Lament for a Maker (16 page)
There was a wild cry – Hardcastle’s. I glanced at him; the sweat was pouring down his face in that icy ditch; he had completely lost his nerve. My glance returned to the vague bulk in front and I realised that what had moved was the figure of a man, crouched over the body. The figure straightened itself as we came up. A voice said: ‘He’s dead.’
When I wrote that Guthrie’s end had been horrible I was thinking chiefly of the full, frank satisfaction in the deep Scottish voice which spoke these words. Dead men hear no curses and mundane mire and fury is nothing to a ghost; still I hope that none will sound that note in my requiem. I said as sternly as if I had been owner of Erchany and chief constable of the county in one: ‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’
The stranger looked at me squarely in the lantern-light, an elderly handsome man with the life of the land writ large on his ruddy face. ‘It’s Rob Gamley I am and I came maybe to have a word with the laird. But the laird’s having a word by now with them are fitter to deal with him.’
It occurred to me as I turned from this savage and unseemly speech and examined the body to wonder if Guthrie had left a single sorrowing heart behind him. Perhaps Christine’s – I didn’t know. Certainly he was gone to the judgement at which Gamley had hinted; his neck was broken and his death must have been instantaneous.
Standing in that little group of people round the dead man, I had to consider what was proper to be done. It may be that I should have insisted that the body be left where it was; one does this, I suppose, where there is suspicion of foul play. But was there, substantially and after all, such suspicion? On one hand there was Sybil’s statement that Guthrie had fallen from the tower; on the other hand there was only what must be called atmospheric evidence – violence and mystery existing merely in the air or uniquely embodied in the fantastic incident of the learned rat. In sum, I saw no utility and much indecency in leaving what was mortal of Ranald Guthrie in the moat – an indecency which the man Gamley’s bitter speech had somehow underlined. So I said briefly: ‘Miss Guthrie had better go ahead with the torch and lantern and we will follow with the body. Mr Gamley, you will please help.’
Properly enough this time, Gamley took off his cap. The action attracted my eye and I saw that he was looking curiously and without friendliness at Hardcastle. And when I glanced in turn at Hardcastle I saw something extraordinary. The abominable creature appeared in mortal terror of Gamley and was keeping his distance as one might keep one’s distance from a bear on a tether. At the same time he was peering at Guthrie’s body with just the sort of excited, furtive interest I could imagine him giving to an obscene photograph. I had no notion what prompted either of these impulses, but the combination of them was somehow singularly disgusting. I much preferred Gamley’s irreverence. Acting on impulse – and, I suppose, high-handedly enough – I ordered Hardcastle into the house to find a resting-place for the body. Gamley and I followed with our burden as well as we could.
We laid the dead man for the time being on a sort of stone table in a cellar hard by the door of the moat. Sybil played her part with the torch; then she said ‘I guess I take the task of breaking this to Christine’ and disappeared. It was good of her, I thought, and perhaps the best plan; I might have been clumsy enough.
I sent Hardcastle for a sheet. Gamley, still cap in hand, took one long searching look at the body. Then he strode to the door. ‘Steady on,’ I said, ‘where are you off to?’ For I thought he was due to give some account of himself. He looked at me squarely again. ‘Young sir,’ he said, ‘I’m off to advise the Devil lock up his spoons and forks.’ And with that dark jest he disappeared.
Here was the second mysterious visitor, I reflected, that I had let slip through my fingers that night. Erchany, well-nigh isolated from the world as it was, had proved mysteriously populous. Whence had Neil Lindsay come, and whence Gamley? Who had tied the messages to the rats? Who had been talking to Christine in the schoolroom? And had Hardcastle’s doctor ever arrived? I turned from these riddles to contemplate the larger riddle of death.
Diana, a man can cry out in agony or fear, fall two hundred feet through the air, break his neck and much else, and look at the end of it all like a child asleep in a cradle! A trick of the muscles at the ultimate moment, no doubt, but something strange and terrible to contemplate nevertheless. Guthrie in his dust had returned to innocence; that sinister face, with the strongly marked features that speak of race, was stronger and purer, as if some artist had taken a sponge and swabbed the baser lines away. One reads of death showing such effects; to encounter them at such a violent issue was disconcertingly moving. I composed the body as I could, brushed the snow from face and hair, and waited.
Presently Hardcastle returned with a sheet. Reasonably or unreasonably, I had formed the opinion that in his attitude to the dead man there was something positively indecent, and I found myself instinctively blocking his way at the door. He handed me the sheet sulkily, peering past me in the same absorbed way as before. ‘I suggest,’ I said, ‘that you go and tell your wife to make some tea or coffee. Something of the sort will be needed.’
The unsavoury brute gave a gulp as if he were swallowing his true reactions to me. Then he said with a sort of elephantine cunning which I was at a loss to fathom: ‘Mr Gylby, you’ll have had a look at the body? It might have been robbed or the like?’
‘The police will inquire into that.’
‘But, sir, we might just give a bit look and see?’
My anger against the noisome creature grew. I turned round and rapidly shrouded Guthrie’s body. ‘And now, Mr Hardcastle, we must get a message off to Kinkeig. The snowfall is over and there’s a drop in the wind. You must see if your odd lad can set out at daybreak.’ And I pushed the factor out of the cellar, locked the door and pocketed the key. I can only assure you that there is something in the atmosphere of the place that confirms me in my self-appointed role as warden of Erchany. Fortunately the minutes are flitting past as I write and presently I expect to resign honourably on the arrival of the law. Meantime, there is still a shock or two to record.
On my locking the cellar door Hardcastle went off down the corridor in a huff and I was left to debate my next move. Nothing would have persuaded me to rummage about the body like a police-surgeon, but Hardcastle’s talk of robbery did put one idea in my head. It had taken me some time to shut up at the tower-top and get the little party to the moat; when we arrived there we found the mysterious Gamley crouched beside the body. His identity would no doubt appear in good time, but might there not be evidence in the snow – perishable and best investigated at once – of how he had got there? I took up Hardcastle’s abandoned lantern and, before returning upstairs, slipped once more out to the moat.
The wind which had so quickly obliterated intelligible traces on the battlements had been without force in this deep trench; every mark since the snow had ceased to fall heavily was legible. And the remoteness of Erchany was curiously brought home to me here; everywhere the snow was patterned over with the tracks of wild creatures that had sought shelter from the storm: the incisive pad of a fox, the little long-jumps of weasels, hither-and-thither scurryings of rabbits crossed once by the steady march of a pheasant upon some invisible mark – and once a little splash of blood and fur. The moon was now coming and going in the clouds with the regularity of a neon sign and the moonlight passed in waves over this arabesqued carpeting of snow; it was something to stop and look at with disinterested pleasure; I had to conquer this unseasonable aesthetic impulse before I pushed ahead with my investigation.
Where Guthrie’s body had fallen the snow was splayed up as if a great meteorite had fallen to earth and round about was the confused trampling of our feet as we had raised the body. But beyond this circle every footprint was distinct. And the story told was clear. Gamley had dropped – hazardously – into the moat about fifteen yards from where Guthrie had fallen and gone straight to the body. When he left me he had exactly retraced his steps to the wall of the moat and then; finding it difficult perhaps to get up where he had come down, he had worked round to that little bridge by which Sybil and I had first crossed to the postern door. There he had been able to climb from the moat without difficulty, and the purposefulness of his progress plainly argues him familiar with the ground. I climbed up after him and followed his tracks – with difficulty now – away from the castle. And presently they converged with the faint remains of tracks coming the other way. Gamley had simply come out of the night and returned to it; presumably he had been making for the little postern door when he had been diverted by Guthrie’s fall.
I returned to the moat and laboriously made the circuit of it. The final picture was perfectly clear: Gamley coming to the body from one quarter; Sybil, Hardcastle and myself from another; our all moving on a line to the house; Gamley making off as he had come. Perhaps my reconnaissance was wasted labour but it gave me a comforting sense of tidying up behind me.
Hardcastle was hovering at the end of the basement corridor; I think he may have been hopefully trying the door of the cellar – if his wife is a witch he himself is certainly a ghoul. And now he came up to me and said hoarsely: ‘It’s murder.’
‘That remains to be seen, Mr Hardcastle. Come upstairs.’
‘I tell you the tink-loon Lindsay’s mischieved and murdered him. Didn’t I tell the laird fient the good could come of traffic with one of that name? He’s mischieved and murdered him, and now he’s away with the quean.’
I had been tramping firmly in front of the brute; now I swung round on him. ‘What’s that you say?’
He gave an evil grin that might have signified ‘I’ve pricked you at last’; then, as once before, his dirty hand came from behind his back to stroke his chin. Incredible the slow, stupid malice with which he went on: ‘So you want to know?’
Whatever impertinent effect of suspense Hardcastle designed was marred at this moment by the outburst, just above our heads, of a quite spine-chilling howling and wailing. A hard fought battle between wolves and hyenas might, I fancied, have produced a somewhat similar impression; it was a few seconds before I realized that I was hearing at last Erchany’s lament for Ranald Guthrie – a lament which was about two-fifths Mrs Hardcastle, two-fifths the moron odd-boy, and one-fifth dogs in the background. Its composition changed as we reached the stair head, Tammas – the odd boy – sinking his ululations to a whimper and Mrs Hardcastle achieving something like articulate speech. Sybil was standing between them, looking so determinedly cool and severe that I suspected the night’s events were really beginning to get on top of her at last.
‘Woe the day, woe the day! The good laird’s deed, the good laird’s dead, and the lassie’s away with a Lindsay!’
Oddly and movingly, the old lady chanted her woes in rhythm. And grotesquely Tammas, swayed by the singsong of her voice, began to mumble verses of his own:
‘The craw kill’t the pussy-oh,
The craw kill’t the pussy-oh…’
It was an uncanny dirge. But I have had my bellyful of the uncanny of late, and I thumped upon an old baize door beside me like a chairman calling a rowdy meeting to order. Presently Tammas subsided into mere whisperings and Mrs Hardcastle, after an unpromising excursus on rats, fell into a vein of simple sense. What light I got on the situation in the next fifteen minutes I had better compress into a few sentences.
Neil Lindsay, the lad who thrust past us at that dramatic moment on the staircase, is, as I guessed, Christine’s lover – and whose suit Guthrie was absolutely opposed to. He is of crofter folk – tenants of a very small farm – in a neighbouring glen; and this social disparity is complicated, according to the Hardcastles, by some species of hereditary feud – I suppose that in these parts such a picturesque absurdity is still possible. There has been tension for some time and recently Lindsay has been coming about the castle at night in a threatening way. Neither Guthrie nor Christine had said anything about the inwardness of the matter, so the Hardcastles are somewhat in the dark. But Hardcastle professes to believe that Guthrie had decided to buy Lindsay off, and that it was for this purpose that he had been ordered to send the young man up to the tower upon his next appearance.
Lindsay came shortly before half-past eleven, was admitted by Hardcastle and sent straight up to the tower. Shortly before midnight Guthrie rang a bell – he seems to have had both the Hardcastles at his beck and call – and when Hardcastle mounted the stair shouted down to him the message about the nightcap which eventually brought me on the scene.
It was at this point that I really had to interrupt. ‘But Mr Hardcastle, can you explain why I should be summoned to celebrate this painful business of buying off the young man Lindsay? Wasn’t it rather a private affair?’
‘By your leave, Mr Gylby, I’m thinking the business would maybe be over and the bit dram with a stranger a way of getting the unchancy loon quietly away.’
I need hardly tell you there was scarcely a word of this story that I was in the least anxious to believe. In estimating its credibility, however, I have to remind myself sharply that on Hardcastle’s lips the multiplication table would soon become, as far as I am concerned, suspect at once. And now he was a less prepossessing figure than ever: his surliness was uncomfortably laced with servility and I was aware that he was intensely uneasy. I had contrived to get part of the narrative from his wife and I think he may have been in terror lest she should say the wrong thing – let the wrong species of sinister cat out of the bag. Or he may simply have been scared of me. Or of Sybil.
One fact has emerged clearly. Lindsay and Christine – unless they have been conveyed to some hidden dungeon of the castle – really have gone away, singly or together. Mrs Hardcastle, whom I am increasingly inclined to believe an honest woman, professes to have seen Christine running down the schoolroom corridor with a suitcase, and a hunt by lantern light at the main door of the castle has revealed two half-obliterated tracks leading off into the darkness. The elopement, I believe, is a fact – and a strange season they chose and a hard trek they’ve had. Lindsay when we met him on the staircase must have been making straight for Christine; a few minutes later they must have departed. But what had happened in the few minutes preceding? What happened in the tower?