Bareback

by John Burke

And we’ll make beautiful music together, thought Nick.

  Abruptly he said: ‘Fiona . . .’ The name itself had become music. ‘How much do you know about The Song?’

  ‘The Kilstane Lances? That song?’

  ‘Yes. That song.’

  ‘We’ve all known it from childhood.’

  ‘From childhood? Always the same? You learned it in school, it was always the same – truly traditional?’

  ‘Who’ll say it wasn’t?’

  She was so innocent; in this at least.

  And then he thought about Lesley Gunn. She was surely the one who could help solve the riddle of the music. He suddenly wanted her here with him, and wished there were some spell to summon her into this room.

  There was no need for any such spell. Without warning DI Gunn arrived at eleven o’clock the next morning.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Information about Mr James Brown’s past in Dundee had reached the incident room in the way that pieces of spicy gossip reach a greedy audience. Tales of shady dealings in a chain of garages rang true, but there had never been enough evidence to warrant a prosecution. In any case DCI Rutherford regarded this as trivial, just the name of the game. ‘There’s only three kinds of garage proprietor – those who are incompetent, those who are dishonest, and those who are incompetent and dishonest.’ An insurance fiddle on a burnt-out furniture warehouse was much more interesting. Word was that several items claimed for had showed up later in Holland. Brown had got away with that only because his partner in crime was a high ranker in his local Lodge, with too many influential people under his thumb. The partner wriggled free, but Brown’s own freedom had its price: ‘Get out of town!’

  It prompted Rutherford to question the relationship between the late Archie Ferguson and Jamie Brown. Solicitor and insurance rep, dealing together with the affairs of several Kilstane worthies, and estates of the deceased: what if something had gone seriously wrong between them – the sort of thing that was likely to come out and surround Brown with yet another nasty smell?

  ‘See what you can get out of Ferguson’s secretary. And have another go at her about those papers.’

  Lesley found Miss Elliot still distressed by what had happened to dear Mr Ferguson, but finding consolation in self-importantly sorting out loose ends in the office.

  ‘So many people so dreadfully upset,’ she fussed, ‘now they no longer have Mr Ferguson to look after them.’ She ruffled a sheaf of documents as if to deal out a deck of cards. ‘All these queries, probate for Mrs Kinnear’s will, this wee matter of planning permission up the brae . . .’ She was loving it.

  ‘Will you be able to stay on here?’

  ‘Ah, that I dinna ken. But until Mrs Ferguson decides about disposal of the practice, I can cope just fine. We’ve always had a working relationship with Barr and McIver in Selkirk, and Mr Barr’s being very kind. Of course I’m no in a position to sign official documents. But I can handle any small problems well enough. Mr Ferguson confided everything in me.’

  With some distaste Lesley tried a direct confrontation: ‘In that case, Miss Elliot, you must have had some idea what was in those papers he took away with him.’

  ‘Nae. It wasnae like him. I’m sure he’d have told me when there was something I needed to know.’

  ‘You said earlier that Mr Brown called here that Friday afternoon, just after Mr Ferguson left.’

  Miss Elliot sniffed. ‘All busy-busy as usual. A bad influence.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘He kept pushing himself in where he had nae call. Mr Ferguson was always too patient with him. I never could understand . . . Anyway, if those papers were connected with Mr Brown in any way it could maybe have something to do with the Cameron estate. That’s all I can think of.’

  ‘Cameron estate?’

  ‘The bookshop. Such a loss. Mr Cameron and now Mr Ferguson.’

  ‘Mr Brown had some interest in the bookshop?’

  ‘Such a figure in the town, Mr Cameron. Eccentric, you might say; but gey generous. He tracked down so many historic documents, you know. Got his hands on things so cheaply for the benefit of the town and the Ridings. So unworldly. It was Mr Ferguson who did the real hard work, helping Mr Cameron prepare his case for the Council.’

  ‘What case would that be?’

  ‘There was an application to pull his building down because the supermarket wanted to extend there. Thought they’d got the planning folk in their pocket. Mr Ferguson gave our services free, and saved the shop.’

  ‘And Mr Brown?’

  ‘Somehow he got himself in with Mr Cameron, and got named as one of his executors.’

  ‘Did he, indeed? Mr Cameron must have had some faith in him.’

  Miss Elliot’s sniff grew more pronounced by the minute. ‘Too softhearted. He let Mr Brown set up his office above the bookshop, and I’ll be bound he wouldnae ha’ charged a proper rent for it. Too sunk in his books to look after his own interests properly. Books – they were all he lived for.’

  ‘Does Mr Brown hold the deeds to the shop, or are they kept here?’

  ‘In our safe,’ said Miss Elliot firmly.

  ‘You’ve checked recently?’

  ‘Aye, I have. If you’re thinking those might be the papers Mr Ferguson took away that night, you’d be wrong.’

  It was something to be discussed with Rutherford. Somewhere there had to be hints leading the way to those mysterious papers.

  ‘Something to do with the bookshop?’ she concluded. Only it was not a conclusion; not yet, not by a long way.

  ‘I couldnae be sure of that, now. But there’s little else Mr Ferguson would have kept from me. It was the only thing, the dealings he had with that Mr Brown.’

  ‘If anything occurs to you, Miss Elliot, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’d appreciate your full co-operation.’

  ‘And what else would you expect o’ me, if it’s to do with finding who killed Mr Ferguson? You will find him?’

  ‘We’ll not give up,’ Lesley promised, ‘until we’ve got him.’ Or her, she added silently.

  In the meantime, she had another task to perform.

  *

  ‘Special delivery. Police escort.’ Lesley held out the quaich. ‘Sign here, please.’

  Sir Nicholas took the vessel from her and went to the window embrasure. With mock solemnity he restored the quaich to its case, turned the key, and slipped it into his pocket.

  Lesley watched sceptically. ‘And when you change your jacket, will you remember to put the key somewhere safe?’

  ‘Don’t you think you ought to provide Black Knowe with full-time police protection?’

  ‘I brought your quaich safely home, sir. It’s up to you to decide whether the parapet needs a twenty-four-hour sentry.’

  ‘Keeping buckets of boiling lead permanently on the go?’ He lounged within the curve of a grand piano which had not been here during her last visit. ‘You know, I can’t see myself bothering with bolts and bars, or shutting the thing away in a bank vault or in the Tolbooth cellars, or whatever. Hiding beautiful things makes a nonsense of living.’

  He was staring at the throat of her white blouse.

  Lesley looked up at the painting of the Lass. Dreamily she wondered what it would be like to float about with gauzy bits of transparent material caressing her hips and shoulders and breasts. It would make a change from being the buttoned-up DI, or even the bogus casual, leather-and-Levi’s image.

  Without her noticing, Sir Nicholas had opened a bottle and was pouring wine into a glass whose deeply cut facets sparkled with a light green tinge. ‘From Sicily,’ he said, ignoring the protesting flicker of her fingers. ‘A lovely mixture of damaschino and grecanico grapes. It’s got a flinty edge to it which I like to pretend comes from the lava of Mount Etna. Symbolically, anyway.’

  Symbolically: there was so much around Kilstane that was symbolic, and traditional, and airy-fairy. And did he think the wine appropriate for Lesley Gunn – a flinty e
dge to her, too?

  She said: ‘I see you’ve moved your piano in.’

  ‘An old-fashioned one. At least it won’t fuse all the lights.’ He raised his glass. ‘If it won’t spoil the taste, how are you getting on with the sleuthing? And poor Mrs Ferguson – how tough are you being on her?’

  She told him as much about Sandy Craig as was reasonable.

  ‘Crime passionnel?’ he suggested. ‘Craig and Hannah, and poor old Ferguson . . .’ He shook his head. ‘No, it’s grotesque.’

  ‘Murder often is, Sir Nicholas.’

  He tilted his glass so that the surface of the wine, swinging slowly to and fro, winked at Lesley. ‘Isn’t it time you called me Nick? I’m still not up to this baronet business.’

  ‘This is a formal enquiry. I don’t think my superiors would approve of any familiarity.’

  ‘Then the sooner you complete the enquiry, the better.’ He went briskly on: ‘Look, since this Craig character walked out on Hurricane Hannah – or drove out on her – and has already got himself a floozie on the premises –’

  ‘That’s not going to last. Maybe wasn’t meant to. All part of a cover-up, maybe. Something doesn’t ring true.’

  ‘Speaking of which, listen to this.’

  He spread a yellowing sheet of manuscript on the lid of the piano. Puzzled by the abrupt change of subject, Lesley leaned over to read the faded copperplate lettering at the head of the page.

  ‘This is The Song?’

  ‘Supposedly.’

  ‘Why only supposedly?’

  He picked out the top line on the piano. Its rhythm was stumbling, awkwardly squeezed into uniformity. Lesley’s knowledge of music was a matter of personal taste and impersonal expertise on valuable instruments and their vulnerability to thieves. But as Nicholas Torrance bent over the manuscript and began singing in jarring conflict with what he was fingering on the piano, she said: ‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there?’

  ‘Very wrong. Now listen to this.’

  He slid a cassette into the machine below the Raeburn portrait. It was a copy of a field recording which immediately suggested the Hebrides. As the harsh voices imposed their rhythm on the room, he picked up the theme on the piano. The two lines clashed: not weaving into each other as the threads of a fugue should do, but tripping over each other, jangling, off the beat and out of order.

  ‘That’s wrong, too,’ Lesley agreed. ‘In just the same way. But what are you trying to say?’

  ‘It’s not what I’m saying but what the music is telling you.’

  He had become immersed in his subject. For some reason he had begun drawing her attention to discrepancies in a local traditional song, but all at once he was digging out another cassette and telling her about the oddities of Albanian folk music.

  ‘Listen to this. It’s called Barashes. And then there’s Percolli Ylberin.’ As the unevenly thudding strains emerged, his head began to jerk in rhythm. ‘Back-of-the-neck music,’ he laughed apologetically. ‘But how would you count the beats in each bar?’

  She tapped her foot, found she had lost the rhythm, and tried again. ‘Seven,’ she said uncertainly.

  ‘Yes. Only it’s not really, is it? Dupes the ear. Seven beats to the bar, against the four-four, two-four, or three-four, or even the six-eight we take for granted. But if you ever saw them dancing, you’d get it: not seven beats, but four plus three. And it doesn’t fit nice and tidily between our normal bar lines.’ He brought her back into focus and said: ‘What are you smiling at?’

  ‘Am I? I . . . it’s just that it’s so fascinating.’

  In fact she was conscious of that disturbing throb in the pit of her stomach again. She wanted to tell Nick Torrance how gorgeous he was when he was talking about things that really turned him on.

  ‘Sir Nicholas, I think it’s time I –’

  ‘That first tape I played you. An old Hebridean folk song collected by a friend of mine. But the snatches I was playing on the piano were the same theme twisted into politeness.’

  ‘By someone like Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser?’

  He beamed. Like all enthusiasts, he loved to find someone with a glimmering of his own language. ‘The very lady. Such an earnest researcher. Did so much good. But caused such a lot of damage to her basic discoveries. In that one, she took a tune in the pentatonic scale which finished on the supertonic, but decided this would never do for the city concertgoer. You heard how she prettified the cadences so as not to disturb the conventional ear. She couldn’t accept the free-ranging melodies of the islanders, so she distorted the mode to make a formal key signature possible.’

  He attacked the piano again, demonstrating that where the original had skipped and swung, striking out into little dancing or reflective phrases which arose naturally from the Gaelic language, the version adapted for a parlour piano had been forced into a straitjacket of bar-lines and academically correct harmonies. ‘Where the tune didn’t fit, it was twisted until it did.’

  ‘Sir Nicholas, what’s this got to do with The Song? Or with the Ridings, or anything I’m supposed to be investigating?’

  ‘Everything about those meddlings is true of The Kilstane Lancers. The reason for the conflict in what we were listening to is that when it came to writing it down it was . . . well, classicised. You weren’t here when the men sang it from memory at the Pipers’ Ball. Like those men on Lewis, their intuition made more sense than the written version. The true rhythm was in their bones, not on that scrap of paper. Only when it came to the formal opening ceremony did they try to follow the written music. And it didn’t come naturally.’

  ‘But if this has been authenticated –’

  ‘By whom? Those bar-lines don’t belong to the right period.’

  ‘Which no local dignitary would notice.’

  ‘Certainly not in a transcription of a familiar old piece which all the locals would have known off by heart. Nor would it occur to them that the notation itself looks too carefully stylised for anyone outside the circle of Court composers.’

  ‘But hasn’t it become an essential part of the ritual? Are you going to tell them they’ve been using a fake all these years? So that everything grinds to a halt again? Or is The Song just an optional extra?’

  ‘Or an obbligato. That I don’t know. But I do know there’s something fishy about it.’ He stared down at the offending sheet. ‘And then there’s the paper. I’d like to have an expert analysis.’

  ‘Haydn.’ Lesley was with him on this. ‘Dating Haydn compositions,’ she recalled, ‘musicologists had to distinguish between work done on twelve-staved Italian quarto or on the Esterhazy papers with their stag watermarks and makers’ initials.’

  ‘Or on English paper with makers’ names and ornaments.’ They grinned crazily at each other. ‘We do both see what we’re after, don’t we? With all the facilities you’ve got, is there any way you could get some of your experts to analyse that paper and date it?’

  ‘I don’t see that I could justify an examination of that kind unless it fitted in with what I’m supposed to be working on.’

  ‘Come off it. You’re already sniffing what’s in the wind. And somehow it does fit in. Do you or don’t you have the facilities?’

  He was drawing her into his own world, as full of tantalising puzzles as her own everyday job. ‘I’ve got quite a team for authenticating old paintings, pottery, documents,’ she admitted. ‘Depending on what else they’ve got on their hands right now.’

  ‘I can’t hold on to the manuscript too long. And I daren’t let Dr Hamilton know I’ve let it out of my sight.’

  ‘These folk hate being rushed. If a thing has been around for centuries, they reckon it will manage another few decades.’

  ‘Not so sure about the centuries.’ Nick – oh, all right, to herself she had been calling him Nick for some little while, but had to make sure her tongue did not betray her – glanced at his watch. ‘Hell. I’m due in town for another bit of pageantry.’ He slid the music manuscri
pt carefully back into its container. ‘Don’t you think you could follow it up? Come up with something?’

  She took the envelope. ‘Provided the guv’nor doesn’t want me to concentrate on this minor matter of a murder.’ She smiled slyly. ‘But then, as it happens, he’s been called away for twenty-four hours. Has to give evidence in a court case. Daren’t risk letting some con man get away with it this time. So I shall have to act on my own initiative, shan’t I?’

  *

  The children’s procession had woven its way through the streets from nine o’clock until ten, followed by the full complement of Kilstane pipers between ten and eleven. Even the most up-to-date double glazing could not have left any resident or visitor in any doubt that it was going to be a day of resounding activity.

  At eleven o’clock precisely the pipers once more played a flourish of welcome to horsemen arriving at the Tolbooth. The riders formed a wide arc and doffed hats as the flag was brought forth and its staff was slotted into its scabbard below the right-hand man’s saddle. The cavalcade then moved off in a slow perambulation through the town.

  This year the Callant’s left-hand man and right-hand man were there not merely as token lieutenants. Nick needed them to explain every yard of the way and each move and gesture he was expected to make. Gilbert and Sullivan, he thought again. There were places where he had to stop, bows and waves which had to be offered, stylised obeisance to the flag at specified intervals.

  Six maidens were allowed to ride with the main body. Risking a glance over his shoulder, Nick guessed that hallowed tradition was not too strict here, and the term ‘maiden’ not too pedantically enforced. There were no members of the Pictish Guild among them. Hannah Ferguson would have denounced any such treachery.

  The cavalcade stopped at each street corner. The left-hand man would dismount, pace out the width of the street, raise his arm to signify that it had neither widened nor narrowed since it was last checked, then return and salute. When the town had been thoroughly covered, the riders made their way down to the river bank. On the meadow a polka was performed by girls of Kilstane Academy’s sixth form, watched and whistled at by boys of the sixth form and youths from other Border towns. When the procession had moved on, the girls would continue with Highland dancing.