Hoping to get away without having to make an entrance, though, I parked my motorcar in a passing place halfway along the drive and made the rest of my approach on foot, cursing the shoes Grant had persuaded me into, which had long, pointed toes, slightly turned up too, after the manner of a Turk’s slippers, and were very tricky to walk in without kicking gravel up in spouts before one.
It only occurred to me when I had got to the front door and was lurking in the rhododendrons on its far side that I should of course have thought of a different way to enter the Hydro if I wanted to be truly incognito. In my mind’s eye I traversed the stone steps, the vestibule, the carpeted steps and the hall beyond. It had to be forty feet without any cover at all until the mouth of the nearest passageway and it did not lead to the Turkish baths by any quick route that I knew. Cursing myself now, I slipped along the front of the building, round the side, down the shallow steps to the terrace level and along past the drawing room to the small smoking room, thinking that with any luck all the smoking gentlemen would be combining their cigars with a game of cards by now and any who were too wholesome for the casino would be tucked up in their blameless beds. I sidled past the window and then put my eye to the gap in the curtain. The room looked empty as far as I could see, but just as I was about to try the handle, I heard a movement from behind me. Someone was coming up the stone steps from the lawn. I darted away into the shadow of a climbing jasmine, hoping that the beads on my dress or the gold buckles on my ridiculous shoes would not catch the light. The figure which appeared at the top of the steps, however, did not so much as glance to either side. He simply strode over the terrace, opened the french window and disappeared inside, drawing it close but not shutting it behind him. I stood for a moment, searching my memory, for I was sure that I recognised him. I had only got a glimpse of his outline, enough to know he was dressed for the evening, but still I had the niggling feeling I knew who he was.
The male members of the bright young set had not resolved themselves into individuals for me; they were still an undifferentiated mass of humanity inside a cloud of laughter and cigarette smoke. It might have been one of the few male mediums, I supposed. Not the unmistakable Loveday Merrick, but one of his lesser fellows. Or perhaps another of our Perthshire neighbours had come to take the waters as had we, far from home and the flu and scarlet fever which were rife there.
Whoever he was, his appearance had told me one thing: I could be sure there was no one in the smoking room, for I would have heard their manly hellos. So, before I could talk myself out of it, I slipped out of the shadow and in at the door, through the empty room and along the dim corridor beyond. I had my story all ready: Grant collapsed and labouring for breath, me thinking only of Dr Laidlaw and how she had helped Hugh and the boys.
Grant had agreed to let the doctor in when she arrived and to say that she felt much better.
‘I’ll tell her I coughed out a right big- I mean to say, I’ll tell her I enjoyed a productive cough and it cleared things,’ she said. I shuddered. ‘Like Master Donald that night, remember?’
‘How could I forget?’ I said. ‘But I’m hoping it won’t get as far as that.’
‘I’m ready to help if it does,’ Grant told me.
In preparation for my part in the charade, I made sure my face was troubled and my breath coming in gasps before I knocked on the doctor’s door. I was going to say that my little motorcar had run out of petrol and she should go on ahead, that I should get Hugh to ring for his chauffeur. I thought I could be fairly certain of pulling it off, although it did strike me now as tremendously complicated. I missed Alec again. I was sure he would have come up with a way of getting Dr Laidlaw out of her office without my dressing to the nines, roping in Grant and sprinting half a mile in these slippers. I shook the thoughts out of my head and knocked.
There was no answer, but I remembered that this was a woman who ignored fire bells. I knocked again. Still nothing. Feeling very bold, I grasped the handle, turned it and burst in.
‘Oh, Dr Laidlaw,’ I began, but the room was empty. My eyes darted to the chimneypiece and I saw the jagged shape of the keys in the bon-bon dish. In three strides I was there. I hid the key ring in the folds of my dress, thinking that Grant’s taste in flowing robes had its uses, and then I fled to the Turkish and Russian – more Turk than Cossack in my Ali Baba slippers – with luck on my side and not a soul to see me.
It was unsettling in the extreme to be there in the darkness when the place was empty, and none the less so for the sensation being so difficult to explain. Perhaps it was just that the rooms, unheated now, felt dead and much colder than in fact they were. The couches, without their towels, were funeral biers and the marble chamber a mausoleum. Even the pool room was changed by the quiet and dark. The water was a blank, black gleam, bottomless like the well, and the ferns and palms around it, in the dark, were moss and lichen and even reaching hands. I turned away and faced the locked door.
The keyhole was fairly large and so I immediately discounted all the littlest of the keys in my bunch. The first one I tried went in halfway and then stuck. I pulled it out again and picked over the bunch looking for one slightly smaller. Then my fingers froze. I was sure I had heard a scuffling from inside the room. Well, perhaps I had, for an unused room in any house will attract scuffling things. I chose another key and tried again. This one went all the way in but would not turn. Nor when I pulled at it would it come out again. I jiggled it this way and that and felt something give. It was not the key in the lock, though; it was the latch. This door was open.
Using the bunch of keys as a handle I twisted and pushed and the door swung wide. I was ready for anything: a new victim; Tot Laidlaw coming at me with a piece of iron piping; even, I am ashamed to say, the sturdy spectre of Mrs Addie in her robe, hovering three feet above the floor and moaning at me.
What I saw was none of these things. At first I thought the room was absolutely empty, no furniture, no equipment, no fittings of any kind. Nothing more than the marks on the floor where something heavy had been standing and the deep scores across it where the thing had been dragged away. I was staring at these scratches, trying to make sense of them, when I saw a movement from near the far wall.
‘Tot?’ said a small, broken voice.
I felt beside me on the wall for a light switch and when my fingers met it I did not hesitate but snapped it on.
Dr Laidlaw was huddled on the bare floor of the empty room, hugging her arms about herself and stricken from weeping.
‘Shall I fetch him?’ I said. She sat up and wiped the tears away with her sleeve.
‘No!’ she sobbed, and shrank even further into the corner where she was cowering.
‘Did he put you in here?’ I asked. Nothing Tot did would shock me and I was at a loss as to explain her horror at hearing his name.
‘No,’ she said again but this time it was a low groan as though she spoke through great exhaustion. ‘Please leave us alone, I beg you.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ I went on, ‘how did you get in, since I have your keys?’ I did not really believe in the possibility of secret passageways and hidden doors in the panelling, but thought it best to make sure.