‘Your wish has been granted,’ said Mr Turnbull, sweeping in the parlour door in a black tie and rather green-tinged dark suit. ‘What can I tell Mrs Gilver, my dear?’
‘Your wife is attempting to get my signature on the pledge,’ I said, speaking with no more reverence than this silly nonsense deserved; it was long past time I staked a claim in the conversation again.
‘You may scoff,’ said Mr Turnbull. I inclined my head, accepting his permission graciously, then I took a hold of myself again. I must swallow all annoyance and do what was needed for the case.
‘I hold no particular brief one way or the other,’ I said, trying to sound lofty. ‘Only I do wonder if going around saying it’s poison is wise. Around here in particular.’ I was speaking with forked tongue, hoping to jolt them, but if they did know anything about Robert Dudgeon they hid it remarkably well and only frowned at me in puzzlement and waited for more. ‘Around here where so many depend on the stuff for their livelihood, I mean. What would become of Queensferry without the bottling hall?’
‘Queensferry without the bottling hall,’ said Mr Turnbull in a dreamy voice, as though he was speaking of Elysium, ‘would be a better place in every way.’
‘Then you would only have to close all the mines and scuttle all the fishing boats and you’d be happy,’ I said, and I did not trouble with much politeness. All very well for Mr Turnbull to lay waste to any trade that was not ‘healthful exercise’ in another form, but we could not all be schoolmasters. ‘And our young men would be off on a ship to the New World to work down their mines instead.’ I remembered Tommy from the night of the greasy pole, threatening emigration to escape his wife and her nagging tongue, and I thought that I would accept a fairly long boat ride to get away from the Turnbulls right now. Mrs Turnbull, I noticed, was reddening with wifely anger to hear me speak to her husband so, but before she had managed more than a rumble, he stepped in.
‘We keep our eyes raised to the heavens and our hearts follow, Mrs Gilver,’ he said. ‘We are not troubled by those who would pull us down.’
‘Very admirable,’ I replied, although thinking that there comes a point where noble idealism becomes ruthless zeal and, once beyond that point, there is no knowing what people will do in the name of a cause, ‘but if you are trying to change minds, all I’m saying is that you might want to lower your sights a little. I don’t see that there’s any point in calling whisky “poison” in a town where so many drink the stuff every day and are manifestly alive and well. Unpoisoned, in fact,’ I explained.
‘But they’re very far from well,’ said Mr Turnbull. ‘They are killing themselves, slowly and insidiously, but killing themselves nonetheless. I speak now as a student of the natural sciences, Mrs Gilver. I have studied the topic in some depth and built up quite a substantial little library on it.’ He took a huge breath and I sensed the beginning of another sermon. I had to keep him out of the pulpit and try to get him to stick to particulars if I was ever to hear anything useful.
‘There are many peoples of the world who lack the European’s capacity to train himself to ingest this poison, Mrs Gilver. Were you aware of that?’
‘I believe I’ve heard as much,’ I said. ‘Red Indians…?’
‘And there are places in the world where the fashion is to ingest arsenic. They build up a tolerance to it, little by little.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘How odd.’
‘And both arsenic and alcohol would kill a child. Or kill its greatest devotee by overdose. Where is the difference between the two? And yet think of the outcry there would be if there were an arsenic factory in the middle of our little burgh. What would you say to that?’
‘Um,’ I said, feeling as though I were back at school being given an oral test without warning. I considered saying that the difference lay in the capacity to make a delicious punch for a party, but I refrained. ‘I do see that you have a point, Mr Turnbull. I certainly do see that. Only, as I say, I wonder if the “poison” angle is your strongest lever in Queensferry of all places. People have to make a living. And I suppose one could say that if they are filching the stuff from the distillery, at least it’s real whisky. I’d have thought it was a good thing in a way to have such a ready supply keeping down the urge towards “moonshine”. I have a sister who married an Anglo-Irishman and the tales she has to tell…’
Mr and Mrs Turnbull rolled their eyes at each other, although whether to indicate that I was naive to think there were no illicit stills in the neighbourhood or simply to express horror at my readiness to find a silver lining in their personal black cloud, I could not say. One thing was now clear beyond a shadow of a doubt, however. They could not possibly have had anything to do with the death. No one in his right mind would bang on like this about the dangers of whisky-drinking if he were in the fortunate position of having his own crime tidied away on account of an excess of whisky-drinking by the corpse-to-be. So their creeping around in the woods must indeed have been a nature-walk, and the uncomfortable feeling they gave me, which I had mistaken for my detective hackles rising, must simply be the feeling one sometimes got from an innocent, everyday, monomaniacal, crashing bore.
‘And another thing,’ I said, free to offend them as I chose now, ‘if you spout a lot of talk about poison that they don’t believe and can’t believe, because their livelihoods depend on it and their own eyes refute it, then they won’t believe anything you do say. They’ll simply put every word down to “teetotallers’ fairy tales” and the baby will go out with the bathwater.’
‘Hmph,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘There is no problem with the locals believing fairy tales, Mrs Gilver. As you yourself have found.’
‘Well, they certainly enjoy them,’ I answered, ‘but as to believing them, who knows?’ I was thinking of the artless way the little Dudgeons had insisted on their current demon being ‘a real one’ as they tried to orchestrate a lift in my motor car. They as good as admitted that most of their monsters were fancy.
‘The children believe them and the parents give way to their silliness,’ pronounced Mr Turnbull. ‘So I am led to conclude that the parents themselves are taken in. No spiritual guidance whatsoever.’
‘That’s just what I was telling Mrs Gilver, my dear,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘About the Burry Man. The very next day! Sitting with their picnics at the Fair. And what dreadful unwholesome rubbish was in those picnic-bags. Trudie and Nellie Marshall were telling the little Quigley girl that Robert Dudgeon died because all the little spikes were poisoned and they stuck in him like a thousand darts.’
I sat up at this, trying not to look too unnaturally interested.
‘And the Christie boy told me in all seriousness that his granny had told him that the curse of the Burry Man fell after twenty-five years and everyone knew Robert Dudgeon shouldn’t never have dared to do it this last time. I ask you!’
‘Well, at least that shows that they know the Burry Man is just one of their neighbours dressed up for the day,’ I said. ‘Some of the other legends would have it that he’s a real bogeyman who lives in a swamp.’
‘Oh, there were plenty of those too,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘Netta Stoddart swears blind that she saw the Burry Man going home on his cart along the Back Braes on Friday night and that when the cart turned round the Burry Man fell off and rolled down the bank on to the railway line and was squashed by a train.’
I could not quite suppress a giggle at this. One had to admire the confidence of little Miss Stoddart to insist on her story when quite a hundred witnesses saw the Burry Man die in an entirely different way. It did occur to me, however, that although the falling, rolling and squashing were nonsense, perhaps Netta Stoddart might have seen the cart turn around.