Last Writes (6 page)

‘Ravens …’ said Ferguson, pushing his plate away.

‘Five,’ said Henry, scribbling on his napkin.

‘Five what?’

‘Five. Go on …’

‘Widgeon.’

‘One and five hundred,’ murmured Henry.

‘You’re quite sure, Tyler,’ Ferguson said acidly, ‘that you don’t mean the four and twenty blackbirds that were baked in a pie?’

‘Quite sure,’ said Henry. ‘Next?’

‘Dotterel.’

‘Five hundred and fifty.’

‘I’ve lost you,’ said the man from the department with no name. ‘But if you insist …’

‘I do,’ said Henry.

‘Then your “collared dove” comes next,’ said Ferguson.

‘One hundred and twice fifty,’ said Henry.

‘Twice fifty is a hundred,’ objected Ferguson. ‘Same thing.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Henry, still scribbling. ‘And five hundred.’

‘You’ve still lost me,’ complained Ferguson.

‘Oh, and five hundred and five from the dove.’

‘Then there’s a full stop,’ said Edward Ferguson, adding with more than a touch of irony, ‘or isn’t that important?’

‘That’s your first number then,’ said Henry.

‘I’m not with you,’ said Ferguson.

‘Your first number is the sum of all those I’ve already mentioned,’ said Henry.

He scanned his eye down the figures. ‘I don’t know about you but I make that two thousand, two hundred and sixty-one.’

Edward Ferguson nodded. ‘That would fit although it’s a little higher than we were bargaining for.’

‘Know thine enemy,’ said Henry.

The man opposite leant over and said, ‘And the mallard and the fox?’ Ferguson gave a quick frown, lifted his hand to stay an answer, and said slowly. ‘No, don’t tell me. Would I be right in saying a thousand, two times fifty and five hundred for “mallard”?’

‘You would,’ said Henry. ‘Good man.’

‘Adding ten for “fox”?’ Ferguson twitched the napkin out of Henry’s hand. ‘And our man couldn’t use “waxwing” because it had got an
i
in it as well as the
x
… that right?’

‘Which would have made it six instead of five,’ agreed Henry. ‘And therefore wrong.’

‘The second number comes to sixteen hundred and ten,’ said Edward Ferguson, pushing his chair back and getting
to his feet. ‘You’ll have to excuse me, Tyler. I need to be getting back with these figures as soon as possible. They’re important.’

‘So was the 1666, if only we’d realised it,’ said Henry. ‘We were a bit slow there.’

‘Slow? In what way?’

‘Because 1666 is the only number which uses all the Roman numbers – MDCLXVI – and in declining order, too.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘That’s what should have told us we were dealing with a chronogram – that and the fact that your chap is a Latinist.’

‘A chronogram?’

‘Chronograms,’ pronounced Henry Tyler hortatively, ‘usually combine an inscription and a date picked out to be read as Roman numerals, but you can do it with any words and numbers you like … oh, you’re off, are you?’ He turned his head as the waiter approached and said to the man, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Ferguson is in a hurry and he’s had to go. He didn’t want a pudding today. Me? Oh, I think I’ll have the apple pie … and while you’re about it, would you bring me another napkin? I appear to have lost mine.’

He hadn’t meant to kill Pearl. At least, that’s what he told the police.

Afterwards, of course.

No, he insisted, he’d only meant to go along and see her for the last time.

Why? Because there were still one or two things left over from the divorce he wanted to clear up with her, that’s why.

Big things?

No, not big things. Little ones.

Like what then?

Well, he’d have liked her to say sorry.

What for?

For walking out on him like she had.

In what way then had she walked out on him?

Without there being anyone else.

Ah …

On either side, he said pointedly, although he supposed they’d be checking up on that.

They said they would. Routinely.

Although, he agreed readily enough, his solicitor had advised him not to go to see her but you know what solicitors are.

The police agreed that they knew what solicitors were.

Too careful by half, that’s what they were, he sniffed. Besides, they didn’t have feelings like normal men did.

Didn’t lose their rag, he meant, did he? said the police. Like some men …

Yes, he supposed he did. What did that Simon Puckle, sitting behind his great big desk in his posh office, know about what made a man see red?

Solicitors, the police countered temperately, knew rather more about life than most men. Pity he hadn’t listened to them, wasn’t it?

Well, if they wanted to put it like that …

They said they didn’t have to put anything in any way. All they had to do was remind him he didn’t have to tell them anything without Mr Puckle being there. If it was Mr Puckle he wanted, of course …

He didn’t need him now, he said.

The police said that in their view he needed a solicitor more than ever now.

He said it was too late, now Pearl was dead.

So was that all? they said, making a note. About this last visit? Just to get her to say she was sorry?

And to see where she’d settled after they’d split up. Not that she’d let him into the house. The back garden was all that he got to see of it.

Very wise, said the police, although not in the circumstances wise enough.

No, he agreed at once, it wasn’t anything to do with him where she had gone but he wanted to do it.

And?

And it wasn’t anything like their old house.

Naturally, said the police who knew rather more about one person families than most.

Nasty, poky little semi-detached place down by the river in Berebury, he sniffed. Half a garden and cheek-by-jowl with the people next door. When you think of the place they’d had before … before … there was no comparison. No comparison at all.

Was that where he was living now? asked the police. The old house?

No, it wasn’t, he growled. He’d had to give up the old home when they’d broken up. That was another thing.

What was?

That she didn’t seem to mind enough about losing the old home.

Ah.

She said she was quite happy here, where she was, thank you. The neighbours were pleasant people. There was a nice quiet old lady next door and some cheerful types across the road. They’d asked her over once or twice and there was another couple next door on the other side, out at work all day, but around at the weekend and they’d asked her in once or twice, too. That was what had got his goat …

What exactly?

That she preferred what she’d got to all that she’d had.

Including him?

If they liked to put it like that. Yes.

Ah, said one of the policemen, more toffee-nosed than the others. A touch of the Brownings, was it?

No, he shook his head. He hadn’t shot her. He’d strangled her.

That, explained the toffee-nosed one, wasn’t what he had meant. Robert Browning’s ‘Last Duchess’ had a ‘heart too soon made glad’ and her husband hadn’t liked it either. The Duke had given commands to have his wife murdered but he had taken matters into his own hands, hadn’t he? Literally.

He didn’t know she was going to provoke him like she had, did he? he muttered defensively.

So why the ticket for the football match that he had set up to video?

He liked to see the game again. See where the ref had gone wrong and all that.

And the supporter’s scarf with his name on that he’d dropped in one of the stands before leaving the ground at half-time?

Because, he snarled, he hadn’t known that the little old lady was sitting just the other side of the garden fence and must have heard every word that passed between him and Pearl, had he?

True.

Otherwise he wouldn’t have turned himself in. No, the old lady hadn’t seen him but he’d said some very personal things to Pearl that only a wife could have known.

Loudly?

A man can’t help shouting when he’s worked up, can he? Not when a woman has made him see red.

Possibly not, said the police, deciding against telling him that the old lady next door was stone deaf and never wasted her hearing-aid battery when she was just sitting in the garden reading, and hadn’t heard a thing.

Rhuaraidh Macmillan, the Sheriff of Fearnshire, paced round his room in his house at Drummondreach for the umpteenth time that morning. He finished up – as he invariably did these days – looking out of the window and scanning the horizon for the hundredth time. In a more peaceful decade the sheriff might have taken time to congratulate himself on the beauty of the view across the Firth from Ardmeanach – the Black Isle – but not now, not in these so very troubled times.

True, looking towards the purple-headed mountain of Ben Wyvis presented a pretty sight to the discerning eye but these were not moments to be enjoying the beauty of the landscape. His problem was that the paths through the hills which led over to the west away from Fearnshire naturally enough led back from there too. There was the rub. That they could carry men from the opposite direction was his worry: men – armed men – from far away to the west back here to Fearnshire.

That those paths to and from the west were only one of the sheriff’s problems he knew well enough. The trouble was that he couldn’t actually see the other well-trodden ways – the ones that came from the south, the east and the north. Another problem was that it was near Candlemass – darkest February – when there were too few hours of daylight for comfort.

If he, Rhuaraidh Macmillan, had been able to crane his neck sufficiently far round to the left from the viewpoint of the ridge on which his house at Drummondreach was built, he would have been able to see the length of the Black Isle to the south and the paths that came from there, too, but he couldn’t.

Those paths and what might be coming along them in his direction were another worry. Alas, the ways from Fortrose and Cromarty were out of his view altogether, which only added to the present discomfort of the Sheriff of Fearnshire. It was not for nothing that the promontory of Ardmeanach was known throughout Fearnshire as the Black Isle. It was because the whole was covered with dark pine trees. So now no one could say who was or was not approaching the back of Drummondreach through the woods. There was no view that way at all.

So that Sheriff Rhuaraidh Macmillan was a very anxious man went without saying in these greatly disturbed times in Scotland. He was, though, at the same time an unhappy man. And if the two conditions – the present unhappiness and the worried state – were not in themselves very closely connected, nevertheless there was no doubt that they had a common cause.

Rhuaraidh Macmillan went on pacing up and down in
his house at Drummondreach and had to concede to himself that both his unhappiness and his worry stemmed from the arrival of Mary Stuart from France and her enthronement as Queen of Scots. As her father, James V, had put it so neatly on his deathbed, ‘It began with a lass and it will end with a lass’.

It hadn’t ended so far, but what man alive could say what the future held?

But it did mean that that second lassie – the one that it might end with: Mary, Queen of Scots – was now Queen of Fearnshire, too. And this – and here was the difficulty – this required the Sheriff of Fearnshire leaving his Highland home and going to Edinburgh to swear his fealty to her.

And if that was not bad enough it had also, alas, made Sheriff Rhuaraidh Macmillan feel he should acquire some little command of the French language before he made the journey south. The sheriff had the Gaelic and the English all right and some little Latin but not – so far – the French.

But ‘Getting the French’ so to speak in remote Fearnshire was not proving easy and the sheriff, no longer a young man, had been reduced to taking lessons from a youthful tutor recently engaged at neighbouring Pitcalnie Castle for the purpose of making the laird’s daughters there fluent enough in the French language to be presented at the Queen’s court.

The sheriff had with difficulty now accepted the principle that in the French language everything had a gender. His reluctance to do so had been compounded by certain illogicalities in this that he, Rhuaraidh Macmillan, had been inclined to cavil at.

Why, he had asked, should ‘ship’ be considered
masculine – ‘
le bâtiment
’ – when every right thinking man – Scotsman, that is – knew that ships were always feminine? Every ship that the sheriff had ever known – and there had always been ships and plenty ploughing their way across the Firth – had invariably been addressed by all and sundry as ‘she’. It even went for ‘
le rafiau
’, the small sailing ships that could put into the little slipway at Balblair, not far from Drummondreach. Graceful line or no, they, too, were addressed as masculine in French.

The tutor from Pitcalnie had not attempted to explain this or any other Anglo-French anomaly the sheriff had latched on. Instead, he had merely counselled learning them by heart: worse, the man had added unhelpfully that that went for the irregular verbs, too. ‘Learn them the hard way,’ the teacher had said airily, being himself still young enough to do that with ease. ‘You’ll just have to commit them to memory.’

The irregular verbs had done nothing, either, to enhance the sheriff’s already jaundiced view of the French language. Nor had he been exactly enchanted with some of their nouns. Why potatoes should be called ‘
pommes de terre
’ or ‘apples of the earth’ defeated him. The word ‘
feu
’, which he himself used often in his everyday speech, was a perfectly proper Scottish word for that ancient duty which was owed by a tenant to a landlord in whose fiefdom he lived. Why the French should use it for the word ‘fire’ he couldn’t begin to imagine …

It was this struggle with a new language that accounted for the sheriff’s present unhappiness. The sheriff’s real worry – admittedly a much more urgent one than becoming fluent in the French tongue – was a warring band of caterans
that he had reason to believe was presently on its way to Fearnshire from somewhere else. That particular ‘somewhere else’ was almost certainly the west but not certainly enough for Rhuaraidh Macmillan – nobody’s fool – not to maintain a keen watch on possible approaches from the other three points of the compass.

He smiled grimly to himself as he put his clerk to watch as well as he could in these directions. ‘It’s called “
placer une sentinelle
”,’ he said to a bemused Dougal, ‘although why the word “
sentinelle
” should always be feminine, I do not know.’

‘All the sentries I’ve ever known have been men, my lord,’ agreed Dougal hastily. ‘Good men,’ that worthy added somewhat ambiguously.

The sheriff sighed and took another turn round his room. Those who lived and had their being in the Highland fastnesses that comprised Fearnshire were usually quite unconcerned by what went on in faraway Edinburgh – but not now. It was a time of change in Scotland and as that clever young Italian, Niccolò Machiavelli, had pointed out, ‘dramatic regime change’ was always a dangerous time for any society. And dramatic regime change was undoubtedly what they had in Scotland just now.

Not everybody in Fearnshire liked it – Pitcalnie the Younger, for one, was known to be a rebel – and the sheriff did not blame them. The behaviour of she on the throne at the Palace of Holyrood was not meeting with favour in every other quarter either. And the county of Fearnshire was one of those quarters. In consequence, rebellion was raising its ugly head and, as is the way of such things, serious dissenters were being joined by a tatterdemalion
collection of miscreants, ne’er-do-wells and landless clansmen disaffected by the toadying of their chieftains at that faraway court in Edinburgh.

One of these roving bands, he had been warned, was even now making its way towards Fearnshire on trouble bent. This was the cause of his worry and speaking to them in French wouldn’t get him very far. While the unhappiness could wait, the worry couldn’t and it was only a conscious effort of will that stopped him spending every minute of every day keeping his eye on the track that came down towards Dingwall from the west through the ancient settlement of Strathpeffer.

What he would do when he saw armed men approaching was a different matter and unfortunately time might well be of the essence. Mustering the forces of law and order was no easy matter in remote Fearnshire so the longer warning he had the better. Assistance against an armed band was not easily at hand at the best of times – even less so when it wasn’t easy to know on whom to count for support.

This was because that well-known dictum ‘he who isn’t with me is against me’ didn’t hold when there were Fearnshire men unashamedly sitting on the fence, watching and waiting to see which way the tide of battle would go. The race would be to the swift, right enough, not to the loyal.

Appeals for loyalty to a distant monarch about whom little good had been heard were not likely to be entirely successful either. It would take time, too, and in some cases persuasion not far short of bribery, to get his nearest neighbours to rally to his side.

He mentally reviewed those on whom he could call for
aid in upholding the rule of law while he once more drifted uneasily towards the point in his room where he could look to the west. One thing was certain and that was that it wouldn’t be a collection of young Lochinvars coming out of the west and descending on Drummondreach.

On the contrary, in fact.

It was more likely that that it would be a rabble led by Colum Mulchaich, ever a troublemaker, and it would be the sheriff’s job to stop Mulchaich and his mob wreaking havoc on the countryside. The sheriff sincerely hoped that it wasn’t also going to be his job to get Colum Mulchaich over to Crochair – more properly called ‘the place of the hanging’ – but if he had to do it, then duty demanded that he did just that.

He was about to take yet another turn round the room when the slightest of movements in the middle distance caught his eye. It was gone in a moment and he had to wait a full minute before he saw it again. He rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t dreamt it. There was a small man clad in some tattered faded grey fustian creeping towards Drummondreach along the shelter of a faraway field wall down near the shore beyond.

The sheriff slipped out into his own front doorway and adjured the hall boy to keep his bagpipes silent at the approach of a visitor. ‘Let the wee mannie come to the house any way he likes,’ he said as the boy laid his chanter aside. ‘He’ll no want a fuss made.’

If he, Rhuaraidh Macmillan, was any judge of what the man wanted it was food and shelter. Even so the figure did not advance any further than the field wall nearest to Drummondreach. Instead, he just lay on the grass
alongside the wall, making no more movement. It didn’t take Rhuaraidh Macmillan long to work out why. The visitor – whoever he was – was waiting for darkness to fall.

The sheriff stopped his pacing up and down of his room and sat down to think instead. This could be good and bad. It might be that the man was a spy, an advance guard, watching and waiting to see that the sheriff was indeed in his home at Drummondreach. It might be that he felt in too much danger himself to advance any further in daylight. It might be that the stranger wanted the cover of darkness for some other fell purpose.

It was a full hour before the sheriff knew anything more. It was deep twilight before the man made a move and then it was only to the very edge of the sheriff’s policies. He stood there for a moment and then raised his right arm and lofted something that looked heavy over a spot where the boundary wall looked at its lowest.

And then he was gone.

The sheriff stifled an impulse to go straight out to see what had been cast onto his land, his hand stayed by rumours of fatal explosions at faraway places in the south. Gunpowder, those had been. This, he decided after a long look, was a hefty round stone. Steeling himself and not seeing anything in the nature of a lighted fuse, he presently set out to examine it. It was indeed a round stone, and it was covered in skiver.

He brought it back inside the house and carefully unwound the piece of split sheepskin leather from the stone, full of hope that it might have a message written on it.

It had.

Calling for Dougal, his clerk, he started to read out the letters roughly scribbled on the skiver.

‘Wait you, while I read it out,’ he instructed him. Holding the skiver to the failing light he called out the words. ‘It begins “
MUCH, FRIENDS
”… That’s not very helpful. I doubt if it’s any of our “friends” on the way.’

‘So do I,’ muttered Dougal under his breath, struggling with his quill.

‘Then it has “
BOOK, TOWNSHIP
” … What does that mean, I wonder?’

‘I canna’ begin to say, my lord,’ said Dougal, scratching the words down. ‘All it does mean is that someone has his letters.’

‘That’s a good point,’ said the sheriff fairly. Most of the insurgents wouldn’t be able to read or write, although that didn’t make them less good at the sword, but there would be one or two educated men among them. ‘It goes on “
HARE, TREE
” … Dougal, is there a somewhere near here with a special tree where hares meet?’

‘Not to my knowledge, my lord,’ said Dougal, literate but no countryman. ‘Not until March, anyway.’

‘Ah,’ said the sheriff, ‘this is better. The word “
SECRET
” comes next.’

‘Secret,’ echoed Dougal, obediently writing this down.

‘And then there’s “
SHIP
”,’ said the sheriff pensively. ‘That’s all. Now, read it back to me.’

The clerk said, ‘Much, friends, book, township, hare, tree, secret, ship.’

‘It disna mean a thing,’ said Rhuaraidh Macmillan, dismissing his clerk and settling down to think. It still meant nothing after he’d called for candles to be brought,
the better to see the written words, and that meant that if anyone else saw the message it wouldn’t mean anything to them either, which might be important.

Searching for the place name he needed so badly – if, indeed, the message had been from a friend – he took the first letter of all the words but could make nothing of them however much he jumbled them about.

Even after he’d had the peat of the fire cast aside and logs brought in the better to warm his body on a cold night – and he hoped his brain, too – he couldn’t fathom anything in the message. Together the words were meaningless no matter which way he looked at them. Separately they meant very little more.