The Piper Page 4

  Or, Hamish thought, Loch Linnhe?

  Hamish pushed Bethune into the nearest chair. Holding him there, he turned to the other two men.

  “Empty your pockets, if you please. Now,” he said to the constable and to Ogilvie, who put up a fuss at the order. But in the end, both men did as they were told.

  Ogilvie held out a pocket watch, handkerchief, small knife, a few coins.

  The constable, flushed with anger, turned out his own pockets. The contents were similar, except for the key to the handcuffs at his belt.

  Then Hamish took it upon himself to try once more to empty the Inspector’s pockets, while the man struggled to stop him.

  With his hand halfway out of the pocket, Hamish turned to his two witnesses and said, “Look.”

  It was the gold medal. They could see, even in the lamplight, the Campbell arms embossed on the back. Hamish drew it the rest of the way out. It was from the piping contest in Inveraray.

  Ogilvie sighed. “I told you he was no’ a policeman.”

  “Then how did he come by the card he was carrying, identifying himsel’ as one?” Hamish demanded.

  “There’s a printer in a close on Prince’s Street. He’s easily bribed. A useful disguise, I should think, claiming to be a policeman. The piper would ha’ trusted him.”

  “I found that confounded medal on the piper’s body, for God’s sake,” Bethune was shouting at them. “Where else was I to keep it safe?”

  “You’re a liar,” Hamish said harshly. “It wasna’ there when I brought him in fra’ the gale. Nor in the bag wi’ his pipes.” He pointed across the room. “I found the piper’s bag where ye left it to rot in the heather. You’d ha’ been smarter to throw it in the loch.” He turned to the constable. “I guessed that his killer had the medal fra’ the start—he took it after knocking the lad o’er the head. There’s no’ a man or woman in the glen would touch the dead lad’s medal.”

  The constable spoke then, slowly digesting what had happened. “He sent me to the loch. He said there was movement by the water.”

  “Well,” Hamish said reasonably, “it wouldna’ be verra’ clever to let you witness him killing me.”

  “And I watched Bethune try yon door,” Ogilvie added. “But he lost his nerve, ye ken. He came back with a cudgel, and that would ha’ killed ye fine. By the time yon constable reached the croft, you’d ha’ been dead, the cudgel by your corpse, and Bethune here lamenting that your killer had got away in the haar.”

  Bethune put up a fierce defense, but it was no use. The gold medal, winking in the flickering lamplight, was his judgment.

  It was Ogilvie, still limping a little, who agreed to accompany the constable back to the village with their prisoner.

  “It’s for the best, MacLeod. Ye ken, it’s the duty of yon constable to bring in the piper’s murderer. I’m staying wi’ the two of them to be sure Bethune doesna’ escape. I never liked the man. He cheats at cards.”

  Hamish wasn’t pleased with the decision; he’d wanted to see Bethune into a cell and charged. But he let them go, watching them from his doorway until they were out of sight in the mist.

  Unable to sleep, he went to the cupboard where he’d put the lad’s pipes and set about cleaning them. It was late, close to five o’clock, by the time he’d finished, wrapped them in a towel, and put them away again. Someone would come for them. One day. The medal would be handed to the Fiscal, in evidence. For now.

  Tired finally, and ready to sleep, he went to bed. The rain had stopped, and a ragged moon shone through the last remnants of heavy mist, brightening his window.

  It was close on dawn when Hamish MacLeod came wide awake, sitting up in his bed.

  From the direction of the loch came the sounds of a pibroch he recognized at once. His grandfather had played it but never like this. The sound, echoing over the water, was pure and stirring. It was “The MacLeod’s Lament,” and he listened to it with his face turned to the window.

  When it was finished, he lay back down again, and closed his eyes.

  It was the only time the piper played for him. He wasn’t sure in the clear light of morning whether it was his imagination or a dream.

  But his granny would say, with the certainty of one who possessed the Sight, that the young piper had paid his debt to the man in the croft.

  An Excerpt from Racing the Devil

  Read on for a sneak peek at the next book by Charles Todd

  RACING THE DEVIL

  An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery

  On sale February 2017

  Click here to buy!

  Chapter One

  Late June 1916

  It was a way of daring Fate. Of spitting in the eye of the devil.

  On the eve of what was to be the worst battle of the war, the coming Somme offensive, all leave had been canceled, and men who had anticipated at least a few days in rotation were ordered to return to the line before midnight.

  In a more or less sturdy French barn that had somehow escaped the lot of the heavily shelled farmhouse connected to it, an enterprising sergeant had set up what passed for an officers’ mess. The food was appalling—he had learned to cook in Bodmin Gaol, although it was anyone’s guess whether he’d been an inmate or hired staff—but he had come into possession of the contents of an abandoned wine shop (or so it was said), and word had got around that what he served was of fairly decent quality.

  The seven officers seated around the scarred, three-legged table had drunk bottles of his best claret, and the bleak mood had changed to a sober acceptance of what they would soon be facing. Verdun was in trouble, the French desperately holding on by a hair, the death toll rising. Britain was mounting a flanking attack to prevent a German breakthrough, and it looked to be a bloody shambles. None of them expected to survive.

  The bombardment that they now knew to be the prelude to tomorrow’s attack had been going on for several days, rattling nerves but with any luck leveling the German trenches they would have to attack at dawn. And the Germans, forewarned, would be waiting, if the artillery barrage had left any alive.

  The seven men were strangers, had never served together. But they soon discovered that before the war they had lived within a hundred miles of one another along the southern coast of England. They had one other thing in common: an enthusiasm for motorcars. Three of them presently owned one. The other four spoke pensively of what they would buy if they lived to see the war’s end. Candles danced and sputtered in rusty tins, a feeble light that made it easier for tired men to say whatever was on their minds.

  It was then that the name of Randolph Graves came up. He had driven in the Grand Prix de Monte Carlo not once but twice, and had come very close to winning both events. One of the seven had known him, but the others knew of him. Anyone mad about racing knew who Randolph Graves was.

  “Bought it at Ypres,” the Captain who had known him said. “I went to see his widow when I was last in London. She took it hard, poor lass. She’d been at school with a cousin. Not much I could do but say the usual. Died for his country. Brave as hell. An example to his men. I doubt it was much comfort.”

  “You never know,” the only Major present commented, finishing his glass. “My father, now, says much the same sort of thing about lads I’ve grown up with. As if,” he added sourly, “sacrifice is a fine end. I’d much rather survive, thank you very much.”

  “What will you do when it’s over?” the Lieutenant queried, passing the nearly empty bottle. “Stay in the Army?”

  “God, no,” the Major said as he passed the bottle on. “I had my eye on a Rolls before that damned Archduke got himself shot. My father talked me out of buying it. Made a certain sort of sense that summer. But if I live, I’ll have it now, and I’ll drive it to Monte Carlo to watch the race.”

  That led to a discussion of model, speed, and cost.

  “There’ll be new chassis designs when this is over,” another Lieutenant put in. “Bound to be.”

  “At least between Pa
ris and Monte Carlo, there’s been no fighting,” the Major added, a touch of yearning in his voice. “The Grand Prix should commence again without too much trouble. Unless of course the roads haven’t been maintained.”

  “If there are any men left who can drive in it,” the Captain retorted bitterly, shifting in his chair. “It’ll be down to us, more’s the pity. And none of us have that skill.”

  “I say. Let’s make a bargain. One year after the war is over, let’s meet in Paris. With our motorcars. And race each other to Nice. Not the Grand Prix. An affirmation that we survived. Something to measure our future by.”

  Surprisingly, they grasped at the straw offered, agreeing with the enthusiasm of men who knew they were doomed and didn’t want to believe it. The sergeant brought out another bottle, still dusty and quite old. They finished it, serious now, laying out the details of their future, the hotel where they’d stay in Paris, the hotel where they’d celebrate their arrival in Nice, how to bring the motorcars across from London, what route to follow south.

  It was taunting Providence, but they didn’t care. It was something to hold on to, when tomorrow dawned and they were in the thick of whatever was to come. A talisman.

  As they walked back through the dark to their respective sectors, the guns were still at it, lighting up the night sky, shaking the earth beneath their feet.

  “I don’t envy the poor devils under that,” someone said quietly.

  “No. But the more of them killed tonight, the fewer we have to face tomorrow or the next day,” the Lieutenant replied grimly.

  What they didn’t know was that the shelling would not penetrate the German trenches. Could not. They had been built far better—and much deeper—than those in the British lines.

  And so on July 1, when the first charge went over the top, they were met with a taste of hell.

  The South of France, Above Nice, Late Autumn 1919

  Andrew Brothers watched the sun set over the hilltops and took a deep breath. He was tired now, and the lamps were being lit in the isolated villages clinging to their perches where the central massif ran down to Nice and the sea. They beckoned, promising food and possibly even a bed. But he couldn’t stop. The others hadn’t, he was sure of it. And he wanted very much to reach the Promenade des Anglais first. Not to best the others, but for his own sense of accomplishment, a way to end his own war. He hadn’t been able to do that in the past year. It still haunted him in ways he’d never expected. And so he’d come to believe that this race would put paid to the trenches and all they represented. Proving he was a whole man at last.

  He wondered how many of the others felt the same way.

  There were only five now. Dobson had bought it on the Somme, some said cursing the Germans as he died. Everett had developed gangrene after a skirmish near Passchendaele, his foot shot off and infection creeping up his leg inch by inch. The doctors had done what they could, but there had been no hope from the start. He’d written Brothers a rambling letter, mostly claiming that even without his foot, he would ride in the motorcar with them by turns and smell the sea as they ran down to Nice. He’d been dead by the time Brothers got it, and there was something macabre about it, that certainty Everett felt that he would survive to make the journey.

  Truth be told, none of them had expected this week would come. Not after the Somme, where they’d all realized they were living on borrowed time, walking dead. For one thing, they’d been more than a little drunk that night in late June, Midsummers hardly past, the days long and warm. Drunk and a little mad. Defiant.

  The odd thing was, he could recall it clearly, as if it were yesterday. The scavenged tables and chairs, whatever cups and mugs could be found in the ruins of shelled villages, a dented coffeepot, a saucepan or two, and a few skillets. The sergeant was nothing if not enterprising. He himself had drunk his wine from a porcelain cup with lilies of the valley painted on it. The Major, he remembered, had had a child’s silver christening mug.

  They’d been daft even to think it might be possible. And yet it had seemed possible somehow. The barn had still smelled of horses and, oddly enough, of chickens. Nothing like the trenches, where the stench of urine and sour sweat and death seemed to permeate the muddy footpath and the scarred walls.

  At the time it all seemed to make perfect sense. They’d toasted each other and wondered what the girls were like in Nice, and ignored the coming battle. The night was quiet, except for a cricket in one of the stalls. They’d laughed and passed the bottles, all of them a little drunk.

  By the time he was back in the lines, he was cold sober and wishing he weren’t.

  He’d had to borrow his brother-in-law’s motorcar to keep his rendezvous at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris.

  Tommy hadn’t been happy about it, but he’d relented in the end. And so Brothers had walked into the hotel, found the other four in the bar, and endured the good-natured chaffing about being the last to arrive. “But not the last to Nice,” he’d told them, and realized he meant it.

  There was no prize for winning. A bottle of the best French brandy they could find. If the winner chose to share it with the others, all well and good. If he didn’t, no one would raise an objection. Being alive—and whole—was all that mattered.

  Brothers also recalled—far too clearly—standing in the trench at dawn on July 1 three years before, waiting for the signal that the attack would begin. And thinking that he had hardly known the men he’d made the pact with. He’d decided that it was for the best. Their deaths wouldn’t touch him. He’d lost enough friends. He didn’t care to make new ones.

  And yet, with each attack he survived, he’d told himself, I’ll race to Nice after all. By God, I will!

  That had become his mantra, and he told himself that if he lived, it didn’t matter about the others. He’d make that drive alone. To prove he was still alive. If he had to beg, borrow, or steal a motorcar.

  They weren’t meant for racing, any of the vehicles the five men had brought to Paris. Nothing like the low, sleek Grand Prix models that swept around the curves and dealt easily with tight corners. Randolph Graves would laugh. But none of them cared. They had lived through the worst that life had to offer. It had taken their youth and their nerve and their joy. And still they had survived.

  He shook himself, staring ahead. Tendrils of mist were beginning to swirl in front of his headlamps, and as he came into the next turn, he realized that he could see nothing to his left—where the long drop had been until now—but a sea of white. With the setting of the sun, mists had crept up the cliff faces all along here. Lost in the past, he hadn’t noticed, but now they were moving up toward the heights above him, and in a matter of minutes he was going to be

  He didn’t know this road. They had all been warned that the descent into Nice was dangerous, a series of twists, turns, and switchbacks with nothing between the motorcar and plunging into ravines but a man’s skill. Bad enough to drive it in the dark, but in a mist? Madness!

  He began to slow, leaning forward to peer through the windscreen at the road. It was vanishing one instant, reappearing the next. And then without warning there was a clear patch, and he took the bend holding his breath, uncertain what he’d find as he rounded it.

  A flash of light behind him distracted him for an instant, but he had no time to glance at his mirror. As it was, he almost missed the next turn as mist eddied at the last possible second. Swearing, he gauged his speed and kept to the right, so close to the cliff face that he felt the scraping of branches against his wings.

  Tommy, he told himself grimly, would be cursing if he knew.

  The mist thinned a little, revealing a straight stretch of road for about twenty yards, and he drew a breath of relief. He couldn’t see the drop on his left, although he knew it was there, but he sped up a little to take advantage of the easier run.

  Something tapped his motorcar hard in the rear, catching him completely unprepared. For an instant, Brothers nearly lost control, reflexes kicking in even as he v
eered left and fought to bring himself right again. Risking a look back, he could see a vague shape in the mist behind him. No lights—whoever it was was running without lights.

  But the next bend was already on him, and he had no time to think about that. He edged around it, working the brake, and then he was hit again.

  Shouting at the other driver, he kept his attention on the mist-shrouded road, hunched over the wheel, gripping it with both hands.

  Who the hell was behind him? And what was he trying to do?

  The next time Brothers was struck, he nearly went over the edge, his tires spinning in the loose grit and underbrush. Yelling, he felt himself sliding, the left rear seeming to lean into the void, and then almost miraculously, he was back on the road.

  Fully alert now, he gunned the motor to earn him some space, skidded in the dust toward the drop as he took the next curve at speed despite the mist, and thanked the gods watching over him that there was no one else on the road. Another bend loomed, and he almost misjudged what he could see in the brightness of his headlamps, for the ruts were deep and treacherous, filled with shadows. It was a sobering moment. But it was a risk he’d have to take.

  The other car was behind him again, and this time when it struck him, it sped up, pushing him, in spite of the possibility that in sending him crashing over the edge, the other driver would fail to disengage in time to save himself.

  Brothers had a moment’s clarity. If he stayed on this road, he’d surely be killed. He didn’t know why or by whom, he only knew that if he didn’t do something soon, either the mist or the man behind him would win.

  And then he saw it. As the mists shifted a little, there was a broadening in the road. Lights, blurred by mist, high above his head. A village perched on a promontory—like so many others he’d passed during the late afternoon.