The Burry Man's Day (25 page)

‘Well, I’ve heard everything now!’ said a voice behind me. I jumped and turned around, flushing to the roots of my hair (I could feel it from the inside, as though I had walked into a steam-bath). One of the three ministers I had met at Buttercup’s cocktail party had opened the door of the bar without a sound and was standing in the threshold twinkling at me. A very useful little knack for a minister to have, I thought to myself.

‘What would this be, then?’ he said, advancing. ‘The Ladies’ Intemperance League? That’s a new one.’ He stopped at the bar, gave Rearden, still slumped face down on the counter, a shrewd look, then gave Brown an even shrewder one which made the landlord shuffle his feet and almost out-blush me. Ah, I thought, this must be Father Cormack. I could relax.

‘He’s only had beer, Father,’ said Brown. ‘And all on the house.’ I should have thought that made it worse: Rearden must have had to absorb simply buckets of the stuff to get this drunk on only beer.

‘Well, I’m not averse to a glass of beer,’ said Father Cormack, ‘although it can be filling and Miss Patterson was busy making dumplings when I left.’ Brown took a small glass from under the counter, polished it vigorously with a corner of his apron and poured a large tot of clear liquid from a bottle behind him.

‘Can I get you anything, madam?’ he said. ‘On the house, since I’m closed, of course.’

‘Sherry?’ I said, but at Father Cormack’s chuckle, I gathered my wits. ‘Or lemonade?’

‘I can heartily recommend the damson gin, Mrs Gilver,’ said Father Cormack, lifting his glass to hold it against the gas light and swirling it gently. ‘William here has his own recipe.’

‘Och, Father,’ said Brown. ‘You’re an awful man. It’s hardly worth callin’ it a recipe. You jist put a few damsons in a bottle o’ gin and wait.’

‘Of course,’ said Father Cormack. ‘What was I thinking? Ah, but lovely stuff it is once the wait is over.’

‘Well, you’ve persuaded me,’ I said. ‘I’m very partial to sloe gin and I’d like to try a new variation.’ Father Cormack chuckled again for reasons best known to himself, and Brown poured me a tot. It was, indeed, quite delicious; fragrant and spiced but with a kick like an angry donkey.

‘Gosh,’ I said, feeling as though flames were licking my toes. ‘Hoo! Well, here’s to Robert Dudgeon, gentlemen, wouldn’t you say?’ We raised our glasses, Brown lifting a beer tankard of his own, and drank.

‘And here’s to the Ladies’ Intemperance League,’ carried on Father Cormack. ‘Power to their elbow. I’d hate to see those Turnbulls cut the heart out of our little Burgh, Mrs Gilver, and that’s what it would do, make no mistake, if we lost our distilling and brewing. Wouldn’t it, William? You must know the old stories about the Hawes Inn.’

‘Smuggling?’ I said. ‘Pirates? Surely
that
doesn’t go on any more. And there’s no actual distilling either, is there? It’s just a bottling hall.’

‘Of course, of course,’ said Father Cormack again. ‘What
was
I thinking?’ He paused and then continued in a much more serious voice with his twinkle turned down to a peep. ‘I missed you on Sunday, William,’ he said, putting down his empty glass and wiping his lips with a handkerchief as Brown refilled it. ‘You and Josephine. Friday too.’ Then he excused this public dressing down by turning to me and saying, cheerfully: ‘Aren’t you glad, Mrs Gilver, not to be one of
my
flock, to be chased up and ticked off like a lost lamb when it’s no one’s business but your own what you do on a Sunday morning? It’s a terrible burden, is it not now, William?’ Mr Brown looked miserably ill at ease in the face of this bantering, but I answered the priest like for like.

‘Certainly, I’m glad to be walking the broad path between such persecution and the absolute fire and brimstone on the other side. I was born in Northamptonshire, you know, where there is a happy third option.’

‘Ah, the Church of England,’ said Father Cormack, twinkling again, and putting his hand across his heart. ‘Will I tell the lady what we call them when there’s no one but us to hear, William? Will I, now.’

‘Father,’ said Mr Brown again. ‘You’re an awful man.’

I rather wanted to hear, but he was not to be persuaded – a terrible tease, it seemed – and instead he started again gently mocking me for my paean to the demon drink.

‘And you’re preaching to the needy, telling William here,’ he said. ‘Don’t let all these bottles here fool you, my dear lady. He’s on the slippery slope, aren’t you, lad? Started out working for a distillery, moved to work for a brewery, and now he’s only running a pub and selling the stuff; the poor man could end up with a lemonade stall if he’s not careful.’ He threw back his head and laughed and I joined in, not because any of this was particularly witty, but he was just such a dear little man with his twinkling eyes and his tuft of hair sticking out in a spout at the front with a gleaming bald head behind it. William Brown though, I noticed, did not laugh along with us, and I wondered after a moment if Father Cormack was not just a little cruel, a little cold, underneath his bonhomie; I was glad indeed not be one of his lambs.

Not long after this, a couple of heads were glimpsed bobbing along the street, just visible above the half-blinds in the windows, and we heard the clang of a shop door being opened along the terrace a-ways. The curfew, evidently, was over and Queensferry was coming back to life so I bid Father Cormack goodbye, thanked Mr Brown for the gin, causing yet another eruption of chortling, and patted Mr Rearden’s shoulder in farewell. Then I opened the door a crack and looked carefully up the street and down before sidling out and beginning to walk back to my motor car trying to look as though I had just done no such thing, which was more of a challenge than one would have imagined as the fresh sea air mingled with the unaccustomed mid-morning gin and made me feel more like waltzing in circles and singing.

After the ribbing I had given Alec about his inebriation the day before I felt most concerned to be myself again before we met and so on returning to the castle I went to my room and rang for more coffee even though there was barely an hour until luncheon. I was growing rather fond of my corner of the castle keep and, although I still wished for a few more windows about the place, for some reason it made me feel extra-specially studious to sit writing at my little desk with a lamp lit. I did spend quite a bit of my free time day by day doing just that, having learned the lesson well on my first case that one cannot guarantee to remember all that one has heard unless one writes it down immediately. Furthermore, it is no good simply sifting through and deciding what one
thinks
are the nuggets because, when one is detecting, the snippets one thinks are chaff often turn out to be pure gold, and the nuggets one hugs to one’s breast as treasure just as often reveal themselves to be utter clinker in the end. This, I often thought to myself, would be one of my most fiercely held detecting maxims if only I could resolve the metaphor into some respectable whole.

Accordingly, I wrote down as much as I could remember of the visit to the Turnbulls, the cart-hunt along the Back Braes and of course the drinking session in Brown’s Bar, and after two cups of strong coffee and some plain biscuits, I had filled six sheets and was ready to face the others in the Great Hall. I shrugged off my dark frock and chose a pearl-grey and pink stripe which Grant is very fond of and always packs even though, to my thinking, it has a little too much of the sailor dress about it for a woman of my age; if I wore it today and tried to drop something dark down the front, it would be safely
hors de combat
for the rest of the visit (Grant never attempts complicated laundering procedures away from home if she can help it).

I doubled back at the last minute to add some notes about my encounter with the weeping village women halfway up the Loan – I had forgotten about them, which rather proved the point about needing to keep careful notes – and so I was late for luncheon. The others were already being served with tomato soup when I arrived, Alec once more tucking his napkin into his collar and Cad once more looking rather shocked to see him do so. Tomato soup, of course, was perfect for my purposes. The pink and grey stripe would be at the bottom of the trunk with a sprinkling of soda under a brown-paper patch before the afternoon was out.

‘How did you enjoy your first Scotch funeral?’ I asked Cad as I sat down. He considered the question for a moment, nodding sagely.

‘I’m not sure that “enjoy” is the word,’ he said. ‘It’s a damn silly idea not to let the women join in for one thing. If the women were there weeping and wailing the men could be patting their shoulders and feeling superior. With no one else there to do the blubbing it was all down to us and I’ve never felt so uncomfortable in all my days.’

Buttercup and I looked first at him and then at Alec – thunderstruck with his mouth open – and then collapsed into giggles.

‘What?’ said Cadwallader. I was not sure I could have explained ‘what’ exactly if I had a week to think it out, only just that he was so very unlike other men and so utterly unaware of it that it was impossible not to laugh.

‘I must say, though,’ Cad went on, ‘I’d far prefer it if we went to the regular Sunday shindigs in that church instead of the Pisky, Freddy my love. It’s much less annoying when you can’t understand a word that’s being said. Still not soothing exactly – the pastor doesn’t have a soothing cadence – but I could learn to think of it as a kind of tone-poem, you know. Avant garde.’

‘It wouldn’t work,’ said Alec. ‘All of a sudden you’d find yourself beginning to catch the odd word and then whole phrases and then there’s no turning back. It happened to me with the men working on the estate. I used to assume they were talking about the birds and the trees and the bonny heathered glens. Then when my ear tuned in at last I got a rude awakening. Clara Bow’s legs, don’t you know. And all points north.’

‘Don’t speak too soon, my darling,’ I said. ‘They can still catch
me
out despite the yawning eternity I’ve been incarcerated here. I can’t, for instance, make head nor tail of what they call Robert Dudgeon’s little cart.’

‘I wondered about that,’ said Cad. ‘When I was going over the inventory. There are scores of them around, you know. We use them for all kinds of things.’

‘Anyway,’ said Alec, ‘since I now have a passable “guid Scots tongue in ma’ heid” –’

‘Alec!’ I said, sharply. I had spoken to him before about attempting a Scotch accent, more than once, and had told him that I would rather he scraped his fingernails down a slate.

‘Sorry!’ he said. ‘But you really are a bore sometimes, Dandy. It’s harmless fun. Anyway, since I can now interpret the natives like a missionary’s child, I did a good bit of earwigging this morning. There was a great deal of discussion about the death as you can imagine, a lot of pretty maudlin revelling in the fact that both father and son are gone and poor Mrs Dudgeon is all alone. How they rolled that around and admired it from all angles. Quite disgusting. As well as that, there was quite a bit of audible tallying of how much respect was being paid to Dudgeon, and from all that I could gather it washes out some of our suspicions about the various Ferry Fair factions. Both the Prod Padres were there and representatives of all three of the great families – four, of course, counting Cad.’ Cad looked surprised but very pleased to be lumped in with the Linlithgows, Roseberys and Stuart-Clarks in this way, and certainly did not suspect for a heartbeat that Alec’s tongue could be in his cheek. ‘Quite an impressive turn-out for an estate carpenter, and a clear sign, I thought, that the feeling for the Burry Man goes far too deep for him to be dislodged by a gaggle of hysterical –’ He caught my eye and stopped. ‘. . . by a few, and an unrepresentative few, ladies who have slightly lost their sense of perspective over a heartfelt difference of opinion.’ He flashed me a beaming smile and I blew him a raspberry in reply. ‘Now, Cad did manage to spot one of the Burry Man’s boys –’

‘The fat one,’ said Cad. ‘Not the fellow with the side-whiskers, no sign of him.’

‘Yes indeed,’ said Alec. ‘And I did get the chance to sidle up to him and strike up a conversation.’

‘And?’ I said. ‘Oh damn and blast. I’ve dropped soup in my lap. Ho-hum.’

‘And I’m afraid I had to make reference to a rumour that it was the drink that did for Robert Dudgeon,’ said Alec, screwing his face up in a grimace of remorse.

‘Oh, Alec, you didn’t!’ I said. ‘Please tell me you didn’t. After Inspector Cruickshank and the doctor managed to keep it quiet for her. You are a stinker sometimes.’

‘Well, I had to get the talk round to the sandwich and the only way I could think to do it was to start with: did he think there was anything in the rumour, and even if there was, wouldn’t he say it was not enough food rather than too much drink that was at the bottom of it, and did people on the way around sometimes give the Burry Man food instead of whisky. How would you have got there starting from somewhere else, Dan?’

I thought about it for a minute or two and had to concede that there was no other obvious route to that particular destination. I took comfort in the thought that the Turnbulls and their like really had started exactly this rumour anyway and Alec had probably not done a great deal, in that particular company, to strengthen it.

‘And?’ said Buttercup to Alec. ‘What did he say? Was there a cloaked stranger who drew up and proffered the sandwich in a gnarled claw?’

‘There was not,’ said Alec. ‘The chap said that nobody ever gave the Burry Man food – pointed out that it would be rather cruel torture to do so since he couldn’t eat it – and that nothing but whisky passed his lips between nine and six. So I said, “Oh, I suppose his wife must have brought him the sandwich, then.” And he looked puzzled. And I said, “He did eat one, you know. It showed up in the post-mortem.” And then he looked at me as though I had crawled out from under a stone, and since we were just then walking at sombre pace behind the coffin en route from the church to the graveyard, I can quite see that what the PM found in the way of stomach contents was hardly polite.’