‘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.