My Bones Will Keep mb-35 Page 6

  ‘I thought you might not, so I’ll trouble you to sign a paper I’ve drafted out.’

  ‘Look here,’ said Laura, ‘ever since that night you helped me cross the loch from Tannasgan you’ve been dogging my footsteps. I thought at first it was coincindence, but I know better now, and I am not prepared to sign anything for you. Furthermore, this nuisance must now cease. It’s becoming something remarkably like persecution. I don’t wish to be unkind, but I’m beginning to feel absolutely haunted.’

  ‘You’ll sign my paper and then I’ll leave you alone.’

  ‘I’ve told you I’ll sign nothing. I understand your anxiety, but it’s no business of mine.’

  ‘You know that the laird of Tannasgan was murdered?’

  ‘Yes, I heard in Edinburgh that he’d been killed by stabbing, and his body put into a barrel’

  ‘That’s right. And when I go to the police with my story of how you skipped at dead of night from An Tigh Mór, what sort of position will you be in? No, no! You and I must stick together. Come, now. We go surety for each other.’

  ‘Kindly get out of my way. I want my breakfast,’ said Laura. She pushed past him, but he clutched her arm.

  ‘You and I must stick together,’ he repeated. Laura swung round. She was of Amazonian strength and fitness and of a high-mettled temperament. With her free hand she caught him a vicious blow on the nose and then wrenched herself away and strode off down the hill. She glanced back when she reached the first bend, but the man was making no attempt to follow her. He was mopping up the blood which was streaming from his nose.

  Laura told Dame Beatrice the story at breakfast, and added that she hoped, most sincerely, that she would see no more of the young man. She wondered whether he had walked to Loch Katrine to take the Trossachs steamer. From Callander he could take a train and thus, although probably in a very roundabout way, get back to Freagair or as far as Tigh-Osda, if he had decided to return to Tannasgan. From what he had written and from what he had said, however, she thought he was far more likely to avoid the neighbourhood of the crime and might make for Inverness or go back to Edinburgh, from where he must have followed her to Inversnaid.

  Before she left the hotel again, it occurred to her to ask at the office whether a Mr Grant had booked in. She described him. The receptionist looked rather suspicious, Laura thought.

  ‘A gentleman such as you describe booked in last night,’ she said. ‘His motor-cycle is still here. He came across with it in the launch while you were having your dinner. He was out walking the morn and has not yet been back for his breakfast, but his name is not Grant.’

  ‘My mistake,’ said Laura. ‘I met him on holiday and thought I recognised him this morning. I was certainly under the impression that he told me his name was Grant’

  ‘His name is Campbell.’

  ‘Ah, my hearing is not what is was.’

  ‘Is it not? Och, well, maybe Campbell would sound like Grant to a Sassenach.’

  Laura thought it best to ignore this insult to her Highland ancestry. She nodded in her turn and followed Dame Beatrice into the open air.

  ‘Do you still want to put in the rest of the day here?’ her employer asked, when Laura told her that the man, Grant or Campbell, had booked in at the hotel and had spent the night under the same roof as themselves.

  ‘But perhaps the encounter had spoilt the place for you.’

  ‘No, of course not. What do you yourself feel about it?’

  ‘That, if you go off by yourself, I shall feel happier if you borrow a stout ashplant from the array which I noticed in the glassed-in porch.’

  ‘By no means a bad idea, although I’m hardly likely to meet our friend on the slopes of Ben Lomond.’

  ‘One never knows. You are proposing to climb, then?’

  ‘On second thoughts, said to be best, I believe I’d like to leave here after lunch and make for Fort William, where we’re booked for a bed tonight, so I shall give Ben Lomond a miss and take a scramble up the steps beside the falls and come back by road. But there’s no hurry for that. The weather, praise be, is fine, so we might as well take a seat out here and meditate. I always like an after-breakfast cigarette.’

  It was while she was enjoying this as they sat on an uncomfortable bench provided by the hotel, that Grant-Campbell came back for a late breakfast. Either he did not notice (the seat was well below the level of the gravel forecourt of the hotel), or else he avoided looking at them, for he marched straight to the glassed-in porch and passed into the entrance hall.

  Laura decided to stay where she was, in order to see what he did and where he went when he emerged. He did not keep her very long. After about thirty-five minutes he came out again and descended the rough flight of steps to board the hotel launch.

  Laura earnestly hoped that they had seen the last of him, but this was not the case. He conferred for a short time with the two men who ran the launch as a ferry service, climbed the steps again, paused, and looked about him, then saw Laura. With a slightly exaggerated bow, which was intended to include Dame Beatrice, he asked whether he might share the seat with them. Laura scowled, but her employer gave the interloper an encouraging leer and moved up to give him room to sit down.

  ‘A pleasant prospect,’ she observed, waving a proprietory hand towards Loch Lomond. ‘Are you staying here long?’

  ‘I’m staying here as long as you do,’ he replied. I’m in trouble and I need this lady’s help. I don’t know why she refuses it.’

  ‘Possibly because she has not been told in sufficient detail why you solicit it. Should you not put all your cards on the table?’

  ‘Should I? Can I trust you?’

  ‘How do I know?’

  ‘Well, I can’t be worse off. I’m certain to be arrested, anyway.’

  ‘Even if Mrs Gavin and I are able to succour you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know! I’ve been on Mrs Gavin’s trail ever since the night I rowed her across the loch, hoping she’d consent to speak up for me when the time came. But women are flint-hearted, even when a man’s life may be at stake.’

  ‘But what makes you believe that Mrs Gavin can speak up for you, as you express it? Mrs Gavin, who is my personal private secretary as well as my young friend, has told me of her adventures, and nothing in her account, which, I am sure, has been of the fullest, gives me any reason to think that she can help you. What causes you to think she can?’

  ‘Because,’ said the young man, ‘Cù Dubh was murdered just as I was tying up the boat to set Mrs Gavin ashore, so, if there is any trouble, it will be up to her to clear me.’

  Chapter 6

  The Piper’s Tune

  ‘…of which this one

  In chief he urg’d – that I should always shun

  The island of the man-delighting Sun.’

  George Chapman

  « ^ »

  ‘INTERESTING,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Pray go on.’

  ‘I can do you the next bit myself,’ said Laura, ‘but we’d better have the revised version.’

  The young man looked at her with loathing.

  It’s no revised version you’ll be getting, but the authorised account,’ he protested, ‘and you can check it against your own knowledge. Now, then!’

  ‘My own knowledge isn’t extensive,’ said Laura, assuming a meekness she did not feel, but aware that Dame Beatrice did not want the witness antagonised beyond the point which had been reached. ‘Carry on. We’re all agog.’

  ‘I went to Tannasgan in answer to a letter from my uncle.’

  ‘Your uncle being the laird?’

  ‘No, no, Mrs Gavin. My uncle is the man Corrie. He wrote that there was a job going at An Tigh Mór. As I was finishing my term at the University and needed to make a little money during the vacation, this was good news, so I happened along to present myself to the laird.’

  ‘And got the job?’

  ‘I was on trial for a fortnight. If I suited it, I was to stay until the laird could get a perma
nent body. If not…’

  ‘And what were you expected to do?’ asked Dame Beatrice.

  ‘It doesn’t matter telling you that, for the laird is dead and, in any case, I didn’t carry out what he laid upon me and nobody can pretend that I did. My job was to sabotage, in any way that presented itself, the hydro-electrical scheme near Tigh-Osda.’

  ‘Did your uncle know the nature of this assignment?’

  ‘No, no. He was as horrified as I was, when I told him what I was expected to do. However, we were agreed that the laird was mad to think of such a thing, and that there would be nothing I could do about it.’

  ‘The laird was mad all right,’ said Laura, ‘but, as I believe I told you on Skye, I rather liked him.’

  ‘It’s as well that somebody did, then, for he was very short of friends, I’m thinking.’

  ‘How long had you been on Tannasgan when Mrs Gavin called there?’ asked Dame Beatrice. ‘She does not seem to have seen you until you met at the boathouse that night.’

  ‘A matter of two days, so, you see, apart from all else, I wouldn’t have known the laird well enough to want to murder him,’ the young man replied, ignoring the implication contained in her last remark.

  ‘That’s as may be,’ said Laura. ‘I’ve known myself to be in people’s company no more than half an hour and I’d find myself wanting to murder them.’

  ‘Ay, but that’s only in a manner of speaking. You’ve never translated the wish into action. Now the laird surely has been murdered, and…’

  ‘And you knew he was going to be. You’ve let that much out, haven’t you? You told us that the laird was murdered just as you were tying up the boat to set me ashore. How did you know what was happening?’

  ‘It was, first, the unearthly wailing and screaming on the pipes, and then the silence. The noise clearly told of the stabbing and the silence must have shown that he was dead.’

  ‘All this sounds as though you may have been an accessory before the fact. You knew he was going to be murdered?’

  ‘I did not, then. It was after I had the news of his death that I put two and two together.’ Young Grant sounded desperate.

  ‘What were you doing down at the boathouse when Mrs Gavin was leaving the house?’ asked Dame Beatrice.

  ‘I was having a quiet smoke and I was wondering, to tell the truth, how I could keep my position and take the laird’s wages without attempting to do the job I was to be paid for. Maybe it doesn’t sound over honest, but I comforted myself with the thought that I could always lend my Uncle Corrie a hand about the place and so earn my money that way.’

  ‘Who killed your employer? Do you know?’

  ‘I could not hazard a guess. According to my uncle, there were plenty who did not like him, and it did not take me two days to find out the reason. He was a stubborn, self-opinionated, selfish old stot.’

  ‘Was he a wealthy man?’

  ‘That’s not for me to say. He was a warm man, I think, but he kept just the two servants, my Uncle and Auntie Corrie. Still, they were on comfortable wages and the food was plentiful. They had no cause to grumble.’

  ‘But you had no idea of the value of his property?’ Dame Beatrice had taken over all the questioning and Laura retired into the background to wait until it seemed necessary that she should speak to the facts as she knew them. ‘Property, is it? He owned the loch and its fish and the islands on it and, of course, the house, but you could buy the lot, I dare say, for a few thousands. If the laird was rich, it was not in land and water. No, no. He had some other ways of making money. My uncle was telling me that when he wasn’t calling at the hydro-electric plant to complain, he was away to to Inverness or Edinburgh on business and would be from home perhaps a week at a time, sometimes longer, but my uncle did not know what his business was.’

  The association of the names of the two cities brought about another association in Laura’s mind.

  ‘You say your name’s Grant?’ she asked.

  ‘It is, ay.’

  ‘You did say you were not related to the Grants who live at a house called Coinneamh Lodge?’

  ‘Coinneamh Lodge? No, I’ve no relatives living in such a place, so far as I know. And whereabouts would this Coinneamh Lodge be situated?’

  ‘Oh, somewhere between Freagair and Tigh-Osda, but nearer to Tigh-Osda. You have to cross the river and the railway-line to get there. It’s rather an isolated place, I should think. I wouldn’t want to live there myself, but I may have told you that I spent the night there’ – she had picked up a signal from Dame Beatrice that she was to go on talking – ‘after I’d driven Mrs Grant home from Tigh-Osda station after their station-wagon had broken down. I suddenly thought of it when you mentioned Inverness and Edinburgh and remembered that your name was Grant, the same as hers.’

  ‘And why would Inverness and Edinburgh bring all that to your mind, Mrs Gavin?’

  ‘Oh, because Mr Grant was going by train. He said that he was going to Inverness, but Mrs Grant told me he was going to Edinburgh, too. It just seemed a coincidence when you mentioned them,’

  ‘Oh, hardly that! Apart from Aberdeen and Glasgow, where else would a business man go but to Edinburgh and Inverness?’

  ‘I could tell you of quite a number of other places he might go to,’ retorted Laura; but she was prevented by Dame Beatrice from embarking upon this recital, for, before she could even mention Perth or any of the prosperous towns and cities of the Lowlands, Dame Beatrice again took the floor.

  ‘We have established, then, that you knew of a plan to murder the laird of Tannasgan,’ she said, taking out a notebook and pencil. Off his guard, Grant gaped at her like a stranded fish and then began to stutter.

  ‘Articulate clearly,’ said Laura. ‘You can’t have it both ways. Either I can give you an alibi for the time the piping stopped—in which case you knew the murder had just been committed, ergo you knew it had been planned—or I can’t. See what I mean? If the murder was committed while we were together in that boat, you didn’t do it, but if it was committed at any time when we were not together – well, you can’t come to me for an alibi, can you, however innocent you may be?’

  ‘I think, Mr Grant,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘that your best plan will be to tell us all you know.’

  ‘I can’t!’ said the young man abruptly.

  ‘You mean that the truth may involve your relatives, the Corries?’

  ‘I don’t know whom it would involve. I did not know the laird was to be murdered, or that the piping had anything to do with it. I found out afterwards – but I can’t let you know how.’

  ‘But, listen,’ Laura urged him. ‘If you knew nothing of what was to happen, why did you ask me in that wild sort of way how I knew a doctor might be needed? And why did you say, when the piping stopped, that that … whatever that was… was all over?’

  The young man stared at her, then he smiled.

  ‘I knew there was something I’d forgotten,’ he said. ‘If you knew a doctor was needed, you knew, at that time, more about the murder than I did! What do you say to that? By God…’ he stood up and faced her… ‘if you can queer my pitch, so can I queer yours! We stand or fall together, Mrs Gavin! What about it? You had better think it over. My position on Tannasgan was more regular than yours, you know!’

  He climbed to the courtyard of the hotel, shouted to the men in the ferryboat and in a short while Laura and Dame Beatrice saw him manhandling a motor-cycle down the steep, precarious steps to the little quay. Several times it looked as though he might lose his footing, but he recovered it and the men received the motor-cycle over the side of the boat and stowed it away.

  The young man returned to the hotel for a small suitcase not much larger than a big attaché-case, descended the steps again and, this time, went on board. The boat backed away, then turned and sputtered across the loch to a long wooden landing-stage on the opposite side. Here the motor-cycle was unshipped, the small case strapped on to the luggage carrier and the whole equip
age was bundled along the landing-stage and, not without effort, thrust up the bank and on to the road. The last the watchers saw was that it turned to the right at the top of the bank and took the lock-side road for Ardlui.

  ‘Thankful to see the back of him,’ said Laura. ‘Are you going to climb all those steps with me to look at the Falls of Arklet? Funny I should have mentioned going for a doctor as my reason for getting away from Tannasgan. Do you think he will blow his top and accuse me of knowing something about the murder?’

  ‘I will climb with you and admire Mr Wordsworth’s falls,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘As to the rest – well, we shall see.’

  ‘I shan’t lose sleep, at any rate,’ said Laura. ‘Besides, there’s always stout denial, an excellent and impregnable defence so long as one sticks to it. And there weren’t any witnesses, you know.’

  Dame Beatrice rose and they climbed to the courtyard and crossed it to the foot of the steps which had been made beside the lashing, tumbling water. Dame Beatrice measured the ascent with her eye.

  ‘We have a long way to go,’ she said; but whether she referred to the climb up the rude stone steps beside the noisy and beautiful stream, or to the fact that the case of the stabbed laird of Tannasgan was only in its infancy, Laura did not enquire.

  Chapter 7

  Auld Acquaintance

  ‘They were great friends in a quarter

  of an hour: and great friends they remained.’

  M. R. James

  « ^ »

  AS she had come by way of Rannoch and Glencoe, Laura had expressed a wish to return to Tigh-Osda and Gàradh by the longer route out to Oban and so, by the coast road, to Ballachulish and back to Fort William. She kept a sharp look-out as the car took its dignified route through Dalmally on the way to Loch Awe and the Pass of Brander, but there was no sign of her motor-cycling boatman.

  The evening and night which they spent at Fort William passed without incident and in the morning Laura elected to join a small party, led by a local guide, which was to climb Ben Nevis. She had made the ascent once before, but by the easier route from Achintee Farm by pony-track and the long, rough, zigzag paths to the summit. This time the party was to use these paths for the descent, but climbed the huge, ugly mass by the tougher way up which followed the Allt-a-Mhuilinn to the club-hut at the head of the glen and then by a trackless route along the side of the mountain and then onwards and upwards between Cair Mór Dearg and the summit.