Noonday and Night mb-51

by Gladys Mitchell

  With the two constables pushing the light trolley with the ladder and the cortège reinforced by Laura, who had been taking another look at the remains of the bishop’s palace, they made their way to their objective.

  The archdeacon’s gatehouse was an ugly, clumsy little building consisting of one octagonal and one round tower bridged by what had been the watchman’s room. A low, narrow doorway in the octagonal tower proved to be the only obvious means of entrance, but the door itself was locked. The inspector produced the key which had been supplied at the archdeacon’s residence. It was a heavy iron affair about seven inches long.

  ‘I think, if you don’t mind,’ the inspector said, as he inserted it, ‘I will take first look, just in case, you know. Do not wish to upset ladies by seeing dead men, do we, then?’

  The others waited below while he mounted a stair so narrow that he could scarcely thrust his broad shoulders between the walls. They could hear him stumbling on the newel treads. Even from where they stood they were aware of a horrible, sweetish odour which came wafting down into the open air. Automatically they moved back from the doorway.

  The inspector came down immediately, blew his nose vigorously and then gulped in some deep breaths of the mild, fresh air which came in over Ramsay Sound.

  ‘He is there, oh, yes, indeed,’ he said. He stepped well back from the tower and then, accompanied by Dame Beatrice, who was followed by Laura, he went out to the archdeacon’s gate to look up at the building from the side which faced the approach-road from the town.

  The octagonal tower had windows on three of its faces. These had been boarded up. The porter’s room, which formed the connection between it and the lesser round tower, also had windows, but only one of these was obscured. The other was open to the air and was not more than ten feet from the ground.

  The inspector called to his sergeant and pointed to the aperture.

  ‘Bring the ladder,’ he said. ‘We shall need to carry him down through the window. Did you bring a sheet with you, then? And the ambulance waiting? Is lovely!’ He turned to Dame Beatrice. ‘Thorough we are, look you, in Dantwylch. Oh, yes, and now so clever you are, lady bach, something more I can tell you. We found out which man was on duty, see, when that coach left the car-park and was found at Swansea. Jones the Ticket told us he was surprised at the card the coach-driver handed in. ‘Why, man,’ he says, ‘you have only been here a matter of ten minutes.’ The driver says, ‘One of my passengers was taken bad, see? Got to get him to hospital.’ Then Jones the Ticket sees somebody stretched out on the floor of the coach and a waterproof spread over him and his face covered. Well, I now think it was not a sick man, but a dead man that Jones saw on the floor of the coach, and I think it was this dead man, look you.’

  CHAPTER 8

  The Hotel on Loch Linnhe

  « ^ »

  But Scotland isn’t England,’ protested Basil Honfleur demonstrating yet again the English genius for understatement, ‘so I do wish you’d go up there, even now, and find out what’s happened to poor Knight.’

  ‘I can do nothing that the police cannot do much better, now that two bodies have been found.’

  ‘Oh, come, now, dash it! The police would never have found those two bodies if it hadn’t been for you.’

  ‘Laura, not I. But, even so, it was only a question of time. The police would have found them sooner or later.’

  ‘Anyway, this time we shall be quicker off the mark. Knight only disappeared four days ago. Surely the sooner we get on the trail the better?’

  ‘The same applies to the police and, unlike myself, they are on the trail already. The fact that now they know your drivers not only disappeared but have been murdered will add much more zest to their efforts than may have been their initial urge when they thought that they were chasing merely a couple of runaways. They really have something to go on this time. By the way, was Knight your regular driver on that tour?’

  ‘No. He offered to do a stint to help us out and that was the tour without a driver.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You mean you won’t go up there, then, and look into things for yourself and on our behalf?’

  ‘For myself, well, yes. Curiosity, apart from my dislike of murder, will impel me to continue my investigations.’

  ‘My Company will be glad to…’

  ‘I am not interested in rewards and I do not believe in fairies.’

  ‘But we’d like to express…’

  ‘Look, my dear Mr Honfleur, does not one thing strike you very forcibly?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘If you have not guessed my meaning it will be kinder if I do not expound it.’

  Basil Honfleur got up from his chair and walked to the window of this office. The view was pleasant. The window did not overlook the busy bus station but gave a prospect of the municipal park. There were lawns, trees and flower-beds and among these meandered a tiny stream. Broad paths were thronged with holiday crowds, but their laughter and conversation scarcely penetrated to the room, which was high up in the building. Faintly, also, like the dying fall referred to by Shakespeare, came the far-off music played by the municipal orchestra, for the bandstand was opposite the window from which Honfleur surveyed the scene.

  He remained where he was for a minute or two and then turned to Dame Beatrice.

  ‘I won’t pretend I don’t understand you,’ he said. ‘You mean this dreadful business is something to do with our organisation, don’t you?’

  ‘I think that, somewhere among your members, you have what my secretary would call a bent operator.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Honfleur gloomily, ‘I know all the evidence suggests that, particularly the hijacking of the coach in Wales and the planting of it in Swansea. But it doesn’t follow, you know. Our chaps are by no means the only people who can handle a coach. Take that tank chap at Hulliwell, for example. If he could take that coach-load back to their hotel without any trouble, so could hundreds of others.’

  ‘That is true. Where is the passenger list for this tour conducted by Knight?’

  ‘As we live there, we picked up the coach in Canonbury,’ said Mrs Grant. ‘I travelled with my neighbour, Mrs Kingsbury, while our husbands went fishing. I did a coach tour with Ian last year. I liked it, but he was less keen. Anyway, we agreed that it wasn’t a bad idea to have separate holidays for a change, so he fixed up with Edward Kingsbury while I went off with Susan. We took a room with twin beds because we thought you got a better room that way, and we know each other quite well, so neither of us minded sharing and it’s more companionable, too.

  ‘We stayed the first night in Harrogate and went on to Edinburgh. We had thought of going out after dinner, but it rained. It was still raining when we left at nine on the following morning – Monday, that would have been – but the rain cleared away before lunch, so we had a really enjoyable run, although it was too misty to see much at first.

  ‘We crossed the Forth Bridge and had a rather poor coffee-stop, I thought. It was only so that people could use the loo, of course. I don’t think anybody bothered with coffee; it wasn’t that sort of place. But the lunch stop was delightful, right at the end of Loch Earn, and we had enough time to walk around a little, when the meal was over, and look at the view. The driver came with Susan and me and told us the names of the mountains, but, of course, I don’t remember what they were.’

  The driver? Mr Knight?’

  ‘Yes. Such a helpful man and so knowledgeable. There wasn’t a question he couldn’t answer, although he said he had done the tour only once before.’

  ‘So you had no suspicions?’

  ‘Suspicions of what?’

  ‘That he might have had something on his mind, perhaps.’

  ‘Good heavens, no, except that I suppose the drivers must always have something on their minds. It must be a big responsibility to have thirty people depending on you for nine whole days and all that driving to do. He was always most jovial, though. When we got back on t
o the coach after the next stop, which was for tea after we’d been through Glen Coe, he said, “You think you’re going to Fort William, don’t you? Well, you’re not.” I remember I felt very disappointed. I wondered whether that meant we were not going to Skye, either, because, of course, they reserve the right to change the route, but, as it turned out, all was well. We stayed at a new hotel, most of it built bungalow-fashion with one three-storey wing, and, I must say, it was excellent. It was about five miles south of Fort William and —’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Dame Beatrice, who did not want to waste time in listening to a description of a hotel which she herself proposed to visit in the near future, ‘and it was from that hotel that Knight disappeared.’

  ‘He sat at dinner the first night with Susan and me and a man who had come on his own, and Knight was as cheerful and talkative as ever. After dinner Susan and I went for a stroll. The hotel was on the shores of Loch Linnhe and it was a lovely evening. There were mountains on the other side of the loch and the water was calm and lovely. If Ian had been there instead of Susan it would have been like our honeymoon. (We spent it in the Highlands.) When we got back, the woman who sat behind us in the coach was reading people’s palms and there was a big group round her, of course, and a lot of laughing and exclamations. The tour had certainly got into its stride and everybody seemed relaxed and happy, especially Mr Knight. I suppose it’s a relief to know a tour is going well.’

  ‘And on the following day you went to Skye.’

  ‘Yes, but the best part of the drive was from Fort William to Kyle of Lochalsh. That was glorious, especially after we turned westwards at Invergarry. Skye wasn’t nearly so impressive, but I don’t think we saw the best part of it, because we took the road straight up to Portree on the east side and didn’t get any real views of the Cuillins or anything like that.’

  ‘And after you got back from Skye?’

  ‘I think most people turned in fairly early. I wrote some postcards and then Susan and I went to bed. We talked about the views of Ben Nevis we had seen on the way back.’

  ‘Did you see any more of the driver after he had brought the party back from Skye?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Somebody bought him a drink at the bar and he was at dinner – not with us, of course, this time. He had to go the rounds. After dinner he was not in the lounge for coffee and I concluded he was checking the coach against the next day’s run.’

  ‘And you never saw him again?’

  ‘No. He wasn’t at breakfast, but nobody thought anything about that, because we concluded he’d had his early so as to get all our suitcases on board ready for the nine o’clock start, but when we came out from breakfast and Susan had been back to our room to make sure the suitcases had been collected from outside the bedroom door and that we’d left nothing behind, we went to the hotel reception to hand in our key and there was all the luggage still stacked in the vestibule and no sign of Knight or the coach. One of the porters was asking whether anyone had seen him, but, of course, nobody had.’

  ‘But the coach was still there? He had not gone off in it?’

  ‘Oh, no, it was where, I suppose, he had parked it overnight behind the hotel. Well, we hung about and hung about. Some sat in the lounge, others looked at the things in the hotel shop, then the newspapers came in, so that helped a bit. I spoke to the manager, but he couldn’t tell us a thing except that Mr Knight must have thumbed a lift into Fort William to buy something and hadn’t been able to get a lift back.’

  ‘Was Knight’s room searched?’

  ‘Oh, yes, when he didn’t turn up, and that was the queerest thing of all. One or two of our men went along with the chambermaid to find out whether he’d been taken ill, but the room was empty and his bed was untouched.’

  ‘What about his suitcase?’

  ‘His suitcase? I’ve no idea. Nobody mentioned that, and it didn’t occur to me to ask. Well, in the end, another driver turned up – I suppose the hotel manager telephoned for him. He came from Edinburgh. We were taken to Perth, which was our next overnight stop, but there was no coffee-break and a very late lunch that day, and everybody was wondering what had happened to Mr Knight. There were some nasty rumours because, of course, most people had read about the other driver.’

  Dame Beatrice did not mention that the last word could now be put in the plural. All she said was:

  ‘And that was the end of the matter, so far as you were concerned?’

  ‘Well, yes. I mean, there was nothing we could do, was there? We got home all right, because they sent another driver up from County Coaches for us, but it wasn’t the same happy party. The driver was a very taciturn man and, anyway, losing Mr Knight like that quite spoilt the holiday, although, of course, it did give us something to talk about for the rest of the trip.’

  ‘Oh, yes? What sort of things were mentioned?’

  ‘Well, as I said, people remembered that, about a month before, another driver had disappeared and had been found murdered in Derbyshire. I knew nothing about that at the time, because Ian and I had been visiting our married daughter in Spain, where she and her husband had rented a flat for a month, and we didn’t get the English papers there, but there was a lot of talk after we got back, apart from all the gossip on the coach.’

  ‘I see.’ Dame Beatrice still did not reveal that another driver had been found murdered, this time in Wales, for that bit of news had not leaked to the press and so was not public property. ‘The two cases are not analogous, though.’

  ‘Not?’

  ‘No. In the Derbyshire affair the driver disappeared at mid-day while his passengers were inspecting a stately home.’

  ‘I don’t see that it makes any difference.’

  ‘And his coach had been moved a few yards from the spot on which he left it. Of course, it may have been moved merely to accommodate another vehicle. I wonder whether your coach had been moved during the night?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Perhaps the people at the hotel can tell me.’

  ‘Oh, are you going up there?’

  ‘As I am being retained by the Company to watch their interests, I think I should see the conditions for myself. By the way, Mrs Grant, did Driver Knight make any mention of the fact that he had returned recently from sick leave?’

  ‘Not so far as I know. He must have made a good recovery. I never saw a healthier-looking man.’

  The hamlet – although it was scarcely large enough to merit even that description – was called Saighdearan. Apart from the hotel, it consisted of an ugly, raw-looking motel a couple of hundred yards further along the road to Fort William, a lorry-drivers café and half-a-dozen cottages put up by a speculative builder for holiday letting. There were also a couple of owner-occupied bungalows on a slope above the hotel and there was a large house further along the loch-side, but it had fallen into ruins and was unoccupied.

  A busy road ran between the hotel and the steep-sided banks of the loch. There was a grey, stony shore, muddy and uninviting, but on the further side the mountains were reflected in the water and the reflections were calm, clear and beautiful.

  Laura had booked in by telephone and as soon as they had tidied up after the drive from Carlisle, where they had spent the night, Dame Beatrice made no secret of her errand to the hotel manager, a massive, bearded man wearing a tweed jacket and a beautiful kilt in the tartan of MacDonald of Clanranald.

  ‘That?’ he said. ‘Yes, a very strange business, to be sure. So you are here on behalf of County Tours, whose driver he was. Well, there’s little I can tell you. The police have all the information I can give.’

  ‘I am wondering whether you have any theories which perhaps you have not imparted to the police.’

  ‘No, no, I am not one to indulge in speculation. From what I heard, this is not the first case of its kind.’

  ‘That is what makes it so serious.’

  ‘Aye, right enough. Well, I’ll recapitulate for your benefit, but there’s nothing I can tell
you that you will not know already.’

  He proceeded to give an account which tallied in all respects with that which she had had already from Mrs Grant, except that the missing man’s suitcase, neatly packed, was still in the hotel.

  ‘I suppose Knight did not have any visitors from outside while the party was here?’ she asked. ‘I note that your lounge bar and your dining-room are open to non-residents.’

  ‘He had no visitors. The coach arrived on the first evening at six, dinner was at seven and he sat at table with three of the passengers. On the following morning the coach left at nine to go over to Skye and he dined that night with some of the other passengers. I always take a look round the dining-room to make sure all is well and everybody is happy, so I am sure he was there. He appeared to be making himself very agreeable to the ladies, as was his custom.’

  ‘And that, I assume, is the last you saw of him. I understand he did not take coffee that evening.’

  ‘Aye, that’s true.’

  ‘You did not see him go to his room?’

  ‘Nobody saw him. He would likely have taken the covered way from the dining-room without going through the lounge.’

  ‘I suppose you did not hear a car come into your front parking-space that night? The space you keep for casual visitors?’

  ‘There would be cars coming and going up to the end of the licensing hours, of course, and, far into the night, there would be cars going by on the road.’

  ‘Oh, of course. How many exits are there to the hotel?’

  ‘There will be four, including the one from the hotel shop. There is another at the hotel entrance by the reception desk, another opposite the shop on the corridor which leads to the ground-floor bedrooms, and one more at the foot of the stairs up to the three-storey wing where Knight had his room. He could have slipped away easily enough without anybody being the wiser, so long as he bided his time and watched that nobody was about, but why should he want to slip away? He wasn’t owing me money.’