Dorothy Sayers - Five Red Herrings

Farren was a devil, a beast, a bully, with his artistic temperament, which was nothing but inartistic temper. There was no peace with Farren about. There was no peace anywhere. If he went back to Gatehouse, he knew what he would find there. He had only to look out of his bedroom window to see Jock Graham whipping the water just under the wall of the house — doing it on purpose to annoy him. Why couldn’t Graham leave him alone? There was better fishing up by the dams. The whole thing was sheer persecution. It wasn’t any good, either, to go to bed and take no notice. They would wake him up in the small hours, banging at his window and bawling out the number of their catch — they might even leave a contemptuous offering of trout on his window-sill, wretched little fish like minnows, which ought to have been thrown back again. He only hoped Graham would slip up on the stones one night and fill his waders and be drowned among his infernal fish. The thing that riled him most of all was that this nightly comedy was played out under the delighted eye of his neighbour, Ferguson. Since that fuss about the garden-wall, Ferguson had become absolutely intolerable.

It was perfectly true, of course, that he had backed his car into Ferguson’s wall and knocked down a stone or two, but if Ferguson had left his wall in decent repair it wouldn’t have done any damage. That great tree of Ferguson’s had sent its roots right under the wall and broken up the foundations, and what was more, it threw up huge suckers in Campbell’s garden. He was perpetually rooting the beastly things up. A man had no right to grow trees under a wall so that it tumbled down at the slightest little push, and then demand extravagant payments for repairs. He would not repair Ferguson’s wall. He would see Ferguson damned first.

He gritted his teeth. He wanted to get out of this stifle of petty quarrels and have one good, big, blazing row with somebody. If only he could have smashed Waters’ face to pulp — let himself go — had the thing out, he would have felt better. Even now he could go back — or forward — it didn’t matter which, and have the whole blasted thing right out with somebody.

He had been brooding so deeply that he never noticed the hum of a car in the distance and the lights flickering out and disappearing as the road dipped and wound. The first thing he heard was a violent squealing of brakes and an angry voice demanding:

‘What the bloody hell are you doing, you fool, sitting out like that in the damn middle of the road right on the bend?’ And then, as he turned, blinking in the glare of the headlights, to grapple with this new attack, he heard the voice say, with a kind of exasperated triumph:

‘Campbell. Of course. I might have known it couldn’t be anybody else.’

CAMPBELL DEAD

‘Did ye hear about Mr. Campbell?’ said Mr. Murdoch of the McClellan Arms, polishing a glass carefully as a preparation for filling it with beer.

‘Why, what further trouble has he managed to get into since last night?’ asked Wimsey. He leaned an elbow on the bar and prepared to relish anything that might be offered to him.

‘He’s deid,’ said Mr. Murdoch.

‘Deid?’ said Wimsey, startled into unconscious mimicry.

Mr. Murdoch nodded.

‘Och, ay; McAdam’s juist brocht the news in from Gatehouse. They found the body at 2 o’clock up in the hills by Newton Stewart.’

‘Good heavens!’ said Wimsey. ‘But what did he die of?’

‘Juist tummled intae the burn,’ replied Mr. Murdoch, ‘an’ drooned himself, by what they say. The pollis’ll be up there now tae bring him doon.’

‘An accident, I suppose.’

‘Ay, imph’m. The folk at the Borgan seed him pentin’ there shortly after 10 this morning on the wee bit high ground by the brig, and Major Dougal gaed by at 2 o’clock wi’ his rod an’ spied the body liggin’ in the burn. It’s slippery there and fou o’ broken rocks. I’m thinkin’ he’ll ha’ climbed doon tae fetch some watter for his pentin’, mebbe, and slippit on the stanes.’

‘He wouldn’t want water for oil-paints,’ said Wimsey, thoughfully, ‘but he might have wanted to mix mustard for his sandwiches or fill a kettle or get a drop for his whiskey. I say, Murdoch, I think I’ll just toddle over there in the car and have a look at him. Corpses are rather in my line, you know. Where is this place exactly?’

‘Ye maun tak’ the coast-road through Creetown to Newton Stewart,’ said Mr. Murdoch, ‘and turn to the richt over the brig and then to the richt again at the signpost along the road to Bargrennan and juist follow the road till ye turn over a wee brig on the richt-hand side over the Cree and then tak’ the richt-hand road.’

‘In fact,’ said Wimsey, ‘you keep on turning to the right. I think I know the place. There’s a bridge and another gate, and a burn with salmon in it.’

‘Ay, the Minnoch, whaur Mr. Dennison caught the big fish last year. Well, it’ll be juist afore ye come to the gate, away to your left abune the brig.’

Wimsey nodded.

‘I’ll be off then,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to miss the fun. See you later, old boy. I say — I don’t mind betting this is the most popular thing Campbell ever did. Nothing in life became him like the leaving it, eh, what?’

It was a marvellous day in late August, and Wimsey’s soul purred within him as he pushed the car along. The road from Kirkcudbright to Newton Stewart is of a varied loveliness hard to surpass, and with a sky full of bright sun and rolling cloud-banks, hedges filled with flowers, a well-made road, a lively engine and the prospect of a good corpse at the end of it, Lord Peter’s cup of happiness was full. He was a man who loved simple pleasures.

He passed through Gatehouse, waving a cheerful hand to the proprietor of the Anwoth Hotel, climbed up beneath the grim blackness of Cardoness Castle, drank in for the thousandth time the strange Japanese beauty of Mossyard Farm, set like a red jewel under its tufted trees on the blue sea’s rim, and the Italian loveliness of Kirkdale, with its fringe of thin and twisted trees and the blue Wigtownshire coast gleaming across the bay. Then the old Border keep of Barholm, surrounded by white-washed farm buildings; then a sudden gleam of bright grass, like a lawn in Avalon, under the shade of heavy trees. The wild garlic was over now, but the scent of it seemed still to hang about the place in memory, filling it with the shudder of vampire wings and memories of the darker side of Border history. Then the old granite crushing mill on its white jetty, surrounded by great clouds of stone-dust, with a derrick sprawled across the sky and a tug riding at anchor. Then the salmon-nets and the wide semi-circular sweep of the bay, rosy every summer with sea-pinks, purple-brown with the mud of the estuary, majestic with the huge hump of Cairnsmuir rising darkly over Creetown. Then the open road again, dipping and turning — the white lodge on the left, the cloud-shadows rolling, the cottages with their roses and asters clustered against white and yellow walls; then Newton Stewart, all grey roofs huddling down to the stony bed of the Cree, its thin spires striking the sky-line. Over the bridge and away to the right by the kirkyard, and then the Bargrennan road, curling like the road to Roundabout, with the curves of the Cree glittering through the tree-stems and the tall blossoms and bracken golden by the wayside. Then the lodge and the long avenue of rhododendrons — then a wood of silver birch, mounting, mounting, to shut out the sunlight. Then a cluster of stone cottages — then the bridge and the gate, and the stony hill-road, winding between mounds round as the hill of the King of Elfland, green with grass and purple with heather and various with sweeping shadows.