‘Heavens,’ I said. ‘Who was it?’
‘All that they could say was that it was the body of a young girl who had died by violent means.’
‘A murder victim?’
‘Just so.’
‘But how long had she been there?’ I said. ‘I thought you said the chamber was sealed.’
‘Oh it was, it was,’ said Mr Tait. ‘I’ve misled you, I think. When I say body I should more properly say skeleton. The skeleton of a girl. And as to how long she had been there, there was no telling. Hundreds of years anyway. That much the scientists could say at a glance, for her poor bones were as light as a bird’s and as soft as biscuits.’ I shuddered. ‘Their phrase, Mrs Gilver, not mine. And it’s only a small part of their . . . callousness, will we call it? Detachment is kinder, perhaps. Because of course they wanted to take her away to their laboratories and try to find out more about her, but I put my foot down.’
‘You did?’
‘They called on me when they found her, and after that I felt I had a say in the matter, as minister of the parish. I felt it was my duty to the poor child to see that she had a decent burial at last.’
‘I don’t suppose there was any thought of trying to find out what happened?’ I said. ‘The police?’
‘They came along,’ said Mr Tait. ‘They wrote in their notebooks. But seventy years is the rule for starting up with a murder inquiry, you know, and this body was hundreds of years old, maybe even a thousand – nobody really knew.’
‘Couldn’t you tell from the style of her clothes?’ I said. ‘Or had they rotted away?’
‘I try to hope that they had rotted away,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Certainly there were no clothes to be seen.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said feebly.
‘And they say she was only a child. Perhaps twelve or thirteen.’
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ I said. ‘Even if it was a thousand years ago, one doesn’t like to think of a child of thirteen . . .’
‘Indeed not,’ said Mr Tait. ‘I suppose that’s partly why I was so determined to get the poor girl buried. I thought it would be the final indignity to have her taken away to some laboratory and . . .’
‘I agree,’ I said, grimacing at the thought of it. ‘And so she’s buried here? At Luckenlaw?’
‘She is,’ said Mr Tait, with a hard edge to his voice. ‘And so we come to the crux of the matter. She was buried in the face of some opposition.’ I wondered at that for a moment.
‘You mean there was a worry that she might be much older than a thousand years. Too old for a Christian graveyard?’
‘That’s rather a sophisticated line of argument for those who were doing the arguing, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘It was more a feeling that if she had been killed and denied burial in the first place it must have been for good reason.’
‘Surely not,’ I said. ‘That’s horrid.’
‘Roots run deep in a place like this,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Some of those making the most noise about it were no doubt thinking that if their own ancestors had decided she was to be dishonoured then who were they to gainsay it now.’
‘But if she were a thief or a murderess or something dreadful like that, she would still have been buried. Somewhere, surely.’
‘Ah, but that’s not what they were imagining at all,’ said Mr Tait. ‘This is what I’m trying to tell you. There were those – and this was only a few years ago, remember – who thought the bones should be burned at the stake, who wondered why she hadn’t been dealt with that way in the first place. They thought my giving her rest was a sign that I had been taken in by the devil himself. Yes, my stock fell sharply over that business. And it has stayed rather depressed in some folk’s estimations ever since. So, when Mrs Fraser came to tell me about her recent ordeal and I tried to reason with her – tried to get something as trifling as a description from her – I’m afraid she took it as more evidence that I had lost my way.’
My head was reeling. The only time in my life before I had felt so dizzy was when I had been persuaded to dance the Viennese Waltz after drinking two glasses of champagne at a hunt ball and had had to go and stand on the terrace for fear I might disgrace myself, and, while young men in high spirits can be expected to whirl their partners around without a care, I had never dreamed that a minister of the kirk sitting in his study in a manse in Fife could make my head swirl in just that way again. Witches, lucky chambers, ghostly strangers? I needed some fresh air.
Miss Lindsay was in the school playground again, waving off the last of her charges for the day, and when she saw me she raised her arm higher to include me in the salute. Here was quite another kettle of fish. Here was respite and a return to cool sanity after the unexpectedly torrid session in the kitchen at Balniel and the staggering interview with the good Reverend, so I turned my steps into the school lane passing the last of the stragglers and presented myself just as Miss Lindsay was drawing the gates closed. Hospitably – for who could blame her if she had wanted nothing but peace and quiet after a long day with a roomful of children; I should have been lying down with vinegar paper had it been me – she threw the gates wide again and invited me in.
‘Still among us, Mrs Gilver,’ she said. ‘Come away in and have a cup of tea.’
Minutes later we were ensconced in her sitting room, where a kettle was already beginning to pipe and a tray of biscuits, which I can only assume she had thrown together with schoolmistressly competence either before breakfast or over luncheon, was scenting the air and making my mouth water. Not that Miss Lindsay seemed the domestic type overall. The sitting room was well provided with books and dust and rather sparse when it came to the lacy covers, china rabbits and framed studio portraits of loved ones which I had always imagined the home of a woman who lived alone might boast, extrapolating from the knick-knacks which had cluttered up the tops of our dressing tables at school. She did not strike me as the sentimental type either. She might wear a heart-shaped brooch on her black cardigan jersey, as Lorna did too, but there was no rose nor ribbon here.
‘I’ve had the most extraordinary afternoon,’ I said, dropping into a sofa, rather lumpy and needing a cushion but a far more comfortable perch than Mrs Fraser’s kitchen chair or the seat in Mr Tait’s study, since it seemed unlikely that the devil and his minions would be joining us here for tea – china tea too, I noticed, as Miss Lindsay spooned it into the pot. ‘It began as an attempt to ensure satisfaction for my audience next month. I meant to ask around and form an idea for the content of my talk.’ As usual at the mention of the talk, even from out of my own mouth, my insides made their presence felt. I ignored them and went on. ‘But my choice of informants conspired against me. I went to Mrs Palmer at Easter Luck and then to Mrs Fraser at Balniel and I’m afraid that poor old household budgets didn’t stand a chance.’
Miss Lindsay, proffering a cup and a biscuit, gave a slight sigh and rolled her eyes wearily.
‘I can imagine,’ she said. ‘At least I can imagine what Mrs Fraser had to say. She’s a pillar of the kirk and she’s one of those who to use the local parlance “wid dae little for God if the devil wiz deid.”’
‘What do you make of it?’ I asked her.
‘The “dark stranger”?’ she said with emphasis almost so heavy as to be ironic. I thought this was a bit much since she was the only one of the entire Rural Institute who was not required to walk home after the meetings and so have to face him. ‘I can’t say I’m surprised, but it’s rotten luck just the same and if I got my hands on the scoundrel, I wouldn’t be responsible for what happened to him.’ Her annoyance, dismissal of the man as a scoundrel and desire to give him a good punch on the nose were just about the first normal reaction to the entire affair I had come across since I got here.
‘Who do you think is behind it?’ I asked her. ‘Have you any idea?’
‘Oh, a husband, I’m sure,’ said Miss Lindsay. ‘Or a father. Even a little band of them perhaps. Who knows how organised they might get to win the day.’ An
d as quickly as that, I discovered that Miss Lindsay had just as many peculiar ideas, albeit of quite a different stripe, as anyone else. ‘They want to stamp us out, you see,’ she went on. ‘You’ve no idea the trouble we had to get the Rural up and running, Mrs Gilver. Just to secure one evening a month – one a month! – away from the children and chickens and mending.’
‘Well, Mr Tait hinted at it,’ I said.
‘Mr Tait didn’t have to bear the brunt,’ said Miss Lindsay stiffly. ‘Mr Tait is treated with respect wherever he goes.’ This was far from being true but I did not correct her. ‘No one would call names after him,’ she finished with a sniff.
‘Who called names after you?’ I asked, thinking that here was the first whiff of a suspect, for surely Miss Lindsay must have recognised at least the voice of the caller.
‘Mr McAdam,’ she said. ‘Although he denies it. I saw him quite clearly at my gate. And Mr Hemingborough.’
‘Mr Hemingborough?’ I blinked at her in surprise. ‘But his wife is a member.’
‘Now she is,’ said Miss Lindsay. ‘She joined in the summer with Mrs Palmer – I’ve heard that she wears the watch-chain in that house, so I daresay he couldn’t prevent her. But last winter he stopped his cart on my lane and called me some very unpleasant names.’
‘Such as?’ I asked her, but she only shook her head, flushed slightly, and concentrated on nibbling away furiously at her biscuit. ‘Mr Tait said there were political concerns,’ I hinted.
‘Oh, that too,’ Miss Lindsay admitted. ‘They found out that Miss McCallum and I had gone on the Women’s March and decided we were planning to lead Luckenlaw into revolution, beginning with their wives.’
‘But you saw them off,’ I said, suppressing the thought that two spinsters from the Women’s March would have sent exactly those same tremors through Gilverton and, I admit, through me.
‘And now, since the men,’ this was spoken in very withering tones, ‘can’t bully us into giving up they – or at least one of them – are trying to sabotage our efforts by frightening the women away. And succeeding. We’ll never see Mrs Fraser or young Elspeth again.’
‘But Mrs Hemingborough and Mrs Palmer started coming along after the trouble began,’ I reminded her. ‘And didn’t the Howie ladies join rather recently too?’
At the mention of the Howie ladies, Miss Lindsay pursed her lips.
‘The meetings were never meant for the likes of them,’ she said. ‘And I am sure that the unfortunate event in July could have been handled perfectly discreetly if only they hadn’t picked that very meeting to roll up to.’
‘This was the Wisconsin preacher?’ I prompted, as agog to hear the details as I was unable to imagine them.
‘And his wife,’ breathed Miss Lindsay with such a look of anguish that I could not bring myself to ask any more. Her thoughts, however, soon returned to the Howies and anger rallied her. ‘Of course, they’ve been there every month since, hoping for sport,’ she said. ‘And I don’t deny, Mrs Gilver, that if I could see a way of getting them out and keeping them out, I would not hesitate to use it.’
I thought quietly to myself that Miss Lindsay was not a socialist in the classic mould, being rather keen on getting precisely her own way.
‘So, apart from Mr Hemingborough and Mr McAdam,’ I said, getting back to the central issue, ‘is there anyone else you can think of who might be behind it?’ She shook her head apparently without giving the question much thought. ‘Or looking at it from another angle – opportunity instead of motive for a change – is there any newcomer, any loner, any odd type? Anyone at all who wasn’t born here and doesn’t have ten generations of ancestors and a web of relations to vouch for his good standing?’ I wanted to see if the same name would pop up again, unbidden.
‘I suppose you mean Jock Christie,’ said Miss Lindsay. ‘I’m not sure who first started bandying his name around, as if a Luckenlaw man who’d lived here all his life couldn’t be behind it. They’re all the same. It could be any of them.’
I took my leave shortly after, finding Miss Lindsay’s jaded view of the male sex as unhelpful, in the end, as Mrs Fraser’s peculiar fixation and Mrs Hemingborough’s even more peculiar dismissal of the stranger altogether. At least there was an explanation of sorts for it, however, even if her spinsterhood and her view of men were a chicken and an egg of cause and outcome. As to the others, I still did not find Mr Tait’s explanation satisfactory. It was one thing surely for spooky discoveries in the dark hillside to bring with them a few legends, but quite another for spooky stories to be the first choice if ever an explanation were needed for anything at all.
As I skirted the green, I heard the children’s voices raised, as usual, for a skipping game. They carried easily in the still afternoon and I recognised the rhyme.
‘Not last night but the night before,’ they sang, ‘Thirteen grave robbers came to my door.’
I shivered and then, smiling as I remembered Mr Tait telling me not to listen too closely, I turned away and almost missed the rest of it.
‘Dig her up and rattle her bones.
Bury her deep, she’s all alone.
Dark night, moonlight,
Haunt me till my hair’s white.
Moonlight, dark night,
Shut the coffin lid tight.’
I stopped with a gasp, mouthing the words over to myself, and then shook my head in disbelief at my own stupidity, at my wide-eyed trust of my charming employer. Mr Tait, I now saw, while making a great show of answering my every question, had been far from candid with me. He had fed me the story drip by drip – of the sealed chamber, its opening and the discovery there – all the time stressing that here were more examples of the kind of nonsense that credulous villagers might believe. Here were further instances of nastiness, nothing more. But that girl in the hillside was not just another story. She was at the heart of this story. She was the key.
Before I could help it my steps had turned for the gate into the churchyard and I was walking amongst the headstones, searching, noting the names – the Palmers and Frasers, Gows and McAdams – reading the verses inscribed near the ground as though intended to be as much a message for the grave’s occupant as for those walking above. Suffer the little children to come unto me, I read and Even so in Christ shall all be made alive, listening to the teasing, lilting sing-song: ‘Knock, knock, who’s there? Knock, knock, who’s there?’ The girls were evidently in fine step today, the chant going on and on, fainter as I passed behind the church to the shadowy side where the ground of the graveyard began to slope up with the rise of the law. Here the earth was soft and the gravestones mossy and lichened. Here was Mrs Tait, beloved wife and devoted mother, Father into thy hands I commend my spirit. Here too under an enormous monument, bristling with curlicues, was the grave of the Reverend Empson, Mr Tait’s forerunner, and the rather more confident: Well done thou good and faithful servant. Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord. I came back around the side of the church. My feet, cold and clumsy, were slipping on the soggy tussocks, and the girls’ voices were beginning to sound weary, slowing a little. ‘Knock, knock. Who’s there? Knock, knock. Who’s there?’ I was almost back where I had started. ‘Knock, knock. Who’s there? Caught you!’
There it was. This must be it. A stone cross with no name, no date of birth or death but only the words: Buried here 21st June 1919 AD and along the bottom In my father’s house are many mansions and Her sins, which are many, are forgiven.
‘A hard-won compromise,’ said a voice behind me and I jumped, pressing my hand to my chest.
‘I didn’t hear you, Mr Tait,’ I said.
‘I saw you come in the gate and guessed what you’d be looking for,’ he said. ‘I came to guide you to it, but of course, you with your detective’s nose . . .’ He smiled at me and tucked my hand under his arm.
‘What did you mean by a compromise?’ I said. Mr Tait gave a laugh that was three parts sorrow.
‘It was not our finest hour at Luckenlaw,�
�� he said. ‘I told you there were those who would have denied her burial altogether. They certainly wouldn’t have stood for what I suggested first: “To be with Christ”, which is far better.’
‘Very apt, I should have said, considering.’
‘They would rather have had: “Strait is the gate and narrow the way.”’ He laughed again and I almost joined him.
‘I saw that on a headstone once,’ I said. ‘I could hardly believe it. Imagine choosing such words for one’s dear departed. It’s almost like saying, “Good luck, but I don’t fancy your chances.” How did you prevail?’
‘Oh, quite easily in the end,’ said Mr Tait. ‘It’s my church and what I say goes.’
This, I reflected, was hardly very lamb of God (which is what vicars are usually aiming for), but I can imagine that it was effective and, remembering I should be suffused with just this spirit of getting the job done, I decided to talk plainly to him.
‘You misled me,’ I began. ‘I have been mystified about why no one fully believes in this dark stranger and you have let me be so, knowing all along what a starring role this poor child has in the current drama.’
‘Indeed,’ said Mr Tait.
‘Even though everyone agrees that the dark stranger is a “he” and the archaeologists were sure that that skeleton was a “she”.’
‘True,’ he acknowledged.
‘So,’ I went on, ‘shall we say that by putting her into hallowed ground you have awakened the devil himself?’
‘That’s certainly one version,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Not by any means the only one, but I’ve heard it.’
‘It’s what Mrs Fraser thinks. How did she put it? That you unleashed the beast and gave it succour.’
‘Shelter anyway,’ agreed Mr Tait. ‘Other versions would have it not only that the luck has left Luckenlaw since she was released but that now her spirit walks abroad, bringing calamity.’
‘There has certainly been a run of poor luck around the farms anyway,’ I said, but Mr Tait cut me off.
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘My farmers’ wives are far too canny to blame dry wells and beef prices on this tortured soul.’
Bury Her Deep Page 11