Wildfire at Midnight (19 page)

"What's that?"

"It proves that Miss Symes can convict him. He was our third climber, all right. He cut that rope."

I said flatly. "Inspector, do you know who this murderer is?"

"Have you finished, Hecky?"

"Aye, sir. Juist aboot it."

"Inspector, please—"

"Any luck, Hecky?"

Hecky straightened up. His face was rueful. "No, sir. It's been wiped."

"What?" The Inspector was across the room in three strides, and was examining the door. His mouth was thin and hard. "Damn!" he said explosively, then added: '"All right, Hecky. Shut the door and get back to your chair." He came back into the room looking angry. "Bang goes my proof," he said bitterly.

"Proof?" I said. "Then you do know who it is?"

"Know. Hardly that, perhaps. Call it a pretty sure guess. . .. But a guess is no good to a policeman, and we've no proof at all—not a shred; and if yon lassie on the bed doesn't open her mouth soon. I'm afraid of what may happen.

Look at tonight, for instance. Look at the kind of chance he takes—and might very well get away with, God help us, because nobody in their right senses would expect him to take a risk like that."

"He'll tempt his luck once too often," I said.

"Luck!" His voice seemed to explode on the word. "He murders Heather Macrae with a twenty-foot blaze of fire on the open side of Blaven. He kills Miss Bradford in full sight of Camasunary glen in the middle of the afternoon. He cuts Beagle's throat within yards—yards—of witnesses. And now this!" He looked at me, and added quietly: "I've been on this corridor all night. I only went downstairs to the office twenty minutes ago. And then—only then—your fire goes out, and he sees Hecky Munro going off and leaving you alone."

"I—I'm sorry," I said feebly.

He smiled at her. "Don't say that, lassie, I told you it wasn't your fault. You've been quite a useful recruit to the Force, indeed you have. . .. That kettle's boiling. Shall

I do those for you?"

"I can manage, thanks." I began to fill Roberta's bottles.

He was standing by her bed, staring down at her face as if he would draw her secret from behind the pale barrier of her brow. His own forehead was creased, his hair tousled, his chin grey with unshaven stubble. His fists were thrust deep into his pockets, and his shoulders were rounded. He looked like any worried middle-aged man wakened out of sleep by the baby's wailing. Then he turned his head, and the quiet intelligent eyes gave the picture the lie. "Do you mind finishing your watch now?"

"No.""

"Don't send Hecky away any more." "I certainly won't!"

"I shan't be on the end of the telephone. I have—a few things to do. But don't worry. And who knows, it may all be over sooner than you think. We'll get him. Oh yes, we'll get him. ..." And his eyes were no longer kind, but cold and frightening.

WHEN, ONCE AGAIN, I had locked and bolted the door behind him, 1 busied myself over Roberta. It was a full twenty minutes before I had finished my tasks, and, when I had done, all desire for sleep had gone.

I drew a curtain aside and looked out of the window. It was still misty. I could see the faint grey of the first morning light filtering hazily through the veil like fight through a pearl. It looked dank and chilly, and I was glad to be able to turn back to the firelit room.

Hecky had made more tea, and I took a cup back to bed with me, wishing yet again that I had something reasonable to read. At this hour of the morning, my heart failed me at the thought of The Bride of Lammermoor, and I had torn up most of the Autocars to light the fire. There remained The Golden Bough—an odd thing, surely, to find in a remote hotel in Scotland? It was a pleasant title, I thought, but I had a vague feeling that it was as heavy going, in its own way, as The Bride of Lammermoor. Something to do with primitive religions . . . hardly a bedside book, and hardly, 1

thought, picking it up incuriously, the sort of book with which to while away even the wettest day in Skye. Except, of course, Sunday, when there was no fishing.

But someone had been reading it. There was a bookmark, an old envelope, thrust between the pages, and, of its own accord, the heavy book fell open at the place thus marked. It opened in the ready and accustomed manner of a book much handled at that particular page.

I looked at it, mildly curious.

The Beltane Fires, I read. In the Central Highlands of Scotland bonfires, known as the Beltane fires, were formerly kindled with great ceremony on the first of May, and traces of human sacrifices at them were particularly clear and unequivocal. . . .

I sat up, staring unbelievingly at the page, my brain whirling. It was as if the words had exploded into the silence of the room, and I glanced across at Hecky Munro's broad back, hardly able to believe that he could be unconscious of their impact. My eye skipped down the cold, precise print. From it, as they had been scrawled in luminous paint, words and phrases leapt out at me. . .. Their sacrifices were therefore offered in the open air, frequently upon the tops of hills

... a pile of wood or other fuel. . . in the islands of Skye, Mull and Tiree . .. they applied a species of agarie which grows on old birch trees and is very combustible. . . .

There flashed between me and the printed page a vivid memory: the birch grove, silver gilt and summer lace, with broken pieces of fungus still littering the wet ground between the smooth-skinned trees. And the brown fans of agaric pushing, palms up, from some of the sleek boles. Very combustible. . . .

I read on, the cool detached prose bringing to my racing mind picture after picture: in the Hebrides, in Wales, in Ireland—in the queer Celtic corners of the land those fires were lit, and rites were performed that echoed grotesquely, though innocently, the grim and bloody rites of an older day. May-day fires, Midsummer fires, Hallowe'en fires— for countless years these had purified the ground, protected the cattle from plague, burned the witches. ...

Burned the witches. Another memory swam up, sickeningly: a young girl lying in the embers with her throat cut; Hubert Hay's voice talking of magic and folklore and writers who questioned Heather Macrae about old superstitions.

1 found that my bands were wet with perspiration, and the print was seesawing in from of my eyes. It was absurd.

Absurd. No modem young woman of eighteen, even if she did live in a. lonely corner of the earth, was going to be sacrificed as a witch. That part of it was nonsense, anyway. But why had she been killed, then, and in that unmistakably ritual manner? Hardly in order to protect the crops. Even James Farlane, born and bred in the mountains, could no longer believe—

1 jerked myself out of my thoughts, and read on. I read how, when the sacrificial fire was built, it was lighted, not from "tame" fire, but from new fire, "needfire," the living wildfire struck afresh from dry oak, and fed with wild agaric. I read how those who struck the living fire "would turn their pockets inside out, and see that every piece of money and all metals were off their persons." I read how, in some localities, the one who made the wildfire must be young and chaste....

The print swam away from me finally then in a wild and drowning dance of words. I put my hands to my face and thought, in a slow painful enlightenment, of Heather Macrae, who was young and chaste, and who divested herself of her pathetic little gewgaws to make the needfire for her murderer. She must have thought the whole affair crazy, I mused bitterly, but she thought it was fun, it was "different," it was the sort of romantic craziness that a clever bookish gentleman from London might indulge in.

My thoughts skidded away from that same clever gentleman from London, as I tried, vainly, to fit the other killings into the same framework of primitive ritual. Where, in the plans of this primeval throwback of a murderer, did Beagle's murder fit? Or Marion Bradford's cut rope? Or the students from Oxford and Cambridge? Or Marcia Maling's doll?

It became more than ever certain, on the evidence of this book, that the only kind of logic that could knit together crimes so various must be the cracked logic of madness. And that the book was evidence there was no doubt. There were too many parallels between its calm statements and the crazy ritual murder on Blaven hill. Nor could it be mere coincidence that the book itself was here, in this hotel. There was the probability that it was the murderer's own: a man whose studies had made him sufficiently familiar with such rites and customs—a man of unstable mind —might, when that mind finally overturned, wallow in just such a blotched travesty of ritual as Heather's murder now showed itself to be. Or it was possible—

I was, I found, still clutching in my damp fist the crumpled envelope that had marked the page. My hand shook a little as I smoothed it out.

I sat looking at it for a very long time.

The envelope was in my father's handwriting. It had no stamp, but it bore, in his clear, beautiful hand, a name and address:

Nicholas Drury, Esq.,

at the Camas Fhionnaridh Hotel, Isle of Skye,

Inverness-shire.

THE MORNING brought misty sunshine and the nurse. She was a youngish, square-built woman, who looked kind and immensely capable. With relief I abandoned Roberta to her and went down to breakfast.

As I went into the dining room, heads turned, and Mrs. Cowdray-Simpson asked quickly: "The girl—how is she?"

I smiled. "All right so far, thank you. The nurse is with her now, and says she's getting on well."

"I'm so glad! I was so afraid that all that disturbance in the night—"

"It was nothing," I said. "I let the fire out, and the Inspector heard Sergeant Munro prowling down the stairs to get wood for me."

Nobody else spoke to me while I ate my breakfast, for which I was grateful. I found myself being careful not to catch anybody's eye. I had just poured my second cup of coffee when Effie, round-eyed, appeared at my elbow.

"If you please, miss, the Inspector says—when you're ready, he says, but not to be interrupting yourself—"

Her voice was high-pitched and possessed remarkable carrying power. It was into a dead and listening silence that I replied: "I'll go and see the Inspector at once. Thank you, Effie.:1

I picked up The Golden Bough, which I had wrapped in yet another piece of The Autocar, took my cup of coffee in the other hand, and walked out of the dining room, still in that uncomfortable silence. My face was flaming. Last night's quarantine seemed still to be isolating me, Nicholas's mocking phrase to be whispering me out of the room. In each look that followed me I could sense the same resentment. In one pair of eyes there might also be fear. My cheeks were still flying scarlet banners when I got to the Inspector's temporary office.

He greeted me cheerfully, with a shrewd glance at my face which provoked me into saying, tartly: "I could do without the distinction of not being a suspect, Inspector Mackenzie!"

He was unperturbed. "Is that so? Don't they like it?"

"Of course they don't! I feel—cut off . . . and the funny thing is that it's / who feel guilty. I wish it was all over!"

"I'm with you there." He stretched out a hand. " Is that for me?"

I handed him The Golden Bough. In some curious way I felt that, by doing so, I had committed myself to something, had started down a path from which there was no turning back. I sat down. "I've marked the place," I said.

I bent my head over my coffee cup, stirring it unnecessarily, concentrating on the brown swirl of the liquid against the blue sides of the cup. I heard the Inspector make an odd little sound, then he said sharply: "Where did you find this?"

I told him.

"And when did you see this marked section?"

"Last night." I told him about that, too. But not about the crumpled envelope. It was in my pocket. I could not go quite so far down the path. Not yet.

"It was you marked these passages?"

"Yes."

"Do you know whose book this is?" The envelope burned in my pocket. "No."

There was a pause. I looked up to find his eyes watching me. He said: "You had other things to tell me, I believe. You told me so, before you found this book. Now, Miss Brooke'"—he was being very formal this morning— "what is it that you think 1 ought to know?"

"The first thing," I said, "concerns the cut climbing rope that killed Marion Bradford."

"Yes?"

I began to tell him about my trip downstairs in the darkness on my first night in the hotel, and how both Jamesy Farlane and Alastair Braine had been in the hotel porch.

"And Mr. Corrigan had been fishing with them," I said slowly. "Alastair said he'd already come back—but yesterday his wife said he didn't get in that night till three o'clock. It was about half past two when I spoke to Alastair."

The inspector was writing rapidly. He looked up when I felt silent. "What you're trying to tell me is that each one of these three men had the opportunity to damage the girls' climbing rope the night before the climb."

"Yes," I said, miserably.

"Then where does Dougal Macrae's third climber come in?"

"He might be innocent," I said, "and just be frightened! When he saw them fall—"

"Aye, aye, lassie," said the Inspector drily, and, again gave me that long considering look. "And had you anything else to tell me?"

I hesitated. The envelope? Not yet, I told myself, not yet, ... And the other thing? The half-lie I had told about what happened by the second bonfire? It wasn't proof, I assured myself desperately, and proof was all he wanted. Surely I didn't have to tell him? Not yet. ... He was watching me steadily across the table. I began rather hurriedly to tell him about the episode of Marcia's doll. Finally I sat back, and looked unhappily across the table at him. "But perhaps you knew?"

He nodded. "Mrs. Persimmon told me about that. But you can forget it. It's not a mystery any longer, and it never was a piece of this mystery in any case. I think I may tell you that it was part of a little. private feud between Mrs. Corrigan and Miss Maling."

"Oh? You mean Alma Corrigan did it?"

"Yes. She told me this morning. She did it to frighten