Cold, Lone and Still

the contents of the glass, I told him all about my experience in the ruins on Rannoch Moor.

‘Oh, well,’ he said comfortingly, ‘it’s not all that unusual for people to see things before they happen. Time is only relative, after all.’

‘But the chap in Scotland was a real chap. I didn’t see a ghost. I just identified him wrongly, that’s all. The really odd thing — well, this chap in the passage is Carbridge.’

‘Yes. It looks as though he turned up after all.’

‘After all?’

‘Yes. He answered the invitation with tremendous enthusiasm, so I quite expected him to come bouncing along and I was most surprised when he didn’t show up.’

‘Well, he’s shown up now all right.’

‘Yes,’ said Trickett, gloomy for the first time, ‘you’re right there. I don’t know what the warden is going to say. He wasn’t a bit keen to grant me permission to hold the party here out of term-time and, if it hadn’t been a reunion for the Scottish adventure people, he would have turned me down flat. He told me so.’ He looked at me sadly, but without animosity. ‘You couldn’t be a sort of Ancient Mariner, could you?’ he asked.

‘I haven’t killed the albatross or anything or anybody else. I’ve just got myself caught up in something nightmarish,’ I answered; but the reference to the Ancient Mariner brought my previous bad dreams rushing back at me like a flock of vampire bats.

Before I could say any more, Bull knocked on the door to tell us that the police had arrived. Would we please come down? We went down. A policeman was standing by the door behind which the party was held and two others, an inspector and a sergeant, both in uniform, were waiting at the foot of the stairs.

‘Which of you gentlemen found the body?’

‘I did,’ I said.

‘Gentleman was on his way to the bog,’ said Bull helpfully.

‘Well, it looks like a case for the CID,’ said the inspector.

‘Did you think it was a hoax, then?’ asked Trickett sharply.

‘We never know, with students.’ The sergeant took down our names and addresses and the inspector sent us to join the rest of the party. Everybody realised that something was up. All the noise had died down, the orchestra had laid aside their instruments and the only sound except for low-toned conversation was made by the pianist, who was strumming very softly some plaintive tunes such as ‘Swanee River’ and ‘Poor Old Joe’. I suppose he thought modern jazz would be out of place.

We all sat around on the floor, for only the orchestra had chairs. Hera sat beside me.

‘So it was you who started all this,’ she murmured, under cover of ‘Massa’s in de cold, cold ground’.

‘Who else? Just my abominable luck. Don’t dwell on it. I couldn’t help it, could I?’ I said.

‘So said the child who swatted the fly on grandpa’s head and caused the poor old man to end up in a lunatic asylum,’ she said; and she certainly was not meaning to be funny. ‘Tell me what has happened,’ she demanded.

‘I’d rather you heard it from the police,’ I said. ‘You would hardly believe it if I told you.’

‘The police? You don’t mean — you can’t mean —?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s what I mean. Carbridge came to the party after all, in a manner of speaking.’

8: Its Aftermath

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When the plain-clothes men turned up, they checked all the names and addresses, took each person outside the door for questioning, and ascertained that, except for myself and the two unlucky hash-slingers, nobody had left the party until Bull brought Trickett out to speak to me. Then they let everybody else go, but hauled Trickett, myself, the caretaker and the two youngsters off to the nick to be questioned.

We were interviewed separately, of course, and they kept me until the last. I can’t say that talking to a policeman who makes it obvious that he thinks you are lying is a pleasant experience. I heard later that they had soon let the youngsters go. All they wanted from them was the assertion that, so far as they knew, nobody except themselves, Bull and myself had been anywhere near the dark passage while the party was going on.

The interview with Trickett had taken longer. They had wanted full details about the Scottish tour, whether he had known Carbridge before he met him in Glasgow, why the students and Perth had left him and the others before the end of The Way and exactly where, when and why they had caught up with him again and, finally, where Perth was and why he had not accepted the invitation to the reunion.

On their part (said Trickett later) they had told him nothing, although he had asked point-blank how long Carbridge had been dead.

‘That’s for the inquest,’ the detective-inspector told him. We all knew that, before the five of us had been ushered into the police cars, James Minch had been closely questioned, for he had given the rest of us a lively account of the interview before the five of us had been shipped off to the nick. It seemed, according to James Minch, that they suspected him of having had a sgian dubh tucked into his colourful woollen, right-leg stocking.

‘You are also wearing a sporran, I see, sir.’

‘It’s an essential part of the outfit. No pockets in a kilt, you see.’