time scheme. Thank goodness we took so much time over lunch. It may turn out to be our alibi.’
‘It still think we ought to go to the police.’
‘In heaven’s name,
‘If he was murdered, the murderer ought to be found.’
‘He
‘Even a few hours may make all the difference.’
‘Oh, Hera, it’s no business of ours. Hang it all, we didn’t even
‘That’s all the more reason for doing our best to see that justice is done.’
‘Punishing his murderer won’t bring Carbridge back.’
‘Finding out who killed him may help a lot of people. Don’t you see, Comrie, that one of his gang must have killed him? I wouldn’t let you put it on to Todd, but
‘Not necessarily at all. There are plenty of thugs and muggers about. He may have had a toss-up with the rest of them and gone off on his own and run into trouble.’
‘Can you imagine that, though? He was the most gregarious pest I’ve ever met. He would never have gone off on his own.’
‘Well, that could boil it down to just three people. So far as we know, he was left with Todd and the two Minches. Tansy and Rhoda had cried off and the students and Perth were way, way behind. Any of the other three could have had a reason for killing him. We don’t know what the relationships were like among them.’
We tramped on, and were soon clocked in at the Inveroran hotel. No questions were asked about our wet and muddy appearance. They are used to wet and muddy people in the Highlands, I suppose. They promised that our clothes would be sponged and would be dry by the morning, so we went to our rooms, had a bath, changed (Hera into the slinky frock again), and went downstairs to have a drink before dinner. I began to relax, however temporarily.
Most of the other guests appeared to be climbers, and there was much talk of mountains I had never heard of, or else I did not recognise the pronunciation of their Gaelic names. We listened and admired and I hoped that our recent experiences were being overlaid in Hera’s mind by pleasanter thoughts.
As the evening wore on, however, I myself again became very far from happy. I did not know much about rigor mortis, but I knew enough to realise that, if Carbridge were as stiff as I reckoned he was, he could have been dead for hours. This was very puzzling. I attempted to remember all that I had read about rigor mortis. My partner Alexander Storey and I run a literary agency which had been set up by Sandy’s father and one or two of our clients write crime fiction, so, to that extent, I have had to undertake a certain amount of reading-up on forensic medicine in order to check the information given in the story before we send the book to a publisher.
To become as stiff as the corpse over which I had stumbled in that blacked-out passage, the man would have been dead for about twelve hours or even longer, for, so far as my recollection of my reading took me, the rigor, once completely established, could last another twelve hours until it began to pass off in the third twelve-hour period.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ I told myself. Carbridge had left the hotel at about eight that morning and I had found the body not more than ten hours later. Well, allowing for the individual vagaries of its onset, I supposed that it would have been just about possible for the corpse to have stiffened in that space of time, but the legs, with their powerful muscles, were always the last parts of the body to be affected, and it was his foot and leg that I had stumbled against and then touched. They had been as rigid as marble.
I had another try at working out the times. With Jane Minch in tow and her sore feet, Carbridge could not have travelled all that much faster than we did. We had stopped for lunch, but, presumably, so had the others. It did not seem possible that Carbridge could have been dead for more than a few hours. Further speculation seemed useless. I tried to tell myself that it was not Carbridge I had found, but it was of no use. True, I had had only a glimpse of a grossly distorted face, but the jeans and the anorak the man was wearing were identical to the clothes Carbridge had been wearing when last I had seen him alive.
5: The End of a Holiday
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It was between nine and ten miles to Kingshouse from Inveroran and, as the challenge from Carbridge could now be ignored by Hera, she agreed to make an easy business of next day’s journey.
We left the hotel at half-past nine, and by the time we reached the beginning of the climb up the Black Mount when we left the head of Luch Tulla I realised that Hera was very tired. There seemed nothing to do but to press on or return to the Inveroran hotel, have lunch there and then try to get a lift in a car or lorry to carry us to Ballachulish, Kinlochleven or even all the way to Fort William itself.
When I suggested this, however, she vetoed it in such a forceful manner that I realised it was useless to argue, so we began the ascent. The surface of The Way on this stretch was good, but the track became extremely exposed and windy. However, the weather remained fine and the mountain views were wonderful and so was the expanse of Rannoch Moor we saw before we descended.
We rested for a while on Ba Bridge and watched the tumbling water as it swirled over its rocks brought down from the mountain crags, but there was more climbing to do and, although I stopped and pointed out a rough track which would have taken us to the road and the chance of a lift, Hera refused to consider the project and lowered her obstinate head to the wind as we looked over to where Schiehallion reared his noble pyramid out of the moor.
I have always thought about this extraordinary mountain ever since I first met its magical name in J. A. Ferguson’s one-act play
