‘Seventeen possibly,’ I said. ‘Big Effie, Marjorie Docherty, Old Abigail Simpson. I’ve got them written down but I can’t remember them all. Mary Patterson who repents of her sins. Lizzie and Peggy.’
‘Haldane,’ said Hugh. ‘Elizabeth and Peggy Haldane.’
‘That’s right, madam,’ said Grant, boggling at him. ‘That’s what Mrs Scott said this morning. Haldane.’
‘How in the blazes do you know that, Hugh?’ I said. ‘Good God, don’t tell me they’ve appeared to you.’
‘Merciful heavens,’ said Grant.
Hugh shook his head at both of us. ‘I know the name because I study my Scottish history,’ he said. ‘Or rather in this case because I listened to the ghost stories at my nurse’s knee. Those people you mentioned and several more were killed in Edinburgh by Burke and Hare. Almost exactly a hundred years ago.’
14
‘Why…’ I began, but I had to take another run at it. ‘Why on earth would the ghosts of the victims of Burke and Hare be haunting the Moffat Hydro?’
‘Actually in the Hydro?’ said Hugh.
‘They think they’re up at the Gallow Hill, really, sir,’ Grant put in. ‘But they come to the Hydro to contact the living.’
‘Very well then,’ I said. ‘Why would the ghosts of the victims of Burke and Hare be up a hill in Moffat then?’
‘Well,’ said Hugh. ‘The story goes-’ He was interrupted by a gasp from Grant.
‘The name we picked, madam!’ she said. ‘William! No wonder they’re tied in knots trying to make me say William who?’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘It was William Burke and William Hare,’ said Hugh. ‘My word, Grant, that must have set the cat among the pigeons.’
‘I said I’d been “wrongly judged and wrongly hanged” and was come down the hill to wreak revenge.’
‘Must be William Burke then,’ I said. ‘He was hanged, wasn’t he? And Hare turned King’s evidence on him and got away?’
‘Yes, but the story goes,’ said Hugh again, ‘that William Hare was pursued wherever he went by the ghosts of his victims – all fifteen of his murder victims or seventeen if you count those who died of natural causes but who he kept out of their decent Christian graves. The legend is that the ghosts – if they caught him – would bring him to justice. That’s why he kept on the move. Down to London, home to Ireland, back again.’
‘I suppose Moffat would be on his way,’ I said. ‘Did he stop here? I looked into all the local ghosts at the library and someone dreadful stopped at the Black Bull. I remember that much. It might have been Deacon Brodie, mind you, or Sawney Bean. They do run in together after a while: Mary in every castle and Wallace in every cave.’
‘It was King Robert in the cave,’ Hugh said, mildly for him when he takes me to task about ancient Scotch history. ‘And Bloody Mary did move about quite a bit, you know.’
‘Whether she did or not,’ I said, ‘I shall go and check, but I’m becoming surer and surer that William Hare stopped at the inn.’
‘Fleeing the ghosts of his victims, but they caught up with him and took him up the Gallow Hill and hanged him there as he should have been hanged with his pal in Edinburgh,’ said Grant. Then she blushed. ‘Or so the mediums believe, madam. Sir.’
‘And a hundred years later, they’re all getting together again to talk about old times,’ I said. Both Grant and Hugh gave me looks of one sort or another. They do not have the long experience of talking about cases that Alec and I do.
‘And now I’ve brought one of the resurrection men to the party when no one asked him,’ said Grant, catching on. ‘And who’s this James, sir, that Mr Merrick was asking me to name?’
Hugh shook his head. ‘That was the saddest one of all,’ he said. ‘Daft Jamie.’
‘I think I’ve heard of him,’ I put in.
‘He was a simpleton,’ Hugh said, ‘but well known and well liked in the streets of the old town. One of the students in the dissecting room recognised him. He was Burke and Hare’s undoing.’
We all sat in silence for a moment or two, thinking of poor daft Jamie and the rest of them.
‘What sins did Mary Patterson have to repent of?’ I asked presently.
‘She was a woman of ill-repute,’ Hugh said. ‘Some of the medical students recognised her too, but they were ashamed to say so.’
‘Dearie me,’ said Grant, which was as good a way to sum it all up as any. ‘So will I say to the mediums that I can hear Jamie then?’ She put on a dull, idiotic-sounding voice. ‘“I’m Jamie, I am. Jamie Daff.” They often get the name a wee bit wrong, you know. It helps folk believe they’re trying to hear it over all the miles between this world and the next. “Help poor Jamie. Help me. Don’t let that bad man find me.”’ Hugh looked the way I had when she had first turned her talents on me.
‘I suppose you might as well,’ I said. ‘But all of these revelations don’t help at all with the question of why Mrs Addie died. Even now we suspect she died in a mud bath.’
‘Depends where they got the mud,’ said Grant. ‘Sir. Madam.’ She stood, bobbed and left us.
‘I don’t think I’m cut out for this game,’ said Hugh, staring after her.
‘It’s not always like this,’ I said. ‘And I can’t let you say that when you’ve just solved two of the things that were puzzling Alec and me for days on end. Without even trying.’
‘I can’t see how you can call it a solution,’ said Hugh. ‘If where we’ve ended up is that a woman sat in a vat of Gallow Hill mud, and out of the mud came fifteen ghosts and she died of fright.’
‘It really isn’t always like this,’ I said again. ‘I assure you.’
‘I’m going to fetch the boys,’ said Hugh, standing. He looked in through the french windows. ‘Grant is holding court in there like Charlotte of Mecklenburg. I’m off.’ I watched him all the way to the end of the terrace, striding along, furious with the silliness and frightfulness of it all, and annoyed with himself that he could not resist taking his sons out of harm’s way, even though the harm was nonsense, as it must be.
‘That’s a very soupy look you’ve got on your face, Dan.’ I turned and saw Alec standing at my other side, smiling down at me. He sat on the chair where Hugh had so recently been, swung his legs up and grinned at me.
‘So. Have I missed anything?’ he said.
When I had finished my report all he could do was give a long, low whistle.
‘The first thing I need to do is go and check that what I remember from the library is right enough,’ I said.
‘Do you?’ Alec said.
I laughed. ‘No, not really, but it’s something I can do and I can’t think of anything else. What about you?’
‘I’m going to wait for the PM report,’ Alec said. ‘Mr Addie said he’ll telephone to me. Probably tomorrow. Mrs Bowie’s still on about her grandfather’s watch, by the way. Good grief, to think of us all over the well path and the Beef Tub and the Gallow Hill like a pair of bloodhounds that day!’
‘I don’t suppose it could be something as silly as theft that got Mrs Addie killed, could it?’ I said. ‘This watch isn’t diamond-encrusted or anything? Only I wonder why they didn’t send her bag back to the family with her clothes. I wonder why they didn’t send those back until I prompted them, come to that.’
‘A plain gold watch, I think,’ said Alec. ‘And one doesn’t poison someone and set her to die in a vat of mud to achieve a burglary. A knock on the head with a cosh is more what you’d look for if it was theft at the bottom of it.’
‘And no marks of violence at all,’ I said. ‘It’s hard to believe they can still tell after a month. I mean, what does…? Did she still…?’
‘Believe me, Dandy,’ said Alec. ‘You don’t want to know.’
We went our separate ways after that, I to the library and Alec to the men’s baths for a salt rub which he richly deserved after all his horrors. I had only got halfway across the drawing room though when Grant waylaid me.