‘No, no, I shan’t need you, and I can supply my own tomatoes. In other words, just come and go as you please. I expect you can find ways of amusing yourself, can you not?’
Laura affected to be stunned.
‘You don’t
Dame Beatrice waved a claw.
‘Don’t get into mischief,’ she said. ‘It is some time since I was in Edinburgh. Go along out and enjoy yourself. Tomorrow you can take me sight-seeing.’
Laura wasted no time. Basely abandoning the programme she had planned, she took a bus to Linlithgow and studied the inscription on a fountain:
People rushed to her assistance. Laura tried to tell them that she had suffered no hurt, but kindly hands insisted upon helping her to a seat under a tree and kindly Scottish voices asked her where she wanted to go. As the only place which Laura wished to visit was Linlithgow Palace, she announced this, and therefore (so extraordinary is the common reaction against a show of courage), she was abandoned on the spot by her well- wishers and undertook a somewhat limping pilgrimage alone.
‘St Michael is kind to strangers?’ thought Laura, hopping painfully up to the chief apartments of the palace in the wake of more active visitors. ‘Oh, well, we’ll wait and see.’
By the time she had seen the Great Hall and the chapel, and, in addition, the room in which Mary, Queen of Scots, was born, she had forgotten St Michael and his kindly interest in strangers and was anxious only to catch the bus and get back to the hotel.
It was a distance of seventeen miles and Laura was sure that she would be back in good time for dinner, as she had promised. When she got off the bus her injured leg not only hurt but had stiffened, so she decided to take a taxi instead of walking the comparatively short distance to the hotel. There were no cruising taxis, but she knew where there was a rank close at hand. To reach it she had to cross the road and it was while she was standing with a fair number of people on an island in the middle of the street, waiting for a stream of traffic to go by, that (her hearing being abnormally acute) she heard a man’s muttered words:
Suddenly there was an exclamation, followed by women’s screams, a screeching of brakes, and, next to Laura, a fainting girl. In the street the blue limousine, unable to pull up in time, discharged its chauffeur and a portly gentleman, the only other occupant, to gaze helplessly at a man’s body which lay in the roadway. A policeman came up. Laura and another woman took charge of the fainting girl, both glad of any excuse not to have to look at the mess in the road.
‘Terrible! Terrible!’ said a man nearby. ‘It was sheer suicide. What way should a body be doing a thing like that?’
‘But, of course, it wasn’t suicide,’ said the shattered Laura to Dame Beatrice when, having walked after all, she had rejoined her employer at the hotel. ‘It was murder. I’m certain of that.’ She recounted the mutterings she had overheard. ‘The only trouble is that I haven’t the faintest idea who said it. There were quite a pack of us waiting to cross and, as soon as the words were out, the deed was done. I waited and told the policeman. He made a note of my name and address but said that it was undoubtedly the man’s own fault and that the words I’d heard “held nae significance,” as the other people he had questioned after the ambulance had driven off had all been perfectly certain that the man had simply thrown up his arms and chucked himself under the wheels. So what do I do?’
‘It seems to me that you have done what you could,’ Dame Beatrice replied. ‘Besides, the policeman may have been right, you know. The words you overheard may have had no bearing on the matter at all.’
Laura tried to take comfort from this thought. On the following morning they went to Holyrood.
‘So that’s that,’ said Laura, when they had visited the Picture Gallery with its somewhat oddly conceived portraits of the Scottish kings from the brush of Jakob de Wet. From him, Laura suggested, may have stemmed the legend that the Scots are a mean, ungenerous, parsimonious, cheeseparing race. Dame Beatrice asked why and was informed that de Wet had been commissioned to produce one hundred and ten works of art (and pay for his own materials) in return for the average sum of two pounds four shillings per portrait.
‘No wonder they’re lousy,’ said Laura. ‘Let’s go to the Zoo.’
‘The Castle first. I like the view out to the Forth.’
‘Have you ever been into the dungeons?’
‘Yes, I was shown them once, but I believe that there is no general admission for visitors.’
‘I’d like to see them. I specialise in the macabre. What’s interesting about them?’
‘Well, if your injuries of yesterday will stand up to it, we will go and see. I know the mother of one of the senior officers of the Black Watch and the great-aunt of a captain in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. We should be able to bluff our way through.’
There proved to be no need for this. As they got out of the car on the Esplanade at the top of Ramsay Lane, a middle-aged man in the uniform of the Scots Guards saluted Dame Beatrice and exclaimed:
‘Well, well! It’s been a long, long time!’
‘Alastair McClennan!’
‘The same. And when are you going to Garadh again to see my cousin Margaret Stewart? She talks often of you in her letters.’
Dame Beatrice introduced him to Laura and mentioned the latter’s desire to inspect the dungeons. She had seen the dark hole which had formed the sixteenth-century prison of the Countess of Glamis, Laura explained, but not the dungeons under the Old Parliament Hall nor (for it seemed a time to strike while the iron was hot) the West Sally Port.
‘Before I take you to see that, Mrs Gavin,’ said he, ‘you must promise me two things: first, to sing “Bonny Dundee” – for, as doubtless you are aware, it was from there that Viscount Claverhouse left Edinburgh in order to raise the Highlands to fight for the Stuart cause—’
