The Unbelievers (10 page)

“You were not fully informed, then. The shaft in which my brother met his end is decorated as an ornamental well, and has water in it, but it was originally a mine shaft.

“As you know, my family have substantial mining interests on our estates in Linlithgowshire. Some of the reserves have been worked for many centuries. The ‘well' from which William was recovered was a mediaeval mineshaft – a bottle mine is the correct term I believe. The grounds at Dalcorn are riddled with these shafts, but that's the only one that's been kept open. A sort of memorial.”

“So,” asked Allerdyce, “how does that lead us to the murderer?”

“Think about mines, gentlemen. Is there anyone connected with the mines who has a resentment against my brother? I can think of one clear person.”

“Who is?”

“James Semple of the Amalgamated Fraternity of Scottish Miners. He's the seditionist who led my brother's miners out on strike when market forces meant he had to cut their wages. He got dismissed for it, of course, along with the other strikers and he and his family were thrown out of the company's cottage. We made sure that every mineowner and factory-owner in Britain knew not to offer him employment. These were the wise precautions my brother had to take to avoid the spread of industrial sedition. Mutiny is mutiny, whether it's in the army or in the mines. It's only a shame that we can't blow the industrial mutineers from the cannons.”

“So you think Semple would want to kill your brother for revenge?”

“I suppose so.”

“Why do you think he would arrange to meet your brother at midnight, on your brother's estate?”

“I don't know. Presumably you fellows can fill in the details. That's what you do, isn't it?”

“I think we might need some more evidence to be able to charge Mr Semple.”

“Well, thrash it out of him then. That's what we do in the army. And hang him quick. The worst you'll have done is to rid the world of another verminous socialist. He's got be punished for what he's done.”

Allerdyce shifted in his chair and flicked over another page of his notebook.

“How has your brother's death affected you, sir?”

“What sort of a bloody impertinent question is that?”

“Merely one asked from professional interest, sir.”

“Well, it's a bloody awful thing to happen isn't it? But you get used to death in this job, and it isn't all bad.”

“Not all bad?”

“I'm sorry for William, of course, but it's been an upturn in my own fortunes. I'm getting a promotion out of this – the army thinks Dukes should rank at least as Major-Generals. And I can't pretend that I don't welcome having the entire revenues of the family's properties.”

“The entire revenues, sir? The late Duke made no provision for the Duchess in the event of his death?”

“No. Why the hell should he leave anything to that fallow bitch?”

Allerdyce lifted his eyebrows. The Brigadier continued.

“My brother managed to avoid marriage for as long as he decently could. He's a wise man – I've managed to avoid marriage entirely and I can't say I feel any the worse for it. But William had the responsibility of perpetuating the family line hanging over him, as our mother reminded him more and more forcibly from year to year. She didn't want the estates passing to a bastard or a stranger. So she ground into him the notion that he had to get married. She also harangued him to recognise the wisdom of marrying his cousin Josephine – she was the sole heir to the fortune which her side of the family had made in America. It would bring the money home to where it belongs.

“Well, gentlemen, the whole thing was a bloody disaster from start to finish. Generations of fine breeding had generated a narrow-hipped bitch who couldn't drop a living child. She was seventeen years old when William married her, she's twenty-seven now, and she's never pupped. There isn't going to be any fortune either – it's all gone in the American wars. And she's turned out to be an opinionated shrew. The whole thing was a complete bloody disaster, gentlemen, a daily curse on all our lives. I've a good mind to turn her out of Dalcorn House so that I can enjoy my property in peace.”

Allerdyce grasped at the lead which the Brigadier had, probably inadvertently, thrown.

“You mentioned that your mother didn't want the estates to pass to a bastard, sir. Did you have anyone particular in mind?”

The Brigadier knocked back his whisky and poured some more.

“How the hell should I know? William was a man of the world. It's his business what he got up to. I've told you who must have killed William – what else do you need to know?”

“You've suggested James Semple, sir. I just wonder whether there are any other connections with the family we should know about?”

“I've told you everything you need to know. Now, just run along and catch that bloody seditionist if you'd be so kind. I have work to do here.” The Brigadier took some papers in his hand, squinted at them, and shuffled them into a different order.

Allerdyce folded away his notebook and stood up to leave. The sergeant followed his lead. The Brigadier tottered unsteadily to his feet. He leant forward over the desk, supporting himself with one hand and holding the glass in the other, and peered at the purple ribbon on McGillivray's chest.

“Victoria Cross?”

“Yes, sir,” answered McGillivray, standing straight.

“Where?”

“Lucknow, sir.”

The Brigadier sat back down, heavily, sloshing whisky out of the glass onto his tartan trousers.

“Ha, India. Bit different from the Crimea. I didn't get anything from the Crimea except this bloody sword from a Russian officer. Not a single medal for all the work I did to clothe and feed an entire bloody army. And that was a proper bloody war. And then Colin Campbell goes spreading medals around like bloody confetti in India, just for putting down a few darkies. Rather devalues the thing, don't you agree?”

Allerdyce looked towards the sergeant. McGillivray's face had gone quite white, and the colour drained from his lips. His fists were clenched. Allerdyce worried for a second that the sergeant might actually reach across the desk and strike the Brigadier.

McGillivray slowly raised his hand and Allerdyce braced himself to intervene between the two soldiers. But the sergeant opened his fist and raised his open hand in a military salute.

The Brigadier staggered back up from his chair and, sloppily, returned the salute. McGillivray about-turned and marched out of the office.

The Brigadier, leaning forward on the desk, addressed Allerdyce.

“The lower ranks can be splendid when they're loyal, but once they go bad they need to be exterminated. I trust you know how to deal with Mr Semple.”

Allerdyce looked the Brigadier in his rheumy eye but saw no reaction. He turned and followed the sergeant out the room.

Rock House clung to a ledge on the lower slopes of Calton Hill. Allerdyce noted that its frontage was angled so that the residents had a view along Princes Street and towards the Castle, rather than across to the looming bulk of the Calton Jail. The seventeenth-century simplicity of the large house was marred by an ugly brick-built extension which, famously, had housed the photographic studio of Hill and Adamson. George Bothwell-Scott QC now owned the house and the studio of the photographic pioneers.

Allerdyce and McGillivray were shown straight through to the studio, where the advocate was tinkering with a screwdriver at the innards of a complex camera. He glanced up briefly as the policemen came in.

“I'll be with you in a second, gentlemen.”

He turned his attention back to the brass spindles and cogs, leaving Allerdyce and the sergeant standing.

So, thought Allerdyce, this is the famous advocate, equally at ease as a defender or a prosecutor, who used to earn the highest fees of anyone at the Scottish bar. George Bothwell-Scott was still a young man, no older than his early forties, but he had retired from the law, and it was rumoured that he'd become unbalanced.

Looking at him now, absorbed in his work, he didn't look mad. His blond hair was neatly parted and macassared, his pale moustache was neatly trimmed, and his shirt-sleeves were rolled up to reveal lean, muscled forearms. The lines under his eyes suggested insomnia, but there was nothing in his appearance that would confirm the rumour that he was addicted to laudanum.

Neither did the room show signs of madness. The French windows admitted as much light as was possible on a dreich, pallid winter's day. Various sizes of camera, their wood and brassware highly-polished, sat on shelves. Where the light was best, augmented by a large skylight, a comfortable chair and a pot-plant sat in front of a painted backdrop of a trellis with vines and flowers. A camera and tripod pointing towards them to capture the portrait of a person who wasn't there. Framed examples of photographic portraits and landscapes hung on the walls. The only peculiarity was the largest picture above the fireplace, a photograph showing a shaft of light from the skylight cutting across an empty chair.

George Bothwell-Scott replaced the cover of the camera and turned his attention to his guests.

“So sorry,” he said. “How may I help you?”

“We'd like to ask you some questions about your brother William's death,” said Allerdyce.

The photographer looked momentarily puzzled.

“Death, gentlemen?”

“His murder, sir. In the well. At Dalcorn.”

“Ah yes, of course. William's passing-over. But please, gentlemen, we mustn't think of it as a death. It is merely a changing. A moving-on from the physical to the spiritual life.” He smiled gently.

Allerdyce corrected his first impression. George Bothwell-Scott was quite possibly mad as a hatter after all. Nonetheless, he might know something useful. He pressed on, determined not to mention the content of the telegram in case it prejudiced George's views.

“We were hoping, sir, that you might be able to suggest some people who may have had particular resentments against your brother. It would help us greatly with our enquiries.”

“Of course, gentlemen, I'll be happy to offer any assistance I can. Please, be seated.”

They sat at the other side of the table from George, the boxy camera between them.

“Let me move that out of the way,” said George. He picked the camera up. “It's a marvellous thing. Do you know anything about photography, gentlemen?”

Allerdyce thought about the struggle he'd had to get a family photograph with Alice and Bertie and baby Stephen in the commercial photographer's studio at Canonmills. The poor man had had to bribe them with sweets and amuse them by holding a toy elephant above the camera before they'd sat still long enough for the exposure. The result had been magical – Margaret sitting smiling with the baby on her lap looking happy and well, and Alice and Bertie staring open-mouthed towards the elephant as if they'd seen an angel flying by. He'd had a miniature version of the photograph made for an extra sixpence, and carried it everywhere with him in his wallet.

“No sir, I'm no photographer.”

“You should be. It's the most fascinating thing I've ever done. You see life so differently when you perceive it through a lens.”

“I'm sure, sir.”

“Take this contraption here. It's one of my favourites, when I can get it to work properly. It's a magazine camera. It's got ten dry collodion plates in it. Wind it up, press the button, and it'll expose each plate in turn. If I point it, say, at a carriage going down a street I'll get images from moment to moment of its progress. And then if I mount the pictures on magic lantern slides I can project each one in turn, at the same speed as they were taken, and recreate the progress of the carriage before your very eyes. It's a whole new concept of time, gentlemen – the ability to revive an actual series of events whenever you choose to.”

“Very interesting, sir, but I wonder if we might address ourselves to your brother's passing-over. We're anxious to find out who did it before he helps anyone else to pass-over prematurely.”

“Of course.”

George put the heavy camera back on the shelf beside its fellows and re-joined the policemen. Allerdyce pulled his notebook out of his pocket.

“First of all, sir, and without any regard to the practicality of whether they could have committed the murder, can you think of anyone who would have wanted to harm your brother?”

“Not specifically, no.”

“Are you sure?”

“No-one comes to mind immediately.”

Allerdyce paused, looking straight at George, judging whether an embarrassing silence might draw out some suggestion which the advocate had initially suppressed. McGillivray stared at him too, his arms folded. George gave a slight, guileless smile and Allerdyce continued.

“All right then, sir, perhaps we can look at this by a process of rational deduction. Can you think of anyone who might feel particularly ill-treated by your brother?”

“Well, yes, lots of people. He's had to do some harsh things, but the wisest people have always recognised that they were utterly necessary.”

“Such as?”

“I'm afraid our father had left the modernisation of our estates woefully incomplete, particularly in Sutherland.”

“You mean clearances, sir?” asked McGillivray. Allerdyce glanced at his sergeant, anticipating another tense interview.

“Rather a crude word, I think,” said George. “When William inherited the Sutherland estates most of the tenantry had already been moved off the unprofitable land in the middle of the county – but our father had stuck for too long with the unsuccessful experiment of re-settling some of the people in new fishing hamlets on the coast. It was a poor idea – the crofters weren't going to take easily to the sea, even if they'd had the capacity and inclination to learn, and the whole enterprise made a frightful loss. People were drifting away anyway – and I'm afraid when the blight came in '47 and '48 some people passed-over from hunger – but it fell to William to take the necessary decision to close the whole enterprise down. It simply wasn't sustainable.”

“So, you think someone who got cleared out of the coastal hamlets might have wanted to take their revenge?” asked Allerdyce, glancing again at the sergeant.

George looked into the space above the Inspector's head, towards the skylight, for a moment before speaking.

“Actually, no. I don't think that's the most likely situation. Most of the survivors are re-settled in Canada and probably quite happy.”

“Not all of them, sir,” observed McGillivray.

“Well, that's as maybe. But I think there might be someone else with a resentment.”

“Being?” asked Allerdyce.

“The estate factor. Patrick Slater. I think he felt rather hard done-by.”

“Why?”

“He'd been quite vigorous in implementing William's policies. He'd taken two months to clear the villages of maybe three thousand people in all. You can't do that without causing a little bit of upset, when tenants find the bailiffs piling up their furniture outside their houses and setting fire to the roof. It's always better to get these things over with quickly, even if it doesn't seem so at the time.”

“My family had some acquaintance with Mr Slater, sir,” said McGillivray. “In fact he served the Duke's eviction notice on my own father and brother.”

“How very interesting,” replied George, with a slight smile of supercilious indifference. “Of course it was slightly unfortunate – and not humanly predictable – that the county got such a sustained spell of bad weather in November – you don't normally expect storms and blizzards to set in that early. A certain number of tenants perished in the elements. I believe some more of them perished on the winter passage to Canada, but that was utterly outside William's control.”

“My own father passed away on that voyage,” said McGillivray, looking impassively at the advocate.

Allerdyce felt his cheeks redden. Again, the sergeant's few words hinted at an agony of pain and loss. It didn't serve the investigation well, however, if McGillivray's private grief made the witness embarrassed or cautious about the conversation. He glanced at the sergeant, holding his hand up slightly to motion him to keep silent.

George, though, seemed singularly unperturbed.

“How unfortunate, Sergeant. But not my late brother's responsibility.”

“So,” asked Allerdyce, “why would Mr Slater resent your brother if he'd been so loyal in carrying out his orders?”

“Well, Inspector, the law has increasingly intruded into the relations between landlord and tenant. One crofter, who'd lost his wife, took it into his head to inspire a prosecution against Slater. Mr Slater ended up in the High Court in Edinburgh, accused of culpable homicide for the energy with which he'd pursued the evictions.

“It looked briefly as if the trial might cause serious harm to the family's reputation. Mr Slater chose to forget his loyalty to his employer and blamed William for having given him so short a period within which to carry out the evictions. He claimed, completely unfairly, that William had even approved his methods. He even wanted William called as a witness.

“We were fortunate at the trial that the judge – Lord McLaren – was an old family friend. He quickly saw the absurdity of dragging a Duke into court as a witness, and reached the proper conclusion that Mr Slater was entirely responsible for the methods he'd chosen.”

“So, what happened to Slater?”

“Found guilty. Sentenced to fourteen years transportation.”

“And when was that?”

“1850. I forget the month.”

“So, Mr Slater may already have returned to these shores, if he has survived so long?”

“It's possible, Inspector, but I don't know. For all I know he's dead, or decided to stay in Australia.”

Allerdyce folded away his notebook and shifted uneasily on his seat. Again, a Bothwell-Scott had quickly fingered a favoured suspect, but had said nothing useful about the rifts which were hinted at within the family. They might be saying what they really thought, or they might be closing ranks.

“May I enquire, sir, about certain family matters?” he asked. “Purely off the record, of course, but it may help to illuminate the background to this case.”

The advocate looked momentarily troubled.

“Family matters? In what sense?”

“I would simply like to understand a little more about the recent history of the Bothwell-Scott family. Your brother Frederick referred to a division in the family which was supposed to have been healed when the late Duke married the Duchess.”

George Bothwell-Scott relaxed.

“I'd hardly call that division recent, Inspector. In fact, it goes back to 1745.”

“The Jacobite rising?”

“Precisely, Inspector. Like so many other families, we were uncertain about the possible outcome of the conflict, so we hedged our bets. The judgement at the time was that the Jacobite cause was more likely to prevail, so James, the heir to the estate, raised a regiment to fight for Bonnie Prince Charlie while, for insurance, his brother Charles accepted a commission in the Government forces.”

“Very prudent, sir.”

“Well, they ended up facing each other at Culloden. If they'd been in one of Walter Scott's romances I suppose there would have been a reconciliation on the battlefield, perhaps with one of them cradling the other in his arms when he died. I'm afraid the outcome was more prosaic. James was taken prisoner and tried. He could have been hanged, but he was sentenced instead, like a common soldier, to be banished and sent into indentured labour in the West Indies. Of course, the Government confiscated his right to inherit the titles and properties he expected, in favour of his loyal Hanoverian brother Charles.”

“And how,” asked Allerdyce, “might this be relevant to the late Duke's marriage?”

“Well, Inspector, the reversal in James Bothwell-Scott's fortunes was not permanent. When he arrived in Jamaica he was, to all intents and purposes, a slave. He was sent to work for the owner of a sugar plantation. The plantation owner, though, was a Scot of good family who instantly recognised that James was of noble birth. He was spared the hard manual labour under the torrid sun which killed so many others, and put to work very successfully as manager of the plantation's business.

“Naturally, that kept him indoors a great deal, in the company of the plantation owner's only child, a daughter. Nature took its course, and the plantation owner granted James his freedom so that they could marry. James became heir to an estate which his own skills had rendered highly profitable.”

“How very fortunate.”

“That was only the start. It was James's son who saw that there were even bigger profits to be made from cotton. Cotton-growing land was cheap, the climate was slightly better than Jamaica so you didn't need to replace the slaves as often, and the new mechanical weaving machines meant it was the fabric of the future. He sold the Jamaican plantation and acquired an estate near New Orleans. The estate prospered, and the American branch of the family came to rival our own in wealth.”