by Alan Hunter
‘If Highness says so. But I’d love to meet a real heather-bashing laird.’
‘They went out with hansom cabs,’ Gently said. ‘Come on. This is the only way that makes sense.’
He led through a thin curtain of underbrush into a grassy space divided by a rivulet, and here a couple of stones which might have been stepping-stones suggested that others used that way. A diagonal line across the opening brought them to a plantation of young firs, where a definite path upward was indicated by a lane or fire-break through the trees. It was rocky and muddy and obstructed with brush and quite unnecessarily perpendicular, and seemed to be going on for ever with no other prospect but more trees.
‘Do you think it’s right?’ Brenda gasped at last. ‘You owe me a new pair of shoes already.’
‘It’s right,’ Gently grunted. ‘There’s someone ahead of us. We keep passing fresh bootmarks and snapped twigs.’
‘Oh hell,’ Brenda panted. ‘These bloody professionals. I’ll tell you something about him too.’
‘What’s that?’
‘He’s no stupid English tourist. He’s a native who knows about ‘‘guid paths’’!’
But at last the fire-break came to an end and plunged them into the twilight of some matured firs, beneath which the bare soil, slippery with needles, made them grab for handholds as they clambered upwards. Then there was day-light again. They had reached the lowest of the horizontal breaks, a broad, grassed, friendly-looking strip carrying a fence of sheep-netting. There was a gate in the fence and beside the gate a smooth stone. Brenda plumped down on the stone and gasped and dashed the hair from her eyes.
‘This stone is the first sign I’ve met that the Forestry is human!’
Gently hung himself on the gate, taking great lungfuls of earthy air. In a way the break was disappointing, because it suggested a view it didn’t offer. It curved at each end into the sky, just refusing a glimpse of the glen, while below and above them were merely trees and more trees.
‘We’re not so fit,’ he puffed. ‘Or maybe just not used to mountains.’
‘Do you like your women sweaty?’ Brenda gasped. ‘Oh, why didn’t I listen to Geoffrey? I like Geoffrey.’
‘We’re high, I think. We can’t be far from the foot of the crag.’
‘George, you can keep the crag.’
‘Look, more bootmarks.’
‘Oh!’ Brenda panted. ‘Oh!’
After ten minutes the sweat began drying and they’d got their second wind; then another push at the track seemed a little less daunting. Beyond the gate it looked docile. Gently was convinced it would soon turn left towards the crag, and Brenda remembered seeing, when down at the cottage, a slanting ridge which could have been the path. So they went through the gate and on upwards, though with not quite the élan of the first onset. Now, after each hundred yards or so, they paused to breathe and wipe sweat.
The track indeed turned left: but only after another punishing ascent, followed by a scramble under young firs planted so thickly that beneath them was almost total blackness. Then it bore away in a steep, broken, slippery traverse, pointing to a goal of increased daylight above the dark night of the trees.
‘That’ll be it,’ Gently gulped. ‘There’s a big gap up there.’
‘Alleluia,’ Brenda moaned. ‘I’m not the girl I used to be. My poor, poor shoes.’
‘I’ll buy you some more in Balmagussie.’
‘If you don’t you’re a rotten swine – and you’re a rotten swine anyway.’
The end came suddenly. At one moment they were dragging themselves over the rocks, with trees hemming them on both sides and threatening to bar the way ahead; the next they were out on soft turf, in a nakedness of light that dazzled them, with a soaring rockface on one hand and airy nothing on the other. They had reached the crag. At its foot was no more than a shallow apron of grass, ending in a second precipice and a rockfall which were hidden from below by the trees.
They stood gasping, looking.
‘Worth it now?’ Gently asked.
Brenda shook her head. ‘Nothing’s worth it – but it’s a pretty good view.’
‘That’s the cottage.’
‘So what about it?’
‘Those are the cars.’
‘I’ve seen a car.’
‘Look at the sun on the tops over there.’
‘George.’
‘Yes?’
‘Drop dead,’ Brenda said.
She slumped down on the turf and lay flapping at her face with her hand. Gently grinned at her through his sweat and threw himself down beside her.
The view was majestic. At this elevation the eastern braes had lost their steepness, and showed rolling heathy tops above the line of the forest. Southward the run of the glen was visible to its portal seven miles off, where, terminated on the right by a massive peak, it appeared to launch into the sky. All the loch could be seen. Its slanty reaches lay pale and skylike among the braes, at this end broad, with rushy boundaries, then narrowing to a distant silver arrow. Northward, where a secondary glen came in from the west, the strath broadened to a small plain, and the folding braes grouped around it to form a cauldron of misty woods.
They lay silently watching for several minutes, then Brenda turned to Gently with a smile.
‘Big enough for you?’
He took her hand. ‘Yes, big enough. Just.’
‘Of course you’re right about the size.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s what really makes the difference. With men too, as well as mountains. Do you think Bridget likes me?’
‘Bridget likes you.’
‘It’s important.’
‘Everything’s important and unimportant.’
‘Well, this is important.’
‘Bridget likes you.’
‘I could, of course, kick your teeth in.’
Gently kissed her.
‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if I could make you jealous, George. You’re so damned impregnable, that’s your trouble. Even if you were jealous it wouldn’t show.’
‘So why bother,’ Gently said.
‘Just an urge. All women have it. To make a man seething mad. To make it eat into his guts.’
‘Well, don’t frustrate the urge,’ Gently said.
‘But what’s the use if you don’t react?’
‘I might pretend, to help out.’
‘Jump over that cliff,’ she said.
He kissed her.
Brenda gave a little wriggle in his arms. ‘On the whole you talk too much,’ she said. ‘Not, in the normal way, that you talk a lot, but George, you do talk too much. Now please be quiet.’
‘Yes,’ Gently said.
‘Quieter still.’
Gently was quiet.
‘Even quieter.’
Gently obeyed.
‘There,’ she said. ‘Much better.’
Gently was quiet then for a space of minutes; but now the sun on the tops was plainly waning. Soon even their lavish Highland evening would be stealing into a night. The dagger of the loch had grown harder, whiter in its thrust down the glen, and a haze was settling in the witch’s pot and dulling the clean lines of the braes.
‘Damn these mountains,’ Brenda sighed. ‘They’re damp too, into the bargain.’
‘Up then,’ Gently said. ‘When you notice that, it’s time to go.’
He helped her rise. For a few last moments they dallied to take a farewell look, Brenda resting on Gently’s arm with a hand curled inside his. Behind them the crag, splintered and fissured, lifted in dizzying pitches to the Keekingstane, and on the right the ‘guid path’ departed untamed into a fresh torment of trees. Suddenly Gently felt Brenda go taut.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Ssh. Just look.’
‘Look where?’
‘There. Up the crag. Then get ready to tell me I’m a liar.’
Gently looked. The crag rose perpendicularly for perhaps another two hundred feet, ending
in a cloven shaft or tooth of rock which could be no other than the Stane. The Stane leaned outwards from the line of the crag and was silhouetted by the paling sky. In the cleft of the Stane Gently saw a man’s head. The man was staring intently through a pair of glasses.
‘I see,’ Gently breathed. ‘That explains all the boot-prints.’
‘Don’t you see who it is?’ Brenda whispered.
‘No. Nor do you at this distance.’
‘But I do!’ she hissed. ‘I’d know him anywhere. I know the shape of his head.’
‘Whose?’
‘Redbeard’s.’
‘Dear Brenda!’
‘Look,’ she said. ‘He’s lowering the glasses.’
The glasses sank, and very briefly they glimpsed a broad, bearded face; then the man apparently caught sight of them and his head vanished from the cleft.
‘There,’ Brenda said. ‘Now call me a liar!’
Gently hunched a shoulder. ‘It’s him if you say so. Maybe I was wrong about him being a farmer. Maybe he’s a Forestry man instead.’
‘Do Forestry men sit around with glasses?’
‘He could be the laird from the big house. He was training the glasses in that direction.’
‘A laird,’ Brenda said. ‘Yes, that’s more like it.’
She gazed back interestedly up the crag, but the laird, if he was one, failed to oblige. Only the chill evening sky showed emptily through the cleft.
Brenda shivered.
‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘He’s probably on his way down.’
‘Don’t you want to meet him?’
‘Some other time. Right now I’ll settle for that dram at the local.’
CHAPTER THREE
Then the justicing-man wi’ his fule bodies
Cam’ gawkin at Willie like a wheen auld hoodies.
‘Willie loupit o’er a linn’, Lady Coupar
WHEN GENTLY WOKE in the morning a grey twilight was pervading his room and a low susurrous buzzing sounded continuously in his ears. He stirred uneasily. Could the Bonnie Strathtudlem’s whisky really be so potent? But no, he’d only had time for a single tot, and apart from the buzzing his head felt clear enough. What, then . . . ?
The hissing wheels of a passing vehicle explained the matter. It was raining out there – Highland rain, which sends down three drops for one of any other sort.
He rolled out of bed and padded to the window. Yes, it was whirring down like a new Flood. The braes were sheeted in smoky wrack and the Hill of the Fairies was lost to view. Just outside the window the gleaming Hawk had spray dancing frolics on its roof, and each fresh car that swished by travelled in a screen-high swathe of water. Highland rain! Why was it inspiriting, when London rain only depressed?
He found Geoffrey in a dressing-gown in the kitchen, drinking tea with Mrs McFie. Mrs McFie was stirring porridge in a black iron saucepan. Both were looking rather solemn, Geoffrey through the window at the rain, Mrs McFie at the porridge, which bubbled fatly as she stirred.
‘Ay, is it you?’ she said when Gently entered. ‘I canna wish ye a very quid mornin’. As I’ve been tellin’ Mr Geoffrey, we talked it up – we talked it up.’
‘Oh I don’t know,’ Gently said, looking round for the tea-pot. ‘It’s much about what I expected. You’re never dry for long in these parts.’
‘It’s no’ the rain, Mr Gently,’ Mrs McFie said tartly. ‘What goes up must come down, there’s no goin’ against that. No, it’s just us talkin’ of the Hill in a fliskish sort o’ way – it doesna do. There’s ay some trouble for idle folk to talk up.’
‘We’ve offended the wee folk,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Seems there’s been an accident, George.’
‘Oh,’ Gently said, pouring tea. ‘Sorry to hear it. I hope nobody was hurt.’
‘That’s very likely,’ Mrs McFie said. ‘Wi’ half the polis from Balmagussie out here – an’ an ambulance, what’s more – an’ the Inspector laddie in plain clothes. No, no, they wouldna be shankin’ around up there for just nothin’. They’re thick as fleas up the paths – they’ll find it more damp than dry, I’m thinkin’.’
‘Up the paths,’ Gently said, staring. ‘What paths are those, Mrs McFie?’
‘Why the Forestry paths, what else? It’s up at the Stane McMorris found him.’
‘Hrrumph! Hrrumph!’ Geoffrey coughed. ‘Judges’ Rules, George, Judges’ Rules. As Mrs McFie is pointing out, the accident happened up the path we were asking about last night. Coincidence, what?’
Gently said nothing.
‘It’s not a coincidence,’ Mrs McFie said. ‘There’s such a thing as talkin’ up trouble, and ye winna persuade me out o’ that.’
Gently poured and stirred tea and took a long, scalding sip. He glanced at Geoffrey; Geoffrey nodded delicately and gave a judicial flick of the eyebrow.
‘Mrs McFie,’ he said. ‘Are you sure it’s this Mr Dunglass who’s met with an accident?’
‘Ay,’ Mrs McFie said. ‘And how should I not be sure, when I had it from my ain cousin?’
‘Your own cousin?’
‘Ay, Johnny Dalgirdy, that’s been gardener at the Lodge since the Major’s time. He lives in the wee bit cottage across the road – my mother’s uncle’s wife was a Maisie Dalgirdy.’
‘And when did the accident happen?’
‘Ye may weel ask that, Mr Kelling. Donald Dunglass went off in his car last night and says he’s away to Balmagussie.’
‘But he was found by the Stane.’
‘Ay. McMorris found him – that’s Andy McMorris, the Forestry man. He was goin’ his round of the fences, ye ken – I daresay that would be early on.’
‘But what would Dunglass be doing up there?’
Mrs McFie wagged her gingery tresses. ‘No doubt the polis are askin’ that question, but Johnny didna ken the answer. Of course, Donald Dunglass owns the braeside – lock and stock, down to Halfstarvit – it’s all lease-work wi’ the Forestry, though ye canna exactly say them nay – but what he’d be doin’ up there after dark is something ye maun ask Donnie.’
‘Have they found his car?’
‘I dinna ken that.’
‘Do you know the make?’
‘Ay – American. One of those over-risen sort of vehicles, like a patty-pan wi’ four wheels.’
Tim,’ Geoffrey said. ‘This Donald Dunglass. I know a Dunglass at my club. He’d be a big, broad-shouldered type, would he – red hair, and a beard?’
‘Nothin’ o’ that sort,’ Mrs McFie said. ‘He’s just a Glesca body, is Donald Dunglass. No but the average run, ye ken, and I doubt if his chin would manage a beard.’
‘I’m perhaps confusing him with someone else,’ Geoffrey said. ‘But I’m certain my man comes from these parts. Does his description suggest anyone to you?’
‘Ay,’ Mrs McFie said. ‘Robert the Bruce.’
Breakfast was a sombre, thoughtful meal, despite Mrs McFie’s real oatmeal porridge. The rain kept tumbling down outside and the wrack drifted steadily over the braes. An occasional figure, clutching its sack or groundsheet, plunged with bended head past their window, and among the few cars that planed by Gently recognized a police Super Snipe. For what were they searching out there, up the hill paths and under the mist? A queer accident it needed to be to make an effort on this scale necessary.
At last Mrs McFie adjusted her defences and departed into the storm, and they were able for the first time to talk freely of the situation.
‘George,’ Bridget said. ‘If you land us in this I’ll never go on holiday with you again. It isn’t necessary, and you’re not to do it – there are plenty of policemen here to handle things.’
‘It’s a nice point,’ Geoffrey said. ‘But I think I’d advise the same thing. To our best information there has been only an accident, and you don’t know that your friend Redbeard was concerned in it. You’ve seen him before, you saw him up there, that’s the extent of your testimony. He could say exactly the same of you. There are no grounds to suppose
his being there is particularly significant.’
‘It isn’t an accident,’ Gently said.
‘Ça va,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I bow to your judgement. But the argument holds, you know no evil of him. Therefore, volunteer nothing. The local police have tongues in their heads.’
‘That’s just what I say,’ Bridget said. ‘If they want information about this man they’ll jolly soon come asking. And anyway, you don’t know they don’t know about him.’
‘That again,’ Geoffrey said. ‘He may be talking to them at this moment George – about a courting couple up from London.’
Gently looked at Brenda. ‘What do you say?’
Brenda tilted her chin and mouthed cigarette smoke. ‘I say I do know evil of him,’ she said. ‘I put him down for a crook the moment I saw him.’
‘Ah, but that’s just opinion,’ Geoffrey said.
‘I’m good at opinions,’ Brenda said. ‘The first time I was ever one of George’s suspects I formed the opinion I was going to like him. And Redbeard is evil. I could feel it last night. He wasn’t playing peekaboo up there with his glasses. He was up to something nasty – and something nasty has happened. I’ll bet they’ll find out he did it, in the end.’
‘Yes, but that isn’t going to help the police,’ Geoffrey said.
‘The police are stupid. They should always listen to one of my intuitions.’
‘Do you want to go to them, then?’
‘No. I’ve another intuition about that. If George sticks his nose in over there they’ll simply grab him with both hands.’
‘Yes, probably as a suspect,’ Gently grunted. ‘Time, place, opportunity.’
‘Well, you should know,’ Geoffrey chuckled. ‘Your reactions are the same as theirs.’
Gently stared gloomily at the rain, the oozing strath, the rolling vapour.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s the whole trouble. My reactions are the same as theirs. I know how they feel out there, especially if they’re getting nowhere, and me sitting here with perhaps just the lead that’ll make all their pieces fall into place. It’s happened to me too many times, being stuck because someone refused to come forward. I’d like to say Hang you Jack with the rest, but it sticks in my throat; I know what’s involved. Can you guess what they’re looking for up the braes?’