Chapter 14
The rain had subsided to a drizzle as Emma returned to the cottage.
The log was glowing on the fire, and the room felt warm and cosy.
My little cottage, Emma thought and savoured those words.
She felt as if she had made a step forward with her life; she was a professional writer, here to work with another author.
It was the sort of place she had dreamed about when she had lived in the tiny room above the bookshop and written her novel at night.
It had all gone so smoothly for her since coming to England: the publishing job, the novel accepted and now this.
A dream fulfilled. Then the doubt crept in again.
What if she couldn’t write well enough to do Iris’s work justice?
She glanced at the pile of pages on the desk.
It didn’t look very thick. Just how far had Iris gone with the story?
Would Iris’s dementia show in the logic of the writing?
Emma had seen a couple of times that morning when Iris seemed to lose a train of thought, only to come back quickly to reality.
What did Iris expect of her? Would they talk through the plot together, would she give Emma suggestions for where she wanted the story to go, or would she expect Emma to take what she had and get on with it?
Going to Scotland was a necessity, that was clear.
She found it hard to picture what Skye looked like.
Those rugged Cuillin mountains—were they tall and sharp like the Alps?
Or were they more like the mountains in Australia—rounded slopes, not appearing particularly high at all?
I’m jumping ahead of myself, she thought.
Let me get through Iris’s pages and talk the plot through with her before I go up to Scotland.
All the same, it was exciting to think about, getting on the train, then a ferry, and being in a very different sort of place.
Following in the footsteps of Inspector Melrose.
She went back to the pages and read on:
The Wild Girl, Chapter 4
The hotel room proved to be spacious and well appointed, with a gas fire in the old fireplace and a view over the strait to the mainland.
Melrose left his suitcase on the bed, conscious that he shouldn’t keep MacDonald waiting.
When he came out the inspector was deep in conversation with the landlady, and Melrose heard the soft notes of the Gaelic speech.
That might be a disadvantage, he thought, if everyone could say things he couldn’t understand.
But then he decided that it was unlikely that Sir Henry Hamilton, MP, spoke the local tongue.
“Right then, let’s get going while the weather holds,” MacDonald said, giving a nod to Mistress MacLeod.
Since the day had been bright and blustery a few minutes ago, Melrose felt that this was a trifle pessimistic, but on coming out of the hotel he noticed a bank of dark clouds covering the northern part of the island.
The wind had picked up and the water in the strait was flecked with whitecaps.
The ferry was just departing, and he watched spray breaking over the front of the boat, glad that he wasn’t on it.
He climbed into the passenger seat beside MacDonald and they set off, driving up the hill past simple white cottages.
As they left the settlement behind the scenery became stark again.
Not a tree in sight and the land rising up to a formidable cone-shaped hill.
“That ahead is Sgurr na Coinnich,” MacDonald said.
Melrose had no idea what he was talking about.
“Yon mountain. Not as big or imposing as the Cuillin, but a fair size. An easy tramp to the top, though. No real climbing there.”
They continued upward, not encountering any vehicle or indeed any living thing apart from a bird of prey that drifted in the upcurrents above them.
At the crest the scenery opened up before them: a series of bays and inlets along the coast to the left with the mainland beyond, and ahead to their right the mountains, the formidable Cuillin, now outlined sharp and dark in the approaching storm.
“So let’s go over the facts, shall we?” he asked MacDonald as the road began to descend to the next cove. “Sir Henry Hamilton. He’s an MP. He lives in the village of Dun Akyn?”
“He lives in Dun Akyn castle,” MacDonald said.
“That’s right. A proper fortress of a place, jutting out on a headland.
I certainly wouldnae want to live there.
He’s only there part of the year. Down in London doing his job as an MP some of the time.
Then there’s his wife, she’s down in the south with him sometimes, actually as often as she can, her being a Sassenach and not from here.
They have—correction, had—two children. Their son, Roland, is twenty-one.
He’s been to the university in Edinburgh.
Not sure what he plans to do with his life, but he’s home again at the moment.
Then there was the daughter, Lucy. She was eighteen, and she had been educated at home by a governess. ”
“So rather sheltered until now,” Melrose said.
“Very sheltered, I’d say. Raised as girls were in the old days to make a good match.”
“And this Euan Chisholm, he was the one her parents had selected for her, or had she chosen him?”
“Definitely the parents,” MacDonald said. “This young man’s father, Lord Chisholm, owns a vast estate across the strait on the mainland. Having the two linked by marriage would be extremely profitable to both. One could run sheep and the other cattle.”
“Did the daughter agree to this match? Was she happy about it?”
“From what I gather the courting was only in the early stages. Chisholm had come to stay at Dun Akyn so that the young people could get to know each other. According to her mother it seemed to be going well. He was quite a charming young man, good-looking, nothing really for Lucy not to like.”
“But then an outsider arrived?” Melrose asked.
MacDonald nodded. “A Mr Francis Stewart. He came to the island ostensibly to do some climbing, but it turns out he was a bit of a Communist agitator, and he was going around trying to tell the crofters their rights when Sir Henry wanted to move them off their land.”
“I thought the expulsion of the crofters happened in the last century?” Melrose said. “That’s what we were taught in school. The big landowners wanted the crofters gone so that they could farm sheep.”
“True. That happened in most places but not so much on the islands. It’s only recently that meat prices have risen in London and Sir Henry got it into his head to raise black Angus cattle on the island.
So he’s been gently persuading some of his crofters to move out so he can turn their land back into grazing. ”
“Gently persuading?” Melrose raised an eyebrow.
“Aye. Sometimes not so gently. And there was even one cottage that burned down mysteriously.”
“So this young man—Stewart, you said—he was causing a bit of trouble for the laird.”
“You could say that. Not only talking to the locals but he wrote a couple of articles for the newspapers in Glasgow and Edinburgh, exposing the injustice here.”
“So Sir Henry would have every reason to want to get rid of him?”
“Definitely. But I don’t think he’d resort to drowning his own daughter. He thought the world of her.”
MacDonald slowed the motor car as a sheep stood in the middle of the road, eyeing them defiantly. MacDonald gave a toot on the horn and the animal wandered off, in no hurry.
“So let me get this straight,” Melrose said. “Stewart was apparently running away with the laird’s daughter, fleeing by boat to the mainland, is that correct?”
“Quite correct. He had come over in his own small sailing boat. As you can see the distance is not great at this point.”
“Do we know if she was leaving willingly with him, or if he was kidnapping her for some reason? Was there a romantic entanglement? Had she fallen for him?”
“Quite possibly. He was, after all, quite a dashing outsider, and as we’ve said, she had been so sheltered.”
“But someone got word of it and didn’t want them to go?”
MacDonald nodded. “Someone made damnty sure they would not make the crossing. The mainsail had been cut to shreds. Clearly slashed through with a knife. They’d have been at the mercy of the current and the waves.”
“Would they not have noticed this when they raised the sail?”
“It was dark, remember. They wouldn’t have seen the rips in the sail.”
Melrose had taken a small notebook from his breast pocket and was jotting down the odd word, not too easily as the car rattled and shook over the rough surface of the road.
“So the jilted suitor would be our obvious suspect. He finds his intended is running off with a bloke of lower class and decides to stop them.”
“That would be my first thought,” MacDonald said.
“Especially since Chisholm’s now disappeared.
We can’t find hide nor hair of him. Nobody remembers seeing him leave the island.
It’s even possible he’s still hiding out in one of the wilder parts of the western shore.
Quite uninhabited there, you know. Or easy enough to bribe a boatman to take him to one of the nearby islands.
We’ve still got men on the lookout for him. ”
“It seems like an open-and-shut case then,” Melrose said. “Unless . . .”
“Unless?” MacDonald turned to look at him.
“Unless the laird knew that Stewart was about to leave and wanted to make sure he never reached the mainland, not knowing about his daughter’s romantic feelings for the young man and that she’d be going with him.”
“That’s a possibility,” MacDonald said. “But you’ll never be able to prove that one.
In my experience of the gentry they close ranks when necessary, and men like Sir Henry wield a lot of power in these parts.
If you so much as hinted he had anything to do with his daughter’s death you’d be taken off the case instantly. ”
“Sounds like a charming assignment ahead for me then,” Melrose said.