From the point of view of one engaged in research, it was a pity that Jean Baxter was a respectable modest woman and didn’t go to funerals. Jean Baxter was Highland stock, truth and duplicity blazed from her face in a mingled lightning, and from such a woman one could get a dozen clues and hope to pick the right one. But Jean was at Clovie Shaws, six miles away, wrapping scones in a napkin and nursing an iron frying-pan for ham and eggs. If Veronica had not been on his hands, he could have gone back with Martin and the Baxters and sunk his sad old teeth in those scones. Veronica was doing a lot of crossing herself, Clovie would think she had fleas, but this couldn’t be helped. Archie’s searching eye returned to Martin, and noted that Martin was not crossing himself. There was no reason to smell a rat in this. Possibly male Anglo-Catholics don’t cross themselves, or possibly Martin refrained through discretion. He was certainly discreet: he had never spoken to Veronica about the resemblance between Hew and Baxter. He was discreet, he was masterful, as witness that mastering of ceremonies behind the coffin. Whatever the card-house Martin was building, Archie sincerely hoped he’d bring it off. Still pondering on the nature of the card-house, Archie presently noticed that Dr Forbes was not one of the congregation. This might be a clue, but it might equally well be a childbed. And when they followed the coffin out to the graveside, old Forbes 215was standing there, a hoary pillar of testimony to the truth that whisky can’t kill a man who drinks it regularly before breakfast. His face was just as red, his high head no balder, as when he got Hew through double pneumonia and vaccinated Archie with a darning-needle, forty years ago. No clues on old Forbes, thought Archie, looking with a surge of affection at the upright old scoundrel who had been, ever since he could remember, the unillusioned faithful friend of the family. He recollected Forbes stalking through the emptied house, and saying, ‘You’re all going, though you belong here, and I’m a foreigner and I’m staying. I shan’t know myself with no Stevensons to pull out of their scrapes. Queer, queer!’ Now Forbes was eyeing Veronica as if his glance would reap her down into the grave. Hew’s coffin was lowered, and Veronica, her cloak billowing after her, swept forward, extricated a bit of rosemary from her bag and dropped it in. The grave-digger, with very much the air of a head-waiter who has seen some smirched diner let fall a cutlet, came up with a blank face to Martin and gave him a little handful of Clovie earth. The flints glittered as they fell from Martin’s hand to the coffin-lid. Mr Guthrie took up his praying, but in that fraction of silence Archie had heard the flints ring false. Whatever was in the coffin (and his mind’s eye instantly presented him with an equivalent weight of river sand and hay), it wasn’t Hew.