Gently North-West

by Alan Hunter

  ‘No, but seriously,’ Gently grinned.

  ‘Seriously she could have lured her husband up to the Stane. Seriously she could have followed behind in the dark and seriously bunged a dirk in his back.’

  ‘What about Redbeard?’

  ‘Another red herring. He’s probably a stray train-robber, the way I supposed. He was going innocently about his unlawful occasions – I daresay checking on the Highland Mail.’

  Gently shook his head, chuckling. ‘We’re away ahead of the facts,’ he said. ‘Let’s start again at the beginning and take it along, step by step. First, we’d better believe Mrs Dunglass’s story, because that’s all we have to go on. She says her husband told her he had a telephone call and that he would have to go into Balmagussie.’

  ‘So she’d ask him why,’ Brenda said.

  ‘All right,’ Gently said. ‘She’d ask him why. And he’d say something about business or the Party – she was perhaps used to him going off at odd hours. Anyway, he goes over the road to the garage, where the gardener also has his cottage, and the gardener sees him fetch out the car and drive away towards the village.’

  ‘Over this bridge,’ Brenda said.

  Gently shook his head. ‘No. The cottage lies behind the house and the trees from this bridge, so it must have been someone in the house who saw the car go over the bridge.’

  Brenda glanced towards the Lodge. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Clever. That’s why you stopped here.’

  ‘It could be a very important point,’ Gently said. ‘I wanted to get it clear in my mind. Now even from the house, as you can see, it’s difficult to get a view of the bridge. You’d need to be standing at that one special window and looking slantwise in this direction. So if Mrs Dunglass saw the car cross the bridge she was necessarily watching to see if it did, from which it follows Dunglass knew he’d be watched and took care he’d be seen heading for town. So now the situation is Dunglass was bluffing about the trip into Balmagussie, and Mrs Dunglass was suspicious, and Dunglass knew she was suspicious.’

  ‘Oh upright judge,’ Brenda said. ‘You’re still knocking nails into her coffin.’

  ‘From the first,’ Gently said, ‘Dunglass’s object was a rendezvous at the Stane. He received a message requiring his presence there and it was important his wife shouldn’t know where he was going. So he plays his bluff, drives off through the village, recrosses the river lower down, then takes a path from there up the braes and so to the Stane. He wouldn’t have used the regular path because it starts too near the house – and the odds are we must have seen him, with the timing being so tight.’

  ‘Please,’ Brenda said. ‘Let me go on. Question: Why was it important his wife shouldn’t know? Answer: He was on secret Party business. Comment: His wife knew about his Party business. Question: What remains then? Answer: A woman period a woman – and if you come up with anything different, George, I’ll scream and burst into tears.’

  ‘I daren’t risk it,’ Gently grinned. ‘But it’s still a curious place for an assignation.’

  ‘Not for mountain hizzies.’

  ‘Even for them. There must be other and better places lower down.’

  ‘You took me up there,’ Brenda said. ‘And I’m just a feeble Kensington hizzie. This one will be a wild, haggis-fed Highland female who can skip up and down braes like a goat.’

  Gently sighed. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I concede a woman is the most likely answer. But we still don’t know why she summoned him up there at such an unusual time, and at a moment’s notice.’

  ‘She must have had the urge,’ Brenda said. ‘It’s probably the mountain air that does it.’

  ‘Maybe. But why did he go? He apparently knew he was taking a risk.’

  ‘Ah,’ Brenda said. ‘Young love.’

  ‘There just could be a secondary reason – like blackmail. If he was having an affair he’d be open to blackmail – and a summons from a blackmailer would explain his caution.’

  Brenda gave her corn-coloured hair a twist. ‘George,’ she said. ‘Have it any way you like – as long as he went up there to meet a woman – and as long as Mary Macbeth went up and caught him at it. That’s the plain crux of the matter. It’s a slice of good old Frankie-and-Johnny. No guerrillaring ghillies or dirk-happy patriots – just straight, honest, wholesome revenge.’

  Gently puffed. ‘We’ll agree on that. I think the Nationalist angle is a blind.’

  ‘Stop right there,’ Brenda said. ‘Then I won’t have to say I Told You So later.’ She snuggled a little against him and slanted her face to his. ‘Now forget it, George,’ she said. ‘Leave mighty Blayne to sort out the pieces. I want to get back to being on holiday.’

  Gently smiled at her. ‘Have you noticed anything?’

  ‘No. I’ve been wasting my time talking.’

  ‘It stopped raining two minutes ago.’

  But when they got back to the cottage they found neither Geoffrey nor Bridget much inclined to stir. Geoffrey was painting; Bridget had her feet up and was knitting and avidly reading a novel. Geoffrey had his gear on the table by the window and was slopping about lushly with Prussian Blue. The braes had come into sight a moment before and he wanted to catch them before they vanished again. All the while Gently and Brenda were reporting their visit his brush was teasing, blotting, scrubbing, and at intervals he exchanged it for a palette-knife and scraped raw, smarting patches out of the pigment. But he was listening, and Bridget surmised and asked questions enough for two; and the subject continued until, to Geoffrey’s chagrin, his inky braes turned suddenly green-gold, and there could be no more doubt that the morning’s rain had finally retreated westward.

  ‘Come on,’ Brenda said. ‘Let’s get in the cars. It’s still only half-past eleven.’

  But Geoffrey looked wistfully at his unfinished sketch, and Bridget turned a page firmly.

  ‘You two go out,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We were planning on lunch at the Bonnie Strathtudlem. We’ve had two days on the road, you know, and a day doing nothing would suit us best.’

  So it was agreed, and Gently and Brenda set out again on their own, in a Sceptre with windows still misted and its Whitehall polish yet pebbled with rain.

  They drove northward through the village between braes now flashing and brilliant with colour. A sky of soft blue fire extended above the sharp-etched tops. Ahead, a group of more naked peaks were unfolding purplish cliffs and blued shadows, and to the left the Braes of Skilling, the tributary glen, lifted roundly and greenly above smoking thickets. Soon they came to Lochcrayhead, the village at the top of Glen Tudlem, from which Glen Cray and its burnished loch drove a wedge eastward through the hills; then they were up in the bare rocks and black crags of Glen Donach, where no man lived, and where the crooked road was blasted and riven from sheer cliffside.

  ‘Where do we eat?’ Brenda asked, the map unfolded over her knees.

  ‘There’ll be a hotel somewhere,’ Gently grunted. ‘Towards Loch Torlinn. We’ll take that road.’

  ‘There’s the Leny Hotel under Ben Leny and the Vrachan Hotel under Ben Vrachan.’

  ‘We’ll see where we finish up. You can’t go very far wrong in these parts.’

  Brenda spread the map wider, and still it was blotchy brown panelled with blue. Occasional touches of grey, now growing more frequent, indicated peaks rising above four thousand feet. The roads were contorted and illogical and ruthlessly dictated by the massifs, and the place-names, except those by the roads, were uncouth and unpronounceable. If you strayed from the road you stepped into country as foreign as the moon. These few thin veins of red on the map were the only lifelines of civilization.

  ‘It’s a far country, and it keeps getting farther,’ Brenda mused. ‘Really, it’s a shock to us poor southrons who live in and out of each other’s pockets. We’re used to thinking of our country as urban, with every square yard recorded and occupied – everything cosy. Then we drive up here and suddenly run slap into Outer Mongolia. It’s almost frightening. It�
��s like turning round to find your house has only three walls.’

  ‘Doctor Johnson was much of your opinion,’ Gently said.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Brenda said. ‘They looked things square in the face in those days. It’s all very well being sloppy and romantic, but a lot of mountains are a lot of mountains. You can’t farm them, you can’t make roads on them and they’re full of violence and a sort of threat.’

  ‘They’re just rocks,’ Gently said. ‘Weathering away in their own weather.’

  ‘So why do we come gawking at them?’ Brenda said.

  Gently grinned. ‘Well . . . they’re there.’

  They came down out of Glen Donach and bowled along a strath road into Kinleary, a prim, stone-built town with a torrent funnelling under a graceful bridge. Its main street was very broad and the houses were capacious and large-windowed; it had an air of detachment, as though waiting for something to happen. Beyond, the road climbed again for its fifteen-mile stride beside Loch Torlinn, and looking back one saw Kinleary riding its image in a bay of the loch. The lines of the mountains and the loch converged on it in a Turner-like construction, and the tidy, austere little town now showed an aspect of extravagant beauty.

  They met little traffic. The road stayed high, with emptiness always at its elbow. At long intervals they would pass a cottage, where a steep path would sag down to the loch-shore. Across the loch, at the width of a mile, the braes were thinly planted with deciduous trees, giving the effect of a vast park rolling endlessly along with them. The peaks behind the braes were dark, their faces to the loch being in shadow; and between them one caught glimpses of peaks yet more wild and inaccessible.

  At last they could see the loch ending squarely and rather tamely at Torlinnhead, and a sudden sharp turn and descent brought them into the village. There was one hotel, the Honest Highlandman, whose sign represented a clans-man carrying his head; Gently ran the Sceptre into the yard behind it and they went in to lunch.

  At coffee, which they drank alone in a lounge that faced straight down the loch, Brenda unfolded the map again and began poring over routes. Because of the arbitrariness of mountain highways they had either to return the way they had come, or make an extensive circuit back to Lochcrayhead by way of Logie, Bieth and Ardnadoch.

  ‘Of course, its all ravingly beautiful,’ Brenda frowned. ‘But I just don’t like having it forced on me. I’m tired of going longways through the glens. What I want now is a bit of sideways.’

  Gently looked at the map. Their line of red certainly offered no alternative. It stretched crookedly and compulsively to Logie, and only to Logie would it go. But reaching south-east from Torlinnhead was a rambling, hatched double line, crossing direct over the massif top of Glen Knockie. He put his finger on it.

  ‘There’s your bit of sideways.’

  ‘Oh my gawd,’ Brenda said, looking. ‘That’ll be another of those ‘‘guid paths’’ – and a really hairy one this time.’

  Gently referred to the legend. Its grading stopped at ‘Other Serviceable Roads’ which came below ‘Roads Requiring Special Care’; neither were indicated by hatched lines.

  ‘Not much encouragement,’ he grimaced. ‘But it must be some sort of a road. Look, there’s a farm or something along it. The hatched lines probably mean it’s unfenced.’

  ‘Why,’ Brenda said, ‘don’t I keep my big mouth shut.’

  ‘We could just take a peep at it,’ Gently grinned.

  ‘We could just jump in the loch,’ Brenda said. ‘Oh, George, I took you for a restful man.’

  But the hotel-keeper confirmed the road was ‘no’ a’ that a bad ane’, and spoke lyrically of the views they could expect ‘off the tap’; so the Sceptre, after idling along the road by the top of the loch, ignored the broad way to Logie and turned its bonnet to the mountains.

  The road began deceitfully. It was at first a lane sheltered by high, English hedges, apparently leading only to a barn which stood blocking the way ahead. Then it turned, narrowed, lost its metalling, lost its hedges, lost its innocence; became at one stroke a brutal rock-track with a gradient that made Brenda catch her breath. Gently slammed into second and the Sceptre grovelled its way upwards. The ground fell away sharply on the right, to the left rose menacingly above them. The Sceptre moaned and bumped and grumbled, heaved itself round an S-bend, lifted its bows to a suicidal hairpin, stalled, and refused to restart.

  ‘And that’s that,’ Brenda said. ‘You’ll never get her out of this, my son. You can’t go up and you daren’t back down – you’re stuck, period. And serve you right.’

  ‘I’ll have to drop her back,’ Gently said. ‘You can get out if you like.’

  ‘Oh,’ Brenda said, ‘I’ll die young too. This or the bomb, it doesn’t matter.’

  Gently took reverse and very delicately braked-and-powered the Sceptre down. Then he restarted on the lesser gradient, and this time the Sceptre gnawed round the hair-pin.

  ‘Which is more than you deserve,’ Brenda commented scathingly.

  Gently chuckled and kept going.

  The track improved. Obviously the trick had been to get through the steep going at the commencement. Now they rose by straight, moderate gradients which the Sceptre took easily in second. Hill-pasture, grazed by sheep, swelled up on the one hand and lapsed gently on the other, permitting, as they climbed, a series of viewpoints into a tremendous glen eastwards. The glen was filled with trees but at times one glimpsed a river serpenting through it, and twice they caught sight of a castle, or castellated house, suggesting a picture snatched from a child’s book. Then the glen receded behind the expanding hillside and suddenly was gone like a dream.

  They came to a fieldgate of steel tube and beyond it the track levelled between shallow banks. On the left, among stunted trees, was the farmhouse Gently had seen on the map. It was a respectable, two-storey, stone-and-slate building occupying a site in a fold of the tops, with nothing but its ragged oaks and thorns to suggest the location was out of the ordinary.

  As they approved it they heard a rushing and barking and sheep came pouring out of a gateway. A flock of them spread across the track in a trotting river, sweeping round the Sceptre and forcing it to halt. Men, dogs appeared, running. A youngster dashed along the bank to open a gate. There was an uproar of baa-ing, barking, shouting, along with the rustling drum of small hooves.

  ‘Foo!’ Brenda murmured. ‘Truly rural. I’m not sure I appreciate tweed on the hoof.’

  ‘Hush,’ Gently muttered. Perhaps we’re not welcome ourselves. The gaffer over there seems to want a word with us.’

  An erect, hard-faced man, dressed in a sagging jacket and muddy jodhpurs, stood apart from the others, waiting for the sheep to go by. When they had cleared the Sceptre he came striding over to it. Gently wound down his window. The man stared at him, at the car.

  ‘Are ye freends o’ the laird’s, like?’ he demanded, tapping his palm with a thick ash-stick.

  ‘Just tourists,’ Gently said. ‘This is a public road to Glen Knockie, isn’t it?’

  ‘Ay, you may say it’s public,’ the man said, his eyes roving about the back of the car. ‘But it’s not a usual road for tourists – who would be puttin’ you on to it, now?’

  ‘We saw it on the map,’ Gently said shortly.

  ‘Ay, it’s on the map, that’s richt.’

  ‘And we wanted to try something out of the way.’

  ‘Somethin’ out o’ the way,’ the man repeated. He caught his palm a smack. ‘Ye ken where ye’re off to?’ he asked.

  ‘To Glen Knockie.’

  ‘Very true. But d’ye ken through what sort o’ country?’

  Gently shook his head.

  ‘I’ll jist tell you then – in case your map didna give ye the information – ye’re headin’ into a deer-forest, man – so go canny – that’s a’.’

  He stared again at Gently, very hard, then turned to follow after the sheep.

  ‘Hold on a minute!’ Gently called. ‘What’s
so special about going into a deer forest?’

  The man came back. He bent down to the window. ‘Either ye ken or ye dinna ken,’ he said softly.

  ‘I don’t ken.’

  ‘Then no harm’s done. Jist hauld to the track like a douce mannie – it’s a guid road if you take it quietly – jist go your ways down Glen Knockie.’

  He strode away, his stick swinging, and began shouting unintelligibly to the others. Gently shrugged and looked at Brenda, who made a face and shrugged back.

  ‘There’s no doubt about it – we dinna ken,’ she said. ‘Do we go on?’

  ‘We go on.’

  ‘That’s my man,’ she said. ‘Damn the torpedoes.’

  The track still continued to climb, though at a much easier rate; but the extreme roughness of the surface prevented Gently from raising the pace. They were well on the tops now and the pasture had given way to heathy moorland, a dark, sad, desolate plain enclosed by rounded shoulders and fretted rockrims. It was high. There was a shelterless bleakness that carried a sure stamp of altitude, though no contrasting depth was at hand for reference. Vegetation was scant, loose rocks and boulders were plentiful; bare rashes of rock and peaty soil showed picked and scoured by violent weather. A few curlews, tame as sparrows, were all that stirred on the tops. They rose limping-winged to sail a few yards, their liquid yelping sharp and spirit-like.

  ‘I keep watching for the deer,’ Brenda said. ‘But I’m darned if I’ve seen a single antler. And I keep watching for a forest, but the last trees we saw were at the farm.’

  ‘Perhaps a deer-forest isn’t what we think it is,’ Gently said.

  ‘I think it’s a forest with deer in it,’ Brenda said. ‘That’s the impression one gets in Hampshire.’

  ‘Well, perhaps the car scares them away.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Brenda said. ‘And perhaps.’

  They bumbled on, and even the curlews seemed to be losing heart and falling behind them. For huge distances in every direction the black, boulder-strewn plateau stretched away. To the west a declivity was appearing, slanting in from between two shoulders, on a line suggesting that eventually it would converge with the track. Brenda compared it to the map.