We hurried along the corridor to the stairs, up two flights and round to the west side, Alec fumbling his key out of his trouser pocket as we went along. Once inside his room I tipped my armful onto the bed and stared at it. Everything was there: shirt, petticoat, stockings, vest, chemise, brassiere and underdrawers – the lot.
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘Tweeds, cotton underthings and corsetry go to completely different bits of a laundry, as I well know.’ I had spent nine days on a case once pretending to be a lady’s maid, and none of the arcane lore I had amassed would ever desert me. ‘How could they all be lost together and then found again?’
Alec picked up the coat part of the tweeds and held it against him. It was gargantuan, looking as though it would wrap twice round Alec’s frame. He let it drop and lifted the skirt, which was easily a yard wide.
‘Everyone kept saying she was a sizeable lady,’ he said. ‘They were being kind.’
I was unfastening the drawstring of the shoe bag. I drew out one wide leather brogue, turned it up and peered at it.
‘Look, Dan,’ Alec said. ‘A walk up a hill could easily have killed a woman this size.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ I said. I put the shoe down and took the skirt from Alec’s hands.
‘The woman who fitted these clothes should never have been sent out climbing hills for exercise,’ he persisted. ‘We’ve cracked it. Dr Laidlaw prescribed it and it did for her. That’s what they’re hiding.’
I was examining the skirt, rubbing the material through my fingers. I sniffed the cuffs of the coat too.
‘But it’s nonsense,’ I said.
‘They’re not hers?’ said Alec.
‘They might be,’ I replied. ‘I can telephone to Mrs Bowie and ask her what dress size her mother took. But these clothes weren’t worn outside on a muddy hillside. She had dirt under her nails, but her coat cuffs are clean and don’t smell of benzene. They smell of lily-of-the-valley cologne.’ I put the coat down and sorted through the pile of smaller garments, lifting a stocking. ‘She had dirt ground into her knees, Regina said. But look at this stocking. It should be torn, or snagged at least, and it’s perfect.’
‘Maybe-’
‘No, look at it, Alec.’ I held it up and let it dangle. ‘It hasn’t been washed. Look.’
‘It looks clean to me,’ Alec said.
‘It’s still got the shape of the leg in it,’ I insisted. ‘Clean stockings look like sausage skins, you know. Worn stockings have the ghost of the leg in them.’ I had not chosen my words wisely and I let the stocking drop again, unnerved. Alec was rummaging in the coat pockets, or trying to, anyway, but looking for pockets where he would in a coat of his own and not finding any. When he finally plunged his hand into the only two there were in women’s suiting, his eyes widened and he drew something out and showed it to me.
‘The lack of muck and benzene is a puzzle,’ he said, ‘but look at this. Proof positive, at least, that she went out that last day.’
In his hand was a striped paper bag, twisted shut at the corners, bearing the name and black-and-white livery of the Moffat Toffee Shop. That, more than the pitiful stocking with the ghost of Mrs Addie’s sturdy leg inside it, melted my heart. I picked the bag up and twirled it around to open it.
‘Poor thing,’ I said, ‘she didn’t even have one.’ For it certainly looked like a full quarter-pound of wrapped toffees in there and the bag had the pristine look that never lasts long after leaving the sweetshop. I glanced up at Alec. He was frowning down at me. He looked to the coat which lay on the bed and back again.
‘Doesn’t seem all that likely,’ he said. ‘How do you get to be the size of those tweeds if you don’t dip into your toffees as soon as you’ve bought them?’
‘Tablet,’ I said. Alec looked into the bag.
‘Toffee,’ he insisted.
‘Yes, it is,’ I agreed. ‘And it shouldn’t be. Mrs Bowie told us when we were there and she said it again on the telephone. Her mother loved the tablet from the Moffat Toffee Shop. Presumably whoever bought these and put them in the pocket of her coat didn’t know that.’
‘This is very bad,’ Alec said. He was trying to refold the skirt and coat into neat squares, hating all of a sudden, I think, to be touching her things.
‘That’s why Mrs Cronin shoved them at us,’ I went on. ‘Perhaps we were meant to do what we did or perhaps I was just supposed to witness Dr Laidlaw discovering the bag of sweets. Well, I’m not going to play their game. I shall ring for a maid to deliver them. Someone’s laying a false scent, Alec, and I don’t want them to know whether or not we’ve got a sniff of it.’
‘A false scent,’ Alec said. ‘Yes, I see. It wasn’t that she went out and they pretended she didn’t.’ He nodded as he thought his way through the thicket. ‘Far from it. She went nowhere and someone is pretending she did.’
‘Regina must have been told to say Mrs Addie was a bit grubby and she went much too far.’
‘Just as the ghosts are going too far now also,’ Alec said. ‘All those mediums. It’s completely out of hand.’
‘Isn’t it worrying that there are two stories?’ I asked him.
He was nodding faster now. ‘The one where she went out and collapsed. And one where she saw a ghost here and died of fright. But there’s as much effort going into suppressing the stories as there is to spreading them. Sergeant Simpson, Dr Ramsay, and the Addies all think different things. I don’t understand at all.’
‘And all of a sudden, I do,’ I said. ‘They couldn’t agree on one. They can’t agree on anything much, after all – whether this place is a hospital or a casino, for instance. Whether to sell up or keep going. Even whether these clothes were supposed to have been to the laundry and back or had been put away at day’s end with a bag of toffees in the pocket! There are two stories, Alec, because there are two Laidlaws, and they can’t agree.’
‘And even if it’s not the two Laidlaws,’ Alec said. ‘If it’s Tot and someone else, or if it’s Tot changing his mind. The ghosts are attracting too much attention so he’s switched to a new tale. No, don’t shake your head at me that way. It makes no difference. Competing stories or successive stories, Dandy – either way when there’s so much effort going into covering something up, it rather looks as though that something might be murder.’
11
The Hydro guests, at least the doctor’s devotees and Tot Laidlaw’s bright young things, were making the most of this afternoon of Indian summer, the way Scots will always do. Heaven knew in what dark dungeon the mediums were gathered to stir chickens’ entrails and cast knuckle bones in the dust – or was I mixing up mediums with some other species of ghoul? – but everyone else was on the terrace, the clock golf course or the croquet lawn, or could be heard at the tennis courts and bowling greens, in the swish and whack of gut against sheepskin or the soft knock of ebony upon ebony and the ripple of applause.
Alec and I had the winter gardens to ourselves, then, and thankfully so given the discussion which needed to be had there.
‘What in the name of blazes method of murder fools a doctor and a policeman?’ Alec said.
‘An untraceable poison?’ I suggested. ‘Or not even untraceable, when I come to think of it, since there wasn’t a proper post-mortem. A perfectly traceable poison. Or smothering.’
‘Doesn’t smothering turn one’s face black?’ Alec said. ‘And anyway I’d have hated to be the one to overcome Mrs Addie and hold her down. Unless she was restrained somehow.’
‘Strangulation turns the face black, not smothering,’ I said. ‘But restraints would certainly show – rings of bruises on the wrists and ankles, mostly likely.’
‘And Dr Ramsay and Sergeant Simpson could hardly miss those.’