Several minutes further on, Mackenzie turned off into a narrow side road that twisted around and over a hill and swung down again, until suddenly the loch was spread out squarely before them once more and the lane curled past the first of two houses that could be seen standing solitarily apart from each other but each within a bowshot of the loch. Both of them stood out with equal harshness against the gentle curves and colors of the landscape with the same dark graceless austerity as the last village or the last town or any other buildings Simon had seen in Scotland, a country whose unbounded natural beauty seemed to have inspired no corresponding artistry in its architects, but rather to have goaded them into competition to offset it with the most contrasting ugliness into which bricks and stone and tile could be assembled. This was a paradox to which he had failed to fit a plausible theory for so long that he had finally given up trying.
Beside the first house, a man in a stained shirt and corduroy trousers tucked into muddy canvas leggings was digging in a vegetable garden. He looked up as Mackenzie brought his rattletrap to a stop, and walked slowly over to the hedge. He was short but powerfully built, and his hair flamed like a stormy sunset.
Mackenzie climbed out and beckoned to the Saint. As Simon reached them, the red-haired man was saying, “Aye, I’ve been over and seen what’s left o’ the dog. It’s more than they found of my sheep, I can tell ye.”
“But could it ha’ been the same thing that did it?” asked the Inspector.
“That’s no’ for me to say, Mackenzie. I’m no’ a detective. But remember, it wasna me who said the Monster took my sheep. It was the Bastions who thocht o’ that, it might be to head me off from askin’ if they hadn’t been the last to see it — pairhaps on their own Sunday dinner table. There’s nae such trick I wouldna put beyond the Sassenach.”
Mackenzie introduced them, “This is Mr Clanraith, whom I was tellin’ ye aboot. Fergus, I’d like ye to meet Mr Templar, who may be helpin’ me to investigate these goings-on.”
Clanraith gave Simon a muscular and horny grip across the untrimmed hedge, appraising him shrewdly from under shaggy ginger brows.
“Ye dinna look like a policeman, Mr Templar.”
“I try not to,” said the Saint expressionlessly. “Did you mean by what you were just saying that you don’t believe in the Monster at all?”
“I didna say that.”
“Then apart from anything else, you think there might actually be such a thing.”
“There might.”
“Living where you do, I should think you’d have as good a chance as anyone of seeing it yourself — if it does exist.”
The farmer peered at Simon suspiciously.
“Wad ye be a reporrter, Mr Templar, pairhaps?”
“No, I’m not,” Simon assured him, but the other remained obdurately wary.
“When a man tells o’ seem’ monsters, his best friends are apt to wonder if he may ha’ taken a wee drop too much. If I had seen anything, ever, I wadna be talkin’ aboot it to every stranger, to be made a laughin’-stock of.”
“But ye’ll admit,” Mackenzie put in, “it’s no’ exactly normal for a dog to be chewed up and killed the way this one was.”
“I wull say this,” Clanraith conceded guardedly. “It’s strange that nobody hairrd the dog bark, or e’en whimper.”
Through the Saint’s mind flickered an eerie vision of something amorphous and loathsome oozing soundlessly out of night-blackened water, flowing with obscene stealth towards a hound that slept unwarned by any of its senses.
“Do you mean it mightn’t’ve had a chance to let out even a yip?”
“I’m not sayin’,” Clanraith maintained cautiously. “But it was a guid watchdog, if naught else.”
A girl had stepped out of the house and come closer while they talked. She had Fergus Clanraith’s fiery hair and greenish eyes, but her skin was pink and white where his was weather-beaten and her lips were full where his were tight. She was half a head taller than he, and her figure was slim where it should be.
Now she said, “That’s right. He even barked whenever he heard me coming, although he saw me every day.”
Her voice was low and well-modulated, with only an attractive trace of her father’s accent.
“Then if it was a pairrson wha killed him, Annie, ’twad only mean it was a body he was still more used to.”
“But you can’t really believe that any human being would do a thing like that to a dog that knew them — least of all to their own dog!”
“That’s the trouble wi’ lettin’ a lass be brocht up an’ schooled on the wrong side o’ the Tweed,” Clanraith said darkly. “She forgets what the English ha’ done to honest Scotsmen no’ so lang syne.”
The girl’s eyes had kept returning to the Saint with candid interest, and it was to him that she explained, smiling, “Father still wishes he could fight for Bonnie Prince Charlie. He’s glad to let me do part-time secretarial work for Mr Bastion because I can live at home and keep house as well, but he still feels I’m guilty of fraternizing with the Enemy.”
“We’d best be gettin’ on and talk to them ourselves,” Mackenzie said. “And then we’ll see if Mr Templar has any more questions to ask.”
There was something in Annie Clanraith’s glance which seemed to say that she hoped that he would, and the Saint was inclined to be of the same sentiment. He had certainly not expected to find anyone so decorative in the cast of characters, and he began to feel a tentative quickening of optimism about this interruption in his travels. He could see her in his rear-view mirror, still standing by the hedge and following him with her gaze after her father had turned back to his digging.
About three hundred yards and a few bends farther on, Mackenzie veered between a pair of stone gate posts and chugged to a standstill on the circular driveway in front of the second house. Simon stopped behind him and then strolled after him to the front door, which was opened almost at once by a tall thin man in a pullover and baggy gray flannel slacks.
“Good afternoon, sir,” said the detective courteously. “I’m Inspector Mackenzie from Inverness. Are ye Mr Bastion?”
“Yes.”
Bastion had a bony face with a long aquiline nose, lank black hair flecked with gray, and a broad toothbrush mustache that gave him an indeterminately military appearance. His black eyes flickered to the Saint inquiringly.
“This is Mr Templar, who may be assistin’ me,” Mackenzie said. “The constable who was here this morning told me all aboot what ye showed him on the telephone, but could we hae a wee look for ourselves?”
“Oh, yes, certainly. Will you come this way?”
The way was around the house, across an uninspired formal garden at the back which looked overdue for the attention of a gardener, and through a small orchard beyond which a stretch of rough grass sloped quickly down to the water. As the meadow fell away, a pebbly beach came into view, and Simon saw that this was one of the rare breaches in the steep average angle of the loch’s sides. On either side of the little beach the ground swelled up again to form a shallow bowl that gave an easy natural access to the lake. The path that they traced led to a short rustic pier with a shabby skiff tied to it, and on the ground to one side of the pier was something covered with potato sacking.
“I haven’t touched anything, as the constable asked me,” Bastion said. “Except to cover him up.”
He bent down and carefully lifted off the burlap.
They looked down in silence at what was uncovered.