‘Gift!’ said Grant. ‘It’s a curse! I pray and pray for it to be taken away and I pray for forgiveness for whatever I did to bring it down upon my wicked head.’
‘My dear girl,’ said Mrs Scott. I was surprised to hear Grant addressed this way. She is slightly older than me and it has been a while since I was a ‘girl’, dear or otherwise. But something about the white collar and meekly parted hair had taken years off her. ‘My dear girl, you have not been among friends. You are among them now. Please, tell us what’s troubling you.’
‘I’m staying in the town with my lady – I’m a maid, you see – and oh, there’s such great evil. I can’t sleep! That voice! I wish I could believe I’m dreaming, but it’s real. And the look of him. I asked for help at the church but the minister scorned me. Then – I’m ashamed to admit it – but I stepped into the Crown for a glass of port, just to help me sleep; because we’re right next door and the sound of the men in the bar put the notion in my head, and someone there was saying that up at the Hydro there was a convention of spiritualists. I thought maybe you could help me.’
‘I’m sure we can,’ said Mrs Davies. ‘This voice, what does it say? And what is it that you see?’
‘Oh, a terrible sight,’ said Grant. ‘A rough, low beast of a man and… harmed. Not right at all. His neck!’ All three mediums were sitting on the edges of their seats now and no one could blame them. It was a bravura performance.
‘And what does he say?’ said Olivia Gooseberry. I hoped that Grant would not unleash the dreadful rumbling sound of her ghost. Not here in the ladies’ drawing room. I felt my shoulders rise as I braced myself for it, but I should have trusted her.
‘He says…’ Grant hesitated. ‘It doesn’t come through my ears, you know. It’s as though I’m speaking it, only not in my voice – oh, it’s too hard to explain.’
‘A channel!’ said Mrs Scott. ‘Don’t fret, my dear. We understand completely. What does he say?’
‘He says…’ She stopped again. ‘It’s such wickedness, I hardly want to tell you.’ All three were wound like springs now. If Grant did not tell them at her next approach, one of them would pinch her.
‘He says, “I am William.” He never says a surname. “I was wrongly judged and wrongly hanged. I am come to wreak my revenge.” And some other things I can never make out and something about his mother but he’s always crying by then.’
The three mediums were dumbfounded, a tableau of rapt stupefaction which lasted so long that Grant raised her head and took a surreptitious peek at them.
Mrs Scott was the first to find her voice.
‘No surname?’ she asked weakly. ‘Not even an initial?’ I thought I could see Grant considering the initial. ‘M’ was always a good bet in Scotland as were ‘O’ in Ireland and ‘T’ in Cornwall, but very sensibly she shook her head no.
‘What does it mean, Mrs Scott?’ asked Olivia.
‘Something stupendous,’ Mrs Scott replied. ‘Something unhoped-for and almost undreamed-of. We must find Mrs Molyneaux, ladies. Or perhaps… dare we… Yes! We must take this straight to Mr Merrick himself.’ She rose. ‘Stay here, my dear. Help yourself to a cup of coffee. Ring for a fresh pot. Tell them to put it on Mrs Scott’s bill if it’s extra. We shall return.’
They stood and sailed out of the room with the wind behind them and the harbour in view, leaving Grant and me gazing at one another over the empty chairs.
‘That seems to have gone down rather well then,’ I said softly.
‘I wonder which part of what I said convinced them,’ said Grant. ‘I hope they tell me. I can suddenly make out the mumbled words if they let me in on what I’m supposed to be hearing, can’t I?’
‘Practise some restraint for now,’ I answered. ‘That would be my advice anyway. You seem to have done plenty to get their attention.’
It was with the greatest reluctance that I managed to drag myself away, for I wanted nothing more than to skulk in my chair and overhear what happened when Mr Merrick appeared on the scene. But generals do not skulk about the front line once the orders are given and I had tasks of my own.
Attics or basement, I wondered as I made my way across the hall to the servants’ door. If the missing object was as heavy as all that I imagined it would be no small matter to lug it up to the attics, even using the invalid lift by which the frailer Hydro guests made their way between bedroom and baths. I would start in the basement, and it seemed sensible to start in the very corridor where Regina, Mrs Cronin and I had all converged that day. There had been doors on either side of it and what could they be except boxrooms? Or possibly boiler rooms, for all that steam had to have its source somewhere.
Finding the place was not going to be easy, though. I could go to the Turkish baths and start from there, but if anyone saw me I could not claim to be lost. If I started at the other end I could, with a little more plausibility, say that I was taking a short cut and had misplaced myself.
I skirted the kitchens, the sculleries and laundry, a boot room, the wine cellar and a boxroom where the casino tables stood waiting for nightfall under their baize covers. What is more, I did it without a single servant seeing me. I even found time to congratulate myself on how much improved in stealth I was these days. When I reached the less populous and well-utilised areas of below stairs, I began to pay close attention to the floor, looking for scraping marks, and I began to try the handles of the doors. Most were locked and I regretted the impulsive way I had thrust Dr Laidlaw’s keys into her hands as she rushed past me the evening before. Those few doors which were unlocked opened to show me guests’ luggage, old deckchairs with their canvas faded and fraying, a collection of toboggans awaiting the winter, a heap of rusting bicycles from early in the century, and any number of moth-eaten tennis nets rolled up and stuffed into tea chests.
At the end of a short corridor leading off the main one, outside yet another locked door, I thought I saw some scratch marks but could not be sure. I put my eye to the keyhole and saw nothing except grey light with strings of cobweb floating in it. I straightened and sneezed, deadening the sound with my finger and thumb pinched around my nose, the way that Nanny Palmer always told me would burst my ear drums, then I lit a match and took a closer look at the scratch marks on the floor. I was almost sure they were about as far apart as the marks on the tiled floor of the empty room last night. Did I dare go back to Dr Laidlaw’s office and re-steal her keys to get through this door? I did not; and besides, she would surely not have returned the keys to the dish from which they had been taken. I was at a loss as to how else I could gain entry to a locked windowless basement, short of hacking the door down with an axe, when I stopped short. It was not windowless, there was grey light and cobwebs in there. If I could work out where on the outside of the building that room lay then I could peer in at the window.
I sighed. My accomplishments were over for the day then: I am pitifully incapable of finding my way around strange houses. Outside, if the sun is shining and it is not noon at the equator, I can navigate as well as anyone else who was taught geography along with her letters and numbers as a child. It is not much help in Perthshire, where the admittedly long hours of daylight in the short months of summer are usually filled with driving rain, but at least the capacity is there if the conditions allow. Inside houses it is another matter and I have been given lewd winks more than once before now because I was wandering a corridor at a house party where I had no reason to be.
I did not even try to form a plan in my head of the Hydro interior today. Instead, I used a mental version of the unravelling jersey method. Back on the main corridor I went along muttering ‘left, left, left’ to myself until I found a staircase. I went up to the ground floor and walked along the corridor I found there saying ‘right, right, right’. At the end I emerged into a corner of the dining room. I crossed it and the hall and emerged from the front door, walked round to the dining-room window, kept walking saying ‘left, left, left’ which took me to the corner of the lawn and then, still saying ‘right, right, right’, I fought my way through the dense shrubbery which screened off the servants’ area from the lawns below the terrace where, for the first time in my life, I was pleased to have to brush cobwebs from my face.