The Mystery of the Green Ray

“I can’t,” the girl replied helplessly. “I wish I could.”

“The two classes of people we want to find,” I suggested, “are those who like Sholto so much as to be prepared to steal him, and those who dislike him so much as to be anxious to destroy him.”

“You don’t think they’ll hurt him,” she cried, anxiously. “Poor old fellow! It’s bad enough his being blind; but I would rather know he was dead than being ill-treated.”

“It’s much more likely to be the act of some very human person who covets his neighbour’s goods,” said Garnesk, reassuringly. “But, at the same time, we must not overlook the other possibility. Can you remember anyone who does dislike the dog?”

“Only one,” said Myra, thoughtfully, “and I don’t think he could have done it. He has a small croft away up above Tor Beag, and Sholto and I were up there one day; but it’s months ago. Sholto went nosing round as usual, and the man came out and got very excited in Gaelic – and you know how excited one can be in that language. He was very rude to me about the dog, and it made me rather suspicious. I told daddy about it after.”

“Yes, and I hope you won’t go wandering about so far from home without saying where you’re going in future, my dear; because – ” said the old man, and pulled himself up in pained confusion as he realised the tragic significance of his words.

“Some sort of poacher, perhaps,” suggested Garnesk, coming quickly to the rescue.

“An illicit whisky still somewhere about, more likely,” Myra replied. And as she could think of no other likely person, and the crofter seemed out of the question, we had to confess ourselves puzzled. I had hoped that Myra would have been able to give us some clue with which we could have satisfied her, while we kept our suspicions to ourselves. Then we left Myra with the specialist, who made a temporary examination. In twenty minutes he assured us that he could make nothing of the case, but that he was willing to stake his reputation that there was nothing organically wrong; and he gave us, so far as he dared, distinct reason to hope that she would eventually regain full possession of her lost faculty. So, after general rejoicings all round, in which I quite forgot the mystery of the man who stole the dog, I went to bed feeling ten years younger, and slept like a top.

When I awoke in the morning much of my elation of spirit had evaporated, and I felt again the oppression of surrounding tragedy. I got up immediately – it was just after six – dressed, and went down to bathe. I was strolling down the drive, with a towel round my neck, when Garnesk put his head out of his window and shouted that he would join me. The tide being in, we saved ourselves a walk to the diving-rock, as the point was called, and bathed from the landing-stage. Refreshed by the swim, we determined to scour the country-side for any tracks of the thief.

“What beats me is how anybody in a place like this, where everybody for miles round knows more about you than you do yourself, could get rid of an enormous beast like Sholto. He was big even for a Dane, and his weight must have been tremendous when he was drugged,” said Garnesk, as we walked up the beach path. “Have you ever tried to carry a man who’s fainted?”

“I have,” I answered with feeling, “and I quite agree with you. If the thief wanted to do away with the dog the beast’s body is probably somewhere near.”

“What about the river?” my companion suggested.

“More likely the loch,” I decided, “or the sea. But that would mean a boat, because it would have to be buried in deep water, or the body would be washed up again on the rocks, even with a heavy weight attached. There are many deep pools in the river, but they are constantly fished, and that would lead to eventual detection. We are dealing with a man who knows his way about. It might be the loch or one of the burns, easily.”

Accordingly we decided to try the loch first; but though we followed the path from the house, carefully studying the ground every foot of the way, and examined the banks equally carefully, we were forced to the conclusion that we were on the wrong scent. Then we came down one of the burns that runs from the loch to the sea, and met with the same result.

“We’ll walk along the beach and go up the next stream,” Garnesk suggested. “Hullo,” he exclaimed suddenly, as we clambered over the huge rocks into a tiny cove, “there’s been a boat in here!”

I looked at the shingly beach, and saw the keel-marks of a boat and the footprints of its occupants in the middle of the cove. We went up gingerly, for fear of disturbing the ground of our investigations. I looked at the marks, and pondered them for a moment. By this time my senses were wide awake.

“What do you make of it?” the oculist asked.

“Well,” I replied, with an apologetic laugh, “I’m afraid you’ll think me more picturesque than businesslike if I tell you all the conclusions I’ve already come to; but the man who came ashore in this boat didn’t steal Sholto.”

“Go on,” he said. “Why, I told you I knew you weren’t a fool.”

“Thank you!” I laughed. “It seems to me that if a man arrived in a boat and went ashore to steal a dog, he would go away again in the same boat.”

“And didn’t he?”

“I feel convinced he didn’t,” I replied, and pointed out to him what must have been obvious to both of us. “Compare the keel-marks with high-water mark. There is less than half a boat’s length of keel-mark, and it is just up above high-water mark. This craft, which appears to have been a small rowing-boat, was run ashore at high tide, or very near it, and run out again very quickly. It might conceivably have come in and been caught up by the sea. But Sholto was stolen between a quarter past eight and half-past nine, when the tide was well on the way out. If Sholto went out to sea it was not in this boat.”

“Well,” said Garnesk, thoughtfully, “your point is good enough for me. We must look somewhere else.”

“I hope my attempts at detective work will not put us off the scent,” I said, doubtfully.

“I don’t think they will, Ewart,” said my companion, graciously. “Not in this case, anyway. I’m sure you’re right, because this bay can be seen from the top windows of the house.”

“You evidently reached my conclusions with half the effort in half the time,” I laughed.

“Oh, nonsense!” he exclaimed. “It was you who pointed out that the one man in this boat came in daylight.”

“Why ‘one man’ so emphatically?” I asked.

“When two men come in a boat to commit a theft, and only one of them goes ashore, the other would hardly be expected to sit in the boat and twiddle his thumbs. It’s a thousand pounds to a penny that he would get out and walk about the beach. Now, only one gentleman came ashore from this boat, and only one got on board again. One set of footprints going and one coming decided me on that. Besides, if anyone came along and saw a solitary man sitting in a boat, they might ask him how his wife and children were, and he would have to reply; whereas an empty boat, being unable to answer questions, would raise no suspicions.”

“You seem to be arguing that this boat may have been the one we are looking for,” I pointed out; “and yet we are agreed that the state of the tide made it impossible for Sholto to have been taken away in it.”

“Yes,” said Garnesk, “I agree to that. But I fancy the thief came by that boat. It seems to me that our man jumps out of the boat, runs ashore, and his friend pulls away and picks him up elsewhere – probably nearer the house. It would look perfectly natural for a man who has apparently been giving a companion a pull across from Skye, say, to land him and then go back. The more I think of this the more it interests me. You see, if the top windows of the house can be seen from the bay, it means that the lower windows can be seen from the top of the cliff. If we can find where our thief lay in wait on the cliff and watched the house, probably with his eyes glued on the dining-room windows to see when we commenced dinner, if we can also find where he left his sea-boots while he went to the house, and then where he rejoined his companion, we are getting on.”

“What makes you say ‘sea-boots’?” I asked. “You can’t tell a top-boot by the footmarks.”

“Indirectly you can,” Garnesk replied, puffing thoughtfully at his pipe. “That boat was pulled in and pushed out by a man who exerted hardly any pressure, although the beach only slopes gently. His companion did not lend a hand by pushing her out with an oar; if he had done so we should have seen the marks, and I couldn’t find any. The only other way to account for it is that our friend, who exerted so little pressure, was wearing sea-boots and walked into the water with the boat. Had he been alone, the jerk of his final jump into the boat would have left a deeper impression on the beach. The tide was just going out; it would have no time to wash this mark away. I looked for the mark, and it wasn’t there; so I came to the final conclusion that two men arrived in the cove shortly after seven last night in a small open boat. One of them – a tall, left-handed man in sea-boots – pushed the boat out again and went ashore.”

I am afraid I was rude enough to shout with laughter at this very definite statement; but it was mainly with excited admiration that I laughed – certainly not with ridicule. Garnesk turned to me apologetically.

“I know it sounds far-fetched, my dear chap,” he said; “but we shall have to think a lot over this business, and I am simply thinking aloud in order that you can give me your help in my own conclusions.”

“My dear fellow,” I cried, “don’t, for heaven’s sake, imagine that I am laughing at you. It was the left-handed touch that made me guffaw with sheer excitement.”

“Well, I think he was left-handed, because the footmarks were going ashore on the right-hand side of the keel-marks, and going seawards on the left-hand side. Jump out of a boat and push it out to sea, and notice which side of the boat you stand by instinct – provided you were doing as he was, pushing on the point of the bows. The fact that his feet obliterate the keel-marks in one place proves that. So now we want to find a left-handed man in sea-boots who knew Sholto was blind” – and he laughed in a half-apology.

“What about these sea-boots,” I asked, “and the place we are to find where he left them?”

“We’ll look for that now; and if we find it we can be pretty sure our mariner stole the dog.”

“You seem to be taking it for granted already,” I pointed out.

“The easiest way to prove he didn’t is to satisfy ourselves that there’s no evidence he did,” said the oculist. “But I fancy he did.”

“From the way you’ve sized it up so far I should be inclined to back your fancy,” I admitted frankly. “I take it, from your diagnosis, that our nautical friend came ashore here, went up on to the cliff, and glued his eye to the dining-room window. When he saw we were at dinner, and it was getting dusk – in fact, almost dark – he took off his sea-boots and slipped up to the Lodge in his stocking-soles. So if we climb the cliff, we expect to find the spot on which he deposited his boots.”

“If we expected that,” Garnesk replied, “we should also expect to find his boots; and he wouldn’t be likely to leave such incriminating evidence in our hands as that. No, my dear Ewart; when he left the cliff he was wearing his boots, and he left them at some point on the path between the house and his embarking place. Come – let’s look.”

I was intensely interested in my friend’s deductions, and I felt convinced that he was right. So we climbed the cliff, he by one route and I by another, in order to see if we could find any traces of last night’s visitor. But that was impossible; the rocks were too storm-swept to harbour any sort of lichen which would have shown evidence of footmarks. Still, we were not disappointed when we reached the top, and Garnesk looked at me with a charming expression of boyish triumph when we came across a patch of ground where the heather had obviously been trampled about and worn down by someone recently lying there.

“I don’t think we’ll worry about tracing him from here just now,” said the specialist. “It would be a very difficult job, and we may as well make for the most likely spot to embark from.”

“Right you are,” I agreed. “I think there can only be one – that is a secluded little inlet, almost hidden by the rocks on the other side of the house.”

“Come on, let’s have a look at it,” my companion urged; and we blundered down the side of the cliff and hurried along the shore. But when we came to the small bay which I had in mind there was certainly some sign of disturbance among the rough gravel with which the shore was carpeted; and that was all the evidence we could find.

“It is such an ideal spot for the job that this almost knocks our theory on the head,” murmured Garnesk ruefully. “There are no boat-marks, or anything.”

“Which, in a way, bears out your diagnosis,” I cried, suddenly hitting on what I thought to be the solution of the difficulty.

“How, in heaven’s name?”