Lament for a Maker

2

Sybil Guthrie began by turning to Wedderburn. ‘I’m afraid I’m chiefly worried at thinking how dense you must have thought me. When you said Lindsay had nothing to fear and that I had only to tell the truth you must have thought it strange that I didn’t in the least see what was in your mind – that I could only say I found it terribly hard to believe you. But you see your case – the case that Guthrie had killed himself to incriminate Lindsay – could never occur to me for the simple reason that it was ruled out by what I knew. On the parapet walk I had seen a man sent hurtling to his death. When you proved your case before the sheriff this afternoon I knew that my continued fibbing – my second line of downright lies – had enabled you to prove what wasn’t true. It was rather a creepy feeling. The evidence of the bogus telephone, of the bureau I knew Lindsay couldn’t have rifled, was conclusive. That is to say, Guthrie’s plot against Lindsay was conclusive. And yet I knew Ranald hadn’t committed suicide. I had seen the man I thought was Ranald killed. And I still believed Lindsay had killed him. Of course my conscience was now clearer still. For I had to believe that Lindsay, in really losing control of himself and killing Guthrie, had merely done what Guthrie was abominably plotting to suggest he had done. That was the only way I could make sense of your case and my knowledge. And though my private morality says a Neil Lindsay oughtn’t to be hanged for killing a degenerate nuisance like Ranald Guthrie under the outrageous provocation I had seen and sensed in those last moments in the tower – well, it was creepy, all the same. I wondered whether perhaps Lindsay hadn’t spotted Guthrie’s plot and killed him in the anger of discovering it. And whether that wouldn’t have been almost justifiable suicide. And whether perhaps Lindsay oughtn’t to have told the truth – what I thought was the truth – and faced it.’ Sybil Guthrie hesitated, seemed to cast about for further words. ‘I mean a court of law tremendously impresses one with the abstract importance of getting the whole truth into the light. I think I was rather shy of walking up to Lindsay and shaking hands with him at the end. I believed we were both less than honest.’

I don’t know if I have mentioned that Sybil Guthrie had great good looks. Noel Gylby said heartily: ‘Well, all’s well that ends well!’

I said – as the best means I could hit on for dissociating myself from this light-hearted point of view: ‘Miss Guthrie, previous to these improved perceptions of yours before the sheriff – you had no doubts or qualms?’

‘Mr Appleby, no. I’m not like you sworn to certain accepted canons of justice. I had only one qualm.’

Gylby made a gesture as if remembering something. ‘The bureau.’

‘Yes. For a moment the rifled bureau staggered me. If it were possible that Lindsay had touched the gold he was – whatever provocation he had suffered – outside my protection. But then I realized my own certainty that he had never been near it. I think I said or hinted to Noel that the bureau merely added to the puzzle – to the mystery of what had happened. It was irrelevant to my moral problem.’

Wedderburn leant forward and patted his client on the hand. ‘My dear, I am afraid you will one day have the practical problem of explaining your moral problem to a judge of the Supreme Court. At Ranald Guthrie’s trial.’

Sybil’s chin tilted. ‘If I can see cousin Ranald in the dock I won’t much worry about the figure I cut.’

Quite illogical, I thought – for why protect a nervously excitable young man like Lindsay only to pursue a nervously degenerated man like old Guthrie? Was not Guthrie just the sort of hospital case that Lindsay, granted a certain pressure at one critical point in life or another, might have become? I turned away from this – the riddle that modern neurology presents to the framers of penal law – to contemplate the more concrete problem of Miss Guthrie. As my colleague Speight had decided, a nice girl. Though Speight, for that matter, might now be inclined a little to modify his verdict. It was in downright echo of Wedderburn’s fatherly tones that I said: ‘And now we had better have in detail just what you did see.’

‘It won’t take long. I saw just what I’ve said I saw: the interview, Guthrie turning on Lindsay at the end and lashing him horribly, Lindsay going out by the staircase door and Guthrie by the bedroom door – the two doors that Mr Wedderburn discovered I just couldn’t command. It’s after that, and by way of omission, that the lying begins.’

Gylby said briskly: ‘I’ve found a bit of chocolate.’ And handed it to Miss Guthrie.

Miss Guthrie took a bite. ‘–that the lying begins. I stood peering into the empty study for I suppose about twenty seconds, wondering if I could dash through and make my get away. And then I heard something. There was still, as you know, a terrific wind up there: what I heard was a cry or shout – and it must have been pretty loud to reach me at all from round a corner of the parapet walk. For that was where it came from – from that side of the parapet walk upon which I now know the little bedroom opens.

‘I was all het up and ready for a bit of guess-work. Watching that sudden verbal attack of Guthrie’s on Lindsay I had felt for a moment, as you know, quite murderous; and my thought was that the two men were together again; that they had somehow got out on the battlements and were quarrelling there. The place was fearfully dangerous and I suddenly felt it was all a stupidity I wasn’t going to stand for. Castle Erchany craziness: I’d had enough of it. So I groped my way along the parapet walk to tell them to drop it.’

Noel Gylby swept Wedderburn and myself with a glance that plainly called upon us to admire. ‘Cheers,’ he said.

‘Of course I knew I might be quite wrong. Still, I got round the corner. And there was certainly something on.

‘It was a confused vision. Somebody had set up a lamp – a storm lantern – in a niche above the door from the bedroom. Below a certain line was darkness; I could see only what was above. And the first thing I saw was Ranald Guthrie’s face. I had just time to see that it was wrenched awry by some violent emotion when his arm rose into the light and I realized that he was holding an axe. I called out to him to stop. I believe he heard me, though I hardly expected him to in the wind. He spun round and took a step that carried him out of the lantern’s rays. I saw him for a moment as a shadow; then I think he stooped down and I could see nothing. I was aware of confused movement – I believe of a groan and then some muttered words. A moment later I saw him again – or rather I saw what I took to be him – reared up against the parapet, his head and shoulders full in the light. For a split second I saw him so and then something came between us: the mere black silhouette of a back I took to be Lindsay’s. I must have felt what was going to happen, for I shouted again and struggled forward. The shadowy back of the second man moved and Guthrie was in view again. But only for a moment. An arm shot out at him and I heard, even in that wind, the crack of a bare fist on his chin. He staggered, gave a great cry – the cry Noel heard from the staircase – and then he went sheer over the parapet.’ Sybil Guthrie shivered, drew her coat about her. ‘That’s all.’

I put down the notebook in which I had been scribbling. ‘All, Miss Guthrie? You didn’t see Ranald make for his get away by the trapdoor and the winding stair?’

‘I saw nothing more. What I was sure I had seen was Lindsay kill cousin Ranald, perhaps in some sort of defence against that axe. And I wasn’t going to be in on it if my witness might entangle Lindsay. I turned round and retreated on an instant impulse, round the corner to the French window by which I had been standing. The beastly thing might best pass as suicide: anyway, I was going to bide my time and see.’

Noel Gylby said heavily: ‘I would have done the same.’

‘And your narrative now,’ I said, ‘instead of embarrassing Lindsay actually convicts the man you thought Lindsay had killed. It is for the policeman a pleasingly complete mix up. A mystery on classical lines with the dénouement quite in the right place.’

Gylby made an approving and Wedderburn a disapproving noise. I had spoken, I think, with some intention of easing a tension evident on Sybil Guthrie’s face. She had been under a long strain and now that the truth was told she was feeling the reaction. ‘Your evidence,’ I went on, ‘has acquitted cousin Ranald on one score at least.’

‘Acquitted him?’

‘Of squeamishness. You remember that according to Mr Wedderburn’s theory Ranald had failed in two particulars. He had failed to keep silent as he hurled himself to death. And his nerve had failed him too in the crux of the plan, the thing that was to incriminate Lindsay in the thought of the countryside; he had failed to take that horrible chop at his fingers in his last living moments. And when we got nearer the truth that last point remained puzzling. Had he relented at the last moment of performing the outrage on Ian – drugged, one supposes, and ready to be hurled to death by one blow? We now know he hadn’t relented; he was simply interrupted by your first cry. And his action upon that interruption is our final and best evidence of the remarkable speed and economy of his mind.

‘Consider just what happened. Ranald has Ian huddled helpless in the snow at his feet. The axe is raised in that particularly nasty moment of his crime when he hears a shout. Someone is on the parapet walk. A paralysing discovery? – not a bit of it. The situation is desperate but may yet be saved. So far, only he himself can have been seen. He pitches the axe over the battlements, gets himself out of the light, stoops, heaves up the body of his brother into a momentarily erect position – and into the light. Then, himself a mere black silhouette, he hits out. The intruder, whoever he be, has no thought of an Ian Guthrie; he sees Ranald Guthrie killed and cannot see the killer. If Ranald can then make his get away by the winding stair, seizing and extinguishing the lamp, his plot is still in a fair way to succeed. The wind will quickly obliterate all traces of the trapdoor having been used; the intruder will not be able to swear that in the darkness the killer did not escape through the bedroom and down the main staircase – on which Lindsay, two or three seconds later, would be found according to plan. And so the case against Lindsay would be even stronger than Ranald had hoped, for of the fact of murder there could be no doubt at all. Ranald Guthrie, in fact, is one who never says die.’

‘Die,’ said Wedderburn, ‘is just what he did say to two innocent men.’ He stood up, a handsome old man suddenly lively with passion. ‘But we’ll get him! Ranald Guthrie has played his last trick.’

From somewhere below us, shattering the silence of the deserted castle, came the harsh high reverberation of a great cracked bell.