Winking at the Brim (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Well, I believe in it,” said Sally Lestrange, putting down her empty coffee-cup. “Surely all those eye-witnesses can’t be wrong? There have been dozens of sightings on Loch Ness, all of them well-attested.”

  “About thirty, only a year or two ago, on Loch Morar, too,” said Sir Humphrey, “and a whole lot more have been reported from Ireland.”

  “Oh, Ireland!” exclaimed Major Tamworth, his toothbrush moustache beginning to bristle. “Don’t talk to me about Ireland! The land of blood and faerie! Banshees, booze, and bombs!”

  “A bit sweeping that,” said Nigel Parris, grinning, “isn’t it, sir?”

  “I was out there in Ulster. I ought to know,” said the major, “and a dirty damned show it was, too. Had some success with the women, though. Must admit that!”

  “I believe the sightings were on the west side of the Irish Republic, not in Ulster,” pursued Nigel, a bearded young man of deceptively apostolic appearance.

  “And there have been reports from Scandinavia,” said Sally, who wanted to keep the conversation on its original lines.

  “Not to mention North America, I believe,” said Hubert Pring, backing her up partly because he had conceived a dislike of the major and partly because he liked to prove himself a mine of information.

  “That was the sea-serpent, I thought,” said Phyllis Calshott. “Didn’t you lend me a book by Commander Gould, Daddy? When I read it, I thought, as Huckleberry Finn said of the Bible, that the statements were interesting, but steep. What do you think, Sally?”

  “Well, monster or sea-serpent or what have you,” said Sally, “all the people who claim to have sighted one or the other can’t be practical jokers or liars. If I had the time and the money I’d organise an expedition myself to Loch Ness or Loch Morar. I don’t see any reason why these creatures shouldn’t exist. They can’t be more extraordinary than dozens of species we take for granted. What about whales and swordfish? What about the dugong and the manatee? Why, nobody believed the coelacanth still existed until somebody dredged one up around the coast of Madagascar, and since then several have been found, so they must still be breeding after, perhaps, millions of years. As for monsters, what could be more monstrous than the giant squid or the Komodo dragon? And anybody who can believe in the rhinoceros and the giraffe can believe anything. Who, for the matter of that, would believe in an alligator or a thirty-foot anaconda if the things hadn’t been seen and photographed?”

  “You are eloquent, Miss Lestrange,” said Angela Barton acidly. “You have the gift of tongues.”

  “You’re confusing me with the day of Pentecost,” retorted Sally. “Still, perhaps I had rather collared the centre of the stage. I apologise, but I don’t retract my assertions.”

  “Good for you, Sally!” said Phyllis, giving her a look of sycophantic admiration. “Sally, you all ought to know,” she went on, addressing, to Sally’s horror, the table at large, “has written a most wonderful novel, and Daddy is going to publish it for her, aren’t you, Daddy dear?”

  “Well, I hope so, I’m sure, but I haven’t seen it yet,” Sir Humphrey replied.

  “And is it about the Loch Ness monster?” asked Nigel’s wife Marjorie, a flirtatious and obtuse young woman whom the company, so far, had ignored. “I shouldn’t think that would make a very good subject for a novel, would it?”

  “No, it wouldn’t, and, of course, I’m sure Sally’s novel isn’t about anything of the sort,” said Phyllis. “Tell us what it’s about, Sally, do.”

  Sally, who could have killed her, smiled and said, “Oh, let’s go on talking about the monster. I was just getting thoroughly interested.”

  Sir Humphrey came to her rescue. So far, after having launched the discussion, he had taken little part in it. Now he leaned forward in his armchair.

  “As a matter of fact, I myself was a member of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau a few years ago,” he said. “We were sponsored at the time by the Field Enterprises Education Corporation of Chicago. They were obliged to withdraw their support later—financial reasons, no doubt—but while they were with us their contributions were most generous, both in money and expertise.”

  “Chicago?” said Jeremy Tamworth. “I would have thought Boston more likely. Culture, and all that, what?”

  “Chicago is richer, perhaps,” said Phyllis Calshott. “Go on, Daddy. Tell them what you intend.”

  “What do you intend, sir?” asked Jeremy. “Not a monster-hunt, by any chance? If so, please count me in.” He caught Marjorie Parris’s eye. She giggled and Lady Calshott scowled.

  “Well,” said Sir Humphrey, “it’s like this. When I was attached to the Loch Ness party I did not have the good fortune to see or photograph anything out of the ordinary, and yet, only a week or two ago, I heard a strange story which aroused my curiosity. It dates back to last September, but I only got hold of it when we went to visit my brother who takes a small place on the west coast of Scotland most summers. The story bears all the marks of authenticity, since it came from my young nephew and a friend of his, and they would not attempt, I think, to lead me up the garden or lie to me.

  “The boys had their frightening experience near my brother’s holiday cottage on a small piece of water called Loch na Tannasg. The nearby village is known as Tannasgan and the loch is only a mile or so away. Tannasgan is at the mouth of a short, swift river which flows into the sea by way of a big sea-loch called Loch Geall.”

  “And the boys?” asked Marjorie Parris.

  “As usual—it was near the end of their holiday—they had taken a boat out on Loch na Tannasg to go fishing. There are salmon in the loch as well as trout. Last summer very little rain came down from the mountains, so the upper stream, where it falls into the loch, was very low, and it’s probable that the salmon couldn’t get up to their spawning grounds and were obliged to remain in the loch.”

  “Providing plenty of food for the poor old monster,” said Phyllis.

  “Bless its heart,” said Jeremy, who detested Phyllis but was obliged to be more or less civil to her, since their families were near neighbours.

  “Oh, don’t tease me, Jeremy,” said Phyllis, pouting. “I only meant—”

  “Let your father finish, darling,” said Lady Calshott.

  “I think I have finished,” said her husband.

  “You mean you think the monsters feed on the fish?” asked Sally.

  “Well, if the composition of the loch is similar to that of Loch Ness, they must do so in order to survive. There would not be nearly enough vegetable matter or plankton in the water to support creatures of any size, so the inference is that the monsters are carnivores.”

  “But what was that about the boys? You still haven’t told us,” said Marjorie Parris.

  “Oh, simply that they claim to have had a sighting,” said Phyllis.

  “Of the monster, do you mean?”

  “Of a monster,” said Sir Humphrey. “It stands to reason that, if there is one, there must be more than one. Like all other creatures, if they exist the monsters must perpetuate their species by breeding.”

  “Are they called monsters because of their size or because of their natures, do you suppose?” asked Nigel Parris, not altogether seriously.

  “I suppose, as they have never been scientifically investigated and as some accounts give the impression that they are frightening, some name had to be attached to them, and ‘monster’ has a grim and terrifying sound which, no doubt, causes the same kind of shuddering delight as that which affects the listeners to a ghost story,” said Hubert Pring pedantically.

  “But tell us about the boys,” persisted Marjorie. “What age are they?”

  “Oh, schoolboys, you know, of about fifteen,” replied Sir Humphrey.

  “Oh!” said Marjorie, obviously disappointed.

  “Boys!” ejaculated Major Tamworth. “All boys are jackanapes! Savages! Practical jokers! Young hooligans! If I get in at the next election—I’ve been nominated, don’t yer know—I shall br
ing in a bill to re-introduce birching. Sensible chaps, those Manxmen! That’ll teach the young devils to behave themselves. These young limbs of yours, Humphrey, were having you on, and you can take my word for it. Must have been having you on.”

  “Possibly,” agreed the grey-haired man, with equanimity. “Very possibly, my dear Major. All the same, boys, beloved of the gods but, as you say, quite often cursed by everybody else, often do have strange experiences and stumble upon strange truths. Take the Infant Samuel, for example.”

  “What about him? You mean the chap in the Bible?” asked the major, looking sceptical.

  “His mother dedicated him (as a thank-offering) to the temple at Shiloh. The result was that he ruined three lives and ended up by anointing two kings and appearing as a disembodied spirit to one of them,” said Hubert Pring.

  “Legend!” snorted the major. “Nothing but legend! You’ll be telling us next that you’ve seen Venus rising from the waves. Lucky devil, if you have!”

  “Very well,” said Sir Humphrey. “Then how about the five French boys at Montignac?”

  “What five boys?”

  “Why,” said Sally, breaking in before her host could answer, “Sir Humphrey means the boys who discovered the wall-paintings in the caves of Lascaux.”

  “Oh, those prehistoric things!” said the major contemptuously. “I don’t see how that proves his point.”

  “Then you don’t know the whole story,” said Sir Humphrey. “What happened was that these boys, who lived in unoccupied France during the war—one, I believe, was actually a refugee from the north—were out on a country ramble with their dog. Upon missing the dog, they searched for him and one of them, stumbling through bushes when he heard the dog barking, found the entrance to the caves and was the first person (at any rate for thousands of years) to gaze upon those extraordinary representations of aurochs, cows, deer, ponies, and bird-men which Aurignacian magicians had painted or engraved upon the walls.”

  “The caves were primitive temples, then,” said Godiva Benson, “and the magicians, I suppose, were their priests.” She looked pleased with this sapient but trite observation.

  “How I’d love to go and see the paintings!” said her sister.

  “I believe the authorities have closed the caves to the public,” said Hubert Pring. “The air, or the damp or something, was getting at the paintings and ruining them. But some friends of mine went while the caves were still open and were rushed through so fast by the guide that they saw almost nothing. It was hardly worth the trouble of going there, they said.”

  “Well, at any rate, those boys made a wonderful discovery,” said Sir Humphrey, “quite as wonderful, in its way, as anything Schliemann found at Mycenae or Evans in Crete. What’s more…”

  “Oh, damn all boys!” exclaimed the major. “If it hadn’t been for the lad James Watt sitting watching his mother’s kettle come to the boil instead of getting up and doing something useful, we might not have had to put up with British Rail and all that that stands for!”

  “There was the boy who became the seventh Lord Shaftesbury,” began Winfrith Benson. “He saw a pauper’s funeral and it horrified him so much that…”

  “Oh, these nineteenth-century reformers!” snorted Major Tamworth. “The Victorians were the biggest hypocrites on earth!”

  “We’re talking about boys,” said his son, winking at Marjorie Parris.

  “What about Mozart sitting at the piano at dead of night in his little reach-me-downs!” said Marjorie, giggling.

  “It was his night-shirt,” said the pedantic Hubert Pring. (“His name ought to be Prig, not Pring,” said Sally to Dame Beatrice, later.)

  “What about boys in myth and legend?” asked Dame Beatrice.

  “Like the Spartan boy and the fox?” said Phyllis Calshott.

  “I was thinking of the boy Thialfi, who, merely by breaking a tiny meat-bone and sucking out the marrow, was taken to the land of the giants and ran a race against the giant Time and almost defeated him. What would have happened, I wonder, had he won the race?”

  “The race against time? We still use that expression. Is that where it comes from?” asked Lady Calshott. “Phyllis, darling, you would know.”

  “None of you has mentioned the most mischievous boy of all,” said Sally. “Not that he’s ever come my way, thank goodness!”

  “Puck, do you mean?” asked Nigel Parris.

  “No, although Puck mentions him in ‘the Dream.’ I mean Eros. Remember? Cupid is a knavish lad Thus to make poor females mad.”

  “Well, I’m glad we’ve come round to females,” said Marjorie Parris. “I was afraid they weren’t going to get a look-in at all.”

  “Oh, girls get none of the limelight nowadays, and never have had it,” said Angela Barton, with her sour smile. “I could tell you…”

  “Oh, girls!” exclaimed Jeremy Tamworth. “They do make news, of course. They can form a bone of contention between their legitimate but divorced parents; they can let all hell loose between their real mothers and their foster-mothers; they can become Miss World if their vital statistics are in the right place and the right order and they can accept lifts in the cars of total strangers and get themselves raped and murdered. That’s girls for you, Miss Barton.”

  “I vote we stick to boys,” said Hubert Pring. “As a prep. school master, I find that one boy on his own is a perfectly reasonable creature; that two boys together, provided they have a common interest, are still capable of civilised behaviour; but get three or more boys in close association and you have that which makes for treasons, stratagems, and spoils—in other words, you have a gang. Mob rule replaces the individual conscience, and the law of the jungle takes over from reason and commonsense. This was well understood by the author of Lord of the Flies.”

  “We seem to have got a pretty long way from the original subject,” said Sally. “Why have we shelved the Loch Ness monster?”

  “Yes, Sir Humphrey, you still haven’t told us exactly what happened to those boys of yours and what they saw,” said Marjorie.

  “What happened was that they went fishing and thought their boat was going to be turned over. What they saw—and they’re convinced of this—was the head, neck, and two humps of a creature which bore a marked similarity to the popular description of the Loch Ness monster,” said Sir Humphrey. “Well, I was so much impressed by the story that I am taking a sabbatical of a sort this summer. While I am on leave from the office I propose to organise an expedition to Tannasgan and I invite any of you who would be interested to join me up there. I shall be on leave for the months of July and August, and should welcome those who could spare a fortnight or more, and particularly anybody enthusiastic enough to put in the whole of the two months or even one of them, to help in the work of keeping watch.”

  “How long can you give us to make up our minds?” asked Hubert Pring. “I’d like to come, I think.”

  “I shall need definite acceptances by the end of May,” said Sir Humphrey.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Volunteer

  “Joining themselves in fatal harmony.”

  Andrew Marvell.

  Sally was not an early riser. Phyllis had gone out riding with Jeremy Tamworth, whose family lived at the other end of the village, Lady Calshott was conducting Dame Beatrice round the garden, and nobody was at the breakfast table except her host when Sally put in an appearance. Sir Humphrey had finished his breakfast and was reading the newspaper. He laid it down when she entered.

  “Help yourself,” he said, having greeted her. “Want me to stay with you while you feed?”

  “Yes, if you’ll talk to me,” said Sally. “I’ve been thinking over what was said last night about this business of going to look for monsters in Loch na Tannasg.”

  “Oh, yes? I’m glad you’re interested. Any chance that you and Dame Beatrice might join us?”

  “I really don’t know. You do believe that report you were given, I suppose?”

 
; “The sighting? Well, I’ve had several talks with the two boys and they seemed very certain of their facts. I spoke to them separately, and their stories tallied in every particular that matters.”

  “And which particulars are those, would you say?”

  “The locale, the boat-trip, the time of day, the surface of the loch, the general appearance of the monster, the kind of wash it created…”

  “And where did their stories not agree?”

  “About the distance they were from the shore and about the size of the creature.”

  “Were the discrepancies significant?”

  “I did not think so. It is difficult for the inexperienced to estimate distance from a boat which is low in the water, and their views as to the length overall of the monster were almost bound to be somewhat vague, since at no time, of course, did they see its entire body. One boy estimated its length as being about thirty feet, the other boy thought it might be nearer fifty.”

  “Both estimates could have been wildly exaggerated, I suppose?”

  “Oh, of course they could. The boys admit to having been badly frightened at the time, and that might well cause them to exaggerate.”

  “How big is the loch? You said it was smaller than Loch Ness.”

  “Tannasg is about eight miles long. I’ve never been there, but I’ve studied it on the map and it appears to be about a mile and a half wide at its broadest part, and less than half a mile across at its narrowest. It has an estimated depth of eight hundred feet, but, as we know, some of these Scottish lochs have anything but a flat bed, so it is possible that there are holes at which the depth could be nine hundred feet or more. I did not get these measurements from the boys, of course. I have looked them up for myself and they bear comparison with the estimated depths of Ness and Morar.”

  “How much did the boys know about the Loch Ness monster before they went boating on Tannasg?”

  “Well, of course, they had bought picture postcards of the 1934 photograph.”

  “That’s the one which shows the head and neck?”