II
The Procurator Fiscal
The procurator fiscal breakfasted at 8:30, punctually, and at 8:30 as usual he entered his severely upholstered dining-room and shut the door behind him. The windows looked into a spacious garden with a belt of trees leading up to the house from the gate, and this morning Mr. Rattar, who was a machine for habit, departed in one trifling particular from his invariable routine. Instead of sitting straight down to the business of breakfasting, he stood for a minute or two at the window gazing into the garden, and then he came to the table very thoughtfully.
No man in that northern county was better known or more widely respected than Mr. Simon Rattar. In person, he was a thickset man of middle height and elderly middle age, with cold steady eyes and grizzled hair. His clean shaved face was chiefly remarkable for the hardness of his tight-shut mouth, and the obstinacy of the chin beneath it. Professionally, he was lawyer to several of the larger landowners and factor on their estates, and lawyer and adviser also to many other people in various stations in life. Officially, he was procurator fiscal for the county, the setter in motion of all criminal processes, and generalissimo, so to speak, of the police; and one way and another, he had the reputation of being a very comfortably well off gentleman indeed.
As for his abilities, they were undeniably considerable, of the hard, cautious, never-caught-asleep order; and his taciturn manner and way of drinking in everything said to him while he looked at you out of his steady eyes, and then merely nodded and gave a significant little grunt at the end, added immensely to his reputation for profound wisdom. People were able to quote few definite opinions uttered by “Silent Simon,” but any that could be quoted were shrewdness itself.
He was a bachelor, and indeed, it was difficult for the most fanciful to imagine Silent Simon married. Even in his youth he had not been attracted by the other sex, and his own qualities certainly did not attract them. Not that there was a word to be said seriously against him. Hard and shrewd though he was, his respectability was extreme and his observance of the conventions scrupulous to a fault. He was an elder of the Kirk, a nonsmoker, an abstemious drinker (to be an out and out teetotaler would have been a little too remarkable in those regions for a man of Mr. Rattar’s conventional tastes), and indeed in all respects he trod that sober path that leads to a semi-public funeral and a vast block of granite in the parish kirkyard.
He had acquired his substantial villa and large garden by a very shrewd bargain a number of years ago, and he lived there with just the decency that his condition in life enjoined, but with not a suspicion of display beyond it. He kept a staff of two competent and respectable girls, just enough to run a house of that size, but only just; and when he wanted to drive abroad he hired a conveyance exactly suitable to the occasion from the most respectable hotel. His life, in short, was ordered to the very best advantage possible.
Enthusiastic devotion to such an extremely exemplary gentleman was a little difficult, but in his present housemaid, Mary MacLean, he had a girl with a strong Highland strain of fidelity to a master, and an instinctive devotion to his interests, even if his person was hardly the chieftain her heart demanded. She was a soft voiced, anxious looking young woman, almost pretty despite her nervous high strung air, and of a quiet and modest demeanour.
Soon after her master had begun breakfast, Mary entered the dining-room with an apologetic air, but a conscientious eye.
“Begging your pardon, sir,” she began, “but I thought I ought to tell you that when cook and me was going out to the concert last night we thought we saw something in the drive.”
Mr. Rattar looked up at her sharply and fixed his cold eyes on her steadily for a moment, never saying a word. It was exactly his ordinary habit, and she had thought she was used to it by now, yet this morning she felt oddly disconcerted. Then it struck her that perhaps it was the red cut on his chin that gave her this curious feeling. Silent Simon’s hand was as steady as a rock and she never remembered his having cut himself shaving before; certainly not as badly as this.
“Saw ‘something’?” he repeated gruffly. “What do you mean?”
“It looked like a man, sir, and it seemed to move into the trees almost as quick as we saw it!”
“Tuts!” muttered Simon.
“But there was two friends of ours meeting us in the road,” she hurried on, “and they thought they saw a man going in at the gate!”
Her master seemed a little more impressed.
“Indeed?” said he.
“So I thought it was my duty to tell you, sir.”
“Quite right,” said he.
“For I felt sure it couldn’t just be a gentleman coming to see you, sir, or he wouldn’t have gone into the trees.”
“Of course not,” he agreed briefly. “Nobody came to see me.”
Mary looked at him doubtfully and hesitated for a moment.
“Didn’t you even hear anything, sir?” she asked in a lowered voice.
Her master’s quick glance made her jump.
“Why?” he demanded.
“Because, sir, I found footsteps in the gravel this morning—where it’s soft with the rain, sir, just under the library window.”
Mr. Rattar looked first hard at her and then at his plate. For several seconds he answered nothing, and then he said:
“I did hear someone.”
There was something both in his voice and in his eye as he said this that was not quite like the usual Simon Rattar. Mary began to feel a sympathetic thrill.
“Did you look out of the window, sir?” she asked in a hushed voice.
Her master nodded and pursed his lips.
“But you didn’t see him, sir?”
“No,” said he.
“Who could
