good deal impressed both by the facts and by that interpretation of them which seemed to lie at the back of the Kinkeig shoemaker’s mind. If Guthrie’s final interview with Lindsay in the tower had been arranged not with the purpose of buying him off but of dismissing him in the company of Miss Mathers, then the tone of the interview as reported by Miss Guthrie was a perfectly natural one. And it was conceivable that Guthrie, a highly unstable man unable to reconcile himself to losing his niece to an enemy, had simply committed suicide as Miss Guthrie apparently maintained.
But undoubtedly there was some sort of case against the lad Lindsay. His known enmity towards Guthrie, his dramatic appearance on the tower staircase a minute after Guthrie’s fall, the rifled bureau, his flight with Miss Mathers: these as counts in an indictment were clear enough. He was protected, indeed, chiefly by my client Miss Guthrie’s categorical statement that he had left Guthrie alive and well in the tower. This statement Bell’s testimony and the letter he had produced now reinforced, for they indicated that the difficulties over Lindsay’s suit had been in process of settlement – a settlement the final stage of which Miss Guthrie had witnessed just short of midnight from her hiding-place outside Guthrie’s study. No doubt a person concerned to suggest a case against Lindsay could attempt to place the letter as part of an elaborately contrived plot against Guthrie, but unlikely ingenuity of this sort I did not think it necessary to explore at the moment. I turned to another point.
‘Mr Bell, we have here a very extraordinary situation. Miss Mathers’ letter suggests that she was to be packed off quietly – apparently with the unkindest implications of ignominy – at Christmas. She and her future husband were simply to emigrate and go out of Mr Guthrie’s life. That is strange and harsh enough and would convict the dead man of being more than eccentric in character. But what are we to think of this departure being fixed for the dead of night – and moreover actually insisted upon when that night proved as wild as it did? It is difficult to believe that these young people could have got through the snow alive.’
Bell nodded his head and was silent for a moment. Then he answered my last point first. ‘They took a chance their spirit would drive them to take, setting out in the smother of the storm. But you’ll know, Mr Wedderburn, the wind had dropped within minutes of their leaving, and a bittock moon was coming through forbye. Lindsay, that’s a stout and skilly chiel, would get the lass safely over to his own folk in Mervie. And the next day they’d be at Dunwinnie and away.’
‘It hasn’t been heard if they’ve been traced to Dunwinnie?’
‘That I couldn’t say. But with all the stour and confloption of the curlers there it’s likely enough not. And as for the laird driving them out in secret and at midnight into a storm, it’s just what would fit the black humour of the man.’
‘You think he really did that?’
‘I do.’
‘And that the laird then committed suicide in some sort of despair?’
‘I think that’s the conclusion will be come to, Mr Wedderburn.’
I looked at Ewan Bell curiously. ‘Then how would you account for the gold that has disappeared?’
He was plainly startled. ‘The gold, sir? I know nothing of that.’
‘A drawer in the corner of the study, I understand, has been violently broken open and gold apparently taken from it.’
‘That’s not so hard to explain as you might think, Mr Wedderburn. You’ll notice Christine says Guthrie was going to give her a sum of money – her own – and as for a drawer being opened with violence the laird himself was a right violent man. You’ll be hearing a story soon of the senseless fury he put to the breaking down of a door a while back.’
That Guthrie had himself taken the money from the drawer and given it to Miss Mathers again dovetailed, I noted, with Miss Guthrie’s statement that neither the laird nor Lindsay had moved in the direction of the bureau while Lindsay was in the tower. And once more I was confronted with a hypothetical sequence of events that had marked imaginative coherence: the final and harshly contrived parting, the bitter plunge to death almost as the hour brought in peace on earth and goodwill among men. I contemplated this in silence for some moments…and knew I was dissatisfied.
I rose. ‘Mr Bell, I must be getting up to Erchany. As yet I know far too little to judge of the matter. But I am very grateful to you for coming in. You are an important witness and I shall no doubt see you again this afternoon.’
‘And you think, Mr Wedderburn, it will be suicide proven?’
‘I think the police, or others, must find Lindsay and Miss Mathers. And for the rest – that truth lies at the bottom of the well. By the way, can you tell me anything of a man called Gamley? He was the first to find Mr Guthrie’s body in the moat.’
‘He was grieve at the home farm once, but left after having words with the laird.’
‘Harsh words?’
Bell smiled. ‘It would be hard to find any in these lands that couldn’t remember harsh words with Guthrie of Erchany. But I judge he comes little into this story. He would be but with the lad Lindsay and waiting to give him a hand away. They met in together some time back and had become fast friends.’
And here my interview with Ewan Bell ended. I rejoined Gylby, who had returned triumphant from the stationer’s with a tin of John Cotton, and we went out in the nip of the winter morning. The skis were piled on the roof of the car, certain parcels requisitioned by Mrs Hardcastle were deposited with the driver, and we drove off for Castle Erchany amid the universal curiosity of Kinkeig. As Mrs Roberts confided to me at parting, there had been nothing like it since the medicos – the reference being doubtless to the unfortunate London physician and his colleagues who had visited the dead man some two years before.
‘Mr Gylby,’ I said as we crept cautiously over the surface exposed by the ploughs, ‘I take it that nothing’ – I hesitated – ‘untoward was discovered about Guthrie’s body?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Well, as the story runs in Kinkeig, this desperate Lindsay had chopped off a number of the fingers.’
Abruptly, young Gylby stopped stuffing a pipe. ‘I really think the Scotch are–’
‘The bloody limit?’
My young acquaintance, I believe, had placed me comfortably as a person of somewhat ponderous utterance; it gave me considerable pleasure to see him positively jump as I thus briefly expressed his thought. ‘I was going to put it,’ he said, ‘that they are people with a developed taste in the macabre. Guthrie’s fingers are intact. It’s his gold that’s gone.’
‘Quite so…I understand that it is definitely for Miss Guthrie that I am to act?’
‘If you are going to be so good.’
‘Very well. Let me put it to you that you have made a statement in contradiction to certain apparent testimony of my client.’ And I tapped Gylby’s journal which I was still holding. ‘Miss Guthrie states that between Guthrie and Lindsay there was nothing like heat; that they shook hands and parted quietly; even that Lindsay spoke or comported himself “gently”. You state that at your own view of Lindsay little more than a minute later you received “an extraordinarily vivid impression of passion”. Now this discrepant evidence may be important. Are you sure that your impression was accurate?’
‘Yes.’ Gylby’s answer was at once reluctant and convinced. ‘Miss Guthrie was observing those people more or less at leisure. You, on the other hand, speak of what “happened in a flash”, and of “a second and a second only”. Are you not more likely to be mistaken than she?’
I thought it wise to let my tone suggest to this slightly airy young man the manner in which an inquiry of the sort impending might have to be conducted. But he was perfectly serious and perfectly forthright. ‘There seems to be such a probability, Mr Wedderburn. Nevertheless I don’t think my impression is wrong.’
I believe it was at this point that I made up my mind – if in a preliminary way – as to what had really happened at Erchany. And my conclusion, I saw, was likely to make my position delicate. I turned to another topic.
‘Mr Gylby, about the man Hardcastle. You are something of a prejudiced witness? It would be possible to suggest, on the strength of your journal, that your attitude to him has been quite venomous from the moment of his first unkind reception of you at Erchany?’
Gylby contented himself with saying: ‘You wait till you see him.’
‘And you are inclined to credit him with some hidden motive in the affair?’
‘He was up to something. Guthrie never gave him that message to me.’
