Even as I reacted to this in a manner that betrayed the lamentable state of my nerves, I turned my head and saw him, like the spectre of my dream, in front of the fire. But this fire threw no terrifying shadow back into the room, and for the worst of reasons. It was almost out.
A glance at my clock told me that it was a quarter-past four. I had not been asleep long, and Hecky had presumably not been to sleep at all, but in spite of us the peat fire, inexpertly stacked, had dwindled and died into an inert-looking mass of black sods.
Now a peat fire is a tricky thing for an amateur to manage. Once it is going well, it is wonderfully hot, a red glowing mass like the heart of a blast-furnace. Mrs. Persimmon had banked this one expertly, and Neill, too, had known what to do with it, but Hecky was a townsman and a Lowlander, while I was the most helpless of amateurs. Between us we must have handled it very clumsily, for it had burned itself almost out, and as Hecky stirred it the peat crumbled, and fell away into fragments that rapidly began to blacken.
I swung myself off the bed, thrust my feet into my slippers, and went softly across to the fireplace.
‘Won’t it go at all, Sergeant?’
‘It will not.’
‘Isn’t there any more peat?’
‘Och, yes, there’s plenty. It’s the putting it on that’s tricky. Have you the way of it at all, miss?’
‘Far from it, but we’ve got to try.’ There was a small pile of fresh peats on the hearth. I knelt down beside Hecky and together we stacked them over the embers and tried to blow them to a flame. But to no avail; the red ash waned and darkened, and the peats steamed sullenly, black and unresponsive. The room felt cold.
‘It’s no good,’ I said. ‘It’s going out.’
We looked at one another in some dismay, then I stood up, biting my lip. I had to put fresh bottles in Roberta’s bed. I had to be ready to make her another drink. I had to get the room warm against the chill hours of daybreak.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Hecky.
‘It’s my fault as much as yours. In fact, neither of us is to blame if we can’t manage the dashed thing. What we should have done is to ask Mrs. Persimmon for some wood to help us keep it going. I’m afraid it didn’t occur to me.’
He stood up, dusting his hands lightly together. ‘Will I go and get some wood, then?’
‘There should be some somewhere,’ I said. ‘The lounge fire was made up with logs, I remember. Perhaps—’
‘I ken fine where it is. We’ve been all over this place at one time and another, you’ll mind. It’s oot the back.’
I said, doubtfully: ‘Should you go, d’you think?’
‘You’ve got to get this fire going, have ye no’?’
‘Yes. Yes, I have.’
‘Well, then, I reckon I’d better go. And if you don’t open the door till I get back, there’ll be no harm done.’
‘I – I suppose not. How am I going to be sure it’s you when you come back?’
‘I’ll knock – this way.’ He moved nearer. His hand went out to the mantelpiece beside me. A finger fluttered. I heard a tiny tapping, the sort that might be made by a grasshopper’s feet landing a little raggedly on a leaf: tap – taptap – taptaptap – tap . . . Nobody else but I, with my ear some nine inches away, could possibly have heard it.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Don’t be long, for goodness’ sake. And – oh, Sergeant—’
‘Yes, miss?’
‘If there’s a kettle hot on the Aga, you might bring it up. It’ll save time.’
‘O.K., miss.’
‘You – you’ll be all right?’
He grinned down at me. ‘Don’t worry about me, now. I’d give a year’s pay to meet that chap, whoever he is, down by the woodshed! I’ll no’ be more than five minutes, miss, and if I see Inspector Mackenzie prowling around, I’ll send him along.’
He let himself out, and I locked and bolted the door again behind him. I heard him go softly down the passage. Silence.
My heart was beating uncomfortably hard, and once again I had to take myself sharply to task. I turned resolutely from the door, and went over to have a look at Roberta. She seemed to have relaxed a little, and her breathing was less shallow, but her eyelids twitched from time to time, as if the light troubled her. I took my green silk scarf out of a drawer and dropped it over her bedside light, then went back to nurse my little core of red fire till Hecky should come back.
He was surprisingly quick. I had ripped some pages from the Autocar, and, with these, and some small crumblings of peat, was getting a nice little lick of flame, when I heard the soft tap at the door.
I was halfway across the room before I realized that the sound had not been the grasshopper-tapping that Hecky and I had arranged.
It came again, a tiny sound: ‘Tap-tap-tap.’
I was standing three feet from the door, with my hands, in rigid fists, pressed down against the front of my thighs. My heart began to jerk in slow, sickening thuds. I stood, turned to marble, with my eyes on the door, while the seconds ticked madly by on the little bedside clock.
Ever so gently, the door-handle turned. Ever so softly, the door rattled as somebody pressed against it.
If I screamed, I thought, people would wake up, and they would catch him there . . . the murderer, trying to get at Roberta.
But if I screamed, it might penetrate that still slumber of Roberta’s, and I had no idea of the possible effect of such a shock. It was not a risk that I felt I had any right to take.
Then I was at the door.
‘Hullo?’ I was surprised that my voice sounded so normal. ‘Is that you, Sergeant?’
Of course it wasn’t; but if he said it was . . .
‘No.’ The vigorous whisper was certainly not Hecky’s. ‘It’s Inspector Mackenzie. I came to take a look at her. Open up, will you, lassie?’
Even as I accepted the statement with a quick uprush of relief, I surprised myself again, I heard my voice saying calmly: ‘Just a minute, Inspector. I’ll get a dressing-gown on.’
In three strides I was at the telephone, and had lifted the receiver. My little clock chittered the seconds crazily away beside me . . . two, four, seven seconds, seven dragging light-years before I heard the click of the other receiver being lifted, and Inspector Mackenzie’s voice, soft, but alert, saying sharply: ‘Mackenzie here. What is it?’
I cupped a hand round the mouthpiece and whispered into it: ‘Come quickly! Quickly! He’s at the door!’
The line went dead. My knees gave way under me, and I sat down slowly on my bed, with the receiver still clutched in my hand. My head turned, stiff as a doll’s head, to watch the door.
There was no sound, no rattle, no movement of the handle. The door stood blind, bland in its smooth white paint, telling nothing.
There was a swift stealthy rush of feet up the corridor. A voice.
‘Inspector? Is anything the matter?’
‘Where the devil have you been, Hector Munro?’
‘To get wood. I’m sorry, sir. Is something wrong?’
Doors opened. I heard Hartley Corrigan’s voice, rawedged with nerves. ‘What the devil’s going on here?’ Then his wife’s scared whisper: ‘Has something – happened?’
‘Nothing, madam. Please go back to bed.’ The Inspector’s voice sank to a reassuring mumble, and, since I could now hear three or four voices murmuring in the corridor, I opened my door.
The Corrigans were just withdrawing into their room, which was opposite my own. The only other people who seemed to have been disturbed were Colonel Cowdray-Simpson and Hubert Hay, whose rooms were just round the corner from our passage, in the main corridor. As I opened the door, Hecky, standing rather shamefacedly before the Inspector, with a bundle of wood under one arm and a still steaming kettle in his hand, turned and saw me, and came hurrying down the passage in some relief.
Inspector Mackenzie whipped round after him. His voice was still low, but clear and urgent.
‘Hecky! Don’t touch that door! Mi
ss Brooke, stand away from the door, please.’
‘Look here, Inspector’ – this was Colonel Cowdray-Simpson, still surprisingly authoritative in a deplorable old dressing-gown, and without his teeth – ‘what’s wrong?’
‘Please accept my assurance that there’s nothing wrong, sir. You can reassure Mrs. Cowdray-Simpson. And you, Mr. Hay; I promise you that if I want help I’ll ask for it, but just at the moment—’
‘O.K. I’m off.’ And Hubert Hay, resplendent in Paisley silk, disappeared reluctantly.
The Inspector came swiftly down to where I was still standing. ‘Now, what’s all this?’
It was so much the conventional policeman’s opening that I felt an absurd desire to laugh. I said, shakily: ‘He – he was at the door. The murderer. He said – he said—’
He took my arm and drew me gently into the room towards my bed.
‘You sit down there. Don’t try to talk.’ He shot a rapid glance at Roberta, and was apparently satisfied. ‘Hecky, get that fire going . . . No, on second thoughts, let me do it; you go to my room and get my bag and give that door a going-over.’ He looked at me. ‘You said he was at the door. I suppose he touched it?’
‘Yes. He pushed it, and turned the knob.’
He gave a small grunt of satisfaction. ‘The knob, Hecky. No, man, leave it standing open, then no ghosts can wipe it clean before you come back. Aah!’
This was an exclamation of satisfaction as the dry sticks caught alight, and the flames roared up the chimney in a crackling blaze.
‘I suppose there wasn’t a sign of anybody when you came?’ I said.
‘No.’ He was expertly stacking peat.
‘He must have heard me telephoning you. I’m sorry.’
‘On the contrary, you did very well.’
‘Well, I’m sorry I made Hecky go downstairs, then. It was my fault for letting the fire down, but I had to get it going again.’
He pushed the kettle down among the now-blazing peats, and stood up: ‘It might have been a lucky stroke,’ he said, ‘if we had seen the murderer. Now, supposing you tell me what happened.’
I told him about it, while Hecky busied himself over the surface of the door, and Roberta lay quietly in her blankets in the little green glow of the bedside lamp.
He listened in silence, his eyes on my face. ‘Hum,’ he said at length. ‘He must either have heard Hecky go, or have seen him go out across the yard. It doesn’t get us much forrarder, except for one thing.’
‘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 that. ‘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.
18
Borderland
When, once again, I had locked and bolted the door behind him, I 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 light 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, I 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 if 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 agaric 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-skinne
d 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.
I found that my hands were wet with perspiration, and the print was see-sawing in front of my eyes. It was absurd. Absurd. No modern 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 Jamesy Farlane, born and bred in the mountains, could no longer believe—
I 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, ‘need-fire’, 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 gew-gaws 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.