‘There is one,’ I said. ‘A newcomer who has aroused suspicions, but nothing more. Mr Tait and the farmers’ wives seem equally adamant that it can’t be him. As far as the locals go, there’s no one with a history of anything that would point the way. It’s possible of course that someone who has always lived there has suddenly developed this nasty twist and, because of the SWRI meetings, there are a lot of men on their own on just the evening in question. In fact, they rather take the Rural night as giving them carte blanche to go out on the town. Or down to the pub at Colinsborough, I suppose.’
‘So all in all no one seems likely.’
‘No, which brings us to the third option: the girls are indeed making it up; there’s a kind of hysterical fad taking hold and they’re all joining in.’
‘This fad being . . . ?’
‘That the devil has been conjured or whatever it is one does with the devil and is walking the night.’
‘And how likely is that?’ said Alec. ‘I must say, Dandy, I do prefer a good solid murder with a corpse and no question whether or not the damn thing happened at all.’
‘Well,’ I began, ‘there is some kind of basis for it – if one half shuts one’s eyes. And there is actually a murder at the bottom of it all, but I doubt very much whether it’s a murder we can solve.’ Now I had his attention, and I went on to tell him about the chamber, the girl, the burial, the disapproval of the burial, and the fantastical imaginings – of Mrs Fraser at least – that this unquiet soul had summoned Satan himself.
‘I never thought I’d say it,’ said Alec, when I was done, ‘but I do believe the counter-revolutionary band in league to stop the bolshie schoolmarm might be the less unlikely theory here.’
‘You haven’t, I gather, spent much time in Fife.’
‘Have you?’
‘Thankfully, no, but the housekeeper at Gilverton when Hugh was a little boy hailed from a fishing village there and her sayings entered family lore. “Keep yer heid doon lest ye meet the devil’s stare” was a favourite but they’re much of a muchness, all employing the same small cast.’
‘I suppose,’ said Alec slowly, ‘that it makes sense of the chicken woman’s behaviour at least.’
‘Mrs Hemingborough?’ I said. ‘Does it?’
‘Doesn’t it? Don’t you think that she might want to keep it quiet if she has attracted the attention of Old Nick? I’m not sure I would put a notice in The Times if it were me.’ I laughed, but his words had reminded me of something. Once again, I riffled through the pages of my little book.
‘There!’ I said, when I had found it. ‘Alec, I think you’re right. She said to me when I bearded her in her kitchen the next day, “what’s for you won’t go by you”. It struck me at the time as rather odd.’
‘What does it mean?’ said Alec.
‘Oh, more east coast wisdom,’ I said. ‘It means that whatever is meant to be will be and there’s no avoiding it. At least, one more often hears it being wheeled out to express the opposite view: that whatever is being withheld from you is not meant to be, so you should shut up and stop pining. They are not really words of comfort, to my way of thinking.’
‘But very revealing here,’ said Alec, ‘if you can credit anyone with such stoicism that she would accept being roughed up by the devil, given a guilty enough conscience.’
‘If there is anyone anywhere with as much stoicism as that,’ I said, ‘Luckenlaw would be just the place to find her. I wonder what she thinks she’s done?’
‘Unimportant,’ said Alec, rather imperiously. ‘A red herring. We must stick to the facts. Are there any other facts? Anything practical and possible that we should take note of?’
‘I did try to piece together a picture of where the fellow might be coming from,’ I said. ‘All the witnesses and victims so far are agreed that he takes a good run at things, so I thought it worth paying attention to the direction he ran.’
‘Possibly,’ said Alec. ‘Although he could hide under any hedge he liked when you think about it. Still, in the absence of anything better . . . I’ll ring for some paper and you can sketch me a map.’ Carefully, he worked his fingers in under the slumbering Milly and lifted her onto my lap. She rolled over, as floppy as a rag doll, dead to the world. Bunty, asleep on my feet, opened one eye to remind me that a puppy on the lap was tolerated out of the goodness of her heart and that the arrangement could be terminated at any time.
Barrow himself responded to Alec’s ring and rose to the occasion with a luxurious pad of snowy white sketching paper and a pair of new pencils in a silver card tray. I noticed that he had the quelling effect on conversations that one finds in Parisian waiters – Alec and I fell silent as he entered and didn’t speak again until he had left.
‘You’re going to have to watch him,’ I said, when he had drawn the doors closed behind him with a respectful backward sweep and a slight bow. ‘He’s another Pallister in the making.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Alec. ‘Pallister is a prig and a bully. Barrow is a treasure. There’s no comparison at all.’
‘Hmm,’ I said but left it there, and bent to the task of sketching out the village of Luckenlaw. ‘Now,’ I said, when I had got as close an approximation down on paper as we needed or I was capable of producing, ‘where does the dark stranger come from? In March he came down the lane towards Easter Luck Farm from the north. All the farm names are shortened to Luck, you know, isn’t it charming? In April he came crashing through the woods behind Mrs Kinnaird’s house, where Annie Pellow lodges. That is, he came from the west, and could have come round the law, meaning that once again he came from the north. I have no idea about the attack on Molly in May; that is one of the many things I need to ask her. In August, he came across the fields from the west towards the lane that leads from Luckenlaw to Balniel Farm.’
‘A completely different direction then,’ said Alec.
‘Quite so,’ I agreed. ‘And then the other night, he once again came from the Balniel road direction up around the manse to the Hinter Luck Farm lane. Both Jessie and Vashti agree about that.’
‘So he’s not coming from the same place every time,’ said Alec. ‘There are at least two patterns to it, and for all we know Molly could tell us something that destroys even those two patterns completely.’
I regarded my little map in sorrow for a moment and then, reluctantly agreeing, I screwed it up and dropped it on the floor for Bunty and Milly to play with when they awoke.
‘And he’s not doing it regularly,’ Alec went on, ‘at least not since his three monthly outings in the spring, and he’s not even going for any particular type, so it’s not as though we can warn the likely next victim.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘And that makes the gaps between his appearances rather odd, doesn’t it? I mean, he plumped for three young girls first which, horrid as it is to say so, at least makes some kind of sense. The next time he felt moved to go prowling he set his sights on a married lady of no great appeal and then on Monday past, he ignored the rather lovely Jessie Holland and took on the much more considerable task of trying to topple Mrs Hemingborough.’
‘As you say,’ said Alec, ‘it doesn’t make sense. If he was choosy, that would explain the gaps but if his tastes are as catholic as it appears he should really have been able to find a victim every month. That might be to our advantage, mind you.’
‘How so?’
‘Because if we find someone who was away or otherwise engaged in June, July and September but free to do his worst in March, April and May, in August, and again the other night we’ll know that’s our man.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘Thank heavens for Jessie Holland, then. If we had been relying on the victim, we’d have October down as another month he missed.’
Not for the first time, the same thought occurred to both of us in unison, and in unison too we blushed in shame that it had taken us so long.
‘Of course,’ said Alec at last. ‘Oh, I’m so glad there isn’t a Dr Watson writing this up for
the scoffing public, aren’t you?’
‘There are no gaps,’ I said. ‘He attacks every full moon and somewhere in Luckenlaw there are more women who, just like Mrs Hemingborough, have borne it and not said a word.’
‘And possibly others who have witnessed his approach or his flight and also kept quiet,’ said Alec. ‘After all, if Mrs Hemingborough had seen him swoop down on Jessie instead of the other way around she would have suppressed that too.’
‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘I did so want to make a go of this for Mr Tait. Surely if I can find the missing victims I’ll be able to make some headway.’
‘And I’ll help,’ said Alec. ‘I’ll come down with you.’ I quite understood his enthusiasm, but I could not let it pass.
‘Absolutely impossible, darling,’ I said. ‘You can’t go knocking on doors and interviewing women in their kitchens. I have a legitimate reason to be there and a place to stay, even a handy story to trot out should anyone ask what I’m up to. You certainly can’t come galumphing down, bereft of any disguise and ruining mine.’
‘I don’t galumph,’ said Alec. ‘And besides, as those revolting children of yours would say: same to you with knobs on. If I can’t haunt the kitchens you can hardly mount a proper attack on alibis amongst the local men.’
‘But it’s not a local man who’s doing it,’ I insisted. ‘Everyone at Luckenlaw knows everyone else and no one recognises this stranger.’ Alec shook his head looking mutinous.
‘Context, Dandy, context,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you ever passed your barber in the street – well, milliner or something in your case, obviously – and been absolutely unable to place him, out from behind his shop front, stripped of his apron?’
‘I think if my milliner bore down on me and tried to claw my eyes out it would spark some recognition,’ I said. ‘Anyway, where would you stay?’
‘Don’t you have any friends in the area where I could be absorbed into a house party and make no ripple?’
‘Only the Taits,’ I told him. ‘And they’re out of the question. House parties of bright young things are not Lorna Tait’s milieu. There are the Howies, who are rather fun and wouldn’t turn a hair, but it’s as far a leap from their drawing room to a cottage kitchen as it is from here. Really, Alec, you’re going to have to leave this one to me.’
‘I’m not a bright young thing,’ said Alec, rather humourlessly. ‘I’m thirty-three, I’m running two houses and I’m keeping on top of a very difficult new butler as you said yourself.’
‘I’ll send frequent dispatches,’ I assured him. ‘And I’ll telephone to you if I need to mull things over. You’ve been no end of help today.’
9
It has never with any truth been said of me that I am the methodical type. It is my great good fortune to have been born when I was and not any later, for if I had been forced to sit at a desk in an office somewhere threading a typing machine with inky ribbon and shuffling carbons into order, some blameless man of business who had employed me would surely have been driven to distraction and bankruptcy. (Likewise, I count myself very fortunate to have been gently born; never to have grappled with a loom in a dark mill, a gutting knife on a harbourside, or a mangle and irons in a fragrant laundry, for I should certainly have garrotted, disembowelled or strangled myself if I had tried.)
So it was a considerable strain to force myself, upon my return to Luckenlaw the following week, into a visit to Molly of Luck House (as I now thought of it, feeling quite the local) to complete my interviews with the known victims, instead of immediately plunging into the delicious task of sniffing out the others. It had been challenge enough to wait this tantalising week, even though I knew that there was a full month before another attack would happen and I would be far better to stay quietly at home, making notes and getting rosettes for wifely attentiveness, than to charge off again on the instant, putting Hugh’s back up and missing half the clues I was finding for the lack of thoughtful preparation which would help me see them for what they were.
Lorna accompanied me to the Howies’ once more, but in the motor car this time owing to the filthy weather, and so we avoided any more dawdling on the footbridge over the ford and sighing at the abandoned cottage where she and her poet were to have settled to their married bliss. She was, as a matter of fact, in more cheerful spirits than I had ever seen her, much taken with Bunty, who had come back with me, although thrown into a domestic twitter by the arrival of Grant besides (for Grant would not hear of being left behind again, not now that the new items ordered for my winter wardrobe had arrived; it would have been intolerable to her to wait at Gilverton with the boxes and bags while I mucked along at Luckenlaw in my autumn frocks and coats with an extra vest for warmth and last year’s shoes). The Taits had never had a house guest bring a lady’s maid before, and Lorna was concerned that Grant might find the servants’ quarters beneath her or baulk at sharing a bedroom with another maid, but I knew Grant better than that; to get out from under Pallister’s eye would be as good as a week at Eastbourne and the chance to let a poor little maid of all work see her, Grant’s, hand-embroidered underclothes and the tissue-layered packing of them – for she was just as fussy about her own belongings as she was about mine – would be meat and drink to her.
I had made a feeble remark or two about leaving some of the more startling purchases behind, but my mind was taken up with the case and I did not have enough spare attention to win the day. Accordingly, I was headed for tea with the Howies decked out in an ankle-length coat of Persian lamb, with a sable collar like a surgical neck-brace and silver clasps worked in the pattern of Celtic knots holding shut the belt. A hat somewhere between a Beefeater’s pancake and a paper sailing ship in its construction had been firmly jammed onto my head in the spare bedroom before I left the manse.
‘And don’t take it off,’ said Grant. ‘Madam. I’ll look into getting some rainwater for tomorrow morning’ – Grant never trusted the water for hair-washing purposes if we were anywhere near the sea – ‘but for today, please don’t take it off. I’ve packed a turban for this evening.’
I rolled my eyes at her in the mirror. A turban, I knew, meant evening clothes to match it, and there was no way I was sweeping downstairs to dinner with Mr Tait and Lorna in beaded chiffon lounging pyjamas, Ali Baba pantaloons or whatever Turkey-inspired excesses Grant had come up with now. I heartily wished the whole Ottoman adventure in couture would blow over some season very soon.
‘My, my,’ said Vashti Howie as we were shown in, ‘don’t you look splendid.’ She was dressed as usual in a collection of what would have been trailing wisps had they been silk but, since they appeared to be made out of hand-dyed sacking, could be more accurately described as flapping hanks. The hand-dyeing was no more successful than the cut either, with the purple and mustard fighting both each other and Vashti’s sallow skin. I wished Grant were there; if she could have witnessed a sight like Vashti commending me for my style, she might have taken fright and ordered me something more becoming. Nicolette, as ever, was in stiflingly tight, bright tweed and high heels, and I thought that if she were not careful she would end up with those tennis ball calf muscles like a country dancing mistress I once had as a child, whom I admired terrifically for soldiering on with her profession despite the nameless and surely painful condition afflicting her poor bulging legs and her pitiful feet, which arched like leaping salmon when she pointed them.
The Howies, as before, were corralled in their ground-floor drawing room, littered about on sofas and armchairs, and all the signs were that they had spent the day there: there was a barely shifting cloud of cigarette smoke hanging just above the level of the lampshades and the fires were pulsing heaps of orange, having been lit first thing and fed repeatedly as the day wore on. The menfolk remained sunk in torpor despite our entrance, but the ladies sprang very flatteringly to life.
‘Darling Lorna,’ cried Nicolette, throwing down the paper she had been reading. ‘We haven’t seen you in an age and we have s
o much to talk about.’
‘We’re throwing a little party next month, for Lorna’s birthday,’ Vashti explained to me.
‘I had heard,’ I said. ‘It’s very kind of you.’ Nicolette and Vashti giggled gently.
‘Not at all,’ Vashti said. ‘We’re simply dying to. It’s the culmination of our entire year.’
‘Long time since we had a party,’ said Johnny Howie, with his chin on his chest. ‘Changed days.’
‘Ah, the parties we had at Balnagowan in the old days,’ said Nicolette. ‘Bonfires on every hilltop, pipers on every headland—’
‘I could have done without the pipers, to be brutally honest,’ said Vashti. ‘Oh but remember that midsummer!’
‘We had such swags of flowers hanging from the chandelier chains, Dandy – monstrous great things; it took all the garden staff to lift them – that they brought the house down. Well, a good lot of the plaster anyway.’
‘ . . . said they were too heavy,’ muttered Irvine Howie. ‘ . . . never listen.’
‘And that was the end of that,’ said Vashti. ‘Cousin Sourpuss wouldn’t let us back.’
‘No more parties at Balnagowan,’ sighed Nicolette, in an amused sing-song, sounding like Nanny telling Baby that its bowl of pudding was ‘all-gone’.
‘So you didn’t actually live in the house?’ I asked, pitying the cousin a little.
‘No, more’s the tragedy,’ said Vashti. She was blunter than I had ever heard any woman being about exactly what her unprepossessing husband had to recommend him and had either of the Howie men looked conscious of the insult I should have blushed for all of them, but Irvine was staring straight ahead, at the glowing tip of his cigarette, as though in some kind of Eastern trance, and Johnny had shut his eyes again.
‘ . . . comes of handing it over to the female line,’ said Irvine, after a long silence. ‘And now even that’s withered and died.’
‘Don’t be so disparaging about female lines!’ said Vashti. ‘Remember it was your illustrious ancestress that brought you Vash and me. Have you ever heard of Lady Fowlis, Dandy? Katherine Ross by birth and—’
Bury Her Deep Page 13
