Stormy Petrel by Mary Stewart Page A

them their full due, repeating all that my sister-in-law had said, and told them that I would hear from my brother himself that evening, then paid for my groceries and made my escape.
    I was halfway home before I realised that, with all the worry and talk about the accident, I had forgotten to ask Mrs McDougall about Ewen Mackay. Or, indeed, about John Parsons.
    Not that it mattered, as I would probably not see either of them again, but the scene last night had been strange, and my curiosity was aroused.
    Take Parsons first. He was, I was sure, an imposter. I refused to believe that he chanced to have the same name as the previous tenants of the cottage – unless he himself was the previous tenant, and had for some reason returned to Moila without wanting to be known? I remembered that, according to Archie McLaren, the family had used a boat, and done all their shopping in Tobermory, avoiding the islanders. An echo of Parsons’ geological jargon last night sounded in my head. I had heard the word ‘garnet’. Perhaps he really was a geologist. Perhaps he had discovered a seam – did you have a seam of garnet? – and had come back secretly to exploit it, and . . .
    This was Hugh Templar taking over. Nonsense. Forget fantasy and look at fact. Take Parsons again. He had – possibly – lied about his name. He had certainly lied about seeing the cottage light. If he had been chasing his flying tent up from the machair on the west of the island, he might have got up as far as the bogland near the lochan, but surely the light from my cottage would not be visible until he had followed the road downhill past the curve and almost into Otters’ Bay. Hence, his excuse for coming to the cottage was also a fake.
    Now take Ewen Mackay. Maybe he had not lied, and in any case what he had said about the cottage being his home could easily be checked. He had known where the coal was kept, and the Calor gas poker, and he had had a key – which, now that I thought about it, I should certainly have asked him to hand over to me . . . But there was that unmistakable and disquieting reaction to the knocking on the door, and then the pointless deception which followed; pointless, because he must have known he could not get away with it. Had it merely been a quick try at getting rid of the intruder? But why? Then there was the rather sharp bout of questioning, which had had, on both sides, a sort of wariness about it.
    And finally, the note this morning, with its suggestion of a truce between the two men.
    I stopped in mid-stride, so suddenly that an oystercatcher, which had been guddling among the reeds at the edge of the lochan, took off seawards with a screamed complaint.
    Supposing, just supposing, that Mackay and Parsons had arranged to meet at the cottage. The storm had been fortuitous, and extra. Mackay, key in hand (where had he really got it from?), had made his way to Otters’ Bay, and had walked straight in, assuming the cottage to be empty. I found it hard to believe that, even if he had been out of the country, his family could have moved away without his knowing. Unless, of course, they had not wanted him to know, and had seen to it that he had no address for them.
    Which would say certain things about Ewen Mackay.
    So, for some reason impossible to guess at, he and Parsons had arranged to meet. It was I, the unexpected tenant of the empty cottage, who was the joker in the pack. I had made them welcome, accepted their nonsensical stories because it didn’t matter one way or the other, and then gone obligingly off to bed and left them to their meeting . . .
    Something moved on the farther side of the lochan, something bulky and dirty white, caught in the bog myrtle, where it shifted and billowed in the breeze. John Parson’s tent? Could there have been that much truth in what he had said?
    I dumped the carrier with my groceries down beside the road, and set off