Lament for a Maker

3

Christmas morning

Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night! My scribblings of the last two days have proved an induction to real tragedy. Mr Ranald Guthrie of Erchany is dead.

It is all so fantastic – as well as rather horrible – that I really doubt if I can change the key in which I have been writing. Erchany is still the enchanted castle; only the enchantment has grown murky as one of great-uncle Horatio’s poems, and the enchanter – great-uncle Horatio’s sometime crony – is with Roull of Aberdene and gentill Roull of Corstorphine. Strange that as he walked down the corridor the other night Guthrie was chanting his own lament!

Our plesance heir is all vane glory,

This fals warld is bot transitory,

The flesche is brukle, the Feyind is sle;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Onto the ded goes all Estatis,

Princis, Prelotis, and Potestatis,

Both riche et pur of all degre;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.

He spairis no lord for his piscence,

Na clerk for his intelligence;

His awfull strak may no man fle;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Art – magicianis, and astrologgis,

Rethoris, logicianis, et theologgis…

But to work – which is getting down on paper an account of what has happened. It may be useful; and it is still my journal for you, Diana. It will be some hours more before the world – doctors, police, lawyers – can get to Erchany; and I don’t at all know how soon after that I shall get away. It is the unpleasant fact that I am involved in what may be an affair of murder. A strange Christmas Day.

I have first to persuade you – and myself – that while the sheets preceding have been an expedient for beguiling the time they are in no sense romancing. They give events accurately, and they give quite accurately too my own perhaps temperamental reactions to events. Nevertheless, I had better give a paragraph to recapitulating without fancy.

Miss Guthrie and I arrived at Erchany, unheralded and with every appearance of sheer accident, late on Monday evening. Hardcastle was rather stealthily on the look out for a doctor. We were politely enough received by Guthrie into what appeared to be the household of a confirmed miser – though with curious elements of expense in the supper. The make-up of the household was noteworthy: the anomalous factotum Hardcastle a striking scoundrel, his wife weak minded, the odd boy halfwitted, the laird himself powerfully witted and perhaps powerfully mad – I am over the line of facts here, for I would cut a poor figure trying to speak of Guthrie’s mental condition in a witness-box. But an undoubted fact, if a mysterious one, is the sense of strain and waiting – a sort of electric current flowing round and between Guthrie, his niece Christine Mathers, and certain unknown outside persons or events. A further fact was Hardcastle’s warning about the dangerousness of a certain Neil Lindsay. After that there are merely matters of impression. First, something about Sybil Guthrie’s attitude to her kinsman’s household and the way in which Guthrie told her his American cousins had ‘sent friends’. To this, as you will hear presently, I hold a key. Second, the way Christine told her uncle he was ‘in two minds’. And third, the way Guthrie said to me: ‘I am glad you found your way here.’ These utterances were charged; they stand – somehow – full in the picture; I give them the status of enigmatic facts. There may, of course, be other points of equal significance buried in my narrative but at the moment I can’t dig them out.

And now the events leading to Guthrie’s death. I don’t know that you will be surprised to learn that the first matter to be recorded concerns a rat.

Christine appeared alone again at supper last night. I think she was rather stumped in the schoolroom afterwards for some method of entertaining us, and she ended by showing us a portfolio of her sketches that lay on a table as if in process of being packed up – rapid, economical impressions mostly of wild geese over Loch Cailie. But she was at once shyer and more secretly possessed than before and soon she slipped away. A few minutes later Sybil said it was cold – as indeed it was – and that she was going to read in bed. And a few minutes after that I went upstairs myself, having in my head the plan of a rat-proof tent on an improved model in which to spend the night. It was in furtherance of this ambitious project that I began studying the creatures.

The most obvious classifications were by size and colour. There were big rats and little rats, brown rats, grey rats and – what I feel vaguely is something very choice – black rats; and there were indeterminate rats of a piebald or mildewed sort. There were a few fat rats and a great many lean rats, a few lazy rats and a great many active rats – these categories overlapping substantially – and there was a possible classification too into bold and bolder. As far as I could see there were no really timid rats, despite the consternation that must sometimes be caused by the wee penknife of the laird. All this was more or less as one might expect in a mansion in which the rodent kind have it nearly all their own way. What really startled me was the sporadic appearance of learned rats. These are, I suppose, even rarer than the pink and blue varieties.

Learned rats. Rats, that is to say, lugging laboriously round with them little paper scrolls – rather like students who have just been given a neatly-printed degree. I am not sure whether I saw in all two or three of these learned rats.

My first thought was that Guthrie must be amusing his solitary days by conducting experiments – the business of tying labels on whales to discover how long it takes them to swim round the world. And I was sufficiently intrigued to go learned-rat hunting, getting quite worked up indeed and spending nearly an hour at it. A mad figure in the best Erchany tradition I must have seemed, stalking the creatures with the bedroom poker. The learned brethren were lazier, I think, and bolder than the others and I believe that the poker was probably a mistake; a skilled pair of hands could have caught one fairly readily. The poker, however, if not much good in attack, might be useful as a weapon of defence; when I abandoned the hunt and set about my fortifications for the night I kept it ready to hand.

Somehow I got to sleep. Twice I was awakened by the scuttling of the rats, twice I lammed out in the dark with the poker – and the second time there was a quite sickening squeal. Poor Mrs Hardcastle: I know now just what goes through her head in the night. I lit the candle. Miraculously, I had killed a learned rat.

There was a nasty mess and it took me a minute to summon resolution to investigate. The scroll was a piece of fine paper – it might have been torn from an India-paper notebook – and it was tied to the leg of the rat, rather cunningly, with a fragment of cotton. I cut it free and unfolded it gingerly, for the creature’s blood was on it. Neatly written in ink were seven words. Bring help secretly to tower top urgent.

I dressed. I don’t think it occurred to me that the thing was melodramatic, or absurd, or a joke or fantasy of Guthrie’s. A period spent at a considerable height will condition one to the job of going really high on a mountain and something over twenty-four hours spent at Erchany had conditioned me to taking the Appeal of the Learned Rat in my stride. I simply wondered how best to make the top of the tower.

The passage outside my room was pitch dark and I hadn’t gone a couple of yards before my candle blew out. At that I remembered Sybil Guthrie’s electric torch; it seemed a shame to arouse or alarm her – not that she is of a timid sort – but at the same time I felt the circumstances of the moment demand all the aids I could lay my hands on. So I turned back and knocked at her door. There was no audible reply; not surprising this, for the wind was rattling in a hundred places round about. I tried again and then I opened the door and went in. I called, struck a match, presently summoned hardihood to grope about on the enormous bed. Suspicion became certainty: there was no one in the room.

If leisure had been given me I believe I should have felt uncommonly apprehensive. But at this moment I caught a glint of light from the corridor; I went out expecting to find Sybil and found instead the abominable Hardcastle, holding a lantern in one hand and thumping at my bedroom door with the other. He looked at me evilly – no doubt he was putting a construction agreeable to himself on my emergence from Sybil’s room – and then he said the laird sent his compliments; he was better now and would I join him in a nightcap in the tower?

I looked at my watch – the refinements of politeness would be wasted on Hardcastle – and saw that it wanted five minutes of midnight. The very eve of Christmas.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As it happens, I was just going there. Lead the way.’

The lantern gave a jump in the brute’s hand; I suppose I must have spoken about as grimly as his grim master. For the message that had come from the tower by Hardcastle – hours after it was known I had gone to bed – was scarcely less problematical than the one that had been brought by the rat: the two of them, coupled with Sybil’s disappearance, were evidence of some devilment or other that I couldn’t now do less than probe. So I tramped down the corridor after Hardcastle in a wrathful mood that probably concealed a good deal of trepidation. Whatever was happening, I had a good notion it was a trap. Some fly was walking into the spider’s parlour. Was it Sybil? Or myself? It never occurred to me it might be Guthrie!

But it did occur to me that Hardcastle was one of nature’s own spiders. Positively, I had told him to lead the way because I was not without anxiety about my throat and I kept a wary eye on him as we went down the great staircase and along what I rather uncertainly conjectured to be the schoolroom corridor. It must have been about half-way that he hesitated and came to a momentary halt, as if listening. I drew up behind him and listened with all my ears too. At first I thought I heard hurried footsteps approaching us; I strained my eyes down the gloomy corridor and could see no one; then, hair-raisingly, the footsteps pattered past me without visible sign. Absurdly – for one can’t brain a ghost – I wished I had brought the poker which had accounted for the learned rat: then I realised that I had been listening only to the peculiar flap-flapping noise of that long tattered carpet that works like a sea on the corridor floor. At that I recovered my wits sufficiently to hear what Hardcastle was hearing: voices from somewhere near the far end of the corridor.

They were a mere murmur – until suddenly some trick of the fragmented Erchany winds caught them and we could distinguish the voice of Christine. I was rather relieved, for I presumed that Sybil was with her and that they were sitting up, perhaps, for Christmas. Hardcastle may have had the same thought; he looked at his watch as I had done a few minutes before; and then a further waft of wind brought us the other voice, a man’s voice – elderly, I guessed, and very Scottish. A second later a door opened in the direction of the murmuring and we could just distinguish a figure slip out and disappear into the darkness in front of us.

The execrable Hardcastle hesitated a moment longer and then we went on. As you know, I hadn’t so far had much chance of getting the lie of the remoter parts of the castle, and our progress now was quite bewildering. The tower is the oldest part, the original keep or donjon, and as we had descended from the bedroom floor I concluded it must be structurally distinct from the later buildings and connected with them only at ground level, making it an isolated place indeed. And presently I got the measure of this isolation. We passed through a small heavy door and then, no more than three yards on, a door that was exactly similar: the intervening space, I realized even in my rather rattled state, represented the thickness of the wall of the tower. And then we climbed a staircase.

I recalled, as one might recall something peculiarly absurd in a dream, that I was a chance guest going to welcome Christmas Day in the apartments of a friendly and courteous host. And again I wished I had brought that poker. We climbed steadily – Hardcastle in front moving with a sinister deliberation, like a warder setting a decent pace to the gallows – an unexpectedly broad staircase that went to and back in short flights, lit at every second flight by narrow windows. The skies must have partially cleared for the moment; through the windows came the faint pallid gleam of an uncertain moonlight reflected from snow; and it was this that gave the few seconds succeeding their most macabre effect. We had climbed it seemed interminably – I was just deciding that Guthrie must hold his vigils at the very top of the tower – when from above us there rang out a single fearful cry. A moment later the gleam from the window I was passing momentarily vanished as if a high-speed shutter had been flashed across the moon. And then – and after an appreciable interval – a faint, dull sound floated up from below.

We must both have guessed more or less what had happened. I felt that faint thud as infinitely more horrible than the cry which had preceded it; Hardcastle, three or four steps above me, called out: ‘Great God, if I didn’t warn him!’ And then we heard footsteps.

What happened then happened in a flash. A young man appeared at the turn above us. Hardcastle’s torch caught him for a second and for a second only – nevertheless I received an extraordinarily vivid impression of passion: a dark skin drained of colour and stretched over a set jaw, an eye that smouldered like Guthrie’s own. Hardcastle cried out: ‘Lindsay!’ and made a lunge so clumsy it occurred to me to wonder if he were drunk; a second later the lad had slipped past us unheeding and was gone. Perhaps I ought to have grabbed at him myself; I suppose at the vital moment I felt the situation too obscure for action. Hardcastle seemed to hesitate whether to turn back; then he gave a curse and hurried on. I could only follow.

We were still a couple of storeys from the top, but now the staircase narrowed and there were no more windows. On each landing as we came up I had noticed a single massive door; we now passed one more of these and arrived panting together before the last of all, which was if anything more massive than the rest. Hardcastle threw it open. We were looking into a low, square room furnished as a study and lit as usual by a few candles. In the middle of it stood Sybil Guthrie.

For a moment we stood like actors holding a scene for the curtain; then Hardcastle bore down upon Sybil in a sudden unaccountable fury. ‘You wee limmer – !’

The phrase was no doubt insulting. I gave myself the satisfaction of taking the scoundrel by the shoulder – perhaps by the collar – and telling him to shut up. The action had a more decisive effect than I intended. Hardcastle at once became glumly and pertinaciously passive, with the result that from that moment I found myself saddled with the direction of affairs at Erchany. Willynilly, I am in charge until some competent and interested person arrives.

I turned to Sybil. ‘Where is Guthrie?’

For a fraction of a second she hesitated, looking warily but composedly from one to the other of us. Then quietly, a little unsteadily, she said. ‘He has fallen from the tower.’ And as if in explanation she pointed across the room to a door close to the one by which we had entered.

I took Hardcastle’s lantern from him and explored. What I found was a small, narrow bedroom, with the same narrow slits for windows as in the staircase, and with a second stout door, now swinging open upon blackness, almost directly opposite the door in which I stood. I crossed the little bedroom to this further door and looked out. I had to clutch at the jamb as I did so, for the wind – though I believe it was moderating steadily – was terrific up here. Before me was a narrow platform of much-trodden snow, bounded by a low castellated parapet – the original battlements, I suppose, of the keep. I staggered cautiously to the verge and looked down. There was nothing to be seen but blackness, and nothing to be heard but the whip and sigh of the wind. I remembered the length of the climb I had just made up the tower staircase and knew that, however thick the blanket of snow beneath, the man who had gone over the parapet was now dead. My first thought – it shows how curiously practical one turns in a crisis – was of relief that there would be no agonised need of medical aid. My second and related thought was that we were most awkwardly isolated should it prove to be some deep mischief that was afoot. And my third thought was simply an image of the rascal Hardcastle, for in my mind already mischief and that ugly brute went together.

I turned back into the study doing my best to think fast. One thing was clear to me on a moment’s reflection. Ranald Guthrie, unless drunk or really demented or walking in sleep or trance, was most unlikely to have taken that drop by sheer accident. It was with a shock that I remembered Sybil’s flat words: ‘He has fallen from the tower.’ They implied – taken in strictness they positively stated – that the merest misadventure was in question. And suddenly I saw the full implications of such a violent and mysterious affair as this, and of the atmosphere in which I had been living these thirty hours past. Suspense, fear, black humours, learned rats, violent death: the sum of them gave one unescapable answer – suspicion. Erchany as the exclusive territory of a malign enchanter was a fantasy of the past; what had happened in the tower tonight made it the territory too of coroners and plain-clothes policemen. And ten miles away over formidable snows there was no doubt a rural constable; twenty miles away a sergeant; and in Aberdeen or Edinburgh perhaps the sort of officer who would deal efficiently with such a matter as this. I must have looked from Sybil to Hardcastle and from Hardcastle to Sybil with an expression of positively virgin responsibility.

Guthrie was undoubtedly dead: nevertheless common humanity dictated that our first real effort should be to reach his body. If, however, we were on the scene of the crime I felt that neither Sybil – whose presence in the tower was unexplained – nor the sinister Hardcastle had better be left in sole possession of it. Sybil could be sent to Christine – only the task of telling Christine what had happened I ought to perform myself, and it must wait until I had been outside and made sure. At the moment, therefore, the three of us in the tower had better stick together.

During these researches into the etiquette of violence I was looking around. I think you had better have the lie of the land as I made it out now and later.

This top storey of the tower is set back from the storeys below, and is in consequence completely islanded by a narrow battlemented platform – a parapet walk – from which there is a sheer drop to the house and the moat beneath. There are two staircases: one is a little spiral staircase that emerges through a trapdoor upon a corner of the open parapet walk; the other is the staircase by which I had come, and which opens within the topmost storey and directly upon the study. From the study one door gives upon the parapet walk and one upon the little bedroom – from which in turn another door gives upon the parapet walk. All the windows are of the narrow defensive sort.

I decided that if possible I ought to lock up. So I took Hardcastle’s lantern again and went to explore the spiral staircase, as also the state of the snow on the platform. It was my impression that there was evidence of a good deal of coming and going about that wind-swept ribbon of battlement, but already the marks were everywhere indistinct and it would have been waste of time trying to direct on them the eye of an amateur detective. I noted the mere fact that recently, within, say, the last half-hour – there had been something like commotion on this hazardous spot; then I went on to the trapdoor. And here the snow was disturbed in a way that afforded definite evidence; recently, the trapdoor had been open. A tug at a stout iron ring told me the door was now bolted from below; a moment’s fumbling found me what I wanted, a bolt that could be pushed home from above. It moved easily; one entrance to the tower-top was secured.

I moved back as quickly as was prudent, pausing only for a glance at the sky. The moon was behind a rack of clouds, but here and there was a star or a group of stars: what must have been Orion’s belt appeared as suddenly as a line of streetlights while I looked. I guessed that daylight would see the snow stretched beneath a clear sky and that for the time being the last flakes had fallen.

I returned to the study and found Sybil and Hardcastle standing very much as I had left them. I said: ‘Now we’ll go downstairs.’ We trooped out to the little landing and I locked the door and put the key in my pocket. Study, bedroom and battlements were inaccessible. Hardcastle muttered something indistinguishable – perhaps it was an attempt to vindicate his stewardship of Erchany – but I was already leading the way down at a run. When we got to ground level Hardcastle indicated another and smaller stair. I locked a further door giving access to the tower staircase and we went down further to a sort of basement. From the tower-top, I realized, Guthrie must have fallen clean into the moat. It was when we came to a little door giving on this that Sybil spoke for the first time since she had said ‘He has fallen from the tower.’ What she said now was: ‘I’m coming too.’ And she produced her torch and switched it on with an air of such determination that I knew expostulation would be useless.

In the moat the snow was deep and so powder-soft that I wondered for a moment against my better knowledge whether Guthrie might not have survived. Our feet sank down to the knee as we rounded an angle of the tower, Hardcastle’s lantern making a wavering circle of light around us and Sybil’s torch exploring the moat in front. A moment later we saw ahead the expected dark splash on the snow. We hurried forward. My heart leapt. The dark splash had stirred.

There was a wild cry – Hardcastle’s. I glanced at him; the sweat was pouring down his face in that icy ditch; he had completely lost his nerve. My glance returned to the vague bulk in front and I realised that what had moved was the figure of a man, crouched over the body. The figure straightened itself as we came up. A voice said: ‘He’s dead.’

When I wrote that Guthrie’s end had been horrible I was thinking chiefly of the full, frank satisfaction in the deep Scottish voice which spoke these words. Dead men hear no curses and mundane mire and fury is nothing to a ghost; still I hope that none will sound that note in my requiem. I said as sternly as if I had been owner of Erchany and chief constable of the county in one: ‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’

The stranger looked at me squarely in the lantern-light, an elderly handsome man with the life of the land writ large on his ruddy face. ‘It’s Rob Gamley I am and I came maybe to have a word with the laird. But the laird’s having a word by now with them are fitter to deal with him.’

It occurred to me as I turned from this savage and unseemly speech and examined the body to wonder if Guthrie had left a single sorrowing heart behind him. Perhaps Christine’s – I didn’t know. Certainly he was gone to the judgement at which Gamley had hinted; his neck was broken and his death must have been instantaneous.

Standing in that little group of people round the dead man, I had to consider what was proper to be done. It may be that I should have insisted that the body be left where it was; one does this, I suppose, where there is suspicion of foul play. But was there, substantially and after all, such suspicion? On one hand there was Sybil’s statement that Guthrie had fallen from the tower; on the other hand there was only what must be called atmospheric evidence – violence and mystery existing merely in the air or uniquely embodied in the fantastic incident of the learned rat. In sum, I saw no utility and much indecency in leaving what was mortal of Ranald Guthrie in the moat – an indecency which the man Gamley’s bitter speech had somehow underlined. So I said briefly: ‘Miss Guthrie had better go ahead with the torch and lantern and we will follow with the body. Mr Gamley, you will please help.’

Properly enough this time, Gamley took off his cap. The action attracted my eye and I saw that he was looking curiously and without friendliness at Hardcastle. And when I glanced in turn at Hardcastle I saw something extraordinary. The abominable creature appeared in mortal terror of Gamley and was keeping his distance as one might keep one’s distance from a bear on a tether. At the same time he was peering at Guthrie’s body with just the sort of excited, furtive interest I could imagine him giving to an obscene photograph. I had no notion what prompted either of these impulses, but the combination of them was somehow singularly disgusting. I much preferred Gamley’s irreverence. Acting on impulse – and, I suppose, high-handedly enough – I ordered Hardcastle into the house to find a resting-place for the body. Gamley and I followed with our burden as well as we could.

We laid the dead man for the time being on a sort of stone table in a cellar hard by the door of the moat. Sybil played her part with the torch; then she said ‘I guess I take the task of breaking this to Christine’ and disappeared. It was good of her, I thought, and perhaps the best plan; I might have been clumsy enough.

I sent Hardcastle for a sheet. Gamley, still cap in hand, took one long searching look at the body. Then he strode to the door. ‘Steady on,’ I said, ‘where are you off to?’ For I thought he was due to give some account of himself. He looked at me squarely again. ‘Young sir,’ he said, ‘I’m off to advise the Devil lock up his spoons and forks.’ And with that dark jest he disappeared.

Here was the second mysterious visitor, I reflected, that I had let slip through my fingers that night. Erchany, well-nigh isolated from the world as it was, had proved mysteriously populous. Whence had Neil Lindsay come, and whence Gamley? Who had tied the messages to the rats? Who had been talking to Christine in the schoolroom? And had Hardcastle’s doctor ever arrived? I turned from these riddles to contemplate the larger riddle of death.

Diana, a man can cry out in agony or fear, fall two hundred feet through the air, break his neck and much else, and look at the end of it all like a child asleep in a cradle! A trick of the muscles at the ultimate moment, no doubt, but something strange and terrible to contemplate nevertheless. Guthrie in his dust had returned to innocence; that sinister face, with the strongly marked features that speak of race, was stronger and purer, as if some artist had taken a sponge and swabbed the baser lines away. One reads of death showing such effects; to encounter them at such a violent issue was disconcertingly moving. I composed the body as I could, brushed the snow from face and hair, and waited.

Presently Hardcastle returned with a sheet. Reasonably or unreasonably, I had formed the opinion that in his attitude to the dead man there was something positively indecent, and I found myself instinctively blocking his way at the door. He handed me the sheet sulkily, peering past me in the same absorbed way as before. ‘I suggest,’ I said, ‘that you go and tell your wife to make some tea or coffee. Something of the sort will be needed.’

The unsavoury brute gave a gulp as if he were swallowing his true reactions to me. Then he said with a sort of elephantine cunning which I was at a loss to fathom: ‘Mr Gylby, you’ll have had a look at the body? It might have been robbed or the like?’

‘The police will inquire into that.’

‘But, sir, we might just give a bit look and see?’

My anger against the noisome creature grew. I turned round and rapidly shrouded Guthrie’s body. ‘And now, Mr Hardcastle, we must get a message off to Kinkeig. The snowfall is over and there’s a drop in the wind. You must see if your odd lad can set out at daybreak.’ And I pushed the factor out of the cellar, locked the door and pocketed the key. I can only assure you that there is something in the atmosphere of the place that confirms me in my self-appointed role as warden of Erchany. Fortunately the minutes are flitting past as I write and presently I expect to resign honourably on the arrival of the law. Meantime, there is still a shock or two to record.

On my locking the cellar door Hardcastle went off down the corridor in a huff and I was left to debate my next move. Nothing would have persuaded me to rummage about the body like a police-surgeon, but Hardcastle’s talk of robbery did put one idea in my head. It had taken me some time to shut up at the tower-top and get the little party to the moat; when we arrived there we found the mysterious Gamley crouched beside the body. His identity would no doubt appear in good time, but might there not be evidence in the snow – perishable and best investigated at once – of how he had got there? I took up Hardcastle’s abandoned lantern and, before returning upstairs, slipped once more out to the moat.

The wind which had so quickly obliterated intelligible traces on the battlements had been without force in this deep trench; every mark since the snow had ceased to fall heavily was legible. And the remoteness of Erchany was curiously brought home to me here; everywhere the snow was patterned over with the tracks of wild creatures that had sought shelter from the storm: the incisive pad of a fox, the little long-jumps of weasels, hither-and-thither scurryings of rabbits crossed once by the steady march of a pheasant upon some invisible mark – and once a little splash of blood and fur. The moon was now coming and going in the clouds with the regularity of a neon sign and the moonlight passed in waves over this arabesqued carpeting of snow; it was something to stop and look at with disinterested pleasure; I had to conquer this unseasonable aesthetic impulse before I pushed ahead with my investigation.

Where Guthrie’s body had fallen the snow was splayed up as if a great meteorite had fallen to earth and round about was the confused trampling of our feet as we had raised the body. But beyond this circle every footprint was distinct. And the story told was clear. Gamley had dropped – hazardously – into the moat about fifteen yards from where Guthrie had fallen and gone straight to the body. When he left me he had exactly retraced his steps to the wall of the moat and then; finding it difficult perhaps to get up where he had come down, he had worked round to that little bridge by which Sybil and I had first crossed to the postern door. There he had been able to climb from the moat without difficulty, and the purposefulness of his progress plainly argues him familiar with the ground. I climbed up after him and followed his tracks – with difficulty now – away from the castle. And presently they converged with the faint remains of tracks coming the other way. Gamley had simply come out of the night and returned to it; presumably he had been making for the little postern door when he had been diverted by Guthrie’s fall.

I returned to the moat and laboriously made the circuit of it. The final picture was perfectly clear: Gamley coming to the body from one quarter; Sybil, Hardcastle and myself from another; our all moving on a line to the house; Gamley making off as he had come. Perhaps my reconnaissance was wasted labour but it gave me a comforting sense of tidying up behind me.

Hardcastle was hovering at the end of the basement corridor; I think he may have been hopefully trying the door of the cellar – if his wife is a witch he himself is certainly a ghoul. And now he came up to me and said hoarsely: ‘It’s murder.’

‘That remains to be seen, Mr Hardcastle. Come upstairs.’

‘I tell you the tink-loon Lindsay’s mischieved and murdered him. Didn’t I tell the laird fient the good could come of traffic with one of that name? He’s mischieved and murdered him, and now he’s away with the quean.’

I had been tramping firmly in front of the brute; now I swung round on him. ‘What’s that you say?’

He gave an evil grin that might have signified ‘I’ve pricked you at last’; then, as once before, his dirty hand came from behind his back to stroke his chin. Incredible the slow, stupid malice with which he went on: ‘So you want to know?’

Whatever impertinent effect of suspense Hardcastle designed was marred at this moment by the outburst, just above our heads, of a quite spine-chilling howling and wailing. A hard fought battle between wolves and hyenas might, I fancied, have produced a somewhat similar impression; it was a few seconds before I realized that I was hearing at last Erchany’s lament for Ranald Guthrie – a lament which was about two-fifths Mrs Hardcastle, two-fifths the moron odd-boy, and one-fifth dogs in the background. Its composition changed as we reached the stair head, Tammas – the odd boy – sinking his ululations to a whimper and Mrs Hardcastle achieving something like articulate speech. Sybil was standing between them, looking so determinedly cool and severe that I suspected the night’s events were really beginning to get on top of her at last.

‘Woe the day, woe the day! The good laird’s deed, the good laird’s dead, and the lassie’s away with a Lindsay!’

Oddly and movingly, the old lady chanted her woes in rhythm. And grotesquely Tammas, swayed by the singsong of her voice, began to mumble verses of his own:

‘The craw kill’t the pussy-oh,

The craw kill’t the pussy-oh…’

It was an uncanny dirge. But I have had my bellyful of the uncanny of late, and I thumped upon an old baize door beside me like a chairman calling a rowdy meeting to order. Presently Tammas subsided into mere whisperings and Mrs Hardcastle, after an unpromising excursus on rats, fell into a vein of simple sense. What light I got on the situation in the next fifteen minutes I had better compress into a few sentences.

Neil Lindsay, the lad who thrust past us at that dramatic moment on the staircase, is, as I guessed, Christine’s lover – and whose suit Guthrie was absolutely opposed to. He is of crofter folk – tenants of a very small farm – in a neighbouring glen; and this social disparity is complicated, according to the Hardcastles, by some species of hereditary feud – I suppose that in these parts such a picturesque absurdity is still possible. There has been tension for some time and recently Lindsay has been coming about the castle at night in a threatening way. Neither Guthrie nor Christine had said anything about the inwardness of the matter, so the Hardcastles are somewhat in the dark. But Hardcastle professes to believe that Guthrie had decided to buy Lindsay off, and that it was for this purpose that he had been ordered to send the young man up to the tower upon his next appearance.

Lindsay came shortly before half-past eleven, was admitted by Hardcastle and sent straight up to the tower. Shortly before midnight Guthrie rang a bell – he seems to have had both the Hardcastles at his beck and call – and when Hardcastle mounted the stair shouted down to him the message about the nightcap which eventually brought me on the scene.

It was at this point that I really had to interrupt. ‘But Mr Hardcastle, can you explain why I should be summoned to celebrate this painful business of buying off the young man Lindsay? Wasn’t it rather a private affair?’

‘By your leave, Mr Gylby, I’m thinking the business would maybe be over and the bit dram with a stranger a way of getting the unchancy loon quietly away.’

I need hardly tell you there was scarcely a word of this story that I was in the least anxious to believe. In estimating its credibility, however, I have to remind myself sharply that on Hardcastle’s lips the multiplication table would soon become, as far as I am concerned, suspect at once. And now he was a less prepossessing figure than ever: his surliness was uncomfortably laced with servility and I was aware that he was intensely uneasy. I had contrived to get part of the narrative from his wife and I think he may have been in terror lest she should say the wrong thing – let the wrong species of sinister cat out of the bag. Or he may simply have been scared of me. Or of Sybil.

One fact has emerged clearly. Lindsay and Christine – unless they have been conveyed to some hidden dungeon of the castle – really have gone away, singly or together. Mrs Hardcastle, whom I am increasingly inclined to believe an honest woman, professes to have seen Christine running down the schoolroom corridor with a suitcase, and a hunt by lantern light at the main door of the castle has revealed two half-obliterated tracks leading off into the darkness. The elopement, I believe, is a fact – and a strange season they chose and a hard trek they’ve had. Lindsay when we met him on the staircase must have been making straight for Christine; a few minutes later they must have departed. But what had happened in the few minutes preceding? What happened in the tower?

On one of these questions Sybil was a witness. She had been – and quite mysteriously – in the room from which Guthrie had gone to his death. But so far she had been all but mum and I was reluctant in the presence of the Hardcastles to embark on what might appear an interrogation. Hardcastle himself, I could see, was consumed with curiosity about Sybil, and this alone would have inclined me to hold off. But in addition I thought I read an appeal or warning in Sybil’s eye, as if she would tell me that before pressing further a private conference would be best.

Another problem came into my head. I turned to Hardcastle and asked as abruptly as I could contrive: ‘Did your doctor ever come?’

It was a hit. Had I clapped on an executioner’s mask and incontinently invited him to lay his head on the block the horrid creature could not have been more taken aback. I have a fancy that a criminal lawyer could have got a lot from him in that moment – a moment in which he was floundering out of his depth. He didn’t know what it was I knew. And it must be confessed that, like a fool, I promptly told him.

‘You called out to ask if it was the doctor, you know, when you opened the door to Miss Guthrie and me.’

‘And didn’t you know, Mr Gylby, that one of the dogs is called Doctor, and that I was but thinking he’d got loose?’

I was rather taken aback myself this time by so neat, if evident, a lie. The fellow possesses the cunning that his face claims for him and for the moment I gave him best. It occurred to me to attempt some sort of communication with Tammas – who was to be our first link, it seemed, with the world.

‘Do you think,’ I said, ‘that you can get down to Kinkeig?’ Tammas, realizing that he was addressed, blushed in the uncertain lamplight like a girl. And then he murmured softly:

‘There’s nae luck aboot the hoose,

There’s nae luck at a’,

There’s nae luck aboot the hoose

When our goodman’s awa…’

In the Elizabethan drama, you will remember, fools and idiots constantly express themselves in snatches of obscure song. Tammas’ habit suggests that the convention has some basis in pathological fact. At any rate, experimental transmission had failed, and I may say I haven’t succeeded in getting across to him yet. Most irritatingly, Hardcastle is a necessary intermediary. I now had to listen to an unintelligible dialect conversation from which there finally emerged the report that Tammas was ready to set out for Kinkeig at once.

And presently set out he did, with instructions simply to announce the death of Guthrie and the need of a doctor and a policeman. I rather expected Hardcastle to be all for raising an immediate hue and cry after Lindsay and Christine, and I was surprised at his good sense in agreeing to reticence for the time being. I wrote out a telegram or two, including one that you will have had by this time. Then I watched him set off, ploughing powerfully through the drifts in the moonlight. In a few minutes he had disappeared; only in the stillness that had come with the drop in the wind I could hear him – uncannily again – singing to the moon. His progress would be dreadfully hard; with good luck he would make the village, I reckoned, about dawn.

It is two hours past dawn now and we may expect help soon. Through the small hours I have kept my lyke-wake in company with this narrative; it has grown to an unconscionable length and I don’t want to run on into embroidery. But there is one further matter on which to report. You will guess that it is an interview with Sybil Guthrie.

After Tammas’ departure there seemed little or nothing that could be done. Sybil and I had big cups of Mrs Hardcastle’s tea in the schoolroom – strangely desolate that pleasant, simple room now seems – and Mrs Hardcastle, standing respectfully by and snivelling, told us that until recently Guthrie had never allowed tea in the house – a beautiful trait in the good laird’s character, it seems, from which she is disposed to draw the comfort of pious contemplation.

When we got her out of the room there was a little silence. Sybil’s affairs, I felt, were no business of such a casually-met companion as myself, and remained essentially no business of mine even when they brushed against mystery. Still, I thought it fair to say nothing and look ever so faintly expectant. And sure enough, Sybil presently said: ‘I think I want to talk to you, Mr Gylby.’ And at the same time she nodded significantly towards the door.

Taking the hint, I strode over and opened it. There was Hardcastle in his favourite lurking role, a sort of adipose fox outside a hen-run. ‘Mr Gylby, sir,’ he said with a fantastic attempt at a solicitous air, ‘I’m thinking you might like a bit more fire in the grate?’

I saw that for the time being there was only one possible working arrangement between Hardcastle and myself – a couple of stout doors securely locked. So I said we didn’t want the fire stoked; we were just going up to the tower. And up we went, Hardcastle looking after us rather as if we were a couple of cockerels scrambling to safety on a tree. I imagine he is still guessing – goodness knows about what – and that this is making his unbeautiful personality somewhat ineffective. I turned round and called to him, perhaps with a spice of malice, that we should be down to breakfast and could Mrs Hardcastle manage boiled eggs? Then, silently and still by the light of a lantern, we climbed and climbed.

Ever since I so neatly demolished her car Sybil and I have been as matey as could be; we cannoned into each other – literally, need I laboriously point out? – from contexts thousands of miles apart and straightway trickled together into an environment almost equally unfamiliar to both of us, a process well calculated to the formation of a close alliance. But during the last couple of hours – ever since Sybil’s unexplained appearance in the study – we had rather drawn apart. Now as we climbed into the solitude of this dark tower, and quite apart from Sybil’s implied promise of explanations, our alliance reasserted itself. I don’t think I feel romantic about this quite unromantic young person but as we came to the locked door of the study I saw that she might have got herself into a fix in which I should have to stand by. ‘Sybil,’ I said, ‘hold the lantern while I find the key.’ She laid her hand on my arm and then on the lantern; in a minute we were standing once more in Ranald Guthrie’s study.

Rather idly I said: ‘The scene of the crime.’

‘But, Noel, there was no crime. I told you he simply fell.’

‘However did he manage that?’

I suppose I must have looked at Sybil doubtingly or doubtfully as I spoke. She flushed and repeated: ‘He simply fell.’

There was a little silence. Perhaps I rumpled my hair in perplexity; anyway, I became aware in that little silence of the ticking of my own wrist-watch. And powerfully there came back to me the slow tick of the clock as we had sat at supper the night before last, the slow tick of the clock upon which I had projected all the intolerable strain of waiting that had been about us. Had we been waiting only for Ranald Guthrie to tumble accidentally from his tower? At two o’clock in the morning one’s mind is not in its best logical trim: I was suddenly convinced that the atmosphere which had been about us was incompatible with Sybil’s assertion. It was a sheer mental failure; I was seeking quite unwarrantably for some simple melodramatic pattern to impose upon a most confused series of events; and Sybil caught me nicely by asking: ‘Do you insist on something more lurid?’

I said evasively: ‘There will be a tremendous number of questions asked, you know.’

‘I guess so.’

‘They’ll want to know all about everybody: where one was and why – all that.’

‘And I should practise my replies on you?’

I said soberly: ‘I should like you to.’

Sybil walked to the far end of the study and turned round. ‘Noel, you are a nice young man despite your airs. But I wish I knew something of your abstract principles.’

‘Take it that they are orthodox and severe.’

‘A pity.’ Sybil looked at me perfectly gravely as she spoke and I knew that somehow she meant what she said. She paused for a moment, knit her brows, from somewhere produced cigarettes. I struck a match, she gave two puffs and went on carefully. ‘Mr Gylby – Noel – you are entitled to the whole story as I can tell it. Listen.’ Again she strode to the end of the room and this time spoke before turning. ‘I was up here spying around.’

‘Enterprising of you.’

I’m afraid my tone of casual admiration wasn’t a success. When Sybil did turn round it was with a satirical smile for the outraged Englishman. ‘I said I was spying around. This household kind of got me curious and I just felt like hiding behind doors and listening. That’s why I was so quick on the draw with friend Hardcastle a few minutes ago in the schoolroom. I’ve got the instinct to prowl and hover.’

‘Very well, Sybil. You have been peering and listening about. Go ahead.’

Sybil glanced at me doubtfully and went ahead with an apparent struggle. ‘This tower has been intriguing me most. It’s so romantic–’

‘Cut out the ingenuous tourist, Sybil. Or keep it for the dumb Dicks.’

‘I thought I had to practise on you! Well, listen. When I went to my room I just lay on my bed and read – and the longer I lay the less I felt like getting my clothes off and trying to sleep. Once or twice I got up and peered out of the window. That was just restlessness, of course; there was nothing but blackness to be seen. Or nothing but blackness until some time round about half-past eleven: I became aware then of a moving light high up across the court I look out on. I guessed it must be Guthrie up in that gallery-place, and it occurred to me that while he was there this tower might be open to inspection. I thought, after all, there wouldn’t be much harm in exploring the – the other public rooms of the castle.’

‘Quite so. As a matter of fact, I set out for the tower myself just a little after you did.’

‘You mean when Hardcastle summoned you?’

‘No. I was going on my own initiative when Hardcastle happened upon me.’

For a moment Sybil seemed to concentrate on an attempt to get behind this statement. Then she continued. ‘I took a candle and matches and went downstairs. I had already given some thought to the plan of the castle and I reckoned with luck to find my way. All the same, I wasn’t awfully hopeful of a successful prowl; I thought it very likely that Guthrie kept his tower locked up. So I was pleased as well as a mite scared when I found I could get through and up the staircase.’

‘You didn’t meet anybody or hear anything? They’ll ask questions like that.’

‘Nobody and nothing. I tried one or two doors on the way up. They were all locked. So I just went on climbing till I came to the top and walked straight in on this.’

Sybil paused and we both looked about us. A sombre room, full of dark woodwork and simply crammed with books; Guthrie was presumably by way of being a learned man as well as a songster. I began to browse around, partly out of curiosity to see which way his tastes lay, partly because I didn’t want to seem impatient for Sybil’s confidences. At one end of the room the bookshelves ran out in bays; I went and peered into these; then I came back and asked Sybil: ‘You poked about?’

‘I didn’t. I hadn’t time. I wasn’t in the room a minute when I heard footsteps mounting the way I had come. It was Guthrie returning.’

‘A moment not without its embarrassment, Sybil.’

‘I’ll say. I knew I really hadn’t any business to penetrate to this remote study. It was frightfully ill-bred. And I was kind of scared of the old gentleman when it came to the point of facing him with grovelling apologies. I saw that in venturing into his den I’d done a silly thing. And I lost my head.’

Sybil’s head, I reflected, was now happily restored to her shoulders; she was as cool as could be.

‘It was quite mad, but I just cast about for somewhere to hide! There were two possibilities: that door near the staircase door, and that other one over there that is a sort of French window on the parapet walk. The first – the one we now know gives on the little bedroom – proved to be locked; I just had time to make for the other and get through. It wasn’t at all comfortable; I found myself out in the open, on a narrow platform, hundreds of feet in the air and buffeted by a howling hurricane.’

‘Between the Prince of the Air within and his attendant spirits without.’

‘Exactly. I dropped my candle in the snow – it will be there still – and stood clinging to the handle of the door. It was pitch dark and the wind simply caught at my wits and numbed them. Minutes must have passed before I realized that a door meant some sort of security beyond and that I was on something more than the merest ledge. I couldn’t quite get the door shut and I was frightened to risk my balance with a really stout tug. So there I was on one side of the thing and there was Guthrie, moving round lighting a few candles, on the other. I had either to recover my good sense and face him, or stay tucked away. I stayed tucked away.

‘Guthrie went over to the desk there in the middle of the room, sat down and buried his face in his hands. A couple of minutes later – no more – he straightened up and called out something I didn’t catch. The staircase door opened – it was just within my field of vision – and a young man came in, ushered I think by Hardcastle, though I didn’t see him. Guthrie rose, pointed to a chair, and this time I heard him speak quite distinctly. He said: “Mr Lindsay, sit down.”

‘Unfortunately – I suppose it must be said – those were the only words I made out. The wind was howling so that the rest of the interview was simply a dumb-show. They talked earnestly for some time–’

I interrupted. ‘And angrily, Sybil?’

Sybil shook her head. ‘Definitely not. It occurred to me they weren’t good friends – it had the appearance of rather a formal parley – but there wasn’t anything that looked like heat. They might simply have been settling something up.’

‘Like the buying-off business Hardcastle told us of?’

‘I suppose so.’ Sybil had paused for a moment as if to inspect my question. Then she went on. ‘Presently they both stood up and Lindsay shook his head – a curiously gentle, curiously decisive action it seemed to me. They moved towards the door–’

‘They were in view all the time, Sybil? They hadn’t moved, for instance, to the other end of the room?’

‘They were in view all the time. They moved towards the door and there shook hands – formally, I should say, rather than cordially. Lindsay went out and Guthrie turned back. I got a shock when I saw his face. He looked – I don’t know how to put it – tragic and broken. I saw him only for a second. He took a key from his pocket, unlocked the bedroom door and disappeared inside, shutting the door behind him. It seemed about a minute or half a minute later that I heard a faint cry. I waited another minute and then decided to make a dash for the staircase. I was in the middle of the room when you and Hardcastle came in upon me.’

‘And when I asked you about Guthrie you said “He has fallen from the tower.” Forgive me. Sybil, but this is what they will ask. How on earth did you know?’

Sybil Guthrie looked at me in silence for a moment. Then she said: ‘Yes, I see.’ There was another silence. ‘Noel, it was a sort of intuition.’

‘Didn’t you tell me once you weren’t psychic?’

I ought not to have brought that in; I wasn’t a prosecuting barrister. But I felt it extraordinarily important that Sybil should realize certain dangers in her situation. And suddenly she blazed out. ‘I tell you I knew, Noel Gylby! That interview had somehow crushed the man. I saw imminent death in his face. And your rushing in on top of that cry just told me. Guthrie was next to mad anyway and when his plans went wrong he made an end of himself.’

‘He had failed, you mean, to buy Lindsay off, and couldn’t bear the thought of losing his niece?’

‘Something like that. And it should be lurid enough for you.’ We were sitting now perched side by side on Guthrie’s desk. After a time I said: ‘Well, that’s been a useful trial spin, Sybil.’

She turned her head and gave me a quick glance. ‘Just what do you mean by that?’

‘I mean,’ I said gently, ‘that we must have a revised version.’

‘In other words, I’m lying?’

‘Not at all. What you have said may be gospel. But it’s just too awkward to be safe. Your piece of intuition is perfectly possible. But it’s the sort of possibility that looks perfectly awful in a court of law.’

Again Sybil said: ‘Yes, I see.’

‘You are lurking here, Guthrie goes into the bedroom, there is a cry, we rush in, and then your mind takes a great leap in the dark – a leap to the truth, maybe. But you see how strange it could be made to look? Only the fact that you have no real connection with Guthrie is between you and positive suspicion.’

Sybil stood up and faced me. ‘Noel, shall I tell you the truth?’

‘For goodness’ sake do.’

‘Behold the chatelaine of Erchany!’

I jumped up. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I’m Ranald Guthrie’s heir.’

. . .

The row of little dots, Diana, means that you are invited to be staggered. Perhaps you won’t be – if only because I wasn’t myself. That there were wheels within wheels in Sybil Guthrie’s relations with Erchany is something that I’ve had a dim sense of for some time, and that sense has probably got into my earlier narrative. If I was decidedly taken aback it was by the sudden vivid image of Sybil and myself sitting each on a wing of my car in the snow and my seeing the Erchany light and saying so importantly that we would make for that. For I had come upon her, in fact, in the middle of a more than ingenious plan to gate-crash on Erchany – a plan into which she had incorporated me magnificently and in her stride. Some refinements of the scheme – the artless requests for guidance south, the resolute driving of her car over a bank – I recall with positive awe. And did she not, in the very critical moment of her plot, stand idly making quiet fun out of the text of Coleridge’s Christabel? As I think I discerned – a formidable young woman.

As yet I have got only the outline of what it is all about. The American Guthries – Sybil and her widowed mother – were served some dirty financial turn by Ranald Guthrie; they heard rumours that he was mad and irresponsible; and having an interest in his estate they have been trying in various ways to discover the true state of affairs. Sybil, being in England, decided to discover for herself. She explored the ground some weeks ago and when the snow came she saw her chance. What she didn’t see, poor child, was the awkward scrape into which her irresponsible jaunt was going to lead her. She really is a bit scared now – which only shows her common sense. It is a most extraordinary position.

But if she’s scared she’s also full of fight. Standing before the empty fireplace in Guthrie’s study and looking down on her as she perched once more on the desk, I thought of the motto that I now knew was hers by right. Touch not the Tyger. It was not inappropriate: the beast was lurking there truly enough and I felt that I had neither touched nor scratched it – I knew, in other words, very little about Sybil. Only I guessed that she would leap at danger if she felt the call; and I knew that there were ways in which she could be quite, quite ruthless. Observe, Diana, that the attraction of Miss Sybil Guthrie is a lunar echo of the attraction of Miss Diana Sandys: observe this and hold your peace.

She perched there full of fight, scarcely needing my prompting that her situation was awkward. I was puzzled, indeed, by an obscure feeling that she was planning ahead further than I could see – a feeling prompted, I knew, by some association in the recent past. A second later I got it: it was Sybil’s eye. She was looking at me, and about the study, with the very glance that Ranald Guthrie had bent upon his unexpected guests. I could scarcely have had a more dramatic reminder that there was a Guthrie at Erchany still.

‘What is known,’ I asked, ‘of your earlier reconnoitring here?’

‘I don’t know. Not much. I sent a telegram from the pub in Kinkeig saying I expected to get something soon.’

‘Whom to?’

‘Our lawyer. He was in London then but he’s sailed for home now. Noel, I think I’d better have a lawyer or someone.’

‘I think you better had. As a matter of fact, you have. I wired.’

‘Noel Gylby! Explain yourself.’

‘I didn’t like it at all: Guthrie dead and Hardcastle muttering murder and you being found up here. We must protect ourselves, mustn’t we? And I have an uncle in Edinburgh just now; he’s a soldier and has the Scottish Command. He’ll see the right sort of person is dispatched.’

‘I’ll say you have a neck.’

‘So have you, Sybil. That’s the point.’

‘Yes, I see.’

So that was that. I didn’t think anyone would really want to hang Sybil; I rather hoped they would be able to hang Hardcastle, though I couldn’t see just how. The thought prompted a question. ‘Sybil, you say Guthrie and Lindsay were in view all the time? What about Guthrie’s ringing a bell and going to the door and shouting to Hardcastle to invite me up?’

Sybil for the first time in our acquaintance looked really startled; I saw that I had brought forward a point that had escaped her. She said: ‘Where is the bell?’

‘Over here by the fireplace.’

‘Then Guthrie rang no bell. And he certainly didn’t go to the door and shout. Hardcastle lied.’

‘And Hardcastle was next to livid at finding you here. In fact Hardcastle had a game. Come over here.’

I led her across the room to one of the bays into which I had been peering earlier. There was an old bureau in which a drawer had been violently broken open. It was empty save for a few scattered gold coins. ‘The miser’s toy cupboard,’ I said, ‘and the toys are gone.’

I glanced at Sybil as I spoke and saw that she had turned pale. For a long moment she was silent; then she said, in odd antithesis to what had been her most familiar phrase hitherto: ‘No – no, I don’t see.’ She knit her brows. ‘And even if–’ She broke off and I could see that she was searching desperately in her mind, perhaps in her memory. ‘I couldn’t be mistaken on that.’ And she turned away from the rifled drawer. ‘Of course, Noel, it adds to the puzzle, but no further problem is involved.’

I must have looked my bewilderment at this outburst of riddling speech, for Sybil laughed at me as she walked across the room and rather wearily threw her cigarette into the fireplace. ‘Noel, what will your lawyer be like? I’m rather wanting to see him.’ She stretched herself with an engaging affectation of laziness and added: ‘And I’m rather wanting to go to bed and sleep.’

‘Then off you go. You have some hours before the rumpus. I’ll see you to your room.’

But Sybil gave a dismissive nod. ‘You needn’t come down, Noel Gylby. Ranald’s ghost won’t trouble me; as you know, I’m not really romantically inclined. But I’m glad you smashed my car. Good night.’

And so I was left in possession of Ranald Guthrie’s tower. And here I have sat scribbling away like Pamela – who, you remember, wrote home thousands and thousands of words on every attempt of her master’s on her virtue. I always liked Pamela and now I know why: I have that itch – hers, I mean, not her master’s. As they said to the Historian of the Roman Empire: ‘Scribble, scribble, Mr Gibbon!’ The story’s a good one, but I forget it. I’m tired. Take it these last few lines are sleep-writing absolute.

Very presently, I suppose, Tammas will bring back a few hardy representatives of order and sanity to this crazy castle. Crazycastle, Dampcastle, Coldcastle, Hardcastle. Hardcastle – grrr!

Good night, lady, good night, sweet lady, good night, good night.

Quoth

NOEL YVON MERYON GYLBY.