Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone (4 page)

Auchenlea House, where we were bound, was a whitewashed villa with red sandstone round its windows, sitting on an east slope with a view over the valley towards the Moffat hills. It was only two miles from the town and its bath house by road, less than that on the footpath, and from its drawing-room window the chimneys of the Hydro could just be seen above the tops of a pine and larch wood. It occurred to me, gazing across on that first afternoon, that looking due west towards trees was not the prospect I should have chosen for a healthful place such as I imagined hydros to be. A cliff top, I should have thought, or at least rolling downs, with morning sun to get the invalids in the mood for the new day. But then I was forgetting that the spas grow up around the springs and the springs bubble up where they please. I turned from the window and surveyed my lodging. It was commodious enough as a drawing room, well served with sofas and chairs, these in turn well served with tables and lamps. The fireplace was a good size too and there were radiators besides, but when I considered that this was it for sitting rooms – no library, no morning room, no billiards room even – I rather quailed. Hugh, Donald, Teddy and I would be in here all day every day when we were not actually eating or over at the Hydro, and I could not imagine it. I foresaw a lot of walks and tearooms if Alec and I were to discuss this case the way that we usually do.

For Alec had abandoned the planned hunt the minute he heard the word ‘murder’ and was even now on a train, taking his hastily concocted bad back and tingling legs to a private suite with bath at the Hydropathic to see what they could do for him.

‘Are you sure?’ I had said. ‘You’re not worried that it might really have
been
a murder then?’

‘Nice try, Dandy,’ he had replied. ‘But there’s no way I’m letting this pass me by.’ He referred, cynically in my view, to the fact that our last few cases had put me – by no efforts of my own – squarely in the middle of the action and had left him rather clinging to the side. That business at Portpatrick had merely been the last and worst of it. Even Alec had conceded that if one of us were to infiltrate a girls’ school it would have to be me, but before that I had forged my way deep into a ladies’ dress department in a High Street emporium and before
that
we had had to choose which one would sleep in a client’s bedroom with her, pretending to be a maid. It was Alec’s turn now without a doubt, and I was happy for him. He would worm his way into the heart of the Hydro and find the truth there and I would trail about the offices of the town officials checking their statements and putting their backs up. It was a sorely overdue rebalancing of the scales.

‘Are you quite well?’ said Grant, coming into the drawing room. ‘Madam. You’re frowning like anything. No point spending all that money on vanishing cream if you’re going to scowl, you know. There isn’t a cream invented that could smooth
that
out.’

‘I’ve been looking into the sun,’ I told her, flustered. Grant glanced out of the window, where thick banks of grey cloud filled the sky, but said nothing. ‘Did you want something?’

‘Oh yes!’ she said. ‘The master wants you. He’s in a right old—’

I quelled her with a look; Hugh is quite wrong about the disposition of power between us.

‘He has something he would like to discuss upstairs,’ she went on, then bobbed, turned and left. ‘Before he bursts,’ she said as she passed through the door and her footsteps quickened as she hurried away.

Thinking that I might as well get it over with right away, I followed her. The hallway of Auchenlea House was square and imposing with a stone fireplace and a suit of armour at the bottom of the stairs. The dining room was across it on the other side of the front door, a mirror image of the drawing room, and the stairs went up the back with soaring stone-mullioned windows at each landing. It was a perfectly pleasant, solid, comfortable house. I squared my shoulders and went to find Hugh.

He was standing in the middle of my bedroom, with Pallister at his side. I blinked, but I suppose it was not actually my bedroom just yet. It was still, strictly speaking, one of the rooms in a house we had let, albeit the best one which was why Grant had ordered my trunk to be deposited there and had put all three of my hatboxes on the bed.

‘Thank you, Pallister,’ said Hugh.

Pallister bowed his head and left, no parting shot from him on his way out, I noticed.

‘Dandy,’ said Hugh. ‘Pallister is displeased.’

‘Pallister is always displeased, ‘I said. ‘The last thing that pleased him was the Jubilee.’

‘I too am a little surprised,’ said Hugh. ‘This house doesn’t seem at all up to scratch.’ I blinked again and looked around me. The bedroom had windows on two sides, four in all, looking out to the hills, and was big enough to hold a dance in. In fact, I glanced around it, it must have been the same size as the drawing room beneath it. It had a pale Aubusson carpet and pale green wallpaper. The hangings were green and white stripes and what with the dark mahogany furniture, the whole room reminded me of nothing so much as a chocolate peppermint cream.

‘I think it’s lovely,’ I said. ‘Much prettier than I dared to anticipate.’

‘Four bedrooms,’ said Hugh. I nodded. This one, its opposite number above the dining room and another two on top of these. And in between, on each landing, what had been dressing rooms were now beautifully cosy bathrooms, with gleaming pipes and the untold luxury of sheepskin rugs on the floor. I was already imagining stepping out of my bath onto sheepskin and was planning to buy some for Gilverton when we returned home to enter into the new era of luxury. On the other hand, this house with its radiators and bathrooms was supposed to be softening Hugh up for the unannounced changes. He looked about as soft as flint just now.

‘Four of us, four bedrooms,’ I said. ‘What’s the problem?’

‘Pallister,’ said Hugh. ‘There is no basement, Dandy, beyond a sort of cellar. No butler’s pantry. Just three servants’ rooms above the kitchen wing.’

‘Have you been scampering up stairs and down, Hugh?’ I interrupted. ‘You must be feeling better.’

‘All very well for Grant and Mrs Tilling and the girl,’ Hugh went on. ‘But is Pallister to doss down with Drysdale in the stable loft?’

‘Well, Grant doesn’t mind sharing with the local girl,’ I said. ‘It won’t be the—’

‘
Interlocking
rooms, Dandy,’ said Hugh. ‘Three in a row.’

‘Ah,’ I said. I thought about it for a moment, wondering if there was some way to work it. If Pallister was in the outermost room then the women would be trapped until he was up in the morning. That would never do. If, on the other hand, he was in the innermost room, he would have three slumbering females to get past if he should need to. Worse and worse. ‘I don’t suppose there’s an outside door?’

‘To the roof?’

‘Or Pallister could have one of the rooms upstairs and Donald and Teddy can share.’

‘One bed in each,’ said Hugh.

‘Well, then there’s only one thing for it,’ I said. I felt my colour rising and I attempted a light laugh. ‘It’ll be quite a second honeymoon.’ Hugh did not return my smile. In fact, his mouth formed a grim line as we both heard the sound of Bunty’s toenails on the stairs. She appeared around the edge of the door, wagged her tail at me, gave Hugh a cold look and then made her way to the bed. It was lower than my bed at home and she managed without any difficulty to clamber onto it. She pawed at the counterpane, turned around twice and lay down, heaving a sigh and stretching.

‘I shall inform Pallister that the matter is resolved,’ Hugh said and stalked out.

I should have liked to avoid him for a few hours but if Bunty was here that meant the boys were too and I was anxious to see how Donald fared after his journey. I changed my shoes and hurried downstairs. They were in the drawing room, to where Mrs Tilling had already brought in the tea-things, having somehow managed to conjure bread-and-butter, scones and sugary cakes from somewhere. I subsided into the chair nearest the teapot and beamed at all three of my menfolk.

‘You look all right,’ I told Donald. ‘Not too tired?’

‘I fell asleep,’ Donald said, causing me a pang. An eighteen-year-old boy should not fall asleep on a two-hours train journey during the day.

‘Which made it pretty dull for me,’ Teddy said. ‘I had brought a pack of cards.’

‘One doesn’t play at cards on a train, Teddy,’ I said. ‘Who put that idea into your head?’

‘You did,’ he said, his eyes wide. He looked cherubic; it has always been a talent of his to be able to look that way. ‘Going to Granny’s. Snap.’

‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Snap. I see.’

‘You live in a very different world from us now, don’t you, Dandy?’ said Hugh. ‘It would never have occurred to me to suspect my sons of setting up a poker school on a railway train.’ For all the world as though gambling at poker – indeed, at anything – were not his favourite indoor pursuit in the world.

‘Speaking of your world, Mother,’ said Donald, ‘guess who we saw.’ He rolled a slice of buttered bread into a cigar-shape and bit the end off it.

‘I can’t imagine,’ I said. I
could
imagine, of course, even if I lamented the rotten luck that put him on the very same train with the boys.

‘Mr Osborne,’ said Donald. I frowned at his cigar, offered the scones to Teddy and handed Hugh his cup.

‘Hah,’ I said. ‘He must be on his way to London.’

‘On this line?’ said Hugh. Railways and their efficient use were an interest of his.

‘No, he got off,’ said Teddy. ‘Of course he might have been stretching his legs,’ he added helpfully. ‘The train did stop for ages.’

‘Although,’ I said, ‘I seem to remember we had a letter from Moffat recently. Perhaps he’s decided to look into the case.’

‘What was it?’ asked Teddy, swallowing a huge mouthful of scone to allow himself to speak. He was twelve before we broke his habit of speaking with his mouth full and his new habit of half choking himself so that he got a share of the conversation was not much of an improvement. ‘Burglary, blackmail, kidnap, murder?’

Hugh regarded me over the rim of his teacup. He did not frown or scowl, but just looked at me very smoothly. Grant would have been delighted with him.

‘My dear Teddy,’ I said. ‘Most of my work is straightening out very dull grown-up misunderstandings. Sad and painful for those concerned, of course, but nothing to gloat over.’

‘I wouldn’t say dull, Mother,’ said Donald. ‘Not when you look back over all of them.’ He put his cup down and sticking out the index finger of one hand and the little finger of the other he drew breath to begin to recall them.

‘Or perhaps he’s making a visit to someone in the vicinity,’ I said. ‘I do have a piece of news of the kind it’s quite all right to pore over, you know. Mr Osborne is seeking a wife.’ That arrested all of them. ‘Perhaps he’s visiting Moffat with matrimonial intent.’

Donald and Teddy were, as boys always are, mortified by this turn of the conversation. Teddy turned crimson to the tips of his ears and Donald simply rolled his eyes. He had had a terrible habit of chasing little girls, all through the pigtail-pulling years and well into the years of more dangerous attentions, but he had been cured of it by a hard-bitten Frenchwoman who had unveiled the mysteries of love and broken his tender heart. Teddy, at sixteen, was entering the eleventh year of finding girls and talk of girls quite simply ghastly.

Hugh loaded a plate with two scones and a cake, refilled his teacup, and made it to the door before he remembered that there was nowhere for him to go. He plumped down into a chair by the front window.

‘Nice view,’ he said. ‘Too hot over there with that enormous fire. Think we were roasting an ox.’

‘It
is
very warm, Mummy,’ said Teddy. ‘Sort of stuffy.’

‘It’s the hot pipes blasting away,’ said Hugh. ‘I’ll investigate the boiler and try to temper the heat before we’re all ill again.’

Yet another part of my plan, so neat on paper, seemed to be unravelling in messy reality. If Hugh and the boys did not glory in the warmth of Auchenlea House, I was in for some trouble when they got home to Gilverton and saw what had happened there. With relief, I turned my thoughts away from such domestic trivia and towards the case. Mrs Enid Addie and her heart attack (alleged) were what I had to pay attention to now.

I had jotted down the details from Mrs Addie’s death certificate, with her grieving offspring watching me closely lest I make a mark upon it, and my first unenviable task was to track down the doctor who signed it. (I counted myself lucky that I had come this far in my detecting career without ever before having been pitched into this particular nest of vipers, for I could not see how a doctor could take such an enquiry as anything but a slur. I only hoped I could escape from his surgery without a threat of slander chasing after me.)

Escaping him, however, was not my only difficulty. Effecting an excuse to visit him was giving me some trouble too. Hugh and the boys awoke on the morning after our first night at Auchenlea House eager to plunge into their watery new pastime and appeared to take it for granted that I would be their handmaiden for the duration.

‘I’d like to go to the well itself,’ said Teddy. ‘It’s only a bit up into the hills and there’s a path.’ He was making a good breakfast, despite the extra solidity that had come of Mrs Tilling attempting porridge on an electric stove whose efficiency had clearly caught her unawares. I grimaced to see him hack off a mouthful with the edge of his spoon and literally chew it before swallowing. ‘But Donald’s being a ninny.’

Donald did not throw anything, raise his voice, call Teddy worse or badger me to punish him and I glanced with real concern at him.

‘Don’t be rotten, Teddy,’ I said. ‘Neither of you is tramping the hills and sharing water with sheep when there is a perfectly good bath house in the town, where the water is served in glasses. In fact, I would imagine that the Hydro has its own supply of the water and there’s no need to go to the public room at all.’

‘Might be fun at the pump room,’ said Donald. ‘Might meet people there.’