Lament for a Maker

by Michael Innes

  I recalled, as one might recall something peculiarly absurd in a dream, that I was a chance guest going to welcome Christmas Day in the apartments of a friendly and courteous host. And again I wished I had brought that poker. We climbed steadily – Hardcastle in front moving with a sinister deliberation, like a warder setting a decent pace to the gallows – an unexpectedly broad staircase that went to and back in short flights, lit at every second flight by narrow windows. The skies must have partially cleared for the moment; through the windows came the faint pallid gleam of an uncertain moonlight reflected from snow; and it was this that gave the few seconds succeeding their most macabre effect. We had climbed it seemed interminably – I was just deciding that Guthrie must hold his vigils at the very top of the tower – when from above us there rang out a single fearful cry. A moment later the gleam from the window I was passing momentarily vanished as if a high-speed shutter had been flashed across the moon. And then – and after an appreciable interval – a faint, dull sound floated up from below.

  We must both have guessed more or less what had happened. I felt that faint thud as infinitely more horrible than the cry which had preceded it; Hardcastle, three or four steps above me, called out: ‘Great God, if I didn’t warn him!’ And then we heard footsteps.

  What happened then happened in a flash. A young man appeared at the turn above us. Hardcastle’s torch caught him for a second and for a second only – nevertheless I received an extraordinarily vivid impression of passion: a dark skin drained of colour and stretched over a set jaw, an eye that smouldered like Guthrie’s own. Hardcastle cried out: ‘Lindsay!’ and made a lunge so clumsy it occurred to me to wonder if he were drunk; a second later the lad had slipped past us unheeding and was gone. Perhaps I ought to have grabbed at him myself; I suppose at the vital moment I felt the situation too obscure for action. Hardcastle seemed to hesitate whether to turn back; then he gave a curse and hurried on. I could only follow.

  We were still a couple of storeys from the top, but now the staircase narrowed and there were no more windows. On each landing as we came up I had noticed a single massive door; we now passed one more of these and arrived panting together before the last of all, which was if anything more massive than the rest. Hardcastle threw it open. We were looking into a low, square room furnished as a study and lit as usual by a few candles. In the middle of it stood Sybil Guthrie.

  For a moment we stood like actors holding a scene for the curtain; then Hardcastle bore down upon Sybil in a sudden unaccountable fury. ‘You wee limmer – !’

  The phrase was no doubt insulting. I gave myself the satisfaction of taking the scoundrel by the shoulder – perhaps by the collar – and telling him to shut up. The action had a more decisive effect than I intended. Hardcastle at once became glumly and pertinaciously passive, with the result that from that moment I found myself saddled with the direction of affairs at Erchany. Willynilly, I am in charge until some competent and interested person arrives.

  I turned to Sybil. ‘Where is Guthrie?’

  For a fraction of a second she hesitated, looking warily but composedly from one to the other of us. Then quietly, a little unsteadily, she said. ‘He has fallen from the tower.’ And as if in explanation she pointed across the room to a door close to the one by which we had entered.

  I took Hardcastle’s lantern from him and explored. What I found was a small, narrow bedroom, with the same narrow slits for windows as in the staircase, and with a second stout door, now swinging open upon blackness, almost directly opposite the door in which I stood. I crossed the little bedroom to this further door and looked out. I had to clutch at the jamb as I did so, for the wind – though I believe it was moderating steadily – was terrific up here. Before me was a narrow platform of much-trodden snow, bounded by a low castellated parapet – the original battlements, I suppose, of the keep. I staggered cautiously to the verge and looked down. There was nothing to be seen but blackness, and nothing to be heard but the whip and sigh of the wind. I remembered the length of the climb I had just made up the tower staircase and knew that, however thick the blanket of snow beneath, the man who had gone over the parapet was now dead. My first thought – it shows how curiously practical one turns in a crisis – was of relief that there would be no agonised need of medical aid. My second and related thought was that we were most awkwardly isolated should it prove to be some deep mischief that was afoot. And my third thought was simply an image of the rascal Hardcastle, for in my mind already mischief and that ugly brute went together.

  I turned back into the study doing my best to think fast. One thing was clear to me on a moment’s reflection. Ranald Guthrie, unless drunk or really demented or walking in sleep or trance, was most unlikely to have taken that drop by sheer accident. It was with a shock that I remembered Sybil’s flat words: ‘He has fallen from the tower.’ They implied – taken in strictness they positively stated – that the merest misadventure was in question. And suddenly I saw the full implications of such a violent and mysterious affair as this, and of the atmosphere in which I had been living these thirty hours past. Suspense, fear, black humours, learned rats, violent death: the sum of them gave one unescapable answer – suspicion. Erchany as the exclusive territory of a malign enchanter was a fantasy of the past; what had happened in the tower tonight made it the territory too of coroners and plain-clothes policemen. And ten miles away over formidable snows there was no doubt a rural constable; twenty miles away a sergeant; and in Aberdeen or Edinburgh perhaps the sort of officer who would deal efficiently with such a matter as this. I must have looked from Sybil to Hardcastle and from Hardcastle to Sybil with an expression of positively virgin responsibility.

  Guthrie was undoubtedly dead: nevertheless common humanity dictated that our first real effort should be to reach his body. If, however, we were on the scene of the crime I felt that neither Sybil – whose presence in the tower was unexplained – nor the sinister Hardcastle had better be left in sole possession of it. Sybil could be sent to Christine – only the task of telling Christine what had happened I ought to perform myself, and it must wait until I had been outside and made sure. At the moment, therefore, the three of us in the tower had better stick together.

  During these researches into the etiquette of violence I was looking around. I think you had better have the lie of the land as I made it out now and later.

  This top storey of the tower is set back from the storeys below, and is in consequence completely islanded by a narrow battlemented platform – a parapet walk – from which there is a sheer drop to the house and the moat beneath. There are two staircases: one is a little spiral staircase that emerges through a trapdoor upon a corner of the open parapet walk; the other is the staircase by which I had come, and which opens within the topmost storey and directly upon the study. From the study one door gives upon the parapet walk and one upon the little bedroom – from which in turn another door gives upon the parapet walk. All the windows are of the narrow defensive sort.

  I decided that if possible I ought to lock up. So I took Hardcastle’s lantern again and went to explore the spiral staircase, as also the state of the snow on the platform. It was my impression that there was evidence of a good deal of coming and going about that wind-swept ribbon of battlement, but already the marks were everywhere indistinct and it would have been waste of time trying to direct on them the eye of an amateur detective. I noted the mere fact that recently, within, say, the last half-hour – there had been something like commotion on this hazardous spot; then I went on to the trapdoor. And here the snow was disturbed in a way that afforded definite evidence; recently, the trapdoor had been open. A tug at a stout iron ring told me the door was now bolted from below; a moment’s fumbling found me what I wanted, a bolt that could be pushed home from above. It moved easily; one entrance to the tower-top was secured.

  I moved back as quickly as was prudent, pausing only for a glance at the sky. The moon was behind a rack of clouds, but here and there was a star
or a group of stars: what must have been Orion’s belt appeared as suddenly as a line of streetlights while I looked. I guessed that daylight would see the snow stretched beneath a clear sky and that for the time being the last flakes had fallen.

  I returned to the study and found Sybil and Hardcastle standing very much as I had left them. I said: ‘Now we’ll go downstairs.’ We trooped out to the little landing and I locked the door and put the key in my pocket. Study, bedroom and battlements were inaccessible. Hardcastle muttered something indistinguishable – perhaps it was an attempt to vindicate his stewardship of Erchany – but I was already leading the way down at a run. When we got to ground level Hardcastle indicated another and smaller stair. I locked a further door giving access to the tower staircase and we went down further to a sort of basement. From the tower-top, I realized, Guthrie must have fallen clean into the moat. It was when we came to a little door giving on this that Sybil spoke for the first time since she had said ‘He has fallen from the tower.’ What she said now was: ‘I’m coming too.’ And she produced her torch and switched it on with an air of such determination that I knew expostulation would be useless.

  In the moat the snow was deep and so powder-soft that I wondered for a moment against my better knowledge whether Guthrie might not have survived. Our feet sank down to the knee as we rounded an angle of the tower, Hardcastle’s lantern making a wavering circle of light around us and Sybil’s torch exploring the moat in front. A moment later we saw ahead the expected dark splash on the snow. We hurried forward. My heart leapt. The dark splash had stirred.

  There was a wild cry – Hardcastle’s. I glanced at him; the sweat was pouring down his face in that icy ditch; he had completely lost his nerve. My glance returned to the vague bulk in front and I realised that what had moved was the figure of a man, crouched over the body. The figure straightened itself as we came up. A voice said: ‘He’s dead.’

  When I wrote that Guthrie’s end had been horrible I was thinking chiefly of the full, frank satisfaction in the deep Scottish voice which spoke these words. Dead men hear no curses and mundane mire and fury is nothing to a ghost; still I hope that none will sound that note in my requiem. I said as sternly as if I had been owner of Erchany and chief constable of the county in one: ‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’

  The stranger looked at me squarely in the lantern-light, an elderly handsome man with the life of the land writ large on his ruddy face. ‘It’s Rob Gamley I am and I came maybe to have a word with the laird. But the laird’s having a word by now with them are fitter to deal with him.’

  It occurred to me as I turned from this savage and unseemly speech and examined the body to wonder if Guthrie had left a single sorrowing heart behind him. Perhaps Christine’s – I didn’t know. Certainly he was gone to the judgement at which Gamley had hinted; his neck was broken and his death must have been instantaneous.

  Standing in that little group of people round the dead man, I had to consider what was proper to be done. It may be that I should have insisted that the body be left where it was; one does this, I suppose, where there is suspicion of foul play. But was there, substantially and after all, such suspicion? On one hand there was Sybil’s statement that Guthrie had fallen from the tower; on the other hand there was only what must be called atmospheric evidence – violence and mystery existing merely in the air or uniquely embodied in the fantastic incident of the learned rat. In sum, I saw no utility and much indecency in leaving what was mortal of Ranald Guthrie in the moat – an indecency which the man Gamley’s bitter speech had somehow underlined. So I said briefly: ‘Miss Guthrie had better go ahead with the torch and lantern and we will follow with the body. Mr Gamley, you will please help.’

  Properly enough this time, Gamley took off his cap. The action attracted my eye and I saw that he was looking curiously and without friendliness at Hardcastle. And when I glanced in turn at Hardcastle I saw something extraordinary. The abominable creature appeared in mortal terror of Gamley and was keeping his distance as one might keep one’s distance from a bear on a tether. At the same time he was peering at Guthrie’s body with just the sort of excited, furtive interest I could imagine him giving to an obscene photograph. I had no notion what prompted either of these impulses, but the combination of them was somehow singularly disgusting. I much preferred Gamley’s irreverence. Acting on impulse – and, I suppose, high-handedly enough – I ordered Hardcastle into the house to find a resting-place for the body. Gamley and I followed with our burden as well as we could.

  We laid the dead man for the time being on a sort of stone table in a cellar hard by the door of the moat. Sybil played her part with the torch; then she said ‘I guess I take the task of breaking this to Christine’ and disappeared. It was good of her, I thought, and perhaps the best plan; I might have been clumsy enough.

  I sent Hardcastle for a sheet. Gamley, still cap in hand, took one long searching look at the body. Then he strode to the door. ‘Steady on,’ I said, ‘where are you off to?’ For I thought he was due to give some account of himself. He looked at me squarely again. ‘Young sir,’ he said, ‘I’m off to advise the Devil lock up his spoons and forks.’ And with that dark jest he disappeared.

  Here was the second mysterious visitor, I reflected, that I had let slip through my fingers that night. Erchany, well-nigh isolated from the world as it was, had proved mysteriously populous. Whence had Neil Lindsay come, and whence Gamley? Who had tied the messages to the rats? Who had been talking to Christine in the schoolroom? And had Hardcastle’s doctor ever arrived? I turned from these riddles to contemplate the larger riddle of death.

  Diana, a man can cry out in agony or fear, fall two hundred feet through the air, break his neck and much else, and look at the end of it all like a child asleep in a cradle! A trick of the muscles at the ultimate moment, no doubt, but something strange and terrible to contemplate nevertheless. Guthrie in his dust had returned to innocence; that sinister face, with the strongly marked features that speak of race, was stronger and purer, as if some artist had taken a sponge and swabbed the baser lines away. One reads of death showing such effects; to encounter them at such a violent issue was disconcertingly moving. I composed the body as I could, brushed the snow from face and hair, and waited.

  Presently Hardcastle returned with a sheet. Reasonably or unreasonably, I had formed the opinion that in his attitude to the dead man there was something positively indecent, and I found myself instinctively blocking his way at the door. He handed me the sheet sulkily, peering past me in the same absorbed way as before. ‘I suggest,’ I said, ‘that you go and tell your wife to make some tea or coffee. Something of the sort will be needed.’

  The unsavoury brute gave a gulp as if he were swallowing his true reactions to me. Then he said with a sort of elephantine cunning which I was at a loss to fathom: ‘Mr Gylby, you’ll have had a look at the body? It might have been robbed or the like?’

  ‘The police will inquire into that.’

  ‘But, sir, we might just give a bit look and see?’

  My anger against the noisome creature grew. I turned round and rapidly shrouded Guthrie’s body. ‘And now, Mr Hardcastle, we must get a message off to Kinkeig. The snowfall is over and there’s a drop in the wind. You must see if your odd lad can set out at daybreak.’ And I pushed the factor out of the cellar, locked the door and pocketed the key. I can only assure you that there is something in the atmosphere of the place that confirms me in my self-appointed role as warden of Erchany. Fortunately the minutes are flitting past as I write and presently I expect to resign honourably on the arrival of the law. Meantime, there is still a shock or two to record.

  On my locking the cellar door Hardcastle went off down the corridor in a huff and I was left to debate my next move. Nothing would have persuaded me to rummage about the body like a police-surgeon, but Hardcastle’s talk of robbery did put one idea in my head. It had taken me some time to shut up at the tower-top and get the little party to the moat;
when we arrived there we found the mysterious Gamley crouched beside the body. His identity would no doubt appear in good time, but might there not be evidence in the snow – perishable and best investigated at once – of how he had got there? I took up Hardcastle’s abandoned lantern and, before returning upstairs, slipped once more out to the moat.

  The wind which had so quickly obliterated intelligible traces on the battlements had been without force in this deep trench; every mark since the snow had ceased to fall heavily was legible. And the remoteness of Erchany was curiously brought home to me here; everywhere the snow was patterned over with the tracks of wild creatures that had sought shelter from the storm: the incisive pad of a fox, the little long-jumps of weasels, hither-and-thither scurryings of rabbits crossed once by the steady march of a pheasant upon some invisible mark – and once a little splash of blood and fur. The moon was now coming and going in the clouds with the regularity of a neon sign and the moonlight passed in waves over this arabesqued carpeting of snow; it was something to stop and look at with disinterested pleasure; I had to conquer this unseasonable aesthetic impulse before I pushed ahead with my investigation.

  Where Guthrie’s body had fallen the snow was splayed up as if a great meteorite had fallen to earth and round about was the confused trampling of our feet as we had raised the body. But beyond this circle every footprint was distinct. And the story told was clear. Gamley had dropped – hazardously – into the moat about fifteen yards from where Guthrie had fallen and gone straight to the body. When he left me he had exactly retraced his steps to the wall of the moat and then; finding it difficult perhaps to get up where he had come down, he had worked round to that little bridge by which Sybil and I had first crossed to the postern door. There he had been able to climb from the moat without difficulty, and the purposefulness of his progress plainly argues him familiar with the ground. I climbed up after him and followed his tracks – with difficulty now – away from the castle. And presently they converged with the faint remains of tracks coming the other way. Gamley had simply come out of the night and returned to it; presumably he had been making for the little postern door when he had been diverted by Guthrie’s fall.