I scrabbled at the door, got it closed, got it locked and put the key back where I had found it. Then I tottered away to rest against another of the gnarled old trees and stood staring.
No one had smelled it because of the slats. Designed to draw all humidity away from the apples and stop them rotting, they had carried the stink of putrefaction up into the air and let it drift away. It was the perfect place to hide a body.
All I now had to decide was whether to telephone to the police right away or speak to Alec, and ask him what he thought the Addies would want to do. I stood up from where I had been slumping against the tree as though my sergeant-major had summoned me to attention. Alec was in Edinburgh engineering the exhumation of Mrs Addie’s body from its Morningside grave. It made no sense at all for me to think that I had found her body in that odd square barrel here in Moffat. If the woman really had been laid out by Regina and carried by an undertaker to her funeral at home then how could she be mouldering so revoltingly in there?
She could not. But then what was it in there?
I have had the experience, not often but each time has been memorable, of vertigo washing over me like a wave. In the early months when the babies were coming I came close to swooning many times. I have been assailed by tidal waves of nausea once or twice too. And recently, since I started detecting, I have undergone great sweeping storms of dread when something I knew deep down was clamouring to be brought into the front of my mind and dealt with there. This was the first time, however, I had ever felt what I was feeling now. An enormous, unstoppable rush of absolute terror, engulfing me entirely and leaving me weak and helpless as it passed.
And all of a sudden, the ghosts were not a nonsense, the mediums not a joke, Loveday Merrick not a charlatan, and Mrs Addie not just a well-loved and much-missed old lady who might have been wronged.
All of a sudden, standing there, everything seemed to skew just a little from what I thought I knew about the world around me and I could feel them alclass="underline" Effie and Lizzie and Mary and their sins and killers, the ghosts and echoes and whispers, the other world reaching out, pleading, to this one.
Mrs Addie was in her grave in Edinburgh, or near it anyway in mid-exhumation, possibly. In that little apple house, not frail and wispy, not floating in a shift, not a wraith at all, but hulking, stinking and evil, was her ghost.
I stumbled out from the shrubs onto the lawn and made my shaking way around to the terrace steps, desperate to be safely with other people and far away from that crawling madness that threatened to worm its way through me if I stayed there. Hugh hailed me as I passed. He was in his deckchair again.
‘You all right, Dandy?’ he said. ‘You look peaky.’
There was no one in the world who could have done more to bring me back to earth. ‘I found something rather unpleasant in the shrubbery,’ I managed to say. ‘A dead thing. I almost stumbled over it and it’s sickened me.’ Hugh was torn between disappointment at this poor showing and that smugness which even the best of men sometimes display in the face of feminine weakness. ‘Smell,’ I said, holding out my sleeve. He took a deep sniff at the wool of my coat to show what stern stuff he was made of and then wrinkled his nose.
‘Faint hint of something,’ he said. ‘Nothing like that stag that time.’ It was true; the smell of the crate in the apple house had been quite different from the stag which had ruined a delightful picnic one day when the boys were tiny (although only because they had to be spanked and taken home when they would not stop poking it).
‘I’ll see you for tea,’ I said faintly and made my way to the telephone kiosk to speak to Alec who I hoped would have more sympathy for me than to cap my horrors with memories of his own.
I had quite forgotten what story Alec would have to tell me or I would not have rung him at all.
Mrs Bowie was not at her brother’s house and Mr Addie was lying down. I looked at my watch – half past twelve: a very odd time for a nap and my first indication that matters had moved swiftly. Mr Osborne was still here, the maid said, and she would fetch him.
‘Hello, Dandy,’ Alec said, sounding rather flattened. ‘I’m coming back to Moffat on the 2.40. Do you really want to hear this now?’
‘I really do,’ I said. ‘And the first thing I want to hear is this: did either Mr Addie or Mrs Bowie see their mother’s body when it was brought home for the funeral?’
‘Not only then,’ said Alec. ‘But poor Mr Addie had to see it this morning too. When they dug it up again. He managed to hold on to his insides, which is more than can be said for the whole of the party, but he’s taken himself off to bed now and I’d be surprised if he’s seen again today.’
‘Poor man,’ I said. ‘It was definitely her then?’
‘Apparently so,’ Alec said. ‘I wouldn’t have liked to be on oath that what we saw in that coffin was the woman in the picture-’
‘You were there?’
‘I was there,’ Alec said. ‘I thought it was the least I could do to stand beside poor Addie since it was me egging him on. I was one of the ones who couldn’t contain himself, I’m afraid. A very poor show.’
‘And is it too soon to know anything?’
‘It’s too soon to know some things,’ Alec said, ‘but did you know that the doctor doing the exhuming just starts in on it right there? He started looking for poisons right away.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing doing,’ Alec said. ‘Because of the stomach contents.’ He swallowed audibly. ‘If you can get a good jugful of stomach contents, then graveside poison tests are easy.’
‘And what was wrong with them?’
‘There were none,’ Alec said. ‘She was empty. Nothing in her stomach, nothing in her bladder or… other areas with similar function nearby. So he’s had to go back to his laboratory to look in her liver and kidneys for arsenic and at her blood for strychnine. Cyanide turns one bright pink – did you know? – so it wasn’t that anyway.’
‘And no other obvious sign of something that could have killed her?’ I asked.
‘None,’ Alec said. ‘No marks of violence. The only thing he ventured – and it’s not much I can tell you – is that she was dehydrated.’
‘What does that mean?’ I asked.
‘She hadn’t drunk anything. It sounds as if this grated carrot diet Dorothea had her on was a pretty tough regime.’ I was interested to note that having to look at a month-old corpse had put Alec into an acerbic mood which did not even sweeten for Dr Laidlaw.
‘Well, I shall be very glad to see you back here again,’ I said. ‘I desperately need to talk to you but only if you promise not to laugh at me.’
‘I’m not finished with my report yet,’ he said. ‘I saved the best bit.’
‘Go on.’
‘Whatever the doctor turns up in his laboratory, he knows already it wasn’t a heart attack,’ said Alec. ‘He had a good look at Mrs Addie’s heart this morning as he removed it – so did I, as a matter of fact. It didn’t reveal much to me but the pathologist said there was nothing wrong with it.’
‘Good grief,’ I said. ‘So… did he telephone to the police? Are they coming to arrest the Laidlaws? And Dr Ramsay?’
‘Not a bit of it,’ Alec said. ‘Apparently it’s not unusual. And Dr Ramsay’s certificate said “heart failure following suspected heart attack”. There’s nothing so far to say that wasn’t a perfectly fair conclusion.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘That’s what he said to me. Everyone dies of heart failure in the end.’
‘I came close to it myself this morning when I looked at Mrs Addie’s face,’ Alec said. At least he was almost laughing. ‘Now your turn, Dan. God, I’ve only just stopped feeling sick, you know. You’re a tonic, dearie.’