It was while they were fumbling with the van’s double back doors that they received their greatest shock so far. Miss Seeton, her upturned face open to the elements—to the refreshing powers of water—suddenly wriggled, coughed, and opened her eyes.
“Oh,” she said, closing them again. “Oh, my head . . .”
The former occupants of the hut gazed at one another in horror. Miss Seeton moaned faintly, and blinked. Her eyes drifted open, unfocussed, as the rain continued to fall.
“Oh, dear,” murmured Miss Seeton. “My umbrella . . .”
After a paralysed silence, Alexander found his voice. “So what’s the matter with you, gawping gaibies all, and the puir wee soul catching her death of pneumonia under your very eyes? Archie, man, open that door smartish and get her in the dry, while I . . .”
Without waiting to see how his instructions were being followed, Alexander turned and headed back to the hut, while the rain continued to fall and Miss Seeton to regain, slowly but surely, consciousness. Nobody cared to set her down on the ground while they fumbled with the handle of the door; they found themselves uttering apologies for the delay and similar soothing words, while Archie’s hands, slippery with a combination of perspiration and rain, struggled to open the recalcitrant lock.
Inside the shelter, the now heavy rain drumming on the roof, Alexander prosecuted his search for Miss Seeton’s umbrella. She’d been carrying it when she was ambushed, as he recalled, but in all the kerfuffle she’d dropped everything she carried—as anyone would have done, in the circumstances. They’d retrieved her handbag and wrapped it in the larger bundle, replaced the binoculars round her neck . . . but they’d never even noticed the umbrella, and where it had gone was anybody’s guess, with people taking off jackets and putting things down and moving them around . . .
And then he saw it: black silk, metal shaft, crook handle, lying half-buried among the components of . . . the Device—lying beneath that length of metal pipe which Archie had rejected as too heavy for bludgeoning purposes. During the scrimmage of the attack—the encounter, he amended silently—it must have been set rolling down on top of the umbrella; which was a fraction its size and weight.
“And mebbe it’s been damaged,” muttered Alexander, as he inspected the slim, neatly furled shape for tears or snags. He whistled silently as he recognised the hallmark, and knew what the handle and shaft must be made of. “Gold,” he said, and glanced out through the open door in the direction taken by the gold umbrella’s owner. “A gold brolly—well, well.” And his opinion of Miss Seeton rose considerably.
“She’ll no grudge me saving myself a soaking,” he said, as he prepared to open the umbrella before plunging out into the cloudburst. “No use for everyone to catch their death!”
He did not pause to ponder the incongruity of this sentiment, but straightway opened the umbrella, felt the spike bump on the lintel as he ducked through the doorway, and set off on a trouser-soaking dash between the raindrops . . .
Which was interrupted at just over the halfway point by a sudden, startling, psychedelic streak of lightning, drawn perhaps by the glitter of the gold umbrella but missing it, by no more than an inch, flashing out of the sky to plunge, tearing the world in two, right to the middle of the little wooden hut.
The “Whump!” of expanding air was already blowing Alexander off his feet, his ears ringing from the thunder, the umbrella bounced from his grasp by the blast, when another, fiercer blast followed just a few seconds after. Blinking, gasping, shaking his head, he finally dragged himself to his knees and turned round . . . to see the shelter he had left not two minutes earlier erupting in a gigantic fireball.
chapter
~26~
“IF ANYONE SAYS that we’ve just had a narrow escape, I won’t quarrel with them,” remarked Liusaidh, in a voice from which the trembling could not be entirely banished.
“And if that isn’t good old British understatement,” Mel said, “I don’t know what is. Guess escapes don’t come much narrower. If my knees aren’t knocking, it’s only because they’ve turned to jelly. How about you, Miss Beigg?”
Philomena was shaking her head. “I thought I must have been struck blind, if not deaf as well. And that Scotland was having its first earthquake in centuries . . .”
The Land Rover’s springs had stopped juddering, and the last echoes of the thunderclap had died away. Liusaidh took a firm grip on herself: noblesse oblige. “Ladies, I’m sorry to say I feel we’re wasting our time. If poor Miss Seeton’s out in all this, she’ll be in need of better help than any we can give her. I think we should go back, and report her—report her missing.”
She hardly looked at Mel as she made the suggestion, but there came no dissenting voice from the passenger seat as she started the engine and drove warily forward through what had become, since the storm, a quagmire. Although the rain had almost stopped, new-made rivulets swirled around rocks, and formed pools, and turned earth into mud: what had been loose and rattling scree as they climbed the slope was more like liquescent toffee as they started to descend. Liusaidh fought with the steering wheel, and spun from one skid into another, while stones were thrown up from under the tyres, clattering against metal or rock before splashing into the sea of thick, brown, treacly sludge.
The front wheels lurched into a pothole, and everyone was flung sideways. “Sorry,” panted Liusaidh, “but I simply can’t see where I’m going . . .” The wheels whirred, spitting mud and stones; the engine whined, as she ground the gears and forced them to drag the Land Rover up and out and on down the slope of the waterfall . . .
The waterfall, or rather the stream which fed it, was spilling over its banks, making the ground even more treacherous. The lower down the slope they went, the thicker and more glutinous the ground. The rain stopped; the sun began to struggle through what remained of the clouds—but it was nothing compared to the struggle below.
They found another pothole. “Oh, no,” muttered Liusaidh through clenched teeth. Mel and Philomena said nothing as she began to manipulate the accelerator . . .
And then all three of them cried out together, as there came a low rumbling from farther up the slope, and a sudden boulder, loosened by moving mud, erupted past and in front of them to smash into another, more stable rock face fifteen feet to their right—and split into three pieces.
Mel gulped. She gulped again. “Did anyone,” she asked, “say something just now about a narrow escape? Because . . .”
“If we hadn’t stuck in the pothole,” breathed Liusaidh, “that boulder would have . . . would have . . .”
“But we did, and it didn’t,” said Philomena, trying hard for her normal brisk tones, and very nearly achieving them.
There was a long, thoughtful silence, broken only by the sound of the idling engine. Liusaidh’s hands gripped the steering wheel, Mel’s had the whitest knuckles she had ever seen. Philomena contemplated her heartbeat, which sounded more like thunder than the thunderclap had, and stared into infinity.
Liusaidh kept looking in the driver’s mirror for further horrors to come, but nothing stirred. In the end, she found her voice again. “Well, we’d better get on,” she said.
“No, wait.” Philomena’s eyes had returned from infinity to focus on the shattered boulder. The sun, having won its battle with the clouds, was recklessly pouring warmth and light on everything within sight. Smooth puddles turned to mirrors; steam rose from rocky surfaces—from every rocky surface save those newly revealed to human gaze, untouched by rain since their first formation.
So why, then, did they glitter so very strangely?
• • •
The damage to the turret had been surveyed by the builders, and the progress of the builders had been surveyed by Mrs. McScurrie. She made them nervous. Where Ranald was affable and interested, the housekeeper was alert and clerical. She carried a stout pad of paper with her, and a pencil; she made notes of the slightest comment passed by the foreman, glared pointedly at the boots of hi
s two companions, and cleared her throat whenever the laird looked like committing himself to some course of action which she thought deserved a longer period of reflection.
The thunderstorm came as a relief to every man present. It is not easy, nor is it altogether safe, to survey a damaged building in gale-force winds and driving rain; when the wind and rain are accompanied by the same forces which first caused the damage, it is even more advisable to desist.
They desisted, and returned to safe ground, where Ranald discovered Liusaidh’s hurried note that she had accompanied Miss Forby and Miss Beigg to go in search of Miss Seeton, whose whereabouts had given cause for some concern.
“She’s taken the Land Rover, and says she ought to be back in a couple of hours—but she hasn’t said when she left,” Ranald grumbled, looking first at his watch and then at the weather. “Or where she was going . . .”
“She kens well how to take care of herself, Glenclachan, and of those with her, never fear.” The builder would have clapped the laird about the shoulders, but spotted Armorel’s expression just in time and changed the gesture to one of general encouragement. “Her leddyship may not ken the hills as well as yourself, but close enough, and she’s a bonnie driver—I’ve thought many a time she should go in for the rallying, the way she tears about in yon truck—”
Mrs. McScurrie skewered him with a look, and he swallowed the rest of the remark. His two henchmen, hitherto silent, found themselves equally lost for words. Ranald forced a grateful smile.
“You’re right, of course, Calum. There’s no sense in my worrying, when she’ll turn up in her own good time with no worse than a soaking, I’m sure. Talking of which”—Ranald, Lord Glenclachan, remembered that noblesse should oblige—“will you have a dram to keep out the chill? The calendar may say it’s August, but . . .”
But Calum and his colleagues felt the eye of Mrs. McScurrie upon them, and declined the invitation with thanks.
Ten minutes later, driving back through the downpour, they headed by silent consent for the Pock and Tang. Calum, parking the car, muttered that it was ill luck they could no longer rely on Dougall McLintie for another batch of the creature; Fergus and Finlay, sparing as ever with words, intimated that this did not matter. No doubt they considered paying the full price for a warming drink worth any reasonable expense, if it would only serve to banish from their minds the icy remembrance of Armorel McScurrie’s glare.
The three men dragged their donkey jackets over their heads and ran into the bar. Calum, arriving first, asked Hamish for three Lairigighs, to be put on the slate.
“Three doubles?” Hamish raised his eyebrows as Fergus and Finlay came panting up, dripping quite as much as the foreman. While the drinks were being poured, the builders shook out their heavy blue topcoats and hung them over nearby chair backs.
The storm was passing; the sun was shining. Hamish went to throw open the door, letting in air much less humid than that into which the trio of jackets had exhaled dust and damp and waterlogged wool. Calum sighed.
“We’d best be getting back to the castle, now there’s no more risk from the weather. And mebbe Glenclachan will have guid news of her leddyship and the wee Sassenach woman.”
“And if he hasnae . . . ,” said Fergus, thoughtfully.
“We could mebbe offer . . . ,” supplied Finlay.
“To help?” Calum nodded. “Aye, we could. But—”
“Help? Up at the castle?” Hamish was all ears. ‘“Some trouble with Lady Glenclachan, is there?”
“Not necessarily,” Calum told him, while Fergus and Finlay bristled. But Hamish was looking at them with a more-than-usually mellow expression, and Calum relented.
“They’ve a guest gone missing,” he said. “Glenclachan’s leddy has gone searching for her, along with the young woman who’s staying here—and Philly Beigg, though heaven alone knows how she came to poke her neb into the business. There it is, though: the three of them vanished into the blue, and the wee auld woman with them, or so we hope, if they’ve only found her. She’d be washed away by the heaviness of the rain, else.”
“Miss Forby, too? I see.” An acute observer would have deduced that Hamish was thinking busily, for he stroked his moustache and frowned. “If you’re heading back now to the castle,” he said at last, “I’d appreciate a lift in your car, Calum. There are . . . a few matters I think his lordship ought to know about—being the laird, as it were.”
Calum looked at him, then, with a shrug, at Fergus and Finlay. “We’re no wasting time now the sun’s out,” he said.
Hamish nodded. “Bear with me a moment, will you?” He went to the inside door, opened it, and shouted for Shona. She came strolling in with a duster in her hand, to be told that she must take her employer’s place at the bar, as he was going out. On business. “Oh, aye?” was all she said, dropping her duster on a convenient table, and Hamish was in too much of a hurry to rebuke her. He turned to Calum, and asked, “Well, are we going?” So they went.
There was no sign of the laird’s Land Rover as Calum and company reached the castle. Nevertheless, he did not find it easy to park: the entire front courtyard—a gravelled area, originally laid down by the motoring Earl Allain—was cluttered with an assortment of cars, vans, and trucks, the disorder of whose disposition must have greatly vexed the methodical mind of Mrs. Armorel McScurrie. Calum scratched his head, shrugged, and reversed farther down the drive, to park under a convenient tree. Now that the sun was once more shining, it seemed like a good idea.
The four men approached the heavy front door; it was not closed. They clattered the knocker; it was not heard. They looked at one another, and walked inside.
They were not noticed. Indeed, so great was the general excitement that it is doubtful if the shade of Bonnie Prince Charlie, playing the bagpipes, wearing the kilt, and dancing a reel at the same time, would have been noticed.
Mrs. McScurrie was issuing orders: Ranald, and the indoor staff, were running to obey them; the outside staff stood in huddles, communing with several sheepish-looking men whose faces were immediately known to Calum and his friends.
“Angus! Alistair! Archie! What’s to do, man?”
Mrs. McScurrie turned in a fury on the newcomers. “Will you be scaring the puir wee soul into fits with your noise? When she’s had a bump on the heid, nearly deid from a bolt of lightning, and then you come caterwauling in with no more sense than—No, Glenclachan”—as Ranald came hurrying up, a hot-water bottle in his hand—“blankets for warmth, I said, and then to call the doctor. Why, a hottie’s the worst you can do when a body’s suffering from shock . . .”
Ranald apologised, and hurried off again, babbling of brandy, and sweetened tea. A chorus of voices volunteered to drive down to the village for Dr. Beltie, if the laird found himself too busy to telephone. Mrs. McScurrie rounded on the chorus and ordered it to keep quiet, because it was only making things even more confused.
The cause of all this confusion was lying, muffled in a selection of jackets and coats, on the old oak settle near the chest in the castle hall—a female cause, as might be observed from the wavy grey hair and neatly shod feet which were all that could be seen at opposite ends of the mufflings. Beneath the head which must have been assumed to belong to the grey hair a makeshift pillow had been placed. The two suits of armour and the figure on the settle were the only calm human forms in the place.
But then, as Hamish, Calum, and the others stood staring, the jackets and coats began to writhe as if a minor earthquake had occurred within their confines, and at once Mrs. McScurrie leaped to suppress the writhing. “Wheesht now, hen, and lie still. There’s no need to go fretting yourself. You’re in safe hands now.”
She turned to glare round at the entire hall-full of men, and perforce her concentration drifted from the jackets. With one final upsurge, their prisoner was free, and struggling to her feet. “You’re very kind,” said Miss Seeton, “but really. I’m sure—Oh,” and she sat down again, her hand to her head.
“Oh, dear . . . perhaps . . .”
“Perhaps is no the word,” she was briskly informed. Mrs. McScurrie’s face wore a distinct I-told-you-so expression as she proceeded to rewrap Miss Seeton in overcoat layers like some wool- and worsted-skinned onion. “Warmth, and rest, and checking with the doctor, that’s what you need—and no argument. Now, where’s Glenclachan gone?”
Ranald reappeared—saying he had telephoned the doctor, who hoped to be here before long—and followed by one of the maids, with a cup of tea on a tray. She was followed by a second maid, with an assortment of blankets in her arms. Mrs. McScurrie took the blankets and draped them about her victim’s person; she took the tea and coaxed Miss Seeton to drink. A brief spasm shook Miss Seeton as she realised how heavily the tea had been sugared, but Armorel refused to pay any heed to her plaintive suggestions that really, she felt so much better now, and would, she was sure, do very well after a little nap . . .
The tea, stronger and sweeter than she would from choice drink it, either cured her shock or gave her enough of another to be able to announce (when she had finished it), in a far firmer voice than she had hitherto used, that she felt a great deal better now.
“We’re very pleased to hear it, Miss Seeton,” volunteered his lordship, with one eye on his housekeeper in case she considered he was taxing the strength of his invalid guest. As Armorel merely scowled, but said nothing, Ranald was emboldened to enquire—if Miss Seeton felt able to talk about it—what, exactly, had happened.
chapter
~27~
BEFORE MISS SEETON could reply, the chorus had started up again, in a self-defeating babble. Half-a-dozen voices all speaking at once achieve a remarkably low level of communication, as well as a remarkably high level of decibels. In the echoing hall, Miss Seeton was observed to wince, and put a hand to her head.
Miss Seeton Rocks the Cradle (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 13) Page 21