“That’s splendid. On the way we might look in on Mrs. Grant. As she lives not so far from Tannasgan, we might be able to pick up some local gossip about the laird’s death. There are certain to be lots of rumours and perhaps some cast-iron facts which won’t reach the ears of the police.”
“You are determined to involve us both?”
“Well, I didn’t dislike the laird and I deeply dislike murder. What about it?”
“I see no harm in calling upon Mrs. Grant.”
“Atta-baby! What’s the matter with starting out tomorrow? As there’s no hurry, we could go by way of Glasgow and Loch Lomond and spend a night at the Inversnaid hotel.”
“Whence you can walk to Loch Katrine and the Trossachs?”
“Don’t suppose I shall bother. I love Inversnaid, and I’m not the only one. What about William Wordsworth, not to mention Gerard Manley Hopkins?” said Laura.
CHAPTER FIVE
At Inversnaid
“Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the bead-bonny ash that sits over the burn.”
Gerard Manley Hopkins
* * *
APART from a rather messy pilgrimage along the shores of Loch Lomond to some rocks known as Rob Roy’s Cave, and a steep and slippery climb up steps from the hotel past the Falls of Arklet, there is no walk from the Inversnaid Hotel except by the road through Glen Arklet and past the village at the top of the hill. This walk Laura took very early in the morning. She and Dame Beatrice had left George and the Jaguar on the western side of the loch and had crossed the water in the hotel launch on the previous afternoon. They were to stay the night before making their leisurely way to the north-west.
On Laura’s left, as she climbed the winding hill, were the lower slopes of Stob-an-Fhàinne, with a house here and there well-screened by trees. On her right was the laughing, sobbing, endlessly noisy Arklet Water as it cascaded turbulently downhill to Wordsworth’s Falls to crash impressively into Loch Lomond. Bushes and bracken grew thickly on the high banks, but whenever there was a gap Laura paused to survey the leaping water. Her progress, because of this, was slow and, looking at her watch when she reached the little church, she decided that by the time she reached the reservoir of Loch Arklet it would be as well to turn back. In any case, the road to Loch Katrine was less interesting at this point.
She stood awhile by the loch, but it had been made too functional for natural beauty and was now part of the Glasgow waterworks (its size having been just about doubled for this purpose), so she turned and strolled back towards the village, through which she had passed before gaining the loch-side.
Just as she reached the post office a man came up the hill towards her and, with a sinking of the heart, she recognised her boatman. He stepped purposefully up to her and barred her way.
“Oh, Lord! You again?” she said, with distaste, remembering the note she had had from him.
“Me again. You got the letter I left at Slanleibh?”
“Yes, I did, but I don’t keep a diary.”
“I thought you might not, so I’ll trouble you to sign a paper I’ve drafted out.”
“Look here,” said Laura, “ever since that night you helped me cross the loch from Tannasgan you’ve been dogging my footsteps. I thought at first it was coincidence, but I know better now, and I am not prepared to sign anything for you. Furthermore, this nuisance must now cease. It’s becoming something remarkably like persecution. I don’t wish to be unkind, but I’m beginning to feel absolutely haunted.”
“You’ll sign my paper and then I’ll leave you alone.”
“I’ve told you I’ll sign nothing. I understand your anxiety, but it’s no business of mine.”
“You know that the laird of Tannasgan was murdered?”
“Yes, I heard in Edinburgh that he’d been killed by stabbing, and his body put into a barrel.”
“That’s right. And when I go to the police with my story of how you skipped at dead of night from An Tigh Mór, what sort of position will you be in? No, no! You and I must stick together. Come, now. We go surety for each other.”
“Kindly get out of my way. I want my breakfast,” said Laura. She pushed past him, but he clutched her arm.
“You and I must stick together,” he repeated. Laura swung round. She was of Amazonian strength and fitness and of a high-mettled temperament. With her free hand she caught him a vicious blow on the nose and then wrenched herself away and strode off down the hill. She glanced back when she reached the first bend, but the man was making no attempt to follow her. He was mopping up the blood which was streaming from his nose.
Laura told Dame Beatrice the story at breakfast, and added that she hoped, most sincerely, that she would see no more of the young man. She wondered whether he had walked to Loch Katrine to take the Trossachs steamer. From Callander he could take a train and thus, although probably in a very roundabout way, get back to Freagair or as far as Tigh-Òsda, if he had decided to return to Tannasgan. From what he had written and from what he had said, however, she thought he was far more likely to avoid the neighbourhood of the crime and might make for Inverness or go back to Edinburgh, from where he must have followed her to Inversnaid.
Before she left the hotel again, it occurred to her to ask at the office whether a Mr. Grant had booked in. She described him. The receptionist looked rather suspicious, Laura thought.
“A gentleman such as you describe booked in last night,” she said. “His motor-cycle is still here. He came across with it in the launch while you were having your dinner. He was out walking the morn and has not yet been back for his breakfast, but his name is not Grant.”
“My mistake,” said Laura. “I met him on holiday and thought I recognised him this morning. I was certainly under the impression that he told me his name was Grant.”
“His name is Campbell.”
“Ah, my hearing is not what it was.”
“Is it not? Och, well, maybe Campbell would sound like Grant to a Sassenach.”
Laura thought it best to ignore this insult to her Highland ancestry. She nodded in her turn and followed Dame Beatrice into the open air.
“Do you still want to put in the rest of the day here?” her employer asked, when Laura told her that the man, Grant or Campbell, had booked in at the hotel and had spent the night under the same roof as themselves. “But perhaps the encounter has spoilt the place for you.”
“No, of course not. What do you yourself feel about it?”
“That, if you go off by yourself, I shall feel happier if you borrow a stout ashplant from the array which I noticed in the glassed-in porch.”
“By no means a bad idea, although I’m hardly likely to meet our friend on the slopes of Ben Lomond.”
“One never knows. You are proposing to climb, then?”
“On second thoughts, said to be best, I believe I’d like to leave here after lunch and make for Fort William, where we’re booked for a bed tonight, so I shall give Ben Lomond a miss and take a scramble up the steps beside the falls and come back by road. But there’s no hurry for that. The weather, praise be, is fine, so we might as well take a seat out here and meditate. I always like an after-breakfast cigarette.”
It was while she was enjoying this as they sat on an uncomfortable bench provided by the hotel that Grant-Campbell came back for a late breakfast. Either he did not notice them (which was quite likely, because their seat was well below the level of the gravel forecourt of the hotel), or else he avoided looking at them, for he marched straight to the glassed-in porch and passed into the entrance hall.
Laura decided to stay where she was, in order to see what he did and where he went when he emerged. He did not keep her very long. After about thirty-five minutes he came out again and descended the rough flight of steps to board the hotel launch.
Laura earnestly hoped that they had se
en the last of him, but this was not the case. He conferred for a short time with the two men who ran the launch as a ferry service, climbed the steps again, paused, and looked about him, then saw Laura. With a slightly exaggerated bow, which was intended to include Dame Beatrice, he asked whether he might share the seat with them. Laura scowled, but her employer gave the interloper an encouraging leer and moved up to give him room to sit down.
“A pleasant prospect,” she observed, waving a proprietary hand towards Loch Lomond. “Are you staying here long?”
“I’m staying here as long as you do,” he replied. “I’m in trouble and I need this lady’s help. I don’t know why she refuses it.”
“Possibly because she has not been told in sufficient detail why you solicit it. Should you not put all your cards on the table?”
“Should I? Can I trust you?”
“How do I know?”
“Well, I can’t be worse off. I’m certain to be arrested, anyway.”
“Even if Mrs. Gavin and I are able to succour you?”
“Oh, I don’t know! I’ve been on Mrs. Gavin’s trail ever since the night I rowed her across the loch, hoping she’d consent to speak up for me when the time came. But women are flint-hearted, even when a man’s life may be at stake.”
“But what makes you believe that Mrs. Gavin can speak up for you, as you express it? Mrs. Gavin, who is my personal private secretary as well as my young friend, has told me of her adventures, and nothing in her account, which, I am sure, has been of the fullest, gives me any reason to think that she can help you. What causes you to think she can?”
“Because,” said the young man, “Cu Dubh was murdered just as I was tying up the boat to set Mrs. Gavin ashore, so, if there is any trouble, it will be up to her to clear me.”
CHAPTER SIX
The Piper’s Tune
“…of which this one
In chief he urg’d—that I should always shun
The island of the man-delighting Sun.”
George Chapman
* * *
“INTERESTING,” said Dame Beatrice. “Pray go on.”
“I can do you the next bit myself,” said Laura, “but we’d better have the revised version.”
The young man looked at her with loathing.
“It’s no revised version you’ll be getting, but the authorised account,” he protested, “and you can check it against your own knowledge. Now, then!”
“My own knowledge isn’t extensive,” said Laura, assuming a meekness she did not feel, but aware that Dame Beatrice did not want the witness antagonised beyond the point which had been reached. “Carry on. We’re all agog.”
“I went to Tannasgan in answer to a letter from my uncle.”
“Your uncle being the laird?”
“No, no, Mrs. Gavin. My uncle is the man Corrie. He wrote that there was a job going at An Tigh Mór. As I was finishing my term at the University and needed to make a little money during the vacation, this was good news, so I happened along to present myself to the laird.”
“And got the job?”
“I was on trial for a fortnight. If I suited it, I was to stay until the laird could get a permanent body. If not…”
“And what were you expected to do?” asked Dame Beatrice.
“It doesn’t matter telling you that, for the laird is dead and, in any case, I didn’t carry out what he laid upon me and nobody can pretend that I did. My job was to sabotage, in any way that presented itself, the hydro-electrical scheme near Tigh-Òsda.”
“Did your uncle know the nature of this assignment?”
“No, no. He was as horrified as I was, when I told him what I was expected to do. However, we were agreed that the laird was mad to think of such a thing, and that there would be nothing I could do about it.”
“The laird was mad all right,” said Laura, “but, as I believe I told you on Skye, I rather liked him.”
“It’s as well that somebody did, then, for he was very short of friends, I’m thinking.”
“How long had you been on Tannasgan when Mrs. Gavin called there?” asked Dame Beatrice. “She does not seem to have seen you until you met at the boathouse that night.”
“A matter of two days, so, you see, apart from all else, I wouldn’t have known the laird well enough to want to murder him,” the young man replied, ignoring the implication contained in her last remark.
“That’s as may be,” said Laura. “I’ve known myself to be in people’s company no more than half an hour and I’d find myself wanting to murder them.”
“Ay, but that’s only in a manner of speaking. You’ve never translated the wish into action. Now the laird surely has been murdered, and…”
“And you knew he was going to be. You’ve let that much out, haven’t you? You told us that the laird was murdered just as you were tying up the boat to set me ashore. How did you know what was happening?”
“It was, first, the unearthly wailing and screaming on the pipes, and then the silence. The noise clearly told of the stabbing and the silence must have shown that he was dead.”
“All this sounds as though you may have been an accessory before the fact. You knew he was going to be murdered?”
“I did not, then. It was after I had the news of his death that I put two and two together.” Young Grant sounded desperate.
“What were you doing down at the boathouse when Mrs. Gavin was leaving the house?” asked Dame Beatrice.
“I was having a quiet smoke and I was wondering, to tell the truth, how I could keep my position and take the laird’s wages without attempting to do the job I was to be paid for. Maybe it doesn’t sound over honest, but I comforted myself with the thought that I could always lend my Uncle Corrie a hand about the place and so earn my money that way.”
“Who killed your employer? Do you know?”
“I could not hazard a guess. According to my uncle, there were plenty who did not like him, and it did not take me two days to find out the reason. He was a stubborn, self-opinionated, selfish old stot.”
“Was he a wealthy man?”
“That’s not for me to say. He was a warm man, I think, but he kept just the two servants, my Uncle and Auntie Corrie. Still, they were on comfortable wages and the food was plentiful. They had no cause to grumble.”
“But you had no idea of the value of his property?” Dame Beatrice had taken over all the questioning and Laura retired into the background to wait until it seemed necessary that she should speak to the facts as she knew them.
“Property, is it? He owned the loch and its fish and the islands on it and, of course, the house, but you could buy the lot, I dare say, for a few thousands. If the laird was rich, it was not in land and water. No, no. He had some other ways of making money. My uncle was telling me that when he wasn’t calling at the hydro-electric plant to complain, he was away to Inverness or Edinburgh on business and would be from home perhaps a week at a time, sometimes longer, but my uncle did not know what his business was.”
The association of the names of the two cities brought about another association in Laura’s mind.
“You say your name’s Grant?” she asked.
“It is, ay.”
“You did say you were not related to the Grants who live at a house called Coinneamh Lodge?”
“Coinneamh Lodge? No, I’ve no relatives living in such a place, so far as I know. And whereabouts would this Coinneamh Lodge be situated?”
“Oh, somewhere between Freagair and Tigh-Òsda, but nearer to Tigh-Òsda. You have to cross the river and the railway-line to get there. It’s rather an isolated place, I should think. I wouldn’t want to live there myself, but I may have told you that I spent the night there”—she had picked up a signal from Dame Beatrice that she was to go on talking—“after I’d driven Mrs. Grant home from Tigh-Òsda station after their station wagon had broken down. I suddenly thought of it when you mentioned Inverness and Edinburgh and remembered that your name was Gran
t, the same as hers.”
“And why would Inverness and Edinburgh bring all that to your mind, Mrs. Gavin?”
“Oh, because Mr. Grant was going by train. He said that he was going to Inverness, but Mrs. Grant told me he was going to Edinburgh, too. It just seemed a coincidence when you mentioned them.”
“Oh, hardly that! Apart from Aberdeen and Glasgow, where else would a business man go but to Edinburgh and Inverness?”
“I could tell you of quite a number of other places he might go to,” retorted Laura; but she was prevented by Dame Beatrice from embarking upon this recital, for, before she could even mention Perth or any of the prosperous towns and cities of the Lowlands, Dame Beatrice again took the floor.
“We have established, then, that you knew of a plan to murder the laird of Tannasgan,” she said, taking out a notebook and pencil. Off his guard, Grant gaped at her like a stranded fish and then began to stutter.
“Articulate clearly,” said Laura. “You can’t have it both ways. Either I can give you an alibi for the time the piping stopped—in which case you knew the murder had just been committed, ergo you knew it had been planned—or I can’t. See what I mean? If the murder was committed while we were together in that boat, you didn’t do it, but if it was committed at any time when we were not together—well, you can’t come to me for an alibi, can you, however innocent you may be?”
“I think, Mr. Grant,” said Dame Beatrice, “that your best plan will be to tell us all you know.”
“I can’t!” said the young man abruptly.
“You mean that the truth may involve your relatives, the Corries?”
“I don’t know whom it would involve. I did not know the laird was to be murdered, or that the piping had anything to do with it. I found out afterwards—but I can’t let you know how.”
“But, listen,” Laura urged him. “If you knew nothing of what was to happen, why did you ask me in that wild sort of way how I knew a doctor might be needed? And why did you say, when the piping stopped, that that…whatever that was…was all over?”
My Bones Will Keep (Mrs. Bradley) Page 6
