“Johnny had an estate up near Comrie. His father, Ginger Auchtermuchty, had been a well-known golfer, but had not been particularly good at keeping the estate in good order. In fact, he was rather bad at that, and by the time that Johnny had left the South East Scotland Agricultural College everybody thought that it would probably be too late to do much with the farms that they had in hand. The fencing was in a pretty awful state and a lot of work needed to be done on the steadings. In fact, when Ginger handed over to Johnny and went to live in Gullane, we were very much expecting to have to sell off a large parcel of land just to keep the place from folding up altogether.
“I first met Johnny when he came in to discuss the possibility of raising some money to do essential repairs. I prepared a deed which gave security for the loan and I remember thinking that he would never be able to repay even part of what he had to borrow. How wrong I was! Johnny proved to have a real nose for the managing of shooting and fishing and within a few years the estate was one of the most successful in Perthshire. And Johnny was also one of the most socially successful people of his day. Everybody liked him and invited him to stay with them.
He used to make people laugh and told the most wonderful stories.
“I had heard about his house parties, which were legendary, but I had never received an invitation to one of them. This slightly distressed me, and I began to wonder whether Johnny thought of me as just his lawyer and not worth having anything to do with socially. That would have been very unjust. I enjoyed a party in exactly the same way as the rest of them did and even if I was not a particularly experienced shot I saw no reason why I shouldn’t be invited to join in now and then.
“And then at last the invitation came. Would I care to come up to Mucklemeikle to shoot? Friday to Sunday? I replied that I would be delighted to do this. I did not ask what it was that we were going to shoot. Betty, who did not treat the invitation with the same enthusiasm as I did, suggested that it might be fish in a barrel. That was meant to be a joke, but I must admit that I did not find it very funny at the time. Indeed, I don’t find it funny now. In fact, it has remained as unfunny as it was when she first uttered it – it really has.”
“Now,” said Ramsey Dunbarton to his wife, Betty, as he read his memoirs to her. “Now things get really interesting.”
“Johnny Auchtermuchty!” mused Betty. “What a card he was, 204
“A great man,” agreed Ramsey.
They were both silent for a moment. Then Betty asked: “And they found no trace of him?” she said. “Not even a few scraps?”
“Not a trace,” said Ramsey sadly. “But let’s not slip into melan-choly. I’ll resume with my memoirs, Betty.” He looked at his watch. “This will have to be the last reading for the time being, my dear. People will just have to wait for the rest.”
“And we haven’t even got to the part where you played the Duke of Plaza-Toro at the Church Hill Theatre,” said Betty.
“Time enough for that in the future,” said Ramsey. “Now back to Johnny Auchtermuchty and the invitation up to Comrie.
“I was delighted, of course, to receive this invitation to shoot, even though, quite frankly, I had not done a great deal of shooting before. In fact, if the truth be told, I had hardly ever handled a shotgun, although I had done a bit of clay-pigeon shooting when I was much younger. I don’t hold with shooting really: I’m rather fond of birds and I think that the whole idea of blasting them out of the sky is a bit cruel. But it was not really for me to criticise my clients and certainly Johnny Auchtermuchty would have been very surprised if I had taken a stand on the matter. There are plenty of Edinburgh solicitors who would have jumped at the chance of a day’s shooting with Johnny and some of them would not have been above a bit of subtle persuasion that he should perhaps take his legal business to them rather than to Ptarmigan Monboddo. Now I am not going to mention any names, but I’m sure that if any of them are reading this they will know that I mean them.
“Betty decided that she would not come after all, and so I motored up to Comrie by myself on the Friday afternoon. I had borrowed a friend’s Rolls-Royce for the occasion and I enjoyed the drive very much, taking the road past Stirling and then up across the hills behind Glenartney. Johnny was standing outside the Big Hoose, as we called it, when I arrived and he said to
me: ‘Nice Rolls there, Dunbarton! You chaps must be charging us pretty handsomely to afford a car like that!’ I was a bit embarrassed by this and started to explain to him that it really belonged to a solicitor from another firm but he paid no attention. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Blame the other chaps! Old trick that, Dunbarton!’
“We all had dinner that night and had a very good time too.
There were a couple of people from Ayrshire and somebody from Fife. Johnny’s wife was a splendid cook and had prepared a very fine set of dishes for us. I asked her if she could give me the recipes to take home to Betty, but she said no. I thought that this was rather rude of her, but I fear that she had long been nursing a grudge against me, at least since she unfortunately had overheard me, some years before, telling somebody that I thought that Johnny had married beneath him. That was most unfortunate, but I was absolutely right. He had, and I think she knew it. I also noted that I was given the smallest bedroom in the house – one at the end of the corridor and that the sheets on the bed did not quite reach the end. And the water in the flask beside my bed did not taste very nice at all, and so I decided not to drink it.
“In the morning we went out to shoot. Johnny had a keeper who I think was hostile to me from the start, although he was polite to the others. He looked at my shoes and asked me whether I thought they were sufficiently robust for the occasion – I thought that was a cheek and I decided there and then that he could expect no tip from me, and told him as much. He was a Highlander, of course, and these people can be quite resentful when they get some sort of notion.
“We took our places alongside several pegs which the keeper had inserted in the ground. I was right at the end, which I suspected was the worst place to be, as there was a clump of whin bush immediately to my right which kept scratching me. Then they started to drive the birds out of their cover and suddenly people started to point their shotguns up in the air and blast away. I did my best, but unfortunately I did not seem to get any birds going in my direction and so I got nothing. Then quite
