enlarge on the superiority of the Scottish practice: it is sufficient to indicate that in England a man may virtually be put on his trial before the coroner, and often without the safeguards of good criminal law. I venture on this note the more willingly in that I do not intend to embark upon an account of the afternoon’s proceedings in Kinkeig. The reader is now familiar with the facts educed, the opinion of the good Inspector Speight, and my own discoveries. It will be sufficient to say, with modesty, that I carried all before me. The case was clear: moreover, as both Guthrie and his accomplice Hardcastle were dead, it was virtually closed. The papers which recorded Guthrie’s highly criminal conduct would pass immediately to the Procurator Fiscal, but unless the weak-minded Mrs Hardcastle could be indicted as a second accomplice it seemed unlikely that any proceedings could be instituted. What actually followed, including the further clarification afforded by the young people who had now been brought back to Dunwinnie, I will therefore leave in what I may confidently term the capable hands of the next narrator.
PART FOUR
JOHN APPLEBY
1
They were not yet married. Perhaps they were to have been married before sailing that afternoon: I made no inquiries for it wasn’t my business. It was in no sense – it never in any sense became – my case: I had simply found them and I was ordered to get them back to Kinkeig – tactfully and if possible without producing the warrant with which I had been provided for Neil Lindsay. If I became interested in them in the course of the journey, if I subsequently became more interested still in the events with which they were involved, that was matter of my own curiosity and not of official instructions. Until they were under the eye of my Scottish colleagues I was a watchdog; after that the merest busybody. This is my preface to what I have to say: I am afraid it is not so impressive as Mr Wedderburn’s.
‘May I speak to you for a few minutes in private? I am a detective-inspector from Scotland Yard.’
They looked at me with wonder but, I thought, without apprehension. They were anxious – an elopement in any circumstances must be an anxious business – but my announcement had not increased their anxiety more than by the expectation of some vexatious official delay in their affairs. It was Miss Mathers who responded first; if she had seen even less of the world than Lindsay she was nevertheless the more competent in dealing with it. I felt that even in his own environment he would be half lost, a creature brooding fixedly on some abstract, imperfectly understood purpose to be achieved. Miss Mathers said: ‘Please come in.’
‘I understand that you have both come from Castle Erchany in Scotland? And that you are the niece, madam, of Mr Ranald Guthrie? I am sorry to have to tell you that Mr Guthrie is dead.’
An exclamation broke from Lindsay. Miss Mathers said nothing but only turned away for a moment into a darker corner of the dingy little room. Presently she turned again, very pale but quite composed. ‘He is…dead, you say?’
‘I am advised that he died suddenly and in obscure circumstances on the night of Christmas Eve. And that it is desirable you should both return to Kinkeig.’
‘Neil, we must go at once. As quickly as can be arranged.’ She turned to me. ‘What will be quickest? We have money.’
They had money: it did not seem strange to them that it was largely in gold. I said: ‘There is a train to Carlisle in twenty minutes. I have a taxi at the door and we can just catch it.’
Miss Mathers turned to Lindsay, who stood immobile regarding me with dark dilated eyes, and shook him gently by the shoulder. ‘Neil, hurry.’ And swiftly she gathered up her things. It was not until we were on the train that she said, with the implication of a most substantial question in her voice: ‘You are coming too?’
‘There is to be a legal inquiry. As a matter of routine, Miss Mathers, I am asked to travel north with you.’
At last she looked at me with something like fear in her eyes. ‘Was my uncle–’
‘You must understand I know little about it. I have come from London, not Scotland.’
Lindsay spoke, suddenly and harshly. ‘London?’
‘It was important to find you. I was put in charge of the search.’
From Liverpool to Carlisle, and from Carlisle over the moors and through the border towns to Edinburgh, I spent most of my time in the corridor, cursing my trade. I think I had fallen under the spell of the girl. I knew nothing of her past, and of her future I could guess only ill. But racing through that wild and lonely country, that seems to cry still to the imagination of the old bitterness of foray and feud and Covenant, and that lay now as in a penance under its garment of snow, I felt obscurely that she was part of these things and that in the most real sense I was bringing her home. Once, just short of Moffat, she came into the corridor and stood beside me, and her look was so far away that I thought she must be searching her memory or her fears. But in a minute she said softly: ‘The peewits.’ Straining my eyes I could just see them wheeling in the gathering dusk. Bird-life, I have been told, is scanty in Canada; I suppose she may have thought never to see the lapwings again.
From Carlisle they had sent a telegram; at Edinburgh they were met by a young solicitor called Stewart, who had made commendable haste from Dunwinnie. I made the best arrangements I could for the night and the next day we continued our journey. It was inevitably a constrained and uncomfortable affair, and I was afraid that Stewart might try to take a firm line and order me out of the picture. He proved however discreet: he may have guessed that I had an emergency card in my pocket. Lindsay never spoke, burying himself in a textbook of geology. Geology, I discovered, was his passion; coming of folk who were bound down, generation after generation, to the ceaseless turning of the soil, he had made the barren and unchanging rock the symbol of his revolt. Lurking in him was the character of genius that lifts a man out of the categories of class; without having exchanged a dozen words with him I realized that Miss Mathers was not proposing a mere misalliance with a green and handsome country lad. Handsome he was – beautiful, in Sybil Guthrie’s word – and the eye saw no reason to dispute that he might have reckless violence to his credit. But I was less interested in what crime might have been his than I was held by the intense relationship that was his and Christine Mathers’. The old high way of love – in our modern world fragmented into sensuality and affection – was in that railway carriage: passion too sheer and taut to be embarrassing or even pathetic, and that evinced itself – though they allowed each other scarcely a word or glance – as clearly as some massive atmospheric pressure upon a barometric screen. And the simple pressure was not the less compelling because somewhere I felt the needle tremble, as if all but invisibly deflected by an alien force. I wondered if suspicion, or a suspicion of suspicion, was hovering between them.
Miss Mathers had some code, not unimpressive in itself, that made her deny the mere constraint and awkwardness in our journey. She spoke to me occasionally of things seen in passing, but most of the time she spent gazing thoughtfully out of the window, her eye searching the turbulent snow-swollen waters of the Forth or absorbedly watching the hovering of a hawk over the Carse of Stirling. At Perth I exercised a certain primitive professional skill in detecting and avoiding a couple of newspaper-men who had got word of us; at Dunwinnie a magnificent and anxious old man – his name Ewan Bell – was waiting with a large car. They all held some sort of conference while I foraged cups of tea: and then we drove to Kinkeig.
By this time I wanted to know what it was all about. I listened attentively and with proper admiration to the facts and theories in the possession of Inspector Speight; I inspected the bodies – the so-dramatically poisoned Hardcastle’s with particular interest; and I broke what I believe was fresh ground by interviewing the small person called Isa Murdoch. It was then time for the inquiry.
The inquiry was, in its somewhat gruesome way, a treat. I had no notion of the identity of Mr Wedderburn and for some time I was under the impression that Stewart must have brought down the ablest advocate in Edinburgh. He made no attempt to smother the plain beginnings of a case against Lindsay. He spoke only once while Miss Guthrie was giving evidence, and that was to draw attention to the cardinal fact that Lindsay, during all the time that he was in the tower, could not have got at the bureau. He then bided his time until the appearance of the witness Gamley, and here he succeeded in emphasizing another significant point. Lindsay and Gamley had become friends, and Lindsay had confided to Gamley that he was taking Miss Mathers away, with her uncle’s consent, on Christmas Eve. He had then asked Gamley to be present at his final interview with the laird, feeling
