‘And he wasn’t twinkling and winking when he said it either. Ugh, I loathe hinters. I can’t fathom why Hugh seems to have taken to him.’
Alec laughed and went to pour himself another glass of sherry. ‘This is lovely wine,’ he said. ‘You surely didn’t find it in the Moffat licensed victuallers.’
‘Pallister brought it with him,’ I said. ‘Why were you laughing?’
‘I’m not surprised Hugh has fallen on Tot like a long-lost brother,’ he said. ‘This whole excursion picked up no end for Hugh when Tot came on the scene.’
‘He does seem – Laidlaw, I mean – to have drawn a more glamorous crowd than I was expecting.’
Alec was shaking his head and laughing silently. ‘Oh, I know he’s beyond the pale, but you have to hand it to him. For years on end Thomas Laidlaw was supposed to be training in hydropathy in the Alps, like his father before him and his sister too, but he bunked off. He went to Monte Carlo and made a fortune there. Then when his father died and left him the Hydro, he came home to sell up, couldn’t get Dorothea to agree and found a way to turn it to hand. Now, he’s making a fortune here. Or was for a while. I rather think he’s in deep water now and only just breaking even.’
‘How?’
‘My dear Dandy, he’s running a casino.’ My mouth fell open and I had to scramble to stop my cigarette falling into my lap and burning me. ‘After midnight,’ Alec said, ‘when all of Dr Laidlaw’s patients are tucked up in their little beds, the winter gardens are transformed. The doors to the terrace are bolted, there’s a doorman on the only door to the passageway and the respectable majority know nothing.’ He laughed again, but he laughed alone.
‘Hugh!’ I said. ‘All those sly looks and that smirking!’ For Hugh loves nothing more on earth than a casino, or rather he loves a casino with a passion equal to his love for grouse, stags, well-managed woodlands and tidy farms running at profit and giving work to his men. I have known him take estate plans to Monaco and spend the days in his room poring over them while the sun shines and the sea sparkles outside, whiling away the hours until darkness falls and the croupiers split their decks for the evening. Finding a casino in a Scottish valley with forests and moors and pheasant outside must have seemed to him like a dream come true.
‘It’s always been an unaccountable quirk of his to me,’ I said. ‘I like a game of cards at home with friends, but one meets such dreadful people in public casinos. The sort of people who would give Hugh toothache if he had to share their carriage on a train.’
‘But taking their money must be lovely,’ Alec said. I had to laugh and nod at that, for while Hugh loves to gamble he does not suffer from the gambler’s usual complaint of loss and remorse and threatened penury. He is either lucky or brilliant or has an iron will because he always walks away from the roulette wheel and the rouge-et-noir where chance is all, as well as from the poker table and the vingt-et-un where skill can help one, better off than when he arrived; and what losses he has endured over the years have been of the size which can be met with a shrug and an extra glass of whisky before bedtime. It is intensely irritating to me, not least since on the few occasions when I have joined him I quickly lost my all and wanted nothing more than to keep going and win it back again.
‘That certainly explains the bright young things,’ I said, shoving thoughts of Hugh aside. ‘But why do they have to subject themselves to the salts and waters? If it’s supposed to convince the staff and other guests that they are patients, it’s not working. You said on the first day that there were two camps.’
Alec shook his head.
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘Something to do with tax, maybe? Tot Laidlaw is what my father used to call a warm man. Onto anything that offers a profit.’
‘I wonder if he’s charging the ghost hunters a premium for the entertainments,’ I said. We gave one another a long and sober look.
‘Ah yes,’ Alec said. ‘The enormous and unspeakable thing. Are you going to say it or shall I?’
‘Oh, I don’t mind saying it. I just don’t know what to make of it.’
‘Go on then.’
‘Very well. The Moffat Hydro is a honey pot which draws not bees but spiritualists, mediums and witchety-woos as though it’s Hallowe’en at Alloway Kirk.’
‘And our suspicious death was apparently caused by a ghostly visitation.’
‘These two things must be related.’
‘But not in the most obvious way.’
‘Which is?’
‘That Mrs Addie saw a ghost and the mediums coming to see it too is no different from archaeologists high-tailing it to Egypt because the Earl has found a new tomb.’
‘Poor Porchy,’ I said. ‘He was a sweet man.’ Alec was giving me a very hard look. I sighed and relented. ‘No, I can’t countenance any of that. It troubles me how detailed things are getting, mind you. Some of the ghosts have names.’
‘Some?’ said Alec. ‘How many are there?’
‘I overheard someone saying seven had been sighted, or heard tapping or whatever ghosts do. And another dozen were in the offing.’
‘Seven?’ said Alec. ‘With names and everything? That can’t be a mistake about a piece of flapping cloth on a lonely fencepost then. Someone must be deliberately making it up. In careful detail, as you say.’ I was nodding.
‘Extremely careful,’ I agreed. ‘Because actually it wasn’t “another dozen or so”. There were four with names or descriptions, and another either eleven or thirteen. As though two schools of thought were having a little academic wrangle. And it seems – again from my overhearings: Nanny Palmer would spank me – that some great personage is coming from London, some panjandrum of the spirit world, to subject the goings-on to serious study. The underlings are all atwitter.’
We sat in silence for a short while, turning it over. It is not a pleasant thing suddenly to have one’s solemn and serious work made into a nonsense that way.
‘So…’ said Alec at last, ‘do we think then that the Laidlaws believe the Hydro is haunted and they wanted to keep it quiet and that’s why they suppressed so many of the facts surrounding Mrs Addie dying?’
‘Bad for business?’ I said. ‘Only it’s not, is it? The place is filling up like a pub on market day.’
‘And I wish it weren’t,’ Alec said. ‘I don’t like those mediums. One of them that passed me in the corridor yesterday had the creepiest eyes I’ve ever seen outside a fairground. Not that we actually believe…’
‘Of course not!’ I said stoutly.
‘So what do we think?’
‘We think someone is making mischief, Mrs Addie caught wind of it and went to see for herself. That’s all. And dropped her bag and went back to find it.’
‘And died of fright. But we don’t believe there was anything to die of fright of. Does that actually make sense, Dandy, when you get right down to it?’
‘Yes,’ I said, stouter still. ‘She could have got a fright from something she imagined. Easily.’ I drained my glass in a most unladylike way. ‘Or the whole story of the fright and the heart attack could be covering up murder, it’s true. But let’s not jump down that hole until we have to.’
‘I still think we could just tell Dr Laidlaw that we know her patient went out and collapsed somewhere.’
‘I’d rather find the bag and not get Regina into trouble,’ I said.
‘Because if she was unscrupulous,’ Alec persisted, ‘she’d have signed that certificate. Why can’t we at least just ask her about Mrs Addie and see what she says?’