by Henry Wade
“I’ll no ask any questions now”, he said. “The Inspector will be along in his car from Fort William tomorrow, and likely he’ll be bringing the Procurator Fiscal with him. Maybe they’ll have some questions to ask. Ye’ll understand, Mr. Hendel, that we must take charge of the boady till the Registrar gives his certificate and that’ll no be till the Fiscal’s satisfied. We’ll tak it along in the launch now and then it’ll be ready for the post-morrtem tomorrow.”
“I expect the Procurator Fiscal will bring a surgeon along from Fort William”, said Dr. Kennedy. “That’s the usual practice. Of course, I shall be present.”
“What about the staag, Mr. Hendel?” enquired McShail anxiously. “Did ye gralloch it?”
“No, I’m afraid I didn’t. I was so taken up with my cousin. Besides, I don’t know how to.”
“T, t”, clucked Jim. “That’ll be good meat spoilt. I’ll be along first thing the morn, but I doobt it’ll be too late to save the meat.”
“Na, na, James McShail; ye mauna touch it”, declared the police-constable. “The corpus must remain in loco until the Inspector and the Prrocurrator Fiscal have viewed it. I doobt it ought to be under police superveesion.”
“I’ll be up there first thing in the morning”, said McShail. “If ye like, I’ll watch over it till ye come. It’ll be the Saabath, but the Meenister will no raise his voice against my doing that for the Captain.”
“That’s kindly, James. I must get back to Mallaig myself with the boady and to notify the Inspector. There’s no other Constable nearer than Fort William. If ye’ll mind the staag for me it will all be ship-shape for the Inspector and the Fiscal when they come along in the morning.”
So it was arranged, and within a quarter of an hour the big launch had gone chugging off in the moonlight. Eustace and Jim McShail stood on the beach and watched it out of sight. The old stalker shook his head.
“I always told the Captain to approach a staag wi’ mair caircumspection”, he said. “’Tis a peety ye didna gralloch the beast; ’tis a sad waste of guid meat.”
On the following morning the launch returned at about half-past one, bearing P.C. Laing, a uniformed Inspector, and two gentlemen in plain clothes. The older of these two proved to be Captain Buchanan, Chief Constable of Inverness-shire, while the other, thin and clean-shaven, was the Procurator Fiscal of the district.
Once the necessary introductions had been effected, the Chief Constable and the Police-Inspector remained quietly in the background, leaving the task of interrogation entirely to the Procurator Fiscal. And very thoroughly he set about that task. Once again Eustace had to tell his story, and this time he realized that he was up against the critical phase of his ordeal. No easy acceptance of statements here, no slurring over of awkward facts, no chance of evading exact questions. A trained lawyer, Mr. Hannay was there to investigate the cause of death; he was perfectly polite but he took nothing and nobody for granted. After half an hour’s rigid cross-examination Eustace thought his story was unshaken—but he was not too comfortable about it; the Procurator Fiscal gave no indication of his feelings. Having finished with Eustace, he proceeded to question Blanche, then Joan Hope-Fording, Harding, Donald, and finally even the ghilly, Ian. Having spent nearly two hours over all this he announced that he was ready to go and see the locus. The whole party climbed into the launch and soon after half-past five they joined McShail beside the dead stag on Beinn Rhoinn.
It was here that Eustace was made to realize the astonishing thoroughness of the Scottish methods of investigation. Inspector Wainwright produced a camera; the dead stag was photographed from several angles; Eustace was invited to place himself where he had stood when David Hendel approached the stag; then he was asked to show David’s attitude when the stag struck him, and was photographed in that attitude from the position at which he himself had been standing. Fortunately he had thought all this out before giving his description to Laing; if he had made a slip, if—taken in conjunction with the stag’s position—David could not have been standing as he had described, the camera would have found it out. Then he showed where David had lain, where he himself had knelt when bandaging him. The ground was searched—Eustace thanked his stars that he had obliterated all trace of David’s crawl downhill. The position from which he had fired was asked for; McShail had already found that and showed the spent cartridge case and even the slot of the stag where it had plunged on being struck, the marks of its few staggering strides before it fell. That produced technicalities about the effect of bullets upon various parts of the stag’s body.
Finally, by the Procurator Fiscal’s direction, the stag was gralloched by McShail, helped by Police-Constable Laing, who had been a ghilly in his younger days. The beast’s lacerated windpipe was produced—and photographed! At this point Captain Buchanan took a hand. He had personal experience of deer-stalking, which the Procurator Fiscal had not. Eustace was questioned as to the actual movements of the stag after being struck by the bullet. Mr. Hannay expressed incredulity at the beast being able to remain on its feet for even a moment, let alone move an appreciable distance, with a smashed shoulder and a severed windpipe, but the Chief Constable assured him that such vitality in stags was not only possible but common. The stag, he said, could not have lived many minutes, but till it had drawn its last sobbing breath it would be capable of striking a blow in self-defence.
Eustace was intensely grateful for this unexpected advocacy. He was thankful that he had stuck to the literal truth regarding the stag’s condition. If he had lied, or prevaricated over the effect of his bullet, he would have been found out for an absolute certainty.
At last Mr. Hannay was through, and McShail and the constable, attaching ropes to the stag’s head and fore-feet, began to pull it down the hill. The rest of the party followed; as they approached the shore Eustace realized that he and the Procurator Fiscal were some distance behind the remainder. Mr. Hannay stopped to light a cigarette.
“I understand, Mr. Hendel”, he said, carefully burying the match in the earth, “that there are now very few male members of the senior branch of your family left?”
Eustace felt his heart check.
“There’s old Lord Barradys”, he said, “and Desmond Hendel—Captain Hendel’s son. And there are sons by the female lines.”
“Ah, yes, but they cannot succeed . . . to the title at any rate.”
Who had been putting him up to this? Not Blanche, surely. That Hope-Fording woman, it must have been.
“I’m not very well up in the family tree”, he said carelessly.
“And yet, if anything were to happen to Mr. Desmond Hendel, you would in due course become Lord Barradys.”
“Is that really so? A couple of months ago there were a whole packet of them. Extraordinary, isn’t it?”
In desperation, Eustace felt that recklessness was his only line.
“A most tragic business”, said Mr. Hannay quietly. “The father and son being drowned together. You weren’t there?”
Eustace stopped dead.
“What the hell are you getting at?” he asked angrily. “Certainly I wasn’t there. I hadn’t seen Howard for years—didn’t even know where he lived.”
There could hardly be any mistaking the ring of truth in his words. In any case, it could easily be proved.
In silence they walked on. As they approached the launch Eustace asked:
“When’ll the inquest be?”
Mr. Hannay smiled.
“There are no inquests, such as you mean, in Scotland”, he said. “I am making the enquiry now.”
Eustace stared at him.
“Then there is no . . . ?”
“No verdict? No, Mr. Hendel, either there is a criminal prosecution . . . or there is not.”
Chapter Twelve
Waiting for the Plums
IT was a gloomy dinner that Eustace, Blanche and Joan Hope-Fording sat down to that Sunday evening at Glenellich. Blanche did her best to appear natural, but this was the sec
ond shock that she had suffered in a few weeks, and the close questioning of the Procurator Fiscal could have left her little doubt of what was in his mind. She did her best to let Eustace see that she herself entirely accepted his explanation of what had happened. It was otherwise with Joan Hope-Fording; the girl was morose and silent, spoke little, and never to Eustace. There could be little doubt as to who had been suggesting things to Mr. Hannay. As for Eustace, he was utterly exhausted after two days of incessant nervous strain. He was almost too exhausted to feel anxious—and Heaven knows he had good reason to be.
As he drank his third glass of port, after the women had left him, he thought over the day’s events—and the more he thought the less he liked them. His story had not been shaken, he had not been caught out in any lies, but under the close scrutiny of the Procurator Fiscal it had worn extremely thin. There remained the undoubted fact that extraordinary accidents do happen, that there was precedent both for serious injury being caused by a dying stag and even for the actual severing of a femoral artery by a stalker’s knife. This, coupled with the fact that there was, and could be, no direct evidence against him, made Eustace hopeful—after the third glass of port—that his story would, however reluctantly, be accepted by the authorities. It was a comfort to him at least to know that it was accepted by Blanche; that being the case it was unlikely that there would be any public suspicion—the Hope-Fording woman could hardly draw attention to herself and her thwarted aspirations by spreading rumours.
So it was in a more cheerful frame of mind that Eustace went into the sitting-room. He found Blanche alone.
“Joan’s gone to bed”, she said; “got a headache. I’m rather glad; I wanted a chance to talk to you, Eustace.”
Eustace wondered anxiously what was coming. He didn’t want another cross-examination.
“It’s about poor David”, she went on. “I wrote to Desmond to-day and asked him what he would like done about the funeral. Personally I feel that as they haven’t a family home—they’ve only been at Clarge a few years—and with all the delay and the post-mortem, it would be much best for him to be buried here. He loved Glenellich; it was the one place where he seemed to be natural; I don’t want to seem to criticize my husband’s family, but they were rather overbearing in some ways, both Howard and David. I never saw their father, but of course old Lord Barradys is too. Up here David seemed to drop all that.”
Eustace thought that that was not his impression, but he was prepared to admit that he had not seen David under the most favourable circumstances; the chap had, at any rate, been decent yesterday when he did kill his stag.
“I quite agree, Blanche”, he said. “Will Desmond be coming up here, d’you think?”
“Oh, no, he couldn’t possibly stand the journey, poor boy. He lives most of the time in London, you know, so as to be near doctors and treatment. It’s a terrible life for him.”
“It must be, poor fellow. I’ve never met him. Do you think he’d care for me to go and see him?”
“I’m sure he would, Eustace. He’s very lonely, I think. He’s got a sort of superior nurse-companion; she’s very nice but . . . he doesn’t see many men. He writes, you know; he’s rather a poet.”
“What about David? I wonder he left the poor boy alone like that.”
“Well, one can hardly blame him, Eustace. He couldn’t bear London after the war; hunting and shooting and fishing—things like that were all he cared for, especially after Beryl died. He was always very nice to Desmond but . . . I suppose it was natural that he should feel disappointed; he wanted a son to do things with him. I don’t think they understood each other very well.”
Eustace thought there were probably not many people in the world who ‘understood’ others as Blanche did. She always had a good word for everybody—saw the best side of them. That probably accounted for his being asked up here—an ironic twist!
“I hope they’ll get through with that post-mortem quickly”, he said. “I don’t like to think of the poor chap lying on some cold slab in Mallaig.”
Early bed that night and Eustace slept more soundly than he would have believed possible on that excruciating mattress. The following day was a complete blank; nobody came near Glenellich. The police had ‘released’ the body of Eustace’s stag on the previous evening, after it had been skinned and closely examined, and McShail spent the morning cutting it up and distributing it, by Eustace’s orders, to crofters along the shore. Joan Hope-Fording had also killed a stag on Saturday and this would be used in the house or for sending away, though one haunch was spoilt by a bullet that had necessitated quick action by McShail. Eustace felt childishly pleased to hear the stalker’s account of how he had snatched the rifle from ‘the leddy’ and dropped the stag with a neck shot just as it was disappearing over the sky-line.
On Tuesday came Police-Constable Laing, bearing the Registrar’s certificate and asking for instructions about the body. In the mail-boat that brought him came a telegram from Desmond agreeing to Blanche’s suggestions as to the funeral, and a further telegram from Mr. Christendome to say that he was coming north that night and hoped to arrive on the following day. Eustace was slightly perturbed at this prospect; he remembered having made rather indiscreet attempts to pump the old lawyer about the family affairs.
However, when he arrived, Mr. Christendome was the embodiment of polite sympathy to Eustace; evidently he had no suspicions at all. Fortunately Joan Hope-Fording had left on the previous day, her departure being unwept by either Eustace or Blanche. There was no further sign from the Procurator Fiscal nor from the police, save that Laing had done everything in his power to help with arrangements for the funeral.
David was buried on Wednesday and both Eustace and Blanche were touched by the way in which every man, woman and child in Glenellich came in ‘decent black’ to see the laird laid to his last rest by the Presbyterian minister. Eustace was aware that he himself was the centre of a good deal of interest, but it was not hostile; evidently in this quarter, at any rate, his story had been accepted without question; no doubt the reminiscences of Donald, McShail, Dr. Kennedy, and Police-Constable Laing had helped to this end, and Eustace was grateful to the Chief Constable and the Procurator Fiscal for keeping any doubts which they might have harboured to themselves.
No other relations came to the funeral; it was hardly to be expected that they would. Lord Barradys and Desmond were prevented by age and infirmity, Henry Carr telegraphed that he was alone in the office and could not get away for so long, for the rest . . . it was a far cry for any but the nearest to come to the west coast of Scotland. Eustace was the sole male representative, and he was conscious of a first-stirring of self-importance as he played his future part as ‘head of the family’.
Harding, Donald, and the two maids, helped by Blanche, had been busy packing for two days; on Thursday the whole party, including Mr. Christendome, left Mallaig at 2.15 p.m., reaching King’s Cross early on the following morning.
Only returning to his lodgings to dump his luggage, Eustace hurried round to Pearl Street. Jill was still in bed, but she bustled out of it at once and in ten minutes was eating, in pyjamas and kimono, the breakfast that Mrs. Hollebone had obligingly prepared for them both.
“Quite like a married couple”, said the good-natured landlady with an affectionate smile at her pet lodger. “I can’t think why . . . oh, well; there’s them as knows their own business best.”
Jill listened to Eustace’s story with eager excitement and brushed aside his doubts about the Procurator Fiscal’s opinion of the story.
“They’d never have let you come away like this if they really thought you’d done it”, she declared. “Why, they couldn’t get you now if they wanted—not without an extradition or whatever it is.”
Eustace laughed.
“Scotland isn’t such a foreign country as all that”, he said, “even though it has got its own way of doing things. Rather a smart way, too, to my thinking”, he added with a grimace. “However
, I daresay you’re right. All the same, I shall keep a sharp look-out for being shadowed for the next week or two. And look here, my girl, no talking about this in public—Valtano’s or anywhere like that.”
Jill kissed him vigorously.
“Of course not, idiot. Never another word about it—from either of us. We’ll just lie back and wait for the plums to fall. But talking of Val’s, what about a spot of celebration to-night?”
These were both good ideas and the celebration at Valtano’s could be carried out without further thought—and was. As for the plums, all was now ready for them, but there remained the question of how to carry on until they actually fell. The £50 legacy from Howard had gone; nothing else would come in until that poor chap Desmond actually passed out, and Eustace was uncertain when that was likely to occur. He would follow Blanche’s advice and go round and see him—see for himself just what the position was. In the meantime money must be raised. With such a future before him Eustace did not intend to go on living in his present squalid manner; in any case, something had got to be done about Jill, otherwise she would have to take an engagement.
There was, of course, his small stock of capital, from which he drew his only fixed income. With the future assured, or practically assured, that capital might now be realized and used for current expenditure until ‘the plums’ came along. But . . . a streak of North-country caution in Eustace warned him not to part with his one sheet anchor. After all, to say that the future was ‘practically assured’ was not quite the same thing as knowing, with good legal statements in black and white, that it was absolutely assured; in any case, the period during which assurance must do duty for fact was an uncertain one—it depended upon the ‘expectation of life’ of Desmond Hendel—and Eustace knew from experience that dying men often take an unconscionable time about their going.
No, it would be unwise to sell capital; far better raise another loan. Now that David was dead Isaacson would surely see that the security was there. Other money-lenders had seen it, shrewd fellows. On his return from Scotland Eustace had found two letters awaiting him, offering to advance any sum up to . . . the usual stuff, but the point was that it was several years since any such offer had been made to him; these fellows had been cute enough to spot the change in his circumstances. They were the wrong sort, of course; the letter-writing, touting fellows with good old Scottish names who charged scandalous rates of interest and gave you no rope if things went a little wrong. Nothing like Isaacson, who had been fair and decent enough . . . up to a point.