‘What about Macbeth?’ asked Laura ‘He seems to be the heir. Wouldn’t he have had a pretty strong motive for murder? – to obtain possession, I mean.’
‘Well, there, you see, Mrs Gavin, you’re the strongest witness we’ve so far found in his favour.’
‘I have sometimes wondered whether the laird was killed on Tannasgan,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘or on the mainland.’
‘The Island of Ghosts!’ said Laura. ‘It sounds a sinister sort of name to me. Just the place to expect murder.’
‘There was once a monastry where this house stands,’ said the inspector, ‘but Norsemen from the Hebrides wrecked the place at the end of the eighth century, so I have read, and murdered the monks. That is the story and it goes on that the island has been haunted ever since.’
‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed Laura. ‘So it wasn’t Macbeth I fled from that night, but the ghosts! I knew there was something queer about this place!’ She looked over her shoulder fearfully and gasped to find a black-clothed figure standing just behind her shoulder.
‘Will I infuse the tea?’ asked Mrs Corrie.
‘Ay, Mrs Corrie,’ replied the inspector. ‘Ladies can always do with a tassie and so can I. You were saying, a while back, Dame Beatrice, that you have sometimes wondered whether Mr Bradan was killed here.’
‘I do not see how he can have been, and yet I cannot see how he could not have been. There is the skian-dhu, of course, but one cannot imagine even such an eccentric as Mr Macbeth entertaining Laura as he did, and asking her to extend her visit, if he had contemplated killing his cousin while she was in the house. Besides, unless the Corries were in collusion with Mr Macbeth and knew where the laird had been (we’ll say) incarcerated, why did Laura obtain no inkling of his presence and why did the young Mr Grant fail to obtain the interview that he wanted?’
‘Since you have interpreted the facts so far, ma’am, perhaps you know where the killing took place?’ said the inspector, smiling. Dame Beatrice shook her head.
‘I might hazard a guess,’ she said, ‘but it would be nothing more.’
‘Well, now!’
‘Tell me, first, whether the police know where it took place.’
‘We do.’
‘Then I will suppose that he was set upon in or near Inverness (since Edinburgh would have been too far away) and murdered on the wooded island where stand the carvings of the fabulous beasts.’
‘What brought you to that conclusion, I wonder? You mean that he ran into some sort of trouble in Inverness, but was actually murdered on Tannasgan?’
‘I did tell you that it was only a guess. One other thing that I know, however, is that Mr Bradan had interests in or near Edinburgh and that those interests were in shipping.’
‘How did you come to that conclusion?’
‘The fabulous beasts, Inspector.’ True to her half-given promise, she did not mention Grant’s regular visits to Inverness and Edinburgh.
‘The fabulous beasties, Dame Beatrice?’
‘Your men – no, I suppose it would have been the men from Inverness or Dingwall – must have seen them when they first searched these islands and rocks, and you appear to have seen them, too.’
‘Oh, ay, I’ve seen them, of course.’
‘Well, they must have had some significance. Not one of them, so far as I am aware, figures in Scottish legend.’
The inspector wrinkled his brow.
‘What way did you get on to shipping?’ he demanded. Dame Beatrice advanced her theories, bolstering them by describing the activities of herself and Laura. ‘So you thought maybe Mrs Gavin would be in trouble because she was in this house on the night of the murder,’ the inspector observed, when she had concluded her recital.
‘It took a little time to work out my theories,’ said Dame Beatrice blandly, ‘and we were not helped by the persistence with which the young reporter Grant dogged Mrs Gavin and waylaid her with requests for assistance in establishing his alibi. There was no doubt that he thought the murder was committed here. Once I had realised that he was in earnest about this, I began to wonder whether he was in any way responsible for the disposal of the body.’
‘You did, ma’am?’
‘Well, a mixture of the dramatic and the macabre is often a feature of the minds of his age and sex; then, he needed his scoop; then – and this, I think, Inspector, may be of the first importance – being a journalist and, as we know, an ambitious one, he may have found out something about the activities of Mr Bradan, and he may even have come here in the first place to blackmail Mr Bradan into using his influence to obtain him a post in Edinburgh. Now, do please tell us what our dear Robert Gavin has been up to when he has not been fishing for sharks or whatever it was.’
The inspector studied his shoes.
‘Well, well,’ he said. He hesitated for a few seconds. ‘Ah, well,’ he added in a tone of resignation, ‘fair’s fair, I suppose, so – you’ll not be letting a word of this go further?’
‘Well, I did mention the loss of the Saracen,’ said Dame Beatrice.
Chapter 16
The other Side of the Herring-Pond
‘For under shore the swart sands naked lay.’
George Chapman
« ^ »
‘PITY it was Inverness and not Edinburgh,’ said Laura, ‘because in Edinburgh, according to my Uncle Hamish, there would be two chief possibilities. The Castle Esplanade is one, but, in this case, I should say, a most unlikely choice because I simply don’t think you’d dare to risk attacking anybody there, even at night. The other one I’m thinking of is the Grassmarket, where, after 1660, they brought Covenanters to be hanged. What about the Grassmarket, Inspector?’
‘Unfortunately, although I appreciate your knowledge of Scottish history, we know Mr Bradan was attacked in Inverness, Mrs Gavin. Well, now, about your good man.’
‘He might have told me he was on a job. What is it? – piracy on the high seas, gun-running, smuggling?’
‘Perhaps a bit of everything. He went to Florida as the guest of a millionaire whom he’d helped at some time, it seems.’
‘Saved his kid from some kidnappers who had followed the family from the U.S.A. to London at the time of the Festival of Britain in 1951. We seem to be haunted by kidnappers all through this business, don’t we?’
‘The millionaire seems to have taken some time to repay his debt, then,’ said the inspector, ignoring the question.
‘Oh, no,’ said Laura earnestly. ‘He was always badgering us to go. I was the one who stood out. I didn’t think I’d fit in with a millionaire’s environment and, until this Edinburgh Conference turned up and we thought’ – she looked accusingly at Dame Beatrice – ‘we thought, I repeat, that I would be needed to aid and abet, Gavin refused to go alone. Anyway, this time, when the invitation came, I insisted that he accept it. I think the prospect of the fishing clinched it, you know.’
‘You don’t care for fishing, Mrs Gavin?’
‘Salmon and trout, yes. Barracuda, sharks and tunny no. I feel they’re above my weight.’
The inspector looked at her long limbs and splendid body and shook his head admiringly.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘from the reports he has sent back to New Scotland Yard and they have passed on to us, it was not so very long before your good man was fishing for something other than barracuda. Maybe you’ll mind a letter you wrote your young son, with marginal illustrations?’
‘Oh, Hamish, yes. I’ve written to him a number of times since we’ve been up here – picture postcards mostly – and I did send him some rather exaggerated drawings of the fabulous animals—’