The Merciless Dead

by John Burke

  Rutherford took a deep breath and was about to risk getting tougher and more bleakly official when two women came out of a side door and began crossing the foyer. The tall dark one fitted the description of the one he was looking for. The other …

  It came out before he could stop it. ‘Lez! What the hell are you doing here?’ Then, awkwardly: ‘Oh, God. Sorry. What do I call you now — Your Ladyship?’

  ‘Makes a change from ‘You stupid bitch’.’

  ‘I never —’

  ‘Frequently.’ She held out her hand, as warm as her smile. ‘But it’s good to see you again, Jock.’

  Tit-for-tat. He was foolishly pleased that the one-time DI Lesley Gunn still remembered how DCI Jack Rutherford hated being called Jock.

  ‘Oh, and this’ — she turned towards her companion — ‘is Mrs Ross. Mrs Morwenna Ross … Detective Chief Inspector Rutherford.’

  Rutherford said: ‘It’s Mrs Ross I’ve come to see. I’ve got a few questions to ask.’

  Ogilvie was twittering, looking irritably from one face to another and then concentrating on the tall, imperturbable woman. ‘I was trying to make this police officer understand that he has no right to burst in here and —’

  ‘I can’t imagine why the police should be interested in me. Pretty sure my papers are all in order, and I was checked for terrorist weapons at the airport. But I’ve no objection to answering this officer’s questions.’

  She was the kind, thought Rutherford, who would always be in charge of a situation. It would never occur to her to be apprehensive. Whatever came at her, she would somehow deflect it without any sign of effort. Admirable in a way; but right here and now he didn’t like that arrogance, and wasn’t sure how things would go if he was the one who had to throw his weight about.

  ‘If you’re really prepared to allow this officer some of your time,’ bleated Ogilvie, ‘I think I had better sit in on the interview. Just to safeguard Mrs Ross’s interests,’ he added defiantly.

  ‘I guess I can get along well enough with Lady Torrance as a witness.’ She smiled at Rutherford. ‘I gather that in her past she had considerable legal experience. You’d have no objections to her being present?’

  ‘None whatsoever.’ Rutherford was more than happy to have his ex-DI around as back-up and reputable witness to the correctness of his procedure. The woman presumably thought Lesley would be on her side; but Rutherford hoped he knew Lesley better than that.

  Ogilvie reluctantly fussed ahead of them to open the door of a small room to the side of the main reception office. Before leaving he gave a critical glance at the small table set exactly in the centre of the room, with four chairs set around it with mathematical precision, two facing the other two exactly, and four glasses and four bottles of mineral water between them as if permanently in place for any urgent conference which might arise at any hour of the day.

  ‘This has the makings of a great movie,’ said Morwenna Ross. ‘Ruthless interrogation, and the accused finally beaks down and confesses all. Isn’t that how it goes?’

  To his irritation, it was she rather than Rutherford who immediately took charge of the seating arrangement, waving the two men towards the chairs facing the door, and Lesley to the chair facing the sergeant. Only when they were seated did she deign to sit down.

  ‘The only trouble is,’ she went on, ‘that I’ve got no notion what I’m supposed to be confessing to.’

  ‘Mrs Ross.’ Rutherford came out with the sort of question he had asked, in so many words, on so many occasions. ‘Can you tell me where you were around nine or ten o’clock last Friday evening?’

  ‘That would be a week ago today?’

  ‘It would.’

  ‘Let me see, now. I had arrived only that morning. I suppose I could have been unpacking, and — no, wait a minute. Late evening? I reckon that would be about the time I went out for a stroll. To clear my head.’

  ‘An evening stroll from your hotel? Where are you actually staying, Mrs Ross?’

  ‘The Foundation funds a private hotel and residential club just behind Charlotte Square. I’m being accommodated in a suite there.’

  ‘That would be the Drovers Court, sir,’ the sergeant said quietly.

  ‘A long walk to Leith,’ Rutherford commented.

  Morwenna Ross looked blandly innocent. ‘Is that where I was?’

  ‘I don’t know, ma’am. Was it?’

  ‘I know I must have walked some considerable distance. I always do walk for miles when I first get to a new place. Shake off the jet lag. Get the feel of the place. You with me? Soak up the atmosphere. But that hasn’t become a crime in this country, has it?’

  He wanted to wipe that lofty indifference off her face. He wanted her to show some sign of guilt, or at least some twitch of alarm. But even while he plunged into a recital of the bare facts of Angus Macdonald’s death, she seemed just mildly interested rather than concerned either for herself or for the facts of that death.

  ‘Now that you mention it, d’you know, I do recall seeing a rather tall, gangly sort of guy stumbling about near the water. Some sort of river, that would be?’

  ‘The Water of Leith,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘But it was late evening, wasn’t it, and there were quite a lot of men staggering about at that time.’ She smiled a tolerant smile. ‘I can’t say I was greatly concerned.’

  ‘And when he collapsed, you didn’t think of going to his assistance?’

  ‘I don’t recall seeing him collapse.’

  ‘We have a witness who says he saw you right behind the man before he went down. Staring at him as if to … well, the impression he got was that you wanted to injure Mr Macdonald in some way.’

  He caught a sidelong glimpse of Lesley’s left eyebrow going up warningly. The hell with it. He still wanted some reaction from this woman.

  She said: ‘And you imagine I’d try to strike a complete stranger dead by just staring at him?’

  ‘I have to take into account the report of any witness nearby at the crucial time.’

  ‘And your witness,’ said Lesley, ‘was in full possession of his faculties at the time?’

  He glared at her. But he knew her well enough to know that she could guess the condition of the sort of witness he would get at that time of the evening in that neighbourhood. His only lead was a flimsy one at best. He had had to follow it up and meet this woman, but it was all too vague, too silly. Write it off, and accept the fact that the verdict was going to be accidental death.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Ross.’ He was going to have to accept the rightness of that lofty expression of hers. ‘It was a report I was in duty bound to follow up. I must apologize for having wasted your time.’

  ‘And your own, Chief Inspector. But of course I quite appreciate the way your police over here have to work. Something else to add to my interesting experiences in this country.’

  Their chairs scraped back. As they got to their feet, Lesley said: ‘I’ll show you out.’ She ushered the two men to the door, giving a half-apologetic nod back towards Morwenna Ross.

  On the steps outside, Rutherford grunted: ‘All right, say it.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Say my great big flat feet have made too much noise to too little purpose, as usual.’

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’ As the sergeant moved tactfully a few yards away, she added: ‘They’ve promoted you, then? From the wilds of the Borders to the Big House itself.’

  ‘Promotion? Aren’t you going to ask why I haven’t made Superintendent by now?’

  ‘You know me. The soul of tact.’

  ‘You’ll need it, if you’re working with that woman in there. And no, I’m not going to ask what you’re doing in this place, because I’ve been told about her telly programme, and it’s my bet you’re bored with the life of the laird’s lady and you’re getting back into the fine arts and crafts racket. You and’ — he repeated the words with a rasp in his throat — ‘that woman. Just mind how you go, Lez.’
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  ‘You know something, Jock? I got a sort of feeling in there that she was rather taken by the idea that she could force someone to drop dead simply by staring at them and willing it.’

  ‘Casting a spell on the poor sod?’

  ‘Just so.’

  ‘You know damn well we can’t take fantasies like that into serious consideration.’

  ‘All I’m saying,’ said Lesley, ‘is that she fancies the idea.’

  ‘Then you’d better watch how you go,’ said Rutherford. ‘Wouldn’t want her bringing a curse down on you.’ He waved to his sergeant. ‘All right, let’s be off. Back to some sensible everyday work, like chasing drug dealers and the regular wife-beaters.’

  5

  Luke’s prediction about results from the television programme soon proved all too justified. There was a flood of phone calls, emails, letters enclosing photographs, and invitations to visit out-of-the-way homesteads across Sutherland, Wester Ross, and the Hebrides. Croft museums in Angus and Caithness sent brochures and guides which they hoped might be of use. Before Lady Torrance was called on to pronounce final judgments, Beth had the task of sifting all incoming calls and material.

  It could have been a thankless chore. There had been many Ross PR campaigns which had been just that. She had often been grateful for Luke’s presence, when they could share sour jokes about prostituting their art, running flags up the flagpole to see who’d salute them, and devising precautions to ensure that the devious Ogilvie didn’t load them with blame when a project went pear-shaped. But this present job was different.

  Of course some submissions were try-ons. Others could be poignant. A very early photograph, lovingly preserved over several generations, showed an elderly woman in a dark dress, shawl and white mob cap sitting on a stool outside a stone cottage in New South Wales. The painstakingly neat handwriting of the accompanying letter said that this had come from the writer’s ‘Great-grandma MacKinnon’, the last survivor there of the MacKinnons sent away from Skye with the assistance of the Skye Emigration Society. There was also a photocopy of a creased scrap of printed paper ordering the emigrants to ‘convert into cash every article of property you possess to procure the means of carrying you to the Colonies’. They had been forced not merely to leave their homes but to sell off belongings to raise a few miserable pence towards their fare. What remained: a few souvenirs so pitiful that they were not worth taking along?

  There were offers of authentic cooking pots, cherished paintings of family groups — unlikely, one might suppose, that crofters could ever have afforded to pay an artist for such a luxury — and any number of wooden boxes claiming to have been babies’ crude cots. Photographs were submitted of slivers of old timber salvaged from burning roofs: as many, thought Beth, as the fragments of the True Cross worldwide. One more substantial piece of doorpost carried a deeply etched mark with fragments of white paint still clinging — the ‘laird’s mark’ ordering the occupants to quit their home. A much-thumbed copy of MacLeod’s Gloomy Memories, a contemporary account of evictions and burnings. Yellowing, crumpled letters from Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, some optimistic about the future, some despondent. A few abusive modern letters asking ‘What Clearances?’ from correspondents claiming that the tales of brutal evictions were a myth, and that those who sailed away for new worlds did so eagerly — a local equivalent, it could be, of the World War II Holocaust deniers.

  To Beth it had become all too real and immediate. Over and done with two centuries ago, yet still alive and heart-breaking today. The landowners and clan chiefs to whom their tenants and clansmen had turned as father figures had set about turning out these supposed kinfolk to make way for sheep runs. There was no discussion, no sympathetic ear for representations from the cottars. Making money from sheep was more important than traditional loyalties. Families given abrupt notice to quit, and failing to do so, often because they could not believe what was threatened, were thrown out and their roofs torn down and set on fire to make sure they could not return. Beth sometimes felt, all too vividly, that she could smell the burning and see, as folk far across doomed Strath Fleet had once reported, ‘the red glow in the sky’.

  She was putting her heart into this job. It was a tale which must never be forgotten. Whatever misdeeds James Fergus Ross might have committed in the contemporary rat-race, at least he was committed now to establishing a lasting memorial to the brutal tragedies which had smitten his ancestors and their neighbours.

  There was a lot of rubbish to be ploughed through, a lot of doubtful material to be evaluated, a barrage of time-wasting queries to be coped with; but she believed in what she was doing. It hadn’t always been the case. But this time she was committed.

  *

  Beth’s parents had brought her up in New Galloway. Her father worked for the Forestry Commission, and her two older brothers followed him into an energetic outdoor life in the Galloway Forest Park. Although they enjoyed their work, all three men felt that ‘our wee Beth’ was the special one of the family, destined for greater things: someone to look up to, and boast about, to say they had always known she was special, and then sit back and accept the tributes of neighbours and workmates. Far from the childhood of Luke Drummond, who had allowed some dismal remarks to seep out about his father, always yelling ‘Got your head stuck in a bloody book again, fat lot of bloody good that’ll do you,’ she was encouraged to read, go in for literary competitions, and join the school debating society. She was a good debater, though sometimes half ashamed at her own glibness.

  There was no doubt that a respectable office job could be found for Beth as a stepping stone to that golden career everyone predicted for her. Leaving Heriot Watt University she worked for a while in the local tourist board — ‘Just finding her feet,’ the family assured friends and neighbours — and then answered an advertisement for a Public Relations assistant with the Ross Foundation in Edinburgh. The name was famous. If you worked for Ross, it was something your folks could boast about.

  For part of the time it was almost too easy. Within six months she was not merely an assistant, but Public Relations Officer. With that school tradition behind her, she was good at talking people into things. It was important to look sincere, which meant you had to be sincere. Talk yourself into believing that what you did was worth doing, at any rate during the time you were actually doing it. At the end, pride in having accomplished a task. But all too often there was the aftermath — like sheepishness after a rather unsatisfactory hour in bed with Luke. It might all seem so real and urgent to start with, but afterwards there could be a feeling of it being not quite such a good thing. An unpleasant taste lingered from knowing that she had had to persuade herself to persuade others to believe in something she didn’t really believe.

  Her family suffered few doubts on her behalf. They took pride in the fact that she now had a position working for one of Scotland’s most successful organizations. ‘A position’: — the word hinted at so many grand skills. In only one way was she a slight disappointment. Her mother and father were waiting to hear of her marriage to someone important, someone capable of looking after her and fathering a grandchild or two for them. On visits to the capital they had met Luke a couple of times but, without saying any derogatory word, gave the impression of not thinking him worthy of their daughter. They would have disapproved even more if they had known that he and Beth frequently shared a bed when the mood took them.

  Nor might they have regarded Luke more highly if they had known that he had in fact proposed marriage. Of course anyone would want to marry their daughter; but he was not the someone they would have hoped for. Luke had proposed twice, and twice Beth had refused him. The proposals had been too much of a formality — genuine yet without passion. Like so many things Luke did, the gesture was timed and tidily introduced into a sequence from which he ticked off commitments at the correct moments so that he could then go on to the next item on the list; rather as if there was a gap in one of his shel
ves which needed filling, or a recurrent blip in a computer file which called for a tidying-up of the template. Beth had turned him down because it was too predictable. She didn’t make an issue of it; simply said that she didn’t want to spoil things.

  There were no mutual reproaches. Without any complicated discussion, they simply did not go to bed together any more. Beth wondered if she had perhaps, after all, spoilt something.

  But in the office she still turned to him without hesitation when she needed help. Or even when she simply needed the relaxation of a brief gossip. Their partnership was just what it had always been. Whenever there were questions to be answered, he was always there, eager to help — much keener, she sometimes thought ruefully, than he had really been about the marriage idea.

  Now, after so many run-of-the-mill campaigns, she found herself working on something in which she did believe. Perhaps, having so recently refused to commit herself to Luke, she needed some other commitment to occupy all her energies.

  After two hours of sorting letters and emails into two piles classified as rejects and possibles, in mid-morning she went into the library with a query.

  ‘Do you have any gen on a Randal Grant? A photographer?’

  Predictably, Luke’s head turned towards his shelves. He did not so much consult indexes or a specific filing system as play the conjuror, plucking out memories from behind file covers or leather bindings with a flourish of the hand.

  ‘Glossy magazines,’ he said. ‘Interiors of stately homes, historic sites, that sort of thing. Did some striking work for Paris Match and others before coming to Edinburgh. Churns out some expensive picture postcards. And illustrations for coffee table books. Rather good quality stuff, though. Why? What’s the interest?’

  ‘He’s been on the phone. Saw Morwenna’s programme. Thinks he might have covered some subjects that would interest us. Family portraits, documents, and old drawings from those stately homes. And some less stately, he hinted.’