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.
18
Which woman, was a question for Alec and me to thrash out together, and no one could have been more surprised than we at where our thrashing led us.
‘Nonsense!’ Alec cried, when I said the name. ‘Snaky, shimmering, gliding over walls and ditches? It can’t be.’ He was still a little disgruntled after his long sojourn in the field hedge at Luckenheart Farm. ‘Ow! What are you planning to do with this thing, Dandy?’ The kitten, its bandaged tail sticking straight out behind it like a tiller, had launched itself at Alec’s trouser leg and now hung there, its ears flat back and its eyes rolling with devilment.
‘I’m taking her home,’ I said. ‘And if you were wearing proper suiting instead of striding about looking like Ali Baba her claws wouldn’t have gone through to the skin. Besides, you’re wrong about the snakiness, Alec dear. It’s because everyone thought he was a man. He was wiry for a man, sinuous for a man. Think about pantomimes or fancy dress parties.’