Bury Her Deep

17

And so all we had to do was wait. Alec had to wait at Luckenlaw, painting like fury in the few short hours of daylight whenever it was not raining, and trying to engage anyone who happened along upon the topic of folklore, moonlight, good and bad luck, ancient burial customs, and anything else that seemed at all likely to uncover the identity of the grave-diggers. I had to wait at Gilverton, drafting and redrafting my wretched talk, heaps of household manuals spread around me and so many spoiled sheets being thrown onto the fire that the housemaid began to clear the ash twice a day.

Mrs Tilling tried to help me, reaching back into her memories of a country childhood for hedgerow recipes and telling me about such esoteric matters as sealing the stalk of a stored pear with a blob of wax to stop it softening, feeling that the truth of the saying ‘Waste not, want not’ made all such hints perfectly relevant to the budget in the end.

‘But really and truly, madam,’ she concluded, ‘when it comes to the hedgerow, the wild fruit is so tart you can use twice the sugar to get the jelly made, and you’d have been better with a nice basket of raspberries from the farm. And even if you did manage to get a squirrel pie over your back teeth, you’d want such a treat afterwards for pudding it’s hardly worth it. I’d ask Miss Grant, madam, for it’s always seemed to me that most of the extravagance downstairs at Gilverton goes on in that there laundry room. Did you know your lavender water comes from London? When the south wall is bursting with it all summer long? No, I thought not.’

When I asked Grant about economy she blanched, suspecting an end to the glorious spell of plenty she had been enjoying of late, and when I assured her that my interest was academic she only replied that she had lived in theatrical digs with insects the size of rats and rats the size of cats when her family was touring and once she had put that life behind her she had thought it best to remember nothing at all.

‘Except for a Brillo in a mousehole,’ she said. ‘That works wonders – they don’t like the taste.’

‘I don’t think my audience would be flattered if I weighed in with tips on seeing off vermin,’ I replied, ‘but thank you for trying.’

Alec kept me up to date, with daily postings from the kiosk on the green.

‘I do like the old boy,’ he said. ‘Mr Tait, I mean. He has a very dry wit for a parson. I only wish he had passed some of it on.’

‘No one could call poor Lorna dry, right enough,’ I said, laughing. ‘Are you coping?’

‘Oh, fairly well,’ Alec said. ‘There have been a couple of ticklish moments, chiefly when the Howies are on the scene. I’m sure Niccy Howie has seen through me, you know. She keeps giving these tremendous guffaws whenever I talk about Art, and she seems to find the Lorna angle highly diverting. But that’s by the by. What I do need to tell you is that another one of those farmers’ wives has been poking around the manse. Lorna told me.’

‘Details?’ I said, with a pencil at the ready to make notes.

‘Very few,’ said Alec. ‘Lord, I wish those girls would shut up with their endless skipping and go home. Can you hear them?’

‘Just,’ I said. ‘I thought they were charming, actually. Although the librettist tends to the macabre. And it’s just as bad here with the twittering and squalling all day. Hugh might be convinced that his little bird tables are instrumental in turning the place into a botanical paradise, but I notice he hasn’t plonked one right outside his window. Never mind that, though. What did Lorna tell you?’

‘She asked my advice, actually. She thinks her father is having a dress made for her for her birthday. She says she found Mrs Torrance raking through her wardrobe and the woman wouldn’t say what she was doing, which threw Lorna into a flutter, because the Howie ladies are organising her entire outfit and she thought her father knew that, and doesn’t want to hurt his feelings.’

‘And what are you supposed to do about it?’ I said. ‘She is a very peculiar girl in some ways.’

‘I was supposed to have a view on it, as a man, you know. Mind you when she said that, Niccy Howie did another one of her snorts and Vashti joined her.’

‘Hmm,’ I said, shrinking from telling Alec that the Howies thought him much more able to debate the dressmaking than to give the man’s-eye view. ‘Now tell me, have you managed yet to track down Jockie Christie?’

Alec gave a mighty sigh, which caused a great deal of buzzing and fluffing on the line.

‘I have,’ he said. ‘I’ve been up there painting that stairway thingummy for days – Cubist, don’t you know, which I thought would lend itself to stairs but it’s jolly difficult, actually – and by the end I was more depressed than I’ve been in my life, except for the trenches. But I don’t think the gloom is coming from him. I like him.’

‘He’s still our first suspect, isn’t he?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes,’ said Alec. ‘I haven’t uncovered anything material. It’s just that I like him. He’s a miner’s son from somewhere called Lochgelly, got a scholarship to grammar school, worked after school to buy his own books and uniform since his family were having none of it, decided he wanted to work on the land, got himself a scholarship to agricultural college, came out top of his class, and presented himself in answer to the Howies’ advertisement. A really good sort. Knows no end of impressive stuff about soil improvement. I almost made a huge gaffe and asked him for advice, thinking about Dunelgar, you know, before I remembered that Captain Watson doesn’t have any soil to improve.’

‘You’re getting as bad as Hugh,’ I told him. ‘It’s hardly a classic character reference, darling.’

In fact, the modern farming method angle was inclined to make me suspect him more. I had come across someone in the past who knew rather too much about flora and fauna than was normal and he had certainly been what my sons called, with great poetic economy, ‘a stinker’. And did not some of these advanced types bury hollow horns full of sheep’s wool in the corners of their crop fields, and pay a great deal of attention to the waxing and waning of the moon?

As the November moon waxed fatter and fatter in the tingling cold sky, I readied myself as best I could to face both my public and the showdown Alec and I had planned for afterwards. He was to open with his demonstration of painting and I was to follow up after tea, leaving him time to get to Luckenheart Farm and watch for the emergence of Jockie Christie before the ladies ventured home.

On the night, our plan – or my plan, rather, for Alec was keener on the interception than on the protection of the matrons – was all the better served by the fact that there were a few familiar faces missing from the schoolroom. Mrs Hemingborough was nowhere to be seen, clearly happy to risk missing any of the chicken feather poultices that her last month’s audience might have brought along for her inspection. Mrs Palmer, Mrs Torrance and Mrs McAdam too were notable by their absence.

‘Strange,’ said Lorna. ‘Mrs McAdam never said anything this afternoon.’

‘You saw her today?’ I asked and Lorna looked troubled.

‘She was upstairs in the manse again,’ said Lorna. ‘Doing whatever it is they’re doing. Oh, I hope it’s not a frock, Mrs Gilver,’ said Lorna. ‘The one Nicolette and Vashti have got me is such a dream of a thing. It would crush me not to wear it.’

‘What a write-up, my darling,’ said a drawling voice from behind us and Nicolette Howie bent down and clashed her hot, painted cheek against Lorna’s and then mine. ‘I’m very glad you like it.’

‘Rather thin on the ground tonight, aren’t we?’ said Vashti, looking around the room.

‘We are,’ said Nicolette, following her gaze. ‘That’s to say, the senior members have resisted the programme but there are plenty of girls. Looking rather well turned out too.’ She winked at me.

‘I’m sorry to tell you, Dandy,’ said Vashti, ‘that I rather suspect they are budding artists more than domestic economists in the making, don’t you?’ I smiled ruefully, for I agreed.

At that moment Alec arrived, carrying an enormous canvas that he only just managed to fit under his arm and hold onto with the very tips of his fingers. He was wearing the smock, which produced a terrific hoot from Niccy Howie (the first of many), and the cavalry boots, with bright red woollen stockings pulled up and folded over, and he had a few paintbrushes stuck behind each ear. Miss Lindsay fussed around getting him set up in a favourable spot and spreading waxed paper for him to chuck his rags onto in between wiping his brushes. Miss McCallum sat lowering from under her sandy brows, obviously deploring the skittish air that the presence of a personable young man had brought to the proceedings.

I had been unable to speak to Alec alone since my arrival back at Luckenlaw that afternoon, and now he was trying to communicate something to me here in this crowded room. He rubbed ostentatiously at one eye, opening it and closing it repeatedly – or in other words, winking – and then he put a hand up to his head and quite deliberately pulled out one of his hairs and put it into his smock pocket.

‘I think the poor lamb’s nervous,’ said Lorna, clearly itching to get up and go to comfort him. I thought he would be even more nervous to have heard himself called a poor lamb.

Then Miss Lindsay clapped her hands for order and the November meeting of the Luckenlaw SWRI was under way. First came a prayer for Armistice Day; the motto was: Punctuality is the politeness of princes – chosen rather pointedly after a pair of girls had come in at the last gasp, giggling; the competition was a moth-repeller in worked wool; and the social half-hour was to be filled with an entertainment chosen by…

‘Our new face, tonight and for one night only,’ said Miss Lindsay. ‘Captain Watson, what’s your pleasure? Singing, dancing, stories or parlour games?’

‘Is anyone here familiar with Chinese ropes?’ said Alec. There was a bemused silence and then a few murmurs of assent.

‘Never heard of them,’ said Vashti Howie. ‘What are they?’

‘It’s a kind of indoor skipping,’ said Alec, ‘done with rubber bands knotted together to make a frame. It’s something that’s easy to show and very hard to describe… a cross between hopscotch and cat’s cradle, but with a rhythm to it. I have brought a quantity of bands along with me’ – here he dug into a pocket and pulled out a spilling handful of what looked like very thin brown worms – ‘and if I can prevail upon someone with nimble fingers to tie them, I should like the social half-hour to be skipping tonight. Along with all the wonderful old skipping songs, of course.’

‘Well,’ said Miss Lindsay, ‘I call that a grand idea. It’s many a long year since any of us have had a good go of skipping and I look forward to the fun. Now Captain Watson, if you’re ready.’

He was. ‘Tonight,’ he began in a thrillingly dramatic voice, quite different from the one he had used to suggest the skipping, ‘I am going to attempt to show you yourselves à l’ art sauvage, by painting in the barbarous style, the wild, the savage style, so eminently suited to the roiling skies of Fife, and the elemental phallic landscape of the Lucken Law.’

Had he really just said that word at the Rural? The Howies and I gaped at one another but either the rest of the meeting were so bowled over by the whole that the details escaped them or they did not know its meaning, for their faces remained as blankly uncomprehending and nervously polite as before.

He sloshed around a great many more long words and a lot of paint too, but I was unable to pay attention to anything outside me and sat instead enveloped in a nauseous fog of foreboding over what was coming after tea. At last, Lorna shook my arm gently and I realised that Alec was in his seat and that Miss Lindsay was by the urn swilling hot water around in the enormous tin teapot.

The canvas Alec had been at work upon was dominated by a huge triangle in every shade of grey – the law – with a threatening dark red sky balanced on top of it like a boater on a bollard, leaving some naked canvas in between.

‘It’s… um…’ said Lorna.

‘It’s twaddle,’ said Nicolette Howie and Lorna’s cheeks blossomed with two small pom-poms of bright pink.

‘Oh Nic,’ said Vashti. ‘Niccy spent precisely six weeks living in a studio in London, while Johnny was working in his father’s bank – just renting the studio, mind, not actually painting – and ever since she’s thought she could be curator of the Louvre. Actually, I quite like it.’

I swallowed a mouthful of tea and felt it fall to the cold pit of my stomach and lie there. What had I decided? Rehearse the first sentence until it is word-perfect and you will have your audience with you. What was my first sentence? ‘In these difficult times…’ or was it ‘Despite these peaceful times…’ or had I decided to go with ‘In times of peace and times of war…’? Oh God. Miss McCallum was collecting the cups. Miss Lindsay was smiling at me, but then…

‘I wonder if I might trespass upon your patience just a little more,’ said Alec’s voice. He stood up and resumed his position by his canvas. ‘I have painted the mighty law, and I have painted the turbulent sky, but in between, around the hill, is the most important element of all… the beating heart of the land. The farms and cottages, the lanes and fields, the men and women who make this place sublime. If Mrs Gilver would be so gracious as to concede the floor a little longer, I could complete my expedition into the savage soul of Luckenlaw.’

Despite the scowls of Miss McCallum and the rolled eyes of some of the others there was no polite way to stop him. The Howies were entertained of course and Lorna was delighted, but even her heart could not have swelled with adoration like mine. On and on and on he droned, saving me.

He was still ladling on paint and blathering about inner space and the echo of the Lucken Law in the warm wombs of its daughters, when Miss Lindsay started to shift in her seat and consult her fob watch surreptitiously. Alec, spying her, immediately began to wind up.

‘Art!’ he declaimed. ‘In the looking, in the seeing, and in the knowing. Here I will leave you. You will be here singing the old songs and dancing the ancient dances and I shall go out into the darkness and know that life pulses inside as we know the beating of our own blood in our bellies.’

There was a humming silence after this, as might well be expected. Lorna Tait broke it.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you staying for the social?’

Vashti and Nicolette brayed like donkeys and a few of the others, fit to burst with pent-up hysteria from the long words and the sepulchral voice and the red socks over the tops of the bootlegs, gave up the fight and shook with laughter.

‘I am not offended,’ said Alec, his eyes dancing. ‘Laughter is the chorus of our humanity. Laughter holds away the pressing darkness and welcomes the stranger. Laughter is the spirit dancing.’ And he threw his scarf over one shoulder, picked up his bag of paints and all of his brushes and swept, magnificently, out.

The meeting was helpless for a good five minutes after he had gone; even Lorna Tait, feeling herself to have been given permission, indulged in a quiet chuckle or two.

‘Aye, you can laugh,’ said a young woman from across the room, ‘but I’ve been sittin’ here knottin’ elastics for his blessed skippin’ all night and he’s no’ even stayed to see it.’ She held up a long, brown, kinked chain of rubber bands and the laughter grew louder again.

‘Oh, let’s do it anyway,’ said Miss Lindsay. ‘I hear those children at their skipping every day and I never get to join them.’

There were more titters at that, for who amongst us had not wondered when we were children whether the adults, especially the teachers, were really people like we were or whether they were just the boring grown-ups they appeared to be.

Willing hands cleared the chairs from the centre of the room and willing volunteers initiated the beginners into the mysteries of the Chinese ropes. When we had all gained a little proficiency, the singing began: the couple from the golden city, she of the black stockings with the wart on her nose, even (horribly) the thirteen grave robbers knocking at the door.

‘Or how about this one?’ said a plump young woman. ‘I mind of this one from when I was at the school.’ She stepped onto the taut bands strung between the ankles of the two ladies who were taking their turn at providing the structure, and began to hop and jump, pinging the elastic and stepping into the spaces.

‘Spring a lock o’ bonny maidie,’ she sang. Others picked it up and joined in.

‘Summer lock o’ wedded lady.

Harvest lock o’ baby’s mammy.

Who will be my true love?

Three times twist me,

All that I wish me.

First time he kissed me

He will be my true love.’

Before my eyes, the vision swam again of Alec plucking a hair from his head and putting it into his pocket, winking at me.

‘I’ve never heard that one before,’ I said, hoping my voice sounded steady. ‘Is it a Fife speciality?’

‘Heavens no,’ said Nicolette Howie. ‘That’s a well-known little song.’

She might have been half right: it might have been well known but it was far more than a little song. It was what the stranger was doing. It was the answer. The locks of three girls, three wives and three matrons, in order, in season. It was the recipe for a… there was no other word for it… a spell. I remembered all the women telling me how he had plucked and pinched, ripped off their hats, nipped at their heads. He was pulling their hair out; some of them had even said as much. He was gathering hair, on the proper night and in the required order to make, if the song was to be believed, a love potion.

Jockie Christie. Sorely in need of a wife and unable to attract one. I shuddered. He had fooled me that night in the jail cell with his forlorn look and his ruddy cheeks – there was nothing fresh and ordinary about him at all. On the contrary, he was desperate, pathetic and rather ruthless. Even Molly Tweed, who had no idea who the stranger was, had hesitated before exonerating him; perhaps she had intuited some truth about him that I had missed. I felt a twinge of conscience about Molly. Certainly, she had made up the story of her attack but perhaps Christie had been laying siege to her instead of the other way around and perhaps if I had been subjected to his attentions for five years – I remembered the sickly feeling I had got at his farm and shivered – I should have ended up imagining things too.

And did Mr Tait know what Christie was up to? I had been sure he knew something. Had his patience finally run out when faced with this pitiful and furtive little scheme? I nodded to myself. Mr Tait had decided to stop smiling at the old ways for once, and had turned to me to help him. Accordingly, as the rubber bands were rolled into a ball and the chairs were rearranged, I piped up.

‘Miss Lindsay, I hope you won’t mind me butting in like this. I’d like to say something.’

‘Oh, Mrs Gilver,’ said Miss Lindsay. ‘How can we refuse you anything now? Your wonderful talk that you’ve worked so hard on and you never got a chance to give it. We’re going to have to ask you to wait another month, I’m afraid. What a bitter disappointment for us all!’

‘Oh quite, quite,’ I said, thinking that I could certainly summon the strength to bear it.

‘But how can we help you?’ Miss Lindsay continued. ‘Ask anything.’

‘How many of you here tonight are mothers?’ I asked. A good few of them raised their hands uncertainly. ‘I wonder then, if I might prevail upon you to stay behind, just a moment, and listen to something I have to say. And I do apologise. Miss Lindsay – I know it’s your schoolroom, but I really must ask the others to step outside. What I have to say is not… for all ears, I hope you understand me.’

‘Watch out, Niccy,’ said Vashti, giggling. ‘The “phallic element” could be outdone yet.’

‘I shall make sure you all get home safely,’ I said as the women who had raised their hands looked at one another in confusion. ‘I won’t take a minute of your time.’

It quite destroyed the mood of the meeting, although not as much as my household budget talk would have done, I daresay. Miss Lindsay and Miss McCallum, feeling slighted, carried the canvas away carefully to set it to dry in Miss Lindsay’s private rooms. Niccy and Vashti mounted a spirited attempt to be allowed to stay, ridiculing the notion that there might be something I could say to the handful of matrons that I could not say to them, but I was adamant. The rest of the meeting melted away, although clearly beginning to feel as though what should be theirs had been comprehensively stolen from them by the outsiders tonight.

When everyone else had gone, I addressed the women remaining.

‘It’s about this dark stranger,’ I said. There were a couple of groans and a couple of nervous giggles. ‘He’s going to strike again tonight,’ I went on, ignoring all of it, ‘and he’s going to pick on someone who has children, a mother.’ I waited to see if the penny would drop in any of the rest of them about the skipping rhyme we had heard only minutes ago, but it was just as Mr Tait had said right back on the first day: no one ever listens to the words. ‘I am determined to get you all home safely, but there are too many for one trip in the motor car, so I propose we work out two sensible routes and in between times the second batch waits here.’

‘I’m no’ a believer in this dark stranger,’ said one woman. ‘I think it’s just stories.’

‘Luckenlaw’s always had stories o’ this and that, but it’s nothin’ to do wi’ the likes o’ us.’ The speaker looked sharply around the room as she said this, then nodded. ‘Naw, nothin’ to do wi’ us.’

‘Aye,’ said another. ‘We dinna believe in a’ they bad spirits and ghosties.’

‘I assure you,’ I said, ‘if it were a spirit or a ghostie – if it were just a story, that is – no one would be more delighted than I, but he is real, he has attacked every month since March, although some have kept it quiet, and he will attack again tonight. He’s not going to hurt you badly, but we do need to stop him. Now, how shall we get you home?’

‘We both live on the green,’ said one woman. ‘And Cissie’s just doon the road fae the post office.’

‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘Three of you in the village itself. That’s going to be very easy. Four can squash into the motor car with me somehow. Now, where do you all live?’

Haltingly, and only too obviously still not believing, they told me. One was from a cottage in the Luckenlaw House grounds, one was from a road worker’s house down towards Colinsburgh, the third was from Kilnconquhar but she always came to this Rural and stopped the night with her sister who was married to Mr Fraser’s shepherd at Balniel, and the last was an ancient old lady who said she lived the back Largoward road and she couldna see any stranger making a beeline for her at her age, but mind if it was mothers he was after, who could say, for she’d had eleven of family all told.

‘That’s us off, Miss Lindsay,’ I called into the sitting-room door as we hurried out to where my motor car was waiting. I bundled the four passengers in, which was rather a tight squeeze, but they were diverted enough by the prospect of the ride not to care, and once they were snugly packed, we crawled up the school lane at a juddering pace behind the three walkers and waited with headlamps shining as they scattered to their houses and shut their doors behind them. Then we set off down the road to Balniel to the shepherd’s house, to the road worker’s cottage beyond, around to the little place tucked amongst the trees on the estate at Luck House and eventually to the Largoward road, the old lady directing me, although with some difficulty because as she said it was that fast in a motor she nivver had time tae think where she was afore she was away past it. Our arrival brought to the door an ancient man in a patched jersey and with a scarf tied over his chest and a middle-aged son with a newspaper folded open and a pipe in his mouth. I left her to do whatever explaining she felt was needed and trundled off again.

After a little confusion amongst the unfamiliar lanes, I finally got back onto the road at Luck House and sat with the engine idling, tussling with myself. Our arrangement had been that I should go straight home to the manse, but I could not resist it. If Christie were our man, Alec would this very minute be creeping along behind him somewhere, in the moonlight. If we had been wrong, however, my gallant Watson would be crouched in a field, watching Christie’s house and cursing, not a hundred yards from where I sat. I switched the engine off, stepped down and struck out along the lane. A cold, white light blanketed the empty fields, gave faces to all the stones in the dykes and turned every bush and gatepost into a silent, waiting stranger, but Luckenheart Farm was no more than a darker smudge against the greater hulking darkness of the law behind it. At the end of the drive I summoned all my courage and turned in.

‘Alec?’ I hissed. ‘Alec, can you hear me? Are you there?’

There was not a sound, not a breath of wind, not so much as a snapping twig to say that any creature was abroad tonight except me. Slowly, the same feeling of crawling dread began to spread through me, but I scurried on.

‘Alec?’ I whispered more softly than ever.

I was almost at the farmyard when I heard something at last; a groan and the sound of feet stamping repeatedly as though some animal were pawing the ground. I stopped, held my breath, and peered ahead. I could just make out a figure standing in the shade of a hedge on the other side of the field dyke. It turned to face me; I could see the moonlight glinting off its hair. My heart leapt into my throat like a trapped frog, but my feet were rooted, my legs trembling. You fool, Dandy, I said to myself. You might be a sensible married woman with children of your own but you’ve been a fool tonight and you are just about to pay for it.

Then the figure spoke.

‘Dandy? What the devil are you doing here? God, my back’s killing me! And both my feet have gone to sleep.’

I willed my quivering legs to propel me forward and tried to keep my voice steady as I spoke.

‘We were wrong then?’ I said. ‘Were we?’

‘Thumpingly wrong,’ said Alec. ‘Staggeringly wrong. Either that or they’re onto us.’

‘What do you mean?’ I had drawn up close to him now and was facing him across the top of the dyke, squinting to make out his features in the deep shadows. ‘Who’s “they”?’

‘In there,’ said Alec, gesturing towards the farmhouse. ‘Where’s the gate? I couldn’t jump over a wall now if all the demons of hell were after me. I’m frozen solid. I swear, Dan, this damned field must lie in a direct draught straight from the Arctic.’

‘Alec, please! Who is “they”? What’s happening?’

‘Well, as you could tell from the number of carts pulled up in Jock Christie’s yard – if your eyes were attuned to the dark as mine are, having been crouched freezing to death in it for the last hour instead of tootling about in a cosy motor car – our sinister stranger has a houseful of visitors tonight. Drew Torrance, Logan McAdam, Bob Palmer and Tom Hemingborough are all in the kitchen with him. They’ve stabled their ponies across the yard there as though they’re in for the night.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I crept up and looked in the window when I got here, just to check that I wasn’t too late.’

‘What are they doing?’ I asked.

‘No idea,’ said Alec. ‘They’re bent over something or other at the table, looking pretty intent too but I didn’t hang about long enough to see. It suddenly struck me that I – a stranger in these parts – was prowling around looking in windows and there were five large and rather handy-looking farmers whom I didn’t want to catch me at it.’

‘Are you sure they’re all still there?’ I asked. ‘One of them couldn’t have slipped out another way since you arrived?’

‘There is no other way, unless it’s a secret tunnel through the hillside. Not outside the bounds of possibility, I’ll grant you. No, I’ve seen this place from up the hill when I’ve been painting and there’s no side door. There’s no way that anyone could have left tonight without crossing at least one patch of bright moonlight and being spotted.’

‘But what else could they be doing,’ I said, ‘if not giving one another alibis?’

‘No idea,’ said Alec again. ‘Cards, dice and the demon drink, perhaps, as Mr Black said all along?’

‘And who is the stranger if not one of those five?’

‘Mr Black himself?’ said Alec. ‘Could Mr Fraser be giving his wife the slip?’

‘It could be someone else entirely,’ I concluded. ‘We could be right down at the tail of the snake again.’

We stood there for a moment or two longer, and I for one was feeling rather sheepish, then suddenly I became aware of the night cold creeping into me and shivered audibly.

‘Yes, you run along, Dan,’ said Alec. ‘No point in both of us catching our deaths, is there?’

‘Aren’t you coming with me?’ I said, surprised. ‘What is there to wait here for? All the ladies are safely home now.’

‘I’m not leaving until they do,’ said Alec grimly. ‘I might be able to work out what they’re up to if they’re still talking about it when they come out. Noise carries tremendously well on these icy cold nights, you know. Or maybe I’ll throw caution to the wind – march up, bang on the door and join them. I could always say I was out painting and felt chilly.’

‘I know you’re joking,’ I said. ‘But promise me you won’t do anything reckless.’

‘I promise,’ said Alec. ‘I’m too precious to risk, I know. Now get home for heaven’s sake before your chattering teeth bring them all out to see what the racket is.’

I gave him a quick squeeze for encouragement and warmth and then picked my way back up the drive and along the lane, stepping more cautiously than ever, now that I knew there was a gathering of our best – our only! – suspects just a stone’s throw away. Before long, I could see the bulky outline of my motor car where I had left it at the junction and, clambering back in at last and closing the door softly but firmly behind me, I began my journey, crawling along, scanning the fields as I went, loath still to leave the night and its adventures. After all, Alec had got the glory of working out the rhyme as well as the chills and cramp of waiting to nab the stranger. I could not help but smile when I thought of him standing in the kiosk one of the days after telephoning me, seething with irritation at the incessant chanting and then, all of a sudden, really hearing the words for the first time. I was nearly home now. Nothing stirring at Balniel tonight, just the empty fields, neatly ploughed and looking like candlewick in the moonlight.

Then it happened. Inching along, I saw on the road in front of me what I thought at first was a leaf flapping in the wind. I looked again. It wasn’t a leaf: could it be a glove? I slowed down even further, peering at it in the beam of the headlamps, and it turned its head, showing me two dazzling eyes and a tiny mouth open in a soundless yell. It was a kitten. I was sure of it. And it was in considerable distress of some kind. I stopped the motor car, jumped out and hurried forward.

The kitten, a little tabby scrap, was mewing piteously and struggling in vain to run away, its claws scrabbling at the dirt of the lane. I crouched down beside it and tried to pick it up but I could not move it. I pulled at it and its mewing rose to a miniature squeak.

‘What on earth…?’ I said, trying to sort out its paddling legs and still its writhing. And then I touched its tail, wet and sticky, finding something hard and flat which should not be there. Somehow it had got stuck under a piece of wood litter embedded in the ground. I picked at it, confused, and then took a closer look.

‘No,’ I breathed. ‘No!’

At each end of the piece of wood, no more than a splinter really, there was something hard and shiny, like a button. This was no piece of wood litter caught under a stone; someone had nailed it to the road, with the kitten’s tail trapped, bleeding, underneath it.

‘But when?’ I said. ‘I can’t have driven past you on the way down.’ I was desperately trying to get my fingers under a nail head to prise it out. ‘And why? Why in heaven’s name would anyone do that?’

As soon as I asked the question I knew the answer and, as I rose, I felt no surprise to see the dark figure, rippling over the field towards me.

I could have run. I could have got into the motor car and locked the door, and yet I stood there. I should like to think it was courage. Hindsight might almost persuade me that it was clear thinking, the idea that the stranger must have emerged from Luckenheart Farm and Alec could not be far behind, that it would be better for the pair of us to catch the stranger in the very act. I am far from sure, though; it certainly did not feel like courage and common sense at the time. He was scaling the dyke now, up on one side and down on the other like a hound, like a panther. I took my hat off and bowed my head, walking away from the writhing kitten, waiting for it to happen, and I think this act of knowing submission must have fuddled him and distracted him from the fact that tonight, for the first time, he was running not into darkness where a tree, bush or building obscured the moon, but right into the glare of my headlamp light.

He was here, reaching out, breathing hotly on me, filling my nostrils with his stink, waxy and vegetative at the same time, familiar and yet strange. He took hold of a handful of hair and pulled. As though the pain had jerked me back to life again, I put my hands around his arms, gripping as hard as I could, and looked up from the black pumps on his feet to the close-fitting black suit of trousers and jersey into the black mask over his face, into the holes where his eyes were glittering. It was then, when I looked into his eyes, that he realised the mistake he had made. He snapped his head round to the lights and hissed with fury, a noise so dreadful that I stumbled back to get away from it and, free of my grasp, he was gone.

The eyes stayed burned into mine. They were not Jock Christie’s eyes; I was sure of it. But I had seen them before. I had seen them tonight.

I crouched back down beside the kitten, which had quietened and was lying still now. My hat was on the road near me and I reached over, took the pin out and dug it under a nail head, slowly easing the shaft out of the ground, bending back the little wooden batten, ignoring the renewed cries.

‘There, there,’ I said, when it was free. ‘There, there. Better now.’ It was bleeding quite astonishingly freely for such a tiny thing and although I wound my handkerchief tightly around its tail it immediately seeped through. It protested when I lifted it, protested even louder when I cradled it close, and I looked around for a gentler way to bear it home. I had always hated that ludicrous Beefeater’s hat, I thought, turning it up and laying the kitten inside it then lifting it like a hammock.

‘Let’s see what the manse servants can do for you,’ I said to it, carrying it back to the car and laying it gently on the seat beside me. ‘What a night. I’m so sorry you had to get caught up in it at such a tender age. You’ve helped a lot – at great cost to your poor tail, of course – but you’ve helped a tremendous lot.’

And so he had. Or she had, for who can say with kittens? People, on the other hand, are easier to tell apart. Perhaps it was the black trousers that had done it – Luckenlaw was a backward kind of place, where the lounging pyjama was yet to make its mark – or perhaps it was the air of brutality and confidence combined, or a feeling, usually reliable enough, that frightening ladies in the night was a man’s game, but they had all got it wrong. The dark stranger was a woman.