Cold, Lone and Still

14: Not an Official Enquiry

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As though nothing had happened to separate us, I rang up Hera, told her about the invitation and asked whether she was prepared to accept it. She replied in the same liberal spirit and said that she would look forward to the gathering.

‘Pick me up half an hour before you had intended to,’ she said, ‘and I’ll give you a drink. What is the party in aid of, anyway?’

‘I think Dame Beatrice wants to size us all up.’

‘Good gracious! What an uncomfortable thought! Never mind. When do I expect you on Wednesday?’

‘Would a quarter to six be all right?’

When we met, it was like old times. She was wearing a dinner dress of midnight blue and looked more beautiful than ever. I told her so. Neither of us referred to the return of the engagement ring. I had it with me, but, unless the right moment offered itself, there was no point in attempting to return it.

At six fifteen I called a taxi and we arrived at the restaurant to find more than half the company already assembled and chattering over cocktails in an anteroom to that in which we were to dine. Cheerfulness was the keynote and, needless to say, Carbridge was never mentioned. The students (Patsy in a surprisingly simple and restrained dark green dress which she informed me she had borrowed for the occasion because the warden was going to be present) all had best-behaviour faces and sleekly groomed hair. Dame Beatrice was in dark red and the warden’s wife in black and gold, but to my mind the lovely Hera stole the picture; there was no doubt that Todd thought so too, and, as a fair-minded man, I could not blame him for wanting to dance attendance on her.

I had calculated that, if everybody whom Trickett had intended to invite had accepted, we should be seventeen at table, but there was an extra guest in the person of the warden’s son, Dominic Terrance, an engaging youth who was going up to Cambridge as soon as the term started.

The dinner was table d’hôte, there was a choice of red or white wine and there were place cards, so that everybody knew where to sit. The seating had been worked out carefully, I thought. Dame Beatrice took the head of the table, Laura the foot, so that both of them had the rest of us in their eye. My dinner partner was Jane Minch and on my other side was Rhoda Green.

The warden and Mrs Terrance were on either side of Dame Beatrice and young Dominic partnered Tansy Parks. Sandy had refused the invitation without having given me any specific reason except to say that he was not acquainted with any of the company.

‘You know Hera, me, Trickett, Sally Lestrange and Dame Beatrice,’ I pointed out. He replied that he knew Dame Beatrice only by repute and that when Trickett had come to the office it was only to speak to me and not to him. He added that dinner parties which numbered more than four people were not much in his line unless all the guests were of the male sex, and that he could see Hera and myself any time he wished and in much less boring circumstances.

Conversation at table was lively and of a general nature, even Rhoda and Tansy joining in. Most of the subject matter was centred on the West Highland Way and, needless to say, again nobody mentioned Carbridge. When we rose from table, Todd said to me, ‘I’ve been told that some of you are to go back with the warden, so I’ll see Hera home. There’ll be no hanky-panky. I know her too well for that.’

I found this remark disquieting, but there was no opportunity to question it. The students, delighted with their evening, were leaving and taxis were being summoned for the rest of us. Hera and Todd went off in the first one and I found myself in the vestibule of the restaurant with Dame Beatrice, Laura, Sally, Perth, young Dominic, the warden and his wife.

The Minches had gone off together on foot, so had Rhoda and Tansy, and the four students also appeared to be hunting in couples, for I saw Trickett and Coral go off in one direction and Freddie and Patsy in another.

I shared a taxi with Sally and Laura, while Dame Beatrice was accompanied by the warden and his wife and son, but, before the taxis came, Laura contrived to segregate me from the others.

‘I expect you wonder what all this is about,’ she said.

‘Not at all. I think you and Dame Beatrice wanted to see all of our walking party together, so that you could sum up one against the other, so to speak. I don’t know, though, why Perth and I have been invited to finish the evening at the hall of residence as guests of Mr and Mrs Terrance.’

‘You may not know, but there is no harm in hazarding a guess.’

‘In that case,’ I said, ‘perhaps Dame Beatrice is going to question Perth about the various relationships between members of the tour party and wants to have me present as a check on what he tells her.’

‘That’s about the size of it.’

When we reached the hall of residence, we were taken up to the warden’s quarters. Having seen us settled and indicated a small side table which held bottles and glasses, he and his wife and son took themselves off, having told us that they would be in the small sitting-room next door. They took Sally with them. I poured whisky for myself, Perth and Laura, but Dame Beatrice refused a drink and, eyeing us benevolently, began her interrogation.

It was directed, as I had anticipated, at Perth, and I guessed from his demeanour that he had expected to be the leading light and was quite happy to be in that position. In his quiet way, and like most Scotsmen, he had a pretty good conceit of himself. Laura had produced writing materials from somewhere and was poised to record in shorthand what he had to say.

‘You, my dear Mr Melrose,’ Dame Beatrice said to me, ‘will amend, confirm or contradict Mr Perth’s statements if and when you see occasion to do so.’

‘Aye,’ said Perth approvingly, ‘ye should always monitor your experiments. What is your wish that I should tell ye, mistress?’

‘What different connotations the same word can have!’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘ “Mistress” is a case in point. In England it means either a female employer of domestic servants or an alternative to a wife. In Scotland it is a form of address to a married woman of reputedly acceptable behaviour. I believe that the Scots’ use of the word is in accordance with its original meaning, and is preferable, in my opinion, to the Frenchified and somewhat stilted “madam”.’

‘Mistress is used by Shakespeare in a pleasant way in The Merry Wives of Windsor,’ said Laura. ‘ “Mistress Ford and Mistress Page are the liveliest of women.” ’

‘Ladies of unblemished virtue and of great wit and charm,’ I said, and I was about to recount my grandfather’s reminiscences of his falling in love with Edith Evans in 1925 on seeing her as Mistress Page, when I realised that, as P.G.W. causes one of his characters to say, we are not put into this world for pleasure alone, so I left the little story untold and waited upon Dame Beatrice’s next words.

‘What did you make of Mr Carbridge?’ she asked Perth. ‘What was your first impression of him? Did you find reason to alter it in any way as the tour progressed?’

‘I’ll answer ye categorically. I thought the man was a fule when first I met him and I still think the man was a fule.’

‘Interesting. Why did you think that, I wonder?’

‘Ye have an English saying that onlookers see most of the game. I kept yon man Carbridge in my sights from the beginning.’

‘Why?’

‘There are types I dinna trust. Hot gospellers, practical jokers, do-gooders and “friends of a’ the world” such as Carbridge. Leddy, I’m telling ye, that man was more sociable than a plague o’ gnats.’

‘Then why do you think he was killed? Gregariousness is not usually an incitement to murder.’

‘Gin it willna weary the company or, maybe, gie great offence to Mr Melrose here, I could furnish ye wi’ chapter and vairse.’

‘Don’t mind me,’ I said. ‘I suppose Hera comes into it somewhere, but I know you to be a gentleman, so anything you say will not come amiss so far as I am concerned. As a matter of fact, she has broken our engagement.’

‘Och, the pity of it! Weel, mistress, I’ll gie ye a potted vairsion o’ the tour as I saw it, and ye may draw your ain conclusions.’

He proceeded to furnish us with details. In a sense, little that he said was new to me so far as the occasions on which Hera and I had been with the rest of the party were concerned, but, of course, for most of the time we had been on our own. He began by describing the meeting at the Glasgow youth hostel. Looking at me, he said that in his opinion Hera and Todd were old acquaintances, and apologetically he asked whether this piece of information came as a complete surprise to me.

‘It certainly does,’ I said. ‘So far as I am aware, their previous meetings were the most casual and accidental encounters. They met in the corridor of the train to Glasgow and again in the cocktail bar at the airport hotel. I’m certain they had never met before.’

‘Ah, weel,’ he said, ‘ye’re entitled to your opinion. So ye believe Todd was leeing when he told Carbridge he had slept wi’ her the night at the airport hotel?’

‘Certainly I do! Besides, a man who would claim that, and, I suppose, boast about it, to a fellow like Carbridge is a skunk. There’s not a word of truth in it, and I don’t see Todd as that kind of a louse, anyway.’

‘Oo, aye? Then wat about Rowardennan?’

I tried to think back. Rowardennan, on Loch Lomond, was where Hera and I had taken the trip across the water to Inverbeg. I remembered that Todd, with others of the youth hostellers not of our party, had crossed with us. He had given us a wave and a word, but, once ashore at Inverbeg, we had seen no more of him. Hera and I, I remembered, had missed the return boat and had spent the night at the hotel, crossing back again in the morning. We had, as we had arranged, occupied separate rooms at the hotel. There had been no sign of Todd on the return trip and he was certainly with the others when they set off next morning.

I said, ‘Well, and what about Rowardennan? Todd didn’t spend the night at the hotel in Inverbeg. I would have known.’

‘Ye think ye would have known, but let me tell ye, laddie, wherever he spent the night, it was not in the Rowardennan youth hostel. I would hae kenned that, better than ye would hae kenned that he had your lassie tae bed.’

‘Tell us more about the tour,’ said Laura tactfully.

‘I’ll dae juist that,’ said Perth, looking at her with gratitude.

I said, ‘I’ll take your word for it that he didn’t spend the night in the hostel with the rest of you. You would have known about that, because of the dormitory system, but you will not persuade me that he spent it at the hotel at Inverbeg. We would have spotted him either there or when he got off the boat coming back to Rowardennan the next morning.’

‘Gang your ain gait,’ said Perth. ‘I willna press the point.’

I nodded, but my memory told me that at Crianlarich Todd had suggested openly to Hera that he should escort her to the hotel after the rumpus I had had with Carbridge. I began to wonder, as the poison of suspicion lodged itself in my mind, whether he would have made such a suggestion had he not had some grounds for believing that she might fall in with it.

Dame Beatrice assisted in dissolving the tension somewhat by asking whether anything had happened between Rowardennan and Crianlarich, while Hera and I were on our own and not with the rest of the party.

I did not remember telling anybody in particular that just before Hera and I reached the hostel at Crianlarich we had come upon Perth and the students busy with their hammers and chisels and all the rest of their geological gear, but I suppose I must have done, or she would not have followed up her question by remarking that it was on that part of The Way that there appeared to have been some slight evidence of dissension.

According to Perth, the trouble, if that is not too strong and misleading a word, began on the stretch between Rowardennan and Inversnaid. There was a rather pointless argument between Tansy and Carbridge about the name of a spectacular mountain — Carbridge claiming that it was called the Cobbler, Tansy maintaining that it was Ben Arthur.

‘But both are right,’ Laura interposed at this point. ‘Ben Arthur is the Cobbler. There are three peaks and these, seen against the skyline, are supposed to represent a cobbler, his wife and his daughter, or some such rubbish. As a matter of fact, the Cobbler is only the anglicised way of pronouncing the Gaelic An Gobaileach, the g being spoken like a k or a hard c. The Gaelic name has nothing to do with shoe-mending. It simply means ‘forked peak’. The ‘Arthur’ I imagine is the name given it for territorial reasons by a clan or sept. The MacArthurs, in a sense, are Campbells, but they claim seniority. When Ewan Campbell resigned his lands in the fourteenth century, King Robert the Second granted them to Arthur Campbell, the son, wherefore the peak was named Arthur, I suppose as a claim to it.’

We all listened to this with the uneasy respect which is accorded to a knowledgeable purveyor of useless information. Laura sensed immediately that the audience was becoming restive. She waved a shapely hand in apology and said, ‘Sorry. I get carried away. Anyhow, what a stupid thing for those two to argue about.’

‘Yes, it hardly seems a matter of life and death,’ said Dame Beatrice, bringing us back to the real seriousness of the matter in hand. ‘What happened after that?’

It appeared that Rhoda had taken up the subject in support of her friend and then had said that the pace set by Todd and Carbridge was turning what ought to be a pleasant ramble into a marathon race. Jane Minch had joined in to complain that her feet were hurting her, but her brother had pointed out that going more slowly was not the best remedy. Better, he said, to push on and get a longer rest at the end of the day.

‘What of the students?’ asked Dame Beatrice. ‘I understand from Mr Melrose that they too preferred to linger a little on The Way.’ (That, of course, although again I did not remember telling anybody about it, had begun at Inchcailloch, the Loch Lomond island which Hera and I had not visited. It was to do with the geological survey.) However, it did not seem that there had been any more serious disputes among the party. The men, in fact, had taken it in turns to carry Jane’s rucksack as well as their own, the exception being Trickett, who said that, with the extra equipment the geologists carried, he was physically incapable of knight-errantry.

‘Did you yourself lend a hand to beauty in distress?’ said Dame Beatrice to Perth.

‘Oo aye, I did my share, but the going, in some places, was verra severe on a lassie wi’ sair feet, even if she wasna hampered wi’ her gear.’

‘Would you say that any one person in the party took a particular dislike to Carbridge?’ asked Dame Beatrice. Perth shook his head and answered that the nearest to that would be the two clerks, Tansy and Rhoda. For one thing, he said, Tansy in particular had an eye on Todd and found Carbridge, with his extreme mateyness and his determination to keep his flock together and permit no straying for purposes of dalliance, extremely frustrating and irritating.

‘Although I’m bound to tell ye,’ said Perth, ‘that the man Todd showed nae disposition to respond to her female wiles. Gin his een strayed ony place when Miss Camden wisna wi’ us, it would hae been that he lookit at the student Patsy Carlow.’

I said nothing, but I could have remarked that, if Todd’s thoughts were on Hera, he would hardly have looked twice at Tansy, anyway. Although, as I had thought when first I met her and Rhoda, Tansy was probably kind-hearted, she could scarcely be called glamorous. The forthcoming and much younger Patsy might be a different proposition.

‘The twa clerks left the party at Crianlarich,’ Perth went on. ‘They didna spend the night at the hostel, but went on to Fort William and there we met them again. Myself and the students spent three days in the hills and slept at the Crianlarich youth hostel, while the ither four — Todd, Carbridge and the Minches, went on. We were a wee thing hindered by mist, but guid work was done to the satisfaction o’ the students and we also took transport, as did the women Parks and Green, to get ourselves to Fort William.’

‘Did you do anything there apart from climbing the mountain?’ asked Laura.

‘Oo, aye. There are shops in the toon, ye’ll ken, and lassies always go wild when there are shops. Souvenirs were purchased and displayed, for, as we were all intending to take the train when we had put in three nights at the youth hostel at Fort William, there was little need to fash about a little extra weight in the packs and the students could leave everything at the hostel while we climbed the mountain.’

‘What kind of things did they buy?’ asked Laura.

‘Och, what you would expect. Rhoda had a tweed for a skirt, Patsy bought Todd a wee present of a knife and Tansy, also fu’ of improper thoughts about Todd, I’m thinking, purchased, at an awfu’ lang price — but, of course, she earned money in her job — she bought him a knife, too. It was a genuine antique. Patsy’s knife was an imitation of a sgian dubh.’

‘A sgian dubh, eh?’ said Laura.

‘Ye’ll be thinking on the murder,’ said Perth, ‘but gin ye think yon man Todd would stab a fellow creature in the back, as I am telled was done tae Carbridge, ye hae Todd summed up wrangly, Mistress Gavin.’

‘The stabbing, as I understand it, was only a coup de grâce in case the strangling hadn’t done the job completely,’ I reminded the company.

‘Oo, aye, verra like,’ agreed Perth. ‘I hae to tell ye, mistress,’ he added, addressing Laura again, ‘as I hae been speired at tae mention purchases, that Jane Minch made purchase of some beautiful notepaper wi’ headings o’ the Loch Ness monster and various flowers and birds and knights on horseback — verra fine indeed.’

‘From the Malin Workshop in Claggan Road,’ I said. ‘Hera bought some, too. Beautiful drawings. Hedderwick, I remember, is the artist’s name. Did anybody else purchase anything in the nature of a weapon?’

‘The maist o’ them made a purchase,‘ said Perth,’but naebody else bought a knife. There was the fake sgian dubh and the knife bought by the woman Tansy Parks. She had it frae a shop which sold antiques. I was wi’ her when she bought it and I wrestled vairbally wi’ the proprietor on her behalf tae hae the price reduced. “Ye’ll ne’er get your money for that bauble,” I was telling him. “A’ the visitors are requiring are souvenirs. Not by ony length is that knife a souvenir o’ a trip to Fort William. It’s no even o’ Scottish manufacture.” ’

‘So what sort of dagger was it?’ asked Laura.

‘I am not convairsant wi’ the history o’ dirks, but, according tae the man, it was Spanish-made in about 1878, and to my mind there was naething so verra special aboot it. It was not what I would ca’ an object o’ distinction, but the lassie fancied it. It was broadish and the blade would ha’ been, in my reckoning, aboot seven inches in length and the knife overall aboot fifteen inches, but there wasna a sheath wi’ it. He had anither, a verra superior specimen, wi’ a tortoiseshell and mother o’ pearl handle, but the price was quite inordinate, so she took the first ane.’

‘What made her choose such an object?’ asked Dame Beatrice.

‘She said she wanted to mak’ a gift of it, but she didna then say to whom. As I telled ye, my thought upon it was that she intended to gift it to Todd.’

‘What you tell us is of the greatest interest,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Do the police know about all this?’

‘I dinna ken.’

We learned later what had happened to Patsy’s knife. Chagrined to find her gift redundant when she discovered the destination of Tansy’s purchase, she had raffled it when the students got back and it had been won by Freddie Brown.