Gently North-West (14 page)

‘Aha!’ Gently said. ‘This could be it.’

He hurried up the incline to peer behind the rockrim. It concealed a space about twenty feet long with a floor of thin, fawny turf. The rockrim was only a few feet high but it was a yard or two in width. A car, placed carefully behind it, would be invisible from the road.

‘But could he have got it up here?’ Brenda queried, joining Gently. ‘I’m darned if I’ll try it with my
1100
.’

‘Oh yes, he got it up here,’ Gently said, pointing to some oil spots. ‘And he’s right about the road – you can see it through that crevice.’

‘So what do we know now?’

‘We know McGuigan was telling us the truth about this. But what I’d like to know is where the person was hidden who shopped McGuigan to Dunglass.’

He stared about the spot. The flank of the crag merged precipitously into the trees, which, with their stockades of blunt-leaved hazels, presented an unbroken and close-knit front. The road was hemmed by a similar screen, and was here a short stretch between sharp bends. There was no indication of an entry having been forced through the skirts of the trees.

‘He’d have to be in there somewhere,’ Brenda ventured.

Gently shook his head. ‘It doesn’t seem likely. He’d have to be too close if he was to see anything, and he couldn’t have got away again without some noise. It would help if we knew where that Forestry box was.’

‘Why don’t you ask the lady?’ Bridget said.

‘What lady?’ Gently asked, turning.

‘The lady who’s watching us – up there!’

They looked where she was pointing. Above the crag, where it rounded off into the brae, a tall girl with a large dog stood silhouetted against the sky. She was dressed in faded jeans and a sloppy sweater and lounged there with an easy, masculine negligence. She was looking down at them scornfully, her tanned face framed by short, bushy hair.

‘Glory!’ Brenda whispered. ‘She’ll be the original mountain hizzie.’

‘That’s your question answered, George,’ Geoffrey murmured. ‘The one above sees all.’

‘I wonder if she bites,’ Brenda whispered. ‘The way she’s looking at us I think she would. She’s taken against us, that’s plain. We’re just four more slugs in her evening landscape.’

The girl now drew herself up stiffly and took two steps nearer the edge.

‘D’ye hear me, down there!’ she called, her voice echoing and sharply clear.

‘We hear you,’ Gently called back. ‘Please, can you tell us where the Forestry keeps its phone-box?’

‘Ay I can,’ her voice rang down. ‘But you’re no’ a Forestryman, southron. Gae hame – gae home, that’s a’ I’ve to tell ye – we need no English up the glens. Take your bonnie leddies an’ your braw cars and point them south. Gae hame!’

‘Somebody should warn MacBraynes,’ Brenda said. ‘This female will ruin the tourist trade.’

‘Wait!’ Gently called. ‘What’s your name?’

The girl threw back her head and laughed. ‘Ye ken I’m Scots, I ken you’re English – that’s a’ the introduction needed. An’ ye hear me tell you – Scots to English – awa’, back to the land o’ the serpent!’

Then she spoke a word to the dog, and the two of them turned and moved away. In a moment they had jumped down into some hollow and disappeared from view.

‘Well!’ exclaimed Bridget indignantly. ‘If
that’s
all the Scots think of us!’

‘I get the impression she was a shade ultra,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I imagine she was one of the silver dirk brigade, George.’

‘She’s a nut-case,’ Brenda said. ‘She was aaacting her uncombed head off. Really, someone should civilize these wild Highlanders.’

Gently stared at the vacant crag. ‘Yes,’ he said.

If you don’t know the course, follow
Madie.

Yacht Club proverb

B
LAYNE HAD RUNG
back shortly before closing time to tell Gently the dabs matched, and Gently had smoked a silent pipe over this information before turning in along with Geoffrey. He slept poorly. Geoffrey snored, and Gently was troubled by a recurring dream. In this dream he was clinging to a perpendicular rockface, with nothing but a glassy surface above him. Below him, with dirks clutched between their teeth, climbed Hamish, Dugald and the ‘Sons of Ivor’, while the sweater-girl with her slavering wolf-hound urged them on from a convenient eminence. At the foot of the rock-face stood Blayne, McGuigan, Mary Dunglass and Mattie Robertson, drinking whisky from cut-glass tumblers and speculating if he would fall or be cut to pieces. In effect, Gently fell, because the rockface always concluded by tilting outwards, and he descended sickeningly to find his bed thrusting up into his back. It was an unpleasant dream. Each time he woke with sweat standing on his brow. Though he knew how it would end, the relief of the knowledge was always witheld till the waking moment.

He rose in the morning feeling dull-eyed and staring sourly at the new-made sunlight. Bridget was already bustling about preparing the picnic they were to take up Glen Skilling. Mrs McFie, dressed in a sepulchral two-piece and a ruffled blouse, and smelling of lavender, seemed almost snappish as she got the breakfast, perhaps due to her early-kirk attendance. Gently ventured an inquiry about the sweater-girl, but Mrs McFie was determinedly unhelpful. She kent one or two o’ that description, she said, but apparently little in their favour.

‘They’re a sinful an’ scornful generation, Mr Gently, wi’ their indecent clothes an’ clarty habits – they’ll come to no guid – the Buik has a word for ’em – I’m glad to report there are none in Tudlem.’

‘This one was very tall,’ Gently persisted. ‘She was taller than most men.’

‘That would be no disteenction,’ Mrs McFie said. ‘They come lang an’ rough about the hills. There’s Jeanie Dinwhiddy – she’s a lang ane – but she’s up to no guid down in Glesca. An’ Meg Macready – she’d suit – but she wouldna be rovin’ the braes with a dog. No, I canna just say exactly who your fleerin’ lassie would be, but this I’ll give ye for Gospel truth – she wasna at the kirk this mornin’.’

‘Which surprises me,’ Brenda put in. ‘Because she had a pulpiteering manner.’

‘No doubt,’ Mrs McFie said. ‘But it wasna contracted by huggin’ a pew.’

When she’d gone – the Major, she told them, expected no washing-up from her on the Sabbath – Gently watched for a while as Bridget cut neat, slim ham-and-tongue sandwiches. Then he sighed and knocked out his pipe.

‘I’ll have to take a rain-check on that,’ he said.

‘You’ll have to what?’ Bridget said, glaring.

‘I’m sorry. I’ve figured a fresh angle on the Dunglass business.’

‘A fresh angle! But it isn’t your case.’

‘I know,’ Gently said. ‘But I’m in it all the same. And because I’m in it I can’t stop thinking about it, and when I think about it I come up with angles.’

‘Oh, my goodness!’ Bridget groaned. ‘Why does one ever go on holiday with this man? George, I’ve cut your sandwiches, and that’s that – you’re coming on this picnic, and you’re going to like it.’

Gently shook his head. ‘Sorry, Bridgie. The angle I’ve figured won’t wait.’

‘Then tell it to Blayne!’

‘Blayne might not appreciate it. And he might not handle it right if he did.’

‘May we know what it is?’ Geoffrey inquired from the kitchen, where he was wiping while Brenda washed. ‘I’ve been giving the case some thought myself, but I haven’t come up with anything bright.’

‘This,’ Gently said, ‘is just a . . . hunch. It may mean only my wasting a day. But when you put a ferret in one end of a burrow it’s usually worth watching what comes out the other.’

‘Go on,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It sounds promising.’

‘Blayne is the ferret,’ Gently said. ‘He’ll be going into Knockie first thing this morning and showing his sharp little teeth to McGuigan. I don’t think he’ll arrest him – not now, after those two sets of dabs checked out; but if he’s worth his salt he’ll make McGuigan believe he’s in imminent danger of being arrested.’

‘You don’t think McGuigan will bolt,’ Geoffrey said.

‘No,’ Gently said. ‘He’ll hardly do that. But he won’t sit pat either and wait for Blayne to arrest him. He’ll do some hard thinking – perhaps make a move. McGuigan knows the set-up. He can guess better than anyone who could have been involved in killing Dunglass. If it’s a Nationalist affair he may not want to divulge it, but he can’t afford not to be able to.’

‘Subtle,’ Geoffrey said. ‘So he could lead you to the murderer.’

‘He’ll follow his hunches, no doubt,’ Gently shrugged.

‘And you want to watch him.’

‘I want to watch him. If anyone knows where to look it’s McGuigan.’

Brenda came out of the kitchen, stood leaning, looking. ‘Ah well,’ she sighed. ‘Don’t grieve for me, Bridget. I’m beginning to get the hang of being George’s girl-friend.’

‘I’ve said it before,’ Bridget said. ‘And I’ll probably be saying it all my life – he’s the most infuriating of men.’

‘One day I’ll tame him,’ Brenda assured her.

It was a long time since Gently had last been employed on a stake-out, and he went about the details of this one with a boyish sort of pleasure. First, he needed a fresh car, the Sceptre by now being too well-known. Geoffrey offered him the Hawk, but Gently turned it down on the grounds that people always look twice at a large car. Instead, he visited the garage across the road, where they offered him a Series V Minx – not perhaps the car of all others for shadowing a hot Cortina, but ideally inconspicuous in the Hillman-minded Highlands.

‘I’m expecting a friend to drop in,’ Gently lied to the garage-proprietor. ‘He’s on a cycling tour. We’re leaving a car behind so he can drive out to join us up Glen Skilling.’

‘Ay, an’ a braw day for ye, too,’ the man replied unsuspiciously. ‘Ye winna see a finer sight than the Braes o’ Skilling in June.’

So the Minx was chartered and fuelled and drifted back to the cottage. Bridget’s picnic was divided in two and one half packed in the Minx’s boot. Then, at Gently’s instance, the Minx and the Hawk set off together, and paused at the store to buy chocolate and spread the gospel of the cyclist and the picnic.

‘So much for the cousins,’ Gently grinned, as the two cars continued in convoy out of the village. ‘That should take care of any message going Knockie-way. All we have to worry about now is that sheep-farmer on the track, but we’re hardly likely to run into his confounded sheep again.’

‘What about the boy-soldier,’ Brenda said. ‘How do we know he won’t be up there.’

‘We don’t,’ Gently said. ‘But I think it’s unlikely – after Blayne has done his job. I think the Knockie Irregulars will be lying low, and that goes for their sentry too. A proper Sabbath peace and calm will be the order of the day at Knockie.’

‘Well, I think it’s daft,’ Brenda said. ‘But I don’t mind picnicking there alone with you.’

‘We’ll get that out of it at all events,’ Gently smiled. ‘And one can do worse than Knockie Forest.’

They arrived at the junction of the Skilling Road. Geoffrey slowed, waved and turned off. The Minx pressed on at an easy-breathed sixty along the route they had followed the day before. They were finding more traffic today, probably excursionists from Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling, Perth, but Gently weaved by it confidently and slid the long miles swiftly away. The Minx was kin to the Sceptre and came familiarly to his hand. It went sure-footed into bends and pulled strongly on the steep gradients.

By ten they reached Torlinnhead and the turn to the track over the tops. In his wisdom, Gently engaged first for the initial scramble, and the Minx clambered up it uncomplaining. In sight of the farm he halted briefly to reconnoitre from a bank, but the sheep were visible on a distant pasture and the farmhouse apparently deserted. They went by it. Nobody stared. The Minx chuntered sturdily on its way. Within half an hour they were over the tops and approaching the spot where the Sceptre had been bogged.

‘Now we just make the car invisible,’ Brenda said. ‘That shouldn’t trouble the trained brain.’

‘If McGuigan can do it at Tudlem,’ Gently chuckled ‘we should be able to do it at Knockie. See over there.’

He pointed to some boulders that stood in a group to the left of the track. A declivity resembling the dry bed of a stream made a line towards and behind them. Gently stopped and got out to explore. The ground was rough but free from gullies. He returned to the Minx, drove it cautiously to the declivity, turned it, backed it behind the boulders. Then he checked the effectiveness of the concealment from the track. Nothing showed. The Minx was swallowed up in the scattered vastness of the tops.

‘And now we just sit here,’ Brenda said. ‘Making non-noises like policemen.’

‘Not exactly,’ Gently grinned. ‘Because McGuigan may leave by the other way. I don’t think he will. Mary Dunglass used the track when she wanted to get here unobserved, and I imagine it’s McGuigan’s quiet way out. But we can’t rely on that.’

‘Then I take it we’re going to play boy-soldiers.’

‘Something of that sort,’ Gently said. ‘I’d say Dugald had a hideaway on the brow of the ridge there. We probably shan’t do better than follow his example.’

He collected the picnic from the boot, Brenda carried the glasses, and they made their way through the boulders and heather. The ridge slanted upwards for a short distance then levelled off in flats and hollows. It was a perfect spot for observation. The track ran immediately below it. Beyond was the vista of the top of the glen with the Lodge a miniature among its trees. In the other direction the tops and the track spread into a distance of sun-hazed peaks, and by lying in a hollow one could watch all this without being in view from any part of it.

Gently picked his hollow, took the glasses, sprawled on his elbows and surveyed the Lodge.

‘We’ve timed it nicely,’ he said. ‘Blayne is still there. That’s a police Super Snipe in the courtyard.’

‘Any chocolate soldiers around?’

‘There’s someone by the stream with a rod or a net.’

‘Probably the boy-soldier after trout,’ Brenda said, slumping down happily. ‘That’s Menace No. 1 taken care of. We can relax, go loose.’

‘Not so loose,’ Gently said, ‘that we can’t jump into action fast if need be.’