The Curse of Loch Ness

by Peter Tremayne

  He took his torch and vanished into the gloom.

  Morag watched him go into the blackness, her heart beating quickly. Not for a moment did she really believe his wild story, even though his manner had been so persuasive. She was now firmly convinced that he was some sort of burglar from London who was about to rob the big house which lay through the trees. What had he called it? Balmacaan Castle. And what would he do with her once he had successfully accomplished his purpose? Damn it! Like a little fool she had even asked him to shine his torch on his face. He would be scared of her identifying him again. All that rubbish about being a lecturer at a polytechnic and his name being Timothy Colbert was obviously a pack of lies. She began half to regret ignoring her parents’ advice against the peripatetic life she had led these past two summers since she had left the isle of Lewis and gone to study at Aberdeen University. But folk singing for tourists had certainly boosted her meagre allowance and hitch-hiking and sleeping rough certainly kept the overheads down.

  But what was she to do?

  He seemed such an honest sort of person, rather rugged and handsome if you liked the craggy outdoor type. Instinctively she felt that he wasn’t the sort to harm a girl. But she distrusted her instincts. She was at that young age where it had been impressed on her that rationale should dominate any instinctive feelings. Perhaps he was capable of murder? Anyway, she didn’t want to be mixed up in anything underhand or shady.

  She gave a shudder at the thought of her family’s reaction if she was arrested as a thief’s accomplice and the story was printed in The Stornoway Gazette .

  Then she chuckled: she, Morag Ross of Stornoway, appearing as a gangster’s moll — that’s what they called them in the American movies.

  Regretfully, she shook her head and drew a slim pencil torch from her pocket.

  She would give him ten minutes or so, time enough to get into the house. Then she would go and wake up the occupants and turn in Mr Timothy Colbert of London. It was the only way. She was only doing her duty as an honest citizen. And, hey! Perhaps there might even be a reward. That would certainly help with next year’s grant.

  And yet … he really had sounded in earnest over this weird tale about his missing girlfriend. Ridiculous! Preposterous! Why did she keep feeling that she ought to believe the man? Things like that did not happen in an out of the way corner of the world such as Inverness. The next thing they would be asking people to believe would be that there was organised crime in Stornoway. She grinned as she imagined a venerable uncle of hers, an upright elder of the local kirk, clad in a 1920s Chicago gangster outfit, except a kilt replaced the trousers. Gosh, yes! Maisie MacLeod, boss of Stornoway’s westside … top man in the illicit turf smuggling racket to the inner islands. She chuckled again.

  Morag Ross, she rebuked herself, you’ve too keen an imagination.

  She glanced once again at her wristwatch. Well, it was now or never. He’d had plenty of time to break in. She would just march up to the door and ring the bell. Silently, she climbed out of the car and set off down the path, following its winding route through the woods towards the tall sombre edifice of Balmacaan Castle.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Tim approached the house as he had done earlier that day … or was it yesterday now? He left the path before it swung out of the woods into the view of the house and made his way in a semicircle towards the outhouses, taking advantage of the cover afforded by the trees and undergrowth. One or two dim lights shone from the house but he could see no movement anywhere and he reached the cobbled courtyard by the stables without incident.

  He paused a moment to consider his position.

  How was he to get into the house?

  There were only two windows at ground level on this side of the building and each of those had a heavy iron grille protecting them. Further along the red brick wall, the modern building merged into the squat stone tower. Tim recalled that two such towers stood at each end of the house like ugly sentinels rising high above the waters of the loch.

  Crouching close to the wall, Tim moved quickly towards the nearest tower.

  It had not withstood the storms of war and revolution for six centuries by accident. It had been erected from solid granite blocks, some several feet square. At the base of the tower was a small wooden side door studded with iron, with iron hinges and handle. It looked impregnable and Tim had no hope as he tried the handle. It was, as he already knew, locked.

  He stood back and peered up in the gloom. The moon, swinging out from behind a cloud bank, gave him welcome aid by bathing the tower in its pale glow.

  Twenty feet above him a series of loopholes started. They looked fairly wide, perhaps wide enough to squeeze through.

  He examined the stone walls again and found that the mortar, which had been placed between the granite blocks, had decayed over the centuries and in places it presented a series of irregular handgrips and toeholds.

  Tim silently congratulated himself on keeping in good physical shape and on having retained his natural agility. He began a cautious ascent, using the precarious handgrips and footholds, scaling the wall like a rock climber going up a sheer face. It took him some time before he reached the broad inward slope which led to the loophole.

  His face was wreathed in sweat as he hung with aching arms to the grips and pulled himself towards the small narrow window.

  His hopes died.

  What from below had seemed to be a window big enough for a man to squeeze through, now narrowed to a slit a mere two inches or less across.

  Tim cursed the deceptive light of the moon.

  Then he felt his whole body freeze as a rattle came from directly below his hanging figure.

  Someone was opening the wooden door of the tower.

  A shaft of light fell onto the ground as the small door was pushed open. Voices came up to him.

  ‘ … I am sure that I don’t know why you are worrying, Mrs Murdo,’ a man’s voice was saying. ‘He went, didn’t he?’

  A female voice replied: it was that of the woman who had opened the door to Tim earlier.

  ‘I have a feeling that he will return, Mr Telstan.’

  Telstan. Tim made a mental note of the name.

  ‘Why? You don’t think he believed you?’

  ‘I am almost positive that he did not. I think the girl must have contacted him before you picked her up.’

  ‘But she says she didn’t,’ protested the man.

  ‘And you believe her?’ sneered the woman.

  There was a silence.

  ‘If he did not believe you, why didn’t he come back immediately with the police and demand to search the house for the girl?’

  ‘It is an unlikely story to go to the police with, isn’t it?’ rejoined the woman.

  ‘Perhaps so,’ agreed the man named Telstan. ‘But then what? What do you expect him to do?’

  ‘I think he may return and try snooping around the house, that’s what. That’s why we must be rid of her car. I said that you should have dumped it before. What if a search was made and he found it?’

  ‘Calm yourself, Mrs Murdo. It won’t take me five minutes to push it over the cliff into the loch. It’s deep enough here.’

  ‘It should have been done before,’ the woman repeated.

  ‘Well, how was I to know that he was going to arrive like this?’ the man sounded aggrieved.

  ‘I knew you were taking a risk when you dictated that postcard for the girl to write. She might have put in a coded message or something which would have warned him.’

  The man chuckled.

  ‘Nonsense, Mrs Murdo. Nonsense. You have been watching too many thrillers on the television. Besides, the young man would not have received the postcard.’

  ‘Whyever not?’

  ‘Because the postcard would not have been delivered in London until yesterday at the earliest. This young man Colbert must have left London before then. You are being a little jittery.’

  The woman sniffed.

&nb
sp; ‘When we entered the order, my sister and I, we did not realise that we would be forced to kill for the sake of … of it.’

  ‘The order demands many things, Mrs Murdo. We are the last to hold faith with the ancients. Unless we are successful, the order may perish from the face of the earth.’

  ‘Let’s get rid of that car.’

  ‘Very well, Mrs Murdo. But first we’d better scout the grounds, just in case.’

  Tim could hear them continue talking as they moved off.

  He found he was perspiring freely and his arms were near breaking point.

  Seizing his courage in both hands, he made a rapid descent, scuffing his shins and scratching his hands as he did so.

  Well, at least his suspicions were confirmed. For some reason these people were holding Jeannie against her will. And they had killed, just as Jeannie had said. Why? Because of some order? Order of what? Well, the ‘why’ didn’t matter so much as the ‘where’ at the moment. Where was Jeannie being held? At least they had done him a favour by leaving the tower door open. If Jeannie were inside the house it would not take long to free her.

  He gave a quick look round and slipped inside the tower.

  *

  Morag Ross followed the twisting path through the woods in the direction that Timothy Colbert had taken.

  Good Lord, she was thinking, what a story to tell the people at college at the next session. I was a burglar’s apprentice! What a pity. He seemed rather too good looking to be a burglar. She still found that a part of her mind wanted to accept Timothy Colbert’s impossible story. Perhaps he was a detective, she suddenly rationalised. Her mind raced as she examined the possibility. No, not really. He would have been a bit more pedestrian; real-life detectives often were. He would have shown her a warrant or whatever they carried and not indulged in spinning such a fantastic tale.

  No; he was up to something illegal right enough.

  Morag paused as the path twisted suddenly out of the woods and, by the light of the moon, the girl could see an overgrown expanse of lawn and garden stretching towards the front of a great house, with its now black castle towers and its archaic Victorian architecture giving it the appearance of a building from a Transylvanian horror movie. She half expected to see a flight of bats circling one of the castle towers.

  She wondered who lived there.

  Well, here goes, she said to herself and set off down the pathway towards the house.

  The moon, playing hide and seek behind fast moving clouds, caused black shadows to dance across the scene.

  There was a movement on the path ahead.

  Morag caught her breath and halted.

  What if it were him coming back?

  Quickly, she slipped off the path into the wood and crouched down behind some bushes.

  Ah, it was all right. It was a man and woman, walking slowly along the pathway.

  Morag began to stand up when the sound of their voices caught her ears.

  ‘I tell you, the man Colbert will cause us trouble,’ came the woman’s voice.

  ‘Nonsense, Mrs Murdo. I still think you are overreacting. Personally, I think he has gone back to Inverness. He’ll probably wait there a few days and go home. Or contact the ferry people in Mallaig. So what? As far as you know, she set off for Mallaig in her car for a vacation. After that … who knows what happened to her? Do you know how many people go missing in this country each year and who are never found? The figures would distress you, dear Mrs Murdo.’

  ‘I do not have your confidence, Mr Telstan. What if Colbert comes back tonight and finds … ’

  Telstan’s voice was sharp as he interrupted her.

  ‘Then he, too, would have to be eliminated. The survival of the order is all important.’

  Morag, crouching behind the bushes, felt the blood in her body turn to ice. There was a thundering in her ears as her pumping heart caused the icy liquid to surge through her system. She raised a clenched fist to her mouth. In doing so she lost her balance for-a precious second, slipped backwards, choking off an involuntary ‘Oh!’ which sprang to her lips. A backward stretching hand saved her from completely toppling over but caused a sudden rustle in the bushes.

  A flashlight stabbed through the darkness in her direction but wavered slightly to the left.

  ‘What was that?’ the woman’s voice was high and sharp.

  The light began to weave its way towards the spot where Morag froze, unable to move in her fright.

  Suddenly, the man chuckled.

  ‘We’re just jumpy tonight, Mrs Murdo. Look there.’

  ‘A rabbit!’

  By some stroke of good fortune a rabbit had decided to spring forward into the very spot where the man had shone his flashlight. It turned and scampered away. Morag could hear the rustling as the little creature crashed through the undergrowth.

  ‘Come on, then,’ the man was saying. ‘Let’s get back. It’s obvious that he is not in the grounds. But we’d best dump the girl’s car in case, as you suspect, he comes on the prowl.’

  ‘It should have been done before,’ replied the woman.

  The two figures turned and walked back the way they had come, back towards the house.

  Morag crouched in the same position for what seemed a long, long time. Finally, she exhaled, a long drawn out sigh of relief.

  Her predominant thought was that Tim Colbert had been speaking the truth. The man and woman were connected with the girl’s disappearance and, moreover, they were afraid of Tim Colbert finding out and bringing the police. Why? What could it mean?

  She felt a wave of guilt and remorse as she realised that she had nearly betrayed him to those terrible people.

  Who were they? Kidnappers? Why did they want to kidnap his girlfriend? Was she an heiress worth a lot of money?

  A thousand thoughts danced in her mind.

  Shuddering from the shock of her discovery, Morag rose from her hiding place. Her first thought now was to find Tim Colbert and warn him that they were looking for him. She started towards the house and then halted. No, that would do no good. She would probably get in his way. She had promised to stay in the car and wait for him to return. That was what she had best do. But what if he didn’t return? That was a bridge to be crossed when she came to it.

  She gave another involuntary shudder and wondered what mystery she had unwittingly fallen into.

  *

  Three quarters of an hour had passed by Tim’s watch. A period in which he was sure that he had searched practically every room in the house. Of course, several rooms were locked but he had whispered urgently through the doors, ‘Jeannie? Jeannie?’ There had been no answers.

  He had entered one room, a bedroom, which seemed to have been used recently. Although the bed was stripped and there was no sign of anything which could prove the room had been occupied, it was cleaner than the rest and gave the impression of a room recently vacated. At the dressing table there was an aroma of scent. Tim felt a momentary annoyance that he could not, as they did in the best fiction thrillers, sniff the perfume and identify Jeannie’s scent. As a matter of fact, he could not even remember what scent Jeannie was fond of. In a corner of the dressing table was a small pile of pink powder, just enough to rub on the tip of a finger. Tim did so and smelt it. One thing he did know about powder: that this was fairly fresh.

  He made a thorough search of the room. His diligence actually paid off for, as he opened the wardrobe, he saw a chiffon scarf lying in the bottom. And this he did recognise, with a quickening of his heart. It was a green scarf which Jeannie was especially fond of wearing because her favourite colours were green and blue.

  Tim picked it up and thrust it into his pocket.

  Where was Jeannie? That the girl was somewhere in the building, he was certain. Halfway through his search he had heard the sound of metal crash against rock and a loud splash followed by a noise which reminded him of water running out of a bath. For a moment he stood still trying to fathom what it could be. Then he realised
that Telstan must have carried out the order to get rid of Jeannie’s car. He must have pushed it over the cliff into the loch at the back of the castle.

  Tim felt a surge of uncontrollable anger.

  Who were these people and their ‘order?

  Well, there was only one thing he could do now, he decided. That was to go to the police and tell them the whole story. He could tell them, at least, where Jeannie’s car was. It would take a frogman a few moments to locate it. And he had the evidence of Jeannie’s scarf found in her bedroom.

  Would that be enough to convince the local police to carry out a thorough search of the building? Of course, the housekeeper could say that Jeannie had left the scarf behind when she went to Mallaig. But what about the car? That would take some explaining.

  Tim crept down the corridor to the stairwell and, keeping close to the wall, he crept down into the main hallway, pausing frequently to listen.

  There was only silence in the building. But he must be careful. The man and woman must have returned to the house by now.

  He was about to move across the hallway when there came a sound which chilled him to the marrow. It began as a soft whispering, like the whispering of the wind in the treetops, but the tone rose higher and higher until the sound became so shrill that he thought it would pierce his eardrums. Then, with an abruptness which made Tim wince, the sound ceased.

  Footsteps were now hurrying down a corridor towards the hall. No lights had been put on but the person was evidently carrying a torch for Tim could see its wavering beam coming closer. He glanced around desperately. To one side of the hall was an old, stately chaise longue. It stood about a foot away from the wall.

  As swiftly as he dared, Tim squeezed himself behind it and lay flat on the floor.

  From this position he could see a woman’s ankles hurrying into the hall and, without pausing, go across to a door under the stairway. Tim heard the rattle of keys as the door was opened. Then it banged to and there was the faint sound of a lock being turned from the other side.

  After a pause, Tim slowly stood up.

  He moved cautiously across the hall to the door. Using his flashlight, he examined the lock. It was difficult to see because outwardly it seemed part of the wooden oak panelling of the walls itself. But careful examination showed the spot where a key had to be inserted and it was by using the key as a handle that enabled the opener to gain entrance. There was certainly no way that Tim could gain access here but he had a growing conviction that Jeannie was imprisoned behind that door somewhere.