A Step So Grave

by Catriona McPherson

  Or was I building castles? I knew that the formality of mistress to servant rankled with Mrs McReadie. She scorned Lady Love for calling her by her honorific and her surname, as though they had not been children together. The bond between the two families was stout and many-threaded, after all. Besides the fact of childhood friendship, there was the saving of a son’s life.

  I looked at my own two sons, standing solemnly before me, and saw with a flare of astonishment that they really were no longer boys. They were men. Donald was looking more and more like his father every day. I felt my mind begin to turn to the drumbeat from Europe and turned it, as ever, resolutely away.

  This time the burst of the firework was more like a bomb going off and it made me gasp. Most unfortunately, the proceedings had just reached the point where objections were being sought and everyone upon the altar stiffened at the sudden conviction that I was going to speak.

  ‘Oh! No!’ I said. ‘Do carry on.’

  Donald simply smirked and rolled his eyes but Hugh, at my side, froze in rectitude and mortification. Alec leaned forward on Hugh’s far side and raised his brows. He knows what it means when I suddenly gasp. He might not know exactly what had just struck me but he knew something had, and hard.

  The son who no longer visited his home, but stayed away at Oxford. The stranger, glimpsed by Cherry on her mother’s birthday, who seemed to her like a younger and heartier version of her father. The piece of shocking news that David Spencer brought north, having run into someone in Oxford who should have been a stranger, but whom he recognised. Lady Love’s disgust about Lachlan’s machinations and her sudden realisation that the act of heroism, dragging the boy to safety, was not the selfless act of heroism she had always thought it but was rather that most natural, most inevitable act of all: a parent saving his child.

  And a third firework exploded. Dolly McReadie’s relief when she heard that a man had travelled on David Spencer’s ticket and was sailing away. She was not an angel, happy for her wicked husband to be leaving. She was a mother, happy to know her child was safe from harm.

  The rest of the wedding was a blur to me. I stood, sat, prayed and sang but when Donald and Mallory had made their triumphant journey back down the aisle, Cherry waddling behind on Teddy’s arm, and the feathers on the hat of the pianist wagging in time as she banged out Mendelssohn, Hugh had to push me to get me walking out behind them.

  The happy couple stopped in the churchyard to be showered with rice and congratulations and Alec sought me out.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  I told him.

  ‘Good God almighty,’ he said, then ducked as though to avoid a smiting and shot a guilty look at the minister a few feet away. ‘Lachlan and Dolly McReadie had a child? Roddy McReadie is Lachlan’s son?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘And he’s the spitting image of his father. How unfortunate.’

  ‘Which is why he stayed away from home.’

  ‘Until Spencer ran into him in Oxford, whereupon he came north, knowing Spencer had twigged and was going to blow his cover?’

  ‘Yes, I think – on Lady Love’s birthday – Spencer was escorting him away again. He hinted as much as we danced. Lady Love’s anger at Lachlan had made her perversely determined not to leave after all. So David Spencer’s own fond hopes of a future with her were dashed – as were Sam McReadie’s, by the way – but the two men had vastly different responses to the same bit of news, didn’t they? Spencer hustled the boy away again, to stop the scandal spreading, and McReadie saw red and killed her.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Alec, a habit he had picked up from me. ‘But if only David Spencer had kept his mouth shut about the child, instead of belting up here full of gossip, his fond hopes wouldn’t have been dashed. What a sorry mess he made of it. If he hadn’t been so ready to make trouble for Lachlan he might have got his wish, wouldn’t you say?’

  I shrugged. ‘Not if we believe her diary,’ I said. ‘It was McReadie that tempted her, not poor David Spencer. Very odd.’

  ‘As odd as Lachlan and “Dolly”,’ said Alec. ‘I agree.’

  ‘Do you suppose that pair mean to marry? Would that make Roddy a legitimate heir?’

  ‘I don’t know the law,’ Alec said. ‘Does it count if his parents marry years too late?’

  ‘We could ask someone, but you know lawyers. They’d be agog to discover who we were talking about and it wouldn’t take much digging to unearth it all. Best leave well alone.’

  ‘I must say, Dandy, all of that certainly knocks my little brainwave for six.’

  ‘Tell me anyway,’ I said, all magnanimity since he had given my tale such a warm reception.

  ‘The roller,’ Alec said. ‘Remember I noticed that the edge of the path had a deep ditch?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I didn’t see the point then and I don’t see it now.’

  ‘It’s not a roller.’ Indeed I did find it difficult to be amazed by this nugget of insight. I had missed the point of it, though.

  ‘I know. It’s a raker. It rakes the gravel.’

  ‘The weight is borne on the rims so that the material – usually gravel – isn’t pushed to the edges. And the teeth rake the surface of the material – usually gravel – smooth.’

  ‘Why do you keep saying usua— Oh!’ I caught up at last. ‘Usually gravel, but sometimes …’

  ‘Snow. Yes,’ Alec said.

  ‘Good grief! I dreamed it and I didn’t pay attention to the dream.’ Alec and I stared at one another. ‘So,’ I said after a while. ‘She could have been put there any time then? And then the roller could smooth away the tracks afterwards?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Well then it falls into place. When Lady Love found out – from Spencer – that her husband had betrayed her, that all his so-called sacrifice and the years of her living with an invalid, had all been to save his bastard son … she changed her mind about leaving.’

  ‘Sour grapes,’ said Alec. ‘She didn’t want Lachlan but she didn’t want it to be mutual. Her famous sweet nature begins to curdle rather.’

  ‘So McReadie killed her. He stashed her in the flower room – where poor Mitten saw her – then moved her to the dovecote and smoothed the path. Spencer knew it.’

  ‘How?’ Alec said.

  ‘Or worked it out, rather. Perhaps Lady Love told him of McReadie’s devotion and told him she was planning to disappoint the man. If we’d known that, then Lady Love killed in her garden with a garden tool and the gardener grubbing out all her last plantings would have struck us as evidence of guilt too.’

  ‘True,’ Alec said.

  ‘And so Spencer planned to kill McReadie when they were on their trip together. But when McReadie found out that his crime was uncovered – the night of the engagement ball – the two men had a confrontation and Spencer died.’

  ‘And Roddy McReadie – aided by his mother and perhaps his father too; who knows? – has left the country, using the passport Sam McReadie had ready for the plant-finding trip.’

  ‘Only one question remains,’ I said.

  ‘Where,’ said Alec, ‘is Samuel McReadie?’

  We pondered it as we walked back round the bay to Applecross House as part of the joyous wedding procession. The sun shone down on the green hills and the silver shore and the sea sparkled blue as cornflowers in the bay. Ahead of us, a gaggle of children skipped and larked along. They spoke in high little chirrups, half-English and half-Gaelic, telling jokes, teasing one another.

  ‘Kelpie pool,’ was the first snippet I really noticed. A small boy was pointing up the hill and dancing around.

  ‘I’m not allowed to,’ another tiny boy said. ‘In case the bodach gets me.’

  ‘Whit bodach?’ said a larger girl. ‘Scaredy-cat, scaredy-cat! Wetted your pants and lost your hat!’

  ‘There’s a bodach in with the kelpie now,’ another girl confirmed. ‘My Granny Roderick told me. He’ll come and get you if you don’t mind your mammy.’

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bsp; Alec and I stopped walking and waited until the children were out of earshot.

  ‘What’s a bodach?’ said Alec.

  ‘An old man,’ I said. ‘What better place to tip a body than a pond everyone already avoids for the curse of bad luck it’s had for years?’

  ‘But how can McReadie be in a loch? Suicide? Unbearable remorse leading to suicide?’

  ‘Or a ruthless woman tidying up loose ends when the neat plan to swap partners fell through.’

  ‘And what shall we do about it?’

  ‘Nothing until after the wedding dance at least,’ I said. ‘When they are safely off on their honeymoon, we shall have to see.’

  I stopped talking as Hugh turned back, fought his way through the waist-high mob of children and came to chivvy us.

  ‘What’s the matter now?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I assured him. ‘I like Mallory. She loves Donald and he loves her too. That’s what matters. Changes are coming, Hugh, as you never tire of telling me. The old concerns of family and society are falling away. None too soon, if you ask me.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Hugh said. ‘What do you mean “family and society”? Is there more scandal yet?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ I said. ‘Let’s dance. The sun is shining and this is a happy day.’ I took Hugh’s arm and Alec’s arm and began to skip. ‘Come and dance a Dashing White Sergeant with me, you two.’

  Epilogue

  There was little warmth in the September sunshine, but its low, golden dazzle was a joy to behold. The bracken had reddened until every hill was ablaze with it and the leaves of the birch trees were spangles of bronze. The last cut of hay was silvering on the fences too and the water in the sound glittered. I caught my breath as we crested the bealach na bà and saw the whole treasure box open before us.

  ‘It’s such a beautiful place,’ I said, ‘to contain such ugliness.’

  ‘The purge will surely be almost done after today,’ said Alec.

  I sighed mightily and let my mind range back over the months as we descended to the shore side. A hopeless tangle of loyalties had rendered me unable to act at midsummer. My fear for Cherry’s safe confinement, for Dickie’s fragile state of mind and for Lachlan’s inevitable heartbreak was bad enough. But there was also poor Roddy McReadie, who had not chosen to be born, nor to be saved on the battlefield, and whose hapless role in the mess would be a perfect opium pipe to the lower sort of Sunday newspaper. I foresaw a manhunt throughout the empire for him. And then there was Mallory, whom I loved more with every passing day, finding in her an alliance I had not even known I was lacking before her arrival. She was another woman in my house of men and a sensible ally to stand shoulder to shoulder with me against Grant’s excesses, after the wedding day was past and life went back to its humdrum tweedy round again.

  If all that meant that Dolly McReadie reigned at the Clachan manse, paying nothing for her scheming and nothing for her sins, I did not see what could be done about it.

  Had not Inspector Hutcheson taken to visiting me I might have let the whole sordid business slip into the past, with my face turned doucely away. But visit he did. He parked himself in my sitting room, a cup of tea in his hand and his most bloodhound-like look upon his face. And there he waited. He kept coming back, before his shifts of duty, and after them, and on his free days. Alec started staying away to avoid him and heaven only knew what Mrs Hutcheson made of his absence from home. After a few weeks, Bunty barely raised her head to greet him, such a fixture had he become. And Becky brought a second cup in on my coffee tray without being asked. Even Hugh took to strolling in for help with the crossword and looked surprised if only Bunty and I greeted him.

  It was the end of July when I cracked and told Hutcheson everything.

  ‘I thought as much,’ he said when I was done. ‘In broad strokes. I couldn’t have guessed at all the incidentals, dearie me no. So. There were two men in love with Lavinia, but her husband wasn’t one of them. She could have scandalised the county and gone off with the gardener or she could have scandalised only the minister by flitting down to Oxford with the man Spencer. But she took a huff to think her husband had a by-blow, not to mention a plan of his own, and she dug her heels in. Well, that’s women – that’s a certain sort of idle woman for you.’

  ‘It’s David Spencer I could shake,’ I said. ‘If he were alive to be shaken. Rushing up on the sleeper to tell a tale that was guaranteed to cause pain and turmoil. If he hadn’t been so quick to point fingers at Lachlan, none of this would have happened. But that’s men for you.’

  Inspector Hutcheon inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘You do see that I can’t just leave this be, Mrs Gilver?’ he said. ‘Like Mr Spencer before me, I’ll be rushing up to Applecross to tell a tale, spreading pain and turmoil. You do see?’

  I nodded glumly. ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I said. ‘There was never going to be a happy ending after Spencer stuck his oar in. But how very nearly! They kept Roddy’s parentage quiet all those years, right through his schooling and the war and the tragedy of Lachlan’s sacrifice. Once Lady Love had gone off with her beloved – either of her beloveds! – then Lachlan and Dolly McReadie could have let their son back into their lives. Cherry wouldn’t have cared, as long as it didn’t interfere with the lambing, and even Mallory would have weathered it in the end.’

  ‘It looks like that, viewed from here,’ Hutcheson said. ‘But if no murder had ever come along to upend their lives, I think their father with his cook and their mother with her gardener would have struck those two girls as a very grievous step. Add a bastard brother – excuse my frankness, Mrs Gilver – and they’d both have had the vapours. We wouldn’t have thought to say, “Thank your stars your mother wasn’t hacked to death in her garden and your old family friend not long at her back”.’

  I shuddered. ‘True,’ I said. ‘Very true. Well then, Inspector, you must do your duty. Truth will out. Blood will out.’

  ‘Love will out, I’ve heard,’ Hutcheson said. ‘But that’s not so much to do with me, in my profession. I shall let you know when Mrs McReadie is about to be arrested and whether we reckon to scoop up Lord Ross too and you can help your daughter-in-law take it in, eh? Break it gently.’

  I smiled at the phrase ‘daughter-in-law’, for it still delighted me. I would help Mallory take it in. That was my job here. I would leave the villains to be dealt with by the long, encircling and muscular arm of the law.

  In the end, the arm of the law barely had to stretch to grab its prey. The prey walked, all unknowing, into its reach. Mrs McReadie, lulled to complacency by her triumphs, made a fatal error. One evening at the Clachan manse while Lachlan sat with his pipe by the fireside and she sat opposite, sometimes bent over her mending and sometimes looking up to smile at him, she gravely miscalculated the depth of his love.

  She told him. Dolly McReadie revealed that her husband had not avenged Lachlan’s wife and fled to the colonies, but instead had killed Lachlan’s wife, then killed his wife’s good friend and had, in turn, been murdered by the very woman who was right now sitting with a half-darned sock in her lap, telling this tale in such a calm, confiding way.

  ‘He’s tipped in the lochan,’ she said. ‘Dead as a doornail.’

  ‘Why …’ Lachlan began in a voice stretched dry. ‘Why are you telling me?’

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs McReadie, with a smile and a little movement of her shoulders that was close to a simper, ‘I’m a widow, you see. I shall have to divorce him for desertion to keep the courts happy, but we’ll know I’m a widow and we’ll know that any second marriage I enter into will be a marriage true in the eyes of God.’

  Lachlan stared. ‘The eyes of God?’ he echoed. ‘The God who saw you kill the man? The God who knows you stitched dolls and whispered spells into them?’

  Mrs McReadie put her needle carefully into her darning ball out of harm’s way and clasped her hands in her lap. ‘Now, Lach,’ she said. ‘Don’t distress yourself.’
>
  Lachlan Ross stood and, on his sturdy legs that were getting stronger every day, he strode to the telephone and asked the exchange to put him through to the police at Inverness.

  So, this September morning, as Alec and I coasted down to Applecross, Dolly McReadie, murderess, was in her prison cell, an object of fear and fascination to the other women and to the warders, who saw her twisting her little bits of wool and muttering. Samuel McReadie, murderer, was lying in the cold earth of a corporation cemetery in Glasgow, no churchyard in the Highlands willing to find a plot for his sorry bones.

  And now Lachlan was to be laid to his rest. He had started to fail as soon as the trial began and his final illness had been such a brutal one that the end came as a relief.

  ‘I’m looking forward to seeing Mallory,’ I said as we trundled along the shore road. Mallory had been at Applecross since summoned to her father’s deathbed and I was missing her and getting rather sick of Donald mooning around missing her too. ‘I’m going to try to get her to come back straight after the funeral. Cherry has plenty of help up here, between Biddy, Dickie and Mitten, and Mallory needs to take care of herself. For once.’

  ‘Is she in an interesting condition?’ said Alec, who picks up some dreadful slang from his maidservants.

  ‘I refuse to answer such a vulgar enquiry,’ I said. ‘But that reminds me: we’ll be seeing Cherry and Mitten’s little boy. Mallory tells me he’s a lusty chap. Came to no harm from all the excitement.’

  ‘Not to mention the shearing,’ Alec added. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Lorrimer,’ I said.

  ‘Fine name.’

  ‘They call him Lollipop.’

  Alec made a disgusted noise in his throat and I did not blame him. We were nearing the gates to Applecross House now and I was looking into my compact mirror to tidy my hair when I heard Alec gasp and felt the car swerve.