I doubled back at the last minute to add some notes about my encounter with the weeping village women halfway up the Loan – I had forgotten about them, which rather proved the point about needing to keep careful notes – and so I was late for luncheon. The others were already being served with tomato soup when I arrived, Alec once more tucking his napkin into his collar and Cad once more looking rather shocked to see him do so. Tomato soup, of course, was perfect for my purposes. The pink and grey stripe would be at the bottom of the trunk with a sprinkling of soda under a brown-paper patch before the afternoon was out.
‘How did you enjoy your first Scotch funeral?’ I asked Cad as I sat down. He considered the question for a moment, nodding sagely.
‘I’m not sure that “enjoy” is the word,’ he said. ‘It’s a damn silly idea not to let the women join in for one thing. If the women were there weeping and wailing the men could be patting their shoulders and feeling superior. With no one else there to do the blubbing it was all down to us and I’ve never felt so uncomfortable in all my days.’
Buttercup and I looked first at him and then at Alec – thunderstruck with his mouth open – and then collapsed into giggles.
‘What?’ said Cadwallader. I was not sure I could have explained ‘what’ exactly if I had a week to think it out, only just that he was so very unlike other men and so utterly unaware of it that it was impossible not to laugh.
‘I must say, though,’ Cad went on, ‘I’d far prefer it if we went to the regular Sunday shindigs in that church instead of the Pisky, Freddy my love. It’s much less annoying when you can’t understand a word that’s being said. Still not soothing exactly – the pastor doesn’t have a soothing cadence – but I could learn to think of it as a kind of tone-poem, you know. Avant garde.’
‘It wouldn’t work,’ said Alec. ‘All of a sudden you’d find yourself beginning to catch the odd word and then whole phrases and then there’s no turning back. It happened to me with the men working on the estate. I used to assume they were talking about the birds and the trees and the bonny heathered glens. Then when my ear tuned in at last I got a rude awakening. Clara Bow’s legs, don’t you know. And all points north.’
‘Don’t speak too soon, my darling,’ I said. ‘They can still catch me out despite the yawning eternity I’ve been incarcerated here. I can’t, for instance, make head nor tail of what they call Robert Dudgeon’s little cart.’
‘I wondered about that,’ said Cad. ‘When I was going over the inventory. There are scores of them around, you know. We use them for all kinds of things.’
‘Anyway,’ said Alec, ‘since I now have a passable “guid Scots tongue in ma’ heid” -’
‘Alec!’ I said, sharply. I had spoken to him before about attempting a Scotch accent, more than once, and had told him that I would rather he scraped his fingernails down a slate.
‘Sorry!’ he said. ‘But you really are a bore sometimes, Dandy. It’s harmless fun. Anyway, since I can now interpret the natives like a missionary’s child, I did a good bit of earwigging this morning. There was a great deal of discussion about the death as you can imagine, a lot of pretty maudlin revelling in the fact that both father and son are gone and poor Mrs Dudgeon is all alone. How they rolled that around and admired it from all angles. Quite disgusting. As well as that, there was quite a bit of audible tallying of how much respect was being paid to Dudgeon, and from all that I could gather it washes out some of our suspicions about the various Ferry Fair factions. Both the Prod Padres were there and representatives of all three of the great families – four, of course, counting Cad.’ Cad looked surprised but very pleased to be lumped in with the Linlithgows, Roseberys and Stuart-Clarks in this way, and certainly did not suspect for a heartbeat that Alec’s tongue could be in his cheek. ‘Quite an impressive turn-out for an estate carpenter, and a clear sign, I thought, that the feeling for the Burry Man goes far too deep for him to be dislodged by a gaggle of hysterical -’ He caught my eye and stopped. ‘… by a few, and an unrepresentative few, ladies who have slightly lost their sense of perspective over a heartfelt difference of opinion.’ He flashed me a beaming smile and I blew him a raspberry in reply. ‘Now, Cad did manage to spot one of the Burry Man’s boys -’
‘The fat one,’ said Cad. ‘Not the fellow with the side-whiskers, no sign of him.’
‘Yes indeed,’ said Alec. ‘And I did get the chance to sidle up to him and strike up a conversation.’
‘And?’ I said. ‘Oh damn and blast. I’ve dropped soup in my lap. Ho-hum.’
‘And I’m afraid I had to make reference to a rumour that it was the drink that did for Robert Dudgeon,’ said Alec, screwing his face up in a grimace of remorse.
‘Oh, Alec, you didn’t!’ I said. ‘Please tell me you didn’t. After Inspector Cruickshank and the doctor managed to keep it quiet for her. You are a stinker sometimes.’
‘Well, I had to get the talk round to the sandwich and the only way I could think to do it was to start with: did he think there was anything in the rumour, and even if there was, wouldn’t he say it was not enough food rather than too much drink that was at the bottom of it, and did people on the way around sometimes give the Burry Man food instead of whisky. How would you have got there starting from somewhere else, Dan?’
I thought about it for a minute or two and had to concede that there was no other obvious route to that particular destination. I took comfort in the thought that the Turnbulls and their like really had started exactly this rumour anyway and Alec had probably not done a great deal, in that particular company, to strengthen it.
‘And?’ said Buttercup to Alec. ‘What did he say? Was there a cloaked stranger who drew up and proffered the sandwich in a gnarled claw?’
‘There was not,’ said Alec. ‘The chap said that nobody ever gave the Burry Man food – pointed out that it would be rather cruel torture to do so since he couldn’t eat it – and that nothing but whisky passed his lips between nine and six. So I said, “Oh, I suppose his wife must have brought him the sandwich, then.” And he looked puzzled. And I said, “He did eat one, you know. It showed up in the post-mortem.” And then he looked at me as though I had crawled out from under a stone, and since we were just then walking at sombre pace behind the coffin en route from the church to the graveyard, I can quite see that what the PM found in the way of stomach contents was hardly polite.’
‘Yet the same point in respect of luncheon tables continues to elude you,’ said Buttercup.
‘And did you get a chance to ask any more after that gaffe or did he draw his skirts aside?’ I said.
Alec waited while the butler scooped a piece of fish on to his plate and a maid following after poured some sauce over it then he resumed.
‘Pray, don’t spare my feelings, Dandy,’ he said. ‘I can take it on the chin if you care to tell me exactly what you think. Yes, I did rather lose his confidence after that, but I fell into step with… wait for it… the famous Donald.’
‘Ah, Donald!’ I said. ‘Lay preacher, chief recruiter for the Band of Hope and all-round hero.’
‘You’re kidding!’ said Alec. ‘Donald is a Temperance Tenter?’
‘I didn’t think he looked the part either,’ I said, ‘but Mrs Turnbull assured me only this morning that he is their star turn.’