The Rough Collier (20 page)

Gil nodded. ‘You’re quite right, we don’t know enough there. I’m hoping the Provost will send someone else out to question the folk at Bonnington, though whether I can rely on the findings from that . . . Anyway, I’ve my own observations and Michael’s.’ He finished his second helping of porridge, and put the bowl down for the dog. ‘Assuming it was poison, and was meant for Murray, and was added to the flask of cordial, I need to find out what it might have been that would be available here in Lanarkshire and would act so quickly.’

Alys and Lady Egidia exchanged a look.

‘And would not be noticed in a cup of the cordial,’ said Lady Egidia. ‘What does it taste of, the cordial, do you know?’

‘I didn’t taste what we found, believe me. It smells like your cough syrup,’ said Gil, pulling a face.

‘Elderberries,’ said Alys, ‘and honey, and perhaps ginger, if it was the same brew that Joanna gave me.’

‘Enough to disguise most things,’ said Lady Egidia. ‘Particularly with another spoonful of honey in it. How big is this flask?’

‘I can show you it. Bide a moment.’

Going quickly up the stair to their chamber, he lifted his outer clothes from the kist where he had flung them down the previous evening. The big purse he had carried was with them, a commodious object of worn leather with half the trim missing. Reflecting that he could now afford a new one, he went back down to the hall, extracting the flask and the pottery bottle as he went. He handed both to Alys, who took them to her mother-in-law, sniffing at one and then the other as she did so.

‘I think the cordial is the same,’ she said, and looked back at Gil. ‘What have you there, Gil? A piece of stone? Is it one of the little fishes from the coal?’

‘No,’ he said, turning the flat slab over. ‘It’s Bel’s slate, that she dropped. I put it in my purse to give back to her, but I haven’t seen the lassie on her own. I’d forgotten it was there.’ He put the stone on the plate-cupboard, and nodded at the flask and bottle in his mother’s hand. ‘Do those tell us anything?’

‘The flask is quite dry,’ said Alys, ‘but if we rinsed it out with a very little water, we might learn what was in it.’

‘A good thought.’ Lady Egidia held the silver flask to her nose again, then turned it in her hand, admiring it. ‘It’s a valuable gift. German work, to judge by the pattern. I wonder how Mistress Weir came by it?’

‘And why she gave it to Murray. She demanded it back, yesterday before we left, as being now Mistress Brownlie’s property.’

‘What did you say?’ his mother asked.

‘Oh, I denied all knowledge. The Provost will want it for the quest.’

‘True. I’ll keep it close for you. And given that you think you know how this man died,’ Lady Egidia went on, ‘who might have brought about his death? Do you know enough to name anyone to Provost Lockhart?’

‘No.’ Gil sighed. ‘Any of the women at the coal-heugh, I suppose. Much depends on what was in the flask and who put it there.’ He brightened. ‘I suppose it would be wiser to leave questioning them further till I know more about that.’

Alys caught his eye and nodded agreement.

‘True,’ said his mother, and indicated the two bowls on the floor. ‘You may as well pick those up, if the dog’s finished, and save Nan bending for them. And then you’d best be off to Lanark and talk to the Provost, afore the day gets any older.’

Lanark town was significantly bigger than Carluke, and now before Sext its long, curving market-place was bustling with folk, on foot, on horse, even in a couple of tilt-carts with their passengers peering out from under the oiled canvas hoods at the displays on booths and counters. Leaving the garrulous Patey at the Nicholas Inn and the horses tied up in the yard, Gil made his way up the hill to the handsome stone house belonging to the Provost, and gave his name to the maidservant who answered the door.

Provost Lockhart was a pink self-consequential man in a magnificent gown of tawny velvet lined with fur. Torn between a desire to oblige the Archbishop’s man and the need to preserve his own pre-eminence in the burgh, he took a little persuading to see Gil’s viewpoint. He sat by the neat coal fire in his private closet and frowned across the hearth at his guest, shaking his head.

‘Only the facts, Maister Cunningham,’ he repeated dubiously, and hitched the furred gown further on to his shoulders. ‘I’m no so sure about that. Is it within the law, now? I was always tellt it was my duty to find a name for the man responsible. Or woman, I suppose,’ he added.

‘You can postpone the end of the quest,’ Gil prompted him. ‘If you gather all the facts we have, and get them writ down clearly, then you can dismiss the assize for the time being, and reconvene when we’ve more idea who to name. Then we can let the two sets of kin deal with the burials, and –’

‘Aye, well.’ Maister Lockhart seized on that point. ‘That would be a good thing, and put an end to a pair of six-week-old carcasses cluttering up the town. I’ve no notion how the assize will react, mind you, they’re that used to being allowed to name names and get someone put to the horn or clapped in the jail, but I can see how it might be a good thing to get rid of the cadavers.’ He nodded, pursing his lips anxiously. ‘I’ve been hearing already how it’s bad for trade up that end of the town, for they’re making their presence public, as you might say, everywhere the wind blows from St Mungo’s kirk. And who do you think was responsible anyway, maister? Is it someone we’d ken here in Lanark? Someone out at Bonnington? Was it because they were – ye ken, wicked sinners? That’s a terrible thing to be found in Lanark, and them ordinary folk, no lords or foreigners.’

‘I’m nowhere near naming anyone,’ Gil parried. ‘Did you send a man out to question the folk at Bonnington, Maister Lockhart?’

‘I did that.’ Rising, the Provost went to his tall desk and searched among the papers on its sloping front. ‘John Mathieson went, and a clerk wi’ him to write it all down, and a right pig’s dinner they’ve made of it, no sort of order to the questions and the answers writ down all anyhow.’ He extracted a folded leaf from the slithering mass, and peered at it. ‘This man, the forester – Syme, his name is – was never seen since well afore the quarter-day, so far as I can make out, but his goats have been wandering everywhere and there’s two folk had complained to the steward’s clerk about that. Why nobody went down to his house instead of making a note to tell him when they saw him . . .’ He turned the page over and perused the back carefully. ‘The man Murray never seen about the policies at all. Get their coal from – aye, aye. And the forester lad no close friends on the estate.’ He held the page nearer, then at arm’s length, and suddenly thrust it at Gil. ‘You can read it for yourself, Maister Cunningham, for what good it does. Just let me have it back afore the quest, which is cried for the morn’s morn after Sext.’

‘Thank you, maister.’ Gil tucked the paper in the breast of his doublet before the man could change his mind. ‘Who will you call for the quest?’

‘Oh, aye.’ Maister Lockhart came to sit down, his anxious expression returning. ‘I’ve to give that some thought and all. Yourself and young Douglas, o’ course.’ Gil nodded agreement. ‘John Hamilton the steward at Bonnington, I suppose, for the forester, as well as for the place they were found. Seems the poor laddie has no kin closer than Ayrshire. The other fellow’s maister and kin, though, I’ve a difficulty there, seeing it’s Mistress Weir from the coal-heugh, or else his wife, Our Lady guard her, poor soul, and I’d no want to ask a woman to view the corp. Either one can testify to when he left his work, and the like, but –’

‘One of the colliers might take it on, or even young Crombie,’ Gil offered.

The Provost considered. ‘Aye, that might do. I’ll send John Mathieson wi’ the summons, after we’re done here. He canny question a witness properly, but he can arrange such a matter as that.’

Gil nodded, and rose to take his leave. As he reached the door something Arbella Weir had said came back to him, and he paused.

‘Maister Lockhart, did you set eyes on Murray yourself, that day he was in the town?’

Lockhart stared at him, frozen in the act of hitching up his furred gown again.

‘Do you know, maister, I did. I did that.’ He settled the tawny velvet round his shoulders, and contemplated the fact, pursing his lips. ‘For when he asked for the quarter’s payment, my steward found there wasny enough in his kist, having paid out on another account just the day afore it, and came to me to get it made up, and the man Murray on his heels.’

‘And was he just as usual?’

‘Oh, aye. Just as usual. He’s – he’d aye an air about him, of all being right wi’ his world, and the hell wi’ anyone else’s.’

‘And what time of day would that be?’

‘Just afore the noon bite,’ said Lockhart positively. ‘I was in here, d’ye see, putting the answers together to a couple letters, and a clerk to scrieve them. The same clerk that went wi’ John constable yesterday, indeed.’

‘That’s valuable,’ said Gil, considering. ‘You’ve no notion where he went after he left here?’

‘I can tell you that and all, and d’ye ken how? I was at my window,’ he gestured towards it, a splendid glazed aperture with a painted blaze of arms at its centre, ‘and spied him and his two men going down the High Street. I stood and watched them go down past where poor Andro Bothwell’s pothecary shop used to be and into the tavern, Juggling Nick’s as they cry it, and remarked to Dandy clerk that I hoped he’d no spend the whole of his takings in there, and the daft loon writ it down.’ He guffawed. ‘Right put out he was, when he’d to scrape it all out and scrieve it again, but I tellt him, I said, that’s no going in a letter to my partner in a venture. So that’s how I mind that, Maister Cunningham!’

Following Murray’s footsteps, Gil went back down the wide street, past the shuttered shop with the wooden mortar and pestle above the door, and paused under the inn sign to admire it again. He had always appreciated the way St Nicholas’ right hand, raised in blessing over the market-place, also appeared to be ready to catch the first of the three fat purses which floated round his head. The bishop was due a coat of paint; his colours were fading, his mitre reduced to an indeterminate grey. Hoping the next painter would do the image justice, he put a hand on the taproom door; then, on a sudden impulse, he turned away and stepped into the saint’s small chapel next to the inn.

There was a hum of conversation in the nave, where perhaps two dozen townsfolk were standing about to hear the Mass. He found a quiet spot by St Giles’s altar, folded his hat and knelt on it to go over the shreds of the midnight dream which still troubled him, to ask for help in putting it from his mind and in reading the puzzle before him. Or did the dream have some bearing on the puzzle? He shivered slightly, as it returned to him in vivid detail.

He had thought he was standing in the clearing by Syme’s house, looking in at the door. In the trees to one side a naked man approached, and inside the house something stirred in the shadows, who or what he did not know but suddenly he had been certain that he must not set eyes on it. As he turned to flee the owl had swooped down over the roof, its wings huge and overshadowing, and seized him in its claws, tearing with its beak at his bare flesh. His back still crawled with the feeling that he was threatened. St Giles, preserve me from all ill, he thought. Perhaps I should go down to the forester’s house again.

After a while he rose from his knees, with no feeling of having been answered, and went to sit near St Roch on the stone bench at the wall-foot, half listening to the singing from beyond the chancel arch and turning matters over in his mind.

His mother and Alys had proposed some experiment, involving one of a nest of young rats which Henry had been saving to teach some terrier pups their business. But whether or not the creature died from drinking the water which had rinsed out the flask, what would that tell him? The man Murray was dead, and Andrew Syme with him, that was inarguable, and it seemed almost certain that their deaths were murder. But if I’m wrong, he thought, if it was an accidental poisoning or even a double suicide, what then? He had studied too much law to have any illusions about the judicial process; if he named someone to Maister Lockhart, or to his master the Archbishop, that person would suffer the penalty for murder as likely as not, whether innocent or guilty. And in this case . . .

In this case, the guilty person was most probably someone he had had civil dealings with in the past few days. Someone from the coaltown, or just possibly one of the two fellows he had left at the saltworks on the shores of the Forth. Or David Fleming, or one of the customers whose fees Murray had collected – the list got longer and longer, though he could probably rule out the people of Forth – or someone from the Nicholas Inn. And I must go in there and ask questions, he told himself. But suppose I name the wrong person to the Archbishop?

He opened his eyes and stared at St Roch’s dog, a splendid black-and-white creature gazing adoringly up at his master. The man who carved the statue was better at dogs than at people, he thought irrelevantly.

But what if Murray’s death was an accident, and the intended victim was Syme? Or perhaps the two of them had been killed deliberately by someone who knew one of the men, knew he had a lover. Now that would work whether the lover was known to be a man or thought to be a woman, but was the poisoner a friend or a would-be lover of Murray or of Syme? Or a friend of Joanna Brownlie, he thought, which takes me back to the coal-heugh and its household.

For the first time since the corpse had come up out of the peat-digging, he wished Alys’s father was present. Pierre was good at this sort of exploration of the wider possibilities, and as he had found last night, it was not an easy subject for a man to discuss with his wife. Even Alys. He thought for a moment about her warm sympathy and the matter-of-fact way she had dealt with his dream, and wondered if perhaps she would find the subject less awkward than he did. Her capacity to surprise him really did seem to be endless.

The townspeople round about him were moving, leaving the little chapel. The Mass must be over. He stretched his back, then drew the paper with the report from Bonnington out of his doublet, and tilted it to the light from the nearest window.