Death Takes the Low Road

by Reginald Hill

‘Well hello !’ repeated Stuart. Repetition was a feature of his public oratorical style. And of his work methods, so his underlings asserted. ‘Where’s Hazlitt? Eh? That’s the question. Where’s Hazlitt?’

  ‘Sh!’ said the dwarf librarian. ‘Over there. 820.4, Literary Criticism, English.’

  ‘No. Not that Hazlitt. Not that Hazlitt. William Blake Hazlitt, I mean. Foolish woman!’

  He shook his head ferociously at the dwarf librarian, who retreated saying, ‘Blake 821, English Poets. To your left,’ till she and her voice disappeared at the same time.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know,’ said Caroline.

  ‘Don’t know? Don’t know?’ said Stuart, varying the stress meaninglessly. ‘What I think is, what I think is … not possible. No.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘What I think is … Poulson! What do you think?’

  A rather grey young man who had appeared momentarily at some distance looked round in surprise at being hailed as though on the open sea. He was Thomas Poulson, lecturer in the Law Department, and Hazlitt’s favourite squash opponent, as his tendency to sudden fits of abstraction made him easily beatable.

  He approached cautiously.

  ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘What is it you want, Stuart?’

  Caroline tried to work out whether the Registrar was being addressed familiarly by his Christian name or formally by his surname.

  ‘Have you heard from Hazlitt?’

  Poulson ingested the question slowly.

  ‘No,’ he said finally.

  ‘There!’ said Stuart triumphantly. ‘There! And Africa are on the phone all the time.’

  ‘Oh, are it?’ said Poulson. Caroline giggled.

  ‘Someone’s got to work,’ said Stuart, and strode purposefully away.

  ‘What’s he doing in the library?’ wondered Poulson.

  ‘You’re a bit off the beaten track yourself,’ said Caroline.

  ‘Oh, hello, Caroline,’ said Poulson, as though noticing her for the first time. ‘I’m after thrillers. Do you have thrillers?’

  ‘From time to time,’ said Caroline. ‘You mean books?’

  ‘Yes. They always get their law wrong, you see. I thought they might provide some interesting seminar problems.’

  ‘Thomas,’ said Caroline, ‘do you have a moment? I have an interesting seminar problem.’

  She drew him into a working alcove and they sat down. At first her intention was merely to pour her worries about Hazlitt into a friendly ear, but it struck her suddenly that only fools and saints didn’t abuse their friendship with lawyers. Quickly she told him what had happened in Enoch Arden’s that day.

  ‘An inspector, you say?’ said Poulson.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘It was a valuable bracelet?’

  ‘Hell no! I mean, not your Liz Taylor bit. Twenty, maybe twenty-five dollars. Sorry, ten pounds at the most.’

  ‘And no charge. Not yet. But this inspector told you to keep yourself available for the next few days. Did he take a statement?’

  ‘If you mean, did I sign anything, the answer’s no. Just told me not to leave town.’

  ‘Odd,’ said Poulson, and, bending his head, seemed to concentrate all his attention on the words Shakespeare was a nut which some earnest student had inscribed in pencil on the table-top. Caroline recognised the fit of abstraction, sighed, rose, made her way to the nearest shelves, and selected a book at random. It was wedged firmly between its two neighbours and she had to pull hard to get it out. Too hard. A large tome of Coleridge’s activities as a French agent came with it and hit the ground explosively. The dwarf librarian appeared instantly and glared down the aisle. Behind her, legs aggessively astride like a marshal in a Western, was a blond young man with a newspaper in either jacket pocket and his hand reaching for his wallet.

  Caroline shrugged expressively, replaced the book and, noticing signs of revival in Poulson, returned to the table.

  ‘What’s odd?’ she asked.

  ‘Presumably,’ he said, ‘you are even more ignorant of the workings of our legal system than most native citizens? So the oddities may have escaped you … It’s odd that you were not charged, odd that this young man should have disappeared, it’s odd that no other witness to your presence in the jewellery department was produced, it’s odd that a man of the rank of inspector should investigate such a trifling matter, it’s odd that you were not taken to the station, and it’s odd that in the midst of all this solicitude which was coming your way no one thought to suggest you might send for a solicitor.’

  ‘I see,’ said Caroline. ‘So all that’s odd, huh?’

  ‘No single matter is excessively odd, perhaps,’ said Poulson. ‘But the sum of effects is one of oddity.’

  ‘And your explanation?’

  He smiled and rose.

  ‘Lawyers don’t explain. They merely demonstrate. I must go now. Should you catch up with Hazlitt, ask him if our game is on next Wednesday. He didn’t turn up last week. Goodbye, Caroline.’

  He disappeared into the maze of shelves. After a moment Caroline rose too and made for the exit where the dwarf librarian scanned her closely, as though suspecting she had the complete works of Dickens concealed beneath her sun-top.

  ‘Ciao!’ said Caroline with a smile.

  ‘636.71, Dogs,’ the dwarf librarian called after her.

  Hazlitt opened his eyes a few moments before breaking the surface skin of full consciousness. There was a heavy weight on his chest and he was surrounded by a dim religious light. The two things together made him wonder nightmarishly if he might be lying in state somewhere, with a heavy catafalque lid drawn back to reveal his farewell face. He was at a loss as to which country might have accorded him this honour, then his mind thrust up violently through the surface skin and he was awake.

  He was in the land of the living and the dim religious light was merely sunshine filtered through the nylon eaves of his tent.

  Without his spectacles, everything was very hazy. Somewhere close in the tent something grunted, an angry animal grunt, and the weight on his chest shifted slightly.

  It was alive! He stiffened in panic, uncertain whether rapid movement or complete stillness were called for. Snake? Not in Skye, not this heavy. What then? Fox? Surely not. Wildcat? They still survived in Scotland, didn’t they? Or perhaps it was merely a sociable sheep.

  Slowly he raised an exploratory hand. He found himself grasping something round and warm and soft, pressure on which increased the creature’s agitation tenfold.

  He sat up abruptly and as he did so his glasses fell down from his forehead on to his nose. Someone had been very thoughtful.

  Thoughtful indeed, he realised. Almost Oriental in thought, having left him a half-naked woman conveniently bound and gagged.

  She stared at him with antagonism and fear in her eyes. He smiled reassuringly at her, wondering whether he should apologise for his recent accidental attack on her scantily covered bosom. But then it dawned on him that perhaps even more reassuring to her would be the covering of his own naked frailties.

  As he pulled on his spare trousers, he took stock of the situation.

  The woman, he now realised, was Cherry. The reason for her lack of clothing above the waist was that someone had removed her tartan shirt and torn it into strips wherewith to gag and bind her.

  He looked around the tent but could see no sign of her gun. Not that he would have very much idea what to do with a gun even if he found one. But Cherry in here did not necessarily mean that Tom (Mark II) was not out there and some form of defence would be a comfort.

  Still, it was pointless delaying investigation any longer, so with another apologetic smile for the woman as he rolled her to one side, he opened the tent flap and cautiously poked his head out into the open air.

  He instantly wished he hadn’t.

  Inside the tent had been the world of the living to which he had been miraculously returned.

  Out here it was the world of
the dead. Sprawled out on the heathery slope before him, as though taking his ease in the sun, was Tom. Only it was an eternal ease. All life must have instantly spilled through the large hole in his chest.

  Hazlitt sat down heavily and assessed the situation. At least he put on the assessing-the-situation face he normally saved for those moments in Senate meetings when he was unexpectedly invited to comment on some matter of which he was completely ignorant. Inside there was nothing but confusion, centred upon a small but growing area of nausea in the pit of his stomach.

  Outwardly, very little had changed. The loch, the mountains, and the sky were all in place. The sun scarcely seemed to have shifted its position. Not many minutes could have elapsed since Tom had hurled him into the water.

  Tom. He raised his reluctant eyes and looked at him again. Things had certainly changed for Tom, the biggest change of all.

  It was time for rational thought. His mind considered the possibilities and came up grasping the nub of the situation, the first and essential course of action.

  He must finish getting dressed.

  Whatever lay ahead of him, he would at least face it like an English gentleman.

  The thought cheered him, but as he pulled on his tee-shirt and woolly socks other thoughts soon dispelled the cheer. For a start, whoever shot Tom was still around, alive and potentially lethal.

  But, he assured himself, whoever shot Tom saved my life, is therefore my friend.

  On the other hand, he answered, lacing up his walking boots, this ‘friend’ has left me with a corpse to explain. Not to mention a captive woman in my tent!

  He crawled back inside and removed her gag. She breathed deeply but said nothing.

  ‘You know he’s dead?’ he asked, reluctant to let her experience the same shock as he had done. She nodded.

  ‘Who did it?’ he asked.

  She laughed scornfully.

  ‘Someone up there loves you,’ she said.

  ‘That’s nice. But why? And you. What have I done to you?’

  ‘Me? Nothing. All I want to do is get back home. Look, won’t you loosen these bonds a bit? They’re killing me.’

  He looked thoughtfully at her. She was hog-tied, wrists and ankles pulled close together. Someone had been very efficient. But he did nothing and instead started packing.

  Danger felt very close. Skye had seemed the ideal refuge in time of trouble, but now he was very aware that despite the lonely vastness of the mountains which lay about him, Skye was only a very small island, which could serve just as easily for a trap as a haven.

  He pulled the woman out of the tent and noticed that she kept her eyes averted from the corpse. Quickly he struck camp, eager to be on his way now. At one point he paused, imagining he could hear the faint sea-changed chatter of an outboard motor, but decided it was probably just the distant call of a ptarmigan.

  His last act was to take a small knife out of his camper’s canteen and lay it on a stone some twenty yards downhill from the woman. He then released the piece of binding which held her ankles and her wrists together.

  ‘Now,’ he told her, ‘you should be able to move pretty easily. Down there’s a knife. A good half-hour’s effort should get you to it and you can start cutting. I’d let you loose now, only you’d probably knock me down or give me a karate chop or something.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. He could not gauge the degree of her sincerity.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s the best I can do. What you do with … him … well, that’s up to you.’

  ‘They’ll get you in the end. You know that?’ she said.

  He shrugged but did not answer, hoisted his rucksack on his shoulders and set off up the lochside away from the sea.

  5

  ‘Scotland!’ exclaimed Caroline.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Searle.

  ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’

  ‘Well, he just let it slip, by accident like, and made me promise not to tell anyone. But in the circumstances, well …’

  ‘The circumstances’ were that Caroline by sighs and blushes and innuendo had contrived to suggest to Mrs Searle’s soap-operatic mind that Hazlitt had left her in the family way and that it was a matter of some urgency that she contacted him.

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tell anyone.’

  ‘No. Certainly not. I wouldn’t!’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Caroline, certain the woman was lying. ‘But someone did ask, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes,’ admitted Mrs Searle, glancing at the clock. It was nearly time for the second episode of her twice-weekly evening serial.

  ‘Who?’ asked Caroline, glancing at her own watch. She had returned home briefly and sat in her room for a while, contemplating the events of the day and trying to reach a conclusion other than that they had something to with Hazlitt’s disappearance. But nothing else fitted, and the only untapped source of information that remained had been Mrs Searle. So just before dinner she had slipped out, allegedly to post a letter. Why she felt it necessary to lie to Professor Nevis she did not know. But last time she had proposed to return to Mrs Searle’s had been from Enoch Arden’s and that attempt had met with little success.

  ‘Why? I don’t know,’ asserted Mrs Searle. ‘Said they were friends.’

  She stood up, went across to the television set and switched it on. Caroline also rose, recognising the interview was at an end. It was time she went home in any case. She had been gone too long already.

  It was a fine summer evening, but she paid little heed to it as she hurried along the pavement. Her mind was trying to make sense of the whole affair. Only one thing was clear. Unease about Hazlitt had started her enquiries into his whereabouts, and nothing had happened to make her any less uneasy.

  But the business in Enoch Arden’s couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it, could it? Not in England? Not in provincial England which was still so like the green, pleasant, quiet, well-ordered land her father described in his rare nostalgic moments. A frame-up here? It was impossible. A mistake, soon to be sorted out.

  Her uncle was waiting for her in the dining room. He had not yet started to eat, though plainly the food had been on the table for some time.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ said Caroline.

  He looked at her with an expression which seemed to combine sympathy and assessment. She could not interpret it clearly, in fact found it difficult to interpret much about her uncle very clearly. Perhaps it was because his subject—molecular biology—was so far removed from her own discipline. Perhaps it was because he was so completely different from his brother John, her father, whose blunt, uncompromising, rather naive view of life permitted few complexities of relationship. Caroline knew the brothers had quarrelled, or at least parted hastily, after the war and she felt her own presence here was symbolic of some kind of reconciliation. One which would hardly last if her father got wind of her present spot of bother. Not that it really worried her. Surely it would go no further.

  ‘Caroline,’ said her uncle, speaking with uncharacteristic abruptness, ‘I’m sorry, but the police have just called. The store is going to prosecute, after all. You’re to appear in court the day after tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Caroline.

  The Old Etonian was in the kitchen when the telephone rang.

  ‘Smithson here, sir.’

  ‘Hello, Smithson. What do they do with their telephone lines up there—float them down to Glasgow?’

  ‘I’m sorry it’s a bad line, sir.’

  ‘Yes, all right. Well, why has my day been interrupted?’

  ‘Just a report, sir. He’s definitely there.’

  ‘Splendid. It’s always nice to be right.’

  ‘Yes, sir. He’s got company now.’

  ‘Really? Us or them?’

  ‘Both, sir.’

  ‘That’s all right, then.’

  ‘Anything new at your end, sir?’

  ‘My end is my own
business, I think, Smithson. You might essay a polite laugh sometimes, you know. Durban seems to have been effective for once in his life and the girl has been taken out. Merely a precaution, of course, but they do possess a certain tenacity of purpose these Americans. Like beagles. Now, which way will Hazlitt break, do you think?’

  ‘No idea, sir. And I’m out of contact temporarily.’

  ‘Nothing wrong?’

  ‘No, it’s just the nature of the terrain. I should hear something pretty soon.’

  ‘Where then? South or north? South would be nice.’

  ‘Yes, but I doubt it. I think it could be a long job. He knows the country well.’

  ‘I’m pleased. I shouldn’t like anything to happen to him. Not yet. Not just yet.’

  This is absurd, thought Hazlitt. I know the country well. I’m by way of being an expert. Besides which, I have had my share of troubles for today. This can’t be happening.

  He looked up at the gnarled and beautiful clumps of heather which his white knuckled hands were grasping, then down at the sharp boulders waiting at the foot of the sixty-foot drop over which his legs were dangling. With a shudder he closed his eyes. It was certainly happening.

  His only previous acquaintance with the strength of heather had been in his vain attempts to force an errant golf ball out of it. (He was an abominable golfer. Not even Poulson at his most distracted ever lost to him.) Then he had cursed the stuff roundly. Now he blessed it as he tried to inch his way upward to the rocky crest on which he had missed his footing a few moments earlier.

  It reacted badly to the blessing. The root he was holding with his right hand suddenly gave way and he slipped sideways as he scrabbled for a new hold, babbling a prayer to the god of the mountains.

  It was answered immediately and, as might have been expected, by a Scottish deity.

  ‘And here’s a hand, my trusty fiere,

  And gie’s a haud o’thine,’

  sang a flat but powerful baritone voice, a hand grasped his wrist and Hazlitt found himself being hauled effortlessly upwards. Safe on the crest, he collapsed in a langour of relief at the foot of his rescuer, who at first glance appeared to be a bearded lady of gigantic proportions.