From London Far

by Michael Innes

  ‘That’s just what I used to say of my old man.’ Mrs Martin was suddenly as emphatic as she was inconsequent. ‘Lorst more jobs, ’e did, than the queen has bangles.’ She stopped and stared. ‘It wouldn’t be a gun, now?’ Her eyes widened. ‘Mr Meredith wouldn’t be going packing a gun?’

  ‘Packing a gun? Dear me, no. I have no intention of taking a firearm with me.’ Meredith smiled, suddenly understanding. ‘Ah, packing a gun. I perceive, Mrs Martin, that you do not go to the cinemas for nothing. And – well – last night I was very decidedly packing a gun.’

  ‘Which would be why, Mr Meredith, sir, there would be brains on your boots?’

  ‘Brains on my boots!’ Meredith recalled the Aubusson carpet and stared at his landlady in horror.

  Mrs Martin nodded with paralysing placidity. ‘They do say as how they splatter,’ she said. ‘They do say they splatter somethink chronic.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Mr Meredith, sir, and beg pardon for being inquisitial, but ’ow did you buy orf the police dorgs? Would it ’ave been wiv a chop?’

  ‘Really, Mrs Martin, the matter was not quite as you would appear to apprehend. It is hardly possible to explain–’

  ‘Wot I would ’ave you tell me, Mr Meredith, sir, is this: ’ow am I to explain the ’ounds when you and the young lady is gorn? For going I can see you are – and very natural too in the circumstantials. But the ’ounds will be inquired after, I don’t doubt.’ Her glance strayed to the desk at which Meredith had been writing, and to the substantial document which lay there. ‘Lord a mercy!’ she exclaimed. ‘If you haven’t been and wrote out a confession. Now just you be going and packing up unobtrusious like, and give that to me to put straight into the kitchen range.’

  It was plain that Mrs Martin supposed her learned lodger to have committed some homicidal act – probably of the species crime passionnel. It was equally plain that she had no thought of being other than an accessory after the fact. Meredith looked at her in some perplexity. ‘Perhaps,’ he said – and knew that his words were to be without inspiration – ‘perhaps the hounds will just go away.’

  Mrs Martin shook her head despondingly. ‘Would that I were Mandrake!’ she said – and paused as if to admire this literary turn of phrase. ‘Would that I were Mandrake Mr Meredith, sir.’

  ‘Mandrake, Mrs Martin?’ This was a reference altogether outside the circle of Meredith’s cultivation. ‘Do I understand you to refer to a plant of the genus Mandragora?’

  ‘A magician, Mr Meredith – one as wot changes ’umans into ’ounds reg’lar. And I could say I had done that to you and Miss Halliwell ’ere.’

  ‘Bless my soul!’ Meredith looked mildly surprised at this Circean proposal. ‘It would certainly be what might be termed a false scent. But I must assure you that you are altogether under a misapprehension. As far as I know, the police are not, in fact, looking for Miss Halliwell and myself; and I believe that none of the King’s judges would hold that I had committed a crime.’

  Mrs Martin shook her head sadly. ‘Ah, Mr Meredith, sir,’ she said, ‘they all believes that until the black and fatal moment comes. Would you be liking a taxi, or would it be more curcumspecial to go out by the back?’

  Meredith sighed. ‘The back, Mrs Martin – by all means, the back. And I hope to return to you in a few days’ time.’

  ‘Um,’ said Mrs Martin.

  ‘If I do not, you will find that suitable arrangements have been made. And I would like to say that, despite an abstraction and reserve of which no one is more painfully conscious than myself I have always greatly appreciated your kindly and competent ministrations.’

  ‘There, now – if you aren’t a regular gentleman!’ Dropping Meredith’s mutilated jacket and lifting up a crumpled apron, Mrs Martin wept. ‘I know as ’ow there will be money in it,’ she whimpered. ‘My hexclusive story in the Sunday papers and a photograph as well – ’olding the ’ounds, as likely as not. But oh, Mr Meredith, sir, would that I were Mandrake!’ And Mrs Martin ran blubbering from the room.

  ‘Really,’ said Meredith, ‘it is hard to know how to take this good woman. Not only is she assisting us, as she believes, to cheat the gallows, but she is taking that course without thinking twice about it. And although in this instance it is all to our benefit, I cannot help feeling that the morals of the Metropolitan populace have been somewhat impaired by the times we live in.’

  Jean Halliwell, who was endeavouring to take a comprehensive survey of her dilapidated person in two inches of pocket mirror, laughed aloud. ‘Juvenal speaks!’ she said. ‘Resolved at length – How does it go?’

  ‘Ah! you have remembered Johnson:

  Resolved at length, from vice and London far,

  To breathe in distant fields a purer air…’

  Meredith paused. ‘Well, I suppose that is just what we are going to do. The road to Moila lies right over peat and heather – to say nothing of some little part at least of the stormy waters of the North Minch. And, talking of Dr Johnson, he was there himself, you know, in 1773, or thereabouts. Boswell’s is a very amusing account of the whole adventure. There may be considerable charm in following some of his footsteps.’ And Meredith, momentarily seeing the hazardous escapade before him in the mild character of a literary pilgrimage, turned to search for an atlas. ‘When he met Lord Monboddo and debated whether our ancestors had tails–’

  ‘We shan’t meet Lord Monboddo.’ Jean had put her mirror away. ‘But we do hope to meet the arch-conspirator, Properjohn. A prim and harmless sort of name, don’t you think? But we may find ourselves rather wishing that we were Mandrake, nevertheless. That the distant fields will yield a purer air is altogether problematical.’

  Meredith, now studying a map, chuckled comfortably. ‘It will be an excellent plan to begin by making each other’s flesh creep. And here is one way to do it: let us remember last night and the very sufficient alarms we experienced on the mere periphery of the business. And by that measure let us compute the kind of reception we are likely to receive at its centre.’

  ‘Our arrival will at least be totally unexpected. For the gang must undoubtedly believe that we are dead.’

  ‘I am inclined to agree with you in that.’ And Meredith nodded – now gravely enough. ‘In addition to destroying we don’t know what compromising matter, the explosion was certainly designed to eliminate ourselves. But just what all these people made of the situation, it would be hard to say.’

  ‘I think I’d risk saying that they had once more lost the requisition book. Of course, it’s a terrifying organization and all that – but I have a kind of feeling that a pleasing vein of muddle runs right through it. Think of the absurdity of swallowing you as Vogelsang! Incidentally, and whether Bubear is alive still or dead, I’m banking a lot on that.’

  Meredith frowned. He was now packing a suitcase – which with him meant beginning with a substantial layer of books. ‘You mean that he will want to keep mum about the whole thing?’

  ‘Just that. He was careless, and as a result the real Vogelsang was killed and the whole depot or whatever it is to be called was abandoned and destroyed in a panic. He doesn’t know what you were after; he doesn’t perhaps really know whether you were the real Vogelsang or not; he just knows that both claimants to the name were killed – as was Marsden’s girl before she gave any information on the Mykonos Marbles. Now, Bubear has been cheating his bosses, as we know, and ten to one it will be his instinct to obscure the discreditable truth of last night’s junketings behind whatever fibs come first into his head. And there’s one other point – a fact I gathered when I was picking up what I could. This Vogelsang, as far as personal acquaintance goes, was to be quite a new contact. Properjohn had never met him. There may be a strong card in that yet.’

  Meredith, having half-filled his suitcase with Latin authors, had gone to seek pyjamas and socks. ‘Your mind’, he called from his bedroom,
‘moves naturally to the tune of romance – or indeed of that strip-fiction in which you and Mrs Martin are both so well read. Or I ought to say so well seen – a capital use for an old idiom. For the effort of reading is unnecessary with such things, and hence their charm.’

  ‘I’m making the effort to read Bradshaw. And it will be effort, I expect, all the way. To get on trains and to stay there. Likely enough, it will be corridors all the time.’

  ‘All that.’ Meredith reappeared with a safety razor and a tooth-brush. ‘Moreover, our movements may be complicated by coming upon areas still under some species of military jurisdiction. I should imagine that those islands–’ He broke off, his eye meditatively upon Jean. ‘By the way…it rather occurs to me that your attire… I mean that if it is really cold–’ And Meredith stopped, much confused.

  ‘You mean I look as if I had come out of a rag-bag – and you would prefer to travel with something from a band-box? But that is going to be fixed right away. Mrs Martin is taking upon herself to lend me an outfit of her daughter Minnie’s things. Are you nearly ready? I think I’ll go and get into them now.’

  ‘Minnie Martin’s things?’ Meredith appeared scarcely relieved. ‘I really greatly fear–’

  But Jean was gone. And Meredith crossed to the window and peered thoughtfully across the square. It occurred to him to count the plane trees; he had never done so before; he felt it unlikely that he would have the chance again. Then his glance strayed over familiar objects: a shelter, a ruined house, a great tank of water filmed with rust and oil. He turned at a sound behind him and found that it was Jean who had re-entered the room. Obscurely perplexed, he studied her as she stood fully equipped for travel. ‘Minnie’s clothes?’ he said.

  ‘Of course.’

  He shook his head. ‘I always understood that clothes, although they may be very simple, must be good. To give a certain effect, that is to say. And I am sure that Minnie, although an excellent child–’

  ‘You have been misinformed.’ Jean produced the two inches of mirror once more. ‘It’s not the quality. It’s the way one puts them on.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Meredith was interested and impressed. ‘I am afraid that I know far too little of the mundus mulierum.’

  ‘Unlike Higbed, to whom all things womanly are an open book.’

  ‘Dear me! I had entirely forgotten him. Have you any idea of what befell the poor man?’

  Jean shook her head. ‘None whatever. We were separated quite early on. I have no more idea of what they did with him than I have – or these clerkly men had – of why he was wanted. Or requisitioned, as they liked to say.’

  ‘Well, well!’ said Meredith. ‘I wonder if we shall meet him in Moila?’

  Part Two

  THE FLYING FOXES OF MOILA

  I

  The Isle of Moila lies off the west coast of Scotland at a point not remote from Loch Torridon, and is separated from the mainland by the Sound of Moila, a shallow and stormy channel, treacherously strewn with submerged rock, which at its narrowest point shows a breadth of little more than a quarter of a mile. The coast is here precipitous, the island being but an outlying spur to the central massif of Ben Carron, from which some prehistoric cataclysm has sundered it by the narrow gash of the Sound. It thus comes about that the cliffs of the mainland are higher than, and dominate, those of the Isle – so that were warfare to be supposed in these well-nigh solitary fastnesses it would appear that a light artillery could quickly subdue the few hundred acres to which Moila extends and destroy whatever of human artifice had been here reared amid the solemn architecture of Nature.

  But such building as Moila shows antedates by far the effective exploitation of gunpowder; and Castle Moila was for centuries second only to Tantallon in the impregnability which its situation conferred. For the westermost tip of the island is formed by a precipitous peninsula, somewhat the shape of a gaping beak or lobster’s claw, to which the only access is by a short and winding causey dizzily poised above a seething sea some hundred feet below. On this peninsula the castle is built, its massive keep facing towards the island, and its two main courts occupying each a limb or jaw of the peninsula and crowning these naturally inexpugnable ramparts with a further vallum of frowning and crenellated stone. It thus comes about that from the inner embrasures of the building the prospect is of a small and secluded natural anchorage nestling within the foundations of the castle far below. Beyond this the view is of sea and the dimness of distant islands, with, however, the little islet of Inchfarr scarcely more than a furlong’s length away.

  The greater part of Castle Moila had been a ruin for centuries – and indeed anyone studying the beautiful series of steel-faced etchings of the building which Robert Billings included in his Baronial and Ecclesiastical Antiquities just a hundred years ago would suppose that no corner of it could remain inhabitable. A habitation, however, it has always been, and its tenant the hereditary Captain holding from the Marquis of Raasay. Only at the beginning of the present century, and when Fortune possessed this dignitary of another castle altogether more eligible for residence – substantially weatherproof indeed – did this venerable disposition cease to obtain. The hereditary Captain moved out, taking all his possessions with him in three market wains and a governess cart, and Castle Moila was for a time delivered over to the gulls and the gannets.

  These fowl had for centuries proliferated on Inchfarr (a fact, this, which was to be peculiarly fateful for the history we relate) and now upon the abandonment of the castle they extended the boundaries of their domain. Soon the dark and towering walls of the great ruin were everywhere white with their droppings, and gleamed like an inexplicable fantasy of snow against the long green rigs of poppy-sprinkled oats on the body of the island. And regularly once a fortnight in the tourist season there would appear from Oban a far-ranging paddle steamer, its decks supporting some hundreds of trippers, two or three favoured rams or ewes in pens, and an old man who played Hebridean music on a xylophone. This argosy would thump its way cautiously between Moila and Inchfarr, and at an appropriate moment a long wail from its siren would start myriads of seafowl from the rocks and battlements to circle and scream in the air. Whereupon the paddle steamer, its mission accomplished, would waddle round Inchfarr and head for home, while the passengers, their thirst for natural beauty slaked, would retire to a cold luncheon in the saloon. At irregular intervals, too, there would come a smaller steamer, decently propelled by a screw, and devoted to that transporting of flocks of sheep from island to island which is one of the few observable activities of the region. This steamer would tie up within the very foundations of the castle – up and through which and across the causey to the island its baaing and bleating cargo would then be discharged. For some years these were the only human activities that Castle Moila saw. Had there been anything to shoot on the island, the place might have been called a shooting-box and let to some guileless American. Had there been a stream to fish, some financier from Glasgow might have been found to sophisticate the ruins into a hydropathic or a hotel. As it was, the birds had it all their own way.

  There came a time, however, when the hereditary Captain found his well-roofed mainland domicile increasingly embarrassed by the characterful behaviour of a number of elder sisters. When the finally disruptive moment arrived, two of these ladies – whose names were Miss Isabella and Miss Dorcas Macleod – flatly declined to retire to the dower house of the estate, maintaining that the great-aunt who held sway there was a witch. Whereupon the hereditary Captain bethought himself of what he held from the Marquis of Raasay, consulted with his factor on certain quantities of floor-board, wainscoting, and slate, with his grieve on a due provision of goats, pigs, and chickens, and, finally, with the Misses Isabella and Dorcas themselves on a convenient date for their early remove to the island. Then, and by way of graceful afterthought, he moved sundry Writers to the Signet, Advocates, and Solicitors to the Supreme Co
urts in Edinburgh to effect a transference of staff and baton. Miss Isabella Macleod had barely ceased coping with the more obtrusive impertinences of the gulls and gannets about her new abode when she was informed that the Marquis of Raasay had gained the Royal concurrence in a notable change in feudal tenure. She was herself hereditary Captain of the Castle of Moila.

  To hold the office, however, it proved to be necessary that Miss Isabella should in person present the Marquis with a pair of velvet breeches yearly – and as this nobleman (with great public spirit) had agreed to govern one of his sovereign’s remoter colonies, the feudal service thus required was not merely rather indelicate, but quite impracticable as well; and the matter was finally adjusted by the lady’s despatching a substantial cheque annually to her overlord’s bankers. Her purse being already in the straitened case usual with those offshoots of the Highland aristocracy who have failed to attach themselves in some way to the prosperity of the Sasunnach, the charge was a considerable burden. Nor was Miss Isabella’s displeasure in any way mitigated when the Marquis from his antipodean retreat ingeniously turned himself into a Limited Company. That the descendant of an earl who fell on Flodden Field should be periodically in need of velvet breeches is in itself not probable; nevertheless, there was about the transaction a colouring of antiquity that had rendered tolerable even the compounding for it with a cheque that would have bought several complete wardrobes. But Limited Companies, while they live on cheques and indeed for them, are inconceivable in breeches, velvet or otherwise; and Miss Isabella never put her signature to this yearly quittance without following it with a Gaelic curse upon the composition of which, pacing her battlements in the long twilight of the Islands, she was accustomed to bestow considerable literary skill. But as the cheque made its way direct to Leadenhall Street and was there dealt with by a resident of Plumstead not particularly well-traded in tongues these careful exercises in a language admirably adapted for imprecation were taken to represent merely so many styles and titles which this remote Celtic lady thought proper to append to her name.