Authors: Alan Hunter
It was while I was revolving this depressing conclusion that I heard a faint rustle at my door, and glancing up I saw that an envelope had been slipped underneath it. I rose quietly and moved swiftly but I was too late to catch the messenger. The envelope was addressed: ‘George’, and I recognized Anne’s flaring handwriting. I opened it. ‘Dear George [I read], I had to write this in the bathroom. Mother – oh dear!!! George, get Uncle Iain on his own. He saw what happened. Grandad rang him at the quay after Earle left. I
know
he went up to watch. They
all
know it wasn’t Earle – you must get them to talk to you!!! George I love Earle. If he still wants me I’ll have him.
Please
George. Anne.’
I preserved that letter, which is why I can reproduce the punctuation with so much confidence. But it told me nothing I hadn’t guessed anyway, nor suggested a line that I didn’t intend to follow.
I
WAS TIRED
and slept late. When I awoke the day was brilliant behind my curtain, and I could hear the whooping of gulls down at the quay and that distinctive northern sound, the chuckle of a curlew. I rose and drew the curtains. The view that morning was ethereal. Lit by morning sun it had a fairy-like texture that seemed to belong to some other world. The colours were so bold and vivid and the space and definition so lyrically clear that my southron soul would scarcely credit that I was yet in the island that contained London. This was different, a more precious existence, and I longed for an opportunity simply to expand in it. But I had other business. I hastened my toilet and dressed and went down, to find the breakfast table deserted except by James Mackenzie, who was deep in his paper.
He greeted me distantly. ‘You slept well, then.’
‘I had a long day yesterday.’
‘Aye, it’s a fair step to Kylie. And you busied yourself after that.’ He glanced over the paper. ‘What’s for today, then?’
‘Inspector Sinclair will be here later.’
James Mackenzie grunted.
‘I would like to have a word with Iain.’
‘You will find him at the boat.’
He rustled his paper and disappeared behind it: it was the
Stornaway Gazette
. I helped myself to porridge and pancakes and a large cup of tepid coffee. Before I got Iain on his own I would very much have liked to get Anne on
her
own, but I had a premonition that she intended to avoid this, which the presence of Verna would make only too easy. Verna was playing her role with zest. She was being the most sorrowing of widows and the most devoted of mothers. It was a role that included among its advantages the excuse to drop me like a hot brick. I had noted this with amusement on the previous evening but this morning my feelings were less charitable: I could bear to be snubbed by Verna, but not if it meant isolation from Anne. And it was as I feared. I found them in the parlour, preparing to take Helen for her airing; Anne resolutely refused to catch my eye and Verna refused to acknowledge my existence. They were busy: I had no excuse, nor would Anne have responded if I had found one; so I gave it up for the present and set out on my errand to the quay.
I went down by the path, and at once it was apparent that from the path one could not see the rocks below. The mass of red sandstone, standing out boldly, entirely concealed the scene of the tragedy. A heathery slope fell away at its foot and down this the path descended to the quay; on the seaward side the slope dropped precipitously to an apron of pebble beach. I paused where the path ran closest to the rock. A faint track connected it with the cleft I had discovered. The cleft represented, in fact, a useful short cut for anyone bound for the House of Reay. I went a few yards up the track: there was no chance of footprints, but I saw signs confirming recent use: freshly bruised heather-bush, and a dislodged pebble with one side weathered and one smooth. But who would be taking that way from the quay? The fishermen, apparently, preferred their cars. It was Iain Mackenzie who walked up from the quay, his house being but the short distance above. Did he also then walk up to the hotel . . . or did one of the inmates walk down to the quay? I recalled the sound of Beattie’s voice in conversation with someone, which had ceased with Robert Mackenzie’s clumsy rattling of the door. Could that have been Iain? Was something going on there into which Fortuny had accidentally blundered? Was it Fortuny’s silence that the killer had wanted, even more than his death? I stood pondering this. It was a considerable theory to base on the evidence of a humble track. And yet it fitted. I now knew for certain that Iain had been told that the fight was taking place. And before that he had been recalled to Kylie: the excuse of the worn worm-gear was too thin. Would it not have been to deal with a threat more serious than Fortuny’s attempts to carry off Anne? I returned to the path. It approached nearest to the edge at about the halfway point from the quay. I paced out forty yards through shin-deep heather before I got to where I could see the parapet and the rocks. It was possible, but why would a man make this detour through the spiteful heather – unless, as Robertson had suggested, it was because he knew that there was something to be seen?
The gulls began yelping; I turned towards the quay. Iain Mackenzie had appeared from a shed. He stood in the doorway, his eyes intent on me. He had something in his hand. It looked like a gun.
‘H
AVE YOU
a licence for that?’
‘Aye.’ The chill grey eyes were regarding me coolly. He had remained by the shed watching me as I came down the path and along the quay. He was wearing dungarees and his hands were black with grease. The gun was an expensive double-barrelled twelve-bore and he held it cradled lightly in the crook of his arm.
‘Do you carry it on board with you?’
‘Ach, what for? You cannot eat Mother Carey’s chickens. But there are a deal of grouse up the braes, and all manner of wildfowl on the lochans.’
‘Why are you carrying the gun this morning?’
‘You just chance to find it in my hand. You ken the womenfolk cannot bear guns, and mother will not have it in the house. So I keep it down here, in the workshop, where I can give it a rub and a pull-through.’ He broke it to show it was empty, then skied it and squinted through each barrel. ‘Are you for shooting?’
I shrugged. ‘I see enough of it.’
‘Aye, that will be cutting targets with handguns. But I mean tramping the heather and the birchwoods, and bringing home a blackcock, or maybe a goose.’
‘I don’t have the opportunity.’
‘That’s a pity, man. Now and then you should take a gun for company. It is grand to be striding out alone among the hills as God made them. It is not the shooting, you ken. That’s just a wee flourish, bringing home something good for the pot. It is feeling you’re a man abune your micht in a great country where you belong. The beasts kill each other to live, and with a gun to hand you are lord among them.’ He held up the finger that lacked a joint. ‘There’s something I got from my love of a gun. Ach, I blew it off when I was a bairn and had more curiosity than respect.’
‘You keep the gun locked up?’
‘Do you think I’m daft? I have a safe place for it in the workshop. And talking of that, we will just step in. I have something there you’ll be wanting to see.’
I followed him into the workshop. It was quite large and was equipped with a lathe and a vertical drill. Along one side ran a heavy zinc-topped bench which was fitted below with a nest of drawers. Iain slid one open; it was lined with oily waste, and in it he placed the gun, after giving it a wipe. Then he picked up something from a box on the bench and dumped it weightily in my hands.
‘There’s your exhibit.’
It was the worm-gear, a hefty threaded cylinder of solid metal. It weighed most of a stone, and I was glad to rest it on the bench while I examined it. Sure enough, the thread was worn. I could see flattened areas in the spiral of steel. But whether the flattening amounted to a near mechanical failure I was not engineer enough to decide. I wiped my hands on a pull of waste.
‘Wouldn’t you have needed help to remove that gear?’
‘It would have been useful, there is no doubt, but I did not wish to keep the lads from their dram.’
‘Not your mechanic?’
‘Ach, he lacks experience, and I ken the machinery like the back of my hand. When it comes to the
Kylie Rose
I’m for doing a job by myself.’
‘You intend to maintain that you were here alone.’
‘Have you heard anything to contradict it?’
I shook my head. ‘But you could contradict it. And that might jog a few other memories.’
Slowly he took a key from his pocket and locked the drawer containing the gun. Then he wiped his hands on the dungarees and began casually peeling them off. ‘I was alone. No question of that.’
‘You were alone when Sambrooke went up the hill.’
‘Aye.’
‘Did you see him?’
‘I was down in the bilge.’
‘Yet I believe you heard that telephone ring.’ I pointed to the instrument, which was installed in a box just inside the door.
Iain went on calmly pulling off the dungarees. ‘If you look outside you will see the bell. We had one fitted that I could hear on the boat. You can hear that bell ring across on Ronsay.’
‘Then do you agree that there was a call.’
He paused. ‘
Aye
.’
‘From your father.’
‘You seem to ken it.’
‘Telling you what was afoot.’
‘If you ken so much you’ll ken that.’
‘And I think I know this,’ I said. ‘You left your job here and went up to watch. You went up that path and bore off to the right, and stood in the cleft to watch the fight.’
He rolled the dungarees and laid them on the bench. ‘You have not been wasting your time, then,’ he said smoothly. ‘It is not every person in Kylie who kens the cleft in the rocks yonder. Sinclair missed it, that’s sure, though he was led away by arresting Sambrooke. But man, you just take a stroll round the place and you read its secrets like a book.’
‘Then you were up there.’
‘I was there later. I did not go up to watch the fight.’
‘How much later?’
‘It was not long. I had nearly finished when father rang.’
‘Shall we walk up there now?’
He hesitated. ‘You ken we’re away on the tide before noon. I am willing to give you what help I can, but I have a few small things to see to.’
‘I would like you to walk up there.’
His grey eyes measured me. ‘Ach well. If nothing else will suit. But I doubt it will get you no forwarder, and it is like to put me behind.’
He took his serge jacket from a nail and led the way along the quay. I glanced towards the house and, sure enough, James Mackenzie stood in his porch, watching us. For the rest Kylie seemed deserted; the road was empty of traffic and people. Yet I had a strange feeling that other eyes were upon us as we began to climb the steep path. Kylie seemed almost to be holding its breath on that still and brilliant morning. We reached the point nearest the cut-off to the beach.
‘I would like to stop here,’ I said.
Iain halted agreeably. There was nothing but casualness in his sauntering manner, his enquiring glance.
‘Was it from here you caught sight of the body?’
‘It was maybe not from this precise place.’
‘From where then?’
‘I did not keep the path. I strayed over to take a view of the beach.’
‘To see what?’
‘Ach, nothing special. You ken I am a wandering sort of man.’
‘But through that tangle of heather?’
‘What is heather to me? I tramp it for miles when I’m after a grouse.’
‘Show me where it was.’
Without any reluctance he kicked his way through the heather, and brought us to the spot where he had seen me standing earlier.
‘This will be about it. Yon is the rock where he was spread out like a starfish. His head was battered, they telled you that? The blood has been washed away since.’
‘Look up the cliff.’
‘Aye, I’m looking.’
‘You can see the parapet from where he fell.’
‘You can well see it. Had I been here sooner I would have seen who was whirling him off.’
‘There is nobody to say you were not here sooner.’
‘There is nobody to say I was.’
I stared into his eyes and he stared back; he wasn’t going to give me an inch.
‘It is a difficult question for you, man.’
‘Is that all you have to say?’
‘You ken that I’m for helping you, but this is a matter you must take or leave. I cannot answer fairer.’
‘I think you were here sooner.’
‘But you have not a witness.’
‘What makes you think that Sambrooke saw nothing?’
He rocked his head. ‘If Sambrooke’s your witness, you have not made much of him up till now. Ach, no. It is the way I am saying. You will have to believe me or you will not. There was no witness, and if there were you would not hear a whisper of him in Kylie.’
The thrust direct. I kept my face blank. But now I was certain that there had been a witness. I was talking to him. What I had to decide was whether it ended there, or not.
‘Let’s go on.’
‘Aye, if you will. Just bear in mind that I’m catching a tide.’
‘We’ll take the short cut up to the bend.’
‘It is what I was about to recommend.’
He plunged away across the heather in a direct line for the cleft. His familiarity with it was obvious and he was careless if he showed it. He was secure, that was the message. I could suspect but I could not prove. I could run with my suspicions to Sinclair, but never would the Sheriff get a sight of Iain Mackenzie. I came up close with him as we entered the cleft.
‘This is a way you’ll often be using.’
‘Aye, if I have any business with Robbie. I’m not one for ever jumping in a car.’
‘You’ve been using it lately.’
He halted. ‘Who says so?’
‘The track shows evidence of recent use.’
‘And why would that be me?’
‘It’s a short cut to your cousin’s. Your crew members seem to prefer their cars.’