by Gwen Moffat
Miss Pink accepted it as a question. ‘It was suicide before the end of capital punishment, and with mad people there will still be that tradition: murder, then suicide. How did it all start? Because his background is at the root of this—’ she gestured towards the water, ‘and it was a question about his roots which put an end to our conversation yesterday evening. I don’t think he was raised in a rectory.’
‘It was a Barnardo’s home, but it wouldn’t have started there. Where does anything start? What made his mother abandon him? Why did his father—? That’s stupid. Why does any man sleep with a woman?’
‘You can go back to the Garden of Eden,’ Miss Pink conceded, ‘but it’s not necessary. I take it he was illegitimate and abandoned and brought up by Dr Barnardo’s people. How well he did for himself. Up to a point,’ she added.
‘Things might have turned out all right if he’d been an ordinary boy,’ Vera said, ‘but he was above average intelligence. I don’t know whether the drive for success was a matter of genes or of conditioning; something of both, wouldn’t you say?’
Her companion nodded. ‘Often success stops at the end of a stage but obviously he transferred to a similar environment and found another ladder?’
‘He joined the Army as a boy recruit, and he was commissioned at the outbreak of the war. He was a good officer: cool and brave and a strong disciplinarian. That was his guiding principle. He could assert discipline, and accept it. He knew his place.’ She paused and watched a gannet fall like a stone against the far headland. A spurt of water rose behind it. ‘He had rages,’ Vera went on, ‘but he had iron control. I think I was the only person who saw him lose his temper. A spaniel was wished on us once when some friends were posted suddenly. It was spoilt, and one day when it refused to get off a chair Gordon throttled it—just like that, apparently without any rage at all.
‘He hated civilian life; he couldn’t find a niche. He applied for various institutional jobs, he even considered the prison service, but the selectors must have seen he could never work with young civilians, even middle-aged ones, let alone with delinquents.’
Miss Pink said with sympathy, ‘The Services are a closed world; it must have been a traumatic experience, for him particularly, to have to come out into—what? A free-for-all?’
‘It was shocking: after years, decades, of respect and appreciation, he suddenly found himself being treated like a silly old man by youngsters less than half his age. Climbing was a case in point. Young Army climbers had always deferred to him because of his rank; it was automatic. He was terribly, agonisingly unhappy, like a man who doesn’t know what’s hit him.
‘Suddenly an aunt died and left me quite a bit of money. We bought Glen Shira House. We’d both known Shira before we were married. Things went well for a time—this was in the early sixties, you understand. What he didn’t realise was that even Shira was changing, more slowly than the Lake District and Wales, but the climbers were bringing new attitudes, what he called decadence. And the crofters changed—or so he maintained. Once, when he was shouting at old MacNeill about tipping in Scarf Geo, MacNeill told him that gentlemen didn’t lose their tempers. He was depressed for days. You see, he’d worked hard to get away from what he thought of as a stigma: his birth, the Barnardo’s home; being an officer and a gentleman was his peak of achievement, but on the one hand the present youngsters saw no value in what he’d achieved, on the other, an elderly peasant suggested that he was a fraud. That’s how he saw it. It was as if his life was crumbling away.’
‘You couldn’t help,’ Miss Pink said. It was a statement, not a question. Obviously Vera had not been able to help.
She said quietly, ‘He seemed set on destroying himself. About a year ago he mentioned suicide. He felt persecuted, even by me. He’d confess his fears and all his frustrations and then accuse me of being about to leave him because he was a failure. Success meant so much to him, worldly success, that there were no other values. He saw no point in going on living. Then he’d rage at me, I think mainly because he sensed that I didn’t consider success—in his terms—important. I didn’t say so, but he knew; he isn’t thick, you know, not really. I mean, he wasn’t.’
There was a disturbance in the water and a seal humped itself out of the sea and settled on a shelf, gleaming like a long wet boulder. The tide was full now, and with the day, the cloud was disintegrating about the peaks of Rum.
‘His remorse was worse than his rages,’ Vera said coldly, as if she didn’t want to get involved again, as if speaking without emotion could keep the thing at a distance. ‘It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d had no sense of guilt. . . .’ She shook her head helplessly. ‘You see why I tried to make Terry go? He was fascinated by her and she was so careless. Gordon had to be handled with kid gloves and—’ her voice dropped, ‘—you had to love him. All Terry saw was what she called—she actually called him!—a dirty old man! And she said he was only pretending to be shocked because she’d been sunbathing. Can you imagine? When she jeered at him that night, she was telling him things about himself that he’d suppressed for all his adult life. She hurt him—and she had all the weapons.’
‘Except one,’ Miss Pink reminded her.
‘Yes, except the last. Silly child. It was just Gordon’s bad luck that he had to be the one who was goaded too far.’
‘No,’ Miss Pink said. ‘His control was going; it would have happened with another woman, another person, quite soon. He was a victim too.’
‘The murder was the end,’ Vera told her. ‘He was genuinely appalled at what he’d done but that didn’t last. Within a couple of days he must have planned how to kill Madge. Planned it, as you said; it wasn’t impulsive.’ She shook her head in horror. ‘And yet there was that crazy reasoning: he’d committed murder but Madge treated it as a minor delinquency, on a par with the nude bathing or poaching, so he killed her as much to punish her as out of self-preservation—because she didn’t give the murder its value!’
‘Did he tell you that?’
‘Oh yes; he always tried to explain himself. We talked a long time last evening. . . . He said she had no moral fibre.’
‘You’ve been in considerable danger yourself.’
‘Not until yesterday. While he was comparatively sane, while he cared about appearances, I was safe. He needed me.’
‘When did he come to think he didn’t need you any more?’
Vera was silent for a moment, considering, then she went on, ‘In one way he needed me right to the last. Yesterday morning, after I’d watched him leave for Portree, I was going to go and see Madge as soon as I could get away but Ken came in with the news—and I came to realise how she’d been killed; not the details, of course, but I knew who’d killed her. We talked when he came back from Portree and he threatened to kill himself if I didn’t stand by him. I could have given him an alibi for the dinner period on Wednesday, you see: the first time he went to Eas Mor. Ida was in the dining room, Euphemia was turning down beds. I could have said I went in the bar or he came in the kitchen. But I wouldn’t do it, not for Madge’s murder. Terry’s was an accident—’ They regarded each other doubtfully and Vera amended that. ‘May have been an accident, but Madge’s murder was—’ She moved her hand blindly on the turf as if the search for a word was physical. ‘Wrong,’ she said. ‘Monstrous. It was planned.’
From the east, in the direction of the mainland, came a faint and alien sound: a distant engine.
‘Something had to be done quickly.’ Vera’s voice took on a note of urgency. ‘There was no time to consider—at that moment. I said I wouldn’t give him away.’ She shook her head vehemently. ‘I would never have given him up to the police, even in these days.’
The drone of the aircraft grew louder and Miss Pink wondered what the searchers were looking for—certainly not two ladies sitting on the shore and contemplating the sea.
‘So he asked me to run him out of the glen in the boot of the car or on the floor but I told him I was under
suspicion and would be stopped at the ferry if not before. So he said that if I could incriminate myself for long enough to draw their fire just while he managed to get out of the glen, he might be able to get away altogether. He proposed to take the boat and reach some place on the mainland where he’d steal a car. He actually said he’d “steal”—no euphemism. He was out in the open.’
Now they heard the clatter of rotor blades. The helicopter was flying parallel with the coast but some distance out to sea. The seal flopped in the water.
‘So you went down and filled the boat.’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘I brought the can back full.’
‘So the boat had no fuel in the tank.’
‘It had enough to get here.’
The helicopter, having turned in to Loch Shira, came back and circled the drifting dinghy. Speech was impossible. At length the aircraft dipped away and headed for the glen. Vera stood up and went to the ruin for the rifle.
‘I heard two shots,’ Miss Pink said.
‘Yes?’
‘You said you didn’t shoot him, and it was dark so unless he was very close to the shore you couldn’t have done.’ Vera looked politely interested. ‘There are no witnesses,’ Miss Pink said, for the second time this morning.
‘That doesn’t matter. He got as far as here, and the fuel ran out. He had no oars and he can’t—couldn’t swim. I had started along the coast when he left Glen Shira and I had a torch. I heard him calling when I reached the Boat Port.’
‘He was calling for help?’
‘Yes. He didn’t know who the torch belonged to at that point, you see.’
‘Go on.’
‘He was quite close inshore actually, close enough for communication, but I didn’t say anything. I fired the rifle—in the air.’
Miss Pink frowned. ‘To let him know who you were?’
She did not answer directly. ‘He was quiet for some time and then he started to plead with me. He said that if I didn’t get help, or swim out to him, he would drown himself.’
Neither spoke for a while. Oyster catchers were piping, gulls called; out on the water the dinghy rocked unattended, drifting gently shorewards with the current.
‘So you fired the second shot—in the air?’
‘Then I heard the splash. Of course,’ Vera said quietly to the sea, ‘it was the only thing he could do in the circumstances. He wanted to die; he just needed a bit of encouragement.’
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