Lament for a Maker

by Michael Innes

  I don’t know if I have mentioned that Sybil Guthrie had great good looks. Noel Gylby said heartily: ‘Well, all’s well that ends well!’

  I said – as the best means I could hit on for dissociating myself from this light-hearted point of view: ‘Miss Guthrie, previous to these improved perceptions of yours before the sheriff – you had no doubts or qualms?’

  ‘Mr Appleby, no. I’m not like you sworn to certain accepted canons of justice. I had only one qualm.’

  Gylby made a gesture as if remembering something. ‘The bureau.’

  ‘Yes. For a moment the rifled bureau staggered me. If it were possible that Lindsay had touched the gold he was – whatever provocation he had suffered – outside my protection. But then I realized my own certainty that he had never been near it. I think I said or hinted to Noel that the bureau merely added to the puzzle – to the mystery of what had happened. It was irrelevant to my moral problem.’

  Wedderburn leant forward and patted his client on the hand. ‘My dear, I am afraid you will one day have the practical problem of explaining your moral problem to a judge of the Supreme Court. At Ranald Guthrie’s trial.’

  Sybil’s chin tilted. ‘If I can see cousin Ranald in the dock I won’t much worry about the figure I cut.’

  Quite illogical, I thought – for why protect a nervously excitable young man like Lindsay only to pursue a nervously degenerated man like old Guthrie? Was not Guthrie just the sort of hospital case that Lindsay, granted a certain pressure at one critical point in life or another, might have become? I turned away from this – the riddle that modern neurology presents to the framers of penal law – to contemplate the more concrete problem of Miss Guthrie. As my colleague Speight had decided, a nice girl. Though Speight, for that matter, might now be inclined a little to modify his verdict. It was in downright echo of Wedderburn’s fatherly tones that I said: ‘And now we had better have in detail just what you did see.’

  ‘It won’t take long. I saw just what I’ve said I saw: the interview, Guthrie turning on Lindsay at the end and lashing him horribly, Lindsay going out by the staircase door and Guthrie by the bedroom door – the two doors that Mr Wedderburn discovered I just couldn’t command. It’s after that, and by way of omission, that the lying begins.’

  Gylby said briskly: ‘I’ve found a bit of chocolate.’ And handed it to Miss Guthrie.

  Miss Guthrie took a bite. ‘–that the lying begins. I stood peering into the empty study for I suppose about twenty seconds, wondering if I could dash through and make my get away. And then I heard something. There was still, as you know, a terrific wind up there: what I heard was a cry or shout – and it must have been pretty loud to reach me at all from round a corner of the parapet walk. For that was where it came from – from that side of the parapet walk upon which I now know the little bedroom opens.

  ‘I was all het up and ready for a bit of guess-work. Watching that sudden verbal attack of Guthrie’s on Lindsay I had felt for a moment, as you know, quite murderous; and my thought was that the two men were together again; that they had somehow got out on the battlements and were quarrelling there. The place was fearfully dangerous and I suddenly felt it was all a stupidity I wasn’t going to stand for. Castle Erchany craziness: I’d had enough of it. So I groped my way along the parapet walk to tell them to drop it.’

  Noel Gylby swept Wedderburn and myself with a glance that plainly called upon us to admire. ‘Cheers,’ he said.

  ‘Of course I knew I might be quite wrong. Still, I got round the corner. And there was certainly something on.

  ‘It was a confused vision. Somebody had set up a lamp – a storm lantern – in a niche above the door from the bedroom. Below a certain line was darkness; I could see only what was above. And the first thing I saw was Ranald Guthrie’s face. I had just time to see that it was wrenched awry by some violent emotion when his arm rose into the light and I realized that he was holding an axe. I called out to him to stop. I believe he heard me, though I hardly expected him to in the wind. He spun round and took a step that carried him out of the lantern’s rays. I saw him for a moment as a shadow; then I think he stooped down and I could see nothing. I was aware of confused movement – I believe of a groan and then some muttered words. A moment later I saw him again – or rather I saw what I took to be him – reared up against the parapet, his head and shoulders full in the light. For a split second I saw him so and then something came between us: the mere black silhouette of a back I took to be Lindsay’s. I must have felt what was going to happen, for I shouted again and struggled forward. The shadowy back of the second man moved and Guthrie was in view again. But only for a moment. An arm shot out at him and I heard, even in that wind, the crack of a bare fist on his chin. He staggered, gave a great cry – the cry Noel heard from the staircase – and then he went sheer over the parapet.’ Sybil Guthrie shivered, drew her coat about her. ‘That’s all.’

  I put down the notebook in which I had been scribbling. ‘All, Miss Guthrie? You didn’t see Ranald make for his get away by the trapdoor and the winding stair?’

  ‘I saw nothing more. What I was sure I had seen was Lindsay kill cousin Ranald, perhaps in some sort of defence against that axe. And I wasn’t going to be in on it if my witness might entangle Lindsay. I turned round and retreated on an instant impulse, round the corner to the French window by which I had been standing. The beastly thing might best pass as suicide: anyway, I was going to bide my time and see.’

  Noel Gylby said heavily: ‘I would have done the same.’

  ‘And your narrative now,’ I said, ‘instead of embarrassing Lindsay actually convicts the man you thought Lindsay had killed. It is for the policeman a pleasingly complete mix up. A mystery on classical lines with the dénouement quite in the right place.’

  Gylby made an approving and Wedderburn a disapproving noise. I had spoken, I think, with some intention of easing a tension evident on Sybil Guthrie’s face. She had been under a long strain and now that the truth was told she was feeling the reaction. ‘Your evidence,’ I went on, ‘has acquitted cousin Ranald on one score at least.’

  ‘Acquitted him?’

  ‘Of squeamishness. You remember that according to Mr Wedderburn’s theory Ranald had failed in two particulars. He had failed to keep silent as he hurled himself to death. And his nerve had failed him too in the crux of the plan, the thing that was to incriminate Lindsay in the thought of the countryside; he had failed to take that horrible chop at his fingers in his last living moments. And when we got nearer the truth that last point remained puzzling. Had he relented at the last moment of performing the outrage on Ian – drugged, one supposes, and ready to be hurled to death by one blow? We now know he hadn’t relented; he was simply interrupted by your first cry. And his action upon that interruption is our final and best evidence of the remarkable speed and economy of his mind.

  ‘Consider just what happened. Ranald has Ian huddled helpless in the snow at his feet. The axe is raised in that particularly nasty moment of his crime when he hears a shout. Someone is on the parapet walk. A paralysing discovery? – not a bit of it. The situation is desperate but may yet be saved. So far, only he himself can have been seen. He pitches the axe over the battlements, gets himself out of the light, stoops, heaves up the body of his brother into a momentarily erect position – and into the light. Then, himself a mere black silhouette, he hits out. The intruder, whoever he be, has no thought of an Ian Guthrie; he sees Ranald Guthrie killed and cannot see the killer. If Ranald can then make his get away by the winding stair, seizing and extinguishing the lamp, his plot is still in a fair way to succeed. The wind will quickly obliterate all traces of the trapdoor having been used; the intruder will not be able to swear that in the darkness the killer did not escape through the bedroom and down the main staircase – on which Lindsay, two or three seconds later, would be found according to plan. And so the case against Lindsay would be even stronger than Ranald had hoped, for of the fact of murder there could be
no doubt at all. Ranald Guthrie, in fact, is one who never says die.’

  ‘Die,’ said Wedderburn, ‘is just what he did say to two innocent men.’ He stood up, a handsome old man suddenly lively with passion. ‘But we’ll get him! Ranald Guthrie has played his last trick.’

  From somewhere below us, shattering the silence of the deserted castle, came the harsh high reverberation of a great cracked bell.

  3

  It was the young lawyer Stewart back from Dunwinnie. We had quite forgotten him; and finding closed doors he had applied himself to the bell in the courtyard. With him was the minister, Dr Jervie.

  We had gone down to the door in a compact, nervous group and I think they must have read in our faces as we stood in the wavering shadows of the hall that the mystery of the place had undergone some violent revolution. But both were curiously silent and it was only when Gylby had kindled a fire in the schoolroom – a thing we might well have done long before – that Stewart said. ‘You have news?’

  Wedderburn replied. ‘The strangest news. Ranald Guthrie is still alive.’

  Stewart was staggered. But my interest was more in Dr Jervie. He had sat down and was staring into the first leaping flames on the hearth; and I think I have never seen a sadder face. At Wedderburn’s words he looked up for a moment like one who turns from meditation to accept some fact on an indifferent plane.

  ‘Guthrie is alive? Then I suppose I saw no ghost.’

  ‘You saw the ghost!’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps your informant didn’t mention me? It would be taken for granted, you know, that the ghost would appear to the minister. What else is the minister paid for, idle havering old fool that he is, than to hold in with such-like daftness and bogle talk?’ The face remained calm, but the words, parodying Scottish village talk at its least beautiful, were startling in their bitterness. Not, I thought, a chronic mood; rather the momentary product of shock. But not, it seemed, the shock of Ranald Guthrie’s continued existence.

  Jervie made a gesture at once of weariness and apology. ‘Can we have your strange story,’ he said, ‘– first?’

  4

  It was an hour and a half later. I had stepped through the schoolroom window and found myself on a small terrace of which I had been unaware before. Everything was very still, the air moist and oddly warm in the night thaw. The moon, almost at the full, was high in a clear heaven. To my right, through aisles of dark larches, I could see the narrow snow-covered fields of the little home farm, a serrated line of larches beyond like a line of pasteboard trees against the luminous back-drop of the sky. But to my left, down the loch, I could look far into the night, far down the long ribbon of dark ice behind an arm of which, sheer and sheerly beautiful, rose the untroubled fastnesses of Ben Mervie and Ben Cailie. I felt my heart heavy with foreboding.

  Jervie came out and stood beside me, looking at the loch and the mountains in silence. Then he said softly: ‘How peaceful it is.’

  A longer silence was split from the direction of the loch by a sound like a pistol shot: the ice was cracking. The sound, sharp in that quiet, roused him. ‘Mr Appleby – come in.’ And he turned back to the schoolroom.

  Stewart had gone up to the tower; Gylby had just returned to the room with a load of wood. Jervie crossed to where he had sat, carefully folded Gylby’s journal letter, laid it on a table beside Ian Guthrie’s testament. Then his eye caught something at the other end of the room, he took up a candle, was presently studying the Indian bird paintings on the wall. He came back, stood before the fire and there recited – with an oddly moving effect of familiar statement:

  ‘Sen for the deth remeid is non,

  Best is that we for deth dispone

  After our deth that lif may we;

  Timor Mortis conturbat me.’

  He turned to Wedderburn. ‘Ranald Guthrie,’ he said, ‘has long since given himself to the Devil. And the Devil gave him the Devil’s own gift in return: pride.’

  Uneasily Wedderburn said: ‘No doubt.’

  ‘Mr Appleby, you wonder if, in all the complex of motives you have discovered, the master motive is avarice – the miserliness that is his ruling passion. I think the master motive is his other ruling passion, pride. Pride that is fiercer in him than was the avarice that sent him haunting among the scarecrows. Pride that made him take a tortuous and diabolical path to an imperative end. He forbade the marriage of Neil Lindsay and Christine Mathers. It couldn’t be. But pride in turn forbade him to give the reason. Neil and Christine are brother and sister.’

  Sybil Guthrie gave a little cry that ebbed into silence.

  ‘Actually, half-brother and half-sister. Christine has been supposed – if only dubiously and by implication – to be the child of Guthrie’s mother’s brother, who was known to have been killed with his wife in a railway accident in France. In reality, Christine is the daughter of Guthrie’s own sister, Alison Guthrie.

  ‘Alison was an eccentric and solitary woman, with a passion for birds–’

  I interrupted. ‘Christine–’

  ‘Quite so. She has something of the same passion. But if Alison had a passion for the creatures of the air she had too a passion, less innocent, for her own menservants. The type is known. And a certain Wat Lindsay, Neil’s father, took service with her for a time when he was already a married man and shortly after Neil’s birth. Christine was–’

  Suddenly, as if a flood had broken, Sybil Guthrie broke into a passion of weeping. Jervie waited for a minute and went on gently. ‘Christine’s mother died in some lonely place at the child’s birth. Ranald Guthrie took the little girl but concealed her parentage with all the ingenuity of which you know him to be capable. It could, of course, have been ferreted out: Mr Wedderburn will doubt if the estate could have been settled at Ranald’s supposed death without the truth emerging. But Ranald was a driven creature and his clear-sightedness had limits. He was passionately determined that the thing he morbidly regarded as shameful should never be known.

  ‘And so it was pride, you see, and not avarice that drove him to the greatest wickedness of all. There was no need that the family history become public. An explanation to Neil and Christine as soon as he knew of their attachment, though unspeakably sad, would have stopped short of real tragedy. But it seems he couldn’t do it. What the psychologists in whom Mr Appleby is interested call the inhibition – that was absolute. He could not speak: he came to see he could not prevent the marriage unless he spoke. So here is the motive against Lindsay for which Mr Appleby has been seeking. We can feel it, I think: the massive fear, hate, horror mounting in him. In front of these young people he saw the commission of a sin – an unwitting sin, if such a thing can be – which has always appeared peculiarly terrible to the neurotic mind. He is responsible, and he can prevent it only by speaking – or acting. And he cannot speak.’

  Sybil Guthrie stood up, now dry-eyed. ‘Where is Christine? Could I drive down – ?’

  Jervie shook his head. ‘Time enough in the morning. Christine is asleep by now in the manse – and Neil at Ewan Bell’s.’

  ‘I say Guthrie couldn’t speak. And that he therefore planned to act. The sense of guilt that lies heavy on his type, that had grown and grown on him with the contemplation of his treachery or cowardice in Australia, he would now tend to unload, I suppose, on Lindsay. He would project it upon Lindsay – Lindsay whose father had, in a sense, betrayed a Guthrie; who was now marching stiff-necked upon deadly sin. Nothing would save the situation, and nothing would be adequate to it, save that Lindsay should die.’

  In a rather husky voice Noel Gylby interrupted. ‘As Christine said of him, he would pit extremes only against extremes. Or what he thought extremes.’

  ‘And so,’ said Jervie, ‘we come to a new view of the jigsaw. Mr Appleby has seen Ranald incorporating Lindsay into his plot against his brother; I see him incorporating his brother into his plot against Lindsay.’ Again he made his weary gesture. ‘I suppose that, criminologically, it is a pretty case.’ He rose.
‘I must find strength for the duty that is laid upon me tomorrow.’ Wedderburn too rose. ‘Jervie, you are sure? There can be no question of the truth of the facts you have told us?’

  ‘I am afraid none. But you must know how we have come by them. We don’t yet know if the child’s birth – Christine’s birth – was falsely registered. But whatever course Guthrie took – and we may be sure it would be clever enough – required the connivance of some other person of status in the country. He went to Sir Hector Anderson of Dunwinnie, an eccentric old man with extravagant views on blood and race. Sir Hector died fifteen years ago, so Guthrie in his present plot has had nothing to fear from him. But he has reckoned without Lady Anderson – not unreasonably, for she is now over ninety. She knew the truth, though she has never divulged it. And she still follows the local news. When she heard that Neil and Christine had been brought back from an attempted elopement she acted at once. The summons that took Stewart hurriedly away late this afternoon was from Dunwinnie Lodge. He had the whole story.’