Fear by Night: A Golden Age Mystery

by Patricia Wentworth

  “Oh, Mr. Halliday—just think of the headlines in the papers! I should just love to be in a headline, but I don’t suppose I ever shall unless I go out with Mr. Anderson in his boat and he upsets her and drowns me. I might get a headline then, but it would only be a very little one.”

  Ann’s innocent gaze remained fixed upon Mr. Halliday’s face. The face remained a blank.

  “If you take my advice, you won’t go out in a boat with no one but me,” he said without the slightest change of voice. “This loch”—he pronounced it lock—“is what I call tricky, and Gale isn’t the hand with a boat that I am. You come out with me, and I’ll see that there aren’t any accidents.”

  Ann sighed.

  “It’s a pity I don’t like boating. I did tell you that before, didn’t I?” How many times was she going to have to say this, and when was it going to sink in?

  As she spoke, she looked out over the loch and wondered just how deep it was, and how far down into those depths she would sink if she went out with Gale Anderson and his boat overturned. It would overturn; she felt quite sure about that. That is to say, it would overturn if Ann Vernon was ever fool enough to go out in it. Ann felt comfortably certain of never being just that particular kind of fool.

  “Gale’s my business partner,” said Jimmie Halliday without taking any notice. “I’ve got nothing against him, but he’s not quite the thing for a young lady like you. A married man didn’t ought to get friendly with an unprotected young lady like you—it wouldn’t look right, and it’s not what Mrs. Halliday would care about neither.”

  “Mrs. Halliday didn’t seem to care about my going out with you.”

  Jimmy was only too painfully aware of this. His spirits were a good deal dashed when he remembered the courtship of Bessie Fox, of the widow at The Stag, and his mother’s reactions. The widow was an escape, and Bessie a brazen piece if ever there was one, but Sarah Hollins would have done him nicely. There was no doubt about it, the old lady was a fair terror when it came to him casting an eye on a girl, but so far it was all to the good, because here was the best part of a hundred thousand waiting to be picked up and no good thinking about it if he hadn’t been a bachelor.

  “She’d come round,” he said.

  “Does she as a rule?” said Ann.

  Jimmy frowned and began to bluster a little.

  “I’m my own master, aren’t I? Nobody can’t say that I haven’t been a good son, but a man’s got to settle some time, and it’d be best for her in the end. What the old lady wants at her time of life is a daughter. Maids and companions—what’s the good of them? Here to-day and gone to-morrow. No—what she wants is a daughter. And who’s going to give her one except me?” He took out a gaily coloured handkerchief and wiped a heated brow. “It may surprise you, Miss Vernon, and I don’t want it to come too sudden, but the fact is I’m thinking of getting married.”

  “Oh—” said Ann. She wanted to laugh. She bit the corner of her lip very hard and gazed at Jimmy. “Does Mrs. Halliday know?”

  “Not yet she doesn’t.”

  Ann shook her head.

  “She won’t like it, Mr. Halliday. She’s told me all about the girls who wanted to marry you when you were young—heaps of them. She said none of them had got you, and none of them were going to get you. I expect you’d better give it up. It would be horrid for the girl, you know, having Mrs. Halliday hate her—and I’m afraid she would.”

  Jimmy mopped his brow again.

  “She’d come round,” he said, but without conviction.

  The laughter which she had been holding in threatened to be too much for Ann. She stooped, picked up a stone, and turning away from Jimmy, sent it skimming over the tree-tops. She looked down on them from where she sat—green tops of pines and delicate sprays of birch with the blue water beyond them. The stone went skimming over the green and dropped towards the blue. Ann watched it go, her lips parted in forbidden laughter. Then she lifted her dancing eyes and looked across the loch. As she did so, she saw something that stopped her laughter.

  Just where the many-coloured reflection of the hills met the blue reflection of the sky, something moved. If she had looked just one split second sooner, Ann would have seen what it was that moved. By just that one flash of time she was too late. She was left with the knowledge that something had moved, and that she didn’t want to laugh any more.

  She put a hand down on either side of her, gripped the stone, and swung round on Jimmy Halliday.

  “Is there anything in the loch?”

  “In the lock?” His lock was quite uncompromising.

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a good bit of fish. The herring come in.” His eyes shifted from hers.

  “I don’t mean herring—I mean something … Mr. Halliday, what is it? I saw it one night in the moonlight. No, I didn’t quite see it, because the moon went behind a cloud, but”—her voice fell—“I heard it, and I saw the wake it left behind. And just now—just now I thought I saw it out there.” She lifted her left hand from the stone and pointed back towards the loch.

  “It would have been just a shadow.”

  “It wasn’t a shadow that I heard in the night—and when the moon came out again there was a track in the water, all foamy.”

  “What night was that?” said Jimmy in a quick undertone.

  “Last night.”

  “What were you doing down by the water?”

  Ann stared at him. He looked as if he was afraid.

  “It was a lovely night. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “You’re to keep away from the water!”

  He spoke roughly, and she was reminded of Mary’s words: “Keep frae the water.” Mary had said that, and Mary had said, “Or it’ll get ye.”

  “What is it, Mr. Halliday?”

  Jimmy gave her a queer look.

  “I’ve told you the loch’s dangerous. You keep away from the water and you’ll be all right. Don’t go out at night or it’ll be the worse for you—let alone that it isn’t at all the thing for a young lady like you. I’m not saying what you saw or what you didn’t see—there’s things I wouldn’t like to talk about—but as for your seeing anything out there just now, that’s all my eye and Betty Martin.”

  Ann gave her head a small obstinate shake. She hadn’t seen anything, but there had been something to see—if she had looked a moment sooner.

  “There was something,” she said under her breath.

  “And I say there wasn’t,” said Jimmy Halliday. Then all of a sudden he laughed. “Have it your own way! But remember the loch’s dangerous. And if that young man that came along in his car a couple of days ago comes back, he’ll be likely to find it out for himself.”

  “Will you tell me what you mean, Mr. Halliday?” said Ann.

  Jimmy Halliday got up and stood over her, his hands in his pockets and his sandy brows frowning.

  “There used to be bits of houses up and down the loch—fisher folks’ cottages. There’s one of them over there in ruins now—you’ve seen it for yourself. Why did the people go away? I’ll tell you why. They were scared. If you ask me what scared them, maybe it was the same thing that scared you—maybe they thought it was risky living down so close to the water—maybe they were afraid of getting their feet wet. Anyway they quit.” He turned away and began to go down over the slope of the knoll. From below her he looked back and spoke again. “What did you think you saw just now?” There was an anxious ring in his voice.

  Ann hesitated.

  “I just missed it. When I looked, it was gone.”

  He moved his shoulders like a man easing them of a weight.

  “You didn’t see anything,” he said, and walked down the hill.

  Chapter Twenty

  Ann sat still and thought about her talk with Jimmy Halliday. One thing emerged. She had begun by being amused, and had ended by being rather frightened. She wasn’t afraid of Jimmy Halliday. She felt quite sure of being able to keep him in order, and if she couldn’t, M
rs. Halliday could and most certainly would. No, she wasn’t afraid of Jimmy. He had undoubtedly signified his intention of making her the offer of his hand in marriage. Why? Propinquity, sentiment, a desire to settle down, a filial ambition to provide Mrs. Halliday with a daughter—or some reason connected with those odd bits of conversation about a will? Whose will?

  She could very easily believe that Jimmy Halliday would like to provide for his old age by marrying an heiress, but it was very difficult to imagine that that heiress was herself. Who was there to leave her money? Elias Paulett? Why, he had never seen her or taken the slightest interest in her. As far as he was concerned, she might have starved or gone to the workhouse.

  Well, she would just have to stave Jimmy off. He did not appear to be an ardent wooer. According to Mrs. Halliday it had usually been the girls who had done the wooing, so it ought not to be too difficult to keep him at a good safe distance.

  She dismissed Jimmy’s courtship and turned to the other part of their conversation. There was something here that puzzled her a good deal. After insisting that the loch was dangerous, and appearing to lend quite a ready ear to her account of having seen something swimming in the strait at night, Jimmy Halliday had gone off the deep end at the idea of her having seen the same something by daylight. Her thought became momentarily more impressed by this discrepancy. He didn’t mind her believing that she had seen something by moonlight, but he had been disturbed—was that the word, or was it alarmed?—at her insisting that she had seen, what she had just missed seeing, under the eye of the sun. She thought there was something odd about this—odd, and a little frightening.

  She stood up and looked out over the water for a long time, but there was no more to be seen than hill and sky above, and below, again hill and sky, like a clear transparent picture upon the surface of the loch. The sunlight made all the colours quiver as if they were alive.

  Ann went back to the house with regret.

  The rest of the day wasn’t at all comfortable. Mrs. Halliday was cross because her nap had been interrupted, and both Jimmy Halliday and Gale Anderson gave her plenty to be cross about. Ann was responsible for bringing down a storm upon Mr. Anderson’s devoted head. He had spoken to her in a low voice, and she at once repeated his remark for Mrs. Halliday’s benefit.

  “Mr. Anderson is shocked to think that I can’t swim.”

  They were all out on the lawn, Mrs. Halliday in a black silk mantle, a black feather boa, and a bonnet with three purple ostrich feathers placed at a rakish angle over one ear. One of the horsehair chairs had been carried out for her, and her feet, in elastic-sided boots, were raised from the grass on a little round walnut footstool with a bead-work top. At the word swim her head went up like a war-horse. She repeated sharply,

  “Swim? What does a young lady like you want to swim for?”

  “I don’t,” said Ann, sitting down on the grass.

  “And what’s it got to do with Mr. Anderson?” said Mrs. Halliday, using very much the voice with which it may be supposed that Job’s war-horse said “Ha!” among the captains.

  “He thinks I ought to learn.”

  Gale Anderson stood a yard or two away and gazed past the ostrich feathers. Jimmy Halliday had gone down to the boat-house.

  “And him teach you?” said Mrs. Halliday very sharply indeed.

  “That was the idea, wasn’t it, Mr. Anderson?”

  Up to this moment Gale Anderson had regarded the removal of Ann as a matter of business, but under the faint mockery of her voice he felt that for once business and pleasure might be combined. She’d laugh at him, would she, and let him in for a tongue-lashing from the old harridan? Well, they laugh best who laugh last.

  Mrs. Halliday snorted.

  “Not in my house!” she said, using an aspirate of alarming intensity. “Not in my house he don’t! Nor you neither, Miss Vernon!”

  Ann had a lovely picture of trying to swim on the parlour floor, but it was swept away by the spate of Mrs. Halliday’s virtuous wrath.

  “There won’t be none of this there mixed bathing in my house, Mr. Anderson—not while I’m above ground there won’t! And Jimmy did ought to know better than to allow you to speak of such a thing—never brought up to suchlike he wasn’t!”

  “I told you Mrs. Halliday wouldn’t like it,” said Ann in a virtuous voice. She gazed sweetly at Mr. Anderson from her seat on the grass, and was repaid by seeing him struggle with a scowl. It defeated him, and he turned and went away round the house.

  Ann was watching his retreat with satisfaction, when the storm broke over her.

  “And let me tell you, Miss Vernon, a young lady with proper feelings don’t get asked to go bathing with married men, nor with single ones neither! Hussies, I call those that do, and worse! And I tell you straight I’m surprised at you, Miss Vernon! When I was in service, the young ladies did use to bathe, and maybe their brothers and a gentleman friend would join them in the water. But how was they dressed? Many’s the time I had Miss Sophy’s and Miss Gwendoline’s bathing-dresses to dry—and what was they like? ’Igh up to the neck and a decent sleeve—blue serge piped with white, and a proper full skirt that came down below the knee and covered the pants. That’s what Miss Sophy and Miss Gwendoline wore in the water. And what did I see the last time I was at the seaside? ’Ussies, and worse! Next door to naked, with their backs showing down below their waists and about as much stuff on the rest of them as ’ud make a pair of silk stockings, and clinging so tight it didn’t hide nothing and wasn’t meant to!” Mrs. Halliday gave a snort at which the ostrich feathers quivered. “And that’s what your bathing-dress is like, I’ll be bound!”

  Ann was sitting up clasping her knees.

  “I haven’t got one. And, dear Mrs. Halliday, I don’t want to bathe the least bit in the world—and certainly not with Mr. Anderson—not even if I’d got a bathing-dress exactly like Gwendoline’s and Sophy’s with yards of blue serge and little white squiggly edges, and Riddle to chaperone us all the time he was teaching me to swim.”

  “Let him teach ’is own wife!” said Mrs. Halliday severely.

  “Perhaps she doesn’t want to learn,” said Ann. “I’m sure I don’t—I keep telling you so. I should hate him to teach me anything. I should think he’s got a perfectly horrid temper. I don’t like him a bit. Do you?”

  Mrs. Halliday drew herself up with an air of offence.

  “And it’s not for you to say who you like and who you don’t, Miss Vernon—not in my house nor yet in Jimmy’s, seeing as Mr. Anderson is his friend.”

  Ann bit her lip. She would have liked to shake Mrs. Halliday. She would have liked to trample on the ostrich feathers. She would have liked to give notice. When you have no home and no money, you can’t afford the luxury of losing your temper. She had not lived all her life in other people’s houses for nothing. She bit her lip very hard, and the colour ran brightly up to the edge of her hair.

  Mrs. Halliday gave a rather lesser snort like an engine letting off steam and cooling down.

  “You mind your manners, and I’ll mind mine,” she said. “A good talking to don’t do a girl any harm—and I’ll say this much for you, you don’t answer back. Jimmy ain’t asked you to go swimming with him, has he?”

  “Oh no, Mrs. Halliday.”

  “And better not,” said Mrs. Halliday darkly. “I’ll take a couple of turns round the lawn if you’ll give me your arm, Miss Vernon, my dear.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Charles drove on through the lovely weather. The clear arch of the sky was of a tender and melting blue. The hills that rose against it showed every gradation of colour from dark pine-green to the heather tints and the bright light leafy mist of the birch. There was black rock and grey rock, hillsides scarred with the red of rusty iron or dropping in ledges of purple shale. Here and there great streaks of yellow ochre dazzling to gold in the sun, and here and there a sudden gleam of white marble looking like frozen snow. The road climbed and fell across wild high moorland
where the bog-cotton blew and dark water stood among tussocks of coarse faded grass.

  All the time he was getting nearer to Ann.

  The sun went down before he reached Loch Dhu. He was between the hills when he lost it. The valley filled with the dusk, whilst the hill-tops still kept the sun. Then there was twilight everywhere.

  A motor-cyclist passed him about half an hour later, coming up with extraordinarily little noise, slowing as he passed and then shooting away. The road became rougher and rougher. The last ten miles was merely a track, with at least two bends that were dangerous in daylight and an adventure in the dark.

  About half a mile from the loch the hill had been quarried. There was a flattish space by the side of the road. Charles drove his car on to it and stopped the engine. It would be better to wait till to-morrow before trying to see Ann, but quite definitely and certainly Charles knew that he was not going to wait—not till to-morrow anyhow. There would be a moon in an hour or two. He would wait till then and no longer. How, in the middle of the night, he was going to get hold of Ann he really did not stop to think. Fortune had been kind to him before, and might be kind again. Once on the island, it would go hard if he could not contrive a way to Ann.

  He switched on a small electric lamp and proceeded to a picnic meal. When it was done and everything neatly put away, he hefted the collapsible boat, which weighed exactly fifty-six pounds, and went down to the shore of the loch to wait for the moon.

  The motor-cyclist had been there before him, but he was not there now. In response to his hail a boat had put off and fetched him over to the island. Jimmy Halliday rowed the boat, and he seemed to expect his visitor.

  The motor-cycle was pushed under the lee of the ruined house and covered with a tarpaulin. Charles found it there and stood a moment staring at it by the light of a carefully shielded torch. He had been wandering aimlessly round the ruined house wondering who had lived there and why it had been allowed to tumble down, when he came on the motor-cycle.