Chapter and Hearse (11 page)

‘Old man Alcaig was asking for her.' The Laird pointed up through a gun loop at the leaden sky. ‘We could see that there was snow on the way and they were anxious to be well beyond Torgorm in daylight.'

‘So…' invited the Sheriff, bringing his gaze back to the pathetic little form at his feet. He had no need to ask why Leanaig hadn't gone with his wife to her dying father's the day before. It was no secret in Fearnshire that old Alcaig and his fine sons didn't like the Laird of Balgalkin. And never had.

‘So she went with them,' said Leanaig.

‘Leaving the bairn with you…' If the Sheriff had remembered rightly, old Alcaig had quibbled for a long time over his daughter's tocher going with her to Leanaig. That it had gone there in the end was a triumph of tradition and usage over personal inclination.

‘She said Jeannie was too young to be crossing the water on a night like last night.' Hector Leanaig ran a hand over his eyes. ‘God!' he said distractedly, ‘she'd have been safer with her mother…'

The Sheriff didn't answer this. Instead he started to examine the child's clothing. Though her nightgown was caught up under one knee, it did not look to him as if it had been really disarranged other than by the tumble down the stairs. Then he started to pull it to one side, lifting it clear of her piteous body.

A hectic choler took over Hector Leanaig's pale visage. ‘Rhuaraidh, I swear by all that's holy that if there's a man in this place who's laid so much as a finger on her, I'll kill him myself with my bare hands, kinsman or not.'

‘Whisht, man,' said the Sheriff soothingly. ‘There's no call for that. No one's been near her in that way. Her goonie's quite clean and there's no sign of interference.'

A low moan escaped Morag, the nurse. ‘The poor mite…'

‘And there's no sign of a struggle,' added Rhuaraidh Macmillan, turning his attention to the turnpike stair, which curled up clock-wise from the hall on their left. He put his foot on the bottom step and peered up. The stone steps curled away out of his sight in an endless spiral. Above them, the turret tower was capped by a conical wooden roof. The stonework and wood of the turret, he noted, looked in reasonable condition. Some of the dowry which had come with Alcaig's daughter in the end had no doubt been spent on her new home, the castle at Balgalkin.

‘Wait you here,' the Sheriff commanded, motioning to his clerk to keep everyone where they were. ‘All of you,' he added firmly as Leanaig started forward to join him.

The Sheriff stepped delicately round the inert figure on the lower steps and started to climb the round stair tower. In the first instance it took him up from the great hall to the second floor of the castle, but he could see that it went further up and beyond still. As he mounted the stair, he ran his left hand over the wall, but only a fine red sandstone dust marked his fingers.

He took his bearings afresh when he stepped off the stair at the first landing and reached the rooms above.

He came first to a little room hung about with fine linens and women's things which he took to be Mistress Leanaig's retiring room. The French fashion these days was to call a lady's place something quite different – by a new French word which he couldn't call to mind just this minute. His wife would know the name of it – and would be wanting one herself at Drummond-reach soon too, he'd be bound.

He came next to the nursery. Here, against the longest wall of the room, was the child's bed and, over in the corner, a little truckle bed where he supposed the nurse, Morag Munro, slept. Macmillan took a careful look at both. Neither showed any sign of great disturbance. The bedding on the child's bed had been turned back as by its occupant slipping out of it quite normally.

There was nothing unusual about the other one either. He put a hand in the child's bed and then did the same between the rugs on the servant's one. There was no residual warmth to be felt now in either sleeping place.

Leaving the nursery he went to the master bedroom, where the Laird and his lady slept – when she was at Balgalkin, that is. He paused on the threshold, the French name of Mistress Leanaig's own room having suddenly come to him after all. Boudoir – that was it.

The room here was a much grander affair than the others. Not only were there a great bed against the further wall and a garderobe, but there were hangings on all the walls and in the corner a small privy stair which did not climb to the upper floors like the turnpike one. Instead, it descended in a clock-wise spiral from the main bedroom to the great hall. This west turret, he deduced, was the Laird and his lady's stair and theirs alone.

The Sheriff advanced on the bed and pulled aside the curtains hanging from the tester – and found another bed covered in thick rugs from which all interior heat had gone. This one, though, did show signs of someone in it having had a rude awakening. To him, the bed coverings had all the look of having been thrust aside in great haste by its occupant.

Rhuaraidh Macmillan walked across to the window. To the north, under a lowering sky, lay a snow-clad Fearnshire and somewhere in that wilderness was a woman whose young daughter was unaccountably dead at the foot of the other stair with her skull broken.

Unaccountably to him, that is.

So far.

Taking his time, Rhuaraidh Macmillan went round the second floor all over again, and then climbed up to the top level by the turnpike stair. Here, without any refinements at all, slept the other retainers of Castle Balgalkin. A persistent curious flapping sound he traced not to pigeons but to an old flagstaff from which was already flying the flag of the Leanaigs at half-mast.

He felt a spasm of pity for Mistress Leanaig, who from all accounts would be leaving one deathbed only to find another. And unless Hector had sent a messenger to Alcaig's Isle, she would read the flag's message as she neared Torgorm but not know for whom it was flying so low.

Macmillan came down to the main bedroom again and stood there thoughtfully before making for the privy stair. Again he put his left hand out and ran it over the wall, this time as he went down rather than up the stair. This time too a fine red sandstone dust marked his fingers.

But so did something else.

He paused and considered his hand. There was no doubt about it. He was looking at blood. Not a lot, but blood for all that. Macmillan stood for a long quiet minute on a step just above the last turn of the stair but still out of sight of those waiting at the foot of the other stair at the east end of the great hall.

Where the body lay.

Then the Sheriff put his hand down again on the wall of the privy stair.

Low down.

The sandstone felt slightly damp to his touch. He would have been the first to admit that the walls of Castle Balgalkin probably always felt slightly damp to the touch in winter – it was no wonder that the Queen from France was finding Scotland not to her liking after warmer climes. But this dampness was different. He crouched down to consider the patch. Unless he was very much mistaken, someone had taken a wet cloutie to the stone and rubbed it as clean as they could before he reached the castle.

Rhuaraidh Macmillan straightened up and turned silently back up the privy stair. He then walked through the master bedroom, and past the nursery and Mistress Leanaig's boudoir to the main east turnpike stair. He descended this and rejoined the dejected group waiting beside the distressful body at the bottom of the stairway.

Hector Leanaig was standing where he had left him, although his head was now sunk on his chest as if he was afraid to look up. The child's nurse, Morag Munro, was still standing under the kissing bough, well away from the others. As the Sheriff appeared down the turnpike stair, her weeping changed to a more primitive keening.

‘It wasn't only me,' she said when she managed to speak. ‘The mistress warned her about Handsel Monday too. She told her that on Handsel Monday night everyone has to keep to their beds until sunrise. Made her promise her mother she would stay there.' She gulped. ‘I heard her say that myself.'

‘I wonder why the child didn't stay in her own bed then,' mused Sheriff Macmillan aloud, addressing nobody in the great hall in particular.

‘It's a dangerous night, Handsel Monday,' growled Hector Leanaig.

‘I ken that right enough, Hector,' agreed Macmillan. ‘But I don't believe in the fairies and witches myself, that's all.'

‘Not believe?' echoed the Laird of Balgalkin, astonished.

‘No, Hector.' The Sheriff shook his head. ‘I'm afraid Handsel Monday is just an ancient way of putting an end to the feasting of hogmanay, that's all.'

Hector Leanaig said obstinately, ‘Jeannie believed in it.'

‘The English,' remarked the Sheriff, ignoring this, ‘call the time when the kissing has to stop by the name of Twelfth Night.'

‘Oh, the English,' said Leanaig dismissively. ‘They're not right-minded folk at all.'

‘But it's still when the kissing has to stop,' said the Sheriff, adding meaningfully, ‘all the kissing, Hector…'

The Laird of Balgalkin stared at him, a flush mounting his cheek.

Rhuaraidh Macmillan stared down at the pitiable figure on the floor. ‘What, Hector, do you think it could be that would make a wee girlie like this so disobedient?'

‘I canna' think, man, of anything at all.'

‘And I can only think of one thing myself,' said the Sheriff.

The Laird jerked his head up, the flush suffusing his whole face now. He searched the Sheriff's face. ‘You can?'

‘I'm afraid so,' said Macmillan very quietly. ‘I think that Jeannie woke up in the night and found her nurse gone from her bed.'

Hector Leanaig said nothing while Morag Munro clutched her kirtle round her head even more tightly.

‘And,' said the Sheriff evenly, ‘I think when that happened, Jeannie was naturally frightened that the fairies or the witches must have spirited away her nurse, Morag.'

The wailing under the kissing bough stopped abruptly and a palpable silence fell in the great hall of Castle Balgalkin.

‘But,' continued Rhuaraidh Macmillan in a steely voice, ‘I don't think they had.'

‘No?' said the Laird hoarsely.

‘No, Hector. I think that something much worse than fairies or witches had taken Jeannie's nurse away from her bed in Jeannie's room.'

The Laird moistened his lips. ‘Something much worse?'

‘You, Hector,' said the Sheriff.

‘Me?' spluttered the Laird of Balgalkin.

‘I think,' maintained Macmillan unperturbed, ‘that when little Jeannie woke up and saw Morag Munro was not in her bed in the nursery, her next thought – her very natural thought – was to find you, her father.'

‘Well, that would be understandable, right enough,' responded Leanaig non-committally. ‘If she did,' he added lamely.

‘Don't forget,' carried on the Sheriff ineluctably, ‘that last night – Handsel Monday – was one your daughter had been told on all sides by people she trusted to be very afraid of indeed.'

‘Aye,' admitted Leanaig, ‘that's true.'

‘I think,' resumed Macmillan, ‘Jeannie was very frightened and did come looking for you – after all, you were only in your own bed in the next room, weren't you, Hector?'

Hector Leanaig said nothing.

‘You either were or you weren't in your own bed, Hector,' said Rhuaraidh Macmillan without impatience. ‘Which was it?'

‘I was,' said Hector Leanaig gruffly.

‘The trouble was,' said the Sheriff almost conversationally, ‘that though you were in your own bed, I think you were not alone in it.'

Hector Leanaig's face told its own story. The flush on it slowly drained away before the Sheriff's eyes, to be replaced by a marked pallor. The man of law pointed to the pathetic bundle at their feet and said, ‘Your Jeannie was young all right, but not too young to know what makes the beast with two backs…'

The woman under the kissing bough screamed. ‘We didna' kill her. I tell you, we didna' kill her. She ran away.'

‘And her father ran after her,' said the Sheriff calmly.

‘To try to explain,' jerked out Hector. ‘I swear that's all I did … I swear.'

‘I know,' said Rhuaraidh Macmillan imperturbably. ‘But Jeannie ran away down the stair before you could catch up with her.'

‘She fell,' said Hector. ‘Before I could catch her and explain.'

Morag Munro ran across the great hall and flung herself at the Sheriff's feet. ‘Believe us,' she pleaded. ‘We didna' touch her. It's true.'

‘Partly true,' responded Macmillan. He pointed diagonally across the hall. ‘But it was the other stair that she ran down. You didn't want anyone to guess she'd come from your room.'

Leanaig brushed his hair away from his eyes. ‘How do you know that?'

‘How else do you account for the crack on her head being on the left of her skull? This is a clockwise stair going up and a left-hand one coming down. If she'd tumbled down this turnpike stair here, her head would have hit the right-hand side of the stairway.' He looked down at the child and then at the step tapering to the apex of its triangle as it became the central pillar of the stair. ‘There's nothing to catch her head on coming down on the left in this turnpike. She would have fallen to the right … and it's the left of her head that's stove in.'

The only sound in the great hall now was the heavy breathing of the Laird of Balgalkin as he struggled to control himself.

‘And the privy stair,' whispered Hector Leanaig, as one making a great discovery, ‘comes down the other way.'

‘Clockwise from the top,' agreed the Sheriff.

‘It's a stair that could be defended by a left-handed swordsman,' said the Laird almost absently.

‘Jeannie hit her head on the left-hand side of the privy stair as she ran down it, away from you.' The Sheriff looked across at Morag Munro. ‘From you both. And the pair of you hoped to get away with blaming Handsel Monday.'