The walking thereabouts was easy and pleasant. The road, with its long curves, kept always to level ground, and the hotel was by the side of the loch. Laura covered the distance in under an hour and a half, and was hot and thirsty by the time she reached the hotel.
Unhitching her pack, she carried it into the lounge, put it down and, seating herself, hoped against hope that a country whose one blot, so far as she was aware, was its somewhat extraordinary licensing laws, would permit her to have some beer.
Before she could test this hope, however, she became aware that she was being regarded, over the top of an open newspaper, by eyes she seemed to recognize. She looked steadily at the eyes, and the newspaper was gradually lowered until, achieving a full glance at the face to which the eyes belonged, she saw that she was sharing the lounge with her artist acquaintance of Glencoe.
“Hullo,” said Laura, recognizing that the onus of greeting was on her. “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” he said; and came over. “You can give me some help, if you will.”
“As long as it isn’t art criticism,” said Laura, grinning.
“Ah, that!” He grinned also. “I’ve been told you were pulling my leg. I’ve given up art. I was too easy to see through, apparently. I’ve taken up canvassing of another kind now.”
It was on the tip of Laura’s tongue to reply:
“Yes, I knew you were phoney. But what exactly are you up to?”
Then she reflected that, after all, there had been murder done upon Rannoch Moor not so far from the spot on which this bearded stranger had chosen to pursue his extraordinary vocation of painting clear cold water over the oil colours on an old picture, and held back her verdict and her question. He answered the question, however.
“To tell you a bit more,” he went on, “I am on an assignment. I’ve been engaged to watch the interests of a fellow called Stewart. He reckons to own some property in the neighbourhood of Duror of Appin—know the place?”
“Well, yes, I know the Duror Inn,” admitted Laura, her heart giving a sudden bound of excitement. The man chuckled.
“I know you do. Just testing you, that’s all. Don’t be offended. I have to know whom I can trust. I’ve seen you go into the house. Craigullich is the name. Well, from what I’ve gathered, it seems that this fellow Stewart is trying to turn out another fellow—some sort of half-brother of his—but the fellow won’t go. So I, having been a pal of Stewart’s, and having time on my hands, and not, I might tell you, a tremendous amount of the ready, took on the job of keeping an eye on him.
“Now comes the oddest part: that day you gave me your cigarettes in Glencoe—many thanks, by the way; real lifesavers—I was due to meet Stewart. I was on the lookout for him. Well, he’s never turned up! It's the funniest thing on earth. I don’t know what to do. I haven't a bean at the moment, except an advance on my fee, which he gave me before we parted, so I’ve got to hang on as best I can. I’ve bought a book on Touting for a Living, and a carpet bag”—he indicated a very cheap suitcase nearby—“and I’ve invested in a few combs and toothbrushes and things, and I’m peddling them about this damned hilly countryside trying to get news of the bloke.”
“Stewart?”
“Stewart. Can’t find out a damned thing. And it’s funny, too, because, you see, we were to go together to a solicitor—or whatever they're called up here—and witness some transfer of title-deeds or something. Don’t understand legal business—never did—but Stewart was in such a fever to get the job over and settled that I can’t understand his not coming.”
“Which way was he to come?” asked Laura.
“I don’t know. He was walking, you see.”
“But where were you to meet him?”
“Where you saw me—that little corrie above the old road through Glencoe. He made me a drawing. Look.”
He opened the suitcase and took out a small sheet of paper.
“But suppose it had been raining or foggy?” persisted Laura.
“I don’t know. He said he hoped it would be fine. And, dash it, it was fine! I couldn’t possibly have missed him.”
“Did anyone else know this—that you were meeting him?”
“Nobody else at all. I had to keep it very secret. I’m only telling you now because I’m in such a stew about the fellow, and I thought you must know something as you’d been inside that house.”
“What made you go to the house?”
“To tell you the truth, I didn’t know what to do. I had to do something, so I went to the house to have a look, that was all. And imagine what I felt to see you! And with a witch!”
“Why didn’t you come up and speak?”
“Forbidden to show myself where this half-brother chap could see me. It appeared to be essential that the fellow should not suspect I had anything to do with Stewart.”
“What do you want with me?”
“I want you to give me the low-down on this half-brother. Come how it may, you know him, or you wouldn’t be visiting the house.”
“I only visit the house with my employer, who happens to be a doctor, and is treating Mr. Loudoun,” said Laura, who began not to like either the request or this new witness. “I’m afraid I can’t help you at all. Neither of us knows Mr. Loudoun except in the way I’ve said, and as for your Mr. Stewart . . .”
She thought no more about a drink, although a waiter had been hovering for some moments on the brink of their conversation. She slung her pack over her shoulder, bade an abrupt farewell to the pseudo-artist turned pedlar, and shot out past the waiter, who looked a little astonished and somewhat affronted as he withdrew to the lair from which he had emerged.
Laura, to her infinite chagrin, was in time to see the dust rising behind a departing bus. Rather than stay where she was, she tramped onward alongside Loch Laggan and picked up a bus an hour later.
Upon thinking over her small adventure she was inclined to believe that she had made, although inadvertently, a discovery of value. So far as she knew, the body found upon Rannoch Moor had not been identified. If it were Stewart, and Stewart turned out to be the Ure of Loudoun’s story, (so her mind raced on), then the importance of the chance meetings, first with the mad artist, and now with the sane bagman, could scarcely be overestimated.
She was tired of her journey back to Ballachulish, and wanted nothing more than to see Mrs. Bradley again and acquaint her with this new development.
Chapter Seven
★
The heathery isle!
Fraoch Eilean!
War cry of the MacDonalds and of the MacNaughtons
★
When Catherine had been laid on her bunk in the single cabin boasted by the Kerisaig, the owner of the craft put about and ran out past the small island of Shuna and the village of Portnacroich, on the east side of Loch Linnhe, came by the narrow channel between Lismore and the small town of Appin, and then, intent upon the continuation of his honeymoon, which had suffered, he felt, some interruption on the previous afternoon and night, he rounded into the Sound of Mull, crossed over towards the long cape of Ardnamurchan, and then let the Kerisaig run freely northwards towards the Sound of Sleat and the island of Skye.
They took the channel by the Kyle of Lochalsh and cruised up between Scalpay and the Narrows to run for Portree. They spent the nights on board the cruiser in the harbour, and put in a day or two cruising. Then, from Portree, they followed the usual steamer route round the north of the island to Dunvegan and Kilmuir.
Catherine wanted to see Dunvegan Castle. Rest and massage had greatly improved the condition of the wrenched foot, and she had been spending most of each day in the cockpit. Ian helped her ashore, and she found that she could walk without much difficulty. He would not allow her to do much walking, however, and they soon returned to the cruiser, having ample stores aboard, and decided to run for Loch Harport before it was dark. A gale blew up from south-westwards as they made Dunvegan Head, so Ian put back, and they spent the night at
Kilmuir, tight and snug and not particularly regretful, as, in spite of the gale, the weather remained fine.
In the morning, however, a sea-mist clouded the sun, and they were obliged to lie hove-to until it cleared. This was not until nearly ten o’clock, but then a bright sun broke through, and, chugging out of Loch Dunvegan, they rounded the headland, giving it plenty of room as the seas were high and the wind was blowing very strongly still from south-west, and came round Duirinish and into Loch Harport to Drynoch. They left the cruiser there and walked across to Sligachan, a distance of less than ten miles as the crow flies, and followed the low ground formed by a small river valley. They came down past the hotel and the low-roofed kirk to the head of a long narrow sea-loch, but did not go down to the water’s edge, for the tide was out and the rocks were dark with wet seaweed. Behind them rose the peaks of Sgurr nan Gillean between which in winter, the snow lies drifted and heavy.
They spent the night at the hotel, and next day took the road towards Bradford and Kyleakin. They had left Sconser, a little place near the seaward end of the loch, and were admiring the mountain heights of the eastern Cuillin, when the adventure began which brought them back, as fast as the Kerisaig could thresh through the narrow seas, to Ballachulish. They met Loudoun; the only Loudoun that they, so far, had seen; the ghost-ridden Loudoun of the moor.
He was walking with two other men, and was on crutches. Immediately he saw them he pursed his lips and lowered his eyes and slightly but unmistakably shook his head. They passed him, therefore, without the slightest sign of recognition. When they looked back he was seated on the ground. The men were still one on either side of him.
“Funny,” said Catherine, when they were out of earshot. “I wonder why he didn’t want us to speak?”
“I should say we were right the first time we met him, and he really is mad,” said Ian. “Still, we can’t do anything about it. I wonder why the crutches? He must have had another fall, I suppose, and busted himself again.”
They walked on, and soon forgot him. They were unaware that there was still a Hector Loudoun at Craigullich.
It was too far for Catherine to walk to Broadford, so, some way along the shore of the reed-girt sea-loch whose margin they were following, they turned back. When they came to the place where Loudoun and his companions had seated themselves, there were the indentations of his crutches on the soft ground, and then, as though he had formed the letters idly as he sat there, the word circauig. Before they reached Sconser he was in sight again. He made no more sign of recognition than he had done the first time, but, as they passed, they could hear that he was singing. The tune was that of Loch Lomond, but the time was peculiarly stressed.
“Dadadad dah dah dah dadadad,” sang Loudoun. “Dadadad dah dah dah dadadad. Dadadad dah dah dah dadadad. Dadadad dah dah dah dadadad. Dadadad dah dah dah dadadad,” he continued; and so, in a marked Morse rhythm of S.O.S., to the end of the tune.
Ian was frowning. He hurried Catherine past the crippled man and his two companions, and said nothing until they were back at their hotel. Then he said:
“You have lunch. I’m going out on my own for a bit. I want to stretch my legs.”
Stretching his legs took him back by the way they had come. The legend circauig was plain to see. He obliterated it, and then turned back once more. He had seen nothing of the three this time, and so deduced that they had not walked as far as Sligachan but must have turned off before they got into the little port.
He was undecided what to do next, and badly wanted his lunch, so he joined Catherine, who had made her meal last as long as ever she could, and reported what he had done.
“If only we could be certain that he isn’t just a lunatic,” he said, “we’d know what to do, I suppose.”
“What would that be?” she enquired.
“Why, get to Uig as soon as possible and find out what’s going on. As a matter of fact, I think I shall do that anyway. We might just as well go there as anywhere else, and, if we can’t locate him, that will have to be the end of it, but if we do locate him, and there’s any funny business going on, we’ll have to do what we can for him, I suppose.”
“Must we interfere?” asked Catherine. “If he wanted our help, he had only to speak as we passed.”
“I know, but, don’t you see, that’s just the point. He didn’t want us to show that we recognized him, and yet I’m certain he was asking for help in that song. And then . . .”
“But why Uig?”
“I’m just coming to that. He wrote circauig on the mud. Divide it up and you get circa (near or round about) Uig, a place on the north-west side of the island. I take it he was telling us where to find him. He’s in trouble. Those two blokes looked tough. Maybe he dared not speak.”
“It sounds like a gangster film,” protested Catherine.
“Well, yes, it does, and we’re on holiday, and it might be all moonshine, you think. Still, you know, Kate, without worrying ourselves at all we can cruise to Uig, and there we shall be no worse off, so what do you say?”
“I say let’s start this afternoon. We did so little hiking this morning that I can easily walk back as far as the boat when you’ve had your lunch; we are going back directly after tea in any case.”
“Good enough. But we’ll hire a car. I’d like to get to Uig as soon as we can. It isn’t every day we get a thriller handed us. Let’s make the most of it. I can see your point, of course, when you say there can’t really be anything in it, but, after all, you know, old Morag did disappear that morning we left Craigullich, or, possibly, the night before when we heard those doors being shut. There’s no doubt Loudoun was scared to death of his ‘ghost,’ and there’s also no doubt there was somebody in the house that night besides the four that we know of.”
So they still left Kerisaig at her moorings, and went by car to Uig. It was a little place standing on a bay of the same name, an inlet of broad Loch Snizort. Application to the driver of the car brought lodgings at the house of one Donald MacDonald, who had his house on the hillside facing the sea. It was a fair-sized modern house—large, in fact, compared with the two-roomed crofts which, scattered over the seaward face of the hill, comprised the rest of the village. Two streams cut gorges in the hillside and then flowed into the bay, and the countryside was treeless. The six-roomed house had no garden. Shaggy, long-horned Highland cattle grazed to the very door. The nearest neighbour, an old lady named Ishbel MacMillan, lived in a one-room croft boasting neither chimney nor window, and with the hearth in the middle of the floor.
Having accepted them with reserve, courtesy and great hospitality as lodgers, the family made no enquiry as to the probable length of their stay, and Ian, by the end of supper, felt as though he had lived in the house half his life-time and could as easily live the second half there. It was like home.
The MacDonalds were crofters, like their neighbours, owning rather more land than some. They had a son and a married daughter in Canada, and another son training for the ministry. The younger daughter was at Edinburgh University, where term had not yet ended. They were able to let her room during the early part of the summer, and the son’s room until the middle of September, since the boy took a post as holiday tutor in England until the schools went back. It was early in the season for tourists, so that both rooms had happened to be vacant. They took the larger one, and looked out beyond a wonderful seascape to where the small group of islands that lay in the entrance to Loch Snizort seemed to point the way to the Little Minch and the Outer Hebrides.
“Wish we were staying here,” said Ian. “For the whole of our honeymoon, I mean; but I am wondering how we can begin this business of trying to find out Loudoun, to know what he wants us to do.”
Catherine could make no suggestion, so the first thing they did upon the following morning was to explore the surrounding country. It seemed to them that a cripple on crutches and attended by two henchmen (or guards, as they now chose to believe them to be) must be sufficiently noticeable to p
rovoke comment. Ian, therefore, at the end of a morning of strolling, loitering, and lazing, during which he had contrived to see everybody, he thought, who lived on or near the hillside, went into the post-office to enquire about a telegram.
The post-office was also the general shop, the chemist’s shop, the draper’s, the ironmonger’s, and the confectioner’s. Ian, going in to ask for his fictitious telegram, and ducking his head to avoid hitting it on the tin baths pendant from the ceiling, had a long and interesting conversation with the post-mistress, first on the subject of the telegram, and secondly on his anxiety for his crippled friend, who had promised to show up at Uig during the week, but of whom, so far, he had no news.
The post-mistress had no news, either, of anyone even remotely resembling the description Ian gave to her of Loudoun. A cripple, poor thing, she was understood to say, would have little pleasure on the hillside at all, at all.
“We’re wasting our time,” he said, on returning to Catherine. “Let’s go fishing. The MacIvers have a boat, and I’m anxious to try out those trident-looking hooks they use here. I’ve never seen them before.”
Arrangements were accordingly made, but before they could be put into practice all plans were changed, for, just as they were on their way down the hill to board the small boat they had hired, they caught sight of Loudoun again, and he winked and slightly nodded before turning off between his two companions towards the south.
Ian telescoped his rod, and told the younger MacIver, a lad of seventeen, that he would not fish after all, but would row on the bay.
“You will not be needing me?” asked the boy. Ian shook his head but added that that would make no difference to the terms on which the boat was hired.
“But it will. The fish was to go to them,” said Catherine.
My Father Sleeps (Mrs. Bradley) Page 9