Gently North-West (7 page)

‘Och, we’ll find it,’ Blayne said. ‘There’ll no’ be that many in the district – and no’ but one with sich an owner. I’ll give Purdy instructions when he rings.’

‘You don’t know who Redbeard is?’ Brenda asked.

Blayne shook his head. ‘But I’m wishful to meet him.’

‘George thought he was a farmer.’

‘That may be. Though he wasn’t up yonder to bargain for kye.’ He rose stiffly and put out his great hand. ‘Man,’ he said to Gently, ‘this has done me guid. Just talkin’ the thing over with a man like yourself has helped me give it a glim o’ perspective. Are you stayin’ long in Strathtudlem?’

‘For the fortnight,’ Gently said.

‘Then maybe we’ll be meetin’ again, whether or no’ your mannie is mixed up wi’ the case. There,’ he said, as a chandelier above them splashed sudden light through the room, ‘you bring illumination where you come, man – they’ve mended the line at Glen Liffen.’

Gently looked out at the still-dashing rain. ‘I wish I could do the same for the weather,’ he said.

‘Och, I’m the man with that in my pocket,’ Blayne said. ‘Do you no’ ken it’ll be steamin’ sun by noon?’

– Judge how looked the Saxons then,

When they saw the rugged mountain

Start to life with armed men.

‘The Battle of Killiecrankie’

G
ENTLY DROVE THE
Sceptre no farther than the bridge, below which the augmented river was booming impressively, before halting for the ostensible purpose of giving himself a fresh light. But while the match was flickering over the bowl of his pipe he was staring hard towards the Lodge which, across two hundred yards of rainy strath, one could see glimmering palely among its trees. Then he grunted and stabbed the match into an ashtray.

‘What do you think of Blayne?’ he growled at Brenda.

‘I like him,’ Brenda said in a small voice. ‘Even though he’s walked out of some Rowlandson cartoon. But I don’t trust him, of course.’

Gently grinned at her round his pipe. ‘Why?’

‘He was much too flattering. I think his object was simply to get you off the scene.’

‘Yes.’ Gently nodded. ‘Also I think he was holding back.’

‘About Mrs Dunglass?’

‘About Mrs Dunglass – and about where his sympathies lie in the matter.’

He tilted open a quarter-light, admitting the rumble and crashing of the river. Before them the wrack was thinning slightly to show the trees on the eastern braes. Rain drummed on roof and bonnet, rills gushed over the road to join the river, but the light was steadily improving. In this Blayne was likely to prove a true prophet.

Gently said: ‘It was something he let slip about there being small credit in it for him – if Mrs Dunglass’s theory was correct, and Dunglass was killed in some Nationalist quarrel. Of course, he might have meant the police would be unpopular if they hung a murder charge on the Nationalists. But he could have meant he didn’t expect his investigations to succeed.’

‘Because,’ Brenda said, ‘he has Nationalist sympathies?’

‘It’s not impossible,’ Gently shrugged.

‘An intriguing thought,’ Brenda said. ‘Now this sort of thing we just do not have in England. Perhaps he’s one of the Hillman–Lochman clique himself.’

Gently chuckled. ‘That’s going too far. I reckon Blayne to be a loyal and efficient policeman, but not over-anxious to make trouble for the Nationalists. I think he’s worried in case there’s something in it and he can’t avoid taking action. It’s deflecting his attention from Mrs Dunglass – which is perhaps what it is intended to do.’

‘Aha,’ Brenda said. ‘A red herring.’

‘It was Mrs Dunglass who suggested Nationalists.’

‘Yes – and who told the Inspector her husband had a row with them – and spun him a yarn about them training guerrillas. That’s a load of old codswallop if you like.’

‘But I’m not sure he doesn’t believe it,’ Gently said.

‘Well I don’t believe it,’ Brenda said. ‘I believe she’s a scheming, conniving woman. I’ll bet she’s got the house-keeper squared, and the gardener too, if his evidence matters. And remember what her shoes tellt the Inspector – she’ll know her way about the braes.’

‘It may not be quite so simple,’ Gently mused.

‘Oh, she knows something,’ Brenda said. ‘For Heaven’s sake listen to my intuition, George – she’s as guilty as hell. Don’t defend her.’

‘I won’t defend her. She’s too pretty.’

‘Oh,’ Brenda said. ‘And oh. And oh. Listen to this – she knew enough to use a dirk, to make it seem like the Mafia did it. What about that?’

‘It only
may
have been a dirk.’

‘She’s got you,’ Brenda said. ‘Her bonny blue een. Wait till you read all about it in the papers my poor, sappy, simpering copper.’

‘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.’