Five Red Herrings

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  He nodded meaningly.

  ‘Ye’ll be thinking of Hugh Farren?’ suggested McAdam.

  ‘I’ll be naming no names,’ said Murray, ‘but it’s well known that he has made trouble for himself with a certain lady.’

  ‘It’s no fault of the lady’s,’ said McGeoch, emphatically.

  ‘I’m not saying it is. But there’s some gets into trouble without others to help them to it.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have fancied Campbell in the rôle of a home-breaker,’ said Wimsey, pleasantly.

  ‘I shouldn’t fancy him at all,’ growled Waters, ‘but he fancies himself quite enough, and one of these days—’

  ‘There, there,’ said Murdoch, hastily. ‘It’s true he’s no a verra popular man, is Campbell, but it’s best to be patient and tak’ no notice of him.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ said Waters.

  ‘And wasn’t there some sort of row about fishing?’ interrupted Wimsey. If the talk had to be about Campbell, it was best to steer it away from Waters at all costs.

  ‘Och, ay,’ said McAdam. ‘Him and Mr. Jock Graham is juist at daggers drawn aboot it. Mr. Graham will be fishing the pool below Campbell’s hoose. Not but there’s plenty pools in the Fleet wi’out disturbin’ Campbell, if the man wad juist be peaceable aboot it. But it’s no his pool when a’s said and dune – the river’s free – and it’s no to be expectit that Mr. Graham will pay ony heed to his claims, him that pays nae heed to onybody.’

  ‘Particularly,’ said McGeoch, ‘after Campbell had tried to duck him in the Fleet.’

  ‘Did he though, by Jove?’ said Wimsey, interested.

  ‘Ay, but he got weel duckit himsel’,’ said Murdoch, savouring the reminiscence. ‘And Graham’s been fushin’ there every nicht since then, wi’ yin or twa of the lads. He’ll be there the nicht, I wadna wonder.’

  ‘Then if Campbell’s spoiling for a row, he’ll know where to go for it,’ said Wimsey. ‘Come on, Waters, we’d better make tracks.’

  Waters, still sulky, rose and followed him. Wimsey steered him home to his lodgings, prattling cheerfully, and tucked him into bed.

  ‘And I shouldn’t let Campbell get on your nerves,’ he said, interrupting a long grumble, ‘he’s not worth it. Go to sleep and forget it, or you’ll do no work tomorrow. That’s pretty decent, by the way,’ he added, pausing before a landscape which was propped on the chest of drawers. ‘You’re a good hand with the knife, aren’t you, old man?’

  ‘Who, me?’ said Waters. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Campbell’s the only man who can handle a knife in this place – according to him. He’s even had the blasted cheek to say Gowan is an out-of-date blunderer.’

  ‘That’s high treason, isn’t it?’

  ‘I should think so. Gowan’s a real painter – my God, it makes me hot when I think of it. He actually said it at the Arts Club in Edinburgh, before a whole lot of people, friends of Gowan’s.’

  ‘And what did Gowan say?’

  ‘Oh, various things. They’re not on speaking terms now. Damn the fellow. He’s not fit to live. You heard what he said to me?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t want to hear it again. Let the fellow dree his own weird. He’s not worth bothering with.’

  ‘No, that’s a fact. And his work’s not so wonderful as to excuse his beastly personality.’

  ‘Can’t he paint?’

  ‘Oh, he can paint – after a fashion. He’s what Gowan calls him – a commercial traveller. His stuff’s damned impressive at first sight, but it’s all tricks. Anybody could do it, given the formula. I could do a perfectly good Campbell in half an hour. Wait a moment, I’ll show you.’

  He thrust a leg out from the bed. Wimsey pushed him firmly back again.

  ‘Show me some other time. When I’ve seen his stuff. I can’t tell if the imitation’s good till I’ve seen the original, can I?’

  ‘No. Well, you go and look at his things and then I’ll show you. Oh, Lord, my head’s fuzzy like nothing on earth.’

  ‘Go to sleep,’ said Wimsey. ‘Shall I tell Mrs. McLeod to let you sleep in, as they say? And call you with a couple of aspirins on toast?’

  ‘No; I’ve got to be up early, worse luck. But I shall be all right in the morning.’

  ‘Well, cheerio, then, and sweet dreams,’ said Wimsey.

  He shut the door after him carefully and wandered thoughtfully back to his own habitation.

  Campbell, chugging fitfully homewards across the hill which separates Kirkcudbright from Gatehouse-of-Fleet, recapitulated his grievances to himself in a sour monotone, as he mishandled his gears. That damned, sneering, smirking swine Waters! He’d managed to jolt him out of his pose of superiority, anyhow. Only he wished it hadn’t happened before McGeoch. McGeoch would tell Strachan and Strachan would redouble his own good opinion of himself. ‘You see,’ he would say, ‘I turned the man off the golf-course and look how right I was to do it. He’s just a fellow that gets drunk and quarrels in public-houses.’ Curse Strachan, with his perpetual sergeant-major’s air of having you on the mat. Strachan, with his domesticity and his precision and his local influence, was at the base of all the trouble, if one came to think of it. He pretended to say nothing, and all the time he was spreading rumours and scandal and setting the whole place against one. Strachan was a friend of that fellow Farren too. Farren would hear about it, and would jump at the excuse to make himself still more obnoxious. There would have been no silly row that night at all if it hadn’t been for Farren. That disgusting scene before dinner! That was what had driven him, Campbell, to the McClellan Arms. His hand hesitated on the wheel. Why not go back straight away and have the thing out with Farren?

  After all, what did it matter? He stopped the car and lit a cigarette, smoking fast and savagely. If the whole place was against him, he hated the place anyhow. There was only one decent person in it, and she was tied up to that brute Farren. The worst of it was, she was devoted to Farren. She didn’t care twopence for anybody else, if Farren would only see it. And he, Campbell, knew it as well as anybody. He wanted nothing wrong. He only wanted, when he was tired and fretted, and sick of his own lonely, uncomfortable shack of a place, to go and sit among the cool greens and blues of Gilda Farren’s sitting-room and be soothed by her slim beauty and comforting voice. And Farren, with no more sense or imagination than a bull, must come blundering in, breaking the spell, putting his own foul interpretation on the thing, trampling the lilies in Campbell’s garden of refuge. No wonder Farren’s landscapes looked as if they were painted with an axe. The man had no delicacy. His reds and blues hurt your eyes, and he saw life in reds and blues. If Farren were to die, now, if one could take his bull-neck in one’s hands and squeeze it till his great staring blue eyes popped out like – he laughed – like bull’s eyes – that was a damned funny joke. He’d like to tell Farren that and see how he took it.

  Farren was a devil, a beast, a bully, with his artistic temperament, which was nothing but inartistic temper. There was no peace with Farren about. There was no peace anywhere. If he went back to Gatehouse, he knew what he would find there. He had only to look out of his bedroom window to see Jock Graham whipping the water just under the wall of the house – doing it on purpose to annoy him. Why couldn’t Graham leave him alone? There was better fishing up by the dams. The whole thing was sheer persecution. It wasn’t any good, either, to go to bed and take no notice. They would wake him up in the small hours, banging at his window and bawling out the number of their catch – they might even leave a contemptuous offering of trout on his window-sill, wretched little fish like minnows, which ought to have been thrown back again. He only hoped Graham would slip up on the stones one night and fill his waders and be drowned among his infernal fish. The thing that riled him most of all was that this nightly comedy was played out under the delighted eye of his neighbour, Ferguson. Since that fuss about the garden-wall, Ferguson had become absolutely intolerable.

  It was perfectly true, of course, th
at he had backed his car into Ferguson’s wall and knocked down a stone or two, but if Ferguson had left his wall in decent repair it wouldn’t have done any damage. That great tree of Ferguson’s had sent its roots right under the wall and broken up the foundations, and what was more, it threw up huge suckers in Campbell’s garden. He was perpetually rooting the beastly things up. A man had no right to grow trees under a wall so that it tumbled down at the slightest little push, and then demand extravagant payments for repairs. He would not repair Ferguson’s wall. He would see Ferguson damned first.

  He gritted his teeth. He wanted to get out of this stifle of petty quarrels and have one good, big, blazing row with somebody. If only he could have smashed Waters’ face to pulp – let himself go – had the thing out, he would have felt better. Even now he could go back – or forward – it didn’t matter which, and have the whole blasted thing right out with somebody.

  He had been brooding so deeply that he never noticed the hum of a car in the distance and the lights flickering out and disappearing as the road dipped and wound. The first thing he heard was a violent squealing of brakes and an angry voice demanding:

  ‘What the bloody hell are you doing, you fool, sitting out like that in the damn middle of the road right on the bend?’ And then, as he turned, blinking in the glare of the headlights, to grapple with this new attack, he heard the voice say, with a kind of exasperated triumph:

  ‘Campbell. Of course. I might have known it couldn’t be anybody else.’

  CAMPBELL DEAD

  ‘Did ye hear about Mr. Campbell?’ said Mr. Murdoch of the McClellan Arms, polishing a glass carefully as a preparation for filling it with beer.

  ‘Why, what further trouble has he managed to get into since last night?’ asked Wimsey. He leaned an elbow on the bar and prepared to relish anything that might be offered to him.

  ‘He’s deid,’ said Mr. Murdoch.

  ‘Deid?’ said Wimsey, startled into unconscious mimicry.

  Mr. Murdoch nodded.

  ‘Och, ay; McAdam’s juist brocht the news in from Gatehouse. They found the body at 2 o’clock up in the hills by Newton Stewart.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ said Wimsey. ‘But what did he die of?’

  ‘Juist tummled intae the burn,’ replied Mr. Murdoch, ‘an’ drooned himself, by what they say. The pollis’ll be up there now tae bring him doon.’

  ‘An accident, I suppose.’

  ‘Ay, imph’m. The folk at the Borgan seed him pentin’ there shortly after 10 this morning on the wee bit high ground by the brig, and Major Dougal gaed by at 2 o’clock wi’ his rod an’ spied the body liggin’ in the burn. It’s slippery there and fou o’ broken rocks. I’m thinkin’ he’ll ha’ climbed doon tae fetch some watter for his pentin’, mebbe, and slippit on the stanes.’

  ‘He wouldn’t want water for oil-paints,’ said Wimsey, thoughfully, ‘but he might have wanted to mix mustard for his sandwiches or fill a kettle or get a drop for his whiskey. I say, Murdoch, I think I’ll just toddle over there in the car and have a look at him. Corpses are rather in my line, you know. Where is this place exactly?’

  ‘Ye maun tak’ the coast-road through Creetown to Newton Stewart,’ said Mr. Murdoch, ‘and turn to the richt over the brig and then to the richt again at the signpost along the road to Bargrennan and juist follow the road till ye turn over a wee brig on the richt-hand side over the Cree and then tak’ the richt-hand road.’

  ‘In fact,’ said Wimsey, ‘you keep on turning to the right. I think I know the place. There’s a bridge and another gate, and a burn with salmon in it.’

  ‘Ay, the Minnoch, whaur Mr. Dennison caught the big fish last year. Well, it’ll be juist afore ye come to the gate, away to your left abune the brig.’

  Wimsey nodded.

  ‘I’ll be off then,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to miss the fun. See you later, old boy. I say – I don’t mind betting this is the most popular thing Campbell ever did. Nothing in life became him like the leaving it, eh, what?’

  It was a marvellous day in late August, and Wimsey’s soul purred within him as he pushed the car along. The road from Kirkcudbright to Newton Stewart is of a varied loveliness hard to surpass, and with a sky full of bright sun and rolling cloud-banks, hedges filled with flowers, a well-made road, a lively engine and the prospect of a good corpse at the end of it, Lord Peter’s cup of happiness was full. He was a man who loved simple pleasures.

  He passed through Gatehouse, waving a cheerful hand to the proprietor of the Anwoth Hotel, climbed up beneath the grim blackness of Cardoness Castle, drank in for the thousandth time the strange Japanese beauty of Mossyard Farm, set like a red jewel under its tufted trees on the blue sea’s rim, and the Italian loveliness of Kirkdale, with its fringe of thin and twisted trees and the blue Wigtownshire coast gleaming across the bay. Then the old Border keep of Barholm, surrounded by white-washed farm buildings; then a sudden gleam of bright grass, like a lawn in Avalon, under the shade of heavy trees. The wild garlic was over now, but the scent of it seemed still to hang about the place in memory, filling it with the shudder of vampire wings and memories of the darker side of Border history. Then the old granite crushing mill on its white jetty, surrounded by great clouds of stone-dust, with a derrick sprawled across the sky and a tug riding at anchor. Then the salmon-nets and the wide semi-circular sweep of the bay, rosy every summer with sea-pinks, purple-brown with the mud of the estuary, majestic with the huge hump of Cairnsmuir rising darkly over Creetown. Then the open road again, dipping and turning – the white lodge on the left, the cloud-shadows rolling, the cottages with their roses and asters clustered against white and yellow walls; then Newton Stewart, all grey roofs huddling down to the stony bed of the Cree, its thin spires striking the sky-line. Over the bridge and away to the right by the kirkyard, and then the Bargrennan road, curling like the road to Roundabout, with the curves of the Cree glittering through the tree-stems and the tall blossoms and bracken golden by the wayside. Then the lodge and the long avenue of rhododendrons – then a wood of silver birch, mounting, mounting, to shut out the sunlight. Then a cluster of stone cottages – then the bridge and the gate, and the stony hill-road, winding between mounds round as the hill of the King of Elfland, green with grass and purple with heather and various with sweeping shadows.

  Wimsey pulled up as he came to the second bridge and the rusty gate, and drew the car on to the grass. There were other cars there, and glancing along to the left he saw a little group of men gathered on the edge of the burn forty or fifty yards from the road. He approached by way of a little sheep-track, and found himself standing on the edge of a scarp of granite that shelved steeply down to the noisy waters of the Minnoch. Beside him, close to the edge of the rock, stood a sketching easel, with a stool and a palette. Down below, at the edge of a clear brown pool, fringed with knotted hawthorns lay something humped and dismal, over which two or three people were bending.

  A man, who might have been a crofter, greeted Wimsey with a kind of cautious excitement.

  ‘He’s doon there, sir. Ay, he’ll juist ha’ slippit over the edge. Yon’s Sergeant Dalziel and Constable Ross, mekkin’ their investigation the noo.’

  There seemed little doubt how the accident had happened. On the easel was a painting, half, or more than half finished, still wet and shining. Wimsey could imagine the artist getting up, standing away to view what he had done – stepping farther back towards the treacherous granite slope. Then the scrape of a heel on the smooth stone, the desperate effort to recover, the slither of leather on the baked short grass, the stagger, the fall, and the bump, bump, bump of the tumbling body, sheer down the stone face of the ravine to where the pointed rocks grinned like teeth among the chuckling water.

  ‘I know the man,’ said Wimsey. ‘It’s a very nasty thing, isn’t it? I’ll think I’ll go down and have a look.’

  ‘Ye’ll mind your footing,’ said the crofter.

  ‘I certainly will,’ said Wimsey, clambering crablike among the st
ones and bracken. ‘I don’t want to make another police-exhibit.’

  The Sergeant looked up at the sound of Wimsey’s scrambling approach. They had met already, and Dalziel was prepared for Wimsey’s interest in corpses, however commonplace the circumstances.

  ‘Hech, my lord,’ said he, cheerfully. ‘I dooted ye’d be here before verra long. Ye’ll know Dr. Cameron, maybe?’

  Wimsey shook hands with the doctor – a lanky man with a non-committal face – and asked how they were getting on with the business.

  ‘Och, well, I’ve examined him,’ said the doctor. ‘He’s dead beyond a doubt – been dead some hours, too. The rigor, ye see, is well developed.’

  ‘Was he drowned?’

  ‘I cannot be certain about that. But my opinion – mind ye, it is only my opinion – is that he was not. The bones of the temple are fractured, and I would be inclined to say he got his death in falling or in striking the stones in the burn. But I cannot make a definite pronouncement, you understand, till I have had an autopsy and seen if there is any water in his lungs.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Wimsey. ‘The bump on the head might only have made him unconscious, and the actual cause of death might be drowning.’

  ‘That is so. When we first saw him, he was lying with his mouth under water, but that might very well come from washing about in the scour of the burn. There are certain abrasions on the hands and head, some of which are – again in my opinion – post-mortem injuries. See here – and here.’

  The doctor turned the corpse over, to point out the marks in question. It moved all of a piece, crouched and bundled together, as though it had stiffened in the act of hiding its face from the brutal teeth of the rocks.

  ‘But here’s where he got the big dunt,’ added the doctor. He guided Wimsey’s fingers to Campbell’s left temple, and Wimsey felt the bone give under his light pressure.

  ‘Nature has left the brain ill-provided in those parts,’ remarked Dr. Cameron. ‘The skull there is remarkably thin, and a comparatively trifling blow will crush it like an egg-shell.’