‘I did get a few scraps from the barman,’ he told me, ‘but I think we had better take it with a pinch of salt.’
‘Oh?’ I said. ‘Why so?’
‘Well, he was much too keen on muscling in to the centre of the story. Very full of this funny feeling he said he had that something was amiss. You know the kind of thing: “Soon as I saw him in the doorway, guvner, a goose walked over my grave and I knew there was trouble a-brewing.” The usual nonsense.’
‘A ghost,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it a ghost that walks over one’s grave?’
‘Why would a ghost give you goose pimples?’ Alec asked, reasonably enough. ‘Anyway, I shall have better luck tomorrow, I expect. Now what of you? You say she’s definitely still worried about something?’
‘Worried is hardly the word,’ I said. ‘If you could have seen her, Alec. And it wasn’t… Oh, it’s so hard to explain. It wasn’t the nagging kind of worry that one feels if one fears that something dreadful might happen. It wasn’t that. And it wasn’t the grind of waiting to hear something; we shall never forget what that looks like after all. This was… I don’t know.’
‘That’s simply not good enough, Dandy,’ said Alec. ‘You must try.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘but don’t smile at me for being fanciful. Here goes. It was… Imagine… Imagine someone you care deeply about. Your mother, say. Imagine that your mother was tied to the railway line with a train coming and no one around you spoke English or understood your frantic gestures and no one would show you where the points were, or for some reason you did not dare to ask. It looked like that would. Worse, even. Horrid.’
‘It sounds like a nightmare,’ said Alec.
‘Yes!’ I yelled. ‘Exactly. She looked as though she were stuck in a nightmare with no one to turn to, even though we were all there trying to help.’
‘And does it fit in at all with our best guess as to what might be troubling her?’ said Alec. ‘Doesn’t sound it. We thought perhaps Dudgeon had been nobbled and had gone back on the deal and now Mrs Dudgeon might have to carry the can. What you’re describing doesn’t chime with that at all.’
I shook my head in agreement. ‘And the things she actually said didn’t seem at all as though they could be troubling on their own account. Bank holidays, and lost documents. Trivial things really. And then this ardent desire to be alone. First she was beside herself with the need to have her husband’s body back and now all she wants is for everyone to go away and leave her alone. I begin to wonder if she was quite normal before all this, because really she hardly seems sane now.’
I heard the ching! of the telephone being hung up in the library next door and then the sound of Cadwallader’s footsteps crossing the floor and advancing along the corridor towards us.
‘Good news,’ he said, entering. ‘She doesn’t need the birth and marriage certificates after all. I got it straight from the horse’s mouth. Well, the registrar’s. As long as the contents are known and there’s no doubt over identification, which there isn’t, she can just walk in and do it. Even better, he is open for business tomorrow, so we can get the whole thing under way. I’m going to slip back round to the cottage now and spread the tidings.’
‘Oh Cad, don’t descend again,’ I told him. ‘They’ll only get into another flap about feeding you. Send a footman, darling, much easier.’ Cad nodded his acquiescence and pulled the bell-rope to summon the maid.
‘I wonder what made Mrs Dudgeon so adamant that tomorrow was out,’ I said. ‘She was fierce about it, wasn’t she, Cad? Can she be quite normal? Have you ever heard any rumours that she wasn’t?’
Cadwallader shook his head. ‘Not that I would have,’ he said, which was a very good point.
‘I wish I knew where to look for a good old-fashioned malicious gossip,’ I said. ‘You must do what you can in the pubs tomorrow, Alec, but mental trouble is not really an interest of men’s.’
‘Well, haul yourself around the teashops and drapers,’ said Alec.
‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘But I daren’t simply plunge in and start asking. Far too many branches of the family. Anyone I quiz is bound to be a relative.’
‘Really?’ said Cad. ‘I haven’t begun to sort the locals out yet. Well done you.’
‘Oh, I haven’t sorted them out,’ I said. ‘The most I could do is attach offspring to parent and only that because they seem to employ so little imagination when it comes to naming them. Bet’s wee Betty, and young Tina that’s Tina’s lassie. Not forgetting young Izzy who’s such a help to Mammy Izzy, of course.’
‘Yes, there are teeming millions of nephews and nieces, certainly,’ said Cad. ‘You could hardly miss them.’
Chapter Seven
Of the three of us, Alec certainly had the best of it the next day. Cad was to take the widow to town, I was to sit with the sisters in her absence, since with Mrs Dudgeon gone their tongues would surely be loosened, and Alec was to start his round of the hostelries.
At eleven in the morning then, we scattered to our tasks, Alec taking my motor car to the first pub on his list, Cad setting off with black hat and solemn face in Buttercup’s Austin to pick up Mrs Dudgeon, and I beginning my solitary tramp through the woods. Solitary, because Buttercup had once again declined to have any part in the day’s adventures and had avoided being press-ganged by the simple but effective method of not getting dressed. She had still been in curling-pins and cold cream, propped up in bed when I had swept into her room half an hour before to drag her with me and her smile had been triumphant as she watched me concluding that I didn’t have time to wait for her. She merely gave a happy sigh and turned the page of her Tatler as I glared and marched out again and worst of all, because of the luscious pile of her bedroom carpet, I could not even slam the door.
Hopeless as she was though, I began fervently to wish as I made my way into the woods that I had insisted she come with me. It was another beautiful day, getting hot as noon approached, but sweet and fresh in the trees, at least in this part of the forest where the ground was dry under birch and spruce. Elsewhere, no doubt, streams, bogs and years of broad leaves rotting would make the woodland unpleasantly rank as August sweltered on, but here was a carpet of needles and patches of sunshine. What could be more cheerful? What could be farther from mould and cobwebs? And yet, as I say, I found myself wishing heartily as I advanced that Buttercup was there, or even better that I had Bunty with me and, despite the dappling sunshine and trilling birds, my pulse was knocking by the time the edge of the wood was out of sight behind me.
Once or twice I fancied I heard footsteps, but then I was just as sure that I heard breathing, and that could hardly be so. Oh, for Bunty! The value of a dog, when one is walking through woods getting spooked for no reason at all, is that a dog has keener hearing but a much duller imagination than oneself and so will mooch along nose to the ground no matter what horrors one’s fancy conjures, and it is only when the ears prick and the nose quivers that one can be sure there is something going on outside one’s own head, and even then it is most likely a rabbit. I shook myself, firmly telling myself that there was no such thing as ghosts, that there was no one creeping along beside me breathing heavily and watching me and, although the jitters did not leave me, I at least managed to keep going and not bolt back to the castle in fright.