Bury Her Deep (16 page)

‘It’s the tweeds,’ he said. ‘Feel that.’ He shot a leg out and I rubbed a piece of the cloth between thumb and forefinger.

‘Heavenly,’ I said. ‘Wasted on you.’

‘That’s what I keep telling Barrow,’ said Alec, ‘but he’s very determined. Now,’ he went on, leaning down to scoop up Milly, who had tired as quickly as puppies do and had come waddling in from the garden to find him, ‘tell me all about the case.’

‘It’s a nasty one,’ I said. ‘A man, no one knows who, jumping out at girls and women at night, assaulting them and running away.’

‘Every night?’

‘No, far from it. Not exactly frequently, but not quite irregularly – when he does show up it’s on the night of the full moon, or’ – I held up my hand for him to let me finish, for his face had fallen and he had started to protest at the thought of the full moon – ‘or rather after the SWRI meetings which happen to be held on the night of the full moon. Scottish Women’s Rural Institute,’ I added, guessing that I would need to explain.

‘Sounds like a job for the local police,’ said Alec. ‘Where do you come in?’

‘That is one of the many peculiarities of the case,’ I said. ‘The local police
were
called in, and they concluded that the girls who reported the attacks were making it up. Refused to have any more to do with it.’

‘A very strange thing to conclude,’ said Alec. ‘Did these girls have a history of telling tall tales?’

I thought back to Elspeth and to Annie Pellow, whom I had interviewed at the Colinsburgh pub on my way home. She had told me what was fast becoming a very familiar tale: a swift approach, a swift attack – ripping her hat as he wrenched it off her head regardless of the stoutly stitched elastic – and a swift retreat whence he had come.

‘Not the girls, no,’ I said, ‘although Luckenlaw itself has a fair talent for horrors. The first was a perfectly ordinary sort – a dairy maid from one of the local farms – and nothing I saw when I interviewed her makes me think she was the type for silliness. The second girl seemed just as sensible. I haven’t yet spoken to the third,’ I said, ‘although I’ve seen her and she didn’t appear the flighty sort.’

‘And when you say they were assaulted,’ said Alec, ‘assaulted how?’

I flicked through the little notebook where I had been jotting down the details of my investigations.

‘What have they been saying?’ I mused. ‘Ah, here we are. Pinching, plucking, nipping, tearing, pulling hair, ripping off clothes – well, a hat – that kind of thing. Anyway, those three happened all in a row. Then after a break, Mrs Fraser, a farmer’s wife, was attacked in August. She has a different view of the matter. She firmly believes that the stranger was  . . . don’t laugh, Alec, promise me  . . . the devil.’

Alec did not laugh, but I could tell it was a struggle.

‘Then two nights ago, Mrs Hemingborough, another farmer’s wife, and quite the most practical woman one could imagine – she had just finished giving a demonstration of chicken-plucking – was attacked. Her reaction is the strangest of all.’

Alec waited for me to explain.

‘She denied that it happened,’ I said. ‘Even though the attack was witnessed by one person – Jessie Holland, a farm worker’s wife – and the fellow was seen approaching by another – Vashti Howie, who saw him from her motor car – Mrs Hemingborough just tidied up all the chicken feathers, told no one and denied it until she was blue in the face when I challenged her.’

‘Chicken feathers?’ said Alec.

‘From the plucking. Now, no one has been able to put a name to this chap, but let me read you some of the descriptions.’ I flipped through my little notebook again, tracing the scribbles with the tip of my pencil. ‘Swooping, flitting, flying over walls, fleet as the wind, sounding like owls’ wings, running like a deer and above all  . . . snaky.’ I paused to see what effect this description would have. Alec merely raised his eyebrows and stared at me, all the while continuing to stroke Milly’s silky ears back over her head. ‘Everyone also agrees that he has a distinctive smell,’ I said. ‘Although no one can agree what it is. Elspeth said eggs, Mrs Fraser said yeast, possibly beer, and Annie Pellow said flowers – bluebells, cowslips and something else, something spicy but definitely still floral, she was sure.’ Alec’s eyebrows were still raised.

‘Eggs?’ he said. ‘Sulphur, do you think she means? Sulphur, also sometimes known as brimstone?’

‘Yes, it gave me pause too, for a moment,’ I said. ‘But then what of the yeast and flowers? Would it be possible to mistake sulphur for either of them? Could anyone imagine that a flower would smell eggy?’

‘And what about the woman with the feathers? Did she get a sniff?’

‘She’s denying it, remember,’ I said. ‘And the witness was too far away.’

‘So what’s the feeling around the rest of the village?’ said Alec. ‘Amongst the non-victims, I mean.’

‘There are various schools of thought,’ I said. ‘The redoubtable Miss Lindsay and Miss McCallum, spinsters both and respectively the schoolmistress and the postmistress, suspect a reactionary saboteur intent on stopping the SWRI movement before it takes hold – they’ve had names shouted at them in the street. I rather go along with this and so does the Reverend Mr Tait, who called me in – he’d
heard
about me, if you can believe it – but at least one of the two cat-calling husbands in question is middle-aged, although wiry with it, and anyway, both their wives have since joined. The other sane and sensible possibility is that it’s just some unfortunate with a monomania, who needs to be pitied and locked up.’

‘And is there anyone around the neighbourhood who seems to fit the bill?’

‘There is one,’ I said. ‘A newcomer who has aroused suspicions, but nothing more. Mr Tait and the farmers’ wives seem equally adamant that it can’t be him. As far as the locals go, there’s no one with a history of anything that would point the way. It’s possible of course that someone who has always lived there has suddenly developed this nasty twist and, because of the SWRI meetings, there are a lot of men on their own on just the evening in question. In fact, they rather take the Rural night as giving them carte blanche to go out on the town. Or down to the pub at Colinsborough, I suppose.’

‘So all in all no one seems likely.’

‘No, which brings us to the third option: the girls are indeed making it up; there’s a kind of hysterical fad taking hold and they’re all joining in.’

‘This fad being  . . . ?’

‘That the devil has been conjured or whatever it is one does with the devil and is walking the night.’

‘And how likely is that?’ said Alec. ‘I must say, Dandy, I do prefer a good solid murder with a corpse and no question whether or not the damn thing happened at all.’

‘Well,’ I began, ‘there is
some
kind of basis for it – if one half shuts one’s eyes. And there is actually a murder at the bottom of it all, but I doubt very much whether it’s a murder we can solve.’ Now I had his attention, and I went on to tell him about the chamber, the girl, the burial, the disapproval of the burial, and the fantastical imaginings – of Mrs Fraser at least – that this unquiet soul had summoned Satan himself.

‘I never thought I’d say it,’ said Alec, when I was done, ‘but I do believe the counter-revolutionary band in league to stop the bolshie schoolmarm might be the less unlikely theory here.’

‘You haven’t, I gather, spent much time in Fife.’

‘Have you?’

‘Thankfully, no, but the housekeeper at Gilverton when Hugh was a little boy hailed from a fishing village there and her sayings entered family lore. “Keep yer heid doon lest ye meet the devil’s stare” was a favourite but they’re much of a muchness, all employing the same small cast.’

‘I suppose,’ said Alec slowly, ‘that it makes sense of the chicken woman’s behaviour at least.’

‘Mrs Hemingborough?’ I said. ‘Does it?’

‘Doesn’t it? Don’t you think that she might want to keep it quiet if she has attracted the attention of Old Nick? I’m not sure I would put a notice in
The Times
if it were me.’ I laughed, but his words had reminded me of something. Once again, I riffled through the pages of my little book.

‘There!’ I said, when I had found it. ‘Alec, I think you’re right. She said to me when I bearded her in her kitchen the next day, “what’s for you won’t go by you”. It struck me at the time as rather odd.’

‘What does it mean?’ said Alec.

‘Oh, more east coast wisdom,’ I said. ‘It means that whatever is meant to be will be and there’s no avoiding it. At least, one more often hears it being wheeled out to express the opposite view: that whatever is being withheld from you is
not
meant to be, so you should shut up and stop pining. They are not really words of comfort, to my way of thinking.’

‘But very revealing here,’ said Alec, ‘if you can credit anyone with such stoicism that she would accept being roughed up by the devil, given a guilty enough conscience.’

‘If there is anyone anywhere with as much stoicism as that,’ I said, ‘Luckenlaw would be just the place to find her. I wonder what she thinks she’s done?’

‘Unimportant,’ said Alec, rather imperiously. ‘A red herring. We must stick to the facts.
Are
there any other facts? Anything practical and possible that we should take note of?’

‘I did try to piece together a picture of where the fellow might be coming from,’ I said. ‘All the witnesses and victims so far are agreed that he takes a good run at things, so I thought it worth paying attention to the direction he ran.’

‘Possibly,’ said Alec. ‘Although he could hide under any hedge he liked when you think about it. Still, in the absence of anything better  . . . I’ll ring for some paper and you can sketch me a map.’ Carefully, he worked his fingers in under the slumbering Milly and lifted her onto my lap. She rolled over, as floppy as a rag doll, dead to the world. Bunty, asleep on my feet, opened one eye to remind me that a puppy on the lap was tolerated out of the goodness of her heart and that the arrangement could be terminated at any time.

Barrow himself responded to Alec’s ring and rose to the occasion with a luxurious pad of snowy white sketching paper and a pair of new pencils in a silver card tray. I noticed that he had the quelling effect on conversations that one finds in Parisian waiters – Alec and I fell silent as he entered and didn’t speak again until he had left.

‘You’re going to have to watch him,’ I said, when he had drawn the doors closed behind him with a respectful backward sweep and a slight bow. ‘He’s another Pallister in the making.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Alec. ‘Pallister is a prig and a bully. Barrow is a treasure. There’s no comparison at all.’

‘Hmm,’ I said but left it there, and bent to the task of sketching out the village of Luckenlaw. ‘Now,’ I said, when I had got as close an approximation down on paper as we needed or I was capable of producing, ‘where does the dark stranger come from? In March he came down the lane towards Easter Luck Farm from the north. All the farm names are shortened to Luck, you know, isn’t it charming? In April he came crashing through the woods behind Mrs Kinnaird’s house, where Annie Pellow lodges. That is, he came from the west, and could have come round the law, meaning that once again he came from the north. I have no idea about the attack on Molly in May; that is one of the many things I need to ask her. In August, he came across the fields from the west towards the lane that leads from Luckenlaw to Balniel Farm.’

‘A completely different direction then,’ said Alec.

‘Quite so,’ I agreed. ‘And then the other night, he once again came from the Balniel road direction up around the manse to the Hinter Luck Farm lane. Both Jessie and Vashti agree about that.’

‘So he’s not coming from the same place every time,’ said Alec. ‘There are at least two patterns to it, and for all we know Molly could tell us something that destroys even those two patterns completely.’

I regarded my little map in sorrow for a moment and then, reluctantly agreeing, I screwed it up and dropped it on the floor for Bunty and Milly to play with when they awoke.

‘And he’s not doing it regularly,’ Alec went on, ‘at least not since his three monthly outings in the spring, and he’s not even going for any particular type, so it’s not as though we can warn the likely next victim.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘And that makes the gaps between his appearances rather odd, doesn’t it? I mean, he plumped for three young girls first which, horrid as it is to say so, at least makes some kind of sense. The next time he felt moved to go prowling he set his sights on a married lady of no great appeal and then on Monday past, he ignored the rather lovely Jessie Holland and took on the much more considerable task of trying to topple Mrs Hemingborough.’

‘As you say,’ said Alec, ‘it doesn’t make sense. If he was choosy, that would explain the gaps but if his tastes are as catholic as it appears he should really have been able to find a victim every month. That might be to our advantage, mind you.’

‘How so?’

‘Because if we find someone who was away or otherwise engaged in June, July and September but free to do his worst in March, April and May, in August, and again the other night we’ll know that’s our man.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘Thank heavens for Jessie Holland, then. If we had been relying on the victim, we’d have October down as another month he missed.’

Not for the first time, the same thought occurred to both of us in unison, and in unison too we blushed in shame that it had taken us so long.

‘Of course,’ said Alec at last. ‘Oh, I’m so glad there isn’t a Dr Watson writing this up for the scoffing public, aren’t you?’

‘There are no gaps,’ I said. ‘He attacks every full moon and somewhere in Luckenlaw there are more women who, just like Mrs Hemingborough, have borne it and not said a word.’

‘And possibly others who have witnessed his approach or his flight and also kept quiet,’ said Alec. ‘After all, if Mrs Hemingborough had seen him swoop down on Jessie instead of the other way around she would have suppressed that too.’

‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘I did so want to make a go of this for Mr Tait. Surely if I can find the missing victims I’ll be able to make some headway.’