My Bones Will Keep

Chapter 9

Young Grant’s Story

I reckon it’s one of two things, ’Spec. Either there come along somebody and done this devil’s job while I was fetchin’ the poor toad his physic, or else he done it himself.’

Eden Philpotts

« ^ »

YOUNG Grant accepted a second cup of coffee and in reply to a motherly query from his hostess assured her that he had had his evening meal. No one else spoke until he put down his cup. Then Laura said: ‘You have been a chump, you know. Now, what about a first, Christian or baptismal name? The word “Grant” is getting a bit confusing.’

‘Me? Oh, call me Alastair.’

‘I will, although I know it isn’t your name.’

‘Right, it is not, then. But I’m ganging warily because you don’t seem at all anxious to give me the alibi I’m seeking.’

‘I can’t give it you. There’s no proof whatever that the laird was killed when the pipes ceased from skirling. Don’t be silly.’

Grant wagged his head and looked apologetic.

‘I don’t wonder you’re mad at me,’ he said. ‘I suppose I’ve made myself a fair nuisance to you.’

‘Why have you come here?’

‘In answer to your letter. Losh, but the old wife was angry when the postwoman, Maggie McTaggart, handed in your envelope! She always scrutinises the mail, does Maggie, when she collects it out of the box. There’s so little of it, you see, because the people staying at the hotel have their own posting box and Maggie collects there, too, so if there’s half a dozen letters with the postmistress that seems an awful lot.’

‘Don’t dodge the issue. Why have you come here?’

‘Why, to have a crack with you. Why else?’

‘Oh, cut out the witticisms,’ said Laura ‘We don’t mind trying to help you, but not if you want to be fresh. Now, then, tell us the tale and we’ll do our best to believe you.’

‘Very good. I do realise that I’ve made myself a great nuisance to you, but…’

‘Cut the cackle, for goodness’ sake, and begin.’

‘Yes, well, to cut a long story short…’

‘But we don’t want you to cut it short,’ said Dame Beatrice, giving Laura the cue to slip out of the ring. ‘Please give us every possible detail. Begin at the beginning, illuminate and expand the middle and proceed at a decorous pace to the end.’

‘Well, Dame Beatrice, the story begins in Edinburgh.’

‘Eh?’ exclaimed Laura involuntarily.

‘The story begins in Edinburgh. I was standing waiting to cross the road when I saw an accident. Well, as you know now, I’m a reporter and, like all reporters, I’m always on the look-out for a story. That day I got one. I saw a man pushed under a car.’

Laura, in spite of her excitement, remained apparently calm.

‘You did?’ she said. ‘When would that have been?’

Dame Beatrice intervened before Grant could answer.

‘Tell us, please, Mr Grant, what you were doing in Edinburgh at that time.’

‘Doing? Oh, you mean my reason for being there! Why, I was covering your Conference, Dame Beatrice. You may not know it, but all Scotland is interested – ay, intensely interested—in anything to do with education.’

‘I was not speaking on education,’ said Dame Beatrice mildly.

‘Maybe not, but I was sent to cover the Conference and we regard such a gathering as educational.’

‘I see. Please continue.’

‘I managed to get leave from my editor to be in Edinburgh before the Conference was actually in session. I said I wanted to interview some of the notables in their hotels. What I really wanted – and he knew it, the douce man!—was to have a wee bit of a fling the way you can’t get it in these parts. Oh, nothing I wouldn’t care for my mother to know about. You can’t get that sort of a fling in Edinburgh, anyway—but just to get to a theatre and walk with the crowds along Princess Street and that kind of thing, and maybe, over a dram, hear of a job on the Scotsman. Of course, I did some interviewing, too. I met two or three of the professors and psychologists and pursuaded them to give me a few facts and theories that I could send back to Freagair to show that I was on the job, and it was when I was coming away from one of these interviews—with Signor Ginetti it was…’

‘Ah, yes. The distinguished Italian alienist who thinks that apes are descended from men and that, in time, there will be no more human beings but a sort of robot world of intelligent but pitiless primates with neither religion nor morals,’ said Dame Beatrice, amused.

‘That’s the laddie. Speaks very good English, too. I left him at something after six and I was waiting, with others, to cross the road to my bus stop… I was staying a bit out of the city for cheapness… when it happened. A big car came by, and a couple of men hurled another man clean in front of it. He didn’t stand a chance, and neither did the driver of the car.’

‘And you would recognise those men again?’

‘I couldn’t swear to them, but I think I would recognise them if I saw them. I never have seen them again and, of course, in the general consternation, they vanished. I recognised you, too, Mrs Gavin, when you turned up at the boathouse on Tannasgan that night. You were in the crowd waiting to cross that road.’

‘Yes, I was,’ Laura agreed. ‘It shook me considerably. I didn’t see you, though.’

‘Well, you’re more noticeable for a woman, being so tall and well-dressed and carrying yourself so well (if I may say so), than I am for a man. I’m only of average height and I was wearing the run-of-the-mill uniform of flannel trousers and tweed jacket. There was no reason for anybody to notice me.’

‘Did you go to the police?’ asked Laura.

‘No, I did not. There was so little I could tell them and there was no proof of what I’d seen. I doubt whether anybody else was aware of what happened.’

Laura was about to speak, but Dame Beatrice dropped a lace-edged handkerchief, one of the code signs between them that Laura was to be silent. Grant bent and picked it up for her and the moment passed.

‘This does not explain what you were doing on Tannasgan that night,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘No, but I’m coming to that. It’s all part of the same story. You see, one of the men who did the pushing was employed, as I well knew, by Cù Dubh himself, and I was fool enough to think that at An Tigh Mór I might be able to get a real scoop – an exclusive story good enough to qualify me for promotion to something a whole lot better than the Freagair Advertiser and Recorder.’

‘This story to be connected with the murder you had seen committed in Edinburgh?’

‘Yes. As I knew that this man was in the laird’s employ, I thought a bit of blackmail might get me what I was after. I was, as Mrs Gavin has pointed out, every kind of a fool to think I could dent the hide of a man like that.’

‘So what did you do, Mr Grant?’

‘I did my job in Edinburgh and then, in the evenings, I went on my motor-cycle to the edge of Loch na Gréine to see what the chances were of getting into An Tigh Mór.’

‘Not a difficult matter if you know what to do,’ said Laura.

‘Quite, Mrs Gavin. Well, I had no luck at all, to begin with. I turned the lantern; I rang the bell. Nothing doing, except that some old fellow cursed me across the water from the island bank and said that they were not expecting anybody and that I was to gang awa’. Which I did. But the following night was different. That would have been the night Mrs Gavin turned up.’

‘Yes, possibly, but you must have got there later than I did,’ said Laura. ‘You weren’t on the island when they brought me across to Tannasgan.’

‘In the rain?’

‘In the rain? I should say so!’

‘I left Edinburgh at five, when the Conference rose – perhaps Dame Beatrice remembers? – and rode straight up to Inverness and on to Freagair and Tannasgan. I had turned the lantern and clanged the bell when I realised that the boat was tied up at the jetty, so I parked my motorcycle and rowed myself across. Goodness knows why the boat was there. I suppose I pulled a fast one, taking it over like that, but I didn’t hear any shouting, so perhaps the guest didn’t turn up.’

‘And when you landed on the island?’ asked Dame Beatrice.

‘Yes, well, thereby hangs a tale.’

‘Aha!’ said Laura. ‘Give us a summary.’

‘That’s not so easy. I walked up to the house and reconnoitred. An old wife – well, not so old, really – came out of the door and speired at me to know what I wanted. I said I wished speech with the laird and, with that, she said I should call again on the morrow, as he always saw reporters the morn’s morn.’

‘How did she know you were a reporter?’ asked Laura.

‘I dinna ken.’ He grinned. ‘Maybe we carry the mark of the beast on us.’

‘Well, what happened then?’

‘It was then I heard the pipes. The sound came from a room, I think, which faced the loch.’

‘Was there a light in it?’

‘Never a light.’

‘At what time would that have been?’

‘Now, now, Mrs Gavin! You don’t catch me like that’

‘So you never encountered the laird?’

‘I did not. The only person I encountered, apart from the old wife, was yourself, when you were leaving.’

‘Then why do you deduce that, when the piping ceased, the laird died?’

‘It’s the only thing to believe.’

‘Is that so? I can’t see the connection.’

‘Can you not?’ His expression was enigmatic. ‘There is only one thing on which we ought to be agreed, Mrs Gavin. If I’m right, and the laird was murdered when the piping ceased, neither you nor I can have murdered the laird, can we? I seem to have said this before.’

‘There’s no proof about the piping, and there’s nothing to show that the laird was on Tannasgan that night. I certainly didn’t see anybody except the red-haired man, the servants and you.’

‘Well, well! As I say, I did not see the laird either, but what does that prove?’

‘I don’t know, but I’m going to find out,’ said Laura.

‘And we’re sticking together over all this?’

‘Time will show,’ said Dame Beatrice, before Laura could answer.