‘Well, be thankful the Rural doesn’t have six initials, then,’ I said, and Lorna laughed again.
‘But why is four so unlucky, I wonder?’ she said. ‘Father, do you know?’
‘Do I know why four is an unlucky number?’ Mr Tait echoed. ‘It’ll be lost in the mists of time. And anyway, you might as well ask why the sky is blue, Lorna dear. Luck and sense have no connection.’
‘Hear, hear,’ I replied. ‘I have never had much patience with luck, good or ill. I always find it impossible to remember what I should and shouldn’t do in the cottages I visit. I must give tremendous offence.’
‘You’d be better off at Luckenlaw,’ said Lorna, ‘with just one big source of luck that everyone agrees on.’ I raised my eyebrows. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought my father had told you. About the sealed chamber in the Lucken Law.’
‘I told Mrs Gilver the facts, Lorna dear,’ said Mr Tait. ‘I did not trouble her with the rest of it. It’s the usual thing, Mrs Gilver. Any secret chamber you care to mention has engendered some tale or other about all the good fortune depending on the sealed door and trouble raining down if it is broken. Thankfully, though, not everyone gives it credence, no matter what Lorna says.’
‘You are not usually so scornful,’ said Lorna.
‘I’m not scornful at all,’ her father protested.
I was feeling scornful enough for all three of us, being firmly with young Jessie Holland in believing that such fancies were for those with too much time and nothing better to fill it.
‘I promised Jessie I would visit this morning,’ I said, using her name since it had come unbidden into my thoughts. ‘I’d like to see how she’s bearing up, of course, but also I thought I might sound her out about household matters. In advance of my talk, you know. In fact, I might pay a few visits around the district to get some ideas about what might be useful.’
Mr Tait looked tremendously impressed, as well he might, at my effortless subterfuge and even Lorna nodded with approval.
‘Only please do be careful,’ she said. ‘The villagers are terribly proud, terribly private about anything to do with money.’ She chuckled. ‘Now later this morning will be quite another matter. You can say whatever you like about money and budgets then. Vashti and Niccy talk of nothing else.’
‘Ah yes,’ I said. ‘Our visit to Luckenlaw House. I had forgotten.’
‘Great favourites of Lorna, that pair,’ said Mr Tait, with an edge to his voice. ‘And she of them too.’
Which, I mused to myself as I trundled out of the drive and up towards Hinter Luckenlaw Lane shortly afterwards, was rather a mystery. Lorna was a sweet girl but Vashti and Nicolette Howie, on our short acquaintance, had seemed rather too sophisticated to choose a sweet girl – and especially a sweet girl from the village manse – for their companion. Perhaps the paucity of other options might explain it. At Gilverton years ago, had it not been for Bunty, I might easily have thrown myself on the doctor’s wife and the minister’s daughter had I been the type; as it was, I had always felt that the few minutes of my day not hounded and harried by Grant, Nanny, Hugh and the rest of them were delicious islands of peace and not to be disturbed lightly. Now, of course, there was occupation and diversion to spare what with my trickle of commissions – or could it now be called a flow? a steady trickle anyway – and with Alec ensconced at Dunelgar and gratifyingly in need of all manner of advice on his household, although I admitted to myself with a quick frown that these days, his staff in place and his furniture arranged, it was Hugh he turned to more often than not, the pair of them, over trout stocks and deer fences, growing as thick as two thieves and as dull as two Hughs at times.
I was well advanced along the lane to the farm before I dragged my concentration back to the matter of the moment and, shaming as that is to admit, it is not the worst of it. Much worse is the fact that I was distracted enough by my musings almost to miss an important point of physical evidence or rather, in true Holmesian fashion, the absence of one – which amounts to the same thing. The barkless dog in this instance was the lane itself, stretching from road to farm gate quite bare and featureless; someone had been out and gathered up every single feather from the night before.
I threw the car into the reversing gear and rolled back along the lane to the hawthorn bush. Even this was picked clean, not a single feather left in its branches, which must have taken quite some time even though the job had clearly been hurried, with numerous little twigs being snapped off here and there. Chastened – imagine almost missing this! – but more than ever a-quiver to get to the bottom of it I started up again and shot along the lane to the farm, sweeping round into the yard, sure of finding Mrs Hemingborough in her kitchen.
There indeed she was. She came to the kitchen door in her pinny to meet me and I took a huge bolstering breath and launched into my performance.
‘My dear,’ I said, taking both of her hands in mine. ‘My poor dear Mrs Hemingborough. What a relief to find you up and about. You look marvellous! I do hope you don’t mind my coming round – I know we’ve barely met, but I couldn’t help myself. Mr Tait is going to pop in later too.’
When I had got to the end of this Mrs Hemingborough, surprisingly to me, was looking just as calm, but decidedly colder. She flapped a hand which I took to be an invitation to enter and I swept into the kitchen and plonked myself into a chair at the end of the table furthest from the range, the other end being spread with a padded cloth for the ironing which waited in a basket on the floor.
‘Mrs Gilver,’ began Mrs Hemingborough, disapproval and natural politeness fighting each other in her voice, ‘please don’t think me inhospitable, I beg you, but I’m not following you. Did someone tell you I was ill?’
For just a fraction of a second, she and I eyed one another. She knew that I knew, I knew that she knew and we both knew that no one was going to give in. Her look to me seemed to say ‘Let battle commence’ and I hoped that mine to her said the same.
‘Mrs Hemingborough, dear,’ I said. ‘I understand absolutely if you want to keep it quiet and I’ve told no one except Mr Tait, but no matter what he did to you you have nothing to be ashamed of and you must not bottle it up. Now, Mr Tait told me that your dreadful experience was not the first and he told me too – quite shocking! – that the police are dragging their feet, which almost beggars belief.’
‘I don’t want to be rude,’ said Mrs Hemingborough, and still she spoke quite gamely but was betrayed by a tiny tremor in the hand which lay on the table top as she sat down and faced me, ‘but I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Why, the attack,’ I said, all innocence. ‘The dark stranger. Last night.’
At this Mrs Hemingborough drew herself up magnificently, so magnificently in fact that I began quail. What if Jessie had been imagining things? I remembered the feathers and, with that thought, rallied again.
‘I see someone has been telling tales,’ said Mrs Hemingborough, ‘but I can assure you, Mrs Gilver, there is no such person as this “dark stranger” and even if there is he made no attack on me last night.’
‘But Mrs Hemingborough,’ I said, gearing up for my master-stroke, ‘my dear, I saw it. I was looking out of my bedroom window at the back of the manse, you know, and in the moonlight, I saw the whole thing. Now, Mr Tait asked me to make his apologies to you for not immediately coming round to help, but the truth is that I didn’t tell him until this morning. I could hardly believe my eyes, you see, and I put it out of my mind, or tried to. And then when I did mention it, at breakfast, of course Mr Tait assured me that it was not a trick of the moonlight at all. It was just the latest instalment in this horrid affair. Well, you can imagine how I felt then. But I daresay, since Mr Tait is not a young man he would more likely have been hindrance than help to any search party and he assured me that you have a good handful of men about the place better suited to it, and your own telephone to summon the police. I suppose it’s too much to hope that they found him?’