Doctor Cooling had driven off at dusk, well satisfied. ‘All’s well that ends well, Doctor, and thanks for your help. Sort of case that might easily have turned out a bit tricky. We’ll soon be reading all about it in the papers, no doubt.’
Doctor McKenzie, however, was not so confident. He went back into the bedroom and stood there looking thoughtfully at the pale heart-shaped face on the pillow. There was no telling, especially with the young and tender, how the intricate mechanism of the brain would react to severe emotional shock. Instinct told him she must have suffered damnably, if not in body, in mind, no matter what had or had not occurred at the Hanging Rock. This wasn’t, he was beginning to suspect, an ordinary case. Just how extraordinary, he didn’t yet know.
For Mike, the timeless days melted imperciptibly into timeless nights. Sleeping or waking it made no difference in the dim grey regions where he was forever seeking some unknown nameless thing. Invariably it vanished just as he drew near. Sometimes he would wake and touch it as it brushed past, only to find himself clutching at the blanket on his bed. A burning pain in his foot came and went, gradually lessening as his head grew clearer. Sometimes he was conscious of the smell of disinfectant, sometimes of a drift of flowery scent from the garden. When he opened his eyes there was always somebody in the room, usually a strange young woman who seemed to be dressed in white paper that crackled when she moved. It might have been the third or fourth day when he fell at last into a deep dreamless sleep. When he woke up the room was in darkness except for a pale incandescent light given off by a white swan sitting on the brass rail at the end of his bed. Michael and the swan looked at each other without surprise until the beautiful creature slowly raised its wings and floated away through the open window. He slept again, awoke to sunshine and the scent of pansies. An elderly man with a clipped beard was standing beside the bed. ‘You’re a doctor,’ said Mike in a voice for the first time recognizably his own, ‘what’s wrong with me?’
‘You’ve had a pretty bad fall and hurt your ankle and knocked yourself about a bit. Looking better today though.’
‘How long have I been ill?’
‘Let’s see. Must be five or six days now since they brought you back from the Hanging Rock.’
‘Hanging Rock? What was I doing at Hanging Rock?’
‘We’ll talk about it later,’ said Doctor McKenzie. ‘Nothing to worry about, my boy. Worry never did a sick man any good. Now let’s have a look at your ankle.’
While the ankle was being bandaged Mike said, ‘The Arab. Did I fall off?’ and fell asleep again.
When the nurse brought his breakfast next morning the patient was sitting up and asking loudly and clearly for Albert.
‘My, we are getting better quickly! Now drink up your tea while it’s nice and hot.’
‘I want to see Albert Crundall.’
‘Oh, you mean the coachman? He comes up here every morning to ask after you. Such devotion!’
‘What time does he usually come?’
‘Soon after breakfast. But you’re not allowed visitors yet, you know, Mr Fitzhubert. Doctor McKenzie’s orders.’
‘I don’t care what his orders are. I insist on seeing Albert, and if you won’t deliver my message I’ll jolly well get out of bed and go down to the stables myself.’
‘Now, now,’ said the nurse with a professional smile that turned her into an advertisement for toothpaste. ‘Don’t go getting yourself all worked up or I’ll get the blame.’ Something about the strangely glittering eyes of the devastatingly handsome youth made her add, ‘Eat up your breakfast and I’ll fetch your Uncle.’ Colonel Fitzhubert, summoned to the bedside, came tip-toeing in on eggshells with a face suitably lugubrious for a sickroom and was overjoyed at seeing the patient actually sitting up, and with quite a high colour. ‘Splendid! Looking almost yourself this morning, isn’t he nurse? Now then, what’s all this I hear about wanting visitors?’
‘Not visitors. Only Albert. I want Albert.’ His head fell back against the pillows.
‘Over-tired – that’s what we are,’ said the nurse. ‘If my patient gets talking to that coachman his temperature will go up for certain and I’ll be getting what-for from Doctor McKenzie.’
‘The girl’s not only a plain Jane but an ass,’ the Colonel decided, aware of currents beyond his understanding. ‘Don’t worry, Mike, I’ll tell Crundall to come up and see you for ten minutes. If there’s any trouble, nurse, I’ll take the blame.’
At last Albert was here beside him, smelling of Capstan cigarettes and fresh hay and settling himself into the bedside chair as if it were a restive colt ready to turn and bolt under his weight. He had never before been an official visitor to a sickroom and was at a loss how to begin a conversation with a disembodied face cut off at the chin by the rigidly folded sheet. ‘That bloody nurse of yours . . . Went for her life soon as she saw me coming.’ It was as good a kick-off as any. Mike even gave a faint grin. The tide of friendship flowed between them. ‘Good for you.’
‘Mind if I smoke?’
‘Go ahead. They won’t let you stay long.’ The old comfortable silence settled down between them like a cat on a communal hearth and they were at one. ‘Look,’ Mike said, ‘there’s a lot I have to know. Until last night my head was in such a muddle I couldn’t think properly. My Aunt came in here and started talking to the nurse – I think they thought I was asleep. Suddenly it all began to sort itself out. It seems that I went back to the Hanging Rock on my own, without telling anyone but you. Is that right?’
‘That’s right. To look for the sheilas . . . Take it easy, Mike, you don’t look too good on it yet.’
‘I found one of them. Is that right?’
‘That’s right,’ Albert said again. ‘You found her and she’s up here at the Lodge, alive and kicking.’
‘Which one?’ Michael asked in a voice so low Albert could hardly hear. The lovely face – lovely even on the stretcher as they had carried her down the Rock, was always in his mind now. ‘Irma Leopold. The little dark one, with the curls.’
The room was so quiet that Albert could hear Mike’s heavy breathing as he lay with his face turned to the wall. ‘So you’ve nothing to worry about,’ Albert said. ‘Only to hurry up and get well. . . . Stone the crows! He’s passed out! Where’s that bloody nurse got to . . .?’ The ten minutes had expired and she was here at the bedside, doing something with a bottle and spoon. Albert slipped past her through the French windows and made his way to the stables with a heavy heart.
9
GIRL’S BODY ON ROCK – MISSING HEIRESS FOUND. Once again the College Mystery was front page news, embellished with the wildest flights of imagination, public and private. The rescued girl was still unconscious at Lake View, and the Hon. Michael Fitzhubert was not well enough to be questioned. Which added fuel to the flame of gossip and rumoured horrors to be later disclosed. The police search of likely and unlikely places in the locality had been resumed with extra men from Melbourne, the dog and tracker brought back on the remote possibility of unearthing a clue to the fate of the other three victims. Drains, hollow logs, culverts, waterholes: an abandoned pigsty where someone had seen a light moving last Sunday. At the bottom of an old mineshaft in the Black Forest a terrified schoolboy swore he had seen a body; and so he had – the carcass of a decomposed heifer. And so it went on. Constable Bumpher, still conscientiously sweating over notebooks filled with unanswerable questions, would almost have welcomed a brand new murder.
At Appleyard College the news of Irma’s rescue was briefly and formally announced by the Headmistress directly after prayers on the following Monday morning; a carefully considered procedure that allowed a full hour for its assimilation before the first classes of the day. After a moment of stunned silence it was received with outbursts of hysterical joy, tears, fond embraces between people barely on speaking terms. On the staircase, where loitering was strictly forbidden, Mademoiselle had come upon Blanche and Rosamund locked in tearful embrace – ‘Alors, mes enfants, this is no moment for tears’ – and felt her own, long unshed, rising to her eyes. In the kitchen, Cook and Minnie rejoiced over a glass of stout, while on the other side of the baize door Dora Lumley clutched the cheap lace at her throat as if she too had been rescued upon the Rock. Tom and Mr Whitehead, at first jubilant in the potting shed, had soon passed on to murder in general, winding up with Jack the Ripper and the gardener gloomily supposing he must be getting back to his lawns. By midday the inevitable reaction from the rapturous relief of the morning was general. Afternoon classes assembled to an undercurrent of whisperings and mutterings. In the governesses’ sitting-room the subject of Irma’s discovery was barely touched on. As if by common consent the thin veils of make-believe obscuring the ugly realities were left intact, and only the headmistress, behind the closed doors of her study, permitted herself a cold-blooded scrutiny of this new turn of affairs. With the finding of only one of the four missing persons, the situation as it affected the College had actually deteriorated.