Wildfire at Midnight

by Mary Stewart

  I sat on the edge of the bed, pressing my hands hard against my eyes, trying to will the pain away, while still in my wincing brain whirled and jostled the images that, conspiring to keep sleep at bay, had switched the agonizing current along my nerves . . . Fire at midnight . . . fire on Blaven . . . and a gentleman from the hotel. Corrigan? Roderick? Alastair? Nicholas?

  I shivered, then flinched and stood up. I wasn’t even going to try and ride this one out; I was going to dope myself out of it, and quickly. The life-saving tablets were in my handbag. I padded across the room to get it, groping vaguely among the grotesque shadows that distorted the corners of the room. But it wasn’t on the dressing-table. It wasn’t on the mantelpiece. Or on the floor near the hand-basin. Or by the bed. Or – it was by now a search of despair – under the bed. It wasn’t anywhere in the room.

  I sat down on the bed again, and made myself acknowledge the truth. I hadn’t taken my handbag on that walk with Roderick Grant. I had left it in the lounge. I could see it in my mind’s eye, standing there on the floor beside my chair, holding that precious pillbox, as remote from me as if it had been on a raft in the middle of the Red Sea. Because nothing, I told myself firmly, wincing from a fresh jag of pain, nothing was going to get me out of my room that night. If anyone was to perform the classic folly of taking a midnight stroll among the murderous gentlemen with whom the hotel was probably packed, it was not going to be me.

  On this eminently sensible note I got back into bed, blew out the candle, and settled down to ride it out.

  Seventeen minutes later I sat up, lit the candle again, got out of bed, and grabbed my housecoat. I had reached, in seventeen minutes of erratically increasing pain, an even more sensible decision – and how much this was a product of reason and how much of desperation I can now judge more accurately than I could then. It was quite a simple decision, and very satisfactory. I had decided that Jamesy Farlane had murdered Heather Macrae. And since Jamesy Farlane didn’t live in the hotel, I could go and get my tablets in perfect safety.

  Perfect safety, I told myself firmly, thrusting my feet into my slippers and knotting the girdle of my housecoat tightly round me – as long as I was very quick, and very quiet, and was prepared to scream like blazes if I saw or heard the least little thing . . .

  Without pausing to examine the logic of this corollary to my decision, I seized my candle, unlocked my door, and set off.

  And at once I saw that this was not to be, after all, the classic walk through the murder-haunted house, for, although the corridor lights were of course unlit, the glimmer from the eastern windows was quite sufficient to show me my way, and to lay bare the quiet and reassuring emptiness of the passages, flanked by their closed doors. I went softly along the main corridor, shielding my candle, until I reached the stair-head.

  The staircase sank down into shadow, and I hesitated for a moment, glancing involuntarily over my shoulder towards the window where I had seen Marcia and Nicholas. No one was there, this time; the window showed an empty oblong framing the pale night. I could see, quite distinct against the nebulous near-light of the sky, the massive outline of Blaven’s shoulder. The moon had gone.

  Then I heard the whispering. I must have been listening to it, half-unconsciously, during the few seconds I had been standing there, for when at length my conscious mind registered, with a jerk, the fact that two people were whispering behind the door to my right, I knew immediately that the sound had been going on all along.

  It should have reassured me to know that someone else was still awake; it certainly shouldn’t have disturbed and frightened me, but that is just what it did. There was, of course, no reason why someone else in the hotel should not be sleepless too. If Colonel Cowdray-Simpson and his wife, or the Corrigans, were wakeful, and consequently talkative, at this ungodly hour, they would certainly keep their voices down to avoid disturbing the other guests. But there was something about the quality of the whispering that was oddly disquieting. It was as if the soft, almost breathless ripple of sound in the darkness held some sort of desperation, some human urgency, whether of anger or passion or fear, which communicated itself to me through the closed panels, and made the hairs prickle along my forearms as if a draught of chilly wind had crept through a crack in the door.

  I turned to go, and a board creaked as my weight shifted.

  The whispering stopped. It stopped as abruptly as an engine shuts off steam. Silence dropped like a blanket, so that in a matter of seconds the memory of the sound seemed illusory, while the silence itself surged with millions of whisperings, all equally unreal. But the sense of desperation was still there, even in the silence. It was as if the stillness were a held breath, that might burst at any moment in a scream.

  I moved away quickly – and tripped over a pair of shoes which had been standing in the corridor waiting to be cleaned in the morning. The carpet was thick, but the small sound, in that hush, was like thunder. I heard a muffled exclamation from behind the door, then, staccato, sibilant, the splutter of a question. A deeper voice said something in reply.

  There was only one pair of shoes: a woman’s. I hastily retrieved the one I had kicked over, and put it back beside its fellow. They were hand-made Laforgues, exquisite, absurd things with four-inch heels. Marcia Maling’s.

  There was silence now behind the door. I almost ran down the stairs, plunging, heedless of the streaming candle-flame, into the darker depths of the hall. I felt angry and ashamed and sick, as if I myself had been caught out in some questionable action. God knew, I thought bitterly, as I crossed the hall and pushed open the glass door of the lounge, it was none of my business, but all the same . . . She had, after all, only met Nicholas tonight. And where was Fergus in all this? Surely I hadn’t misread the hints she had dropped about Fergus? And where, too, did Hartley Corrigan come in, I wondered, remembering the look in his eyes, and, even more significantly, the look in his wife’s face.

  And here I paid for my speed and my heedlessness as the swing door rushed shut behind me and tore the flame from my candle into a long streamer of sharp-smelling smoke. Shadows surged up towards me, pouncing from the corners of the dim lounge, and I halted in my tracks and put a hand back to the door, already half in retreat towards the safety of my room. But the lounge was untenanted save by those shadows; in the glow of the banked peat fire I could see it all now clearly enough. I threw one haunted glance back at the hall beyond the glass door, then I went very quietly across the lounge towards where I knew my handbag ought to lie.

  Marcia and Nicholas . . . the coupled names thrust themselves back into my mind. The odd thing about it, I thought, was that one couldn’t dislike Marcia Maling – though I might feel differently about it if, like Mrs. Corrigan, I had a man to lose. It was to be supposed – I skirted a coffee table with some care – it was to be supposed that she couldn’t help it. There was a long and ugly name for her kind of woman, but, remembering her vivid, generous beauty as she sat opposite me in this very room, I could not find it in me to dislike her. She was impossible, she was wanton, but she was amusing, and very lovely, and, I thought, kind. Perhaps she was even being kind to me, in a queer way, by attracting Nicholas’ attention to herself when she guessed I wished to escape it – though this, I felt, was perhaps giving a little too much credit to Miss Maling’s disinterested crusading spirit.

  I grinned wryly to myself as I stooped and groped beside the chair for my precious handbag. My fingers met nothing. I felt anxiously along the empty floor, sweeping my hands round in little questing circles that grew wider and more urgent with failure . . . and then I saw the faint glint of the bag’s metal clasp, not on the floor, but on a level with my eye as I stooped. Someone must have picked it up and put it on the book-shelf beside the chair. I grabbed it, yanked out with it some magazines and a couple of books, and flew back across the lounge with my long skirts billowing behind me.

  I was actually at the glass door, and shoving it open with my shoulder, when I heard the outer door of
the hotel porch open, very quietly. I stood stock still, clutching books and bag and dead candle to a suddenly thudding heart.

  Someone came softly into the porch. I heard the scrape of a nailed boot on the flags, and faint sounds as he moved about among the climbing and fishing gear that always cluttered the place. I waited. Roderick Grant had told me the hotel stayed open all night: this was surely – surely – nothing more sinister than some late fisherman, putting his things away. That was all.

  But all the same, I was not going to cross the hall and climb the stairs in full view of him whoever he was. So I waited, trying to still my sickening heart-beats, backing away from the glass door as I remembered my white housecoat.

  Then the outer door opened and shut again, just as softly as before, and, clear in the still night, I heard his boots crunch once, twice, on the gravel road. I hesitated only for a moment, then I shouldered aside the glass door and flew across the hall to the outer porch, peering after him through the window.

  The valley was mist-dimmed, and full of vague shadows, but I saw him. He had stepped off the gravel on to the grass and was walking quickly away, head bent, along the verge of the road towards Strathaird. A man, slim, tallish, who walked with a long, swinging stride. I saw him pause once, and turn, looking back over his shoulder, but his face was no more than a dim blur. Then he vanished into the shadows.

  I turned back from the window in the not-quite-darkness, gazing round the little porch. My eyes had adjusted themselves now: I could see the table, with its weighing-machine and the white enamel trays for fish; the wicker chairs holding rucksacks, boots, fishing-nets; pale ovals of climbing-rope depending from pegs; coats and mackintoshes, scarves and caps, fishing-rods and walking-sticks . . .

  Behind me the door opened without a sound, and a man came quietly in out of the night.

  I didn’t scream, after all. Perhaps I couldn’t. I merely dropped everything with a crash that seemed to shake the hotel, and then stood, dumb and paralysed, with my mouth open.

  The porch door swung to with a bang behind him. He jerked out a startled oath, and then, with a click, a torch-beam shot out and raked me, blindingly.

  He said: ‘Janet!’ And then laughed. ‘My God, but you startled me! What on earth are you doing down here at this hour?’

  I blinked into the light, which went off.

  ‘Alastair?’

  ‘The same.’ He swung his haversack from his shoulder, and began to take off his Burberry. ‘What was that you dropped? It sounded like an atom-bomb.’

  ‘Books mostly,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Oh.’ He laughed again, and pitched his coat over a chair. ‘You looked like a ghost standing there in that white thing. I was unmanned; but positively. I nearly screamed.’

  ‘So did I.’ I stooped to pick up my things. ‘I’d better go back to bed.’

  He had a foot up on one of the chairs. ‘If you’d stay half a minute more and hold the torch for me, Janet, I could get these blasted bootlaces undone. They’re wet.’

  I took the torch. ‘Is it raining?’

  ‘In fits and starts.’

  ‘You’ve been fishing, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes. Up the Strath.’

  ‘Any luck?’

  ‘Pretty fair. I got two or three good trout; and Hart took a beauty; one and a half pounds.’

  ‘Hart? Oh – Hartley Corrigan.’

  ‘Mm. Don’t wave the light about, my girl.’

  ‘Sorry. Is Mr. Corrigan not back yet, then?’

  ‘Lord, yes. He came back a couple of hours since, but I’d just had some good rises, so I stayed. Strictly illegal, of course, so don’t tell on me, will you?’

  ‘Illegal?’

  ‘It’s the Sabbath, my dear, had you forgotten? I should have stopped at midnight, like Hart.’ He pulled his second boot off, and straightened up.

  ‘His fish aren’t in the tray,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ His eyes followed the torch-beam to the table. ‘Neither they are . . . that’s odd.’

  ‘Alastair.’

  He turned his head sharply at the note in my voice.

  ‘Well?’

  I said, baldly: ‘Someone came into this porch five minutes ago, messed around for a bit, and then went out again.’

  ‘What? Oh—’ he laughed. ‘Don’t sound so worried! That would be Jamesy.’

  ‘Jamesy?’

  ‘Jamesy Farlane; he was out with us. He’s a better walker than I am, and he was in a hurry. He lives some way over towards Strathaird.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. I swallowed hard.

  ‘Did you think he was a burglar? You don’t need to worry about such urban horrors here, Janet. Nobody locks their doors in the Islands. There aren’t such things as thieves.’

  ‘No,’ I said. I put the torch down on the table, and turned to go. ‘Only murderers.’

  I heard the sharp intake of his breath.

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Roderick Grant.’

  ‘I see. Worried?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  He said: ‘I shouldn’t be. Whatever it was all about, it can’t touch you.’

  ‘I wasn’t worried about myself.’

  ‘Who, then?’ He sounded wary.

  I said, with an edge to my voice: ‘Heather Macrae, of course. The girl – and her people. What had she done that a filthy grotesque thing like that should catch up with her? What was it all about? There’s something more than queer about it, Alastair. I can’t explain just how I feel about it, but it – it’s somehow particularly nasty.’

  He said, inadequately: ‘Murder’s never pretty.’

  ‘But it can be plain,’ I said, ‘and this isn’t just plain, wicked murder. She wasn’t just hit or stabbed or choked in a fit of human passion. She was deliberately done to death, and then – arranged. It was cold-blooded, calculating, and – and evil. Yes, evil. Here, too, of all places, where you’d think that sort of perverted ugliness had no existence. It’s haunting me, Alastair.’

  He said, a little lamely: ‘The police are still on it, and they won’t let up, you know.’

  I said: ‘Who do you think did it?’

  ‘Janet—’

  ‘You must have thought about it. Who? Jamesy Farlane?’

  ‘I – look, Janet, I wouldn’t talk too much about it—’

  I said: ‘You mean, in case it’s someone in the hotel?’

  He said, uncomfortably: ‘Well—’

  ‘Do you think it’s someone in the hotel?’

  ‘I don’t know. I – don’t – know. If it frightens you, my dear, why don’t you go somewhere else? Broadford, or Portree, or—’

  ‘I’m staying here,’ I said. ‘I want to be here when they do nose out this devil, whoever he is. Whoever he is.’

  He was silent.

  I said: ‘Good night, Alastair,’ and went back upstairs to my room.

  I never took the tablets, after all. My dead-of-night walk among the murderers must have been the kind of shock-therapy that my headache needed, for when I got back to my room I realized that the pain had completely gone.

  I got into bed and surveyed the rest of my booty.

  I had got, I discovered, two copies of The Autocar; the books were The Bride of Lammermoor, and the abridged edition of Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

  The Bride of Lammermoor put me to sleep in something under ten minutes.

  7

  Sgurr Na Stri

  Next morning, sure enough, it was raining, with a small, persistent, wetting rain. The sheep grazing in the glen near the hotel looked damp and miserable, and all but the nearest landmarks were invisible. Even Sgurr na Stri, just beyond the river, was dim in its shroud of grey.

  When I came down, a little late, to breakfast, the place was quiet, though this was the Sabbath quiet rather than a depression due to the weather. I could see Alastair Braine and the Corrigans sitting over newspapers in the lounge, while Mrs. Cowdray-Simpson and the old lady had already brough
t their knitting into play. There were, however, signs that even a wet Sunday in the Highlands could not damp some enthusiasms; Colonel Cowdray-Simpson, at the grille of the manager’s office, was conducting a solemn discussion on flies with Major Persimmon and a big countryman in respectable black; Marion Bradford and Roberta were in the porch, staring out at the wet landscape; and near them Roderick Grant bent, absorbed, over a landing-net that he was mending with a piece of string.

  He looked up, saw me, and grinned. ‘Hullo. It’s too bad it’s Sunday, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you have loved a nice day’s fishing in the rain?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ I said with decision. ‘I suppose this is what you fishing maniacs call ideal weather?’

  ‘Oh, excellent.’ He cocked an eye at the sullen prospect. ‘Though it mightn’t prove too dismal even for laymen. This is the sort of day that can clear up in a flash. Miss Symes might get her climb after all.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Roberta turned eagerly.

  ‘It’s possible. But’ – he shot a wary half-glance at Marion Bradford’s back, still uncompromisingly turned – ‘be careful if you do go, and don’t get up too high. The mist can drop again just as quickly as it can rise.’

  He had spoken quietly, but Marion Bradford heard. She turned and sent him a smouldering look.

  ‘More good advice?’ she asked in that tense, over-defiant voice that made anything she said sound like an insult.

  Roberta said quickly: ‘It’s good of Mr. Grant to bother, Marion. He knows I know nothing about it.’

  Marion Bradford looked as if she would like to retort, but she merely pressed her lips together and turned back to stare out of the window. Roderick smiled at Roberta and turned his attention to his landing-net. Then Ronald Beagle came out into the porch, with a rucksack on his back.