Cold, Lone and Still

‘Why?’

‘There are types I dinna trust. Hot gospellers, practical jokers, do-gooders and “friends of a’ the world” such as Carbridge. Leddy, I’m telling ye, that man was more sociable than a plague o’ gnats.’

‘Then why do you think he was killed? Gregariousness is not usually an incitement to murder.’

‘Gin it willna weary the company or, maybe, gie great offence to Mr Melrose here, I could furnish ye wi’ chapter and vairse.’

‘Don’t mind me,’ I said. ‘I suppose Hera comes into it somewhere, but I know you to be a gentleman, so anything you say will not come amiss so far as I am concerned. As a matter of fact, she has broken our engagement.’

‘Och, the pity of it! Weel, mistress, I’ll gie ye a potted vairsion o’ the tour as I saw it, and ye may draw your ain conclusions.’

He proceeded to furnish us with details. In a sense, little that he said was new to me so far as the occasions on which Hera and I had been with the rest of the party were concerned, but, of course, for most of the time we had been on our own. He began by describing the meeting at the Glasgow youth hostel. Looking at me, he said that in his opinion Hera and Todd were old acquaintances, and apologetically he asked whether this piece of information came as a complete surprise to me.

‘It certainly does,’ I said. ‘So far as I am aware, their previous meetings were the most casual and accidental encounters. They met in the corridor of the train to Glasgow and again in the cocktail bar at the airport hotel. I’m certain they had never met before.’

‘Ah, weel,’ he said, ‘ye’re entitled to your opinion. So ye believe Todd was leeing when he told Carbridge he had slept wi’ her the night at the airport hotel?’

‘Certainly I do! Besides, a man who would claim that, and, I suppose, boast about it, to a fellow like Carbridge is a skunk. There’s not a word of truth in it, and I don’t see Todd as that kind of a louse, anyway.’

‘Oo, aye? Then wat about Rowardennan?’

I tried to think back. Rowardennan, on Loch Lomond, was where Hera and I had taken the trip across the water to Inverbeg. I remembered that Todd, with others of the youth hostellers not of our party, had crossed with us. He had given us a wave and a word, but, once ashore at Inverbeg, we had seen no more of him. Hera and I, I remembered, had missed the return boat and had spent the night at the hotel, crossing back again in the morning. We had, as we had arranged, occupied separate rooms at the hotel. There had been no sign of Todd on the return trip and he was certainly with the others when they set off next morning.

I said, ‘Well, and what about Rowardennan? Todd didn’t spend the night at the hotel in Inverbeg. I would have known.’

‘Ye think ye would have known, but let me tell ye, laddie, wherever he spent the night, it was not in the Rowardennan youth hostel. I would hae kenned that, better than ye would hae kenned that he had your lassie tae bed.’

‘Tell us more about the tour,’ said Laura tactfully.

‘I’ll dae juist that,’ said Perth, looking at her with gratitude.

I said, ‘I’ll take your word for it that he didn’t spend the night in the hostel with the rest of you. You would have known about that, because of the dormitory system, but you will not persuade me that he spent it at the hotel at Inverbeg. We would have spotted him either there or when he got off the boat coming back to Rowardennan the next morning.’

‘Gang your ain gait,’ said Perth. ‘I willna press the point.’

I nodded, but my memory told me that at Crianlarich Todd had suggested openly to Hera that he should escort her to the hotel after the rumpus I had had with Carbridge. I began to wonder, as the poison of suspicion lodged itself in my mind, whether he would have made such a suggestion had he not had some grounds for believing that she might fall in with it.

Dame Beatrice assisted in dissolving the tension somewhat by asking whether anything had happened between Rowardennan and Crianlarich, while Hera and I were on our own and not with the rest of the party.

I did not remember telling anybody in particular that just before Hera and I reached the hostel at Crianlarich we had come upon Perth and the students busy with their hammers and chisels and all the rest of their geological gear, but I suppose I must have done, or she would not have followed up her question by remarking that it was on that part of The Way that there appeared to have been some slight evidence of dissension.

According to Perth, the trouble, if that is not too strong and misleading a word, began on the stretch between Rowardennan and Inversnaid. There was a rather pointless argument between Tansy and Carbridge about the name of a spectacular mountain — Carbridge claiming that it was called the Cobbler, Tansy maintaining that it was Ben Arthur.

‘But both are right,’ Laura interposed at this point. ‘Ben Arthur is the Cobbler. There are three peaks and these, seen against the skyline, are supposed to represent a cobbler, his wife and his daughter, or some such rubbish. As a matter of fact, the Cobbler is only the anglicised way of pronouncing the Gaelic An Gobaileach, the g being spoken like a k or a hard c. The Gaelic name has nothing to do with shoe-mending. It simply means ‘forked peak’. The ‘Arthur’ I imagine is the name given it for territorial reasons by a clan or sept. The MacArthurs, in a sense, are Campbells, but they claim seniority. When Ewan Campbell resigned his lands in the fourteenth century, King Robert the Second granted them to Arthur Campbell, the son, wherefore the peak was named Arthur, I suppose as a claim to it.’

We all listened to this with the uneasy respect which is accorded to a knowledgeable purveyor of useless information. Laura sensed immediately that the audience was becoming restive. She waved a shapely hand in apology and said, ‘Sorry. I get carried away. Anyhow, what a stupid thing for those two to argue about.’

‘Yes, it hardly seems a matter of life and death,’ said Dame Beatrice, bringing us back to the real seriousness of the matter in hand. ‘What happened after that?’

It appeared that Rhoda had taken up the subject in support of her friend and then had said that the pace set by Todd and Carbridge was turning what ought to be a pleasant ramble into a marathon race. Jane Minch had joined in to complain that her feet were hurting her, but her brother had pointed out that going more slowly was not the best