‘But I’ve heard hints of troubles too dreadful to name,’ I said, trying to remember where and what exactly. Mr Tait only shook his head, his eyes closed patiently. ‘Well,’ I said at last, stuck for any other conclusion, ‘why on earth did you spoon it out in such tiny spoonfuls instead of just telling me everything right from the start?’ Mr Tait opened his eyes again and had the grace to look sheepish.
‘Shall I answer honestly?’ he began, leading me away at last. ‘Foolish as it seems now, since it’s all come out in under a day, I hoped that you would not need to know. Also, I thought if I told you before you had been here you might decide you wanted no part of it, whereas if you got the scent . . .’
I was forced to concede both points: I might well have felt this hotbed of phantoms and curses was no place for me, but now I was here in the thick of it, a dozen sealed chambers concealing a hundred skeletons could not drive me away. I admitted as much to him with a rueful smile.
We were back in his library before I spoke again. Mr Tait, displaying another of his armoury of priestly skills, waited quite contentedly with his arms folded across his ample frontage to see what I had to say.
‘Might I ask one more thing?’ I began. ‘I’ve been mildly wondering why Lorna was not told of my true mission here. Was it because you thought she would pour it all out and sway my judgement?’
‘No, no,’ said Mr Tait, shifting uncomfortably as he often did when Lorna’s name came up. ‘Lorna and I do not discuss the matter daily over tea, but no, it wasn’t that. More that Lorna has a very trusting nature, almost to the point where we could call her suggestible. Certainly, she is easily led. And although she is no gossip, she is inclined to be rather warm and open with her many friends. Miss McCallum and Miss Lindsay, for instance.’
‘Not to mention the Luckenlaw House contingent,’ I added.
‘Indeed,’ said Mr Tait. ‘It seemed best.’
I agreed, although I did not entirely go along with the idea of Lorna being easily led. She had none of the chameleon-like quality of the truly suggestible, picking up neither the arch amusement of the Howies nor Miss McCallum’s cheery vigour, but remaining her own mild, calm, kindly self whatever was going on around her. It was a quality I much admired, since I was forced to be much more like an egg with a truffle these days, fitting in anywhere, all things to all men. (The thought that it was chiefly in the immediate pursuit of confidences and the ultimate pursuit of truth was not much comfort. To be a sucker-up and a flatterer when ulterior motives prompt one into it is hardly a characteristic one would wish included in one’s eulogy.)
A clock chimed five as we sat there and the sound of it, doleful and muffled as it was, jolted me back to life.
‘I must go,’ I said. ‘I still need to pop in to see Annie Pellow and Hugh is expecting me home.’
‘Ah, Hugh,’ said Mr Tait. ‘He was a fine boy and he’s grown into a fine man.’
I am not entirely sure why I heard this as a rebuke; perhaps because with all the names and dates, the farms and lanes, the lurid tales of the dark stranger, and the whisper of sabotage whirling around my head like dust motes in winter sunshine, I needed Alec Osborne as I had never needed him before.
‘One thing,’ I said, rising. ‘Miss Lindsay is stuck on the notion of an irate husband with a grudge against the Rural, Mrs Fraser is determined that the stranger is not of woman born at all, and Elspeth no longer knows what to think, but is there any hard evidence against this Christie fellow? Did the police question him?’
‘Not a shred,’ said Mr Tait. ‘There is nothing more than parochial insularity at work there. He’s a newcomer and he was given a farm to run that was running just fine without him, that’s all. The Howies were perfectly within their rights of course, but changes are always unwelcome in a backward-looking place like Luckenlaw.’
8
‘I’m pleased you got along so well with the Reverend,’ said Hugh the next morning. ‘He’s a fine chap, and his daughter seems a very good sort too. Exactly the kind of people one wants to encourage.’ Touching, I suppose, the way that Hugh begins each day fresh-faced and eager, believing that today will be the day he wins the battles against weather, vermin, prices and, in the case of his current tribulations with the low water pressure in his stock-feeding system, gravity itself and that it will also be the day when his wife, out of the blue, becomes the woman he wishes she would be and takes up with kindly clergy and their wholesome daughters for a change.
‘So you’ve met Lorna, have you?’ I said, rather surprised. I had thought the yearly luncheons at Gilverton were Hugh’s only connection with Mr Tait these days.
‘I’ve stopped off now and then, yes,’ said Hugh. ‘I’m sure I told you I was there a few years back to watch the excavation. In fact, I asked you to come along.’
‘This would be the archaeologists opening the chamber?’ I had no memory of the episode, but I could believe that Hugh, hearing of scientists moving earth and digging holes in hillsides, would have been right there with his tail wagging. Neither did I have any trouble believing that he would have asked me to join him as though suggesting a picnic, nor that he would actually have believed I might come, nor that I would have heard the word ‘dig’ and refused, without listening to any of the details. I did think, however, that it might have registered when he told me what they had found.
‘I don’t remember you regaling me with the thrilling outcome,’ I said. Hugh cleared his throat and became intensely interested in sawing the top off his boiled egg.
‘Well, no,’ he said at last. ‘Beastly business. It gave me nightmares and I thought it best not to trouble you.’ I smiled at that. I suppose it is far too late now for Hugh ever to change from being the absolute Victorian which, let us face it, he is.
‘Did you actually see her?’ I said, knowing that I would be shocking him but agog for details.
‘No, thank heavens,’ he said, shuddering. ‘There wasn’t room for Mr Tait and me inside what with all the university chaps and their equipment; we were supposed to get in for a poke around once they had finished. But after the discovery it wouldn’t have seemed right, somehow.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ I said. Sometimes Hugh’s chivalry brought out an answering indelicacy in me that was far beyond my real measure of it. In fact, sometimes Hugh and I seemed as bad as the boys: Donald gorging himself sick on oysters just because Teddy was scared to try them; Teddy half drowning himself swimming underwater simply because Donald had never learned. ‘I mean to say, we tramp around cathedrals and chapels eagerly enough, don’t we? People sprawl on tombs and take rubbings.’
‘People,’ said Hugh witheringly, ‘sprawl in public parks in their bathing dresses playing gramophones, but that doesn’t mean people like us have to ape them,’ and he gave me the look, a quizzical frown with lips pushed forwards making his moustache bristle, which he has started giving me with depressing regularity this last short while.
This look had puzzled me at first, I must own, but recently I have come to understand it. My life, quite simply, has changed. I have looked upon evil and battled it for one thing but, more to the point, I have sat at cottagers’ doors and shared cool drinks of water with them; I have watched a wise woman at her herbs; I have clambered out of a shale mine in the dead of night and walked into a public bar in the light of day; I have interviewed laundry maids, kitchen maids, barmaids and coalmen and run about woods, along beaches and through empty houses as I have never run in my life since I was a girl. Why, only the day before this breakfast, I had raced up a drive and beaten a farmer’s wife to the dairy.
My life then, as I say, has changed and inevitably that is beginning to show, even to one as unobservant and uninterested as Hugh. It would be far odder if all of my experiences had rolled off me like water from a duck and I had remained exactly the same creature as before, languidly proper, decently shocked by nasty stories and primly disdainful of anything which smacked too much of pulsing reality. Of course, from Hugh’s p
oint of view, lacking the knowledge which would serve as explanation, the new heartiness and vulgarity have no cause at all, hence his frequent recourse to these little reminders about people like us and my just as frequent attempts not to giggle at them.
‘What did you make of it?’ I asked him. ‘Who did you think she was? Did the archaeologists have any ideas? Did Mr Tait?’
‘What on earth do you mean, Dandy? “Who she was”?’
‘Or why she was in there, rather. The Luckenlaw villagers have whipped up no end of lurid stories, I can tell you. But what did you think?’
‘I think: “We should not make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter”,’ said Hugh. I blinked at him. ‘Goldsmith,’ he added. I blinked again. The habit of quotation appeared to be taking root. ‘Sound thinking, if you ask me,’ he concluded stoutly and retired behind his newspaper taking his piece of toast with him.
‘I’m motoring over to Dunelgar,’ I said to the newspaper presently, ‘if you had any message for Alec.’ Silence greeted this. ‘I shall bring back news of Minnie for you.’ Hugh had recently given Alec one of the latest litter from his favourite spaniel bitch.
‘Milly,’ said Hugh, unable to resist correcting me although he rustled the newspaper into a tighter and more impenetrable shield as he did so.
‘And how is Hugh?’ said Alec, as soon as I had stepped down onto the drive an hour later and taken a minute to make sure that Bunty and Milly were going to play sensibly and not need to be chaperoned. Bunty, having subjected Alec to her usual besotted greeting, pranced about, whining with excitement, twisting herself around and whipping her tail as the fat little bundle that was Milly darted in and out of her legs, squeaking and nipping at her, with her tail going round like a suckling lamb’s.
‘Stern, grumpy and quoting Oliver Goldsmith,’ I answered. ‘I cannot imagine what the matter is and I cannot be bothered trying.’
‘“All his faults are such that one loves him still the better for them”,’ said Alec, although whether he was talking about Hugh or Goldsmith was not quite clear.
‘Don’t you start,’ I answered. ‘Now give me some coffee and get ready to listen and have brilliant ideas, because I am absolutely stumped.’
We went through the passages to the conservatory at the back, partly so we could keep an eye on the dogs, now tumbling together on the lawns which stretched away behind the house. Alec, living here, was used to the place by now but I still had to stop in doorways sometimes and gather myself, willing away the memories of the first time I had come, the first time I had seen a case through to its grisly end. Thankfully, Dunelgar was close enough to Gilverton for me to avoid ever spending the night and so I was never forced to climb the stairs and recreate the nastiest memory of all. Besides, the conservatory was an easy place in which to ignore the ghosts: lush with ferns and glossy palms, the air a shingle-wrecking fug from the steam pipes, the floor tiles and window panes sparkling, it was hard to recall the dusty emptiness which used to reign here.
‘I do hope Bunty doesn’t squash her,’ I said, watching the dogs rolling together down a slope towards the obligatory bird table at the bottom, disturbing the collection of sparrows busy with their morning titbits. (When Hugh gets a bee in his bonnet he can become quite peculiar and he had been pressing these little bird tables on all our friends.)
‘Fat chance,’ said Alec. ‘She’s as unsquashable as a beach ball. I simply cannot get Barrow not to feed her treats and if she gets into the kitchens . . .’ Barrow was Alec’s new valet cum butler. He was a terribly smart young man, born in London but trained at Chatsworth no less and, while heaven only knew why he had chosen to incarcerate himself in a bachelor establishment in Perthshire which did not even run to a housekeeper, the resulting power was beginning to turn his head and he was already shaping up to be the kind of dictator who would make Pallister look like a mother’s help.
‘He’s quite a find, nevertheless, your Barrow,’ I said. ‘You look positively svelte.’ Alec shrugged the compliment off, but it was true. His hair shone, his nails gleamed, and although he was wearing tweeds and brogues he exuded the air of a man in a silk dressing gown with his feet in a basin of water and scented oils.
‘It’s the tweeds,’ he said. ‘Feel that.’ He shot a leg out and I rubbed a piece of the cloth between thumb and forefinger.
‘Heavenly,’ I said. ‘Wasted on you.’
‘That’s what I keep telling Barrow,’ said Alec, ‘but he’s very determined. Now,’ he went on, leaning down to scoop up Milly, who had tired as quickly as puppies do and had come waddling in from the garden to find him, ‘tell me all about the case.’
‘It’s a nasty one,’ I said. ‘A man, no one knows who, jumping out at girls and women at night, assaulting them and running away.’
‘Every night?’
‘No, far from it. Not exactly frequently, but not quite irregularly – when he does show up it’s on the night of the full moon, or’ – I held up my hand for him to let me finish, for his face had fallen and he had started to protest at the thought of the full moon – ‘or rather after the SWRI meetings which happen to be held on the night of the full moon. Scottish Women’s Rural Institute,’ I added, guessing that I would need to explain.
‘Sounds like a job for the local police,’ said Alec. ‘Where do you come in?’
‘That is one of the many peculiarities of the case,’ I said. ‘The local police were called in, and they concluded that the girls who reported the attacks were making it up. Refused to have any more to do with it.’
‘A very strange thing to conclude,’ said Alec. ‘Did these girls have a history of telling tall tales?’
I thought back to Elspeth and to Annie Pellow, whom I had interviewed at the Colinsburgh pub on my way home. She had told me what was fast becoming a very familiar tale: a swift approach, a swift attack – ripping her hat as he wrenched it off her head regardless of the stoutly stitched elastic – and a swift retreat whence he had come.
‘Not the girls, no,’ I said, ‘although Luckenlaw itself has a fair talent for horrors. The first was a perfectly ordinary sort – a dairy maid from one of the local farms – and nothing I saw when I interviewed her makes me think she was the type for silliness. The second girl seemed just as sensible. I haven’t yet spoken to the third,’ I said, ‘although I’ve seen her and she didn’t appear the flighty sort.’
‘And when you say they were assaulted,’ said Alec, ‘assaulted how?’
I flicked through the little notebook where I had been jotting down the details of my investigations.
‘What have they been saying?’ I mused. ‘Ah, here we are. Pinching, plucking, nipping, tearing, pulling hair, ripping off clothes – well, a hat – that kind of thing. Anyway, those three happened all in a row. Then after a break, Mrs Fraser, a farmer’s wife, was attacked in August. She has a different view of the matter. She firmly believes that the stranger was . . . don’t laugh, Alec, promise me . . . the devil.’
Alec did not laugh, but I could tell it was a struggle.
‘Then two nights ago, Mrs Hemingborough, another farmer’s wife, and quite the most practical woman one could imagine – she had just finished giving a demonstration of chicken-plucking – was attacked. Her reaction is the strangest of all.’
Alec waited for me to explain.
‘She denied that it happened,’ I said. ‘Even though the attack was witnessed by one person – Jessie Holland, a farm worker’s wife – and the fellow was seen approaching by another – Vashti Howie, who saw him from her motor car – Mrs Hemingborough just tidied up all the chicken feathers, told no one and denied it until she was blue in the face when I challenged her.’
‘Chicken feathers?’ said Alec.
‘From the plucking. Now, no one has been able to put a name to this chap, but let me read you some of the descriptions.’ I flipped through my little notebook again, tracing the scribbles with the tip of my pencil. ‘Swooping, flitting, flying over
walls, fleet as the wind, sounding like owls’ wings, running like a deer and above all . . . snaky.’ I paused to see what effect this description would have. Alec merely raised his eyebrows and stared at me, all the while continuing to stroke Milly’s silky ears back over her head. ‘Everyone also agrees that he has a distinctive smell,’ I said. ‘Although no one can agree what it is. Elspeth said eggs, Mrs Fraser said yeast, possibly beer, and Annie Pellow said flowers – bluebells, cowslips and something else, something spicy but definitely still floral, she was sure.’ Alec’s eyebrows were still raised.
‘Eggs?’ he said. ‘Sulphur, do you think she means? Sulphur, also sometimes known as brimstone?’
‘Yes, it gave me pause too, for a moment,’ I said. ‘But then what of the yeast and flowers? Would it be possible to mistake sulphur for either of them? Could anyone imagine that a flower would smell eggy?’
‘And what about the woman with the feathers? Did she get a sniff?’
‘She’s denying it, remember,’ I said. ‘And the witness was too far away.’
‘So what’s the feeling around the rest of the village?’ said Alec. ‘Amongst the non-victims, I mean.’
‘There are various schools of thought,’ I said. ‘The redoubtable Miss Lindsay and Miss McCallum, spinsters both and respectively the schoolmistress and the postmistress, suspect a reactionary saboteur intent on stopping the SWRI movement before it takes hold – they’ve had names shouted at them in the street. I rather go along with this and so does the Reverend Mr Tait, who called me in – he’d heard about me, if you can believe it – but at least one of the two cat-calling husbands in question is middle-aged, although wiry with it, and anyway, both their wives have since joined. The other sane and sensible possibility is that it’s just some unfortunate with a monomania, who needs to be pitied and locked up.’
‘And is there anyone around the neighbourhood who seems to fit the bill?’
Bury Her Deep Page 12