Fear by Night: A Golden Age Mystery

by Patricia Wentworth

  Someone had torn up her letter to Charles.

  The heat of her anger burned her through and through. And then it was gone, and she was afraid. She really was over the rim of the world. Nobody knew where she was. Charles didn’t know where she was. She wanted desperately for Charles to be able to find her.

  Presently the fear died down, as the anger had died. She tore the scrap of paper in half and buried the pieces under a heather root.

  She thought about writing another letter. She thought about complaining to Mrs. Halliday or to Jimmy. She stood there sheltered by the trees and argued with herself. The letter might have been destroyed by accident.… Oh no, she couldn’t make herself believe in an accident. Then if it wasn’t an accident, what was the use of complaining? A second letter would only share the fate of the first. She stood there for a long time, and then went soberly back to the house.

  Chapter Ten

  In a few days Ann had explored the island. It was a most irritating island, because there were only two places where you could get down to the water’s edge.

  There was the beach below the house, and away on the opposite side of the island another tiny strand not a dozen yards across. Everywhere else the sides of the island fell sheer or were banked with a huddle of great rocks and boulders. The beach below the house was a short semicircular stretch of white sand with the boat-house filling up a corner. On either side a tiny headland ran out into the water, and the water was deep.

  Ann had a fright when she tried to paddle out to the headland. The beach shelved gently for a few yards, and then quite suddenly she was up to her neck. It was as if she had stepped down a yard. She stood there with the water moving her lightly to and fro. A ripple came up over her chin and touched her lips with salt. She had the feeling that before her was another deep step down, or perhaps the island fell sheer away to the bottom of the loch. She was afraid to move, but she had to move, and presently she turned round and found a foothold and climbed back into the shallow water. Her clothes hung about her heavy and cold, and she found that she was trembling a little. But all the same, now that she was wet, she meant to find out more about that sudden drop.

  What she needed was a pole or a stick. She broke a long thin branch from one of the birches above the landing-place and measured it in yards, counting a yard from her outstretched finger-tips to her mouth, as all women do. It was not quite nine feet. She held it thin end up and went back into the water, feeling in front of her with the butt end of the branch. Everywhere at a distance of between three and four yards from the beach there was that sudden deep step down, and in some places the drop was more than three feet. Four feet—five—six—and once she could not touch bottom at all with her nine-foot bough. What would have happened to her if she had waded out in one of those deeper places? It was an easily answered question. Her own words came back and mocked her: “I shall take care not to be drowned.”

  When she had taken off her wet things she carried them down into the kitchen for Mary to dry. It was the middle of the afternoon and the house was dead quiet. Mrs. Halliday was having her nap, and Jimmy Halliday was out with the boat. When Mrs. Halliday slumbered, Riddle slumbered too. Ann thought it would be nice if no one but Mary knew that she had fallen into the loch. She came in with her dripping bundle, shut the door behind her, and put her finger to her lips.

  Mary raised herself slowly in her chair. She had been sitting, as she always sat when she was alone, with her elbows on her knees, her chin in her cupped hands, and a drift of wispy hair across her eyes. Her blank look gave way to a startled one.

  “I fell in and got soaked,” said Ann. Her eyes laughed, and the air of an adventure hung about her. “Can you dry my clothes? I don’t want everyone to know I was so stupid.”

  Mary put up a hand and brushed the wisps of hair aside. The hand shook. She got up out of her chair, came a step nearer, and said in a toneless, whispering voice,

  “Did ye see it?”

  They were the first words that Ann had heard her speak. She had thought her dumb, and now she wondered if the poor thing’s wits were astray. She said very kindly,

  “I just fell in. You will dry them—won’t you?”

  Mary came nearer and put out her hands until they rested on Ann’s shoulders. They felt cold and heavy there. Mary didn’t look at her. She stood with bent I head, looking down.

  “Did ye see it?” she said again. The words were distinct, but separated from one another as if by the effort it cost her to speak them. It wasn’t quite like a human person speaking. In the back of Ann’s thought it reminded her of a gramophone record running down.

  “I didn’t see anything.” She lifted the wet clothes between them. “Look—they’re soaking. Will you help me wring them in the yard?”

  There was just a moment’s pause, and then the clothes were taken out of her hands.

  Whilst they were wringing them out and hanging them before the fire, Mary was her vacant everyday self. Her strong hands moved efficiently and her blank gaze went past Ann as if she wasn’t there. Only just at the end, when Ann put a hand on her arm and thanked her, she opened her lips as if she were going to speak.

  “What is it?” said Ann.

  The lips closed again. Ann had the feeling that they had spoken, and that what they had said was there between them in the room. It was rather a horrid feeling. She said with a quiver in her voice,

  “What is it? Has something frightened you?”

  The lips opened again, made an assenting sound, and shut in a grey, hopeless line.

  “What is it, Mary? What’s frightening you? Won’t you tell me?” She put her arm about the thin shoulders and felt how tense they were. “Poor Mary! Do tell me.”

  The lips were very near to her ear. Again with a grinding difficulty words came from them.

  “Keep frae the water or it’ll get ye.” And with that she twisted away and went out into the yard to the cow-shed.

  It was next day that Charles Anstruther came to the shore of the loch and looked across at the island. There didn’t seem to be any way of getting to it. He supposed that there must be some way, since the smoke of a chimney was rising from among the trees and he could see what was obviously a boat-house. He stood there and hallooed, but no one answered him and no one came. It began to look as if visitors were neither expected nor desired, and his suspicions of Mr. James Halliday took a new lease of life. It was a preposterous thing to immure Ann on an inaccessible island. The whole thing was preposterous. He felt a damned fool, standing here hallooing at a piece of perfectly unresponsive scenery. The place was as lonely as if it was back in the twelfth century. At the edge of the loch there was a stone cottage with its roof fallen in and foxgloves growing by the empty hearth, and that and the thread of smoke on the island were the only signs that any human being inhabited, or ever had inhabited, this loneliness.

  He stood there wondering what he should do next. He certainly hadn’t come here just to go away again. It was a long way from London to Loch Dhu. He had reached Oban to find the Emma moored there. It seemed quite easy and practicable to row out to her and ask for Miss Vernon’s address.

  There was a skipper and a boy on board. Not a sociable person the skipper. A few terse words of one syllable appeared to exhaust his conversation. All the same he managed to convey quite clearly that he hadn’t got any address, and that he wouldn’t give it if he had. It wasn’t his business to give addresses; it was his business to wait for Mr. Halliday’s orders and to stay where he was till he got them. At this point he walked away and leaned on the rail with his back to Charles.

  Charles was aware of the grinning boy. He took out a cigarette and lit it, and at the same time allowed the crisp corner of a bank-note to appear. The boy’s grin became fixed. His eyes goggled. Charles unfolded the note, refolded it, put it away, and caught the goggling eye. It seemed to him that it held a hopeful, lingering look. He addressed the skipper’s back.

  “If Mr. Halliday should send you an addres
s, my name is Anstruther and I am at the Marine Hotel.”

  There was no response. Charles had not in fact expected one. He returned to the shore.

  The question was, did the boy know the address, and would he be able to communicate with Charles if he did? His eye had certainly glistened at the sight of the fiver. Well, no address, no fiver.

  Twenty-four hours passed, and it looked as if there was going to be no boy. The front at Oban affords a very beautiful prospect, but prospects were not being of any use to Charles. He walked up and down the long paved stretch and counted the hotels, and wondered why one of the houses had a roof like a bishop’s mitre. These are occupations which pall. There were, besides, shop-windows full of strings of pink, and blue, and white, and purple stones. There was a beautiful Ionic cross of smoky cairngorm. Behind the surface attention that he gave to these things was a growing anxiety about Ann.

  He was looking at the cross, when he was aware of a dark blue shoulder almost touching his own. He moved a little. The shoulder moved too. A quick glance of annoyance showed him the slightly ferrety features of the Emma’s boy. They wore a half embarrassed, half familiar grin. The pale blue eyes fixed themselves on Charles’ face. Then, with an awkward thrust of the shoulder, he said in a hoarse whisper,

  “Abaht that address—”

  Charles’ frown smoothed out. He looked encouragingly at the unpleasing youth and said,

  “Can you let me have it?”

  The grin widened. The embarrassment became more evident.

  Charles took out his note-case and opened it.

  “I’ll give you a fiver—if you’ve got it.”

  “I got it all right,” said the boy. “Skipper dropped a letter he was posting. I got it all right.”

  “Well?” said Charles. He unfolded the note and held it out.

  “Skipper ’ud take the ’ide off me.” His eyes sought Charles with a look of furtive intelligence.

  Charles said briefly, “How much?”

  The boy licked his lips. His heart beat with terror at his own audacity. The skipper would certainly have the hide off him if he knew. He said “A tenner,” and had an awful spasm of fear lest he should get nothing at all.

  He got the tenner, and Charles got the address.

  In his relief the boy emptied out all the information that he had. It chiefly concerned the whereabouts of Loch Dhu. It was not to be confused with the better known loch of that name. The boy had been there once, and it gave him the pip—“fair made me ’air curl.”

  Charles got away with an impression in his mind about Loch Dhu. Now that he was standing upon its shores, the impression remained. The rugged and precipitous hills, the sheerness of their descent into the water, and that air of a place once inhabited and now deserted all went to deepen its influence upon his imagination.

  He hallooed again, making a trumpet of his hands, and suddenly someone ran across the little white beach and stood at the water’s edge. It was Ann. She stood there waving, in a blue cotton frock with the sun on her. It was late afternoon, and the shadow of the island was across the beach. Only Ann’s head and shoulders emerged from it into the sunshine. He shouted, “Ann!” and across the water his own name came back to him with the echo of hers:

  “Charles—Ann—”

  He shouted, “Is there a boat?” dwelling on the o and prolonging it till the echo brought the sound again. In vivid pantomime Ann showed him a locked boat-house and a departed boat. Across some two hundred yards of water his name came to him again like a ghost that vanished before it could be grasped.

  What a predicament! He had come to see Ann, and he saw her. And he might as well have stayed in town.

  Ann, on her side, felt herself slipping from that high secure place to which the sight of Charles had lifted her. She had been on the heathery knoll when his first call came. It had been very pleasant there in the sun. The breeze came and went. It was very pleasant, but under the pleasantness there was something that she had to keep pushing out of sight. She wouldn’t look at it long enough to be sure exactly what it was, but it rather spoiled the sunshine and the heather. And then Charles called, and Ann’s heart came up into her throat and she started scrambling and running for the beach with an overwhelming joy and relief.

  But now she saw him a long way off and with no means of coming nearer. It was the sharpest disappointment she had ever known, and beneath the disappointment the thing which she had pushed away out of sight began to stir.

  Charles was shouting again.

  “… back …”

  Did he mean that he would come back again? He was pointing at the sun, and the water, and himself. She couldn’t make out what he meant. She shook her head, and Charles made strange signs with his arms. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been heart-breaking. It was still more heart-breaking when, after a little more of this, he waved and turned from the shore.

  Ann stood as near the water as she could and saw him go. She could only see a very little bit of the road, because it twisted away between the hills. At the turn Charles waved again, and then he was gone.

  Ann went back into the house and listened to the life histories of the eighteen children of Mrs. Halliday’s uncle, Ebenezer Todd—“Three pair of twins, and five of ’em foxy, and girls—and a red-’eaded girl is what I can’t abide. Boys isn’t so bad, but the boys was all dark except one, and he was so red you could ha’ struck a match on his ’air.” Mrs. Halliday turned her brooch to the light and displayed its bunch of flowers. “That’s a bit of it down in the left-hand corner. Makes a nice rosebud, don’t it, though there wasn’t nothing of the rose about ’im—an impudent rapscallion if ever I see one, and the girls all after ’im like a lot of wasps after plum jam, and dear knows why, for he wasn’t no beauty. Married a pork-butcher’s widow in the end, and her in her fifties, and a very ’appy couple they made, only no children of course. And there was his sister Aggie, that was like a thread of cotton and no more colour than a bit of tallow, she married a widower with eight—more like a hank of tow her ’air was. There’s some of it in that ivy-leaf. What I call a pore thing, my Cousin Aggie.”

  Ann’s head was going round long before they had finished with the Todds. She hoped she wouldn’t be expected to remember about them. She could really only think about Charles and the water that lay between them.

  Chapter Eleven

  Jimmy Halliday had not returned when Ann went up to bed that night. They hung the key on a nail behind the big fuchsia at the front door. Ann always wondered why they locked the door at all, but neither Riddle nor Mrs. Halliday would have gone to sleep behind an unlocked door. It was a real villa door that shut with a spring lock, so they only had to hang up the key and give it a good bang—“And like as not Jimmy won’t be back till breakfast time,” said Mrs. Halliday. “Comes of a poaching stock on both sides of the family, and when it’s that way, they’d sooner be out nights than in their beds.”

  Ann wondered when Charles would come back, or whether he would come back at all. The strange, floating sound of his voice rang in her head—sound without words, sound like water flowing, and in the middle of it one sharp island of a word—“back.” She was sure that the word was “back.” She went to her room, but she didn’t undress. She knelt down by the open window and thought about what Charles would do. He would go away for the night and perhaps come back again in the morning, when he might hope that the boat would be in, and that there would be someone there to put him across. Very deep inside herself Ann had a feeling that Charles might come and Charles might call, but that no boat from the island would put out to bring him over.

  She jerked away from this.

  Perhaps Charles would hire a boat and come back by water. That would be much better. If she saw him coming, she could direct him to the one narrow place where a landing was possible on the other side of the island. She began to think that Charles would come in a boat, but she had no idea how far he would have to go to find one. She wished she knew more geogra
phy. She wished she knew where she was.

  The day had been fine, but now the eastern sky had clouded over. Some light still lingered in the west. The high tops of the hills caught the last of it, but the loch, over which their shadows fell, was dark. The trees were dark beyond the lawn, and about the house it was dusk—a thin, clear dusk at first, but deepening every moment. Ann slipped down into a sitting position with her arms on the sill. Presently it would be cold, but just for a little the cooling air was pleasant. She did not feel at all inclined to go to bed. All sounds had ceased in the house. The trees were dead still—black painted trees on a background of grey. She could just hear the water moving and no more. Now it was so dark, she could not see where the lawn ended and the trees began. The clouds covered the sky. Somewhere behind them there should be a moon. She wished that they would break and let it through.

  And then there was a sound. She could not tell what sort of a sound it was, but it startled her. She kneeled up and leaned over the sill, pushing back the hair from her ears and listening. She could hear something moving amongst the trees, and she wondered if Jimmy Halliday had come back. That only lasted for a moment. You didn’t have to listen to hear Jimmy Halliday come home; he came clumping up from the beach after banging the boat-house door, and, day or night, there was no mistaking his tread. This was none of Jimmy Halliday. This was a cautious, hesitant step.