Mrs. Bradley, respectful to and apprehensive of this vocabulary, confessed that she shared Laura’s enthusiasm, and agreed to make an early start the next day. They decided to do exactly as the newspapers stated that the murdered man had done once he had reached Tyndrum. To carry out their plan it was necessary to get to Tyndrum, so they drove southward to Portnacroish and followed the main road round Loch Creran past Benderloch Station and across Connel Ferry. Then, instead of going on to Oban, they would turn eastwards along Loch Etive, follow the same road which went through the Pass of Brender along the narrow northern arm of Loch Awe, and on through Dalmally to Tyndrum.
It would have been preferable, had they been walking and had they not been following a trail laid down, as it were, for their guidance, to have branched off northwards about two miles east of Dalmally and taken the narrow road up Glen Orchy which joined the main motor road from Tyndrum near Bridge of Orchy Station before the two routes led on to Loch Tulla and so to Kingshouse, but this slight pleasure was denied them.
It was not difficult, once they reached Bridge of Orchy, to see some point in the police theory that the murdered man could very easily have come on to Rannoch Moor. At Bridge of Orchy it was possible to do two things, either of which would have led to the Kingshouse Inn. The main road, which, according to the police theory, the man had followed, kept east of Loch Tulla and followed the shore of the loch. It crossed the small railway almost at the northern end of the loch, proceeded in snake-like bends until it came to the broken Loch Baa south of Loch Laidon, passed this loch and then wound away in a westerly bend to Glencoe, by-passing Kingshouse Inn, which was on the old road, not the new. It crossed the old road, however, just south of Kingshouse, and it was at this crossing, according to the police, as reported in the daily papers, that the man had mistaken his way and had wandered on to the moor, across the end of which the new road ran before it swung westward towards the cliffs and battlements of Glencoe.
The police theory, therefore, was tenable up to a point. On the other hand, it was not very easy to see why a man who had followed a highroad throughout his trip should suddenly, and for no good reason, forsake it at all, let alone mistake for it a secondary road which was narrower and very much out of repair.
Mrs. Bradley and Laura went back to Bridge of Orchy and tried the old road from there. After half a mile they came back. No one could have made such a mistake. Mrs. Bradley returned to her original opinion. If the man had strayed on to Rannoch Moor it must have been his intention so to stray. It was not the result of a mistake, and there was no reason to suppose, either, that he had missed his way in the dark. It was quite conceivable that he might have lost the road if a sudden mist had come, of the kind that could sweep over the land like a cloud, but the weather, so far, had been perfect.
“Of course, the pedlar-artist could have murdered him, couldn’t he?” said Laura.
It was known that he had stayed one night in Tyndrum and the next in the hotel at the head of the loch. He had had to leave the motor road at Bridge of Orchy in order to get to this hotel, and, when he left the next morning (which, it seemed, he had done at nine o’clock or shortly after), he was faced with a stretch of about twelve miles by the main road, plus the extra three or four to get back on to it from the inn if he stuck to the road (and he was not provided with climbing boots, according to the description of the body supplied by Laura).
Sixteen miles, even of hilly walking—and the gradients on the new road were not very formidable—should not have taken a man in middle life from nine o’clock until after dark to accomplish. There was no published evidence, so far, of the time at which the murder was supposed to have taken place, so nothing could be checked from that. In any case, the onset and the passing of rigor mortis varied so greatly according to individual idiosyncrasy and to conditions of temperature and other natural phenomena that the actual time of death was always difficult to assess.
“Let’s assume,” suggested Laura, “that the police are right, and he did lose his way, and see whether that gets us anywhere. Then we can begin again, and assume that he went on to Rannoch Moor on purpose, and see if that leads anywhere.”
As they had already covered more than a hundred miles since leaving Ballachulish, Mrs. Bradley suggested that these new manœuvres might be more successful in the morning, so Laura drove on to Kingshouse, where she was welcomed, and they spent the night there, and, by doing so, missed the return of Ian and Catherine from Skye. Laura was glad of her dinner and a bed. They had had a picnic lunch, and she had done all the driving and was more tired than she had suspected when at last they garaged the car.
The next day the weather, which, so far, had given the lie to all critics of its antics in the Western Highlands, broke in solid, teeming, apparently limitless rain which made bounding cataracts down the mountain-sides and torrents of the hitherto placid streams.
Laura, awakened early by the sound of it on her window, got out of bed and looked on to a grey-shrouded world. It was impossible to see very far. The mountains were hidden in a curtain of rain and mist, or loomed in nebulous bulk of a dark no-colour, shapeless, veiled, and depressing. A strange light illumined the landscape, and things seen near at hand—the many-coloured heather of the moors, the patches of bright-green grass or brilliant bog—were so rich and lovely in the rain that it was certain that the countryside had come into its own, and was intended to be seen, as Laura pointed out later, on wet days only.
She dressed, put on her waterproof coat and went out for a walk. She splashed and dripped and streamed, grew red in the face and wet about the feet, and returned in about an hour, exuberantly cheerful and even hungrier than usual.
There were plenty of facilities for dealing with wet clothing at the inn. She gave her things to a maid, went off to have a bath, and appeared at breakfast in Mrs. Bradley’s coat and a pair of travelling slippers.
They spent the morning indoors exchanging theories about the case, and by lunch Laura’s things, except for her shoes, were dry. What was more, the rain ceased at midday, and the maid lent Laura a pair of gentlemen’s brogues whilst her shoes were drying. They were on the large side, but Laura had big feet and could manage to keep them on, although she could not have gone for a walk in them. At just after two she and Mrs. Bradley got out the car, and drove over roads which in parts resembled rivers, in an attempt to discover what had taken the murdered man on to Rannoch Moor.
“An odd thing about it,” said Laura, “is that the Hector Loudoun whom Ian and Catherine met, mentioned Mr. Ure in that typescript. If Mr. Ure is Stewart, and the Loudoun we saw murdered him while the other Loudoun took his half-brother’s place, he’d have wanted to keep Ure dark, you’d rather think. He’s up to some pretty game, it seems to me. If only we knew what it was.”
Mrs. Bradley agreed. She did not see, at the moment, how they were to receive much enlightenment unless the haunted Hector Loudoun should choose, or be compelled, to reappear and tell more than he had, so far, disclosed. It was possible, of course, that he had no more to tell, but the fact of his disappearance from Craigullich, she supposed, and possibly (although this was more open to doubt) of the disappearance of old Morag, made him strangely suspect.
She pondered, too, the strange story of the previous murder, and wondered to what extent the tale told by Janet Forbes to Laura was correct. The story intrigued her, if only because of its endless contradictions and silences. Granted that the details of it were true, it was one of the very strangest stories which had ever come to her ears. She wished she had the means of filling in all its obvious and tantalizing gaps. That a man should shoot his wife’s lover was natural enough; but that he should shoot the brother instead, get himself hanged without a word of explanation or defence, and so leave his wife free to marry the very person against whom, it would seem, his keenest hatred should have been directed, was fascinating, curious, and, for lack of further evidence, inexplicable.
“There is nothing to be found out here,” she sai
d to Laura, as they again came on to the moor and the car began to bounce. “If the murderer and the murdered man met, it would have been on the twelve-mile stretch after leaving Bridge of Orchy. Craigullich must now be our goal.”
“We may hear the ghost,” said Laura. The sky had begun to threaten. The fastnesses of the gloomy and sodden moor were not inviting. She was glad to drive back to the inn. They paid their bill, she took her own shoes, and shortly they were back in Ballachulish after a drive through Glencoe with its terrifying backcloth of sombre and scudding cloud, the tops of the mountains sunk in impenetrable mist, and the whole scene reminiscent of the strange and dreadful mezozoic age, its primordial terrors and grandeurs, its giant-statured vertebrates and all the crude, frightful chaos of pre-history.
“Well, this is a knock-out, of a sort,” said Ian, faced at Ballachulish with the news that Mrs. Bradley, accompanied by Miss Menzies, had left for a short motor tour of the Western Highlands. “What do we do now?”
“I should think we’d better go at once to Craigullich and find out whether Mr. Loudoun has arrived there safely,” said Catherine. Ian looked doubtful.
“For one thing, it’s raining cats and dogs at present, and the cockpit’s half-full of water; and for another, what if he hasn’t?” he said. “We can’t spend the whole of our time in getting him out of a mess. My instinct is to leave well alone, and to stay here, out of the wet.”
“But aren’t you curious to know what he was doing as the prisoner of those men, and why he needed our help?”
“Not particularly. But if you are, well, let’s go. We can’t do any harm by going, unless you catch your death of cold. The rain won’t hurt me. It’s in my bones. I only hope we haven’t let a murderer loose on the countryside, that’s all.”
“A murderer?” said Catherine, looking extremely startled. “You mean he might have killed that man on the moor?”
“Good Lord, no! But he may have killed old Morag.”
“Oh, heavens! You don’t really think that! You know you don’t! Besides, I don’t see when he could have done it.”
“Why do you think he had us there that night?”
“To keep him company. He said so.”
“There was a lot more in it than that, I’m quite convinced. I ought not to have helped him escape. I see that now. I should just have told the police. It would have been much better.”
“Oh, dear! That doesn’t make it a very nice job to go and see him, then.”
“Very well. Don’t let’s go.”
“But I don’t want to go back to Skye.”
“Neither do I. We should wonder all the time what those other fellows were up to. It wouldn’t be very enjoyable. I tell you what, Kate. You stay here at the hotel and wait for Aunt Adela and Laura, and I’ll go over to Craigullich—I can run the boat down as far as Portnacroish and walk up the road from there—and have a word with Loudoun, if he’s at home, and be back in time for dinner, or perhaps even lunch, if I start in good time in the morning.”
“If you go, I’m coming with you.”
“All right. That’s just as you like.” He could not account for his own misgivings in the matter and had hesitated to confide them to her, but early next morning, after a seven o’clock breakfast, they refuelled the Kerisaig, lying off North Ballachulish, and gently chugged southward down Loch Linnhe past the flattish headland west of the Duror Inn, and, keeping towards the eastern shore of the loch, came down past small islands to the little bay south of Portnacroish, and there anchored the cruiser and went ashore just north of Appin.
It was easy enough to get on to the road to Ballachulish, and it took them about a half hour to enter the policies of Craigullich. The most strange and sinister silence encompassed the house. The little loch, under skies neither grey nor blue, looked lonely, secret and deep. They went up to the house and knocked, but no one came. The door was unlocked. They went in.
“I don’t like it,” said Ian. He was more sensitive than his sister Laura, and more easily affected by atmosphere. The fact that the house seemed to be empty would, in itself and at that time of day, have affected nobody but a child or a neurasthenic. But the empty house was filled with something intangible and yet horrible which struck into his sensitivities as extreme cold might have struck into his bones. His Highland origins proclaimed themselves in a sixth sense as urgent and uncomfortable as the gift of prophecy. “There’s something wrong,” he said. “You stay outside. I’m going to have a look round.”
“I’m coming too,” said Catherine. She followed him into the dining-room, the room in which they had sat with Loudoun upon their previous visit.
The dining-room was empty, and the portrait was gone from over the mantelpiece. In its place, attached to the wall by means of a piece of putty, was a fast-fading sprig of leaves from the bough of an ash tree. Under it had been scrawled across the wall in thick black pencil (of the kind that artists sometimes use for sketching) the motto from the armorial bearings of Menzies of Menzies, Will God I Shall.
Ian stood contemplating the hunting badge of his clan, and the confident assertion below it, without a word. Catherine watched him and the door. He turned on his heel and led the way into the opposite apartment, which was furnished as a drawing-room. Here lay the cause of that uneasiness which he had felt since his approach to the house. A dead man lay on the carpet, his blood congealing from a horrible wound in the neck.
“Get back!” said Ian to Catherine, barring the doorway with his body and filling it with his shoulders so that she should not see what he had seen. “Go into the dining room and stay there. There’s trouble—bad trouble—here.”
“Who is it?” she asked, speaking steadily.
“Loudoun; not a doubt. I’m afraid he’s dead. It looks like suicide. There’s a piece of paper near his hand.”
“I’m coming in with you,” said Catherine. He did not argue. They both went into the room, and she was the first to kneel beside the body.
“Don’t touch him,” said Ian anxiously. Catherine, pale but not faint nor sick at the dreadful sight of the blood, took a mirror out of her handbag and held it to the dead man’s lips. It came away unclouded.
“Yes, he’s dead,” she said. “But, Ian, I don’t think it’s Mr. Loudoun.”
Ian did not heed her for a moment. He was looking at the paper which appeared to have been released from the dead man’s hand. The hand was lying, palm upwards, and with a forefinger covered in blood. On the paper was splashed, apparently with blood and with the letters so roughly printed that it might have been done with the bloody forefinger, the words: I byde my tyme. It was the motto of Campbell of Loudoun.
Ian read it, but did not touch the paper. He looked anxiously to see that Catherine touched nothing, either, but she, with knitted brow, was sitting on her heels out of line of the thickened blood, and was gazing at the dead man’s hand.
“This isn’t Mr. Loudoun,” she insisted. At the repetition, Ian looked up sharply.
“It must be Loudoun. It’s the image of him,” he said. She got up and shook her head with finality.
“It isn’t Mr. Loudoun’s hand. Don’t you remember that I read his hand the night we stayed here, before you carried me to bed? Well, that’s not the hand I read.” She pointed to it. “The lines are as different as can be. I’ve got the impression I made. I’ll show you when we go back. I can prove—to the police or anybody else—that he’s not the man we stayed with. He’s awfully like him . . .”
Ian put his arm round her shoulders and they went out into the hall and closed the drawing-room door.
“We shall have to report this, of course,” he said, “It’s a stinking nuisance. Spoilt our holiday completely, I’m afraid. . . . But, Kate, look here! If this fellow isn’t Loudoun, we don’t know whether it was this one or our Loudoun that we rescued at Uig, do we?”
“And old Morag still isn’t here,” said Catherine, going to the kitchen and boldly opening the door.
“Come on,” said
Ian. “Let’s go.”
“But, Ian, wait a minute . . .”
Catherine hesitated, and glanced up at Ian’s granite face.
“I know,” he said, grimly, meeting her eye and then drawing her towards the front door. “I know what you mean. But perhaps we’d better not say it. It could have been suicide, you know. The wound was in his throat, and, either by luck or judgment, he may have got the carotid artery. That’s about an inch and a half below the surface. He’d have been unconscious in five seconds and dead in twelve.”
“Could he have written that message in five seconds?”
“No, of course he couldn’t. That won’t do, then. Anyway, we can leave all that to the police. Better go into Appin, I suppose—or Portnacroish might do. Or shall we report it in Ballachulish? We’re on the spot there if they happen to want us again. Yes, that’s what we’d better do.”
They got the Kerisaig under weigh as soon as they could, hastening out of the little Glen Ullich to get to her, and trotting along the road, but the distance back from Portnacroish to Ballachulish seemed twice as long as it was.
“How did you know all that about the carotid artery?” asked Catherine, sitting beside Ian at the controls of the sturdy cutter.
“Learnt a few things like that from a chap in the Indian police—a friend of my father. Why?”
“I just wondered.”
“Oh, yes. I could recite you a whole table of the stuff. He made me learn it. We used to have lots of fun—catch-as-catch can, unarmed combat, judo, thuggery of all kinds. You want to look out for yourself if you and I ever scrap. And where did you learn not to mind blood and dead men?”
“I did a First Aid Course last year.”
“Then you knew about arteries, too?”
My Father Sleeps (Mrs. Bradley) Page 11
