Michael Innes - Lament for a Maker

Noel Gylby swept Wedderburn and myself with a glance that plainly called upon us to admire. ‘Cheers,’ he said.

‘Of course I knew I might be quite wrong. Still, I got round the corner. And there was certainly something on.

‘It was a confused vision. Somebody had set up a lamp – a storm lantern – in a niche above the door from the bedroom. Below a certain line was darkness; I could see only what was above. And the first thing I saw was Ranald Guthrie’s face. I had just time to see that it was wrenched awry by some violent emotion when his arm rose into the light and I realized that he was holding an axe. I called out to him to stop. I believe he heard me, though I hardly expected him to in the wind. He spun round and took a step that carried him out of the lantern’s rays. I saw him for a moment as a shadow; then I think he stooped down and I could see nothing. I was aware of confused movement – I believe of a groan and then some muttered words. A moment later I saw him again – or rather I saw what I took to be him – reared up against the parapet, his head and shoulders full in the light. For a split second I saw him so and then something came between us: the mere black silhouette of a back I took to be Lindsay’s. I must have felt what was going to happen, for I shouted again and struggled forward. The shadowy back of the second man moved and Guthrie was in view again. But only for a moment. An arm shot out at him and I heard, even in that wind, the crack of a bare fist on his chin. He staggered, gave a great cry – the cry Noel heard from the staircase – and then he went sheer over the parapet.’ Sybil Guthrie shivered, drew her coat about her. ‘That’s all.’

I put down the notebook in which I had been scribbling. ‘All, Miss Guthrie? You didn’t see Ranald make for his get away by the trapdoor and the winding stair?’

‘I saw nothing more. What I was sure I had seen was Lindsay kill cousin Ranald, perhaps in some sort of defence against that axe. And I wasn’t going to be in on it if my witness might entangle Lindsay. I turned round and retreated on an instant impulse, round the corner to the French window by which I had been standing. The beastly thing might best pass as suicide: anyway, I was going to bide my time and see.’

Noel Gylby said heavily: ‘I would have done the same.’

‘And your narrative now,’ I said, ‘instead of embarrassing Lindsay actually convicts the man you thought Lindsay had killed. It is for the policeman a pleasingly complete mix up. A mystery on classical lines with the dénouement quite in the right place.’

Gylby made an approving and Wedderburn a disapproving noise. I had spoken, I think, with some intention of easing a tension evident on Sybil Guthrie’s face. She had been under a long strain and now that the truth was told she was feeling the reaction. ‘Your evidence,’ I went on, ‘has acquitted cousin Ranald on one score at least.’

‘Acquitted him?’

‘Of squeamishness. You remember that according to Mr Wedderburn’s theory Ranald had failed in two particulars. He had failed to keep silent as he hurled himself to death. And his nerve had failed him too in the crux of the plan, the thing that was to incriminate Lindsay in the thought of the countryside; he had failed to take that horrible chop at his fingers in his last living moments. And when we got nearer the truth that last point remained puzzling. Had he relented at the last moment of performing the outrage on Ian – drugged, one supposes, and ready to be hurled to death by one blow? We now know he hadn’t relented; he was simply interrupted by your first cry. And his action upon that interruption is our final and best evidence of the remarkable speed and economy of his mind.

‘Consider just what happened. Ranald has Ian huddled helpless in the snow at his feet. The axe is raised in that particularly nasty moment of his crime when he hears a shout. Someone is on the parapet walk. A paralysing discovery? – not a bit of it. The situation is desperate but may yet be saved. So far, only he himself can have been seen. He pitches the axe over the battlements, gets himself out of the light, stoops, heaves up the body of his brother into a momentarily erect position – and into the light . Then, himself a mere black silhouette, he hits out. The intruder, whoever he be, has no thought of an Ian Guthrie; he sees Ranald Guthrie killed and cannot see the killer . If Ranald can then make his get away by the winding stair, seizing and extinguishing the lamp, his plot is still in a fair way to succeed. The wind will quickly obliterate all traces of the trapdoor having been used; the intruder will not be able to swear that in the darkness the killer did not escape through the bedroom and down the main staircase – on which Lindsay, two or three seconds later, would be found according to plan. And so the case against Lindsay would be even stronger than Ranald had hoped, for of the fact of murder there could be no doubt at all. Ranald Guthrie, in fact, is one who never says die.’

‘Die,’ said Wedderburn, ‘is just what he did say to two innocent men.’ He stood up, a handsome old man suddenly lively with passion. ‘But we’ll get him! Ranald Guthrie has played his last trick.’

From somewhere below us, shattering the silence of the deserted castle, came the harsh high reverberation of a great cracked bell.

3

It was the young lawyer Stewart back from Dunwinnie. We had quite forgotten him; and finding closed doors he had applied himself to the bell in the courtyard. With him was the minister, Dr Jervie.

We had gone down to the door in a compact, nervous group and I think they must have read in our faces as we stood in the wavering shadows of the hall that the mystery of the place had undergone some violent revolution. But both were curiously silent and it was only when Gylby had kindled a fire in the schoolroom – a thing we might well have done long before – that Stewart said. ‘You have news?’

Wedderburn replied. ‘The strangest news. Ranald Guthrie is still alive.’

Stewart was staggered. But my interest was more in Dr Jervie. He had sat down and was staring into the first leaping flames on the hearth; and I think I have never seen a sadder face. At Wedderburn’s words he looked up for a moment like one who turns from meditation to accept some fact on an indifferent plane.

‘Guthrie is alive? Then I suppose I saw no ghost.’

‘ You saw the ghost!’

‘Yes. Perhaps your informant didn’t mention me? It would be taken for granted, you know, that the ghost would appear to the minister. What else is the minister paid for, idle havering old fool that he is, than to hold in with such-like daftness and bogle talk?’ The face remained calm, but the words, parodying Scottish village talk at its least beautiful, were startling in their bitterness. Not, I thought, a chronic mood; rather the momentary product of shock. But not, it seemed, the shock of Ranald Guthrie’s continued existence.

Jervie made a gesture at once of weariness and apology. ‘Can we have your strange story,’ he said, ‘– first?’

4

It was an hour and a half later. I had stepped through the schoolroom window and found myself on a small terrace of which I had been unaware before. Everything was very still, the air moist and oddly warm in the night thaw. The moon, almost at the full, was high in a clear heaven. To my right, through aisles of dark larches, I could see the narrow snow-covered fields of the little home farm, a serrated line of larches beyond like a line of pasteboard trees against the luminous back-drop of the sky. But to my left, down the loch, I could look far into the night, far down the long ribbon of dark ice behind an arm of which, sheer and sheerly beautiful, rose the untroubled fastnesses of Ben Mervie and Ben Cailie. I felt my heart heavy with foreboding.