“Thanks very much,” said Ian. “My people at MacDonald’s had better know. It’s most likely the boy has been kidnapped. Towards Portree, you say? It was very good indeed of you to come.”
“No trouble it is to me, at all, at all, and you to be speaking so kindly,” said Mr. Maclain.
Chapter Twelve
★
Gainsay who dare!
Dh’ aindeoin co theireadh e!
War cry of the MacDonalds of Clanranald
★
Roused to action by the news brought by Mr. MacIain and his nephew, Mrs. Bradley’s party separated into two sections. She and Jonathan roused Mr. MacDonald’s cousin Angus MacIver and hired his car (bought, some six years previously, for the use and abuse of summer tourists) to go at once to Portree. Ian and Laura backed the Kerisaig out of her moorings and took her with all speed back to Ballachulish.
Brian himself, in the meantime, cramped, uncomfortable, and in pain from the roughness and force with which he had been bound and gagged, was trying to get his wits to work in order to effect his escape.
He could see nothing out of the windows, for the blinds were drawn and, in any case, he was helpless. He could not tell how fast the car was travelling, but deduced, from the way it swayed and swung, that the speed must be considerable.
One comfort he had; he was alone. Both men were seated in front. He had been placed along the back seat with a couple of suitcases in front so that he should not be jolted on to the floor. As it was pitch dark, he minded not being able to look out of the window much less than he would have minded it by daylight.
The car made a comparatively short journey and then pulled up. The men got down and lifted the boy on to the roadside.
“This should do,” said one. “Take his legs and bring him over here. This is a quiet part, but you never know.” The other, obeying, grunted, and said that he supposed not. “Then you’d better stay and keep your eye on him,” continued the first, “while I run the car over the ferry.” The second demurred, but was soon overruled by the first, who added grimly, “All right, if you want a bullet through your guts. He is as jealous as a stoat, and you ought to know it. Besides, you’re in bad already, so you’d better do what he says.”
The car, whose lights had been switched off as soon as it had stopped, was now driven away, and the man left with Brian cut him free.
“Now, young ’un,” he said, in not unkindly tones, “behave yourself and you’re safe; but try any tricks and I’ll have to cut your throat. Plenty of water hereabouts to dump your dead body in, you know.”
Brian said nothing, and the man then asked him whether he had lost his tongue.
“No,” said the boy, “but what have I done to be kidnapped?”
“Nothing, sonny. It’s nothing to do with you. You’re what we call a pawn. Ever played chess?”
“A bit. We’ve got a club at school.”
“Have you now? And where might your school be, I wonder?”
“In the south of England, not far from Dartmoor. I daresay you know it.”
“Less of your lip,” said the man, turning suddenly ill-tempered, “else I’ll soon have that gag back! You keep a civil tongue in your head, do you hear!”
“Sorry. No offence,” said Brian. “Why shouldn’t I mention Dartmoor? You weren’t ever in prison there, were you?”
The man did not answer.
“If we’re not going to talk, do you mind if I go to sleep?” asked Brian. He could feel that they were seated on coarse, long grass, and guessed the presence of water. He lay down and began to rub his wrists and ankles, where the thick string used by the men to tie him up had cut into and chafed the skin. He also tenderly touched his mouth, which felt bruised and stiff from the gag. He did not know what time he had, for the first man might be gone all night or might return in a quarter of an hour, for all he knew. As he gently massaged the limbs and restored their circulation he contrived to edge himself slightly further from his captor.
“Here, you keep still,” said the man, “or you might roll into the sea.”
Brian kept still on the instant. He did not believe that they were very near the sea. There was not a sound to be heard, neither was there the tang of sea-salt in the wind. He deduced that they were on a grassy knoll above a loch, and worked out, from this, a boyish plan of escape which a grown person might not have risked. He suddenly flung himself sideways and began to roll over and over. The man made a grab in the dark, but missed and went plunging forward on hands and knees. Brian rolled faster. He was on the slope he had hoped for and expected. It was fairly steep, but not worse than he had anticipated. He hoped he would not roll on to boulders, but that, from his point of view, was the only danger.
There were no boulders. There was nothing but the shallow, grassy waters of a loch, and he splashed in, shouted aloud as though he were in terror, splayed water all around him as though he were trying to gain the bank and escape the water, but all the time plunged deeper and deeper in.
He could hear the man shouting, and then he could see the spotlight of a torch. The water suddenly deepened. Whether he had reached a stretch in which he could swim, or whether he had only found a deep hole, he could not immediately tell, but he chanced it and swam, and then found he could keep on swimming.
It occurred to him then that he had not the slightest idea of how far it was across the loch. It might be several miles and it might be a hundred yards or even less. He could not see a thing, and there was nothing to do but to swim on and trust in Providence.
The gods of daring, heedless youth looked after him. He had swum not more than a couple of hundred yards, and could still hear the shouts of the man, when his arms, reaching out and dipping deep, encountered grass again. In a couple of seconds he was in the muddy shallows, and was half-floating, half-crawling forwards whilst the depth of the water decreased at last to inches.
The ooze was soft and slimy. His fear, at this point, was of mud into which he would sink. But his luck still held. His knees sank in to a depth of seven or eight inches, but he could manage to drag himself forward, although he wondered whether the man could hear the squelching sound that he made.
Then another thought came. It was more than probable that his captor, guessing what had happened, and knowing the place, had only to walk round the margin of the loch to overtake him.
Brian lay where he was, and listened. The man was calling him—not by name, of course, but by the soubriquet of “Say, kid!”
Brian could hear the sound of this becoming fainter, and thanked his stars that the man, faced by alternatives, had elected to walk the wrong way round the loch.
The boy did not waste time. He scrambled forward, not caring now whether the man heard him or not, got clear of the water and marginal mud and felt the ground steeply rising. Ahead of him was a black mass, distinguishable against the dark sky. He made for it. The hills were cleft by corries, some large, some small. It would be odd, and hard, he thought, if, once at large on a hillside, he could not outwit the two men.
At Portree there was not the slightest trace. Mrs. Bradley philosophically, and Jonathan blasphemously, parked the car and themselves until morning. Fortunately the hotel was well accustomed to idiotic guests who got lost, rash and ill-advised guests who left it too late to continue their journey elsewhere, and unfortunate guests who had been caught by the weather or other Act of God, and so had to put up for the night at places they had expected to by-pass or go through on their way to their own hotel or the mainland, and expressed no surprise at the invasion.
No surprise was expressed, either, and probably little was felt, when Jonathan, having arranged that the two of them should be accommodated, also demanded that they should be called at not later than five on the following morning.
The Kerisaig churned out from Uig Bay and crossed Loch Snizort, going north of the Ascrib Islands and out past Vaternish Point. Ian allowed the headland about a mile of leeway, and then turned the cruiser south
towards Loch Dunvegan. The Kerisaig passed Ardmore Point on the north shore of Loch Dunvegan and then ran clean across the outer limit of the loch to Dunvegan Head.
The seas were rough and high, and a stiffish breeze was blowing. It was not a night on which Ian would have chosen to go for a cruise, and he had done his best to get Laura to accompany Mrs. Bradley and Jonathan in the car. His sister, however, had been firm, for she knew very well that in default of herself as crew he would have had to take Jonathan, and that would have been unfair, she thought, to Mrs. Bradley. Besides, she loved the cruiser, and had spent some happy holidays on board the sturdy little cutter. She cared neither for wind, rain, nor sea, and exulted in being soaked through and tossed about.
Daylight soon came. Ian put out the navigation lights and crammed on speed. They ran past the little Loch Pooltiel, came round another headland, passed, on a south-east slant, the islanded, broken Loch Bracadale and then kept south past Rudha nan Clach and MacFarlane’s Rock on about the hundred-fathom line marked on Ian’s charts.
At last they made Cuillin Sound, past Loch Brittle and the island of Soay, and, leaving the coast entirely, made straight for the Sound of Sleat across rainbow mountains of billows. The day was fine, though not warm, and the bucketing seas streamed into the tiny cockpit in cascades of dirty green as different from the spectrum iridescence of the spray as the colours of the flying-fish laid on deck is different from its colours as it leaps from the white and blue wave.
From Point of Sleat they came more directly south, ran down past Eigg and Muck, past Ardnamurchan Point, which began to be an old friend, and into the Sound of Mull. Ian made straight for Oban and went to the police to report upon the kidnapping. It had happened, he presumed, well out of Cameron’s district, but as the men might be headed, with the boy, towards Lochaber or even Appin, the inspector seemed a very good person to whom to confide their anxieties. He was interested, warmly indignant, and full of polite but very sincere-sounding promises. Somewhat comforted, they ran the Kerisaig northwards to Ballachulish, and returned once more to the hotel.
Meanwhile, at Portree a council of war had been held, and it had been decided that Jonathan should remain on Skye and scour it, assisted by the authorities and anybody else who would serve, whilst Mrs. Bradley returned to the mainland and followed her own inclination, which was to pick the trail up again near Appin. She argued that the kidnapping was to put a spoke in the activities of herself and her party, since the boy himself could scarcely be reckoned a danger to anyone’s plans. Either she or Laura—so she assumed—must have stumbled on something vital. She could not decide what it was, and therefore was inclined to think that it must be Laura who had collected this special knowledge, and not herself.
She carefully reviewed, as she travelled (by steamer and then by motor-coach south again), the special information which Laura had amassed. The most interesting piece seemed to be the story told by the ex-domestic servant Janet Forbes and the so-far-unexplained activities of the pseudo-artist-bagman. She decided to concentrate on these two persons and to review in detail what they had had to tell. If her utter neglect of her very young nephew seemed callous, it had to be allowed that there were resourceful, intelligent people already devoted to his interests. She did not think she could offer them very much help, and she had deduced that the boy was not in danger.
She felt sure that the kidnapping was a plot to keep her and her party on Skye and away from Craigullich, and felt that her efforts would be far more usefully employed in finding out the hub of the mystery surrounding the Loudouns, Stewart, and the so-far anonymous bagman than in helping to search for her nephew.
Wet through and cold, Brian lay out on the hill. He had climbed, trusting only to luck that no accident happened, up and away from the grassy loch beside which the men had placed him, and had gained what seemed to him an eminence at least three hundred feet above the water. In fact, he had climbed up less than a quarter of that distance, but he felt completely safe and was full of self-congratulation in that he had escaped and was free once more.
He lay sprawled in his wet clothes until dawn, and then, with them clammy and clinging, and feeling as though he were cased in snow, he took stock of himself and his position. The men had taken his rucksack and emptied his pockets. He had no map, no money, nor any kind of property except the clothes he was wearing. He found himself in country which was vaguely familiar, although he knew he had never seen it before. He had seen photographs of it, however, and recognized the peculiar surroundings of the Storr Rock.
He could see below him the still and grassy waters of the loch out of which he had crawled after his swim. It was like the cold, hard silver of an unsheathed sword in the cold, hard light of the dawn before the sunrise. He must have swum across from a low peninsula (which dipped two long quiet capes to the water’s edge), to the rising banks of the rock itself which now towered above him with its greatest serrated mass clean cut as a Spanish sierra against the faint morning sky.
The boy climbed higher, and then, from a vantage point, looked down to the water and beyond it. There was no sign of his captors; no sign of the car; yet he knew he had not heard the latter driven away. He rested, and then climbed on. The rock was two thousand three hundred feet at its highest point, but he did not make for this. With the instinct of boyhood he made a climber’s circuit and crossed the ridge at about a thousand feet. Once on the further side he felt safe, and rested again. He could see the sea, and decided to make for the coast. With good heart, strong limbs and a little luck he could make his way back to the MacDonalds. He decided upon the west coast route, and worked down the longer, shallower side of the ridge, coming on to the Carbost road not far from Hinnisdal Bridge. From here the road ran directly north to Uig.
Mrs. Bradley went first to Janet Forbes, and Janet Forbes received Mrs. Bradley with her usual kindness and with less than her usual acerbity. Mrs. Bradley looked ‘a respectable body’—this in spite of a certain eccentricity of dress and deportment—and, in Janet’s view, was a person who belonged to a generation respected, indulged, and obeyed by the genus to which she herself belonged.
She spoke warmly of Laura, and the conversation passed easily from this to the house of Craigullich and its glen. The story which emerged in response to Mrs. Bradley’s questions did not differ from that told to Laura, and not one extra fact emerged which might afford any further explanation of the mystery of the two deaths. Mrs. Bradley, now primarily interested in the second of the deaths, that of the Loudoun she had met at Craigullich, pressed Janet again as to the possibility that there had been born twin boys to Lorna Loudoun—then still Lorna Stewart. The old servant admitted the possibility, but added that she had never heard of it, and had never seen any Loudoun at Craigullich. But she had left before Lorna married again and brought her new husband ‘to a place where he wisna wanted, and where none had ony guid word to say to him,’ and so could provide no positive information.
Mrs. Bradley, who had formed various theories which would account for the first murder, was now visited by a startling and, at first sight, unlikely one to account for the second. It was natural, she supposed, that if the murdered man on Rannoch were the legal owner of Glen Ullich and its house, those he would dispossess if he pressed his claim should wish him out of the way. Expressed arithmetically, that theory merely amounted to two minus one leaves one; one to enjoy the fruits of premeditated, sordid, mercenary crime. Murder—even mass murder—had been committed more often that not for a similar reason. She reviewed the cases of George Joseph Smith, Burke and Hare, and the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Troppmann.
But, if this were the reason for the death of Ure (supposing Ure to be Stewart) there seemed to be two theories which could account for the death of Loudoun. One was that his twin (and it remained to be proved that he had a twin) had eliminated him in order to claim the property himself; the other, which would fit in better (psychologically speaking) with the family history as she knew it, was that the second murder was an
act of revenge for the first. The difficulty here, however, was to find a likely avenger. There seemed to be no one, with the possible exception of the artist-bagman, and he had represented himself merely as Stewart’s friend.
“What was Mr. Stewart like?” she demanded. “The son, not the man who was hanged?”
“And a black day that was,” said Janet, “Och, aye. I shall not forget it. And his murderer to be marrying on young Mrs. Stewart so soon!”
“His murderer?” But Mrs. Bradley realized that Janet had avoided answering the question.
“What else? Gin Roderick Loudoun had not led her into that wickedness, what way would they have hanged Mr. Stewart for shooting his brother? Roderick Loudoun murdered him as though he had killed him wi’ his own hands, the more disgrace on him that he didna! It was he told the police that Mr. Stewart shot his brother dead, glad though he was to see him put out of the way, and him wishing to marry on Mrs. Stewart all the time! I would be willing to believe it was he that told Mr. Stewart his brother had taken Mrs. Stewart to England. I would say he killed them both, his brother and Mr. Stewart too! Aye, and another with them!”
This statement was not open to discussion, Mrs. Bradley felt; neither did she think that further questioning of Janet could elicit information of value, since the old servant had probably left the realm of fact for the (to her) more satisfactory and romantic one of fancy. Her fancies might be nearer the truth than the facts were, but, since they were incapable of proof, they were dangerous and might be misleading. It was curious, however, that Janet had formed these theories. She did not look the kind of woman to nurse such whimsical ideas as that one brother should set out to have another brother murdered by a righteously angry and disillusioned husband in order that he himself, in his turn, could have the husband hanged and so take the wife for himself. Mrs. Bradley wished she could see a portrait of Lorna Stewart. She asked what Lorna looked like, and received the answer that she was ‘a wee, sma’ bit of a thing, much like many others that could be told of.’
My Father Sleeps (Mrs. Bradley) Page 17
