‘Presumably you have heard him speak, then?’
‘Oh, yes. He had to, on that occasion, didn’t he? He had quite a gentlemanly kind of voice, quite public school, you know. If he was a commercial traveller he was a very high class sort of one, I should say. But, of course, he was an artist as well.’
‘But you never saw any of his paintings? He never attempted to interest you in his work?’
‘Oh, no. He was not the type of man to take advantage’ – she giggled again – ‘not of any sort.’
‘How unenterprising of him! Tell me, Mrs White – you must know your husband’s boat-yard pretty well – would it be possible for anybody to get into it after dark and borrow a boat?’
‘Oh, I daresay you could get into the yard easy enough, but it wouldn’t do you much good. My husband hasn’t got any big boats with properly bedded engines. His are all little things with outboard motors and those are all removed and locked up at night. Then he’s got one or two small yachts, but the sails are all stowed in the sail lockers while they’re at the boat-yard.’
‘But if you owned a car and your own outboard motor, you could make shift to borrow a boat and then put it back without anybody being the wiser?’
‘No, I don’t believe you could,’ said Mrs White. ‘There are guard dogs at the next yard and I’m sure they’d create if anybody got into my husband’s place after dark.’
‘Guard dogs? I thought everybody trusted everybody else in the Highlands.’
‘There was a gang of roughs – Glasgow Irish – up here on the spree the year before last and a lot of damage was done, that’s why the dogs are there.’
‘I see. When was Mr Carstairs last in residence next door?’
‘He drove off in his car the day before the party went to Skye. He drove off at about mid-day and they pulled in for the night at about six and went to Skye the next morning, like I told you before.’
‘And the driver disappeared some time that same night. I see.’
‘So Willie wasn’t drowned in Yarrow,’ said Laura, ‘if the murderer didn’t commandeer a boat, and so the chances are that he is still alive.’
‘We cannot assume that. I had hoped to be able to prove that Knight spent the time when he was supposed to be on sick leave in carrying out those smuggling operations which, rightly or wrongly, I have assumed to be at the bottom of this business. It seems now that we must adjust our ideas.’
‘Yes, I see that; but if Carstairs isn’t Knight, who is he? If he isn’t Knight – and we can take that for granted after the descriptions we’ve had of both of them – he may not be mixed up in this business at all. You said, a while ago, that you thought we’d been persuaded to come up here on a wild-goose chase. Isn’t it time we went back and had another word with Basil Honfleur about Knight?’
‘You may well be right. Let us sleep on it. I will make up my mind in the morning.’
Laura guessed that Dame Beatrice was dissatisfied with their progress. The theory that Knight and Carstairs were the same person had appeared promising, although, except for Knight’s sick leave and Carstair’s comings and goings, there had been little to support it. Now, however, there seemed no way to connect the two men. Knight might or might not still be alive; Carstairs might or might not be the commercial traveller and/or the roving artist that Mrs White took him to be. The only suspicious circumstance about him, in fact, was that, as he seemed to be in residence there so seldom and so intermittently, he should have purchased a bungalow in Saighdearan at all, considering that there was a hotel and a motel on the spot which he could use.
In any case, thought Laura, lying fully dressed, except for her shoes, on her comfortable hotel bed at eleven o’clock that night, Saighdearan seemed an unlikely place for a commercial traveller to buy a pied-à-terre, although it might suit an artist.
‘I’m still sure we’re right, and there’s more to our Mr Carstairs than meets the eye,’ said Laura, to the four walls of her room, ‘and I’m dashed if I don’t go and have a snoop around that place of his.’
When, having put on her shoes and an anorak when she had changed her dinner-frock for slacks and a sweater, she got into the hotel yard, the last of the bar customers were leaving and there was conversation, laughter and much revving up of cars.
Laura strolled out on to the road, crossed to the loch-side footpath and strolled onwards in the direction of Fort William.
The night was luminous, although there was only the sliver of a new moon. The waters of the loch washed very gently towards the stony shores, stirred slightly by a night-wind and the far-off tides beyond Lismore Island and Oban.
Gradually the noise of the cars died away as the customers of the hotel bar made their homeward journeys. Laura strolled on, enjoying the night air and the blessed silence of stars, mountains and the deep, dark water, the latter flashing now and again into moon-tipped wavelets as the currents made their infinitesimal movements.
Except for an occasional car which swept by at speed along the otherwise deserted road, she might have been alone in the world. On the other side of the loch was the awful majesty of the Ardgour mountains. In front of her lay Lochaber and somewhere away to the east was the vast Killiechonate Forest and the awe-inspiring massif of Ben Nevis.
It occurred to Laura that it might be interesting to pay a visit to MacGregor White’s boatyard, but then she remembered the guard dogs near by who could be trusted to give warning of her approach. Besides, except that they were Carstairs’ only near neighbours, there was nothing to connect the Whites with him, so she began to retrace her steps towards the hotel and, when she reached the spot opposite the lane which led up to the two bungalows, she crossed the road and began the steep ascent.
There were no lights in the Whites’ bungalow. Laura opened the gate which led to Carstairs’ front door and took to the small lawn to avoid the sound of her footsteps on the path. The path continued, however, round the side of the building away from the Whites’ property, so she followed it round to the back.
Whether the bungalow was empty, or whether the occupant was in residence again, there was no way of telling except by knocking on the door and this Laura, who could think of no reason she could give for calling at such an hour, was unwilling to risk. Having conceived the idea of inspecting the interior, however, she was hoping to find some means of ingress, regardless of the chance of being caught in the criminal act of breaking and entering, or whatever that was called under Scottish law. Herself a Highlander by birth and ancestry, she still had little knowledge of the legal terminology of her native land.
Cautiously she tried the back door, but it was locked. This appeared to indicate that the bungalow was empty of human kind, for few people in the Highlands, as in the English countryside, trouble to lock up, even at night, if the house is tenanted.
There were three windows at the back of the bungalow. Laura, prowling past them, diagnosed them as belonging to kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. A side window which she passed could be that of a second bedroom, she thought. She ignored it, since from it the light from a small torch she had brought with her could be seen from the road if anybody was passing. At the back of the bungalow, however, apart from a very small garden, there was nothing but the hillside, so, having halted and listened for a while, she switched on the torch and inspected the back windows.