Josephine Tey - The Collected Works

“I have brought you a visitor,” the minister was saying. “This is Mr. Grant. I found him fishing, but catching nothing, so I brought him in to get some hot tea. My sister, Mrs. Dinmont. My niece, Miss Dinmont. And a friend of ours, Mr. Lowe. Now, where will you sit?”

Grant was given a seat beside Miss Dinmont and facing Lamont. Lamont had bowed to him when introduced, but so far gave no sign of ill-meditated action. Either he was paralysed or he was going to take things quietly. And then as he sat down Grant saw the thing that made his heart leap. Lamont’s cup was on the wrong side of his plate. The man was left-handed.

“I am so glad you didn’t wait, Agnes,” Mr. Logan said in a tone which clearly said, I think you might have waited. “It was such a fine evening that I crossed by the swing bridge and came home by the other side of the river.”

“Well, we’re glad you did,” said his niece, “because you’ve brought Mr. Grant, and that makes an uneven number, and so we can put it to the vote. We’ve been having a fight as to whether a mixture of race in a person is a good thing or not. I don’t mean black and white, but just different stocks of white. Mother says that a single-stock person is the best, of course, but that is because she is solid Highland, back to the flood and before. Logans are Maclennans, you know, and there never was a Maclennan who hadn’t a boat of his own. But my father was a Borderer and my grandmother English, and Mr. Lowe’s grandmother was an Italian, so we are very firmly on the other side. Now, Uncle Robert is sure to side with Mother, being a pure-bred Highlander and having in a pure-bred degree all the stubbornness and stinking pride of his race. So we are looking to you for support. Do say that your ancestry is tartan.”

Grant said, quite honestly, that he thought a mixed strain of more value than a pure-bred one. That was, talking of pure-bred as it can exist today. It gave a man a many-sidedness instead of giving him a few qualities in excess, and that was a good thing. It tended to cleverness and versatility, and consequently broad-mindedness and wide sympathies. On the whole, he endorsed Miss Dinmont’s and Mr.—er—Lowe’s point of view.

In view of the lightness of the conversation Grant was astonished at the vehemence and seriousness with which Mr. Logan contradicted him. His race was a fetish with him, and he compared it at length with most of the other nations in western Europe, to their extreme detriment. It was only towards the end of tea that Grant found, to his intense amusement, that Mr. Logan had never been out of Scotland in his life. The despised Lowlanders he had met only during his training for the ministry some thirty years ago, and the other nations he had never known at all. Frustrated in his effort—nobly seconded by Miss Dinmont—to make light conversation, Grant played the part of a Greek chorus to Mr. Logan, and let his thoughts deal with Lamont.

The Levantine was beginning to look a little better. He met Grant’s eyes squarely, and except for the antagonism in his own, there was nothing remarkable about him. He made no attempt to hide the small scar on his thumb, though he must have known, as he knew about his telltale cup, that it was damning evidence. He had evidently decided that the game was up. It remained to be seen, though, whether he would come quietly when the time came. At least Grant was glad to see that flicker of antagonism in his eyes. It is an unlovely job to arrest a craven. A police officer would much sooner be hacked on the shins than clasped about the knees. There would quite obviously be no knee-clasping on this occasion.

One thing caused Grant’s heart to harden against the man: the strides he seemed to have made in Miss Dinmont’s regard in the three days of his stay. Even yet his quick smile came out to answer hers, and his eyes sought hers oftener than those of any one else at table. Miss Dinmont looked a girl who would be quite able to take care of herself—she had all a red-haired person’s shrewdness and capability—but that did not excuse Lamont’s lack of decent feeling. Had he merely been preparing an ally? A man on the run for murder does not usually have the spare interest for love-making—more especially if he is an amateur in crime. It was a blatant and heartless piece of opportunism. Well, he should have no chance of appealing to his ally; Grant would see to that. Meanwhile he kept his place in the conversation, and did justice to the fried trout which was the pièce de résistance of five-thirty tea at the manse. The Levantine ate, too, and Grant caught himself wondering what degree of effort was required to swallow each of these mouthfuls. Did he care, or had he got past that? Was his impudent “Don’t you think so, Mr. Grant?” a bluff or the real thing? His hands were quite steady—that thin, dark left hand that had put an end to his friend’s life—and he did not shirk his part in the conversation. There was obviously to the others no difference between the man who sat there now and the man who had sat there at lunch. The Levantine was doing it well.

At the end of tea, when they began to smoke, Grant offered Miss Dinmont a cigarette, and she raised her eyebrows in mock horror.

“My dear man,” she said, “this is a Highland manse. If you like to come out and sit on a stone by the river, I’ll have one, but not under this roof.”

The “under this roof” was obviously a quotation, but her uncle pretended not to hear.

“There’s nothing I’d like better,” Grant said, “but it’s getting late, and as I am walking to Garnie, I think I’d better start. I’m so grateful to you all for the good ending to my day. Perhaps Mr. Lowe would walk a bit of the way with me? It’s early yet, and very fine.”

“Certainly,” said the Levantine, and preceded him into the hall. Grant’s adieux to his hostess were cut short by the fear that Lamont would have disappeared, but he found him in the hall calmly hoisting himself into the trench-coat he had worn that morning. And then Miss Dinmont came out to join her uncle, who was seeing them off the premises, and Grant had a sudden fear that she was going to offer to accompany them. Perhaps the resolute way in which Lamont kept his back turned to her daunted her a little. It would have been so natural for him to say, “Won’t you come along too?” But he said nothing. Kept his back turned, though he knew she was there. That could only mean that he didn’t want her, and the suggestion she had been on the point of making died on her lips. Grant breathed again. He had no desire for a scene with a hysterical female, if it could be avoided. At the gate both men turned to acknowledge the presence of the two at the door. As Grant was replacing his battered hat he saw Lamont’s salutation. It was a mere doffing his cap and donning it again, but Grant had not known that any gesture could be so eloquent of farewell.

They walked in silence up the first slight ascent of road until they were well out of sight of the house, at the parting of the ways where the high road went up the hill and the track to the crofts branched off along the river. There Grant halted and said, “I think you know what I want you for, Lamont?”

“What exactly do you mean?” asked Lamont, facing him calmly.

“I am Inspector Grant from Scotland Yard, and I have a warrant for your arrest for the murder of Albert Sorrell in the Woffington queue on the night of the 13th. I must warn you that anything you say may be used in evidence against you. I want to see that you have nothing on you. Will you take your hands out of your pockets a moment and let me run you over?”

“You’ve made a mistake, Inspector,” the man said. “I said I’d go a bit of the way with you, but I didn’t say how far. This is where I get off.” His left hand shot out of his pocket, and Grant, expecting a revolver, knocked his hand up as it lifted, but, even as his eyes closed instinctively, he saw and recognized the blue pepper-pot from the manse tea-table. Helpless, half blind, coughing and sneezing, he heard the man’s flying feet on the moor-track, and desperately tried to control himself so that he could hear the direction of the retreating sounds. But it was at least two minutes before he could see well enough to be able to follow. A remembrance of that evening in the Strand came to him, and he decided to take his time. No man, even as lightly built as the Levantine was, could run for more than a limited time. There was a radius of possibility bounded by the circumstance of exhaustion point. And judging by the direction he had chosen, when he reached that exhaustion point, the Levantine would be in a country that offered him little means of escape. And, of course, he would be shrewd enough to recognize that. Therefore, the more likely procedure would be that he should repeat the tactics of the Strand evening: lie hidden, probably till darkness made it safe to move, and then return to a better means of escape.