Appleby File (22 page)

‘Meaning from the mayor and city council?’

‘That does make it sound a good deal more prosaic. But remember for how long Venice held the gorgeous East in fee. She seems capable of decidedly regal behaviour still.’

‘Dr Watson,’ Appleby said, ‘once discovered with some surprise that his friend Sherlock Holmes was uncommonly vague about the workings of the Solar System. Holmes explained that he hadn’t much interest in acquiring useless information – useless, that’s to say, from his professional point of view, which was that of a dedicated enemy of crime. But the truth is that some scrap of quite out-of-the-way knowledge may turn out uncommonly useful to a detective. For example, there was that Highland holiday of ours. Judith, you remember that? It was when we stumbled upon the mystery of Glen Mervie.’

‘The affair that began with my refusing the milk?’ Lady Appleby said cryptically. ‘It was most obtuse of me.’

I scented a story in this.

‘I can’t believe,’ I murmured diplomatically, ‘that Judith would ever be obtuse. But just what happened?’

‘My friend Ian Grant,’ Appleby began, ‘is Laird of Mervie, and the place runs to some uncommonly good shooting in a small way – to say nothing of a trout stream that’s a perfect wonder. So I always enjoy a holiday there, and so does Judith. But this particular holiday turned out to be of the busman’s sort. When, I mean, they found Andrew Strachan’s body lying by the Drochet.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Drenched in gore?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Capital, Appleby. Your reminiscences, if I may say so, tend to be a little on the bloodless side. But here is a certain Andrew Strachan steeped in the stuff. Proceed.’

‘Actually, I’ll go back a bit – at least to the previous day. Grant and I had been shooting over a neighbour’s moor, and Judith came to join us in the afternoon. We drove back to Mervie together, and Grant stopped just outside the village to speak to one of his tenants, an old woman called Mrs Frazer. Mrs Frazer’s sole possession seemed to be a cow, and she was milking it when we all went and had a word with her. She wasn’t interested in me, but she looked at Judith rather searchingly. And then she offered her a drink of milk straight from the cow. Judith refused it. I think she felt that poor old Mrs Frazer needed whatever dairy produce she could raise, and oughtn’t to be giving it away.’

‘And that,’ I asked, ‘was what was obtuse? The old woman was offended that Judith declined her hospitality?’

‘It wasn’t quite that – as I realized when Grant stepped forward and insisted rather peremptorily that Judith should change her mind. He apologized later. It was a matter, it seemed, of the Evil Eye.’

'The Evil Eye!’ I was startled.

‘Just that. Didn’t the poet Collins write an ‘Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands?
’
The Evil Eye is very much one of them. But, of course, you come on the idea all over Europe.’

‘The Italians,’ I said, ‘call it the
Malocchio
.’

‘Quite so. Well, Mrs Frazer had decided that Judith was perhaps the possessor of the Evil Eye. It’s widely believed to accompany great physical beauty.’ Appleby paused happily on this obvious invention. ‘Anyway, the point seemed to be this: Mrs Frazer’s cow would die unless the magic was defeated. There are various ways of defeating the Evil Eye, and the surest of them is obliging its possessor to accept a gift. Hence the milk.’

‘Superstition of that sort is still widely prevalent in those parts?’

‘Most certainly. Grant talked to us very interestingly on the subject that evening. He had a shepherd some way up Glen Mervie whose possession of the Evil Eye was one of the terrors of the region. And there’s great belief, too, in various forms of Second Sight – particularly in what’s known as Calling – and in family apparitions and so forth. Ian Grant himself would be regarded as no true Laird of Mervie if he admitted that he hadn’t in fact seen the spectre of a white horse on the night his father died on the battlefield.’

‘And Andrew Strachan,’ I asked, ‘whose body was found by the Drochet? I suppose the Drochet is a burn?’

‘Yes. It rises on Ben Cailie, and runs through the Glen of Mervie to join the Garry. As for Andrew Strachan, I took him to be one of Grant’s tenants. But actually he wasn’t. His father had been a crofter who bought his own farm. So Andrew Strachan was a landowner himself in a very small way – which was what enabled him to keep his younger brother Donald so harshly under his thumb. If Donald had been a tenant of Grant’s he’d have had a square deal. As it was, he worked for his brother Andrew, who was a very hard man. They lived in neighbouring cottages in a clachan a mile beyond the village, which is itself a pretty remote spot. There was only their mother – and she was over eighty – who heard a word of their quarrel.’

‘Ought you to tell me they’d had a quarrel? Isn’t it giving too much away?’

‘You’ll find out in a minute. In any case, they
did
have a tremendous quarrel – on that very afternoon, as it happened, that Mrs Frazer gave Judith the milk.

‘Donald Strachan’s story of what followed was quite simple. The quarrel came to nothing, and later that evening Andrew set off up the glen for Dunwinnie. He was courting there. Or rather, if Donald was to be believed, he was after a woman there who was no better than she should be. It was the sad fact, Donald said, that his brother would often spend half the night in Dunwinnie, drinking a great deal with this ungodly wench, and then he’d come stealing home before daybreak. Such goings-on, you understand, have to be conducted much on the quiet in that part of the world, The kirk and the minister are still powers in the land.’

‘And I suppose Donald’s suggestion was that Andrew had simply met with an accident?’

‘Just that. And all the facts – or nearly all the facts – were such as to make it quite possible. There’s a point half-way down the glen where the path forks. One branch climbs imperceptibly, and eventually skirts the verge of some very high rocks overhanging the burn, it was at the foot of these that Andrew Strachan’s body was found. His skull was cracked open, and in a way that was a quite conceivable consequence of a perfectly possible fall.’

‘In all probability,’ Appleby went on, ‘there would have been no serious question about what had happened, if it hadn’t been for one very queer thing. The lad who found Andrew Strachan dead found Donald Strachan, too – alive and not a couple of hundred yards away. Donald had fractured a thigh, as a man might do who had a bad fall while running blindly among rocks. It seemed a queer coincidence that both brothers should meet with an accident on the same night. And what was Donald doing in the glen, anyway? He had an explanation to offer. It was an uncommonly odd one.’

Appleby paused for a moment. He is rather a practised retailer of yarns of this sort.

‘I mentioned what, in the Highlands, they term Calling. It’s supposed that, in some supernatural way, a man may sometimes hear his own name being called out by a relation, or a friend, who at that moment is either dying or in great danger in what may be some quite distant spot. It might be Canada, for example, or Australia.’

‘I’ve heard of it,’ I said. ‘Indeed, isn’t it on record as rather well-attested?’

‘Yes, it is – although I don’t know what a court of law would make of it. And it looked as if a court of law would have to try. Because Donald Strachan’s story was simply that, in the middle of the night, and after their abortive quarrel, he had heard Andrew
calling
. He said he somehow knew at once that it was a
calling
in this rather special sense. And as he was aware that Andrew had gone up the glen to Dunwinnie, he got up and made his way there himself, convinced that there had been an accident or a fatality. And he hurried so recklessly through the darkness that he had his own utterly disabling fall.’

I digested all this for a moment in silence.

‘It would certainly have been a hard nut for a judge and jury,’ I said. ‘But what did you think yourself?’

‘I saw another possibility. It wasn’t pretty, but at least it had the merit of
not
involving the supernatural. Donald, I supposed, had crept into Andrew’s cottage in the night, battered him to death, and then lugged the body to the one spot in the neighbourhood where the appearance of a fatal accident could be made credible. And he’d never have been suspected if he hadn’t had his own tumble among the rocks.’

‘But had you any evidence?’

‘There
was
one piece of evidence.’ Appleby paused again. ‘And it was I,’ he went on rather dryly, ‘who pointed it out to the local police. The Strachans were both wretchedly poor, and their clothes were little better than rags. And that did rather obscure what was nevertheless clear when one looked hard enough. Andrew’s body was fully dressed. But his jacket was on inside out.’

‘So you concluded–?’

‘I concluded that his body had been shoved into it, and probably into the rest of his clothes, in the dark.’

‘It was certainly a fair inference. In fact, my dear Appleby, I can’t think of any other explanation.’

‘Ah – but remember the Solar System. Holmes
might
conceivably have been caught out by his ignorance of it. And I was being caught out by – well, by my ignorance of those popular superstitions of the Highlands. You remember my telling you that up that glen there was a shepherd whose possession of the Evil Eye was a terror to the district?’

‘Certainly I do.’

‘Well, it seems there are more ways of averting the Evil Eye than by offering a drink of milk. You can avert it – at least from harming your own person – simply by wearing any of your garments inside out.’

‘Widdershins!’

‘Yes, indeed – that’s the general name for such behaviour. And nobody up there would dream of going through the Glen of Mervie without taking that precaution. So you see the police – and my host, for that matter – distinctly had the laugh on me.’

‘It was no laughing matter.’

‘That’s true. But there was clearly no case against Donald Strachan. He just had to be believed.’

The villa stood on a remote Cornish cape. Its flat roof commanded a magnificent view, but was not itself commanded from anywhere. So it was a good spot either for sunbathing, or for suicide of a civilized and untroublesome sort. George Elwin appeared to have put it to both uses successively. His dead body lay on the roof, bronzed and stark naked – or stark naked except for a wrist watch. The gun lay beside him. His face was a mess.

‘I don’t usually bring my weekend guests to view this kind of thing.’ The Chief Constable had glanced in honest apology at Appleby. ‘But you’re a professional, after all.’

‘Fair enough.’ Appleby gazed down dispassionately at the corpse. ‘What kind of a chap was this Elwin?’

‘Wealthy, for a start. But – as you can see – retaining some unassuming tastes.’ The Chief Constable had pointed to the watch, which was an expensive one, but on a simple leather strap. ‘Poor devil!’ he added softly. ‘Think, Appleby, of taking a revolver and doing that to yourself.’

‘Mayn’t somebody have murdered him? A thief? This is an out-of-the-way place, and you say he lived here in solitude, working on his financial schemes, for weeks at a time. Anybody might come and go.’

‘True enough. But there’s £5,000 in notes in a drawer downstairs. An unlocked drawer, heaven help us! And Elwin’s fingerprints are on the gun – the fellow I sent along this morning established that. So there’s no mystery, I’m afraid. And another thing: George Elwin had a history.’

‘You mean, he’d tried to kill himself before?’

‘Just that. He was a hypochondriac, and always taking drugs. And he suffered from periodic fits of melancholy. Last year, it seems, he took an enormous dose of barbiturate – and was discovered just in time, naked like this in a lonely cove. He seems to have had a fancy for death in the sun.’

‘I think I’d prefer it to death in the dark.’ As he said this, Appleby knelt beside the body. Gently, he turned over the left hand and removed the wrist watch. It was still going. On its back the initials
G E
were engraved in the gold. Equally gently, Appleby returned the watch to the wrist, and buckled the strap. For a moment he paused, frowning.

‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I’d rather like to have a look at his bedroom.’

The bedroom confirmed the impression made by the watch. The furnishings were simple, but the simplicity was of the kind that costs money. Appleby opened a wardrobe and looked at the clothes. He removed a couple of suits and studied them with care. He returned one, and laid the other on the bed.

‘Just what did you mean,’ he asked, ‘by saying that Elwin was always taking drugs?’

‘Ambiguous expression nowadays, I agree. He kept doctoring himself – messing around with medicines. Just take a glance into that corner-cupboard. Regular chemist’s shop.’

The cupboard was certainly crammed with medicine bottles and pill boxes. Appleby took rather more than a glance. He started a systematic examination.

‘Proprietary stuffs,’ he said. ‘But they mostly carry their pharmaceutical name as well. What’s tetracycline for, would you suppose? Ah, it’s an antibiotic. The poor chap was afraid of infections. Do you know? You could work out all his fears and phobias from this cupboard.’

‘A curious thought,’ the Chief Constable said grimly.

‘Various antihistamines – no doubt he went in for allergies in a big way. Benzocaine, dexamphetamine, sulphafurazole – terrible mouthfuls they are.’

‘In every sense, I’d suppose.’

‘Quite so. A suntan preparation. But look, barbiturates again. He could have gone out that way if he’d wanted to. There’s enough to kill an elephant, and Elwin’s not all that bulky. Endless analgesics. You can bet he was always expecting pain.’ Appleby closed the cupboard door, and glanced round the rest of the room. ‘By the way, how do you propose to have the body identified at the inquest?’

‘Identified?’ The Chief Constable stared.

‘Just a thought. His dentist, perhaps?’