Authors: Denzil Meyrick
Tags: #Detective and Mystery Fiction, #Short Fiction
XI
Daley opened the email, the header bearing the title and logo of McMunn Inc. He clicked on the attachment and peered at the screen. The letter had been scanned, but the yellowing of the page revealed its age. Though the handwriting was old-fashioned, it was bold and clear:
Wantage
September 10th, 1963
To Whom It May Concern,
I fear that my days are running out, and I have more reason than most to shy away from Death’s clammy embrace.
I have been a lucky man – a very lucky man – much more than I deserved to be. For instance, I have loved – truly loved – two beautiful women, though my heart ached for one of them for more years than I care to mention. I came to America with nothing, and America took me to its heart. Here I have wealth, family, respect, security – what more could any man wish for?
Despite this good fortune, I fall asleep with the same image on my mind every night: a face on a distant shore. For the first time since it happened, I will tell the tale.
It was still dark, but I could see the first light of day breaking over the hills as I looked down on that face for the last time. Those unseeing eyes stared up at me; they stare at me still, despite the passage of time. There was blood on his face and in his hair. When I hit him, I did so out of desperation, as he’d come at me with a length of timber. The only weapon I had to hand was a mallet used for hammering bungs into whisky barrels. I will never forget watching the life drain from him as he sank to his knees and then fell forward onto the deck of the little steam puffer. One blow was all it had taken; an act that changed every second of my life still to come, and ended his for good.
Of course, I panicked. I felt the hangman’s noose; felt it tighten around my neck.
I found an empty butt on the deck. It was a cask that had leaked and was to be brought back to the distillery. Because it had been badly coopered – no doubt old Tommy had been drunk when he’d done it – I managed to force two metal hoops up and off, take out the end of the cask, then cram the man I had killed into it.
As I drove the cart to Dalintober beach, our old mare was restless and she whinnied, smelling blood and death. I calmed her, and soon we were at the pier. I rolled the cask down the little slipway and onto the sand, dreading the moment that the barrel I had hammered back together as best as I could, would fall apart and its grim contents spill out onto the sand.
The butt remained intact, and as I rolled it along the beach, I could feel the motion moving the dead man within. Rolling a barrel with a dead man in it is much easier than carrying his weight over your shoulder, and though the bright blue Dalintober moon helped me, by the same token it would have been my undoing had I not been able to hide the body and someone seen me at my dark deed.
As the last shovels of sand buried the dead man, I considered my next move. I took the horse and cart back to the pier in Kinloch and started walking.
It was light now, though early, and I was mindful lest a hardworking crofter already at their toil should witness me. I cut across fields away from the road, in the main. Luck was with me though and I wasn’t spied.
After a long and fretful trek, I knocked on the cottage door of the Gentleman from Blaan, as we in the distillery used to call him. Simply put, he was a smuggler; I won’t name him here, but he and I had done a handsome trade in illicit whisky, which he sailed off to Ireland under the very nose of the Excise men. I hope, like me, he had a long and prosperous life; he deserved it. He helped me – gave me a few coins to see me on my way – and never breathed a word.
I took to sea with him to Ireland, and once there made my way to Cork, where I sought to work my passage on a ship bound for America. At every moment I feared two things: the hand of a stout Bobby on my collar, and the thought that I would never see the woman I loved again.
Oh, Cathy McMunn, how I missed you.
For a long time, I hoped that I would be able to send for her, and that is why I did what I did. When the purser on the Winter Star asked me my name, I gave it: Archibald McMunn. I knew it was a risk, but in those days word spread more slowly than it does today. I was told that the name under which I travelled would be the one given to the authorities in America. Despite the risk of discovery, I had to do it. Soon, when the fuss had died down back in Kinloch I would send for Cathy and we would live as man and wife.
It was in that hope that I carried the name that took me to the United States of America, and the name I have lived with all these years. It is a name that belongs to another. To a dead man buried on the beach at Dalintober, where I left him so long ago.
As the years passed, the fear of being caught lessened. I kept myself busy and tried to plan how to bring Cathy and the child she had carried in her belly when I left and that I knew to be mine, over to America to be with me. But the time was never right; mostly I couldn’t raise the money, and when at last I could afford it, I had fallen in love with another – my beautiful wife Rebecca.
I found that America and Scotland were very different. People took to me and I was able to make my way, first as a salesman and then with my own small company. It didn’t matter who you were here. You didn’t need wealth or a title to succeed. If you worked, and worked hard, you could live the American dream. I did.
I made one mistake, though. Feeling guilty, I sent money to Cathy, to help her and her child, who by that time would be grown and perhaps in need of a start in life. You may ask me why I didn’t offer this same financial support to my own wife and family; the answer is, I don’t know. I suppose we were married very young – mere children - and anything I had found alluring about her I later found irritating. If it is any consolation, I will take the guilt of abandoning them to my grave. Along with everything else, that is.
I was the town sheriff, and when the questions came from Kinloch, it was easy for me to dismiss them as the ramblings of men in a distant land. How could Archie McMunn, Sherriff and doer of good, ever have been responsible for such a thing? The folks here in Wantage used to joke about it, while my blood ran cold.
I feel guilt, real guilt; not for the man, but for the crime. I had no love for the real Archie McMunn, and still don’t. He was a brute, and the world was better off without him; but as for murder, I feel it in my soul every waking minute.
I am leaving strict instructions for those who come after me, so I suppose that now you are reading this, the body of Archie McMunn has been discovered on Dalintober beach. I have made financial provision for him to have a proper Christian burial with a headstone. I want it to bear his real name: Archibald McMunn. It is a small price to pay in return to the man whose very name – whose life, in truth – I stole.
For me, I await God’s judgement. Ultimately, it is all that really matters. I seek forgiveness from no other.
The name I append to this letter seems entirely foreign to me now. It is as though it is the calumny, not the reverse.
Yours, most sincerely,
William Cardle
XII
The shouting from the cells of Cardle and McMunn was audible as DS Scott opened the door to Daley’s office.
‘Here, Jim, this has just come in from forensics. They tested that pair’s DNA, and it turns out they’re related in some way. Aye, an’ neither have any connection to oor man in the barrel. How’s that possible? They tell me you were the man who put them onto it.’
‘It was just a hunch, Brian, but now there’s no doubt. We’re about to reunite long-lost cousins,’ replied Daley, getting to his feet.
‘Eh?’
As Daley bent down to close the email from Wantage he noticed the corporate logo of McMunn Inc. It was a whisky barrel.
Acknowledgements
This short story was written to help the Dalintober Beach Regeneration Fund. My thanks and best wishes to James MacLean and the rest of the committee. Thanks, too, are due to Fraser McNair for the wonderful cover photograph. To see more of Fraser’s work go to www.jfmcnair.com. For cover design, as always, Chris Hannah at www.chrishannah.com. Thanks also to Neville Moir and Alison Rae at Polygon, and my agent Anne Williams at KHLA in London. Special thanks to my old mate Eddie Mitchell, now in Adelaide, who prompted an idea to form in my muddled brain.
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