Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard MEGAPACK®. Josephine Tey
not scorn the mail-car. It was the one significant thing in each day to the dwellers in the thirty-six miles between him and the sea. Grant resigned himself to discomfort, and hoped that comedy would save the journey from boredom. So far comedy had been absent from him. He bagged a seat by the driver and hoped for the best.
As they went along the narrow roads, torn here and there where burns had swept across them in their downward path in spate from the hills, he realized the force of the man’s remark about meeting things. There was no room in most places for even a perambulator to pass.
“How do you manage when you meet something?” he asked the driver.
“Well, sometimes we back—and sometimes they back,” he said. After about five miles Grant saw this new rule of the road demonstrated when they came face to face with a traction-engine. It was a diminutive specimen of its kind, but formidable enough in the circumstances. On one side was the hill, and on the other a small rocky ravine. With the greatest good humour the driver reversed, and backed his unwieldy vehicle until he could run it into the bank in a siding for road metal. The traction-engine chuffed complacently past, and the journey was resumed. In all the thirty-six miles they met only two more obstacles, both motors. In one case they grazed past by a mutual withdrawing of skirts, the near wheel of the mail-car being in a ditch and the near wheel of the other in a bank of heather and boulders. In the other case the car proved to be a Ford, and with the mongrel adaptability of its kind took without parley to the moor, and with complete insouciance swept bumping past the stationary mail-car what time the drivers exchanged unintelligible greetings. This display of amphibiousness seemed to astonish no one, and though the car was now full to overflowing, no remark was made. It was evidently a daily occurrence.
With the laden state of the car in his mind, Grant wondered what would happen to the people along the road who would have no means of travelling. The same fear had occurred to a little old woman who had been waiting by a roadside cottage for the car. As it slowed down and the driver descended to her assistance she looked scaredly at the crowded benches and said, “How are you going to make room, Andy?”
“Be quiet,” said Andy cheerfully; “we never left any one yet.” “Be quiet,” Grant learned, was not a reproof in this country, and had nothing to do with its English meaning. It was an expression of half-jocose refutal, and, on occasions, of straightforward admiration tinged with disbelief. On Andy’s lips it meant that the old lady was what a Lowlander would call “haivering.” And certainly he was as good as his word. Room was found, and no one seemed to suffer very badly, unless it was the hens in the coop at the back, which had been rolled slightly sideways. But they were still vociferously alive when their proud owner, waiting at the head of a track that led apparently nowhere, claimed them and bore them away in a wheelbarrow.
Several miles before Garnie, Grant smelt the sea—that seaweedy smell of the sea on an indented coast. It was strange to smell it so unpreparedly in such unsealike surroundings. It was still more strange to come on it suddenly as a small green pool among the hills. Only the brown surge of the weed along the rocks proclaimed the fact that it was ocean and not moor loch. But as they swept into Garnie with all the éclat of the most important thing in twenty-four hours, the long line of Garnie sands lay bare in the evening light, a violet sea creaming gently on their silver placidity. The car decanted him at the flagged doorway of his hostelry, but, hungry as he was, he lingered in the door to watch the light die beyond the flat purple outline of the islands to the west. The stillness was full of the clear, far-away sounds of evening. The air smelt of peat smoke and the sea. The first lights of the village shone daffodil-clear here and there. The sea grew lavender, and the sands became a pale shimmer in the dusk.
And he had come here to arrest a man who had committed murder in a London queue!
Chapter 11
CARNINNISH
Grant had got little information from Andy, the mail-car driver, not because the driver was ignorant—after all, he had presumably driven Lamont these thirty-six miles over the hills only two days before—but because Andy’s desire to find out all about himself was, surprisingly enough, just as strong as his to find out about Lamont, and he brushed aside Grant’s most hopeful leads with a monosyllable or a movement of his head, and produced instead leads of his own. It was a game that soon palled, and Grant had given him up long before he had resigned himself to knowing no more of Grant. And now the landlord of the Garnie Hotel, interviewed in the porch after breakfast, proved equally unhelpful, this time through genuine ignorance. Where the mail-driver would have been intensely interested in whatever happened at Carninnish, which was his home and his resting-place each night, the landlord was interested only in Garnie, and in Garnie only as it affected his hotel.
“Come for some fishing, sir?” he said, and Grant said yes, that he had thoughts of fishing the Finley if that were possible.
“Yes,” the man said; “that’s just four mile at the back of the hill beyond. Perhaps you’ll know the country?” Grant thought it best to disclaim any knowledge of the district. “Well, there’s a wee village the other side, on Loch Finley, but you’re better here. It’s a wee poky place of an hotel they have there, and they have nothing but mutton to eat.” Grant said they might do worse. “Yes, you’d think that the first day, and maybe the second, but by the end of a week the sight of a sheep on the hill’d be too much for you. We can send you over in the Ford every day if you’re not fond of walking. You’ll have a permit, I suppose?” Grant said that he had thought there would be some water belonging to the hotel. “No; all that water belongs to the gentleman who has Carninnish House. He is a Glasgow stockbroker. Yes, he’s here—at least he came a week ago, if he’s not gone again.”
“Well, if I can have the Ford now, I’ll go over and see him.” Fishing was the only excuse which would allow him to wander the country without remark. “What did you say his name was?” he asked, as he stepped into a battered Ford alongside a hirsute jehu with a glaring eye.
“He’s a Mr. Drysdale,” the landlord said. “He’s not overgenerous with the water, but perhaps you’ll manage it.” With which cold comfort Grant set off on a still colder drive over the hills to the Finley valley.
“Where is the house?” he asked the hirsute one, whose name he learned was Roddy, as they went along.
“At Carninnish.”
“Do you mean right in the village?” Grant had no intention of making so public an appearance at this early date.
“No; it’s the other side of the river from the village.”
“We don’t go through the village?”
“No; the bridge is before you come to the village at all.”
As they came to the edge of the divide the whole new valley opened maplike before Grant’s fascinated gaze several hundreds of feet below. There were no fields, no green at all except on the border of the river that ran, a silver thread, through scattered birch to the distant sea-loch. It was a brown country, and the intensity of the sea’s blue gave it a foreign air—faery lands forlorn, with a vengeance, Grant thought. As they ran seawards down the side of the hill he noticed two churches, and took his opportunity.
“You have enough churches for the size of the village.”
“Well,” said Roddy, “you couldn’t be expecting the Wee Frees to go to the U.F. That’s the U.F. down there—Mr. Logan’s.” He pointed down to the right over the edge of the road, where a bald church and a solid foursquare manse sheltered in some trees by the river. “The Wee Free is away at the other end of the village, by the sea.”
Grant looked interestedly out of the corner of his eyes at the comfortable-looking house that sheltered his quarry. “Nice place,” he said. “Do they take boarders?”
No, Roddy thought not. They let the house for a month in the summer. The minister was a bachelor, and his widowed sister, a Mrs. Dinmont, kept house for him. And his niece, Mrs. Dinmont’s daughter, was home for holidays just now. She was a nurse in London.
No word of another