niche, and got Ian Guthrie on my back. I’ve carried a calf that was fell heavier often enough on my father’s croft.
I got him to the trapdoor and through it, and I bolted it from below. It must have been only a couple of minutes later, I suppose, that the Gylby lad was out on the deserted battlements looking about him. With a little help Ian staggered down that long winding stair and along the corridor to near the schoolroom. I looked in; Christine had gone. I got him in and he rested a bit, warming himself before the little fire. Presently he said: ‘Ranald?’
‘I killed him – knocked him over the parapet.’
His face was paper-pale, but now it drained yet paler. ‘Poor crazy chap!’ He was silent for a moment. ‘He was just going to kill me, Mr Bell – after a little operation.’ And he spread out his right hand. ‘Hence the axe.’
It was to be a long time before I fully understood that. You’ll remember Mr Appleby saying that the California Flinders must display no marked character-trait which might become known as quite alien to the Sydney Flinders, and how because of that Ranald had to attempt to get the better of his miserliness. That was true enough. But there was something else about the Sydney Flinders that Appleby didn’t know – and that Ranald, thanks to what Ian had written him, did. In the early days of his radiology Flinders had lost two fingers – as you can easily do, it seems, with that unchancy stuff. Well, Ranald could arrive in California without two fingers readily enough: a little surgical reading, a period of seclusion, rather more than common fortitude – these were all that was necessary. But the body that was to be found in the moat and taken to be Ranald Guthrie’s presented a more difficult problem. Clearly it must not display two fingers amputated long ago. On the other hand a further operation to conceal this would, in normal circumstances, arouse suspicion at once – arouse suspicion through the question:
But now I was still staring at that right hand of Ian Guthrie’s in mere puzzlement when he got unsteadily to his feet. ‘I hear voices,’ he said – it must have been Gylby and the others coming down from the tower – ‘we’ll be going.’
I looked at him fair stammagasted. ‘Going!’
‘Nobody knows I’m here except the scoundrel Hardcastle, who won’t talk. And Ranald’s death will pass, maybe, as accident or suicide.’
‘Mr Ian, you needn’t think I’m feared of owning to the killing of your daft brother. It was him or you and me.’
‘True enough, Ewan Bell. But do you think I want a lurid scandal because Ranald went off his head? We’ll away to Kinkeig while we may.’
I thought he must be off his head himself to think of getting through the snows that night in his condition. But I know now, of course, what was driving him: he had near a passion – the dark Guthrie passion – to end his days as Richard Flinders. Not unnaturally, when you come to chew on it, for Richard Flinders was what he had made himself through nigh fifty years. At the moment I had to submit to what I had no understanding of and follow him out of the castle. You must remember he knew nothing of Lindsay or the danger the lad was like to be brought to. Nor had I any clear picture of it myself, or maybe I would have made him stay.
An hour before I had been wondering if my strength would take me to Erchany; now I had the task of getting a sick man back the long road to Kinkeig. The shock of it all must have made me half indifferent. I had no thought but that we were like to perish on the way and I felt simply that what must be must be. As it happened we both proved uncommonly tough and we passed Kinkeig kirk as the bell was tolling for the early service. We met no one and for the next twenty-four hours Ian Guthrie lay low in my house. But not quite low enough. The thought of seeing Kinkeig again fascinated him and the next evening he went for a bit dander in the gloaming. Hence, Reader, Ranald Guthrie’s ghost.
He told me his story and by comparing what we knew we puzzled out most of the jigsaw. But Ian still didn’t want to come forward. There would be an inquiry, he said, and he would hold his hand till that was over: if suspicion fell on Lindsay forward he would come; otherwise away he would sail as Richard Flinders and no one any the wiser. And meantime I was to persuade Christine not to let on that I had been at Erchany.
You must judge if I did right when at one point I opposed his plan absolutely. Even if it so turned out that Ian Guthrie need not come alive again to public knowledge, I said, the family and the lawyers must know. And that bit common sense I did succeed in imposing on the rank Guthrie eccentricity of the man. When and if all was quietly over, he agreed, I might get the folk intimately concerned to the castle by night and he would come over from Dunwinnie again and have it out with them. And on that Ian slipped away from Kinkeig in the darkness and tramped back to his Dunwinnie hotel – where, certain, in all the confloption of sporters and curlers Richard Flinders had not been missed.
And that’s all – though I had uneasy hours enough thereafter. I didn’t reckon on the policeman Appleby having gone up to the meikle house when I engineered that family meeting right fortunate it was that he proved a wise man, knowing where to let be. Ranald Guthrie and the coarse creature Hardcastle were both dead, and Ian Guthrie was a childless man whose attitude to the Erchany estate was his own affair. And silence for a time on the full and final story, while it was but indulgence to him, was mercy to Christine Mathers.
4
And so the Guthries have gone from these lands and Castle Erchany is to let. What gear was left in the place unrotted has been dispersed; the family portraits and all the schoolroom stuff were shipped away to Sybil and Christine and then there was a grand sale. The great Flemish table where they sat and had their caviare that night was bought by Dr Jervie for the kirk session. The globes that wee Isa Murdoch hid behind in the gallery were bought by Mistress Roberts of the Arms; she sits in the private now with her teapot on one side and the terrestrial globe on the other, ready to show you what port her bairns wrote from last. Fairbairn of Glenlippet – him that licenses his motor ever by the quarter – bought a great granite louping-stone from the court; folk were sore puzzled to know what use he would make of it but Will Saunders says it will bear a brave inscription to Mistress Fairbairn one day. And all the mouldering theology in the gallery I bought myself: right solid stuff to chew on it has proved and a grand stand-by in the discussions I whiles hold with the minister.
Today I have wandered through the meikle house perhaps for the last time. The winds that ever eddy about Erchany are sighing through the broken windows; warm and scented from the braes though they are they scarcely bring to the castle a suggestion of summer or of the sun. Utterly the place has slipped into the past: I doubt that its only tenants hereafter will be the rats – they have already forgotten the dottled Hardcastle wife – and the martins that know their season. Stone will fall from stone and this high tower to which I have climbed be as forgotten as the Lindsays’ tower in Mervie – the Guthries of Erchany, that have so passionately lived in the life of Scotland, like their rivals remembered only in footnotes to history.
But the Gamleys are back at the home farm. One of Gamley’s lads has taken a wife, a Speyside lass, and now I hear her singing in the field – some crude ephemeral tune such as has nigh killed the true minstrelsy of Scotland. And yet – because it rises joyous and full-throated from the earth – I hear it as an enduring song.
Endnote
[1]
Note on Inspector (later, Sir John) Appleby Series
John Appleby first appears in
