My Bones Will Keep

The hotel possessed two dining-rooms.

They were connected by a wide archway, but, as it was early in the season and few guests were expected, this archway was blocked by a large screen. The head waiter showed Laura to a table by the wall. The dining-room was less than a quarter full and there was no sign of her boatman. He must have left by the hall door and gone straight out into the street

While she was having lunch she debated which of two routes she should take and where she would spend the last night of her holiday. At Ballachulish she could follow the coast road southward towards Oban and then go by the Pass of Brander to Loch Awe and Dalmally, or she could drive eastward from Ballachulish through Glencoe and across the Moor of Rannoch to Tyndrum and Crianlarich. She remained very much in two minds during the whole of the meal and had come to no final decision when she paid her bill. In the end she decided to see what she felt like when she reached Ballachulish.

Here she had no difficulty in making up her mind, for she realised that, so early in the year, the Pass of Glencoe would be free of trippers. The wild wastes of Rannoch had always exercised a strong fascination for her, so she turned eastward and was soon on the road through the pass. At Tyndrum she decided not to go on to Crianlarich, but to turn westwards to a village called Slanleibh.

It was easy enough here to get a room and the hotel was modern and pleasant. Laura garaged the car after she had been to the reception desk, unpacked, had a bath and put on a dinner gown, the first time she had worn one on the trip. Then she went into the large, beautifully-furnished lounge with its cocktail bar in a discreet alcove, and, picking up an illustrated weekly, sat by the fire.

After a bit, she walked up the three broad, carpeted steps which led to the cocktail bar and there, seated against the right-hand wall so that she had not been able to see him from her fireside chair, was her familiar, the Tannasgan boatman, respectably clad in a dinner jacket and smooth-cheeked from a recent shave. Laura ordered her drink and decided to take the bull by the horns.

‘Hullo,’ she said. ‘You again?’

The man looked at her over the rim of his glass, and said:

‘Let me buy you a drink. A dry Martini, is it?’

They went in to dinner together and sat at the same table. Laura was soon telling him about her unexpected holiday and describing her trip, but, obtaining no reciprocal information, she said, at a venture:

‘Do you know some people called Grant who live at Coinneamh Lodge, not so very many miles from Tannasgan?’

‘I do not, I’m afraid. What about them?’

‘Oh, nothing much. They also sheltered me from the rain, that’s all.’

‘Oh, I see. Tell me, where do you make for tomorrow?’

‘Oh, Edinburgh. I shall be on duty again the day after tomorrow.’

‘On duty?’

‘Yes, I’m a personal private secretary.’

She excused herself after dinner by saying she had letters to write and went up to her room. Here she saved her oath by writing a letter to her mother and sending her son a couple of picture postcards; then she sat at the window, looked at the view and decided that, in spite of the long drive to Edinburgh which faced her on the morrow, she would get up early and take a walk before breakfast.

This she did, but paused on the threshold of the hotel front door to look at the view and assess the weather. Before her, beyond the little river, rose the mountains, not threatening and dark, but scooped roundly out, with cup- like peaks, and against the mountain flanks the lower hills showed green. Near at hand, cattle grazed in a small paddock with trees in it, but away to Laura’s right the distant peaks had bare and ragged outlines, threatening, and capped with purple cloud.

Laura shrugged, liking neither the clear outlines of the mountains before her nor the cloud behind the peaks away to the west, but she stepped out briskly and walked towards the main part of the village which lay in the direction of Loch Awe. Once past the post office she took a track to the left, a rough and stony road but one which, as she climbed, provided vast views of the mountains.

At breakfast, which she took as soon as she returned to the hotel, she glanced round the dining-room for her boatman, but he was nowhere to be seen. She concluded that he was breakfasting later, but when the waiter removed her porridge plate he produced an unaddressed envelope.

‘The gentleman asked me to give you this during breakfast, madam.’

‘What gentleman?’

‘The one you dined with last night.’

‘Oh, of course. Thank you.’ She took out the letter. It was written on the hotel notepaper and was signed A.D. Grant.

If the need arises, please don’t forget that you saw me on Tannasgan. Kindly enter the date in your diary before you forget it. You’ll know why later on.

‘Of all the cheek!’ muttered Laura ‘Don’t flatter yourself, my lad. Anyway, I don’t keep a diary.’ Then the signature struck her. ‘Grant? Grant?’ she thought. ‘Oh, of course, Grant!’ Then she reflected that there were thousands of Grants in the world and that it was probably only a coincidence that this one possessed the same surname as the acquaintances she had made at Tigh-Osda. All the same, coincidence certainly had had a long arm on this holiday of hers.

Laura finished her breakfast, paid her bill and got out the car. It was nine o’clock and the weather was still holding up. It was raining over Ben More by the time she reached Crianlarich, but she had left the rain behind before she took a late lunch in Stirling, and from Linlithgow to Edinburgh the weather was perfect. She turned in the car at the garage from which she had hired it, flagged a taxi and reached the hotel in time for a bath and dinner. She was shown to her employer’s table and told the waiter that she would wait for Dame Beatrice. She was still studying the menu when Dame Beatrice appeared.

‘This calls for champagne,’ said the black-eyed, beaky-mouthed, elderly, thin psychiatrist, ‘but as neither of us