The Merciless Dead

by John Burke

  ‘But what’s that on the wall behind it?’ said Beth suddenly.

  Randal’s chin jutted close to her shoulder as he bent over the print, studying the blurred shape. ‘Sorry, I kept the background deliberately hazy in order to throw that head into nice dramatic relief. Why? Got some notions about it?’

  ‘I was wondering … no, it couldn’t be.’

  ‘The suspense is killing me. Couldn’t be what?’

  ‘The Ross Tapestry. You wouldn’t have heard of that, but —’

  ‘Oh, I’ve heard of it. Vaguely. One of those clan traditions like the fairy flag of the MacLeods, right? Come to think of it, that thing there does look more like a tattered old flag — one of the Colonel’s campaign souvenirs, maybe.’

  It would be quite a coup to have identified the tapestry and established that Nadine Ferguson had carried it off, egged on by her husband’s old enemy as he carried her off as well.

  But where had it come from; how much of its history had she scraped together in that vacuous head of hers?

  Beth moved along the display until at the end she found, half tucked away among a stack of large prints in the corner of the studio, the study of the naked girl which had dominated the room on her earlier visit. ‘You like your women with large breasts?’ she said.

  ‘No, I’m not really into bulges. Preferably medium, nicely balanced but not obtrusive.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, then felt she must be flushing scarlet. ‘No, I mean, I didn’t mean …’

  ‘Oh, but I think you did.’ Very quietly he said: ‘I don’t suppose you’d let me take a picture of you?’

  ‘To add to your gallery of conquests?’ Hadn’t she said something that silly only a few minutes ago?

  ‘Just because I think you’ll be very beautiful.’

  As if hypnotized, Beth felt her fingers plucking at the buttons of her blouse, and finding absurd difficulty in freeing them. Until, as she was shrugging the blouse off, Randal said, with what sounded like a painful croak in the throat: ‘No, don’t. I’m sorry, I oughtn’t to have … I mean, Beth, I’m not in the mood for taking pictures right now.’

  There was a slow, intensifying pulse deep down in her stomach. ‘No, neither am I,’ she breathed as she eased her hips out of her tights.

  Luke would have been meticulous in preparations for this moment. The bed would have been neatly laid out, the curtains half drawn, a soft light glowing behind a vase of flowers. Even, on occasion, a bottle of champagne in a bucket at exactly the right temperature for afterwards.

  Here she was being pressed down to the floor, laughing a protest that was too ridiculously insincere, feeling the roughness of the tacky carpet scratching at her bottom, shifting to and fro not because of that roughness but because of Randal’s insistent, driving force shaking her, shaking her from side to side. His beard scraped her breasts, and they rocked to and fro, and then his mouth was murmuring close to her ear until the murmurs became gasps and at last they were both singing almost in pain to the rhythm of his thrusts and her eager, throbbing response.

  ‘Quite a duet,’ he said at last, when they were sated and still. He pushed himself up on his elbows and looked down into her eyes. ‘Beth, I think that really was what they mean about making beautiful music.’ He tried her name again, like someone discovering an enticing new flavour in his mouth. ‘Beth.’

  They both laughed contentedly, and she lay in his arms and for a fleeting moment felt a spasm of guilt about Luke, wondering how he would feel if he knew what had just happened; and then stopped wondering, and waited for what she knew must soon happen again; and again.

  *

  Luke saw Lady Torrance slapping twice at the back of her neck, and then at her left wrist.

  ‘That’s something you’re going to have to cope with,’ she said to Morwenna Ross. ‘Midges. They’re famous round here, aren’t they? Or infamous. Visitors aren’t going to be able to concentrate on much else.’

  ‘I’ve been going into this,’ Ogilvie piped up. ‘There’s a new machine which has been devised to kill them. I’ve got the specification back in the office. It sounds as though they’ve found the answer at last.’

  Yet another wonderful breakthrough, thought Luke, to add to all the others that had promised so much and failed so dismally.

  The four of them walked from the hotel through a windbreak of trees towards the restored croft, Luke shifting the canvas bag he was carrying from one hand to another, hearing the occasional squeak and rattle from inside. Patches of raw ground alternated with small plantings of saplings. Shreds of timber and bushes were humped into the apparent makings of a bonfire on the edge of a small lochan, whose shallow yet dark waters were contaminated by builders’ rubble.

  ‘That had better be cleared up by opening day,’ said Ogilvie threateningly.

  The path was better laid than the old track which would once have led to the turf-roofed cottage. And that roof was now in better repair than it would have been originally. A few yards from the main building, a small barn seemed to be forcing its ragged stones up out of the earth. Between it and the squat front door a headstone in the grass looked garishly new, although an attempt had been made to rusticate it. Morwenna turned to Luke for guidance, but Ogilvie strutted forward. Carrying a clipboard, he was prepared to tick off one item after another as they proceeded round the site. Luke had provided every last little detail of those notes, swotted up from page and screen and simplified for Ogilvie’s benefit. In his own mind they needed no explanations, though here everything was more vivid and immediate: here was the reality, in three dimensions. Why, then, should it all look so false, like a film set?

  ‘That stone is in memory of a young son of the family who enlisted in the Countess of Sutherland’s Regiment,’ said Ogilvie solemnly, ‘and was killed in the Peninsular War.’

  Lesley Torrance looked puzzled. ‘But if he was so loyal and remembered with respect, how could their family be thrown out?’

  As Ogilvie turned over a page in search of more details, Luke added: ‘If a crofter’s son didn’t enlist when called upon, the family would be evicted. Sometimes the man of the house would be offered a small patch of land if his boys would enlist — and then when they’d gone off to the wars, the factor reneged on the agreement and chucked the family out anyway.’

  ‘Thank you, Drummond, thank you. I was about to come to that.’

  The sun came out suddenly, igniting a golden blaze in clumps of gorse across the bleakness of the moorland.

  Indoors, the croft was much darker until Ogilvie, consulting his clipboard, found a switch and some low-wattage light bulbs came on, set in ragged gaps between the calculatedly uneven stones of the wall, plastered and held together by plugs of clay to make them draught-proof. The exposed roof timbers were of crudely sawn bog fir. At one end of the building was a byre; the other end was living accommodation. The floor throughout was an uneven surface of hard trodden earth. There was a box bedstead in one corner, and opposite it a bench with several cardboard labels, including one rough sketch of a military medal of some kind.

  Morwenna Ross turned to Luke. ‘I think you’ve got some of Lady Torrance’s wonderful finds in that bag.’

  He set it on the end of the bench and groped into it like a lucky dip. The ribbon of the medal he produced was faded, but the medal itself had been polished and gleamed proudly as he laid it on the cardboard marker. Beside it he spread a number of rings and pins, and a small, battered teapot.

  Morwenna smiled graciously at Lady Torrance. ‘We’ll link them with their appropriate captions in due course.’

  Ogilvie went on reciting from his clipboard as if laying a blessing upon the display. ‘Those who tried to call upon ancient rights and stay in their homes were continually harassed. Water bailiffs were paid handsomely to watch over lakes and creeks day and night, to keep the locals from fishing as they had been accustomed to do. From now on all fishing rights were reserved for wealthy visitors, many of them the Duke of Sutherland’s f
riends from England. If the locals’ animals strayed, they could be impounded and the owners fined. Few of them had any money, so had to hand over their pathetic little personal valuables, such as heirlooms like’ — he pointed dramatically — ‘medals awarded for gallantry in the Napoleonic wars.’

  Mementoes, thought Luke, which had somehow survived to be passed down through the families of men who had wrested them from the downtrodden as punishment and kept them as trophies rather than as genuinely needed payment, to be gradually discarded through junk shops by their descendants.

  ‘We shall need to get some hangings for the wall,’ said Morwenna.

  ‘A tapestry?’ said Lesley Torrance.

  Luke wondered whether Morwenna Ross had caught the tinge of scepticism in that remark. ‘Not many families would have run to that.’ He kept his voice respectful, which did not prevent Ogilvie from glaring disapproval at him. ‘Though they would, of course, have had some sort of curtains round the bed.’

  As they emerged, blinking, into daylight, a group of men like beaters came plodding out of a cluster of gorse bushes. But there was no shooting party to justify their movements. They could equally have been a gang of old-time cattle rustlers biding their time, sizing up the strengths and weaknesses of the land and its defenders.

  ‘Waiting till we’re out of the way,’ Ogilvie snapped, ‘until they start smashing things up again.’

  Old Mrs Aird was waiting outside the hotel. Not specifically waiting for the visitors, thought Luke: just waiting, as part of the whole ambience.

  Lesley Torrance moved away from the others to speak to her. Luke felt the old crone was not quite real. Somehow he was seeing an old woman in a shawl and rough skirts, crouching over a peat fire like some overdone character in a pseudo-historical film. Then, quite clear and present in front of him, shifting from one vision to another, the woman was in fact dressed in a plain dark blue blouse, an even darker blue skirt, and a heavy grey cardigan. Yet her eyes were staring not at anything or anybody here and now, but at something distant in time, in a less comfortable past.

  As he moved past the two women he heard Mrs Aird’s doom-laden mumble. ‘May a shroud be spun for the chief who runs after money.’ Part of her repertoire of sayings real or bogus.

  Ogilvie made one of those impatient little croaks in this throat that Luke knew all too well from interminable meetings in the Ross building.

  ‘We really will have to find a way of getting rid of that insolent old woman. Quite out of keeping with our image.’

  At dinner that evening he threatened to dominate the conversation with his summary of what they had found and what they hadn’t found and what had to be tackled urgently. There was no break in the harangue until, when he paused briefly to draw breath, Lesley looked pleadingly at Morwenna across the table and asked in a rush: ‘That loutish Ferguson character. Exactly what is the situation between him and Mr Ross — or Ross Enterprises in general? Simply some dispute about estate borders?’

  Ogilvie looked eager to pontificate about this, too, but Morwenna beat him to it. ‘More to it than that. It goes back further. The two families have been business rivals for more than a century. There were clashes in Newfoundland and Canada — much larger concerns than here. And twice in our own times Mr Ross has bought out Ferguson. Leaving him near bankruptcy. Made a poor deal of everything he put his hand to.’

  ‘And round here,’ Ogilvie interrupted, ‘Ferguson was not alerted to the purchase of the hotel and the derelict croft, and enough surrounding land to make the restoration project viable, until too late. We did it very quietly through a holding company.’ His audience was left with the impression that this had all been Ogilvie’s skilful work.

  Luke went on eating, wondering about the ramifications of the divorce and Nadine Ross’s remarriage to Sholto Ferguson. Part of a tit-for-tat? How childish these captains of industry could get! Or maybe it went beyond mere spite. Maybe Ferguson had hoped his new bride would tell him some crucial Ross business secrets.

  Luke felt contempt for all this, even for the firm he worked for; yet he had to admit he enjoyed keeping tabs on things, even the seedier things, adding to his store of knowledge, able to call up a relevant fact from his files or machine memory or even, most enjoyably, direct from his own memory.

  What sort of bloody job do you call that, for Christ’s sake? If you’d had to work your guts out with real men, the way I've had to …

  His father’s voice was startlingly clear above the others’ conversation.

  ‘You all right, Drummond?’ Ogilvie seized an opportunity to reassert himself.

  ‘Fine, sir.’

  ‘Thought you were looking a bit seedy. Food’s all right?’

  ‘Fine, thank you.’

  ‘Not used to being out of the office, braving the wilds, eh?’

  As bad as Luke’s father.

  He was glad to be up early in the morning, ready to drive back to what he had to admit would be the comfort of his chair, his table, his computer screen and his bookshelves.

  Their departure was delayed by Ogilvie making some aggressive phone calls about security arrangements, growing more and more irritable as he was passed from one office to another, until he could slam the receiver down and say, ‘Well, took some doing, but I think I’ve made that clear.’

  Like some guardian spirit forever watching over the place, Mrs Aird was outside to watch them leave. As Lesley Torrance passed her, Luke heard the old woman murmur: ‘You’ll be the one to understand the way of it. You have the gift.’

  She said nothing to Morwenna Ross, but the two of them stared at each other until Luke had turned the car out on to the road.

  They passed the Rent House, where the workmen were tackling the collapsed scaffolding. A couple paused to watch them go, but made no sign.

  As if Lesley Torrance’s remark yesterday had rankled, Morwenna Ross said: ‘One wall in there must be reserved for the tapestry when it’s found.’

  When? Luke glanced in his mirror and caught a glimpse of Lady Torrance’s sceptically raised eyebrow, and knew what it was saying. If …?

  But aloud she was saying politely: ‘I’m still hazy about this whole question of the tapestry. How could anything of any size or complexity be woven in … well, the conditions they lived in then?’

  ‘A group of devoted women in the family,’ Morwenna intoned with almost religious fervour, ‘worked together in a communal effort. They must have felt the threat coming closer, and wanted to leave some memory of themselves as a community.’ As the car came out of the shadow of a line of birches into sunlight, she added a virtual command: ‘We shall find it. We must.’

  *

  It was mid afternoon when they slid into Ogilvie’s parking slot behind the Ross building. Luke had dropped Morwenna Ross and Lesley Torrance at the hotel, but Ogilvie, as could have been predicted, wanted to round things off with his usual neatness.

  ‘Must get a full report off to Jack, eh, Mrs Ross? He’ll want to know just what I … what we’ve made of things on site.’

  Ogilvie was devoted to despatching reports, memoranda and bulletins to Toronto. He wanted to keep up a day-to-day, almost hour-by-hour, record of his dedication to the Ross cause. Never a moment omitted, never a breathing space.

  Morwenna was staring quizzically at him. ‘Jack? Oh, yes, of course.’ She explained to Lesley, yet in some way was implying something to Ogilvie: ‘Jacques Hunter, in charge of head office in Toronto. Mr Hunter’s the real power behind the throne — or Mr Ross’s wheelchair, I suppose one might say.’ Her emphasis on the ‘Mr’ was undoubtedly for Ogilvie’s benefit.

  Beth was in the library, spreading out some photographs along the table. Luke looked at the pale gleam of her throat in the afternoon light through the tall west window, and wondered if she had been waiting for him to return, as in that not so distant past when she would have wanted his report on what had happened and gone over every exasperating or amusing detail, and then rounded the day off by going co
mfortably to bed.

  He was temped to kiss the back of her neck — lightly, affectionately but without implying too much.

  Instead he said brightly: ‘Well, what have you been doing while we were away?’

  She turned a couple of the photographs towards him.

  Before he could comment, Ogilvie came bustling in. ‘Hello, what have we here? What’s been going on while I’ve been away?’

  ‘They’re the work of Randal Grant. A photographer who’s been suggesting he work for us. Samples of his work. A magazine feature, taken in the sort of house that … well …’

  ‘Wanting to work for us? You didn’t commit yourself to anything?’

  Didn’t commit herself? Luke interpreted that quite differently; felt a jab of irrational anger; and knew Beth well enough to know that she was aware of it.

  ‘I’ve simply sent copies to Toronto in the usual way. I thought you’d want that.’

  ‘Well, I think you could have left that to me. As it is, I suppose I’d better follow up with a word to Jack’ — he caught Luke’s eye and hastily went on — ‘to Mr Hunter myself. But I hope you haven’t offered this person too much encouragement. We’ve always used one of the bigger agencies.’ He began sorting through the pictures, and said reluctantly: ‘Hm. Rather good. Where were they taken?’

  Luke knew that Beth was having to make an effort at being innocent and offhand. ‘I — er, I understand they come from … from Lockhart House.’

  ‘Lockhart House? Just a minute. Good God, don’t you know … isn’t that —’

  ‘The Ferguson household,’ said Luke. ‘Our old friend Colonel Sholto Ferguson.’