Which is how I wasted a couple of hours that night, stumbling along the driveway in virtual pitch-darkness and trudging the Dubneath track to find a miniature collapsed ruin. Some giant bird—at least, I hope it was only a bird—swished past my head and frightened me to death as I felt the fallen stones of the old crofter’s cottage. Maybe the gatehouse, a retainer’s place from the estate’s grander days? Nothing there, anyway.
The bird mooed and swished me again, so I cleared off. One bare porch light was always left burning, on Elaine’s instruction, so returning was less problematic. I just followed that lovely civilized glimmer down below, and made it safely.
A cross mark on the map to show which building I’d investigated—leaving about a dozen isolated buildings within about a five-mile radius of Tachnadray—and I was ready for bed. Nobody had followed me, I thought. I was quite confident.
Some people have a politician’s mind. They’re always highly dangerous because politicians, remember, have a vested interest in doom. Robert was like that. I mean, just because I was up early next morning and strolling a couple of miles across the uplands he decided to follow, obviously longing for me to turn out to be a traitor. Me! I ask you.
There was a light drizzle on a long breeze. It was only when I turned to shake the water off my mac hood that I saw the suspicious swine. He was perhaps a mile off, but covering the ground at a hell of a lick, his enormous hairy redhead topped by a bonnet and nodding like a horse does at each pace.
He saw my pause and stopped. Casually I went on, giving a glance back down the hillside. He started up after me again. I paused. He halted. I moved, and he came on.
No use continuing in these circumstances, so I made a curve along the hill’s contour and fetched up on the Dubneath track about a mile from where I’d started. Robert, by then higher up the hill, realized my intention and stopped to watch me without any attempt at concealment. He simply held the skyline looking down. I gave the hearty wave of the dedicated dawn-rambler, and cheerily whistled my way back to the big house for breakfast.
The building I’d wanted to inspect was over the hill’s shoulder, about two miles off.
Robert was proving a nuisance, especially as it was his terrain, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind that if I found that cottage I’d find Joseph. Predecessors are always a nuisance in any job. Predecessors who prove elusive and taboo are even more disturbing.
“Och, the poor wee thing,” Mrs. Buchan said, noisily brewing up. She was the serf-factotum, red-faced, plump, and breathless. I watched fascinated amid the din. All kitchens look like pandemonium to me, but Tachnadray’s was special. It was a vast long hall, sort of Somersetshire-ninepin-bowling-alley-shaped but with huge iron ranges along one side. Mrs. Buchan rushed everywhere. I’d asked about Elaine.
“Can’t the doctors do anything?”
“Don’t ye think they’ve tried, you daft man?” Mrs. Buchan sang, trotting her large mass from table to oven with raw bread. “It was that horse. A stupid great lummock. I’m against horses, always was. But do people listen?”
“Why aren’t you a McGunn, Buchan?”
The far door opened and Robert entered. He sat without a word. With me at one end of the long table and the red-bearded giant glowering at the other, we were a gift for a passing jokester.
“Morning, Robert. Breakfast presently.” She sprinted to the copper porridge pan, panting, “I am. Before Buchan wed me. My two bairns are away in London.”
“Sinners.”
The joke fell flat. “Aye,” she wheezed over the frying bacon. “I pray for them night and day.”
“I walked out this morning,” I said hopefully as the porridge came.
“Aye. You were seen.”
The laconic shutout. I bent to my spoon. “I thought I saw Hector walking Tessie and Joey.”
“No, man. He’d be away in the opposite direction, on the…” Mrs. Buchan’s voice trailed off as Robert’s massive hulk emitted a warning rumble.
“Lovely dogs,” I said casually, reaching for hot new bread.
Eating always cheers me up. And happiness brings luck, though folk mistakenly assume it’s the other way round. Nice knowing that the cottage Hector inspected every morning lay in the opposite direction to the place I’d just tried to reach. Progress in Tachnadray.
Duncan told me when I reported for work that Elaine had called a meeting tomorrow morning. I’d have to get a move on with Plan X.
« ^ »
—— 16 ——
You must have played that imagination game where you can have any woman (or man, mutatis mutandis) on earth? And “have” in any way you like? It used to be my big favorite until matters got out of hand, over this bird called Wilhelmina. She was a drama student and lived on Natural Earth-Friendly Pulses, which means beans. It ended in tragedy when, in the throes of orgasm, somebody (she claimed it was me) uttered a strange bird’s name. She played merry hell and stormed out in a rage. Naturally I missed her almost until the pubs opened, and felt the chill wind of economics because she’d paid the mortgage. Still, I got used to food again. God, those bloody beans. But the point of mentioning that dream game of yippee is, Shona was beginning to figure in my imagination. Disloyal to Jamie, of course, to think hopefully of Shona rapturously savaging my defenseless body. Only a heel would lust like that. Her great dog Ranter was the deterrent.
Duncan gave me permission to go into Dubneath that morning, to see what was available in a small lumber yard. It sounds quick and easy. In fact I had to walk four miles on the track to a cairn of stones and wait there on the bare hillside for a lorry to come by at half past ten. It was on time, driven by a warped old geezer called Mac whose one utterance was “Aye,” in various tones of disbelief. Oddly, I was almost certain I’d seen Robert stalking the upland stones while I’d waited, but looking more intently only seemed to make him vanish actually on the hillside. Clever, that. I got the lorryman to drop me on the outskirts of the megalopolis and walked in.
The lumber yard was soporific. A neat rectangle of sloped planks, a barrow, a wooden shed with a corrugated roof. A few pieces of secondhand furniture were covered by a lean-to on the side opposite the double gate. I shouted a couple of times, wandered a bit. The only rescuable items were a heavy rosewood desk, eastern, and a wellington chest whose top and side panels had split badly. Beggars can’t be choosers. I scribbled a note, offering for the two, and wedged it in the shed door saying I’d call back.
It was too early to phone Tinker, or call on Shona—I wasn’t going to risk that great silent dog without protection—so I went to see George MacNeish. He was doing out the saloon bar with Mary. They seemed honestly pleased to see me.
I pretended to stagger to a stool. “I’m in hell. No houses anywhere, and all the grub’s French.”
“That’ll be Michelle,” Mary said, smiling. “But Gladys Buchan’ll start you off right each day.”
“She tries.” I closed the door because two old anglers in tweedy plus fours were chatting in the parlor. “Look, folks. Who and where is this Joseph?”
The smiles faded. After a moment of still life I said, “I can’t go out and ask Mrs. Innes.
Everybody in Tachnadray shuts up if I mention him. It’s getting on my nerves.”
George was about to say something when Mary put in one breath ahead. “It’s no business of ours, Ian. Maybe you’ve been too long in the soft south. Up here family feelings are best not touched.”
“Seems daft to me. Okay, he drank. Is that enough to launch a bloke into oblivion? And where’s the harm telling me?”
George deliberately chose his words. “Joseph is a McGunn, so he’s rightly your clan’s responsibility, not ours. But to settle your mind: Joseph worked up at Tachnadray, yes.