Lament for a Maker

all.’

I put down the notebook in which I had been scribbling. ‘All, Miss Guthrie? You didn’t see Ranald make for his get away by the trapdoor and the winding stair?’

‘I saw nothing more. What I was sure I had seen was Lindsay kill cousin Ranald, perhaps in some sort of defence against that axe. And I wasn’t going to be in on it if my witness might entangle Lindsay. I turned round and retreated on an instant impulse, round the corner to the French window by which I had been standing. The beastly thing might best pass as suicide: anyway, I was going to bide my time and see.’

Noel Gylby said heavily: ‘I would have done the same.’

‘And your narrative now,’ I said, ‘instead of embarrassing Lindsay actually convicts the man you thought Lindsay had killed. It is for the policeman a pleasingly complete mix up. A mystery on classical lines with the denouement quite in the right place.’

Gylby made an approving and Wedderburn a disapproving noise. I had spoken, I think, with some intention of easing a tension evident on Sybil Guthrie’s face. She had been under a long strain and now that the truth was told she was feeling the reaction. ‘Your evidence,’ I went on, ‘has acquitted cousin Ranald on one score at least.’

‘Acquitted him?’

‘Of squeamishness. You remember that according to Mr Wedderburn’s theory Ranald had failed in two particulars. He had failed to keep silent as he hurled himself to death. And his nerve had failed him too in the crux of the plan, the thing that was to incriminate Lindsay in the thought of the countryside; he had failed to take that horrible chop at his fingers in his last living moments. And when we got nearer the truth that last point remained puzzling. Had he relented at the last moment of performing the outrage on Ian – drugged, one supposes, and ready to be hurled to death by one blow? We now know he hadn’t relented; he was simply interrupted by your first cry. And his action upon that interruption is our final and best evidence of the remarkable speed and economy of his mind.

‘Consider just what happened. Ranald has Ian huddled helpless in the snow at his feet. The axe is raised in that particularly nasty moment of his crime when he hears a shout. Someone is on the parapet walk. A paralysing discovery? – not a bit of it. The situation is desperate but may yet be saved. So far, only he himself can have been seen. He pitches the axe over the battlements, gets himself out of the light, stoops, heaves up the body of his brother into a momentarily erect position – and into the light. Then, himself a mere black silhouette, he hits out. The intruder, whoever he be, has no thought of an Ian Guthrie; he sees Ranald Guthrie killed and cannot see the killer. If Ranald can then make his get away by the winding stair, seizing and extinguishing the lamp, his plot is still in a fair way to succeed. The wind will quickly obliterate all traces of the trapdoor having been used; the intruder will not be able to swear that in the darkness the killer did not escape through the bedroom and down the main staircase – on which Lindsay, two or three seconds later, would be found according to plan. And so the case against Lindsay would be even stronger than Ranald had hoped, for of the fact of murder there could be no doubt at all. Ranald Guthrie, in fact, is one who never says die.’

‘Die,’ said Wedderburn, ‘is just what he did say to two innocent men.’ He stood up, a handsome old man suddenly lively with passion. ‘But we’ll get him! Ranald Guthrie has played his last trick.’

From somewhere below us, shattering the silence of the deserted castle, came the harsh high reverberation of a great cracked bell.

3

It was the young lawyer Stewart back from Dunwinnie. We had quite forgotten him; and finding closed doors he had applied himself to the bell in the courtyard. With him was the minister, Dr Jervie.

We had gone down to the door in a compact, nervous group and I think they must have read in our faces as we stood in the wavering shadows of the hall that the mystery of the place had undergone some violent revolution. But both were curiously silent and it was only when Gylby had kindled a fire in the schoolroom – a thing we might well have done long before – that Stewart said. ‘You have news?’

Wedderburn replied. ‘The strangest news. Ranald Guthrie is still alive.’

Stewart was staggered. But my interest was more in Dr Jervie. He had sat down and was staring into the first leaping flames on the hearth; and I think I have never seen a sadder face. At Wedderburn’s words he looked up for a moment like one who turns from meditation to accept some fact on an indifferent plane.

‘Guthrie is alive? Then I suppose I saw no ghost.’

‘You saw the ghost!’

‘Yes. Perhaps your informant didn’t mention me? It would be taken for granted, you know, that the ghost would appear to the minister. What else is the minister paid for, idle havering old fool that he is, than to hold in with such-like daftness and bogle talk?’ The face remained calm, but the words, parodying Scottish village talk at its least beautiful, were startling in their bitterness. Not, I thought, a chronic mood; rather the momentary product of shock. But not, it seemed, the shock of Ranald Guthrie’s continued existence.

Jervie made a gesture at once of weariness and apology. ‘Can we have your strange story,’ he said, ‘– first?’

4

It was an hour and a half later. I had stepped through the schoolroom window and found myself on a small terrace of which I had been unaware before. Everything was very still, the air moist and oddly warm in the night thaw. The moon, almost at the full, was high in a clear heaven. To my right, through aisles of dark larches, I could see the narrow snow-covered fields of the little home farm, a serrated line of larches beyond like a line of pasteboard trees against the luminous back-drop of the sky. But to my left, down the loch, I could look far into the night, far down the long ribbon of dark ice behind an arm of which, sheer and sheerly beautiful, rose the untroubled fastnesses of Ben Mervie and Ben Cailie. I felt my heart heavy with foreboding.

Jervie came out and stood beside me, looking at the loch and the mountains in silence. Then he said softly: ‘How peaceful it is.’

A longer silence was split from the direction of the loch by a sound like a pistol shot: the ice was cracking. The sound, sharp in that quiet, roused him. ‘Mr Appleby – come in.’ And he turned back to the schoolroom.

Stewart had gone up to the tower; Gylby had just returned to the room with a load of wood. Jervie crossed to where he had sat, carefully folded Gylby’s journal letter, laid it on a table beside Ian Guthrie’s testament. Then his eye caught something at the other end of the room, he took up a candle, was presently studying the Indian bird paintings on the wall. He came back, stood before the fire and there recited – with an oddly moving effect of familiar statement:

‘Sen for the deth remeid is non,

Best is that we for deth dispone

After our deth that lif may we;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.’

He turned to Wedderburn. ‘Ranald Guthrie,’ he said, ‘has long since given himself to the Devil. And the Devil gave him the Devil’s own gift in return: pride.’

Uneasily Wedderburn said: ‘No doubt.’

‘Mr Appleby, you wonder if, in all the complex of motives you have discovered, the master motive is avarice – the miserliness that is his ruling passion. I think the master motive is his other ruling passion, pride. Pride that is fiercer in him than was the avarice that sent him haunting among the scarecrows. Pride that made him take a tortuous and diabolical path to an imperative end. He forbade the marriage of Neil Lindsay and Christine Mathers. It couldn’t be. But pride in turn forbade him to give the reason. Neil and Christine are brother and sister.’

Sybil Guthrie gave a little cry that ebbed into silence.

‘Actually, half-brother and half-sister. Christine has been supposed – if only dubiously and by implication – to be the child of Guthrie’s mother’s brother, who was known to have been killed with his wife in a railway accident in France. In reality, Christine is the daughter of Guthrie’s own sister, Alison Guthrie.

‘Alison was an eccentric and solitary woman, with a passion for birds–’