The Stormy Petrel

by Mary Stewart

  She stopped. Silence for a moment. Megan said, miserably: ‘We waited, but you didn’t come, so after a bit we went down and had a look in the shed, but there wasn’t anything to see. Nothing that seemed to matter, I mean. So we went home. We thought of telling Mrs McDougall, but we decided you ought to know first. Anyway, she’d gone to bed. She leaves the door for us – actually I don’t think it’s ever locked. Then this morning Archie came in at breakfast-time and said the police were here, and the Customs, so we knew there must be something really wrong, and he said he’d bring us down.’

  The sergeant got to his feet. ‘You did right, miss. And now, Miss Fenemore, with your permission, we would like to take a look at that shed ourselves.’ A look down at Ewen. ‘Unless Mr Mackay would like to save us the trouble?’

  Ewen smiled at him. He had abandoned any pretence of indignation, and was merely patient and interested. ‘Look and be damned,’ he said, and leaned back in his chair.

  ‘Very well. Jimmy, you stay here, but give a shout for Sandy or Calum to come in here, will you? . . . No, not you, Archie. There’s the ferry now, did you not hear her? You’d better go. You’ll hear soon enough what happens – but till you do, see you keep your mouth shut, do you mind me?’

  ‘I mind you.’ Archie sketched a farewell gesture to me and the girls, and went, so quickly and willingly that I was surprised, till I remembered that of course he would be back here very soon with Crispin, and possibly in time to see the result of the search.

  ‘Just a minute.’ Neil put a hand out as the detective, with one of the Customs men, made for the door in Archie’s wake. ‘If I come with you—’

  ‘No. You’ll stay here, please, Mr Hamilton.’ The sergeant did not add that three women would be no help if Jimmy should have any trouble with Ewen, but his meaning was plain enough. I expected to see Ewen smile, but saw, with a queer, unpleasant little thrill, that he was staring up at Neil, with something new in his face. He had lost colour again, and over the prison pallor shone a faint sheen of sweat, and I saw him swallow a couple of times, as if his throat hurt him.

  Neil said: ‘I doubt if they would find anything, sergeant, short of taking the shed to pieces, but if you let me go, I know where to look. I suppose there’d better be someone with me, as witness –’

  ‘All right,’ said Ewen abruptly. ‘All right.’ He sat up, flexing his shoulders, and slanted a look up at Neil. I saw nothing there now but a sourly humorous acceptance. ‘I’d forgotten. Stupid of me.’

  ‘Forgotten what?’ demanded the sergeant. He looked alert and vigorous, not like a man who had lost a night’s sleep. At his gesture, the other men stayed where they were.

  It was Neil who answered him. ‘Only that he stole my trout rod once, when we were boys, and I saw him fishing with it later, and followed him back home – here – and watched him hide it in a place he’d made in the garden shed. There were a few other things there that I knew had gone missing from people’s boats and gardens and so on. I didn’t give him away – boys of that age don’t – so his parents never knew. I waited till I saw him using the rod again, and, well, I took it back.’ He looked at Ewen, and for the first time there was something like sympathy there. ‘Eventually.’

  ‘It was quite a fight,’ agreed Ewen. ‘Well, go on. Go and get them.’

  ‘The Purdeys?’

  ‘The Purdeys. And I hope you get well and truly done for all the years of illegal possession.’

  The sergeant nodded at Jimmy, and he, with Neil and one of the Customs officers went out of the cottage.

  I caught Megan’s eye, and what I saw there made me get to my feet.

  ‘Sergeant Fraser, my brother is due to arrive on this ferry, so Archie will be down here again soon. Will you want Miss Lloyd and Miss Tracy again, or may they go back with him?’

  ‘Surely. I know where they are staying, and we will be in touch again before they leave. Wednesday, you said, Miss Tracy?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Ann was on her feet, reluctantly, I thought. Megan was already making for the door.

  ‘Then will it be all right if we wait outside?’ I asked.

  ‘Surely,’ he said again. He had risen from his chair when the other men went out of the room, and now he moved to open the door for us.

  Megan paused on the threshold and looked back to where Ewen sat, with every appearance of ease, in the armchair by the fire. She cleared her throat, but the words came hoarsely, in a rush. ‘I’m sorry. I truly am. But it was the truth.’ She looked and sounded like an awkward and unhappy schoolgirl.

  Ewen raised his head and smiled at her, a smile full of his own powerful brand of charm. He lifted one hand, and turned it over, palm up. ‘Of course it was. Don’t give it a thought. I never had a hope anyway, did I? Dogs with bad names . . . Goodbye, then. Enjoy your holiday.’

  I saw the tears start to her eyes, and said savagely under my breath: ‘Damn you, Ewen Mackay!’ then, with an arm round her shoulders, urged her through the doorway and down the path to the beach.

  Ann spoke quickly, fiercely. ‘Look, Meg, don’t upset yourself. What could we do? We had to tell the police, and it’s not as if there was any doubt about it, because he admitted it himself, so it’s nonsense to talk about dogs with bad names. The man’s a thief and a liar, we knew that from Mrs McDougall, and you said so yourself, remember? He had it coming to him, so don’t talk such balls!’

  ‘It was a Judas thing to do. I know Mrs McDougall told us about him, but he was nice to us, and we didn’t have a thing against him ourselves. I know we had to tell the police, but it still feels like a Judas thing to do.’

  I sat down on the edge of the jetty, where it jutted from the sand above the high tide mark, and pulled her down beside me.

  ‘Megan.’ I was still angry, but not with her. ‘This is nonsense, and you’ve got to snap out of it here and now. Listen to me. I had a talk with Mrs McDougall myself last night – no, Saturday night. She told me more than she told you. Ewen Mackay is not a man to be pitied, except in that he was born without scruple, yes, literally without a scruple of conscience. He had every chance, loving parents, an indulgent patron, brains, looks, charm. All assets. The only thing he didn’t have was money, and to get that he set out in cold blood to rob people – some of them as poor as himself, but who had spent their lives working, and had saved something for their old age. He robbed them, without a second thought, of everything they had. Think about them. The last one – the one he went to prison for – was an invalid of eighty-five, and he robbed her of something less than three hundred pounds. All she had. Not even as much as it would cost him to hire that boat of his.’

  ‘“The smiler with the knife under the cloak,”’ quoted Ann.

  ‘It doesn’t matter a damn about the guns, or whatever he had in that duffel bag,’ I said. ‘But you see what this dog with a bad name is like . . . He comes out of the slammer, having seen the notice of Mrs Hamilton’s death, hires a boat and comes straight up here to rob the dead, and perhaps – though we don’t know if that bit was true – to settle again on the parents who left their home to get away from him.’

  Megan nodded. ‘Yes, I’m sorry. I do see. It was only seeing all those police, and all they wanted was to catch him, and all he could do was sit there, and it was four to one, eight to one counting us—’

  ‘I know. It was beastly. But there was no Judas about it. Stick to that. It’s over now, anyway. There they go. And it looks as if they’ve found the guns.’

  The three men were coming round the corner of the cottage. Their search in the shed had apparently been successful. The detective-constable was carrying a slim, wrapped object, and under Neil’s arm was the long, gleaming shape of a shotgun.

  ‘They have indeed,’ said Ann. She did not trouble to keep the satisfaction out of her voice. ‘And let’s hope that those so-special Purdeys do the trick, and put our friend Ewen straight back where he belongs.’

  Megan sent her a look where a shadow of trouble stil
l showed, but all she said was: ‘I suppose it was because it was guns that the police came roaring over like that?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘You heard what the sergeant said – no, that was before you came down here. Once Neil reported the guns missing they would certainly come over, but normally it would be by ferry; it wouldn’t be so very urgent, and anyway I doubt if there’s a police boat in Oban. But Ewen made the mistake of hiring a boat cheaply from a pal on one of the outer isles, and it was a boat that was suspected of running drugs in the islands. There’ve been cases, but I don’t know much about them. Anyway, that’s what brought the Customs men roaring over, to see if Ewen Mackay was into that racket, and I suppose the police thumbed a lift with them.’

  ‘Drugs?’ Megan looked horrified.

  ‘I don’t think he had anything to do with that. He was quite genuinely shocked and scared when he knew – and furious with the pal who’d flogged him the boat. His error.’

  ‘Greed,’ said Ann flatly. ‘Tried to get a boat cheaply, so brought the sheriff’s posse straight in. Serve him right. If he’d had till morning he might just have made it, and he could have come back for the loot later on.’

  ‘I still can’t see why he should have gone for those guns,’ said Megan. ‘With an empty house to choose from . . . What’s so special about “Purdeys”? If he’d just gone for the silver or whatever, he might have got away with it.’

  ‘Twenty or thirty thousand pounds, and going up each year,’ said Ann, who knew about such things. ‘That’s how special. I’m talking about honest prices, auction prices – if you call them honest . . . He’d get less, of course, but it still made the trip worthwhile.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ said Megan, wide-eyed. The thought, unspoken, came to me again, that Megan’s assets, as the daughter of a farm worker, were much the same as Ewen Mackay’s. But they had got her to Cambridge on a good scholarship, and would get her very much further.

  ‘That’s what brought him back to Moila, to pick up the guns,’ said Ann. ‘And I suppose he thought that he might as well swipe some other stuff, whatever he had in that bag. But why the portrait?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’ Megan was, I was glad to see, back to her normal self. ‘You can’t tell me he went to all that trouble for auld lang syne?’

  ‘You heard what Neil said,’ I said drily. ‘He’d been told that it was the most valuable thing in the house, and because he knew nothing about pictures he believed it. Pictures are going even madder than guns at auction, aren’t they, Ann?’

  ‘I don’t know much more about them than Ewen Mackay does, but I wouldn’t give twenty-five pounds, let alone twenty-five million, for a daub of greenery yallery flowers,’ said Ann, and Megan laughed. It was apparently something they had argued about before. But whatever she had been going to say was never said. Two things happened almost simultaneously.

  The cottage door opened, and Ewen Mackay came out, with the two detectives, and Neil behind them. Ewen wore handcuffs.

  And from the curve of the track came the note of the Land Rover, as Archie McLaren returned to the scene of the crime, bringing my brother with him.

  18

  He brought another man as well. Climbing carefully out of the Land Rover came a man apparently somewhere in his fifties, dressed, incongruously for the Western Isles, in a dark business suit two sizes too big for him, complete with waistcoat and a tie of such subdued and dreary colours that it had to be regimental or public school. His face, like his figure, looked as if it was meant to be fat and good-natured, but had been reduced by a very effective slimming diet, so that his cheeks looked flabby and his neck showed folds below the chin. His hair had thinned and receded, and showed a pepper-and-salt powdering of grey. With his pointed nose, smallish mouth, and twinkling eyes of some shade between grey and green, he looked like a good-tempered gnome. Of the Zürich, rather than the Disney variety: the suit was expensive, and his wristwatch and cufflinks had the rich and unmistakable glint of gold.

  In contrast my brother Crispin, tall and thin, was dressed exactly like a doctor on holiday, that is to say in old trousers only just reputable enough for the train journey, and an ancient sweater. He slid down from the Land Rover, ignoring the offer of a helping hand from his companion, and got himself adjusted to the elbow crutch he had mentioned, a strong affair of tubular chromium which supported wrist and elbow on the injured side. His movements were careful, and he limped slightly, but he walked well enough to meet me, and leaned down to kiss my cheek.

  ‘Rose. You look wonderful, and what a great place you’ve picked.’ He did not appear to have noticed anything strange, yet, about the group of men further down the beach at the boats. ‘This is Hartley Bagshaw, who travelled up with me.’

  ‘Mr Bagshaw,’ I said, and shook hands, murmuring the usual things about hoping the journey had been comfortable, and had they had breakfast, while wondering madly why Crispin had brought him along, and was I going to have to put him up and feed him, and at the same time trying not to miss what was going on down at the jetty’s end. ‘Are you on holiday, too?’

  But Mr Bagshaw’s gaze had gone past me, and he certainly had not missed what was going on. ‘What the hell?’ he said, explosively. ‘That’s a police boat, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, Customs, but—’

  ‘And those men – they’ve got to be policemen. They are policemen! What goes on?’ And then, fortissimo, ‘Ewen Mackay? Ewen Mackay?’

  The police had looked our way as the Land Rover stopped, then had made some sort of tactful haste to get their man away before my visitors arrived. But now the whole group froze as Ewen, in the act of stepping, escorted, into the launch, stopped and turned, with the handcuffs clearly visible.

  Mr Bagshaw froze, too, for two long seconds, then, starting forward, he exploded again into speech, and I learned three new words in the next three seconds, and then several interesting ways of using well-known and respectable words that would never have occurred to me in a lifetime. I caught a glimpse of Archie’s face of startled horror, of Ann’s mouth dropping open, of Megan’s flushed cheeks, then Sergeant Fraser barked something, Ewen held up his cuffed wrists and laughed, and Mr Bagshaw shut his mouth with a snap, said: ‘I beg your pardon, ladies. I got a shock. The police seem to have arrested a friend of mine. It must be a mistake. Excuse me.’ And he darted down the beach towards the group there. In spite of the apology, he was still flushed, and all the good nature had vanished from his eyes, which were bright with fury and what might have been fear. Crispin said ‘Steady on!’ and moved to hold him back, but his injury checked him, and he stumbled, saved himself by grabbing at me, said ‘Damn and blast,’ and stood still, rubbing his leg. Archie, still looking outraged, called out: ‘Hey, there!’ and started down the beach after Mr Bagshaw.

  It was reaction, I suppose, from the sleepless night, the unpleasant tensions of the recent interview in the cottage, and now this totally unexpected irruption into the scene. I wanted to laugh, and saw, suddenly, that the girls, clinging together on the jetty, were about to succumb to the same near-hysteria. I beckoned to them, controlling myself sharply, and when they came, introduced my brother.

  ‘Ann, Megan, this is my brother. Crispin, meet Ann Tracy and Megan Lloyd.’

  That did it. If I had hoped that the semi-formal introduction would sober us up, I had not reckoned on my voice sounding exactly like the lecturer’s voice Megan had so wickedly imitated on the broch island; and now it was accompanied, in a cruel counterpoint, by another spate of angry and idiomatic speech from Mr Bagshaw, every word of which carried clearly up the beach to where we stood. The girls did manage to take Crispin’s hand and say something, then they both went off, helplessly, into peals of laughter.

  ‘His friend, he said . . .’ That was Ann, wiping her eyes. ‘What d’you suppose he calls people he doesn’t like?’

  ‘If we stay a bit longer,’ quavered Megan, ‘we might learn.’

  ‘I would like,’ said Crispin, ‘to know ju
st what has been going on here? If you three idiots will stop laughing for a moment and tell me—’

  ‘Idiots, he called us,’ wailed Ann. ‘So rude. And we’ve only just met. Oh, R-Rose –’

  I took a hold of myself, and of Crispin’s arm. ‘Come on, let’s go in and get ourselves some coffee. Cris, I suppose you had breakfast on the boat? Well, I haven’t had mine, and I don’t suppose the girls have either. I haven’t a clue what’s going on now, but we can talk in the house. Come on.’

  ‘They’re coming back,’ said Megan.

  She was at the window, opposite me where I sat at the table finishing my coffee. All four of us – myself, Crispin and the girls – had started by declaring that we could not possibly eat any breakfast, and we had all ended up at the table with mugs of coffee and a stack of toast and marmalade, with a jar of local honey on the side. Crispin had even produced a bag of fresh doughnuts which he had bought on the ferry, but we did jib at those, and put them aside ‘for afters’. No one said ‘After what?’ but we all knew. There would be no peace on this peaceful island until its storm centre had been removed.

  Which might be at any moment now. Sea Otter was still at the jetty, rubbing shoulders with Stormy Petrel, but the Customs launch had gone, not back to the mainland, but along the coast towards Halfway House and the broch island. The detective-constable had gone with it, and Neil, along with Ewen and the Customs officers. It was to be assumed that they had gone to look for the dumped duffel bag: I wondered if, having admitted to the major theft of the guns, and with the picture sitting behind the boathouse as witness of my story, Ewen would settle for cooperation as the most sensible course.