Lament for a Maker

5

When my client’s statement had been taken I excused myself and sought out Noel Gylby. I saw that I should presently need an assistant, and realizing that Miss Guthrie’s considered evidence on the doors had confirmed Speight in his suspicions of Lindsay I judged it imprudent to attempt taking him into my confidence at this point. Gylby, I thought, would be reliable as well as intelligent, and he would certainly relish the business of unravelling a mystery. Together we found Mrs Hardcastle, who was creeping somewhat eerily about the castle in furtherance of her fugitive warfare with the rats, and persuaded her to cut us some sandwiches for an early luncheon. I then suggested that we find a quiet spot for a talk and Gylby, after a moment’s thought, led the way up to the long winding room known as the gallery. I paused to view the demolished door in some astonishment – I had not yet heard little Isa Murdoch’s story – and then we passed inside. After a cursory view of the family portraits and the mouldering theology we made ourselves as comfortable as we could in an alcove.

‘Mr Gylby, you will have some idea of what the police have in mind about this affair?’

‘Hanging the elusive Lindsay.’

‘Quite so. And have you any opinion of your own?’

‘Nothing so clear-cut as an opinion. But I have one or two feelings – the principal one being that there are too many pieces. It’s as if a couple of the laird’s famous jigsaws had got mixed up and one found oneself, as the picture progressed, with an embarras de richesses.’

‘I find myself in agreement with you, Gylby. Pray go on.’

‘Too much villainy about. Active villainy in Hardcastle and a sort of lurking, prospective villainy in Guthrie himself. My idea rather is that Guthrie was up to some dirty game, that Lindsay was somehow too much for him and that in consequence he got what he more or less deserved. I have felt that Sybil has some suspicion or knowledge that it was that way – and that she has been trying to shield Lindsay as a result.’

‘A most interesting theory. Can you push it further?’

‘Well – it sounds fantastic and squalid and horrible – but what about this. Consider the apparently rifled bureau. Guthrie was proposing to plant a fake robbery on Lindsay at the very moment he was going off with his niece. Lindsay spotted the plot while up in the tower, slipped back without Sybil seeing him and sent Guthrie over the battlement. Then he simply made off with the girl.’

‘Excellent up to a point. But I think it has a psychological flaw. Such a plot against Lindsay implies a twisted mind of the perpetrator. We may grant that; it is evident that Guthrie was a most peculiar person. But what of Lindsay? Guthrie was in a sense his enemy, and that he should kill him in passion upon the discovery of such a plot is possible enough. But would he thereupon – as you put it – “simply make off with the girl”? I think that would almost imply another twisted mind in the case. The impulse of a normal man, killing his enemy in passion and upon the discovery of a dastardly plot, would be to face it out. Particularly, he would not make off as a fugitive with a girl he loved. Is that sentiment, Gylby? I am inclined to call it sound mental science.’

‘I rather agree.’

Moreover we should still be left with far too many pieces – have fitted in, indeed, little more than the rifled bureau. So let us go back and glance at what appears to be Speight’s present case. Lindsay kills Guthrie, steals his gold and runs off with his niece. What do you think of that as a picture?’

‘First of all, that Christine Mathers isn’t the sort to fall for that kind of chap. And that it’s lurid and crazy.’

‘And if Lindsay could be shown to have paused in his flight, and in requital of some legendary injury to have chopped a few fingers off the corpse?’

Gylby stared at me. ‘A madman’s dream.’

‘Exactly – a madman’s dream. And your first impression of Ranald Guthrie was that he was mad.’

‘Good God!’

‘Your ejaculation is almost justified. It is a most horrid picture. Ranald Guthrie committed suicide – and in the same instant an abominable crime. Having got that we have got to the core of the mystery. It remains to work it out in detail.

‘Guthrie would not let Lindsay have his niece: we must begin, I think, with that as a fact of pathological intensity. And for some reason his hatred of the young man was so extreme that he plotted – having failed, perhaps, to achieve his end in other ways – to prevent the thing by Lindsay’s death – and his own. Remember he was of a more than melancholic temperament, with that deep will-to-death which is the ground of so many apparently unmotivated suicides. Actually, he once attempted suicide – I was fortunate enough to secure evidence of that yesterday – and we must imagine him contriving an act in which these dominant impulses would be telescoped. He would rob Lindsay of his niece by a method that meant nothing less than Lindsay’s ignominious death at the hands of the law; at the same time he would satisfy his own obscure and profound craving for self-destruction. You can see why he chanted Dunbar’s poem and why the fear of death was upon his face: he knew he was going to die. You can see why he gave signs of struggle; why, as Miss Mathers said, he seemed “in two minds”. No man could meditate such a deed without moments of terror and revulsion.

‘There was to be a crime – and a witness. There was to be the best sort of witness – a medical witness.’

‘Hardcastle’s doctor!’

‘I think so. The first thing that went wrong was that this doctor – whoever he be – failed to turn up. You and Miss Guthrie turned up instead. And Guthrie decided that you would serve. Hence his look of calculation as he considered you. Hence his significant remark that he was very glad you had come.

‘I believe there is another trace of the original plan in the circumstance that Guthrie feigned illness next day. That was somehow to be exploited to get the doctor to the right place at the right moment – everything was to turn on that – and it was a fragment of the plan which for some reason he adhered to even when the doctor – daunted, we may guess, by the snows – had to be replaced by yourself.

‘And now the plan. It was really very simple. Lindsay was to come on Christmas Eve and take Miss Mathers, together with her dowry, quietly and indeed secretly away. Guthrie’s eccentricity, his insistence that the marriage was disgraceful and so on, was enough to give a natural colour to this. Lindsay and Miss Mathers would see that he was determined to humiliate them by such an arrangement, but they would suspect nothing more. Nor should we at this moment have the least notion of what had been arranged but for the chance of Miss Mathers having managed to send a letter to an old friend in Kinkeig. Save for this circumstance, which Guthrie didn’t reckon on, there would only have been the word of the fugitive that Guthrie had ever sanctioned their departure, or that he had given Christine a sum of gold.

‘Lindsay was to be brought up to the tower for a final interview with Guthrie – and at a set moment he was to be dismissed. And dismissed in a particular mood. I suppose Guthrie knew the lad’s temperament, and knew how to lash him – Miss Guthrie’s word – into a flaming passion before telling him to go.’

‘Mr Wedderburn, the man was a fiend!’

‘You barely exaggerate. And you see what actually happened. Summoned by Hardcastle, you came up the tower staircase just in time to meet that very angry young man face to face. He pushed past you unheeding – you remember that Hardcastle made a noticeably ineffective attempt to stop him – and suspecting nothing. Then he simply joined Miss Mathers and together they shook the dust of Erchany from their feet. And meantime – the moment, indeed, that Lindsay was through the study door – Guthrie had dashed through the little bedroom and over the battlements to his death.’

Gylby had got up and was pacing up and down the gallery. Now he stopped, the plainest excitement on his face. ‘It fits – yes, Mr Weddenburn, it all fits! Only I can’t just see how the times–’

‘An important point. We shall presently suggest with a stopwatch, I hope, that Lindsay could not have killed Guthrie; that between the moment of your hearing the cry and seeing Guthrie fall and of his appearing at the turn of the stair there was not sufficient time for him to have come all the way from the battlements. But Guthrie did not expect a matter of half a minute to be important there. He did not expect the witness on the stair to see his body fall. And, overestimating his own nerve, he did not expect to give that cry. It was to be enough that, hard upon Lindsay’s descending in a passion from the tower, Guthrie’s body should be found at the bottom of it.

‘Nevertheless we must return to the matter of timing in a moment. But meanwhile note this. Guthrie’s nerve failed him in that final cry. But it also failed him in a more vital particular. He was unable to lop himself of a finger or so before he fell.’

‘Mr Wedderburn, I can’t believe it all. It’s the most horrible thing I ever heard.’

‘But it is so. Guthrie sharpened a hatchet to deal, he told Mrs Hardcastle, with a great rat: it was undoubtedly his underlying thought that the rat was Lindsay and that the hatchet was to be used to incriminate him. Again, Hardcastle displayed a curious eagerness to get at the body; he declared that Lindsay had “mischieved” the body; as soon as the lad brought here by the constable got back to Kinkeig the rumour spread that the body had been mutilated. Only Hardcastle could have set that story going; he believed the thing had happened simply because he knew it was to be part of the plan; and if he has been in some puzzlement and uncertainty recently it is because he is bewildered at having heard no authentic news of it. If the thing had actually happened the point of evidence against Lindsay would have been, in the popular mind, overwhelming. And the popular mind is not to be disregarded when you are out for a criminal conviction. Macabre as Guthrie’s abortive plan was, it was by no means unintelligent.’

Gylby produced a handkerchief and mopped his brow. ‘Mr Wedderburn, I most frightfully admire your unruffled calm. Guthrie must have been horribly and obscenely mad.’

I shook my head gravely. ‘No! In all this there is nothing that is not perfectly logical and clear-headed, nothing that would incline a court for a moment to allow that Guthrie was insane. He knew what he wanted and how to achieve it. And he emerges from your own narrative clearly enough as one who knew right and wrong. Mad he was in the loosest sense. Strictly he was sane, wicked and fantastic, and even his fantasy was perfectly efficient – was all calculatingly directed to a rational if perverted end. Only once did he topple over into extravagance – a flourish of fantasy that positively told against his game.’

Gylby slapped his hand resoundingly upon the faded surface of Africa on an adjacent terrestrial globe. ‘The learned rats!’

‘The learned rats. His plan for getting the witness up the tower stair was upset by the non-appearance of the doctor, and before settling on the further perfectly rational plan which he finally employed he indulged the fantasy of luring you to the tower through the messages tied to the rats. I believe a court would accept that as fragmentary evidence of real craziness. But it was only a momentary aberration. And all the time the prosaic and efficient machinery for getting you to the tower on time was waiting to be set in motion.’

‘You said you would come back to the timing. And that was surely the difficult thing – getting me near the top of the tower staircase on the dot.’

‘Undoubtedly it was. And it was there that the conservative laird had recourse to the resources of modern technicology. That is why I have sent for an electrician. Notice that it was unimportant that you should be at this or that point at a given moment by the clock. What was important was that Guthrie should know just where you were at a given moment. He could then time his conversation with and dismissal of Lindsay. You remember saying that you had wondered if Hardcastle were drunk – because once or twice he stumbled against the wall of the staircase as you went up? And you have noticed that Guthrie had a little house telephone on his desk? No doubt there is no bell but merely a muted buzzer of the modern type. And no doubt Hardcastle could send signals of your progress by some such simple action as momentarily contacting two wires. He led you upstairs, you will recall, “deliberately”. The picture seems complete. Your visit to the laird was timing itself with all the accuracy of a royal procession.’

‘It all means that Hardcastle was privy to the whole unspeakable plot?’

‘I do not think you were mistaken, my dear Mr Gylby, in your estimate of the very great depravity of the man Hardcastle. I only wish that his neck, in our good Scots phrase, could feel the weight of his buttocks. But unfortunately he is not an accessory to actual murder.’

‘But he will be convicted? I mean you can put all this across the sheriff or whoever it is, and see that the man is tried?’

‘I haven’t a doubt of it. And now I wonder if there are any loose ends? Guthrie’s random efforts to break momentarily from his own extreme miserliness – the efforts that had the odd consequence of presenting you with a supper of caviare – were an attempt, no doubt, to make colourable his treacherous gift of gold to his departing niece. If she had reason to think his miserly habits were breaking up she would be the less likely to suspect that there was anything wrong. And the sudden interest in medical studies I am inclined to put down to a morbidity arising from the knowledge of what was in front of him. Indeed, here perhaps is another glimpse of real craziness in the man: Guthrie turning to medical science for companionable reading on amputation and broken necks. A poor preparation for eternity, Gylby. I fear he little heeded the last verse of Dunbar’s poem.’

Gylby rose. ‘What a comfort orthodoxy can be! It’s nice to think that the soul of Ranald Guthrie is fairly roasting.’

‘I fear that is very much the sentiment you justly censured in the man Gamley. And now–’

I was interrupted by the appearance of Inspector Speight in the demolished doorway. ‘Surely, inspector, that is not my electrician yet?’

‘No more it is: he’ll be a good hour more. But there’s a message up from Kinkeig I thought you’d like to have. They’ve found Lindsay and the young lady at Liverpool. The two are on their road back now, with a lad from Scotland Yard to help them find their way. They set off yesterday afternoon and will be in Kinkeig in time for the sheriff.’

‘Splendid, inspector. Their return is most timely. I think we can undertake to settle the matter of Mr Guthrie’s death quickly enough and leave them to their happiness. They will deserve it.’

Speight stared, shook his head dubiously and went away. I turned round and discovered Gylby gazing absently at the long line of cracked and browned Guthrie portraits, a curiously perplexed look on his face. He caught my glance. ‘Mr Wedderburn, Guthrie’s death is settled – but somehow I don’t feel there is any happiness for Christine Mathers. Something about her, some obscure awareness she can’t bring to consciousness… I don’t know.’

‘My dear Gylby – more mystery?’

‘I don’t know. Tragedy perhaps.’ He passed a hand through his hair. ‘Erchany must be getting me. I am not gay.’

This was Noel Gylby in an unsuspected character, and I was about to probe into the basis of his feeling when we were again interrupted. The Kinkeig constable, considerably out of breath, had appeared in the doorway. ‘Excuse me, sir, but would the inspector be here about?’

‘You have just missed him. Is anything the matter?’

‘By your leave, sir, it’s the coarse creature Hardcastle–’ I jumped up. ‘He’s bolted?’

‘No, sir. But he’s drinking like a fish.’

‘Is that all? Save your breath, man, and let him drink. It’s no business of yours.’ I turned to Gylby. ‘He’ll cut all the sorrier figure this afternoon.’

‘But Mr Wedderburn, sir, you don’t understand. And I don’t know what to do. The daft creature’s drinking water!’

For a moment I thought the man was attempting an unseasonable jest; then I saw that he was not only agitated but positively shaken. I said: ‘Explain yourself.’

‘Sir, it’s the most uncouthy sight. The gomeril chiel’s down by the cattle-trough in the back court, whiles roaring and scraiching like Judas Iscariot at the Judgement, and whiles fair wallowing in the sharrow sharny seip.’

‘God bless me! Gylby, come.’ And we all three hurried from the gallery and downstairs.

The spectacle with which we were confronted in the back court may justly be termed extraordinary. Hardcastle, his body hideously swollen and bloated, was lying by a low trough in a corner, screaming horribly and fighting for water amid a multitude of hideously swollen and bloated rats. A few seconds more and his screams died away. Even as we ran up he rolled over on his back in a final convulsion, his limbs twitching faintly in ghastly correspondence to the weakening reflexes of the already dead vermin about him. And he was not unattended in his agony. On one side stood his wife, crying out: ‘He took the poison for his porridge, ’twas the rat-nature lured him to it, woe the day!’ On the other side stood – or rather pranced – the daftie Tammas, clapping his hands and casting a wild laughter against the very face of death.