Lament for a Maker

4

I was received by Miss Guthrie in what is referred to throughout these narratives as the schoolroom. She struck me at once as possessing that blend of elegance and‚ élan which gives many of her cultivated countrywomen their slightly baffling charm; I was inclined to think that Inspector Speight, in finding her ‘nice’ had displayed at once an accurate and unexpectedly sophisticated taste. She was evidently determined to be businesslike. I judged her to be a person familiar with the elementary proprieties of legal business; nevertheless I thought it proper to say a few words on the relations generally presumed to exist between solicitor and clients in these Islands. She listened with a very becoming attention – the readers must not think me unaware of a slight tendency in myself to what might be unkindly termed pomposity on such occasions – and presently we were seated comfortably together on a sofa. Miss Guthrie, indeed, was so kind as to give me permission to smoke a pipe.

‘So far,’ I said, ‘I have interviewed only a certain Mr Bell, our friend Mr Gylby – from whom I have had a very full narrative both orally and in writing – and the Hardcastles. Gylby’s character-sketch of Hardcastle seems to me penetrating.’

‘Noel,’ said Miss Guthrie briskly, ‘is quite an able youth.’

‘No doubt. He has also given something of a character-sketch – writing, you will understand, to a most confidential correspondent – of yourself.’

Perhaps a shade blankly, Miss Guthrie said: ‘Oh!’

‘He has recorded the opinion that you are not romantically disposed.’

‘I call that a mite unkind of Noel. All nice girls are romantic.’

I smiled. ‘But some perhaps conceal it.’

Sybil Guthrie lit a cigarette. ‘Mr Wedderburn,’ she said, ‘is this the right way about our business?’

‘I conceive it,’ I replied gravely, ‘to be a suitable approach.’

‘Very well. And I am a romantic girl and Noel was wrong. Will you tell me just why?’

‘Consider the manner of your coming to Erchany, Miss Guthrie. Mr Gylby, who was involved with your plan at the very closest quarters, is chiefly impressed by its ingenuity and efficiency. But to one like myself, at some distance from the affair, it is its aspect as a romantic prank that is most evident. You had eminent medical testimony, I gather, that Mr Guthrie was in no sense certifiably insane, and your own covert visit to him could be of no practical utility. But you liked the excitement – the romance and excitement – of besieging the castle, of carrying it not by storm but by a ruse. You even sent a slightly flamboyant telegram to your American lawyer in London. What were you fundamentally engaged in? Family business? Not a bit of it. You were simply after adventure – and adventure seasoned with at least an appreciable spice of danger, for Mr Guthrie was a very eccentric man. Noel Gylby has been so struck by what I may term your executive ability that he has quite missed what must be called the romanticism of the underlying motive.’

Miss Guthrie manipulated a delicate veil of cigarette smoke between us. ‘And then, Mr Wedderburn, what?’

‘I am wondering whether this same impulse has not made you manipulate a little what you witnessed in the tower.’

‘You mean that Ranald Guthrie didn’t commit suicide at all?’

‘On the contrary, I am quite sure he committed suicide. Believe me that if I thought the account you gave to Mr Gylby a fundamental perversion I could not possibly consent to act for you. And now, Miss Guthrie, we had better hold the rest of our consultation on the site of the incidents involved.’

‘You mean the tower? Must we? I hate the place now.’

‘Nevertheless I think that if you will be so good, and if the police will permit us, it will be a useful move.’

My friend Inspector Speight proved good enough simply to hand me the keys of the staircase and the dead man’s study; I rejoined Miss Guthrie and together we made the laborious ascent of the tower. Once entered, I looked about me with the liveliest curiosity. Flush with the door by which we stood, and but a few feet away, was what must be the door to the little bedroom. Half-way along the left-hand wall was the French window to the battlements. In the middle of the room was a square table serving as a desk. And everywhere were books.

I was struck by the agelessness of the place: not a thing but might have held its place where it stood for generations. The late Mr Guthrie, it was to be concluded, had been of more than conservative temperament – in addition to which, of course, he had spent no penny that he could help. Half idly, I cast round for some sign of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, and found it abruptly in the form of a hand telephone on the desk. I glanced at Miss Guthrie in perplexity. ‘Surely,’ I said, ‘Erchany isn’t on the telephone!’

‘Of course not, Mr Wedderburn; we weren’t as dumb as that. The machine here must be some sort of house-telephone to the offices. I haven’t seen another in the castle.’

‘An interesting innovation of the penurious laird’s. The police, I suppose, have been most efficiently over these rooms; nevertheless I suggest that before further talk we make a little inspection of our own. Let us begin with the rifled bureau.’

The piece of furniture to which my client led me would have delighted a connoisseur, but it struck me as a most improperly fragile strong-box. Its single drawer had been broken open – a single powerful wrench would have sufficed – and in the bottom there still lay the few odd coins that had been noticed by Gylby. I stared at them, I suppose, in a sort of absent perplexity; Miss Guthrie seemed to follow my thought. ‘I reckon,’ she said, ‘the tower itself is a sufficient strong-room.’

‘Perhaps so. Nevertheless it was a deliberate establishing of temptation. Do you think Hardcastle, for instance, would be so faithful a retainer as to resist it?’

Miss Guthrie wrinkled her forehead. ‘It is rather perplexing.’

‘Not at all.’

‘Mr Wedderburn!’ The sincerity of my client’s astonishment was a pleasure to mark.

I gave a chuckle which oddly reminded me that I was Aeneas’ uncle. ‘No perplexity, my dear lady, was intended: and – what is much more – none exists. Though I am bound to say you have done your best.’

‘Mr Wedderburn, you are making quite unprofessional fun of me.’

‘Then let us be grave again and pursue our inspection. Among other things, I should much like to find the poems of William Dunbar.’

I fear I was excelling in a rather childish species of mystification. I turned to the bookshelves without more ado and began very seriously to search for the publications of the Scottish Text Society. Guthrie’s books were most methodically arranged and I came upon them without difficulty. Taking down the three volumes of Dunbar, I found myself quite smothered in dust.

‘Our friend the poetical laird,’ I said, ‘knew his favourites. He had no need to refresh his memory on the poem he seems to have been so fond of.’ And I turned to the Lament for the Makaris.

‘He takis the knychtis in the feild,

Anarmit under helme et scheild;

Wictour he is at all melle;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.

‘He takis the campion in the stour,

The capitane closit in the tour,

The lady in bour full of bewte;

Timor Mortis conturbat me…

‘Well, Death has certainly taken the captain from his tower.’ I laid down the volume. ‘And there seems to be only one interpretation, does there not? But if Guthrie has not been reading Dunbar recently, let us see what he has been reading.’ And I moved over to a pile of books, still in their dust-covers, on the desk. Ewan Bell had omitted to tell me, at our interview a few hours earlier, of Guthrie’s sudden interest in medical studies as reported by Miss Mathers, and I was therefore surprised as well as puzzled by the pile of medical literature which I found confronting me. Letheby Tidy’s Synopsis of Medicine. Osler’s Principles and Practice of Medicine. Muir’s Text-book of Pathology – I turned them over one after another in some perplexity. ‘Now where,’ I said, ‘does the science of medicine come into the picture?’

Miss Guthrie picked up Dunbar. ‘Well, it comes for that matter into the poem.’ And she read:

‘In medicyne the most practicianis,

Lechis, surrigianis, et phisicianis,

Thame self fra ded may not supple;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.’

‘That is very interesting. And if I may make the remark, Miss Guthrie, you have considerable facility in Middle Scots. You studied it at college?’

‘Why yes, I did.’

‘May I ask if you have taken your Ph.D?’

‘Yes, Mr Wedderburn, I have.’

‘Then you are quite sure that you are not the “doctor” for whom Hardcastle was on the look out?’

Miss Guthrie flushed. ‘What an extraordinary piece of ingenuity! Of course I’m not. He knew nothing about me. And one doesn’t arrange to be called “Doctor Guthrie” all one’s days because of a roaring piece of pedantry in youth.’

‘I suppose not. Well, let us search further. I only wish that my own “youth” were as little behind me as yours.’

I found little more to interest me in the study. Books apart, it carried only a few traces of the career and interests of Ranald Guthrie: a boomerang and a native food-carrier from his Australian days, a few sketches by Beardsley to mark his contacts with a past generation of writers, a case or two of Pictish and Roman remains in token of his interest in archaeology. I moved into the bedroom. Here too there seemed little of interest. Guthrie had slept in a room immediately below. Except for a stretcher bed used perhaps for an occasional siesta this was little more than a lumber-room: a broken chair, a pile of old canvas, rope and sticks in a corner, a cracked mirror hung on the wall, a scrap of tattered curtain over the narrow windows. Much of Erchany, I gathered, was in just this state of dilapidation; I was turning away when my attention was caught by a book lying on the floor. I picked it up. ‘More medicine, Miss Guthrie. Experimental Radiology by Richard Flinders.’ I put it down again. ‘We are here by courtesy of the police and had better leave things as we find them. And now, perhaps, it is time to return to our discussion.’

Back in the study, Miss Guthrie took up what I knew to be her characteristic position perched on the desk. It was uncommonly chilly and I so far consulted the halting circulation of age as to talk while pacing about. ‘Miss Guthrie, I dare say you have read stories in which all sorts of revelations are effected by what is called a reconstruction of the crime?’

Obliquely but positively Miss Guthrie answered: ‘There was no crime. You’ve agreed to that yourself.’

‘I think you mistake me. But for the moment we will say “the events of Christmas Eve”. And I invite you, here in this room, to consider the probable results of the police attempting a reconstruction of those events.’

‘I don’t quite get what you mean.’

‘I mean simply that such a reconstruction would at once shake your testimony as it stands at present; and that it would shake it for a very good reason. The account you gave to Mr Gylby was as much coloured by your own desires as it was illuminated by the clear light of objective fact.’

Miss Guthrie stood up. ‘If you believe that, Mr Wedderburn, I really don’t think–’

‘But what I can see that the police might not see is that you are placing yourself in a hazardous and disagreeable position to no purpose at all. I will not presume, as a man, to judge your attitude, though as a lawyer I must think it wrong. The relevant point is this: romantic perjury can only embarrass us. And all we need is the facts.’

Miss Guthrie inspected the tips of her fingers. Then she said: ‘Please explain what you mean about a reconstruction.’

‘Imagine this room lit by two or three candles. The French window is not quite shut, there is a gale outside and the light is not only dim but uncertain and flickering. You are outside the window, peering in. Just how much could you see?’

‘Quite a lot – in a flickering way. And no reconstruction could prove that I saw just so much, no more and no less.’

‘Very true. But it is much easier to demonstrate that neither you nor anyone else can see round a corner. And I put it to you that without thrusting your head into the room it is impossible from that French window to see those two contiguous doors – to staircase and bedroom – fully and clearly. If either were opened wide you would no doubt be able to see the movement. But if one – or both – were opened only slightly, so that a man might slip through, you would see nothing. In other words, Miss Guthrie, your testimony translates an impression quite illegitimately into a certainty. The staircase door opened wide and you saw no more of Lindsay. The bedroom door opened wide and you saw no more of Guthrie. But Lindsay might in the moments following have slipped through the two doors – from staircase to bedroom and back – without your being any the wiser.’

Still perched on the desk, my client looked at the doors long and thoughtfully. ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that is so.’

‘I think you liked Miss Mathers?’

‘I did.’

‘And this young Mr Lindsay, from what you saw of him?’ Miss Guthrie’s chin went up a decisive inch. ‘I thought him quite beautiful, Mr Wedderburn.’

‘And you had further formed the opinion that your kinsman was an almost wholly unbeautiful person?’

‘Very decidedly.’

‘Then we begin to see where we are. You were going to stick to these young people – whose circumstances are romantic, touching and beautiful – let the worst betide. All that stood between Lindsay and the gravest suspicion was your knowledge that he had gone out for good while Guthrie was alive. Therefore you have deliberately given your impression the status of knowledge… Miss Guthrie, have the police recorded your statement?’

‘No. Inspector Speight said he would take it formally later.’

‘Speight is a most circumspect officer. Now let me most earnestly tell you that you must go back to your mere and honest impression about the doors. You will lose credit if you don’t. And the one vital necessity is that your testimony should be seen to be reliable.’

‘Mr Wedderburn – I don’t understand. Vital to what?’

‘Vital to the safety of the quite beautiful young man Neil Lindsay.’

My client jumped up and approached me in considerable agitation. ‘You must tell me more of what is in your mind, Mr Wedderburn. You must.’

‘Simply this. That you couldn’t really and truly see the doors clearly is a thousand pities – still, it is not fundamentally important. What is fundamentally important is what took place between Guthrie and Lindsay. And that is where you have actually lied.’

Miss Guthrie was very pale and I thought I detected a rising tide of passion which might at any moment usher me from her presence for good and all. I therefore went on as hurriedly as was consonant with the impressiveness I knew to be necessary if I were to get my way with her. ‘You say Lindsay left quietly. Gylby says he left in a passion. And Gylby is speaking the truth. Now if Lindsay is to be vindicated we must have a clear picture of what actually happened. And that clear picture requires the truth – Gylby’s truth. Do you understand me?’

Miss Guthrie passed a hand over her forehead and sat down rather limply on a chair. ‘I don’t understand you at all.’

‘Let me then assure you of this – and I speak with nearly fifty years’ experience of the law. Neil Lindsay is safe. I have a picture of the case now which no prosecution could break through. Guthrie committed suicide. But that is far from implying that there has been no crime. A few hours ago I thought your evidence about the doors might be vital to him. I know now that all he needs is your simple story of what happened in this room. Please give it to me.’

Miss Guthrie rose, walked to the window and scanned the snow as if there might be counsel in it. ‘I find it,’ she said presently, ‘terribly hard to believe you.’ There was a silence. ‘But it is clear I must do as you say.’ And she turned and came back to her old position on the desk.

‘Of course you are right about the doors. I didn’t realize it, but I see it’s something they could demonstrate as a fact simply with a scale plan. I couldn’t be certain Lindsay hadn’t slipped back and through the bedroom to the battlements for the necessary half minute – though I knew he hadn’t.’ Miss Guthrie looked at me squarely. ‘I knew Lindsay hadn’t killed Guthrie. And everything followed from that.’

‘Inaccurate evidence never follows legitimately from anything, my dear.’

With a sober nod Miss Guthrie acknowledged this final fatherly rebuke. Then she went on. ‘Everything I have said about the interview between Guthrie and Lindsay is true – except right at the end. They sat and had that formal parley. Guthrie never went and shouted to Hardcastle about asking Noel up. Neither of them could have gone near the bureau–’

‘Exactly. This is vital and they can’t shake you on it.’

‘But at the end they got up and walked about half-way to the door. I could still see them clearly and I thought they were going to part with formal civility – like I made up for Noel – when I suddenly saw that something had gone wrong. Guthrie was talking and though I couldn’t hear a word I could see just what he was doing. He was lashing the boy – the young man – Lindsay with words. It was as if he knew he had some hold on him – some hold that made it safe to be briefly and hideously cruel. I knew in that instant that I just hated my kinsman and I felt – horribly it now seems – a fierce longing that the boy should kill him there and then. That was why I felt afterwards that I must–’

‘I see. Had Lindsay actually killed Guthrie you would have been spiritually an accomplice.’

‘Something like that. It was a piece of obscene cruelty on Guthrie’s part, and it was over in a few seconds. I had just drawn breath from it when I saw that Lindsay was gone.’

‘And that is the whole story? Then you have nothing to do but come downstairs and repeat it formally to Inspector Speight.’

Miss Guthrie gave a sigh of relief. Then she hesitated. ‘Mr Wedderburn – you are sure? It’s terribly hard to believe.’

I smiled at the reiterated phrase. ‘You need have no doubts.’

‘You know, Noel said there was another thing. He said it would be thought very strange that I should guess on that cry that Guthrie had–’

‘My dear young lady, Mr Gylby’s experience is no doubt curious and extensive. Nevertheless I venture to assure you that you need have no apprehensions.’ I consulted my watch. ‘And now there will just be time to send post-haste to Dunwinnie for an electrician.’

‘An electrician!’

‘Precisely. And one, if possible, with an impressive and venerable exterior. Much depends on little matters of that sort. And now, Miss Guthrie, for Inspector Speight.’

We went out and I locked the study door behind me. I felt, I believe, much as I feel when I lock up a family deed box with the knowledge that its affairs are comfortably settled for a generation. In silence we descended the long staircase and made our way to the police inspector’s room. We found Speight consuming ham sandwiches in meditative solitude.

‘May we interrupt you, inspector? My client Miss Guthrie would like to make a formal statement. And I don’t think we shall have much more trouble over the Erchany mystery.’

‘You think not, Mr Wedderburn? I’m real glad to hear it. Come away, Miss Guthrie, and we’ll have your bit story down on paper for the sheriff.’

‘There is one other matter before we begin. I propose to send my car into Dunwinnie to find a competent electrician. I believe he may be useful to us.’

Inspector Speight put down his sandwich. ‘Mr Wedderburn, did you say an electrician?’

‘Just that. And if they have a stopwatch at the police station I believe that would be useful too.’