At this point Deborah called out that she thought she could see someone approaching.
“It’s a man, I think,” she added, as Jonathan joined her.
“It’s Loudoun,” said Mrs. Bradley, coming from the point of vantage she had chosen. “Now, take care, Jonathan. He’s armed, and he’s prepared to encounter Stewart, so don’t look like Stewart if you can help it! Come with me. We’ll make for the woodshed. He can’t drag the loch without a boat—or believes he can’t, which means the same thing for our purpose. Deborah, go into the bedroom and lock the door. Don’t be afraid for Jonathan, child,” she added kindly. “I was joking. He shall come to no harm.”
“Hop it,” said Jonathan. “It’s safest for me if you do what Aunt Adela tells you.”
Realizing that this would be so, Deborah, feeling rather faint, went into the bedroom and concealed herself behind the curtains. The woodshed and all its possible drama was out of her line of vision, but, to her horror, the man approached the house and came in. She could hear him below. Satisfied, however, that the place was empty, he soon went out again. She listened, terrified and trembling, to hear the sound of a gun, but there was nothing. Then, to her great relief, she saw her husband approaching the house. He came straight upstairs, and said cheerfully:
“It’s all right now, Deb. We’ve got him. Let me in. He walked straight into Aunt Adela and a square bottle filled full of varnish. I thought she’d done for him at first. She caught him full on the base of the skull with one of the edges. Still, she’s scientific in these matters, and when we had tied him up he was just beginning to come round. Murmuring broken words, as they say in books. Very broken. Even I haven’t heard some of them before, and I’ve knocked around a goodish bit.” He took his wife in his arms. She began to cry. “Now, then, that’s enough of that,” he said. “When this is over we’ll have a real holiday at Clacton or Blackpool or somewhere.”
Deborah laughed and dried her eyes:
“I’ll go back now,” he continued, “and hike him up to the house. He’s to be put in the dining-room and threatened. At least, I think she said frightened, but it means the same thing, I suppose.”
It did not mean quite the same thing. Loudoun, dumped in a chair and told to keep quiet, obeyed for exactly ten minutes. Then Jonathan, left to guard him, was just calling Mrs. Bradley’s name when he heard a sibilant whisper, faint, at first, as a zephyr, and then increasing in volume. It seemed to come from just outside the door.
“Peace, peace,” it breathed; and then, in a louder tone, “I must have peace for my soul. Let me sleep, let me sleep, let me sleep. I will sleep for ever and ever.”
Loudoun, in spite of his bonds, struggled on to his feet.
“For God’s sake! ” he said. “What’s that?”
“You ought to know,” said Jonathan. “It’s the sound of running water. Sit down and keep quiet, as you were told.”
“No, no,” moaned the wretched creature. “The voice! The voice!”
“What voice?” Jonathan knew now who the ghost was.
“Surely you heard it? God! There it is again!”
“My son! My son!” Said the voice. “I must speak to my son. How can I sleep unless I speak to my son before he dies?”
“He won’t die! I swear it! I swear he won’t die,” gasped Loudoun. Jonathan stepped forward, caught him as he fainted, and laid him flat on the rug.
“He’ll never live to be hanged, at this rate,” he said, as Mrs. Bradley came in. “Or, if he does, he’ll be hanged on his own confession. I don’t think he’ll stand much more.”
“Be that as it may,” said Mrs. Bradley, “all we want now are Stewart and the police, and Dougald the Post to get a telegram sent to Janet Forbes.”
“I suppose she will be needed to swear to Stewart. But will she recognize him after such a very long time? She only recollects him as a child.”
“She knows all about Stewart. She has met him quite recently. I knew that when she avoided describing him to me.”
“Old Morag, I suppose, could swear to Stewart, too.”
“Old Morag has given us valuable information, but I am not sure that a court of law would regard her as a very reliable witness.”
“Here are Ian and Laura, and with them the police,” said Deborah, who had come in and was looking out of the window.
The police, who had come prepared, now pulled on fishermen’s boots, and, taking their tackle in their hands, began wading into the loch, preceded by one of their number who carried a long stick with which he tested the depth of the water as he went forward. Except for a small area in the centre, the water was nowhere more than three feet deep.
The work was slow and thorough. Several times the hooks caught, but no result was obtained until one of the men, who was standing almost up to his waist in the deeper part of the loch and casting his grappling hook into the very centre, gave a cry that there was something along the bottom, but that he could not hook it.
Upon this Jonathan, who was watching from the bank, volunteered to dive. His aunt came quickly up, drew him away from Ian, by whom he was standing, and spoke to him softly and earnestly. He stiffened, then shrugged, and began to take off his clothes.
“I’ll go up to the house and get Loudoun to tell me where to get some towels,” said Ian, making off. Jonathan waded in and began to swim.
“Now, sir! ” said the sergeant. Jonathan breathed and dived. He came up empty-handed.
“I’ll have to take your irons down with me,” he said. “I can touch it, but I can’t lift it. The mud must be holding it down.”
He dived with the hooks in his hands, and came up gasping.
“Try now,” he said, swimming towards the bank. The water of the loch was like ice. He shuddered and shuddered with cold as he climbed up on to the shore and grasped the towels which his aunt was holding. She gave him one and rasped him into warmth with the other.
“Now get on up to the house. The police have a fire in the kitchen,” she said, as she bundled his sweater over his head, and gave him a push towards the door. Jonathan, fumbling with the belt of his flannels, nodded and smiled.
“It was—what you said,” he observed. “Will you—must you stay here? Of course, you must.”
He hurried towards the house and the Camerons’ fire. Mrs. Bradley, looking grim, watched the efforts of the police. It took them forty minutes to recover the treasure. It consisted of an iron-bound wooden box so stout that the water had not yet rotted it through. Inside was the pitiful skeleton of a child. An iron casket was clamped by a rusted chain round the bones of the thighs.
“You can come out now, Mr. Stewart,” said Mrs. Bradley, turning from her examination of these relics. To the slight but disguised astonishment of everyone else, Stewart emerged from the bushes among which he had been hiding and from which he had watched the dragging of his loch, and came towards her.
“What is it? Is it treasure?” he demanded. “Old Morag used to tell me . . .”
“It is treasure of a sort,” said Mrs. Bradley. She moved aside. “It is the treasure that passed from David Loudoun to Lorna Stewart. It is the child, and, I have no doubt, the jewels that David gave her. It is treasure for you, because it is the vindication, I think, of your father, who committed no murder, at all. We shall find, I fancy, when we can get this iron casket open—the lock, as you see, has rusted in—that it was Rory Loudoun who shot David Loudoun, and that your father was falsely accused. It was Rory Loudoun, too, who killed the child before he married your mother—the child that was born in England before Malcolm Stewart came home.”
She turned to Laura.
“You remember what Morag has hinted from time to time? It was only hearsay evidence, of course, but it seems to have proved itself now. We shall know when we open the box.”
“You mean—you mean . . .” said Stewart, stammering.
“I mean your father was an innocent man, but he was a man who did not want to live. He wanted to suffer—and sleep.”
Stewart went very pale.
“Well, well,” he said. “Maybe he’ll sleep sound enough now.”
The Kerisaig lay off Elgol in the Isle of Skye. Laura was at the controls, Ian and Catherine were on deck, for the sea was as calm as glass in the shut-in bay, and Deborah, Jonathan, and the boy Brian had returned to the mundane air of England. Mrs. Bradley sat beside Laura in the well, and gazed at the Cuillins, jagged against the sky.
“There are still things I don’t understand,” said Laura. “First, what about that typescript which Loudoun gave Ian to read?”
“I’ve thought about that, and re-read it several times,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I am inclined to think that we stumbled upon an embryo author there. The careful style, the use of the third person, the fact that the story does not altogether correspond with what the man told Ian by word of mouth, all indicate a literary treatment. I suspect the typescript of being a bone flung at a dog—a bone the man may have wanted to keep for himself, but with which he felt he had to part to keep the dog busy. As I think we argued before, it was essential to his plan that Ian should stay downstairs until Alexander Loudoun got back.”
“Yes, I see. Now what about those two men—the ex-criminals? What exactly was their part? Whose side were they on? I feel I ought to know this, but I can’t quite work it out.”
“Well, first they were employed to kidnap Hector, and keep him safely on Skye until Alexander got away with the treasure. Through Ian he got away from them all too soon, and so was able to take his brother by surprise and murder him. The men came back to Craigullich to report, only to find their employer dead and their erstwhile prisoner in a position to blackmail them. They then fell in with his proposal that they should work with him—they were only mercenaries, after all.
“He got rid of them for a day on Beinn Cruachan whilst he worked out a new plan, for by this time James Stewart had come on the scene and was a threat to the whole of the enterprise, and arranged with them that, as we were rather a nuisance, they should kidnap young Brian and keep us busy looking for him on Skye.”
“How did the Loudouns know about the treasure in the first place?”
“I think old Morag told them. You see, I think they were her sons. Minnie is a word used here for mother.”
“Then weren’t they Loudouns at all? Wasn’t Rory Loudoun their father?”
“Oh, yes—or David Loudoun. The Loudouns were bad all through. Hector or Alexander probably met the other two criminals in prison. That’s why they were able to employ them and count on their help. Did it never strike you as strange that Janet Forbes left the house so soon? She knew what Rory and David Loudoun were like, and what Morag had suffered. No doubt tongues had wagged in the clachan.”
“Well, it’s all a queer tale,” said Laura. “And the jewels were almost worthless after all,” she added regretfully.
“Their value was sentimental only, but Morag didn’t know that. She found out somehow that they had been thrown in the loch, and she decided that they were not Stewart property, and that her own sons were entitled to them. One can see the logic of that. On the other hand, she knew that her boys had no claim at all to the rest of the property. Stewart should have what was his own. She warned him as soon as she believed that her boys intended to occupy Craigullich with her.”
“Queer that Rory Loudoun should have written a confession of what he’d done and then throw it into the loch with the murdered boy.”
“The confession was as near as he dared get to an act of atonement. One can’t read it any other way.”
Laura stared at the sea and the landscape before her. Cumulus cloud, soft and white, but promising later rain, was billowing over the bay. The sky, seen beyond it, was blue, and the water in which the boat lay, so far unshadowed by cloud, was the colour of turquoise. Farther out it was shadowed with grey, and a great grey cliff came almost sheer to the water. The Cuillins, fantastic and beautiful, tossed their ragged yet strangely symmetrical peaks like the cloaks of the northern giants, who could change themselves at will into mighty hills and their eyes into upland lakes. Their beauty and their serenity were awesome.
From the peak came Ian’s lazy voice quietly singing, and Catherine’s sudden laughter. Mrs. Bradley turned her alert, black head to take in the words of the song.
“Wull ye gang tae the Hielands, Leezie Lindsay?
Wull ye gang tae the Hielands wi’ me?
Wull ye gang tae the Hielands, Leezie Lindsay,
My pride and my darling tae be?”
About the Author
Gladys Mitchell was born in the village of Cowley, Oxford, in April 1901. She was educated at the Rothschild School in Brentford, the Green School in Isleworth, and at Goldsmiths and University Colleges in London. For many years Miss Mitchell taught history and English, swimming, and games. She retired from this work in 1950 but became so bored without the constant stimulus and irritation of teaching that she accepted a post at the Matthew Arnold School in Staines, where she taught English and history, wrote the annual school play, and coached hurdling. She was a member of the Detection Club, the PEN, the Middlesex Education Society, and the British Olympic Association. Her father’s family are Scots, and a Scottish influence has appeared in some of her books.
My Father Sleeps (Mrs. Bradley) Page 23
