‘Do you know,’ I told her, ‘I really don’t care. Whether it’s a saboteur, a mischief-maker, some poor fellow who should be in a sanatorium for his own sake as much as for others . . . I couldn’t give a fig. All I know is that it’s causing a great deal of silliness and nasty whispers about devils and demons, frightening women who should know better, and it’s got to stop.’
‘Och, it’ll stop betimes,’ said Mrs McAdam, ‘when it’s run its course.’
‘But why should it?’ I insisted, infuriated once again by the bovine insipidity, the sheer gormlessness of these women. If they were not colluding in it, how could they be so ready just to take this? ‘Why should it get to run its course,’ I demanded, ‘any more than a burglar should get to burgle until he’s set for life, or a murderer get to murder until he’s removed everyone standing between him and his fortune? Why on earth should we take this lying down?’
‘We?’ said Mrs McAdam. ‘Pardon me, but you’ve had to take nothing, and if those who have are not complaining I don’t see why you should be.’ As soon as she had said this, her eyes flared, her hand fluttered at her hair, and she turned to her copper again, in some confusion.
‘Aha,’ I said. ‘My warning’s too late then. You, Mrs McAdam, were September’s victim. I wondered if you might be.’
‘Aye well,’ she said, sounding brusque with the annoyance she felt at her slip. ‘Now you know and it’s done me no harm, has it?’
‘Now that we have things out in the open where they belong, then,’ I said, ‘perhaps you won’t mind answering a question or two, because you can think what you like, but to my mind this stranger has to be stopped and if we can work out who he is, then we can stop him.’
‘You’d best leave it alone,’ said Mrs McAdam. ‘Mark my words,’ – and I knew exactly what words they were going to be – ‘what’s for you won’t go by you.’
‘Humour me,’ I insisted. ‘I’m taking it as read that he came at you across the fields, flying over the ground, swooping over the dykes like a racehorse etc., etc., that he knocked you over, pinched you, ripped at your head and face and then was off again. How am I doing thus far?’ Mrs McAdam shrugged reluctantly. ‘And he was a wiry chap. Not very tall and rather snaky in his outline. Now,’ I went on, drawing my little sketch map out of my pocket and spreading it on the kitchen table. ‘My guess is that he came from . . . the direction of . . . Let me see now . . . Actually it’s very hard to say. In the spring he was coming more or less from the north, latterly from the south, almost as though he’s always coming in towards the village from the outside.’ Mrs McAdam had drifted over to my side and was peering over my shoulder at the arrows on my map.
‘That’s not right,’ she said. I swung round on her.
‘You know who it is, don’t you?’ I said.
‘No!’ she blurted. ‘Only, he came at me from Luckenheart way.’
‘Where’s that?’ I said.
‘Next farm along,’ said Mrs McAdam.
‘In which direction?’ I said.
‘Och, that’s right, I was forgetting,’ she said, scowling. ‘Thon Howies changed the name when they landed. Thought it made the place sound swankier, I daresay. Luck Mains. But Luckenheart Farm it always was and always will be.’
‘He came at you from there?’ I said. ‘It is Jock Christie, isn’t it? It must be. His name pops up over and over again.’
‘He’s nothing to do with it, poor lad,’ said Mrs McAdam.
‘Why poor?’ I demanded. ‘Why does everyone keep saying that? Is there something amiss there?’
‘Amiss?’ said Mrs McAdam, with a wry twist of her mouth. ‘I’ll say there is.’
‘Everyone says there is.’ Now that I knew that Luckenheart and the Mains were one and the same place, I was remembering. ‘People shiver when they say the name.’
‘Aye well,’ said Mrs McAdam. ‘You’d need to ask Mr Tait about that.’
I stared at her in puzzlement, but could not begin to imagine what she meant.
‘And one more question,’ I said presently, with my fingers crossed that her sudden mood of openness would not run out before I was finished. ‘The dark stranger, when he attacked you that September night – what did he smell like?’
It was her turn to stare at me.
‘What?’
‘I agree it’s an odd question,’ I said. ‘And, since you know who it is, it would make more sense for me to ask for his name, but if you won’t tell me that, perhaps you’ll at least give me a sporting chance to work it out for myself. Was there a smell?’
‘What are you asking?’ said Mrs McAdam. ‘I don’t just understand you.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘in March he smelled like eggs apparently, in April like flowers, in May like whisky, although that might not be as certain as some of the others, in June like bonfire smoke, in August like yeast, and I should like to know what he was dabbing behind his ears in September.’
Mrs McAdam looked thunderstruck and sank down at the table opposite me, her copper full of underclothes quite forgotten.
‘I thought . . . I thought it was from coming through the fields,’ she said softly. ‘The smell of fresh cut corn on him.’ She shook herself out of the reverie and looked at me piercingly. ‘Say it again,’ she commanded. ‘Tell me again.’ I ran through the peculiar little list a second time. She shook her head at the whisky but made no other response.
‘What is it, Mrs McAdam?’ I said. Her face was changing, her eyes darkening, her mouth turning to a grim line, two darts of white appearing on either side of her nose.
‘Somebody’s been making fools of all of us,’ she said. ‘Mr Tait was right all along.’ She was rigid with fury now.
‘So tell me who it is,’ I said. ‘Tell the police. I know it’s hard if it’s a neighbour, someone you’ve known all your life. I know ties run deep, but he’s got to be stopped before he does someone a real injury.’
‘A neighbour?’ she cried. ‘Someone I’ve known . . . I tell you this, madam, for nothing. If Luckenlaw had kept to folk born here, and meant to be here, we’d all be a sight better for it. I mind when Mr Tait come back, brought his wife home and that bonny baby girl, we were that happy to see them and we were managing Luckenheart just fine, until those flibbertigibbets changed the name and gave the place to a lad that’s hardly more than a boy, as if a laddie alone could run Luckenheart, but they’re Lorna’s chums so what can we say?’ The white darts were invisible now; her whole face was waxy, her eyes bulging. ‘Even then, though, even then! But there’s that Hetty McCallum at the post office down there and Morag Lindsay teaching our lassies glory knows what in that schoolroom. And Lorna Tait’s as thick as thieves with the pair of them, getting her head turned and nobody saying a word against it. Through the fire and the dry wells and the air over our heads and the ground beneath us, we kept strong and kept believing it would all come right. And all these months, we went out into the night and endured whatever came to us. And now, you say, it was . . . she was . . . he’s . . .’ She ran out of steam at last and sat, panting.
In the silence that followed, I tried to make sense of this, but in vain.
‘I must be getting along, Mrs McAdam,’ I said at last, the polite little formula sounding ridiculous after such histrionics. She nodded dumbly, still staring down at the table although her breathing was beginning to slow again. ‘Can I make you a cup of tea before I go?’ I said, hesitating to leave her in such distress even if I could not account for the cause of it. She shook her head. ‘Can I just suggest, then,’ I went on, ‘that you don’t leave the copper much longer?’ The cauldron of little girls’ underthings was almost at a rolling boil. She nodded again and put her hands to the table top to haul herself to her feet. With one last sympathetic look, I left. An interesting outcome from my point of view, I thought, striding away down the drive, but not a high point in Mrs McAdam’s quiet life, me bringing shocks and horrors and leaving behind cold dismay and shrunken laundry. A lot of good I had done the McA
dam household economy today.
One thing we had agreed on, however, was that there was something wrong at Luckenlaw Mains Farm, or Luckenheart to give it its traditional title, and so since I was almost there already I decided to go along and have a closer look.
Such was my brave plan when I was standing in Over Luck yard, untying Bunty; when I was out of sight of that dwelling my nerve began to fail me and when I passed into a little conifer wood and exchanged almost all of the feeble daylight for a dripping, dark green gloom, it was not only the cold which made me shiver.
Soon, however, I emerged again into the grey daylight, my sigh of released tension startling a crow, which gave a rasping croak and flapped off wetly with Bunty chasing. I had arrived at Luckenlaw Mains. Motoring there with Lorna only the day before, I had noted no particular atmosphere about the place but, now, standing at the end of the drive, I felt a marked reluctance to go any closer to where the farmhouse and buildings lay in their little hollow. I did not think anyone was at home – there were no lights on in the house and no smoke curled from either range of chimney pots set into the gable ends – but the air of abandonment was more than just that. The garden was untended and the wall had been breached from the outside at some distant time in the past, flat stones now splaying out in heaps on either side of the gap and the rounded tops of the copestones showing amongst the long grass. A solitary cow stood ankle deep in mud in what should have been the drying green, and watched me speculatively.
I do not mind cows as a rule, but I decided not to take a chance on what this one was speculating about and so, when I finally summoned the resolve to approach the place, I went around into the farmyard ignoring the house and garden. The yard was somewhat tidier, byre doors neatly patched with odds bits of wood and gates held securely, if not decoratively, shut with twists of wire. I have seen it many times in Perthshire too: the farm shipshape and the house and garden a riot of neglect. As though to confirm my view, inside the wall which made a little inner yard around the kitchen door, red clay pots sat, mossy and abandoned, only a yellowed stalk here and there hinting at flowers from years ago. Indeed, a boot scraper with dark curls of fresh dirt clinging to it was the only indication that the house was inhabited at all.
‘Not very jolly, is it, darling?’ I said to Bunty. She was tucked in about my skirts, clearly no keener than me. I retreated thankfully back to the lane again.
Once there, though, I stopped and regarded the place, puzzled as to why I should have felt such disinclination to linger, for I am the very last person to be visited by ‘the heebie-jeebies’ as my sons call it since they learned the term in those American shockers which do the rounds of their dorms these days, and apart from the rather wild state of the garden and the dead flowers in their pots there was nothing to choose between this farm and many others: a perfectly ordinary grey stone steading, in a perfectly ordinary little hollow in the fields of Fife. True, it had that brute of a hill rearing up and glowering at it and so it was far from cheery, but no worse in that respect than Over Luck where I had just been. Still, I was glad to be off the place and I thought that even the cow looked glum to have to be staying.
Alec and I met up again practically at the gates of the manse. He was grappling with a canvas and easel, and had a fisherman’s bag slung across his shoulder. He was rather red despite the cold and breathing heavily.
‘I couldn’t face tramping back round,’ he said, ‘so I came up and over. My word, it’s steep, though.’
‘Any luck?’ I asked him.
‘No sign of Christie anywhere, and the light was terrible. No point in staying any longer. It would look very suspicious if I sat there painting in the rain.’
I was puzzled for a moment by the torrent of explanation, but only for a moment.
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘You felt it too?’
‘Felt what?’ said Alec, putting down his easel and busying himself with rearranging his bag. ‘This thing weighs an absolute ton. I should have decanted the turpentine into a little flask, I suppose.’
‘I stopped off at Luckenlaw Mains,’ I said, ‘and I’ve never felt such an atmosphere in my life. Not even in a graveyard.’
‘Nor me,’ said Alec. ‘So take pity, Dan, and ask me back to the manse for sweet, strong tea. I’m sure Lorna won’t mind.’
When we got inside, however, the sitting room was empty, although a fire had been laid and was burning cheerfully in expectation of someone’s return, and I ushered Alec in and went to deliver Bunty to her quarters. She was rather muddy for the fireside, at least in someone else’s house. Just then I heard a step descending from the landing and I put my head back round the boot-room door.
‘Lorna?’ I called. ‘Captain Watson has come to see you, dear.’
It was not Lorna who appeared at the turn of the stairs, though, but Mrs Hemingborough, coming down with her coat buttoned up and her basket over her arm as though she had taken a short cut through the manse bedrooms on her way home from the village.
‘She’s not in, Mrs Gilver,’ she told me. ‘I was just looking for her too.’
‘I’ll tell her you called,’ I said, reminding myself that she was the intimate and I the stranger here, and that it was not so very unusual, in the country, for neighbours to walk freely in and out of one another’s houses, although in my experience the ground floor was the normal limit.
‘Wasn’t that Mrs October?’ said Alec, when the front door had closed behind her. He had taken a surreptitious peek when he heard me hailing someone. ‘What is going on?’
‘Oh, well as to that,’ I said, ‘I’ve no idea, but I’m not surprised to see Friend Hemingborough making free with the manse. From what I’ve been hearing at Over Luck this morning, relations between Mr Tait and his farmers’ wives are a good deal closer and more complicated than meets the eye.’
‘Meaning?’ said Alec.
‘Listen to what Mrs McAdam said,’ I suggested, ‘and if you can make sense of it, please tell me.’
At the end of my outpouring, Alec did not smile fondly and explain it all to me and perversely I would have welcomed it if he had. Instead, he crossed his eyes, puffed out his cheeks and made a long loud noise somewhere between a raspberry and an imitation of a horse.
‘How very torrid,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got a clue.’
‘Well, at least try, darling,’ I urged him.
‘Mr Tait,’ said Alec slowly, ‘seems a good place to start. Mr Tait has always believed the dark stranger was just a man. That’s why he got you to come and investigate.’
‘To do the dirty work,’ I said. ‘To make the discovery – although I’m almost sure he knows who it is, Alec – and take the blame for what his parishioners would see as disloyalty.’
‘Could a minister possibly be as twisty as all that?’ said Alec, screwing up his nose. ‘And anyway, didn’t his parishioners think the stranger was a demon?’
‘And yet submitted to his attentions with the same kind of stoicism which saw them through all their farming troubles.’
‘Until something you said to Mrs McAdam revealed that Mr Tait was right all along and set her off on the extended rant which still makes no sense at all.’
‘Perhaps it wasn’t actually related,’ I said. ‘Perhaps Mrs McAdam simply hated being proved wrong and resented Mr Tait for being right and so vented all her other resentments.’
‘Those being?’
‘That the Taits started the rot when they moved in, the postmistress and schoolmistress have undermined the heart of their village, the Howies are an abomination – poor Howies, although one can see almost what she means – and this slip of a lad who’s been given a prime piece of farmland to ruin is the very last straw. But they were all Lorna’s friends and out of respect for Mr Tait the neighbours didn’t shun them as they would have liked to?’
‘Goodness knows,’ said Alec. ‘I wonder what the vital clue was. What smell was it that struck her?’
‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘Nor why suddenly
finding out that the stranger was human would make Mrs McAdam not just angry, but absolutely aghast. She turned as white as her laundry.’
We sat in silence, thinking, for a while.
‘What about this?’ said Alec at last. ‘If, thinking the girl in the grave had unleashed a demon, you’d dug her up and got rid of her, then you found out you were wrong and you’d dug the poor girl up for nothing, wouldn’t that make you go pale? It would me.’
I was shaking my head.
‘The “demon unleashed” contingent is quite separate from the . . . oh, what shall we call them? The fatalists. The stoics who think you can’t dodge what’s coming for you and if what’s coming is a dark stranger then you take it, button your lip and endure. Mr Tait’s farmers’ wives can’t have been the ones who were out digging.’
‘Although maybe he thought they were,’ said Alec, sitting up very straight all of a sudden. ‘Maybe he went to Mrs Hemingborough or Mrs Palmer or someone that morning to say that they’d been seen, and they said “Seen doing what?” and that’s why he was in a funk when you met him.’
‘Yes!’ I said. ‘Only then he reasoned that whoever had taken her, he knew where they’d have put her so it was all one in the end anyway.’
‘Precisely,’ said Alec and sat back, looking satisfied. ‘Now, where does that leave us?’
‘Unless I’m mistaken, it leaves us not knowing who the stranger is or who the grave-diggers were,’ I said, and we both sighed heftily.
‘Right,’ said Alec, slapping his hands on his thighs and looking ready to wrestle the thing to the ground. ‘Fraser? No. His wife has left the Rural and he doesn’t have the freedom to roam any more.’
‘And he was roaming with Annette Martineau anyway,’ I reminded him. ‘Until she unaccountably took umbrage at his casual manners.’
‘Hemingborough, McAdam, Torrance and Palmer have the same problem except at the other end. The stranger started his campaign long before their wives joined the Rural, so the menfolk couldn’t have been slipping out from March onwards, even if they are slipping out now. I wish I could find out what they’re up to. But back to our suspects. Black?’
Bury Her Deep Page 26
