Pat McIntosh - The Rough Collier

Provost Lockhart was a pink self-consequential man in a magnificent gown of tawny velvet lined with fur. Torn between a desire to oblige the Archbishop’s man and the need to preserve his own pre-eminence in the burgh, he took a little persuading to see Gil’s viewpoint. He sat by the neat coal fire in his private closet and frowned across the hearth at his guest, shaking his head.

‘Only the facts, Maister Cunningham,’ he repeated dubiously, and hitched the furred gown further on to his shoulders. ‘I’m no so sure about that. Is it within the law, now? I was always tellt it was my duty to find a name for the man responsible. Or woman, I suppose,’ he added.

‘You can postpone the end of the quest,’ Gil prompted him. ‘If you gather all the facts we have, and get them writ down clearly, then you can dismiss the assize for the time being, and reconvene when we’ve more idea who to name. Then we can let the two sets of kin deal with the burials, and — ’

‘Aye, well.’ Maister Lockhart seized on that point. ‘That would be a good thing, and put an end to a pair of six-week-old carcasses cluttering up the town. I’ve no notion how the assize will react, mind you, they’re that used to being allowed to name names and get someone put to the horn or clapped in the jail, but I can see how it might be a good thing to get rid of the cadavers.’ He nodded, pursing his lips anxiously. ‘I’ve been hearing already how it’s bad for trade up that end of the town, for they’re making their presence public, as you might say, everywhere the wind blows from St Mungo’s kirk. And who do you think was responsible anyway, maister? Is it someone we’d ken here in Lanark? Someone out at Bonnington? Was it because they were — ye ken, wicked sinners? That’s a terrible thing to be found in Lanark, and them ordinary folk, no lords or foreigners.’

‘I’m nowhere near naming anyone,’ Gil parried. ‘Did you send a man out to question the folk at Bonnington, Maister Lockhart?’

‘I did that.’ Rising, the Provost went to his tall desk and searched among the papers on its sloping front. ‘John Mathieson went, and a clerk wi’ him to write it all down, and a right pig’s dinner they’ve made of it, no sort of order to the questions and the answers writ down all anyhow.’ He extracted a folded leaf from the slithering mass, and peered at it. ‘This man, the forester — Syme, his name is — was never seen since well afore the quarter-day, so far as I can make out, but his goats have been wandering everywhere and there’s two folk had complained to the steward’s clerk about that. Why nobody went down to his house instead of making a note to tell him when they saw him …’ He turned the page over and perused the back carefully. ‘The man Murray never seen about the policies at all. Get their coal from — aye, aye. And the forester lad no close friends on the estate.’ He held the page nearer, then at arm’s length, and suddenly thrust it at Gil. ‘You can read it for yourself, Maister Cunningham, for what good it does. Just let me have it back afore the quest, which is cried for the morn’s morn after Sext.’

‘Thank you, maister.’ Gil tucked the paper in the breast of his doublet before the man could change his mind. ‘Who will you call for the quest?’

‘Oh, aye.’ Maister Lockhart came to sit down, his anxious expression returning. ‘I’ve to give that some thought and all. Yourself and young Douglas, o’ course.’ Gil nodded agreement. ‘John Hamilton the steward at Bonnington, I suppose, for the forester, as well as for the place they were found. Seems the poor laddie has no kin closer than Ayrshire. The other fellow’s maister and kin, though, I’ve a difficulty there, seeing it’s Mistress Weir from the coal-heugh, or else his wife, Our Lady guard her, poor soul, and I’d no want to ask a woman to view the corp. Either one can testify to when he left his work, and the like, but — ’

‘One of the colliers might take it on, or even young Crombie,’ Gil offered.

The Provost considered. ‘Aye, that might do. I’ll send John Mathieson wi’ the summons, after we’re done here. He canny question a witness properly, but he can arrange such a matter as that.’

Gil nodded, and rose to take his leave. As he reached the door something Arbella Weir had said came back to him, and he paused.

‘Maister Lockhart, did you set eyes on Murray yourself, that day he was in the town?’

Lockhart stared at him, frozen in the act of hitching up his furred gown again.

‘Do you know, maister, I did. I did that.’ He settled the tawny velvet round his shoulders, and contemplated the fact, pursing his lips. ‘For when he asked for the quarter’s payment, my steward found there wasny enough in his kist, having paid out on another account just the day afore it, and came to me to get it made up, and the man Murray on his heels.’

‘And was he just as usual?’

‘Oh, aye. Just as usual. He’s — he’d aye an air about him, of all being right wi’ his world, and the hell wi’ anyone else’s.’

‘And what time of day would that be?’

‘Just afore the noon bite,’ said Lockhart positively. ‘I was in here, d’ye see, putting the answers together to a couple letters, and a clerk to scrieve them. The same clerk that went wi’ John constable yesterday, indeed.’

‘That’s valuable,’ said Gil, considering. ‘You’ve no notion where he went after he left here?’

‘I can tell you that and all, and d’ye ken how? I was at my window,’ he gestured towards it, a splendid glazed aperture with a painted blaze of arms at its centre, ‘and spied him and his two men going down the High Street. I stood and watched them go down past where poor Andro Bothwell’s pothecary shop used to be and into the tavern, Juggling Nick’s as they cry it, and remarked to Dandy clerk that I hoped he’d no spend the whole of his takings in there, and the daft loon writ it down.’ He guffawed. ‘Right put out he was, when he’d to scrape it all out and scrieve it again, but I tellt him, I said, that’s no going in a letter to my partner in a venture. So that’s how I mind that, Maister Cunningham!’

Following Murray’s footsteps, Gil went back down the wide street, past the shuttered shop with the wooden mortar and pestle above the door, and paused under the inn sign to admire it again. He had always appreciated the way St Nicholas’ right hand, raised in blessing over the market-place, also appeared to be ready to catch the first of the three fat purses which floated round his head. The bishop was due a coat of paint; his colours were fading, his mitre reduced to an indeterminate grey Hoping the next painter would do the image justice, he put a hand on the taproom door; then, on a sudden impulse, he turned away and stepped into the saint’s small chapel next to the inn.

There was a hum of conversation in the nave, where perhaps two dozen townsfolk were standing about to hear the Mass. He found a quiet spot by St Giles’s altar, folded his hat and knelt on it to go over the shreds of the midnight dream which still troubled him, to ask for help in putting it from his mind and in reading the puzzle before him. Or did the dream have some bearing on the puzzle? He shivered slightly, as it returned to him in vivid detail.

He had thought he was standing in the clearing by Syme’s house, looking in at the door. In the trees to one side a naked man approached, and inside the house something stirred in the shadows, who or what he did not know but suddenly he had been certain that he must not set eyes on it. As he turned to flee the owl had swooped down over the roof, its wings huge and overshadowing, and seized him in its claws, tearing with its beak at his bare flesh. His back still crawled with the feeling that he was threatened. St Giles, preserve me from all ill, he thought. Perhaps I should go down to the forester’s house again.