My Bones Will Keep

Don’t be silly.’

Grant wagged his head and looked apologetic.

‘I don’t wonder you’re mad at me,’ he said. ‘I suppose I’ve made myself a fair nuisance to you.’

‘Why have you come here?’

‘In answer to your letter. Losh, but the old wife was angry when the postwoman, Maggie McTaggart, handed in your envelope! She always scrutinises the mail, does Maggie, when she collects it out of the box. There’s so little of it, you see, because the people staying at the hotel have their own posting box and Maggie collects there, too, so if there’s half a dozen letters with the postmistress that seems an awful lot.’

‘Don’t dodge the issue. Why have you come here?’

‘Why, to have a crack with you. Why else?’

‘Oh, cut out the witticisms,’ said Laura ‘We don’t mind trying to help you, but not if you want to be fresh. Now, then, tell us the tale and we’ll do our best to believe you.’

‘Very good. I do realise that I’ve made myself a great nuisance to you, but…’

‘Cut the cackle, for goodness’ sake, and begin.’

‘Yes, well, to cut a long story short…’

‘But we don’t want you to cut it short,’ said Dame Beatrice, giving Laura the cue to slip out of the ring. ‘Please give us every possible detail. Begin at the beginning, illuminate and expand the middle and proceed at a decorous pace to the end.’

‘Well, Dame Beatrice, the story begins in Edinburgh.’

‘Eh?’ exclaimed Laura involuntarily.

‘The story begins in Edinburgh. I was standing waiting to cross the road when I saw an accident. Well, as you know now, I’m a reporter and, like all reporters, I’m always on the look-out for a story. That day I got one. I saw a man pushed under a car.’

Laura, in spite of her excitement, remained apparently calm.

‘You did?’ she said. ‘When would that have been?’

Dame Beatrice intervened before Grant could answer.

‘Tell us, please, Mr Grant, what you were doing in Edinburgh at that time.’

‘Doing? Oh, you mean my reason for being there! Why, I was covering your Conference, Dame Beatrice. You may not know it, but all Scotland is interested – ay, intensely interested—in anything to do with education.’

‘I was not speaking on education,’ said Dame Beatrice mildly.

‘Maybe not, but I was sent to cover the Conference and we regard such a gathering as educational.’

‘I see. Please continue.’

‘I managed to get leave from my editor to be in Edinburgh before the Conference was actually in session. I said I wanted to interview some of the notables in their hotels. What I really wanted – and he knew it, the douce man! —was to have a wee bit of a fling the way you can’t get it in these parts. Oh, nothing I wouldn’t care for my mother to know about. You can’t get that sort of a fling in Edinburgh, anyway—but just to get to a theatre and walk with the crowds along Princess Street and that kind of thing, and maybe, over a dram, hear of a job on the Scotsman. Of course, I did some interviewing, too. I met two or three of the professors and psychologists and pursuaded them to give me a few facts and theories that I could send back to Freagair to show that I was on the job, and it was when I was coming away from one of these interviews—with Signor Ginetti it was…’

‘Ah, yes. The distinguished Italian alienist who thinks that apes are descended from men and that, in time, there will be no more human beings but a sort of robot world of intelligent but pitiless primates with neither religion nor morals,’ said Dame Beatrice, amused.

‘That’s the laddie. Speaks very good English, too. I left him at something after six and I was waiting, with others, to cross the road to my bus stop… I was staying a bit out of the city for cheapness… when it happened. A big car came by, and a couple of men hurled another man clean in front of it. He didn’t stand a chance, and neither did the driver of the car.’

‘And you would recognise those men again?’

‘I couldn’t swear to them, but I think I would recognise them if I saw them. I never have seen them again and, of course, in the general consternation, they vanished. I recognised you, too, Mrs Gavin, when you turned up at the boathouse on Tannasgan that night. You were in the crowd waiting to cross that road.’

‘Yes, I was,’ Laura agreed. ‘It shook me considerably. I didn’t see you, though.’

‘Well, you’re more noticeable for a woman, being so tall and well-dressed and carrying yourself so well (if I may say so), than I am for a man. I’m only of average height and I was wearing the run-of-the-mill uniform of flannel trousers and tweed jacket. There was no reason for anybody to notice me.’

‘Did you go to the police?’ asked Laura.

‘No, I did not. There was so little I could tell them and there was no proof of what I’d seen. I doubt whether anybody else was aware of what happened.’

Laura was about to speak, but Dame Beatrice dropped a lace-edged handkerchief, one of the code signs between them that Laura was to be silent. Grant bent and picked it up for her and the moment passed.

‘This does not explain what you were doing on Tannasgan that night,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘No, but I’m coming to that. It’s all part of the same story. You see, one of the men who did the pushing was employed, as I well knew, by Cu Dubh himself, and I was fool enough to think that at An Tigh Mor I might be able to get a real scoop – an exclusive story good enough to qualify me for promotion to something a whole lot better