My Bones Will Keep

Without waiting for an answer, she walked down the hall and through a green-baize door at the end of it. She came back almost at once and reported that nobody seemed to be about.

‘Did you try the kitchen door?’ asked Dame Beatrice.

‘Locked, but neither bolted not barred, so the Kirkintillochs may have gone shopping.’

‘The…?’

‘Oh, the old wife told me they came from Kirkintilloch. Their name’s Corrie. And that’s another funny thing. If Mrs Grant’s description of the laird was correct, the Corries aren’t a bit the kind of servants you’d think he’d engage, nor would they be likely to stay if he did. They’re really decent people.’

‘I think, you know, that people take the work they can get. Now I will give one more glance at your sleeping friend and then we will take to the boat, if that is what you would like.’

The red-bearded man was still asleep, so down to the boathouse they went.

‘Unless you wish for my services at the oars, madam, I suggest I stay here and apprise you with three short blasts on my police whistle if the gentleman wakes up, or strangers approach,’ said George, who appeared to be enjoying himself. Dame Beatrice agreed to this plan, but asked whether he would not be bored if they left him by himself. After all, he was one of the party.

‘Thank you for inquiring, madam,’ he said, ‘but I have my pocket sketching block and a soft black pencil. The views are extensive and imposing, and the air is clement. I shall do very well indeed.’

So Dame Beatrice and Laura left him, and Laura soon had the boat out on the loch and was pulling round to the blind side of the house. As she rowed past the white, windowless facade, she could see that the loch broadened, and when she had rounded the house, and come to the back of it, she could also see that Tannasgan was not the only island in the loch; it was merely the largest. From where she was, four stony outcroppings, one thickly wooded, came into her view. On the further shore of the loch rose the high, bare slopes of Ben Dun which she had seen from the opposite side, and with their backs to the lower slopes of the mountain and their suspicious, inquisitive gaze fastened on the boat and its occupants, were a dozen or so of wide-horned, shaggy, Highland cattle.

‘A picturesque group,’ remarked Dame Beatrice.

‘Highland cattle always look so young for their age, and Ben Dun is a fine chunk of Lewisian Gneiss,’ said Laura. ‘Learnt that at College and I’ve always been proud of knowing it. Nevertheless, the mainland, at the moment, does not attract me, so what about exploring that island with the trees on it?’

‘A childishly pleasant idea. Pray manoeuvre us thither.’

The loch was shallow close inshore to the wooded islet, and Laura paddled cautiously to the land. They tied up to a tree and, Laura leading the way, followed a rudimentary path which began at the water’s edge and disappeared into the woods.

‘Made by the police exploring all avenues, I expect,’ she said. ‘Wonder what they expected to find? You’d think they would have stuck to Tannasgan. I suppose it didn’t yield any clues.’

Dame Beatrice offered no criticism of this view, and they continued to follow the little path as it wound in and out among the trees. Laura very soon changed her opinion.

‘It wasn’t made by the police. It’s more like a bit of landscape gardening. It’s been worked out. It makes the woods seem ever so much bigger than they are,’ she said. She realised another thing, too, and gave voice after about another hundred and fifty yards of motiveless perseverance. ‘Makes you think of Three Men in a Boat,’ she observed.

‘In what way?’ Dame Beatrice demanded, interested to learn whether Laura’s deductions coincided with her own.

‘You know – the maze at Hampton Court.’

‘I see that you recognise the silver birch we are coming to.’

‘That, and the clump of heather in the shape of a half-moon, and the cotton-grass in that circular swamp and the little trench where peat has been dug.’

‘Amazing! I had not realised quite how observant you must be.’

‘I’m going to take a chance and see whether I can cut the cackle and get to the centre. You’d better stay here. I’ll yodel if I’m lucky.’

‘Very well, child.’ Dame Beatrice was quite capable of a little rough walking, but she was prepared to respect and encourage Laura’s pioneering spirit, and remained where she was to await Laura’s call.

This came even sooner than she had expected. Laura had plunged through a tangle of undergrowth and was able, almost immediately, to announce that her inconoclastic plan had worked out. She yodelled happily. Dame Beatrice followed the trail and, in the clearing which formed the centre of the maze, came upon an extraordinary and most unexpected sight.

Laura waved a large and shapely hand.

‘Welcome to Battersea Park,’ she said. ‘What do you think of the monumental masonry?’

Dame Beatrice inspected the inanimate tenants of the clearing. They made a strange addition to the living vegetation of birch and pine.

‘Let us look more closely at these petrified fauna of another and more picturesque age,’ she suggested. ‘Let us inspect these phenomena of the imagination of mediaeval man.’

They inspected them. All were fabulous beasts rendered crudely but powerfully by the hand of some amateur sculptor.

‘I observe the basilisk, the gryphon, the werewolf (at the moment of changing from man to wolf – very clever, that!), the salamander and the gorgon,’ said Dame Beatrice, after she had studied the exhibits in silence. ‘I wonder why the salamander is in pieces and is covered in what looks like soot?’

‘I wonder whether he carved them himself?’ said Laura, ignoring the work of some iconoclast