Gently with Love (14 page)

‘Shall we check in first or carry on?’

‘Don’t be daft. We’ll be staying at the house. If we booked in here they’d take it as an insult.’

I hesitated. ‘I’m not family.’

‘It makes no difference. You’re a guest of the Mackenzies. That means you eat and sleep and drink with them. Especially the latter. So let’s get it over.’

I was a little taken aback. It had not been my plan to become an inmate of the Mackenzie house. Certainly I wanted to hobnob with them but I would have liked to have preserved a comfortable distance. However, there seemed no help for it, so I set the Sceptre rolling again.

The road lifted gently to the point of the headland, which ended in a knob of pinkish rocks. On the right the land rose steeply in a heathery shoulder and on the left dropped sheer to the shores of the loch. We reached the bend: it was a strange moment. I felt an irresistible sensation of having been there before. Just as I had been imagining it from Earle’s description, so now it was appearing in all its complex reality. I stopped for the second time.

‘This won’t take a moment. There’s a point here I want to check.’

‘But George, we’re almost there—!’ Verna’s eyes grew round. ‘This . . . this isn’t the place where it happened, is it?’

I paid no attention. I suppose the scene of a killing is for me the most compulsive spot on earth. I climbed out of the car and stood quite still, intently absorbing every detail. The rocks had been the roadmaker’s final problem; there had been no way round or over them. They had brought the road along the line of the loch till it reached the cliff, and then they had to blast. They had taken a great bite from the knob of the headland; the bend in the road was a descending hairpin; they had blasted it out to double width to prevent awkward encounters in the blind turn. On each side the pink rock was savagely shattered and on the inside of the bend it rose in a precipice. On the outside it was fissured vertically, forming pinnacles and broken teeth of rock. Now what Earle had asserted was evident. The gradient was steep going down into the bend. If the fight had taken place where I had parked the Sceptre it was unlikely to have shifted from there to the parapet. The distance was a matter of thirty yards, incorporating a surface of broken rock and debris: up there, without a doubt, Fortuny had been dragged while he was senseless or semi-conscious. I wondered if Sinclair had found trailing bloodstains. The rain had erased such evidence for me.

I walked up to the parapet and looked over to the waves I could hear booming below. I disturbed a gull from its perch on a ledge and it went floating away with echoing cries. At this point the cliff was shallowly indented. In the angle lay a delta of fallen rocks. The sea, green and yeasty, broke over them furiously with a ponderous and sullen sound. One slab of rock stood clear of the breakers: I picked up a splinter and dropped it over. The splinter fell clean and, it seemed, slowly, till it bounced on the slab and soundlessly vanished. Fortuny hadn’t bounced and hadn’t vanished, though the odds were high that this would happen. The nature of the waves suggested a scour that would quickly have carried the body away.

‘Oh God, George, do let’s go!’

Verna had come up to stand beside me. She stared over the cliff with horrified eyes and in her voice was an urgent appeal. But I hadn’t finished. There was one vital point that had to be settled before I left. I knew I must find the answer here and I thought I knew where I should look. I returned to the car. Ranked behind it were the splintered and broken pinnacles. Between several there was space sufficient for a man to insinuate his body. I compared the fractures and chose one. Beyond it I spied a cleft in the rock. Two steps took me through it: I was looking down at a bay with a quay, and a trawler moored to it. I looked back: I could see the Sceptre. I looked down: I could see the quay. I felt as sure as if he had told me that I was standing on the spot where the murderer had stood. From the quay a road departed in the direction of the village; and a path rose steeply to pass close under the rocks.

W
E DROVE OUT
of that ominous ravine to be met at once by a prospect of the village. Kyleness was sited in a horseshoe of hills of which the two tips were two headlands. From the surrounding heights the land fell modestly to the shore and the quay, and the road descended by easy stages through the village before turning sharply towards the latter. White-walled croft cottages scattered the lower ground; houses of brick fronted the road; one boasted a shopfront, and beside it I noted the red flash of a phone box. The quay was furnished with a storage tank and several wooden structures, one of which I took to be a net store. Three poles carried a telephone line to it down the steep slope from the upper road. It was a scene of space and charm, and warmed now by chequered sunlight. In the bay lay a multitude of rocky islets and sheep were grazing on two of the largest. It lacked trees, I thought, but little else to render it a setting of the heart’s desire; and I felt sad to have been brought to such a spot by the commission there of a brutal crime.

Verna wasn’t sharing my sentiments. She pointed nervously: ‘That’s it.’

I would have guessed anyway; the Mackenzie house was easily the largest in Kyleness. It was a tall, grey, double-fronted building, standing alone on a forbidding slope, to the right of the road, directly above the quay, and presenting narrow windows to the sea and Lewis. Gates stood open to a short, steep drive which was flanked by azaleas in bloom, and grey walls surrounded the gardens to fence them off from the bracken and heather. The style of the house was mid-Victorian and indeed it had a formidable appearance.

‘George, I’m relying on you,’ Verna muttered. Her usual brio was quite cowed.

‘He can but eat you,’ I returned callously.

Her expression conveyed that that was no joke.

B
UT IT WAS
Alex who, seeing us pull up, hastened to open the heavily panelled door. He came out with a welcoming smile and embraced his mother and kissed her.

‘This is splendid. We didn’t expect you until later.’ He turned to me and grasped my hand. ‘What luck that Verna had you to call on.’

I thought he looked thinner than when I had last seen him and that his brown eyes met mine a little deliberately. But then Anne came running out of the house to throw her arms round Verna.

‘Oh – mother!’

‘My child!!’

‘Oh mother, I’ve wanted you such a lot.’

‘Now I’m here, my darling.’

‘I’m so miserable.’

‘Darling, we’re going to make it all right.’

Anne sobbed and Verna comforted. It was the best thing that could have happened. I could see Verna’s morale rising rapidly as she wept and commiserated with her daughter. I imagined that she had expected Anne to be censorious and that this scene yielded a double cordial. Her eyes sparkled: she could feel her situation becoming established. She was the long-awaited mother, come to comfort, support, and forgive.

‘Then you’ve arrived, woman,’ said a dry voice that halted Verna’s cooing instantly. The tall figure of James Mackenzie loomed impressively in the doorway. He was eyeing Verna askew and his thin-lipped mouth had a joyless droop. His lean, high-cheekboned features were framed in long hair that now was quite white. Verna released Anne, but kept a firm grip on her arm.

‘Yes, I’m here, Jamie,’ she said meekly.

‘Aye. And you’ve come too late to do more than greet along with the lassie.’

Verna bridled. ‘I came as soon as I could.’

‘Where were you when the lass was carrying?’

‘I—’ She shot a look at Anne. ‘That is between my daughter and me.’

‘Aye, no doubt.’ The drooped mouth drooped further. ‘It will be between you that you gave her no countenance. It will be between you that set on a scoundrel to come worrying her night and day. But woman, it’s between you and me that I never had word that my son was dead, and that you did not come to speak to an old man and seek to lighten his grieving. Where was your heart then, and where is your heart now? You had a husband worth a dozen of the rogue you sent to woo your daughter.’

Verna’s eyes were big, but she remembered. She gave a sob. ‘Oh, that isn’t fair! I loved Colin. No woman could have loved him more than I did. When he died it broke something inside me, I was out of my mind for days. I couldn’t bring myself to write letters. I simply had to leave it to other people. They didn’t write to you, but I never knew that. Oh, you don’t know how unfair you’re being.’

James Mackenzie’s eyes were fierce. ‘But since, woman? In all this time that you’ve been back?’

‘When I realized you hadn’t been told I just didn’t know what to do about it. You get so angry. I couldn’t think what to write and I daren’t come to see you. I knew what you’d think, that I didn’t love Colin, and I couldn’t bear to hear you accuse me of it.’ She ventured another sob.

‘Aye, and that’s likely,’ James Mackenzie growled. But now there was a curious expression in his eye: it might well have been unwilling admiration. ‘You loved him so sore that you could not face me – could not abide a wee explanation. Your fondness unnerved you. Your grief was so strong that you could not fufil the mere forms of humanity.’

‘I loved him. But you’ve never believed that.’

‘Your love stopped short of doing what he would have wished.’

‘You’re so unfair!’

‘You have not behaved well, woman.’

‘It’s because you’re so hard. And yet you blame me.’

‘Ach well, ach well.’ The old man sighed. ‘You cannot be other than you are, I’m thinking. Colin chose you, and that’s in your favour, and you brought him a lad and a fair lassie.’

‘I never loved anyone else but Colin.’

‘I am hoping that truth is in your conscience. But we’ll say no more. I cannot well blame you that his bones are lying so far from Kylie.’

Verna snuffled and hugged Anne’s arm: Anne’s eyes were large and distant. She too had changed in the last year; her handsome face had fined, had saddened. One felt that the roguish smile she had from Colin had been overlaid by much suffering; there was hurt in her face. She had a stillness about her as though a vital part had been stunned. James Mackenzie raised his hand and let it fall.

‘You had best come in, then, and seek your room. It is a sad time to be offering welcome, but I doubt not that things will mend yet.’ He peered at me. ‘You’ll be Colin’s friend?’

I nodded. ‘We’ve met before.’

‘Aye, I recollect. He spoke much of you. They were happier days then.’

I held back. ‘If you’re short of room . . .’

James Mackenzie stared, then grabbed my hand. ‘Ach, get in, and cease your nonsense.’ He had the grasp of a man much younger.

W
E MET MRS
Mackenzie, a busy, grey-haired matron in whom I remembered Colin’s lively mother, and Iain Mackenzie’s wife, Maisie, a tall, sandy-haired woman of about fifty. Then we were introduced to Anne’s daughter, who was sleeping soundly in an old-fashioned cradle. She had been christened Helen, after her great-grandmother, and of her lineage there could be no doubt. The faces of babies differ widely. In some the features are determinedly neutral. They are baby faces, and time must elapse before they begin to assume their distinctive characters. In others the character is present from birth and they seem to enter the world as complete people. Such a one was Helen. She was instantly recognizable as a Mackenzie and as Anne’s daughter. She had dark hair and a perfectly shaped nose and the chin and the mouth of her mother and her grandfather. The genes of Fortuny, Verna and Colin’s mother might never have existed in this world: they had been side-stepped entirely. Helen had been born where she belonged. And for once, I think, I saw Verna lovable, when she looked with starry eyes at her granddaughter. In that there was no falseness. I felt that baby was going to be spoiled.

‘Oh darling. When is the christening?’

Just the wraith of a smile came into Anne’s eyes. ‘Not yet, mother. Too much has happened. I don’t feel ready for that just now.’

‘We have not regular kirk services here,’ beamed Mrs Mackenzie. ‘The preacher fits us in with a wheen other parishes.’

‘But couldn’t we have the christening in Ullapool?’

‘That is an overlong journey for a tender wee bairn.’

Verna looked unconvinced. I could see that she was planning such a christening as Ullapool would long remember, and in this I imagined, from the glint in his eye, that James Mackenzie was not far behind her. For a moment the tragedy was forgotten in considerations of pure bliss. But not by Anne.

‘There won’t be any christening. There won’t be anything till Earle comes back.’

Verna’s glee was checked. ‘But, darling, we must make plans for the future.’

‘There isn’t any future. Can’t you see that? There hasn’t been any future since Wednesday.’

‘My dear, life does go on.’

‘No.’ Anne shook her head decidedly. ‘It stopped then. Up there on the cliff.’

‘Ach, that was just foolishness,’ James Mackenzie chided. ‘No harm will come to your laddie. I ken Sinclair and he kens me. And here is Colin’s friend come to make all right.’

‘He can’t make all right.’

‘And who better? Is not he a famous man in London? I swear he will settle this matter as quick as a salmon jumps over a rock. And then your laddie will come home, and you will be bonnie as a briar rose. Ach, now, put your fears away. It is a sad affair, but we have weathered the worst.’

Anne looked at me. Her eyes were piteous. ‘Did they let you talk to Earle?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I had a long chat with him. I’m convinced that Earle is innocent.’

‘You see?’ James Mackenzie said quickly. ‘The business is all in hand, lassie. The Superintendent would not be for committing himself unless he was sure as the Butt of Lewis.’

‘I never thought he was guilty.’

‘And who did? Have I not given you word and hand?’

She faltered. ‘What did he say of me?’

‘He told me he loved you,’ I said. ‘And to be sure to tell you.’