by Jack Mann
“The costume — yes.” Miss Brandon eyed the few clothes hanging in the wardrobe. “But there are the gray shoes” — she pointed at a row of shoes beside the dressing table. “Unless she had two pairs.”
“She had not,” Miss Aylener said. “The shoes — and the fur — ”
“He saw her out yesterday afternoon,” Miss Brandon guessed. “If the girl who went to Bristol changes the gray stockings for flesh-colored ones before she gets there, and takes off the neckerchief, and possibly throws the fox fur out of the window or hides it under a cushion in the train, who would identify her as the girl you described to a ticket-collector at Paddington? A pair of stockings would go in her handbag, and the rest is merely a matter of discarding things.”
“You mean — ?” The older woman looked at her, and in the look was respect for this swift, intuitive interpretation of evidence.
“Only that you — Mr. Kyrle — anyone interested was meant to inquire about somebody who went to Bristol. Quite possibly interest the Bristol police in a mysterious disappearance, for the girl who went there knows nothing about your niece, and couldn’t attempt to impersonate her, even if she wished.
“One sentence, by what Mr. Green told me, would betray her as not your niece. Not that she would try, unless we are greatly mistaken. The impersonation was intended to last only until she had get on the train at Paddington. After that, the absolute disappearance of your niece, together with the utter mystery of her having gone to Bristol at all, was to drive you distracted and make you go on searching there.”
“Yes. Yes.” She laid her hand on Miss Brandon’s arm. “My dear, how logical you are! I’m so very grateful to you for your kindness to an old woman. And you think — Mr. Green — ?”
“The wisest man I know, and the best. You — you shouldn’t have offered to pay him to commit murder. He isn’t like that. But I’m forgetting. About your niece’s actual leaving here. You say you heard nothing, know nothing about it? The time she left, I mean. Didn’t anyone see her go out last night? She must have gone then.”
“I haven’t asked,” Miss Aylener answered. “You see — the taxi, and her being seen then, as I thought till we saw this fox fur. But there was a dinner party here last night, and I heard cars and people leaving until after midnight. A send-off for some expedition, and about a hundred guests dining in a special room. Men and women, all sorts of people, and some of them in ordinary day clothes. So she might have slipped out when they were leaving, and not been noticed.”
“You think she went entirely alone and of her own accord?”
“My dear, he had only to call, from anywhere. She would have to respond — she would have to go when he called. If you understand.”
“Not altogether. I don’t know as much as Mr. Green knows. You mean, if he exercised some sort of influence, she would get up and walk out to him, without letting you know anything about it?”
“If he called from the other side of the world, she would go to him or die on the way. It was my fault. I should have gone quite away from Brachmornalachan with her, never let her see him.”
“But — Miss Aylener — Mr. Green said in that report of his that it began at Eleusis. She first got really to know MacMorn there.”
“Then I can forgive myself.” She spoke after a long interval, and led the way back to the sitting room. “We have fought him so long, so very long! So many ages. I saw the dark men land. They should have killed them all, then!”
She went to the chair she had left to go into the bedroom, and sat down in it. The pupils of her eyes had shrunk to pin points, and left a blue deeper than that of the sea which rolls round Ithaca.
Miss Brandon stood, facing her, and did not speak.
“They took our people, thirteen to each stone,” Miss Aylener said, and her voice that had been so perfectly musical was flat and dull. “In the blood of our people they drew the Unseen to dwell in the circle, and with him the Daughter, the Maiden possessed of all, yet whom none may possess. They made shadows, outside the lines of the rowans they made shadows. For each one of our people, a shadow to obey them — ”
Her eyes closed, and she relaxed, shrank to the lines of the chair as if all the muscles of her body had lost their governing power. Miss Brandon went to her and took her hand, lifted it, and found it ice-cold. She slid her fingers until she found the pulse: it was normal, unhurried, but strong as that of her own heart’s driving.
Margaret Aylener opened her eyes, and warmth came back to her fingers as they closed around those of the girl.
“Go now,” she said. “Soon, he’ll call you. Go, and answer.”
Miss Brandon released her hand from the grasp of the older woman’s fingers, and went out from the hotel, hurrying back to Little Oakfield Street.
These were things she could not understand: she knew only that she had to play her part in them.
“Don’t argue. Go and get a large pork pie.” With the admonition, Gees himself got out on the offside of his Rolls-Bentley, and spoke over his shoulder. “Get two bottles of beer too.” Then he crossed the street to the post office and entered, while Kyrle went on his errands, meekly.
Within three minutes, Gees heard Miss Brandon’s voice.
“We’re near the halfway mark,” he told her. “What did you dig out of Miss Aylener, please?”
She told him of the finding of the fox fur and suede shoes, not forgetting also to recount Miss Aylener’s strange words toward the end of the interview. Gees asked her to repeat them.
“ ‘The Maiden possessed of all, yet whom none may possess’,” he repeated back to her. “That’s a new one on me, Miss Brandon, and I don’t recognize it as belonging to any of the mythologies. But about Miss Aylener — did she say whether she meant to stay in London?”
“I was just going to tell you,” she answered. “She telephoned me less than ten minutes ago, to say she was leaving today to return to Brachmornalachan, and asked me to tell you when you rang me.”
“Well, Miss Brandon, I want you to keep an eye out for that girl Betty, and give her four ten-shilling notes if she turns up and tells you a story of any sort. Be as nice as you can to her, tell her you’re acting for me and know all about it, and get out of her just how and why she went to Bristol — if she did. That’s all for now. If I’m not back by the end of the week, I’ll write to you.”
Returning to the car, he found that Kyrle was already in it. Gees took a clasp knife from his pocket before he started the engine.
“Take that, and slice the pie,” he bade. “I can eat pie and drive, but first — ” he opened one of the bottles Kyrle had put down on the floor, and took a drink from it. “Now for pie and the open road, and when I told you we’d get there before dark I had in mind that it isn’t dark till nearly eleven, when you get as far north as that.” He engaged gear, and the car moved on.
About an hour later, the second beer bottle went hurtling out from the car and hit the soil of Cumberland. By that time, Kyrle had ceased to press his feet against the floorboards and hold his breath at intervals. They had shaved disaster so many times that he began to feel the crash would be a relief, when it happened.
When they rocked through Gretna, Gees peered at the trip figures on the speedometer and nodded his satisfaction. “Average forty-five, including getting out of London,” he remarked. “I doubt whether it’s ever been done in the daytime.”
“The next time it’s done, I’ll stay home,” Kyrle said. “I take a risk occasionally with my bus, but you — ”
“Curse me when we hit something,” Gees advised.
“That’s a fool challenge to Providence,” Kyrle protested, “and a direct hit at this speed won’t leave me any time to curse. Oh, carry on! I’m more anxious than you are to get there, but I want to arrive in one piece. And if you average forty the rest of the way, we shall arrive before it gets altogether dark. Ahead of them, I still think.”
“Fog,” Gees said. “After we leave the main road.”
�
��Weather like this?” Kyrle derided. “Impossible!”
“Quite — if we get there ahead of them,” Gees assented. “Otherwise, not in the least impossible. Probable, in fact.”
The sun was setting when he hurtled the car past the inn at which he had had a late lunch on the way to his first meeting with Margaret Aylener, and, when he slowed to turn off the main road, the afterglow had begun to fade out from the western sky. The car rocked along the uneven track, and, as they ran out from between the low walls to open, Kyrle pointed ahead at a saloon car approaching them.
Gees swung aside to let it pass, and they saw that it was empty except for the driver.
“He’s beaten us to it,” Gees said. “Probably he made Glasgow or Edinburgh by air, and either chartered that car to take him on, or else got to the nearest station and took it from there.”
“Then you were right,” Kyrle admitted. “All the way I’ve been afraid it was Helen who went to Bristol. I wouldn’t tell you before.”
“If I hadn’t been sure,” Gees said, “I wouldn’t have risked my neck and yours in the attempt at beating him to it.”
They reached the point where three ways branched, and, a little later, topped the last rise between them and Brachmornalachan.
Kyrle’s breath hissed through his teeth as, gazing ahead, he saw a whitish cloud hiding the loch and all the tiny village, thinning to reveal only the ragged copses of evergreens toward the summits of the hills.
“Right about the fog, too,” he half groaned. “What’ll we do?”
“If you feel in the pocket of that door beside you,” Gees said, “you find an automatic pistol small enough to go in your pocket. It’s loaded. Do you know how to use it?”
“I do — but you don’t think it will come to shooting, surely?”
“I have a great respect for the man we are going to see,” Gees answered. “That is, for the man I hope we are going to see. I think we need every form of persuasion there is, when we met him. Therefore you’d better pocket the gun. I’ve got one like it for myself.”
Kyrle found the pistol and put it in the right-hand outer pocket of his lounge coat, after which he buttoned the weatherproof he was wearing, for already the car had dipped down to the first thin layers of fog, and there was a chill in the air.
The long twilight of the north was as yet but little advanced, but under the thin, upper strata of mist through which they moved, the greater density which altogether hid Brachmornalachan was a darkness as of utter night.
They dipped another half-mile down the long slope toward the tiny village, sank into a tangibility of blinding wetness, and Gees stopped.
“His devils are out,” he said. “You get down and walk by the front end of the off-side wing, to keep us to the road.”
Kyrle got out and went round the front of the radiator, and Gees shifted his gear lever into first to move on at a walking pace. Kyrle asked for headlights, bade him dip them, and then asked him to switch them off.
Dipped or level, the lights made a gray wall ahead that reflected the rays back on the car, and without lights the track was more easily discernible in the Hades-gloom to which they had descended.
Presently Kyrle called to Gees to stop, and his voice sounded back faintly through the thickness before he came to stand opposite the driving seat.
“It’s no use,” he said. “I can’t be sure. We may be off the road even now. I think you were right — there must be devils out.”
Gees switched off the engine and took out the ignition key, pocketing it. “How far would you say we are from the post office?” he asked.
“Half a mile. A mile — anything. Impossible to tell.”
Gees went to the front of the car and dropped to his knees to peer at the ground, went down on his hands and crawled a little way. “It’s all right,” he said as he stood up again. “We’re still on the track. We’ll leave the car and go ahead on foot. To The Rowans, first.”
“If — if she arrived with him, would he have let her go there?” Kyrle asked.
“No. But Callum may be useful. I was a fool, Kyrle. We ought to have stopped that car we passed, and asked the man in it what passengers he brought here, as well as making sure of the number.”
“You did that, then?”
“It’s registered in my mind, an easy one to remember. Now let’s go. I’ll take the rut on the right, and you keep in the one on the left and tell me if you feel you’re missing it.”
Slowly they went on through the wet, blanketing fog, only just visible to each other as they kept to the wheel tracks, with no more than the width of a vehicle between them.
CHAPTER XV
creatures of the darkness
Presently the stone bulk of the post office loomed up on Gees’ right, and, passing the vague, unlighted frontage, he sighed relief that they had kept to the right track, not followed other ruts and got themselves lost in this clinging darkness. A little way farther on, Kyrle said: “It’s thinning, Gees. I can see the way. now.”
“How’s the moon, do you know?” Gees asked with odd abruptness.
“Quite well, thank you,” Kyrle answered. “I have an idea it’s new either tonight or tomorrow, so it won’t be much use to us. Why, did you think it might rise and help us, later on?”
“The dark of the moon,” Gees reflected, ignoring the question. “But is it new tonight or tomorrow? You don’t know, I suppose?”
“I don’t. Nor do I see what difference it makes.”
“There is very little darkness here at this time of year — complete darkness, I mean,” Gees remarked, abandoning the subject of the moon. “And there — yes, that’s the wall of The Rowans. Kyrle, isn’t that someone by the gate? A woman, too, by the look of it — ”
He broke off as Kyrle began running toward the gate, and followed without hurrying his pace.
Twelve hours at the wheel of the Rolls-Bentley, and at such a pace as he had maintained throughout the day, had left him with little surplus energy. He saw the figure by the gate move away, for the fog had thinned to reveal even the outline of the house at this distance, and saw, too, that she moved little less quickly than Kyrle.
They had almost vanished in the haze when their voices came back to him, Kyrle’s first, sharply questioning:
“What were you doing there?”
Equally sharp, the rejoinder: “Dinna fret yersel’! ’Tis my ain business.” And Gees knew the voice, but could not place it.
Baffled, apparently, Kyrle stood still while her figure grew faint and vanished in the mist. Then he returned to where Gees waited by the gate, and shook his head as if far from satisfied.
“I thought it might have been Helen,” he explained, “but it was that woman from the post office. Gralloch, her name is. What the devil would she be doing here at this time of night?”
“Search me,” Gees answered, and opened the gate to hold it while Kyrle passed through. He followed, and they went toward the house.
“Yes, but — ” Kyrle began but left the words unspoken as Gees pulled at the bell-handle beside the door.
“Going directly away from the post office, at this time of night.” Gees looked at his wrist watch as he spoke. The luminous hands pointed to ten minutes past eleven. Then, since his first summons had brought no response, nor produced any apparent movement in the house, he rang again, and before the sound of the bell inside had ceased, the heavy door swung open and revealed Elizabeth, her bare ankles showing from under the edge of her nightdress, which was all but covered by a heavy coat, and her long hair twisted in an untidy bun at the back of her head.
“Ye’re ower late,” she said drily, with no apparent surprise. She swung the door wide, and by the light of her candle found and pulled down the switch for the lights of the entrance hall. “Wull ye have eggs and bacon?”
The practical directness of the question made Gees smile. Elizabeth evidently went to the heart of things, and knew men’s needs.
“Nothing on earth would please me
more,” he said.
“ ’Tis quickest,” she remarked, and opened the dining room door. But Gees did not move, and Kyrle waited on him. “Elizabeth,” he asked, “can you tell me whether new moon is tonight or tomorrow night?”
“By the almanac,” she said with no hesitation, “new mune’s six-therrty tomorrow night.”
“Then there’s plenty of time for eggs and bacon,” he remarked, and made for the dining room. “And for a rest as well.”
Kyrle, following him into the room, asked irritably — “What are you gibbering about? All this about the new moon — what is it?”
“The difference” — Gees pulled the carving chair back from the table at which he had dined with Margaret Aylener, and slumped into it — “between tackling our problem after twelve hours of Hell’s own driving, and tackling it fresh. I want grub and a rest, I do.”
“What do we do next, then?” Kyrle demanded.
“Personally, I hope she cooks me no less than four eggs,” Gees said. “That pork pie wasn’t bad, but it was no more than a mere snack. And it was a long while ago, too. If you cast an eye leftward, that decanter we punished some years ago isn’t empty, and I spot soda in the syphon. As a prospective relative, what about doing the honors?”
Kyrle got up, wearily, and poured two stiff drinks. As he put one tumbler down beside Gees he said: “This is a mere waste of time.”
“And of me, and of a perfectly good Rolls-Bentley,” Gees retorted. “If you’re in such a blasted hurry, go and get busy. New moon is not till six-thirty tomorrow night, and I want all the energy I can raise to face what it means. Therefore” — he lifted his glass — “here’s how.”
“I’m in your hands,” Kyrle said, and drank deeply before he put his tumbler down. “I don’t know what it all means.”
“And I’m only guessing,” Gees told him, “but I think I’ve guessed right.” Elizabeth looked in on them. She hadn’t bothered to dress. “Wull ye have tea, or coffee?” she asked from the doorway.