The Merciless Dead

by John Burke

  Randal Grant scrambled out on to the soggy ground, and obediently paced round the crumbling remains. Luke thought irritably that he already had file upon file of similar views neatly annotated in his archives. Later he would have the pleasure of sifting through this intruder’s resulting prints and discarding the lot.

  As they were approaching Achnachrain, he said: ‘On our right, down by that burn, that’s one of the late Sholto Ferguson’s plantations.’

  ‘Not any more it isn’t,’ said Ross.

  ‘No longer in this world to irritate us,’ said Ogilvie eagerly, to show that here he was in the know.

  ‘There’s always you around to fulfil that function.’ Ross grinned an evil grin in what he calculated must be Ogilvie’s direction. The old man might have mellowed in some ways, but he still needed a cringing subordinate to vent his spasmodic irritations on. ‘And for your information, gentlemen, Ferguson lost that property while he was still alive. Though he didn’t know it.’ He was sounding gleeful now, like a small boy tipping a hated school bully into a pond. ‘We bought it through his creditors while he wasn’t looking. I’m thinking of establishing a Timber Research Centre there.’

  ‘A wonderful idea, Mr Ross,’ Ogilvie fawned. ‘It’ll bring so much into the region.’

  ‘Might bring you here for a holiday? A week or two’s outdoor exercise would do you a world of good. Roll up your sleeves and saw a few logs. Find out what real work is.’ The main reason for Ogilvie being brought along was still clearly to be the butt of the old man’s rancour.

  ‘One of the Sutherlands’ factor’s nastiest efforts.’ Luke was pointing out a clachan within a crumpled ring-dyke. ‘When he’d set the place on fire, the stocks of butter and cheese the family were trying to save melted and ran down the slope.’

  ‘Just the same as the American settlers treated the food stores of the Ojibwa,’ commented Randal Grant.

  For the last few miles Luke had been anticipating a few blockages and hostile demonstrations. Instead, stretches of road were being trimly repaired, and a gate was being set up with a bright new signboard at the entrance to the spruce plantation. Two men, dressed smartly in matching shirts and denims, unloading pallets from a truck, straightened up and gave a casual but respectful salute as the Ross contingent drove past.

  ‘Those security men I recruited seem to know their job,’ smirked Ogilvie.

  ‘Or Mr Hunter’s achieved a lot in the couple of days he’s been here,’ said old Mr Ross tartly.

  They passed the old Rent House, still bristling with scaffolding, and arrived at the Raven Hotel.

  Mrs Aird was waiting by the main entrance as the travellers got down. She looked each one up and down, nodding and ticking them off in her mind, until she came to Luke. He smiled, expecting that knowing little nod of hers in return. Instead, as she stared into his eyes the blood drained from her dark little face, leaving it as blanched as her voice. ‘No, oh no.’ She stumbled to one side, looking away from him and shivering.

  Waldo was lowering the wheelchair out with Ross fidgeting in it. Mrs Aird moved towards him, still avoiding Luke’s gaze and staring into the old man’s face.

  ‘It’s true the way it was promised. Ye’ll be bringing them back.’

  Old Ross craned forward as he had been doing so often, striving to get a hazy picture into focus. ‘And that’ll be a great day, right?’

  Ogilvie, on his way to the hotel entrance, turned back and tried to urge Mrs Aird away. But Ross barked even more imperiously and groped a friendly hand towards her.

  She said: ‘The burning is nae finished. The embers will be breathed on.’ Without further explanation, she hobbled round the side of the hotel.

  Old Ross chuckled. He was caught up in the atmosphere, longing to believe in second sight, the evil eye, the prophecies of the ancient seers, all part of the atmosphere. ‘Now that’s what I call a character.’

  Almost, thought Luke, a TV sitcom character with a catchphrase. Only those catchphrases, repeated down the generations, had become sad, not comic.

  Indoors, Jacques Hunter was waiting, rather like Mrs Aird, to count them all in. Also he had an urgent message for Luke Drummond from Edinburgh. Ogilvie risked a plaintive glance at Ross. ‘That would be what they were trying to tell me on my mobile.’

  It was a message relayed from Luke’s sister. Their father was very ill. She thought Luke had better come immediately.

  Ogilvie was decisive. ‘Go ahead and phone home, Drummond. Explain that it’s impossible for you to get away right now.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure I don’t need to go anyway. He’s always having these turns, and none of them ever turns out to be serious.’

  When he rang, Dorothy was insistent. ‘It really is serious this time, Lukie. I don’t think he’s got long.’

  ‘It really won’t do,’ Ogilvie fretted.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Ross was wheeled up beside them. Luke was only halfway through an apologetic explanation when the old man interrupted. ‘Nonsense. Of course you must go, laddie.’ The word ‘laddie’ sounded incongruous in that accent, all part of an image which Ross was belatedly acquiring. ‘It’s right and proper,’ he said emphatically, with a glance over his shoulder in Randal Grant’s direction, ‘that a son should be at hand when his father needs him.’

  ‘And if you’re feeling guilty about it,’ said Jacques Hunter with a seriously friendly smile he had not shown before, ‘on the way back you can drive round some of the remoter Clearance sites and give us a report on the state of their maintenance. Croick, Inchbeath, those sort of places. We could then assess how they mesh in with our work so far.’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ said Ogilvie with quiet triumph, ‘we don’t have a spare vehicle here.’

  ‘Then find one,’ said Ross. ‘By first thing tomorrow morning.’

  *

  Rutherford nodded to the constable to start recording, and said: ‘Right, sir. Your name and present address, please.’

  ‘Look, I told ye all that oot there when ye brought me in.’

  The man was in his fifties, but the lines of resentment bitten into his face made him look older. His shabby tweed jacket might have come from a charity shop, or been snatched from the back of a pub chair.

  ‘For the sake of the tape, please,’ said Rutherford patiently — as patient as a bird of prey awaiting the moment to swoop.

  ‘Och, of all the … aye, well, I’m Ali Murdoch.’

  ‘Ali?’

  ‘Alistair. Alistair Murdoch. Of no fixed address. That’s the way you put it, isn’t it?’

  ‘No fixed address? You were found at your brother’s in —’

  ‘Och, aye. Only because that bastard threw me out, and I’m with Jim and the bairns until I’ve … well, found another job.’

  ‘Also present,’ Rutherford added in the direction of the recorder, ‘Detective Chief Inspector Rutherford and Detective Constable Mackay. Now then, Mr Murdoch, what was your occupation until you were thrown out, as you put it?’

  ‘Ye ken fine that I worked for the Fergusons o’ Lockhart House.’

  ‘In what capacity? On a regular basis?’

  ‘It was never what ye’d call regular. When it suited them. Or when there was a panic and the place had to be cleaned up. I had a cottage at the bottom of the grounds, so they could yell for me when they wanted something doing. Usually at the last minute, when madam had one of her fits on her.’

  ‘And when in the end you were dismissed, you decided to take a souvenir or two?’

  ‘I took nothing.’

  ‘You were paid off, and —’

  ‘That I wasnae. Just yelled at, and kicked out like some mongrel. As if it was my fault his woman’d had some pictures taken and I ought to have been there stopping it or something. No reasoning with the bastard.’

  ‘So on your way out you felt you’d help yourself to a few pieces to make up for it.’

  ‘I told you, never touched a thing.’

  Rutherford put the witch-b
rooch on the table between them.

  Murdoch licked his upper lip. ‘And what would that be?’

  ‘That would be the property of the Fergusons of Lockhart House — your employers, who you’ve robbed.’

  ‘Never seen it in my life before.’

  ‘Stole it,’ said Rutherford implacably, ‘after you’d had a big row with Ferguson and smashed his head in.’

  ‘I never … I … look, I never laid a finger on the man.’

  ‘Maybe you could plead self-defence. You claim the Colonel was in a bad temper about something. He went for you, you fought back —’

  ‘It wasnae like that.’

  Rutherford admitted to himself that the likelihood of this crumpled little wimp of a man tackling a man of Ferguson’s build and reputation was improbable. But he persevered. ‘After your set-to, you got out quickly, grabbing whatever you could.’

  ‘There was only that one wee thing.’

  ‘Ah, this thing? You’re admitting it now.’

  ‘All right, then. Just that one thing. But I didnae attack him, I just got oot as fast as I could — fast, the way he’d been ranting at me — and I just … och, so I did just grab that one wee thing as I went. So fashed wi’ the way that man treated me … wouldn’t pay me what he owed me …’

  ‘You could have taken him to court for non-payment of wages.’

  ‘Me? Taking a sodding Colonel to court? Och aye, an’ who’d be paying any attention to the likes of me?’

  ‘So you decided to steal —’

  ‘I wasnae myself. It just came over me, I … well, I helped myself as I went past. Just that one thing,’ Murdoch insisted plaintively.

  ‘And never raised a hand to Colonel Ferguson?’

  ‘I keep telling ye. Look, why not find about that other one?’

  ‘What other one?’

  ‘I wasnae the only one there that day. There was that car came in as I was leaving. Belting up the drive, spraying gravel all over me.’

  ‘Who was it? A regular visitor?’

  ‘Didnae see the face.’

  ‘If you’re making this up as you go along —’

  ‘I’m not. I’m telling you. There was this car there. A hire car.’

  ‘How d’you know it was a hire car?’

  ‘I know where it came from. Expensive job. Johnson’s by the airport.’

  ‘That’s something we can check on.’ Rutherford took a deep breath. ‘Now, let’s get this straight. Think carefully. We’re talking about the day of the murder, right?’

  ‘I’d not be wanting to say that. I mean, I only heard afterwards about it, and I never got down to —’

  ‘If you want to escape a charge of murder, or accessory to murder, as well as theft, you’ll get down to some serious work on your memory right now. The date. The time of day. Every last little detail …’

  *

  The closer Luke got to Thurso the deeper he drove into his childhood landscape. For some miles there had been a beautiful but bleak wilderness, shaped and limited only by the hunched hills of gorse to the north and a shadowy Ben Loyal to the west. But then, topping the slight rise three miles from home, he looked beyond the low ridge on to a gleaming sea, with the red-brown hulk of Orkney in a distant haze. To him the compact town was even more a wilderness — the dead land of his father’s coldness and scorn at everything the boy had loved most. The rasp of that voice was always there to torment him, with no Off switch. What sort of job is that, sitting in an effing library all day? Never find a woman who’d look at the likes of you twice.

  He had spent a good part of the previous evening extracting snippets of information for old Jamie from his laptop. The old man was in a mellow mood. He had reached his destination, he was pleased to be here and to be soaking up the atmosphere. ‘You sure do have a command of that machine of yours.’ Difficult to tell whether he was genuinely ignorant of the world of computers, leaving such things to subordinates, or if it was a pretence and he was merely in a rare patronizing mood. ‘Got the whole history of the Rosses in there?’

  ‘I keep adding to it. And finding all kinds of questions about different branches of the family. Some marrying into Indian families. Some descendants still proud of their mixed ancestry, some still not sure of the exact links.’

  ‘You’re enjoying your job?’

  ‘I am, sir.’

  ‘Good. Seems to me that with all you know about the past, you’ve got a good solid future with us. And on the subject of the Indians … well, it’s polite nowadays to call ’em Native Americans. Isn’t that right, Jacques?’

  ‘Only some of us happen to be Canadians.’ Jacques Hunter loomed over them. ‘Don’t want to interrupt, but I thought before it gets too dark you might have a look at the ground that’s been cleared for the Highland games and dancing.’

  His smile, an oddly twisted smile in that dark uncommunicative face, lingered in Luke’s mind, and was still there, haunting him, as he drove away early in the morning: not so much threatening as passing judgment. He wanted to settle down somewhere and chase up that worrying business about the two Ross threads, and maybe the Hunter involvement in the whole family pattern.

  But right now there was the more distasteful confrontation ahead.

  Rab Drummond had worked for years on the Orkney ferry out of Scrabster, retiring early after a dispute and claiming sickness benefit for a sudden onset of nervous spasms and an inexplicable pain in the left leg which went on plaguing him for years. In spite of this kind of disability he ranted almost without pause against his son for his lack of physical guts, lack of interest in maritime affairs, and ingratitude to the parents who had done so much for him. When he had a moment to spare from berating Luke he would turn on Dorothy and say, in various different ways, that you only had to look at her to see why she’d never catch a man for herself. Their mother’s attempted reproaches and her soothing remarks to her children were gradually worn down, just as she herself was, until her death became another unreasonable burden on her husband’s life.

  Luke could almost, shamefully, hope that this time his father’s illness was real. And lethal. But of course it wasn’t. He had been right: just another self-indulgent false alarm.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lukie.’ They were sitting in the window of the parlour that had hardly changed since Luke’s childhood, except that today his father wasn’t sitting in that creaky chair of his, waiting to snarl and attack without warning. ‘But it really did seem genuine. It got so bad after I’d rung you, they had him over to Inverness late last night. Operated. He had all the symptoms, the doctor said this morning.’

  ‘Symptoms of what?’

  ‘Gallstones. He was doubled up in pain, truly he was, Lukie. And the way he described it, they were sure it was at a dangerous stage, and they operated right away.’

  ‘Remember his kidney trouble that wasn’t kidneys at all? Just something he’d heard from another old soak in the bar.’ More like an old woman, thought Luke sourly, than an old man, picking up stray items from gossip and inflating them.

  ‘The surgeon said’ — it was the first time Dorothy had summoned up a feeble little attempt at a smile — ‘he’s what they call a church-window patient: hundreds of small panes. You know, like —’

  ‘Yes,’ said Luke, ‘I get it.’

  ‘Do you want to go in and see him? I mean, if it’s on your route back.’

  He wanted no such thing. But if he failed to visit the hospital then of course there would be reproaches: a scrawled, self-pitying letter, a spiteful phone call timed to interrupt him in the office, and all the usual abuse on the lines of ‘Call that a job?’ and ‘Running away from your responsibilities’ and ‘Don’t suppose you’re man enough to marry that little tart of yours and get down to real work and raise a family.’

  The only guilt Luke felt was at leaving poor Dorothy to cope with their father’s tantrums when he got back home.

  Leaving Thurso today was like that first escape. Going to university, in the teeth of h
is father’s scornful disbelief, had been a wonderful release into a world he soon fell in love with. And after his mother’s funeral, and after obligatory visits to the increasingly malicious widower, it was bliss to get back into what had become his wonderful retreat, the Ross Foundation library. There he was in charge. There he organized things the way he wanted them, enjoyed his skill in responding to any request, however complicated, from all departments in the Foundation, and set a tempo which only the occasional barb from the wasteland of his family home could disturb.

  And getting back to Beth. Always in the past she had been there, an essential part of his pleasure in getting back to warm, uncompleted routine. But this time, driving through the damp monotony of the flow-lands, the pleasure of anticipation abated. Something would have to be done. He had let her go too easily, too damned politely. He was suddenly angry with himself, suddenly determined not to let that creep Randal Grant, or David Ross, or whatever he cared to call himself, get his hands on her.

  He wrenched his thoughts away from that subject. It was becoming more painful than he wanted to admit. He tried to make himself concentrate on speculation about that unexpected Ross discrepancy. Should he come out with his interpretation of that discovery, and throw the whole project into chaos? First thing back in his own world, he would really have to wrestle with the tangle between old documents, microfiche, and the still undisciplined online transfers.

  If he had been really intent on dutifully visiting his father in Inverness, he would simply have taken the A9 and kept going. But Jacques Hunter’s suggestion that he should call in on a few historic sites while he was in the region was a good excuse for dawdling. There were so many places whose history he knew from those archives he loved to pore over, but few he had ever had cause to visit until old Jamie Ross’s pet project was upon them, becoming real and immediate.

  He swung westwards towards Strathnaver, one of the most heart-breaking of the valleys.

  The route took him past a neat little church, one of those built by Parliament to lure Highlanders away from their stubborn Catholic faith. It was a surprisingly squared-up building, almost a Lego toy, in a setting of low hillocks bare save for smudges of bell heather and some dark smears of forestry development. The unkempt churchyard was surrounded by a drystone wall gashed with a number of gaps where stones had fallen inwards. Headstones of uncared-for graves leaned at crazy angles. Luke knew he had let himself be drawn here to look for one particular burial, to confirm what he had read.