by Gwen Moffat
‘Lavender?’
‘She knew I wasn’t jealous. She knew there was something more important, and Lavender is inquisitive. I hadn’t much influence left with him. After Tuesday night he thought of me as being on Madge’s side, at least while she was alive.’
‘It was Tuesday that Madge told him that she’d seen him in the wood?’
‘Yes. The police had arrived and were with you in the writing room. Gordon brought you tea and Merrick kept him there, do you remember? At that time Madge was upstairs with me in our sitting room. I thought she was subdued and I’d been trying to draw her out as to what was bothering her. You realise that until then she hadn’t attached any importance to hearing Gordon blundering through the wood the evening before; if she guessed he’d come from Largo, she’d have thought he’d merely had a tiff with the girl. All day Tuesday she was on the other end of the Cuillin and she heard that Terry had been killed only when she got back, with Maynard. That’s why she was preoccupied in our sitting room.
‘When Gordon came up from talking to the police, I left them for a few moments and I went down to make some coffee. I was away too long.’
‘Did he attack her? She accused him?’
‘She didn’t accuse him. She asked him what story he had given the police.’ She turned to Miss Pink angrily. ‘That girl was ready to work out a story to dovetail with his, to cover him, just because she and I were friends!’
Miss Pink nodded in agreement. ‘A very loyal person. The relationship between you was alive and active; Terry was dead, and your husband was merely a pawn. If Madge had had any respect for him she wouldn’t have died, because she’d have known it was too dangerous to stay in the glen.’
Gratitude filled Vera’s face, then it hardened. ‘I don’t know how he reacted when she asked him what his story for the police had been. He would have blustered; she would have become impatient—not realising that I knew everything, and wanting to get her questions answered before I came back. He told me, as if in justification of his attacking her, that she was “without a trace of feeling”—for Terry, he meant! He denied everything, so she told him she’d seen him in the wood. I came in just after he’d thrown himself on her. She was in an easy chair and his weight held her down. I rushed over and hit him across the bridge of the nose. Of course, I had no idea what had led up to that but I pretended to misunderstand. It seemed to strengthen his position if I was ignorant of what had happened at Largo.’
‘Or it could have been that your mind refused to accept that here was another homicidal attack.’
‘Possibly. At any rate, after I’d bawled her out for seducing my husband—I’ll never forget the way she looked at me, she was in pain too; he’d got her by the throat—she left, and then he told me about her seeing him in the wood. I thought at first that I’d go to her room and work out a story; after all, she’d been prepared to do that originally, but I held back—for her sake. I felt it was too much to ask after what he’d done to her. Do you know, I don’t think she realised that he’d tried to kill her? Or did she think he was always violent towards women? Otherwise why did she accept the whisky the following night?’
‘She was a strange person,’ Miss Pink said, ‘like Terry. It was as if the powers of assessment were concentrated in one direction; in Madge’s case: towards rock, and that all normal sense of caution regarding human beings was lacking. One wonders if judgement had never developed, or had got partway and atrophied. I can understand Madge stubbornly refusing to be driven away until she’d done the traverse of the ridge, but her moving to Eas Mor was an open invitation to the killer.’
‘It was suicidal! She should have gone to Sligachan. I wanted to warn her, but would I have been able to make her go even if I told her the truth? I compromised and watched Gordon. He stayed down all Wednesday; he knew I was watching—and then he came to me and told me he couldn’t bear to see me so anxious about Madge’s talking; that she never would, she thought too highly of us. In a roundabout way he told me that she had nothing to fear from him and I could stop worrying . . . but if he’d said he was going on the hill on Thursday, I’d have gone with him. I was completely hoodwinked at the times when he did go up there.’
‘In the fog on Wednesday,’ Miss Pink put in, ‘while we were at dinner and you were serving in the kitchen, and again, while you relieved him in the bar and we thought he was in the Rescue Post.’
‘He told me this evening—last evening.’ Vera was listless. ‘She accepted the whisky. She wasn’t in the least frightened. He told me that her not being afraid made him angry. I can see a mad logic in Gordon’s actions.’
‘Oh yes.’ Miss Pink was definite. ‘He was able to justify himself: on the premise that he was a superior person.’
‘He said to me, “She ought to have been afraid! It was unnatural!” He asked her to forgive him, said I’d sent him up. He wished her well on the traverse and said that we both expected her to come back to the house when “it had all blown over”.’
‘He told you all that?’
‘Yes. He said she was quite friendly. My guess, knowing Madge, is that even in those circumstances, she was a little bored—’
Miss Pink nodded. ‘She would be.’
‘And then he produced the whisky and a wee metal cup he carries and they drank to her climb the next day.’
‘My God!’
Vera’s voice was cold. ‘And he came away, and went back when she was comatose and smothered her with a jersey in a plastic bag. He was clever enough to know the jersey on its own would leave fibres. . . . He put the rucksack outside the tent, the billies—you know all the rest. Except before, before—’ She shuddered uncontrollably.
‘She was dead when he threw the body over,’ Miss Pink said gently.
Vera smiled—a kind of smile. ‘How long does it take to die with a jersey and a plastic bag over your face?’ It was Miss Pink’s turn to shudder and then she noticed that Vera was staring fixedly at the water, but the only sign of life was a pair of gannets patrolling lazily. ‘Drowning takes four minutes,’ she said.
‘And the cache?’ Miss Pink asked on a high note. ‘He emptied that yesterday, on his way to Portree.’
‘He left the car in the forest, along the forestry road, and went very fast up Coire a’ Ghreadaidh.’
Miss Pink nodded. ‘Both Irwin and I heard him in the mist; Irwin thought he saw him—he did see him. Hamlyn left the Stone Man just before I got there. He must have heard me coming. He was cutting things very fine. The water bottle and the food would have been thrown down some gully. . . .’
‘He was over the edge,’ Vera said. ‘Mad. It would have taken only a minor thing to make him kill again. Either that or suicide. He was obsessed by death and seemed to have got other people’s muddled with his own, as if killing them was a form of suicide?’
Miss Pink accepted it as a question. ‘It was suicide before the end of capital punishment, and with mad people there will still be that tradition: murder, then suicide. How did it all start? Because his background is at the root of this—’ she gestured towards the water, ‘and it was a question about his roots which put an end to our conversation yesterday evening. I don’t think he was raised in a rectory.’
‘It was a Barnardo’s home, but it wouldn’t have started there. Where does anything start? What made his mother abandon him? Why did his father—? That’s stupid. Why does any man sleep with a woman?’
‘You can go back to the Garden of Eden,’ Miss Pink conceded, ‘but it’s not necessary. I take it he was illegitimate and abandoned and brought up by Dr Barnardo’s people. How well he did for himself. Up to a point,’ she added.
‘Things might have turned out all right if he’d been an ordinary boy,’ Vera said, ‘but he was above average intelligence. I don’t know whether the drive for success was a matter of genes or of conditioning; something of both, wouldn’t you say?’
Her companion nodded. ‘Often success stops at the end of a stage but obviously he tran
sferred to a similar environment and found another ladder?’
‘He joined the Army as a boy recruit, and he was commissioned at the outbreak of the war. He was a good officer: cool and brave and a strong disciplinarian. That was his guiding principle. He could assert discipline, and accept it. He knew his place.’ She paused and watched a gannet fall like a stone against the far headland. A spurt of water rose behind it. ‘He had rages,’ Vera went on, ‘but he had iron control. I think I was the only person who saw him lose his temper. A spaniel was wished on us once when some friends were posted suddenly. It was spoilt, and one day when it refused to get off a chair Gordon throttled it—just like that, apparently without any rage at all.
‘He hated civilian life; he couldn’t find a niche. He applied for various institutional jobs, he even considered the prison service, but the selectors must have seen he could never work with young civilians, even middle-aged ones, let alone with delinquents.’
Miss Pink said with sympathy, ‘The Services are a closed world; it must have been a traumatic experience, for him particularly, to have to come out into—what? A free-for-all?’
‘It was shocking: after years, decades, of respect and appreciation, he suddenly found himself being treated like a silly old man by youngsters less than half his age. Climbing was a case in point. Young Army climbers had always deferred to him because of his rank; it was automatic. He was terribly, agonisingly unhappy, like a man who doesn’t know what’s hit him.
‘Suddenly an aunt died and left me quite a bit of money. We bought Glen Shira House. We’d both known Shira before we were married. Things went well for a time—this was in the early sixties, you understand. What he didn’t realise was that even Shira was changing, more slowly than the Lake District and Wales, but the climbers were bringing new attitudes, what he called decadence. And the crofters changed—or so he maintained. Once, when he was shouting at old MacNeill about tipping in Scarf Geo, MacNeill told him that gentlemen didn’t lose their tempers. He was depressed for days. You see, he’d worked hard to get away from what he thought of as a stigma: his birth, the Barnardo’s home; being an officer and a gentleman was his peak of achievement, but on the one hand the present youngsters saw no value in what he’d achieved, on the other, an elderly peasant suggested that he was a fraud. That’s how he saw it. It was as if his life was crumbling away.’
‘You couldn’t help,’ Miss Pink said. It was a statement, not a question. Obviously Vera had not been able to help.
She said quietly, ‘He seemed set on destroying himself. About a year ago he mentioned suicide. He felt persecuted, even by me. He’d confess his fears and all his frustrations and then accuse me of being about to leave him because he was a failure. Success meant so much to him, worldly success, that there were no other values. He saw no point in going on living. Then he’d rage at me, I think mainly because he sensed that I didn’t consider success—in his terms—important. I didn’t say so, but he knew; he isn’t thick, you know, not really. I mean, he wasn’t.’
There was a disturbance in the water and a seal humped itself out of the sea and settled on a shelf, gleaming like a long wet boulder. The tide was full now, and with the day, the cloud was disintegrating about the peaks of Rum.
‘His remorse was worse than his rages,’ Vera said coldly, as if she didn’t want to get involved again, as if speaking without emotion could keep the thing at a distance. ‘It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d had no sense of guilt. . . .’ She shook her head helplessly. ‘You see why I tried to make Terry go? He was fascinated by her and she was so careless. Gordon had to be handled with kid gloves and—’ her voice dropped, ‘—you had to love him. All Terry saw was what she called—she actually called him!—a dirty old man! And she said he was only pretending to be shocked because she’d been sunbathing. Can you imagine? When she jeered at him that night, she was telling him things about himself that he’d suppressed for all his adult life. She hurt him—and she had all the weapons.’
‘Except one,’ Miss Pink reminded her.
‘Yes, except the last. Silly child. It was just Gordon’s bad luck that he had to be the one who was goaded too far.’
‘No,’ Miss Pink said. ‘His control was going; it would have happened with another woman, another person, quite soon. He was a victim too.’
‘The murder was the end,’ Vera told her. ‘He was genuinely appalled at what he’d done but that didn’t last. Within a couple of days he must have planned how to kill Madge. Planned it, as you said; it wasn’t impulsive.’ She shook her head in horror. ‘And yet there was that crazy reasoning: he’d committed murder but Madge treated it as a minor delinquency, on a par with the nude bathing or poaching, so he killed her as much to punish her as out of self-preservation—because she didn’t give the murder its value!’
‘Did he tell you that?’
‘Oh yes; he always tried to explain himself. We talked a long time last evening. . . . He said she had no moral fibre.’
‘You’ve been in considerable danger yourself.’
‘Not until yesterday. While he was comparatively sane, while he cared about appearances, I was safe. He needed me.’
‘When did he come to think he didn’t need you any more?’
Vera was silent for a moment, considering, then she went on, ‘In one way he needed me right to the last. Yesterday morning, after I’d watched him leave for Portree, I was going to go and see Madge as soon as I could get away but Ken came in with the news—and I came to realise how she’d been killed; not the details, of course, but I knew who’d killed her. We talked when he came back from Portree and he threatened to kill himself if I didn’t stand by him. I could have given him an alibi for the dinner period on Wednesday, you see: the first time he went to Eas Mor. Ida was in the dining room, Euphemia was turning down beds. I could have said I went in the bar or he came in the kitchen. But I wouldn’t do it, not for Madge’s murder. Terry’s was an accident—’ They regarded each other doubtfully and Vera amended that. ‘May have been an accident, but Madge’s murder was—’ She moved her hand blindly on the turf as if the search for a word was physical. ‘Wrong,’ she said. ‘Monstrous. It was planned.’
From the east, in the direction of the mainland, came a faint and alien sound: a distant engine.
‘Something had to be done quickly.’ Vera’s voice took on a note of urgency. ‘There was no time to consider—at that moment. I said I wouldn’t give him away.’ She shook her head vehemently. ‘I would never have given him up to the police, even in these days.’
The drone of the aircraft grew louder and Miss Pink wondered what the searchers were looking for—certainly not two ladies sitting on the shore and contemplating the sea.
‘So he asked me to run him out of the glen in the boot of the car or on the floor but I told him I was under suspicion and would be stopped at the ferry if not before. So he said that if I could incriminate myself for long enough to draw their fire just while he managed to get out of the glen, he might be able to get away altogether. He proposed to take the boat and reach some place on the mainland where he’d steal a car. He actually said he’d “steal”—no euphemism. He was out in the open.’
Now they heard the clatter of rotor blades. The helicopter was flying parallel with the coast but some distance out to sea. The seal flopped in the water.
‘So you went down and filled the boat.’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘I brought the can back full.’
‘So the boat had no fuel in the tank.’
‘It had enough to get here.’
The helicopter, having turned in to Loch Shira, came back and circled the drifting dinghy. Speech was impossible. At length the aircraft dipped away and headed for the glen. Vera stood up and went to the ruin for the rifle.
‘I heard two shots,’ Miss Pink said.
‘Yes?’
‘You said you didn’t shoot him, and it was dark so unless he was very close to the shore you co
uldn’t have done.’ Vera looked politely interested. ‘There are no witnesses,’ Miss Pink said, for the second time this morning.
‘That doesn’t matter. He got as far as here, and the fuel ran out. He had no oars and he can’t—couldn’t swim. I had started along the coast when he left Glen Shira and I had a torch. I heard him calling when I reached the Boat Port.’
‘He was calling for help?’
‘Yes. He didn’t know who the torch belonged to at that point, you see.’
‘Go on.’
‘He was quite close inshore actually, close enough for communication, but I didn’t say anything. I fired the rifle—in the air.’
Miss Pink frowned. ‘To let him know who you were?’
She did not answer directly. ‘He was quiet for some time and then he started to plead with me. He said that if I didn’t get help, or swim out to him, he would drown himself.’
Neither spoke for a while. Oyster catchers were piping, gulls called; out on the water the dinghy rocked unattended, drifting gently shorewards with the current.
‘So you fired the second shot—in the air?’
‘Then I heard the splash. Of course,’ Vera said quietly to the sea, ‘it was the only thing he could do in the circumstances. He wanted to die; he just needed a bit of encouragement.’
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