indistinct and it would have been waste of time trying to direct on them the eye of an amateur detective. I noted the mere fact that recently, within, say, the last half-hour – there had been something like commotion on this hazardous spot; then I went on to the trapdoor. And here the snow was disturbed in a way that afforded definite evidence; recently, the trapdoor had been open. A tug at a stout iron ring told me the door was now bolted from below; a moment’s fumbling found me what I wanted, a bolt that could be pushed home from above. It moved easily; one entrance to the tower-top was secured.
I moved back as quickly as was prudent, pausing only for a glance at the sky. The moon was behind a rack of clouds, but here and there was a star or a group of stars: what must have been Orion’s belt appeared as suddenly as a line of streetlights while I looked. I guessed that daylight would see the snow stretched beneath a clear sky and that for the time being the last flakes had fallen.
I returned to the study and found Sybil and Hardcastle standing very much as I had left them. I said: ‘Now we’ll go downstairs.’ We trooped out to the little landing and I locked the door and put the key in my pocket. Study, bedroom and battlements were inaccessible. Hardcastle muttered something indistinguishable – perhaps it was an attempt to vindicate his stewardship of Erchany – but I was already leading the way down at a run. When we got to ground level Hardcastle indicated another and smaller stair. I locked a further door giving access to the tower staircase and we went down further to a sort of basement. From the tower-top, I realized, Guthrie must have fallen clean into the moat. It was when we came to a little door giving on this that Sybil spoke for the first time since she had said ‘He has fallen from the tower.’ What she said now was: ‘I’m coming too.’ And she produced her torch and switched it on with an air of such determination that I knew expostulation would be useless.
In the moat the snow was deep and so powder-soft that I wondered for a moment against my better knowledge whether Guthrie might not have survived. Our feet sank down to the knee as we rounded an angle of the tower, Hardcastle’s lantern making a wavering circle of light around us and Sybil’s torch exploring the moat in front. A moment later we saw ahead the expected dark splash on the snow. We hurried forward. My heart leapt. The dark splash had stirred.
There was a wild cry – Hardcastle’s. I glanced at him; the sweat was pouring down his face in that icy ditch; he had completely lost his nerve. My glance returned to the vague bulk in front and I realised that what had moved was the figure of a man, crouched over the body. The figure straightened itself as we came up. A voice said: ‘He’s dead.’
When I wrote that Guthrie’s end had been horrible I was thinking chiefly of the full, frank satisfaction in the deep Scottish voice which spoke these words. Dead men hear no curses and mundane mire and fury is nothing to a ghost; still I hope that none will sound that note in my requiem. I said as sternly as if I had been owner of Erchany and chief constable of the county in one: ‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’
The stranger looked at me squarely in the lantern-light, an elderly handsome man with the life of the land writ large on his ruddy face. ‘It’s Rob Gamley I am and I came maybe to have a word with the laird. But the laird’s having a word by now with them are fitter to deal with him.’
It occurred to me as I turned from this savage and unseemly speech and examined the body to wonder if Guthrie had left a single sorrowing heart behind him. Perhaps Christine’s – I didn’t know. Certainly he was gone to the judgement at which Gamley had hinted; his neck was broken and his death must have been instantaneous.
Standing in that little group of people round the dead man, I had to consider what was proper to be done. It may be that I should have insisted that the body be left where it was; one does this, I suppose, where there is suspicion of foul play. But was there, substantially and after all, such suspicion? On one hand there was Sybil’s statement that Guthrie had fallen from the tower; on the other hand there was only what must be called atmospheric evidence – violence and mystery existing merely in the air or uniquely embodied in the fantastic incident of the learned rat. In sum, I saw no utility and much indecency in leaving what was mortal of Ranald Guthrie in the moat – an indecency which the man Gamley’s bitter speech had somehow underlined. So I said briefly: ‘Miss Guthrie had better go ahead with the torch and lantern and we will follow with the body. Mr Gamley, you will please help.’
Properly enough this time, Gamley took off his cap. The action attracted my eye and I saw that he was looking curiously and without friendliness at Hardcastle. And when I glanced in turn at Hardcastle I saw something extraordinary. The abominable creature appeared in mortal terror of Gamley and was keeping his distance as one might keep one’s distance from a bear on a tether. At the same time he was peering at Guthrie’s body with just the sort of excited, furtive interest I could imagine him giving to an obscene photograph. I had no notion what prompted either of these impulses, but the combination of them was somehow singularly disgusting. I much preferred Gamley’s irreverence. Acting on impulse – and, I suppose, high-handedly enough – I ordered Hardcastle into the house to find a resting-place for the body. Gamley and I followed with our burden as well as we could.
We laid the dead man for the time being on a sort of stone table in a cellar hard by the door of the moat. Sybil played her part with the torch; then she said ‘I guess I take the task of breaking this to Christine’ and disappeared. It was good of her, I thought, and perhaps the best plan; I might have been clumsy enough.
I sent Hardcastle for a sheet. Gamley, still cap in hand, took one long searching look at the body. Then he strode to the door. ‘Steady on,’ I said, ‘where are you off to?’ For I thought he was due to give some account of himself. He looked at me squarely again. ‘Young sir,’ he said, ‘I’m off to advise the Devil lock up his spoons and forks.’ And with that dark jest he disappeared.
Here was the second mysterious visitor, I reflected, that I had let slip through my fingers that night. Erchany, well-nigh isolated from the world as it was, had proved mysteriously populous. Whence had Neil Lindsay come, and whence Gamley? Who had tied the messages to the rats? Who had been talking to Christine in the schoolroom? And had Hardcastle’s doctor ever arrived? I turned from these riddles to contemplate the larger riddle of death.
Diana, a man can cry out in agony or fear, fall two hundred feet through the air, break his neck and much else, and look at the end of it all like a child asleep in a cradle! A trick of the muscles at the ultimate moment, no doubt, but something strange and terrible to contemplate nevertheless. Guthrie in his dust had returned to innocence; that sinister face, with the strongly marked features that speak of race, was stronger and purer, as if some artist had taken a sponge and swabbed the baser lines away. One reads of death showing such effects; to encounter them at such a violent issue was disconcertingly moving. I composed the body as I could, brushed the snow from face and hair, and waited.
Presently Hardcastle returned with a sheet. Reasonably or unreasonably, I had formed the opinion that in his attitude to the dead man there was something positively indecent, and I found myself instinctively blocking his way at the door. He handed me the sheet sulkily, peering past me in the same absorbed way as before. ‘I suggest,’ I said, ‘that you go and tell your wife to make some tea or coffee. Something of the sort will be needed.’
The unsavoury brute gave a gulp as if he were swallowing his true reactions to me. Then he said with a sort of elephantine cunning which I was at a loss to fathom: ‘Mr Gylby, you’ll have had a look at the body? It might have been robbed or the like?’
‘The police will inquire into that.’
‘But, sir, we might just give a bit look and see?’
My anger against the noisome creature grew. I turned round and rapidly shrouded Guthrie’s body. ‘And now, Mr Hardcastle, we must get a message off to Kinkeig. The snowfall is over and there’s a drop in the wind. You must see if your odd lad can set out at daybreak.’ And I pushed the factor out of the cellar, locked the door and pocketed the key. I can only assure you that there is something in the atmosphere of the place that confirms me in my self- appointed role as warden of Erchany. Fortunately the minutes are flitting past as I write and presently I expect to resign honourably on the arrival of the law. Meantime, there is still a shock or two to record.
On my locking the cellar door Hardcastle went off down the corridor in a huff and I was left to debate my next move. Nothing would have persuaded me to rummage about the body like a police-surgeon, but Hardcastle’s talk of robbery did put one idea in my head. It had taken me some time to shut up at the tower-top and get the little party to the moat; when we arrived there we found the mysterious Gamley crouched beside the body. His identity would no doubt appear in good time, but might there not be evidence in the snow – perishable and best investigated at once – of how he had got there? I took up Hardcastle’s abandoned lantern and, before returning upstairs, slipped once more out to the moat.
The wind which had so quickly obliterated intelligible traces on the battlements had been without force in this deep trench; every mark since the snow had ceased to fall heavily was legible. And the remoteness of Erchany was curiously brought home to me here; everywhere the snow was patterned over with the tracks of wild creatures that had sought shelter from the storm: the incisive pad of a fox, the little long-jumps of weasels, hither-and-thither
