The Tartan Ringers Read online

  A few hours later as I was strolling somewhere, or back, merely waiting for the world to reopen, George called me from the inn steps.

  ‘There’s a body to meet you, Ian.’ He waved towards the quay. I felt pleased. A kindness shown, a kindness sown. Swiftly remembering that I was temporarily Ian McGunn, I waved thanks and went down the stone harbour front. A youngish bloke was sitting on the wall. His pipe was unlit. The Sabbath again, I supposed knowingly.

  ‘How do.’ I stood a second. ‘I’m Ian McGunn.’

  ‘Hello,’ he said, smiling. ‘Jamie Innes.’

  ‘Not angling,’ I observed, glad.

  ‘Not on Sunday.’ He grinned, blue eyes from a tanned young leather face. ‘You?’

  ‘No. Fish never did me any harm.’

  ‘Hunter? Deer? Nature watcher?’ He ran down a list of lethality, earning a constant headshake.

  ‘Ah, well. Poetry. One slim volume, a few here and there in obscure journals.’ How obscure only I knew.

  ‘I’m not a very educated man,’ he confessed. ‘But at least I can tell Shona I met you first.’

  Shona? ‘Shona?’ I said as blankly as I’m able.

  ‘We’re engaged. She’s a McGunn. She’ll be pleased to meet you, seeing you’ve possible relatives here.’ He rose and invited me to accompany him by tilting his head. ‘You were saying on the bus. Old May Grimmond from Lybster’s a cousin to Mrs Ross who keeps the shop, who’s related to George MacNeish at the inn, who . . .’

  Until that moment I’d assumed that the Highlands were a large underpopulated expanse of differing counties. Illusions again. Now I could see a strain of blood ties ran strongly round somnolent old Dubneath. What worried me was that here I suddenly was, Ian McGunn, urgently needing an entire clan’s genealogy, addresses and photographs.

  We walked a few hundred yards before Jamie stopped outside a terraced cottage and pushed open a wooden gate. The cottage door was pulled, and a melodious voice said, ‘Welcome, Ian McGunn! You’ll stay for tea.’

  ‘Shona,’ Jamie introduced. ‘That beast’s Ranter.’ A dog the size of a horse stared at me with less than ecstasy.

  ‘Er, hello,’ I said. The impression was swirling blue, gold, yellow, and a smile. The bird, not the dog. ‘I, er, trust I’m not inconveniencing . . .’

  ‘Come in, man. Us here waiting and you so long to call I’ve to send Jamie Innes combing the town seeking you out wandering all the county before setting foot in the house . . .’

  Gasp. ‘Erm, thanks, er, Shona . . .’ I honestly believe that a woman meeting a man only takes him in piece by piece – eyes, height, age, smile, face. But a man’s different. We take in the complete woman at one swallow. That’s why particular points – remembering the colour of her eyes, for instance – aren’t really important to a man. It’s also why women get very narked, because they assume we use their scoring system. I couldn’t keep my eyes off Shona, and struggled to keep from being too obvious. She was lovely.

  The cottage was prepared for action. Linen tablecloth, plates just so. The most formal tea table you ever did see, while Shona swung her long bright hair and spun herself fetching the teapot and piles of sandwiches. She told Ranter to wait outside. It left calmly, giving me a warning glance.

  ‘And what’s this about you in a common lodging like that MacNeish’s tavern no more than a pub and you not even bothering to knock on a door—’ etcetera.

  ‘Give the man a chance, Shona,’ Jamie pleaded.

  ‘Aye, well, if he’s come through the south he’ll only be used to them Edinburgh folk . . .’

  Jamie winked. ‘We blame Edinburgh for giving us all a bad reputation. There’s a joke. Edinburgh folk tell callers: Welcome – you’ll have had your tea!’

  ‘What did that MacNeish give you for your dinner, Ian?’ Shona demanded from the kitchen.

  And we were off into womanchat. By sheer skill I managed to keep off my relatives for the whole visit. Shona was lovely in that spectacular way some women are. Jamie Innes obviously worshipped her, laughing appreciatively at her stories of the schoolchildren even though I’m sure he must have heard them all before.

  Getting on for six Shona rose to shoo Jamie away and summoned me to walk her out.

  ‘Time for chapel,’ she commanded. ‘The Innes clan being famous heathens, Jamie doesn’t go so you’ll walk me down, Ian.’

  ‘Er, if you wish.’

  ‘And while we do,’ she said, bright with anticipation, ‘I’ll exchange tales of the McGunns with you.’

  ‘Shouldn’t I go with Jamie . . . ?’ I tried desperately.

  Jamie said, ‘But I’m outnumbered, Ian. You McGunns use unfair tactics.’

  We parted at the gate. Jamie turning up the road leaving me and Shona to start towards the chapel by the waterfront. She slipped her hand through my arm. There was a low rumble behind us, Ranter stalking. Its eyes were almost on a level with mine. A stair-carpet of a tongue.

  ‘Take no notice of the beast, Ian,’ she said happily. ‘Now we can have a really good gossip.’

  ‘Gossip?’ That was it. My heart sank. I invented desperately. ‘Well, er, I think my grandad came from Stirling . . .’

  ‘Not that, silly.’ She was laughing prettily at me. ‘What I really want to know is, are you and Jo lovers, Lovejoy?’

  Chapter 11

  THAT STOPPED ME. She was rolling in the aisles laughing.

  ‘Your face!’

  Women really nark me. ‘You’re sly.’

  ‘Oh, whist, man! I guessed when I heard you’d been telling George MacNeish about his old things. And you couldn’t take your eyes off my old father’s mulls.’

  These are peculiarly Scottish containers for snuff, made of horns, silver, sometimes bone or stone. It’s easy to pay too much for these, because usually they’ve bits missing. The complete ones have a decorative chain holding tiny tools – a mallet, scoop, prong – also of silver, and of course it’s these that have casually been nicked or lost. Mulls come in two sorts, the larger table mull with castors for use after posh dinners, or the personal mull. Antique dealers invent wrong names, being too thick to learn the right ones, and call the portable sort a ‘baby’ mull, it being small. I’d never even seen a matching pair of snuff mulls before. But Shona had such on her mantelpiece, lovely horn and silver shapes with all the accoutrements. I’d only given clandestine glances, but should have remembered that women can always recognize a drool.

  She was enjoying herself. ‘Handed down. Family.’

  ‘From about 1800,’ I said with a moan of craving.

  She fell about. ‘Well you can’t have them,’ she said at last, recovering. ‘Jo said you’re a terror for old things.’

  ‘Jo said I was coming?’

  ‘Yes. She’s been ringing every couple of days.’ Shona grimaced at me. ‘That’s why I suspect you and she of . . .’

  ‘None of your nosey business.’

  She hugged herself as they do. ‘I like you, Lovejoy. Secretly, I’m glad you won’t tell.’

  ‘Only women gossip about lovers.’

  She thought a bit before beginning an argument about diarists. I was too impatient to listen. ‘Where did you get the bureau from?’

  ‘The one Jo said got lost? Oh, a place I know.’

  ‘A place with antiques?’ I asked evenly. I’m not devious like other people. I honestly say exactly what I mean practically always.

  She gave me a look, women being of a suspicious nature. ‘Very well,’ she said at last, some decision made. ‘You’ll come up to Tachnadray with me tomorrow.’

  Tachnadray? I said great, never having heard the name. For the sake of propriety off she went to kirk and I went to read Untracht’s monograph on jewellery. Each to his own religion.

  That evening I had a demure supper ritual in the hotel lounge served by Mrs MacNeish. It was like a barn. Dead fish and stag heads on wall plaques and sepia photographs of ancient shooting parties proudly dangling dead birds. I’d have to send somebody up her
e to buy these exhibits on a commission job. Someone else. I’m not a queasy bloke; I just can’t rejoice in extinction. Mary MacNeish laid up for major surgery. I’d never seen so much crockery and cutlery in my life. I told her cheerfully, ‘Just met Shona.’

  ‘Aye, I heard,’ Mrs MacNeish said.

  We bantered a bit while I tried to keep my knees together and hold off the slab cake till the starting gun. Politeness is a killer. Also, something wasn’t quite right. In the woman’s prattle a discordant note was sounding. You can always tell. The publican’s wife was open-faced and friendly, but she was having her work cut out to stay so when Shona was mentioned. Yet Shona was pally and really something to see. I wondered if it was me, and like a fool put it out of my mind.

  During the gluttony I had the sense not to mention Tachnadray, and eventually returned to reading Untracht’s methods of inlaying silver strips in English boxwood bracelet carving.

  Maybe for once I should have thought deeply instead.

  Next day I consulted the register of electors. They’re those cobwebbed, yellowing, string-hung pages of local names in every village post-office-cum-stores. Pretending idleness – nothing new – I found that Tachnadray listed umpteen McGunns, plus one ectopic: plain James Wheeler. Yet even here somebody had inked in the McGunn surname, converting him to clan. Odd, that. Amending electoral rolls is illegal, even if you changed your name lawfully. I checked its date: printed twenty years previously, and that ink had faded. I wondered if Lovejoy McGunn sounded better than Ian, then decided to let ill alone.

  Shona brought Jamie’s van about ten o’clock. She drove as fitted her personality, with good-humoured extravagance, and asked if MacNeish’s pub was comfortable.

  ‘Grand parlour,’ I said. ‘Are those places only used for funerals? It felt like the dust covers were just off.’

  Shona laughed. ‘In the Highlands the best room’s always kept for occasions, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Tachnadray got one too?’

  She sobered swiftly. ‘How much do you know, Lovejoy?’ We turned uphill inland.

  ‘This Tachnadray’s where the antique came from?’

  ‘Yes.’ She faced me defiantly. Odd. Defiance is for enemies. ‘I arranged it.’

  ‘But down in East Anglia we’d been told to expect a reproduction.’ I cleared my throat, not wanting to seem a crook. ‘You see, if a genuine antique had showed up we, er, might have only paid you for a repro.’

  ‘And claimed that a reproduction had been delivered.’ Shona nodded, getting the point quicker than I really wanted. ‘And then, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Then?’ I said blankly. ‘Well, I’d have flogged your genuine antique.’

  She was so patient. ‘And then, Lovejoy?’

  ‘I’d have come here to . . .’ I slowed, nodding.

  ‘. . . To find who was stupid enough to sell off expensive antiques thinking them reproductions.’ She gave me a satisfied smile. ‘You’ve found her. It’s me. It was bait, Lovejoy.’

  Expensive bait. ‘But why?’ We’d gone half a mile and already the houses had vanished. We were on an upland moor and still climbing, the van labouring and coughing.

  ‘Because I need a divvie. Jo had mentioned you. I’d heard of one in Carlisle, but it’s so difficult to trust anyone in antiques, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sometimes, love,’ I agreed piously. ‘Why didn’t you tell Jo to ask me up without all this?’

  ‘It hadn’t to be me that procured you, Lovejoy. You had to wander in on your own. You pretending to be a McGunn simply made it easier for me.’

  Therefore she wanted ignorance, which meant I’d have to get a move on to suss her game out. Antiques were at stake. If I allowed her to distract me they’d slip through my fingers. It happens to me every time when women are around. ‘I’m part of your plot?’

  ‘A plot for survival. We McGunns are a lost tribe, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Here. I thought you’d given up pretending—’

  ‘Be quiet and listen!’ she blazed it out fiercely.

  For a few minutes she drove, winding us away from the coast into bleak countryside. Rocks, gullies, a little rivulet or two, heather and a few trees having a desperate time. There was even a big-bellied bird noshing some heather. Funny life for a pigeon, I thought, though whatever turns pigeons on in Caithness . . . Shona cooled enough for her sermon.

  ‘You picked an august name, Lovejoy. We McGunns are Picts, inhabitants here long before the rest of these . . . people came.’ She meant anybody else was a serf. ‘Yet now we’re dispossessed. The Highland clearances of two centuries gone, the clan rivalries, everything in history has been against us.’

  The sky was grey, cloudy. A distant grey house glided along the horizon. Wuthering Heights. A small lorry drove past us towards Dubneath. Shona beeped her horn in reflex salutation. A few sheep watched us, hoping for a lift to civilization. I hid a yawn. Nice place if you were an elk.

  ‘We were driven to the coastal villages,’ she continued. ‘People who’ve heard of Armenians, the Jews and Tasmanians would think you mad if you classed us with the likes of them.’ She shot me a hard glance, waggling the wheel the way women do for nothing. ‘Wouldn’t they?’

  I thought a bit. For all I knew she might be a nut. ‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘But it’s life. Families come and go. Names peter out, get revived.’

  ‘In 1821 we tried,’ she said bitterly. ‘The Clan McGunn formed a society – like those Gordons and Grants.’ She spoke with hate. ‘But our last clan chief died and we were finished.’

  ‘And you’ll reunite the clan and march on Rome.’

  ‘No,’ she said, choking down an impulse to chuck me through the windscreen. ‘But the loyals among us must share some feeling of . . . pride.’

  Odd word, I thought, I’ll bet that sentence was surprised when it ended like that. ‘By giving away what genuine antiques you’ve got left? Slinging them on the first lorry heading south?’

  ‘You’ll see, Lovejoy.’

  For a while she drove us angrily on into ever bleaker countryside without speaking. Just as I was wondering if she’d brought any nosh she screeched us to a jolting stop above a chiselled glen. There was a muddy looking lake off to the right, seemingly on a tilt. Can lakes actually slope like that? Trees, clearly unwelcome tourists, clustered around a large gable-and-turret building of grey stone. Ranked windows and disguised chimneys, a long drive with drystone walling, and a bare flagpole. It could have been uninhabited except that the main door stood open and somebody was standing waiting in shadow at the top of the steps. I thought it was a woman. A man with a wheelbarrow near outhouses stood peering up the hillside at our van.

  ‘Tachnadray, Lovejoy. Isn’t it beautiful?’

  ‘The architect read Jane Eyre.’

  ‘During your visit, Lovejoy,’ Shona said after a moment with careful coolth, ‘you’ll refrain from sly digs. Understood?’

  ‘Not really, love,’ I said, opening the van door and sliding down to stretch my legs. It was time me and cousin Shona got a few things straight before hitting the old homestead. ‘I’ve gone to a lot of bother to get here. Right now I could be out of your hair, and home in peace. I sympathize with your diaspora, but we Lovejoys never had a posh dynasty.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Explain why you’re Pretty Miss Welcome down in Dubneath, and Boadicea as soon as we see that phoney Victorian castle. And,’ I said on as she drew furious breath, ‘why you think you have the right to ballock me as soon as we’re out of Jamie’s earshot.’

  She said quietly, ‘So it’s money you want.’

  ‘Or antiques. Or both.’

  ‘Very well, Lovejoy. You’ll be paid.’ Pause. ‘Enough.’

  A minute’s reflection, and I nodded. We rolled as I got in. She nearly took my toes off with the wheel. Our relationship was deteriorating fast.

  ‘The . . . owner of Tachnadray agreed with my idea of having copies of the antiques made and selling them. We have two men doing it.’ She turned us between
two tall stone gateposts bearing carved coats-of-arms. ‘I believe we – Tachnadray – are being defrauded.’

  Such disloyalty, I thought, but didn’t say. ‘And I’m to prove your suspicions?’

  ‘Much, much more, Lovejoy.’ She’d recovered her smile. However daft her dreams, she really seemed to come alive again in Tachnadray. She’d recovered all her sparkling good humour as soon as we made the glen. ‘You’re to prove who’s doing it.’

  ‘Here, love,’ I said uneasily. ‘You’re not wanting anybody buried at midnight in the crypt, are you? Because hunting’s not my game—’

  ‘Here we are, Lovejoy,’ she said gaily, stopping the van below the steps. ‘Tachnadray.’

  The woman waiting in the shadows of the main door stepped forward into view. She walked with grave composure to the top step and stood to welcome us. I got out and went forward. For half a step I was a bit uncertain. After that there was no question. Between the two women the air had thickened with utter hatred. It’s not fair that hunters last longest, or that prey wear out fastest. Somebody should change the rules. Quickly I stepped to one side, put on my most sincere smile and went bravely up the steps. This new woman couldn’t give me a bigger pack of lies than Shona.

  Chapter 12

  CAITHNESS IS ONE of those places you think of as perfect, full of plain wisdom, isn’t it. The simple life: dawn porridge, down to the trickling burn to brew up the day’s malt whisky or whatever, then highland reels all evening. Idyllic. Instead, here I was ascending these wide steps, grinning hopefully at the elegant older woman smiling down at me, with a lovely bird like Shona smiling away at my side, and me wishing I was in battledress being fired at. It had felt safer.

  ‘Morning,’ I said pleasantly. ‘I’m . . .’ Who the hell was I?

  ‘Ian McGunn, Michelle,’ Shona introduced in her lovely brogue. ‘We stopped to admire the klett.’

  ‘Isn’t it a lovely view, Ian? Welcome to Tachnadray.’

  Klett? ‘Thanks. Yes. Lovely, er, klett.’

  ‘Do come in.’