The Man in the Queue (18 page)

As they went along the narrow roads, torn here and there where burns had swept across them in their downward path in spate from the hills, he realized the force of the man's remark about meeting things. There was no room in most places for even a perambulator to pass.

"How do you manage when you meet something?" he asked the driver.

"Well, sometimes We back—and sometimes they back," he said. After about five miles Grant saw this new rule of the road demonstrated when they came face to face with a traction-engine. It was a diminutive specimen of its kind, but formidable enough in the circumstances. On one side was the hill, and on the other a small rocky ravine. With the greatest good humour the driver reversed, and backed his unwieldy vehicle until he could run it into the bank in a siding for road metal. The traction-engine chuffed complacently past, and the journey was resumed. In all the thirty-six miles they met only two more obstacles, both motors. In one case they grazed past by a mutual withdrawing of skirts, the near wheel of the mail-car being in a ditch and the near wheel of the other in a bank of heather and boulders. In the other case the car proved to be a Ford, and with the mongrel adaptability of its kind took without parley to the moor, and with complete insouciance swept bumping past the stationary mail-car what time the drivers exchanged unintelligible greetings. This display of amphibiousness seemed to astonish no one, and though the car was now full to overflowing, no remark was made. It was evidently a daily occurrence.

With the laden state of the car in his mind, Grant wondered what would happen to the people along the road who would have no means of travelling. The same fear had occurred to a little old woman who had been waiting by a roadside cottage for the car. As it slowed down and the driver descended to her assistance she looked scaredly at the crowded benches and said, "How are you going to make room, Andy?"

"Be quiet," said Andy cheerfully; "we never left any one yet."

"Be quiet," Grant learned, was not a reproof in this country, and had nothing to do with its English meaning. It was an expression of half-jocose refusal, and, on occasions, of straightforward admiration tinged with disbelief. On Andy's lips it meant that the old lady was what a Lowlander would call "haivering." And certainly he was as good as his word. Room was found, and no one seemed to suffer very badly, unless it was the hens in the coop at the back, which had been rolled slightly sideways. But they were still vociferously alive when their proud owner, waiting at the head of a track that led apparently nowhere, claimed them and bore them away in a wheelbarrow.

Several miles before Garnie, Grant smelt the sea—that seaweedy smell of the sea on an indented coast. It was strange to smell it so unpreparedly in such unsealike surroundings. It was still more strange to come on it suddenly as a small green pool among the hills. Only the brown surge of the weed along the rocks proclaimed the fact that it was ocean and not moor loch. But as they swept into Garnie with all the éclat of the most important thing in twenty-four hours, the long line of Garnie sands lay bare in the evening light, a violet sea creaming gently on their silver placidity. The car decanted him at the flagged doorway of his hostelry, but, hungry as he was, he lingered in the door to watch the light die beyond the flat purple outline of the islands to the west. The stillness was full of the clear, far-away sounds of evening. The air smelt of peat smoke and the sea. The first lights of the village shone daffodil-clear here and there. The sea grew lavender, and the sands became a pale shimmer in the dusk.

And he had come here to arrest a man who had committed murder in a London queue!

Grant had got little information from Andy, the mail-car driver, not because the driver was ignorant—after all, he had presumably driven Lamont these thirty-six miles over the hills only two days before—but because Andy's desire to find out all about himself was, surprisingly enough, just as strong as his to find out about Lamont, and he brushed aside Grant's most hopeful leads with a monosyllable or a movement of his head, and produced instead leads of his own. It was a game that soon palled, and Grant had given him up long before he had resigned himself to knowing no more of Grant. And now the landlord of the Garnie Hotel, interviewed in the porch after breakfast, proved equally unhelpful, this time through genuine ignorance. Where the mail-driver would have been intensely interested in whatever happened at Carninnish, which was his home and his resting-place each night, the landlord was interested only in Garnie, and in Garnie only as it affected his hotel.

"Come for some fishing, sir?" he said, and Grant said yes, that he had thoughts of fishing the Finley if that were possible.

"Yes," the man said, "that's just four mile at the back of the hill beyond. Perhaps you'll know the country?" Grant thought it best to disclaim any knowledge of the district. "Well, there's a wee village the other side, on Loch Finley, but you're better here. It's a wee poky place of an hotel they have there, and they have nothing but mutton to eat." Grant said they might do worse. "Yes, you'd think that the first day, and maybe the second, but by the end of a week the sight of a sheep on the hill'd be too much for you. We can send you over in the Ford every day if you're not fond of walking. You'll have a permit, I suppose?" Grant said that he had thought there would be some water belonging to the hotel. "No; all that water belongs to the gentleman who has Carninnish House. He is a Glasgow stockbroker. Yes, he's here—at least he came a week ago, if he's not gone again."

"Well, if I can have the Ford now, I'll go over and see him." Fishing was the only excuse which would allow him to wander the country without remark. "What did you say his name was?" he asked, as he stepped into a battered Ford alongside a hirsute Jehu with a glaring eye.

"He's a Mr. Drysdale," the landlord said. "He's not overgenerous with the water, but perhaps you'll manage it." With which cold comfort Grant set off on a still colder drive over the hills to the Finley valley.

"Where is the house?" he asked the hirsute one, whose name he learned was Roddy, as they went along.

"At Carninnish."

"Do you mean right in the village?" Grant had no intention of making so public an appearance at this early date.

"No; it's the other side of the river from the village."

"We don't go through the village?"

"No; the bridge is before you come to the village at all."

As they came to the edge of the divide the whole new valley opened maplike before Grant's fascinated gaze several hundreds of feet below. There were no fields, no green at all except on the border of the river that ran, a silver thread, through scattered birch to the distant sealoch. It was a brown country, and the intensity of the sea's blue gave it a foreign air—faery lands forlorn, with a vengeance, Grant thought. As they ran seawards down the side of the hill he noticed two churches, and took his opportunity.

"You have enough churches for the size of the village."

"Well," said Roddy, "you couldn't be expecting the Wee Frees to go to the U.F. That's the U.F. down there—Mr. Logan's." He pointed down to the right over the edge of the road, where a bald church and a solid four-square manse sheltered in some trees by the river. "The Wee Free is away at the other end of the village, by the sea."

Grant looked interestedly out of the corner of his eyes at the comfortable-looking house that sheltered his quarry. "Nice place," he said. "Do they take boarders?"

No, Roddy thought not. They let the house for a month in the summer. The minister was a bachelor, and his widowed sister, a Mrs. Dinmont, kept house for him. And his niece, Mrs. Dinmont's daughter, was home for holidays just now. She was a nurse in London.

No word of another inmate, and he could not pursue the subject without making the always curious Highlander suspicious. "Many people at the hotel here?"

"Three," said Roddy. As befitted the retainer of a rival concern there was nothing he did not know about the inn at Carninnish. But though all three were men, none of them was Lamont. Roddy had the history and predilections of all of them at his fingertips.

Carninnish House lay on the opposite side of the river from the village, close to the Sea, with the high road to the north at its back. "You'd better wait," Grant said, as Roddy pulled up before the door; and with what dignity Roddy's method of coming to a halt had left him, he descended on to the doorstep. In the hall was a lean, rather sour-looking man in good tweeds. The stockbroker's got a party, thought Grant. He had quite unconsciously pictured the stockbroking gentleman as round and pink and too tight about the trouser legs. It was therefore rather a shock when the lean man came forward and said, "Can I do anything for you?"

"I wanted to see Mr. Drysdale."

"Come in," said the man, and led him into a room littered with fishing tackle. Now Grant had intended quite shamelessly to try sob-stuff on the broker of his imagination, appealing to his generosity not to spoil his holiday; but the sight of the real man made him change his mind. He took out his professional card, and was gratified at the man's surprise. It was a compliment to the perfection of the disguise which his old fishing clothes afforded.

"Well, Inspector, what can I do for you?"

"I want you to be good enough to let me fish in the Finley for a little. Two days at most, I think. I think a man I want is in the neighbourhood, and the only way I can go about without attracting notice is to fish. I thought the hotel at Garnie would have some fishing of their own, but it appears they haven't. I won't catch any fish, but I have fished a good deal, and I won't frighten everything in the river."

To his surprise a smile had come over the dour face of Mr. Drysdale. "Inspector," he said, "I don't think you can have any idea how unique this occasion is, how utterly unique you are. Even in the '45 they didn't come here looking for any one, and no one, certainly, has done it since. It's simply incredible. A criminal in Carninnish, and a C.I.D. inspector looking for him! Why, drunk and incapable is the most horrible crime that this neighbourhood has known since the flood."

"Perhaps my man thought of that," said the inspector dryly. "Anyhow, I promise I shan't bother you long if you give me the permission to fish."

"Certainly you can fish. Anywhere you like. I'm going up the river now. Would you care to come with me, and I'll introduce you to the best pools? You might as well have a decent day's fishing if you're going to fish at all. Send that madman back to Garnie"—Roddy was giggling with a maid in high-pitched Gaelic outside the open window, quite indifferent to the probable proximity of "the gentleman"—"and tell him he needn't come back. I'll send you over in the evening whenever you want to go."

Delighted at the unexpected graciousness on the part of the ill-favoured and reputedly ungenerous one, Grant dismissed Roddy, who received his congé with the grave respect of an A.D. C., but departed in a flurry of high unintelligible cackle flung between himself and the maid. It sounded like the protesting row of an alarmed hen as she rockets over a fence to safety. When the noises had died away, Drysdale began in silence to collect his tackle for the river. He asked no more questions, and Grant was again grateful to him. To break the silence which Drysdale had evidently no intention of breaking, he asked about the state of the river, and soon they were talking fishing with the freedom of two enthusiasts. They proceeded up the right bank of the river—that is, the opposite bank from the village and the manse—and Drysdale pointed out the pools and their peculiarities. The whole tawny, narrow boulder-strewn river was not more than six miles long. It ran from a hill loch in an impetuous scramble, broken by still pools, to the sea at Carninnish.

"I expect you'd like to be near the village," Drysdale said, and suggested that the inspector should be left the lower half of the river while he went up to the hill end, where he would probably spend the day; and to that Grant gratefully agreed. As they passed opposite the manse, Grant said, "That the manse? Scotch clergymen seem to be very comfortable."

"They are," said Drysdale, with emphasis, but did not pursue the subject. Grant remarked on the apparent size of the house, and asked if they took boarders. It would be a good place to stay. Drysdale said that as far as he knew they did not take any one, and he repeated Roddy's tale of the summer letting. He took leave of Grant with the abruptness of a shy man, and departed into the landscape, leaving Grant with the comfortable knowledge that he had an ally after his own heart if the need for one should arise.

Grant decided that he would start fishing perhaps two hundred yards above the manse and work slowly down, taking his bearings and keeping an eye on the traffic to and from the house. On his side of the river there was a cart-track that was almost a road, but on the other side there was as far as he could see, only the path like a sheep-track made by the feet of fishermen and gillies, so that any one coming upriver would come on his side. The manse was surrounded by a stone wall, and faced away from him towards the high road on the other side of the river. Inside the wall was a row of scraggy firs which effectually hid the detail of the house. Only gleams of whitewash and its eight chimneys advertised its presence. At the back the garden wall ran down to the river bank, and in the middle of the wall flanking the river was a small iron gate of the strictly utilitarian pattern popular in the Highlands. Though he could not see the high road immediately in front of the house he had an uninterrupted view of the road on either side. No one could come or go from the house without his being aware of it. And he could stay where he was all day unquestioned and unremarkable. It was an ideal situation. Grant sent the first cast hissing over the brown shining water, and felt that life was good. It was too sunny for fishing and his prospects of catching anything were meagre in the extreme; but a bigger catch lay to his hand. No one had mentioned that a stranger had arrived at the manse, but just as he had known on the Brixton stair-landing that the rooms were empty, Grant now had a feeling that his man was here.