Fear by Night: A Golden Age Mystery

by Patricia Wentworth

  “The old lady sets a good deal of store by her. I won’t have her put about.”

  Ann stood quite still.

  There was no more to hear. The rain came down, and the boat rolled in the choppy sea.

  She left the skylight open and the wet coming in, and made her way up the companion. She could not put any meaning to the words that she had heard. Mr. Halliday had made her go below. Why was he a damn fool to do it? Or weren’t they talking about her at all? And what was the opportunity that had been missed?

  She got the door open, and the wind met her. Not the raging fury of a little while ago, but a joyful, bounding wind that came hallooing across the open sea, flinging its showers at them and whooping off again. Ann held to the rail and looked out upon black tossing water. The lightning flickered away in the north, violet and green, and the clouds drove dark before the wind. On the western horizon was one pale streak of a light between green and grey.

  Ann did not know quite when she began to have the feeling that someone was watching her. If she was visible at all, it must be only as a black blob. Why should anyone watch a black blob? Why for that matter should anyone watch Ann Vernon? She called herself an idiot and listened to James Halliday shouting out that there was another squall coming. She supposed she would have to go down again, but it would be much more interesting to stay there. She forgot the feeling of being watched as she looked out into the dark and heard the roar of the coming squall. Then, as she turned regretfully and groped for the companion door, something struck her on the head and she fell. There was a confusion of wind and water, an icy drenching, and a roaring noise. She was flung against something hard. Her hands clutched, and closed upon emptiness.

  She had not time to be afraid before a grip that hurt was on her arm, her waist, and a moment later she was inside the companion, with Jimmy Halliday shouting at her. She could hear him above the wind, because it was he who was holding her. In a voice that sounded as if he was using a megaphone he was inquiring what the blank, blank, blankety something she meant by coming on deck when he had told her to stay below—“You blank, blank, blank little fool, you!”

  Ann was so dazed that she just stared at him and went on staring. There was a little bright light just overhead. It showed Jimmy Halliday’s face not six inches from her own, all puffed and scarlet under the wet sandy hair, whilst angry words and oaths came pattering out of his mouth like hailstones. She ought to have been angry, or frightened, or grateful, because she had very nearly been drowned, and he was swearing at her, and it began very dimly to occur to her that he had saved her life. But she wasn’t angry or frightened or grateful, or anything at all except numb and dumb. Her head didn’t feel as if it belonged to her, and when he gave her a push which sent her down the companion, she sat down in a huddle on the bottom step and shut her eyes. The wind drowned Jimmy Halliday’s voice and the furious bang of the door above her.

  She might have sat there for a long time if the boat had not been rolling so. She got up and made her way to her own cabin and lay down upon the berth. The squall lessened. The boat rolled. Once she heard Jimmy Halliday’s voice pitched on a note of rage. He was swearing at somebody else now, which was a comfort. She rather gathered that he was swearing at Gale Anderson.

  Then the voice was gone. She fell asleep.

  Chapter Eight

  They landed next day in the very early morning. The wind had dropped and the rain was coming down, not heavily but in a fine weave of mist and water which blotted out both sea and hills. There remained a muddy foreshore sprinkled with boulders and coated with a yellowish rust, and above it a stretch of wet grey road, and a car.

  The driver left his seat, exchanged a few inaudible words with James Halliday, and rowed off to the yacht. Gale Anderson took his place at the wheel. Mrs. Halliday and Riddle were helped in. Ann took a back seat and was barricaded with suit-cases. The rest of the luggage went on behind, and with Jimmy Halliday on the seat beside the driver they began to climb towards the unseen hills.

  It wasn’t a very cheerful journey. Ann’s head ached. Riddle dwelt with mournful pride upon the certainty that she would presently be sick. And Mrs. Halliday, with her feet in cloth-topped button boots raised comfortably upon a couple of suit-cases, put her head back against a scarlet leather cushion and slept. She not only slept, but she snored in an awful rhythmic manner which reminded Ann of a cornet solo in an advanced modern symphony. The mist streamed by. Something rattled at the back of the car. It had the sound of metal upon metal, and it fretted Ann almost to screaming point. She put her hand to her head and felt the lump upon it. Something must have hit her very hard to make a lump like that. All through the business of getting up and getting Mrs. Halliday packed and landed Ann had been wondering just what it was that had raised that lump. She felt perfectly certain that she had not hit herself. She had been hit. Something had banged down upon her head and knocked her flying, and she had gone down clutching and slithering to the black drowning water that was waiting for her.

  She looked round at Jimmy Halliday’s bullet head with its short sandy hair and felt a belated gratitude. If he hadn’t clutched her, she wouldn’t be here now. She wondered where she would be. Her body would be swinging to and fro with the tide, and she would be somewhere else. The thought made her feel vaguely disembodied. She came back with difficulty to the question of what had hit her. There slid into her mind Gale Anderson’s voice and Gale Anderson’s words: “Damn fool to send her down! There’ll never be a better opportunity.”

  They drove on into the mist and rain.

  Presently Mrs. Halliday woke up and told a cheerful story about a young man that was hanged for sheep stealing.

  “The last man in England to be hanged for it he was, and nothing but a lad of eighteen. He worked for his father, and there was a stray sheep come in along of theirs, so he asks his father what ’e shall do, and ’is father says, ‘Some’un’ll claim it,’ but no one did. So it come to the sheep shearing, and the lad says to his father ‘There’s that sheep as come in along of ours—what’s to do with it?’ And his father says, ‘Brand it and turn it in with the others,’ and so ’e did. And it wasn’t a week after someone come and claimed it. And they hanged the lad.”

  “Oh—they didn’t!” said Ann.

  Mrs. Halliday’s bonnet hung at a jaunty angle over one large ear. She nodded her head against the scarlet cushion.

  “Sure enough they hanged him. And my father climbed a tree to see it done, and fell down in a faint. Many’s the time he’s told me.”

  They drove all day in the mist. The hills were shapes, not so much seen as imagined. The sound of falling water came and went. Sometimes a great black shoulder loomed up, or the thick air parted to show a hill side hung with dripping pines, or a flat waste stretch of moorland dark with bog. Every now and then they passed another car or a group of stone cottages. Mrs. Halliday went to sleep. There were two picnic meals by the wet roadside.

  Ann had plenty of time to think. She thought about the stormy night and being hit on the head. She thought about lunching with Charles at the Luxe. She thought a lot about Charles.

  In the evening they stopped by the side of a loch. There was a boat by the shore. It was a relief to get out of the car and into the boat. James Halliday and Gale Anderson took a pair of oars apiece and rowed them out upon the loch. The shore faded.

  Ann said, “Where are we going?” but no one answered her. They might have been going out of the world. She dipped a finger in the water, put it up to her lips, and found it salt. Was the yacht waiting for them out in the fog? She couldn’t have got there. It came to Ann that she hadn’t the faintest idea where they might be. They had driven all day, but they might have run in a circle for all she knew.

  Out of the mist sprang a line of lapping ripples and a tiny white beach. The boat grounded, and the two men pulled her up.

  A narrow path led up from the beach. It climbed by steps and steep slanting zigzags to come out upon a little lawn. An
d there, joyful to see, were the lighted windows of a house.

  “And a nice cup of tea is what I want, if I never had bite nor sup again,” said Mrs. Halliday.

  Jimmy Halliday put his arm round her and lifted her over the threshold.

  “You shall have as many cups of tea as you like, old lady,” he said.

  Chapter Nine

  The mist was all gone when Ann woke up. She ran to the window and looked out. Below her was the little green lawn, and beyond the lawn a straggle of bushes and trees, and beyond the trees the bright glancing of water blue in the sun, and the still clouded shapes of the hills. She washed and dressed quickly and ran down and out. It was all a wonder and an enchantment. The air was fresh and soft, and a thick dew drenched her feet.

  She looked at the house from the lawn, and could have laughed, it was so out of keeping with its surroundings. A neat little villa with a bow window on either side of the front door and a cherub’s head for a knocker. The room on the right was the dining-room. The room on the left was the parlour. Mrs. Halliday’s room above it, the blinds all down. Her own room above the dining-room. All as tidy and small as if it had been picked up out of a row in Tooting—“It ought to be called Mon Répos, or Sans Souci, or Il Nido!” Her rather horrid forebodings of the day before were things to laugh about.

  She ran round the house and stood still to stare. The villa front masked something very much older. The windows at the back were of the smallest, mere slits in thick old walls of weathered stone. There was a huddle of out-houses—a cow-shed, a pig-sty, a cobbled yard. She could smell the cows. There was more than one, by the fidgeting, breathing, munching sounds that came to her through the boarded doors. A cock flew up on to the yard gate and crowed. What an odd house to find in this wild place, so neat and smug in front, so old and ramshackle and untidy behind.

  A path ran uphill between bushes. Ann climbed and went twisting and turning up a steep slope. The trees and a thick undergrowth hid everything except themselves. She came out at last on to a heathery knoll. The trees and bushes ceased, and the path came to an end. She went knee-deep amongst heather and tumbled rocks, and found herself at last at the top of the rise. She had made up her mind that she would not look until she had reached the top. Now, at the view-point, she saw water all round her, shining away in blue stretches to the precipitous shores of the loch. As she stood, the climbing sun was on her right. A very dark, frowning hill rose sheer from the water on that side. Immediately in front of her a black cliff streaked with red shadowed the loch. She turned about and saw, as it seemed a mere stone’s throw away, the landing-stage from which they had come the night before and a bend of the road which had brought them.

  She wondered what had happened to the car. It wasn’t there any longer. Had it gone back and round the bend into the dark hollow between the pine-clad hill and the rough bare one which towered up into the clouds? She wondered who had made the road between the hills, and whether it had been a watercourse before it was a road. There was only that one break that she could see in the rugged wall of the loch. She could not even tell on which side lay the sea. If to the west, it was hidden by the sweep of the hills. She thought the light breeze came that way and that it tasted salt.

  The island was quite small, perhaps four hundred yards across; she couldn’t tell. She could only see its shore on one side, where it was very rocky. She thought the loch looked deep. There was no change in the colour of the water under the cliffs. She thought how sea-water changes to green and muddy yellow as it shallows along the coast. There was nothing like that here, and she pictured the loch as a deep chasm driven into the land, with the cliffs that edged it going down sheer under the water—down, and down, and down. She wondered what it was like down there in the depths. It ran through her mind that she had heard of a loch that was a mile deep. A mile.… Ann shivered. It was a very long way down.

  The thought stayed in her mind, and later on at breakfast she asked Jimmy Halliday whether the loch was deep. He raised his sandy eyebrows.

  “Deep enough,” he said.

  “Yes—but how deep?” said Ann.

  “Deep enough to drown you,” said Jimmy Halliday.

  Ann felt as if a very cold drop of water had run I down her neck. She gave a little shiver. And Mrs. Halliday nodded and said,

  “That was a goose a-walking over your grave, Miss Vernon, my dear.”

  Ann laughed.

  “I shall take care not to be drowned,” she said.

  Jimmy. Halliday didn’t say anything for some time. Then quite suddenly he asked her if she could swim, and when she had said no, he relapsed into silence again.

  Gale Anderson was not at breakfast. It presently appeared that he wasn’t in the house at all, or on the island. Since he was gone, and the car was gone, it was to be inferred that they had gone together. Ann felt that she could very easily bear his absence.

  After breakfast she explored the house. The two front rooms were exactly alike, and so were the two bedrooms over them, but the back of the house was all up and down, and in and out, with little rooms like cupboards, and at one corner a spiral staircase with steep worn steps in the thickness of the wall. It led from the kitchen to a tiny room which was scarcely more than a recess with a door to it. There was another stair in the front of the house, a proper villa stair with a painted banister and wooden treads carpeted in red. At the back of the house on the ground floor was a kitchen, and a very large wash-house. Both these had stone floors.

  The work of the house was all done by a middle-aged woman with a vacant face. She was tall, and thin, and bent, and she wore a dark stuff petticoat and a little grey cross-over shawl. Her faded hair was screwed up into a knob at the back of her head, but stray wisps of it fell about her forehead and her large pale ears. She kept the house very clean and tidy and she was a good cook, but she never spoke. Only every now and then she would stop in whatever she was doing, straighten her back, and look at you through the falling wisps of hair. When she did this to Mrs. Halliday, the old lady would say sharply, “Get on with your work, Mary!” and then she would sigh and bend down again and go on working.

  Now that they were actually here, Mrs. Halliday was quite willing to talk about the island. They came here every year, and she liked it well enough—though why she should like it, Ann couldn’t imagine, since she hardly ever went out, and then never beyond the little green lawn. Riddle hated it, as was to be expected. She became very low-spirited and gave in her notice regularly every morning after breakfast.

  “What does Mr. Halliday do with himself?” said Ann.

  It appeared that Mr. Halliday fished. In the boat-house beside the little landing-stage there was a motor-boat as well as the rowing boat which had brought them over. Sometimes Jimmy Halliday took one, and sometimes the other. He would be away for a few hours, or all day, or a day and a night. Sometimes he went out at night and came back with the dawn. Once Ann asked him to take her, and was astonished at the roughness of his refusal.

  Mrs. Halliday nodded over a stocking she was knitting. She knitted all her own stockings in fine black wool with a broad rib.

  “Sailors don’t like drowned folk,” she said—“and Jimmy’s been a sailor same as his father. Thinks they follow them, sailors do—thinks they come up out of the sea and ’aunts them. I don’t rightly know as I’d believe it myself, but my ’usband, Jimmy’s father, he took it for gospel.”

  Ann went away and wrote a letter to Charles.

  Darling Charles,

  I love being here. I ought to be bored stiff, but I’m not. There’s nothing here but rocks and heather, and water and hills and rocks, especially rocks.…

  It was quite a nice long conversational letter. When she had finished it, she went back to Mrs. Halliday.

  “Please what’s our address? I’ve just been writing a letter—”

  Mrs. Halliday’s needles clicked.

  “‘The House on the Island, Loch Dhu’,” she said placidly. “Dhu—it’s a silly-sound
ing name, isn’t it and means black, so they tell me. Seems funny they should talk foreign, and all one country, and it’d be a lot handier if they called it The Black Lake and have done with it, though a lake it isn’t, for it runs out into the sea over yonder.”

  Ann pricked up her ears.

  “Isn’t Loch Dhu near Arran?”

  Mrs. Halliday shook her head.

  “There’s more than one, and this one’s lonely enough. There’s no one comes here now. There’s been a cottage or two where the cliffs wasn’t too steep, but they’re all fallen in and the people gone—and there’s nothing in all the world that I hate so hearty as a house without a roof.”

  “Why did the houses fall down?” said Ann.

  “Because the folk went away and left them, Miss Vernon, my dear.”

  “But why did they go?”

  “Some says one thing, and some says another,” said Mrs. Halliday, and would say no more.

  “And how shall I get my letters to the post?”

  “Jimmy’ll take them. There’s a post-box over by the landing, and the postman comes that far and takes what’s there and leaves what he’s brought with ’im. He don’t come every day.”

  Ann gave her letter to Jimmy Halliday, and began to wonder when she would get an answer. It would be nice to hear from Charles. It would be like hearing from someone in another world. She began to feel as if she had got over the edge of the world she knew and off the map. It would be very nice to hear from Charles.

  She found she was counting the days. But of course if the postman didn’t come every day, it was no good counting. Mrs. Halliday didn’t seem to know how often he came, and when she asked Jimmy Halliday, he threw her one of those odd sideways looks and said.

  “When he feels like it.” And then he laughed, and Ann wasn’t sure that she liked the sound of his laughter.

  And then she found the piece of paper.

  She was out at the back in the yard watching the hens feed. Mary had thrown them some house scraps, and now she came and went to the rubbish-heap beyond, bringing out her ash-bucket to empty. There was a high gusty wind overhead. A little piece of paper came blowing along the yard. The wind caught it, twirled it high, and dropped it at Ann’s feet. She bent to pick it up, and it fluttered away from her as if it was alive. Laughing and breathless, she caught it at last where the path turned upwards amongst the trees. It lay in her hand like a little dead, captured thing. It had whirled away from her and danced on the wind, and now it was only a scrap of dirty paper. And then quite suddenly she stopped laughing and was hot through and through with anger. Under the smudges and stains she could see two words. They were words in her own writing. She had written them herself, and she had written them to Charles—“especially rocks.” Part of “especially” was torn away, but she knew what she had written.