I record then, that my present pass is my own responsibility and fault. I have been childish and vindictive. And – what I fear irks me more – I have been a poor analyst of the mind.
In a sense vindictive, but in a sense I have cast a distorting charity over the past. I had come to feel that Ranald played me a mean trick, that he failed to play the game, and because of that I would give him a nasty jolt before going into my retirement for good and all. How childish the impulse – and how far out of the estimate of what lay between us! In running away, horses, water and all, in that crisis Ranald had betrayed himself – as a Guthrie, as a brother and as a man. And he had lived since in the eating consciousness of that betrayal, his life dominated by one shameful memory. I had fished him, a hysterical and grateful adolescent, from Fremantle harbour and a plentiful society of sharks; a few months later my blood was on his head in the bush. And the issue, to be played out in this lonely Scottish keep, is strangely tuned to the central truth of the greatest of Scottish tragedies, Macbeth. There is a blood guiltiness from which there is no turning back, no way out save forward through blood. Ranald remembers not a mean trick but a betrayal and a crime. Year by year the element of deliberation in his panic desertion of me has been more evident. Year by year the dynamics of guilt have taken firmer hold of his mind, straining and finally disrupting his personality, so that in any fix he will at once envisage himself as the trapped and ruthless man. Convinced – through my own melodramatic folly, no doubt – that I was coming like some wild Guthrie of the past to execute an absolute revenge, he laid his own plans at a level of uncompromising violence – though violence tempered by some elaborateness, some intellectually satisfying subtlety, to which I feel I have by no means penetrated. My spectre has overshadowed Ranald’s whole existence. Now that I have returned as if from the dead he has found some peculiar release in imposing a new perspective on my life, making the sacrifice of it no more than a move in some complicated game of which he is master. My death in the bush overwhelmed and destroyed him; my death at Erchany he will control and exploit. It is a ‘life line’ of some interest to mental science.
I wrote to him from Australia, giving some account of myself but saying nothing of my intentions – yielding to the foolish satisfaction of concocting vague menace out of reticence. He must have had ample time to lay his plans; to isolate Erchany, to dismiss servants, to secure the help of the creature Hardcastle. Ranald is being driven by years of abnormal development and I cannot find that I very much wish for justice against him. But Hardcastle is assisting at murder for pay. I hope they will get him.
I wrote once more to Ranald and told him that Dr Richard Flinders would arrive secretly on the night of the twenty-third of December. This will seem wanton and melodramatic enough, and its melodrama played with a nice irony into the hands of Ranald’s own melodramatic fantasy. But there was some sense in it. I did not intend that Ian Guthrie should come to life again and the hour would make it easy for my brother to arrange a wholly confidential meeting. Moreover there was implicit in the choice a hint of sentiment and reconciliation. In our boyhood we had held a regular tryst at this midnight, a tryst at which we discussed what the next midnight – Christmas Eve – would bring to our stockings. This implication, clearly, Ranald was in no state to catch.
The unexpectedly heavy snows presented me with a problem. But I have long been accustomed to sking – I doubt if the world knows that there are excellent snow-fields in Australia – and skis were easy to come by at my hotel in Dunwinnie: it is a centre, crowded at present, for such winter sports as Scotland is beginning to contrive. I reached Erchany somewhat hazardously by the shores of Ben Cailie.
I was received by Hardcastle with just the caution that I expected and taken straight to this tower. And here he and Ranald between them overpowered me. That is all. It is simple, astonishing and – if only because Ranald and I are brothers – curiously horrible. This little bedroom might have been designed as a prison; may have been a prison hundreds of years ago. I have done what I can. Several of the Erchany rats, bold and sluggish creatures, I have succeeded in catching and sending out as messengers: I think it likely that they have the liberty of the whole crannied building. And I have tried as good an imitation as I can manage of the Australian cooee, one of the most penetrating calls in the world. But the height of this chamber, the thickness of these walls, the gale and the muffling snowfall outside make it unlikely that the sound will be heard, or if heard thought to be other than an owl or a trick of the wind. Nor have I any evidence that Erchany is not deserted except for my brother and his man.
I have been given a book: Experimental Radiology by Richard Flinders – I must count myself lucky that Ranald has this sort of fantastic, rather than some downright sadistic, streak. It is clear and tidy, and has pleased me as well as another book. And medicine brings me to a final record. Ranald is not mad. His thoughts and actions are logically directed to certain realizable ends…
PART SIX
JOHN APPLEBY
1
Mr Wedderburn drew a long breath as I laid down the unfinished narrative. ‘Fratricide,’ he said. ‘And Miss Mathers was right. My interpretation of the facts came nowhere near the measure of Guthrie’s ingenuity. Ian’s murder by Ranald was to be read as Ranald’s murder by Lindsay. He killed his brother and incriminated his niece’s lover. It is madness.’
I nodded. ‘In the face of any moral order it is madness. And yet it all abounds in logic. He was very skilfully fulfilling needs and achieving ends.’
Sybil Guthrie stirred from the immobility in which she had listened to Ian Guthrie’s testament. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘What drove him? What was his motive in such devilry?’
I considered. ‘There is a network of motive. You can work back in various directions, and dig down to various depths, and keep finding motives. There was what Ian saw: Ranald’s life lived under the shadow of that crime in Australia; all the massive feelings of guilt that abound in the neurotic crystallized on it; a resulting fearful certainty that Ian was coming for absolute vengeance; the conviction that Ian must be outwitted and destroyed. At the same time there was some deeper symbolism at work. Ian’s death in the bush had got on top of him; at Ian’s second and veritable death he would be on top.’
Noel Gylby clapped his hands like a child. ‘On top by several hundred feet…on top by the height of the tower!’
‘Exactly. And a psychoanalyst would find a symbolism yet deeper. I was thinking of it earlier today. When a man throws himself from a height he is taking a symbolical leap from danger – the perilous above – to safety – the secure below. In hurling Ian from the tower Ranald was achieving just what he had failed to achieve in Australia. He was rescuing Ian. In fact his crime was a stroke of wit – of the dark irony of which we have a good deal of evidence in Ranald.’
Wedderburn exclaimed: ‘Wit!’
‘In the Freudian sense. A reconciling of violently opposed desires at a verbal or symbolical level. The desire to destroy Ian: the desire to rehabilitate himself, to prove his own manhood, by rescuing Ian.’
There was a silence in which we could hear, behind the wainscoting of the gallery, the dragging movement of a poisoned rat. Wedderburn took out a handkerchief and passed it across his forehead. ‘I prefer,’ he said, ‘to encounter these abysses of the mind in text-books. And in medical text-books, not legal ones.’
‘They are bound to figure sometimes in both. But we are far from having exhausted the network of motive yet – nor have we all the materials. Somewhere there is a strong motive of fear, horror, hatred against Neil Lindsay, whose destruction was worked with such diabolical skill into the greatest of all the jigsaws. That we must investigate. What is clear so far is the whole picture in relation to Ian. You can think of much that fits in. The passionate shutting-up of this gallery, for instance, when Ranald inherited.’ I let my torch circle the portraits on the wall. ‘The Guthries of Erchany! The tradition Ranald had betrayed. A wild, dark lot they
may have been. But fratricide, of which Ranald had virtually been guilty in the bush, was outside the family scope.’
Wedderburn nodded. ‘According to my friend Clanclacket they were distinguished for sticking together.’
‘And then the passion of impatience at the opening-up of the gallery. He had got his idea and he must see the family portraits again to assure himself of its feasibility; to reassure him that Guthries really have the strange characteristic, occasionally observable in old families, of being remarkably like each other.’
Gylby broke in. ‘That’s the point where I can’t see–’
‘Listen.’ I fished from my pocket Gylby’s own journal letter and turned the pages. ‘It is, as you remarked, rather literary; but it gives the essence.’ And I read:
‘Guthrie in his dust had returned to innocence; that sinister face, with the strongly marked features that speak of race, was stronger and purer, as if some artist had taken a sponge and swabbed the baser lines away. One reads of death showing such effects; to encounter them at such a violent issue was disconcertingly moving. I composed the body as I could…
One reads of death showing such effects. You see how nicely Ranald had calculated? Actually you were looking at a different man. But what you thought you saw was the transfiguring effect of death – a well-known and authentic thing. Death commonly does just that: makes a man look slightly different, takes away lines of pressure and anxiety so that an impression of ease or peacefulness or innocence results. Death, in fact, would turn brother Ranald into brother Ian. Conversely, Ian dead and spontaneously thought of as Ranald would certainly seem Ranald – touched by death. And remember that neither you nor Miss Guthrie ever saw the living Ranald in a good light. On the night of your arrival there was nothing but an ungenerous candle-light. And on the following day Guthrie took care not to appear. You see how, appearing like a bolt from the blue, you were yet fitted instantaneously into the jigsaw. The body was to be formally identified by Hardcastle who was in the know, by Mrs Hardcastle who is half-blind and by Dr Noble who hadn’t seen Ranald Guthrie for two years. The Gamleys had been sent away and Gamley’s coming into the picture at all was an unforeseen mischance. But Gamley saw the body only by lantern-light and suspected nothing. Miss Mathers, the one person who would have seen at once that the dead man was not Ranald, was on her way to Canada and unlikely to be found in time for the merely formal identification which alone would be thought of. At the same time Miss Mathers’ absence was part of the plan for incriminating Lindsay. And – as I say – you and Miss Guthrie, who might have been such an awkward irruption on the scheme, were brilliantly utilized to give, imperceptibly, further weight to the assumption that the dead man was Ranald. Ranald operated with superb economy, using everything that turned up, from a legend about chopped fingers to an unexpected kinswoman. Indeed he found you useful, Miss Guthrie, in more ways than one.’
Sybil Guthrie looked absently into the gloom of the gallery. ‘I frightfully confused the issues,’ she said.
‘No, I don’t mean your story of events in the tower, we’ll come to that. I mean that Ranald found your conversation useful.’
Miss Guthrie opened round eyes.
‘We all see, I think, what Ranald was aiming at for himself. ‘Oh my America, my new found land.’ His early experience as an actor. His making a rapid study of general medicine. His leading you to talk of America as far back as you could remember, the America in which Richard Flinders had worked. All these things show us clearly what Ranald was intending to do – I should say what he is intending to do. Richard Flinders has died as Ranald Guthrie: Ranald Guthrie is going to live as Richard Flinders – a Richard Flinders who is retiring both from medical research and from the society in which he has lived for the last twenty years, who is going to live quietly in California on a pension. It is, as Ian was going to tell us when he had to break off writing, a feasible, a realizable end. And notice here again a strong appeal, a strong motive, on the symbolical level. Compare the lives of the two brothers and it is clear than Ian won. Ian had always been, he himself tells us, “the rudely healthy member of the family.” Ranald, on the other hand, was a “neurotic personality.” And subsequently–’
‘Ian,’ Wedderburn interrupted unexpectedly, ‘was packed off abroad because he was too successful with the young women; Ranald, because he had run away to a profession that consists in hiding from oneself by dressing up as somebody else.’
‘A capital psychologist’s point. And subsequently this position – the proposition, simply, of Ranald’s inferiority – is exacerbated. Ian saves Ranald’s life: Ranald betrays Ian’s. Later still Ian as Richard Flinders rises to eminence in a beneficent career: Ranald’s life is futile and increasingly neurotic. But now Ranald becomes Ian! The unsuccessful brother succeeds both in identifying himself with his successful rival and in displacing him.’
Wedderburn took a turn up and down the gallery. ‘Mr Appleby, it is all perfectly coherent. How strange, then, that motives of this sort are almost unknown to criminal law.’
It is because these profound motives are always – except in the case of madmen – rationalized. There is always a topdressing, so to speak, of motive comprehensible not to the deeply passional but to the romantic or economic man. And it is with these super-imposed motives that we deal in the police courts. There is such a further motive here, in a direction we have not yet explored.’ In my turn I paced up and down the gallery. ‘And yet I don’t know that this further motive is really a superficial one. Perhaps it is the master motive of all.’
Noel Gylby searched his pockets for absent cigarettes; discovered instead his store of buttered biscuits. He handed them round. ‘Motives,’ he said vaguely, ‘to right of us, motives to – sorry: go on.’
‘Take another significant point in Guthrie’s behaviour – and one in which we see him nearest to real madness; in which we see him at his most patently pathological point. He could impersonate Flinders. He could get up the America Flinders had known. He could get up enough medicine to protect himself in the event of any unforeseen intrusion on his privacy by medical people. But there was one big difficulty. The Californian Flinders must not display any marked character-trait which it might become known was quite alien to the Sydney Flinders. And Ranald Guthrie had such a trait – more than a trait, indeed. He had a stubborn and strange and glaring compulsion. He was a pathological miser. If he were to become Flinders he had the tremendous task of conquering that.’
‘Surely the impossible task?’ It was Sybil Guthrie who spoke. ‘Almost certainly the impossible task. But that his will would refuse to acknowledge. We know that he made efforts – and the grotesque nature of the early results give the measure of his task. He thought of his table and ordered up wine and laid in caviare. But he neglected to stop starving his dogs.’
Wedderburn chuckled. ‘Including Doctor.’
‘In Ranald’s miserliness, then, lay the grand impediment to his plan. But does it not also point to a motive, perhaps the grand motive? His ruling passion was miserliness; was living, little Isa Murdoch told me, on other people’s threepenny bits found in the pockets of scarecrows. Which was just what he was planning to do. At last he was going to live not at his own but at other people’s expense – on Flinders’ pension.’
Sybil Guthrie foraged for biscuit crumbs in her lap, licked a buttery finger. ‘Mr Appleby, I can stand no more of this. I want action. Where is Ranald Guthrie now? For instance, is he likely to be lurking with a gun round that corner?’
‘I think not. A couple of nights ago he was in Kinkeig – we must discover why – and was observed–’
Wedderburn threw up despairing hands. ‘The ghost!’
‘Undoubtedly the ghost. And as to where Ranald is now, we can guess. He had to pick up the thread of Flinders’ life as quickly as possible. And the circumstances have been perfectly designed to facilitate his doing so – the beautiful economy of the jigsaw again! Flinders had come quietly to Scotland and was s
taying at a big hotel in Dunwinnie, a place full to overflowing with curlers and winter-sporters generally. If Dr Flinders went on a nocturnal expedition and came back with his hair gone slightly greyer or a wrinkle gone astray nobody was in the least likely to notice. There might be unknown elements which would make the whole thing a gamble, of course. But, that point at the hotel passed, Ranald was really in a tolerably strong position. He was Dr Flinders en route for California, with Dr Flinders’ vital papers in his possession. No doubt there would be a second critical point when he took over Dr Flinders’ financial affairs, but a little forgery would more likely than not see him through. And there is no reason to suppose that up to the moment he is at all alarmed. Provided our discoveries are kept dark he will be found without difficulty.’
There was a little silence, broken this time by Wedderburn taking a composed munch at a biscuit. He finished his mouthful and said: ‘And our next move?’
‘Is to listen to Miss Guthrie. I think there was a point at which she almost upset all Ranald’s plans.’
2
Sybil Guthrie began by turning to Wedderburn. ‘I’m afraid I’m chiefly worried at thinking how dense you must have thought me. When you said Lindsay had nothing to fear and that I had only to tell the truth you must have thought it strange that I didn’t in the least see what was in your mind – that I could only say I found it terribly hard to believe you. But you see your case – the case that Guthrie had killed himself to incriminate Lindsay – could never occur to me for the simple reason that it was ruled out by what I knew. On the parapet walk I had seen a man sent hurtling to his death. When you proved your case before the sheriff this afternoon I knew that my continued fibbing – my second line of downright lies – had enabled you to prove what wasn’t true. It was rather a creepy feeling. The evidence of the bogus telephone, of the bureau I knew Lindsay couldn’t have rifled, was conclusive. That is to say, Guthrie’s plot against Lindsay was conclusive. And yet I knew Ranald hadn’t committed suicide. I had seen the man I thought was Ranald killed. And I still believed Lindsay had killed him. Of course my conscience was now clearer still. For I had to believe that Lindsay, in really losing control of himself and killing Guthrie, had merely done what Guthrie was abominably plotting to suggest he had done. That was the only way I could make sense of your case and my knowledge. And though my private morality says a Neil Lindsay oughtn’t to be hanged for killing a degenerate nuisance like Ranald Guthrie under the outrageous provocation I had seen and sensed in those last moments in the tower – well, it was creepy, all the same. I wondered whether perhaps Lindsay hadn’t spotted Guthrie’s plot and killed him in the anger of discovering it. And whether that wouldn’t have been almost justifiable suicide. And whether perhaps Lindsay oughtn’t to have told the truth – what I thought was the truth – and faced it.’ Sybil Guthrie hesitated, seemed to cast about for further words. ‘I mean a court of law tremendously impresses one with the abstract importance of getting the whole truth into the light. I think I was rather shy of walking up to Lindsay and shaking hands with him at the end. I believed we were both less than honest.’
Lament for a Maker Page 23
