Wildfire at Midnight (7 page)

I went softly across the head of the stairs, and was almost past before I realized that someone was standing, still and quiet, at the end of the passage opposite, silhouetted against the dim window. Almost with a start, I glanced over my shoulder.

It was two people. They had not seen me, and for a very good reason. They were in one another's arms, kissing passionately.

The woman was Marcia Maling. I recognized the fall of her pale hair even before her scent reached my nostrils. J remember vaguely thinking "Fergus?"—and then I recognized, too, the set of the man's shoulders, and the shape of his head.

Not Fergus. Nicholas.

Hurriedly I looked away, and went softly down the main corridor towards my room.

Somewhere behind me, on the other side of the passage, I heard a door shut softly.

IT WAS PRECISELY ONE FORTY-EIGHT A.M. when I decided that I was not going to be able to sleep, and set up in bed, groping for the light switch. The tiny illuminated face of my traveling clock stared uncompromisingly back at me from the bedside table. One forty-eight A.M. I scowled at it, and pressed the switch. Nothing happened. Then I remembered that the hotel made its own electricity, and that this was turned off at midnight. There had been a candlestick, I recollected . . . my hand groped and found it. I struck a match and lit the candle.

I scowled at the clock again, then slipped out of bed. I was jaded and depressed, and I knew that I had already reached the stage when my failure to sleep was so actively irritating that sleep had become an impossibility. What was worse, I knew I was in for one of the blinding nervous headaches that had devastated me all too often in the last three or four years. I could feel the warning now, like electric wire thrilling behind my eyes, pain, with the elusive threat of worse pain to come.

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 to 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 mantlepiece. 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, an4 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 stairhead.

The staircase sank down into shadows, 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. 1 could see, quite distinct against the nebulous near-light of the sky, the massive outline of Blaven1 s shoulder. The moon had gone.

Then 1 heard the whispering. I must have been listening to it, half unconsciously, during the few seconds 1 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 quickly away—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 handmade 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 on 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's 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 bookshelf 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 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 heartbeats, 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 onto 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. \ 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, then stood, dumb and paralyzed, 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 fish, and Hart took a beauty. One and a half pounds.'1

"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 1 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 are they . . . 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."