Was Mrs Addie hunting for ghosts? Regina thought not and Alec would soon be able to add her family’s views on the matter. Very well then, was she out and about on some other errand and happened simply to see one? Why did she return at night? And where did she return to? Did she bring anything back with her? How did Dr Laidlaw happen to follow her there? Only one of these questions had I the least chance of answering.
‘Mrs Bowie,’ I said, when the call had been put through and the servant had summoned her. ‘I am so pleased to be able to have a word with you, but it is actually Mr Osborne I’m hoping to catch.’
‘Oh Mrs Gilver, you missed him!’ said Mrs Bowie. There was no outrage in her voice, no disapproval. I guessed that Alec had managed to ascertain Mrs Addie’s views on the spirit world without offending her daughter to the point of sulking. ‘He was here a good couple of hours but he’s away to catch his train now. He’ll be back with you before much longer.’ I heard her voice grow strained as she twisted her neck, I guessed, to see a clock in the room where she was speaking.
‘Oh, dash it,’ I said. ‘I so much wanted to ask him to raise a few more questions with you than he went away armed with. Our investigation goes on apace, Mrs Bowie, and I have made some pertinent discoveries today.’
‘Can you not just ask me yourself?’ she said, falling neatly into my plan.
‘Well, how very accommodating of you,’ I said. ‘I should not for the world have asked you to hang on a telephone and be interviewed but if you are sure…’
‘For my dear mother’s rest, anything,’ said Mrs Bowie. She would bend over backwards head to heels now that this telephone interview was her own idea. My devious tricks shock me sometimes.
‘We are trying to piece together your mother’s last day,’ I said. ‘And I wondered-’
‘Oh, but dear Mr Osborne thought of that,’ said Mrs Bowie. I noted the adjective with interest. Not only had he not offended the woman; he had made a conquest of her. ‘He said it occurred to him coming up on the train.’
‘And could you help him with it?’ I said.
‘Not with much more than we could tell you at our first meeting,’ she said. ‘She wasn’t going to go out for a few days yet. She had treatments planned for all day every day and it was going to be later in the week before she could get down to the town to get some tablet and send a postcard. That’s what we told you, if you remember.’
‘I certainly do,’ I said. ‘But did Mr Osborne happen to mention that we think your mother’s plans might have changed? We think she did indeed go out that day. The day she died – I’m so sorry to speak baldly, I mean no incivility by it.’ This was me trying too late and most likely in vain to match what I am sure had been Alec’s Arthurian heights of tender chivalry.
‘He did say as much,’ said Mrs Bowie, ‘but my brother and I are quite in agreement that he – you both, pardon me – are mistaken. If Mother went out she’d have sent me a card, if not a wee parcel, and well…’
‘Yes?’
‘It wouldn’t be like her. She always adhered to her treatment diary. It was like a sacred duty to her. She had such regard for old Dr Laidlaw; she’d never have gone against what the Hydro told her to do.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘I do see, and I daresay you’re right, Mrs Bowie. But there’s one last thing that Mr Osborne might have neglected to ask. I wonder – I’ve no desire to upset you – but when your mother’s effects came back to you, did you happen to go through them? Did you look through her pockets? Tidy out cloakroom receipts and suchlike. And I wonder – this must seem like awful cheek – but have you sorted through her clothes and shoes and things? Laundered them or sent them for cleaning?’
There was a long silence at the other end. I thought I had horrified the woman, harping on about the clothes and shoes and the very bus tickets of the dead woman. But when eventually she drew breath and spoke again it was not that at all.
‘Now, fancy you thinking of that, Mrs Gilver,’ she said. ‘You really are a pair of wonders, Mr Osborne and you. I’ve been meaning to write to Dr Laidlaw and ask about Mother’s bag and about the clothes she was wearing that day. Her trunk came back right enough on the train, all clean and tidy, and her overnight bag too with her nightgowns. And of course her earthly remains themselves came back. We had the funeral right here in Morningside. But her things from that last day are missing.’
Quietly to myself in the kiosk I mimed whipping a hat off my head and throwing it in the air. Huzzah! I was willing to bet they were missing. I was absolutely willing to bet they were. They must have been filthy.
‘Not that we’re making a fuss over a suit of clothes,’ Mrs Bowie was saying now. No Eliza Doolittle she, caring about what had happened to a new straw hat what should have come to her. ‘It’s just that she always carried her father’s watch in her bag.’
‘Her bag’s missing?’ I said, astonished that they would accept such a thing.
‘Oh, not her proper handbag,’ said Mrs Bowie. ‘Just her little bag that she kept with her and took out on wee short walks and so on.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I see.’
‘It’s just that it had a lock of hair from our brother who died, inside the watch-case you see… and there were some very precious letters too that she always kept with her. I’d like to have them again if we could find them. Only with all the ill feeling after the police and the Fiscal and all of that, it never did seem like the right time to write and ask and…’
‘Leave it to me, Mrs Bowie,’ I said. ‘Put it right out of your mind and leave it to me.’ What I really meant was ‘For heaven’s sake don’t write now and go mucking everything up for us’ but one cannot talk to clients that way.
‘I shall, Mrs Gilver,’ she said, ‘most thankfully.’ With that we made our farewells and I hung up the earpiece and sat back. I had gone panning for silver and found gold.
It was the bag. The Laidlaws and Dr Ramsay and Sergeant Simpson together had decided not to upset the Addies with talk of their mother crashing through undergrowth, chasing ghosts, and tumbling to her death, and so they must have packed her dirty clothes and shoes away, hoping that her son and daughter would never think to ask for them. Perhaps they had even burned them in the boiler if they were really ruined. But they would never have kept or burned a woman’s handbag, not even a little indoor bag, surely, with her husband’s watch and her cache of letters, presumably tied with a red ribbon and unmistakably precious to the most casual glance. That would have been returned with her trunk and case and her ‘proper bag’, surely. The only explanation I could come up with was that when she was brought home that night, she had no longer had her bag with her. She had dropped it, lost it somewhere. And if we were lucky and searched very hard it might still be there, lying where it fell.
A shaft of sunlight broke over my head and a choir of angels sang my name in a sweet piping soprano. If one drops a bag somewhere, one returns to search for it. Hallelujah. I might not know why Mrs Addie went out on a spree in the afternoon instead of submitting to her heat lamps and mustard wraps, but I thought I knew why she went back again at night. She was not a ghost hunter hoping to see better against a dark sky than the glimpse she had caught in the daytime. She was a woman with a bundle of precious letters and a lock of precious hair who would venture out to find them even if a ghost was in the offing.