Winking at the Brim (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  It needed neither a long nor a difficult pull to reach the island. She beached the boat in a tiny cove and splashed ashore, her immediate objective the church tower.

  The tower, however, proved not to belong to the church. Laura prowled about the extensive ruins, identified the church itself, and discovered that if it had ever possessed a tower this was no longer standing. There was a small belfry, the remains of two Gothic, traceried windows which in England would have belonged to the fourteenth century, what appeared to be the abbot’s doorway into the church, two high walls of the cloister, an overgrown square of cloister garth with the remains of a well in the middle of it, the remains of the chapter house, and a building with a dividing wall which, since it was on the side of the cloister opposite to, and therefore furthest away from, the church, Laura assumed to be the roofless remains of the refectory and kitchen. Behind all this was the chief landmark which Sally had noticed, the tower.

  Laura scrambled her way towards it. Like all the other remains, it was roofless, but it appeared to have been strongly fortified. It was an uncompromising, square chunk of masonry with window openings all the way up one side on a slant which indicated a staircase. The top of the building was crenellated like the battlements of a castle.

  “The abbot’s lodging,” said Laura aloud. She stepped in at a ruined doorway and found herself surrounded by paraphernalia which obviously had not derived from the Middle Ages. The floor had been cleared of weeds and at one side of the room, which was well-lighted, being open to the sky, and without most of its west wall, were three large metal tanks. Near these a square of concrete flooring had been laid and leaning against one of the three walls which remained intact were a couple of wooden shovels. To complete the picture of this skeleton of an illicit still for the manufacture, Laura had no doubt, of the whisky, rough and harsh, which Mrs. McLauchlin had refused to serve to her visitors, were the remains of a large fire. On the edge of the concrete flooring was a demijohn three-parts full of clear water.

  Laura bent and sifted through the ashes of the fire with her fingers, then she stepped out through the remains of the ruined west wall and found two mounds of fuel, one of coke, the other of peat, heaped up under a lean-to to keep them out of the rain. She returned to the interior. Above the remains of the fire was a kiln on a screen of metal.

  “Well!” said Laura, describing the scene to Dame Beatrice and Sally in the privacy of Dame Beatrice’s bedroom that evening and keeping her voice very low as she enumerated her discoveries. “You know what I think now, don’t you?”

  “Tell us,” urged Sally. “I never was any good at guessing-games. You’ve told us what you saw on the island, but it doesn’t mean a thing to me. Has it something to do with Angela Barton’s death? Is that what you mean?”

  “Laura has been describing some of the apparatus necessary for the manufacture of an inferior but potent alcoholic beverage known to the Irish as poteen and to the Scots as pot still,” said Dame Beatrice.

  “What’s more, I know where they stowed the stuff before they sold it to the pub,” said Laura. “I found some casks up at the hunting-lodge when I was there. Oh, and that reminds me. I found an empty bottle, too, but it had contained sparkling burgundy. It had been dropped into one of the casks.”

  “But why is this important, and why are you talking in the tones of a Gunpowder Plotter?” asked Sally. “I mean, the island is deserted and nobody is making the stuff nowadays.”

  “They were making it not so long ago,” said Laura, “and if that wretched Barton woman had been over there snooping around and was threatening to blackmail the McLauchlins or tell the police, or something of that sort, she might easily have laid herself open to the chance of getting murdered.”

  “So what about you?” asked Sally, openly amused by Laura’s rhetoric. “Won’t you get murdered, too?”

  “All very well to laugh,” said Laura severely. “What I want to know is what we’re going to do about it.”

  “To prevent our own murders?” asked Sally.

  “Well, the cellar in this pub is probably full of the stuff.”

  “I think,” said Dame Beatrice, “that our best plan will be to approach the sinful McLauchlins and confront them with your suspicions. They will hardly murder three of us in order to preserve their secret. Besides, it is not as though the still is in working order.”

  “It isn’t much otherwise,” retorted Laura. “There’s the coke and peat for the fire, the kiln for the distilling, the concrete floor—quite intact, I may tell you—for germinating the malted barley, a demijohn of water for the sprinkling and even a couple of wooden shovels for turning the green malt over, as well as three tanks for steeping the barley after it’s been cleaned.”

  “Seems to me that you know more than you ought to about illicit distilling,” said Sally. Laura waved a shapely palm.

  “The principle is the same, whether the process is legal or not,” she said, “and naturally I take an interest in my homeland’s most admirable industry.” She turned to Dame Beatrice. “So now for the McLauchlins,” she added.

  “I shall be interested to hear what they have to say.”

  “And you do think Angela might have gone over to the island and seen what I saw, don’t you?”

  “I will not commit myself on that point at present.”

  “There must be pretty heavy penalties for distilling without a licence, you know.”

  “I am sure you are right about that.”

  “And Angela was always finding out horrid facts about people,” said Sally, who had sobered down. “It wouldn’t only be the McLauchlins who could have wanted her out of the way.”

  “We have yet to find out whether they did want her out of the way,” said Dame Beatrice.

  “I’ll go along and sort them,” said Laura. She found Mrs. McLauchlin in the bar, but otherwise it was empty.

  “And whit can I dae for ye, Mistress Gavin?” asked the landlord’s wife, with her usual beaming smile.

  “I’ll have a dram,” Laura replied, “of the kind you serve to the shepherds.”

  “Och, no, then, ye wull not! Pot still is no for the likes o’ yoursel’, Mistress Gavin.”

  “Why, what’s the matter with it?”

  “Naething’s the maitter wi’ it, ye ken, but, all the same, yell be getting the malt, as before.”

  “At three times the price?”

  “Aye.” She looked amiable but determined.

  “But why?”

  “Ye’ve no the stomach for pot still.”

  “Try me and see. How long has the island been out of business?”

  “Oh, lang syne, maybe. Whit way wud ye be speiring aboot the wee inch? Ye’ll hae been thereaboot, I’ll be thinking.”

  “I have, and I know what I saw there.”

  “Aye. It’s a peety, a sair peety.”

  “What is?”

  “That the pollis had tae be tellt.”

  “Oh? When was this?”

  Mrs. McLauchlin sighed.

  “We thocht—ma guidmon and I—it micht be best to let Inspector McMurdo know that the cellar here, when we took the place three years syne, was weel stocked wi’ whit ye ken.”

  “Oh, you told the police, did you?”

  “We did that, being law-abiding folks and no wishing to be in trouble.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Och, McMurdo is a senseeble body. He said he wad investigate, and no to say onything to onybody, but to sell off what we had and he wad see tae it that the island revairted tae its former lonesomeness.”

  “And no other action was taken?”

  “We haird nae mair aboot the matter. Inspector McMurdo is guidmon tae ma ain sister, ye ken.”

  “So the still hasn’t operated for three years?”

  “I widna gae sae far as that, Mistress Gavin. Inspector McMurdo kens fu’ weel that the fishers and the shepherds maun hae their dram. Shutting doun the still was what ye micht ca’ a gradual process, but it was s
peeded up when we kenned there was tae be Sir Humphrey’s search for the monster. The English dinna understand drenk.”

  “I wouldn’t like to bet on that. Do you mean you didn’t want to poison them? Anyway, look here, suppose some ill-disposed person had found the remains of the still, as I did when I was poking about on the island, and had told, or threatened to tell, the authorities, would that person have run into trouble with, well, with any of the people of these parts?”

  “Och, no! The still was nae mair, and the pollis kenned a’ aboot it lang syne. Speir at ma guidmon gin ye’ll not believe me.”

  “Oh, I believe you all right,” said Laura. “Well, produce your beastly expensive malt if you won’t let me save my bawbees.”

  “Na, na. Ye shall drenk on the hoose, Mistress Gavin. You and ma’sel are weel agreed, I’ll be thinking.”

  “Oh, well, many thanks. That’s very kind of you. Slainte! By the way, there is something in the loch, isn’t there?”

  “An otter, maybe. Ye’ll no credit Sir Humphrey and a’ his havering?”

  “About a monster? Oh, but I do.”

  “Aweel, oorselves we want nae truck wi’ it.”

  “You mean you didn’t want any truck with it while the illicit still was going strong, don’t you?” said Laura. “It might pay you to believe in it now. Attract the tourists, you know.”

  Mrs. McLauchlin held on to the bar counter and rocked with happy laughter.

  “So the McLauchlins are right out of it, I think,” said Laura. “We don’t even know that Angela Barton ever set foot on the island, anyway. The chances are that she didn’t. That boat is heavy to launch and a weighty old tub to row. Even if she had gone over there, she might not have recognised that the remains were those of an illicit still.”

  “And as the police already knew all about the still,” said Dame Beatrice, “she could not have been murdered for threatening to report it. Yes, you have made your point.”

  CHAPTER 15

  With Beaded Bubbles

  “Turn down an empty glass.”

  Edward Fitzgerald.

  “Well,” said Laura, “now we can be certain that the illicit still had nothing to do with the murder, what really interests me is why three different methods of killing were involved. There’s the strychnine—it’s actually named in the report in a Glasgow newspaper Mrs. McLauchlin showed me—there’s the throat-wound, and there’s the fact that the body must have been at some time in the loch, but whether before or after the death nobody seems to have mentioned, although I suppose the police know. Anyway, why didn’t the murderer simply drown the poor woman? If a gaff or a boat hook made that wound in her throat, surely it would have been easy enough to hold her under water long enough to do the trick? If she’d met her death by drowning there might not have been any reason to suspect murder at all.”

  “But the authorities do not suspect murder,” Dame Beatrice pointed out. “According to Sir Humphrey, with whom I have had further conversation, they believe that Miss Barton made two abortive attempts at suicide before she finished up by poisoning herself. The medical report is that there was water in the lungs…”

  “Means she wasn’t dead when somebody put her in the loch.”

  “Or when she put herself in. Sir Humphrey tells me that the police theory is that she threw herself into the water but, being a swimmer, could not find the resolution deliberately to drown herself.”

  “All the same,” argued Laura, “the water in the loch is absolutely freezing cold. You’d risk heart-failure, I should think, going into it. I can well believe that she wasn’t dead when they chucked her in. All I can’t understand is why they didn’t just leave her there. Even if there had been no water in the lungs, the doctors would assume that she died of shock and exposure. It’s been known to happen to people in these Highland lochs, you know.”

  “It seems to me,” said Dame Beatrice, “that the immersion of the body in the loch could well have been accidental.”

  “You mean she slipped and tumbled in?”

  “No. I think the chances are that she had been poisoned before she reached the other side of the loch and that, in removing the helpless but not quite dead body from the boat, the murderer let it fall.”

  “But it would only have fallen into shallow water, so why gaff it?”

  “To give the impression of attempted suicide, I suppose,” said Sally. “I know why they carried it up to the cottage, though. They hoped it wouldn’t be found, or, at any rate, not for a very long time. You see, the plan—Sir Humphrey’s plan—was that the investigation with regard to the monster should last for a couple of months. If Angela failed to turn up again at the caravan for her supper, Lady Calshott would have suggested to the others that Angela had simply gone home. She was due to go the next day or so, anyway, and she was utterly cheesed off with Sir Humphrey, who wanted her to do another short stint of watching at the tent.”

  “Wouldn’t they have expected a letter to say that she had arrived home, though?” asked Laura.

  “You didn’t know Angela. She wouldn’t have bothered, I’m sure, and the Calshotts would know that, and be quite unsuspicious until they themselves got home nearly two months later.”

  “But the letter which the vicar is supposed to have written? Why have forged that, if the body was not to be found?” asked Sally.

  “Written by someone who was anxious to allow for all contingencies, but who was not capable of logical thought, perhaps,” said Dame Beatrice.

  “Meaning what, Grandmamma?”

  “That if the body had been in the water, the letter ought to have been immersed at the same time. It was extremely careless to leave a perfectly dry letter beside a saturated, clothed body. In fact, if murder needs to be proved, I should say that goes a long way towards proving it.”

  “Shall you point that out to the police?”

  “They will have thought of it for themselves, and may have found their own explanation for it.”

  “But they’re letting everybody go home!”

  “Be calm, and wait upon events. Since there appears to be nothing useful we can do here, I think we ourselves may well make tracks for home very soon.”

  “And when we get there?”

  “I shall have a word with our dear Robert, Laura’s husband, and then I shall institute a few guarded enquiries of my own, since I know the people involved.”

  “I’ve thought of something I ought to have mentioned sooner,” said Laura suddenly. “It had quite slipped my mind until now. You remember the thermos flask and its metal cup or cap? Well, that other thing I found in the cellar of the hunting-lodge, that bottle, don’t you know. It couldn’t have been there long, because, when I up-ended it, I could see that there was still a drop or two of wine left in it.”

  “So the cork had been replaced,” said Dame Beatrice.

  “Yes. There were some empty casks still reeking a bit of spirits, and there was this bottle in one of them, labelled sparkling burgundy.”

  “There’s nothing much in that,” said Sally. “Sir Humphrey dished out a couple of bottles to each caravan party to celebrate any sighting of the monster. Phyllis wanted ours opened at lunch one day, though, so we had it and she got a bit tiddly and slept it off in the afternoon when she and I were on tent-watch. I daresay others had the same inspiration. The watching bored everybody, I think.”

  “Could you find this empty bottle again, do you think?” asked Dame Beatrice, addressing Laura.

  “I suppose so. I only chucked it into some bushes. But it won’t tell you anything, you know. The strychnine was in the coffee in the thermos flask.”

  “If there was also strychnine in the burgundy it would open up an interesting line of thought, though. The thermos flask as an agent of death has been suspect all along, since I understood it was pretty well established that Angela Barton never burdened herself with such an encumbrance.”

  “Do you want me to row across and find the bottle?”


  “It would oblige me if you would. Take Sally with you to help with the boat.”

  “Not you as well?”

  “No. I have some telephoning to do.” She saw the two young women off and then went into the post-office and rang up the police.

  “We considered the matter of the letter,” said the quiet voice at the other end of the line, “but the fiscal decided it was so strong in evidence that the puir body took her ain life that the suicide verdict must stand. He contended that the letter may well have been dropped in the cottage before she tried the methods she did, and then, finding she hadna the will-power either to cut her throat or meet her death by drooning, she returned to the but-an’-ben for the strychnine, putting it off to the last because she kenned what a terrible death she had prepared for herself.”

  “Well, I follow his reasoning, Inspector, but it does not satisfy me. The letter, as I informed you earlier, is believed to be a forgery. Has he considered that?”

  “I canna answer on his behalf. All I can say is that we believe the evidence in favour of the puir body’s having killed herself is quite impossible to ignore.”

  On Sally’s advice they left Dame Beatrice’s car in the inn yard and Sally drove Laura as far along the south shore of the loch as the motorised caravan could go. It seemed strange to Sally to pass neither caravans nor tents, but the boat was still there and they pushed off, scrambled in, and Laura took the oars. The actual distance across the loch at this point was a bare half mile, but it was a slanting pull to reach the point nearest to the hunting-lodge and this increased the distance quite considerably.

  The weather, which had improved since the drenching storm which had caused Sally to seek shelter in the croft cottage where she had discovered the body, had deteriorated again. The sky was dark, the mountains a threatening purple, and the surface of the loch was now ruffled by a wind which had sprung up just as they had reached the pine-wood and the boat.