Wildfire at Midnight

by Mary Stewart

  My thoughts skidded away from that same clever gentleman from London, as I tried, vainly, to fit the other killings into the same framework of primitive ritual. Where, in the plans of this primeval throwback of a murderer, did Beagle’s murder fit? Or Marion Bradford’s cut rope? Or the students from Oxford and Cambridge? Or Marcia Maling’s doll?

  It became more than ever certain, on the evidence of this book, that the only kind of logic that could knot together crimes so various, must be the cracked logic of madness. And that the book was evidence there was no doubt. There were too many parallels between its calm statements and the crazy ritual murder on Blaven hill. Nor could it be mere coincidence that the book itself was here, in this hotel. There was the probability that it was the murderer’s own: a man whose studies had made him sufficiently familiar with such rites and customs – a man of unstable mind – might, when that mind finally overturned, wallow in just such a botched travesty of ritual as Heather’s murder now showed itself to be. Or it was possible—

  I was, I found, still clutching in my damp fist the crumpled envelope that had marked the page. My hand shook a little as I smoothed it out.

  I sat looking at it for a very long time.

  The envelope was in my father’s handwriting. It had no stamp, but it bore, in his clear, beautiful hand, a name and address:

  Nicholas Drury, Esq.,

  at The Camas Fhionnaridh Hotel,

  Isle of Skye,

  Inverness-shire.

  19

  Abhainn Camas Fhionnaridh

  The morning brought misty sunshine and the nurse. The latter was a youngish, square-built woman, who looked kind and immensely capable. With relief I abandoned Roberta to her and went down to breakfast.

  As I went into the dining-room, heads turned, and Mrs. Cowdray-Simpson asked quickly: ‘The girl – how is she?’

  I smiled. ‘All right so far, thank you. The nurse is with her now, and says she’s getting on well.’

  ‘I’m so glad! I was so afraid that all that disturbance in the night—’

  ‘It was nothing,’ I said. ‘I let the fire out, and the Inspector heard Sergeant Munro prowling down the stairs to get wood for me.’

  Nobody else spoke to me while I ate my breakfast, for which I was grateful. I found myself being careful not to catch anybody’s eye. I had just poured my second cup of coffee when Effie, round-eyed, appeared at my elbow.

  ‘If you please, miss, the Inspector says – when you’re ready, he says, but not to be interrupting yourself—’

  Her voice was high-pitched and possessed remarkable carrying-power. It was into a dead and listening silence that I replied: ‘I’ll go and see the Inspector at once. Thank you, Effie.’

  I picked up The Golden Bough, which I had wrapped in yet another piece of Autocar, took my cup of coffee in the other hand, and walked out of the dining-room, still in that uncomfortable silence. My face was flaming. Last night’s quarantine seemed still to be isolating me, Nicholas’ mocking phrase to be whispering me out of the room. In each look that followed me I could sense the same resentment: in one pair of eyes there might also be fear. My cheeks were still flying scarlet banners when I got to the Inspector’s temporary office.

  He greeted me cheerfully, with a shrewd glance at my face which provoked me into saying, tartly: ‘I could do without the distinction of not being a suspect, Inspector Mackenzie!’

  He was unperturbed. ‘Is that so? Don’t they like it?’

  ‘Of course they don’t! I feel – cut off . . . and the funny thing is that it’s I who feel guilty. I wish it was all over!’

  ‘I’m with you there.’ He stretched out a hand. ‘Is that for me?’

  I handed him The Golden Bough. In some curious way I felt that, by doing so, I had committed myself to something, had started down a path from which there was no turning back. I sat down. ‘I’ve marked the place,’ I said.

  I bent my head over my coffee cup, stirring it unnecessarily, concentrating on the brown swirl of the liquid against the blue sides of the cup. I heard the Inspector make an odd little sound, then he said sharply: ‘Where did you find this?’

  I told him.

  ‘And when did you see this marked section?’

  ‘Last night.’ I told him about that, too. But not about the crumpled envelope. It was in my pocket. I could not go quite so far down the path. Not yet.

  ‘It was you who marked these passages?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know whose book this is?’

  The envelope burned in my pocket. ‘No.’

  There was a pause. I looked up to find his eyes watching me. He said: ‘You had other things to tell me, I believe. You told me so, before you found this book. Now, Miss Brooke’ – he was being very formal this morning – ‘what is it that you think I ought to know?’

  ‘The first thing,’ I said, ‘concerns the cut climbing-rope that killed Marion Bradford.’

  ‘Yes?’

  I began to tell him about my trip downstairs in the darkness on my first night in the hotel, and how both Jamesy Farlane and Alastair Braine had been in the hotel porch.

  ‘And Mr. Corrigan had been fishing with them,’ I said slowly. ‘Alastair said he’d already come back – but yesterday his wife said he didn’t get in that night till three o’clock. It was about half-past two when I spoke to Alastair.’

  The Inspector was writing rapidly. He looked up when I fell silent. ‘What you’re trying to tell me is that each one of these three men had the opportunity to damage the girls’ climbing-rope the night before the climb.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, miserably.

  ‘Then where does Dougal Macrae’s third climber come in?’

  ‘He might be innocent,’ I said, ‘and just be frightened! When he saw them fall—’

  ‘Aye, aye, lassie,’ said the Inspector drily, and, again, gave me that long considering look. ‘And had you anything else to tell me?’

  So I told him about the episode of Marcia’s doll, feeling, with every word, more and more like the despicable little informer Nicholas had called me. Finally I sat back, and looked unhappily across the table at him. ‘But perhaps you knew?’

  He nodded. ‘Mrs. Persimmon told me about that. But you can forget it; it’s not a mystery any longer, and it never was a piece of this mystery in any case. I think I may tell you that it was part of a little private feud between Mrs. Corrigan and Miss Maling.’

  ‘Oh? You mean Alma Corrigan did it?’

  ‘Yes. She told me this morning. She did it to frighten Miss Maling away from the hotel for – er, reasons of her own.’

  ‘I – see.’ I was remembering Alma Corrigan’s face as she watched Marcia’s car driving away across the glen. ‘Well, it appears to have worked.’

  His mouth relaxed a little. ‘Quite so.’ Then he looked down at his notes. ‘Well, I’m much obliged to you for telling me these things. I think you were right to do so. Is there anything else?’

  ‘No,’ I said, but I was not well enough guarded yet, and his eyes lifted quickly to my face. They had sharpened with interest.

  He said flatly: ‘You’re lying to me, aren’t you? There is something else.’

  ‘No.’ But I said it too loudly.

  He looked at me very gravely for a few long seconds. Then he laid the pencil carefully down on his papers, and put his hands, palm downwards, flat on the desk. ‘Lassie’ – his tone was no longer official; it was very kind – ‘I think you told me a lie last night, didn’t you?’

  ‘I? A lie? What—’

  ‘When you said you hadn’t guessed who the murderer was.’

  I bit my lip and sat rigid, my eyes on the floor.

  He said: ‘Do you really think a woman of Marion Bradford’s experience wouldn’t have noticed if the rope was damaged when she put it on? Do you really think that rope was cut in the hotel porch that night?’

  ‘I – it might have been.’

  ‘It might. But do you think it was?’

/>   ‘N-no.’

  He paused. ‘I’ll tell you how we think this murder was done,’ he said at length. ‘You realized, of course, that Roberta Symes never climbed across the Sputan Dhu at all?’ He added, as I stared at him: ‘There was no rope on her body, was there?’

  I said slowly. ‘No. No, there wasn’t. Of course . . . if she’d been middle man on the rope the murderer couldn’t have cut it between her and Marion. D’you know, I never worked that out? How stupid of me!’

  ‘It’s just as well you didn’t, or you’d have left the Sputan Dhu to look for her elsewhere.’

  ‘What did happen, then?’

  ‘We think he offered to do the climb with Marion Bradford, Roberta watching. When he got Miss Bradford to the one pitch that’s out of sight of the other side – there’s an overhang—’

  ‘I know. I noticed it. He could have cut the rope then without being seen.’

  He nodded. ‘He pulled her off and cut the rope. Roberta would see an “accident”, see her fall. Then she would hear him shout that he was coming back. He could get back quite easily alone by going higher above the gully. She would wait for him in who knows what agony of mind, there by the gully’s edge. And in her turn, when he came there, he would throw her down.’

  I said nothing. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. I believe I shut my eyes. I know I was trembling.

  ‘Lassie,’ he said, very gently, ‘if a man’s a murderer, and a murderer like this one, crazy and – yes, vicious and crazy, he’s not fit to defend, you know.’

  I said chokily: ‘Loyalty—’

  ‘Doesn’t enter into it. He’s an outlaw. Your loyalty is to the rest of us, the same ordinary people who want him locked up so that they can be safe.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you arrest him, if you’re so sure?’

  ‘I told you. I can’t possibly move without proof. I’m waiting for some information to come from London. Or – there’s Roberta.’

  ‘Why did you leave me with her, if you’re so sure I’d shield the murderer?’ I cried.

  ‘Because I’m a good enough judge of people to know that, when it comes to the point, you’ll be on the right side, whatever your – loyalties.’

  ‘My instincts, you mean,’ I said bitterly. ‘If you’d been in the lounge last night, you’d have heard me talking very fine and large about my principles, but now—’ I got up. ‘Has no one ever told you that people mean more to women than principles? I’m a woman, Inspector Mackenzie.’

  He had risen, and his eyes met mine levelly. ‘So was Heather Macrae.’

  I blazed at him at that. ‘I don’t know why you’re treating me to a sermon on loyalty, Inspector Mackenzie! Even if I did guess who your murderer was it’s only a guess! How am I supposed to be able to help you catch him? I’ve told you everything—’

  ‘No.’ His voice was soft, but it brought me up short. ‘I still don’t believe you.’ He surveyed me grimly. ‘And if this fact – whatever it is – that you are keeping back, is one that will give me the proof I want, then I must warn you—’

  ‘Proof? I haven’t any proof. I swear I haven’t! And if I had – oh God, I must have time to think,’ I said shakily, and almost ran out of the room.

  There may have been people in the hall: I never saw them. I went blindly across it, making without coherent thought for the glass porch, and the fresh air and freedom of the glen. But when I pushed my way through the swing doors into the porch I came face to face with Dougal Macrae coming in. He greeted me gravely.

  ‘Good morning, mistress. It’s a grand morning for it, forbye a bit of mist coming up frae the bay. Are you wanting to go right away?’

  ‘Go?’ I looked at him blankly.

  ‘It was today I was taking you fishing, Mistress Brooke. Had you forgotten?’

  ‘Fishing? Oh—’ I began to laugh, rather weakly, and then apologized. ‘I’m sorry; but it seems odd to be thinking of fishing after – after all this.’

  ‘To be sure it does. But ye canna juist be sitting round to wait for what’s going to happen, mistress. Ye’ll be better out in the clear air fishing the Abhainn Camas Fhionnaridh and taking your mind off things. Fine I know it.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you do . . . All right, Mr. Macrae, I’ll come. Give me five minutes.’

  Three-quarters of an hour later, as I stood on the heather where the Camasunary River flows out of Loch na Creitheach, I knew that Dougal had been right.

  The mist that, earlier that morning, had blanketed the glen, had now lifted and rolled back, to lie in long vapour-veils on the lower slopes of Blaven and Sgurr na Stri. Just beside us, An’t Sròn was all but invisible in its shroud, and from its feet the loch stretched northwards, pale-glimmering, to merge with the mist above it in a shifting opalescent haze. Marsco had vanished; the Cuillin had withdrawn behind the same invisible cloak, but directly above our heads the sky was blue and clear, and the sun shone warmly down. The river, sliding out of the loch in a great slithering fan of silver, narrowed where we stood into a deeper channel, wrangling and glittering among boulders that broke it into foam or shouldered it up in glossy curves for all the world like the backs of leaping salmon. Close under the banks, in the little backwaters, piles of froth bobbed and swayed on water brown as beer. The smell of drying heather and peaty water, strong and fresh, was laced with the pungent odour of bog-myrtle.

  Dougal was a good instructor. He soon showed me how to assemble my hired rod, how to fix the reel and tie the fly, and then, with infinite patience, he began to teach me how to cast. Neither of us spoke a word about anything but the matter in hand, and very few, even, about that. It was not long before I found, to my own surprise, that the difficult art I was attempting had, indeed, a powerful fascination, before which the past faded, the future receded, and the whole of experience narrowed down to this stretch of glancing, glimmering water, and the fly I was trying to cast across it. The timeless scene and the eternal voice of the water created between them a powerful hypnosis under whose influence the hotel with its inmates and its problems seemed far away and relatively unimportant.

  And even if my own problem did not recede with the others, it did – so passionately did I refuse to face it – relax a little of its claw-hold on my mind.

  Dougal had put up his own rod, but did not at first use it. He sat on the bank smoking and watching me, occasionally getting up to demonstrate a cast. Of course I never caught anything; I did not get even the suspicion of a bite. But so powerfully had the peace and timelessness of the place worked upon me that when at length Dougal began to unwrap sandwiches for lunch I was able to think and speak with tolerable composure.

  We ate at first in silence, while the water ran bubbling-brown past our feet, and a dipper flew zit-zitting up and down the centre of the river. A fish leaped in a flashing silver arc.

  ‘That’s just where I was fishing,’ I said humbly. ‘I must have been casting over him all the time, and never caught him.’

  ‘You might yet; I’ve known stranger things happen,’ said Dougal. It could hardly be called an encouraging answer, but I supposed that, from a Highlander, it might even be accounted praise. He looked up at the sky. ‘It’s a bit over-bright for the fish, in fact. If the mist came down a little, and took some of the glare off, it might be better.’

  ‘It seems a pity to wish the sun away.’

  ‘You’ll not notice, once you’re fishing again.’

  We finished our lunch in silence, then Dougal got out his ancient pipe, while I fished in my pocket for cigarettes. As my fingers closed over the remains of yesterday’s rather battered packet of Players, they encountered something else, something metallic and unfamiliar.

  I gave an exclamation as I remembered what it was. Dougal turned an enquiring eye in my direction, through a small fog of pipe-smoke.

  ‘I ought to have given this to the Inspector, I suppose,’ I said, withdrawing my hand from my pocket with the cairngorm brooch. ‘It’s Roberta’s, and—’

  ‘Where d
id ye get that?’ The big Scotsman’s voice was harsh. His pipe fell unheeded into the heather, and his hand shot out and grabbed the brooch from my palm. He turned it over and over in a hand that shook.

  ‘Why – up on the hill, yesterday,’ I said, uncertainly. ‘On the scree near the Sputan Dhu. I – I thought Miss Symes must have dropped it there.’

  ‘It was Heather’s.’ Dougal’s voice was unsteady too.

  ‘Heather’s?’ Confusedly I tried to remember where I had picked it up . . . yes, it had been lying on the scree below the ledge where she had been found. Could it have dropped or been kicked off that little pile of metal in the corner? . . . I turned to look back at Blaven, only to find that the mist was, indeed, rolling down the slopes behind us like a tide of smoking lava. Blaven was already invisible, and a great wall of mist bore steadily across the glen behind us, obliterating the afternoon.

  ‘I gave it to her for her birthday,’ said Dougal, his voice unnaturally loud and harsh. ‘She was wearing it when she went out that night . . .’ He stared at it for a moment longer, then thrust it back at me. ‘You’d best take it, mistress. Give it to the Inspector and tell him where you found it. God knows it won’t help him, but—’ He broke off, and turned with bent head to hunt for his pipe. By the time he had got it alight again his face was once more impassive, and his hands steady. He glanced round at the silently advancing mist.

  ‘This’ll be better for the fish,’ he said, and relapsed into silence.

  The sun had gone, and with it, the peace of the place had vanished too. The finding of that pathetic brooch had brought back, only too vividly, the horrors which had beset this lovely glen. My own miserable doubts and fears began again to press in on me as the grey mist was pressing. The other side of the river was invisible now. We seemed, Dougal and I, to be in the centre of a world of rolling grey cloud, islanded between the loud river and the lake, whose still and sombre glimmer dwindled, by degrees, into a grey haze of nothing.