‘I shall inform Pallister that the matter is resolved,’ Hugh said and stalked out.
I should have liked to avoid him for a few hours but if Bunty was here that meant the boys were too and I was anxious to see how Donald fared after his journey. I changed my shoes and hurried downstairs. They were in the drawing room, to where Mrs Tilling had already brought in the tea-things, having somehow managed to conjure bread-and-butter, scones and sugary cakes from somewhere. I subsided into the chair nearest the teapot and beamed at all three of my menfolk.
‘You look all right,’ I told Donald. ‘Not too tired?’
‘I fell asleep,’ Donald said, causing me a pang. An eighteen-year-old boy should not fall asleep on a two-hours train journey during the day.
‘Which made it pretty dull for me,’ Teddy said. ‘I had brought a pack of cards.’
‘One doesn’t play at cards on a train, Teddy,’ I said. ‘Who put that idea into your head?’
‘You did,’ he said, his eyes wide. He looked cherubic; it has always been a talent of his to be able to look that way. ‘Going to Granny’s. Snap.’
‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Snap. I see.’
‘You live in a very different world from us now, don’t you, Dandy?’ said Hugh. ‘It would never have occurred to me to suspect my sons of setting up a poker school on a railway train.’ For all the world as though gambling at poker – indeed, at anything – were not his favourite indoor pursuit in the world.
‘Speaking of your world, Mother,’ said Donald, ‘guess who we saw.’ He rolled a slice of buttered bread into a cigar-shape and bit the end off it.
‘I can’t imagine,’ I said. I could imagine, of course, even if I lamented the rotten luck that put him on the very same train with the boys.
‘Mr Osborne,’ said Donald. I frowned at his cigar, offered the scones to Teddy and handed Hugh his cup.
‘Hah,’ I said. ‘He must be on his way to London.’
‘On this line?’ said Hugh. Railways and their efficient use were an interest of his.
‘No, he got off,’ said Teddy. ‘Of course he might have been stretching his legs,’ he added helpfully. ‘The train did stop for ages.’
‘Although,’ I said, ‘I seem to remember we had a letter from Moffat recently. Perhaps he’s decided to look into the case.’
‘What was it?’ asked Teddy, swallowing a huge mouthful of scone to allow himself to speak. He was twelve before we broke his habit of speaking with his mouth full and his new habit of half choking himself so that he got a share of the conversation was not much of an improvement. ‘Burglary, blackmail, kidnap, murder?’
Hugh regarded me over the rim of his teacup. He did not frown or scowl, but just looked at me very smoothly. Grant would have been delighted with him.
‘My dear Teddy,’ I said. ‘Most of my work is straightening out very dull grown-up misunderstandings. Sad and painful for those concerned, of course, but nothing to gloat over.’
‘I wouldn’t say dull, Mother,’ said Donald. ‘Not when you look back over all of them.’ He put his cup down and sticking out the index finger of one hand and the little finger of the other he drew breath to begin to recall them.
‘Or perhaps he’s making a visit to someone in the vicinity,’ I said. ‘I do have a piece of news of the kind it’s quite all right to pore over, you know. Mr Osborne is seeking a wife.’ That arrested all of them. ‘Perhaps he’s visiting Moffat with matrimonial intent.’
Donald and Teddy were, as boys always are, mortified by this turn of the conversation. Teddy turned crimson to the tips of his ears and Donald simply rolled his eyes. He had had a terrible habit of chasing little girls, all through the pigtail-pulling years and well into the years of more dangerous attentions, but he had been cured of it by a hard-bitten Frenchwoman who had unveiled the mysteries of love and broken his tender heart. Teddy, at sixteen, was entering the eleventh year of finding girls and talk of girls quite simply ghastly.
Hugh loaded a plate with two scones and a cake, refilled his teacup, and made it to the door before he remembered that there was nowhere for him to go. He plumped down into a chair by the front window.
‘Nice view,’ he said. ‘Too hot over there with that enormous fire. Think we were roasting an ox.’
‘It is very warm, Mummy,’ said Teddy. ‘Sort of stuffy.’
‘It’s the hot pipes blasting away,’ said Hugh. ‘I’ll investigate the boiler and try to temper the heat before we’re all ill again.’
Yet another part of my plan, so neat on paper, seemed to be unravelling in messy reality. If Hugh and the boys did not glory in the warmth of Auchenlea House, I was in for some trouble when they got home to Gilverton and saw what had happened there. With relief, I turned my thoughts away from such domestic trivia and towards the case. Mrs Enid Addie and her heart attack (alleged) were what I had to pay attention to now.
3
Monday, 21st October 1929
I had jotted down the details from Mrs Addie’s death certificate, with her grieving offspring watching me closely lest I make a mark upon it, and my first unenviable task was to track down the doctor who signed it. (I counted myself lucky that I had come this far in my detecting career without ever before having been pitched into this particular nest of vipers, for I could not see how a doctor could take such an enquiry as anything but a slur. I only hoped I could escape from his surgery without a threat of slander chasing after me.)
Escaping him, however, was not my only difficulty. Effecting an excuse to visit him was giving me some trouble too. Hugh and the boys awoke on the morning after our first night at Auchenlea House eager to plunge into their watery new pastime and appeared to take it for granted that I would be their handmaiden for the duration.
‘I’d like to go to the well itself,’ said Teddy. ‘It’s only a bit up into the hills and there’s a path.’ He was making a good breakfast, despite the extra solidity that had come of Mrs Tilling attempting porridge on an electric stove whose efficiency had clearly caught her unawares. I grimaced to see him hack off a mouthful with the edge of his spoon and literally chew it before swallowing. ‘But Donald’s being a ninny.’
Donald did not throw anything, raise his voice, call Teddy worse or badger me to punish him and I glanced with real concern at him.
‘Don’t be rotten, Teddy,’ I said. ‘Neither of you is tramping the hills and sharing water with sheep when there is a perfectly good bath house in the town, where the water is served in glasses. In fact, I would imagine that the Hydro has its own supply of the water and there’s no need to go to the public room at all.’
‘Might be fun at the pump room,’ said Donald. ‘Might meet people there.’
Had I not been sure that my elder son was a stranger to the novels of Miss Austen, and had his heart not still been bruised by its recent travails, I would have worried that he expected an Isabella Thorpe to be promenading the pump room in a bonnet and waiting only for Donald Gilver to make her morning perfect. As it was, I took it as a good sign for him to be showing interest in society at all, even if he was not well enough to have taken up his lifelong war with his little brother again.
‘There will be lots of people at the Hydro too,’ I said.
‘Ancient invalids,’ said Donald.
‘In bath chairs,’ added Teddy, giggling.