WILDFIRE

by Mary Stewart

  In that moment I heard the little whimper of pain again, but this time back to my left.

  I looked back the way I had come, almost giddy now with bewilderment and excitement, my heart thudding, and my legs and wrists none too steady.

  Then I saw the answer to the riddle. I had pressed past the jutting buttress of rock at the corner, without seeing that behind it, and running sharply back into the face of the cliff, was a narrow fissure. Most of the opening was masked by a hanging mat of weeds and heather, but there was a little space below this, through which someone might have crawled. . ..

  I tore at the heather mat with desperate hands. It was tough, but chunks of it came away, and I flung it down the gully. Pebbles and peat spattered down onto the ledge. I yanked at a great trail of green and threw it down, so that the sunlight streamed past me into what was, in effect, a small dry cave.

  She was there, all right. She was lying in a little curled huddle, her back against the wall of the cave. One leg stuck out at an ugly angle, and her hands were torn and covered with dirt and dried blood.

  But she was alive. I flew across the cave to kneel beside her. Her eyes were shut, and the bright face that I remembered was a frightening grey-white, with a film of sweat over it like cellophane. The flesh was pulled back from the bones, so that her nose jutted out as sharp as a snipe's beak.

  I thrust a shaking hand inside the brave red jacket and tried to find her heart. ...

  A man's shadow fell across the floor of the cave.

  Chapter 14

  RODERICK'S VOICE SAID: "My God, you've found her!"

  I turned with a great sob of relief. "Oh, Roderick—oh, thank heaven someone's come! She's alive, and—"

  "Alive?" His voice was incredulous. He took a stride across the cave, towering over us both. "Alive?"

  "Yes. Yes, she is! I heard her moaning—that's how I found her."

  He was down on his knees beside me now, his hands moving over Roberta. His face was grim.

  "Yes, she's alive, but only just, Janet. I'm very much afraid—He broke off, while his hands gently explored her head. She whimpered and moved a little. 1 said: "I'll stay with her, Roderick. You go and get the others. You'll go faster than me!"

  He hardly seemed to hear me; he was still intent on Roberta. He looked remote, absorbed. When he spoke, it was with suddenly impersonal authority. "Janet, I left my haversack at the end of the ledge. You'll find my brandy flask in the pocket. Get it, will you?"

  I went quickly. The sunshine met me in a dazzle of light and warmth as I stepped through the cave door. Behind me Roberta whimpered again, and said something in the blurred little voice of delirium. I caught the word "Marion. ..."

  It halted me in mid-stride, as the implications—the terrifying implications—of our discovery of Roberta came fully to me for the first time. I swung round. Roderick turned his head, and my frightened eyes met his. And beneath their still impersonal coolness I saw the same thought that was driving my heart in sickening jerks against my ribs.

  "Roderick. ..." I almost whispered it. "Roderick, she— she knows who did it."

  There was grim twist to his mouth. "I realize that," he said. "And by God she's going to stay alive till she tells us. Get that brandy, please."

  "We ought to wrap her up first. Have my coat. . . .We've got to get her warm somehow until we can call the others." I began to take off my coat. He followed suit rapidly, and I knelt down to wrap the now quiescent Roberta as warmly as I could in the two garments.

  He added, still with that grim note to his voice: "And I'm not going for help either, to leave you here with this amount of potential dynamite; nor are you going to wander this hill alone any more, my dear. You fetch that brandy while I have a look at her leg, and then you'd better get along above the end of the ledge and just yell bloody murder till somebody comes. And if you don't like the look of whoever comes just yell bloody murder for me." He smiled suddenly. "And I'll be there. Now hurry."

  "All right," I said. But as I tucked Roberta's cold hands gently inside my coat and made to rise, she began to stir once more, restlessly. The grey lips parted again in a whimper, and 1 saw that her eyelids were flickering.

  "She's coming to," 1 whispered. My heart began to thump violently. Roderick's hand gripped my shoulder.

  Then Roberta's eyes opened wide; they were dark and filled with pain, but sensible. For a moment she stared at me, as if bewildered, then her gaze moved beyond me.

  Someone else was coming along the ledge.

  Roberta's hands moved feebly under mine, like frightened animals. Her eyes dilated in an unmistakable look of pure terror. Then she fainted again.

  I looked around. Framed in the narrow doorway of the cave was Hartley Corrigan, with Nicholas just behind him. And I could hear Alastair's voice as he followed the others along the ledge.

  Alma Corrigan was waiting at the end of the ledge, and was now summoned with a shout. With the coming of the others my responsibility had lightened, and I had time to feel the slackening of nervous tension that comes with reaction. All at once exhaustion seemed to sweep over me like a drowning wave, and it was with feelings of unmixed thankfulness that I found myself elbowed aside by Mrs. Corrigan as she proceeded, with Roderick, to take charge of Roberta. I heard her giving rapid orders for first aid, while Roderick curtly deputed Nicholas to go and summon the other searchers and commandeer a stretcher.

  The cave was now uncommonly crowded, but, remembering that look of terror in Roberta's eyes, I stayed where I was. I did go out onto the ledge, but there I remained, leaning against the rock in the sunlight, watching the others inside. If any of those people was the murderer who had sent Roberta to her death, it hardly seemed likely that he could finish his work here and now before she could speak and identify him—but I was taking no risks. I leaned there against the warm rock, and watched the others in the cave ministering to Roberta.

  Presently I heard a shout from Nicholas, away up near the main cliff. This was answered by a more distant call. And after that, it did not seem so very long before the stretcher party arrived, and I could at last abandon my post and leave the ledge to them.

  Dougal Macrae was with them, and the boy Iain, and Hubert Hay, who was certainly not the third climber, since he had been with me on Sgurr na Stri when Marion fell to her death, Roberta would be safe enough now—that is, if the murderer's work had not been already done too well, and she were to die of exposure.

  But at least she had been found. The long strain was over. 1 sat among the heather, waiting for the stretcher to be brought off the ledge, and lifted my face to the sun, shutting my eyes and feeling, for the first time for two days, a sense of relaxation. The warm, sweet heather-smelling afternoon insisted, with every lark note, every linnet call, on the normality of the day and place. Even when, with mutterings, and cautious scrapings of boot on stone, the stretcher was maneuvered along the ledge and balanced onto the scree, even then I still felt strangely lighthearted, as though the worst were over.

  I had forgotten that Roberta had only to open her mouth and speak, and that a man—a man I knew—would hang by the neck until he was dead and then be buried in quicklime in a prison yard.

  Inspector Mackenzie, with the enormous Hecky and Neill, the young local constable, was on An't Sron when the stretcher was brought down. Hecky stayed where he was, and continued what was apparently a minute examination of the ground round the bonfire, but Inspector Mackenzie, after one glance at Roberta, summoned young Neill from his job, and with him accompanied the stretcher back to the hotel.

  As soon as he was told that I had found Roberta, he dropped back from the main party with me, and began to question me. I told him, as exactly as I could, what had passed. He listened quietly, and as soon as I had finished, he took me through it all again, putting a question here and there, until I must have repeated every action and every word from the moment I heard the first moan, to the arrival of the stretcher party. As I told my story, trudging wearily beside him down
the valley, I found that the precarious tranquillity that had lit my little hour upon the hillside had already vanished, a snow-on-the-desert passing that left me picking my old lonely way through the grey wastes of uncertainty and desolation. And that little cold wind of terror fumbled and plucked again, ice-fingered, at my sleeve, so that I stumbled once or twice in my narrative. But I recounted, honestly and flatly enough, all that I remembered, and left him to draw what conclusions he would.

  Then he surprised me. He looked sideways at me and said abruptly: "I'm putting young Neill on to guard yon lassie, and we'll send for a nurse straightaway. But we'll not get one before tomorrow at soonest, as the doctor told me this morning that the district nurse is tied up just now with a tricky case. So someone's got to look after Miss Symes till a nurse comes. Do you know anything about nursing?"

  "A little, I suppose, but—"

  "That's fine. Will you do it? Stay with her tonight and watch her for me?"

  "Why, of course," I said. "But surely someone else—I mean isn't there anyone more competent, more practiced, perhaps, than I am? Mrs. Corrigan seems to know her stuff, and I imagine Mrs. Persimmon—"

  "No doubt," he said drily. "But has it not struck you, ma'am, that you're the only woman in the hotel who wasn't here at the time of the first murder?"

  "I—I suppose I am. But, Inspector, you can't suspect a woman, surely? I mean—"

  "Maybe not," he said, "but Mrs. Corrigan and Mrs. Persimmon have husbands. And I want no one in that room who might be in any way—er—involved." He shot me a queer look. "No one, on any excuse whatever. You follow me?"

  "If you mean Nicholas," I said tartly, "I'm hardly 'involved' with him, and I assure you he's not likely to be admitted."

  His mouth relaxed a little. "Now, now, lassie," he said, almost indulgently, "I wasn't meaning any such thing. Then I take it you'll do it?"

  "Of course." I looked at him curiously. "Do you mean to tell me that I'm the only person here you don't suspect?"

  "Let's say," he said cautiously, that I don't suspect you of wanting to kill Roberta Symes."

  And with that, we reached the hotel. Since Marion Bradford's body with in the room which she had shared with Roberta, and this, had been locked by the police, I suggested that Roberta should be given the other bed in my room. The offer was approved by the Inspector, and accepted gratefully by the Persimmons, who were already harassed beyond belief. 1 left her being tucked up by Mrs. Persimmon and Mrs. Cowdray-Simpson, with Neill and the Inspector in attendance, and went along to have a bath.

  When eventually I got back to my room I found that a bright fire had been kindled on the hearth, and that a kettle was already singing on the bars. All the apparatus for making hot drinks was there, and a half bottle of brandy gleamed on the bedside table.

  The Inspector had gone, but Mrs. Persimmon was still busy over something by the hearth, and Neill rose from the chair by the fire and grinned shyly at me. He was a tall, overgrown lad of perhaps twenty, with graceful coltish movements, and the black hair and blue eyes of the true Celt. He said: "The doctor will be here soon, Mistress Brooke. Inspector Mackenzie told me to tell you. He says will you stay here with me till then?"

  "Of course. Do we do anything for her meanwhile?"

  Mrs. Persimmon rose to her feet. "We've packed her in hot-water bottles," she said. "She's as warm as we can get her, so all we can do now is wait for the doctor." She bent in a harassed way over Roberta's bed, twitching the blankets unnecessarily into place. She was a small woman, with a round face that normally was good-humored, and wispy, untidy brown hair. Her eyes were of the true glass-grey that you so seldom see, clear and lovely, but just now they were puckered and clouded with worry. "If she comes round enough to swallow, you could give her a little sweet tea—and I'll go down now and make some really good clear broth. But that's all we can do for the moment."

  "Except," said Neill softly, "to watch her."

  We both looked at him. I said uncertainly: "It all sounds very—very frightening, Neill. Does he really expect the murderer to try and get her in here?"

  He spread out calloused, beautifully shaped hands. "If she talks, we can hang him," he said simply.

  I went over to the bed and looked at her. She was lying very quietly now, and though I fancied that her skin had lost some of its icy glaze, it still had a tight-stretched pallor that was frightening. Her face was pinched and small; her body, too, was still and small in its packed blankets. Not dangerous; not "potential dynamite"; not worth the ghastly risk of silencing her. ... It seemed impossible that those dry lips should ever speak again.

  But even as I turned from the bedside she stirred and moaned and her eyelids fluttered. The dark head shifted restlessly on the pillow.

  "Here," said Mrs. Persimmon from the hearth. "Here's the tea."

  With anxious concentration we fed a few drops of the weak sweet stuff between her lips, and saw with delight the faint ripple of the throat muscles as she swallowed. I began, spoonful by spoonful, to pour the life-giving glucose into her, watching anxiously for any sign of change in that effigy of a face.

  "I'll go and see about the broth," said Mrs. Persimmon at length, and went out.

  The telephone rang. I jumped violently, spilling tea on the bedclothes. Neill lifted the receiver, listened and then said to me: "The Inspector's on his way up, ma'am. The doctor's here."

  "Thank heaven for that!" I said fervently.

  "Yes indeed."

  A minute later we admitted Inspector Mackenzie and the doctor, and thankfully watched the competent way in which the latter examined Roberta. At length he pulled the bedclothes back over her, and looked across the bed at the Inspector.

  "I can't find anything wrong except the leg," he said brusquely. "Bruises and lacerations, yes; they'll heal, given time. But we'll have to deal with the leg now. I'll need Mary Persimmon to help me, and someone else."

  He glanced at me from under inquiring brows, but the Inspector intervened. "No, Miss Brooke's done enough for today, and besides, she has to be night nurse. Tell Mrs. Persimmon to bring one of the maids up with her, and I'll stay here myself. There's a telephone, doctor, if you want to give your orders."

  "What? Oh, ah, yes." The doctor lifted the receiver, and began to dictate a list of his requirements.

  Inspector Mackenzie turned to me. "I've asked the cook to give you something to eat as soon as possible," he said. "It'll be ready in the kitchen in ten minutes or so. You go on down, lassie. I'll call you when we want you back."

  I gave another look at the small figure in the bed, and then made my way downstairs to the lounge.

  Chapter 15

  RODERICK WAS IN THE HALL. He must have been waiting for me, because, as soon as I appeared, he strode towards the foot of the stairs, looking anxious.

  "Is she all right? What does the doctor say?"

  "He didn't say very much," I replied. "He's found no actual damage beyond the broken leg, but I imagine it's the two nights in the cave that will kill her if anything does."

  "What does he think of her chances?"

  "He didn't say. 1 suppose she has as good a chance as anyone could have after what she's been through. She's young and very strong, and she did find herself a dry corner out of the wind and rain."

  "She's still unconscious, of course?"

  "Oh yes."

  "She'll pull through it," he said confidently. "Once they get the leg set—I suppose they're doing that now?"

  "Yes. Mrs. Persimmon's helping. They sent me down, I'm glad to say."

  "And I'm glad they did. You look washed out, Janet."

  I smiled. "Thank you for nothing."

  "Sorry, but it's true." He was still looking worried. "You won't have to go back and sit with her, will you?"

  "I think the Inspector wants me to stay in the room tonight."

  "But that's absurd!" he said angrily. "You've done more than enough for one day! Why can't Mrs. Corrigan stay with her?"

  "She's done quite a
s much as I have."

  "Well, Mrs. Cowdray-Simpson, then?"

  I said, carefully: "Inspector Mackenzie has allowed me to understand that he doesn't include me in his list of suspects."

  "He doesn't—?" He broke off, and his blue eyes narrowed. "Surely he doesn't suspect any of the women?"

  "I rather think he suspects everybody," I said, uncomfortably. "At any rate, I'm not married to a suspect either, you see."

  He opened his mouth as if to speak, and then shut it again in a hard line. His eyes slid away from mine and he studied the pattern of the carpet.

  1 swallowed, and said hastily: "I'll be all right, Roderick. All I have to do is give her a drink every now and again, and 1 can get some sleep between times. In fact it's terribly snug in here, with a lire, and a kettle to make tea, and all the works!"

  "Does the Inspector—" He paused, and shot a quick glance round the hall, then lowered his voice. "Does the inspector think there's still any danger to Roberta from— him?"

  The last syllable fell queerly, whispered in the empty hall. I found myself lowering my voice in reply.

  "I think so. But he's taking precautions. Roberta'll be safe enough, and, by the same token, so will I." I smiled at him again. "So don't worry!"

  "Very well, then, I won't. As a matter of fact"—his voice was suddenly grave, and a little abstracted—"as a matter of fact, I think you're probably the only person in the hotel who isn't—"

  "Suspected of murder?"

  "No. Who isn't in danger from the murderer."

  He looked at me then, with a strange hesitant look that seemed to be mingled of both pity and dread, and something else that I found it hard to read. I felt my heart jump and twist painfully inside my ribs, and I could not meet his look. I turned sharply away towards the lounge door, saying in a tight, flat little voice: "I'll go and ring for a drink."

  There seemed to be a crowd of people in the lounge, all gathered into small groups near the blazing fire. The air was a hiss of whispered conversations, which ceased abruptly as I came in. Heads swiveled, eyes stared, and then a fusillade of questions met me.