Lament for a Maker

2

From Perth to Dunwinnie the railway line had as yet been but imperfectly cleared of snow and as a result my train ran over an hour late. Once arrived, moreover, I had the utmost difficulty in securing a conveyance the driver of which was willing to undertake the perils of a night drive to Kinkeig. I was told that Dr Noble had been through, as also the police and the sheriff, and that word had come back of the sheriff’s judging it necessary to hold an inquiry into the manner of Mr Guthrie’s death. I saw that it was necessary to push forward and, having secured some modification – though a mere solacium indeed – of the first exorbitant tariff proposed, I succeeded in reaching Kinkeig without notable hazard just short of eleven o’clock. It is the merest hamlet and I counted myself fortunate in securing simple but adequate accommodation at an inn laconically known as the Arms.

My client, whom I supposed to be the young Mr Gylby, was still at Erchany and thither I proposed to proceed – I had better, perhaps, say penetrate – on the following morning. Precise information would then be available. Meanwhile I did not think it wise altogether to neglect the voice of rumour. I proceeded to the parlour – the bar being of course closed – and rang the bell. The mistress of the house, a Mrs Roberts, answered, and to her I said: ‘Would you be so good as to bring me–’

‘What you’ll be in need of,’ interrupted Mrs Roberts firmly, ‘is a nice cup of malted milk.’

It is a maxim of sound forensic practice that to give play to the eccentricities of a witness’ character is the surest technique for landing fish. I said: ‘That is exactly what I was going to ask for. Please let me have a nice cup of – ah – malted milk.’

Mrs Roberts hurried away and it is proper to testify that the potation with which she returned was not unpalatable. Moreover she was disposed to be talkative, and for the next half-hour I listened to information about the affair at Erchany which in places made me open my eyes very wide indeed. Little more than twenty-four hours before I had been absorbed in the tranquil study of in-field and out-field in the eighteenth century. Now I was confronted with a story having all the characteristics of what students call the Senecan Drama: revenge, murder, mutilations and a ghost. Must I confess to a trick of my nephew Aeneas’ temper coming upon me as I listened, and to an unwonted quickening of the pulse of the senior partner of Wedderburn, Wedderburn and McTodd? I have always felt a curious attraction in romances of detection – a species of popular fiction which bears much the same relation to the world of actual crime as does pastoral poetry to the realities of rural economy – and now as I listened to the good Mrs Roberts I seemed to be faced with a rank confusion of kinds. Mr Guthrie’s death was actual enough, but it was set in just such a context of fantasy as might have been woven round it by the operation of a wayward and irresponsible literary mind. Or perhaps it was rather the folk-mind, with its instinct for bizarre elaboration, that I had to deal with. In listening to Mrs Roberts I was listening to the voice of rumour, perhaps to the lingering myth-making faculty of simple people. Revenge, murder, mutilations and a ghost – these, it might be, were but adding one more to the romantic legends of the Guthries with which Clanclacket had been entertaining me earlier that day.

Revenge and murder. A certain Neil Lindsay, a young man of loose principles and a cruel heart, had taken upon himself to revive and prosecute an immemorial family feud with the Guthries. This he had done by hurling Ranald Guthrie from a high tower at midnight on Christmas Eve, stealing a large sum of gold, and making off with a young woman variously reported as his enemy’s ward, niece, daughter and mistress.

Mutilations and a ghost. Not content with these abominable deeds the young man Lindsay had paused in his flight to inflict a most horrid outrage upon Guthrie’s dead body, chopping a number of fingers from the corpse in macabre requital of some savage incident between the families five hundred years ago. And this lurid and perverted deed was in its turn crying out for vengeance; at the midnight of Christmas Day Ranald Guthrie’s ghost had been abroad in Kinkeig, waving its maimed hands to the moon and crying out awfully of that hell from which it had been a few hours released to walk the earth.

I have here compressed the narrative of Mrs Roberts into a few sentences; rumour is invariably diffuse. But I was, as I have intimated, curiously compelled by her wandering recital; the story had a measure of imaginative coherence which evoked something like conviction; I found a positive effort was required to view it critically – to note, for instance, the interesting rapidity with which the legend had been enriched with supernatural accretions. As a humble student of folklore I thought this aspect of Kinkeig’s reactions to the death of its laird worth some further inquiry. ‘Mrs Roberts,’ I asked, ‘have many folk seen the ghost?’

‘Faith, yes.’

‘You yourself?’

‘No, faith!’ Mrs Roberts looked quite scared at the mere suggestion.

‘Then who?’

Mrs Roberts considered. ‘The first would be Mistress McLaren, the smith’s wife. The pump in her yard was frozen fast and she was going down the road for water when she saw the uncouthy thing right afore her in the moonlight. She gave a scraitch poor creature, that was heard by half Kinkeig. And you couldn’t have better proof than that.’ Mrs Roberts must have detected a sceptical temper in my inquiries, for she produced Mrs McLaren’s conclusive scream with a good deal of triumph.

‘No indeed, Mrs Roberts. And what happened then?’

‘The McLaren body was just outside Ewan Bell the sutor’s. She ran in to him fair terrified and he took her home.’

‘And did Mr Bell see the ghost?’

‘That he did not.’

‘Does Mrs McLaren often see ghosts?’

My hostess was much struck by this question. ‘Fancy your asking that, sir! A Highland body she is and second-sighted; it’s her that says she foresaw the Erchany daftie come louping through the snow with news of the Guthrie’s death. And it was her that knew the Guthrie had the evil eye.’

‘Well, in your own words, Mrs Roberts, you couldn’t have better proof than that. And who was the next to meet the ghost?’

Mrs Roberts looked at me rather suspiciously. ‘The next would be Miss Strachan the schoolmistress.’

‘Miss Strachan. Now do you happen to know if this Miss Strachan had any reason to have Erchany and its affairs much on her mind?’

Mrs Roberts’ suspicion became plainly tinged with respect. ‘Faith, and that’s unco strange to ask! It was the Strachan quean that had a right awesome meeting with the laird at Erchany a while back.’

‘Quite so. And who else saw Mr Guthrie’s ghost?’

Mrs Roberts looked doubtful. ‘Well, I don’t for certain know that –’

‘In fact, nobody else! Just those two and not, as you suggested, a number of people?’

I was really quite remorseful over this examination, Mrs Roberts looked so dashed. ‘No,’ she said; ‘I suppose no one else really. Except, of course–’

At this point we were interrupted by the entrance of the lady’s husband, who appeared to be going round shutting up the inn for the night. ‘Mr Wedderburn, sir,’ he said, ‘you’ll surely be wanting a nightcap? And it will be a toddy, I’m thinking, in this dreich weather?’

Mrs Roberts seized my empty cup. ‘Mr Wedderburn, you’ll take another malted milk?’

I divined here some conjugal friction which I had no desire to exacerbate; murmuring an indistinguishable word I picked up my candle and betook myself to bed. But I verily believe that, for all my satisfactory demolition of the supernatural element in Mrs Roberts’ story, I half-expected to meet the ghost of Ranald Guthrie of Erchany in the corridor.

I was awakened in the morning by clamour; hastening to the window, I found this to proceed from the assembled young of Kinkeig, and to be occasioned by the appearance at the tail of the village of a tall and slender youth, armoured in the species of exquisiteness that defies exhaustion or disordered attire, and bearing on his shoulder – the prime cause, this, of the juvenile excitement by which I had been disturbed – implements which I presently identified as ski sticks and skis. It was to be conjectured that here was a visitor from Erchany; I dressed and hurried downstairs. As I had anticipated, the young man was awaiting me. He came forward and said: ‘I am Noel Gylby. I think you must be–’ I rather expected him to add ‘the person sent by my uncle.’ Instead, he concluded: ‘–the gentleman who has been good enough to come and help us?’

‘My name,’ I said, ‘is Wedderburn. And I have come to give what help I can.’

Warmly, but not without the deference proper in the young, Mr Gylby shook me by the hand. ‘Then, sir,’ he said, ‘begin by offering me breakfast!’

In the course of the hour ensuing I found Noel Gylby – though not perhaps without a due sense of his own charm – an agreeable and intelligent youth. His account of the events at Erchany was lively – in places, indeed, what Aeneas would call ‘hard boiled’ – but it was also confident and clear: I noted that if and when the time came here would be an excellent witness. And by extraordinary good fortune he had kept a journal at Erchany. He was good enough to hand it to me and I read it at once. I will here merely add a note on the events subsequent to his last entry.

The Erchany odd lad – orra lad, to give the phrase its local flavour – had reached Kinkeig, as Gylby predicted, shortly after dawn on Christmas Day. His exhaustion was such that it was some time before he could give an articulate account of himself; and it must have been between nine and ten o’clock before anything effective was done. A volunteer had to be found to struggle into Dunwinnie for the doctor, the telephone line having come down in the night. Even then there was likely to be delay; Dr Noble’s most practicable route to Erchany would be along the frozen length of Loch Cailie, and it would be unlikely that a vehicle could be prepared for him under a matter of hours. A similar delay marked the immediate relief of Castle Erchany. The Kinkeig constable was justifiably doubtful of keeping his bearings without Tammas, and so Tammas had to be given time to recover. Eventually the constable, Tammas and two strong lads set off some time after noon – the escort being occasioned, it may be suspected, by the constable’s sense that he was about to storm a citadel of the blackest magic. Making remarkable time, they reached Erchany soon after four. The constable inspected tower and body, took statements, pocketed keys and drank tea – by which time the hour was too advanced for any sort of safe return. One of the lads, however, was resolute to get back that night – he had a tryst, Gylby imagined, with his lass – and he eventually set out alone and had the good fortune to reach Kinkeig safely at about nine o’clock, bringing with him the constable’s preliminary report. By this time the telephone line had been repaired and the police at Dunwinnie were provided – apparently by Mrs Johnstone the postmistress – with all the information that was available. Meanwhile Dr Noble had reached the castle by way of the loch; like the constable and the second strong lad he spent the night there.

Thursday the twenty-sixth December – the day of my own journey north – was distinguished by the appearance of senior police officers and the sheriff of the county, a person of adventurous disposition who was attracted by the notion of a mystery buried so deep in snow. He came by way of Kinkeig, set out accompanied by his clerk to tramp to Erchany, abandoned the clerk half-way, arrived at the castle, took notes and announced that he would hold an inquiry, turned back, found the unfortunate clerk in a critical condition and carried him on his shoulders back to the village. He then ate a supper the proportions of which I was later to hear graphically described by Roberts, excruciated Mrs Roberts by drinking a bottle and a half of bad claret, and was finally driven off to Dunwinnie, promising to arrange for a fleet of snowploughs next day. I should say that I recount these circumstances not as being strictly relevant to my narrative, but simply as likely to reflect credit on the legal profession in the northern part of these Islands.

Gylby then went on to explain his own appearance that morning. He had noticed the skis among some lumber in the little bedroom in the tower and recollecting that the route to Kinkeig was largely downhill over not too heavily timbered snow slopes he had persuaded the police to let him borrow them. The proceeding had been successful and had given him, he complacently remarked, a capital appetite. He only regretted that there had not been a second pair of skis for my client Miss Sybil Guthrie – who, as the heiress of Erchany, was expecting the arrival of her legal adviser with some impatience.

I was just resigning myself to the prospect of a journey altogether more arduous than suited my years when a further and greater commotion in the village heralded the arrival of the promised snow-ploughs. Two motor contrivances of a modern and powerful type, they passed us with a muffled roar and disappeared up the road to Erchany. I had retained my hired car overnight; we had nothing to do but step into it and follow comfortably and at our leisure. Learning that the body was to be brought down that afternoon and that the inquiry would be held at the manse immediately before the interment, I judged it prudent to proceed to the castle at once. I had instructions to receive and observations to make before I could confidently face the afternoon’s proceedings. Gylby, who had something the air of a lighthouse-keeper who has successfully handed over in trying circumstances, seemed disposed to linger over the oatcakes and marmalade; with some persuasion I managed to get him on the move a few minutes before half-past nine. We were about to leave the inn when Mrs Roberts appeared and asked me – with the most evident interest – if I would see a caller, him that Mistress McLaren had taken refuge with, Ewan Bell? I could hardly refuse; Gylby politely proposed to take a walk down the village and buy tobacco; the visitor was presently shown into my private sitting-room.

Mr Bell will forgive me if I venture to describe him as venerable and magnificent. An athlete who had retired in his later years upon the profession of Biblical patriarch is perhaps the best image to offer the reader: his shoulders might have been those of a smith rather than of a cobbler; his features had the benign severity of some pillar of the Kirk from the pencil of a Wilkie. He bowed to me gravely and said he understood I was to represent the family interest in the probing of the sad affair at the meikle house?

‘I am giving legal advice to Miss Guthrie, Mr Bell. As you may know, she is the American lady who happened to be staying at the castle at the time of Mr Guthrie’s death.’

‘And no doubt, sir, a relation of the laird’s?’

I considered Mr Bell shrewdly. He seemed a most responsible old man and not at all likely to have called merely out of a thirst for gossip. ‘Miss Guthrie is a relation of the dead man and has a near interest in the estate.’

Ewan Bell again gravely inclined his head. ‘What I’ve ventured in about, Mr Wedderburn, is the young people that have gone away – Miss Mathers and the lad Lindsay. I have a thought that if there’s any talk of its being other than an accident that’s befallen at Erchany it will be the strangeness of their going that’s the reason.’

‘Their disappearance is certainly a striking circumstance.’

My visitor weighed this non-committal answer carefully. Then he said: ‘What I’ve come to say is, their going was at the bidding of the laird.’

‘You interest me, Mr Bell. May I invite you to take something against this very trying weather?’

With a severity which contrived to give all the effect of stern refusal Mr Bell agreed to a dram. This was presently brought by Mrs Roberts – I fear it confirmed her in the evil opinion of lawyers which the sheriff’s tolerance of claret had begun – and Mr Bell paused only for a ceremonial word over his glass before producing that letter of Christine Mathers which has been reproduced on an earlier page. I read it through twice with the greatest attention before I spoke. ‘Mr Bell, this is a most significant document. You have no doubt shown it to the police?’

‘I thought, Mr Wedderburn, I’d like the counsel of a well-reputed person like yourself first.’

‘A perfectly proper feeling. But you must take it to the police before the inquiry. And now perhaps you can give me some account of the circumstances in which the letter was received?’

Briefly, Bell outlined that interview with Christine Mathers which is fully described in his narrative. I was a good deal impressed both by the facts and by that interpretation of them which seemed to lie at the back of the Kinkeig shoemaker’s mind. If Guthrie’s final interview with Lindsay in the tower had been arranged not with the purpose of buying him off but of dismissing him in the company of Miss Mathers, then the tone of the interview as reported by Miss Guthrie was a perfectly natural one. And it was conceivable that Guthrie, a highly unstable man unable to reconcile himself to losing his niece to an enemy, had simply committed suicide as Miss Guthrie apparently maintained.

But undoubtedly there was some sort of case against the lad Lindsay. His known enmity towards Guthrie, his dramatic appearance on the tower staircase a minute after Guthrie’s fall, the rifled bureau, his flight with Miss Mathers: these as counts in an indictment were clear enough. He was protected, indeed, chiefly by my client Miss Guthrie’s categorical statement that he had left Guthrie alive and well in the tower. This statement Bell’s testimony and the letter he had produced now reinforced, for they indicated that the difficulties over Lindsay’s suit had been in process of settlement – a settlement the final stage of which Miss Guthrie had witnessed just short of midnight from her hiding-place outside Guthrie’s study. No doubt a person concerned to suggest a case against Lindsay could attempt to place the letter as part of an elaborately contrived plot against Guthrie, but unlikely ingenuity of this sort I did not think it necessary to explore at the moment. I turned to another point.

‘Mr Bell, we have here a very extraordinary situation. Miss Mathers’ letter suggests that she was to be packed off quietly – apparently with the unkindest implications of ignominy – at Christmas. She and her future husband were simply to emigrate and go out of Mr Guthrie’s life. That is strange and harsh enough and would convict the dead man of being more than eccentric in character. But what are we to think of this departure being fixed for the dead of night – and moreover actually insisted upon when that night proved as wild as it did? It is difficult to believe that these young people could have got through the snow alive.’

Bell nodded his head and was silent for a moment. Then he answered my last point first. ‘They took a chance their spirit would drive them to take, setting out in the smother of the storm. But you’ll know, Mr Wedderburn, the wind had dropped within minutes of their leaving, and a bittock moon was coming through forbye. Lindsay, that’s a stout and skilly chiel, would get the lass safely over to his own folk in Mervie. And the next day they’d be at Dunwinnie and away.’

‘It hasn’t been heard if they’ve been traced to Dunwinnie?’

‘That I couldn’t say. But with all the stour and confloption of the curlers there it’s likely enough not. And as for the laird driving them out in secret and at midnight into a storm, it’s just what would fit the black humour of the man.’

‘You think he really did that?’

‘I do.’

‘And that the laird then committed suicide in some sort of despair?’

‘I think that’s the conclusion will be come to, Mr Wedderburn.’

I looked at Ewan Bell curiously. ‘Then how would you account for the gold that has disappeared?’

He was plainly startled. ‘The gold, sir? I know nothing of that.’

‘A drawer in the corner of the study, I understand, has been violently broken open and gold apparently taken from it.’

‘That’s not so hard to explain as you might think, Mr Wedderburn. You’ll notice Christine says Guthrie was going to give her a sum of money – her own – and as for a drawer being opened with violence the laird himself was a right violent man. You’ll be hearing a story soon of the senseless fury he put to the breaking down of a door a while back.’

That Guthrie had himself taken the money from the drawer and given it to Miss Mathers again dovetailed, I noted, with Miss Guthrie’s statement that neither the laird nor Lindsay had moved in the direction of the bureau while Lindsay was in the tower. And once more I was confronted with a hypothetical sequence of events that had marked imaginative coherence: the final and harshly contrived parting, the bitter plunge to death almost as the hour brought in peace on earth and goodwill among men. I contemplated this in silence for some moments…and knew I was dissatisfied.

I rose. ‘Mr Bell, I must be getting up to Erchany. As yet I know far too little to judge of the matter. But I am very grateful to you for coming in. You are an important witness and I shall no doubt see you again this afternoon.’

‘And you think, Mr Wedderburn, it will be suicide proven?’

‘I think the police, or others, must find Lindsay and Miss Mathers. And for the rest – that truth lies at the bottom of the well. By the way, can you tell me anything of a man called Gamley? He was the first to find Mr Guthrie’s body in the moat.’

‘He was grieve at the home farm once, but left after having words with the laird.’

‘Harsh words?’

Bell smiled. ‘It would be hard to find any in these lands that couldn’t remember harsh words with Guthrie of Erchany. But I judge he comes little into this story. He would be but with the lad Lindsay and waiting to give him a hand away. They met in together some time back and had become fast friends.’

And here my interview with Ewan Bell ended. I rejoined Gylby, who had returned triumphant from the stationer’s with a tin of John Cotton, and we went out in the nip of the winter morning. The skis were piled on the roof of the car, certain parcels requisitioned by Mrs Hardcastle were deposited with the driver, and we drove off for Castle Erchany amid the universal curiosity of Kinkeig. As Mrs Roberts confided to me at parting, there had been nothing like it since the medicos – the reference being doubtless to the unfortunate London physician and his colleagues who had visited the dead man some two years before.

‘Mr Gylby,’ I said as we crept cautiously over the surface exposed by the ploughs, ‘I take it that nothing’ – I hesitated – ‘untoward was discovered about Guthrie’s body?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Well, as the story runs in Kinkeig, this desperate Lindsay had chopped off a number of the fingers.’

Abruptly, young Gylby stopped stuffing a pipe. ‘I really think the Scotch are–’

‘The bloody limit?’

My young acquaintance, I believe, had placed me comfortably as a person of somewhat ponderous utterance; it gave me considerable pleasure to see him positively jump as I thus briefly expressed his thought. ‘I was going to put it,’ he said, ‘that they are people with a developed taste in the macabre. Guthrie’s fingers are intact. It’s his gold that’s gone.’

‘Quite so…I understand that it is definitely for Miss Guthrie that I am to act?’

‘If you are going to be so good.’

‘Very well. Let me put it to you that you have made a statement in contradiction to certain apparent testimony of my client.’ And I tapped Gylby’s journal which I was still holding. ‘Miss Guthrie states that between Guthrie and Lindsay there was nothing like heat; that they shook hands and parted quietly; even that Lindsay spoke or comported himself “gently”. You state that at your own view of Lindsay little more than a minute later you received “an extraordinarily vivid impression of passion”. Now this discrepant evidence may be important. Are you sure that your impression was accurate?’

‘Yes.’ Gylby’s answer was at once reluctant and convinced. ‘Miss Guthrie was observing those people more or less at leisure. You, on the other hand, speak of what “happened in a flash”, and of “a second and a second only”. Are you not more likely to be mistaken than she?’

I thought it wise to let my tone suggest to this slightly airy young man the manner in which an inquiry of the sort impending might have to be conducted. But he was perfectly serious and perfectly forthright. ‘There seems to be such a probability, Mr Wedderburn. Nevertheless I don’t think my impression is wrong.’

I believe it was at this point that I made up my mind – if in a preliminary way – as to what had really happened at Erchany. And my conclusion, I saw, was likely to make my position delicate. I turned to another topic.

‘Mr Gylby, about the man Hardcastle. You are something of a prejudiced witness? It would be possible to suggest, on the strength of your journal, that your attitude to him has been quite venomous from the moment of his first unkind reception of you at Erchany?’

Gylby contented himself with saying: ‘You wait till you see him.’

‘And you are inclined to credit him with some hidden motive in the affair?’

‘He was up to something. Guthrie never gave him that message to me.’

‘Certainly that appears to be Miss Guthrie’s impression.’

With unexpected heat Gylby said: ‘Sybil was speaking the truth.’

‘You cannot suppose me to be suggesting otherwise. Have you any notion of why Hardcastle should give you the false message?’

‘I have some notion it might be an act of stupid malice against his master. He stumbled against the wall of the staircase once or twice as were going up and it occurred to me he was acting in some sort of random, fuddled state. I think he may be not only a rascal but a drunken rascal.’

‘And not a man engineering some complicated deception?’ Gylby shook his head. ‘He’s cunning, all right. But he couldn’t see far enough ahead for anything like that.’

‘Another point. You thought Guthrie was mad? And you formed that impression before hearing Mrs Hardcastle speak of doctors who had apparently come to inquire into his sanity some years ago?’

‘I thought him mad from the first few minutes. Only you must understand, sir, that I use the word very loosely. I don’t know that his was the sort of madness they certify; I rather suppose not. It was more as if he lived in the shadow of something that no man could remain quite sane while contemplating. He was broken, fragmented. He was mad as the heroes were mad when the Furies were hunting them down.’

I looked at my companion with a new interest. ‘A most illuminating remark, Mr Gylby. I have always maintained against our educational reformers that there is the greatest utility in the grand old fortifying classical curriculum.’