‘Remarkable,’ I said. ‘She wasn’t at all distressed by what she saw whilst “looking down”?’ Both Addies looked puzzled and Loveday swept in.
‘There was indeed great wickedness,’ he said. ‘Thomas Laidlaw was a man lost to all goodness. But none of his capers had the power to touch Mrs Addie by then. And good may come of evil, you know.’
‘This is the most wonderful bit of all,’ Mrs Bowie said. ‘And there’s no way Mr Merrick could have known of it unless Mother told him. So we know we can trust him.’
‘I see,’ I said and waited. If Loveday Merrick had found good in any of what had happened at the Hydro I was more than keen to hear.
‘Mother’s sore back,’ Mrs Bowie said. ‘It wasn’t the old trouble after all. It was something else.’
‘And if she hadn’t passed when she did,’ said Mr Addie, ‘how she did, drifting off that way, she would have been in for a very unpleasant time of it.’
‘What was it?’ Alec asked, rather baldly. I had already guessed; their very reluctance to say it screamed its name.
‘A growth,’ said Mrs Bowie in hushed tones. ‘Of the spine. Advanced and unstoppable. Mr Merrick told us.’
‘After Mrs Addie told you?’ I asked Loveday, turning a face I was keeping carefully blank towards him.
‘And so good came of evil, you see,’ Loveday Merrick repeated. ‘A calm, easeful death instead of the suffering that was coming.’
‘But wouldn’t the post-mort-’ Alec began, but he caught himself just in time.
‘And no,’ Loveday said later when he, Alec and I were walking back down through the city towards the railway station together, ‘the post-mortem wouldn’t. If it had been an organ, then certainly, but a growth in the muscle tissue around the spine? It could easily be missed. There are no holes in my story for the Addies to fall through. I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’m rather good at it now.’
He had tucked my hand under his arm in an avuncular way, shepherding me safely through the drifts of fallen leaves and over the cobbles slick with the last of the morning’s frost, and now he gave me a squeeze with his elbow as well as a slight wink. I was instantly his ally and found myself speaking up.
‘Where’s the harm, Alec, really? If Mr Merrick has brought comfort to the poor Addies and proofed them against being picked off by music-hall mediums in future, where’s the harm?’
‘Gilver and Osborne, servants of truth,’ muttered Alec. I could see what he meant and when he shot rather a poisonous look at the way my gloved hand was nestled in the crook of Merrick’s arm I could see what he meant there too.
‘Ah, yes,’ said Merrick. ‘Truth. I’m glad you mentioned it and I’m very glad we have this chance to speak plainly away from the family and their sensitivities. Now, I don’t know how much you’ve been told about what Tot’s been coming out with.’
‘Nothing,’ I said, astonished. ‘Told by whom?’
‘Oh, I’ve found Sergeant Simpson pretty forthcoming,’ Merrick said. In other words, he had the police eating out of his hand as well as the family. Thank goodness, I thought to myself, that his intentions were pure, for Svengali had nothing on him. Under cover of getting a handkerchief out of my pocket to dab at a smut on my cheek, I got my hand away and moved to walk a little closer to Alec, who was persuasive at times, but never actually mesmerising.
‘And I think,’ Merrick went on, ‘that Laidlaw simply can’t resist showing off, telling how clever he’s been.’
‘How clever?’ I said. ‘The man’s in jail, his sister dead, his hotel burned down and his reputation in shreds.’
‘But for a while there,’ said Merrick, ‘oh, for a while there it looked so promising. It was high stakes, but Tot Laidlaw’s nothing if not a player. The insurance was all stoked up, although it took his last pennies to stoke it, it seems. The guests were taking treatments to keep the books square – Dorothea would have got a tidy sum for the loss of such a successful clinic, you know. The casino was only open to the kind of hard-bitten gambler who’d keep his mouth shut so long as the cards were dealt.’ Alec caught my eye a little at that, but we said nothing, although I tucked the phrase away to use on Hugh sometime when I needed to.
‘What about Dr Ramsay?’ Alec said.
‘Yes, using Dr Ramsay was a mistake,’ said Merrick, ‘but one that Laidlaw almost managed to put right – dragging that infernal mud bath back to the Turkish, tricking the poor fool into it.’
‘Was he counting on it burning to ash and hiding his crime?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think he could have been thinking very clearly at all by then,’ said Merrick. ‘But he was certainly planning a hero’s death for Ramsay: a doctor going in to save souls with no thought for his own neck.’
‘And what of Laidlaw’s neck?’ Alec asked. ‘Will he hang?’
Merrick shook his head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘He didn’t kill Mrs Addie and he didn’t kill his sister.’
‘But he threw that poor woman’s body in the water and hid what killed her – it was him, wasn’t it?’
Alec and I had spent long hours discussing exactly what happened after Mrs Addie entered her mud bath that Sunday night in September. One thing we had agreed on was that Regina and Mrs Cronin were innocents in the matter, or at least guilty of no more than an abundance of loyalty. Regina was horrified when the truth finally dawned upon her, and Mrs Cronin had spent the last month at the Hydro trying to be everywhere at once in case Dorothea forgot someone again. No good would come of pointing the police in their direction, besmirching their good names and thrilling the newspapers.
When it came to the Laidlaws, however, we found it harder to see eye to eye. I blamed Tot for just about everything; Dorothea forgot her patient and failed to tell the truth about it, swept up in her brother’s schemes. But I was sure it was Tot who found the body, washed it, handed it to Regina, signed up Dr Ramsay and lied to the police about the outing and the ghost. At some point in the grisly process, Dorothea found out what he was doing, certainly, but whether she happened upon him at the pool, actually dousing the poor dead Mrs Addie in cold water, or answered the door to Dr Ramsay and wondered what he was doing there, Tot was the engineer of it all.
Alec did not agree. He made the admittedly compelling point that Tot’s usual round would not suddenly take him into the ladies’ baths one evening and that Dorothea must at least have found the body and turned to him for help in dealing with it. I argued him down: he might well have gone there looking for his sister; knowing the kind of man he was, he might have gone looking for someone who was not his sister. But, in the end, Dorothea Laidlaw was too sensitive a topic for Alec and me to argue for long.
I returned my attention to Merrick, who had got on to Ramsay himself by this time.
‘Although Laidlaw’s at least partly responsible for what happened to Ramsay in the end,’ he was saying.
‘Wholly responsible,’ said Alec fiercely. ‘Tot killed Ramsay plain and simple.’ He suspected me of blaming myself for Dr Ramsay’s death and was always most vociferous about Laidlaw’s guilt any time the matter arose between us.
‘Ah, but Ramsay’s never going to melt a jury’s hearts,’ Merrick said. ‘He put his name to the death certificate of a murder victim to escape his gambling debts. And he spun ghost stories. Some of my “colleagues” are easily angry enough to give Laidlaw’s lawyers chapter and verse on that one. And then Ramsay isn’t a local man and the Laidlaws are Moffat from generations back. I can’t see fifteen good Dumfries men letting him swing.’
‘But he’s a fiend,’ I said. ‘He’s brought nothing but shame on the town and the county.’
‘It would be shame to you, Mrs Gilver, and to me,’ Merrick said. ‘But others have a taste for notoriety we don’t share. He’s brought high drama, filled all the inns with newspapermen, he’s rid the place of a white elephant and made space to build some neat wee houses instead, and it’ll be a long while again before Moffat sees its next casino.’