The shopkeeper decided to forgive my sin – which was, I expected, chiefly made up of my not being Alec – since I had brought hard news, and she gave a chuckle.
‘Oh, Mrs Addie never came to the shop until she’d been a good week with the doctor,’ she said. ‘She came and did her treatments and as soon as she was able she came down here and undid them all again.’
‘I’m not sure I follow,’ Alec said.
The woman pulled her face out of its grin and lowered her eyes. ‘I meant no disrespect, sir.’
‘I shouldn’t imagine it for a minute,’ he assured her. ‘But how could your toffee undo a cured back?’ I kicked him gently and he took his cue and changed course like a dressage pony. ‘Ah, well. Water under the bridge. Let’s just both be thankful we knew her and let’s never forget her, eh? Now, to business.’ He rubbed his hands together and began a protracted series of negotiations into the differences between toffee, tablet and fudge, the comparative ‘nippiness’ of pan drops, oddfellows and humbugs and an enquiry into the healthful properties of liquorice sticks which only ended when the queue which had built up behind him reached the door and was letting a draught in.
I bought sugar mice for Donald and Teddy, who would be mystified by my nostalgia, I was sure, and a quarter-pound of comfits for Hugh who is fond of them, and we left at last.
‘Well?’ said Alec, shifting a large piece of toffee into his cheek and carefully closing the wrapping on the remainder (thus does one try to pretend one is not going to eat the lot and have to sip warm water and baking soda later).
‘I think we can take the bad back as a politeness,’ I said. ‘Mrs Addie came to the Hydro for some “banting”.’
‘What?’
‘A reducing diet. I always think it’s a most expressive word.’
‘A reducing diet?’ said Alec. ‘Ah, I see.’
‘Which explains why her daughter would be so sure she wasn’t off the Hydro grounds within a day of getting there. The Old Doctor must have kept her captive until he had helped her shift a few pounds.’
‘It also explains why she was moaning about the food,’ Alec said. ‘Dorothea – Dr Laidlaw must have had her on a special menu, not the pies and custards the rest of us are wading through.’
‘I wonder if knowing that helps us?’ I said. ‘Let’s go back to the house and drop off Bunty. She’ll have had enough of the back seat by now.’
‘It might do,’ Alec said. ‘I can see why Dr Laidlaw would be interested in her anyway. I mean to say, standing someone on a set of bathroom scales is pretty black and white, isn’t it? There’s no way to disguise the fact that something’s working. Or not. And I happen to know from our discussions that Doroth- Dr Laidlaw’s biggest bugbear is that asking people how they are feeling is a hopeless way of finding out how ill they are.’
‘What is the work she does?’ I asked. ‘Doroth- Dr Laidlaw?’ I was not exactly sure why I was teasing him; sometimes I think it has simply become a habit as it was with my brother and sister and me. ‘What is it that absorbs her so that she ignores her appointments with her patients?’
‘Fascinating stuff,’ Alec said. He had coloured a touch at the teasing but let it go by unremarked, which was most unusual. ‘And she’s an expert in the field. More learned papers than you could shake a stick at and the Hydro is the perfect place to study it.’
‘Study what?’ I said. We were back at the motorcar and right enough, Bunty was standing up on the back seat with her head out of the side window flap, playing to a crowd of children who were taking turns to pet her. She grew excited enough when she saw me to drive them back a little, just enough to let us through.
‘Bonnie doggy, missus,’ said a grubby little sort in a tattered dress and a ribbon which only added to the tangles in her hair and did nothing for decoration. ‘She looks like a bag ae toffees.’ I laughed; it had not struck me before but the black-and-white patterned toffee shop did have a faint air of Dalmatian about it. I decided to spare myself Donald and Teddy’s looks of scorn at my sentiment and handed the urchin the bag of sugar mice, calling to her departing back that she should share them.
‘Snake oil,’ Alec said, once we were in and Bunty had recovered from the joy of reunion. ‘Faith healing. Mumbo-jumbo. Only she calls it the Placebo.’
‘Sounds like a resort on the Mediterranean,’ I said. ‘“Come to the Placebo – white beaches and dancing every night.” And she studies it at the Hydro?’
‘She thinks it’s the perfect place,’ Alec said again. ‘Promise you won’t tell Hugh.’ Light was beginning to dawn upon me. Alec grinned. ‘She doesn’t believe a bit of it. Not a jot. Not the sitz baths or the sun lamps or anything.’
‘Huh!’ I said. ‘She charges enough for it in that case.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Alec. ‘But she charges because it works. I tell you, Dandy, it’s a marvel. The theory is – Do-octor Laidlaw explained it all to me – that Donald and Teddy and Hugh will all get better even though it’s complete hocus-pocus. And they’ll all get better faster than if they just rested and let nature take its course, and they’ll all get better quicker with three different “treatment plans” than if they all did the same. And the more trouble it is the better it works.’
‘That must be why the patients who’re only there for the casino have to submit to treatments,’ I said. ‘Only… I wonder what she’s measuring if they’re not ill to start with.’
‘Could be any one of a hundred things,’ Alec said. ‘She’s working on an enormous review of it. Thinking about The Lancet, no less.’
‘She certainly seems to have convinced you,’ I said. ‘You don’t think that maybe if something went wrong – if one of her patients died, for instance – she would cover it up? With The Lancet in view?’
‘Not patients. Guinea pigs,’ Alec said. ‘That’s what she calls them.’
‘Such callousness doesn’t exactly speak to-’ I began. Then I stopped as a thought struck me. ‘Why did she tell you all of this? When she’d only just met you?’
‘I’m a control,’ Alec said. ‘She really does have a first-rate mind, Dan. She tells a select few to see if it still works when we know it’s all nonsense.’
‘Ah,’ I said. We were swinging into Auchenlea’s gate now. ‘So you’re a guinea pig too then, really. I thought for a bit she was taken with you.’ I did not turn my head since I was navigating a narrow drive, but I thought I saw him stiffen. ‘Won’t it muck things up rather – for The Lancet – that there’s nothing wrong with you? Will you pretend to get better or pretend to stay crocked? Can you even remember what it is that’s supposed to be wrong with you?’
‘Bad back, like Mrs Addie,’ Alec said in a distant voice. ‘I never thought of that.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘My bright idea about the Fiscal means that you’ll have to open your little cage and run away anyway. The experiment is over, at least for you.’
He did not take much convincing. Dr Laidlaw might see Alec as just another dead moth to be pinned but I was becoming ever more sure that he had failed to take a comparably professional view of her. All that choking on her name and letting me rib him. To me she was a suspect, like her brother and Mrs Cronin and even Regina. To Alec she was an innocent, sullied by the coarseness of Tot, and deserving, without question, of all the loyalty Mrs Cronin and Regina could give her. For that reason too I was not as loath as I normally would be to despatch him on an errand.
‘I prefer “mission”,’ he said. I was not going to quibble. Certainly I was not going to fight him for the opportunity to raise the thorny question of exhumation. It would take all of his charm to talk Mrs Bowie into anything of the kind and Mr Addie would not have let me get to the end of the first sentence before he paid his outstanding bill and showed me the door.