Laura did not attempt to argue or reason. Breakfast was at eight. She fell asleep looking forward to that hour.
It came to the same thing exactly in the end. By the time the party had assembled and were eagerly watching the other table to see when the men descended, both Stewart and Loudoun had gone. Nine o’clock struck, and ten. Then Laura spoke to the chambermaids. Both gentlemen, after breakfasting together at six, had left the hotel on foot and were not expected to return.
“Maybe they would be climbing,” was the general opinion, expressed diffidently in the face of Laura’s disappointment and dismay.
“We’ve missed the bus all right,” said she to the others. “They’ve gone. What’s more, they left the inn together.”
The only thing left to do was to pay the bill, hope for the best, and go after them. The old road wound by a wood and over the moors. Then it climbed the higher ground, was joined by a mountain track, circumnavigated some boggy little lochs which trailed out on the end of Loch Bena and at the side of Loch na Achlaise, and then bent westwards at fourteen hundred feet to within a few hundred yards of the main motor road to Glencoe, which it joined just south of Kingshouse, crossing it to arrive at the inn itself.
“And here I stay,” said Jonathan, stretching his legs in the parlour, “unless we take a bus to Ballachulish.”
“We’ll miss all the fun if we do. What do you say, Ian?” asked Laura. Ian signified his willingness to go on.
“Then you go without us,” said Jonathan. “My own view is that murder has already been committed, if it’s going to be committed at all. But why blokes who had breakfast together, apparently in an amiable spirit, should then go out and lay for one another, passes my comprehension and belief. I think we’re on the wrong tack, and I’m not bothering any more about it. We’ve got the wrong pig by the ear.”
“Aren’t you really bothering? ” asked Deborah, when they were alone. He shrugged and laughed.
“Why should I? We’ve made fools of ourselves so far. Aunt Adela will lay down her cards and scoop the pool, you’ll see. She always does. She weaves the web, and, in the end, the flies walk into it.”
“But don’t you think we ought to go with the others?”
“No, I don’t,” said Jonathan roundly.
“It’s my fault, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is your fault,” he answered violently. “And if we weren’t in a damn-fool public place instead of in our own house, I’d demonstrate to you how much your fault it is. I wish we hadn’t brought you. All this unnatural hiking is the last thing on earth you ought to be doing. It’s too much for you, and, murder or no murder, I’m not having any more of it.”
“But, darling . . .”
“There’s nothing doing, Deb. We came here for a holiday. What are we getting? A job of work which by rights the police ought to do, and would do much better.”
“Yes, I know, but we’re in for this now, and I’m not going to back out to please you or anybody.”
“Rank insubordination. You’ll do as you’re told.”
“I never have done as I was told, and I’m not going to begin just because . . . just because . . .”
“Just because what? ” asked Jonathan, suddenly tender, and speaking with anxious quietness.
“Just because I’d rather,” said Deborah, shivering. “I don’t want to chase murderers, any more than you want me to; and I loathe hiking; so do you; but we’re in for both, and that’s that.”
“Well, look here, then! I’ll strike a bargain. If you’ll come straight back to Ballachulish, by bus, and get orders directly from Aunt Adela, I won’t say a word against anything she wants us to do. But it’s ridiculous to kill ourselves for nothing. . . .”
“You don’t mean ourselves; you mean me.”
“Will you come back by bus?”
“No, I won’t.”
“Then here we stay.”
“Don’t be quarrelsome,” said Deborah uncertainly.
“Don’t be aggravating,” said Jonathan, laughing. “What good can we do if we do walk?”
“We could hurry, and catch up the others.”
“Pointless. Look here, there’s only one way those fellows can take, and that’s the road through Glencoe, unless they take the larig over the Devil’s Staircase. Now, then; suppose they take the larig? Ian and Laura are much more likely to catch them up there than we are. Suppose we go by bus through Glencoe, we get to Ballachulish before them, and cut them off from their rendezvous, wherever that may happen to be. But the answer to the whole question is that we are unlikely to do a scrap of good, whatever we do. Therefore I say let’s take the bus, and be comfortable. So pack up your traps, and let’s go.”
“They may be on Rannoch Moor, where the other man’s body was found.”
“Yes, they may be. I’d thought of that, too. But it’s no good, Deb. They’ve been too quick for us if they are on Rannoch Moor, and we might just as well save our legs. We couldn’t possibly be in time to stop the fight, even if we could find them on the moor, and we probably couldn’t.”
“I think we ought to try.”
“Do you? All right. You win. We’ll go to the place where Aunt Adela thinks the murder of Ure took place. Then, if there’s nothing doing, I take it for granted you’ll come back to Ballachulish my way.”
“Yes, that’s fair,” said Deborah. The morning was rapidly clearing, and they stepped out on to the road with higher spirits than would have been the case had the weather continued to be wet. Nevertheless, Deborah was soon aware that she was tired. Jonathan watched her without appearing to do so, and was glad that the walk was not a long one. It was boggy and heavy, however, and their feet were wet and their shoes covered in mud by the time that they reached the shepherd’s hut.
There was no sign of Ian or Laura, and no sign, either, of the men. Jonathan led the way to the place beside the sheep-walk where Mrs. Bradley had gathered the blood-bespattered bracken—or as near as he could guess it, for he had not been with her and Laura at the time. It made no difference, however. Nobody was about, and the wild and desolate moor, like some forgotten quagmire on the moon, stretched apparently endlessly around them, hedged, fenced and guarded by its mountains, and remote as on the day of creation.
“There’s nothing here,” said Deborah, oppressed by the awful stillness. “Let’s go back to the road.”
They turned immediately, and hastened back to the hut. Jonathan peered inside it, but it was empty. They made their way back to the inn and from there to the new road through Glencoe to wait for a conveyance.
Laura and Ian, imagining that there was little hope of overtaking the two men, who had gained a considerable start of them, had taken the route afterwards agreed upon by Jonathan and his wife, except that, having tried the moor and the hut, they came back to Kingshouse, and, making little of the miles which lay between them and Ballachulish, soon passed Stob nan Cobar, Beinn Fhada and the higher mountains of the north side, and came in the early afternoon to Loch Treochatan, flanked by the cleft peak of a stony hill.
The road was joined beyond the loch by the old road through the glen, and this they took, preferring its winding sweeps to the gorges and blasted cuttings of the shorter motor road.
“Of course, they may travel part of the way together,” suggested Ian. Laura thought this unlikely.
“They couldn’t trust one another,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Ian. “Loudoun isn’t a bad sort of fellow in his way, and although I don’t know much about Stewart . . .”
“Oh, I don’t think he would turn treacherous,” said Laura. “He doesn’t seem that sort at all.”
“Well, there you are, then. I know more about the one, and you know more about the other, and we each back our own man to play fair. But do people who’ve inherited hate and blood feuds and so on, care about fairness and honesty? Wouldn’t they, if they saw the chance, take a pop at doing their enemy down? I mean, it isn’t a game they’re playing. I w
ouldn’t care to bet on either of them remembering he’s a gentleman if a likely chance turned up of being able to lay out the other without there being witnesses, and in a place where the body wouldn’t be found.”
“If they’re not together,” said Laura, “that means that one of them has come this way to Ballachulish, and the other must have gone south by Tyndrum and then north by Connell Ferry, don’t you think? I wonder how they decided? It’s a bit like Red Riding Hood and the wolf.”
“Except that they’ll find a pretty lively grandmother at the other end,” said Ian with a chuckle.
“I wish we were with her,” said Laura, stepping out faster. “I wonder whether she’s at Craigullich or at the hotel?”
Mrs. Bradley, as they found later, was not at either. Content with her newly-thatched bothy and the peat-fire which went with it, she surveyed the lovely little glen with simple affection. In case she had chosen wrongly, the Cameron policemen were patrolling the policies of Craigullich and the country between Duror and Appin. She did not believe she was wrong, however, and waited with expectation but not impatience.
On the morning when Stewart, Loudoun, Laura, Ian, Deborah, and Jonathan left the Kinsghouse Inn, she seated herself in the sun outside the door of the hut, and knitted a shapeless grey garment whose length seemed disproportionate to its width and whose claim to usefulness lay purely in the fact that its composition assisted thought. She was wrapped in a grey shawl out of which her black head emerged with a sibylline effect which seemed to startle a large crow which, after flapping lazily down the glen, came to earth with an ungainly lurch and stagger, cursed the uneven ground, and then, giving a shocked squawk at the sight of Mrs. Bradley, made off with a scuttling rush of legs and wings. It got into the air, squawked defiance and obloquy at her, and then made off up the glen like an evil spirit.
The day wore on. She had her simple lunch and exchanged her knitting for a book. The afternoon came and the day began to fade. The glen became quiet with sunset. There was still no sign of the men. Mrs. Bradley began to believe that she had miscalculated; that the men had already met, and that what she had hoped to prevent was already an accomplished fact.
It was the time of the new moon, and, while the day was still light, the sliver of white appeared at the head of the glen. Behind the far hills the sky was orange-pink, and above the glen it was deeply and wonderfully blue. A pale light, primrose-coloured, lay between the blue and the sunset, and the distant hills were not black but of palest violet. Nearer, they were blue and less clearly cut, and the moorland hills near at hand were dark with their little deeps, and greenish upon their heights.
The river, which ran through the glen and spread into the small shallow loch with its green and grassy banks and lichened boulders, was like a succession of rapids into the loch, as, cutting its bed, it came upon ledges of stone which, in time, had made miniature waterfalls. The recent heavy rain had made these into cascades which filled the whole glen with sound, yet a sound that seemed part of the silence.
The bothy was not near the water, but had been built in the widest part of the glen, on firm ground just below the stony outcroppings of the hill.
She waited and waited, but night came and she retired into the bothy and went to sleep. The fact that it was sleep on a hair-trigger mattered not to her. It was the kind of sleep to which she was accustomed.
At just after midnight she woke. Something, she knew, had disturbed her; some suspicious sound had occurred; some noise had been made which had sent a message to her subconscious mind. She crept from her bed and went to the entrance of the hut.
The moon had set, but the sky was brilliant with stars. Careful to make no sound, she crouched on the ground at the side of the door and listened. She watched; but nothing rewarded her. She went back to her austere bed, lay down again and did not sleep. At the first faint light she got up and went again to the door. She crept out, went down to the shallow edge of the loch, bathed her face and hands in its waters, dried herself on a handkerchief, and then walked west towards the sea.
The level stretch of grass was short and green; greener at sunrise than at any other time in the day; but its greenness was interrupted. A black hole, softly, boggily dark, gaped like a grave at the northern edge of the water.
By tea-time on the previous day, the party from Kingshouse had, two of them on foot and the other two in a motor-coach, rejoined Catherine and Brian at Ballachulish. There was no news of Mrs. Bradley, for she had communicated to no one but the Camerons her decision to picket the glen. Not knowing what else to do, and advised by Laura, supported roundly by Deborah, that she would not want her plans interfered with, the two men decided to remain at the hotel until they received further orders.
Nothing came all that night, and they went to bed at eleven. Before dawn Deborah woke.
“What’s the matter?” asked Jonathan, feeling her stir in his arms.
“Something’s happening,” she said. “And I’m afraid.”
She got up and dressed. Jonathan, impressed, got up, too, and before breakfast they were out on the moors and taking the coast road south towards Appin.
“How do you know the right way?” he asked, striding to keep up with her, for Deborah was half-running along the highway.
“I know,” she answered. “I don’t know how, but I know. There must be something happening at Craigullich.”
They met Mrs. Bradley not far from the Duror Inn.
“Oh,” said Jonathan, “there you are! Deb got frightened. She thought something must have happened.”
“I think it’s happening now,” said Mrs. Bradley.
There was no one at Craigullich when they arrived. The inspector had left a message saying that they had received a call to go to Inverary, and would be back as soon as they could. New evidence had turned up with regard to the murder of Ure on Rannoch Moor.
“Might mean anything or nothing,” said Jonathan, when he had read the message. “There are always people to swear to these things, but the police will have to investigate the matter, I suppose. The human craze for notoriety is extraordinary. By the way, what evidence have you got against the Loudouns?”
“None, child.”
“Then . . . ?”
“I know one killed his brother, and I am certain that he and his brother, between them, made an end of Ure.”
“What shall you do? Shall you hand Loudoun over to the police, if and when we catch him?”
“On a charge of—what? I can’t prove my assertions, you know. On the other hand, if the police get their hands on the man, it will be most unfortunate if they do not find evidence against him.”
“Doesn’t sound like you to say that?”
“Doesn’t it?” She grinned, “Perhaps I have something else in view for Mr. Loudoun. One never knows.”
“The fourth commandment does come home to roost, doesn’t it? I suppose both these Loudouns suffer because of their father and mother. Stewart, too. What’s going to happen to him if he doesn’t get his revenge? I can’t understand a fellow coming back half across the world just to slug a man. He can’t have thought much of his property to stay away from it all these years.” He went on to give Mrs. Bradley details of the chase after Loudoun and Stewart.
“One of them is here,” she said when he had finished. “Which one I do not know.” She described the grave she had seen, and added, “I suspect it is Stewart, but that is only surmise. Whoever did it must have brought the spade from Craigullich. I looked everywhere for the spade, but did not find it.”
“We ought to go back,” said Jonathan. “They may have met by now.”
“They will meet at Craigullich, child, I think,” said Mrs. Bradley. “That is why I wish to waylay them. Let us get to the house. We are three. That should be enough to command the approaches from the upper windows.”
“We can expect Ian and Laura at any time now, I should imagine,” said Deborah. “I left a note to tell them which way we had gone.”
“Good,�
�� said Mrs. Bradley. “Then we may look forward to their joining us, but not, I think, until Laura has had her breakfast. She is not at her best in a fasting condition, and knows it.”
“I’ll tell you what,” said Jonathan. “If the police have received a false message from Inverary they’ll be back, too, pretty soon. We ought to be able to cover both glens with their help. One lot can watch by the grave, and the other can stay up at the house.”
“There is no need to watch the grave yet,” said Deborah, with great distaste. “What morbid ideas you’ve got! And I refuse to see anyone killed. Do I have to look out of a window?”
“Just as you like,” said Mrs. Bradley. “You won’t see anyone killed, but it would be useful if I could know as soon as possible if anyone approaches the house, or, better still, the loch. That is all.”
“Right. Which window shall I take?”
The three of them went up the stairs, and whilst Jonathan stood at the window which lighted the staircase, and Deborah sat on the arm of a chair at the window of the bedroom which Mrs. Bradley and Catherine, at different times, had occupied, Mrs. Bradley herself made a rapid tour of the house.
“Interesting,” she said, “and enlightening, too. I should say that none of these rooms, with the exception of the room I slept in and the bedroom which I suppose old Morag occupied, and, later, Ellen (whom the police, by the way, have identified and exonerated in Craig Mellon) slept in, have been used for a good many years. There is a camp bed with blankets in the room from which Loudoun—the dead one—emerged on the night when I slept here, but his fingerprints are thick on dusty furniture, and the other rooms have not been entered. It certainly looks as though the Loudoun tenancy of Craigullich has been of singularly short duration and was not intended to be permanent. They were after the treasure, nothing else.”
My Father Sleeps (Mrs. Bradley) Page 22
