The Tartan Ringers (14 page)

‘Touché,’ I said, beaming. ‘We hire a promotions man for plans to make the estate solvent.’ I gazed round at them all. ‘It’d take one single phone call.’

‘I won’t have Tachnadray a mere tourist stop.’ Elaine had spoken. ‘I couldn’t have dinner ogled by tourists at so many dollars a head.’

‘It’s degrading for a noble house,’ Shona said.

‘Not even a Clan McGunn coat-of-arms on headscarves, wooden plaques?’ I pleaded. ‘Pride’s expensive. Christ’s sake, Elaine. Have you never seen a Manchester mill on the go? For a percentage they’d do thousands a bloody day – tea towels, travelling bags, all in McGunn tartan. Cups, mugs, silver brooches, Tachnadray deer. And Duncan’s workshop’d turn out phoney shields—’ I was in agony. ‘Can’t you see?’

‘No.’ Elaine calmly pronounced over my distress, and with utter serenity gestured the serf to pour coffee. ‘I’m becoming rather tired of your schemes, Ian.’

One last try. ‘Then it’s your dreaded Tachnadray secret.’

Everybody stilled, even the beverage-toting peasant.

‘Secret?’ Michelle made a too-casual search for sugar, which anyway was within easy reach.

‘What secret?’ It wasn’t until Duncan demanded point blank, his voice harsh and his pipe like a clutched weapon that the penny dropped and I thought in sudden jubilation, God, there really is something.

‘Wine,’ I explained, cerebrating at speed.

‘Establishing a vineyard,’ from dear innocent Michelle, ‘takes centuries.’ She’d dressed in lovely harebell blue.

‘So we don’t,’ I explained, thinking: Give me strength. ‘We never even see the bloody wine, see? A vineyard simply bottles us up Tachnadray Special. Print new labels, ships it to a distributor.’

‘Outsiders!’ Shona spat.

‘No, Ian.’ Another royal imperative. ‘Too long-term.’

‘Then you don’t need money,’ I concluded with angry finality. For a second I thought I’d overacted, but not for Michelle.

‘You’re wrong, Ian. We’re in dire straits.’ She really did say it, dire straits, straight out of her English lessons.

‘Michelle,’ Duncan warned, too late.

I said, acting driven to the brink, ‘Then we sell up.’

Outrage. Horror. The lackey almost dropped the coffee pot. Duncan almost swallowed his pipe. Michelle gave a Gallic squeal of turmoil-powered indignation. Shona paled. Even Elaine’s smile wilted somewhat, a case of needle reversed. Robert would have inverted me in the nearest soufflé.

‘At an auction. Here, in Tachnadray.’ It was my turn to smile now. ‘We sell every damned thing. Even,’ I said, choosing my words carefully, ‘even some things we haven’t got.’

Well, what works for Sidoli’s travelling fairground can work for Tachnadray’s immobile gentility, right? Elaine looked and said nothing. The rest tried to argue me into the ground. They hadn’t bothered to listen to a word I’d said, so I just noshed, nodded, muttered ‘You’ve got a point there’ sort of responses, and started working out the scale of the operation. Barefaced robbery, lies and immoral usury are the tools of the work world’s greatest auction firms. They’d be just as useful in Tachnadray.

Because of Elaine’s telepathic swiftness in mind-guessing, I carefully didn’t think of my other scam, which was to find this oh-so-unimportant cottage and raid the damned thing.

Theft, I often say to myself, is often in a good cause. It’s especially beneficial when it happens to somebody else. Oh, I don’t mean the great Woburn Abbey silver haul, though even that netted mind-bending reward money when those two workers found the cache in that Bedfordshire water-pumping station. Somebody always does well out of it, even when theft goes wrong. One problem is finance law, the great rip-off of modern times. Those lucky enough to be in on it – police, lawyers, estate agents – are of course all for it and want us, the oppressed majority, to join in their hearty approval. We don’t. Reason? Because the law costs us a fortune. All we can do is try to exist in spite of it.

That evening, aware now of the strong differences of opinion around the table, we separated with Elaine saying she’d ‘take advice’ and that we’d have a conference about it all in a day or so. Money was obviously Tachnadray’s old battleground where Shona and Michelle fought daily. Very serious stuff. Solvency’s a perennial laugh, though a rather moaning sort of laugh, at Lovejoy Antiques, Inc. But I’ve always managed by having friends I can rely on, borrow from, or otherwise sponge off, and Tachnadray only had this gaggle of clan innocents.

Up in my converted garret I easily worked out the solution, how to hold an important auction sale of the many valuable antiques we hadn’t got. The idea wasn’t new, but the actual sin would have to be. In immorality freshness is always important, like in fruit. I shelved it, and settled down to examine the Ordnance Survey map I’d brought. This cottage Hector had mentioned was niggling.

Scattered thinly among the colours and contours of the uplands round Tachnadray were black rectangles which indicated buildings. The mansion was clearly marked. I’d work outwards, and start with the cottage on the valley road. I’d noticed it standing maybe a mile beyond the end of the drive.

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 red head 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 shut-out. 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.

Y
OU 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 favourite 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 defenceless 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 lorry man 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 second-hand 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 parlour. ‘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. And left under a cloud. That’s all. Now stop your asking, and stay mute like a canny man.’

‘There!’ I said with evident pleasure. ‘Wasn’t painful, was it? And look how relieved you’ve made me. Just for that I’ll drag your wife down into her kitchen, bolt the door and force her to warm up some of her rotten old mouldy pasties.’

Their expressions lifted and amid smiling prattle Mary started for the kitchen. I don’t know which of us was the more relieved as normality reasserted itself.

‘Typical McGunn,’ George mock grumbled. ‘Always thieving.’

‘Shut your face, MacNeish. Or I’ll take up golf and thrash you at your own game. Here, missus,’ I said, slamming the kitchen door after me. ‘What’s this about the soft south? I’ll have you know I work bloody hard down there . . .’

My heart felt sick, though I cleared Mary’s grub quick enough and kept up the rabbiting. The MacNeishes had been generous enough to give me a warning when I’d left for Tachnadray, but now I needed to know something definite they’d handed me a load of codswallop. I didn’t believe that about Joseph leaving under a cloud. He was still around, and I badly needed to find him.

By eleven o’clock I was at the great Innes emporium, smiling as I entered and hoping to find it empty of customers. It was, but a glance at Mrs Innes’s closed face made it apparent there’d be no joy there. She’d been warned. I put on a show of buying a few things – staples, resin, electric torch, stout twine, wood stain – and asked about the lumber man.