Bury Her Deep (4 page)

‘What a pretty spot you live in, Miss Tait,’ I said. ‘That is, one can imagine that it’s charming in the summertime.’

‘Lorna, please,’ she said. ‘“Miss Tait” sounds like my Aunt Georgia.’ She spoke lightly enough, but a quick frown passed across her face, a moment’s flickering of her brows and faltering of her smile, like the merest wisp of cloud over the sun. ‘Yes, we are lucky to live here,’ she went on. ‘It’s a great good fortune, these days, when so many people seem to lurch about from pillar to post, never settling, or live all cramped up together in bed-sitters. I count myself a very fortunate girl.’

Oh dear, I thought. How sad and, if I am honest, how rather dreary too. Lorna then, like so many others, was fighting a desperate battle under that limpid façade. She was still mourning whoever it was whose death had put that rose and ribbon at her neck and half of her wanted no more than to call herself blessed to have loved at all, while the other half was beginning to panic at the passing years, to make sure and call herself a girl but wince each time she was reminded that she was fast becoming a Miss Tait like her Aunt Georgia before her.

There were many in the same boat and by now, six years after the end of the war which put them there, one was beginning to see distinct patterns in how these poor girls responded to their fates. Some simply married the first male creature to come into view and so joined the rest of us in the great lottery of life. Others dedicated themselves to the memory of their lost loves and let the rest of the world grow indistinct. Yet others railed at their misfortune, turned bitter and sneered at anyone who had what they lacked, pretending not to care, not to grieve, hardly to feel, and I usually thought these the saddest of all. Lorna was threatening to make me change my mind, however, for her path it seemed to me now was even more painful to witness. She was one who would hope and hope and fade, quite out in the open for all to see, causing friends and kind strangers to plot matches for her and crueller types to pity and, in the end, despise her for her sadness and her helpless longing. Oh dear, I thought again, and I smiled at her father who smiled back and might well have been thinking ‘Oh dear’ himself.

Then I told myself sternly that I was not here to comfort and befriend poor Lorna, and that, although I should certainly ask Hugh if there were any young men of good prospect lurking around Gilverton who seemed not to be finding our own collection of poor Lornas to their liking, this evening I had to harden my heart and not allow myself to be sidetracked, for there was still much to be learned.

My introduction to the case, after all, that day in my sitting room at Gilverton had necessarily been rather short what with Hugh and the coffee tray waiting.

‘There is an unfortunate state of affairs developing at Luckenlaw, my dear Mrs Gilver,’ Mr Tait had begun, ‘and although it is too far advanced for it to be nipped in the bud exactly, I think we could still weed out the pest before it sets seed.’ Long years with Hugh had equipped me ably to handle any horticultural metaphor and I nodded, encouraging him to go on. ‘It started in the spring,’ he said, ‘and at first it was rather worrying. A dairy maid from a local farm arrived home one evening with a tale of being set upon in the lane. She wasn’t hurt, but she was very badly shaken. Naturally the police were summoned and they, along with the men of the village and the neighbouring farms, searched high and low for the rascal but found nothing. As the days and weeks passed, the girl put the nasty experience behind her like a good sensible lass and no more was thought of it until it happened again. A different girl, the same story, another search and no one to be found. The third time it happened the police went through the motions, as they must, but with no great hopes of catching him, and that’s when people started wondering aloud whether there was really anything in it. Some of the details of these attacks were extremely fanciful, you see, and the sergeant told me that it wasn’t the first time they had wasted a lot of effort on girls’ silly nonsense, nor would it be the last. I preached a good stiff sermon on as near a topic to wasting police time as I could find in scripture’ – here I could not help a chirp of laughter and I longed to ask Mr Tait for chapter and verse – ‘and that seemed to do the trick, for a while. But now it’s started again. And it’s not silly girls any more, Mrs Gilver, anything but. Farmers’ wives, sensible married types with children of their own, women I’ve known for years to be steady and down-to-earth, women who would no more make mischief with a lot of silly tattle than they would  . . .’ He took a deep breath before starting again. ‘Now, as you can imagine there are all sorts of rumours and fantastical stories flying around and I’m afraid that it’s beginning to be spoken of outside the village. Lorna, my daughter, told me that it came back to her from a friend she has down in Earlsferry, five miles away. No details and Luckenlaw was not mentioned by name thankfully – that’s the last thing we need – just a tale that there was a “dark stranger” roaming the hills in Fife and grabbing girls who were out alone at night.’

‘Grabbing them?’ I asked.

‘You see!’ cried Mr Tait. ‘Already it’s getting worse in the telling. The girls – if there’s any truth to the tale at all – are certainly not being “grabbed”. They’re not really being harmed at all. Just waylaid. And frightened.’

‘I can imagine,’ I said.

‘And while it’s bad enough to think that a Luckenlaw man could be doing it,’ said Mr Tait, ‘someone I see from the pulpit every Sunday, someone perhaps that I’ve christened and married myself, at least
that
could happen anywhere. The alternative – that the women are making it up – is much worse.’

‘And so you would like me to speak to them?’ I said.

‘My dear, if you would,’ said Mr Tait. ‘I would hate to see Luckenlaw get a name for this kind of thing.’

‘You’ve grown fond of the place then?’ I said. ‘It always seems rather brutal to me the way a minister is just landed in a parish and must make a home there come what may. I’m glad you’ve been “lucky” at Luckenlaw.’

‘Oh no, Mrs Gilver,’ said Mr Tait. ‘You are quite wrong on both counts. At least, my dear late wife was a Luckenlaw girl – she grew up on a farm there – and the village took me quite to its heart because of that. And the name of the place has nothing to do with luck. But there, you’re English. You’d hardly know.’

I tried to look interested in the history lesson I felt sure was on its way.

‘It’s a common mistake,’ he continued, ‘but actually the Lucken Law gets its name the same way as the old luckenbooths did.’

‘Luckenbooths?’ I echoed.

‘Silversmiths’ shops,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Literally locked booths. Locked up because of their precious contents. Likewise the Lucken Law: the locked hill. That is to say, containing a sealed chamber. You find them throughout Scotland. Hard to know what they were originally used for: hiding places; ancient ceremonies, perhaps. Certainly, there were burials for a time in the Luckenlaw chamber.’ And then, amazingly, he stopped as though the subject were at an end. It was the shortest lesson on the thrilling history of ancient Scotland I had ever encountered and surprised gratitude spurred me on to speak.

‘Very well then,’ I said to him, ‘I’ll do my best.’

‘And I hear that your best is very good indeed.’

I should not say I was an excessively modest woman, and certainly not one who cannot bear to be complimented when compliments are due – I have always felt that to rebuff perfectly reasonable praise is churlish and, in its way, more demanding than simple thanks would be: one forces the giver into much greater efforts at subtlety and evidence than most casual admirers would care to take, for one thing. At the current moment, however, I felt I really had to speak. It would be better to set matters straight from the outset than to waft along on undeserved praise and disappoint him in the end.

‘I have to say, Mr Tait,’ I began, ‘that I have no great expectations about solving this for you. If it’s a mare’s nest I doubt whether anyone knows who started it, much less why. These things do tend to take on a life of their own. Look at the Loch Ness Monster, for instance. Whose fault is that? And even if the dark stranger exists, if no one knows what he looks like then catching him at it seems the only hope, and unless we can discover some kind of a pattern to the thing, we won’t know where to look. So, please, be sure that I will do my best but do not, I beg you, get your hopes up.’

Mr Tait nodded and appeared to take my protestations to heart.

‘Like you,’ he said, ‘I don’t know whether to hope that he exists or not for each possibility is as unappealing as the other. But as to a pattern, that’s very clear. Didn’t I tell you? It’s the SWRI that’s the pattern, my dear. It always happens after one of their meetings. That’s half the trouble. It always happens on a night when just about every man in the place is on his own and no wife to say where he’s been. It always happens on a night where almost every woman is out walking in the dark, when the very best of them might fall prey to fancy.’

‘Except they’re not out walking in the dark, are they?’ I said, recalling what he had told me. ‘It’s the full moon.’ Mr Tait put his head in his hands and groaned.

‘Yes,’ he said, straightening up again at last and heaving a mighty sigh. ‘There is that. A man out prowling the lanes or a woman making up silly stories would be bad enough, but it has to be said: there is that too.’

3

There was hardly a moment between tea by the fire and the early dinner which was to allow Lorna and me to get to the meeting on time, but Mr Tait just managed to show me the few points of interest in his church – a stone pulpit carved all over with representations of twining branches which made it look rather varicosed and a gargoyle grimacing from the top of a pillar – while I snatched the chance to run through my plan for the evening.

Such as it was. Mr Tait had sent me the names of the women who had reported encountering the dark stranger and I had committed them to memory but my intention was to accompany home another of the ladies, someone who lived a fair walk from the village, in the hope that tonight she might be the one and I might be a witness – a very faint hope since all the previous victims had been alone.

‘Are the women organised into parties now?’ I asked. ‘Surely none of them is brave enough still to walk home without a companion? Come to that, I find it odd that the meetings are rolling on at all. If this has been going on since the spring, I mean. I wonder the husbands and fathers haven’t put their feet down and ordered their womenfolk to stay away.’

‘I rather think most of them go along with the police sergeant’s view of things,’ said Mr Tait. ‘And in a couple of cases I know that the wives have encouraged them in it, precisely
because
they would otherwise put their feet down and the women would never get off the farm again. As to banding together  . . . I did suggest that Lorna might get my old Napier out and ferry them – she can handle it although it’s a bit of an antique now – but they seem to relish the fresh air and the extra measure of freedom that their moonlit walks afford them.’

We had come out of the church again and were threading along the gravel path between the gravestones towards the gate. Out on the green, the skipping game was still going strong, two volunteers keeping the rope whipping round as a chain of girls wove in and out of it, concentrating fiercely and singing as they went:

‘Here she comes, there she goes,

Here she comes, there she goes,

Here she comes, there she goes  . . .’

It was rather mesmerising and Mr Tait and I paused to watch them. On and on it went and I was beginning to wonder if they would simply keep going until called into bed, when at last one stumbled in the rope and all the others yelled: ‘Caught you!’

The unfortunate one untangled her ankles and with a fairly gracious shrug took over one end of the rope, letting the girl who had been holding it join the rest. Slowly the two girls began to work up a rhythm again and when the rope was whirring round faster than ever, one of them shouted ‘Not last night’ and the others began singing.

‘Not last night but the night before

Thirteen grave robbers came to my door.

Dig her up and rattle her bones.

Bury her deep, she’s all alone.

Dark night, moonlight,

Haunt me till my hair’s white.

Moonlight, dark night,

Shut the coffin lid tight.

Knock knock, who’s there?

Knock knock, who’s there?

Knock knock, who’s there?’

Their voices followed us as we crossed towards the manse and we were just passing through the gate when the chanting stopped and a chorus of voices yelled: ‘Maggie.’

‘It’s very democratic, skipping, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I only have sons, as you know, and none of their games are anything like as fair as that.’

‘Only it doesn’t do to listen too closely to the words of the songs,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Just like nursery rhymes. If you were told the meanings of the sweetest little nursery rhymes, it would make your toes curl.’

‘So I believe,’ I said. ‘Especially the eighteenth-century ones – the three men in a tub, for instance, are best left well alone.’

After dinner, Lorna and I set out well wrapped against the raw evening to make the short journey across the green and down to the school where the SWRI meetings were held. All around us, cottage doors slammed as we passed and soon we were heading a small caravan of village women. I wondered briefly whether it was fear of the dark stranger making them move en masse like this, but I soon concluded that it was just their natural politeness and sense of what was due to Lorna as the minister’s daughter which led them to watch out for her and fall into step.

We could see the faint outline of another group coming up the lane towards us and there was a light bobbing in the darkness further away across the field, someone with a lantern taking a short cut from one of the farms.