Lament for a Maker

by Michael Innes

  Gylby then went on to explain his own appearance that morning. He had noticed the skis among some lumber in the little bedroom in the tower and recollecting that the route to Kinkeig was largely downhill over not too heavily timbered snow slopes he had persuaded the police to let him borrow them. The proceeding had been successful and had given him, he complacently remarked, a capital appetite. He only regretted that there had not been a second pair of skis for my client Miss Sybil Guthrie – who, as the heiress of Erchany, was expecting the arrival of her legal adviser with some impatience.

  I was just resigning myself to the prospect of a journey altogether more arduous than suited my years when a further and greater commotion in the village heralded the arrival of the promised snow-ploughs. Two motor contrivances of a modern and powerful type, they passed us with a muffled roar and disappeared up the road to Erchany. I had retained my hired car overnight; we had nothing to do but step into it and follow comfortably and at our leisure. Learning that the body was to be brought down that afternoon and that the inquiry would be held at the manse immediately before the interment, I judged it prudent to proceed to the castle at once. I had instructions to receive and observations to make before I could confidently face the afternoon’s proceedings. Gylby, who had something the air of a lighthouse-keeper who has successfully handed over in trying circumstances, seemed disposed to linger over the oatcakes and marmalade; with some persuasion I managed to get him on the move a few minutes before half-past nine. We were about to leave the inn when Mrs Roberts appeared and asked me – with the most evident interest – if I would see a caller, him that Mistress McLaren had taken refuge with, Ewan Bell? I could hardly refuse; Gylby politely proposed to take a walk down the village and buy tobacco; the visitor was presently shown into my private sitting-room.

  Mr Bell will forgive me if I venture to describe him as venerable and magnificent. An athlete who had retired in his later years upon the profession of Biblical patriarch is perhaps the best image to offer the reader: his shoulders might have been those of a smith rather than of a cobbler; his features had the benign severity of some pillar of the Kirk from the pencil of a Wilkie. He bowed to me gravely and said he understood I was to represent the family interest in the probing of the sad affair at the meikle house?

  ‘I am giving legal advice to Miss Guthrie, Mr Bell. As you may know, she is the American lady who happened to be staying at the castle at the time of Mr Guthrie’s death.’

  ‘And no doubt, sir, a relation of the laird’s?’

  I considered Mr Bell shrewdly. He seemed a most responsible old man and not at all likely to have called merely out of a thirst for gossip. ‘Miss Guthrie is a relation of the dead man and has a near interest in the estate.’

  Ewan Bell again gravely inclined his head. ‘What I’ve ventured in about, Mr Wedderburn, is the young people that have gone away – Miss Mathers and the lad Lindsay. I have a thought that if there’s any talk of its being other than an accident that’s befallen at Erchany it will be the strangeness of their going that’s the reason.’

  ‘Their disappearance is certainly a striking circumstance.’

  My visitor weighed this non-committal answer carefully. Then he said: ‘What I’ve come to say is, their going was at the bidding of the laird.’

  ‘You interest me, Mr Bell. May I invite you to take something against this very trying weather?’

  With a severity which contrived to give all the effect of stern refusal Mr Bell agreed to a dram. This was presently brought by Mrs Roberts – I fear it confirmed her in the evil opinion of lawyers which the sheriff’s tolerance of claret had begun – and Mr Bell paused only for a ceremonial word over his glass before producing that letter of Christine Mathers which has been reproduced on an earlier page. I read it through twice with the greatest attention before I spoke. ‘Mr Bell, this is a most significant document. You have no doubt shown it to the police?’

  ‘I thought, Mr Wedderburn, I’d like the counsel of a well-reputed person like yourself first.’

  ‘A perfectly proper feeling. But you must take it to the police before the inquiry. And now perhaps you can give me some account of the circumstances in which the letter was received?’

  Briefly, Bell outlined that interview with Christine Mathers which is fully described in his narrative. I was a good deal impressed both by the facts and by that interpretation of them which seemed to lie at the back of the Kinkeig shoemaker’s mind. If Guthrie’s final interview with Lindsay in the tower had been arranged not with the purpose of buying him off but of dismissing him in the company of Miss Mathers, then the tone of the interview as reported by Miss Guthrie was a perfectly natural one. And it was conceivable that Guthrie, a highly unstable man unable to reconcile himself to losing his niece to an enemy, had simply committed suicide as Miss Guthrie apparently maintained.

  But undoubtedly there was some sort of case against the lad Lindsay. His known enmity towards Guthrie, his dramatic appearance on the tower staircase a minute after Guthrie’s fall, the rifled bureau, his flight with Miss Mathers: these as counts in an indictment were clear enough. He was protected, indeed, chiefly by my client Miss Guthrie’s categorical statement that he had left Guthrie alive and well in the tower. This statement Bell’s testimony and the letter he had produced now reinforced, for they indicated that the difficulties over Lindsay’s suit had been in process of settlement – a settlement the final stage of which Miss Guthrie had witnessed just short of midnight from her hiding-place outside Guthrie’s study. No doubt a person concerned to suggest a case against Lindsay could attempt to place the letter as part of an elaborately contrived plot against Guthrie, but unlikely ingenuity of this sort I did not think it necessary to explore at the moment. I turned to another point.

  ‘Mr Bell, we have here a very extraordinary situation. Miss Mathers’ letter suggests that she was to be packed off quietly – apparently with the unkindest implications of ignominy – at Christmas. She and her future husband were simply to emigrate and go out of Mr Guthrie’s life. That is strange and harsh enough and would convict the dead man of being more than eccentric in character. But what are we to think of this departure being fixed for the dead of night – and moreover actually insisted upon when that night proved as wild as it did? It is difficult to believe that these young people could have got through the snow alive.’

  Bell nodded his head and was silent for a moment. Then he answered my last point first. ‘They took a chance their spirit would drive them to take, setting out in the smother of the storm. But you’ll know, Mr Wedderburn, the wind had dropped within minutes of their leaving, and a bittock moon was coming through forbye. Lindsay, that’s a stout and skilly chiel, would get the lass safely over to his own folk in Mervie. And the next day they’d be at Dunwinnie and away.’

  ‘It hasn’t been heard if they’ve been traced to Dunwinnie?’

  ‘That I couldn’t say. But with all the stour and confloption of the curlers there it’s likely enough not. And as for the laird driving them out in secret and at midnight into a storm, it’s just what would fit the black humour of the man.’

  ‘You think he really did that?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And that the laird then committed suicide in some sort of despair?’

  ‘I think that’s the conclusion will be come to, Mr Wedderburn.’

  I looked at Ewan Bell curiously. ‘Then how would you account for the gold that has disappeared?’

  He was plainly startled. ‘The gold, sir? I know nothing of that.’

  ‘A drawer in the corner of the study, I understand, has been violently broken open and gold apparently taken from it.’

  ‘That’s not so hard to explain as you might think, Mr Wedderburn. You’ll notice Christine says Guthrie was going to give her a sum of money – her own – and as for a drawer being opened with violence the laird himself was a right violent man. You’ll be hearing a story soon of the senseless fury he put to the breaking down of a door a while
back.’

  That Guthrie had himself taken the money from the drawer and given it to Miss Mathers again dovetailed, I noted, with Miss Guthrie’s statement that neither the laird nor Lindsay had moved in the direction of the bureau while Lindsay was in the tower. And once more I was confronted with a hypothetical sequence of events that had marked imaginative coherence: the final and harshly contrived parting, the bitter plunge to death almost as the hour brought in peace on earth and goodwill among men. I contemplated this in silence for some moments…and knew I was dissatisfied.

  I rose. ‘Mr Bell, I must be getting up to Erchany. As yet I know far too little to judge of the matter. But I am very grateful to you for coming in. You are an important witness and I shall no doubt see you again this afternoon.’

  ‘And you think, Mr Wedderburn, it will be suicide proven?’

  ‘I think the police, or others, must find Lindsay and Miss Mathers. And for the rest – that truth lies at the bottom of the well. By the way, can you tell me anything of a man called Gamley? He was the first to find Mr Guthrie’s body in the moat.’

  ‘He was grieve at the home farm once, but left after having words with the laird.’

  ‘Harsh words?’

  Bell smiled. ‘It would be hard to find any in these lands that couldn’t remember harsh words with Guthrie of Erchany. But I judge he comes little into this story. He would be but with the lad Lindsay and waiting to give him a hand away. They met in together some time back and had become fast friends.’

  And here my interview with Ewan Bell ended. I rejoined Gylby, who had returned triumphant from the stationer’s with a tin of John Cotton, and we went out in the nip of the winter morning. The skis were piled on the roof of the car, certain parcels requisitioned by Mrs Hardcastle were deposited with the driver, and we drove off for Castle Erchany amid the universal curiosity of Kinkeig. As Mrs Roberts confided to me at parting, there had been nothing like it since the medicos – the reference being doubtless to the unfortunate London physician and his colleagues who had visited the dead man some two years before.

  ‘Mr Gylby,’ I said as we crept cautiously over the surface exposed by the ploughs, ‘I take it that nothing’ – I hesitated – ‘untoward was discovered about Guthrie’s body?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Well, as the story runs in Kinkeig, this desperate Lindsay had chopped off a number of the fingers.’

  Abruptly, young Gylby stopped stuffing a pipe. ‘I really think the Scotch are–’

  ‘The bloody limit?’

  My young acquaintance, I believe, had placed me comfortably as a person of somewhat ponderous utterance; it gave me considerable pleasure to see him positively jump as I thus briefly expressed his thought. ‘I was going to put it,’ he said, ‘that they are people with a developed taste in the macabre. Guthrie’s fingers are intact. It’s his gold that’s gone.’

  ‘Quite so…I understand that it is definitely for Miss Guthrie that I am to act?’

  ‘If you are going to be so good.’

  ‘Very well. Let me put it to you that you have made a statement in contradiction to certain apparent testimony of my client.’ And I tapped Gylby’s journal which I was still holding. ‘Miss Guthrie states that between Guthrie and Lindsay there was nothing like heat; that they shook hands and parted quietly; even that Lindsay spoke or comported himself “gently”. You state that at your own view of Lindsay little more than a minute later you received “an extraordinarily vivid impression of passion”. Now this discrepant evidence may be important. Are you sure that your impression was accurate?’

  ‘Yes.’ Gylby’s answer was at once reluctant and convinced. ‘Miss Guthrie was observing those people more or less at leisure. You, on the other hand, speak of what “happened in a flash”, and of “a second and a second only”. Are you not more likely to be mistaken than she?’

  I thought it wise to let my tone suggest to this slightly airy young man the manner in which an inquiry of the sort impending might have to be conducted. But he was perfectly serious and perfectly forthright. ‘There seems to be such a probability, Mr Wedderburn. Nevertheless I don’t think my impression is wrong.’

  I believe it was at this point that I made up my mind – if in a preliminary way – as to what had really happened at Erchany. And my conclusion, I saw, was likely to make my position delicate. I turned to another topic.

  ‘Mr Gylby, about the man Hardcastle. You are something of a prejudiced witness? It would be possible to suggest, on the strength of your journal, that your attitude to him has been quite venomous from the moment of his first unkind reception of you at Erchany?’

  Gylby contented himself with saying: ‘You wait till you see him.’

  ‘And you are inclined to credit him with some hidden motive in the affair?’

  ‘He was up to something. Guthrie never gave him that message to me.’

  ‘Certainly that appears to be Miss Guthrie’s impression.’

  With unexpected heat Gylby said: ‘Sybil was speaking the truth.’

  ‘You cannot suppose me to be suggesting otherwise. Have you any notion of why Hardcastle should give you the false message?’

  ‘I have some notion it might be an act of stupid malice against his master. He stumbled against the wall of the staircase once or twice as were going up and it occurred to me he was acting in some sort of random, fuddled state. I think he may be not only a rascal but a drunken rascal.’

  ‘And not a man engineering some complicated deception?’ Gylby shook his head. ‘He’s cunning, all right. But he couldn’t see far enough ahead for anything like that.’

  ‘Another point. You thought Guthrie was mad? And you formed that impression before hearing Mrs Hardcastle speak of doctors who had apparently come to inquire into his sanity some years ago?’

  ‘I thought him mad from the first few minutes. Only you must understand, sir, that I use the word very loosely. I don’t know that his was the sort of madness they certify; I rather suppose not. It was more as if he lived in the shadow of something that no man could remain quite sane while contemplating. He was broken, fragmented. He was mad as the heroes were mad when the Furies were hunting them down.’

  I looked at my companion with a new interest. ‘A most illuminating remark, Mr Gylby. I have always maintained against our educational reformers that there is the greatest utility in the grand old fortifying classical curriculum.’

  3

  The road from Dunwinnie to Kinkeig and the road from Kinkeig through Glen Erchany to Castle Erchany form with the long line of Loch Cailie a rough equilateral triangle. In the centre of this soars the bulk of Ben Cailie, buttressed to the south by the smaller mass of Ben Mervie and skirted to the south again first by Glen Mervie and then by the precipitous Pass of Mervie. The panorama of this on our right as we drove – peak upon peak of virgin snow soaring into a bleakly sunlit winter sky – was a spectacle well-calculated at once to soothe and elevate the mind. The latter part of our journey was performed in silence, broken only by an involuntary exclamation of my own when we finally turned a bend and sighted the castle across a final arm of the loch. As a historical monument it is, I suppose, of quite minor importance, and additions in the later seventeenth century have somewhat modified – though they have not destroyed – its stern medieval character. But my first impression of it was of something so darkly powerful and so inviolably lonely – like a monster of the most solitary habit half couched in a lair of larch and snow – that I could not have been more struck by the sudden appearance of the original Tintagel itself. Particularly impressive was the tower, massive but remarkably lofty, and built, it may be supposed, for observation as well as defence. Looking at the sheer lines of it from a distance I could understand Gylby’s instant knowledge that the man who had fallen from that height was inevitably dead.

  We drove over a drawbridge and pulled up in the central court. Young Gylby said cheerfully: ‘Home again!’ and assisted me to alight.

  My f
irst awareness – like that of Erchany’s unbidden guests a few nights before – was of the dogs; confined in a system of kennels at the farther end of the court, they were signalizing their disapproval of our advent in no uncertain terms. I was next aware of an elderly and infirm old woman in a shawl and snow-boots, hobbling towards us with every appearance of haste and anxiety. For a moment I was almost afraid we were to hear the announcement of another fatality; then she called out eagerly: ‘You’ll have minded my poison? You won’t have disremembered it, Mr Gylby, sir?’

  ‘Here you are, Mrs Hardcastle.’ And Gylby handed her out the parcels from beside the driver. She was about to make off with them as hastily as she had come when she became aware of the presence of a stranger. Not – as I imagine – without some discomfort in the joints, she made me a ramshackle curtsy. Gylby said politely: ‘Mr Wedderburn – Mrs Hardcastle.’

  ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘you’d best know at once what Mr Gylby knows. There’s a terrible great number of rats in Erchany.’ She tapped her parcels and looked fearfully about her. ‘But I’m tholing it no more! I’m an old body grown and now I’m going to sleep of nights.’ Her voice sank hoarsely and she nodded her head to where the figure of a man had appeared beside the kennels. ‘But don’t tell my man! He’s fell unkind. Whiles he sets them at me.’

  ‘The dogs, Mrs Hardcastle?’

  ‘The rats.’

  And Mrs Hardcastle, concealing her parcels beneath her shawl, hurried away. I turned to Gylby. ‘That is Hardcastle over by the kennels? It occurs to me to have a word with him before we go in.’

  I crossed the court. The late laird’s factor was giving the dogs a more than meagre meal and cursing them heartily the while. ‘Down, Caesar,’ I heard him call as I came up, ‘down, you tink cur!’