‘I don’t remember you regaling me with the thrilling outcome,’ I said. Hugh cleared his throat and became intensely interested in sawing the top off his boiled egg.
‘Well, no,’ he said at last. ‘Beastly business. It gave me nightmares and I thought it best not to trouble you.’ I smiled at that. I suppose it is far too late now for Hugh ever to change from being the absolute Victorian which, let us face it, he is.
‘Did you actually see her?’ I said, knowing that I would be shocking him but agog for details.
‘No, thank heavens,’ he said, shuddering. ‘There wasn’t room for Mr Tait and me inside what with all the university chaps and their equipment; we were supposed to get in for a poke around once they had finished. But after the discovery it wouldn’t have seemed right, somehow.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ I said. Sometimes Hugh’s chivalry brought out an answering indelicacy in me that was far beyond my real measure of it. In fact, sometimes Hugh and I seemed as bad as the boys: Donald gorging himself sick on oysters just because Teddy was scared to try them; Teddy half drowning himself swimming underwater simply because Donald had never learned. ‘I mean to say, we tramp around cathedrals and chapels eagerly enough, don’t we? People sprawl on tombs and take rubbings.’
‘People,’ said Hugh witheringly, ‘sprawl in public parks in their bathing dresses playing gramophones, but that doesn’t mean people like us have to ape them,’ and he gave me the look, a quizzical frown with lips pushed forwards making his moustache bristle, which he has started giving me with depressing regularity this last short while.
This look had puzzled me at first, I must own, but recently I have come to understand it. My life, quite simply, has changed. I have looked upon evil and battled it for one thing but, more to the point, I have sat at cottagers’ doors and shared cool drinks of water with them; I have watched a wise woman at her herbs; I have clambered out of a shale mine in the dead of night and walked into a public bar in the light of day; I have interviewed laundry maids, kitchen maids, barmaids and coalmen and run about woods, along beaches and through empty houses as I have never run in my life since I was a girl. Why, only the day before this breakfast, I had raced up a drive and beaten a farmer’s wife to the dairy.
My life then, as I say, has changed and inevitably that is beginning to show, even to one as unobservant and uninterested as Hugh. It would be far odder if all of my experiences had rolled off me like water from a duck and I had remained exactly the same creature as before, languidly proper, decently shocked by nasty stories and primly disdainful of anything which smacked too much of pulsing reality. Of course, from Hugh’s point of view, lacking the knowledge which would serve as explanation, the new heartiness and vulgarity have no cause at all, hence his frequent recourse to these little reminders about people like us and my just as frequent attempts not to giggle at them.
‘What did you make of it?’ I asked him. ‘Who did you think she was? Did the archaeologists have any ideas? Did Mr Tait?’
‘What on earth do you mean, Dandy? “Who she was”?’
‘Or why she was in there, rather. The Luckenlaw villagers have whipped up no end of lurid stories, I can tell you. But what did you think?’
‘I think: “We should not make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter”,’ said Hugh. I blinked at him. ‘Goldsmith,’ he added. I blinked again. The habit of quotation appeared to be taking root. ‘Sound thinking, if you ask me,’ he concluded stoutly and retired behind his newspaper taking his piece of toast with him.
‘I’m motoring over to Dunelgar,’ I said to the newspaper presently, ‘if you had any message for Alec.’ Silence greeted this. ‘I shall bring back news of Minnie for you.’ Hugh had recently given Alec one of the latest litter from his favourite spaniel bitch.
‘Milly,’ said Hugh, unable to resist correcting me although he rustled the newspaper into a tighter and more impenetrable shield as he did so.
‘And how is Hugh?’ said Alec, as soon as I had stepped down onto the drive an hour later and taken a minute to make sure that Bunty and Milly were going to play sensibly and not need to be chaperoned. Bunty, having subjected Alec to her usual besotted greeting, pranced about, whining with excitement, twisting herself around and whipping her tail as the fat little bundle that was Milly darted in and out of her legs, squeaking and nipping at her, with her tail going round like a suckling lamb’s.
‘Stern, grumpy and quoting Oliver Goldsmith,’ I answered. ‘I cannot imagine what the matter is and I cannot be bothered trying.’
‘“All his faults are such that one loves him still the better for them”,’ said Alec, although whether he was talking about Hugh or Goldsmith was not quite clear.
‘Don’t you start,’ I answered. ‘Now give me some coffee and get ready to listen and have brilliant ideas, because I am absolutely stumped.’
We went through the passages to the conservatory at the back, partly so we could keep an eye on the dogs, now tumbling together on the lawns which stretched away behind the house. Alec, living here, was used to the place by now but I still had to stop in doorways sometimes and gather myself, willing away the memories of the first time I had come, the first time I had seen a case through to its grisly end. Thankfully, Dunelgar was close enough to Gilverton for me to avoid ever spending the night and so I was never forced to climb the stairs and recreate the nastiest memory of all. Besides, the conservatory was an easy place in which to ignore the ghosts: lush with ferns and glossy palms, the air a shingle-wrecking fug from the steam pipes, the floor tiles and window panes sparkling, it was hard to recall the dusty emptiness which used to reign here.
‘I do hope Bunty doesn’t squash her,’ I said, watching the dogs rolling together down a slope towards the obligatory bird table at the bottom, disturbing the collection of sparrows busy with their morning titbits. (When Hugh gets a bee in his bonnet he can become quite peculiar and he had been pressing these little bird tables on all our friends.)
‘Fat chance,’ said Alec. ‘She’s as unsquashable as a beach ball. I simply cannot get Barrow not to feed her treats and if she gets into the kitchens…’ Barrow was Alec’s new valet cum butler. He was a terribly smart young man, born in London but trained at Chatsworth no less and, while heaven only knew why he had chosen to incarcerate himself in a bachelor establishment in Perthshire which did not even run to a housekeeper, the resulting power was beginning to turn his head and he was already shaping up to be the kind of dictator who would make Pallister look like a mother’s help.
‘He’s quite a find, nevertheless, your Barrow,’ I said. ‘You look positively svelte.’ Alec shrugged the compliment off, but it was true. His hair shone, his nails gleamed, and although he was wearing tweeds and brogues he exuded the air of a man in a silk dressing gown with his feet in a basin of water and scented oils.
‘It’s the tweeds,’ he said. ‘Feel that.’ He shot a leg out and I rubbed a piece of the cloth between thumb and forefinger.
‘Heavenly,’ I said. ‘Wasted on you.’
‘That’s what I keep telling Barrow,’ said Alec, ‘but he’s very determined. Now,’ he went on, leaning down to scoop up Milly, who had tired as quickly as puppies do and had come waddling in from the garden to find him, ‘tell me all about the case.’
‘It’s a nasty one,’ I said. ‘A man, no one knows who, jumping out at girls and women at night, assaulting them and running away.’
‘Every night?’
‘No, far from it. Not exactly frequently, but not quite irregularly – when he does show up it’s on the night of the full moon, or’ – I held up my hand for him to let me finish, for his face had fallen and he had started to protest at the thought of the full moon – ‘or rather after the SWRI meetings which happen to be held on the night of the full moon. Scottish Women’s Rural Institute,’ I added, guessing that I would need to explain.