Bury Her Deep (32 page)

‘Here she comes,’ said Hugh, looking at Vashti’s fluttering lashes. She groaned and started a little as she opened her eyes and remembered where she was.

‘Don’t say anything, darling,’ said Nicolette, kneeling at her side and shaking her head a little between her bejewelled hands. ‘Who could blame you for fainting? I’ve never heard such a ghastly racket in my life.’ She shot a poisonous glance at Miss McCallum, who was the colour of a vanilla custard and was being supported on one side by Miss Lindsay and on the other by Lorna Tait, who had either regained her colour or had never lost it despite the lusty shriek.

‘If you hadn’t gone poking about,’ said Miss Lindsay to Nicolette.

‘Now, now, ladies,’ said Mr Tait. ‘We’ve all had a nasty shock and I feel most remorseful about having put you in the way of it. Please, I beg you, forgive me. Now, if Mrs Howie is feeling quite recovered and Miss McCallum thinks her legs will stand it, I think we should make our way slowly back to base camp and go home for tea.’

It was a quite outstandingly mournful little procession which trailed back down through the gorse and bracken to the motor cars. When we got there, Nicolette helped her sister into the two-seater and left, hurtling backwards towards the farmyard without another word. Miss McCallum collapsed into the nearest seat, which happened to be in Hugh’s Daimler, and Miss Lindsay inevitably hopped in beside her. Lorna, with a glance at her father, made a third and Hugh climbed in to chauffeur the three of them back to the village, reversing out very slowly, as though he thought the slightest bump under the wheels would start one of them off howling again.

That left Mr Tait and me. My legs were still feeling a little woolly from the alarums, but I managed to turn my motor car in the space and drive fairly smoothly down to the Mains farmyard and out onto the road. It was around about Wester Luck Cottage when I heard the first gulp from beside me and I looked round to see Mr Tait’s lips twitch just once, before he drew his eyebrows down in a frown and cleared his throat. There was silence for a moment and then another gulp, this one with a slight whinny behind it. My lips twitched too, I let out a shriek to equal any of Miss McCallum’s and then we both put our heads back and roared.

‘A rat! A rat!’ I said.

‘Nonsense, only a mouse,’ wept Mr Tait.

‘I’ll save you, Hetty,’ I cried in a falsetto tremble.

‘Good Lord,’ said Mr Tait, wiping his eyes and forehead with his handkerchief. ‘What a disaster.’

‘Nonsense,’ I told him. ‘If you wanted the tale spread around, the more packed with incident it is the better.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Tait, as though only just remembering. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

16

The next morning, Alec and I held a dawn meeting under cover of another early walk for Bunty. Hugh, still smarting at being ticked off so peremptorily in the chamber the day before, and in a considerable sulk about the way his long-awaited adventure had descended into hysterics, had taken himself off home straight after breakfast, not even pretending to care when – and possibly whether – I joined him there again. I had been all ready with a long list of dreary facts about household economy that I still needed to ascertain, but he had waved my explanation away with an imperious hand. If only he had known that my preparations for this wretched talk consisted of precisely one page of notes which read:
Insurance, daily/weekly marketing, pastry
, and that every time I imagined having to stand up and talk sense in front of all those women who thought I was either an expert or an idiot (and I knew not which was worse), I felt I should be lucky to faint dead away like Vashti Howie and be carried off in someone’s manly arms.

‘Well, that’s a great pity,’ said Alec, when I had brought him up to date. ‘If the grave robbers are
not
in fact bent on preserving the honour of the church but are in thrall to the silliest kind of superstitious nonsense, and the SWRI is
not
, after all, a front for a band of witches, then our neat little picture looks rather dish-evelled again. I still believe that either Jock Christie or Drew Torrance could be the dark stranger, though. I took the chance of going round to the Torrances’ yesterday afternoon, after I ducked out of facing Hugh – what a narrow squeak that was, eh? – and had quite a long chat under cover of asking permission to paint on their land.’

‘And?’

‘Well, he’s rather a poor specimen. Not quite rickety, but far from burly, so he fits the silhouette and he was not at all truthful about his moonlight meanderings.’

‘How on earth did you get him onto that?’

‘I bemoaned the fact that there’s nothing to do in the evening in Luckenlaw – unless you were a female, I said, in which case you at least got a jaunt to the Rural once a month, but what were the men supposed to look to for entertainment?’

‘Masterly,’ I said. ‘How did he answer?’

‘He said that after a day of sweat and toil on the farm he was happy to kick his boots off and doze with his feet on the fender. As a matter of fact, once he was on the subject of agricultural toil, it was rather a job to get him off it again. It must be marvellous to be a policeman who can just rap on the door, ask ten questions, tip his hat and leave. I thought I was going to grow roots standing there.’

‘So that just leaves Mr Palmer to be viewed,’ I said. ‘I suppose you’ll do that, will you?’ My enthusiasm for a wifely return to Perthshire had cooled, not to say chilled, after the short visit from Hugh, and I should be happy to find some excuse for remaining at Luckenlaw.

‘Certainly,’ said Alec. ‘Perhaps the dairy at Easter Luck would lend itself to a study in white, but right now I’m off to Luckenlaw Mains where I hope to fall in with young Christie. And you should keep on with your researches into the—’

‘Oh, please don’t say it,’ I groaned. ‘Every time I think of it, I could swoon.’

‘Yes, but you could start with Mrs McAdam. You haven’t spoken to her yet. You might even warn her – a married woman with children of her own – that she should be very careful at November’s full moon. You might get some idea of just how well she knows that already.’

It was as cheerless as any day could be – grey, cold, never managing quite to rain or quite to stop, just near enough to frost to make one’s feet cold but not near enough to freeze the mud and make the going easy. It was, in short, dreich and drumlie; two words which have always seemed to me to mean exactly the same thing but which, given the number of dreich and drumlie days to be described in Fife, are both absolutely essential. Bunty, nevertheless, managed to be in the same ebullient frame of mind as ever and watching her set off at a prancing trot with her head up and nose quivering hauled my spirits up just a shade too and I tried to enjoy the view of the distant sea and the great shrieking flocks of seagulls over the flat fields as they looped and wheeled, tying invisible knots and loosening them again.

Perhaps Monday morning was not the best time to catch and hold the attention of a busy farmer’s wife since Monday was washday, in the farms of Luckenlaw the same as everywhere, and she had, I guessed from counting the petticoats and bodices she was shaking out and dipping into the bubbling copper, at least three daughters as well as the husband whose overalls lay bundled on a sheet of newspaper on the floor awaiting the dregs of the wash-water once the daintier items had been seen to. On the other hand, it is always easier to talk to someone whose eyes and hands are occupied than to someone who is sitting across a table staring back at you, and the scented steam in the large kitchen-scullery was excellent camouflage, throwing both of us into what they call on the pictures ‘soft focus’, capable of making Mary Pickford look like a schoolgirl when she was thirty if a day and allowing me, I hoped, to appear as a kind of shimmering Fairy Godmother come to issue kindly advice, and not the gimlet-eyed nosy parker I was really.

It would be best, I had decided, to go fairly straight to the point and, thanks to my session with young Mrs Muirhead, I felt I had an opening.

‘My brief, Mrs McAdam, as you know, is the household budget,’ I began. ‘But I have to say it’s fading into the background the more I learn about what’s going on here at Luckenlaw.’ She did not look up – she was pounding energetically with her dolly – but I saw her stiffen slightly and I thought that the rhythm of the dolly became a little slower as though, instead of listening while she pounded, she was now pounding while she listened. Her dark head, the scraped-back hair just touched with grey but still strong and shining, inclined ever so slightly my way.

‘I think I’ve just about got a handle on the thing now,’ I went on, ‘and so I’ve come to warn you.’ A glance flicked my way, but she kept working. ‘It was your – is she your niece or your goddaughter? Young Mrs Muirhead, anyway – who got me interested in the problem. She had worked herself up into a dreadful state. Such a shame just when she should be keeping calm and thinking happy thoughts, don’t you agree?’

‘She’ll be fine,’ said Mrs McAdam. ‘She’s young and strong. But  . . . can I trouble you to say just what it is you’re getting at, madam? I’m not just quite following you.’

I pursed my lips at her words: I have always thought it monstrous to declare that a person is ‘strong’ simply to excuse oneself from being more kindly and careful than one feels like being. Indeed, the old saw which declares ‘What does not kill you makes you stronger’, no less than Luckenlaw’s own ‘Whatever’s for you won’t go by you’, has always seemed to me to be the worst kind of heartless nonsense and the one time that a grand benefactor was heard to utter it, with oily condescension, in Moncrieffe House Convalescent Home, I was immensely gratified to witness him receiving a swift bop on the nose from a young lieutenant, with one arm blown off and a bad gas tummy. Mrs McAdam had just, unbeknownst to herself, got on my wrong side in rather a big way.

‘I’m talking about these nasty attacks by the fellow they’re calling the dark stranger,’ I said. ‘I’ve worked out the pattern, you see. I know what’s going on, and I’ve come to warn you.’ She let go of the handle of the dolly at last and it fell to the side of the copper with a dull clunk. Blowing a wisp of hair away from her eyes and putting her hands on her hips, she faced me.

‘To warn me?’ she said.

‘Not to come in November,’ I told her. ‘To the SWRI. It’s like this you see: three young girls, three young women and two matrons attacked in that order, every month.’

‘
Every
month?’ said Mrs McAdam, frowning.

‘Oh yes,’ I told her airily. ‘I’ve found them all. Every month since March it’s been. And so married ladies with families, like yourself, need to be told to beware, because it’s going to be one of you in two weeks’ time if we’re not careful.’

‘This is what you’ve worked out, is it?’ said Mrs McAdam, looking almost amused, which took some of the wind out of my sails. I thought I was due a bit of credit for having untangled it, surely. ‘And what do you make of it, madam? What do you reckon it’s all about?’

‘Do you know,’ I told her, ‘I really don’t care. Whether it’s a saboteur, a mischief-maker, some poor fellow who should be in a sanatorium for his own sake as much as for others  . . . I couldn’t give a fig. All I know is that it’s causing a great deal of silliness and nasty whispers about devils and demons, frightening women who should know better, and it’s got to stop.’

‘Och, it’ll stop betimes,’ said Mrs McAdam, ‘when it’s run its course.’

‘But why should it?’ I insisted, infuriated once again by the bovine insipidity, the sheer gormlessness of these women. If they were not colluding in it, how could they be so ready just to
take
this? ‘Why should it get to run its course,’ I demanded, ‘any more than a burglar should get to burgle until he’s set for life, or a murderer get to murder until he’s removed everyone standing between him and his fortune? Why on earth should we take this lying down?’

‘
We?
’ said Mrs McAdam. ‘Pardon me, but you’ve had to take nothing, and if those who have are not complaining I don’t see why you should be.’ As soon as she had said this, her eyes flared, her hand fluttered at her hair, and she turned to her copper again, in some confusion.

‘Aha,’ I said. ‘My warning’s too late then. You, Mrs McAdam, were September’s victim. I wondered if you might be.’

‘Aye well,’ she said, sounding brusque with the annoyance she felt at her slip. ‘Now you know and it’s done me no harm, has it?’

‘Now that we have things out in the open where they belong, then,’ I said, ‘perhaps you won’t mind answering a question or two, because you can think what you like, but to my mind this stranger has to be stopped and if we can work out who he is, then we can stop him.’

‘You’d best leave it alone,’ said Mrs McAdam. ‘Mark my words,’ – and I knew exactly what words they were going to be – ‘what’s for you won’t go by you.’

‘Humour me,’ I insisted. ‘I’m taking it as read that he came at you across the fields, flying over the ground, swooping over the dykes like a racehorse etc., etc., that he knocked you over, pinched you, ripped at your head and face and then was off again. How am I doing thus far?’ Mrs McAdam shrugged reluctantly. ‘And he was a wiry chap. Not very tall and rather snaky in his outline. Now,’ I went on, drawing my little sketch map out of my pocket and spreading it on the kitchen table. ‘My guess is that he came from  . . . the direction of  . . . Let me see now  . . . Actually it’s very hard to say. In the spring he was coming more or less from the north, latterly from the south, almost as though he’s always coming in towards the village from the outside.’ Mrs McAdam had drifted over to my side and was peering over my shoulder at the arrows on my map.

‘That’s not right,’ she said. I swung round on her.

‘You know who it is, don’t you?’ I said.

‘No!’ she blurted. ‘Only, he came at me from Luckenheart way.’

‘Where’s that?’ I said.

‘Next farm along,’ said Mrs McAdam.

‘In which direction?’ I said.

‘Och, that’s right, I was forgetting,’ she said, scowling. ‘Thon Howies changed the name when they landed. Thought it made the place sound swankier, I daresay. Luck
Mains
. But Luckenheart Farm it always was and always will be.’