Wildfire at Midnight

by Mary Stewart

  I called ‘Roderick!’ and was amazed at the harsh croak that my stiff throat produced.

  He did not move. My knees were shaking, and it was with difficult, uncertain steps that I made my way towards him over the rough ground.

  I said his name again: ‘Roderick!’

  He heard then. He swung round. He said: ‘Yes?’ and then ‘Janet!’ His voice sounded raw with shock, but at that I could hardly feel surprised. God knows what I looked like, death-white and shaking, wet and filthy, with the ghosts of terror and despair still looking out of my eyes.

  He took two swift strides to meet me, and caught hold of my hands, or I would have fallen. He thrust me down on to a flat rock with my back against the warm stone of the buttress. I shut my eyes, and the sunlight beat against the lids in swirls of red and gold and violet. I could feel its heat washing over me in great reviving waves, and I relaxed in it, drawing my breath more smoothly. Then at length I opened my eyes and looked up at Roderick.

  He was standing in front of me, watching me, and in those blue eyes I saw, again, that dreadful look of compassion. I knew what it meant, now, and I could not meet it. I looked away from him, and busied myself pulling off my sodden shoes and unfastening my coat, which slid off my shoulders to lie in a wet huddle on the rock. My blouse was hardly damp, and the grateful heat poured through it on to my shoulders.

  He spoke then: ‘You don’t – know?’

  I nodded.

  He said slowly, an odd note in his voice: ‘I told you that you would not be hurt. I shouldn’t have said it. It was—’

  ‘It hardly matters,’ I said, wearily. ‘Though why you thought, after what Nicholas put me through when we got divorced, that he’d have any scruples about me now, I don’t know.’ My left hand was flat on the hot rock. The line where my wedding ring had been showed clear and white on the third finger. I said, still with the weight of dreariness pressing on me: ‘It was wrong of me to try and protect him, suspecting what he was. I see that now. One shouldn’t really put people before principles. Not when the people are – outlaws.’

  My voice dwindled and stopped. He had turned away from me, and his eyes were on the distant peaks of the Cuillin, where they swam above the vaporous lake.

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  I blinked stupidly. ‘Why did I do what?’

  ‘Protect – him.’ There was a curious light tone to his voice that might have been relief.

  I hesitated, then said flatly: ‘Because I’m his wife.’

  He turned his head sharply. ‘Divorced.’

  ‘Oh yes. But – but that made no difference to some things. I mean, one has loyalties—’

  He said harshly: ‘Loyalties? Why call it loyalty when you mean love?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  He was silent. Then he said abruptly: ‘What happened down there? How did you find out?’

  ‘He was looking for me in the mist. He called me. I knew his voice.’

  ‘He called you! But surely—’

  ‘I was with Dougal Macrae, fishing, when the mist came down. Dougal had gone to get his rod. I heard a struggle, and Dougal must have been knocked out, then he – Nicholas – started looking for me. Only, Dougal recovered and went after him. They both chased off into the mist, and I ran away, but I got lost. And then – and then—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I heard him coming across the bog, calling for me. Not calling, really, only whispering. I suppose he’d given Dougal the slip, and had doubled back to look for me. And he daren’t call loudly in case Dougal heard him.’

  ‘He must know that you’ve guessed who – what – he is.’

  I shivered a little. ‘Yes.’

  He was peering down now at the thick pall that covered the valley. ‘So Drury is down there. In that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How far away?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose it was only a few minutes ago that—’

  He swung round on me, so suddenly that I was startled.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, abruptly, almost roughly. ‘We’ve got to get out of this. Get your shoes.’

  He had hold of my wrist, and pulled me to my feet.

  ‘Down into that?’ I said, doubtfully. ‘Shouldn’t we wait till it clears a little? He’s—’

  ‘Down? Of course not. We’re going up.’

  ‘What on earth d’you mean?’

  He laughed, almost gaily. ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills . . .’ He seized my coat where it lay on the rock, and shook out its damp folds. Something tinkled sharply on to a boulder, and rolled aside with a glint. ‘Don’t ask questions, Janet. Do as I say. What’s that?’

  ‘Oh!’ I cried, stooping after it. ‘It’s Heather’s brooch!’

  ‘Heather’s brooch?’ His tone was casual, so casual that I looked at him in some surprise.

  ‘Yes. I found it yesterday under that dreadful ledge. I thought it was Roberta’s, but Dougal said—’

  Once again my voice dwindled and died in my throat. I stood up, the brooch in my hand, and looked up into his eyes.

  I said: ‘The first night I was here, you told me about Heather’s murder. You told me about the little pile of jewellery that was found on the ledge. A bracelet, you said, and a brooch, and – oh, other things. But the brooch wasn’t on the ledge when she was found. And since she had only been given it that day, for her birthday, you couldn’t have known about it, unless you saw her wearing it yourself. Unless you, yourself, put it on to that little pile on the ledge beside the bonfire.’

  High up, somewhere, a lark was singing. Round us, serene above the mist, the mountains swam. Roderick Grant smiled down at me, his blue eyes very bright.

  ‘Yes,’ he said gently. ‘Of course. But what a pity you remembered, isn’t it?’

  23

  Blaven

  So we faced each other, the murderer and I, marooned together on our island Ararat above the flood of cloud: alone together, above the silent world, on the mountain where already he had sent three people to their deaths.

  He was smiling still, and I saw in his face again the look of compassion that, now, I understood. He liked me, and he was going to kill me. He was sorry, but he was going to kill me.

  But, just for a moment, even this knowledge was crowded out by the one glorious surge of elation that swept through me. The whole of that silent, cloud-top world was drenched with the light of the sun and the song of the lark – and the knowledge that I had been criminally, stupidly, cruelly wrong about Nicholas. I think that for two full minutes I stared into Roderick Grant’s mad blue eyes and thought, not: ‘I am here alone with a maniac killer’, but: ‘it was not Nicholas, it was not Nicholas . . .’

  Roderick said, regretfully: ‘I’m so sorry, Janet. I really am, you know. I knew when I heard you talking to Dougal by the river, that sooner or later you’d remember. I didn’t really mean to, but of course I’ll have to kill you now.’

  I found to my surprise that my voice was quite calm. I said: ‘It won’t help you if you do, Roderick. The Inspector knows.’

  He frowned. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘He told me so. He said he was just waiting for information from London to confirm what he knew. And of course there’s Roberta.’

  His face darkened: ‘Yes. Roberta.’

  The vivid eyes hooded themselves as he brooded over his failure with Roberta. I wondered if he had killed Dougal, or if Dougal, with Nicholas, were still hunting through the mist below us . . . the lovely, safe mist, not many yards below us—

  ‘Don’t try and run away,’ said Roderick. ‘I’d only have to bring you back again. And don’t scream, Janet, because then I’d have to throttle you, and’ – he smiled gently at me – ‘I always cut their throats, if I can. It’s the best way.’

  I backed against the cliff of the buttress. It was warm and solid, and there were tiny tufts of saxifrage in the cleft under my fingers.
Real. Normal. I forced my stiff lips to smile back at Roderick. At all costs, I must try and keep him talking. Keep him in this mad gentle mood. I must speak smoothly and calmly: if I should panic again, my fear might be the spark that would touch off the crazy train of his murderer’s mind.

  So I smiled. ‘Why did you do it at all, Roderick? Why did you kill Heather Macrae?’

  He looked to me in surprise. ‘They wanted it.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘The mountains.’ He made an oddly beautiful gesture. ‘All these years, these ages, they’ve waited, dreaming like this, above the clouds, watching over the green life of the valleys. Once, long ago, men paid them worship, lit fires for them, gave them the yearly sacrifice of life, but now’ – his voice had an absent, brooding tone – ‘now they have to take for themselves what they can. A life a year, that’s what they need . . . blood and fire, and the May-Day sacrifices that men paid them when the world was young and simple, and men knew the gods that lived on the mountains.’

  He looked at me. It was uncanny and horrible, to look at someone’s familiar face, to listen to someone’s familiar voice, and to see a complete stranger looking out of his eyes.

  ‘She helped me carry the wood and the peat; together we collected the nine woods and the wild agaric and the oak to make the wildfire. She made the fire for me, and then I cut her throat and—’

  I had to stop him. I said abruptly: ‘But why did you kill Marion Bradford?’

  His face darkened with anger. ‘Those two women! You heard the little one – Roberta – that night. You heard her talking sacrilege, you heard how she chattered of conquering – conquering – these.’ Again the flowing gesture that embraced the dreaming peaks. ‘And the other one – Miss Bradford – she was the same.’ He laughed suddenly, and sounded all at once perfectly normal and charming. ‘It was quite easy. The elder one, that dreadful, stupid woman, she was a little in love with me, I think. She was pleased and flattered when I met them on the mountain and offered to show her the climb across the Sputan Dhu.’

  ‘I suppose you thought they were both dead when you left them.’

  ‘They should have been,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t it bad luck?’

  ‘Very,’ I said drily. My eyes went past him, scanning the fringes of the mist. No one. Nothing.

  He was frowning at a sprig of heather that he had pulled. ‘That ledge where you found Roberta,’ he said. ‘I’d been along the damned thing three times already, but I never went further than the corner when I saw the ledge was empty. I wanted to find her first, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’ The lark had stopped singing. There was no sound in the blue-and-gold day but the grotesque exchange of our pleasant, polite voices, talking about murder.

  ‘But you found her.’ The cock of his eyebrow was almost whimsical. ‘And you nearly – oh so nearly – gave me the chance I wanted, Janet.’

  I forgot about being calm and quiet. I cried out: ‘When you sent me to get the flask! You were going to kill her then!’

  He nodded. ‘I was going to kill her then. A little pressure on the throat, and—’ This time the gesture was horrible. ‘But you came back, Janet.’

  I licked my lips. ‘When she opened her eyes,’ I said hoarsely, ‘it was you she saw. You, standing behind me.’

  ‘Of course.’ He laughed. ‘You thought it was Drury, didn’t you? Just as you thought it was Drury who killed Ronald Beagle—’

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  He hesitated, and into the blue eyes came a look of naïve surprise. ‘D’you know, I don’t quite know, Janet. I’d hated him for a long time, of course, because I knew that to his mind, they were just so many peaks to be climbed, so many names to be recorded. And then he came among us that night, on the mountain, talking so glibly of Everest – Everest conquered, those untouchable snows defiled and trampled, where I had thought no man could ever put his sacrilegious feet . . . You said that, Janet; you remember? You spoke like that about it once, and, because of that, I thought that I could never hurt you . . . But Beagle – I followed him down the hill. I caught him from behind and killed him . . .’ His eyes met mine ingenuously. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I must have been a little mad.’

  I said nothing. I was watching the edge of the mist, where it frothed along the empty mountainside.

  ‘And now,’ said Roderick, feeling in his coat pocket ‘where’s my knife?’ He patted his coat carefully, as a man does when he is wondering where he has put his pipe. The sun gleamed on his dark-gold hair. ‘It doesn’t seem to be – oh yes, I remember now. I was sharpening it. I put it down somewhere . . .’ He smiled at me, then he turned and scanned the heather anxiously. ‘Can you see it, Janet, my dear?’

  Little bubbles of hysteria rose in my throat. My fingers dug and scraped at the rock behind me. I stiffened myself with a jerk and flung out an arm, pointing at the ground beyond him.

  ‘There, Roderick! There it is!’

  He swung round, peering.

  I couldn’t get past him, down into the mist. I had to go up.

  I went up the end of that buttress like a cat, like a lizard, finding holds where no holds were, gripping the rough rock with stockinged feet and fingers which seemed endowed with miraculous, prehensile strength.

  I heard him shout ‘Janet!’ and the sound acted like the crack of a whip on a bolting horse. I went up ten feet of rock in one incredible, swarming scramble, to haul myself, spreadeagled, on to the flat crest of the buttress.

  The enormous wing of rock soared in front of me up to the high crags. Its top was, perhaps, eight feet wide, and strode upwards at a dizzy angle, in giant steps and serrations, like an enormous ruined staircase. I had landed, somehow, on the lowest tread, and I flung myself frantically at the face of the next step, just as the ring of boots on rock told me that he had started after me.

  How I got up what seemed to be twenty feet of perpendicular rock, I do not know. But my mad impetus still drove me, holding me against the cliff, clamping my hands instinctively into crannies, bracing my feet against juts of safe rock, propelling me upwards as thoughtlessly and as safely as if I were a fly walking up a wall.

  With a heave and a jerk I dragged myself on to the wider ledge that marked the second step. And, inexorably, the next perpendicular barred my way, this time gashed from summit to foot by a vertical crack, or chimney. I flew at this, only to be brought up short as I saw that the rock on which I stood was a stack, a chunk split off the main buttress, and between me and the next upright there yawned a gap which dropped sheer away to the level of the scree.

  The gap was perhaps four feet wide, no more. And at the other side, on one wall of the chimney, was a smallish, triangular ledge, above which a deep crevice held a slash of shadow.

  There was my handhold, there the ledge for my feet, if I could only get across that dreadful gap . . . But I was nearly foundered, and I knew it. My breath was coming in painful gasps; I had knocked one of my feet; my hands were bleeding.

  I hesitated there, on the brink of the split in the rock. Then I heard the rattle of pebbles behind me – close behind. I turned, a terrified thing at bay, my eyes desperately searching for another way off the top of the stack. To left, to right, a sheer drop of thirty feet to the scree. Before me, the chasm. A hand swung up over the edge of the platform where I stood. A dark-gold head rose after it. Mad blue eyes, rinsed of all humanity, stared into mine.

  I turned and leaped the gap without a second’s thought. I landed on the little ledge. My knee bumped rock, but I hardly felt it as my hands, clawing wildly, found a safe anchorage in the crevice above. Then my knee was in the crevice. With a heave and a wriggle I pulled my body up to it, and was in the chimney, which was narrow enough to let me wedge myself against one side of it while I sought for holds in the other. I swarmed up it like a chimney-boy whose master had lit a fire beneath him.

  Then my hand slid into a deep grip; I braced myself and with one last heave, one final convulsion, dragged myself out of the chim
ney and on to a deep ledge sheltered by an overhang.

  And this time I was cornered. I knew it. Even if I could have climbed the overhang that bulged above me, the impulse had given out; nature had swung back on me. I was finished. And the place where I now found myself was no more than a ledge of rock, some four feet by ten, piled with small boulders and blazing with bell-heather.

  I crouched among the scented flowers and peered down.

  Roderick was standing twenty feet below me at the edge of the gap, his convulsed face lifted to mine. His breathing was ragged and horrible. I saw the sweat gleaming on his flushed cheekbones, and on the knuckles of the hand in which he held the knife . . .

  I screamed then. The sound splintered against the rocks into a million jarring, tearing echoes that ripped the silence of the afternoon into tatters. The raven swept out from high above me with a frightened bark.

  Something flashed past my cheek with the whistle of a whip-lash. The wind of it seared my face. Roderick’s knife struck the cliff behind me, and shattered into a hundred little tinkling notes that were whirled into the bellow of the echo as I screamed again.

  The empty rock flung my terror back at me, hollow, reverberating. The raven swung up, yelling, into the empty blue air. Away to the west, in the greater emptiness, the Cuillin dreamed on indifferently. I crouched in my eyrie high above the sea of cloud, an insignificant insect clinging to a crack in a wall.

  Roderick swore harshly below me, and his now empty hands lifted, the fingers crooked like claws.

  ‘I’m coming up,’ he said on a savage breathless note, and I saw his knees flex for the leap across the gap.

  My fingers scrabbled at the heather, caught up a big jagged rock, and held it poised on the brink of the ledge.

  ‘Keep off!’ My voice was a croak. ‘Stay where you are, or I’ll smash your head in!’