Last Writes Page 9

  ‘But deid all the same,’ said Malcolm Alcaig flatly.

  ‘Must be,’ said Ian Macrae ineluctably. ‘There.’

  ‘Dead, then.’ Rhuaraidh Macmillan’s pardonable anger at the men was compounded by his having to accept that his dislike of wagers was yet another sign of his now being well and truly middle-aged. He liked the condition no more than did the next man but it was undeniable. And he had been made even more cross because the three men in front of him had just brought that uncomfortable realisation a little nearer.

  ‘Aye, then,’ conceded Hamish Urquhart. ‘Dead.’

  ‘From the hen?’ The sheriff now knew for certain what he had been beginning to suspect for some time: that middle-age was most surely upon him.

  There was a shuffling of feet.

  ‘Just a simple bet, you say?’ he thundered to the three young loons now standing in front of him at his house at Drummondreach, outraged by their sorry tale. Besides, like it or not, these days he needed his secure hour in the afternoon and resented being disturbed.

  Hamish Urquhart hung his head.

  ‘Dead where?’ asked the sheriff bleakly. His writ ran throughout this part of Fearnshire and the deaths of all who died untimely there came within his jurisdiction. Those who died in their beds were outwith his remit: fever and old age had no need of the inquisition of Sheriff Rhuaraidh Macmillan.

  Sudden death did.

  Urquhart waved an arm and muttered ‘Away to the west.’

  ‘Stop havering, man,’ commanded the sheriff. ‘And tell me where.’

  ‘Cnoc Fyrish,’ answered Hamish Urquhart, jerking his shoulder in a more northerly direction.

  ‘Cnoc an Deilignidh,’ said Malcolm Alcaig.

  ‘Meann Chnoc,’ said Macrae of Cornton.

  ‘The Big Burn?’ asked the sheriff.

  There was a pregnant silence.

  ‘Well?’ demanded the sheriff.

  ‘Not the Big Burn,’ admitted Hamish reluctantly.

  ‘Where if not the Big Burn?’

  ‘The Ugly Burn.’

  ‘Strath Glass, then,’ divined the sheriff. ‘So where in Strath Glass?’ he asked impatiently.

  ‘Near Novar,’ said Hamish Urquhart vaguely.

  The sheriff said, suddenly struck by an unhappy thought, ‘Where exactly at Novar?’

  Urquhart stirred uncomfortably. ‘The Black Rock.’

  The sheriff said sharply, ‘Places don’t come more dangerous than the Black Rock at Novar.’

  He meant it. The site was just a narrow fissure in the rock, high above the surrounding land and immeasurably deep. It was with good reason that that stretch of the River Glass at the bottom of the chasm was known as the Ugly Burn.

  ‘And you all know that,’ he said.

  ‘Aye,’ admitted Urquhart uneasily. ‘We ken’t that, right enough.’

  ‘That’s what made it such a good hen,’ said Ian Macrae naively. He quickly subsided into silence, though, when he caught sight of the sheriff’s basilisk expression.

  ‘This man that’s either dead or missing …’ began the sheriff sarcastically, motioning the hall boy to summon his clerk and get the little palfrey he used for rough terrain saddled.

  ‘Both,’ said Malcolm Alcaig, not a man noted for his intellect.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Calum Farquharson of that ilk,’ supplied Malcolm Alcaig.

  ‘Ye’ll ken him, maybe?’ said Ian Macrae.

  It wasn’t so much a question as a statement. The sheriff was famous as a seannachie: the genealogy of the Highlands had been bred in his bones. Besides, Calum Farquharson had been a troublemaker since childhood.

  ‘I know him fine,’ said Rhuaraidh Macmillan dryly. A blackavised giant of a man, was Calum Farquharson, given to boasting, and with not half enough brain to go with his brawn. ‘So what was the hen, then?’ he asked crisply.

  ‘The man was always so fu’ of hisself,’ put in Malcolm Alcaig obliquely. ‘Farquharson had no modesty at all.’

  ‘He thought he could do it,’ shrugged Hamish Urquhart.

  ‘Do what?’ asked the sheriff.

  ‘Clear it.’

  ‘Clear it?’ barked Rhuaraidh Macmillan. ‘The Black Rock? Was he mad? It must be all of fifteen foot across at the narrowest.’

  ‘Seventeen,’ said Malcolm Alcaig.

  ‘We measured it with a rope,’ said Ian Macrae ingenuously.

  ‘No man can clear that distance,’ said the sheriff, turning as the hall boy led his little steed out of the steading, accompanied by his clerk. He swung himself into the saddle and motioned the others to follow him. ‘And,’ he added sourly, ‘even Calum should have known that you can’t cross a chasm in two stages.’

  ‘Lachlan Leanaig bet him he couldn’t clear it,’ said Hamish, falling in behind the little steed. ‘That was the hen.’

  ‘And he couldna’,’ said Malcolm, looking round at the other two, ‘could he?’

  ‘No,’ said Hamish.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ian Macrae suddenly.

  ‘What!’ exclaimed Hamish.

  ‘He could,’ insisted Ian Macrae.

  They all stared at him.

  ‘He could,’ insisted Ian Macrae, ‘but he didn’t,’ he added hastily. ‘Not then, anyway.’

  ‘But before?’ barked the sheriff. His clerk was already busy making a note.

  ‘Aye,’ said Ian Macrae. ‘He cleared it right enough before.’

  ‘Before what?’ demanded the sheriff.

  ‘Before the hen.’

  ‘He didn’t tell us that,’ said Hamish Urquhart, surprised. ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday,’ said Ian insouciantly. ‘He cleared it all right yesterday.’

  ‘We didn’t know that, Macrae,’ said Hamish Urquhart, turning on his friend. ‘How did you?’

  ‘I was in the wood and I saw him,’ said Ian simply. ‘He didn’t see me, though.’

  Hamish Urquhart stopped in his tracks and said indignantly, ‘Then it wasn’t a proper hen after all.’

  ‘Highland gentlemen don’t bet on certainties,’ agreed the sheriff dryly, looking down on them from his mount, and leaving aside for the time being the more germane question of whether Lachlan Leanaig had also known Calum Farquharson had cleared the distance the day before. That could come later. ‘So why didn’t he clear it again today?’

  That silenced them all.

  ‘He had this pole …’ began Hamish Urquhart eventually.

  ‘But it slipped.’

  ‘It was bendy enough, all right,’ volunteered Malcolm.

  ‘We saw him test it before he made the leap.’

  ‘And long enough,’ offered Ian Macrae. ‘He knew that, anyway, from yesterday.’

  ‘And yet you watched him fall,’ concluded the sheriff balefully.

  ‘Och, we couldna’ do anything else,’ protested Hamish Urquhart. ‘There was no stopping him once he’d taken the hen.’

  ‘There was no stopping him once he started to fall,’ observed Ian Macrae, Younger, of Cornton.

  The sheriff glared at him. Ian Macrae wasn’t any brighter than Calum Farquharson and that wasn’t saying much for either of them.

  Malcolm Alcaig said, ‘And nobody knows how far it is to the bottom, do they?’

  Nobody did know.

  It was as deep as that.

  ‘It’s nothing but a wee cleft in the hill,’ muttered Hamish Urquhart rebelliously. ‘There’s no width to it at all.’

  ‘Maybe, but no one comes out alive at the foot of it,’ said the sheriff. ‘You all know that.’ The cleft ran for a good few hundred yards between the rocks: the length had been measured time and again, right enough. It was the depth that hadn’t.

  ‘We tried to get in from below with a flare,’ said Hamish Urquhart.

  ‘Afterwards,’ said Ian Macrae.

  ‘But it blew out,’ said Malcolm Alcaig, ‘like it always does.’

  ‘It was aye dark in there,’ shivered Ian Macrae. ‘You couldn’t see your hand in front
of your face.’

  ‘And you were frightened,’ finished the sheriff for them, digging his heels in to the palfrey’s sides to urge it on.

  ‘They say the Devil himself lives under the Black Rock,’ said Hamish.

  ‘I’ll have no talk of diablerie, you understand,’ said the sheriff firmly. ‘You can’t be blaming Himself for a bad hen.’ He looked round. ‘And where’s Lachlan Leanaig now?’

  ‘He’s away to the Cloutie Well with Farquharson’s coat,’ Hamish Urquhart told him. ‘The man took it off before he jumped and left it on the ground.’

  ‘He’ll no be needing it now anyway,’ remarked Ian Macrae.

  ‘A wishing well’ll do no good to a man already lying dead,’ said the sheriff. ‘You should know that. All of you,’ he added balefully, looking round at the sorry bunch before him. ‘Even you. And that includes Lachlan Leanaig.’

  ‘No harm in trying the Cloutie Well,’ muttered Hamish Urquhart obstinately. ‘No harm at all.’

  ‘This hen …’ began the sheriff on another tack, ‘Was it for merks?’

  Hamish Urquhart shook his head. ‘No, no, Farquharson has no need of money.’

  ‘Not now, anyway,’ said Ian Macrae, Younger, of Cornton.

  ‘Not then, either,’ supplemented Malcolm Alcaig. ‘He’s got land enough and to spare.’

  ‘So …’ The sheriff was getting impatient, ‘what was the stake then?’

  The young bloods shuffled their feet, looking anywhere save at the Sheriff of Fearnshire, and kept silent.

  ‘I’ll have the three of you put in irons in an instant …’ threatened Rhuaraidh Macmillan.

  ‘Four,’ said the incorrigible Ian Macrae of Cornton.

  ‘So that’s the way of it, is it?’ deduced the sheriff, unsurprised. ‘So what did Lachlan Leanaig bet Calum Farquharson, then?’ Lachlan Leanaig was a wild man, too, if ever there was one.

  ‘That Calum couldn’t clear the Black Rock,’ said Hamish.

  ‘And the stake?’ went on Sheriff Macmillan inexorably.

  ‘Och, it was only a woman,’ mumbled Hamish.

  Sheriff Macmillan tightened his lips, prudently keeping his own counsel. It was only a woman ruling Scotland just now and there was not a lot to be said for her. And what there was, he thought to himself, was better not said aloud.

  Malcolm Alcaig was more forthcoming. ‘Jemima from Balblair,’ he said.

  ‘Big Jemima,’ said Ian Macrae, waving an arm in the direction of the south-east. ‘Lachlan’s fancy woman, too.’

  Rhuaraidh Macmillan made no answer to this, only partly because he had no breath left now with which to do so. Any doubt that the Sheriff of Fearnshire might have had about his growing older had definitely left him halfway up the climb to the top of the Black Rock. That had been very soon after the going had got too steep for his little mount and he had had to use his own two feet from then on.

  But he kept silent partly, too, because from what he’d heard she who was known as Big Jemima from Balblair had much the same way with her as far as men were concerned as did Her Majesty at Holyrood. There had been the Queen’s wee mannie, David Rizzio, and then the Earl of Darnley and now James Bothwell … No good would seem to have come to them either.

  ‘Calum had got on the wrong side of Lachlan over Big Jemima,’ explained Hamish Urquhart. ‘Lachlan said he’d forget the whole stushie if Calum cleared the Black Rock.’

  ‘This hen,’ said the sheriff acidly, ‘when was it laid?’

  ‘The day before yesterday,’ replied Hamish Urquhart.

  ‘And where, may I ask, was Lachlan Leanaig yesterday when Calum was practising his leap?’ enquired the sheriff when he had got enough of his breath back to speak.

  There was a silence, broken by the ineffable Ian Macrae. ‘I saw him going down the path to Evanton. That was after I came out of the wood.’

  ‘Was it, indeed?’ said the sheriff slowly, motioning his clerk to write that down. No one in Edinburgh had been eager to write down what had happened to Rizzio and it seemed no one knew exactly what had happened to Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley at Kirk o’Field or, if they did, they weren’t keen to write that down either. But Rhuaraidh Macmillan was Sheriff of Fearnshire and he would cause to be written that which he found, and all of which he found. Not for him the mockery that had been the trial of the Earl of Bothwell, he who was now married to the woman who was Mary, Queen of Scots.

  ‘But I don’t know if he’d seen Calum clear it,’ offered Ian Macrae.

  ‘Had Leanaig seen you?’ asked the sheriff pertinently.

  Ian Macrae shook his head. ‘No, no, I was still in the wood then.’

  ‘So you did see Calum leap and Lachlan might have done so, too,’ concluded the sheriff. ‘And neither of them knew you could have known anything.’

  ‘Aye,’ agreed Ian Macrae, nodding. ‘That’s the right of it.’

  ‘If Calum knew he could clear it and Lachlan knew Calum could clear it,’ objected Hamish Urquhart heatedly, ‘then I still say it wasn’t a proper hen at all.’

  ‘That,’ said the sheriff soberly, ‘is something I am taking in to avizandum.’

  Hamish Urquhart looked at the sheriff blankly, while Malcolm Alcaig poked his friend in the ribs and said, ‘It means he’s thinking.’

  ‘Taking matters into consideration,’ the sheriff translated for him as they reached the top of the Black Rock. What the sheriff was thinking about was a wager taken by a man – Calum Farquharson – who had already demonstrated that he could accomplish the feat concerned; and a wager made by a man – Lachlan Leanaig – who might very well already have known that it could be done. What the sheriff did know – had always known – was that two wrongs never did make a right.

  ‘Wait you behind me, all of you,’ he said, ‘while I take a look for myself.’ Sheriff Rhuaraidh Macmillan stepped delicately over the stony ground that had been the platform from which Calum Farquharson had taken his fatal leap, though keeping well back from the edge of the drop. ‘Where were you all when Calum took his jump?’

  ‘We three were over the other side, and Lachlan was with him this side,’ said Hamish.

  ‘Seeing him off,’ said Ian Macrae.

  ‘Aye, that he was,’ agreed the sheriff dourly. ‘With a vengeance.’ He stooped and touched the ground in one place and then another. He brought his fingers up before his face to examine them more clearly and then asked, ‘When did you all last take meat together?’

  ‘The day before yesterday,’ said Hamish, looking mystified.

  ‘And where?’ barked the sheriff.

  ‘At Castle Balgalkin,’ stammered Hamish. ‘Lachlan’s brother’s place.’

  ‘Then that’s where Lachlan Leanaig can answer to a charge of murder,’ said the sheriff, turning away from the Black Rock.

  ‘Murder?’ echoed Hamish Urquhart. ‘But it was only a hen.’

  ‘It was a calculated killing,’ said the sheriff sternly. ‘Why do you suppose you three were sent up the other side?’

  ‘To catch Calum when he landed?’ suggested Malcolm Alcaig.

  ‘So that you couldn’t see the fat on the stone that made his pole slip,’ said the sheriff, advancing his sticky fingers for their inspection. ‘And which is probably why Lachlan Leanaig is off to the Cloutie Well with Calum’s coat. I daresay there was fat on that too, after Calum took it off and threw it on the ground just before he jumped.’

  PLANE FARE

  ‘I can’t tell you how excited the children are, Henry.’ Wendy Witherington had just met her brother off the London train at Berebury. ‘They’ve been looking forward so much to your coming down.’

  ‘Nothing like as much as I have to getting away from London, believe me.’ Henry Tyler gave his sister a friendly kiss and heaved his Gladstone bag into the boot of the little car standing outside the railway station.

  ‘You poor dear,’ said Wendy. ‘It must be hard going there for you just now.’

  ‘Between the Stresa Conference,’ said Henry, wh
o worked at the Foreign Office, ‘and the machinations of Herr Adolf Hitler, it is.’

  ‘Well,’ she said calmly, ‘you know that nothing exciting ever happens here in Calleshire so you should get a little rest while you’re with us.’

  ‘My dear sister, what makes you think that taking young Edward to Sir Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus isn’t going to be exciting? If that isn’t, then I don’t know what is.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ she conceded. ‘And I can assure you that you’re not the only one to be excited. Edward’s been talking about nothing except those magnificent men in their flying machines for weeks. He’s been saving up for the flight ever since Christmas.’

  ‘Good fellow.’

  ‘Actually,’ admitted Wendy, ‘he’s only got two shillings so far, but with the half a crown you’ve promised him, he’s nearly there.’ She steered the car out of the station forecourt. ‘I understand he has high hopes of getting the last sixpence out of his father.’

  ‘And what does Tim have to say about that?’

  ‘I think,’ said Tim’s wife, ‘that he hopes to negotiate a deal with Edward over removing some weeds in the lawn in exchange for that sixpence, but I’m keeping out of that one.’

  ‘Wise woman,’ declared Henry Tyler stoutly. ‘If only some politicians could manage to keep their distance from some equally delicate negotiations, our life at the office would be much more manageable.’

  ‘Treaty trouble?’

  ‘It’s not so much treaties that are the problem,’ he answered her seriously, ‘as hidden alliances.’

  ‘Ah …’ Wendy negotiated a blind corner with care. ‘Secret promises.’

  ‘You could say, Wen,’ went on Henry, bruised from recent encounters with both Lord Halifax and Herr Joachim von Ribbentrop, ‘that treaties are only written to be torn up …’

  ‘I wouldn’t say any such thing,’ she protested.

  ‘But at least,’ he carried on regardless, ‘with a treaty you can see what was and what wasn’t agreed in the first place. Gives you somewhere to start.’

  ‘Henry, you’re getting cynical.’

  ‘I can assure you, my dear, with the best will in the world, hidden alliances can undo a country completely.’ Henry stared out of the passenger window as the car passed through the environs of the pleasant and peaceful little market town of Berebury and wondered how long it would remain both pleasant and peaceful. ‘I’m glad Edward’s happy, anyway. That’s something to be grateful for at this sad juncture in world history.’