Noonday and Night

CHAPTER 10

The Bungalow

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Describe him?’ The manager looked dubious. ‘My dining-room staff would be better at that than I would. We get coaches all the time during the summer and unless the drivers have any complaints, which is very seldom indeed at my hotel, I don’t really see anything of them. They’re civil, unobtrusive lads as a rule and they don’t bring themselves much to my notice. Why not have a wee word with my head waiter?’

The head waiter was Swiss. Like most of his calling, he had a good command of English and he readily consented to describe Knight.

‘This driver was taller than myself. I am metres one point seven. I think maybe he would be seven centimetres taller.’

‘Two and a half to three inches taller than yourself, and you measure roughly five feet seven. I see. What kind of build has he?’

‘Build? His body? Not fat.’

‘Noticeably broad-shouldered, powerful?’

‘Oh, no, not that; just ordinary. He had brown hair, a little grey on the temples and cut short, not the modern fashion.’

‘Was he clean-shaven?’

‘Oh, yes, there was no moustache or beard.’

‘What kind of man was he?’

‘Jocund, always with a smile.’

‘Did you like him?’

The Swiss shrugged his shoulders.

‘What does your Shakespeare say?’ he asked rhetorically. Dame Beatrice cackled.

‘Was he a smiling villain?’ she said, ‘or are you referring to Julius Caesar’s preference for fat men?’

The head waiter merely shrugged his expressive shoulders again.

‘He had been here only once before,’ he said, as though this unhelpful remark was an answer to her question.

‘He was in your dining room on the first night the party stayed here?’

‘Making himself very agreeable to the ladies, yes.’

‘And you saw him at dinner the evening the party returned from Skye?’

‘Certainly I did. The people at his table invited him to a glass of wine and I myself took their order, so I know he was there.’

‘He did not take coffee in the lounge that evening, I am told.’

‘I do not know about that. He had to look over the coach, perhaps.’

‘Would anybody on the staff know whether he took the coach out after dinner, I wonder?’

The head waiter did not know, but he thought not. However, he went off to make enquiries and returned shortly to say that nobody believed that the coach had been moved that night.

‘Nothing to show that it couldn’t have been moved after dark, though, and brought back before morning,’ said Laura, when she and Dame Beatrice were alone. ‘I mean, something happened that night, otherwise Knight would not have disappeared. I’m beginning to wonder more and more whether he is the nigger in our woodpile. You don’t think, failing any gatehouses in the immediate neighbour-hood, that the murderers did a Young Hunting on him, do you?’

‘Your cryptic reference eludes me.’

‘The Border ballad, you know:

The deepest pot in Clyde Water

They got Young Hunting in,

With a green turf tied across his breast

To keep that good lord down.

‘That’s all I meant. I don’t suppose it would be past somebody’s ingenuity to stab the man the way Noone and Daigh were stabbed, take him by night to White’s boatyard, commandeer a boat and take the body down the loch towards Oban and drop it overboard. If it was weighted down, it could lie on the bed of the loch till Doomsday and nobody except the murderer would know it was there.’

‘You may be right.’

‘Things do go in threes, you know.’

‘I still think we were brought up here to get us away from those areas in Derbyshire and Pembrokeshire where our enquiries were beginning to prove embarrassing to somebody.’

‘But if you thought that, why did you come?’

‘To allay suspicion.’

‘Whose?’

‘Ah, yes, whose?’

‘Well, what’s the next move?’

‘I think I should like to find out for certain whether the head waiter’s Mr Knight is Mrs White’s Mr Carstairs.’

‘I thought you’d made up your mind that they are two different men.’

‘I should wish to be sure. We now have an unbiased description of Knight from the headwaiter. He does not know Carstairs. Mrs White, we assume, does not know Knight, so a comparison of height and the general appearance of the two men may be of interest.’

‘And if the descriptions don’t tally, as you believe they won’t?’

‘Then I may be impelled to accept your Young Hunting theory.’

‘You’ll never find the body if they have dumped it in Loch Linnhe. Once past Sallachan Point, goodness knows how deep it is out in the middle. It’s ten fathoms through the Narrows and then the marine contour lines pretty well follow the line of the shore. If they did weight the body…’

‘We are assuming that there is a body, you know. Do you care to accompany me to Mrs White’s again?’

They mounted the slope. This time a youthful maidservant answered the door. Dame Beatrice produced a card.

‘Please to come ben,’ said the girl. She admitted them and left them in the narrow entrance hall while she went to show the card to her mistress. Mrs White received them effusively.

‘I did not know I would have the pleasure again, Dame Beatrice,’ she said. ‘My husband is at work, of course. He will be sorry to have missed you. Is there any more news?’

‘There seems to be a discrepancy,’ Dame Beatrice replied. ‘We have received two descriptions of the man for whom we are enquiring. Of course, neither may be correct, but it would help our enquiry if you will give us your own description of Mr Carstairs.’

‘I had very little to do with him, you know. He was here today, gone tomorrow – that kind of thing. That is why we thought he might be a commercial traveller, or perhaps be going around to sell his pictures.’

‘Was he tall, short, fat, thin, dark, fair?’

‘Oh, you just want that kind of description. I should call him about medium, taking him all round, I suppose. He was on the sturdy side and had brown hair. I don’t know what colour his eyes were, but I expect they were either brown or grey. He was taller than me, but not as tall as my husband. Mr White is five feet ten.’

‘Did you ever see your husband and Mr Carstairs standing together?’

‘No, I don’t think so, but I’m sure Mr Carstairs wasn’t as tall.’

‘And he was a sturdy type of man? – broad-shouldered, noticeably strongly built?’

‘No, just ordinary I think. Oh, I don’t know, though. Come to think, he had very broad shoulders and I believe he must have been very strong because once’ – she giggled in a girlishly repellent fashion – ‘I had a garment blow off my line of washing and go sailing over the back fence, so, instead of going all the way round, I decided to climb the fence to get it back and my foot got stuck between the railings. Well, I knew Mr Carstairs was at home, so I yelled and shouted and he came out and reached up and lifted me straight into the air to release my shoe – and I weigh all of eleven and a half stone, you know.’

‘Presumably you have heard him speak, then?’

‘Oh, yes. He had to, on that occasion, didn’t he? He had quite a gentlemanly kind of voice, quite public school, you know. If he was a commercial traveller he was a very high class sort of one, I should say. But, of course, he was an artist as well.’

‘But you never saw any of his paintings? He never attempted to interest you in his work?’

‘Oh, no. He was not the type of man to take advantage’ – she giggled again – ‘not of any sort.’

‘How unenterprising of him! Tell me, Mrs White – you must know your husband’s boat-yard pretty well – would it be possible for anybody to get into it after dark and borrow a boat?’

‘Oh, I daresay you could get into the yard easy enough, but it wouldn’t do you much good. My husband hasn’t got any big boats with properly bedded engines. His are all little things with outboard motors and those are all removed and locked up at night. Then he’s got one or two small yachts, but the sails are all stowed in the sail lockers while they’re at the boat-yard.’

‘But if you owned a car and your own outboard motor, you could make shift to borrow a boat and then put it back without anybody being the wiser?’

‘No, I don’t believe you could,’ said Mrs White. ‘There are guard dogs at the next yard and I’m sure they’d create if anybody got into my husband’s place after dark.’

‘Guard dogs? I thought everybody trusted everybody else in the Highlands.’

‘There was a gang of roughs – Glasgow Irish – up here on the spree the year before last and a lot of damage was done, that’s why the dogs are there.’

‘I see. When was Mr Carstairs last in residence next door?’

‘He drove off in his car the day before the party went to Skye. He drove off at about mid-day and they pulled in for the night at about six and went to Skye the next morning, like I told you before.’

‘And the driver disappeared some time that same night. I see.’

‘So Willie wasn’t drowned in Yarrow,’ said Laura, ‘if the murderer didn’t commandeer a boat, and so the chances are that he is still alive.’

‘We cannot assume that. I had hoped to be able to prove that Knight spent the time when he was supposed to be on sick leave in carrying out those smuggling operations which, rightly or wrongly, I have assumed to be at the bottom of this business. It seems now that we must adjust our ideas.’

‘Yes, I see that; but if Carstairs isn’t Knight, who is he? If he isn’t Knight – and we can take that for granted after the descriptions we’ve had of both of them – he may not be mixed up in this business at all. You said, a while ago, that you thought we’d been persuaded to come up here on a wild-goose chase. Isn’t it time we went back and had another word with Basil Honfleur about Knight?’

‘You may well be right. Let us sleep on it. I will make up my mind in the morning.’

Laura guessed that Dame Beatrice was dissatisfied with their progress. The theory that Knight and Carstairs were the same person had appeared promising, although, except for Knight’s sick leave and Carstair’s comings and goings, there had been little to support it. Now, however, there seemed no way to connect the two men. Knight might or might not still be alive; Carstairs might or might not be the commercial traveller and/or the roving artist that Mrs White took him to be. The only suspicious circumstance about him, in fact, was that, as he seemed to be in residence there so seldom and so intermittently, he should have purchased a bungalow in Saighdearan at all, considering that there was a hotel and a motel on the spot which he could use.

In any case, thought Laura, lying fully dressed, except for her shoes, on her comfortable hotel bed at eleven o’clock that night, Saighdearan seemed an unlikely place for a commercial traveller to buy a pied-à-terre, although it might suit an artist.

‘I’m still sure we’re right, and there’s more to our Mr Carstairs than meets the eye,’ said Laura, to the four walls of her room, ‘and I’m dashed if I don’t go and have a snoop around that place of his.’

When, having put on her shoes and an anorak when she had changed her dinner-frock for slacks and a sweater, she got into the hotel yard, the last of the bar customers were leaving and there was conversation, laughter and much revving up of cars.

Laura strolled out on to the road, crossed to the loch-side footpath and strolled onwards in the direction of Fort William.

The night was luminous, although there was only the sliver of a new moon. The waters of the loch washed very gently towards the stony shores, stirred slightly by a night-wind and the far-off tides beyond Lismore Island and Oban.

Gradually the noise of the cars died away as the customers of the hotel bar made their homeward journeys. Laura strolled on, enjoying the night air and the blessed silence of stars, mountains and the deep, dark water, the latter flashing now and again into moon-tipped wavelets as the currents made their infinitesimal movements.

Except for an occasional car which swept by at speed along the otherwise deserted road, she might have been alone in the world. On the other side of the loch was the awful majesty of the Ardgour mountains. In front of her lay Lochaber and somewhere away to the east was the vast Killiechonate Forest and the awe-inspiring massif of Ben Nevis.

It occurred to Laura that it might be interesting to pay a visit to MacGregor White’s boatyard, but then she remembered the guard dogs near by who could be trusted to give warning of her approach. Besides, except that they were Carstairs’ only near neighbours, there was nothing to connect the Whites with him, so she began to retrace her steps towards the hotel and, when she reached the spot opposite the lane which led up to the two bungalows, she crossed the road and began the steep ascent.

There were no lights in the Whites’ bungalow. Laura opened the gate which led to Carstairs’ front door and took to the small lawn to avoid the sound of her footsteps on the path. The path continued, however, round the side of the building away from the Whites’ property, so she followed it round to the back.

Whether the bungalow was empty, or whether the occupant was in residence again, there was no way of telling except by knocking on the door and this Laura, who could think of no reason she could give for calling at such an hour, was unwilling to risk. Having conceived the idea of inspecting the interior, however, she was hoping to find some means of ingress, regardless of the chance of being caught in the criminal act of breaking and entering, or whatever that was called under Scottish law. Herself a Highlander by birth and ancestry, she still had little knowledge of the legal terminology of her native land.

Cautiously she tried the back door, but it was locked. This appeared to indicate that the bungalow was empty of human kind, for few people in the Highlands, as in the English countryside, trouble to lock up, even at night, if the house is tenanted.

There were three windows at the back of the bungalow. Laura, prowling past them, diagnosed them as belonging to kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. A side window which she passed could be that of a second bedroom, she thought. She ignored it, since from it the light from a small torch she had brought with her could be seen from the road if anybody was passing. At the back of the bungalow, however, apart from a very small garden, there was nothing but the hillside, so, having halted and listened for a while, she switched on the torch and inspected the back windows.

Her conclusions, so far as the kitchen and the bedroom were concerned, proved to be correct and, as the third window was made of opaque glass, she decided that she was right about that also. It was the only sash window, she noticed; the other two were casements. It was almost as though it had been put in especially for her purpose.

‘Oh, well, here goes for the bathroom, then,’ thought Laura. ‘Better take my shoes off.’ She did this, laid them on the sill of the adjacent bedroom window and, taking a stout bowie knife from the pocket of her anorak, she slipped back the catch of the bathroom window. ‘Here, I expect, is where I break my neck,’ she thought, as she pushed up the lower sash.

Kneeling on the narrow sill, she shone her torch into the room. Fortunately the window was fairly wide and it was not above either the bath or the washbasin. The lid of the WC, which was directly under the window, was down. This was an unexpected bit of luck. Her stockinged foot slipped on the wooden lid of the WC but she held on, retained her balance and stepped down on to the bathroom floor.

The bathroom door was locked on the inside. This seemed a curious circumstance.

It looked as though the last occupant of the bungalow must have left it by the same means as Laura had managed to enter it. She turned the key, waited and listened and then opened the door.

Feeling that in for a penny was in for a pound, she tried the door which was next to the bathroom. It opened into a bedroom and here all was confusion. The bedclothes and two pillows were on the floor, the mattress was half on and half off the bed, a small cupboard on the wall was wide open and so were the drawers of a dressing chest.

Laura shone her torch round and about, took in the scene and then continued her exploration of the bungalow. But for the sitting-room, which appeared to have no key, all the rooms (the bathroom having been the sole exception) were locked on the outside, so at every door she listened carefully before she turned the key and went in, but nowhere else was in the same state of disorder as the bedroom she had entered.

‘Wonder whether they found what they were looking for?’ she said aloud. She returned to the bedroom. As it overlooked the hillside and not the road, she judged that it would be safe to switch on the electric light. She did this and then noticed what the beam of her torch had been too limited in scope to disclose. The tumbled bedclothes were stained with blood.

‘Here’s a nice how d’ye do!’ muttered Laura. The thought that she was unlawfully on enclosed premises with every chance of being in company with a dead body was not an encouraging one. Still less encouraging, because it changed speculation into certainty, was the sight of a black shoe and a sock-clad ankle sticking out from under the tumbled bed.