Cold, Lone and Still (5 page)

‘Change back into your other clothes as quickly as you can,’ I said, when I had hustled Hera back to the room into which we had climbed. ‘We don’t want to get these togs soaked as well, and it’s pouring with rain outside.’

‘Why the hurry? What’s the matter? Couldn’t you get the blocked end of the passage open?’ she asked, understandably surprised by the force I had used to get her back into the other room.

‘I didn’t try. We’ve got to get away from here as quickly as ever we can. Don’t ask questions. Just get changed.’

‘You’ve got to tell me why. Did you see a ghost in the passage? — or what?’

‘Not a ghost, although there might be one in the future. There’s a dead man in there. I kicked him. Now for heaven’s sake shut up and get changed. There’s no point in getting
two
sets of clothes soaked through.’

Shivering with distaste, we climbed into our damp trousers and gave our anoraks, which were waterproof, a final shake before we put them on. ‘Now let’s have a good look round and make sure we haven’t left any traces to show that we were here,’ I said.

‘But why? The police will have to be told about — about
him
.’

‘Not on your life! We only found the body by the merest accident. It is no business of ours if people get themselves killed in ruined forts and I’m damned if I’m going to get myself mixed up with Scottish law and procurator fiscals and all the rest of it. What we’ve got to do is to step it out as soon as we leave here and trust to luck that we can find either Bridge of Orchy or Inveroran before dark. The mist is excuse enough if we get there late. We’ve got to alibi ourselves, don’t you see?’

‘But why? And why did you drag me away from the passage like that? I wouldn’t have minded seeing a corpse.’

‘We’ll go through that opening in the hall where the wall’s gone. It will be easier than scrambling through that window again,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you more later. Come on! Come on!’ So we passed through another, smaller yard which was strewn with fallen masonry, crossed into the first yard and so out of the precincts by the postern door. The road was plain enough to follow. We headed on to it and I set a cracking pace as we left the ruins behind us.

‘Oh, do slow down a bit,’ said Hera, after about the first half-mile. ‘We’re walking as though the Devil himself is behind us.’

‘Who knows that he isn’t?’ I said, slackening the pace; and then I gave her the bad news. ‘The dead man was Carbridge,’ I said, ‘and he wasn’t merely dead; he’d been murdered. That’s why I hauled you away before you saw him.’ She said nothing in response to this, but, from then on, she set the pace herself and there was no more talk about going to the police. All she said was: ‘I didn’t want it to happen that way.’

‘What didn’t you?’ I asked foolishly.

‘I did want to get to Fort William before he did, but now he can’t get there at all. But, look here’ — she slowed down and almost stopped walking — ‘are you sure it was Carbridge? It couldn’t have been, you know. I mean, how did he get there and where are the other three?’

‘Lost in the mist, the same as we were. He must have lost contact with them somewhere or other on the moor. Perhaps they were too slow for him if Jane Minch’s feet are hurting her.’

‘Todd wouldn’t have been slow. They would have gone on together, wouldn’t they? Where is Todd?’

‘Fleeing from justice, perhaps. I tell you Carbridge was murdered. I saw that he was. It looks to me as though Todd —’

‘No! You are not to say that! It’s wicked. You have no proof!’

‘Sorry! No, of course I haven’t. Now let’s hurry on. I can’t forget I had a row with Carbridge last night and there were witnesses. I can’t afford to report his body to the police. How can I?’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ she said, ‘but it was only a passing tiff. It would never occur to anybody who was there that any thought of murder was in your mind.’

‘It would never occur to anybody?’ I repeated, but in the form of a query, not a statement. ‘Well, if you’re interested, I might as well tell you that it occurred to
me
. If I had been alone with him last night —’

‘If you had been alone with him, the situation would never have arisen. Look here, I was right the first time about reporting what you saw. Don’t you see that the body is bound to be found soon. I suppose they’ll either take it to Fort William or to Stirling, but I really haven’t a clue about these things and I simply don’t want to know, but can’t you see, Comrie, we
must
tell the police we found him. There’ll be the most awful trouble if we don’t, when it all comes out that we were in that ruin.’

‘How
can
it come out? Even if it was discovered that we were there, there is nothing to prove that we saw the body. I didn’t even touch him.’

‘You fell over him. You accidentally kicked him. Bodies can bruise, even if they’re dead.’

‘Which proves what? Look, now, Hera, if you go to the police, you’ll land us in a whole lot of trouble and we may be held up for days, even if we’re not actually placed under suspicion. The first thing the police are going to ask is whether we knew the man.’

‘We could say no to that.’

‘And have them round up Todd and the rest of the gang and prove us to be liars? That would help a lot!’

‘Oh, dear! I don’t know
what
to do.’

‘That doesn’t sound like you. Anyway, when in doubt, do nothing and let Time pass. What did somebody call it? — masterly inactivity. That’s our ticket and we can’t afford to swop it for any other. Can’t you see that?’

It must have been at about this point that the rain eased off and we could see further ahead of us than we had been able to do since leaving the ruins. I had an idea that we were approaching the spot where we had deviated from The Way. I heard voices and laughter. Hastily I dragged Hera into a dip in the moor and pulled her down among the soaking plants in the hollow.

‘Keep quiet,’ I whispered. ‘If anybody spots us here, they’ll only think of Lady Chatterley in the rain, but we mustn’t be seen walking away from the ruins.’

The voices died in the distance. Cautiously I reconnoitred. There was nobody to be seen, so I pulled Hera to her feet and hand in hand, muddy now as well as wet, we ran forward. Almost the first thing we set eyes on was one of the signs used to mark The Way.

‘So this is where we went wrong,’ she said. ‘Just our luck! How do you
know
Carbridge was murdered?’

‘Saw a dirty great knife sticking out of him. It was something I didn’t want
you
to see.’

‘And you’re certain he was dead, although you didn’t handle him?’

‘Quite certain. He was cold and stiff.’

‘Then you
must
have touched him, or you wouldn’t have known that.’

‘All right, I did touch him, but nobody will ever know, unless you tell them.’

‘Oh, that’s not fair!’ she said passionately. ‘Look here, I want to go home. I want to get on a train and go back to Glasgow, and then I want to get on another train and get to Euston, and then I want to take a taxi to my flat and never go on holiday again.’

‘Cool it,’ I said. ‘Forget all about today. We’ve done nothing wrong and there certainly was nothing anybody could do for poor Carbridge. Let it ride. The most stupid thing we could do now is to go straight home. People would begin wondering why. When people begin wondering why, trouble starts.’

‘What people?’

‘People at home, for one thing. They would know we must have had some reason for cutting our holiday short and, naturally, they’d begin to speculate and then, once the body is discovered —’

‘That might not be for ages, unless we —’

‘Oh, my dear girl, use your loaf! The poor chap will be missed and a search will be made. Those ruins are not all that far off The Way and there are plenty of his gang to testify that he was walking The Way when he went missing. In fact, he will have been reported missing already, I wouldn’t wonder. The sooner we get to Inveroran and pick up our planned schedule, the better. As it stands at present, nobody can prove that we ever deviated, let alone that we holed up in the ruins. The mist and the time we spent at Bridge of Orchy will account for that gap in the time scheme. Thank goodness we took so much time over lunch. It may turn out to be our alibi.’

‘It still think we ought to go to the police.’

‘In heaven’s name,
no
! Do you want to land us both in the cart?’

‘If he was murdered, the murderer ought to be found.’

‘He
will
be found. No doubt about that.’

‘Even a few hours may make all the difference.’

‘Oh, Hera, it’s no business of ours. Hang it all, we didn’t even
like
the chap!’

‘That’s all the more reason for doing our best to see that justice is done.’

‘Punishing his murderer won’t bring Carbridge back.’

‘Finding out who killed him may help a lot of people. Don’t you see, Comrie, that one of his gang must have killed him? I wouldn’t let you put it on to Todd, but
one
of that four —’

‘Not necessarily at all. There are plenty of thugs and muggers about. He may have had a toss-up with the rest of them and gone off on his own and run into trouble.’

‘Can you imagine that, though? He was the most gregarious pest I’ve ever met. He would never have gone off on his own.’

‘Well, that could boil it down to just three people. So far as we know, he was left with Todd and the two Minches. Tansy and Rhoda had cried off and the students and Perth were way, way behind. Any of the other three could have had a reason for killing him. We don’t know what the relationships were like among them.’

We tramped on, and were soon clocked in at the Inveroran hotel. No questions were asked about our wet and muddy appearance. They are used to wet and muddy people in the Highlands, I suppose. They promised that our clothes would be sponged and would be dry by the morning, so we went to our rooms, had a bath, changed (Hera into the slinky frock again), and went downstairs to have a drink before dinner. I began to relax, however temporarily.

Most of the other guests appeared to be climbers, and there was much talk of mountains I had never heard of, or else I did not recognise the pronunciation of their Gaelic names. We listened and admired and I hoped that our recent experiences were being overlaid in Hera’s mind by pleasanter thoughts.

As the evening wore on, however, I myself again became very far from happy. I did not know much about rigor mortis, but I knew enough to realise that, if Carbridge were as stiff as I reckoned he was, he could have been dead for hours. This was very puzzling. I attempted to remember all that I had read about rigor mortis. My partner Alexander Storey and I run a literary agency which had been set up by Sandy’s father and one or two of our clients write crime fiction, so, to that extent, I have had to undertake a certain amount of reading-up on forensic medicine in order to check the information given in the story before we send the book to a publisher.

To become as stiff as the corpse over which I had stumbled in that blacked-out passage, the man would have been dead for about twelve hours or even longer, for, so far as my recollection of my reading took me, the rigor, once completely established, could last another twelve hours until it began to pass off in the third twelve-hour period.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ I told myself. Carbridge had left the hotel at about eight that morning and I had found the body not more than ten hours later. Well, allowing for the individual vagaries of its onset, I supposed that it would have been just about possible for the corpse to have stiffened in that space of time, but the legs, with their powerful muscles, were always the last parts of the body to be affected, and it was his foot and leg that I had stumbled against and then touched. They had been as rigid as marble.

I had another try at working out the times. With Jane Minch in tow and her sore feet, Carbridge could not have travelled all that much faster than we did. We had stopped for lunch, but, presumably, so had the others. It did not seem possible that Carbridge could have been dead for more than a few hours. Further speculation seemed useless. I tried to tell myself that it was not Carbridge I had found, but it was of no use. True, I had had only a glimpse of a grossly distorted face, but the jeans and the anorak the man was wearing were identical to the clothes Carbridge had been wearing when last I had seen him alive.

I
t was between nine and ten miles to Kingshouse from Inveroran and, as the challenge from Carbridge could now be ignored by Hera, she agreed to make an easy business of next day’s journey.

We left the hotel at half-past nine, and by the time we reached the beginning of the climb up the Black Mount when we left the head of Luch Tulla I realised that Hera was very tired. There seemed nothing to do but to press on or return to the Inveroran hotel, have lunch there and then try to get a lift in a car or lorry to carry us to Ballachulish, Kinlochleven or even all the way to Fort William itself.

When I suggested this, however, she vetoed it in such a forceful manner that I realised it was useless to argue, so we began the ascent. The surface of The Way on this stretch was good, but the track became extremely exposed and windy. However, the weather remained fine and the mountain views were wonderful and so was the expanse of Rannoch Moor we saw before we descended.

We rested for a while on Ba Bridge and watched the tumbling water as it swirled over its rocks brought down from the mountain crags, but there was more climbing to do and, although I stopped and pointed out a rough track which would have taken us to the road and the chance of a lift, Hera refused to consider the project and lowered her obstinate head to the wind as we looked over to where Schiehallion reared his noble pyramid out of the moor.

I have always thought about this extraordinary mountain ever since I first met its magical name in J. A. Ferguson’s one-act play
Campbell of Kilmhor
and shall never forget the closing speech by the old woman Mary Stewart after the heroic and defiant death of her son Dugald. He told the despicable Campbell, ‘Till ye talk Rannoch Loch to the top of Schiehallion, ye’ll no talk me into a yea or nay.’ Apart from that, it was during rehearsals of this play that I had fallen in love with Hera. She had been cast as the girl Morag Cameron, while I played the tiny part of the toadying and sycophantic James Mackenzie. Amateur material were the whole lot of us, but the play itself carried us through, although I wouldn’t go bail for our Campbell’s Scottish accent! However, I digress, as the lecturer said when he was extolling the beauties of the Clifton Blue butterfly and stepped backwards off the cliffs at Beachy Head.

Slowly, and with many pauses for rest, although it was too wet everywhere to sit down, we made progress towards Kingshouse. Of one thing I was determined. If the hotel there could accommodate us, we were going to stay there at least a second night. We had allowed a fortnight for the holiday and still had a day or two in hand, but, apart from that, there was nothing to stop us from putting in another week if we felt so inclined. Our return tickets to London from Glasgow were valid for a month, so no problem there, and I had money enough to cover any extra expenses and could get more in Glasgow if we needed it.

At last the climbing was over and The Way began to descend. I knew, however, that to get to Kinlochleven there was more climbing ahead of us and I was becoming more and more anxious about Hera’s powers of endurance. She knew what I was thinking, for, when we stopped to admire the view we got of Buachaille Etive Mor, she said, ‘Stop worrying, Comrie. Women are much tougher than men. We have to be.’

We passed the way to the ski-lift and came on to a well-surfaced road and a car park. We passed Blackrock Cottage and then, thankfully, we found that The Way took us downhill again and across the moor to the remote but more than welcome Kingshouse hotel. I enquired at once about the possibility of extending our booking and, to my great relief, this turned out to be possible.

The hotel and its pine trees were grandly situated under the protection — or the menace — of mighty Beinn a’Chrulaiste and all around were other mountains and the moors. Fortunately Hera was so greatly taken with the setting that she made no objections to my booking us in for an extra night and, although I knew she would never admit it, I am sure she was relieved to think that we were to take a whole day off from walking.

I had one other card up my sleeve, but I had to be wary about how and when I played it. To get to the Kingshouse hotel we had had to cross a main road and I knew from the guidebook that a bus route went along it to Fort William. It was my intention to insist, when the omens seemed favourable, that we should catch a bus and finish our journey that way. I thought of complaining of blisters on my feet, but the necessary evidence for this was lacking. I wondered whether I could fake a sprained ankle, but this would be inconvenient later if I had to cry off climbing Ben Nevis, a project on which she had set her heart.

In the event, I adopted neither subterfuge, but opted for yet another night at the hotel, pointing out to Hera that a stay of three nights entitled us to a rebate on the day-to-day terms charged, although whether this was the case I neither knew nor cared. Finally I put it to her bluntly that I had booked us for the third night as well as the second one and that she must please herself about what she wanted to do, but that I was determined to stay.

‘We’ve covered sixty miles since we left Drymen,’ I said. ‘A good deal more, if you count the extra miles we covered when we lost our way in the mist. We’ve proved our point, don’t you think?’

‘I’m not sure about that,’ she answered. ‘I don’t terribly care for your protective attitude. It isn’t really protective, you know. It’s mere self-assertion and male vanity. I detest this ‘women and children first’ nonsense. On a ship the sailors are the people to be considered. As for the Victorian ideal of the captain’s either being the last to leave the vessel or even going down with it, I never heard such poppycock! The leader ought to be the principal survivor, not the inevitable casualty.’

‘Why?’

‘For obvious reasons, I should have thought. Where would the sheep be, if the shepherd died?’

‘So what exactly are you getting at?’

‘Go and get us more drinks and I’ll tell you. You see,’ she went on when I returned, ‘you were very quick to hustle me away from that corpse. I won’t blame you for that, except to say that it was high-handed and unnecessary.’

‘You didn’t
really
want to see a murdered man, particularly somebody we knew,’ I said.

‘But are you sure that it
was
somebody we knew? You only flashed your torch on him before you were grabbing me by the arm and dragging me back to that other room and then forcing me to get back to our road.’

‘What is all this? Of course we had to get back on to our road. We had to get to the hotel.’

‘I still think that, if you saw what you say you saw, we ought to go to the police. There might be all sorts of things for them to find out.’

‘We’ve been into all this.’

‘Look, when the mist came down and we lost our way, how far ahead of us were the other four?’

‘If there still were four of them. The Minches might have left Todd and Carbridge by then. Everybody else had left them.’

‘In any case, whether there were four of them or just the two men, they might have got to that turning we took long before the mist came down. Why should they have gone off the track? What made them leave The Way and go junketing away across country? It’s too far-fetched to suppose that they were trying to take a short cut by the same route we had chosen. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘They may have heard about the ruins and wanted to take a look at them.’ I knew this could not be true. Hera picked up the suggestion and threw it away.

‘The ruins are not mentioned in the guidebook. Besides, Carbridge wanted to get to Fort William quickly. He wasn’t any too pleased when Perth and the students spent that time at Inchcailloch on Loch Lomond and he dropped them altogether later on because they wanted to linger and collect bits of rocks and things. Why should he — or any of the others, for that matter — have wasted their time and energy going off the marked route?’

‘You tell me,’ I said.

‘When you went charging down that dark passage you talk about, did you slip?’

‘No, I fell over the body, as I told you. If you’re thinking of blood, it coagulates pretty quickly unless the chap is a haemophiliac’

‘Why wouldn’t you let me see him?’

‘Oh, my dear girl, don’t be morbid!’

‘I might have been able to do something.’

‘Don’t talk so daft. He was dead, frozen, and as stiff as a board, I tell you.’

‘I still think we ought to go to the police.’

‘No. And that’s flat. We hardly knew the chap and it’s no business of ours what’s happened to him. We’ve had all this out before. Heaven knows what sort of scandal we might get ourselves mixed up in, apart from the ghastly business of interviews with the police and being quizzed by reporters and having to appear in court at God knows what inconvenient time. They don’t even hold inquests up here, I believe. It’s straight into the rough stuff if the Procurator Fiscal thinks there’s a case to answer, as in this instance there damn’ well would be.’

‘All right,’ she said reluctantly. ‘You’ve made your point, but I’m not going to say I’m happy about it. That poor man!’

‘Probably only got what he asked for.’

‘I didn’t realise how callous you can be.’

‘That’s not callousness, it’s only common sense. And now snap out of it.’

But, of course, neither of us could do that, and it was a silent and not exactly a compatible pair of love-birds who resumed their journey a couple of days later. However, encouraged by my unusually high-handed victory, I laid down the law again and, to my astonishment, this time she capitulated without a fight.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Let’s take to the main roads and do Ballachulish and on to Fort William, if we can pick up any transport, but heaven knows how the buses run in these parts.’

However, we were in luck. We had not been waiting at the roadside for more than ten minutes before a whacking great car with a man and a woman in it pulled up and the man put his head out. From the size of the vehicle and the fact that it had a left-hand drive, I guessed that the couple were from the States and this proved to be the case. Moreover, they were bound for Ballachulish, so we could not have been more lucky.

Needless to say, we did not mention the dead man, but they were greatly interested when they heard about The Way. The woman asked innumerable questions. I was on tenterhooks in case Hera should give away, after all, the secret of our visit to the ruins and the gruesome discovery I had made there, but she was discretion itself and as the car diminished the distance between Kingshouse and our destination, I became easier in my mind.

The couple were inclined to dismiss the magnificent Grampians as mere foothills compared with their own Rockies, but allowed that, compared with the mountains of Switzerland and Austria, those in the Highlands had ‘atmosphere’. In any case, whatever the views of the couple and however subversive they were, neither Hera nor I was prepared to quarrel with them, for we were much too grateful for the lift to be in any mood to argue with the kindly and voluble Americans. It was not until almost the end of the journey that we discovered that they were really bound for Oban and had come miles out of their way for our sakes. After we had crossed the bridge at Ballachulish, they took us all the way to Fort William.

‘Think nothing of it,’ the driver said. ‘My wife is wild to see Glen Coe where the massacre took place, so we were bound for Ballachulish anyhow. All we need to do is go back-along and then pick up our route south. At Oban I aim to take pictures and then cross the only bridge over the Atlantic. Boy! Will that be something to tell the folks back home!’ He was referring to the bridge which connects the mainland to the little island of Seil on the road from Oban to Easdale. I remembered it well from the coach tour with my parents, for I had been young enough to believe that the coach really
was
going to cross to America.

The youth hostel at Fort William was about three miles from the town shops, but it was marvellously well situated, as I knew, for the climb up Ben Nevis. It was a Grade One hostel, had one hundred and twenty-eight beds, cooking facilities and a shop, but meals were not provided, so we bought our own food from the hostel store. When we went into the kitchen to cook it, who should be there but Rhoda and Tansy. They had put up at a hotel for three nights and then come on to the hostel. They and we were the only people at the hostel when we arrived. The weather was fine and the other hostellers either had not yet arrived or were out enjoying themselves. I became more and more grateful to the kindly Americans for the welcome lift they had given us from Kingshouse to Fort William, for, if we climbed Ben Nevis on the morrow, it meant at least a seven-hour stint and some rough going, even by the easiest ascent. To have cut out the long miles and overnight stop if we had completed the walk was a marvellous bonus. We crossed the bridge opposite the hostel and looked around us. It was pleasant in the glen, but I had climbed Ben Nevis once before, and I knew that conditions could be very different when we reached the summit. Hera was all eagerness and anticipation, so I warned her that the way up the great (and, to my mind, very ugly) mountain was not only arduous in places, but could be extremely dull.

‘But think of the view from the summit!’ she said.

‘Well enough, so long as the weather holds and the Ben isn’t capped by cloud.’

‘It won’t be. We haven’t come all this way for nothing. If it’s no good tomorrow, we can wait a day, can’t we?’

‘We’re only booked in for tonight and this is a very popular hostel,’ I pointed out.

‘Then we’ll go to a hotel. Why not?’

But she was not to climb Ben Nevis on that holiday, for, because of the most startling and utterly unforeseen circumstance, we were out of that hostel as soon as next morning’s breakfast was over. We lost no time in making for the railway station and in taking the train for Glasgow. We were fleeing, as it were, from a disembodied spirit and terrified, so far as I myself was concerned, not for my life, but for my reason. At about seven o’clock that evening when, taking advantage of the fact that only a few hostellers had drifted in, Hera and I had cooked and eaten our simple supper rather earlier than we really wanted it, a lot of hostellers, all chatting and laughing, came in. Among the crowd were four people we knew. The next moment Hera and I were hailed by Carbridge, Todd and the Minches, all very much alive, although tired, they said, from their climb. To clinch matters, we were joined an hour later by Perth and the students. They had climbed with the others, but had stayed longer on the mountain to add little bits of lava and granite to the collection they had already made at Inchcailloch and along The Way and had despatched to London to avoid having to tote so much heavy material on the rest of their march.