After the show I drove Ellen back to Inchfort Field and we didn’t say much on the way; the slender moon had set by the time we were heading out of Perth.
As I pulled up at the field gate she said, ‘Thank you, Julie. It was braw. All of it, even the silly bits. The performing budgies!’
I snickered. ‘They were hilarious.’
‘But that Sphinx …’
She paused, then climbed up on the back of the car and lit her pipe (a new one, I supposed).
‘That singer frighted me half to death. How you cheeked her! But she was wonderful – it was all wonderful.’
Ellen passed me the pipe. I climbed up next to her and we sat on the back of the Magnette with our feet on the seats, looking up at the stars and smoking in silence.
‘I’d better go,’ I said at last. ‘It’s past midnight.’
‘Aye,’ Ellen said. She swung her legs around, slid off the car and hopped over the field gate, sure-footed and at home in the dark.
‘Thank you!’ she called again.
Brig O’Fearn village was pitch-black. I drove cautiously. I’d never driven at night before, except coming home from Perth half an hour earlier. But Ellen had been with me then, full of smouldering warmth and wonder, and though I’d been driving carefully I hadn’t been nervous. Now the road felt cool and lonely, and something new was eating at me.
As I rounded the corner to take the humpbacked bridge in Brig O’Fearn, the headlamps of the Magnette splashed light over a dark, looming figure in the process of wheeling a bicycle by the handlebars down on to the river path below the bridge. The bicycle’s own headlamp was only a dim pinpoint of baleful yellow without speed to generate enough power to keep it alight.
Probably the Water Bailiff going to check on the Glenfearn School, I thought; and yet the cold nagging in my stomach wouldn’t go away. I kept thinking about the legend of the standing stones walking about to swim with the salmon on Lammas Night. It was only two nights off.
Only when I’d pulled the Magnette up to the Strathfearn House garages and a squealing bundle of doggy fluff half my size came bounding into my arms and knocked the wind out of me did I realise what was really bothering me.
Pinkie was here and Ellen was by herself in Inchfort Field, alone with the standing stones and the stars and the murdered ghost of Hugh Housman.
My prudent mother keeps a torch in her car. I took it with me to find my way along the river path so I could deliver Pinkie to her proper mistress; it would be faster to walk that way than to drive the long way round again.
The birch wood by the river, so alive with birdsong and the constant activity of the Glenfearn School by day, mostly has only one voice at night: the sound of running water. It is beautiful, but it is so old. It is the sound the long-dead pearl fishermen heard, the sound the Bronze Age people heard when they launched the log boat into the prehistoric River Fearn, the sound they heard when they raised the Drookit Stane – the river has a voice that doesn’t die. It is as inhuman and ancient as starlight.
The Inverfearnie Library was slumbering calmly with Mary tucked safe inside as I passed.
Even so I managed to work myself into a funk of nerves well before I got to Inchfort.
There was a light and more than one human voice by the Salmon Stane in Inchfort Field.
I switched off my own torch to save the batteries. I could see the standing stone from the bottom of the field, a pure black silhouette against a less black and star-salted sky, and there was another lit electric torch burning in the long grass at the base of the stone to show me the way. Pinkie pressed close against my legs, keeping quiet and sensible, which made me think she knew who was up there. She was subdued and submissive, but she wasn’t paralysed with fear.
Presumably Ellen wasn’t either.
When I got closer I could see that there were two people there, faintly foot-lit by the torch on the ground as if they were on stage. One was Ellen, with her back against the stone like Joan of Arc tied to the stake. The man she was facing held her prisoner with a stick like a spear shaft, pinning her arms and chest against the stone. She was struggling like a salmon and spitting protests.
Pinkie dropped and cowered silently.
‘I didnae!’ Ellen swore.
‘The librarian’s seen ye,’ said the other. ‘And I’ve seen ye. Bold as brass, beneath her door, on the footbridge, on the path. Do you not bring your young man here the night?’
‘I never had a man here – never, day or night. Never! I said so to the inspector – you heard – it was he as said I did that, not I! I’m working at the library with the Earl of Strathfearn. I don’t – No, I won’t – Oh!’ She gasped, and twisted at the waist, and I could not see what his free hand was doing to her.
The man said in a low, clear voice, ‘Aye, but ye will, ye teasing tinkie hussy, ye will. Or I’ll have your brother arrested for the murder of yon Dr Housman. Ye ken? He’ll hang for it.’
He could, I suddenly realised with horror. He could. Mary’s alibi for Euan only made sense if Housman had committed suicide – if he’d waded away into the river right after I saw him. It wouldn’t work if Housman had been murdered later.
‘No!’ Ellen’s entire body made another wrenching bid for freedom, and she suddenly let out a squealing, outraged sob. ‘O, God, I’ll have you down Sheriff Court mysel’, I swear, you filthy scaldy bastard!’
‘And whose word will they take, lassie, yours or mine?’
There was no way in the world I was ever again going to stand frozen, frightened and cowed and passive, and watch this man launch a violent attack on any McEwen.
I lit my own electric torch and shone it at his head.
‘Angus Henderson,’ I said coldly, ‘what the bloody hell are you doing?’
He turned swiftly, and got a faceful of light. I knew he couldn’t see a thing.
Instinctively he raised his cromach, freeing Ellen, and hit out at me. The staff caught me a thudding thump on the shoulder that knocked me sideways on to one knee.
I dropped the torch with a shrieking gasp.
Pinkie, surely in desperation, did the bravest thing she’s probably ever done in her life and leaped at Henderson with a snarl.
‘Pinkie! Down! No!’ Ellen yelled. ‘Down!’ She wrestled the dog to the ground.
My arm was numb. I scrabbled for the torch with shaking, unsteady fingers.
‘Let her go, Ellen!’
‘No,’ Ellen said, crouched, holding the dog tight against her. ‘One dunt o’ that cromach will break her skull.’
‘Oh.’
Suddenly I felt sure I knew how I’d got that dunt on the head.
The river watcher was towering over me, a dark shadow like the standing stone. My frantic fingers found the torch at last, cold and solid metal, and I aimed its beam into his craggy face, trying to blind him. I could hear my own breath coming harsh and fast, and swallowed bile.