‘Ah, weel,’ he said, ‘ye’re entitled to your opinion. So ye believe Todd was leeing when he told Carbridge he had slept wi’ her the night at the airport hotel?’
‘Certainly I do! Besides, a man who would claim that, and, I suppose, boast about it, to a fellow like Carbridge is a skunk. There’s not a word of truth in it, and I don’t see Todd as that kind of a louse, anyway.’
‘Oo, aye? Then wat about Rowardennan?’
I tried to think back. Rowardennan, on Loch Lomond, was where Hera and I had taken the trip across the water to Inverbeg. I remembered that Todd, with others of the youth hostellers not of our party, had crossed with us. He had given us a wave and a word, but, once ashore at Inverbeg, we had seen no more of him. Hera and I, I remembered, had missed the return boat and had spent the night at the hotel, crossing back again in the morning. We had, as we had arranged, occupied separate rooms at the hotel. There had been no sign of Todd on the return trip and he was certainly with the others when they set off next morning.
I said, ‘Well, and what about Rowardennan? Todd didn’t spend the night at the hotel in Inverbeg. I would have known.’
‘Ye think ye would have known, but let me tell ye, laddie, wherever he spent the night, it was not in the Rowardennan youth hostel. I would hae kenned that, better than ye would hae kenned that he had your lassie tae bed.’
‘Tell us more about the tour,’ said Laura tactfully.
‘I’ll dae juist that,’ said Perth, looking at her with gratitude.
I said, ‘I’ll take your word for it that he didn’t spend the night in the hostel with the rest of you. You would have known about that, because of the dormitory system, but you will not persuade me that he spent it at the hotel at Inverbeg. We would have spotted him either there or when he got off the boat coming back to Rowardennan the next morning.’
‘Gang your ain gait,’ said Perth. ‘I willna press the point.’
I nodded, but my memory told me that at Crianlarich Todd had suggested openly to Hera that he should escort her to the hotel after the rumpus I had had with Carbridge. I began to wonder, as the poison of suspicion lodged itself in my mind, whether he would have made such a suggestion had he not had some grounds for believing that she might fall in with it.
Dame Beatrice assisted in dissolving the tension somewhat by asking whether anything had happened between Rowardennan and Crianlarich, while Hera and I were on our own and not with the rest of the party.
I did not remember telling anybody in particular that just before Hera and I reached the hostel at Crianlarich we had come upon Perth and the students busy with their hammers and chisels and all the rest of their geological gear, but I suppose I must have done, or she would not have followed up her question by remarking that it was on that part of The Way that there appeared to have been some slight evidence of dissension.
According to Perth, the trouble, if that is not too strong and misleading a word, began on the stretch between Rowardennan and Inversnaid. There was a rather pointless argument between Tansy and Carbridge about the name of a spectacular mountain — Carbridge claiming that it was called the Cobbler, Tansy maintaining that it was Ben Arthur.
‘But both are right,’ Laura interposed at this point. ‘Ben Arthur is the Cobbler. There are three peaks and these, seen against the skyline, are supposed to represent a cobbler, his wife and his daughter, or some such rubbish. As a matter of fact, the Cobbler is only the anglicised way of pronouncing the Gaelic An Gobaileach, the g being spoken like a k or a hard c. The Gaelic name has nothing to do with shoe-mending. It simply means ‘forked peak’. The ‘Arthur’ I imagine is the name given it for territorial reasons by a clan or sept. The MacArthurs, in a sense, are Campbells, but they claim seniority. When Ewan Campbell resigned his lands in the fourteenth century, King Robert the Second granted them to Arthur Campbell, the son, wherefore the peak was named Arthur, I suppose as a claim to it.’
We all listened to this with the uneasy respect which is accorded to a knowledgeable purveyor of useless information. Laura sensed immediately that the audience was becoming restive. She waved a shapely hand in apology and said, ‘Sorry. I get carried away. Anyhow, what a stupid thing for those two to argue about.’
‘Yes, it hardly seems a matter of life and death,’ said Dame Beatrice, bringing us back to the real seriousness of the matter in hand. ‘What happened after that?’
It appeared that Rhoda had taken up the subject in support of her friend and then had said that the pace set by Todd and Carbridge was turning what ought to be a pleasant ramble into a marathon race. Jane Minch had joined in to complain that her feet were hurting her, but her brother had pointed out that going more slowly was not the best remedy. Better, he said, to push on and get a longer rest at the end of the day.
‘What of the students?’ asked Dame Beatrice. ‘I understand from Mr Melrose that they too preferred to linger a little on The Way.’ (That, of course, although again I did not remember telling anybody about it, had begun at Inchcailloch, the Loch Lomond island which Hera and I had not visited. It was to do with the geological survey.) However, it did not seem that there had been any more serious disputes among the party. The men, in fact, had taken it in turns to carry Jane’s rucksack as well as their own, the exception being Trickett, who said that, with the extra equipment the geologists carried, he was physically incapable of knight-errantry.
‘Did you yourself lend a hand to beauty in distress?’ said Dame Beatrice to Perth.
‘Oo aye, I did my share, but the going, in some places, was verra severe on a lassie wi’ sair feet, even if she wasna hampered wi’ her gear.’
‘Would you say that any one person in the party took a particular dislike to Carbridge?’ asked Dame Beatrice. Perth shook his head and answered that the nearest to that would be the two clerks, Tansy and Rhoda. For one thing, he said, Tansy in particular had an eye on Todd and found Carbridge, with his extreme mateyness and his determination to keep his flock together and permit no straying for purposes of dalliance, extremely frustrating and irritating.
‘Although I’m bound to tell ye,’ said Perth, ‘that the man Todd showed nae disposition to respond to her female wiles. Gin his een strayed ony place when Miss Camden wisna wi’ us, it would hae been that he lookit at the student Patsy Carlow.’
I said nothing, but I could have remarked that, if Todd’s thoughts were on Hera, he would hardly have looked twice at Tansy, anyway. Although, as I had thought when first I met her and Rhoda, Tansy was probably kind-hearted, she could scarcely be called glamorous. The forthcoming and much younger Patsy might be a different proposition.
‘The twa clerks left the party at Crianlarich,’ Perth went on. ‘They didna spend the night at the hostel, but went on to Fort William and there we met them again. Myself and the students spent three days in the hills and slept at the Crianlarich youth hostel, while the ither four — Todd, Carbridge and the Minches, went on. We were a wee thing hindered by mist, but guid work was done to the satisfaction o’ the students and we also took transport, as did the women Parks and Green, to get ourselves to Fort William.’
‘Did you do anything there apart from climbing the mountain?’ asked Laura.
‘Oo, aye. There are shops in the toon, ye’ll ken, and lassies always go wild when there are shops. Souvenirs were purchased and displayed, for, as we were all intending to take the train when we had put in three nights at the youth hostel at Fort William, there was little need to fash about a little extra weight in the packs and the students could leave everything at the hostel while we climbed the mountain.’