4
At Logan’s back, as he rode the crest of that grim darkling swell, the forlorn hope of sunrise was fighting upward in the sky. By that pallid light, diffused through a gray mist, he saw that he was in perilous waters. Had the breeze been higher, he could have had no hope for making shore, amateur oarsman that he was. Sweeping round the reefs toward the sheer cliffs just visible in the west, a current tugged in ugly mood at the oars; and he pulled hard against this current, for it would have hurried him against that fearsome wall. Still coming in toward shore, the tide helped him against the current. And now he was among rocks.
From the white heave of the water, he perceived that he was passing over skerries which would be dry at low tide. What was worse to the eye, here and there stuck up sharp rocks like swords menacing the sky, the “needles” of which Colin had spoken. Had it not been dawn, surely he would have run straight upon one. All about them—they lay all too close, and suddenly he was passing some by—were wicked immense swirls and eddies, enough to bring a man’s heart into his mouth. And Logan’s heart did come into his mouth.
Once only, in all his life before, had he been so frightened; and that had been in a place very different, though equally eerie—a broken tomb in Okinawa, where he had crouched with two other cut-off soldiers while the Japanese scouts shuffled and whispered in the dark all about. This fearsome coast was worse than the tomb had been, for here he was utterly alone, in a hostile element. The mind-picture of the Okinawan tomb, hurrying through his brain in this horrid wet moment, vanished when the dinghy swung toward one of the smaller needles as if drawn by a magnet. Logan thrust the tip of an oar hard against the rock, and the boat slipped past. A wild scraping sound and a trembling assailed him then: the dinghy hesitated, in the flood of the tide, right upon a reef barely submerged. Yet her bottom held; and next she was off that rasping bed and hurtling on toward the dim line of the beach.
Logan was nearly powerless. What a fool he had been! This one crowded hour of glorious life he would have exchanged, gladly, for a lifetime of servitude in the law-office. Yet there seemed to be sand dead ahead; and if he could pull hard enough against the weakened current, he might yet get ashore.
In the growing light, the island of Carnglass loomed like one tremendous barrier of naked and sheer precipice, except for a kind of fissure or den which was his goal, vague beyond the whitecaps. The needles were gone now; the swell was full and heavy, as if the skerries were past; and he could make out the waves flinging themselves upon a dark beach, fighting high toward some grass and stunted trees, and then retreating to the terror of the abyss. Two minutes more, and the dinghy was tossed by those waves right upon the sand.
Leaping out, Logan tugged with all his remaining strength at a line attached to the bow, to draw the boat as high upon the shore as he might, the water swirling about his waist. Back came the surf, flinging the dinghy higher yet, and blinding and drenching Logan, almost taking his feet from under him. Yet, persisting, he dragged the little boat over the sand with a power he had not known was in him; and when he thought she might be safe, he reached over the gunwale, grasped the heavy chunk of rusted iron that was her anchor, and flung it into the oozing sand. More he could not do; if the waves swept her out again, that was beyond his power to remedy. He staggered from the boat toward the tide-line and the grass beyond. When the sand grew firm under his feet, he fell nerveless to the beach, a spent man. And there he lay perhaps five or ten minutes, like a stranded jellyfish.
It was done. The thing was done. He was ashore in Carnglass, and a whole man, though shivering and shaking with the reaction from his fright among the needles. Perhaps the game, after all, might be worth the candle.
As some strength returned to him, his first thought was for the dinghy, in which his knapsack lay. Her anchor having held, the little boat rested askew upon the sand; he must have come in at the very flood of the tide, for already the combers broke further out, and the dinghy’s bows were altogether out of the water. Reeling to the boat’s side, Logan hauled out the knapsack and then plodded up the beach to the place where the heather and the gorse began to grow. He was in a kind of cove or pocket between thousand-foot cliffs, a triangle of land sloping steeply upward toward a third range of cliff at the back; and upon the face of that rearward cliff, not so beetling as its sea-neighbors, he thought he could make out the faint line of an ancient path.
Something more welcome, however, now huddled close before him: a line of low rubble walls, the work of man. These were primitive cottages, no doubt the clachan of Dalcruach. They were larochs, roofless ruins, deserted these many years.
All but one. Toward the end of the row of forlorn dwellings, a single thatched roof remained, kept secure against the Hebridean gales by a wide-meshed net spread over the rough thatch and anchored by big stones lashed to the net-ends. The hut had no chimney, but only a hole in the middle of the thatch; it had no windows, and a single door; this must be the “black house” of the Isles, one of those Viking-age cottages still inhabited, squat, thick-walled, snug, out of the childhood of the race. People dwelt in them still, Logan had been told, here and there in Uist and Barra. And this one might be the cottage of the keeper or gillie that Colin MacLeod had mentioned. Incautious in his weariness, Logan limped to the heavy door and pounded. No one answered: the hut seemed to be as empty as its roofless neighbors. And then Logan observed that the door had been secured by a padlock and hasp, but the hasp had been ripped away from the door-frame, the screws hanging impotent in their holes. Lifting the latch, Logan entered.
Yes, it was a black house. Lacking proper fireplace or chimney, the peat smoke had eddied round the single room for centuries, perhaps, turning stone walls and beams and thatch to ebony. But it was dry, and it was furnished. There were a table and shelves, and a chair or two, and a heap of dry peats by the rough hearth below the gap in the thatch. And in a corner stood that rare object, the old-fashioned cotter’s closet-bed, built of boards up to the roof to keep off the draughts, with only a wide hole for the occupant to crawl in upon his mattress, and a curtain over that aperture. Logan pulled back the curtain. There was no one inside, but there were decent blankets upon the bed. Feeling like Goldilocks in the house of the Three Bears, Logan flung down his pack.
Some dry bits of driftwood lay by the peats. Logan tested the cigar-lighter he had kept in an inner pocket of his jacket, to see if it would work; it still would. Making a little heap of kindling upon the hearth, he banked peats about it, and lit a fire; in three or four minutes, some of the brown and springy squares of peat had begun to smoulder, and Logan piled more peat upon them to keep the fire going while he slept. Only then did he throw off his drenched clothes, laying them upon a chair near the fire, and drag himself naked into the venerable bed, rolling deep into its blankets. Swiftly Logan sank into unconsciousness.
The sea-water having affected his watch, Logan could not tell what time it was, precisely, when at length he woke; but surely it was well into the afternoon. Some vigor had returned to his body. The slow-burning peats still glowed upon the hearth; the house was warm, and thick with the sweet smoke; daylight—the sun must be free of the clouds for a time—came through the smoke-gap in the thatch. There was no sound but the unending wash of the sea upon the beach, deadened here by the thickness of the walls of rubble. His clothes, still very damp but wearable, lay faintly steaming on the chair by the fire. This was the loneliest spot Logan ever had known.
Having dressed, Logan turned out the contents of his knapsack, which had not suffered badly from the sea. A pair of binoculars he had bought before leaving America was intact, and he had his shaving-things, and the ordnance-map and old Balmullo’s pamphlet, and what mattered most to him, the thermos of coffee, Colin’s bottle of whiskey, and the big parcel of sandwiches from the hotel. Of those sandwiches, he promptly ate all but a reserve of two. Pouring the coffee into a pan he found upon the shelves, he set it to warm by the peats. Life was liveable again. And opening the door with the broken hasp, Logan went out into the Carnglass afternoon.
The ghostly clachan of Dalcruach lay silent in a cul-de-sac formed by the sea, the two sea-cliffs, and the inland cliff. Just now the sun was peeping through the gray blanket above. Everywhere water was running: little torrents foamed from the lip of the cliffs, and springs sent tiny streams down to the rocky bay, through gorse and heather and bracken. Between cliffs and tide, this bit of lowland must have been cultivated intensively for centuries, but now a towering forest of green bracken, high as Logan’s head, came right down to the backs of the ruined cottages. Except for some gulls, the only animate thing which Logan could see was a shape high up the face of the landward cliff: a goat, or perhaps a deer. Primroses already flowered upon the cliff-face. Upon these scanty and isolated acres, a little village of MacAskivals had subsisted from time out of mind. But they were gone, and Logan stood in this wet green desolation as if he were the last man on earth.
He went down to the dinghy. The receding tide had left her high enough, but soon the sea would return; so he took off shoes and stockings and tried to drag her to a more sheltered place by a shelf of rock that ran up from the skerries into the silver sands of the beach. But though he bailed her out, she was too heavy for him; only the tide could budge her. Her oars he carried back to the black house. And now he would make his way across the island to the Old House, before evening came. The sun had withdrawn again, but surely he could find his way up the cliff, despite the mists, and so across brae and valley and hill to the Old House and Lady MacAskival. Already he had been nearly six days on the way.
Sitting on a boulder by the door of the black house, he examined the ordnance survey map of Carnglass, Daldour, and the waters round about. Carnglass really was a peculiar island. A ring of tremendous cliffs seemed to guard her from the sea at all points, except here at Dalcruach and at Askival harbor, a larger opening at the opposite extremity of Carnglass, away to the southwest. To judge by the contour-lines, these sea-cliffs also had an inner face, standing some five hundred feet high above a kind of central valley or moor. Halfway between Dalcruach and the Old House by Askival harbor, this valley was interrupted by a tall, sharp hill, ridges from which extended across the valley to the cliffs on either side of the island, a sort of watershed.
As the gull flies, it could not be more than three miles from Dalcruach to the Old House. But there was the hard climb of the landward cliff behind Dalcruach; then the valley or moor would be boggy; and the ridge in the middle of the island must be surmounted; and between that ridge and the Old House were some markings which Logan took to indicate a bad bog. The trip would require some hours, and he had best set off. The dotted line of a minor path, on the map, suggested that some track ran across the island, but surely nothing like a road. Then Logan took up his thorn stick and began the ascent of the landward cliff.
Up this dim path, surely little but sheep, goats, and deer had gone for many years. Here and there a hazel bush clung to the cliff’s edge. Though the day was cool, that sharp climb made Logan pant. After half an hour, he was at the summit, and much of Carnglass spread out before him—or would have been visible, had not the mist been growing thicker. He could make out the big hill—on the map it was called Mucaird—in the middle of the island, but the ridge and hill would have shut off Old House and New House, even had the day been clear. As a gust of wind in this high place dissolved the fog for a few moments, he glimpsed a derelict farm or sheep-steading nestled against Mucaird. And the valley between him and the high hill was not an even plateau, but rugged and broken with spurs of rock, though the bracken waved over the higher parts of it. He turned his glasses toward the south. There, across the deep blue of the Sound of Carnglass, lay the low isle of Daldour.
Now he would have to descend the inner face of the cliff, perhaps four hundred feet high, to the green valley: a descent more precarious than the climb from Dalcruach, for boulders lay tumbled upon the inner face, as if ready to fall to the valley floor, and their shapes were hidden by a dense growth of fern. He must step with care. Down he started.
But about three boulders down, he halted again. The mist—here it hung cloud-like—lay just over his head, the sunlight coming through in a dim religious way. At the moment, the valley beneath him, nevertheless, was quite clear of fog. And almost straight down, in the part of the valley at the foot of his cliff, men were moving. Logan turned his binoculars upon them.
Away to his left, a small puppet that must be a very big man was running frantically across the valley floor, just here rocky and bare. Some two hundred yards behind him, three other men trotted. These were armed men: it was rifles they seemed to be carrying. None of them were looking upward toward Logan. One of the three halted, knelt, brought his gun to his shoulder, and fired. The report echoed uncannily from the cliffs. He had shot at the big man leaping toward the further rocks: there could be no doubt of it.
But the big man was not hit. He had reached some boulders near the southern cliff, and now crouched behind one of them, drawing something from the long cloak or coat he wore. As his three pursuers came on—the man must have been hidden from their view, Logan thought—a report came from behind the cluster of boulders: the big man had a pistol. Immediately after firing, the man in the coat darted on to the next clump of boulders, and waited there. Stooping and taking what cover they could in the bracken, his three adversaries cautiously pushed forward, about ten yards from one another. The big man held the advantage of higher ground. As the three neared the rocks he had just left, and so came within range of his pistol, the big man fired a second time. Now the three pursuers fell flat on their faces, for the bullet seemed to have ricocheted against a boulder perilously close to the foremost rifleman. And taking advantage of their discomfiture, the big man scrambled on toward the mouth of a small ravine that appeared to twist into the southern cliff.
Swinging his glasses toward the three riflemen, Logan thought he caught some movement to their rear. He focused the binoculars. Though he could not be sure, it seemed to him that someone or something was stealthily drawing closer, through bracken and gorse, to the three men. Whatever it might be—and if it was not an optical illusion—it kept hid in the green stuff; no head ever showed. If there, it must be moving on all fours, beast-like; what one detected was not a form, but a trail of movement through the dense bracken, to be discerned only by an observer who, like Logan, was perched high above.
Logan looked back toward the big man, who was just disappearing into the gully or den at the southern cliff. Two of the pursuers, who now had got to their feet, fired at him as they stood. The big man stumbled, recovered, and was gone into the recess. And the riflemen resumed, at a walk, their tracking. Then the bank of mist settled over Logan’s head and lower into the valley, cutting Logan off from sight of whatever was happening below. He heard two more shots, though; and then silence followed. Through all this, no human voice had drifted up to him.
Logan clung astonished to his perch. Here in Carnglass were wheels within wheels. He had suspected something was amiss in the island: but to discover, as if he were an Olympian looking down upon the follies of humankind, this curious sport of island man-hunting was bewildering even to Hugh Logan, who had been around. This, after all, was a small corner of Great Britain, in the year of Our Lord one thousand nine hundred and sixty. In Mutto’s Wynd, his own struggle with Jock Anderson’s gang conceivably might have been only a chance encounter; and even if it had been part of someone’s design, no more had been meant, perhaps, than a brutal robbery. The sinister-ludicrous figure of Captain Gare had come to him at Oban through no chance encounter, but that insubstantial personality had vanished before a little chaffing. This affair in the valley of Carnglass was deadly serious—this stalking of a man as if he were a rabbit. And Logan had not the faintest notion of what pursuers and pursued might be.
So what should he do now? The mist, reinforced by a light rain, had become so dense below him that the remaining descent of the cliff, in these conditions, would be almost foolhardy until some sunlight worked its way through. In any event, what with this delay, it seemed improbable that he could make his way to the Old House before sunset. And, judging from the silent hunters far below, to knock at the gate of the Old House after sunset might be highly imprudent. Logan did not relish the thought of being taken for the big man with the pistol, supposing that person still to be in the land of the living. Besides, the quarry might be doubling back across the valley by this time, and for Logan to descend unknown into that scene from the Inferno, with bullets flying, wasn’t the best policy for a rising man of law. Everything considered, he had better creep back along the dim path to Dalcruach, and there spend another night in the black house, even though this must mean he had taken a full week to reach Lady MacAskival. He could make a safer start early in the morning; perhaps Lady MacAskival’s demoniac gillies did not hunt before breakfast. And there was a queasy feeling at the pit of his stomach. It was thoroughly improbable that any man would try to make his way over the cliff to Dalcruach this evening, what with fog, wind, and the clammy emptiness of the dead clachan in the cul-de-sac.
So Logan, still marvelling, shuffled carefully back toward Dalcruach, where he could enjoy the peat fire, and eat his remaining sandwiches, and write some memoir of this past week to post to Duncan MacAskival when the business was accomplished. He had found a kerosene lamp on one of the shelves, with fuel still in it. He might even read a bit in old Balmullo, for the sake of settling his nerves. Though the hasp was torn loose, the heavy door could be barred from within by a balk of sea-worn timber that fitted into holes on either side of the door-frame; and Logan did bar it. Now no one could get at him suddenly except through the thatch of the roof. And if folk outside did not know Logan to be unarmed, they would think twice about bursting blindly through the roof. Lighting the lamp, Logan took some sheets of paper—somewhat blurred and dampened by water—from a pad in his pack, settled himself at the table, and began to write with his ball-point pen.
He would save the sandwiches until he had finished writing. He was hungry, though; and despite the moist air, his throat felt dry. Logan put down his pen, threw his oilskin over his shoulders, and went out to the spring that bubbled only ten yards from the door. Coming back with a full pail, he drank deep and put the rest of the water—tasting faintly of peat—by the shelves. He drew up the chair and resumed his writing.
Then a deep voice spoke behind him. “Will you be a writer, or a philosophist?” the voice said.
Upsetting his chair, Logan sprang nimbly round to face the voice. He saw a very big man in a drenched ragged overcoat; and in the man’s massive fist was a little old pistol, held steadily. The big man was bareheaded and bald-headed: a sloping dome of a head, with strong flattish features, battered and seared, and a broad, full-lipped mouth. Blood was caked all down one cheek of that hard face, and seemed still to be oozing from a gash high on the bald skull, where a little flap of skin fell away from the bone.
Logan’s visitor stood gigantic in the shadows, close by the boxed bed; probably he had hidden there. “Don’t move your hands,” the deep voice said. “I’m Seamus Donley: so don’t move your hands. I said to you, ‘Will you be a writer, or a philosophist?’ Or, now, will you be a police-detective?”
Immobile, Logan thought he detected some humor in that wide mouth. “Good evening, Mr. Donley,” Logan said. “Put away that toy, and eat a sandwich with me.”
“Turn round, Mr. Police-Detective,” Donley told him, “and hold your hands high.” There was nothing else Logan could do; besides, if the man had meant to shoot him in the back, he could have done that already. Donley’s rough hands ran over and into Logan’s pockets. “Now where might your gun be, Mr. Police-Detective? Your friend Seamus has looked in your rucksack and in the bed already.” This was a wild Irishman: the brogue was pronounced, and possibly a little exaggerated, as if Donley strove for effect.
“I have no gun, Mr. Donley.”
“Swing round again and let me look at you,” Donley grunted. He had stepped back a pace, by way of precaution, but in the lamp-light Logan saw clearly enough the reckless, not ill-natured face of a man in late middle age; and below that face an immense barrel-chest and powerful arms. The gun man must stand nearly six feet six. “Faith,” Donley went on, “I come near to believing you. You’ve the look of innocence. But whatever were they thinking of to send an acolyte of a police-detective after Jackman’s fellows? Now listen to me, Mr. Police-Detective: if you’ve a gun about you, fetch it out, for you need it as much as yours truly, Seamus Donley. Would the lads in the Republican Army ever have believed that old Seamus should be asking a police-detective to help him? Sure, it’s your life, man, as much as mine. We can’t tell but Jackman’s chaps might be at the door this living minute.”
“I don’t understand you, Mr. Donley, and I didn’t bring a gun.”
Donley scowled. “Saints in heaven! Now’s no time for playing little games, Mr. Police-Detective. This is not London. Those fellows would put you over the cliff as quick as myself. That’s what they did with Lagg; but you can’t know that. You know me: any police-detective knows Seamus Donley, that lay in Derry gaol four hard years, breaking out last Christmas. Do you think it’s myself would be telling you my own name, and showing you my own face, if we’d no need for standing back to back? A fine young police-detective you are! Here, now: I’ll send Meg to bed.” He thrust the gun back inside his coat. “There, I’m trusting you, Mr. Police-Detective, and you must be after trusting me. We’ll put out the light, for ’tis a standing invite to Jackman and his bully boys.” Donley blew out the wick. “And we’ll trample the turfs.” Donley crushed under his boots most of the peats, and tossed ashes over the rest of the fire, leaving only a faint glow. “These three days gone, Mr. Police-Detective, Jackman’s gang have let me be after dark, but they might change; and there’s others might come.”
Logan groped about the table in the dark. “I’m afraid I can’t offer you much refreshment, Seamus Donley, but there are two sandwiches left, and most of a bottle of whiskey. Why do you take me for a detective?”
“I’d have eaten and drunk your victuals before now, Mr. Police-Detective, but you gave me no time. I’d but a moment to slip through your door and into your bed while you were at the well. A fine young police-detective you are! But Donley’s not the man to let his host go hungry.” He handed back half a sandwich to Logan, wolfing the others. “And the poteen: that’s the medicine for myself when I’ve been three days and nights in caves and bogs. One morning I caught a rabbit and ate it raw, and another time I cut a sheep’s throat and had a supper of the bloody ribs; but for the rest, it was birds’ eggs got on the cliffs and sucked on the run, and a few shellfish I pulled from the rocks on this very beach.”
Logan—his eyes had adjusted fairly well to the dark now—brought two tumblers from the shelves and filled them with whiskey. “Your health, Mr. Seamus Donley.”
The Irishman chuckled. “There’s this to be said, young fellow my lad: you’re a cool police-detective. And how do I know you’re a police-detective? Why, what else might you be? It’s not an Englishman that you are, though—there’s that for you. I’m thinking you’ll be an Edinburgh man.”
He might get more information out of Donley, Logan reflected, if he did not try to dispel this illusion. “More whiskey, Mr. Donley? Of course. And what is it I can do for you?”
Donley drained at a gulp his second tumbler of whiskey. He had taken a chair opposite Logan, and sat relaxed, though watchful: a hardened customer. “Why, just this, Mr. Police-Detective: first we’ll take those oars of yours out of this hovel, and then we’ll launch that boat of yours between the two of us, with myself inside, and then it’s Seamus for Scotland and Mr. Police-Detective back to his but-and-ben in Carnglass—back to Hell, that is.”
Upon the thatch the rain fell heavily now, and the wind has risen. “You have turned daft, Seamus Donley,” Logan said. “Listen to that wind. You’d never get over the skerries in that little old boat this night, let alone row to the mainland. Daldour would be the best you might hope for.”
“Daldour?” Donley snorted. “And land among the heathens? Why not the Cannibal Isles? Besides, there I would rot in Daldour till you, Mr. Police-Detective, might choose to come for me in the police-launch. No, it’s not Derry gaol for Seamus. It’s a Kerry man I am, and as good a boatman as any in these islands—born by Bantry Bay. No, I’ll be hid in Glasgow or Birmingham or Liverpool before you report to the Chief Constable, my boy—supposing that ever you get clear from Carnglass, which I do very much misdoubt.”
“If you must be fool enough to go boating this night, Mr. Donley, then wait an hour on the chance of the wind falling. The boat’s light enough for you and me to get her afloat, even so: the tide must be up beyond her now. The risk of this wind is greater than the risk of low water on the skerries.”
Bending forward, Donley gave Logan a light approving tap on the shoulder. “For a police-detective, you’re a decent sort. What would your name be?”
Logan told him.
“See here, Mr. Detective Logan: I’ll wait that hour, but no more. Never would I have guessed a police-detective would have a regard for Seamus Donley’s skin. And see here: you’d best come with me. If you’ll give myself your word of honor bright—you’re no Englishman, that I’ll say—to grant myself twelve hours pursuit-free once we set foot ashore, then it’s Seamus who’ll set you in Scotland safe, Mr. Scots Detective, and shake your hand at parting.”
“No, thank you, Seamus Donley,” Logan answered, “but I’ve business in Carnglass. Lady MacAskival will see that I get to Oban or Glasgow, when the business is done.”
“Lady MacAskival! Do you think they’d let you see her, or that the Old One gives orders today? And even were they all saints in Carnglass, they’ve no boat to put at the service of one Mr. Logan, Police-Detective, with a face like the cherubim. Was it not my fire that fetched you here?”
“What fire?”
A note of pique came into Donley’s voice. “Then you will have known of Jackman’s doings earlier, and I’ve had half my labor in vain. I might have told Jackman that what with his crew, the police were sure to find him out. ’Tis this: I burnt the yacht and wrecked the launch three nights gone. That was for spiting and hindering Jackman. And I had hopes of folk spying the fire and sending word to shore.”
“Then they’ve had no communication with the mainland for three days?” This, Logan thought, could explain the confusion of Dowie and Gare.
“Three days? What with the storm, Jackman’s sent no messages, nor got any, all this week. The wireless is a wreck. Jackman will be raging like an imp from the Pit, that oily limb of Satan. Oh, he’ll be cursing the day he crossed Seamus Donley.”
He might worm the whole story gradually out of Donley, Logan hoped: it was clear enough that Donley assumed he already knew a good deal of it. “Tell me this, Mr. Donley, while we’re waiting here: what state are matters in at the Old House?”
“Do you take me for an informer?” The heavy voice, there in the smoky darkness, took on an ominous tone. It never would do to forget that Donley must be a thoroughly dangerous man.
“I take you for a man who’s been tricked, Mr. Seamus Donley, and who needs what aid he can find. While we’re on that topic, I’ll do what I can for that bloody spot on your head. Did a bullet come close to finishing you?” A little light shone from the peats, and by it Logan set to washing the wound and bandaging it with two clean handkerchiefs from his knapsack. Donley, gritting his teeth, seemed to trust Logan sufficiently to let him do the job, though he kept one hand upon the pistol within his coat. Logan put back the flap of skin upon the skull and improvised a kind of scarf-bandage that probably would not endure long; he washed the caked blood from Donley’s lined face.
“No, that was a damned fall this afternoon, when Ferd was shooting at me, Mr. Detective Logan. In all my years with the I.R.A., I never came so close to my end. But I’ll even scores, trust Seamus for that.”
The man had not winced much during the bandaging. “Keep your hand in, my boy, and in no time you’ll be as fine a doctor as any at Dublin, or as Jackman himself. Jackman will be no true physician, but I’ll not need to be telling you that, Mr. Police-Detective. ’Tis a doctor of philosophy he’ll be, University of Leningrad, or Moscow. Yet I’m not the man to be stinting anyone of his praise: Jackman’s clever with splints and medicines, and all else under the sun. A clever child, Edmund Jackman. Jackman it was that drew me out of Derry gaol, he having use for me. Jackman it was, sure, but not for Seamus’ sake. For doing the Devil’s work, there’ll be none better than Jackman.”
“And what,” Logan continued as he adjusted the clumsy bandage, “is life like at the Old House?”
“Well, now, Mr. Detective Logan, do you mind that bit in Dante’s Inferno where old Dante and Vergil observe the stewing of the frauds in the chasms? That’ll be your reception at the Old House, and if you’ve a brain in your skull, Mr. Logan, you’ll be jumping into the little boat with Seamus and making for your headquarters. You’ll require a dozen constables with rifles, or more, to take Jackman’s gang.”
Despite his brogue—which, Logan suspected, was in part the affectation of a virulent Irish nationalist, or of whimsy—Donley had not spoken like an unschooled man; and this literary allusion confirmed Logan’s surmise. “I think you’re what you Irish call a ‘spiled praist,’ Seamus Donley.”
“Sure, never a praist,” Donley answered, grinning, “not myself. Yet I had some inclination after being a monk, and a lay-brother I was for nine praying months, in Sligo, till the love of the drink and the love of the girls undid me. Jackman was after calling me ‘Father Seamus’: he’s eyes in his head, more eyes by one than most men. His boy Ferd was for giving me a third eye for myself.” Here the gunman gingerly touched his bandaged forehead. “Ferd will be the deadliest of Jackman’s imps, as you’ll find to your sorrow; do you watch sharp for him. ’Tis the Maltese Cat I call him. Swift with a gun, and swift with a knife. And Jackman sent him to the Old One for a cook at the Old House! Ferd has virtue as a cook, no denying: the father of him keeps a little eating-house in Soho. But Ferd’s better at murthering than cooking.”
“How many others are in the Old House?”
Again Donley filled his tumbler of whiskey. “Jackman himself, and that walking cadaver Royall, that he calls his secretary—the only other political man in the lot. Then there will be five manservants, or a set of cutthroats that Jackman pawned off on the Old One for servants: butler, footman, gardener, gardener’s boy (a broth of a boy!) and a fellow that passes for stableman or cowman. I was the keeper or gillie. Then there are three men for the yacht and the launch, all Jackman’s pick: I singed the whiskers of one of them, Harry Till, a Liverpool longshoreman, and he may be at death’s door, praise be to the saints. Because Jackman told them so, the Old One and the Young One turned off all the old servants, even the laborers at the farm; Lagg sent his wife back to Galloway, and at the end, he was living in a room or two by himself at the New House. Except for the Old One and the Young One, there’s but one woman in Carnglass, and that’s a poor shawlie, old Agnes with the arthritis, fit for no better than scrubbing floors and carrying trays to the Old One. So the odds will be ten or eleven to one against Mr. Police-Detective, as they’ve been against myself these three days past. Come away, Mr. Detective Logan: yourself would last two days less than Seamus has.”
“Do you mean that Lagg is dead?”
Donley shifted uneasily. “Mind this, Mr. Logan: ’tis no doing of mine. What could be done to help Lagg, the old toad, I did. Nor did I see him die. They took him beyond the Chapel, to the highest of the cliffs, and they did not bring him back. ’Twas Seamus was meant to do the job, but I was one too many for even Dr. Edmund Jackman. Should ever there be a trial, and should yourself and myself come alive out of this, Mr. Logan, you’ll bear that in memory.”
“If I’m to bear witness for you, Seamus, perhaps you’ll tell me the details of your part in the business.”
Donley sighed. “Never did I think myself would turn informer, but that comes of the keeping of ill company. Not that Jackman and Royall will be common criminals: they’re uncommon enough. The rest will not be politicals, only hard cases that Jackman has some clutch upon. As for myself, Mr. Detective Logan, I never took a penny that was not mine, unless on Army orders.”
Getting up abruptly, Donley went to the door and put his ear against it. “The wind is high still,” he said, “and sure they never will come to us in such dark as this—not Jackman’s town crew. But ’tis my nerves that are on edge, Mr. Logan: three days with next to nothing in my belly, mind, so that there have been times when I thought more people than Jackman’s were walking in Carnglass. A damned island. Well, then, my autobiography, or a bit of it, Mr. Police-Detective. Much good may the telling of it do you, or myself.” Thrusting his chair toward the smouldering fire, Donley warmed his boots. What little light there was played upon his scarred face. And Hugh Logan listened.