My Bones Will Keep

Laura and Dame Beatrice were discussing this child as they passed into the street on their way back to the hotel, when a young man raised his hat in response to Laura’s quick look of recognition.

‘Well, well!’ she said, coming to a halt. ‘Dame Beatrice, this is the kind-hearted and chivalrous gent who gave me a lift into Freagair that time I was benighted on my way back from Tannasgan. Mr Curtis, this is Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley.’

‘How do you do, Mr Curtis?’

‘How do you do, Dame Beatrice?’

‘I am grateful indeed to you for succouring Mrs Gavin.’

‘It was a pleasure. You heard the news about what happened on Tannasgan after Mrs Gavin left?’

‘Yes, and we are both very glad that she had left.’

‘It might have been a bit awkward, if she’d stayed, I suppose. Have you seen today’s paper?’

‘No, we haven’t seen a paper since we left Edinburgh three days ago. Have there been developments?’

‘Yes, the police have been questioning a man called Grant, a customer of mine. They must have some idea that he can help them, I suppose. They can’t possibly believe him guilty! I know the chap well.’

Laura had a sudden inspiration. It arose from her previous uncomfortable feeling that her own and Mrs Grant’s impressions of the lairs of Tannasgan did not tally, and she also remembered the doubts expressed by Dame Beatrice.

‘Was the owner of An Tigh Mor on Tannasgan also a customer of yours?’ she asked.

‘He was – and a more difficult, curmudgeonly, cheese-paring old party I’ve yet to find. I don’t like losing customers, through death or for any other reason, but I can’t say I’m sorry to think I’ll never call on the owner of An Tigh Mor on Tannasgan again. When I think of that tonsured pink scalp with the fringe of red hair and the nasty little mouth always being wetted with that snaky tongue – I was always surprised it wasn’t forked! – I know I can do very well without ’em.’

‘I believe he wasn’t generally liked in the neighbourhood,’ said Laura, convinced now that she had never met him.

‘Liked? He was absolutely loathed. Nothing was ever pinned on him, so far as I know, but I’ve heard that he was always playing dirty little tricks and doing people down. I did hear that he was pretty shady in other matters—bigger ones, too. Smuggling. This fellow Grant I mentioned…’

‘Would that be the Grant who lives at Coinneamh Lodge, about a dozen miles this side of Tigh-Osda?—a man with a wife and small kid?’

‘No. This is a young chap who lodges with the post-mistress at Crioch. She lets him do as he likes with the bit of ground she dignifies by the name of her ‘policies.’ He’s a particularly keen gardener and always interested in our catalogues, although he doesn’t buy very much from us because he hasn’t much space.’

‘Is he in his early twenties, with light-brown hair? And does he switch from fairly intelligible Scots to standard English, as the mood takes him?’

‘That sounds like the same lad. Why, do you know him?’

‘Well,’ said Laura cautiously. ‘I’ve met him once or twice. What were you going to tell me about him? Look, come with us and have a drink. Our hotel is not licensed, but the one next door is.’

‘Grant’s all right, you know,’ said Curtis, over the drinks. His raised eyebrows seemed to demand explanations from Laura. She gave them.

‘So, you see, I don’t know what to make of him,’ she added, at the end of her recital. ‘He may be all right, but something has scared him, and, I should say, it’s some sort of guilty knowledge that he possesses. Still, I can’t possibly give him an alibi. I don’t even know at what time the murder was committed.’

Curtis wagged his head and, swallowing the rest of his whisky, gazed into the bottom of the glass.

‘This red-bearded old chap you met on Tannasgan,’ he said, ‘would be some sort of relation to the laird, no doubt. But I wonder where the other one was? He could have been dead by the time you arrived—at least, according to what I read in the papers.’

‘Wherever he was, I don’t think he was in the house, unless, as you say, he was already dead. You see, I saw quite a lot of the place, one way and the other, and I could have been certain that nobody was at home but myself, the Corries and this man whom I took to be the laird.’

Curtis shook his head again.

‘I’m glad you got out of it when you did,’ he said. ‘It’s an odd sort of set-up. How are the police getting on?’

I’ve no idea,’ said Laura, ‘and, although I’m a Scot by birth, I’ve very little knowledge of legal procedure up here. I know they don’t hold inquests in the English fashion, but that’s about all.’

‘You’ve had no visits from the police?’

‘So far, none. I couldn’t help them, anyway. But you were going to tell me about some trick or other that the laird had played on young Grant.’

‘Yes, I was, but I’m not so sure about telling anybody else about it now. I don’t suppose it would be considered enough to supply Grant with a possible motive for murder, but – well, murder has been committed and Grant was on Tannasgan, or may have been, at the time.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Laura, ‘and, as I’ve told you, I’ve only his word for it that the killing was done while the pipes were skirling their loudest. Besides, if that were so, the piper could hardly have been the killer. You couldn’t stick a man with a skian dhu and manage the pipes at the same time, could you?’

‘I’m not an authority on piping or stabbing, let alone a combination of the two,’ said Curtis. ‘Look here, it’s my