Pat McIntosh - The Harper's Quine

‘I likely was,’ said Campbell easily. ‘I stayed here, and left that here with my other gear.’

‘How long were you in Glasgow?’

‘A few days — from the Wednesday to the Saturday. Then I went out to Muirend where Sempill was, to persuade my sister home. I’m still trying, without much success.’

‘And that was when you met Bridie Miller?’

There was a silence.

‘It was,’ said Campbell finally.

‘When did you last see her?’

The green eyes flickered. Gil could almost hear the other man recognizing that it was useless to deny it. With a barely perceptible hesitation, Campbell admitted, ‘On May Day. Before Compline.’

‘That was why you were late to the service?’

‘It was. But Neil came in just ahead of me, and Bess was live when he left her. That’s certain enough. And before you ask, yes, I did see the two of them in the kirkyard. They were just going into the trees as I came through the gate, and Neil crossed to the south door and went into the church before me.’

‘I am looking at what happened to Bridie,’ Gil said. ‘It is likely but not necessary that the two deaths are connected.’

‘Is that what it seems to you?’ said Campbell, his tone challenging. ‘An exercise in logic?’

‘No,’ said Gil a little defensively, ‘but it helps. Now, I saw you in the market yesterday,’ he continued, going on the attack, ‘talking to another servant lass. What was in her basket?’

‘Her basket?’ repeated Campbell. Gil waited. ‘Green stuff. Let me think. A pair of smoked fish, a package of laces and a great bundle of something green. Long narrow leaves.’ His fingers described them. ‘I know — leeks.’

‘You seem very sure of that,’ Gil commented. Campbell grinned without humour, showing his teeth in the same way his sister did.

‘I offer you the advice for nothing, brother: there’s always a good line to be spun from a lassie’s marketing. Believe me, they love it if you take an interest in what they have bought.’

‘Thank you,’ said Gil politely. Try spinning that line with a girl who reads Chaucer and Thomas a Kempis, he thought. ‘What were you talking about this time, apart from leeks and smoked fish?’

‘Where was Bridie.’ The handsome face with its lopsided mouth twisted. ‘And she, poor lass, was probably getting stabbed about then, by what you said. I had trysted to meet her after Sext by St Mary’s down the Thenawgait and she never showed. It was another lassie from the same household I was speaking to, Maister Cunningham. She said they had all left the house before Bridie, but she’d seen her at first up and down the market. I looked further, but I never saw her, and then you told me last evening she was dead, poor wee limmer.’

‘So you never saw her yesterday?’

‘That’s what I have just said.’

‘Do you know the name of the girl you were speaking to?’

‘No, but she was certainly one of Agnes Hamilton’s household, for I asked that.’

Gil set the hat aside and said, getting to his feet, ‘Thank you, Maister Campbell. That is all I wish to ask you just now.’

Something like surprise crossed James Campbell’s face, but he rose likewise and bowed. When Gil left he was still standing, holding his closed Horace, looking thoughtful.

Gil made his way down the stairs and out to the yard, which he crossed in a wide curve to avoid the furious mastiff, with a nagging feeling of questions unasked. There was something he had missed, or not uncovered, or not noticed, about the whole business. Perhaps in Rothesay, he thought, crossing Rottenrow to his uncle’s house. All may be clearer from a distance.

Maggie Baxter was disinclined to talk.

‘Aye, I did speak to Mally Bowen,’ she said, ‘but she had little enough to tell me. Dead between Sext and Nones, she estimated, no struggle, not forced. There was blood on the front of her kirtle, quite a lot, and a kind of odd smell on her hair. That’s all, Maister Gil, and I’ll thank you to get out of my way till I get the dinner ready. Go on!’ She made shooing motions with her floury hands.

‘Thank you, Maggie,’ said Gil, making for the door. ‘I noticed the smell on her hair too.’ He remembered the kerchief in his purse, and pulled it out. ‘It’s on this. I don’t know what it is, but it’s familiar. You try.’

‘I haven’t the time to be bothered,’ said Maggie, sniffing at the kerchief. ‘Aye, I know it, but I can’t name it the now. It’ll come to me. Now get out my way, you bad laddie, or the dinner will be late!’

Gil left obediently, and went to look for his uncle. Finding him at prayer in his little oratory, he crossed the hall quietly and went up to his garret to find what he needed for the journey.

Over dinner, the Official gave out a. stream of instructions and advice about travel. Gil nodded politely from time to time, and forbore to point out that he had gone to France at eighteen and returned alone five years later.

‘I promised you a docket for the Treasurer,’ his uncle recalled, ‘for funds for the journey, and I’ll give you a letter for William Dalrymple in Rothesay. We were at the College together, and I believe he is still chaplain of St Michael’s. In the castle,’ he added helpfully. ‘And James Henderson has given me a letter for you to take to the steward at the Bishop’s palace. One of them should be able to offer you a bed.’

‘And a bed for Maister Mason,’ Gil pointed out.

‘Indeed.’

‘He bade me ask if he might call on you after Vespers.’

‘Did he so? Well, I’ll be here. And what have you learned today, Gilbert?’

‘Little enough.’

Canon Cunningham listened to Gil’s account of his day while Maggie cleared the table round him, and at length said thoughtfully, ‘James Campbell knew Mistress Sempill was out in the trees. Could he have gone out of the kirk during the service?’

‘He could,’ Gil agreed. ‘He uses a wee thin knife, and he admitted to having slipped away, he said to say a prayer to St James.’

‘Reasonably enough.’

‘But though he might have stabbed the servant lassie, I do not know why he should have killed Bess Stewart. What could he gain from her death?’

‘Some benefit to his sister, perhaps? Many are unaware,’ said the Canon, settling into his lecturer’s manner, ‘of the restrictions which canon law places on the remarriage of adulterers. He may have thought — ‘

‘He has studied at St Andrews and Bologna,’ Gil interrupted.

‘Ah. Well, Gilbert, you must follow the scent where it leads you, and hope you have not gone astray. Meanwhile there is this matter of the harper’s bairn. Do you know, I might act for the laddie. He needs someone to see him right, poor bairn.’

‘That would be a great relief to me,’ Gil said.

His uncle shot him a look, and a crease appeared at the side of his mouth. All he said, however, was, ‘You are enjoying this hunt, aren’t you, Gilbert?’

‘I am,’ he admitted. ‘It seems wrong, when two women have died, but I feel as if I have woken up after months asleep, like the lassie in the old tale.’

‘I hope not,’ said his uncle drily, ‘considering what came to the lassie. Well, well, you must make the most of what God sends you. I will write you out that docket for the Treasury, and then I am for the Consistory, to look over the papers for a matter tomorrow morning. I will be back after Vespers.’

Gil, having exchanged the docket for a satisfactory sum of money, returned to the house and finding his uncle still out retreated to his garret again, to go over the evidence he had collected and to consider what he hoped to find out in Rothesay. Seated cross-legged on his bed, he worked through what he knew, dogged by that same feeling of something missed, or not noticed, or not asked. The man with the best reason for killing Bess Stewart had witnesses to show he had not, including Gil himself. The men with the best opportunities had no reason that he had yet uncovered for doing so. The death of Bridie Miller must be connected, since as he had said to the mason it was not logical to assume two killers with the same method of working, loose at the same time in a town of five thousand souls, but John Sempill had a witness to show he was on his way up the High Street when she died, and if James Campbell was telling the truth he had been down the Thenawgait at Sext waiting for a girl who never showed. Gil himself had seen him only a little later, just beyond the Tolbooth.