Wildfire at Midnight (15 page)

I was out of sight of the party, and could no longer hear their voices. The only sounds that held the summer air were the rush of the waterfall and the sudden rich burst of song from an ouzel I had disturbed from his perch. I frowned up at the steep pitch of rock above the gully, trying to picture what might have happened there two days ago.

Looking back now, I can realize that this was perhaps one of the queerest moments in the whole affair. If I had not been so abysmally ignorant—and so stupid—over the business of that climb across the Sputan Dhu, if I had worked on the evidence plainly available (as the others were even now working), I, too, would have abandoned the gully and searched elsewhere, and the story would have had a very different ending. But I sat there in the sun, smoking and piecing together my own bits of evidence, and deciding that, come what may, I had to finish seeing for myself if Roberta was on this side of the Sputan Dhu. So I stubbed out my cigarette and got up to resume my search.

I have no idea how long I took. I clambered and slithered and peered, pushing aside mats of heather and wood rush, and crawling into the most unlikely places. At first I called occasionally, my breathless "Roberta!" ringing queerly back from the cliffs above. Soon I was too exhausted to call but climbed and searched in a grim, hard-breathing silence, brought, minute by minute, to acknowledge that Roderick had been right when he said that he had searched every inch of the place. Roberta was not there.

At length, when I was all but giving up, my foot slipped when 1 was investigating a ledge. This was wide enough, and 1 suppose 1 was in no actual danger, but the brink of the ledge overhung the gully itself, and 1 was so badly frightened that 1 had to sit down, my back pressed against the wall of the rock, to collect my wits and my courage.

The sun poured down, slashing the rock with purple shadows. The towering cliffs shut out all sound but the rush of the lonely water. I might have been hundreds of miles from anywhere. The stillness was thick, frightening, uncanny.

I sat still, listening to my own heartbeats.

It was then that I heard the moan.

From somewhere to my left it came, to the left and behind me.

I was on my feet in a flash, fatigue and fright alike forgotten.

"Roberta!" My voice was shrill and breathless. I waited.

It came again, a tiny animal whimpering. It seemed to come from somewhere along the ledge, somewhere back from it, inside the very rock. ... I turned my back resolutely to the gully and my face to the cliff, and went as quickly as I dared towards the sound.

I came to a jutting rock, a corner, and peered round it, with my heart thudding in my throat. Beyond the buttress the ledge ran along the gully side, rising gradually and dwindling to a mere crack in the cliff. I could see the whole of it from where I stood. There was nothing there. Nothing.

I called again: "Roberta!"

I waited. There was no sound. The sun beat upon the empty rock. "Roberta!"

There it was again, the tiny moaning.

I squeezed cautiously past the corner, and along the ledge. This was wide enough at first even for me, who am not used to mountains, but when I found it growing narrower, and taking a nasty outward slant at the same time, I stopped, bewildered and, once more, afraid. There was certainly nothing on the ledge. And, just as certainly, this ledge had already been reached. I had seen the imprint of boots which led as far as the corner. I was imagining things.

In that moment I heard the little whimper of pain again, but this time back to my left.

I looked back the way I had come, almost giddy now with bewilderment and excitement, my heart thudding, and my legs and wrists none too steady.

Then I saw the answer to the riddle. I had pressed past the jutting buttress of rock at the corner, without seeing that behind it, and running sharply back into the face of the cliff, was a narrow fissure. Most of the opening was masked by a hanging mat of weeds and heather, but there was a little space below this, through which someone might have crawled. . ..

I tore at the heather mat with desperate hands. It was tough, but chunks of it came away, and I flung it down the gully. Pebbles and peat spattered down onto the ledge. I yanked at a great trail of green and threw it down, so that the sunlight streamed past me into what was, in effect, a small dry cave.

She was there, all right. She was lying in a little curled huddle, her back against the wall of the cave. One leg stuck out at an ugly angle, and her hands were torn and covered with dirt and dried blood.

But she was alive. I flew across the cave to kneel beside her. Her eyes were shut, and the bright face that I remembered was a frightening grey-white, with a film of sweat over it like cellophane. The flesh was pulled back from the bones, so that her nose jutted out as sharp as a snipe's beak.

I thrust a shaking hand inside the brave red jacket and tried to find her heart. ...

A man's shadow fell across the floor of the cave.

RODERICK'S VOICE SAID: "My God, you've found her!"

I turned with a great sob of relief. "Oh, Roderick—oh, thank heaven someone's come! She's alive, and—"

"Alive?" His voice was incredulous. He took a stride across the cave, towering over us both. "Alive?"

"Yes. Yes, she is! I heard her moaning—that's how I found her."

He was down on his knees beside me now, his hands moving over Roberta. His face was grim.

"Yes, she's alive, but only just, Janet. I'm very much afraid—He broke off, while his hands gently explored her head.

She whimpered and moved a little. 1 said: "I'll stay with her, Roderick. You go and get the others. You'll go faster than me!"

He hardly seemed to hear me; he was still intent on Roberta. He looked remote, absorbed. When he spoke, it was with suddenly impersonal authority. "Janet, I left my haversack at the end of the ledge. You'll find my brandy flask in the pocket. Get it, will you?"

I went quickly. The sunshine met me in a dazzle of light and warmth as I stepped through the cave door. Behind me Roberta whimpered again, and said something in the blurred little voice of delirium. I caught the word "Marion. ..."

It halted me in mid-stride, as the implications—the terrifying implications—of our discovery of Roberta came fully to me for the first time. I swung round. Roderick turned his head, and my frightened eyes met his. And beneath their still impersonal coolness I saw the same thought that was driving my heart in sickening jerks against my ribs.

"Roderick. ..." I almost whispered it. "Roderick, she— she knows who did it."

There was grim twist to his mouth. "I realize that," he said. "And by God she's going to stay alive till she tells us. Get that brandy, please."

"We ought to wrap her up first. Have my coat. . . .We've got to get her warm somehow until we can call the others." I began to take off my coat. He followed suit rapidly, and I knelt down to wrap the now quiescent Roberta as warmly as I could in the two garments.

He added, still with that grim note to his voice: "And I'm not going for help either, to leave you here with this amount of potential dynamite; nor are you going to wander this hill alone any more, my dear. You fetch that brandy while I have a look at her leg, and then you'd better get along above the end of the ledge and just yell bloody murder till somebody comes. And if you don't like the look of whoever comes just yell bloody murder for me." He smiled suddenly. "And I'll be there. Now hurry."

"All right," I said. But as I tucked Roberta's cold hands gently inside my coat and made to rise, she began to stir once more, restlessly. The grey lips parted again in a whimper, and 1 saw that her eyelids were flickering.

"She's coming to," 1 whispered. My heart began to thump violently. Roderick's hand gripped my shoulder.

Then Roberta's eyes opened wide; they were dark and filled with pain, but sensible. For a moment she stared at me, as if bewildered, then her gaze moved beyond me.

Someone else was coming along the ledge.

Roberta's hands moved feebly under mine, like frightened animals. Her eyes dilated in an unmistakable look of pure terror. Then she fainted again.

I looked around. Framed in the narrow doorway of the cave was Hartley Corrigan, with Nicholas just behind him. And I could hear Alastair's voice as he followed the others along the ledge.

Alma Corrigan was waiting at the end of the ledge, and was now summoned with a shout. With the coming of the others my responsibility had lightened, and I had time to feel the slackening of nervous tension that comes with reaction. All at once exhaustion seemed to sweep over me like a drowning wave, and it was with feelings of unmixed thankfulness that I found myself elbowed aside by Mrs. Corrigan as she proceeded, with Roderick, to take charge of Roberta. I heard her giving rapid orders for first aid, while Roderick curtly deputed Nicholas to go and summon the other searchers and commandeer a stretcher.

The cave was now uncommonly crowded, but, remembering that look of terror in Roberta's eyes, I stayed where I was. I did go out onto the ledge, but there I remained, leaning against the rock in the sunlight, watching the others inside. If any of those people was the murderer who had sent Roberta to her death, it hardly seemed likely that he could finish his work here and now before she could speak and identify him—but I was taking no risks. I leaned there against the warm rock, and watched the others in the cave ministering to Roberta.

Presently I heard a shout from Nicholas, away up near the main cliff. This was answered by a more distant call. And after that, it did not seem so very long before the stretcher party arrived, and I could at last abandon my post and leave the ledge to them.

Dougal Macrae was with them, and the boy Iain, and Hubert Hay, who was certainly not the third climber, since he had been with me on Sgurr na Stri when Marion fell to her death, Roberta would be safe enough now—that is, if the murderer's work had not been already done too well, and she were to die of exposure.

But at least she had been found. The long strain was over. 1 sat among the heather, waiting for the stretcher to be brought off the ledge, and lifted my face to the sun, shutting my eyes and feeling, for the first time for two days, a sense of relaxation. The warm, sweet heather-smelling afternoon insisted, with every lark note, every linnet call, on the normality of the day and place. Even when, with mutterings, and cautious scrapings of boot on stone, the stretcher was maneuvered along the ledge and balanced onto the scree, even then I still felt strangely lighthearted, as though the worst were over.

I had forgotten that Roberta had only to open her mouth and speak, and that a man—a man I knew—would hang by the neck until he was dead and then be buried in quicklime in a prison yard.

Inspector Mackenzie, with the enormous Hecky and Neill, the young local constable, was on An't Sron when the stretcher was brought down. Hecky stayed where he was, and continued what was apparently a minute examination of the ground round the bonfire, but Inspector Mackenzie, after one glance at Roberta, summoned young Neill from his job, and with him accompanied the stretcher back to the hotel.

As soon as he was told that I had found Roberta, he dropped back from the main party with me, and began to question me. I told him, as exactly as I could, what had passed. He listened quietly, and as soon as I had finished, he took me through it all again, putting a question here and there, until I must have repeated every action and every word from the moment I heard the first moan, to the arrival of the stretcher party. As I told my story, trudging wearily beside him down the valley, I found that the precarious tranquillity that had lit my little hour upon the hillside had already vanished, a snow-on-the-desert passing that left me picking my old lonely way through the grey wastes of uncertainty and desolation. And that little cold wind of terror fumbled and plucked again, ice-fingered, at my sleeve, so that I stumbled once or twice in my narrative. But I recounted, honestly and flatly enough, all that I remembered, and left him to draw what conclusions he would.

Then he surprised me. He looked sideways at me and said abruptly: "I'm putting young Neill on to guard yon lassie, and we'll send for a nurse straightaway. But we'll not get one before tomorrow at soonest, as the doctor told me this morning that the district nurse is tied up just now with a tricky case. So someone's got to look after Miss Symes till a nurse comes. Do you know anything about nursing?"

"A little, I suppose, but—"

"That's fine. Will you do it? Stay with her tonight and watch her for me?"

"Why, of course," I said. "But surely someone else—I mean isn't there anyone more competent, more practiced, perhaps, than I am? Mrs. Corrigan seems to know her stuff, and I imagine Mrs. Persimmon—"

"No doubt," he said drily. "But has it not struck you, ma'am, that you're the only woman in the hotel who wasn't here at the time of the first murder?"

"I—I suppose I am. But, Inspector, you can't suspect a woman, surely? I mean—"

"Maybe not," he said, "but Mrs. Corrigan and Mrs. Persimmon have husbands. And I want no one in that room who might be in any way—er—involved." He shot me a queer look. "No one, on any excuse whatever. You follow me?"

"If you mean Nicholas," I said tartly, "I'm hardly 'involved' with him, and I assure you he's not likely to be admitted."

His mouth relaxed a little. "Now, now, lassie," he said, almost indulgently, "I wasn't meaning any such thing. Then I take it you'll do it?"

"Of course." I looked at him curiously. "Do you mean to tell me that I'm the only person here you don't suspect?"

"Let's say," he said cautiously, that I don't suspect you of wanting to kill Roberta Symes."

And with that, we reached the hotel. Since Marion Bradford's body with in the room which she had shared with Roberta, and this, had been locked by the police, I suggested that Roberta should be given the other bed in my room.

The offer was approved by the Inspector, and accepted gratefully by the Persimmons, who were already harassed beyond belief. 1 left her being tucked up by Mrs. Persimmon and Mrs. Cowdray-Simpson, with Neill and the Inspector in attendance, and went along to have a bath.