The front desk was hardly alarming, looking with its worn, polished surface, gleaming brass bell and backdrop of shallow shelves full of wire baskets where papers were neatly filed, just like any other slightly shabby office one might encounter. Sergeant Doolan awaited us behind the counter, hatless of course and with the collar of his tunic unbuttoned in a concession to the lateness of the hour and, no doubt, his sense that he was being highly accommodating to Mr Tait and indeed to Mr Christie.
‘Madam,’ he said, nodding politely at me, before turning to Molly. ‘Now, Miss . . . Tweed, isn’t it? I ken you said away back when we spoke before that you did not know the man who assaulted yer person, but I want you to keep an open mind and look right close at this fellow we’ve got here. We’ve put a low light on in the cell so you’ll be seeing him much as you would have seen him yon night he attacked you.’
‘Um, Sergeant?’ I said, unwilling to let this pass.
‘Oh quite so,’ said Sergeant Doolan. ‘I mean, you’ll be seeing him in the same light as whoever it was you saw that night. Now, let’s go through.’ He produced a satisfyingly huge bunch of keys from under the skirts of his tunic and picked through them as he strode unhurriedly along a passage leading towards the back of the building. We filed through the gap in the desk made by a lifted flap and scurried after him.
‘Now,’ he said, when he had fitted a key into a door at the end. ‘Just take a good look at him, Molly, and tell us the truth. You can do a tremendous good deed by all your friends and neighbours if you help us—’
‘Sergeant, really!’ I remonstrated again. Molly was beginning to breathe rather fast and, as the sergeant turned the key, she put her hand into mine. Even through my glove I could feel that her fingers were icy and I squeezed them as we stepped through the door and into the dimness on the other side.
11
‘Molly?’ said a voice in the dark.
‘Miss Tweed to you, if you don’t mind, son,’ said Sergeant Doolan.
Slowly, my eyes were adjusting. The room we stood in was no more than ten feet square and was divided into two halves by a set of stout bars running all the way from floor to ceiling. On our side of the bars was a kitchen chair with a newspaper, open at the racing pages, lying on it. On the far side was a small camp bed with a thin blanket folded neatly on top of the equally thin pillow, and a young man sitting bolt upright facing us and staring.
‘Stand up, son,’ said Sergeant Doolan. His voice was far from friendly; I expect the epithet was habitual more than anything, since most of those who passed through his hands must be young men and he had to call them something. ‘Now, Miss Tweed. Tell me, is this the man who knocked you over in the yard that moonlit night in May?’
Molly, letting my hand fall away from hers, took a step forward and peered through the bars at Jock Christie. He was a striking figure, even in his present humbled state, standing there in his laceless boots, clutching at the waist of his beltless, braceless trousers. He was perhaps twenty-five, perhaps not as much as that, with fair hair brushed forward in a shock, and those jug-handle ears which I have always found rather endearing in a young man, perhaps because they remind me of my sons, newly shorn for their return to school which is when I love them best. He had the look of a farmer, hands swollen and roughened, arms and legs slightly bent while at rest as though braced against the weight of a hay bale or the pull of the plough horse, but he was far from bulky, even in his heavy clothes. Would anyone say he was snaky? Molly was hesitating, saying nothing at all.
‘Miss Tweed?’ said Sergeant Doolan, and his voice betrayed a little of the hopeful excitement her hesitation must have been affording him.
‘Molly?’ I said, wonderingly. She turned to face me and her eyes were wide and dark in her stricken face.
‘I dinna ken what to say,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, why did I ever come here?’
‘You mean, you’ve changed your mind?’ I breathed. She stared hard over my shoulder for a minute or two, remembering I daresay, although there was a calculating look on her face rather than the expression of effortful concentration which might be expected. At last, her brows unknitted and she turned back to face the sergeant and the prisoner.
‘It wasna him,’ she said in a clear voice.
‘You’re sure?’ said Sergeant Doolan.
‘As sure as I’m standin’ here,’ said Molly. ‘It wasna John Christie that jumped oot at me that nicht.’
The young man in the cell sat down heavily on the camp bed again with his shoulders slumped forwards and his hands hanging down between his knees. He looked up at the sergeant from under his shock of hair.
Sergeant Doolan glanced between him and Molly once or twice and then cleared his throat importantly.
‘Aye, well,’ he said. ‘There’s still the matter of what you were up to tonight, though, isn’t there?’
‘I was out a walk,’ said John Christie. ‘I told you that.’
‘Out a walk in a field in the dead of night with no lantern?’ said Sergeant Doolan.
‘It was nine o’clock,’ said Christie. ‘And I like walking in the fields. I like to feel the earth under my boots. I’m a farmer.’
I could see that Sergeant Doolan had trouble swallowing this and it did not ring quite true to me either, for every farmer I have ever met – and that is many – has been only too desperate to put the horse in its stall at the end of the weary day and shut the door against the crops and the beasts and the endless troubles they bring. Even Hugh, who charges around the fields and woods from dawn until dusk in all weathers, is ready to turn his back on them after dinner and settle into an armchair.
‘So you’re admitting you often do this, are you?’ said Sergeant Doolan. ‘Tramp about in the cold and dark when every other buddy wi’ any sense is by his own fireside?’
‘My own fireside is gey lonely,’ said Christie. ‘I’m happier out under the sky, day or night the same.’
And troubled as he was, certain as he was that something here did not add up, Sergeant Doolan had no choice but to let him go.
We delivered Elspeth back to Easter Luck Farm, making no mention of the sudden attack of dainty disinclination which had beset her – there was no harm done after all – and then rumbled around the back lanes to Luckenlaw House to return Molly to her kitchens. Once again, a party from above stairs turned out to greet us, the Howie men this time accompanying their wives to the door, and much to Mr Tait’s disgust and my slight exasperation all four of them were now rather drunk. Still, it was the first time I had ever seen Irvine Howie on his feet and he had even left his newspaper behind, bringing with him only a brandy glass and a half-smoked cigarette.
‘Hurrah for Molly!’ Nicolette chirped as Mr Tait opened the side door of the motor car and she stepped down. ‘Well, was it him?’
Molly shook her head and, giving a kind of flying curtsey as she passed, scuttled round the side of the house to the back door.
‘No, it wasn’t him,’ said Mr Tait sternly. ‘You’ll be very pleased to hear, Mr Howie, that your tenant will soon be back at the farm.’
Johnny Howie had the grace to look sheepish at this; after all, one might have expected a little more solicitousness from the menfolk at least when a young man in their bailiwick was clapped in irons.
‘Yes, steady on there,’ he said to his wife. ‘It’s a serious matter, you know.’
‘Oh, don’t be so utterly dreary,’ said Nicolette. ‘Come on, Vash, let’s go and ask her about it. Such a scream!’ With that, the sisters disappeared giggling into the house.
‘ . . . excuse our wives,’ said Irvine, taking a last lazy draw on his cigarette and flicking it onto the gravel. ‘ . . . more sense than a pair of geese, sometimes.’ And he too strolled unsteadily away into the lamplit hall without so much as a farewell, much less a thank you.
Mr Tait was beginning to look thunderous, his jaw stuck out and his eyes for once without the merest hint of a twinkle.
‘Yes, I must apologise for them,�
� said Johnny, who was unfocused around the eyes but otherwise seemed in a rather better state than the rest of them. ‘They are beyond any pale, but there’s no harm in them really, you know.’ His words sparked a memory in me, but I could not catch at it. ‘Just high spirits.’
‘It’s hardly a matter to raise the spirits!’ said Mr Tait.
‘No, no, you misunderstand me, sir,’ said Johnny. ‘Their spirits were high anyway, and simply failed to come down to a seemly level for this nasty business.’
‘Well, there are worse crimes than being too cheerful, aren’t there?’ I offered, thinking that anyone who managed to hoist their spirits off the ground at all when incarcerated in this spot with these husbands deserved some credit for it.
‘Poor things,’ Johnny Howie went on and he leaned against the doorframe as though settling in for a lengthy chat. Perhaps he was just as intoxicated as the others after all, but rather better at hiding it. ‘When we married, you know, they thought life was going to be one long round of parties. No wonder they’re so excited about putting this bash on for Lorna.’ It was perhaps an innocent remark, but still it served to remind Mr Tait that he could not afford to be absolutely disapproving and superior, and he grunted in a conciliatory kind of way.
‘Aye well,’ he said. ‘A quiet life in the country is not for everyone, right enough.’
‘How true, how true,’ said Johnny Howie. ‘When I think of those two girls who arrived at Balnagowan all those years ago, stuffed to the brim with the thrilling history of the Rosses – they weren’t joking, you know, when they said it was our ancestress who was the chief attraction – when I think of them reduced to finding diversion at village meetings and an artistic new tenant in a damp little cottage . . . my heart aches for them, really it does. I could refuse them nothing it’s in my power to give.’
Neither Mr Tait nor I could think of an answer to any of this and so urging him to go inside and showering him with goodbyes we hurried back to the motor car and left.
‘I’m not at all sure I’m happy to see Lorna get any closer to that lot, if I’m honest,’ said Mr Tait, speaking loudly over the thump and screech of the engine as we trundled down the drive.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They have very fashionable manners – that is to say no manners at all – but they’re terribly fond of Lorna. She might even be a good influence on them in the end.’
‘What did you make of young Jock Christie?’ said Mr Tait, and it is quite something when giving one’s impression of a prisoner and possible prowler can be seen as moving on to safer topics.
‘He seemed rather dejected to find himself behind bars, as might be expected,’ I said. ‘And while I am sure he wasn’t “prowling” really – what good would prowling round a field be, anyway? Unless to poach rabbits – he wasn’t absolutely convincing with his tale of a blameless stroll either, gave the rather feeble excuse of finding it lonely at home and being happier out. But it’s hardy less lonely, is it? And that makes me think, Mr Tait. Why is his fireside lonely? I should have thought that a fine young man like that, with a farm to boot, would be married. There’s certainly no shortage of single girls for him to choose from.’
‘Who’s to say?’ said Mr Tait. ‘I was forty myself before I married.’
‘Yes but . . .’ I began and then stopped, unable to think of a way to phrase my meaning that was not blunt to the point of coarseness. I decided just to say it anyway. ‘But it was different then. Before the war, I mean. There were . . . well, enough men to go round, weren’t there? Now, at Luckenlaw the same as everywhere else, there are scores of young women – Miss McCallum, Miss Lindsay, Annie Pellow, Elspeth, Molly – and those are just the ones I’ve met in a day or two.’
‘Not to mention . . .’ said Mr Tait, thinking of Lorna, I am sure.
‘Not to mention all the others whom I haven’t,’ I supplied, thinking of Lorna too. ‘So I simply don’t see how Jock Christie has managed to live here for five years and stay single. And I’m sure there’s something behind it. Something Johnny Howie said just now reminded me. Aha!’
Mr Tait turned to look at me, making the motor car swerve. We were back in the village by now, headed for the manse drive.
‘Aha?’ he said.
‘Yes. Mr McAdam said a very strange thing earlier this evening. When he was entreating you to help, he said of Jock Christie that he “had done no wrong, not really” and so he didn’t deserve to be in jail. Johnny Howie just said something very similar about his wife and sister-in-law: that there was not really any harm in them. Now in the case of the Howie ladies, I can see what he meant. No harm in them although they are rude and silly. But what did Mr McAdam mean about Christie? If he has not really done any wrong, what is it that he has done? Do you see what I mean?’
‘I do, I do indeed,’ said Mr Tait, letting the motor car roll to a stop in front of the old stable in the side yard of the manse. ‘But you are being carried away by your detective’s nose, my dear Mrs Gilver. I am afraid that Logan McAdam was merely thinking of the farm. As I mentioned before, what the lad did was take over a farm that he had no business taking over, not at his age and with his college learning and no farming in his blood.’
‘Ah yes,’ I said, remembering. ‘I’ve heard a bit more about that now. Hadn’t all the neighbouring farmers more or less moved in and helped themselves? It seemed like fearful cheek to me, but I can understand why they hoped it might go on for ever. Whoever it was who sold the estate to the Howies sold it not a moment too soon if a good farm was lying empty, don’t you think?’
‘That’s not how it was seen at Luckenlaw,’ said Mr Tait, and his voice was rather cold, to my surprise. ‘Farmland cannot lie useless and it was a lot of hard work for the neighbours to keep the place in good heart, and as for old Lady Muirie – well, she had a lot of respect for the old ways and no taste for change.’
‘I apologise, Mr Tait,’ I said. ‘I seem to have said something that’s upset you.’ At this, he softened again and the twinkle came back into his eye. I could see it quite clearly in the light of the lamp the manse servants had left burning for us above the door.
‘Not at all, my dear,’ he said, patting my knee through the travelling rug folded there. ‘I am being too sensitive by far. Only, it was my wife’s family’s farm, you see. They had been the tenants there as long as anyone could remember, connections of the Muiries away way back. And since she had no brothers or sisters, when her father died and she was all the way up in Perthshire, there was no one to run the place.’
‘I am sorry,’ I said again, but it still sounded most peculiar to me. Why, it must have been empty for decades, and no matter how fond of tradition this Lady Muirie might have been, I was on the side of the Howies (and of Hugh, I would wager) in thinking that a farm needed a farmer, even if he was a slip of a lad whom no one knew and for whom no one much cared. It was shocking, somehow, to think that nothing more than parochial gossip and sour grapes lay behind all the mutterings of Jock Christie’s name in the case of the dark stranger.
The next morning, putting all thoughts of the farming dynasties of Luckenlaw out of my head, I turned back to the question of the missing victims and set off resolutely after an early breakfast to beard Miss Lindsay when her den was about to be overrun by cubs. (I had decided that she probably kept her SWRI records all together somewhere and that if I landed on her unannounced just before school began she would have no choice but to leave me with them and tend to her charges.) The skies had cleared before the ground had dried last night and now there was a crackling glaze of frost underfoot, the fallen leaves picked out in white along their veins and stuck fast to the ground. Bunty pranced ahead, as skittish as always when she felt the earth unaccountably tingle and splinter under her paws, and I huddled inside my Persian lamb coat and Beefeater’s hat hoping that I would not slip as I picked my way down the drive and across the green to the school lane.
‘Here she comes, there she goes,’ sang the girls, at play inside
the railings waiting for the bell.
‘Torn stockings and hairy toes,
A broom in her hand and a wart on her nose,
Here she comes, there she goes.’
I decided not to take it personally and gave them a benign smile as I passed them. Bunty made a few feinting darts towards the skipping rope but thought the better of it and followed me to the schoolhouse door.
Miss Lindsay was too polite to do other than greet me and usher me in, but she glanced not all that surreptitiously at her fob watch as she did so, and I made haste to explain that I was on a quest to view her Rural register the better to pin down those farms and cottages where I should look to find my audience for the talk.
‘What a good idea,’ she said. ‘You certainly do seem to have a talent for organisation, Mrs Gilver.’ With that staggering remark – one I had never heard directed my way before – she slapped a stout cardboard file on the table before me, took up her hand bell and left. The summoning clangs had sounded and faded away before I recovered myself and bent to the file, unwinding the ribbon tape holding it shut and feeling a thrill of anticipation for what I would find there.
I was in luck. The list of members was practically the first document in the – not inconsiderable – pile and, Miss Lindsay being Miss Lindsay, not only were the departing members scored off and the newcomers added in at the end but the dates for these comings and goings were included in her clear, round, schoolteacher’s hand. I opened my notebook and began to copy it down, fearing that when the morning prayers which I could hear droning away in the schoolroom were finished she might leave her class at work and return to me. Bunty, having padded around the sitting room and subjected everything in reach to a thorough sniffing, had decided that although there were no biscuits in the immediate offing this place was otherwise acceptable and had curled herself in front of the fire and gone to sleep.
Bury Her Deep Page 17
