Fatal Venture (14 page)

When Morrison came on deck next morning he found they were lying in the Skerries Roads off Portrush, with the town to the south, the Skerries Islands to the north, the promontory of Ramore Head to the west and Dunluce and the Causeway Heads to the east. In the clear morning sunshine, he thought it as charming a prospect as any he had seen. The hard, cold blue of the water reflected the more delicate azure of the sky and contrasted with the rich yellow of the sand, which ran up into dunes of paler tint, crowned with the greyish green of bents and grasses. Sea and sand appeared almost incredibly clean. Even the rocks, showing a huge variety of browns and greys, looked as if they had recently been washed – as, indeed, in that country of frequent rain, they had. Even the further headlands, faint as if viewed through blue gauze, were beyond all question spotless. Everything, indeed, that Nature had done was perfect: it was only when he came to view the works of man, as exhibited in the houses of Portrush, that his critical faculty revived.

Morrison was on fire with eagerness as he stood on the boat-deck looking round him. It was not the beauty of the view which had excited him, but something much more personal. The great excursion had been arranged! Margot, alone, was going with him to visit the Causeway!

He could scarcely believe in his good fortune. And yet perfection was not absolutely perfect. He was not to enjoy the drive with her from Portrush. He was to go in the forenoon and she to follow later.

In this disappointment, he had simply been hoist with his own petard. He had devised an elaborate scheme to ensure his being sent for lunch to the Causeway. His plan had worked so far as he himself was concerned, but her contribution had broken down.

“I think,” he had told old Stott, “that we should do a new excursion in these parts: the Causeway in the morning, lunch there, and along the coast in the afternoon. If you agree, I’ll slip out to the hotel and see if they could do the lunch.”

Stott readily agreed, and Morrison rang up the hotel manager, making an appointment for the morning. Then at the last moment Margot announced that she had been forced to accompany her family to lunch with some friends who were staying at Portrush. She was sorry, but she would take a taxi out immediately after lunch.

Morrison at once rang up the hotel manager, only to find that he would not be available after one o’clock. After all he had said to old Stott, Morrison felt he must see the man, so the drive with Margot had gone west.

Portrush being a popular port of call, a good many more people than usual went ashore. Some, on excursion bent, were bound for the Causeway, the Salmon Leap at Coleraine or other points of local interest, but by far the majority plumped for golf on the famous links. Bristow belonged to this party. He went ashore in the same boat as Morrison, his clubs beside him.

“Golf for you?” asked Morrison. “Ever been round these links?”

“No,” Bristow answered, dabbling his hand into the tiny passing wavelets. “I’ve never had the nerve. I’m not much of a golfer, you know. I intended to go round when I was here six weeks ago settling up for this call, but the links were too crowded. This time, with the season over and the place half empty, I’m going to try my hand.”

“Photography, too?” went on Morrison, glancing at the camera slung over the other’s shoulder.

Bristow made a grimace. “Victimised again,” he complained. “Old Stott has heard of some bally ruin on that hill behind the town and wants the usual. How did you escape this time?”

“Been sent to the Causeway to get information for further trips.”

“Good Lord! I should have thought we’d fixed up all the trips in the British Isles. Well, here are two men from the Club to meet me,” he continued, as they stepped ashore at the temporary boat-slip near the Ladies’ Bathing Place. “Cheerio, and don’t die of overwork.”

Once more Morrison had that little feeling of surprise that he did not take more to Bristow, who could be, as on this occasion, exceedingly pleasant. But there was something in him which he found vaguely repellent. Whether the man had too keen an eye to the main chance, or whether in his composition lurked some hidden streak of selfishness, he didn’t know. All he was sure of was that he felt towards him as the poet to Dr Fell.

Morrison duly drove out to the Causeway, discussed his business with the manager and, passing on to the dining room, began his lunch.

In these last ten days he believed that he and Margot had drawn much nearer to one another. She now greeted him as an old friend, and it no longer happened that when they met she was just on the way elsewhere. He thought she was actually growing to like him, and he gloried in the belief.

He had no plans for the future. He was still in that state when he could see no further than the moment. To be with Margot: just to bask in her presence: that was what he longed for. If this were to lead to problems in the future, well, the future could look after itself. He would take what joy he could get, while it was to be had.

This afternoon, he felt, was going to be the greatest of his life. At worst, it would be joy unmixed: at best he might – or was he mad to think so? – he might propose, and – she might accept! His lunch was a good lunch, but he was too eager and excited to eat.

Then suddenly the bottom fell out of his entire world.

A summons to the telephone: Margot’s voice. A crescendo of joy swept up in him, followed immediately by a dashing, ghastly, hideous disappointment. She was extremely sorry, but she was being carried off to visit friends at Castlerock, and she couldn’t therefore come to the Causeway. Again she was so sorry, and she hoped they would have their excursion elsewhere on another day.

The sun still shone, but there was no longer brightness and warmth in its beams; just a cold, pitiless glare. The landscape was still there, but a dead landscape; hard and austere and repellent. The later accessories of his excellent lunch lay before him, but now the thought of food made him ill. The world was a great void – loathsome, damnable. For the moment he wished he was dead.

Like a man in a dream, he paid his bill and wandered out into the hateful void. Once again he had no plans. The remainder of this ghastly day had somehow to be put in. How should he do it?

At first he neither knew nor cared. Then gradually an urge for physical movement grew up in him. It was some eight miles to Portrush. He might as well walk back. It would pass the time and, though this he thought unlikely, the exercise might possibly relieve his feelings.

He took the Portrush road, tramping along like an automaton with head dawn and shoulders hunched forward, paying scant attention to the scenery and nursing his dull load of disappointment. But gradually the extreme sombreness of his mood changed. After all, everything was not necessarily lost, he had no reason to suppose that this would be the last day either of his or Margot’s life. In all human probability, he would see her again, and the Giant’s Causeway was not the only beauty spot in the British Isles.

Passing through Bushmills, he began the long ascent to the White Rocks, taking as he walked a gradually increasing interest in his surroundings. The sun began to cheer up slightly, and the country grew less repellent. The sea, indeed, was looking almost attractive, clear and fresh and vividly blue. Far out on the horizon he could see the great bulk of the
Hellénique,
creeping very slowly westward towards the open Atlantic. He pictured what was taking place on board: Anderson and Miss Pym doing his work in that office, the routine of the ship, and those maniacs down in the bilges, sitting round their tables at their infernal games. Bad and all as were his present circumstances, he was at least better off than they.

He tramped on, the road rising and getting closer to the sea, till it was skirting the edge of the cliffs. Presently he reached the summit and rounding a little bluff, saw lying before him the sandhills, the golf links, the splendid East Strand, with Portrush and Ramore Head beyond.

He had come to a straight stretch of the road some three or four hundred yards long, when he decided to get out on to one of the headlands for a better view of the cliffs. Accordingly, he climbed the low wall bounding the road, and made his way to where the grass ended and the cliff dropped sheer to the water below. It was a broken coast and at each side of him were gullies, with further irregularly shaped rock masses beyond. For a few moments he gazed in admiration, then turned back to the road.

He had just reached the wall, and was about to climb over, when he saw a man appear a couple of hundred yards nearer Portrush. The man entered upon the road from the seaside, and, after looking up and down, appeared to consult a map. Then he crossed the road and disappeared over its inland side. It seemed unlikely that he could have seen Morrison, hidden as he was by the wall.

Now there was nothing remarkable in all this. But what immediately aroused Morrison’s interest was that the man was old Stott. On the prowl for ruins, he thought. A second lot, evidently, as Bristow had said his was on Ballywillan Hill at the back of the town.

The matter, of course, had nothing to do with Morrison, and he climbed back over the wall and resumed his walk towards Portrush. In a few seconds he came to the place where Stott had crossed, and he saw that on the sea side there was an easy ascent from the beach. Visible evidence of Stott’s passage up it remained in the shape of three footprints across a patch of sandy earth.

On the other side of the road was a curiously shaped basin or dell full of stunted trees and shrubs. Trees in the open on that windswept coast were practically nonexistent and the occasional ones which had survived were small and distorted, with their few branches turned inland, like hunched-up old men cowering before the blast. To look at those trees was almost to see the wind, and their appearance made Morrison think what a magnificent sight a winter gale in such a place must be.

The wooded basin was an exception to the rule. Here was shelter – of a kind. The surrounding lip broke the fury of the wind. The trees had seized on the protection, and though they were all stunted and miserable, they were at least putting up a fight for life. At the back of the hollow Morrison could see high ground, bleak and deserted.

It was into this thicket that Stott had gone. Presumably the ruin was in the hollow. Though admittedly the ancients chose hills rather than hollows for their buildings, the circumstances here were special. No doubt early man selected the place for the same reason as had the present-day trees. Giving it an interested glance, Morrison was about to pass on when a sudden sound brought him up with a jerk.

A choking shout or cry came from the spinney, a hoarse scream cut off quickly and dying away in a rather hideous gurgle.

For a moment Morrison stood as if turned to stone. It was obviously his duty to investigate, but he was no hero and always shrank from taking unweighed responsibilities. However, he did not delay long. Screwing up his courage, he stepped off the road and hurried into the little wood.

“Anyone there?” he shouted. There was no answer. He repeated the call.

The coppice was surprisingly thick. Between the trees were masses of close-growing bushes which made passage difficult and a view impossible. But he pushed ahead, calling out at intervals. He worked through to the opposite side of the saucer, then turning, came more slowly back.

About halfway to the road, almost in the centre of the little wood, he happened to notice on his left a freshly broken twig. He turned past it, devoutly wishing he were out of the horrible place. Then, after walking a few yards, he once again became rigid.

On the grass of a tiny clearing between clumps of poor-looking pines lay a man, and though Morrison could not see his features, he knew instantly that it was old Stott. He had fallen forward in a heap with his back bent and his head down near his knees. His arms were twisted beneath him, and he looked as if he had not gone down instantaneously, but had made some kind of struggle. His hat lay close by. Morrison was sure he was dead. Though he had only once before seen a corpse, there was that about Stott that left no doubt whatever.

Gingerly he stepped nearer, and then saw what he had missed in that first quick glance. The back of Stott’s head was dented between the bald top and the light fringe of grey hair. Though the skin was not broken and there was no blood, there was a definite hollow beneath which the skull must be shattered.

Morrison shivered. Even in that first moment of shock he realised that this could be no accident. There was nothing in the spinney to produce an injury of that kind. No fall could do it, no branch pushed aside and slapping back into position. No, only human agency could have brought about such a result.

With a shrinking horror growing in his mind, Morrison realised that he was in the presence of murder. Murder! And only just committed. It seemed fantastic, incredible. Five minutes before Stott had been alive and well: and now – he would never move or speak or take photographs again.

And there was more than that in it. Murder involved a murderer, and that murderer must be close by. He must almost certainly be in the spinney. Perhaps, Morrison felt, he was at that moment watching him. Perhaps he was creeping up behind him, ready with whatever he had killed Stott, to make a second blow.

Morrison realised that he was in very real danger. He knew too much. The murderer would see that his presence meant that within a few minutes the Portrush police would be on the scene, whereas only for him the body might not have been found for days: not until the scent was cold.

Fearfully, Morrison glanced behind him. He could see nothing untoward, but the shrubs were thick and horribly close. Anyone could approach unseen, and a single blow might make his head like Stott’s.

It was clear that for his own sake he must get out of the wood as quickly and silently as he could. For poor Stott’s sake also. He could do nothing for him, except to help to avenge him. And the quicker he brought the police, the greater their chance of doing it.

His heart was thumping like a mill as he retraced his steps, darting quick glances round in search of an enemy. But he saw no one, and had almost reached the road when another idea struck him, and for the third time he stopped dead in his tracks.