Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone Read online

  ‘It’s a thought,’ I replied. ‘It would get us away from the scarlet fever and actually it might go along very well with what I was intending.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Although we’d have to go a long way south to find seaside that wasn’t a trial in October. France, perhaps? The mountains? But I’d spend all the money I’m hoping to use for my grand idea.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Central heating,’ I proclaimed. ‘A boiler and pipes and radiators and every room in the house like a fireside nook from wall to wall and floor to ceiling.’

  ‘Hugh must be ill,’ said Alec.

  ‘Hugh doesn’t know,’ I told him. ‘So you see, getting him out of the house would be pretty handy.’

  ‘Can you afford it?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘the thing is, you see, that Hugh has just offloaded some shares.’

  ‘Really?’ Alec cocked his head. ‘He’s selling? Everyone’s buying.’

  ‘That’s what Hugh says too, but he won’t tell me what. What are you buying?’

  ‘Oh Dandy, join the modern age,’ Alec said. ‘One doesn’t buy shares in things any more. One buys securities on margin with a broker’s loan.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Alec. ‘I think it’s an American invention.’

  ‘Aha! Then you are both at the same game. Hugh offloaded these shares, as I said – ancient old things he’s been holding for sentimental reasons more than anything; I think his father first bought them – and he offloaded his London broker too and got one in New York.’

  ‘Sounds like it then,’ said Alec. ‘Good for Hugh.’

  ‘So we’re sloshing in actual cash for a change, until he spends it on these New York securities. Only with the flu and bronchitis it’s been the last thing on his mind. Or maybe he thinks I’ve done it for him. I couldn’t say.’

  Alec’s face betrayed a not uncommon mix of emotions; he is my friend – mine, not ours – and his loyalties lie properly with me, but every so often when it comes to such things as farming, shooting and evidently money too some deep masculine chord begins to thrum in harmony with Hugh.

  ‘You can’t possibly be serious, Dan,’ he said. ‘Hugh thinks you’ve stepped in and carried out his business for him whilst he was ill – as he has every right to expect you to, by the way – and instead you’re planning to fritter away shares in a gold mine just so you can waft about in backless frocks and not get gooseflesh?’

  ‘I don’t see it that way at all,’ I said. ‘I think if I choose to spend money wisely on solid goods instead of gambling on ticker-tape fairy tales Hugh should be thankful for my sound sense.’

  ‘Sound sense?’ Alec cried. ‘Dandy, this is the biggest year the stock market’s ever seen!’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘I haven’t a clue,’ said Alec. ‘But the brokers and bankers do. That’s good enough for me.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I hope your trust in them is warranted.’

  We tore bread, drank soup and glared for a minute. Alec gave in first.

  ‘The mountains? The Alps, you mean? For the air?’

  ‘The mountain air does the same job as ozone, doesn’t it? Not to mention all the clinics and tonics and what have you.’ I hoped he would not notice the inconsistency of my advocating cold mountain breezes while I was plotting to banish the fresh air of a thousand draughts from Gilverton for ever.

  ‘And I’d take over Gilver and Osborne, would I?’ said Alec. ‘While you’re away.’

  ‘If a case comes in,’ I said. ‘It’s been rather quiet.’

  ‘Only …’ He drank soup, then sherry, then a mouthful of water. ‘I might be busy.’

  ‘I can always have my post forwarded,’ I said. ‘If I go at all, darling. It was only a thought.’

  ‘The thing is,’ said Alec, ‘I’m thinking of taking a wife.’

  To my great satisfaction I did not drop my spoon, inhale a crumb or utter a gasp. With perfect honesty, however, that was because my thought when I heard him was ‘Whose wife? Take her where?’ and by the time I had properly parsed his odd phrasing I was past the danger.

  ‘Well, let me be the first to offer my congratulations,’ I said.

  ‘And so I’m going to have to put a bit of effort into finding one.’

  ‘You— You mean— You’re planning to marry someone but—’

  ‘I need a wife,’ he said, like someone telling a waiter he needed a fork. ‘I need an heir. I’d quite like a daughter or two. A family, I suppose you’d say.’

  ‘You’ve picked a funny time to start the auditions,’ I said and my tone of amusement, my air of calm interest, was quite a feat, even though I myself say so. ‘Why not wait until next season? You’d not get in the door of the first ball before one of the mammas picked you off.’

  Alec shuddered.

  ‘I can’t face a season and the mammas,’ he said. ‘Not to mention some drip of a girl making eyes at me. I’d like to marry a woman who wants a home and a family of her own and won’t pester me with a lot of silly nonsense beforehand.’

  ‘You want to marry Hugh,’ I said. ‘If only he had a sister. Or a niece, I suppose.’

  ‘Sister,’ said Alec. ‘Someone over thirty and past all the lovey-dovey stuff would be ideal.’

  ‘Well,’ I said briskly, ‘I shouldn’t have thought you’d have any trouble. A personable young man under forty, good family, nice estate, reasonable income.’

  ‘Would you like to tap my ribs with a rubber hammer, Dan?’ he said. ‘I told you I couldn’t face the mammas and you instantly become one.’

  I laughed and he laughed with me and Barrow came in for the soup plates and the evening passed away on teasing and stock market gossip. It wasn’t until I was in my little motorcar driving home that I let the mask fall and plunged into mourning. It was over then, Gilver and Osborne, Alec and me. Whatever he said about a sensible girl and life going on as usual except punctuated by babies, there was not the faintest chance that our pleasant round would survive the advent of a wife. I could picture her already and, try as I might, I did not care for her.

  So I stopped in on Hugh, instead of making straight for my sitting room.

  ‘How would you like to go away for a bit?’ I said. ‘A change of air, build you up again.’

  ‘Bournemouth kind of thing?’ said Hugh. ‘Rather late in the year, isn’t it? Last thing Donald needs is a sea fog seeping in at his bedroom window. I just paid him a visit and I see what you mean.’

  ‘How about mountain air?’ I said. ‘Some crisp mountain air and those clever doctors?’

  ‘Germans?’

  ‘Swiss, I was thinking.’

  ‘Same thing,’ said Hugh. ‘Can’t say I could face the journey anyway.’

  ‘Then put it out of your mind,’ I said, bending to peck his cheek. ‘Goodnight, dear.’

  ‘Are you all right, Dandy?’ he said, understandably startled. ‘I didn’t mean to shoot the idea out of the sky, you know. I’m with you as far as the clever doctors anyway. Marvellous what they can do with salts and hot towels and electrical currents these days.’

  By which I took it that Hugh had been reading the back pages of old Blackwood’s Magazines again. I left him to his amusements and retired to mine, and to my daily duties too.

  It was a good thing that Gilver and Osborne had been enjoying a peaceful spell because this evening, when I did not even open my correspondence until bedtime, was typical. We had caught a thief in March, unmasked a poison pen in June and then apart from Alec tracking down a bad debtor in August – this being quite a speciality of his these days, much less sordid to have someone like him tap the shoulder and ‘old man’ and ‘dear chap’ his way to a settlement than to have bailiffs calling – our little operation had been in dry dock. That was about to change.

  ‘Dear Messrs Gilver and Osborne,’ the letter began. ‘We would like to engage you to solve a murder which has been grossly
mishandled by the Dumfriesshire Constabulary and scandalously hushed up by the Dumfries Procurator, leaving our dear departed mother without justice and letting a brutal killer go free.’

  I turned up the lamp and put my feet back down on the floor; I had tucked them under me, but this letter needed a straight back.

  ‘Our mother was a guest at Laidlaw’s Hydropathic Establishment in Moffat during the late summer, there to take the waters for a recurring back complaint. She was recovering nicely and was otherwise in excellent health, being a sensible lady of quiet habits. Her heart was perfectly sound. The doctor’s diagnosis of acute heart failure was nonsense and the Fiscal’s capitulation is an outrage. We await notice of your terms and remain, sincerely yours, Herbert Addie and Mrs Jas. Bowie (née Addie), “Fairways”, Braid Road, Edinburgh.’

  Well.

  On the one hand, murder is the gold standard for a detective and any of that ilk who says otherwise is afraid of sounding callous and so is lying. On the other hand, these Addies – or rather this Addie and Bowie née – sounded like the very worst sort of client. They had already made up their minds and looked to Gilver and Osborne for corroboration; I would be forced to warn them, along with sending our terms, that we were servants of truth and that our fee only paid for us finding out whether, finding out what. No treasures on earth could buy our agreement to finding out that, dear dead mother or no.

  However, the Addies were only part of the picture here. Fate, or coincidence as she is known in these rational days, had painted rather more, in the form of a hydropathic hotel with, one assumed, salts and hot towels and electrical currents, whither a loving wife and mother could remove her convalescing household while the plumbers were in. So long as she did not mention the brutal killer still at large, anyway.

  2

  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.’