Corryvreckan?”
Isabel said that she did. She had never seen it, she explained, but she knew.
“You don’t want to see it,” said the barman. “Or rather, if you do see it, you want to be looking at it from dry land. It’s a muckle great whirlpool. The tide comes in, you see, and it sweeps past the top of Jura and Scarba. It creates quite a current, as you can imagine. It’s when that current hits the undersea mountain up there—that’s called the Hag—that you get those great eddies. And a whirlpool in certain conditions. That’s it. That’s the Corryvreckan.”
Jamie had stopped glaring at Isabel and was listening in fascination. “Would it suck a boat down—even a large one?”
The barman shrugged. “The Royal Navy used to describe the Gulf of Corryvreckan as unnavigable—the only stretch of water in Britain that they wouldn’t sail into. Now they say that it can be approached only with great caution and with local knowledge. In other words, people who don’t know what they’re doing should keep well away. So, yes, boats can go down. People have died. Including McInnes.”
They digested this in silence. Then Jamie asked, “I read somewhere—I forget where—about divers going down. Can you actually dive there?”
The barman looked at Jamie. “Just,” he said. “You have a window at slack tide. Five or ten minutes at the most. There’s a boat that will take you—if you’re experienced enough. They drop a ball and line down and you follow the line down to the top of the pinnacle. You watch your bubbles. If they start to go 1 7 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h down instead of up, you know it’s time to get out pretty smartly.
Otherwise you’re sucked down six hundred feet.” He paused.
“You’re not a diver, are you?”
Jamie shuddered. “No, thank you.”
The barman smiled grimly. “Good. If you were, I was going to suggest that you settle your bill before you tried diving on the Corryvreckan.”
“What happened to McInnes?” Isabel asked.
“He used to stay up near Inverlussa,” said the barman. “He had an arrangement with somebody up there and they let him a couple of rooms whenever he came to the island. He painted Jura a lot, you know. I hear he was quite famous in places like Edinburgh and London.”
Isabel wondered if the barman knew what a McInnes would fetch today. “He’s popular,” she said. “Very.”
“Well, he wasn’t doing too well that last time he came up,”
said the barman. “He’d had wife trouble and he was pretty low about that. But he also told me that his paintings had been slated in the papers. Torn to shreds, he said. He was very cut up.”
“The London critics,” said Isabel. “They went for him.”
The barman shook his head. “Poor Andy. Well, they did him in all right. I think he knew fine well what he was doing when he took that boat of his round the corner to the Corryvreckan. He knew. Everybody round here knows, even the bairns. You go and ask one of those wee bairns outside the shop about the Corryvreckan and how you need to keep well away. It’s the first thing anybody tells you about the water round here.”
For a while Isabel said nothing. Then, “Suicide?”
“Nobody likes to reach that conclusion,” said the barman.
“But sometimes what else are you to think?”
T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S
1 7 3
Jamie took a sip of his whisky. The conversation had depressed him. McInnes was dead. Why go on about it? “This is a lovely light whisky. But they make a peated one too, don’t they?” he suddenly asked the barman.
The barman glanced over the road at the distillery building.
“Yes,” he said. “In fact, Jimmy over there tells me that they’re about to put one in the cask right now. So come back in eight years and you can try it.”
Isabel was not paying any attention to this discussion of whisky. She was thinking about what the barman had told her and wondering whether McInnes had had life insurance. If he had, then the money would have gone to his wife. Sometimes people change the beneficiary of their life insurance as soon as they leave their spouse; sometimes they forget to do this. A lot of men live to regret not making the change, she thought; or rather, they die not to regret it.
But why, she went on to ask herself, why choose to commit suicide in a
C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N
E
LIZZIE HAD PURLOINED one of the estate Land Rovers for the trip to Barnhill. It was normally used for taking deer stalkers up the hill and was equipped with gun and telescope racks. A particularly fine wicker hamper, used for lunches for the sporting clients, was fixed to the floor of the vehicle with leather straps.
With Lizzie at the wheel they made their way along the winding estate road that led to Barnhill. Now there was nothing; no houses, no telephone wires, and the road became little more than a track. Here and there, rain had created deep potholes in the surface, and Isabel put her hand protectively over Charlie’s head as the Land Rover bucked and lurched. They made slow progress, but eventually they saw in the distance a white-washed stone farmhouse, with a wooden porch protruding from the front and low slate-roofed sheds on either side. To one side of the house, across a rough field, a thicket of trees stood, and beyond that a hillside of half-exposed granite outcrops. From the angle of the trees and the shape of the gorse bushes, it was evidently a windy place. A battered green Land Rover was parked in front of the house, its tailgate down. A black Labrador T H E C A R E F U L U
