Chapter and Hearse

by Catherine Aird

  He felt a spasm of pity for Mistress Leanaig, who from all accounts would be leaving one deathbed only to find another. And unless Hector had sent a messenger to Alcaig’s Isle, she would read the flag’s message as she neared Torgorm but not know for whom it was flying so low.

  Macmillan came down to the main bedroom again and stood there thoughtfully before making for the privy stair. Again he put his left hand out and ran it over the wall, this time as he went down rather than up the stair. This time too a fine red sandstone dust marked his fingers.

  But so did something else.

  He paused and considered his hand. There was no doubt about it. He was looking at blood. Not a lot, but blood for all that. Macmillan stood for a long quiet minute on a step just above the last turn of the stair but still out of sight of those waiting at the foot of the other stair at the east end of the great hall.

  Where the body lay.

  Then the Sheriff put his hand down again on the wall of the privy stair.

  Low down.

  The sandstone felt slightly damp to his touch. He would have been the first to admit that the walls of Castle Balgalkin probably always felt slightly damp to the touch in winter – it was no wonder that the Queen from France was finding Scotland not to her liking after warmer climes. But this dampness was different. He crouched down to consider the patch. Unless he was very much mistaken, someone had taken a wet cloutie to the stone and rubbed it as clean as they could before he reached the castle.

  Rhuaraidh Macmillan straightened up and turned silently back up the privy stair. He then walked through the master bedroom, and past the nursery and Mistress Leanaig’s boudoir to the main east turnpike stair. He descended this and rejoined the dejected group waiting beside the distressful body at the bottom of the stairway.

  Hector Leanaig was standing where he had left him, although his head was now sunk on his chest as if he was afraid to look up. The child’s nurse, Morag Munro, was still standing under the kissing bough, well away from the others. As the Sheriff appeared down the turnpike stair, her weeping changed to a more primitive keening.

  ‘It wasn’t only me,’ she said when she managed to speak. ‘The mistress warned her about Handsel Monday too. She told her that on Handsel Monday night everyone has to keep to their beds until sunrise. Made her promise her mother she would stay there.’ She gulped. ‘I heard her say that myself.’

  ‘I wonder why the child didn’t stay in her own bed then,’ mused Sheriff Macmillan aloud, addressing nobody in the great hall in particular.

  ‘It’s a dangerous night, Handsel Monday,’ growled Hector Leanaig.

  ‘I ken that right enough, Hector,’ agreed Macmillan. ‘But I don’t believe in the fairies and witches myself, that’s all.’

  ‘Not believe?’ echoed the Laird of Balgalkin, astonished.

  ‘No, Hector.’ The Sheriff shook his head. ‘I’m afraid Handsel Monday is just an ancient way of putting an end to the feasting of hogmanay, that’s all.’

  Hector Leanaig said obstinately, ‘Jeannie believed in it.’

  ‘The English,’ remarked the Sheriff, ignoring this, ‘call the time when the kissing has to stop by the name of Twelfth Night.’

  ‘Oh, the English,’ said Leanaig dismissively. ‘They’re not right-minded folk at all.’

  ‘But it’s still when the kissing has to stop,’ said the Sheriff, adding meaningfully, ‘all the kissing, Hector…’

  The Laird of Balgalkin stared at him, a flush mounting his cheek.

  Rhuaraidh Macmillan stared down at the pitiable figure on the floor. ‘What, Hector, do you think it could be that would make a wee girlie like this so disobedient?’

  ‘I canna’ think, man, of anything at all.’

  ‘And I can only think of one thing myself,’ said the Sheriff.

  The Laird jerked his head up, the flush suffusing his whole face now. He searched the Sheriff’s face. ‘You can?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ said Macmillan very quietly. ‘I think that Jeannie woke up in the night and found her nurse gone from her bed.’

  Hector Leanaig said nothing while Morag Munro clutched her kirtle round her head even more tightly.

  ‘And,’ said the Sheriff evenly, ‘I think when that happened, Jeannie was naturally frightened that the fairies or the witches must have spirited away her nurse, Morag.’

  The wailing under the kissing bough stopped abruptly and a palpable silence fell in the great hall of Castle Balgalkin.

  ‘But,’ continued Rhuaraidh Macmillan in a steely voice, ‘I don’t think they had.’

  ‘No?’ said the Laird hoarsely.

  ‘No, Hector. I think that something much worse than fairies or witches had taken Jeannie’s nurse away from her bed in Jeannie’s room.’

  The Laird moistened his lips. ‘Something much worse?’

  ‘You, Hector,’ said the Sheriff.

  ‘Me?’ spluttered the Laird of Balgalkin.

  ‘I think,’ maintained Macmillan unperturbed, ‘that when little Jeannie woke up and saw Morag Munro was not in her bed in the nursery, her next thought – her very natural thought – was to find you, her father.’

  ‘Well, that would be understandable, right enough,’ responded Leanaig non-committally. ‘If she did,’ he added lamely.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ carried on the Sheriff ineluctably, ‘that last night – Handsel Monday – was one your daughter had been told on all sides by people she trusted to be very afraid of indeed.’

  ‘Aye,’ admitted Leanaig, ‘that’s true.’

  ‘I think,’ resumed Macmillan, ‘Jeannie was very frightened and did come looking for you – after all, you were only in your own bed in the next room, weren’t you, Hector?’

  Hector Leanaig said nothing.

  ‘You either were or you weren’t in your own bed, Hector,’ said Rhuaraidh Macmillan without impatience. ‘Which was it?’

  ‘I was,’ said Hector Leanaig gruffly.

  ‘The trouble was,’ said the Sheriff almost conversationally, ‘that though you were in your own bed, I think you were not alone in it.’

  Hector Leanaig’s face told its own story. The flush on it slowly drained away before the Sheriff’s eyes, to be replaced by a marked pallor. The man of law pointed to the pathetic bundle at their feet and said, ‘Your Jeannie was young all right, but not too young to know what makes the beast with two backs…’

  The woman under the kissing bough screamed. ‘We didna’ kill her. I tell you, we didna’ kill her. She ran away.’

  ‘And her father ran after her,’ said the Sheriff calmly.

  ‘To try to explain,’ jerked out Hector. ‘I swear that’s all I did … I swear.’

  ‘I know,’ said Rhuaraidh Macmillan imperturbably. ‘But Jeannie ran away down the stair before you could catch up with her.’

  ‘She fell,’ said Hector. ‘Before I could catch her and explain.’

  Morag Munro ran across the great hall and flung herself at the Sheriff’s feet. ‘Believe us,’ she pleaded. ‘We didna’ touch her. It’s true.’

  ‘Partly true,’ responded Macmillan. He pointed diagonally across the hall. ‘But it was the other stair that she ran down. You didn’t want anyone to guess she’d come from your room.’

  Leanaig brushed his hair away from his eyes. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘How else do you account for the crack on her head being on the left of her skull? This is a clockwise stair going up and a left-hand one coming down. If she’d tumbled down this turnpike stair here, her head would have hit the right-hand side of the stairway.’ He looked down at the child and then at the step tapering to the apex of its triangle as it became the central pillar of the stair. ‘There’s nothing to catch her head on coming down on the left in this turnpike. She would have fallen to the right … and it’s the left of her head that’s stove in.’

  The only sound in the great hall now was the heavy breathing of the Laird of Balgalkin as he struggled to control himself.

  �
�And the privy stair,’ whispered Hector Leanaig, as one making a great discovery, ‘comes down the other way.’

  ‘Clockwise from the top,’ agreed the Sheriff.

  ‘It’s a stair that could be defended by a left-handed swordsman,’ said the Laird almost absently.

  ‘Jeannie hit her head on the left-hand side of the privy stair as she ran down it, away from you.’ The Sheriff looked across at Morag Munro. ‘From you both. And the pair of you hoped to get away with blaming Handsel Monday.’

  Hector Leanaig sagged like a man stuffed with straw reeling from a punch in the solar plexus. ‘I may have killed my daughter, Rhuariadh, but I didn’t murder her.’

  ‘But she’s as dead,’ said the Sheriff bleakly, ‘as if you had.’

  The Laird made a visible effort to straighten himself up. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Me?’ Rhuariadh Macmillan gave a mirthless laugh. ‘I’m not going to do anything, Hector Leanaig. No, I’m going to leave that to poor wee Jeannie here…’

  ‘Jeannie?’

  ‘Aye, man. She’s going to haunt you here for the rest of your life.’

  Preyed in Aid

  ‘You’re wanted, Seedy.’ Inspector Harpe greeted his old friend Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan with the unwelcome message as he crossed the threshold of Berebury police station ready to report for duty.

  ‘Who by?’ asked Sloan cautiously. He was head of the tiny Criminal Intelligence Department of ‘F’ Division of the Calleshire force and a naturally careful man. Actually he thought he could guess who wanted him.

  ‘Him upstairs, of course,’ replied Harpe.

  Sloan’s step very nearly faltered. A request for attendance from his superior officer, Superintendent Leeyes, was never a good sign. Least of all did it cheer first thing in the morning on a dreary January day, the more especially when it was a day which fell at that low point towards the end of the month when memories of festive cheer had faded and the office Christmas decorations had been taken down but not yet decently put away for another year.

  ‘How is he today?’ he asked Harpe warily. The barometer outside the police station measured the ambient temperature and pressure of the county of Calleshire. The atmosphere inside the police station, on the other hand, tended to be calibrated against the current state of the Superintendent’s temper.

  Inspector Harpe gave this question some thought before he replied. ‘Quiet.’

  That, thought Sloan, could be good or bad.

  ‘Very quiet,’ added Harpe judiciously.

  ‘Too quiet?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Did he say what…’

  ‘He wants to know all that you can tell him about the Reverend Christopher Carstairs.’

  ‘The Vicar of St Leonard’s?’

  ‘None other.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan drew breath and tried his best not to damn with faint praise. ‘I should say he’s well meaning, always trying to do his best, but more than a bit on the naïve side.’

  ‘Gullible,’ translated Harpe.

  ‘And too compassionate by half,’ finished Sloan.

  ‘Always takes the side of the underdog.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I told the Super too.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He wants you to see if there’s anything known against.’

  Sloan raised his eyebrows. ‘Wouldn’t have thought so myself for a moment, but I’ll run a check.’

  A few minutes later he was in his superior’s office and saying, ‘No, sir. Not a thing. Nothing known at all against Mr Carstairs. I’ve double-checked.’ He coughed and enquired delicately, ‘Were you expecting there to have been, then?’

  ‘There was always the off chance,’ said Superintendent Leeyes, not lifting his eyes from a sheet of paper on his desk, ‘that the man might have plenty of previous and it’s always just as well to make sure first.’

  ‘No form of any sort,’ insisted Detective Inspector Sloan firmly.

  ‘It was just a thought, Sloan, that’s all.’ The Superintendent sounded almost wistful.

  ‘Clean as a whistle,’ said the Inspector, mystified.

  The Superintendent essayed a little laugh. ‘We can’t say the same about Matthew Steele, though, can we?’

  ‘Matthew Steele?’ echoed Sloan, even more puzzled. Actually, he would have said that Matthew Steele didn’t have one single thing in common with the Vicar of St Leonard’s Church in Berebury, except, perhaps now he came to think about it, a well-developed way with words. ‘No, sir. Record as long as your arm. You name it and Steele’s done it. Done quite a lot of time for some of it too.’ He paused. ‘But not for all of it,’ he added with heavy significance. ‘Oh, no, not for all of it by any means.’

  ‘And more talkative than a murmuration of starlings,’ groaned Leeyes.

  ‘But never a canary, sir,’ pointed out Sloan.

  ‘Steele never sings about anything,’ snorted Leeyes. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’

  ‘Always plenty to say for himself, though, when we take him in, has our Matthew Steele…’

  ‘Talk the hind leg off a donkey.’

  ‘He’ll argue the toss with anyone,’ agreed Sloan, ‘but it doesn’t usually amount to much.’

  ‘That’s not going to be a lot of help to me,’ complained Leeyes.

  ‘Should have been a lawyer,’ said Sloan, wondering where all this was leading.

  ‘Or in the pulpit,’ suggested Leeyes unexpectedly.

  ‘Not with his lack of principles,’ said Sloan, realizing too late that, in standing up for men of the cloth, he’d inadvertently impugned the whole legal profession in passing.

  With wholly uncharacteristic passivity, Superintendent Leeyes let this go by. Instead he went off at a tangent and asked if Sloan could tell him exactly when Ash Wednesday was.

  ‘Not offhand, sir, but I’ll look it up for you,’ promised the Detective Inspector, even more puzzled.

  ‘Do.’ The Superintendent waved his hand. ‘It’s quite soon, isn’t it?’

  ‘A couple of weeks, at least…’ Sloan’s mother would know. She was a great churchwoman and would have the date at her fingertips. Bound to …

  ‘That’s what I meant, Sloan. Soon…’

  ‘Easter’s a movable feast, of course, sir, which is why the date varies from year to year,’ murmured Sloan, mentally trying to connect Matthew Steele, con man and common thief, with any religious festival at all. He found it was just as difficult to equate ‘a couple of weeks’ with ‘soon’. In Superintendent Leeyes’s terminology, ‘soon’ usually meant within the hour at the very latest.

  ‘Of course,’ said Leeyes humbly. ‘I’d quite forgotten that the date isn’t always the same.’

  ‘That’s why, sir, I can’t tell you straight away when it will be.’ On the other hand, unlike Matthew Steele, the Reverend Christopher Carstairs would obviously have a simple and straightforward link with Ash Wednesday on whatever date it happened to fall this year.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Leeyes, again unnaturally in agreement.

  Sloan cleared his throat and asked, ‘Has Steele been up to something again, then, sir?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said Leeyes.

  Detective Inspector Sloan took a deep breath and said, ‘Actually, sir, we think he may have been on the Tilson Street job.’

  ‘The Calleshire and Counties Bank one?’

  Detective Inspector Sloan nodded.

  Superintendent Leeyes cocked his head to one side. ‘Robbery with violence, wasn’t it?’

  ‘One of the girl tellers was hit over the head and the Bank Manager threatened. But it’s only a hunch, sir, that Steele was involved. There’s no way we can prove it. Not yet, anyway. Probably not until we can find the proceeds. We’re doing all we can, of course, but it hasn’t amounted to much so far. Is that the problem?’

  The Superintendent shook his head. ‘No, no, Sloan, it’s not that. It’s just that he and I are both in this church business at
St Leonard’s together.’

  Sloan raised his eyebrows. ‘You and Steele, sir?’ Privately he was absolutely certain that Matthew Steele had orchestrated the Tilson Street bank job. All the Berebury CID needed now was hard evidence to prove it, but Sloan didn’t want to say so. Not just now. Not until he knew what all this peculiar prevarication was about.

  ‘Him and me,’ said his superior officer regretfully.

  ‘Sir?’ If he couldn’t finger Steele, then finding what had been stolen would be the next best thing …

  ‘The two of us.’ Leeyes grimaced. ‘That’s the trouble – or, rather, part of the trouble.’

  Sloan frowned. This could be serious. In the police book, the Superintendent’s consorting with known criminals would be considered a bad thing. Having anything to do with the likes of Matthew Steele – as opposed to actually having him on a charge for anything that could be considered wrong doing – would be a risky business for any policeman, let alone a full-blown Superintendent. ‘Where, sir,’ he asked tentatively, ‘does Mr Carstairs come in, then?’

  ‘It was all the Vicar’s idea in the first place,’ said Leeyes, his eyes still cast down on the paper lying on his desk. ‘He’s asked Steele too – not that he wanted to do it either, I gather, but the Vicar’s a persuasive sort.’

  ‘And what’s Steele got to do with the Vicar?’ asked Sloan pertinently.

  ‘Steele’s been repairing the church tower of St Leonard’s for weeks now,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘He has, has he? I didn’t know that.’

  ‘I expect that’s how the Vicar got to know him – and, come to that, it’s probably why Steele didn’t like to refuse to do it.’

  ‘And does the Vicar know that Steele’s got a bad record?’ asked Sloan, still in a verbal fog.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so for a moment,’ said Leeyes. ‘But they’ve got trouble in their belfry. And before you ask, not bats.’

  ‘At least there’s not a lot Steele can nick in a church tower,’ said Sloan, ‘though we decided long ago that you couldn’t ask for better cover for burglary than a builder’s business. A covered van, ladders and a good excuse for going equipped with as many tools as you like…’