My Bones Will Keep

Chapter 7

Auld Acquaintance

‘They were great friends in a quarter

of an hour: and great friends they remained.’

M. R. James

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AS she had come by way of Rannoch and Glencoe, Laura had expressed a wish to return to Tigh-Osda and Gàradh by the longer route out to Oban and so, by the coast road, to Ballachulish and back to Fort William. She kept a sharp look-out as the car took its dignified route through Dalmally on the way to Loch Awe and the Pass of Brander, but there was no sign of her motor-cycling boatman.

The evening and night which they spent at Fort William passed without incident and in the morning Laura elected to join a small party, led by a local guide, which was to climb Ben Nevis. She had made the ascent once before, but by the easier route from Achintee Farm by pony-track and the long, rough, zigzag paths to the summit. This time the party was to use these paths for the descent, but climbed the huge, ugly mass by the tougher way up which followed the Allt-a-Mhuilinn to the club-hut at the head of the glen and then by a trackless route along the side of the mountain and then onwards and upwards between Cair Mór Dearg and the summit.

Visibility at the top was particularly good that day. The beautiful peak of Schiehallion stood out to the south-east, distinguishable from the three Bens—Mor, Vorlich and Lawers – by its remarkable symmetry and pointed cone.

It had taken several hours to make the ascent, and Laura, who liked hard and strenuous exercise, had enjoyed it. The easier descent gave her time and a chance to do a little constructive thinking, and she pondered on all that had happened from the time she had driven Mrs Grant from the station at Tigh-Osda to when she last had encountered her boatman at Inversnaid.

She had accepted Mrs Grant’s personal reaction to the laird of Tannasgan, but she did not share it. There was a mystery because there was, somewhere, a discrepancy. The portrait which Mrs Grant had painted of an overbearing and meanly spiteful man, who used his position unfairly in order to make difficulties for people he did not care for, did not square with Laura’s own impression of a hospitable eccentric, possibly mentally deranged to some degree, but definitely kind-hearted and obviously lonely. However, Mrs Stewart of Gàradh, whom she and Dame Beatrice were to visit, had not liked the laird.

Laura pigeon-holed these thoughts and reconstructed what had happened, apart from her encounter with Mrs Grant and with the laird. There was the rather odd business of the bearded stranger who, in arbitrary fashion, had called over the boat which had borne her, soaking wet, to the Island of Ghosts. He seemed to have taken it for granted that she was bound thither, and for no better reason than that they had met on the shores of the loch more or less opposite An Tigh Mór. He might have been a mere busybody, one of those irritating Helping Hands whose interference, so often, has nothing but nuisance-value, but Laura did not think so. Without possessing Dame Beatrice’s trained psychological insight, she was intelligent when it came to summing people up, and, the more she thought of it, the more convinced she was that she had been sent to the Big House purposely. Then, was it another coincidence that she had seen him again on Skye?

Again she switched her thoughts, this time to the mysterious conduct of the boatman. She had been startled at meeting him so unexpectedly in the boathouse at that time of night, but had accepted his presence as one of the idiosyncrasies of the household. His subsequent dogging of her footsteps and his insistence upon her agreeing to furnish him with what seemed to be an alibi, together with his chameleon-like changes of speech and behaviour, added up to something remarkably like a man with a guilty conscience or else to a man who was afraid that, although he was innocent of any part in the murder, his presence at the Big House might implicate him. Laura could not help wondering how much he knew of the reason why the laird had come to his death in the manner in which this had occurred. A skian-dhu! Romantic, she supposed, but horrible.

By the time she had turned these thoughts over in her mind and had built various theories upon them, the climbers reached the refreshment hut, where they stayed for a quarter of an hour. After this, Laura dismissed the murder and turned to the scenery. From a spur on the ridge which they reached a little later, they halted to admire the northern face of Ben Nevis, impressively different from the humped and uninteresting mass which is the usual picture of the highest mountain in Britain.

The precipices here were so steep that they seemed living giants literally pouring themselves headlong into the glen. The escarpments cut the sky-line in sharp silhouette and the crags looked monumental. Two enormous shoulders jutted out in strong support of the magnificence of the scene. The mountain dominated the light-blue sky.

As the party continued to descend, Laura thought she might suggest to Dame Beatrice, when she got back, that they should remain at the hotel another day and walk along Glen Nevis, but by the time they reached Fort William she had thought better of it. She badly wanted to contact Mrs Grant again and obtain her reactions to the death of the laird, therefore to use up another day for the walk would be to put off this interesting encounter and would be a waste of time, she decided; so when Dame Beatrice enquired at what time they should order the car in the morning, Laura plumped for a nine o’clock start and they set off promptly at that hour for Inverness.

They stopped for coffee at half-past ten and, as they sat at the small table, Dame Beatrice said:

‘What was it you told me about the appearance of the laird of Tannasgan?’

‘Big, red-headed, red-bearded and with a wild and bright blue eye.’

‘Yes. I shall be glad to meet your Mrs Grant.’

‘Why, particularly?’

‘I am most interested to find out whether, as you two seemed not to see eye to eye in the matter of the laird’s nature and character, you are equally at variance in describing his looks.’

‘Oh?’

Dame Beatrice said no more, but finished her coffee and led the way out. George was talking to the driver of a motor-coach which had pulled up for the coffee-break. As soon as he saw his employer, he nodded to the man and came back to the car.

‘The driver of the coach-party tells me the Loch Ness monster has been seen again, madam,’ he said.

‘I bet it’s gone again, too,’ said Laura. ‘Always my luck! When was this, George?’

‘Yesterday evening, Mrs Gavin, just before sunset.’

‘Yes, she prefers the beginning and the end of the day when she decides to surface. Oh, well, it’s just one of those things. Do you believe in her, George?’

George permitted himself a slight smile.

‘You should hear some of the stories I’ve heard!’ he replied. ‘Skin divers who’ve gone down to look for her and never been seen again, and others who’ve come up, but can’t speak of what they’ve experienced because it’s too horrible, and others who’ve fallen out of boats, and their bodies never recovered. It’s all fairy tales, if you ask me.’

‘Leaving all that aside – it may or may not be true, of course – what do you think yourself, George?’

‘Well, Mrs Gavin, they never expected to find a live coelacanth, did they?’

Laura nodded, well pleased with this contribution from a fellow-believer, and, judging it best to leave matters in this satisfactory state, she joined Dame Beatrice, who was already established on the back seat of the car, and said no more. George slammed the door, took his seat at the wheel, and off they drove.

Inverness offered its usual impression of narrow streets, a broad shallow river, bridges, a modern castle and a general air of knowing that the city was the capital of the Highlands. After dinner they went out to see some Highland dancing. The dancers were children of tender years; in fact, the youngest was four years old, and, because of this, the belle of the ball. She danced sedately, in her own time and rhythm, with an engaging singleness of purpose, for she was, at times, completely divorced from the rest of the set. Whether she was enjoying herself it was impossible for the charmed and sentimental onlookers to tell, but her concentration and sense of heavy responsibility were there for all to see.

Laura and Dame Beatrice were discussing this child as they passed into the street on their way back to the hotel, when a young man raised his hat in response to Laura’s quick look of recognition.

‘Well, well!’ she said, coming to a halt. ‘Dame Beatrice, this is the kind-hearted and chivalrous gent who gave me a lift into Freagair that time I was benighted on my way back from Tannasgan. Mr Curtis, this is Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley.’

‘How do you do, Mr Curtis?’

‘How do you do, Dame Beatrice?’

‘I am grateful indeed to you for succouring Mrs Gavin.’

‘It was a pleasure. You heard the news about what happened on Tannasgan after Mrs Gavin left?’

‘Yes, and we are both very glad that she had left.’

‘It might have been a bit awkward, if she’d stayed, I suppose. Have you seen today’s paper?’

‘No, we haven’t seen a paper since we left Edinburgh three days ago. Have there been developments?’

‘Yes, the police have been questioning a man called Grant, a customer of mine. They must have some idea that he can help them, I suppose. They can’t possibly believe him guilty! I know the chap well.’

Laura had a sudden inspiration. It arose from her previous uncomfortable feeling that her own and Mrs Grant’s impressions of the lairs of Tannasgan did not tally, and she also remembered the doubts expressed by Dame Beatrice.

‘Was the owner of An Tigh Mór on Tannasgan also a customer of yours?’ she asked.

‘He was – and a more difficult, curmudgeonly, cheese-paring old party I’ve yet to find. I don’t like losing customers, through death or for any other reason, but I can’t say I’m sorry to think I’ll never call on the owner of An Tigh Mór on Tannasgan again. When I think of that tonsured pink scalp with the fringe of red hair and the nasty little mouth always being wetted with that snaky tongue – I was always surprised it wasn’t forked! – I know I can do very well without ’em.’

‘I believe he wasn’t generally liked in the neighbourhood,’ said Laura, convinced now that she had never met him.

‘Liked? He was absolutely loathed. Nothing was ever pinned on him, so far as I know, but I’ve heard that he was always playing dirty little tricks and doing people down. I did hear that he was pretty shady in other matters—bigger ones, too. Smuggling. This fellow Grant I mentioned…’

‘Would that be the Grant who lives at Coinneamh Lodge, about a dozen miles this side of Tigh-Osda?—a man with a wife and small kid?’

‘No. This is a young chap who lodges with the post-mistress at Crioch. She lets him do as he likes with the bit of ground she dignifies by the name of her ‘policies.’ He’s a particularly keen gardener and always interested in our catalogues, although he doesn’t buy very much from us because he hasn’t much space.’

‘Is he in his early twenties, with light-brown hair? And does he switch from fairly intelligible Scots to standard English, as the mood takes him?’

‘That sounds like the same lad. Why, do you know him?’

‘Well,’ said Laura cautiously. ‘I’ve met him once or twice. What were you going to tell me about him? Look, come with us and have a drink. Our hotel is not licensed, but the one next door is.’

‘Grant’s all right, you know,’ said Curtis, over the drinks. His raised eyebrows seemed to demand explanations from Laura. She gave them.

‘So, you see, I don’t know what to make of him,’ she added, at the end of her recital. ‘He may be all right, but something has scared him, and, I should say, it’s some sort of guilty knowledge that he possesses. Still, I can’t possibly give him an alibi. I don’t even know at what time the murder was committed.’

Curtis wagged his head and, swallowing the rest of his whisky, gazed into the bottom of the glass.

‘This red-bearded old chap you met on Tannasgan,’ he said, ‘would be some sort of relation to the laird, no doubt. But I wonder where the other one was? He could have been dead by the time you arrived—at least, according to what I read in the papers.’

‘Wherever he was, I don’t think he was in the house, unless, as you say, he was already dead. You see, I saw quite a lot of the place, one way and the other, and I could have been certain that nobody was at home but myself, the Corries and this man whom I took to be the laird.’

Curtis shook his head again.

‘I’m glad you got out of it when you did,’ he said. ‘It’s an odd sort of set-up. How are the police getting on?’

I’ve no idea,’ said Laura, ‘and, although I’m a Scot by birth, I’ve very little knowledge of legal procedure up here. I know they don’t hold inquests in the English fashion, but that’s about all.’

‘You’ve had no visits from the police?’

‘So far, none. I couldn’t help them, anyway. But you were going to tell me about some trick or other that the laird had played on young Grant.’

‘Yes, I was, but I’m not so sure about telling anybody else about it now. I don’t suppose it would be considered enough to supply Grant with a possible motive for murder, but – well, murder has been committed and Grant was on Tannasgan, or may have been, at the time.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Laura, ‘and, as I’ve told you, I’ve only his word for it that the killing was done while the pipes were skirling their loudest. Besides, if that were so, the piper could hardly have been the killer. You couldn’t stick a man with a skian dhu and manage the pipes at the same time, could you?’

‘I’m not an authority on piping or stabbing, let alone a combination of the two,’ said Curtis. ‘Look here, it’s my turn to buy a drink. If you’re doubtful about young Grant, why don’t you call at his lodgings in Crioch and talk to his landlady? I do assure you that the chap’s all right, really he is.’

‘Then why is he so keen on this alibi business?’ asked Laura.