The Case of the Constant Suicides

by John Dickson Carr

“Lord William Russell –”

  The train sped on.

  3

  At three o’clock on the following afternoon, a mellow day of Scotland’s most golden weather, Kathryn and Alan Campbell were walking up the hill comprising the one main street in Dunoon, Argyllshire.

  The train, due to reach Glasgow at half past six in the morning, actually got there toward one o’clock in the afternoon. By this time they were ravenously, ragingly hungry, but still they got no lunch.

  An amiable porter, whose conversation was all but unintelligible to both Campbells, informed them that the train for Gourock left in five minutes. So they piled into this, and were borne lunchless along Clydeside to the coast.

  To Alan Campbell it had been a considerable shock when he woke in the morning, tousled and unshaven, to find himself hunched back against the cushions of a railway carriage, and a good-looking girl asleep with her head on his shoulder.

  But, once he had collected his scattered wits, he decided that he loved it. A sense of adventure was winging straight into his stodgy soul, and making him drunk. There is nothing like spending the night with a girl, even platonically, to remove a sense of constraint. Alan was surprised and somewhat disappointed, on looking out of the window, to see that the scenery was still the same as it was in England: no granite cliffs or heather yet. For he wanted an excuse to quote Burns.

  They washed and dressed, these two roaring innocents, to the accompaniment of a stern debate – carried on through a closed door and above the splash of running water – about the Earl of Danby’s financial reconstruction policy of 1679. They concealed their hunger well, even in the train to Gourock. But when they discovered, aboard the squat tan-funneled steamer which carried them across the bay to Dunoon, that there was food to be had below, they pitched into Scotch broth and roast lamb with silence and voracity.

  Dunoon, white and gray and dun-roofed, lay along the steel-gray water in the shelter of low-lying purple hills. It looked like a good version of all the bad paintings of Scottish scenery which hang in so many houses: except that these usually include a stag, and this did not.

  “I now understand,” Alan declared, “why there are so many of these daubs. The bad painter cannot resist Scotland. It gives him the opportunity to smear in his purples and yellows, and contrast ‘em with water.”

  Kathryn said that this was nonsense. She also said, as the steamer churned in and butted the pier sideways, that if he did not stop whistling “Loch Lomond” she would go crazy.

  Leaving their suitcases at the pier, they crossed the road to a deserted tourist agency and arranged for a car to take them to Shira.

  “Shira, eh?” observed the dispirited-looking clerk, who talked like an Englishman. “Getting to be quite a popular place.” He gave them a queer look which Alan was afterwards to remember. “There’s another party going to Shira this afternoon. If you wouldn’t mind sharing the car, it ’ud come less expensive.”

  “Hang the expense,” said Alan, his first words in Dunoon; and it is merely to be recorded that the advertising posters did not drop off the wall. “Still, we don’t want to seem uppish. It’s another Campbell, I imagine?”

  “No,” said the clerk, consulting a pad, “this gentleman’s name is Swan. Charles E. Swan. He was in here not five minutes ago.”

  “Never heard of him.” Alan looked at Kathryn. “That’s not the heir to the estate, by any chance?”

  “Nonsense!” said Kathryn. “The heir is Dr Colin Campbell, Angus’s first brother.”

  The clerk looked still more odd. “Yes. We drove him out there yesterday. Very positive sort of gentleman. Well, sir, will you share Mr Swan’s car, or have one of your own?”

  Kathryn intervened. “We’ll share Mr Swan’s car, of course, if he doesn’t mind. The idea! Flinging good money about like that! When will it be ready?”

  “Half past three. Come back here in about half an hour, and you’ll find it waiting. Good day, ma’am. Good day, sir. Thank you.”

  They wandered out into the mellow sunshine, happily, and up the main street looking into shop windows. These appeared to be mainly souvenir shops, and everywhere the eye was dazzled by the display of tartans. There were tartan ties, tartan mufflers, tartan-bound books, tartan-painted tea sets, tartans on the dolls and tartans on the ashtrays – usually the Royal Stewart, as being the brightest.

  Alan began to be afflicted with that passion for buying things which overcomes the stoutest traveler. In this he was discouraged by Kathryn, until they reached a haberdasher’s some distance up on the right, which displayed in its windows tartan shields (Campbell of Argyll, Macleod, Gordon, Macintosh, MacQueen) which you hung on the wall. These conquered even Kathryn.

  “They’re lovely,” she admitted. “Let’s go in.”

  The shop bell pinged, but went unheard in the argument which was going on at the counter. Behind the counter stood a stern-looking little woman with her hands folded. In front of the counter stood a tallish, leather-faced young man in his late thirties, with a soft hat pushed back on his forehead. He was surrounded by a huge assortment of tartan neckties.

  “They’re very nice,” he was saying courteously. “But they’re not what I want. I want to see a necktie with the tartan of the Clan MacHolster. Don’t you understand? MacHolster. M-a-c, H-o-l-s-t-e-r, MacHolster. Can’t you show me the tartan of the Clan MacHolster?”

  “There isna any Clan MacHolster,” said the proprietress.

  “Now look,” said the young man, leaning one elbow on the counter and holding up a lean forefinger in her face. “I’m a Canadian; but I’ve got Scottish blood in my veins and I’m proud of it. Ever since I was a kid, my father’s said to me, ‘Charley, if you ever go to Scotland, if you ever get to Argyllshire, you look up the Clan MacHolster. We’re descended from the Clan MacHolster, as I’ve heard your grandad say many a time.’”

  “I keep telling ye: there isna any Clan MacHolster.”

  “But there’s got to be a Clan MacHolster!” pleaded the young man, stretching out his hands. “There could be a Clan MacHolster, couldn’t there? With all the clans and people in Scotland? There could be a Clan MacHolster?”

  “There could be a Clan MacHitler. But there isna.”

  His bewildered dejection was so evident that the proprietress took pity on him.

  “What wad your name be, now?”

  “Swan. Charles E. Swan.”

  The proprietress cast up her eyes and reflected.

  “Swan. That’d be the MacQueens.”

  Mr Swan seized eagerly at this. “You mean I’m related to the clan of the MacQueens?”

  “I dinna ken. Ye may be. Ye may not be. Some Swans are.”

  “Have you got their tartan here?”

  The proprietress showed it to him in a necktie. It was undoubtedly striking, its predominating color being a rich scarlet, and took Mr Swan’s fancy at once.

  “Now that’s what I call something like it!” he announced fervently, and turned round and appealed to Alan. “Don’t you think so, sir?”

  “Admirable. Bit on the loud side for a necktie, though, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I like it myself,” agreed Mr Swan musingly, holding the tie at arm’s length like a painter studying perspective. “Yes. This is the tie for me. I’ll take a dozen of ’em.”

  The proprietress reeled.

  “A dozen?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  The proprietress felt compelled to sound a note of warning. “They’re three-and-saxpence each.”

  “That’s all right. Wrap ’em up. I’ll take ’em.”

  As the proprietress bustled off through a door at the back of the shop, Swan turned round with a confidential air. He removed his hat out of deference to Kathryn, revealing a mop of wiry mahogany-colored hair.

  “You know,” he confided in a low voice, “I’ve traveled a lot in my time; but this is the queerest damn country I ever got into.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. All they seem to
do is run around telling each other Scotch jokes. I dropped into the bar of the hotel down there, and the local comedian was bringing the house down with nothing but Scotch jokes. And there’s another thing. I’ve only been in this country a few hours – got in by the London train this morning – but on four different occasions I’ve been buttonholed with the same joke.”

  “We haven’t had that experience so far.”

  “But I have. They hear me talk, see? Then they say, ‘You’re an American, eh?’ I say, ‘No, Canadian.’ But that doesn’t stop ’em. They say, ‘Have you heard about my brother Angus, who wouldn’t even give the bloodhounds a scent?’”

  He paused expectantly.

  The faces of his listeners remained impassive.

  “Don’t you get it?” demanded Swan. “Wouldn’t even give the bloodhounds a cent. C-e-n-t, s-c-e-n-t.”

  “The point of the story,” replied Kathryn, “is fairly obvious; but –”

  “Oh, I didn’t say it was funny,” Swan hastened to assure them. “I’m just telling you how queer it sounds. You don’t find mothers-in-law running around telling each other the latest mother-in-law jokes. You don’t find the English telling each other stories about the Englishman getting the point of the joke wrong.”

  “Are the English,” inquired Alan with interest, “popularly supposed to do that?”

  Swan flushed a little.

  “Well, they are in the stories told in Canada and the States. No offense. You know the kind of thing. ‘You cannot drive a nail with a sponge no matter how hard you soak it,’ rendered as, ‘You cannot drive a nail with a sponge no matter how wet it is.’ Now, wait! I didn’t say that was funny either. I only –”

  “Never mind,” said Alan. “What I really wanted to ask: are you the Mr Swan who’s hired a car to go out to Shira this afternoon?”

  A curiously evasive look went over Swan’s leathery face, with the fine wrinkles round eyes and mouth. He seemed on the defensive.

  “Yes. That’s right. Why?”

  “We’re going out there ourselves, and we were wondering whether you’d mind if we shared the car. My name is Campbell, Dr Campbell. This is my cousin, Miss Kathryn Campbell.”

  Swan acknowledged the introductions with a bow. His expression changed, and lit up with good nature.

  “Not the least little bit in the world! Only too pleased to have you!” he declared heartily. His light gray eyes quickened and shifted. “Members of the family, eh?”

  “Distant ones. And you?”

  The evasive look returned.

  “Well, since you know what my name is, and that I’m related to the MacHolsters or the MacQueens, I couldn’t very well pretend to be a member of the family, could I? Tell me, though.” He grew more confidential. “What can you tell me about a Miss or Mrs Elspat Campbell?”

  Alan shook his head, but Kathryn came to the rescue.

  “Aunt Elspat, you mean?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about her, Miss Campbell.”

  “Aunt Elspat,” replied Kathryn, “isn’t really an aunt, and her name isn’t Campbell, though they all call her that. Nobody quite knows who she is or where she came from. She just walked in one day, forty years or so ago, and she’s been there ever since. Sort of female head of Shira. She must be nearly ninety, and she’s supposed to be rather a terror. I’ve never met her, though.”

  “Oh,” said Swan, but volunteered no more. The proprietress brought him his parcel of neckties, and he paid for it.

  “Which reminds me,” he went on, “that we’d better get going, if we want to be in time for that car.”

  After bidding an elaborate farewell to the proprietress, Swan held open the shop door for them.

  “It must be a good way out there, and I want to get back before dark; I’m not staying. I suppose they have the blackout up here too? I want a decent night’s rest tonight for once. I sure didn’t get one on the train last night.”

  “Can’t you sleep on trains?”

  “It wasn’t that. There was a married couple in the next compartment, having a hell of a row about some dame from Cleveland, and I hardly closed my eyes all night.”

  Alan and Kathryn cast a quick, uneasy glance at each other, but Swan was preoccupied with his grievance.

  “I’ve lived in Ohio myself; know it well; that’s why I listened. But I couldn’t get this thing straight. There was some guy named Russell, and another one called Charles. But whether the dame from Cleveland was running around with Russell, or with Charles, or with this woman’s husband, I never did make out. You just heard enough so that you couldn’t understand anything. I knocked on the wall, but even after they’d turned out the light –”

  “Dr Campbell!” cried Kathryn warningly.

  But the murder was out.

  “I’m afraid,” said Alan, “that that must have been us.”

  “You?” said Swan. He stopped short in the hot, bright, drowsy street. His eyes traveled to Kathryn’s ringless left hand. They seemed to be registering something, as though writing it down.

  Then he continued, with such a jerking and obvious change of subject that even his smooth voice added to the obviousness of it.

  “They certainly don’t seem to be feeling any shortage of food up here, anyway. Look at these grocery-store windows! That stuff over there is haggis. It –”

  Kathryn’s face was scarlet.

  “Mr Swan,” she said curtly, “may I assure you that you are making a mistake? I am a member of the Department of History at the Harpenden College for Women –”

  “It’s the first time I ever saw haggis, but I can’t say I like the look of it. It can manage to look nakeder than any meat I ever did see. That stuff that looks like slices of baloney is called Ulster fry. It –”

  “Mr Swan, will you please give me your attention? This gentleman is Dr Campbell, of University College, Highgate. We can both assure you –”

  Again Swan stopped short. He peered round as though to make sure they were not overheard, and then spoke in a low, rapid, earnest voice.

  “Look, Miss Campbell,” he said, “I’m broadminded. I know how these things are. And I’m sorry I ever brought the subject up.”

  “But –!”

  “All that business about my losing sleep was a lot of bunk. I went to sleep just as soon as you turned the light out, and didn’t hear a thing afterwards. So let’s just forget I ever spoke about it, shall we?”

  “Perhaps that would be best,” agreed Alan.

  “Alan Campbell, do you dare . . .”

  Swan, his manner soothing, pointed ahead. A comfortable blue five-seater car was drawn up before the tourist office, with a chauffeur in cap, uniform, and leggings, leaning against it.

  “There’s the golden chariot,” Swan added. “And I’ve got a guide-book. Come on. Let’s enjoy ourselves.”

  4

  Past the tiny shipyard, past the Holy Loch, under heavy timberfurred hills, up the rise past Heather Jock, and into the long, straight stretch beside deep Loch Eck, the car sped on.

  They took to the driver at once.

  He was a burly, red-faced, garrulous man with a singularly bright blue eye and a vast fund of secret inner amusement. Swan sat in front with him, while Alan and Kathryn sat in the rear. Swan began by being fascinated with the driver’s accent, and ended by trying to imitate it.

  Pointing to a trickle of water down the hillside, the driver said that this was a “wee burn.” Swan seized on the words as a good thing. Henceforward water in any form, even a mountain torrent which would have carried away a house, became a wee burn: Swan calling attention to it and experimentally giving the letter “r” a sound like a death rattle or a singularly sustained gargle.

  He did this to Alan’s intense discomfort, but Alan need not have minded. The driver did not mind. It was as though (say) Sir Cedric Hardwicke were to hear the purity of his English commented on with amusement by Mr Schnozzle Durante.

  Those who regarded Scotsmen as dour or unc
ommunicative, Alan thought, should have listened to this one. It was impossible to stop him talking. He gave details of every place they passed; and, surprisingly, as it turned out from Swan’s guidebook later, with accuracy.

  His usual work, he said, was driving a hearse. He entertained them with a description of the many fine funerals, to which he referred with modest pride, where he had had the honor of conducting the corpse. And this gave Swan an opportunity.

  “You didn’t happen to drive the hearse at a funeral about a week ago, did you?”

  To their left, Loch Eck lay like an old tarnished mirror among the hills. No splash or ripple stirred it. Nothing moved on the slopes of fir and pine, stretching up to a pate of outcropping rock, which closed it in. What deadened the mind was the quality of utter silence here, of barriers against the world, and yet of awareness behind it: as though these hills still hid the shaggy shields.

  The driver was silent for so long a time, his big red hands gripped round the wheel, that they thought he could not have heard or understood. Then he spoke.

  “That’d be auld Campbell of Shira,” he stated.

  “Aye,” said Swan, with perfect seriousness. The thing was infectious: Alan had several times been on the point of saying this himself.

  “And ye’ll be Campbells tu, I’m thinkin’?”

  “Those two are,” said Swan, jerking his head toward the two in the rear. “I’m a MacHolster, sometimes called MacQueen.”

  The driver turned round and looked very hard at him. But Swan was perfectly sincere.

  “I drove one of ’em yesterday,” said the driver grudgingly. “Colin Campbell it was; and as guid a Scot as masel’, for a’ he talked like an Englishman.”

  His face darkened.

  “Such bletherin’ and blusterin’ ye niver heard! An atheist forbye, and thocht nae shame tae admit it! Cau’d me ivery name he caud lay his tongue tu,” glowered the driver, “for sayin’ Shira is no’ a canny place. And it isna either.”

  Again there was a heavy silence, while the tires sang.

  “Canny, I suppose,” observed Alan, “being the opposite of uncanny?”