As soon as I had this thought, lazily to myself, I tried to catch it and see what was behind it. I thought hard; I let my mind drift. I asked questions; I made bold statements to see if a bit of my brain would reject them. I drew a map and marked it with farm names, victims’ names, months and even arrows to show where the stranger had sprung from each night. In short, I did every kind of thinking I knew how to do, but it got me nowhere.
Still, cheered even by a vague hint that there was a pattern there somewhere, I turned to what could be thought out here in my room: first, were there any before the spring? Secondly, was there any way to work out who November’s victim was going to be? Or even to narrow it down to a set from which the stranger might choose?
In answer to the first of these questions I felt an enormous pull, like an undertow, towards something my eye would find simply delicious. I longed to say that of course Elspeth was first and I wanted to go even further: to say that there would be exactly one more. Three in the spring, three in the summer and three in the autumn sounded just right, but I should be no kind of detective at all if I could not resist this pull, for it is as spurious as it is ingrained – the feeling we have that all things for good and especially for ill must come in threes, like Goldilocks’s bears and the wolf’s little pigs. Pure superstition, I always told Grant, when she regaled me in sepulchral tones of the third calamity to befall someone.
‘First it was her leg,’ she would say. ‘All over ulcers like the doctors had never seen. Then the very next month her poor old dog that she had had from a pup died in the night, and now, three years to the day after she buried her mother, if she hasn’t gone and lost her grandmother’s locket. And’ – she would pause here to let the thrilling moment reverberate around us – ‘the locket had her grandmother’s and her mother’s hair plaited together with a few little hairs from her doggie’s tail that she took while he lay dying, and that makes . . . three. Madam.’
‘But if she goes blind tomorrow, you won’t count it as number four, will you?’ I would protest. ‘You’ll just start counting again on a new set of three and wait like the ghoul you are for the next instalment.’
‘You can scoff all you like. I’ve seen it too often to doubt it.’
‘And the leg ulcers?’ I would say. ‘What connection to the locket there?’
‘Now,’ Grant would say, drawing herself up and twisting her nose as though she was mixing a dish of waving lotion, ‘you are being disgusting.’ And there would be no ‘madam’ at all because I did not deserve one.
So there might well be more to come after November and there might well have been a few before March. As to predicting who might be next, I could not say. I stared glumly at the paper in front of me for a while, but it was well after eleven, the fire was dying down, my hot bottle had cooled and, I was sorry to notice, I had forgotten to drink a good third of my cocoa. Find Miss September, I printed in thick black letters underneath the map, then I stood, stretched and walked over to warm myself at what remained of the fire before undressing for bed.
Approaching the fireplace, however, meant that I also approached two windows, terribly draughty despite the heavy curtains which the maid had drawn. (I have often thought it an unmistakable expression of the Calvinist soul of Scotland how often a fireplace is set between two windows in a long wall, as though the architect defied us to find any cosiness in his designs. Far preferable is the habit of setting the fires into the inner walls, so that high sofa backs can protect one against icy blasts and the chimneys are clustered prettily about the roofs like birthday-cake candles rather than rearing up looking like battlements around the edges.)
Eventually, I stopped rubbing my hands and turned around to warm my other side, shivering, then stepped over to the bed and debated with myself whether to ring for Grant or just shuffle off my clothes as quickly as possible and hop in. I looked at my watch: almost midnight, rather late for Grant, and besides I should be much warmer with the shuffle and hop. A moment later I climbed into bed, hugging the last warmth in the bottle.
I was getting drowsy despite the temperature when I realised that, in the light from the embers, I could see the curtains trembling. The window must have been left open after the room was aired that morning – I should have known it could not really be that cold, even in a manse – and so I slithered out of bed again trying to leave all the warmth I had managed to muster undisturbed for my return, crossed the floor, parted the curtains and felt along the bottom of the window for a gap. I certainly could not tell by looking, for it was as black a night as any I have ever seen. Right enough, there was a slice of colder air where the window had not been properly fastened and with both hands on the transom I gave it a good downward shove to see if I could close it all the way.
Just then, while my face was pressed almost flat against the glass, I thought I saw something.
I stopped, holding my breath and staring out into the blackness, feeling – as one always does when looking hard into the impenetrable dark – as though my eyes were slightly bulging. Again, very obliquely, I thought I saw it: a flicker to the left somewhere. I latched the window and let the curtains fall shut again, making sure that they were well overlapped and tucked under against the carpet too. Why should there not be a flicker? I asked myself. Someone with a candle visiting a privy. I wriggled back into bed.
I did not know what time it was and did not want to wake myself up again properly by striking a match and looking at my wristwatch, but if it had been midnight when I retired and I had drowsed for an hour before I saw the curtain moving, it was by now rather late for any of the cottagers to be up and about. And then, when I considered it fully, I could not think which precise cottager it would be. Surely that flicker came from the kirk, or the graveyard anyway; there was no cottage garden obliquely opposite the back of the manse.
Well, a very late stroll then, I told myself as at last I dared to stretch my feet down into the chilly reaches of sheet near the footboard, for I never can drop off if I am curled up in a ball. Slowly, delicious sleep began to steal over me, and I wafted down into a half-dream of walking barefoot in long, wet, tickling grass. It was pleasant enough, right up until the moment it ended, as those walking dreams so often do, with a sudden plummet and a startled awakening.
I lay still, waiting for my heart to cease hammering. The difficulty with the late stroll, I now realised, was that I had most definitely seen a candle, not a lantern, and no one would take a candle to go for a walk, even if anyone trying to train a puppy perhaps or barred from smoking their baccy in the house would be out walking on such a night as this. And young Mr Christie walked in the fields, not around the gardens of his neighbours and through the churchyard.
Go back to sleep, I told myself, for if I knew one thing about this case it was that the eventful evenings were a month apart and we were quite midway between the last and the next tonight. Besides, it was ridiculous to imagine that, so soon after telling Mrs Hemingborough how I happened to look out of my window at the precise moment to witness a vital clue, I should do just that. I sank back against my pillows and invited sleep once more, dreamless for choice and lasting until morning.
Needless to say, some indeterminate time later, having jerked awake from an even more calamitous fall in a much more disquieting dream, I had my face pressed to the window again and this time the flickering, although no brighter, was scattered around, as though that first candle had been used to light some more.
14
Even with one cheek flattened against the glass I was never going to see any more than the flickering from here and, not wanting to appear foolish, I was loath to rouse Mr Tait before I knew more definitely what, if anything, was happening. So, casting my mind over the layout of the manse and deciding that the window at the far end of the passage must overlook the graveyard square on, I wrapped myself in my dressing gown and very softly crept to the door. I had to do without slippers for Grant’s latest purchase in that department was a pair of not particularly
well-fitting beaded Turkish mules with terribly clackety soles which made me sound as though I were tap-dancing whenever I moved. In a pair of thick bed socks I eased my bedroom door open and, taking my candle, padded along the dark passageway.
When I got there, however, I found that as well as having heavy curtains drawn across it, the end window was shuttered and the noise I should make opening a set of shutters was impracticable. I looked around at the closed doors on either side of me. Lorna’s bedroom was to the front, in quite another wing, and I was sure I had heard Mr Tait harrumphing from a room near hers in the mornings, so . . . since there was no housekeeper, old governess or other favoured servant who might be given a room on the main floor I felt I was reasonably safe in turning the handle of the door nearest and stepping into the room.
What lay inside did, I will confess, give me a moment’s pause. The good suite of heavy furniture, the immaculate but old-fashioned satins festooning the bed and window, the spray of silk flowers on the bedside table and, above all, the folded nightgown with white prayer book laid on top of it told me that I was in Lorna’s mother’s room and everything I had ever read, from Jane Eyre to the penny dreadfuls Nanny Palmer used to forbid me to look at although she left them lying around, told me to flee.
On the other hand, the curtains were drawn back and even from the door I could see that there was an excellent view of whatever it was flickering away down there in the graveyard. I scuttled over and peered out, snuffing my own candle as I did so.
There were at least four points of light, I thought, although the bare branches of the big trees in the manse driveway obscured the view somewhat. I was sure too that there was more than one person because every so often all the lights would be hidden as though someone crossed in front of them and the crossings were surely too frequent to be just one individual, unless he were running laps.
I hesitated for a moment. I should tell Mr Tait straight away, but he might forbid me to go with him and find out what was going on. If I dressed first it would be harder for him to slip away without me, but I should not waste time dressing before I raised the alarm. There was, I have no shame in admitting it, no question of my striking out on my own; I should have died of fright to walk into a candlelit graveyard scene without someone there to protect me. At this – admittedly rather feeble – thought, at last I remembered. Alec! He was barely five mintues’ walk away.
I threw some clothes on, padded downstairs and stole out onto the porch – Luckenlaw Manse was not the sort of place to lock its doors even at night and so I had no creaky key with which to wake the household. Once outside, I put on my shoes and then, with my lip caught between my teeth, I started down the drive, creeping along on the soft earth at its edge, trying to breathe as softly as I could and straining to see if I could hear anything.
I need not have strained: before I had cleared the gates of the manse, the sounds from beyond the graveyard wall were unmistakable. My scalp prickled and I almost turned back but, summoning reserves of courage from who knows where, I made my feet move again. Keeping to the shadows, shaking with fright, expecting every second to hear a voice raised in alarm or to feel a hand over my mouth, I moved as quickly as I stealthily could out of the gates and along the manse garden wall to the first house in the village square then, with a deep breath, I stepped into the open and raced on tiptoe across the green to the schoolhouse lane and down to the ford. That sound! I began to whimper, unable to stop myself. Skidding on the patches of ice but somehow managing to stay upright, I ran onwards, trying to remember where the footbridge led across to the garden – it was as black as any coal mine down here tonight – until a sudden icy flood around my feet told me I had missed it. I splashed through the stream and sprinted over the grass, banging my leg hard against the stone balustrade at the side of the porch. That sound! It couldn’t be true! I fumbled for the handle, found it, turned it and collapsed inside.
‘Alec!’ I shouted. The cottage was in darkness and I had no idea where anything was except the living room. ‘Alec, wake up! There’s someone in the graveyard.’
‘Wha—’ came a groggy voice to the left of me. ‘Dandy, is that you?’
‘There are people in the graveyard, Alec,’ I said, feeling my way into the room from where his voice had come. ‘Oh God, where are you? Where are your matches?’ I heard the creak as he got out of bed and the rasp of a match being struck and at last his face, owlish with sleep above a striped nightshirt, appeared before me.
‘People?’
‘With candles set out,’ I told him.
‘What are they doing?’ said Alec, reaching for his trousers. ‘Who is it?’
‘I’ve no idea who it is,’ I said, ‘but I know what they’re doing. I heard the scrape of the shovels. Oh Alec, they’re digging.’
He was only a moment dressing and we made better time on the way back up the hill than I had coming down, because Alec took an electric torch and kept it trained on the path in front of us, only switching it off when we reached the village green. Again, feeling horribly exposed even in the blackness we flitted across to the top corner, and then slowly, without a sound, feeling for each footstep before we made it, we crept along, pressed into the hedge, to the corner of the kirkyard wall. I do not know when I realised that we were too late; it came upon me gradually. We were nearly there and yet it was as dark as ever, no flickering. We were at the gate of the kirkyard and yet there was no sound to be heard.
‘Are you sure?’ Alec breathed.
‘Of course I’m sure,’ I said a little louder although still whispering. ‘But we’ve missed them. Switch on your torch again.’
‘Maybe they heard us,’ said Alec. ‘They could be hiding in there.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘They’ve gone.’
Alec turned the switch on his electric torch and I could feel him bracing himself, but I was perfectly at ease now. I knew they were nowhere near.
‘But where have they gone?’ said Alec. ‘It can’t have been down through the village or we would have passed them. Do you think they’re in the church?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I think the church is the very last place they’ll be.’
I sounded bleak with the aftermath of terror, even to myself, and Alec, hearing it too, put an arm round me.
‘Dandy,’ he said. ‘Are you absolutely sure you heard what you said you heard? Could it have been tree branches scraping in the wind?’
‘What wind?’ I retorted. ‘And what about the candles?’
‘Lovers?’ said Alec, sounding doubtful. ‘A poacher?’ He heard me sigh and hastened to placate me. ‘But let’s look around by all means,’ he said. ‘Let’s check thoroughly and see if anything’s out of place. Where shall we start?’
‘We don’t need to look around,’ I said. ‘I know where the out-of-place thing is going to be. I know what they were doing.’ And taking his torch, I led him to the spot, picking my way between the graves as though I was stepping through a flower meadow on a summer’s day, all fear gone. When I got there, I played the torch briefly over the scene and then swung the beam backwards to light Alec’s way.
‘Well?’ he said, when he drew up beside me. I shone the torch down at our feet once more. The grave was open and the coffin lid lay teetering on the heap of earth at its side. I played the torch around. There was one candle left there, forgotten, stuck with dripped wax to a jam pot lid.
‘Sh-shine it inside,’ said Alec, stuttering with cold or fear, I could not say which. I did as he asked and we both looked at the emptiness of it, the white folds of the linen covers flapped back, making it look grotesquely like a picnic basket down there.
‘Now tell me I’m silly to think there could be witches,’ I said.
‘Wh-whose grave is it?’ said Alec.
‘Can’t you guess?’ I asked him. ‘I knew she had something to do with all of this. I just knew it.’ I moved the beam of the torch up to the headstone. It was partially obscured. I could make out In my father’s house are man
y mansions but the rest of it, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, was lost under the earth which had been thrown up out of the grave.
Alec took some persuading that he could not accompany me to fetch Mr Tait and I suppose it was gratifying that he did not wave me off into a night full of grave robbers without a care, but we wasted valuable time arguing before he finally gave way.
‘Well, at least let me see you safely back to the manse,’ he said. ‘Then I’m going to come back here and hide behind a headstone to see what happens.’
‘Darling, you can’t,’ I said. ‘He’ll probably call the police and if they come and find you lurking about they’ll arrest you.’
‘I could jump over the wall and run away if I hear them,’ he said, sounding rather mulish for him, as though determined to be heroic in some way.
‘If they come with klaxons blaring and wake up the village and then one of the awakened villagers sees you leaping over his garden wall, you’re likely to be shot. On balance, I’d rather you were arrested.’
‘Oh very well,’ he said at last. ‘But promise me you’ll come down first thing and tell me what happened.’ He switched his torch on again and held it aloft, training the beam up the manse drive. I squeezed his arm and squelched off in my sodden shoes, turning and waving before I opened the door.
It was easy to tell which was Mr Tait’s room; a noise like someone trying to drink soup through a straw came rumbling from behind one of the doors, a noise Lorna could never have produced, even after an evening of neat gin and Woodbines. I knocked softly and immediately the rumble stopped.
‘Come in, my dear,’ said Mr Tait’s voice. I hesitated and then opened the door and entered, blinking, into the darkness. ‘I did not hear the telephone,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you were disturbed, Lorna. Who is it who needs me?’
Bury Her Deep Page 21