Rum Affair

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Rupert, after a glance, was more informative. “We have a walkie-talkie here, sir. We’ve been in touch with the police. Weather permitting, they’ll be here tomorrow. It’s only a case of keeping the murderer safe here all night.”

  The murderer. I forced my tired mind to work. Whom had he eliminated? Kenneth, of course, Stanley Hennessy, if Rupert followed him. Ogden . . . ? I had got so far when Johnson said, as if I had spoken aloud: “Yes: Ogden now. You left Twiss and the Buchanans at the door of the Castle the first time, and came back to Seawolf for your torch. We spoke to you from Dolly. Then after you’d unloaded your boat, you rowed back to the nearer, big jetty, and went straight to the Castle. Bob and Nancy and Michael Twiss were already exploring inside. Where did you go then?”

  Ogden had not stirred. The long, knuckle bone chin sunk on his chest, hands clasped on his stomach, he said: “Up the first stairs I came to. I flashed the torch around, to let them all find me, but the first person I came across was Twiss. He was wrecking Dr Holmes’ workroom.”

  I know I gasped. Johnson looked up. “You came across him! You didn’t say anything later?”

  Ogden raised his untidy eyebrows. “Lovers’ tiff, I assumed. Venting his spite on the third party. Far be it from me to drag in Madame Rossi.”

  “Did he tell you it was personal spite against Dr Holmes?” Johnson was pressing.

  Ogden grinned. “You should have heard the names he was calling him. I told him he ought to have his backside slapped; but it’d cost those bastards in Whitehall a packet to replace all that bloody tat, so I wouldn’t give him away. Then he’s found dead. It seemed a dirty trick to give him up after.”

  “Only common sense, I should have thought,” said Johnson thoughtfully. “And after your encounter with Twiss in the doctor’s laboratory, you went your two ways?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Did you see him again before or after the rest of us arrived?”

  “No. I found the Buchanans eventually, along by the bedrooms, and we shared the big torch until we got to the library, and Bob began to fool about with that filthy eagle’s red eyes. He had a small torch he was experimenting with, and Nancy was helping him. I went up and looked at the birds.”

  “Did you hear a shot, then or beforehand?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. And I would have. The house was like a sounding board with all that bare parquet. You could hear Nancy’s cough all over, like the bloody finale of La Traviata, and thank God the organ didn’t play that.”

  But Johnson was staring into space, the sullen red of the fire flickering behind him, and an expression of irritation on his face. “What a pity,” he observed. “What a pity. For it really seems that you and Nancy and Bob Buchanan are the only people with the time and the opportunity to have knocked the chap off. And without an obvious motive, it seems a little invidious to pick any one of you. I suppose we’d better shut all three of you up. Unless—” ignoring Nancy Buchanan’s squeal of protest – “unless we conduct an experiment. Here—” he slipped his hand inside the reefer jacket and came out with something silvery and heavy. “Here is a gun – a real one, Tina. It was careless of me to drop it on Staffa. The other, as you know, is just a dummy lighter. Let us take this one, which is about the calibre of Michael’s and fire it off in that bedroom, while we make a few tests. It seems to me, for example, that a turret alcove surrounded by windows, especially windows with wildly tossing trees outside them, would not make very much of a listening post. While you were planning shocks with your eagle, Bob, do you really think a single shot would have reached you?”

  It wouldn’t. I was suddenly sure of it. I remembered the outspread wings in the dark, the red glare on the picture, the tinkle of glass. I remembered too the burst of sound from the organ, and then the increase in volume, met quite shockingly when the heavy door was swung open. For it was a swing door. I had forgotten that, too.

  My eyes met Bob Buchanan’s. He was picturing it too. And slowly, as all of us watched him, he shook his bonneted head.

  “Well, well,” said Johnson mildly. “Thank goodness for that. For an awkward moment back there I thought, Ogden, you were going to evade me.”

  FIFTEEN

  He had accused Ogden. Ogden, with the long, lugubrious face? Ogden, with his engine stuck at full speed ahead, tumbling head over ears in his dinghy? Ogden with his plugless basins and his lights tied on with string!

  And what of Victoria? Surely no one watching her and her hopeless crusade could link her with murder and treachery? Surely no one engaged on secret and dangerous work would conceivably choose a Victoria to crew for him?

  I looked at the others. There were Nancy and Bob, tired, muddled and hopelessly confused with all the evening’s events, the shuttling of question and accusation. Nancy, bending, suddenly put the cork in the last thermos and shoved it into the rucksack: decks cleared for action. Kenneth, now very still, was giving all his attention, not to Ogden, but to Johnson’s businesslike face. Beside me, as I turned, I found Hennessy also looking at Johnson and frowning. His mouth, that aggressive, muscular mouth, was a little open.

  “I expect you thought you’d got away with it as well,” continued Johnson to Ogden, quite pleasantly. “If Michael Twiss hadn’t decided to blackmail you today.”

  For a long moment Cecil Ogden himself was perfectly still. Then, disarmingly, his discontented, straitened face under the pixie cap split into a grin.

  “God,” he said. “If that’s where you get with conjecture, I’m glad I got ploughed in my bloody prep school certificate.” The bony wrists shot out of his frayed cuffs as he stretched, but the cultured voice was peeved, all the same. “You don’t pick on the big boys do you, you fellows? It’s always the same. Find the man with the bottom out of his trousers and shove the blame on to him. What’s Twiss supposed to blackmail me about? Victoria?” His grin was not very nice. “And what am I supposed to pay him with? Buttons?”

  “Oh, come,” said Johnson. “What did they pay you for damaging the Lysander and destroying our trust in Holmes, in one beautiful bang? What about all that dishy equipment hidden on Seawolf? To hear Lenny describe it on Barra, your fo’c’sle’s like Santa’s grotto.

  “You see, Kenneth: Michael Twiss was just a blackmailer, that and nothing besides. Going round with Tina here, he had access to all kinds of dirt – no offence, Tina, but you know better than I do the social circles he was moving in. He sensed that Madame Rossi had realised pretty nearly all her ambitions; he perhaps guessed that one day his job would be done. Particularly he was afraid she would form a permanent attachment which would end his opportunities just the same, both for blackmail and for the kind of life he was used to as her manager. So he tried to dissuade her by every possible means from her proposed meeting with Dr Holmes for this and another very good reason: he was blackmailing Dr Holmes over his past connection with Madame Rossi, and he did not want Madame Rossi to find out . . . Fascinating, isn’t it?” he added mildly, and the glasses winked as he turned, surveying us all.

  “A moment ago you made a serious accusation against Ogden,” said Hennessy abruptly. “I think before you go any further you ought to substantiate.”

  Ogden’s voice answered. Crossing his long legs, he found the lion’s head in his way and flipped it over to spread itself, heavily, on Nancy’s trim shoes. Nancy gasped. Ogden said: “There’s no hurry. Let him go on. I’m going to take a packet off him for slander anyway, at the end of all this.”

  I had seen for some moments that Kenneth wanted to speak. He hesitated again, and then said to Johnson: “But how do you know? Or is this all guesswork, about Twiss?”

  Johnson grinned. He had hitched himself beside us, on the arm of Hennessy’s chair and appeared perfectly at ease, smoking and swinging one foot. “We knew. The same way that Cecil Ogden knew. We all searched the chap’s luggage. Great people for fancy luggage, Tina, you and your manager. Michael’s you’ll remember, came aboard at R
hu before he did. It was locked, and with such a particularly fine lock that even Lenny got suspicious. I’m afraid he got over-inquisitive and opened it. Tina’s letters to Kenneth Holmes were inside. Or prints of them, anyway. Then, when we were all having our sing-song on Evergreen, I thought it would do Lenny good to have a long look at Dolly that evening through the spyglass. Dolly was quite empty, except for Ogden, who boarded her to borrow some oars.

  “You were on board a hell of a long time, Ogden. We thought it might be simple curiosity – or even simpler plain pilfering. But we found when we came back that we had underestimated you. Dolly had been very thoroughly searched, including your cases Tina, and mine. And Michael Twiss’ fine lock had been disturbed yet again. That was when we began to be quite definitely interested in Ogden.”

  Unexpectedly, Ogden made no effort to refute this. His face, losing its defiant grin, wore the sullen expression with which we were all familiar. “It isn’t a crime – yet – to read other people’s drivelling love letters. I was just having a look round. But I suppose you’ll try and pin something on me, now, to protect your white-headed boy, Dr Holmes. I suppose you’ll say I dismantled the crutch next, so that she got hit overboard.”

  “She” – with a jerk of the head towards me. He hated women. It was because Victoria was sexless that he tolerated her. Johnson said: “Don’t be silly. We’ve affirmed with no reservations that the crutch was in perfect order both after you’d gone, and when Twiss and Tina and Rupert and Lenny all came back on board from Evergreen. The crutch accident was arranged by someone on board, and it had to be Twiss. How did he get you to come out of your cabin, Tina, incidentally? By talking like Holmes?”

  I nodded.

  “I thought so. There were some obvious gaps in your account of it. But that aroused our suspicions a little further, Ogden. For having read Twiss’ letters, you might quite well deduce that this forthcoming meeting between Tina and Holmes was not to her manager’s liking, and that he might be afraid of it. In which case, even an irresponsible blighter like yourself might have been expected to tip us off after the accident, however indirectly. There were one or two other things. You’d been hanging around the islands a lot this past season or two, scrounging stuff for the boat from the lighthouse men and the trawlers and the coastguards: everyone knows you and humours you. But this time you weren’t keen to have anyone on board but Victoria, who knows better than to go into the fo’c’sle: you put an embargo on that, didn’t you? What did you make her believe? That you’d actually pinched something valuable and hidden it there? She’d be unhappy, but she’d stick by you through that kind of trouble. Then at Crinan, Tom McIver reported a very interesting conversation.”

  “Reported?” I could not help myself. It was Tom McIver, the big man from the puffer, who brought the first message from Kenneth to me. I couldn’t look at Kenneth. All along, we had been betrayed and exposed; our letters read, our messages intercepted, our meetings spied upon. How could Kenneth have known, sending his chivalrous message, his warning to me to stay away, that McIver was Johnson’s man?

  “Tom’s a good chap,” said Johnson now. He had relit his pipe and through the smoke he was looking, I saw, straight at Kenneth. “In the Navy during the war, and did a bit of work for us, then and later. He doesn’t like it much, but he understands what’s important, and he’s discreet. He passed on a message from you, Kenneth, which we took the liberty of editing slightly. And he reported to me, first that Hennessy had shown an interest in it; and secondly that Ogden had come aboard with some extremely inquisitive questions about Dr Holmes and Lysander. McIver had been told what to do if this happened. He informed Ogden, in strict confidence, of Holmes’ message. He also gave the impression that although treachery had been nearly proven, suspicion was shifting away from Dr Holmes.

  “That was when, Ogden, it occurred to you that Michael Twiss would make a nice victim. Not only blackmailer, but spy. And dead, so that he could no longer defend himself . . . You must tell us, some time, whom you got to plant the mine in the cave under Staffa. No wonder you didn’t want to go ashore. And how annoyed you must have been when Lenny turned up and prevented you from completing the explosion. You had already quarrelled with Victoria to get her out of the way . . . and that wasn’t difficult to do either, because you hadn’t been keeping to the rules of the race, had you? By Portree you were the only boat with electric lights on from end to end, because you were the only boat which has continuously been using her engine, whenever you thought you could get away with it. And Victoria wouldn’t give you away, although I’d guess she has begged you to admit it.”

  He paused. The fire had burned up now, although the wood smoke lingered, hazily, in the darkness above. Behind us, arms folded, Rupert stood watching. Away from the ruddy glow of the fire the old-fashioned light was wan and barely picked out the dust-covered furniture. Above us, the gallery seemed empty, but one could not be sure. No one from the village could get in, Johnson had said. And no one from the boats. But how could one guard a house of this size? I remembered, belatedly, the tent by the shore, the small moving figures on the hillside, half-obscured by the mist. Glasgow students, Johnson then said. Culling the deer. And then I remembered Johnson’s voice saying again, and more recently than that: “Do you remember hearing that shot? We put it down to a stalker. But no one shoots on a Sunday in Scotland.”

  No one shoots anything on a Sunday in Scotland. But people.

  Sitting on the far arm of Hennessy’s chair, Johnson had cut off from us all the warmth of the fire. Fear, I suppose, makes one cold. As I shivered, Hennessy put one arm round my shoulders, and I found it hard not to flinch. How did we know which was the murderer? Whom did we trust? Even before Ogden said, jeering: “Christ, what a crime! So that’s what’s at the bottom of this farrago, is it? The deadliest sin in the book. First I read someone’s letters, and now I’ve been cheating and using my engine . . . That makes me a murderer. And I’ll tell you something else, too. I don’t lower my bloody ensign at sundown. A bounder, fellows. Debag him, chaps. Run him out of the regiment!” The mimicry was angrily exact, and Rupert flushed.

  “About that fo’c’sle,” Johnson said, undisturbed. “You were claiming a moment ago to be among the great underprivileged. We had a good look at Seawolf, and Binkie too, when you were all on shore at Barra. You’d need more than a few tins of Navy Brasso to pay for a shortwave transmission set like the one you’ve got concealed in the fo’c’sle, Ogden . . .”

  Nancy Buchanan said slowly: “You were on Binkie? Then you saw . . .”

  “The banner? Yes, of course; we knew all about it. I’m sorry, Nancy.” There was a thread of regret, ludicrously, in Johnson’s voice. “But lives were at stake. We had to find out where you and Bob fitted in. Then it was quite plain. On South Rona, you harmed no one and you made no move out of character. You even helped us, unwittingly, to explain the general alert and the multiplicity of security men, so that the real culprit didn’t take fright and run. The choice at that time,” said Johnson placidly, “lay between you and Hennessy, with the odds largely on you. There were various risks. One was that Michael Twiss, or even Dr Holmes himself, should have an accident or appear to commit suicide. Or even that Holmes and Tina should die, killed by Twiss. We took what precautions we could, but Hennessy didn’t help by knocking out Tom McIver after we had planned that he should take Tina safely across to South Rona and protect her until she and Holmes met.

  “We had planned,” said Johnson, glancing at me, “for McIver to take you to the lighthouse harbour, where we would have arranged for you to meet Kenneth under safe supervision, so to speak. Instead, Hennessy took you to the far end, which meant a long and dangerous walk, and then insisted on coming with you. We had already sent Dr Holmes – sorry, Kenneth – a fake message from Tom McIver, altering the rendezvous to the Land Rover. We didn’t want him roving all over South Rona in the dark – it was like King’s Cross Station as it was. In fact, we had to take so many damned precaut
ions that we almost inhibited anything from happening. Only Twiss, kindly transported by Ogden, took a pot shot at Tina and hit Hennessy – it was a difficult shot in the dark and he was basically a coward.

  “He didn’t know that, far from being suspicious, Ogden back at the lighthouse was giving him all the rope he needed to hang himself. He didn’t know that Ogden left the lighthouse almost immediately after he did, but neither of them went back to Seawolf. Twiss took his little Spanish .45 automatic and fired at Tina, damaging Hennessy’s ear. In the furore that followed, with Hennessy and the Buchanans and the Navy all tumbling over each other, Twiss lost his nerve and ran, dropping the gun. Ogden picked it up, we assume, and followed us. Remember, he had expected Holmes to be with Madame Rossi: he didn’t know about the Land Rover scheme. I think in fact he lost her for a while. In any case the chap I had ready to follow her saw nothing of him. What seems likely is that he did eventually try the Land Rover either up on the road or after I had driven down to the jetty, and heard enough to realise that suspicion had indeed shifted now from Kenneth to Michael Twiss. If Kenneth wasn’t going to be his scapegoat, as he hoped, in order to keep Madame Rossi out of it, then Michael would make an excellent substitute. Except that we must never be able to question Michael and to discover that he was really only a dirty little blackmailer after all.

  “Unfortunately for Michael,” continued Johnson, with no regret in his voice at all, “chacun à son métier, he sealed his own immediate fate with great dispatch by ferreting out all Ogden’s highly secret and highly expensive equipment in the fo’c’sle. Ogden, after all, had had to sail the yacht, with very little help, on that misty passage from Portree. He couldn’t be below all the time. And Twiss was emphatically not bound by any ties of loyalty as Victoria was. In fact, his business was to pry. So on arrival at Rum, I should judge, he was ready when Ogden interrupted him playing merry hell in the lab with an immediate counter proposal; pay me what I ask, or I tell the authorities there is something very funny going on in Seawolf. So that Ogden had, quite simply, to kill him – as soon as possible, and with his own gun. If he were lucky, we’d all think it suicide. If he were fearfully lucky, we should find it was murder and accuse Dr Holmes. In any case, everyone would assume Michael Twiss was the man who organised the accident in the Lysander. If he could steal letters from Holmes, he could microfilm blueprints.”