Cold, Lone and Still (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “We’ve covered sixty miles since we left Drymen,” I said. “A good deal more, if you count the extra miles we covered when we lost our way in the mist. We’ve proved our point, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not sure about that,” she answered. “I don’t terribly care for your protective attitude. It isn’t really protective, you know. It’s mere self-assertion and male vanity. I detest this ‘women and children first’ nonsense. On a ship the sailors are the people to be considered. As for the Victorian ideal of the captain’s either being the last to leave the vessel or even going down with it, I never heard such poppycock! The leader ought to be the principal survivor, not the inevitable casualty.”

  “Why?”

  “For obvious reasons, I should have thought. Where would the sheep be, if the shepherd died?”

  “So what exactly are you getting at?”

  “Go and get us more drinks and I’ll tell you. You see,” she went on when I returned, “you were very quick to hustle me away from that corpse. I won’t blame you for that, except to say that it was high-handed and unnecessary.”

  “You didn’t really want to see a murdered man, particularly somebody we knew,” I said.

  “But are you sure that it was somebody we knew? You only flashed your torch on him before you were grabbing me by the arm and dragging me back to that other room and then forcing me to get back to our road.”

  “What is all this? Of course we had to get back on to our road. We had to get to the hotel.”

  “I still think that, if you saw what you say you saw, we ought to go to the police. There might be all sorts of things for them to find out.”

  “We’ve been into all this.”

  “Look, when the mist came down and we lost our way, how far ahead of us were the other four?”

  “If there still were four of them. The Minches might have left Todd and Carbridge by then. Everybody else had left them.”

  “In any case, whether there were four of them or just the two men, they might have got to that turning we took long before the mist came down. Why should they have gone off the track? What made them leave The Way and go junketing away across country? It’s too far-fetched to suppose that they were trying to take a short cut by the same route we had chosen. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “They may have heard about the ruins and wanted to take a look at them.” I knew this could not be true. Hera picked up the suggestion and threw it away.

  “The ruins are not mentioned in the guidebook. Besides, Carbridge wanted to get to Fort William quickly. He wasn’t any too pleased when Perth and the students spent that time at Inchcailloch on Loch Lomond and he dropped them altogether later on because they wanted to linger and collect bits of rocks and things. Why should he—or any of the others, for that matter—have wasted their time and energy going off the marked route?”

  “You tell me,” I said.

  “When you went charging down that dark passage you talk about, did you slip?”

  “No, I fell over the body, as I told you. If you’re thinking of blood, it coagulates pretty quickly unless the chap is a haemophiliac.”

  “Why wouldn’t you let me see him?”

  “Oh, my dear girl, don’t be morbid!”

  “I might have been able to do something.”

  “Don’t talk so daft. He was dead, frozen, and as stiff as a board, I tell you.”

  “I still think we ought to go to the police.”

  “No. And that’s flat. We hardly knew the chap and it’s no business of ours what’s happened to him. We’ve had all this out before. Heaven knows what sort of scandal we might get ourselves mixed up in, apart from the ghastly business of interviews with the police and being quizzed by reporters and having to appear in court at God knows what inconvenient time. They don’t even hold inquests up here, I believe. It’s straight into the rough stuff if the Procurator Fiscal thinks there’s a case to answer, as in this instance there damn’ well would be.”

  “All right,” she said reluctantly. “You’ve made your point, but I’m not going to say I’m happy about it. That poor man!”

  “Probably only got what he asked for.”

  “I didn’t realise how callous you can be.”

  “That’s not callousness, it’s only commonsense. And now snap out of it.”

  But, of course, neither of us could do that, and it was a silent and not exactly a compatible pair of love-birds who resumed their journey a couple of days later. However, encouraged by my unusually high-handed victory, I laid down the law again and, to my astonishment, this time she capitulated without a fight.

  “Very well,” she said. “Let’s take to the main roads and do Ballachulish and on to Fort William, if we can pick up any transport, but heaven knows how the buses run in these parts.”

  However, we were in luck. We had not been waiting at the roadside for more than ten minutes before a whacking great car with a man and a woman in it pulled up and the man put his head out. From the size of the vehicle and the fact that it had a left-hand drive, I guessed that the couple were from the States and this proved to be the case. Moreover, they were bound for Ballachulish, so we could not have been more lucky.

  Needless to say, we did not mention the dead man, but they were greatly interested when they heard about The Way. The woman asked innumerable questions. I was on tenterhooks in case Hera should give away, after all, the secret of our visit to the ruins and the gruesome discovery I had made there, but she was discretion itself and as the car diminished the distance between Kingshouse and our destination, I became easier in my mind.

  The couple were inclined to dismiss the magnificent Grampians as mere foothills compared with their own Rockies, but allowed that, compared with the mountains of Switzerland and Austria, those in the Highlands had “atmosphere.” In any case, whatever the views of the couple and however subversive they were, neither Hera nor I was prepared to quarrel with them, for we were much too grateful for the lift to be in any mood to argue with the kindly and voluble Americans. It was not until almost the end of the journey that we discovered that they were really bound for Oban and had come miles out of their way for our sakes. After we had crossed the bridge at Ballachulish, they took us all the way to Fort William.

  “Think nothing of it,” the driver said. “My wife is wild to see Glen Coe where the massacre took place, so we were bound for Ballachulish anyhow. All we need to do is go back-along and then pick up our route south. At Oban I aim to take pictures and then cross the only bridge over the Atlantic. Boy! Will that be something to tell the folks back home!” He was referring to the bridge which connects the mainland to the little island of Seil on the road from Oban to Easdale. I remembered it well from the coach tour with my parents, for I had been young enough to believe that the coach really was going to cross to America.

  The youth hostel at Fort William was about three miles from the town shops, but it was marvellously well situated, as I knew, for the climb up Ben Nevis. It was a Grade 1 hostel, had 128 beds, cooking facilities, and a shop, but meals were not provided, so we bought our own food from the hostel store. When we went into the kitchen to cook it, who should be there but Rhoda and Tansy. They had put up at a hotel for three nights and then come on to the hostel. They and we were the only people at the hostel when we arrived. The weather was fine and the other hostellers either had not yet arrived or were out enjoying themselves. I became more and more grateful to the kindly Americans for the welcome lift they had given us from Kingshouse to Fort William, for, if we climbed Ben Nevis on the morrow, it meant at least a seven-hour stint and some rough going, even by the easiest ascent. To have cut out the long miles and overnight stop if we had completed the walk was a marvellous bonus. We crossed the bridge opposite the hostel and looked around us. It was pleasant in the glen, but I had climbed Ben Nevis once before, and I knew that conditions could be very different when we reached the summit. Hera was all eagerness and anticipation, so I warned her that the way up the great
(and, to my mind, very ugly) mountain was not only arduous in places, but could be extremely dull.

  “But think of the view from the summit!” she said.

  “Well enough, so long as the weather holds and the Ben isn’t capped by cloud.”

  “It won’t be. We haven’t come all this way for nothing. If it’s no good tomorrow, we can wait a day, can’t we?”

  “We’re only booked in for tonight and this is a very popular hostel,” I pointed out.

  “Then we’ll go to a hotel. Why not?”

  But she was not to climb Ben Nevis on that holiday, for, because of the most startling and utterly unforeseen circumstance, we were out of that hostel as soon as next morning’s breakfast was over. We lost no time in making for the railway station and in taking the train for Glasgow. We were fleeing, as it were, from a disembodied spirit and terrified, so far as I myself was concerned, not for my life, but for my reason. At about seven o’clock that evening when, taking advantage of the fact that only a few hostellers had drifted in, Hera and I had cooked and eaten our simple supper rather earlier than we really wanted it, a lot of hostellers, all chatting and laughing, came in. Among the crowd were four people we knew. The next moment Hera and I were hailed by Carbridge, Todd, and the Minches, all very much alive, although tired, they said, from their climb. To clinch matters, we were joined an hour later by Perth and the students. They had climbed with the others, but had stayed longer on the mountain to add little bits of lava and granite to the collection they had already made at Inchcailloch and along The Way and had despatched to London to avoid having to tote so much heavy material on the rest of their march.

  When Carbridge and his companions came in, I heard Hera give a peculiar little cry. As for me, I was so flabbergasted that I could feel my head swimming and I suppose I came as near to fainting as I have ever been in my life. However, it was Carbridge all right and as full of effervescence and bonhomie as ever. He appeared to have forgotten our dispute and my high-handed action at Crianlarich, and soon the “old boy, old boy” stuff began again, and the advice to Hera: “My tip, fair one, is to avoid that climb unless you go up by pony.”

  Before the footweary but triumphant quartet—Jane’s feet must have responded to my treatment—had gone to the kitchen quarters to prepare something which would restore their wasted tissues, Hera dragged me outside and on to the bridge over the River Nevis again.

  “You told me he was dead! You said you fell over him! You said he had been murdered! You said he had a knife in his back! You said he was stone-cold and stiff!” she babbled. Well, shock has different effects on different people. Now that I had recovered a little, the shock of seeing him had made me reckless.

  “So you believed all that guff,” I said. “Poor old you!”

  She smacked my face and, as I suppose I was really somewhat hysterical at the time, this summary treatment had its usual result. I apologised and assured her that I had been certain it was the body of Carbridge that I had seen. I tried to take her hand. She shook me off, turned aside, and began to cry.

  “For heaven’s sake, stop it!” I said. “When they’ve had their meal, we’ve got to face that lot again.” We did. There was much euphoria. There was triumph that they had walked The Way and much exhibiting of souvenirs they had bought in Fort William. Todd, said Carbridge, had been the favourite of the ladies. Tansy and Patsy had both bought him presents.

  When they had all turned in for the night, I said, “Darling, I did fall over him, I did see him. I did touch him. I could have sworn it was he. I spoke out of turn just now, I know I did, but please don’t hold it against me. I’ve had the most awful shock. You can’t imagine what it was like when that lot walked in. And then, when you turned on me—”

  “I didn’t turn on you. Don’t you think I had a shock, too, after all you’d said?”

  “Yes, of course, but—and, please, I am not intending to start an argument—I do think my shock must have been more severe than yours.”

  “So you were telling me the truth?—or, at any rate, you thought you were.”

  “Darling, I swear I was!”

  “Then,” she said, with a complete return to her usual forth-rightness, “we’ll go home first thing tomorrow and when we get back to London you’d better see a psychiatrist. I’m not going to father my children on a man who sees a corpse where no corpse is. All that nonsense about falling over it in a dark passage!”

  “There was a corpse all right,” I said, “but I made a mistake about whose corpse it was. I suppose I was badly rattled, and you must admit that Carbridge is a very ordinary-looking bloke. So far as his clothes are concerned.”

  “Well, I’m glad now that you wouldn’t let me go to the police. Nice fools we should have looked if we had reported finding a dead man who, a day or two later, was able to climb Ben Nevis and eat a hearty supper afterwards.”

  “Look, I made a mistake. Do I have to keep on spelling it out?”

  “I’ve looked a lot of times at the map since we started out. There’s no castle marked.”

  “It wasn’t a castle, I tell you. It was only a ruin and probably wasn’t important even in its heyday.”

  “Can you remember what the place looked like?”

  “I think so. Why? If we’re not going to the police, I shan’t need to describe it to anybody.”

  “Just as well, perhaps.”

  “Could you describe it?”

  “No, of course I couldn’t, but I would be willing to agree to your description if it ever came to the point. A thick mist, like the one we ran into, sends my wits wool-gathering. I never could find my way in a fog.”

  I looked suspiciously at her.

  “Are you trying to tell me something?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, with an emphasis I could not account for at the time. “I want you to see a psychiatrist or a doctor, or an eye specialist, or even all three, as soon as we get back to London.”

  “I’ll be shot if I do!” I said hotly. “What are you getting at, for God’s sake?”

  She smiled in a cat-like way and repeated that I needed my head, my blood pressure, and my eyes tested. I could have struck her to the ground. Instead, I attempted a verbal attack.

  “You’re becoming senile,” I said. I thought the ungentlemanly shaft would hurt her. It did not. She still smiled.

  “Yes, but I wear well,” she said, “which is more than you do. When I was your age, at least I didn’t see things which weren’t there.”

  She was four years older than I was, a fact I had always deplored.

  “If you are going to make nasty cracks about what I saw or didn’t see, I shall marry Jane Minch,” I said.

  She laughed. “The children will look like plover’s eggs,” she said. “Those freckles! Oh, my God!”

  6

  A Visit to a Psychiatrist

  We were lucky with the train from Glasgow, where we spent the night. The run from there to Euston passed without incident and, except that I was aware that she was keeping an eye on me, I might have thought that Hera had forgotten all about what had happened. The only spoken reference she made to our excursion in the mist was in the form of a quotation from a nostalgic poem by W. J. Turner. We were reminiscing about our walk along The Way, but steering well clear of our visit to the ruins, when she said, looking at me in a commiserating sort of way which was rather galling:

  “I dimly heard the master’s voice

  And boys far-off at play,

  Chimborazo, Cotopaxi

  Had stolen me away.”

  “I am not a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, and what I saw and touched had nothing to do with the mountains of Ecuador,” I said, “still less with the Grampians of Scotland.”

  “Knows his geography, too!” she said, with the simulated admiration she might have extended to a bright child of five. I grinned, determined not to allow her to see that she had irritated me.

  “If you let out a crack like that when we’re married, I’ll clout
you,” I said.

  “Another infantile reaction,” she retorted, so, as usual, she had the last word. We had dinner in Soho, then I took her by taxi to her flat and walked back to my own. I had nothing but my rucksack to carry. She had invited me in, but I knew that, if I accepted the invitation, we should either quarrel or make love, or perhaps the one would follow the other, and who knew in which order?

  “You’re angry with me,” she said, when I would not go in.

  “No,” I said. “Sometimes I’d like to murder you, but I’m never angry with you.”

  “Sometimes? Never? Do those come under the heading of lies, damned lies, or statistics? And perhaps we had better not mention murder for a bit. I might begin to think you are obsessed by it.”

  So, like the chap in A Shropshire Lad, I walked home alone “amidst the moonlight pale,” and while I walked and long after I had let myself into my flat and had gone to bed, I turned over in my mind all that had happened since I had been in London the last time. It did not make for comforting thoughts. I reviewed everything that I remembered about the mist, the realisation that we had lost our way, the unexpected discovery of the stone wall, its entrance arch, the glassless window through which we had climbed, and my subsequent discovery of the body. It was of no use to tell myself that only some of this had happened. Either all of it, or none of it, I told myself, had fallen within my experience. I was worried and fearful.

  “Well, how did your holiday go?” asked my partner when I turned up at our offices a couple of days later. “You’re back early, aren’t you? Anything go wrong?”

  “Sandy,” I said, “I am going to describe to you all the objects which I imagine I can see in this room and you will check with me whether I am really seeing them or not. Or—no!” I went on. “I might only think you were agreeing with me. In fact, for all I know, you may not be here at all, and neither may I, come to that. There’s no proof, is there?”