Bury Her Deep (21 page)

‘Taking a walk after supper is not a crime,’ he said. ‘Now, who should we ask to go with us?’

This was not a straightforward matter, I thought, as I went upstairs to dress for the unexpected outing. Clearly, Mrs Muirhead was out of the running in her condition and I was not keen to include Mrs Fraser in the party. Annie Pellow had seemed a level-headed girl, but she lodged on the green and it would be terribly public for her to be dragged out in her curl-papers at ten o’clock at night in front of her neighbours. Molly Tweed was a far better bet: she had had a good look at her assailant that night in the spring. She was favourably disposed to young Mr Christie, but I still believed that her preference for him would only guarantee her making no mischief if he was
not
the one, and could not possibly lead her as far as covering for him if indeed he were guilty. And then Elspeth McConechie could perhaps be persuaded to come along too, for she was a sensible soul.

It took some doing to winkle Elspeth out of her employers’ protective grasp in the end; I had forgotten just how solicitous Mrs Palmer had been when I had tracked Elspeth down to her dairy.

‘Come now, Mrs Palmer,’ Mr Tait had said with a stern look over the tops of his spectacles, as we stood on the kitchen doorstep at Over Luck, ‘Elspeth has no objection and Mrs Gilver is here to take care of her. You surely don’t want our young friend languishing in that nasty jail, do you?’

At which, Mrs Palmer had – very reluctantly – nodded to Elspeth that she was free to go and had left us to it, with a ‘Do what you will then, you’re harming no one’ thrown over her departing shoulder.

Our reception at Luckenlaw House could hardly have been more different. Vashti and Nicolette were summoned by the noise of Mr Tait’s motor-car engine – he had unearthed the fabled Napier for the expedition and it made a racket like twenty aeroplanes running out of fuel together in a hailstorm – and were only just persuaded not to come along, as though the trip were laid on for their fun, but settled in the end for giving Molly an archly solemn pep talk each.

‘Remember,’ said Vashti, ‘take a very good look and make sure you are quite certain before you say yea or nay.’

‘And only go in if you are you sure it won’t be too upsetting,’ said Nicolette. ‘I should hate to think you’re going to relive that shocking ordeal.’

‘Well, we had better be off,’ said Mr Tait, ‘and let you ladies get back to your refreshment.’ He glared at the cocktail glass in Nicolette’s hand.

It was only a few miles down to Colinsburgh, where the blue light above the police station shone out alone into the darkness. There were no streetlamps on the long stretch of terraced cottages which made up the bulk of the little town and with the public bar shut up and shuttered and lamps already out behind almost every pair of drawn curtains, it was a picture of slumbering respectability. Mr Tait’s ancient motor car shuddered to a halt and he climbed down.

‘Wait here, won’t you please, ladies,’ he said. ‘I have high hopes of Sergeant Doolan. You might not have to go through with it at all if he can be brought to his senses.’ With that he left us.

‘I dinna ken why everybody’s so set on Jock Christie,’ said Molly once we were alone. Mr Tait had subdued her on the journey, but she was clearly quite unbowed by my presence alone. ‘It’s no’ him, eh it’s no’, Elspeth?’ Elspeth shook her head. She was in less ebullient spirits than the irrepressible Molly, shivering slightly beside me and looking ghastly pale in the faint blue light. Before she had plucked up the nerve to speak, Mr Tait was back again. He opened the door and climbed in, shutting it behind him with what amounted to a resounding slam at this hour of the night in a quiet village.

‘Confound the man,’ he said, treating the three of us to a scowl which was surely Sergeant Doolan’s by rights. ‘He’s adamant. Said Christie was behaving suspiciously, creeping around in the edge of a field at Balniel with no excuse for being there, and now he’s in his office there stamping pieces of paper and tying up files with pink tape left, right and centre. I’m afraid, my dears, that you are going to have to steel yourselves for a rather unpleasant ten minutes or so. Now who wants to go first? Or shall you both go together?’

‘I canna,’ blurted out Elspeth. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Tait. I canna thole goin’ in there.’

‘But it’s John Christie, my dear,’ Mr Tait said gently. ‘You are not about to face your attacker again. It’s Jockie Christie and you know it wasn’t him.’

‘I canna,’ said Elspeth again, her voice rising. ‘My mother would drop deid if she kent I had walked into a police station and looked at a man in a jail cell. She wis afrontit enough that I didna keep ma mooth shut aboot the stranger. She would dee and she would kill me first, and I
canna
.’ She stopped talking but continued to shake her head over and over again. Mr Tait looked for a moment as though he were planning to attack this stout resolve, but in the end he turned to Molly, with a sigh.

‘So, it falls to you, my dear,’ he said. ‘You must come in and tell Sergeant Doolan – once again, as though you didn’t tell him until you were blue in the face in the springtime – that you had no idea who attacked you and John Christie is not the man. Come along.’

‘No!’ wailed Elspeth. ‘Don’t leave me, Mr Tait.’ Her nerve, which I had thought so firm, had quite deserted her and so, since she could not be left howling alone at the roadside and Molly could not be sent alone into the jail, I took a deep breath and stepped down into the street.

If truth be told, I was rather wobbly about the knees at the prospect of entering the place. I had been inside a police station once before, but it had been in the daytime and I had been taken in a side door to be interviewed as a witness in a room with an ordinary window; I had never before heard clanking keys and looked through bars at a prisoner. I told myself not to be a ninny and strode through the door sweeping Molly before me.

The front desk was hardly alarming, looking with its worn, polished surface, gleaming brass bell and backdrop of shallow shelves full of wire baskets where papers were neatly filed, just like any other slightly shabby office one might encounter. Sergeant Doolan awaited us behind the counter, hatless of course and with the collar of his tunic unbuttoned in a concession to the lateness of the hour and, no doubt, his sense that he was being highly accommodating to Mr Tait and indeed to Mr Christie.

‘Madam,’ he said, nodding politely at me, before turning to Molly. ‘Now, Miss  . . . Tweed, isn’t it? I ken you said away back when we spoke before that you did not know the man who assaulted yer person, but I want you to keep an open mind and look right close at this fellow we’ve got here. We’ve put a low light on in the cell so you’ll be seeing him much as you would have seen him yon night he attacked you.’

‘Um, Sergeant?’ I said, unwilling to let this pass.

‘Oh quite so,’ said Sergeant Doolan. ‘I mean, you’ll be seeing him in the same light as whoever it was you saw that night. Now, let’s go through.’ He produced a satisfyingly huge bunch of keys from under the skirts of his tunic and picked through them as he strode unhurriedly along a passage leading towards the back of the building. We filed through the gap in the desk made by a lifted flap and scurried after him.

‘Now,’ he said, when he had fitted a key into a door at the end. ‘Just take a good look at him, Molly, and tell us the truth. You can do a tremendous good deed by all your friends and neighbours if you help us—’

‘Sergeant, really!’ I remonstrated again. Molly was beginning to breathe rather fast and, as the sergeant turned the key, she put her hand into mine. Even through my glove I could feel that her fingers were icy and I squeezed them as we stepped through the door and into the dimness on the other side.

11

‘Molly?’ said a voice in the dark.

‘Miss Tweed to you, if you don’t mind, son,’ said Sergeant Doolan.

Slowly, my eyes were adjusting. The room we stood in was no more than ten feet square and was divided into two halves by a set of stout bars running all the way from floor to ceiling. On our side of the bars was a kitchen chair with a newspaper, open at the racing pages, lying on it. On the far side was a small camp bed with a thin blanket folded neatly on top of the equally thin pillow, and a young man sitting bolt upright facing us and staring.

‘Stand up, son,’ said Sergeant Doolan. His voice was far from friendly; I expect the epithet was habitual more than anything, since most of those who passed through his hands must be young men and he had to call them something. ‘Now, Miss Tweed. Tell me, is this the man who knocked you over in the yard that moonlit night in May?’

Molly, letting my hand fall away from hers, took a step forward and peered through the bars at Jock Christie. He was a striking figure, even in his present humbled state, standing there in his laceless boots, clutching at the waist of his beltless, braceless trousers. He was perhaps twenty-five, perhaps not as much as that, with fair hair brushed forward in a shock, and those jug-handle ears which I have always found rather endearing in a young man, perhaps because they remind me of my sons, newly shorn for their return to school which is when I love them best. He had the look of a farmer, hands swollen and roughened, arms and legs slightly bent while at rest as though braced against the weight of a hay bale or the pull of the plough horse, but he was far from bulky, even in his heavy clothes. Would anyone say he was snaky? Molly was hesitating, saying nothing at all.

‘Miss Tweed?’ said Sergeant Doolan, and his voice betrayed a little of the hopeful excitement her hesitation must have been affording him.

‘Molly?’ I said, wonderingly. She turned to face me and her eyes were wide and dark in her stricken face.

‘I dinna ken what to say,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, why did I ever come here?’

‘You mean, you’ve changed your mind?’ I breathed. She stared hard over my shoulder for a minute or two, remembering I daresay, although there was a calculating look on her face rather than the expression of effortful concentration which might be expected. At last, her brows unknitted and she turned back to face the sergeant and the prisoner.

‘It wasna him,’ she said in a clear voice.

‘You’re sure?’ said Sergeant Doolan.

‘As sure as I’m standin’ here,’ said Molly. ‘It wasna John Christie that jumped oot at me that nicht.’

The young man in the cell sat down heavily on the camp bed again with his shoulders slumped forwards and his hands hanging down between his knees. He looked up at the sergeant from under his shock of hair.

Sergeant Doolan glanced between him and Molly once or twice and then cleared his throat importantly.

‘Aye, well,’ he said. ‘There’s still the matter of what you were up to tonight, though, isn’t there?’

‘I was out a walk,’ said John Christie. ‘I told you that.’

‘Out a walk in a field in the dead of night with no lantern?’ said Sergeant Doolan.

‘It was nine o’clock,’ said Christie. ‘And I like walking in the fields. I like to feel the earth under my boots. I’m a farmer.’

I could see that Sergeant Doolan had trouble swallowing this and it did not ring quite true to me either, for every farmer I have ever met – and that is many – has been only too desperate to put the horse in its stall at the end of the weary day and shut the door against the crops and the beasts and the endless troubles they bring. Even Hugh, who charges around the fields and woods from dawn until dusk in all weathers, is ready to turn his back on them after dinner and settle into an armchair.

‘So you’re admitting you often do this, are you?’ said Sergeant Doolan. ‘Tramp about in the cold and dark when every other buddy wi’ any sense is by his own fireside?’

‘My own fireside is gey lonely,’ said Christie. ‘I’m happier out under the sky, day or night the same.’

And troubled as he was, certain as he was that something here did not add up, Sergeant Doolan had no choice but to let him go.

We delivered Elspeth back to Easter Luck Farm, making no mention of the sudden attack of dainty disinclination which had beset her – there was no harm done after all – and then rumbled around the back lanes to Luckenlaw House to return Molly to her kitchens. Once again, a party from above stairs turned out to greet us, the Howie men this time accompanying their wives to the door, and much to Mr Tait’s disgust and my slight exasperation all four of them were now rather drunk. Still, it was the first time I had ever seen Irvine Howie on his feet and he had even left his newspaper behind, bringing with him only a brandy glass and a half-smoked cigarette.

‘Hurrah for Molly!’ Nicolette chirped as Mr Tait opened the side door of the motor car and she stepped down. ‘Well, was it him?’

Molly shook her head and, giving a kind of flying curtsey as she passed, scuttled round the side of the house to the back door.

‘No, it wasn’t him,’ said Mr Tait sternly. ‘You’ll be very pleased to hear, Mr Howie, that your tenant will soon be back at the farm.’

Johnny Howie had the grace to look sheepish at this; after all, one might have expected a little more solicitousness from the menfolk at least when a young man in their bailiwick was clapped in irons.

‘Yes, steady on there,’ he said to his wife. ‘It’s a serious matter, you know.’

‘Oh, don’t be so utterly dreary,’ said Nicolette. ‘Come on, Vash, let’s go and ask her about it. Such a scream!’ With that, the sisters disappeared giggling into the house.

‘ . . . excuse our wives,’ said Irvine, taking a last lazy draw on his cigarette and flicking it onto the gravel. ‘ . . . more sense than a pair of geese, sometimes.’ And he too strolled unsteadily away into the lamplit hall without so much as a farewell, much less a thank you.

Mr Tait was beginning to look thunderous, his jaw stuck out and his eyes for once without the merest hint of a twinkle.

‘Yes, I must apologise for them,’ said Johnny, who was unfocused around the eyes but otherwise seemed in a rather better state than the rest of them. ‘They are beyond any pale, but there’s no harm in them really, you know.’ His words sparked a memory in me, but I could not catch at it. ‘Just high spirits.’