‘It’s me, Mr Tait,’ I said. ‘And it’s not the telephone. Something dreadful has happened, I’m afraid.’ I told him as succinctly as possible and trying as far as I was able to stick to what was true, although I got into an unforeseen little patch of difficulty trying to mesh the fact that I had heard the shovels with the fact that when I got there all was quiet and the players had left the stage. ‘I fluffed it most dismally,’ I said. ‘I hadn’t the courage to barge in, and so I dithered between lying in wait watching them and coming back here to get you and in the end I missed them.’
Mr Tait stretched out a hand and patted one of mine; I was sitting on the edge of his bed and he was propped up, apparently at his ease, listening and watching me over his spectacles.
‘Do not berate yourself, my dear,’ he told me. ‘You were extremely courageous to go at all. And now, if you will return to your rest, I’ll get me up and see what’s to do about it.’
‘Shall I telephone to the police?’ I said.
He patted my hand again and shushed me.
‘Let me take care of all that,’ he said.
‘But who do you think it was?’ I insisted. ‘What do you think they’re going to do with her?’
‘Hush now,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Don’t you worry. Just leave all that to me.’
He could not have sounded less ruffled if I had been telling him I had put out a pane in his greenhouse with my tennis ball. This was puzzling in the extreme and so, although I did leave him to dress in peace, I did not return to ‘my rest’, but waited until his feet had clumped downstairs and I heard the front door open and close again and then flitted back to the window of Mrs Tait’s bedroom and knelt there, peeping over the sill to watch him. He took a long time to appear and I had begun to wonder if he had gone some other way when at last he came into view, holding a lantern in one hand and, I caught my breath when I saw it, a sturdy shovel in the other. I watched his progress all the way down the drive and then watched through the tree branches as the light bobbed along and came to rest where the candles had been before. I could see nothing more than the lantern light itself, but I did not need to: that shovel had told me as clearly as anything that there were to be no police klaxons or search of the village tonight, but instead a quiet tidying of the mess before anyone should wake at dawn and see it. What in heaven’s name was going on? I leaned my head against the windowpane and watched the yellow glow grow shimmery as my breath misted the glass, wishing I could think of an excuse to go over and join him there. Could I perhaps take him a glass of brandy? I decided I could and settled down to wait until I thought he would be cold enough to welcome it.
I do not know what woke me, only that I lifted my head with a jerk and felt my neck go into a spasm. It was still pitch black outside, but now that I was awake I could hear faint sounds of movement from the bowels of the house and as I unfolded my stiff arms and hauled myself to my feet, shivering, I heard a door open and saw a slice of light grow upon the grass below, into which Bunty suddenly appeared, prancing and shaking her ears, greeting the dawn before the dawn had even arrived to be greeted. I looked over at the kirkyard but could see no lantern glow so, stumbling a little, my feet wooden with cold after their soaking and my legs thrumming as the feeling came slowly back into them, I hurried along the passage and crossed the landing to the front of the house. Knocking softly, I edged open Mr Tait’s door, meaning to launch into the first of many questions while he was fuddled with sleep and at the psychological disadvantage of being in his nightshirt while I was dressed (albeit in last night’s crumpled clothes and with my hair flattened on one side from resting on the windowsill). Mr Tait, though, was not there.
I slipped downstairs, hurrying, fearing that his night’s work had proved too much for him – he was hardly a young man after all – and let myself out into the garden, to be given an ecstatic welcome by Bunty, who immediately stopped rolling in the piles of leaves and began wheeling around me on the drive, starting down it and then coming back to my side, as though trying to whip me into embarking on a walk like a gird being made to roll by a cleek.
I took little persuasion, for once, and now that I was outside I could see that it was not really complete darkness after all, probably around six then and not too peculiar of me to be up and about should I happen upon a villager on my way.
There was no sign of Mr Tait in the kirkyard. In fact, I had to spend a moment convincing myself that the whole adventure had not been a dream. The grave was filled, the ground was flat and covered not only with grass but also with a quantity of fallen leaves. I stepped forward to peer at the writing on the headstone, suspecting that I had come to the wrong place somehow, and it was when I did this and felt my foot sink slightly into the ground that I knew I could trust my sense and my memory again. He had done a marvellous job; the turfs under the heap of leaves were fitted as close as tiles, and it was only the smears of earth on the grass all around, remnants of the heap that had been there the night before, and the fact that these leaves were rather sodden and mouldy, most unlike their crisp counterparts elsewhere, that hinted at the fakery of the thing at all. I walked around the church to the dark place under the far wall where, on my earlier visit, I had seen a leaf heap with a wheelbarrow propped against it. Right enough, here was a raw scar where turfs had been lifted and, on top of the heaped leaves, a pile of the earth which Mr Tait had been unable to fit tidily back into the hole. I wondered how he would explain these oddities to the beadle and wondered rather less idly, if his work were done and he had not gone home to his warm bed, where this most vari-talented of ministers might be.
Bunty, always a tremendous mind-reader when one plans to take her home again before she feels a walk has really run its course, stopped dead in the lane with the manse gates ahead and the church gates behind and stood looking up at me with her tongue lolling and tail swinging. It was grey dawn by now and not having a lantern was no excuse for it, but I looked up the lane and down it and could summon no desire for either.
‘I’m sorry, my darling,’ I told her. ‘I’m too tired. Promise a lovely long walk later.’
Bunty sat down and raised a paw to me, a display she can never be induced to wheel out on command but to which she resorts frequently in her own cause. I sighed, glanced up towards the start of the law rise again and jumped. It felt as though my feet had literally left the ground but I suppose it was only my heart which leapt really; there was Mr Tait, shovelless although still with the lantern, its glow diminshed now as the daylight crept up around it, coming down towards me at a harried but rather weary shuffle.
‘Where did you spring from?’ I said, blunt from the fright of him suddenly appearing that way.
‘Where have you been?’ he said, equally bluntly, drawing up beside me and absent-mindedly patting the head which Bunty shoved under his hand. He was white with exhaustion and his clothes, as might be expected, were filthy.
‘I woke up and wondered where you were so I came to find you,’ I told him.
‘And did you meet anyone?’ he said, looking wildly around him. ‘Did you see anything?’ He put his hands through his hair, leaving streaks of dirt upon his high, shining forehead.
‘I – no,’ I said. ‘Mr Tait, has something happened? Something else, I mean?’
‘Forgive me,’ he muttered, and began to trot away. ‘I must get back and get out of these things before anyone sees me.’ And with another distracted scrub, at his face this time, which put a smear across his cheeks and knocked his spectacles crooked, he skipped and hobbled towards the front door of his house.
‘As far removed from the man who sat up in bed and told me not to fret about it as a . . . as a . . . what sort of very harassed person is most unlike what sort of terribly calm one, Alec?’ I said later that morning, when I had gone down to Ford Cottage to tell him the ending.
‘As a grill chef is from a Buddhist monk,’ supplied Alec, who was looking most satisfyingly engrossed and puzzled by what I had recounted to him.
&
nbsp; ‘Thank you. Exactly. Only I’m too bone-tired from sleeping on a windowsill to think up similes of my own.’
‘So, we have to ask ourselves, what happened in the interim?’ I recognised in his tone the beginnings of one of our marathons of conjecture and I yawned, as I had been doing every five minutes since I had arrived.
‘More coffee?’ said Alec. I shook my head and shuddered.
‘Sorry, darling, but it’s perfectly vile. You must ask someone to teach you how to make it if you ever try camping out again. And there’s no use in me having a go. I’ve never made the stuff in my life and wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘Feeble old us,’ said Alec. ‘Compared with Mr Tait, anyway, turning his hand to landscape gardening at his age and running up and down the law at dawn.’
‘I don’t think he came down from the law,’ I said. ‘I should have seen him. I looked up there, towards the green, down at Bunty, up there again and bang! There he was as though he had popped out of a rabbit hole. And I don’t think he came from any of the cottages either. I didn’t hear a door and he had that rather set, dogged look that you only get when you’ve been on the go a while. Not at all the gait he would have had if he’d stepped out of a cottage and would be stepping in at his front door in a minute or two.’
‘Hmm, rather nebulous,’ said Alec, ‘but I’ll give you the door. You always hear everything in that hushed time in the very early morning. That’s why the waking-up insomnia is so much worse than the can’t-get-to-sleep kind. So . . . where was he?’
‘I think,’ I said slowly, ‘that he must have emerged from the end of one of the little lanes that comes around the law.’
‘Oh, super!’ said Alec drily. ‘That means he was at any of the five farms or one of their no doubt plentiful workers’ cottages. Or even Luck House itself.’
‘Not Luck House,’ I said. ‘The Howies are Lorna’s friends, very much so, not his. He’s never actually said anything but I can’t see him feeling unperturbed because he thought he could rely on them to get him out of trouble.’
‘But what about if he thought that they were mixed up in it and then he found out they weren’t, so he was stumped. We don’t know, do we, whether it was confidants or culprits he went looking for.’
‘Either way,’ I said, ‘he’s rather too wary of the Howies to think he could take it in his stride if it was them behind it.’
‘The mystery is how he could have thought that at all,’ Alec said. ‘I simply can’t imagine what could make a minister, faced with the theft of a corpse from his own churchyard, say: “Ah well, not to worry. These things happen.” It sounds absolutely mad.’
‘It does rather, doesn’t it,’ I agreed. ‘Nevertheless, that’s exactly how it happened.’
‘And anyway,’ said Alec, ‘it occurs to me now that he can’t have thought he knew who it was. I’ve just realised: if he did, he would have gone round there and got the bones back to rebury them before he went to work, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t have filled in the grave and made it unusable and then gone after the corpse.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘If only I weren’t so tired I should have realised that.’
‘So in some mysterious way that’s not anything to do with recapturing the bones, he thought at first that all would be well and then having been somewhere around one of those five farms, he found it wouldn’t be.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And that does make a bit of sense. He does tend to think of the farming contingent as the hub of his parish, I’ve noticed. More than once he has described the women of this place in general as “farmers’ wives” and really hardly any of them are. He said it the first time we met when he was telling me about the stranger: that it wasn’t silly wee lassies any more. It was sensible farmers’ wives whom he had known all his life.’
‘But Mrs Fraser from August is a farmer’s wife,’ said Alec. ‘And didn’t you say that his own wife was from farming stock too?’
‘True,’ I said, frowning. ‘Still, something about it bothered me. What did he say . . . ? Not silly girls, but sensible farmers’ wives he’d known for years, grown wom— Aha! That’s it. Grown women with children of their own. That’s what’s been niggling at me.’
‘I don’t follow,’ said Alec.
‘March, April and May were the three girls: Elspeth, Annie and Molly. Then came another three, none of whom has children since none of them has had time yet: Mrs Muirhead, whose first joyous confinement fast approaches, Mrs Torrance who only married that nice Drew Torrance from Ladybank way in the spring and was attacked in July – I heard that from a witness only yesterday, darling, although Mrs Torrance herself kept shtoom – and Mrs Fraser from Balniel who foiled Annette Martineau’s hopes to be the lady of Balniel some time last year and has yet to be blessed. Then September – the only month in which a grown woman with children of her own who could have been attacked and then told Mr Tait about it had a chance to get into the busy programme.’
‘Ergo: Mr Tait knew about her and did not tell you.’
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I really do think that might be true.’
‘Why wouldn’t he?’ Alec asked.
I shrugged. ‘Sworn to secrecy, perhaps, as I am with Mrs Muirhead?’
‘And,’ said Alec, ‘do you think it might be this same someone in both cases? The woman who confided in Mr Tait and whoever he turned to last night who couldn’t, in the end, help him?’
‘It could be,’ I answered slowly. ‘Certainly whoever ousted that girl’s bones from consecrated ground last night must believe the bad spirit has summoned the devil. Such a person might well turn to her minister if she thought the devil had come after her, and might very well beg him not to tell.’
‘But even if that’s right it doesn’t help with who the stranger really is,’ said Alec. ‘I take it you don’t believe that—’
‘Of course not!’ I said, glaring at him.
‘Well, you seem to believe in witches these days,’ said Alec, with a sly smile. ‘Who’s to say what else?’
‘I don’t “believe in witches”,’ I said hotly. ‘I believe that some people do and that some of them are here at Luckenlaw.’ One of his eyebrows lifted as though hooked on a fishing line. ‘Alec, I saw it. The Rural badge is a witch’s heart and quite a lot of the members wear one.’
‘Presumably, though, the witches were not involved last night? I mean, candles and graveyards must be right up their street, but wouldn’t they be pleased to have summoned the devil and be the last people to dig up bones and chuck them in efforts to get rid of him again?’
‘I can’t believe you’re laughing at this. People have dug up a grave!’
‘I know, I know, and it is nasty. But it’s not as if it was someone’s dear old mother. It was an ancient skeleton. It should probably have gone to a museum in the first place instead of getting a coffin and a headstone and what have you.’
I shook my head, speechless at his callousness.
‘Anyway,’ said Alec. ‘To turn back to sense and sanity for a moment. I should be much happier if we could carve another path through all of this. If we could say that the stranger and the grave robber – one of the grave robbers, anyway – are the same person. Wouldn’t you? Then we could forget all about witches completely.’
I groaned and put my head in my hands.
‘Of course we couldn’t,’ I said. ‘There are witches in the Rural and the villagers think the girl was a witch too. Witches are absolutely germane to both problems.’ We stared at one another, surprised at how neat it sounded, put that way. When we spoke again, it was rather gingerly, as though we feared the idea might dissolve if we breathed too heavily on it.
‘Someone is trying to sabotage the Rural because they suspect it’s a coven,’ said Alec slowly.
‘And someone ousted the girl they thought was a witch from her grave,’ I added.
‘That could be the same person, couldn’t it?’
‘Easily.’ We let our pent-up breath go and
beamed at one another.
‘Now,’ said Alec, in a brisk voice. ‘Who? Who do we know disapproves of the Rural? Let’s start there.’
‘Mr Black.’
‘That’s one.’
‘And Miss Lindsay did say that a couple of the menfolk had called out names in the street, remember. And she did wonder whether it was these same men who were behind the attacks. But it’s all wrong,’ I said. ‘Their objection was political. She didn’t say what names they called in the street, but it was finding out that Miss Lindsay and Miss McCallum had been on the Women’s March that did it.’ Alec opened his eyes very wide at that. ‘Yes, exactly, darling,’ I said. ‘That’s what I thought too.’
‘Who was it anyway?’ said Alec, and I fished my notebook out from my pocket and leafed back through it searching.
‘Hmph, here we go,’ I said at last, and I read through what I had written. ‘My, my, I think we might be wrong. What I’ve got here suggests that it wasn’t politics that was the problem at all. I said that Mr Tait had hinted at political concerns and Miss Lindsay replied: yes. That too. What do you think of that?’
‘It suggests that Miss Lindsay being a Red under the bed was not the issue. Her politics were a problem, but not the problem.’
‘Precisely. And as to who did the shouting: Mr McAdam and Mr Hemingborough.’
‘In other words,’ said Alec, ‘two farmers who live on the lanes where Mr Tait might have been this morning.’
‘Two farmers who were not at home on the night of the meeting when Mr Black went calling.’
‘And one of whose wives had been very reluctant to admit the existence of the stranger.’
‘Both of whose wives actually,’ I said. ‘Mrs McAdam is young Mrs Muirhead’s Auntie Bessie and, when the poor girl related her ordeal, Auntie Bessie – in very un-aunt-like fashion if you ask me – told her to keep quiet about it. Went as far, if you can believe it, as to tell her “not to be daft”.’
Bury Her Deep Page 22
