‘Poor old Hugh,’ Alec said. ‘He didn’t cash his chips, you know.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Or at least I’m not surprised. A gentleman doesn’t cash his chips until he’s leaving. But money won and lost isn’t really money lost, is it? He’s finished no worse than he started, I daresay.’ I made a move towards the nearest armchair and then stopped myself. ‘Where can we sit when we’re so filthy?’ I said. ‘I feel as though I shall fall over if I try to stay standing.’
‘Let’s nab the bathrooms first while the guests are drinking their soup,’ Alec said. And dreadful hostess though it made me, I agreed.
Half an hour later, clean and warm, although oddly attired for a social gathering, Alec, Loveday Merrick and I had found a quiet spot and sat down at last to make sense of the puzzle as best we might. I was sitting on my bed with Bunty at my back like a pillow. Alec was on the dressing-table stool and Mr Merrick, the oldest among us, and the most undone by the night’s exertions, was in the little upholstered chair by the window, telling all and making Alec’s jaw and mine drop to our laps in wonder.
‘So I suppose the best sort of way to describe what I am,’ he said, ‘is a professional sceptic. I keep my reputation with the snake oil peddlers by dint of very cautious balancing. Someone has to be most egregious – most egregious indeed – before I’ll go all out and expose them. And even then I don’t do it myself. None of the debunking is ever traced back to me. On the other hand, if it’s just the usual comforting nonsense I have a quiet word and they respect me all the more for it. I couldn’t resist this Burke and Hare caper when it met my ears. Never thought it would end like this, I can tell you.’
‘I don’t actually think the ghosts and the fire are connected,’ I said. ‘Not closely anyway. The fire wasn’t started to kill Dr Ramsay, it was just a convenient way for him to go since it was planned.’
‘So Dr Laidlaw started the fire to kill herself?’ Mr Merrick said. ‘Such wickedness! She could have taken twenty souls with her.’
‘No, no, no,’ I said. ‘Dorothea Laidlaw would never have done such a thing. She didn’t start the fire at all.’
‘But you said something to me, Dandy,’ said Alec, ‘suggesting there was something about her I wouldn’t care to know.’
I submitted him to very close attention, trying to decide what to say. Unfortunately he caught me at it.
‘You’re not about to break my heart,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you listen to a thing I told you. I admired her, but that’s all.’
I was not half so sure as he seemed to be, but I took his words at face value.
‘Mrs Addie,’ I said. ‘It was Dr Laidlaw who killed her. She put the poor woman in the mud bath on Sunday evening and then went back to her study to her precious work.’
‘Oh dear God,’ said Alec. ‘She forgot?’
‘Not the sort of woman you’d want in charge of your children, eh?’
Alec took a mighty breath in, held it for a long moment during which Merrick and I watched him anxiously, and then let it go in a great rush which left him slumped against the dressing table behind him.
‘The prospect of marriage doesn’t seem to agree with me,’ he said. He was beyond being embarrassed by Merrick’s presence. ‘She seemed ideal. A rational, educated woman happy to pursue her own… I took to her at once. And it was hard to resist the prospect of slaying the dragon, of course. Or at least getting her away from that brother of hers. Ah, well.’ He grinned at us. ‘Onward and upward. Third time lucky maybe.’
‘It wasn’t the first time or the last that she’d forgotten a patient,’ I said. ‘Usually, Mrs Cronin checked and double-checked. But Monday was Mrs Cronin’s day off. I knew it was. I should have paid attention to the way her coat and outdoor shoes kept bothering me. So on a Monday the baths were very quiet. This was before Tot started the new regime of insisting everyone had treatments, you see.’
‘So she just sat there until Monday night,’ Alec said. ‘Forgotten.’
‘And I think somehow it was Tot who found her,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he went looking for Dorothea – she loved the plunging pool and only ever went in it when the baths were closed and empty. At any rate, it was Tot who thought up the cover story of the ghost and the fright and it was he who got Dr Ramsay to sign the certificate in return for forgiving the gambling debts. He washed the body. Perhaps he tipped it into the plunging pool and that’s why they had to clean it out all of a sudden. And he either told Dorothea, or she found out somehow. Perhaps she caught him at it even.’
‘I don’t suppose we shall ever know,’ Alec said.
‘Anyway,’ I went on, ‘he gave the body to Regina to lay out and talked that fool of a sergeant round and the only way for Dorothea to have stopped it all would be for her to admit to something which would have her struck off and disgraced and prevent her from doing the one thing she cared about. Her damned precious working. That’s the main thing to remember. She was taking care of her own interests all the way.’
‘That’s not quite fair, Dandy,’ Alec said. ‘That was when she started asking Tot to close the Hydro. She must have been terrified she’d forget again.’
‘Oh, Tot’s the real villain of the piece, I’ll grant you,’ I said.
‘Because the forms he made her sign were insurance forms, weren’t they? He insured the hotel to the hilt and started planning the fire. Planned it for the middle of the night when all his chums would be in the casino too and if some poor invalid slept through it and died – too bad!’
‘Why did he insist on all the treatments, I wonder?’ asked Merrick.
‘Same reason he blew a gasket if one called the Hydro an hotel,’ I said. ‘Presumably the insurance for hotels isn’t as good as for hospitals. He needed all of his chums to say with their hands on their hearts that they had been undergoing treatments at the time of the fire. They knew the names and everything – heat lamps and sitz baths. I mean, even Sergeant Simpson knew that a huge hotel going up in flames must be an insurance job, didn’t he?’
‘Why did Laidlaw start the rumours about Burke and Hare?’ Alec said. ‘You’d think he’d want the death of Mrs Addie to die down, not to become notorious.’
‘Ah yes,’ I said. ‘You didn’t hear that bit. He didn’t start them. That was Dr Ramsay’s big tease. He was giving Tot Laidlaw a taste of his own medicine. At least, partly that and partly sucking up in a strange way. I think he always very much wanted to be one of Tot’s set, you know. And Tot was such a joker: the story of Mrs Addie dying of fright had at least a bit of a tease in it. But not only was Tot unwilling to take what he dished out, very soon it got completely out of hand. Especially after your entrance, Mr Merrick. Not to mention Grant’s.’
Merrick chuckled. ‘She was very good,’ he said. ‘For a minute, she almost convinced me. I mean, she wasn’t known in the trade and I couldn’t see what her angle was at all.’
‘You really don’t believe a scrap of it then?’ I said.
‘Good grief, of course not,’ Merrick replied. And because there could have been any number of women of any size milling about the grounds of the Hydro in robes and turbans after the fire, I did not tell him.
‘That sounds like a car,’ said Alec, cocking his ear. ‘It might be Laidlaw now.’ I stood and crossed to the window.
‘It’s Drysdale with the next batch,’ I said. ‘I should go down and see to them.’
‘Go to bed,’ Alec said. ‘Mrs Tilling is in her element down there. You’d only get in the way.’