Read Online Gently North-West by Alan Hunter - Free Book Online

daresay checking on the Highland Mail.’
    Gently shook his head, chuckling. ‘We’re away ahead of the facts,’ he said. ‘Let’s start again at the beginning and take it along, step by step. First, we’d better believe Mrs Dunglass’s story, because that’s all we have to go on. She says her husband told her he had a telephone call and that he would have to go into Balmagussie.’
    ‘So she’d ask him why,’ Brenda said.
    ‘All right,’ Gently said. ‘She’d ask him why. And he’d say something about business or the Party – she was perhaps used to him going off at odd hours. Anyway, he goes over the road to the garage, where the gardener also has his cottage, and the gardener sees him fetch out the car and drive away towards the village.’
    ‘Over this bridge,’ Brenda said.
    Gently shook his head. ‘No. The cottage lies behind the house and the trees from this bridge, so it must have been someone in the house who saw the car go over the bridge.’
    Brenda glanced towards the Lodge. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Clever. That’s why you stopped here.’
    ‘It could be a very important point,’ Gently said. ‘I wanted to get it clear in my mind. Now even from the house, as you can see, it’s difficult to get a view of the bridge. You’d need to be standing at that one special window and looking slantwise in this direction. So if Mrs Dunglass saw the car cross the bridge she was necessarily watching to see if it did, from which it follows Dunglass knew he’d be watched and took care he’d be seen heading for town. So now the situation is Dunglass was bluffing about the trip into Balmagussie, and Mrs Dunglass was suspicious, and Dunglass knew she was suspicious.’
    ‘Oh upright judge,’ Brenda said. ‘You’re still knocking nails into her coffin.’
    ‘From the first,’ Gently said, ‘Dunglass’s object was a rendezvous at the Stane. He received a message requiring his presence there and it was important his wife shouldn’t know where he was going. So he plays his bluff, drives off through the village, recrosses the river lower down, then takes a path from there up the braes and so to the Stane. He wouldn’t have used the regular path because it starts too near the house – and the odds are we must have seen him, with the timing being so tight.’
    ‘Please,’ Brenda said. ‘Let me go on. Question: Why was it important his wife shouldn’t know? Answer: He was on secret Party business. Comment: His wife knew about his Party business. Question: What remains then? Answer: A woman period a woman – and if you come up with anything different, George, I’ll scream and burst into tears.’
    ‘I daren’t risk it,’ Gently grinned. ‘But it’s still a curious place for an assignation.’
    ‘Not for mountain hizzies.’
    ‘Even for them. There must be other and better places lower down.’
    ‘You took me up there,’ Brenda said. ‘And I’m just a feeble Kensington hizzie. This one will be a wild, haggis-fed Highland female who can skip up and down braes like a goat.’
    Gently sighed. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I concede a woman is the most likely answer. But we still don’t know why she summoned him up there at such an unusual time, and at a moment’s notice.’
    ‘She must have had the urge,’ Brenda said. ‘It’s probably the mountain air that does it.’
    ‘Maybe. But why did he go? He apparently knew he was taking a risk.’
    ‘Ah,’ Brenda said. ‘Young love.’
    ‘There just could be a secondary reason – like blackmail. If he was having an affair he’d be open to blackmail – and a summons from a blackmailer would explain his caution.’
    Brenda gave her corn-coloured hair a twist. ‘George,’ she said. ‘Have it any way you like – as long as he went up there to meet a woman – and as long as Mary Macbeth went up and caught him at it. That’s the plain crux of the matter. It’s a slice of good old Frankie-and-Johnny. No guerrillaring ghillies or