‘Can you give me any idea as to what ails your sons?’ she said, in a wavering voice, as I stood and brushed the dust from my coat. ‘So I know what to bring, you know. I don’t travel with a Gladstone bag every day like Dr Ramsay.’
‘Pleurisy and pneumonia after flu,’ I said. ‘Nothing serious like weak hearts or anything. In fact, let’s not pander to them with a house call after all. What was I thinking? I, like you, Dr Laidlaw, believe in fresh air and exercise. And yes, it was Dr Ramsay. How did you know?’
The putty had faded to chalk, leaving her lips blue – rather prettily bowed lips, dimpling in at the corners; I had not noticed them before, unpainted as they were – and her eyes dark and enormous, with purple smudges around them. I felt a familiar thrill as I let myself out and made my way to the front hall to meet the others. It was becoming clearer and clearer that the Addies were not imagining things. Their dear dead mother had been wronged in some way, I was sure of it, and we would avenge her.
Naturally, Hugh and the boys were nowhere to be seen when I got there, Hugh’s stringent punctuality being reserved for beaters, chauffeurs, ministers of the kirk and fellow officers, not for the likes of me. Whenever he saunters in late to some rendezvous we have arranged, he looks at his watch and says, ‘Good, good. Let’s make an early start then since you’re here in nice time,’ as though I have come up to scratch for once in a blue moon and surprised him. Today I was glad of it, because an opportune meeting came my way. There was an inopportune one first, though.
As I waited, installed in one of those throne-like chairs with which hallways come equipped, seat-cushions stuffed with something which gives them that stodgy and unyielding consistency, like fudge, I was far from delighted to hear whistling and see a silhouette sauntering towards me along the passageway with its hands in its trouser pockets. Thomas Laidlaw; I could not take to the man.
‘Well, well, well,’ he said, when he reached me. He took his hands out of his pockets but only to rub them together as though with vast relish of unknown source, hardly more civil than if he had left them there. ‘Off already, Mrs Gilver?’
‘For the evening, Mr Laidlaw,’ I said. ‘In the morning I shall return.’
‘Once the sun is safely up, eh?’ he said, giving me a solemn look. ‘I think you’ll have to summon more courage than that, Mrs Gilver, if your trip’s not to be a wasted one.’
I stared and summoned, not courage, but my haughtiest voice and my most disdainful expression.
‘I do not have the pleasure of understanding you, Mr Laidlaw,’ I said. ‘You speak in riddles.’
‘Can I ask who recommended us to you?’ he said. ‘A family who hails from Perthshire needn’t by any means come as far as Moffat to a hydro.’ They were almost the words Mrs Cronin had spoken to me. ‘Any particular reason we took your fancy?’
‘Your sister – such a scholar – has no equal in Crieff,’ I said and I was intrigued to see him lift his chin up and away to the side to give me a narrow look from the corner of his eye. He reminded me of an archer sighting prey along his drawn bow. Then, at a sound from outside on the drive, he spun around on the balls of his feet to face the door.
‘Reinforcements,’ he said. ‘Who do you suppose this will be?’
It was only to be expected that the owner of such a large hotel in such a dull spot would be charmed by arriving guests, but I found myself paying more attention than Nanny Palmer would have called polite as the door opened and the newcomers entered. I was agog to see if these would be more of the solid but sickly bourgeoisie I took to be the doctor’s lot or more of the vacuous crew I had filed under her brother’s name.
I had momentarily forgotten my overhearings, but as soon as I saw the little caravan which hove through the baronial doors of the Hydro with bags and boxes aplenty as though planning to stay for a month I thought to myself: Aha! Class 3. For if Mrs Scott, Mrs Davies and Mrs Riddle – those odd, earnest ladies in the steam room – had had clothes on I was sure the clothes would be these.
They were five in number, two men and three women all somewhere in the sixties or beyond. The men were dressed with outlandish – one might almost say Dickensian – extravagance in their tall hats, velvet facings, satin pipings and brocade upon any garment that brocade could applied to. I could not help but conclude they must be sorry that old-fashioned garb could only, at its farthest stretch, take them back that far, and that cut-away tailcoats and neck cloths of white silk would have been out-and-out fancy dress and would have brought the whistle to a constable’s lips if he had seen them.
The women were even more extraordinary. To be sure, one was of a sort to be seen in village streets throughout the land, only not often in the lobbies of large hotels. She had stuck with the fashions of her youth throughout the fifty years since its passing and was therefore dressed in skirts which trailed the ground with a lace cap over her white hair. She had on a travelling cape of wool with a red flannel lining and a red-silk-lined hood, and if she had held out an apple and invited me to take a bite of it I might not have run, but I would certainly have broken into a trot in the opposite direction.
The younger companion at her side, most solicitously offering her arm and helping the old woman up the stone steps from the vestibule to the lobby proper, was another sort entirely. Her hair, brownish-grey and wiry with it, was drawn straight back from her forehead and hung down almost to her waist. Her dress, of a greyish-brown one might imagine had been chosen to match her hair, except that no one would look so grimly drab on purpose, hung straight from her shoulders to her calves, like a sack, and the overcoat on top was of a navy serge I had not seen since the last time a troupe of Girl Guides had chosen an inclement day to storm the park at Gilverton and huddle around their campfires until the charabanc returned to fetch them home again.
The final member of the coven was comparatively unremarkable set against the rest: hair of a somewhat suspicious bright brown given the wrinkles which striped her forehead and fanned from the corners of her eyes, and an outfit of military cut, the jacket well served with pockets and the skirt reminiscent of a lady’s riding costume with its clever deep pleats and moleskin touches. She took off her hat, threw her gloves into it and looked around for a servant who would take it away. Tot Laidlaw obliged, rushing forward and bowing to them all, but looking at them very hard all the while.
At that interesting moment Hugh arrived, with the boys in tow, just in time to see me gawking at strangers like a guttersnipe. I think I may even have had my mouth open, and he let the spirit of Nanny Palmer live in the glare he gave me.
‘We got tired of waiting for you on the terrace,’ he said with astounding cheek. ‘Thought we’d try here. Good, good. Let’s be off then.’ As an apology for lateness it failed on every count but I saved my breath, simply rolling my eyes and standing to follow him. He held the door open for me – what manners were drummed in by his own nanny and the subsequent schoolmasters are unshakeable – and I swept out, managing to pick up a mention of ‘late booking’ and ‘lucky cancellation’ on my way past the new arrivals.
I had expected to need a long quiet evening to creep my way towards the fact of Alec, his presence in the Hydro, the coincidence of our arrival there and the thorny question of whether I had dragged my loved ones into a case or an assignation, but we were still on the drive heading back to the road when Hugh broached it himself.
‘You didn’t know Osborne was headed here, did you, Dandy?’
‘Oh, yes, that’s right, Mummy,’ said Teddy. ‘We saw him again. I told you he got off the train.’
‘I did not,’ I said. ‘Is he really here then? At the Hydro? What fun.’