‘From the toffee shop.’

‘What treatment would that have been?’ I asked, with my pencil poised.

Mrs Bowie stared at her brother with wide eyes.

‘Oh, I’m not an educated woman,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t tell you all the fancy names and what they mean.’

‘But nothing, one assumes, that would have put her heart under strain,’ I said. ‘Surely the Fiscal must have considered that.’

‘We shall ask him,’ said Alec, rather grandly. I resented a little the air of him sweeping in and summing up after his secretary had fussed on with her questions and her pencil. On the other hand, it was a competent way to bring matters to a close and one should be glad, I daresay, whenever Gilver and Osborne or either of its parts looks competent. Lord knows, we display other qualities often enough.

Our decampment to the Moffat hills was not as orderly as one might have hoped. My packing caused Grant no trouble, for she is an old hand, and with almost a whole motorcar at her disposal – since Hugh was neither hunting nor dancing and needed only tweeds, flannels and something for dinner – she did not need to pare her selections down. Indeed, I noticed three hatboxes being carried downstairs but said nothing. Donald and Teddy, along with Bunty, were going by train; Donald because he had never grown out of his childhood’s carsickness and Teddy to keep him company. They were recovered enough to pack their own trunks with Becky’s help and I kept them on their honour by requiring them to tick items off a list and sign it at the end. It had worked while they were at school and continued to work now; they are good boys really. The problem arose with Pallister and Mrs Tilling, for he could no more imagine serving us dinner without his silver spoons, wine without his decanters or tea without his pot than she could envision a distant kitchen having its own sharp knives, fish kettle and marble pastry board. When I saw her wrapping a rolling pin in brown paper, though, I had to protest.

‘I like my own pin, madam,’ she said. ‘That there pin might be wood. There might be weevils.’

I declined to point out that weevils do not bore into wood and set up home there.

‘We could run to a new one if so,’ I said. ‘Or – the cook at home when I was a child used a wine bottle filled with crushed ice. I used to help fill it. You really can’t take everything, you know.’

Mrs Tilling gave a smirk of triumph whose source I could not immediately locate and unwrapped a corner of the rolling pin from its paper covering.

‘There,’ she said. ‘That’s a rubber stopper, madam, for the ice water to go in.’

I left her to it. Pallister and she were following with Drysdale in my motorcar and, although they outranked him, in this one respect he had final authority. He alone was responsible for the Cowley and he was quite firm enough to throw Pallister’s wooden boxes or Mrs Tilling’s rush baskets out onto the gravel if he felt the suspension was in danger.