Miss Good was also pleased to see them. Carey had just concluded an exposition, with demonstration, of the way to introduce a newcomer into a pen which already held a settled group. He had caught and anointed three pigs, the newcomer and two others, with pig-oil powerfully scented with aniseed, and Miss Good and three other students were each to take a pig of the remaining four and copy his method.
‘And, of course, the pigs are all right—quite sweet, actually—but the smell of aniseed makes me retch,’ said Miss Good. ‘But if it’s about that ghost I saw… and there’s nothing else you’d want to see me about… well, I did realise afterwards that it might be Highpepper being silly, but, as I didn’t think of that at the time, I didn’t take any notice except to scram.’
‘As who would not?’ said Laura, who had been briefed by Dame Beatrice on the way down. ‘But I do wish you’d tell me a bit more. I’m interested in ghosts, and this may have been a real one, after all.’
‘Mrs Gavin was born in the west of Scotland,’ explained Dame Beatrice, ‘where there is a long history of extra-sensory phenomena.’
‘Oh, yes? I wouldn’t know. But, if Mrs Gavin is interested in ghosts, as such, she’s come to the wrong shop, I’m afraid. You see, what I saw couldn’t have been a ghost. I know that perfectly well now. The proof is that the ghost’s horse trampled Miss Considine’s brussels sprouts. Looking back, it was obviously Highpepper. I can’t see the point, all the same. I should think something came unstuck and the boy had to make a getaway. I mean, no rag was carried out, so far as we know.’
‘Just a moment,’ said Laura. She was carrying a brief-case and from it she produced a stiff-covered, shiny notebook of rather impressive size and very impressive thickness. It was nearly half-full of notes and weird drawings which she had manufactured on the preceding day in preparation for the visit. She skimmed through the notebook—they were in the Principal’s sitting-room—as fine and private a place as the grave once the telephone had been disconnected and the door locked—and found a lurid picture of a headless rider and a headless dog in the middle of what looked like the destruction of the Cities of the Plain. ‘You see, the horse may have been a real one.’
‘The horse?’
‘Well,’ said Laura, temporising, ‘we all know about the Gytrash, don’t we?’
‘I—I don’t see the connection.’
Neither did Laura, but she continued, sternly:
‘So you may as well describe the ghost to me. It was tall, you say?’
‘I don’t know. Anyone on horseback looks tall.’
Broad?’
‘Well, I couldn’t really say.’
‘Did it look like a man or a woman?’
‘I was so scared, I just turned and ran.’
‘It followed you, didn’t it?’
‘I don’t think it followed me. I mean, I don’t think it saw me at all.’
‘Look here, said Laura, upon inspiration, ‘where are those brussels sprouts? I mean, you spotted the horse and rider at the head of the drive, I gather. Where had they been before that?’
A look of intelligent interest replaced the former expression of slightly puzzled distaste on the student’s face.
‘You know, I never thought of it that way before,’ she said. ‘Miss Gonsidine told me about the sprouts being trampled just to prove to me I hadn’t seen a ghost. The sprouts are in the kitchen garden, and that’s about the most unlikely place you can think of for anybody to go riding. It’s right round by the butler’s pantry that was, and all that sort of thing.’
‘Ah, that’s if the person knew the layout here. Try to imagine a person having an assignment with somebody here, but having no knowledge of the geography, so to speak.’
‘I don’t see what you’re getting at.’
But Laura, inspired with a truly magnificent notion, was not prepared to explain. She said:
‘I wish you could remember the size of the rider. Haven’t you any idea?’
Thus prompted, Miss Good replied reluctantly:
‘Well, you know Anne Boleyn?’
‘The apparent headlessness of the apparition, you mean?’
‘Yes, so why should I suddenly think of Henry the Eighth?’
‘Her husband, and responsible for the headlessness aforesaid?—No, by thunder!’ Laura got up, smote the astonished and slightly resentful student a congratulatory blow between the shoulder-blades, and said urgently, ‘The kitchen garden, my girl, and quick about it, before my brain has time to cool. As the barrow-boy remarked when he looked at an alligator’s teeth, you said a mouthful, cocky.’
Dame Beatrice, with an alligator’s smile, watched them go. She had been visited by a wild idea, too. She waited. The kitchen garden, as Laura had anticipated, was unusually vast. A strip of lawn separated it from the back of the house, and then it stretched far and wide, beautiful and austere. At that time of year it was given almost wholly over to brussels sprouts and cabbages, and these spread, downhill slightly, to a couple of ponds, a disused cottage and, finally, a gate which opened on to a lane.
Laura, nosing about like a hound which has picked up the scent, made rapidly for this gate and opened it.
‘Nobody except the dustmen ever come in that way,’ volunteered Miss Good, obviously on the defensive.
‘And are the dustcarts horse-drawn?’
‘No, not nowadays.’
‘But a horse has been here. Look at the hoof-prints.’
‘It must have been somebody from Highpepper, as I said.’
‘And it might be your ghost of Henry VIII. Well, I must away and write up my report. Many thanks for your invaluable assistance. Sorry to have taken up your time. Of course,’ she added, as they walked back to the front door together, ‘there is nothing to show that the ghost didn’t come from Highpepper. That needs to be borne in mind. I do agree with you there, and that something caused him to sheer off before there was any ragging.’
‘Well?’ said Dame Beatrice, when they returned to Miss Considine’s room. ‘Did the brussels sprouts enlighten you, I wonder?’
‘Yes and no,’ Laura replied. ‘You know you had an idea that the ghost may have been two people? Well, that’s exactly what it was. It reminded Miss Good of Henry VIIL’
‘You couldn’t call that proof,’ said Miss Good. But Laura wagged her head solemnly.
‘I call it proof,’ she said. ‘Of course, if we could have seen the hoof-prints the morning after you saw this apparition, we might have been able to show that the horse was more heavily laden when it left by the front gate than when it appeared at the back, but that’s past praying for now.’
They took their leave of Miss McKay, and, when they were in the car, Dame Beatrice, with a leer, congratulated Laura on her detective work.
‘I think we may take two things for granted,’ she said. ‘The horse was carrying two persons, neither of whom had to be recognised, and the collaborator with, or abductor of, Mrs Coles did not come from Highpepper.’
‘Did not?’
‘Nobody who knew anything about the environs of Calladale would have trampled Miss Considine’s brussels sprouts, and any Highpepper student who had planned to abduct Mrs Coles would certainly have taken pains to familiarise himself with the topography, if he did not know it already.’
‘Yes, but, if secrecy was the main object, surely the ghostly get-up was a bit noticeable?’
‘Yes and no. You must realise that the effect on most of the students would have been the same as the effect on Miss Good. There is a legend here of a haunting.’
‘Sudden and unreasoning panic? Oh, I see. No hanging about to investigate the phenomenon, but the hasty sauve qui peut? Something in that, no doubt. So what do we get? Somebody carried off Mrs Coles…’