‘Well, that’s a great pity,’ said Alec, when I had brought him up to date. ‘If the grave robbers are not in fact bent on preserving the honour of the church but are in thrall to the silliest kind of superstitious nonsense, and the SWRI is not, after all, a front for a band of witches, then our neat little picture looks rather dish-evelled again. I still believe that either Jock Christie or Drew Torrance could be the dark stranger, though. I took the chance of going round to the Torrances’ yesterday afternoon, after I ducked out of facing Hugh – what a narrow squeak that was, eh? – and had quite a long chat under cover of asking permission to paint on their land.’
‘And?’
‘Well, he’s rather a poor specimen. Not quite rickety, but far from burly, so he fits the silhouette and he was not at all truthful about his moonlight meanderings.’
‘How on earth did you get him onto that?’
‘I bemoaned the fact that there’s nothing to do in the evening in Luckenlaw – unless you were a female, I said, in which case you at least got a jaunt to the Rural once a month, but what were the men supposed to look to for entertainment?’
‘Masterly,’ I said. ‘How did he answer?’
‘He said that after a day of sweat and toil on the farm he was happy to kick his boots off and doze with his feet on the fender. As a matter of fact, once he was on the subject of agricultural toil, it was rather a job to get him off it again. It must be marvellous to be a policeman who can just rap on the door, ask ten questions, tip his hat and leave. I thought I was going to grow roots standing there.’
‘So that just leaves Mr Palmer to be viewed,’ I said. ‘I suppose you’ll do that, will you?’ My enthusiasm for a wifely return to Perthshire had cooled, not to say chilled, after the short visit from Hugh, and I should be happy to find some excuse for remaining at Luckenlaw.
‘Certainly,’ said Alec. ‘Perhaps the dairy at Easter Luck would lend itself to a study in white, but right now I’m off to Luckenlaw Mains where I hope to fall in with young Christie. And you should keep on with your researches into the-’
‘Oh, please don’t say it,’ I groaned. ‘Every time I think of it, I could swoon.’
‘Yes, but you could start with Mrs McAdam. You haven’t spoken to her yet. You might even warn her – a married woman with children of her own – that she should be very careful at November’s full moon. You might get some idea of just how well she knows that already.’
It was as cheerless as any day could be – grey, cold, never managing quite to rain or quite to stop, just near enough to frost to make one’s feet cold but not near enough to freeze the mud and make the going easy. It was, in short, dreich and drumlie; two words which have always seemed to me to mean exactly the same thing but which, given the number of dreich and drumlie days to be described in Fife, are both absolutely essential. Bunty, nevertheless, managed to be in the same ebullient frame of mind as ever and watching her set off at a prancing trot with her head up and nose quivering hauled my spirits up just a shade too and I tried to enjoy the view of the distant sea and the great shrieking flocks of seagulls over the flat fields as they looped and wheeled, tying invisible knots and loosening them again.
Perhaps Monday morning was not the best time to catch and hold the attention of a busy farmer’s wife since Monday was washday, in the farms of Luckenlaw the same as everywhere, and she had, I guessed from counting the petticoats and bodices she was shaking out and dipping into the bubbling copper, at least three daughters as well as the husband whose overalls lay bundled on a sheet of newspaper on the floor awaiting the dregs of the wash-water once the daintier items had been seen to. On the other hand, it is always easier to talk to someone whose eyes and hands are occupied than to someone who is sitting across a table staring back at you, and the scented steam in the large kitchen-scullery was excellent camouflage, throwing both of us into what they call on the pictures ‘soft focus’, capable of making Mary Pickford look like a schoolgirl when she was thirty if a day and allowing me, I hoped, to appear as a kind of shimmering Fairy Godmother come to issue kindly advice, and not the gimlet-eyed nosy parker I was really.
It would be best, I had decided, to go fairly straight to the point and, thanks to my session with young Mrs Muirhead, I felt I had an opening.
‘My brief, Mrs McAdam, as you know, is the household budget,’ I began. ‘But I have to say it’s fading into the background the more I learn about what’s going on here at Luckenlaw.’ She did not look up – she was pounding energetically with her dolly – but I saw her stiffen slightly and I thought that the rhythm of the dolly became a little slower as though, instead of listening while she pounded, she was now pounding while she listened. Her dark head, the scraped-back hair just touched with grey but still strong and shining, inclined ever so slightly my way.
‘I think I’ve just about got a handle on the thing now,’ I went on, ‘and so I’ve come to warn you.’ A glance flicked my way, but she kept working. ‘It was your – is she your niece or your goddaughter? Young Mrs Muirhead, anyway – who got me interested in the problem. She had worked herself up into a dreadful state. Such a shame just when she should be keeping calm and thinking happy thoughts, don’t you agree?’
‘She’ll be fine,’ said Mrs McAdam. ‘She’s young and strong. But… can I trouble you to say just what it is you’re getting at, madam? I’m not just quite following you.’
I pursed my lips at her words: I have always thought it monstrous to declare that a person is ‘strong’ simply to excuse oneself from being more kindly and careful than one feels like being. Indeed, the old saw which declares ‘What does not kill you makes you stronger’, no less than Luckenlaw’s own ‘Whatever’s for you won’t go by you’, has always seemed to me to be the worst kind of heartless nonsense and the one time that a grand benefactor was heard to utter it, with oily condescension, in Moncrieffe House Convalescent Home, I was immensely gratified to witness him receiving a swift bop on the nose from a young lieutenant, with one arm blown off and a bad gas tummy. Mrs McAdam had just, unbeknownst to herself, got on my wrong side in rather a big way.
‘I’m talking about these nasty attacks by the fellow they’re calling the dark stranger,’ I said. ‘I’ve worked out the pattern, you see. I know what’s going on, and I’ve come to warn you.’ She let go of the handle of the dolly at last and it fell to the side of the copper with a dull clunk. Blowing a wisp of hair away from her eyes and putting her hands on her hips, she faced me.
‘To warn me?’ she said.
‘Not to come in November,’ I told her. ‘To the SWRI. It’s like this you see: three young girls, three young women and two matrons attacked in that order, every month.’
‘Every month?’ said Mrs McAdam, frowning.
‘Oh yes,’ I told her airily. ‘I’ve found them all. Every month since March it’s been. And so married ladies with families, like yourself, need to be told to beware, because it’s going to be one of you in two weeks’ time if we’re not careful.’
‘This is what you’ve worked out, is it?’ said Mrs McAdam, looking almost amused, which took some of the wind out of my sails. I thought I was due a bit of credit for having untangled it, surely. ‘And what do you make of it, madam? What do you reckon it’s all about?’
‘Do you know,’ I told her, ‘I really don’t care. Whether it’s a saboteur, a mischief-maker, some poor fellow who should be in a sanatorium for his own sake as much as for others… I couldn’t give a fig. All I know is that it’s causing a great deal of silliness and nasty whispers about devils and demons, frightening women who should know better, and it’s got to stop.’
‘Och, it’ll stop betimes,’ said Mrs McAdam, ‘when it’s run its course.’