Bury Her Deep (22 page)

‘It’s hardly a matter to raise the spirits!’ said Mr Tait.

‘No, no, you misunderstand me, sir,’ said Johnny. ‘Their spirits were high anyway, and simply failed to come down to a seemly level for this nasty business.’

‘Well, there are worse crimes than being too cheerful, aren’t there?’ I offered, thinking that anyone who managed to hoist their spirits off the ground at all when incarcerated in this spot with these husbands deserved some credit for it.

‘Poor things,’ Johnny Howie went on and he leaned against the doorframe as though settling in for a lengthy chat. Perhaps he was just as intoxicated as the others after all, but rather better at hiding it. ‘When we married, you know, they thought life was going to be one long round of parties. No wonder they’re so excited about putting this bash on for Lorna.’ It was perhaps an innocent remark, but still it served to remind Mr Tait that he could not afford to be absolutely disapproving and superior, and he grunted in a conciliatory kind of way.

‘Aye well,’ he said. ‘A quiet life in the country is not for everyone, right enough.’

‘How true, how true,’ said Johnny Howie. ‘When I think of those two girls who arrived at Balnagowan all those years ago, stuffed to the brim with the thrilling history of the Rosses – they weren’t joking, you know, when they said it was our ancestress who was the chief attraction – when I think of them reduced to finding diversion at village meetings and an artistic new tenant in a damp little cottage  . . . my heart aches for them, really it does. I could refuse them nothing it’s in my power to give.’

Neither Mr Tait nor I could think of an answer to any of this and so urging him to go inside and showering him with goodbyes we hurried back to the motor car and left.

‘I’m not at all sure I’m happy to see Lorna get any closer to that lot, if I’m honest,’ said Mr Tait, speaking loudly over the thump and screech of the engine as we trundled down the drive.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They have very fashionable manners – that is to say no manners at all – but they’re terribly fond of Lorna. She might even be a good influence on them in the end.’

‘What did you make of young Jock Christie?’ said Mr Tait, and it is quite something when giving one’s impression of a prisoner and possible prowler can be seen as moving on to safer topics.

‘He seemed rather dejected to find himself behind bars, as might be expected,’ I said. ‘And while I am sure he wasn’t “prowling” really – what good would prowling round a field be, anyway? Unless to poach rabbits – he wasn’t absolutely convincing with his tale of a blameless stroll either, gave the rather feeble excuse of finding it lonely at home and being happier out. But it’s hardy
less
lonely, is it? And that makes me think, Mr Tait. Why
is
his fireside lonely? I should have thought that a fine young man like that, with a farm to boot, would be married. There’s certainly no shortage of single girls for him to choose from.’

‘Who’s to say?’ said Mr Tait. ‘I was forty myself before I married.’

‘Yes but  . . .’ I began and then stopped, unable to think of a way to phrase my meaning that was not blunt to the point of coarseness. I decided just to say it anyway. ‘But it was different then. Before the war, I mean. There were  . . . well, enough men to go round, weren’t there? Now, at Luckenlaw the same as everywhere else, there are scores of young women – Miss McCallum, Miss Lindsay, Annie Pellow, Elspeth, Molly – and those are just the ones I’ve met in a day or two.’

‘Not to mention  . . .’ said Mr Tait, thinking of Lorna, I am sure.

‘Not to mention all the others whom I haven’t,’ I supplied, thinking of Lorna too. ‘So I simply don’t see how Jock Christie has managed to live here for five years and stay single. And I’m sure there’s something behind it. Something Johnny Howie said just now reminded me. Aha!’

Mr Tait turned to look at me, making the motor car swerve. We were back in the village by now, headed for the manse drive.

‘Aha?’ he said.

‘Yes. Mr McAdam said a very strange thing earlier this evening. When he was entreating you to help, he said of Jock Christie that he “had done no wrong, not really” and so he didn’t deserve to be in jail. Johnny Howie just said something very similar about his wife and sister-in-law: that there was not really any harm in them. Now in the case of the Howie ladies, I can see what he meant. No harm in them although they are rude and silly. But what did Mr McAdam mean about Christie? If he has not
really
done any wrong, what is it that he
has
done? Do you see what I mean?’

‘I do, I do indeed,’ said Mr Tait, letting the motor car roll to a stop in front of the old stable in the side yard of the manse. ‘But you are being carried away by your detective’s nose, my dear Mrs Gilver. I am afraid that Logan McAdam was merely thinking of the farm. As I mentioned before, what the lad did was take over a farm that he had no business taking over, not at his age and with his college learning and no farming in his blood.’

‘Ah yes,’ I said, remembering. ‘I’ve heard a bit more about that now. Hadn’t all the neighbouring farmers more or less moved in and helped themselves? It seemed like fearful cheek to me, but I can understand why they hoped it might go on for ever. Whoever it was who sold the estate to the Howies sold it not a moment too soon if a good farm was lying empty, don’t you think?’

‘That’s not how it was seen at Luckenlaw,’ said Mr Tait, and his voice was rather cold, to my surprise. ‘Farmland cannot lie useless and it was a lot of hard work for the neighbours to keep the place in good heart, and as for old Lady Muirie – well, she had a lot of respect for the old ways and no taste for change.’

‘I apologise, Mr Tait,’ I said. ‘I seem to have said something that’s upset you.’ At this, he softened again and the twinkle came back into his eye. I could see it quite clearly in the light of the lamp the manse servants had left burning for us above the door.

‘Not at all, my dear,’ he said, patting my knee through the travelling rug folded there. ‘I am being too sensitive by far. Only, it was my wife’s family’s farm, you see. They had been the tenants there as long as anyone could remember, connections of the Muiries away way back. And since she had no brothers or sisters, when her father died and she was all the way up in Perthshire, there was no one to run the place.’

‘I am sorry,’ I said again, but it still sounded most peculiar to me. Why, it must have been empty for decades, and no matter how fond of tradition this Lady Muirie might have been, I was on the side of the Howies (and of Hugh, I would wager) in thinking that a farm needed a farmer, even if he was a slip of a lad whom no one knew and for whom no one much cared. It was shocking, somehow, to think that nothing more than parochial gossip and sour grapes lay behind all the mutterings of Jock Christie’s name in the case of the dark stranger.

The next morning, putting all thoughts of the farming dynasties of Luckenlaw out of my head, I turned back to the question of the missing victims and set off resolutely after an early breakfast to beard Miss Lindsay when her den was about to be overrun by cubs. (I had decided that she probably kept her SWRI records all together somewhere and that if I landed on her unannounced just before school began she would have no choice but to leave me with them and tend to her charges.) The skies had cleared before the ground had dried last night and now there was a crackling glaze of frost underfoot, the fallen leaves picked out in white along their veins and stuck fast to the ground. Bunty pranced ahead, as skittish as always when she felt the earth unaccountably tingle and splinter under her paws, and I huddled inside my Persian lamb coat and Beefeater’s hat hoping that I would not slip as I picked my way down the drive and across the green to the school lane.

‘Here she comes, there she goes,’ sang the girls, at play inside the railings waiting for the bell.

‘Torn stockings and hairy toes,

A broom in her hand and a wart on her nose,

Here she comes, there she goes.’

I decided not to take it personally and gave them a benign smile as I passed them. Bunty made a few feinting darts towards the skipping rope but thought the better of it and followed me to the schoolhouse door.

Miss Lindsay was too polite to do other than greet me and usher me in, but she glanced not all that surreptitiously at her fob watch as she did so, and I made haste to explain that I was on a quest to view her Rural register the better to pin down those farms and cottages where I should look to find my audience for the talk.

‘What a good idea,’ she said. ‘You certainly do seem to have a talent for organisation, Mrs Gilver.’ With that staggering remark – one I had never heard directed my way before – she slapped a stout cardboard file on the table before me, took up her hand bell and left. The summoning clangs had sounded and faded away before I recovered myself and bent to the file, unwinding the ribbon tape holding it shut and feeling a thrill of anticipation for what I would find there.

I was in luck. The list of members was practically the first document in the – not inconsiderable – pile and, Miss Lindsay being Miss Lindsay, not only were the departing members scored off and the newcomers added in at the end but the dates for these comings and goings were included in her clear, round, schoolteacher’s hand. I opened my notebook and began to copy it down, fearing that when the morning prayers which I could hear droning away in the schoolroom were finished she might leave her class at work and return to me. Bunty, having padded around the sitting room and subjected everything in reach to a thorough sniffing, had decided that although there were no biscuits in the immediate offing this place was otherwise acceptable and had curled herself in front of the fire and gone to sleep.

Elspeth the dairy maid, Mrs Fraser from Balniel, and Mrs Muirhead had resigned their memberships exactly when one would have expected they might – immediately after the meetings which had ended so horribly for each of them – but I noted as I was copying this down that although there were other fallings away – a Mrs Gow, two Misses Morton and a Mrs and Miss Martineau – none of these had left after the July or September gatherings and so did not seem likely to be the missing victims. Besides, surely a Mrs and Miss Martineau must be mother and daughter, must live at the same address and must therefore have walked home together and kept one another safe. The same had to be true of the Miss Mortons, or at least it would be easy enough to find out. Mrs Gow was certainly worth a visit, even though it was the August meeting which had seen her off, after which it had been Mrs Fraser of Balniel who had succumbed to the stranger and sent him packing with her deserving goodness and her prayers.

So much for the droppers-off. As for the joiners-in, a Mrs Torrance had come along for the first time in June; the Howies – famously – had turned up in July to witness whatever cataclysm the preacher’s wife had unleashed on the gathering and how I wished I knew! Mrs Hemingborough had finally fallen into step only in time for the meeting in September, which was rather hard luck when one considered that it was after the very next get-together, in October, that she was ravaged in the lane. September, in fact, showed rather a flurry as Mrs McAdam also had her first experience of the Rural meeting and Mrs Palmer, Elspeth McConechie’s mistress, too.

A very fruitful exercise, I concluded rather smugly to myself, tucking my notebook into my pocket, and now I should tidy the papers back into their box and be on my way. Instead, however, I continued to leaf through the pages in the file, mostly rather dreary official communications from the grandly titled Federation Headquarters or else carbon copies of earlier talks, which made my heart sink: I was no more able to pound out my talk in triplicate upon a type-writing machine, than I was able to dream up anything to say. Towards the bottom, things got marginally more interesting again, with photographed displays of handicrafts and recipes copied out in handwriting upon decorated cards. One of these, I noted, was for a concoction called Boiled Dressing (to be used in place of salad oil) and its long list of ingredients began with flour, vinegar and hot sour milk. I shuddered, praying that Mrs Tilling would never come across such a thing, and quickly turned it face down.

I was nearly at the bottom now, just a page or two to go and then something lumpy underneath. The very last sheet of paper bore some sketches in watercolour, rather nicely done, and since the notes which accompanied them were in Miss Lindsay’s writing I surmised that the painting was her handiwork too. I stared at the sheet and my heart began to bang so hard in my chest that I was sure I could hear it and glanced down at Bunty to see if she could hear it too. All of the pictures were of a heart shape or a pair of hearts entwined, some with a banner across them, some with crowns above them: in short they were sketches of the jewel that Lorna Tait, Miss McCallum and Miss Lindsay herself wore as brooches, that Nicolette and Vashti Howie – to Miss McCallum’s disapproval – had rendered in crochet-work for themselves. What was causing my heart to bang so painfully under my ribs, however, was not the sketches but the title, emblazoned across the top of the page in an extravagant copperplate with illuminated capitals and curlicued underlining.
The Witch’s Heart,
it said.

I lifted the sheet out of the box and reached for the final item – the heavy, irregular shape I had felt – sure that I knew what I should find. It was a roll of stiff leatherette tied with a strap, something like a needle case, which creaked and crackled impossibly loudly as I opened it. I looked warily at the door and then again at Bunty, knowing that if footsteps were approaching even from a distance she would have an ear cocked by now.

When the last fold of squeaking leatherette was released, I gazed down at what lay before me. It was set out like a travelling salesman’s display case, which was fairly close to the truth, and the sales had been going rather well. Quite half of the little loops were empty with only a couple of pinpricks on each to show where the pins had been pushed through when the roll was full. There were still plenty left though, done in blue enamel, with some white and some gold; row after row of witch’s hearts waiting for takers.