Lament for a Maker

1

They were not yet married. Perhaps they were to have been married before sailing that afternoon: I made no inquiries for it wasn’t my business. It was in no sense – it never in any sense became – my case: I had simply found them and I was ordered to get them back to Kinkeig – tactfully and if possible without producing the warrant with which I had been provided for Neil Lindsay. If I became interested in them in the course of the journey, if I subsequently became more interested still in the events with which they were involved, that was matter of my own curiosity and not of official instructions. Until they were under the eye of my Scottish colleagues I was a watchdog; after that the merest busybody. This is my preface to what I have to say: I am afraid it is not so impressive as Mr Wedderburn’s.

‘May I speak to you for a few minutes in private? I am a detective-inspector from Scotland Yard.’

They looked at me with wonder but, I thought, without apprehension. They were anxious – an elopement in any circumstances must be an anxious business – but my announcement had not increased their anxiety more than by the expectation of some vexatious official delay in their affairs. It was Miss Mathers who responded first; if she had seen even less of the world than Lindsay she was nevertheless the more competent in dealing with it. I felt that even in his own environment he would be half lost, a creature brooding fixedly on some abstract, imperfectly understood purpose to be achieved. Miss Mathers said: ‘Please come in.’

‘I understand that you have both come from Castle Erchany in Scotland? And that you are the niece, madam, of Mr Ranald Guthrie? I am sorry to have to tell you that Mr Guthrie is dead.’

An exclamation broke from Lindsay. Miss Mathers said nothing but only turned away for a moment into a darker corner of the dingy little room. Presently she turned again, very pale but quite composed. ‘He is…dead, you say?’

‘I am advised that he died suddenly and in obscure circumstances on the night of Christmas Eve. And that it is desirable you should both return to Kinkeig.’

‘Neil, we must go at once. As quickly as can be arranged.’ She turned to me. ‘What will be quickest? We have money.’

They had money: it did not seem strange to them that it was largely in gold. I said: ‘There is a train to Carlisle in twenty minutes. I have a taxi at the door and we can just catch it.’

Miss Mathers turned to Lindsay, who stood immobile regarding me with dark dilated eyes, and shook him gently by the shoulder. ‘Neil, hurry.’ And swiftly she gathered up her things. It was not until we were on the train that she said, with the implication of a most substantial question in her voice: ‘You are coming too?’

‘There is to be a legal inquiry. As a matter of routine, Miss Mathers, I am asked to travel north with you.’

At last she looked at me with something like fear in her eyes. ‘Was my uncle–’

‘You must understand I know little about it. I have come from London, not Scotland.’

Lindsay spoke, suddenly and harshly. ‘London?’

‘It was important to find you. I was put in charge of the search.’

From Liverpool to Carlisle, and from Carlisle over the moors and through the border towns to Edinburgh, I spent most of my time in the corridor, cursing my trade. I think I had fallen under the spell of the girl. I knew nothing of her past, and of her future I could guess only ill. But racing through that wild and lonely country, that seems to cry still to the imagination of the old bitterness of foray and feud and Covenant, and that lay now as in a penance under its garment of snow, I felt obscurely that she was part of these things and that in the most real sense I was bringing her home. Once, just short of Moffat, she came into the corridor and stood beside me, and her look was so far away that I thought she must be searching her memory or her fears. But in a minute she said softly: ‘The peewits.’ Straining my eyes I could just see them wheeling in the gathering dusk. Bird-life, I have been told, is scanty in Canada; I suppose she may have thought never to see the lapwings again.

From Carlisle they had sent a telegram; at Edinburgh they were met by a young solicitor called Stewart, who had made commendable haste from Dunwinnie. I made the best arrangements I could for the night and the next day we continued our journey. It was inevitably a constrained and uncomfortable affair, and I was afraid that Stewart might try to take a firm line and order me out of the picture. He proved however discreet: he may have guessed that I had an emergency card in my pocket. Lindsay never spoke, burying himself in a textbook of geology. Geology, I discovered, was his passion; coming of folk who were bound down, generation after generation, to the ceaseless turning of the soil, he had made the barren and unchanging rock the symbol of his revolt. Lurking in him was the character of genius that lifts a man out of the categories of class; without having exchanged a dozen words with him I realized that Miss Mathers was not proposing a mere misalliance with a green and handsome country lad. Handsome he was – beautiful, in Sybil Guthrie’s word – and the eye saw no reason to dispute that he might have reckless violence to his credit. But I was less interested in what crime might have been his than I was held by the intense relationship that was his and Christine Mathers’. The old high way of love – in our modern world fragmented into sensuality and affection – was in that railway carriage: passion too sheer and taut to be embarrassing or even pathetic, and that evinced itself – though they allowed each other scarcely a word or glance – as clearly as some massive atmospheric pressure upon a barometric screen. And the simple pressure was not the less compelling because somewhere I felt the needle tremble, as if all but invisibly deflected by an alien force. I wondered if suspicion, or a suspicion of suspicion, was hovering between them.

Miss Mathers had some code, not unimpressive in itself, that made her deny the mere constraint and awkwardness in our journey. She spoke to me occasionally of things seen in passing, but most of the time she spent gazing thoughtfully out of the window, her eye searching the turbulent snow-swollen waters of the Forth or absorbedly watching the hovering of a hawk over the Carse of Stirling. At Perth I exercised a certain primitive professional skill in detecting and avoiding a couple of newspaper-men who had got word of us; at Dunwinnie a magnificent and anxious old man – his name Ewan Bell – was waiting with a large car. They all held some sort of conference while I foraged cups of tea: and then we drove to Kinkeig.

By this time I wanted to know what it was all about. I listened attentively and with proper admiration to the facts and theories in the possession of Inspector Speight; I inspected the bodies – the so-dramatically poisoned Hardcastle’s with particular interest; and I broke what I believe was fresh ground by interviewing the small person called Isa Murdoch. It was then time for the inquiry.

The inquiry was, in its somewhat gruesome way, a treat. I had no notion of the identity of Mr Wedderburn and for some time I was under the impression that Stewart must have brought down the ablest advocate in Edinburgh. He made no attempt to smother the plain beginnings of a case against Lindsay. He spoke only once while Miss Guthrie was giving evidence, and that was to draw attention to the cardinal fact that Lindsay, during all the time that he was in the tower, could not have got at the bureau. He then bided his time until the appearance of the witness Gamley, and here he succeeded in emphasizing another significant point. Lindsay and Gamley had become friends, and Lindsay had confided to Gamley that he was taking Miss Mathers away, with her uncle’s consent, on Christmas Eve. He had then asked Gamley to be present at his final interview with the laird, feeling reasonably enough that the support of a friend might be desirable. Gamley had actually accompanied him to the castle for that purpose but had been refused admission by Hardcastle. He had waited, had seen Guthrie fall and hurried to help. Lindsay and Miss Mathers, finding him gone, had concluded that he had returned home and gone off without further waiting. Unless Lindsay and Gamley were in a conspiracy it was thus evident that Lindsay had at least not premeditated any violence.

But it was after the available witness was apparently exhausted that Wedderburn played his single decisive card. For the guidance of the sheriff he begged leave to call a certain Murdo Mackay, who proved to be an elderly and impressive working electrician. This person swore that there had been installed – and unmistakably recently installed – an electrical contrivance for the sole purpose of sending signals to Guthrie’s study from various points on the tower staircase. The apparatus was perfectly simple, a matter of two wires that had only to be pressed together to activate the buzzer of a small desk telephone – a buzzer that had been so muffled that it would be audible only to a person actually sitting by the desk. The whole contrivance could have no other purpose than that which he had described; moreover it was so set up that it could have been removed without leaving a trace by anybody with five minutes leisure in the study and on the staircase. The existence of this device the police, whose attention had been called to it by Wedderburn at the last moment, had to confirm.

After this Wedderburn’s road was clear. He built up an unshakable case. Guthrie, while affecting to give his niece away to Lindsay under eccentric and humiliating circumstances, had actually plotted that rarest of human achievements, a truly diabolical crime.

I followed all this with sufficient interest – it was an anatomy of wickedness beyond my considerable experience – but nevertheless I believe I was still primarily interested in the young people with whom I had travelled. As the story grew Lindsay’s eyes darkened; he gave no other sign of whatever emotions possessed him. He was, I suppose, relieved – and yet I doubt if throughout he had ever thought of his neck. He was of the secret kind, with that almost maiden’s shyness which often marks in a man the union of simple breeding and sensibility, and the light that had come to beat on Christine Mathers and himself was a sort of death to him. There was a sense, I felt, in which Ranald Guthrie had triumphed. Though not lacking in manners, Lindsay had to be prompted by the girl into some expression of thanks to Wedderburn; after that it was clear he only wanted to get away.

But it was in Christine Mathers that I was most interested. She had not the mask or shell of Lindsay, and wonder, horror and thankfulness were evident in her by turns: to have her lover cleared at the cost of her uncle and guardian’s infamy must have been a harrowing and bewildering experience. But her responses were far from being emotional merely; she followed the course of the inquiry syllable by syllable with her whole mind, as if she were preparing to fight every word if need be. And I noticed – what nobody else in court, I believe, troubled to notice – that as Wedderburn’s story grew so did a look of puzzlement on Christine Mathers’ face. Through all the interplay of her emotions – anxiety, abhorrence, relief – was this constant and growing thing: an intellectual doubt. Speight might have taken heart had he observed it, but Speight was fully occupied with the task of retreating in good order.

Sybil Guthrie – felt by Speight to be ‘real nice’ – had also captured something of my attention. If Miss Mathers was relieved and puzzled Miss Guthrie was exultant and – indefinably – something else. When Wedderburn began to speak she had watched him much as I have seen women watch an unlikely fancy in a horse race; when he had finished and it was all over I thought I could discern some faint light of mockery or irony on her face. She was tasting, it occurred to me, some delicate flavour in the affair that others were unaware of – and a flavour, maybe, not without its astringency or even bitterness. But when the sheriff had pronounced his findings and withdrawn she was the first person to hurry to Miss Mathers. Standing at the back of the minister’s library in which the inquiry had been conducted, I saw her kiss Christine, shake hands awkwardly with Neil Lindsay and then turn and go briskly from the room. An interesting girl: I felt sorry I was unlikely to see more than a glimpse of her again.

The transition from inquiry to funeral was a difficult business during which I felt a considerable admiration for the minister, Dr Jervie. He might have been moving among the relatives of the most beloved and pious of his parishioners; and his control of the situation was the more remarkable in that he was not, I thought, one to whom pastoral contacts came easily – rather he was a shy, scholarly, and it might be visionary man. Perhaps because I was attracted by his personality, I felt some desire to attend the funeral myself. But it seemed scarcely an occasion for curious strangers, and after some conversation with Speight I set off to find myself a room at the inn.

The manse is some way from the village; I had to tramp about a quarter of a mile in the heavy and now melting snow. That day had seen a rapid change in the weather: a stiff, mild wind had blown the sky almost clear of clouds and there was every indication of a rapid thaw. Beside me as I walked was the splash and gurgle of a torrential little stream; at the tail of the village it went to swell the ice-green waters of the Drochet, a small river that was already risen high on the piers of an old stone bridge I presently crossed. In front of me, at a distance difficult to assess in the now failing light, was the shadowy whiteness of Ben Mervie, with the summit of Ben Cailie still clear-cut in brilliant sunlight beyond. Over the village the blue peat smoke was drifting on the wind, and already in some little shop there was the yellow light of a lamp. It was cold, peaceful, lonely, compelling; I walked for some time merely submerged in the spirit of the place. But presently the tug of the snow at my shoes brought me back to the fact that there was matter tugging too at my mind. I had just set myself to explore it when there came a hail behind me. It was Noel Gylby.

I should explain that Gylby and I were old acquaintances, having met in a setting of some excitement a year before. He takes rather a glamorous view of criminal investigation and I believe he was sorry I hadn’t arrived in time to make spectacular gestures in the Erchany affair. He called out now: ‘Appleby – I say – I’ve got my journal back!’ I stopped. ‘You what?’

‘Didn’t you know? I wrote a whacking great account for Diana of what was going on at the castle. Old Wedders’ – he meant the eminent Writer to the Signet – ‘had it and now he’s returned it. Would you like to read it?’

‘Very much.’

Gylby thrust a small sheaf of papers into my hand. ‘You may find it a bit literary’ – he said this with complacency – ‘but all the facts are there. Are you going to the pub? You know, I think you might do something about ordering a meal. The sheriff has told Wedders there’s a claret would go splendidly with a piping hot curry or a tart really stuffed with strawberry jam. I’m going back for the last act.’

‘The funeral baked meats shall be ordered. And thank you for your notes.’

I went on to the inn, secured a room and sat down to Gylby’s journal. Perhaps it stands to the credit of his literary style that I quite forgot my promise about ordering a meal. When he returned with Wedderburn and Sybil Guthrie a little more than an hour later there were introductions and we sat down to a supper of cold roast mutton. It was singularly tasteless and I don’t doubt threw the execrable claret into the highest relief. I drank beer.

Old Wedderburn seemed disposed to expand; indeed he beamed on me so cordially that I ventured to congratulate him on his conduct of the case.

‘My dear Mr – um – Appleby, it was my good fortune to listen patiently to the gossip of the hostess of this inn. Everything followed from that.’

‘Indeed?’

‘The fantastic rumour about the mutilating of the corpse! Could such an extraordinary story start up unbidden, or as the result of some mere misapprehension? For a little time I was dull enough to think so. Then I saw that it must have its source in malice – malice that was either stupid or calculating. I tested the theory that it might be calculating – and what did I find? That the rumour, if it were to be really damaging, must be true. And to that I knit the remarkable fact of Hardcastle’s curiosity about the body and the statement he made – without having had the opportunity to investigate – that Lindsay had “mischieved” Guthrie. That took me straight to the heart of the plot.’

‘A strange plot, Mr Wedderburn. I doubt if there is anything closely analogous on record. Men have killed themselves to incriminate others before this, but they were not men of what appears to have been Guthrie’s type. They may have had his melancholy verging on madness, but they have been lacking in his intellectual vigour.’

‘I am without your familiarity, Mr Appleby, with the archives of the criminal mind. But we must frame our psychologies to fit facts, and not vice versa.’

I reminded myself that that afternoon Wedderburn had annihilated his adversaries, and that nothing was to be gained by setting myself up as a cock-shy for his very efficient forensic method. I said: ‘Very true. And the fact of the abominable plot against Lindsay is unshakable.’

‘You know–’ It was Gylby who spoke, and he looked rather warily at Wedderburn before continuing. ‘You know, Christine said a queer thing. I hung about a bit at the manse and made helpful noises. And suddenly she said quite out of the blue: “I can’t believe it; my uncle had a finer mind than that.” And then she looked at me as if I must have an alternative explanation in my hat.’

Wedderburn peered severely at the sediment in the bottom of his glass. ‘I do not see it as a queer thing. Such a sentiment in the scoundrel’s niece and ward is a very proper and becoming one. But we are not concerned with family piety.’

‘I’m afraid, sir, she didn’t mean quite that. She wasn’t denying that Guthrie was capable of great wickedness. She meant that his mind was subtler – more ingenious – than the story shows.’

‘More ingenious? Bless my soul!’

‘And she said: “He had a level head really; he would pit extremes only against extremes.”’

Sybil Guthrie crumbled bread, made a wry face over a mouthful of claret and broke in: ‘Will she brood over it? I suppose she will. Mr Appleby, how do people’s minds behave when they have been through a horrid thing like this?’

I avoided generalization. ‘I think, Miss Guthrie, she will brood as long as she feels she hasn’t got the truth.’

‘She has the truth! We all have.’

‘It is scattered among us. But I don’t know that we have pooled it all yet.’

Very deliberately, Wedderburn put down his glass and folded up his table napkin. ‘Mr Appleby, Gylby assures me that your opinion in matters of this sort has great weight. Will you be so good as to explain the statement you have just made?’

‘Miss Mathers herself has one piece of information which has not, I think, been pooled. Who was with her in the schoolroom, and who emerged from it and disappeared into the darkness, just before Gylby and Hardcastle went up the tower staircase?’

‘Dear me – an interesting point. She has no doubt told Stewart. I fear I rather took charge from him this afternoon; otherwise the explanation would no doubt have emerged.’

‘It is more than an interesting point. Here in Erchany on this isolated night is another man – and we are told nothing of him. Unless indeed it could have been the boy Tammas.’

Gylby shook his head at this. ‘Not Tammas; he wasn’t let into the house till long after. And not, of course, Gamley either.’

‘Very well. And the matter gains much greater significance from the fact that there was in all probability – and despite Miss Guthrie’s impression to the contrary – another visitor to the tower. Somebody must know who it was that opened the trapdoor on the battlements, passed through it, and bolted it on the lower side. Gylby’s record tells us that the snow provided the most conclusive evidence on that point. The door had been opened not long before. By whom? Why?’

They were silent for a moment and then Wedderburn said, with unexpected humour: ‘Mr Appleby, this is a slaughter of the innocents. And I fear they include both myself and your colleague Speight.’ He paused. ‘However clear the main features of the situation, there are undoubtedly factors that we have overlooked. And I will say that they call for investigation.’

‘I think they do – and that there is yet truth to come. Miss Guthrie, you agree?’

She eyed me thoughtfully before replying. ‘If you find real evidence of another person in the tower I agree there is yet truth to come. Mr Appleby, come to Erchany.’

Wedderburn rose. ‘Miss Guthrie and I intend to go up now. The dead man appears to have had no legal representative and in the circumstances we judge it proper, along with the young man Stewart, to search for what papers there may be. You will come along with us? But first, perhaps, we should go to the manse, where Miss Mathers is staying for the time being, and ask her to explain her nocturnal visitor.’

‘I will come up – though you will understand that I have no official standing. Anything we discover may have to go to Speight. As for Miss Mathers, I think it would be wise to wait until later. There is another question I am saving up for her.’

Wedderburn turned from helping Miss Guthrie with her coat. ‘And that is?’

‘Whether her uncle ever went in for winter sports.’

‘A most enigmatic inquiry.’

Noel Gylby looked up from stuffing his pockets providently with buttered biscuits. ‘You’ll find,’ he said, ‘that Appleby has questions like that for us all round. What’s mine?’

‘Just this. We’ve had the message of the Learned Rat. But what was the message of the Unfamiliar Owl?’