Wildfire at Midnight (20 page)

Miss Maling away from the hotel for—cr, reasons of her own."

"I—see."" I was remembering Alma Corrigan's face as she watched Marcia's car driving away across the glen. "Weil, it appears to have worked."

His mouth relaxed a little. "Quite so." Then he looked down at his notes. "Well, I'm much obliged to you for telling me these things. I think you were right to do so. Is there anything else?"

"No," I said, but I was not well enough guarded yet, and his eyes lifted quickly to my face. They had sharpened with interest.

He said flatly: "You're lying to me, aren't you? There is something else."

"No." But I said it too loudly.

He looked at me very gravely for a few long seconds. Then he laid the pencil carefully down on his papers, and put his hands, palm downwards, flat on the desk. "Lassie" —his tone was no longer official; it was very kind—"I think you told me a he last night, didn't you?"

"I? A lie? What—"

"When you said you hadn't guessed who the murderer was."

I bit. my lip and sat rigid, my eyes on the floor.

He said: "Do you really think a woman of Marion Bradford's experience wouldn't have noticed if the rope was damaged when she put it on? Do you really think that rope was cut in the hotel porch that night?"

"I—it might have been."

"It might. But you don't think it was."

"N—no."

He paused. "I'll tell you how we think this murder was done," he said at length. "You realized, of course, that Roberta Symes never climbed across the Sputan Dhu at all?"

He added, as I stared at him: "There was no rope on her body, was there?"

I said slowly. "No. No, there wasn't. Of course ... if she'd been middle man on the rope the murderer couldn't have cut it between her and Marion. D'you know, I never worked that out? How stupid of me!"

"It's just as well you didn't, or you'd have left the Sputan Dhu to look for her elsewhere."

"What did happen, then?"

"We think he offered to do the climb with Marion Bradford, Roberta watching. When he got Miss Bradford to the one pitch that's out of sight of the other side—there's an overhang—"

"I know. I noticed it. He could have cut the rope then without being seen."

He nodded. "He pulled her off and cut the rope. Roberta would see an 'accident,' see her fall. Then she would hear him shout that he was coming back. He could get back quite easily alone by going higher above the gully. She would wait for him in who knows what agony of mind, there by the gully's edge. And in her turn, when he came there, he would throw her down. She must have fallen out of sight, or, if he'd suspected she wasn't dead, he'd have gone down to finish her."

I said nothing. I couldn't speak, couldn't think. I believe I shut my eyes. I know I was trembling.

"Lassie," he said, very gently, "if a man's a murderer, and a murderer like this one, crazy and—yes, vicious and crazy, he's not fit to defend, you know."

I said chokily: "Loyalty—"

"Doesn't enter into it. He's an outlaw. Your loyalty is to the rest of us, the sane ordinary people who want him locked up so that they can be safe."

"Well, why don't you arrest him, if you're so sure?"

"I told you. I can't possibly move without proof. I'm waiting for some information to come from London. Or— there's Roberta."

"Why did you leave me with her, if you're so sure I'd shield the murderer?" I cried.

"Because I'm a good enough judge of people to know that, when it comes to the point, you'll be on the right side, whatever your—loyalties."

"My instincts, you mean," I said bitterly. "If you'd been in the lounge last night, you'd have heard me talking very fine and large about my principles, but now—" I got up. "Has no one ever told you that people mean more to women than principles? I'm a woman, Inspector Mackenzie."

He had risen, and his eyes met mine levelly. "So was Heather Macrae."

I blazed at him at that. "I don't know why you're treating me to a sermon on loyalty, Inspector Mackenzie! Even if I did guess who your murderer was it's only a guess! How am 1 supposed to be able to help you catch him? I've told you everything—"

"No." His voice was soft, but it brought me up short. "I still don't believe you." He surveyed me grimly. '"And if this fact

-whatever it. is—that you are keeping back, is

one that will give me the proof 1 want, then I must warn you—"

"Proof? 1 haven't any proof! I swear I haven't! And if I had—oh God, 1 must have time to think," 1 said shakily, and almost ran out of the room.

There may have been people in the hall; I never saw them, I went blindly across it, making without coherent thought for the glass porch, and the fresh air and freedom of the glen. But when I pushed my way through the swing doors into the porch I came face to face with Dougal Macrae coming in. He greeted me gravely.

"Good morning, mistress. It's a grand morning for it, forby at bit of mist coming up frae the bay. Are you wanting to go right away?"

"Go?" I looked at him blankly.

"It was today I was taking you fishing, Mistress Brooke. Had you forgotten?"

"Fishing? Oh—" I began to laugh, rather weakly, and then apologized. "I'm sorry; but it seems odd to be thinking of fishing after—after all this."

"To be sure it does. But ye canna juist be sitting round to wait for what's going to happen, mistress. Ye'll be better out in the clear air fishing the Abhainn Camas Fhionna-ridh and taking your mind ofi things. Fine I know it."

"Yes, I suppose you do. . . . All right, Mr. Macrae, I'll come. Give me five minutes."

Three-quarters of an hour later, as I stood on the heather where the Camasunary River flows out of Loch na Creitheach, I knew that Dougal had been right.

The mist that, earlier that morning, had blanketed the glen, had now lifted and rolled back, to lie in long vapor veils on the lower slopes of Blaven and Sgurr na Stri. Just beside us, An't Sron was all but invisible in its shroud, and from its feet the loch stretched northwards, pale-glimmering, to merge with the mist above it in a shifting opalescent haze.

Marsco had vanished; the Cuillin had withdrawn behind the same invisible cloak, but directly above our heads the sky was blue and clear, and the sun shone warmly down. The river, sliding out of the loch in a great slithering fan of silver, narrowed where we stood into a deeper channel, wrangling and glittering among boulders that broke it into foam or shouldered it up in glossy curves for all the world like the backs of leaping salmon. Close under the banks, in the little backwaters, piles of froth bobbed and swayed on water brown as beer. The smell of drying heather and peaty water, strong and fresh, was laced with the pungent odor of bog myrtle.

Dougal was a good instructor. He soon showed me how to assemble my hired rod, how to fix the reel, and tie the fly, and then, with infinite patience, he began to teach me how to cast. Neither of us spoke a word about anything but the matter in hand, and very few, even, about that. It was not long before I found, to my own surprise, that the difficult art I was attempting had, indeed, \ powerful fascination, before which the past faded, the future receded, and the whole of experience narrowed down to this stretch of glancing, glimmering water, and the fly I was trying to cast across it. The timeless scene and the eternal voice of the water created between them a powerful hypnosis under whose influence the hotel with its inmates and its problems seemed far away and relatively unimportant.

And even if my own problem did not recede with the others, it did—so passionately did I refuse to face it—relax a little of its clawhold on my mind.

Dougal had put up his own rod, but did not at first use it. He sat on the bank, smoking and watching me, occasionally getting up to demonstrate a cast. Of course I never caught anything; I did not get even the suspicion of a bite. But so powerfully had the peace and timelessness of the place worked upon me that when at length Dougal began to unwrap sandwiches for lunch I was able to think and speak with tolerable composure.

We ate at first in silence, while the water ran bubbling-brown past our feet, and a dipper flew zit-zitting up and down the center of the river. A fish leaped in a flashing silver arc.

"That's just where I was fishing," I said humbly. "I must have been casting over him all the time, and never caught him."

"You might yet. I've known stranger things happen," said Dougal. It could hardly he called an encouraging answer, but I supposed that, from a Highlander, it might even be accounted praise. He looked up at die sky. "It's a bit overbright for the fish, in fact. If the mist came down a little, and took some of the glare off, it might be better."

"It seems a pity to wish the sun away."

"You'll not notice, once you're fishing again."

We finished our lunch in silence, then Dougal got out his ancient pipe, while 1 fished in my pocket for cigarettes. As my fingers closed over the remains of yesterday's rather battered packet of Players, they encountered something else, something metallic and unfamiliar.

I gave an exclamation as 1 remembered what it was. Dougal turned an inquiring eye in my direction, through a small fog of pipe smoke.

"I ought to have given this to the Inspector, I suppose," I said, withdrawing my hand from my pocket with the cairngorm brooch. "I'd forgotten all about it. It's Roberta's, and—"

"Where did ye get that?" The big Scotsman's voice was harsh. His pipe fell unheeded into the heather, and his hand shot out and grabbed the brooch from my palm. He turned it over and over in a hand that shook.

"Why—up on the hill, yesterday," I said, uncertainly. "On the scree near the Sputan Dhu. I—I thought Miss Symes must have dropped it there."

"It was Heather's. Dougal's voice was unsteady too.

"Heather's?" Confusedly I tried to remember where I had picked it up. . . . Yes, it had been lying on the scree below the ledge where she had been found. Could it have dropped or been kicked off that little pile of metal in the corner? ... I turned to look back at Blaven, only to find that the mist was, indeed, rolling down the slopes behind us like a tide of smoking lava. Blaven was already invisible, and a great wall of mist bore steadily across the glen behind us, obhterating the afternoon.

"I gave it to her for her birthday," said Dougal, his voice unnaturally loud and harsh. "She was wearing it when she went out that night. . . ." He stared at it for a moment longer, then thrust it back at me. "You'd best take it, mistress.

Give it to the Inspector and tell him where you found it. God knows it won't help him, but—" He broke off, and turned with bent head to hunt for his pipe. By the time he had got it alight again his face was once more impassive, and his hands steady. He glanced round at the silently advancing mist.

"This'll be better for the fish," he said, and relapsed into silence.

The sun had gone, and with it, the peace of the place had vanished too. The finding of that pathetic brooch had brought back, only too vividly, the horrors which had beset this lovely glen. My own miserable doubts and fears began again to press in on me as the grey mist was pressing. The other side of the river was invisible now. We seemed, Dougal and I, to be in the center of a world of rolling grey cloud, islanded between the loud river and the lake, whose still and somber glimmer dwinded, by degrees, into a grey haze of nothing.

I shivered. "Don't you think we ought to go back, Mr. Macrae? I think I ought to give the brooch to the Inspector straightaway."

He got up. "It's as you wish, mistress. Shall I take down the rods, then?"

I hesitated. Perhaps it was only the eeriness of the mist-wrapped glen, but, suddenly, violently, I wanted to be gone.

I could escape this thing no longer; I must face my problem now, and take whatever uneasy peace was left to me.

"We must go back," I said at length. "There are—other reasons—why I should see the Inspector. I mustn't put it off any more. And I—I don't like the mist."

"We can't lose our way along the riverbank even in this. Don't worry your head about the mist. Just bide still a minute while I get my rod, then we'll get away back."

He turned downriver, and before he had gone ten yards, was swallowed in the mist. I stubbed out my cigarette on the now chilly stone, and watched the grey swirl where he had disappeared. The obliterating cloud pressed closer, on heather, on rock, on the chuckling water.

The dipper warned me first. It burst from under the fog, fleeing upstream with a rattle of alarm notes that made my nerves jump and tingle.

Then through the blank wall of the mist there tore a cry. A curse. A thudding, gasping noise, and the sickening sound of a blow. And a sharp yell from Dougal.

"Lassie! Run!"

Then the horrible sound of harsh breath choking, rasping in a crushed throat; another thud; and silence.

OF COURSE I SCREAMED. The sound was like a bright knife of panic, slashing at the mist. But the grey swirls deadened it; then they were all round me, clawing and fingering at me, as I stumbled forward towards where Dougal's voice had been.

I am not brave. I was horribly frightened, with a chill and nauseating terror. But I don't think anybody normal would unhesitatingly run away if they heard a friend being attacked nearby.

So I leaped forward, only to falter and trip before I had gone five yards, so blinding now was the mist that shrouded the moor. Even the edge of the river was invisible, and a hasty step could result in a broken ankle, or, at best, a plunge into the rock-ridden swirl of waters. I put out my hands, foolishly, gropingly, as if they could pull aside the pale blanket of the mist. I plunged another four yards into it, then I stepped on nothing, and went hurtling down a bank to land on my knees in deep heather.

It was only then that I noticed how complete was the silence. The sounds of the struggle had ceased. Even the river, cut off from me by the bank, ran muted under the mist. I crouched there, shaken and terrified, clutching the wet heather stems, and straining with wide, blind eyes into the blankness around me. I found I was turning my head from side to side with a blind weaving motion, like a new-born beast scenting the air. The mist pressed close, the bewildering, sense-blotting nothingness of the mist, so that I no longer knew which way the river ran, or where I had heard the men fighting, or—where the murderer might, now, be supposed to be.