‘Well, Mr Tait hinted at it,’ I said.
‘Mr Tait didn’t have to bear the brunt,’ said Miss Lindsay stiffly. ‘Mr Tait is treated with respect wherever he goes.’ This was far from being true but I did not correct her. ‘No one would call names after him,’ she finished with a sniff.
‘Who called names after you?’ I asked, thinking that here was the first whiff of a suspect, for surely Miss Lindsay must have recognised at least the voice of the caller.
‘Mr McAdam,’ she said. ‘Although he denies it. I saw him quite clearly at my gate. And Mr Hemingborough.’
‘Mr Hemingborough?’ I blinked at her in surprise. ‘But his wife is a member.’
‘Now she is,’ said Miss Lindsay. ‘She joined in the summer with Mrs Palmer – I’ve heard that she wears the watch-chain in that house, so I daresay he couldn’t prevent her. But last winter he stopped his cart on my lane and called me some very unpleasant names.’
‘Such as?’ I asked her, but she only shook her head, flushed slightly, and concentrated on nibbling away furiously at her biscuit. ‘Mr Tait said there were political concerns,’ I hinted.
‘Oh, that too,’ Miss Lindsay admitted. ‘They found out that Miss McCallum and I had gone on the Women’s March and decided we were planning to lead Luckenlaw into revolution, beginning with their wives.’
‘But you saw them off,’ I said, suppressing the thought that two spinsters from the Women’s March would have sent exactly those same tremors through Gilverton and, I admit, through me.
‘And now, since the men,’ this was spoken in very withering tones, ‘can’t bully us into giving up they – or at least one of them – are trying to sabotage our efforts by frightening the women away. And succeeding. We’ll never see Mrs Fraser or young Elspeth again.’
‘But Mrs Hemingborough and Mrs Palmer started coming along after the trouble began,’ I reminded her. ‘And didn’t the Howie ladies join rather recently too?’
At the mention of the Howie ladies, Miss Lindsay pursed her lips.
‘The meetings were never meant for the likes of them,’ she said. ‘And I am sure that the unfortunate event in July could have been handled perfectly discreetly if only they hadn’t picked that very meeting to roll up to.’
‘This was the Wisconsin preacher?’ I prompted, as agog to hear the details as I was unable to imagine them.
‘And his wife,’ breathed Miss Lindsay with such a look of anguish that I could not bring myself to ask any more. Her thoughts, however, soon returned to the Howies and anger rallied her. ‘Of course, they’ve been there every month since, hoping for sport,’ she said. ‘And I don’t deny, Mrs Gilver, that if I could see a way of getting them out and keeping them out, I would not hesitate to use it.’
I thought quietly to myself that Miss Lindsay was not a socialist in the classic mould, being rather keen on getting precisely her own way.
‘So, apart from Mr Hemingborough and Mr McAdam,’ I said, getting back to the central issue, ‘is there anyone else you can think of who might be behind it?’ She shook her head apparently without giving the question much thought. ‘Or looking at it from another angle – opportunity instead of motive for a change – is there any newcomer, any loner, any odd type? Anyone at all who wasn’t born here and doesn’t have ten generations of ancestors and a web of relations to vouch for his good standing?’ I wanted to see if the same name would pop up again, unbidden.
‘I suppose you mean Jock Christie,’ said Miss Lindsay. ‘I’m not sure who first started bandying his name around, as if a Luckenlaw man who’d lived here all his life couldn’t be behind it. They’re all the same. It could be any of them.’
I took my leave shortly after, finding Miss Lindsay’s jaded view of the male sex as unhelpful, in the end, as Mrs Fraser’s peculiar fixation and Mrs Hemingborough’s even more peculiar dismissal of the stranger altogether. At least there was an explanation of sorts for it, however, even if her spinsterhood and her view of men were a chicken and an egg of cause and outcome. As to the others, I still did not find Mr Tait’s explanation satisfactory. It was one thing surely for spooky discoveries in the dark hillside to bring with them a few legends, but quite another for spooky stories to be the first choice if ever an explanation were needed for anything at all.
As I skirted the green, I heard the children’s voices raised, as usual, for a skipping game. They carried easily in the still afternoon and I recognised the rhyme.
‘Not last night but the night before,’ they sang, ‘Thirteen grave robbers came to my door.’
I shivered and then, smiling as I remembered Mr Tait telling me not to listen too closely, I turned away and almost missed the rest of it.
‘Dig her up and rattle her bones.
Bury her deep, she’s all alone.
Dark night, moonlight,
Haunt me till my hair’s white.
Moonlight, dark night,
Shut the coffin lid tight.’
I stopped with a gasp, mouthing the words over to myself, and then shook my head in disbelief at my own stupidity, at my wide-eyed trust of my charming employer. Mr Tait, I now saw, while making a great show of answering my every question, had been far from candid with me. He had fed me the story drip by drip – of the sealed chamber, its opening and the discovery there – all the time stressing that here were more examples of the kind of nonsense that credulous villagers might believe. Here were further instances of nastiness, nothing more. But that girl in the hillside was not just another story. She was at the heart of this story. She was the key.
Before I could help it my steps had turned for the gate into the churchyard and I was walking amongst the headstones, searching, noting the names – the Palmers and Frasers, Gows and McAdams – reading the verses inscribed near the ground as though intended to be as much a message for the grave’s occupant as for those walking above. Suffer the little children to come unto me, I read and Even so in Christ shall all be made alive, listening to the teasing, lilting sing-song: ‘Knock, knock, who’s there? Knock, knock, who’s there?’ The girls were evidently in fine step today, the chant going on and on, fainter as I passed behind the church to the shadowy side where the ground of the graveyard began to slope up with the rise of the law. Here the earth was soft and the gravestones mossy and lichened. Here was Mrs Tait, beloved wife and devoted mother, Father into thy hands I commend my spirit. Here too under an enormous monument, bristling with curlicues, was the grave of the Reverend Empson, Mr Tait’s forerunner, and the rather more confident: Well done thou good and faithful servant. Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord. I came back around the side of the church. My feet, cold and clumsy, were slipping on the soggy tussocks, and the girls’ voices were beginning to sound weary, slowing a little. ‘Knock, knock. Who’s there? Knock, knock. Who’s there?’ I was almost back where I had started. ‘Knock, knock. Who’s there? Caught you!’
There it was. This must be it. A stone cross with no name, no date of birth or death but only the words: Buried here 21st June 1919 AD and along the bottom In my father’s house are many mansions and Her sins, which are many, are forgiven.