‘Yes. No.’ Housman added hastily, ‘I didn’t see him hit you. But I saw him carrying you. And he saw me. He threatened that if I gave him away he’d haul me in for assaulting you. And it could have easily been me. I couldn’t prove … I was afraid …’
Irritatingly, he let that sentence go unfinished.
I forced myself to be patient with him.
‘That’s why you didn’t tell anyone,’ I said. ‘But I still don’t understand why you hid.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He was panting a little; we were walking at a youthful pace and he was not young. And of course, he’d been living on stolen sandwiches for a month.
‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated sheepishly. ‘Who are the others with you?’
I thought, Oh, don’t you try to change the subject, you wee weasel of a man.
I answered his question, but I wasn’t going to be so familiar as to give him our names. Let him wonder.
‘The short fair one is my brother; the tall ginger ones are friends of ours who stay here in the summer. They took me to the hospital after the Water Bailiff hit me.’
‘I-I’m sorry,’ he stammered for the third time. ‘I didn’t see him hit you.’
It was almost as though he was trying to tell me Henderson hadn’t hit me.
Fleetingly, I wondered if Housman could possibly have hit me himself.
But as he rabbited on, I couldn’t believe he was remotely capable of committing an act of violence against anyone.
‘When Henderson left me there with you, I realised I truly might get blamed for the attack,’ Housman said. ‘I thought you were going to die. And then it would look like I’d killed you. And I panicked. So I hid. I didn’t really know what to do when the lifeboats first started searching for me … I hoped it would all blow over if I didn’t turn up.’
‘You perfect coward,’ I sympathised patronisingly. ‘Please don’t tell me again that you’re sorry. Scavenging sandwiches and newspapers from the workers at the Big House! And was that also you pawing through the McEwens’ things while they slept? You’re a disgrace to academia.’
It took every fibre of my being not to scream at him: WHAT ABOUT MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS’ PEARLS, YOU SNEAKING WEASEL?
‘Why didn’t you just run away back to England and make up some scholarly excuse?’ I asked. ‘To stop everyone thinking you’d drowned yourself?’
He fell abruptly silent. The rest of what he’d told me was probably true – it fit the jigsaw properly. But the answer to this particular question was: ‘I wanted to go back for those three hundred and twenty-seven pearls I hid in the river’, and he wasn’t going to tell me that.
He hadn’t given up on going back for them.
And with Solange still in prison …
Greedy, treacherous little coward! I thought. Go and see if you can find them now. Good luck to you.
17
THE GLORIOUS TWELFTH
The morning after we discovered Hugh Housman hiding in Aberfearn Castle, Ellen telephoned me from the Inverfearnie Library to tell me I must come to see her at once.
I did not go rushing out there in a blaze of curiosity. The events of the past fortnight had left me wary and cautious of strangers. It sounded like Ellen on the ’phone, but it could have been anyone. I thought irrelevantly of Housman’s ‘damned unfeeling’ sister. After I hung up I sat on the bottom step in the hall swithering for ten minutes, and then rang back just to prove the call had come from the library.
Mary answered. Yes, she’d let Miss McEwen use the telephone. Miss McEwen had paid her twopence to put the call through.
‘Do you think I should come?’ I asked, irrationally cautious.
‘What is the matter with you, Julia? Why wouldn’t you come to see her if she wants you to? I thought she was your friend.’
*
Ellen met me by the iron footbridge. She was carrying a large brown envelope.
I thought of pearls.
‘What is going on?’ I asked.
‘I want to show you something.’
‘Where’s Pinkie?’
The envelope was flat. It couldn’t be pearls.
‘In Miss Kinnaird’s kitchen. Pinkie’s not let through to the other rooms, but Miss Kinnaird has fallen in love with that dog.’
‘She’s pure magic, our Pinkie.’
‘Come along,’ Ellen said, and strode ahead of me across the circular drive of the library, the gravel crunching beneath her feet. She moved with force and purpose and I had to keep making uneven little skips to keep up with her, because her legs are so much longer than mine.
‘Where are we going?’
‘That flat rock by the Drookit Stane – I want to show this to you before I show Strathfearn.’
She meant Sandy.
‘I want to see what you think,’ she added.
When we reached the flat rock at the beachy place, she sat down and slid a sheaf of glossy paper from the envelope.
‘Come and look.’
I sat beside her.
‘The photographer from the Mercury, that Catriona Lennox, sent us these this morning,’ Ellen said. ‘It just says “Strathfearn Log Boat Excavation Project” in the address, so I opened it because I took in the post. No one else has seen it.’
They were the photographs Miss Lennox had taken during the morning we’d first begun our salvage operation. Ellen shuffled through them rapidly; I watched over her shoulder.
‘You ken what you’re looking at?’ she asked.
‘Aye.’
‘What’s this one, then?’
‘That’s looking close at the bit of cord tied to the boat.’
‘So what’s this?’
‘That’s it again.’
‘Is it?’
I frowned. ‘Well, yes, or another angle – it’s the same bit of rope.’
‘Why?’ She held the two photographs up before me.
The camera must have been very close, but it made the detail perfectly clear. ‘You can see that criss-cross woven pattern in it, there and there,’ I said. ‘This bit’s mostly crushed or decayed, but you can see they’re the same, can’t you?’
‘Aye,’ she said in an expressionless voice. ‘I can see that. I wanted to know if you could too.’
She didn’t lower her hands, but held the pictures up, waiting.
‘But that’s not the boat,’ I whispered. ‘The rope’s the same, but that picture –’
‘The rope’s the same,’ Ellen echoed.
The photographer had accidentally included a picture of the rope that had strangled the murdered man. She’d shot it so close that his decayed skin beneath it was as dark and cakey as the wood of the Bronze Age boat.
But the rope was the same.
‘He can’t have been killed with anything that old!’ I said. ‘You saw how fragile it was.’
Ellen said softly, ‘Maybe it wasnae sae old when he was killed.’
She let that sink in. She’d had a bit longer than me to get used to the idea. For me, it was as if a half-completed jigsaw had been flipped upside down and now I was looking at a completely unfamiliar picture.
‘You’re saying the dead man is as old as the log boat?’
‘All I’m saying is it’s the same rope.’
I shook my head.
‘Two ends of the same rope,’ Ellen suggested. ‘Maybe even one end tied to the boat, one end tied round his neck.’
I had a wild vision of a person being dragged to death by a boat. No, of course not. ‘He was buried in the boat,’ I said slowly.
‘Maybe.’