I whistled. ‘I’ve grown so used to talk of the coal boat that it failed to register,’ I said. ‘But there can’t have been one today. Do you think one of the local fishermen could have been persuaded to take him over to Plockton? Or down to Kyle?’
Alec shook his head. ‘I think a Wester Ross man putting out to sea today would be as conspicuous as you or me walking down Piccadilly stark naked, playing bagpipes.’
‘But how else could he get down to Leith in time for the sailing?’ I said. Even as I spoke, I answered myself and could not help a laugh escaping me. ‘He’s not going to Leith, is he? He’s not going to New Zealand to look for black flowers for Lady Love’s memory.’
‘Of course not,’ said Alec. ‘Who knows where he’s gone. Let’s go and ask Mrs McReadie what she’d put her money on.’
From Grant’s words ‘in the kitchen with the door shut’ I expected the cook to be sitting in her Windsor chair weeping into a handkerchief and letting the household go to pieces around her, but far from it. She was trussing a leg of lamb when we entered the room and had Lairdie busily shelling green peas at one end of the table and Mackie peeling potatoes at the other. She wiped her hand across her brow and faced us down with a look like a cow protecting newborn calves, or like my own Mrs Tilling if I try to talk to her about menus when she’s busy with her marmalade.
‘What boat did Mr McReadie take?’ I said. Lairdie stopped with his thumb halfway along a plump pod and Mackie let a half-peeled potato plop into the bucket of water, splashing his trousers.
‘What’s this you’re coming asking?’ said Mrs McReadie, looking up, her black eyes as bright as ever.
‘There can’t have been a coal boat today. On the Sabbath.’
‘There’s ways round everything,’ Mrs McReadie said. ‘We are God-fearing folk here at Applecross, but we all loved her ladyship. And sometimes you have to choose.’
‘So one of the local boatmen broke the Sabbath to help him escape?’ said Alec. ‘Because everyone applauds him for avenging Lady Love’s murder?’
‘But wasn’t someone going to break the Sabbath anyway?’ I said. ‘To help them get off on their expedition? That’s rather odd, isn’t it?’
‘They were going by motorcar,’ Mrs McReadie said. Mackie had fished his potato out of the bucket of water but now stalled again. Lairdie had finally managed to strip the little peas out of the pod, throw it down and start on another one.
‘The police are going to try to stop him at the port,’ I said. ‘What do you think of that?’ Mrs McReadie shrugged with a commendable show of unconcern. ‘But we don’t think your husband has any intention of going near the port,’ I added. Mrs McReadie faced me calmly, both her hands resting on the haunch of lamb as if it was a comfort to her. ‘We think it would be a better idea to search the islands across the sound. Do you have any more relations or connections there? Someone who’d be just as happy to meet the boat as someone evidently was to set sail in it?’
‘Unless the whole story of a boat is nonsense from start to finish,’ Alec said. ‘If we were to search the estate would we find him holed up in an abandoned croft cottage with a flask and a loaf?’
‘There are no abandoned cottages on the Applecross estate,’ said Mrs McReadie. ‘Lady Love wouldn’t hear of it.’
‘We shall suggest it to the inspector anyway,’ I said, watching her carefully. There was no flash of fear upon her face nor any shuffling of her feet. ‘And now,’ I said, with a glance at my watch, ‘we’d better get ready for church.’ I turned away, then whipped my head back quickly. I could not mistake what I saw when I did so. Mrs McReadie, for some reason I could not fathom, was deeply relieved.
Mallory met us in the hall. She was white around the eyes and I suggested walking to the service. ‘I know people will be staring, my dear,’ I said. ‘But you must hold your head up and ignore them.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Mallory said. ‘One day of sticking my chin in the air and then I can escape. Thank you so very much for inviting me down, Dandy. Let’s see what Cherry says about walking.’
I nodded. ‘Will your father be all right without you?’ I said. ‘If you do come away.’
Mallory’s face grew rather fixed at the mention of Lord Ross. ‘I expect so,’ she said. ‘David was very much Mummy’s friend, not his. As we’ve all come to see only too well. He won’t grieve for the man who was trying to ruin his life with a divorce and actually ruined it with a murder. Why would he?’
I did not agree with her rather cut and dried view of grief. Lord Ross, still reeling from the death of his wife, might well be profoundly shocked by this latest round of horrors. He might even be miserable that it took a servant to avenge her, while he looked helplessly on.
The household was beginning to assemble en masse. Mrs McReadie had washed the lamb blood from her hands, rolled down her sleeves and put on a dark coat and a black straw hat. She came out of the kitchen passageway with the two footmen at her heels. They, in tweed caps and coats, looked as unlike servants as ever. Cherry, descending the stairs, was in full mourning. Her coat was black and dead plain and she wore a black felt hat pulled down hard over her ears, although she clutched her prayer book in gloveless hands.
‘You’re very sombre,’ said Lord Ross, spying her. ‘I don’t think you wore such a lot of black to church the first Sunday after Mummy died.’
‘Shall I change?’ said Cherry.
‘No, dearest,’ Mallory said. ‘We don’t have time if we’re going to walk. And I want to walk.’
‘Does anyone know where he is?’ Cherry said. ‘David. Is he still here or have they taken him away? I hate to think of his body lying alone in the police house. What if one of the little Petries sees it? They are always playing housey in the jail cell. But then there’s no way Roderick would have picked him up on the Sabbath.’
‘Don’t think of it,’ said Lord Ross. He had opened the front door and held it for his daughters and me to pass through. ‘I do wish you’d try not to dwell on such morbid thoughts. I’ve been trying to get you to take better care of yourself since the very day you shared your happy news. I wish you would indulge me. Truly, I do.’
‘Roderick?’ I said. The name had caught my attention, but even as it did I knew it had distracted me from something more important. I tried to see past it to the back of my own mind. Unfortunately, Mallory came up beside me and took my arm, talking in my ear and driving the idea away completely.
‘The undertaker,’ she said. ‘Well, undertaker, carpenter and smith combined. There isn’t enough work for three men in such a tiny place.’
I murmured politely but all hope of concentrating was gone now. For at the end of the drive a slow procession of black-clad men, women and children was snaking along the shore road.
‘Aren’t they going the wrong way?’ I said.
‘No,’ said Mallory. ‘Easter, harvest and Christmas Eve, we use the Clachan church.’
‘And everyone will be there?’ said Alec. ‘I don’t suppose your minister would make a plea from the pulpit, would he?’
‘A plea for what?’ Lord Ross said.
‘Information, cooperation, civic duty,’ said Alec. ‘Someone must have seen McReadie go. If he left after daybreak someone must have seen something. I cannot believe that a whole village full of people whose houses face the sea missed a boat setting sail. Or, if he went up and over that road – whatever it’s called – someone must have been out feeding beasts, even on a Sunday. They’d recognise him, wouldn’t they? A local man. Or even if they just saw a figure, they would be able to confirm now that it was McReadie. Why have you stopped walking, Dandy?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. In truth, I did not even know if it was the same something troubling me again or if Alec, with his little speech about witnesses to McReadie’s departure, had started another one.
‘I don’t think our minister would be willing to do that,’ Cherry was saying. ‘What do you think, Mall darling? Police business strikes me as that wh
ich is Caesar’s, although no doubt he’ll have plenty to say about last night. The champagne, the dancing, the bare shoulders.’
‘But that’s rampant hypocrisy!’ I said. ‘He was there dancing! With his wife, admittedly, but he definitely danced. And I’m sure I saw a glass of something in his hand that didn’t look like lemonade.’
‘Oh but the poor man,’ Cherry said. ‘He’ll be so angry with himself. He prides himself on having a kind of nose for evil. He came after Mummy died and cast out the spirits from the knot garden, for instance. But he missed David right here in our midst. He’ll be inconsolable on that score.’
‘So, you see, Dandy,’ Mallory added, ‘he’ll be very down on the old ways and very up on the church this morning. Even though it’s Easter.’
‘Even though?’ I said. ‘Especially because, surely.’
‘Oh well, you know,’ said Cherry. ‘Springtime and all that. It gets rather tangled. And he does usually manage to tread a very nice line.’
They were making no attempt to speak in low voices and I glanced about myself at the knots of villagers who were keeping pace with us. There was no susurration of whispered Gaelic this morning. All were listening intently as we turned off the path up across the velvety, sheep-nibbled grass towards the church, just as the bell began dolefully to call us.
‘Daddy,’ Mallory said, as we approached the door. ‘The Gilvers have asked me to go down and stay in Perthshire for a bit. What do you think? It’s only if you can spare me.’
‘Well now, how can I answer that?’ said Lord Ross, with a fond smile. ‘I cannot “spare” you. But I cannot bear you to be here with all of this sadness either. On you go, my dear. I’ve got all the Tibballs to keep me spirits up. On you go.’
The inside of the Clachan church was as cold as the grave and as dark as a chimney. There was nothing so flamboyant as a single chip of stained glass but somehow the plain windows did not let in as much light as they ought. We shuffled onto the front pew and I pawed the ground like a horse, groping for a hot pipe upon which to rest my feet. There was nothing there. The board panels of the hymn-book stand met the stone slabs of the floor without so much as a hassock for comfort. I sat back, working my hands up into my coat sleeves, and gazed at the altar. A plain table with a dark cloth, an oak lectern with a plain black ribbon marking the place in the Bible and a pulpit, entirely unornamented and looking exactly like the air-raid watchtowers I had seen in the news reels during the war, all promised a very dull hour on this happiest day of the Christian year.
Needless to say there were no flowers and I spent a few sad moments wondering what Lady Love had made of that all her life. If she had married an Englishman and embarked on her years of horticulture in the south she would have been granted the chance to mount astonishing displays every week. Easter Sunday in the church of a lady who loves flowers is exuberant beyond all reckoning. Even my mother, who tended towards reverence for weeds and grasses, could hardly help producing beauty at Easter.
As the pews filled behind us, I was watching Mallory out of the corner of my eye. When Donald had first told us that there was a girl he wanted to marry, all I had felt was profound relief. That she was thirty was news, I admit, but she was of good family and fortune, nicely brought up and apparently steady. The divorce of her parents would have given me pause. The murder of her mother did give me pause. And so one might have thought that this second murder would have finished her off for me altogether as a candidate to join my family and as the star by which my son would now chart his life’s journey. Strangely, though, I found myself feeling rather fierce and determined on Mallory’s behalf. Still I was glad the thing was done.
We would take her away to Gilverton. We would have the wedding there. I would fill Gilverton chapel with flowers. I would lean hard on Hugh until he coughed up a honeymoon for them both as a wedding present, and none of the usual three weeks with an aunt in Devon and the sleeper home. Donald and Mallory would go to Paris, Rome and Vienna, staying in hotels and going to nightclubs.
Except that nightclubs made me think of Berlin and I wondered if a trip to Vienna was a sensible idea. I wondered if any part of Europe was a sensible idea. ‘Luftwaffe’ still struck me as a comical word, but in the last month alone Germany had rejected the very idea of disarmament and then there had been the business in Sudetenland. ‘They’ve won an election, Dandy,’ Hugh had said, reading the headlines. ‘Those Nazis have actually won at the ballot box now.’
I must have sighed, because Mallory turned and gave me an inquisitive look.
‘Are you all right?’ she said.
‘Very much so.’ I managed to get a smile onto my face. ‘I’m thinking about the wedding. I was wondering where you wanted to go on your honeymoon.’
Mallory was smiling too now. ‘It’s going to be so beautiful,’ she said. ‘June is lovely here. It’s light until midnight and the meadows are so sweet. The apple blossom will be finished but Mummy’s roses will be absolutely at their peak.’
‘Here?’ I said.
‘Where else?’ said Mallory. ‘Delia says June will be fine. She’s ordering my veil from Brussels and it takes a month.’ It took me a minute or two to place the name and when I did I thought, quietly to myself, that I was going to have to take Miss Cordelia Grant firmly in hand. ‘It won’t interfere too badly with the farming,’ Mallory said. ‘It’s after the shearing but before the first cut of hay. And before Cherry is too enormous to be my matron of honour and so Donald can get back from honeymoon – he wants to go to Norway – before the grouse.’
‘Norway?’ I said. ‘Norway? What for? And what about you? You are the most accommodating bride I’ve ever seen, I must say. If you want to get married in late November with no veil and spend Christmas in New York, you should just say so. You’ve got the rest of your life to fit yourself around others, dear. Your wedding is the one time you can suit yourself.’
‘I don’t mind,’ Mallory said. ‘I’m sure it’ll all be tremendous fun whatever we do.’
‘Even Norway?’ I said.
‘He’s interested in the softwood plantations,’ said Mallory. ‘The inland climate isn’t so different from Perthshire and we both think it would be a good idea.’
I simply stared. I was going to put my foot down about this. I saw Hugh’s hand in it and I was going to put my foot down hard on top of that hand. This child was not beginning her married life looking at pine trees in Norway.
Before I could say any of that, however, a door opened at the side of the altar and the minister, swathed in black and with a face like a poker, came in to begin the service.
There were no words of comfort from him for the family who had been visited once again by tragedy, nor even for the many villagers who had spent the night sitting on a ballroom floor waiting to be grilled by policemen and hangers-on like me. There was not even any fire and brimstone, which would have been some sort of relief. There was just a steady drone from some oft-neglected book of the Bible, dead dull and unrelenting. I found my head starting to droop after ten minutes. A hymn revived me but then he started in on the sermon itself and now there was only his voice and his own deathly words, not even the music of scripture to catch at one’s ear. And it was not getting any warmer in here, despite the breath of all the people and their packed bodies. I shrank down in my pew and stared at my feet. If my eyelids closed perhaps he would not notice. Even if he did, he might take it to heart and liven things up a bit before next time.
Cherry fell asleep before me, as well she might, being both with child and at rest after a hard week’s work crofting. I was aware of her sagging against my shoulder on my right side and could hear little popping noises as her gentle snores pushed her lips apart each time she breathed out. I listened to them for a moment or two and then I realised that the popping sounds were actually caused by pieces of gravel shooting out from under my feet as I walked with heavy shuddering tread along one of the paths in the apple crosses. I was trying to get to the knot garden in th
e middle, to get something out of the dovecote, but my feet were heavier and heavier. The popping had stopped now and slow dragging groans began instead. When I looked down I was heaving myself through snow up to my knees, the heaviest snow I had ever known. I pulled at one foot and shifted it forward, then I leaned over at an impossible angle and brought the other one under me again. Before I could take a third step the ground changed a second time. It was not snow after all; it was ice, brilliant and crackling, and I was skimming along as though on skates, swinging round the corners, hanging onto the branches of the criss-crossed apple trees. I was following someone. There was a trail in the ice ahead of me where something sharp had been dragged, leaving a deep score-mark. I peered closer and closer as it grew fainter and fainter, until I was bent double and it was gone. The ice was unmarked, polished and clear, the trellis patterns of the apple boughs reflected perfectly in it, because it was glass I was standing on. The paths between the apple trees were made of smooth, clean, plate glass. I could feel it tremble under my weight and I could see through it to the earth below, from where the face of Lady Love and the face of David Spencer were looking back at me. She opened her mouth to speak and I saw the earth shift and seethe as David Spencer lifted his hand, shovelling through the heaped dirt and apple-tree roots to cover her mouth and silence her. He was too slow but McReadie was there too. I saw him in the glass below my feet, working at her with a little trowel, scraping the earth up and patting it smooth, like a pillow behind her head. She closed her mouth and then closed her eyes and was just beginning to darken and fade into the soil itself when the glass gave way and I crashed through.
I must have gasped, possibly even snorted, as I awoke. The minister sent me one cold flick of a look but did not pause in his droning. Mallory smothered a giggle and Cherry cleared her throat and sat up.
I bent my head, partly to hide the flush of shame in my cheeks but mostly to try to catch at what my dream had been telling me before cold wakefulness drove it away.
A Step So Grave Page 24