Stormy Petrel

‘Oh, Rose!’

Megan and Ann spoke together. They were both sitting at the table in the window. Just inside the door, which was shut, stood Archie McLaren. Seeing the boats at the jetty, he must have come with the girls to the cottage to see what was happening, and now, presumably, he would stay to see the drama out, and the ferry passengers would have to take care of themselves.

The scene in my sitting-room was certainly set for drama. Ewen still sat in the chair by the hearth, with Sergeant Fraser across from him, but the detective-constable had moved his chair to block the doorway to the scullery, and Neil was beside the fireplace, standing with an elbow on the mantelshelf. Someone had pushed the Calor gas poker into the dead logs in the fireplace, and added the rest of the peat from the hearth. The fire had caught, and was burning cheerfully.

‘Hullo, there. Good morning, Archie.’ I greeted the newcomers a little uncertainly, then – because doing something, anything, was better than standing there trying not to look at Ewen – went to pull the gas poker out of the fire and turn it off. ‘An early call? Have you had breakfast?’

It was a silly remark in the circumstances, but it bridged the moment. Ann spoke breathlessly. She looked tense and excited.

‘Rose, we had to come . . . Of course we didn’t know anything like this had happened, the police being here, I mean, and Mr Hamilton, but when Archie told us, we knew we’d have to come and tell you what happened yesterday.’

I went across to the sofa and sat down, looking enquiringly at Sergeant Fraser.

He nodded. ‘Yes, it does have to do with this. It seems that while you were away on the island yesterday, the young ladies came down here. What they have told us may be important, but since you are the owner, the lessee, rather, of this cottage, we waited for you. Perhaps Miss Tracy or Miss Lloyd would repeat their story for you?’

I raised my brows at them. Megan, looking flushed and unhappy, shook her head. Ann leaned forward.

‘Yes. We came down here in the evening. Yesterday evening. We wouldn’t have disturbed you if you’d been busy, but we wanted to watch for the otters again. You weren’t at home, so we went up there –’ she gestured vaguely – ‘behind the cottage, and found a place we could watch from without being seen. You know, a hide.’

‘Ann.’ It was Megan, her voice low. ‘Not all that. Just finish.’

Ann took a breath. She seemed to have no difficulty in looking at Ewen. ‘All right. He came. Ewen Mackay there. His boat came in to the jetty. He got out and went to the cottage door and knocked. Because of what we had heard about him, we stayed where we were and didn’t say anything. He knocked again, but of course there was no answer. Then he went in. He had a key. We didn’t know what to do, so we stayed put and watched. He didn’t stay long – just went in and called out, as if he was checking to see that the place was empty. Then he went back to his boat.’ She paused. ‘Megan?’

‘No. You.’

‘He took something out of the boat, a bundle. It was wrapped in what looked like cloth, thick, but it was long, and stiff, not just cloths, I mean. He went round the back to that shed, not the loo, the tool-shed, and of course that was just below us and we saw it all. He was hurrying. He went into the shed. He wasn’t there long. When he came out he didn’t have the bundle. He went to the boat and then away.’

She stopped. Silence for a moment. Megan said, miserably: ‘We waited, but you didn’t come, so after a bit we went down and had a look in the shed, but there wasn’t anything to see. Nothing that seemed to matter, I mean. So we went home. We thought of telling Mrs McDougall, but we decided you ought to know first. Anyway, she’d gone to bed. She leaves the door for us – actually I don’t think it’s ever locked. Then this morning Archie came in at breakfast-time and said the police were here, and the Customs, so we knew there must be something really wrong, and he said he’d bring us down.’

The sergeant got to his feet. ‘You did right, miss. And now, Miss Fenemore, with your permission, we would like to take a look at that shed ourselves.’ A look down at Ewen. ‘Unless Mr Mackay would like to save us the trouble?’

Ewen smiled at him. He had abandoned any pretence of indignation, and was merely patient and interested. ‘Look and be damned,’ he said, and leaned back in his chair.

‘Very well. Jimmy, you stay here, but give a shout for Sandy or Calum to come in here, will you? . . . No, not you, Archie. There’s the ferry now, did you not hear her? You’d better go. You’ll hear soon enough what happens – but till you do, see you keep your mouth shut, do you mind me?’

‘I mind you.’ Archie sketched a farewell gesture to me and the girls, and went, so quickly and willingly that I was surprised, till I remembered that of course he would be back here very soon with Crispin, and possibly in time to see the result of the search.

‘Just a minute.’ Neil put a hand out as the detective, with one of the Customs men, made for the door in Archie’s wake. ‘If I come with you—’

‘No. You’ll stay here, please, Mr Hamilton.’ The sergeant did not add that three women would be no help if Jimmy should have any trouble with Ewen, but his meaning was plain enough. I expected to see Ewen smile, but saw, with a queer, unpleasant little thrill, that he was staring up at Neil, with something new in his face. He had lost colour again, and over the prison pallor shone a faint sheen of sweat, and I saw him swallow a couple of times, as if his throat hurt him.

Neil said: ‘I doubt if they would find anything, sergeant, short of taking the shed to pieces, but if you let me go, I know where to look. I suppose there’d better be someone with me, as witness –’

‘All right,’ said Ewen abruptly. ‘All right.’ He sat up, flexing his shoulders, and slanted a look up at Neil. I saw nothing there now but a sourly humorous acceptance. ‘I’d forgotten. Stupid of me.’

‘Forgotten what?’ demanded the sergeant. He looked alert and vigorous, not like a man who had lost a night’s sleep. At his gesture, the other men stayed where they were.

It was Neil who answered him. ‘Only that he stole my trout rod once, when we were boys, and I saw him fishing with it later, and followed him back home – here – and watched him hide it in a place he’d made in the garden shed. There were a few other things there that I knew had gone missing from people’s boats and gardens and so on. I didn’t give him away – boys of that age don’t – so his parents never knew. I waited till I saw him using the rod again, and, well, I took it back.’ He looked at Ewen, and for the first time there was something like sympathy there. ‘Eventually.’

‘It was quite a fight,’ agreed Ewen. ‘Well, go on. Go and get them.’

‘The Purdeys?’

‘The Purdeys. And I hope you get well and truly done for all the years of illegal possession.’

‘Sergeant Fraser, my brother is due to arrive on this ferry, so Archie will be down here again soon. Will you want Miss Lloyd and Miss Tracy again, or may they go back with him?’

‘Surely. I know where they are staying, and we will be in touch again before they leave. Wednesday, you said, Miss Tracy?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’ Ann was on her feet, reluctantly, I thought. Megan was already making for the door.

‘Then will it be all right if we wait outside?’ I asked.

‘Surely,’ he said again. He had risen from his chair when the other men went out of the room, and now he moved to open the door for us.

Megan paused on the threshold and looked back to where Ewen sat, with every appearance of ease, in the armchair by the fire. She cleared her throat, but the words came hoarsely, in a rush. ‘I’m sorry. I truly am. But it was the truth.’ She looked and sounded like an awkward and unhappy schoolgirl.

Ewen raised his head and smiled at her, a smile full of his own powerful brand of charm. He lifted one hand, and turned it over, palm up. ‘Of course it was. Don’t give it a thought. I never had a hope anyway, did I? Dogs with bad names . . . Goodbye, then. Enjoy your holiday.’

I saw the tears start to her eyes, and said savagely under my breath: ‘Damn you, Ewen Mackay!’ then, with an arm round her shoulders, urged her through the doorway and down the path to the beach.

Ann spoke quickly, fiercely. ‘Look, Meg, don’t upset yourself. What could we do? We had to tell the police, and it’s not as if there was any doubt about it, because he admitted it himself, so it’s nonsense to talk about dogs with bad names. The man’s a thief and a liar, we knew that from Mrs McDougall, and you said so yourself, remember? He had it coming to him, so don’t talk such balls!’

‘It was a Judas thing to do. I know Mrs McDougall told us about him, but he was nice to us, and we didn’t have a thing against him ourselves. I know we had to tell the police, but it still feels like a Judas thing to do.’

I sat down on the edge of the jetty, where it jutted from the sand above the high tide mark, and pulled her down beside me.

‘Megan.’ I was still angry, but not with her. ‘This is nonsense, and you’ve got to snap out of it here and now. Listen to me. I had a talk with Mrs McDougall myself last night – no, Saturday night. She told me more than she told you. Ewen Mackay is not a man to be pitied, except in that he was born without scruple, yes, literally without a scruple of conscience. He had every chance, loving parents, an indulgent patron, brains, looks, charm. All assets. The only thing he didn’t have was money, and to get that he set out in cold blood to rob people – some of them as poor as himself, but who had spent their lives working, and had saved something for their old age. He robbed them, without a second thought, of everything they had. Think about them. The last one – the one he went to prison for – was an invalid of eighty-five, and he robbed her of something less than three hundred pounds. All she had. Not even as much as it would cost him to hire that boat of his.’

‘“The smiler with the knife under the cloak,”’ quoted Ann.

‘It doesn’t matter a damn about the guns, or whatever he had in that duffel bag,’ I said. ‘But you see what this dog with a bad name is like . . . He comes out of the slammer, having seen the notice of Mrs Hamilton’s death, hires a boat and comes straight up here to rob the dead, and perhaps – though we don’t know if that bit was true – to settle again on the parents who left their home to get away from him.’

Megan nodded. ‘Yes, I’m sorry. I do see. It was only seeing all those police, and all they wanted was to catch him, and all he could do was sit there, and it was four to one, eight to one counting us—’

‘I know. It was beastly. But there was no Judas about it. Stick to that. It’s over now, anyway. There they go. And it looks as if they’ve found the guns.’

The three men were coming round the corner of the cottage. Their search in the shed had apparently been successful. The detective-constable was carrying a slim, wrapped object, and under Neil’s arm was the long, gleaming shape of a shotgun.

‘They have indeed,’ said Ann. She did not trouble to keep the satisfaction out of her voice. ‘And let’s hope that those so-special Purdeys do the trick, and put our friend Ewen straight back where he belongs.’

Megan sent her a look where a shadow of trouble still showed, but all she said was: ‘I suppose it was because it was guns that the police came roaring over like that?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘You heard what the sergeant said – no, that was before you came down here. Once Neil reported the guns missing they would certainly come over, but normally it would be by ferry; it wouldn’t be so very urgent, and anyway I doubt if there’s a police boat in Oban. But Ewen made the mistake of hiring a boat cheaply from a pal on one of the outer isles, and it was a boat that was suspected of running drugs in the islands. There’ve been cases, but I don’t know much about them. Anyway, that’s what brought the Customs men roaring over, to see if Ewen Mackay was into that racket, and I suppose the police thumbed a lift with them.’

‘Drugs?’ Megan looked horrified.

‘I don’t think he had anything to do with that. He was quite genuinely shocked and scared when he knew – and furious with the pal who’d flogged him the boat. His error.’

‘Greed,’ said Ann flatly. ‘Tried to get a boat cheaply, so brought the sheriff’s posse straight in. Serve him right. If he’d had till morning he might just have made it, and he could have come back for the loot later on.’

‘I still can’t see why he should have gone for those guns,’ said Megan. ‘With an empty house to choose from . . . What’s so special about “Purdeys”? If he’d just gone for the silver or whatever, he might have got away with it.’

‘Twenty or thirty thousand pounds, and going up each year,’ said Ann, who knew about such things. ‘That’s how special. I’m talking about honest prices, auction prices – if you call them honest . . . He’d get less, of course, but it still made the trip worthwhile.’

‘Good heavens!’ said Megan, wide-eyed. The thought, unspoken, came to me again, that Megan’s assets, as the daughter of a farm worker, were much the same as Ewen Mackay’s. But they had got her to Cambridge on a good scholarship, and would get her very much further.

‘That’s what brought him back to Moila, to pick up the guns,’ said Ann. ‘And I suppose he thought that he might as well swipe some other stuff, whatever he had in that bag. But why the portrait?’

‘Yes. Why?’ Megan was, I was glad to see, back to her normal self. ‘You can’t tell me he went to all that trouble for auld lang syne?’

‘You heard what Neil said,’ I said drily. ‘He’d been told that it was the most valuable thing in the house, and because he knew nothing about pictures he believed it. Pictures are going even madder than guns at auction, aren’t they, Ann?’

‘I don’t know much more about them than Ewen Mackay does, but I wouldn’t give twenty-five pounds, let alone twenty-five million, for a daub of greenery yallery flowers,’ said Ann, and Megan laughed. It was apparently something they had argued about before. But whatever she had been going to say was never said. Two things happened almost simultaneously.

The cottage door opened, and Ewen Mackay came out, with the two detectives, and Neil behind them. Ewen wore handcuffs.

And from the curve of the track came the note of the Land Rover, as Archie McLaren returned to the scene of the crime, bringing my brother with him.