Lament for a Maker (21 page)

That Guthrie had himself taken the money from the drawer and given it to Miss Mathers again dovetailed, I noted, with Miss Guthrie’s statement that neither the laird nor Lindsay had moved in the direction of the bureau while Lindsay was in the tower. And once more I was confronted with a hypothetical sequence of events that had marked imaginative coherence: the final and harshly contrived parting, the bitter plunge to death almost as the hour brought in peace on earth and goodwill among men. I contemplated this in silence for some moments…and knew I was dissatisfied.

I rose. ‘Mr Bell, I must be getting up to Erchany. As yet I know far too little to judge of the matter. But I am very grateful to you for coming in. You are an important witness and I shall no doubt see you again this afternoon.’

‘And you think, Mr Wedderburn, it will be suicide proven?’

‘I think the police, or others, must find Lindsay and Miss Mathers. And for the rest – that truth lies at the bottom of the well. By the way, can you tell me anything of a man called Gamley? He was the first to find Mr Guthrie’s body in the moat.’

‘He was grieve at the home farm once, but left after having words with the laird.’

‘Harsh words?’

Bell smiled. ‘It would be hard to find any in these lands that couldn’t remember harsh words with Guthrie of Erchany. But I judge he comes little into this story. He would be but with the lad Lindsay and waiting to give him a hand away. They met in together some time back and had become fast friends.’

And here my interview with Ewan Bell ended. I rejoined Gylby, who had returned triumphant from the stationer’s with a tin of John Cotton, and we went out in the nip of the winter morning. The skis were piled on the roof of the car, certain parcels requisitioned by Mrs Hardcastle were deposited with the driver, and we drove off for Castle Erchany amid the universal curiosity of Kinkeig. As Mrs Roberts confided to me at parting, there had been nothing like it since the medicos – the reference being doubtless to the unfortunate London physician and his colleagues who had visited the dead man some two years before.

‘Mr Gylby,’ I said as we crept cautiously over the surface exposed by the ploughs, ‘I take it that nothing’ – I hesitated – ‘untoward was discovered about Guthrie’s body?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Well, as the story runs in Kinkeig, this desperate Lindsay had chopped off a number of the fingers.’

Abruptly, young Gylby stopped stuffing a pipe. ‘I really think the Scotch are–’

‘The bloody limit?’

My young acquaintance, I believe, had placed me comfortably as a person of somewhat ponderous utterance; it gave me considerable pleasure to see him positively jump as I thus briefly expressed his thought. ‘I was going to put it,’ he said, ‘that they are people with a developed taste in the macabre. Guthrie’s fingers are intact. It’s his gold that’s gone.’

‘Quite so…I understand that it is definitely for Miss Guthrie that I am to act?’

‘If you are going to be so good.’

‘Very well. Let me put it to you that you have made a statement in contradiction to certain apparent testimony of my client.’ And I tapped Gylby’s journal which I was still holding. ‘Miss Guthrie states that between Guthrie and Lindsay there was nothing like heat; that they shook hands and parted quietly; even that Lindsay spoke or comported himself “gently”. You state that at your own view of Lindsay little more than a minute later you received “an extraordinarily vivid impression of passion”. Now this discrepant evidence may be important. Are you sure that your impression was accurate?’

‘Yes.’ Gylby’s answer was at once reluctant and convinced. ‘Miss Guthrie was observing those people more or less at leisure. You, on the other hand, speak of what “happened in a flash”, and of “a second and a second only”. Are you not more likely to be mistaken than she?’

I thought it wise to let my tone suggest to this slightly airy young man the manner in which an inquiry of the sort impending might have to be conducted. But he was perfectly serious and perfectly forthright. ‘There seems to be such a probability, Mr Wedderburn. Nevertheless I don’t think my impression is wrong.’

I believe it was at this point that I made up my mind – if in a preliminary way – as to what had really happened at Erchany. And my conclusion, I saw, was likely to make my position delicate. I turned to another topic.

‘Mr Gylby, about the man Hardcastle. You are something of a prejudiced witness? It would be possible to suggest, on the strength of your journal, that your attitude to him has been quite venomous from the moment of his first unkind reception of you at Erchany?’

Gylby contented himself with saying: ‘You wait till you see him.’

‘And you are inclined to credit him with some hidden motive in the affair?’

‘He was up to something. Guthrie never gave him that message to me.’

‘Certainly that appears to be Miss Guthrie’s impression.’

With unexpected heat Gylby said: ‘Sybil was speaking the truth.’

‘You cannot suppose me to be suggesting otherwise. Have you any notion of why Hardcastle should give you the false message?’

‘I have some notion it might be an act of stupid malice against his master. He stumbled against the wall of the staircase once or twice as were going up and it occurred to me he was acting in some sort of random, fuddled state. I think he may be not only a rascal but a drunken rascal.’

‘And not a man engineering some complicated deception?’ Gylby shook his head. ‘He’s cunning, all right. But he couldn’t see far enough ahead for anything like that.’

‘Another point. You thought Guthrie was mad? And you formed that impression before hearing Mrs Hardcastle speak of doctors who had apparently come to inquire into his sanity some years ago?’

‘I thought him mad from the first few minutes. Only you must understand, sir, that I use the word very loosely. I don’t know that his was the sort of madness they certify; I rather suppose not. It was more as if he lived in the shadow of something that no man could remain quite sane while contemplating. He was broken, fragmented. He was mad as the heroes were mad when the Furies were hunting them down.’

I looked at my companion with a new interest. ‘A most illuminating remark, Mr Gylby. I have always maintained against our educational reformers that there is the greatest utility in the grand old fortifying classical curriculum.’

The road from Dunwinnie to Kinkeig and the road from Kinkeig through Glen Erchany to Castle Erchany form with the long line of Loch Cailie a rough equilateral triangle. In the centre of this soars the bulk of Ben Cailie, buttressed to the south by the smaller mass of Ben Mervie and skirted to the south again first by Glen Mervie and then by the precipitous Pass of Mervie. The panorama of this on our right as we drove – peak upon peak of virgin snow soaring into a bleakly sunlit winter sky – was a spectacle well-calculated at once to soothe and elevate the mind. The latter part of our journey was performed in silence, broken only by an involuntary exclamation of my own when we finally turned a bend and sighted the castle across a final arm of the loch. As a historical monument it is, I suppose, of quite minor importance, and additions in the later seventeenth century have somewhat modified – though they have not destroyed – its stern medieval character. But my first impression of it was of something so darkly powerful and so inviolably lonely – like a monster of the most solitary habit half couched in a lair of larch and snow – that I could not have been more struck by the sudden appearance of the original Tintagel itself. Particularly impressive was the tower, massive but remarkably lofty, and built, it may be supposed, for observation as well as defence. Looking at the sheer lines of it from a distance I could understand Gylby’s instant knowledge that the man who had fallen from that height was inevitably dead.

We drove over a drawbridge and pulled up in the central court. Young Gylby said cheerfully: ‘Home again!’ and assisted me to alight.

My first awareness – like that of Erchany’s unbidden guests a few nights before – was of the dogs; confined in a system of kennels at the farther end of the court, they were signalizing their disapproval of our advent in no uncertain terms. I was next aware of an elderly and infirm old woman in a shawl and snow-boots, hobbling towards us with every appearance of haste and anxiety. For a moment I was almost afraid we were to hear the announcement of another fatality; then she called out eagerly: ‘You’ll have minded my poison? You won’t have disremembered it, Mr Gylby, sir?’

‘Here you are, Mrs Hardcastle.’ And Gylby handed her out the parcels from beside the driver. She was about to make off with them as hastily as she had come when she became aware of the presence of a stranger. Not – as I imagine – without some discomfort in the joints, she made me a ramshackle curtsy. Gylby said politely: ‘Mr Wedderburn – Mrs Hardcastle.’

‘Sir,’ she said, ‘you’d best know at once what Mr Gylby knows. There’s a terrible great number of rats in Erchany.’ She tapped her parcels and looked fearfully about her. ‘But I’m tholing it no more! I’m an old body grown and now I’m going to sleep of nights.’ Her voice sank hoarsely and she nodded her head to where the figure of a man had appeared beside the kennels. ‘But don’t tell my man! He’s fell unkind. Whiles he sets them at me.’

‘The dogs, Mrs Hardcastle?’

‘The rats.’

And Mrs Hardcastle, concealing her parcels beneath her shawl, hurried away. I turned to Gylby. ‘That is Hardcastle over by the kennels? It occurs to me to have a word with him before we go in.’

I crossed the court. The late laird’s factor was giving the dogs a more than meagre meal and cursing them heartily the while. ‘Down, Caesar,’ I heard him call as I came up, ‘down, you tink cur!’

My approach in the snow had been quite unheard. I said pleasantly in his ear: ‘Bonny beasts, Mr Hardcastle.’

He swung round and glared at me suspiciously – not, I fancy, merely because of the obvious irony of my remark. His villainy as sketched by Gylby was apparent enough. But it was not an assured villainy; he seemed, indeed, woefully lacking in confidence. He said now with a sort of surly uncertainty: ‘Maybe so.’

‘And this is Caesar? I should be inclined to give him a powder and follow it up with a little red meat. Now pray, Mr Hardcastle, which is Doctor?’

Rather weakly, Hardcastle pointed at a recumbent animal. ‘That’s him.’

‘Is it indeed? Let’s have a look at him. Doctor! Hey, Doctor! You know, Mr Hardcastle, I think Doctor must be deaf.’

Hardcastle positively brightened. ‘He
is
deaf.’

‘Really now? That is a little unusual in so young a dog. I wonder, can you be mistaken? It should be easy to devise a test.’

‘Damn’t to hell!’ cried Hardcastle. ‘Will you leave the beast alone?’

‘Certainly if you wish it; I believe my interest in the animal is exhausted. A dumb – and deaf – witness, is he not? I am solicitor to Miss Guthrie, the incoming proprietor. I should be obliged if you would take me to her.’

Gylby’s estimate of the factor, I reflected, had been remarkably accurate. A cunning ruffian, but one whose cunning was soon exhausted. I was not displeased to find him fitting neatly enough into the picture that was forming in my mind of the events of Christmas Eve. This picture was as yet far from complete; only the cardinal pieces – if I may use an image suggested by what I had heard of Ranald Guthrie’s jigsaws – were as yet in place. But these gave me – unless I was greatly mistaken – the first outlines of a very curious situation. Inevitably, there was a great deal that was still obscure and invited the most careful and cautious investigation. I pause on this word. I had come to Erchany in my professional character as a solicitor; it will be not without amusement that the reader perceives me, while yet standing but on the threshold of the castle, as lured into the undignified role of a private detective agent!

As I entered the great hall of the castle a uniformed police officer stepped forward, introduced himself as Inspector Speight, and invited me into a small and bare room in which he had apparently established his headquarters. I might properly have insisted on being conducted to my client before assisting at any conference with the police; there seemed, however, to be no necessity for this and I accepted the invitation. I found Inspector Speight a civil and intelligent officer and judged it might be useful to show him I already had some grip of the situation. After a few preliminary remarks I therefore said: ‘I suppose you’ve found Gamley?’

‘Yes, there was no difficulty in that. We have a line on him for this afternoon.’

‘And you have no doubt traced the young people who were packed off by the late Mr Guthrie?’

‘Packed off? I don’t know about that.’

‘A point that will emerge, inspector. I think it will be found to be of some importance. And where had they got to?’

The inspector shook his head. ‘Strangely enough, Mr Wedderburn, we’ve had no word of them yet. But then they had good reason to lie pretty low.’

‘I wonder, inspector, I wonder. It is possible that now Mr Guthrie is dead the necessity for their departing unobtrusively is over. I venture to think it is very possible.’

‘If I may say so, Mr Wedderburn, that seems a singularly wrong-headed way of looking at it.’

‘That depends entirely on the point from which one looks, does it not? Perhaps you have grounds for believing that the young Mr Lindsay has committed some crime?’

I had reckoned accurately in counting on a streak of irritation latent in Inspector Speight. My bland manner drew him at once. He said abruptly: ‘The lad pitched Guthrie to his death. I haven’t a doubt of it.’

‘Perhaps so, inspector. I would say myself it is a little early to cherish convictions. And I think there may be some evidence in direct rebuttal?’

‘To be sure, there’s Miss Guthrie.’

So Miss Guthrie had already told the police her story. I rose. ‘I think, inspector, I must now seek my client.’

Inspector Speight made a protesting gesture. ‘You mustn’t be taking it, sir, I think it necessary to discredit what the young lady has told us entirely. But she was scared and confused out there in the storm and she wanted to see as little ill in the business up there as might be.’ The inspector paused. ‘Perhaps she’ll come to a clearer recollection, though, on thinking it over.’