‘ “I must bury sorrow out of sight,” ’ capped Laura, grinning. ‘Browning could be as banal as Shakespeare when he liked, couldn’t he?’
‘Heresy of the deepest dye!’
‘About Shakespeare? What price some of those ghastly rhyming couplets at the end of the scenes in Macbeth, to name but one play?’
‘Curtain lines on an uncurtained stage? I am not well-informed on the subject of the Elizabethan theatre.’
‘Be that as it may, I’ll say good-night, then, before I become tediously informative. What time breakfast?’
‘Half-past eight, I think.’
‘Right. I wonder whether there would be any joy in having a swim in the loch? It ain’t the plunging-in I mind; it’s the perishing getting-out.’
For what it might turn out to be worth, there was one scrap of information which, after breakfast on the following morning, Dame Beatrice gleaned from a previously untapped source. This was a boy of sixteen who had not been questioned by the police for the simple reason that he had not been in the hotel at the time of their visit.
It was Laura who discovered him and obtained an item of information while Dame Beatrice was interviewing the chamber-maids.
‘You’d better talk to him, I think,’ she said to her employer. ‘He says he was “away to Oban” when the police called, but he did encounter a stranger whom he describes as “a black man”. That, in these parts, could mean anybody darkish – a Spaniard or a Pakistani – let alone a Sudanese the colour of a black boot.’
‘What is the youth’s name?’
‘Wullie MacKay.’
‘And where shall I find him?’
‘In the yard behind the scullery. He’s gutting fish we’re to have for lunch. The hotel buys in bulk from the quayside and the eviscerations are one of Wullie’s jobs. He seems to be a man-of-all-work.’
Dame Beatrice opened the conversation with the lad by asking how the name of the hamlet ought to be pronounced. She gave her own phonetic rendering of Saighdearan.
‘Och, no!’ said Wullie, far too polite to show amusement. He pronounced it for her.
‘Ah! Sy-tshir-un! ’ echoed Dame Beatrice . ‘I am obliged to you. Would it have a meaning in English?’
‘Aye. Saighdearan will be meaning Soldiers.’
‘Indeed? It ties up with Fort William, I suppose?’
‘That place,’ said Wullie darkly, ‘will be having another name put upon it when we get our way.’
‘You are a Scottish Nationalist, are you? But surely your own name is William? Besides, what about William Wallace? He was also a great nationalist, although, I believe, by birth a Welshman.’
Wullie threw away the entrails of the fish he was cleaning and they were swooped upon by a squawking, hostile bird. He said, ‘I’ll no play with words. What would it be that you are wanting with myself?’
‘A description of the black man.’
‘Och, him!’ said Wullie, evincing no surprise. ‘He was a little, thin fellow, maybe like a tinker, but I think he was a foreign man. Besides, he had money. He was showing me an English five-pound note and saying it would be for myself if I would tell him which coach-party was staying here and what would be the name of the driver.’
‘And could you tell him that?’
‘Och, aye.’
‘And he gave you the five pounds?’
‘That, no.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘I kenned the was up to no good, so I was telling him the wrong party and the wrong driver. He said that was no’ what he was after and he ganged away and took the five pounds with him.’
‘Did you ever see him again?’
‘I did not.’ He threw a fish-head to a passing cat and bent all his attention on his work.
‘Well, it is a pity that you should be done out of five pounds because of scruples which become you,’ said Dame Beatrice, producing an equivalent bank-note and laying it on the end of the wooden block on which he was so sedulously operating. ‘Would you care to comment on an idea which I entertain? I think your black man was an Italian.’
‘Keep your money, lady. I couldna say what his nationality might ha’ been,’ said Wullie, pointedly ignoring the gift. ‘He was no’ from these parts, anyway, and I didna trust him.’
Dame Beatrice left the five-pound note where it lay and went back to Laura.
‘I tried another long shot,’ she said, ‘but it did not even leave the bowstring. Our next approach must be to the local inhabitants, as you suggested.’
‘There can’t be many of those. I’ve talked to the manager and, except for the people who run the motel and the restaurant and that scruffy good-pull-up-for-carmen along the road, the only birds who are more or less resident, he tells me, are a man called Carstairs and the Whites.’
‘And these are?’
