The Seventh Petal

Chapter 1

SOLO female on a long hike, I found words pinned to a dead man’s chest and they mesmerised me: The march came fast. The old tune, the fine tune, when the wild men in their red tartan came over hill and moor.

Uneasily, and close to panic at discovering a corpse, I scanned the hilltop for wild men but there was only this still one. I was in the Scottish Highlands, remote and deserted.

Because I was overdrawn at the bank and overweight on the scales, a camping trek had seemed my wisest holiday from showbiz. Banjo in backpack, I intended to commune with Nature and maybe invent fresh songs. Now the remote mountain trail had produced this horror.

While hesitating beside the body, I imagined bagpipes droning among pine-scented crags to match the rhythm I was reading: The tune with the river in it, the fast river and the courageous, that kens not stop nor tarry, that runs round rock and over fall with a good humour, yet no mood for anything but the way before it.

The man lay near a shoulder-high cairn of fist-sized stones that topped a scarp above an extensive loch. Wild country indeed, after miles of tramping from the Uloughness ferry, where I had alighted from a gasping Fort William bus. People were rare in this region, a dead one cause for panic. He was elderly, his suit lightweight, hardly garb for walking this wilderness. His thick form was crumpled as if victim to a heart attack. Then I noticed the dagger, its blade hidden deep, and I knew this was murder.

Mystery also. The typed lines were attached by safety-pin to his waistcoat. I yanked the paper free. The message might explain something, for doubtless the victim and his killer had perused these phrases also:

I glanced left, right and behind as heat tingled my scalp, for my finger had touched a splash of blood across one corner of the page. I stumbled in a daze, off the track into bracken and gorse. The wild tune of those imagined bagpipes taunted my ears and persisted while I fled down towards the loch. There was a squat castle guarding its shore, the only building I had encountered in this rugged panorama. The castle’s dark walls swallowed the sunlight that glinted from the vast mountain lake.

Only when I paused to examine its squarish military outline, its tower, and the narrow road twisting lochside, did I realise my fist still gripped the sheet of paper that breathed a living poem from the dead man . . . The tune of the heroes, the tune of the pinelands and the broad straths, the tune that the eagles of Loch Duich crack their beaks together when they hear, and the crows of that countryside would as soon listen to as the squeal of their babies.

The bagpipes still skirled. What? The sound was real, not imagined after all, and it was coming from down there at the castle, pulling my alarm to its mesmeric beat. Down, down the hillside I slid, scattering stones and twigs, my heart thumping, my senses recognising a new sound, a human sound. It was the voice of a woman somewhere below. She was singing to the sweet groan of those pipes.

Faint at first, then surging to full throat, the melody echoed over the water and amid the pines. It was a song familiar to me, with a wistful lilt I had often performed myself when engaged for a folksy gig. More suited to harp or guitar accompaniment, it was that popular Scotttish air, Over the sea to Skye.

The invisible voice singing it was what one might expect to hear in an opera. It was a glorious soprano, now outsounding the drone of the pipes and beckoning me towards it. As I paced down, a skittering disturbed the waters of the loch, in the shadows near clumped rocks where small fish splashed in the shallows, as if dancing. Incredibly, the music was calling them too.

Soon a slate tiled roof appeared on a level with my boots and in my haste, unbalanced by the backpack, I fell over a bank through prickly heather and thistles before bursting onto flat tarmac, a car park. I spotted an orange tour bus and hurried past it where massive walls anchored the castle as if they were defying the landscape’s hostility on this age-old shore. Loud people were having fun on smooth lawns.

They sat about wooden tables on grassy terracing that stepped down dry-stone walls to a pebbled beach. To alert them, I flagged the paper above my head, lurching into their midst. A portal with sculpted pediment framed the musical performers - gaudy bagpiper and the diva wearing grey slacks and rollneck sweater. They went abruptly silent.

One of the picnickers, an extremely fat man, grabbed my elbow with a laugh and snatched for the crumpled sheet of paper. She’s guessed it, sonovabitch. Everyone listen up. Heck, I reckon we have a winner.

My mouth, open to blurt my gruesome discovery, gaped like a frozen trout, because attached to this bloke’s chest was a sheet just like the one I carried. My eyes narrowed to its different message:

I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills . . .

You couldn’t imagine anyone less floatable than a cloud. I’m large-waisted myself, but this guy’s big belly drooped close to his thighs, stretching belted pink trousers and a yellow blazer that boasted narrow downward stripes of red, white and black. His fleshy cheeks swelled at me like bright-red tomatoes set in pillows of dough. Had this been a circus he would have been the baggy-pants clown.

Beside him peered a scrawny woman, longarmed in black shirt and slacks and a floppy hat of tartan cotton that allowed spiky hair to tease her tall brow and weather-browned features. She, too, had adorned her bosom with a sheet of paper, its peculiar verse increasing my confusion: Wee sleekit, courin, timrous beastie, o whit a panic’s in thy breastie. Ascerbic and alert, she added her own comment. This woman does not belong to us.

Lonely Cloud scrunched his vivid cheeks at me, mouthed like a guppy, grinned again at the paper he had jerked from my hand, and accused in an American accent, What the heck are you doing with Tam’s poem?

A grumpy woman, middleaged and dowdy, bulging from a floral frock, squinched hatefully at him, Laird Tam never had a poem. That’s what foxed us all. He did not stick to the rules. Her hostile squint intensified into my face. Who are you?

Sheil B. Wright, I panted. The B was added by myself to make a stage name. Pleased to meet you. My hand went mechanically to shaking status but she ignored it, just went on aiming belligerence. While I tried, unsuccessfully, to read the literature on this one’s adorned bodice, she declared to a chorus of agreement: No. She’s not. She is not one of us. There were about ten of these poetry loonies.

The obese Yank, making closer scrutiny, agreed I was indeed, sonovabitch, not one of them. Only now realising my demented appearance, he abandoned ebullience and explained softly, as if to calm me, The game is Guess The Poet. We each pick a few lines and the others have to name the author. I am Wordsworth and she, – nodding to the tanned athlete in tartan – she is Rabbie Burns. We’ve all guessed everybody, I tellya, except Tam’s puzzle. Has the cunning old badger sent you to claim his victory? Where the heck is he anyway?

I told them.

THE police came by helicopter. While we were waiting I learned that the outing I had blundered among comprised the Loch Ulough Book Club, and that the corpse had been their patron and weekend host. He was a wealthy landowner, affectionately known as Laird Tam.

Chief Inspector James Stirling wore a kilt with a furry sporran that was the same colour as his tiny taut moustache. Into this deep sporran he would soon bag the blood-smirched paper I had plucked from the victim, but not without some preliminary chastisement. He directed a glare at me. He lacked height yet had a big bald head allowing maximum brain capacity. His nose and ears were also outsized, designed for sniffing out clues and hearing helpful whispers.

This nose aimed at me now while his ears were wide to my tale of finding the body. His firm fingers stroked the plastic pouch that protected the evidence. His voice was calm, yet uttered with a clarity that relayed official retribution. It is an offence to remove material from the scene of a crime.

Chief Inspector Stirling’s men were still probing the death scene on the ridge above the castle. He had descended by an easy stone stairway, prior knowledge of which would have saved me from my thorny tumble.

Now he was seated with a mug of tea at one of the chunky tables on the terrace. He had seated me opposite, and had arranged the crumpled page in its forensic wrapping beneath an ashtray. Exhibit One.

I had seen this fellow before, in a cowboy movie, and instantly recognised my plight. His cold stare, even without twin holsters and a lightning draw, would halt a buffalo stampede. Furthermore, his gentle Highland lilt held more menace than a midnight bog on a moonless winter night. The book clubbers stood about us in a circle, eager to see discomfiture heaped upon the messenger who had interrupted their jollies.

Looking beyond your stupidity, steel-eyed Stirling told me quietly as his fingers teased the wrinkled sheet, we have a mighty puzzle here. Why was Laird Tam wearing the words of Munro?

His comment caused gasps and sighs from the onlookers. Och! The brilliant polis! one declared. Straight off he guesses Neil Munro. What d’ye think of that, Mister Wells?

Tam cheated, hollered the fat American. It is prose. Tam selected prose, not poetry.

Detective Stirling was not to be interrupted. Neil Munro, he repeated. Scotland’s greatest author.

This brought more exclamations and a concerted jabbering from the booklovers. I had the impression it disturbed them more than the murder. The Scots admire their literature with a passion fully equal to their regard for liquefied grain in high-priced bottles.

But surely, blurted the skinny-limbed woman in the tartan bonnet. Surely Robert Louis Stevenson?

Sir Walter Scott, said another.

John Buchan, Kenneth Grahame, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexander McCall Smith . . . The alternative nominations flew fast, yet Stirling remained deaf to them, directing his gaze down to the evidence.

The genius, he told them quietly, who created Para Handy’s comic adventures on a Clyde pufferboat. Who invented Erchie the Glasgow waiter. Fine sense of humanity. And now a clue to murder.

Duffy the coalman, volunteered the tartan bonnet, and don’t forget that cunning salesman Jimmy Swan.

Stirling nodded to her dismissively, and I was thinking that if Homicide had a Literature Division this quaint detective must head it. He was still lecturing softly, as if exploring a train of thought. Here we have no comedy but haunting words, he mused. "They are from The Lost Pibroch. Hmm. Pinned to the chest of a murdered man. Why, why?"

Heck, lootenant, it was just a game, said the Yank in his brash drawl. And prose breaks the rules. Everyone else had a poet. That was the agreement.

Stirling gave him the fast-draw stare and a gentle rebuke. Sur, although they do not rhyme, these lines which you have called prose are the grandest poetry to an exiled Scot. They are poetry the world over to my countrymen living far from their native land.

Okay, lootenant, have it your way. It’s sure true that Tam was exiled for many years. We arrived together from Chicago just a week ago, but he never said anything about any lost pea broth.

A cloud dimmed the sun, a blackbird cried from up on the tower, a swan on the loch splashed great wings, all these like a portent preceding the woman who now appeared. The nearest pines were whispering in a sudden gust, not an unpleasant sound, yet odd. The same could be said of the Fritheen of Ulough, a title from prehistory and the druids: she was not unpleasant, just odd.

Her name was Abeline, tall, neat and stately. Her fingers acknowledged the bowing tree branches while she strolled across the lawn to stand before the kilted detective. I felt my neck prickle when, for the first time, I heard her speak.

My brother Tam was absent seven and a half years, now his absence is permanent, his soul locked in the Zone of Rebirth. Otherwise I could have made contact and received the name of his killer. I wanted to have that ready for you, Sergeant Stirling.

A nutter, but the policeman accepts her statement, dipping his chin, scratching his little moustache. Nowadays, my lady, it is Detective Chief Inspector. The evidence will tell us the culprit soon.

This was the mistress of the castle. Her copper locks fell to her waist like frayed ropes and they framed a narrow face and jawline that were deathly pale. Severe eyes peered from deep sockets, a gun-duel match for Stirling. High-noon lochside was my weird fantasy when I saw her staring him down, but that’s just the way I often consider strangers. It is how I think up notions for my ballads. There’s folksong material everywhere when you’re born with a twisted imagination.

She had that quality known as Presence. Simmering from within, this gained impact from a priestly gown of forest green and a brass badge that glinted on her breast. This unusual medallion, suspended from a broad golden chain, was like a broken cross. I studied it.

There was a