Lammas by Shirley McKay Page A

he could hardly stand. The student had danced with the missing lass. He was on the pier, and she ran after him. There he had passed out. He had not seen her since.
    The girl had more to say, though none of it coherent, in between her wails. Elspe was her friend. She was very dear to her. They had worked together at the harbour inn. Their master was a man called Walter Bone. Elspe had a sweetheart, and Walter had found out. He had flown into a rage, and said that he would kill her.
    â€˜What were his words?’ Andrew Wood said, for the words made a difference to the fact.
    â€˜He would swing for the limmar, he said.’
    â€˜By which he meant that he would kill Elspe?’
    â€˜I didna understand him at the time,’ Marie said, ‘but he went to do it all the same. He went to push her aff the pier.’
    â€˜And did you see him do it?’ Andrew asked her patiently. He was a patient man. His patience in the past had been a shrewd relentlessness, tenacious in pursuit until he got his man. Now it was resigned; he was weary of a post he was close to giving up, called forever back to attend to one last crime. This might be the last man he would have to hang. He would not be sorry if it was.
    â€˜Ah didna see him,’ Marie said. ‘But she wis on the pier, and he went rinning efter, and ainly he com back.’ She blurted out the rest.
    The tumblers had been walking on a rope across the water, and everyone had watched. When the walk was done, they came back to the inn, where there was going to be a magic show.
    The magician who intended to put on the show stood by Marie’s side. He offered her the comfort of a string of coloured handkerchiefs, on which to blow her nose. The crownar took an urgent and immediate dislike to him. He belonged to a class of man Sir Andrew had no wish to see about the town, or any town in Fife. On any other day, when there was no fair, he would have him whipped. He was no more than a beggar and a thief. What was a juglar, but a common trickster? What was a trickster, but he ought to hang? No word of his, or this foolish girl’s, had any scrap of worth.
    Marie said that she had looked for Elspet at the inn. She had not found her there. But she had found Walter Bone, in the lassies’ sleeping chamber, sitting on the bed that she and Elspet shared. When she tried to speak with him, he was wild and strange. Then she had seen the ribands in his hand, that Elspet had been wearing at her breast. That was when she screamed.
    To illustrate the point, she began to scream again. ‘Mak the wench whisht, or I will,’ Andrew warned, and the juglar took the lassie in his filthy clasp. Sir Andrew turned, disgusted, to examine Walter Bone.
    Walter had the ribbons still, the single piece of evidence with any substance to it. He said that the girl had given them to him.
    â€˜And why would she do that?’
    â€˜I dinna ken,’ Walter said.
    â€˜Where is she now?’
    â€˜I have nae idea.’
    The crownar scratched his head. He was still undecided what he should do next when he saw Robert Lachlan coming through the mill port, with Hew Cullan by his side. Robert Lachlan he disliked intensely. His feelings for Hew were a good deal more ambivalent. Hew was an expert in resolving mysteries, and rooting out the source of anomalies like these. Yet while he was adept in solving certain problems, he caused as many problems as he solved. His involvement was not likely to simplify the case. Therefore Andrew’s welcome to him was at best lukewarm.
    â€˜This man is my client,’ Hew told him.
    â€˜Your client,’ the crownar said. ‘Why does that not surprise me? You may speak to him here, in my hearing. I will not wait while you play with words, nor would I have you put an answer in his mind that was not founded there.’
    This was not what Hew had hoped for. But Robert had primed him with the essential facts, and he asked Walter straight,