The Whispering Knights (Mrs. Bradley) Read online

  It was a long, low, thatched structure, black on the outside, as its name implied, and almost equally black within. They were not the only visitors. A coach-party had arrived just before them, and there was much talking, laughter, clicking of cameras, and people going in by the doorway where sat the custodian collecting the small entrance fees, while other people were coming out by a side gate from a small compound.

  “Glad this mob weren’t at Callanish,” said Laura to Capella. “Are you coming inside?”

  “Oh, yes, I suppose so. I don’t see a sign of any window. It’s probably as black as pitch.”

  “I understand that the house is in the hands of the Scottish National Trust,” said Dame Beatrice, “so that ensures that it will be well maintained. It is much larger than I would have supposed.”

  “They had to accommodate the domestic animals—sheep, I suppose—as well as themselves,” said Laura.

  “It’s a spooky-looking place,” said Capella nervously. “I’m glad there are so many people about.”

  “Nach eil tannasgan agaibh anna an tigh-òsda?” asked Laura conceitedly and, considering that her hearers had no Gaelic, inexcusably. Dame Beatrice cackled.

  “You will have to translate for the benefit of the ignorant,” she said. Laura glanced at Capella, laughed, apologised, and said, “Not until we’ve been inside, if you don’t mind. Then maybe I will have cuspair òraide, and that means material for a lecture.” They moved towards the entrance and, Laura leading and with Capella hard on her heels and Dame Beatrice, who had lingered a little, bringing up the rear, they entered the long, dark interior.

  Apart from the black outside walls, built mainly of turf, the blackness within no doubt contributed to the appellation of the house, for certainly there were no windows and, except for a solitary candle-lantern, there was no light except for the dull glow of a peat fire which was burning in the middle of the hard clay floor of what must have been the family living-room. The smoke, of which, probably owing to experienced stoking by the custodian, there was very little, escaped through an aperture in the roof, but this was not visible, so whether it was a simple small hole or the more sophisticated louvre to be seen in English mediaeval halls before the introduction of wall fireplaces, none of them knew.

  There were beds in alcoves, but the furnishings were of the simplest kind and the objects on view, as the visitors’ eyes gradually accustomed themselves to the more than semi-darkness, were few and of the most basic, necessary kind.

  They went through an opening into what had been the roofed and walled space devoted to wintering the one or two domestic animals, and from it there was a door which led into the compound. They blinked in the sunshine and gratefully breathed the fresh, tangy, sea-scented air.

  “One of the children was crying,” said Capella, as they walked to where they had parked the car.

  “There weren’t any children,” said Laura, waving as, with fluttering hands and what she referred to as “wreathèd smiles,” the coach-party moved off. “That’s one of these jamborees they call ‘an extended tour.’ Comes from Exeter, like ourselves. You wouldn’t find children on a sight-seeing trip of that kind. Not the sort of holiday for kids at all.”

  “I didn’t mean coach-party children. I meant one of the children in that wall-bed inside the Black House. I think she was hungry. I expect the people who lived there were poor.”

  “Come, come!” said Laura. “The children in the wall-bed were dummies, although realistic, I admit. You mean you’re hungry. I could do with my lunch myself. Dame B. calls me imaginative, but that was before she met you!”

  CHAPTER 10

  MOONLIGHT, MURDER, AND LOVE

  “Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,

  Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?”

  William Shakespeare

  “What do you really make of young Capella and her dreams and hauntings?” asked Laura, going in to say goodnight to Dame Beatrice before joining her room-mate. Dame Beatrice shrugged.

  “She was probably a precocious child who, whether with or without the knowledge of her parents, read indigestible matter at too early an age.”

  “You think she read all that stuff her papa wrote?”

  “I think it is more than likely.”

  “So what about Sister Veronica?”

  “I know. It is puzzling. I wonder whether they see the same figure flitting from stone to stone?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. I took it for granted that they did.”

  “Unlikely, I think, but neither seems to have had more than fleeting glimpses of this flitting figure, and so we have not been able to get a detailed description of it. Incidentally, I suppose you noticed that it was not until Sister Veronica mentioned it that Capella claimed to have seen it.”

  “You’ve given up the idea that it is a real person, then?”

  “As I believe I have said before, if it were flesh and blood, as the saying goes, others of the party must surely have obtained a glimpse of it. Capella, of course, is open to any suggestion which involves the occult.”

  “But you don’t believe in ghosts, do you?”

  “I prefer to say that I have never seen one and I do not suppose I ever shall. As for not believing in them, well, as in the case of the Loch Ness monster, there is too much reliable evidence for anybody to ignore.”

  “I suppose the same is true of unidentified flying objects and the odd things that happen in the Bermuda Triangle. Well, I’d better join my stable-companion or I shall be having bad dreams if we stay talking about these things. What are we doing tomorrow?”

  “I believe there are some very fine beaches. It would be a pity to leave the island without seeing a little more of it.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing I would like to do, but only if you’ll come along, too. I’d love to visit Callanish by moonlight, but I should hate to go alone.”

  “The stones by moonlight would be well worth seeing. I don’t know whether Capella ought to go with us, though. She is highly sensitive and nervous.”

  “She has lost her superstitious fears of the stones. If she wants to go I think it would be all right. After all, she’s old enough to make up her own mind.”

  “Old enough and wise enough are not synonymous terms. However, the chances are that she will decide not to join us.”

  Laura told Capella of the project next day as they sat on the beautiful Garry sands a few miles north of Stornoway. Here and there when the tide was out, rocks broke the expanses of the golden beach. The long arm of Tolsta Head reached out to sea and the massive stacks of rocky cliff had holes and caves accessible at low tide.

  Very much to her surprise, Capella appeared to relish the idea of a moonlight visit to Callanish.

  “That really would dispose of my dream once and for all,” she said, “and it would be a thrilling experience, anyway. When do we go?”

  “It depends on Dame B., but we’re having a very lazy day, so I should think it will be tonight.”

  They returned to Stornoway, drove along the Eye peninsula and then, returning, Laura took the north-west road to Port of Ness where there was another fine sandy beach, although the cliffs were less spectacular than those of Garry, and they spent another lazy hour.

  “Do you think it was a case of thought transference?” asked Laura that evening when she had tapped at Dame Beatrice’s door to find out whether her employer was ready to go down to dinner. “I mean, I had hardly breathed a word to her about seeing the stones by moonlight when she came right out with it and talked about its disposing of her dream and all that.”

  “Interesting,” said Dame Beatrice, ignoring the reference to thought transference. “Well, that disposes of any doubts I had about taking her with us.”

  It was in the half-light that they set out after dinner. Westward of the town Laura drove at a very moderate pace. The moorland roads were unfenced and, although during the daylight journey she had noticed no straying animals, she was takin
g no chances, for she had nothing but the headlights to guide her, except for a glow from an occasional croft cottage or house and these lay back from the road.

  The sky was heavy and the moonlight was fitful. The moon seemed to be playing a game of hide-and-seek as it appeared and disappeared, now swimming in a clear lift of sky, then making luminous a small, light patch of thin cloud, and often disappearing altogether behind the heavier nightwrack.

  It was ten o’clock or so when Laura, hoping she had remembered the junction correctly, turned off on to the narrow track which led to the stones. She pulled up as the moon decided to reveal them, and there they stood in their stark avenues and in their circle of inscrutable magic, mute witnesses to who knows what strange primitive rituals enacted before recorded time.

  They loomed, black and menacing, the silent guardians of an age which for countless centuries had passed from men’s minds and which could never, even with all the resources of modern scholarship and technology, be revived and recreated. The stones by day had been grey and thin and had born evidence of the five feet of peat which had deposited itself around them until it was dug out when the now-non-existent cairn had been excavated to reveal the small passage-grave inside the stone circle. Now, however, in the shifting, treacherous moonlight, the stones looked black, seeming taller and heavier than by day, and the pattern they made seemed more meaningful and sinister, the impression being that of tall warriors, hooded, cloaked, and watchful, keeping menacing guard and ward, not over the little grave, sufficiently guarded by the tall and lonely monolith which stood nearest to it, but over something which was going on in the stone circle, something so pagan and yet so holy that even the guardians kept themselves hooded in the presence of those mysterious rites.

  The three women left the car and stood and gazed at the scene. Then Dame Beatrice took the path which led to a wicket gate and from this she walked into the main avenue of stones and approached the stone circle. Capella and Laura took the slightly longer way and traversed the whole of the main avenue.

  As they approached the circle of stones which surrounded the grave, Capella said, “I had that dream again last night. I ought not to have come. If I went round and touched every stone, do you think it would go away and never come back?”

  “You sound like a kid of ten,” said Laura. “I suppose, when you were ten you took care never to tread on the lines that marked off the paving stones. Now I never walk widdershins round a church. We all have our little fancies.”

  “Perhaps if I went and stood on the knoll at the end there, where I stood in my dream,” said Capella, “that might work. Will you come with me?”

  “If you like. Hullo, what’s Dame B. up to?”

  Dame Beatrice had reached the centre of the stone circle. The moon, which, riding high, had swum behind some light clouds and turned them to warm silver, swam out again and caused the tall black stones to cast even blacker shadows.

  Where Dame Beatrice stood there seemed to be another shadow. It was across the tiny chambers of the open tomb and Laura was quick to realise that it was not cast by one of the stones. Leaving Capella’s side, she went across to it. Dame Beatrice heard her and turned round.

  “Keep Capella away,” she said, but it was too late. Capella came bounding towards them, caught her foot, and fell flat on her face. Laura picked her up, but she had already seen what the strange shadow was.

  “I knew it,” she said, holding on to Laura. It’s the body I saw in my dream, isn’t it? It’s that flitting ghost at Castlerigg.”

  Dame Beatrice was on her knees. She looked round and said, “I thought it might be a tramp sleeping out, but it isn’t. It is a woman and I think she is dead. Go back to the car, Laura, and bring me the big torch you keep there. And you, Capella, stay where you are, or go with Laura and sit in the car.”

  Capella accompanied Laura, but they did not say anything to one another as they hurried along. Laura went back with the torch. Dame Beatrice took it and again knelt beside the body. When she got up and handed back the torch she said, “Her skull is crushed. One might almost suppose that one of the stones had toppled over and killed her. Would it distress you too much to take a look? I may need a witness. She was first strangled, then struck.”

  Laura came forward and took the torch. The woman lay face upward, so that the dreadful head-wound was not visible. The feet were neatly side by side and the arms were so straight that they might almost have been clamped to the body. The eyes were wide open, as though in shocked surprise and were staring straight up at the sky. This had cleared again, and Laura got a good look at the suffused face. Silently they returned to Capella and the car, and when the car left the trackway and took the road for Stornoway, the unknown dead and the primitive grave, the tall, stark, terrifying stones and the gently-washed shores of Loch Roag were left to the night-winds, the silence, and the fugitive dances of the clouds, the stars, and the moon.

  “Nobody we know, thank goodness,” said Laura when they reached the town.

  The police officer who called at the hotel on the following morning was quietly-spoken, very polite, and obviously embarrassed.

  “No body?” said Dame Beatrice, when he had made his apologetic explanation. “Well, there was certainly a body there at half-past ten last night. I have two witnesses.”

  Capella, who had seen enough to qualify her as a witness, came forward and testified to having seen the body. Laura followed suit and was able to be more explicit. The tall, dark, thin policeman scratched his jaw.

  “It was night and it was often overcast,” he said. “Do you not think that in such a place, and at night, the shadows or some such deceived you? It is not a part of the island that I myself would care to be visiting at such a time except in the course of my duty. I went there with my men and we took strong lighting. I declare to you that if there had been anything there we must surely have seen it. Will you not agree that some trick of the moonlight and the weird nature of the place had you deceived?”

  “No,” Dame Beatrice replied, “we were not deceived. There was a woman’s body, she had first been strangled and then knocked on the head. If it has been moved from where we saw it, I suggest that you find out where her body has been hidden.”

  The officer departed, shaking his head.

  “One thing,” said Laura, “this is a bit of goose for us in a way. As they don’t believe us, there’s nothing to keep us from driving down to Tarbert and catching the next ferry to Uig, as we planned to do. It’s not as though the dead woman was a member of our party, or anything awkward like that. We’ve done all we could. If they choose to doubt us there’s nothing more we can do. We’ve left our names and our home addresses. It’s up to them now.”

  “I shall be glad to leave this place,” said Capella. “I don’t like dreams that come true.”

  “Anyway, it wasn’t you who was lying across the grave,” said Laura robustly, “so it wasn’t a dream come true. It was just one of those things. Let’s forget about it and enjoy the rest of the trip.”

  They dropped the subject, but while Capella had gone to ask the hotel porter to bring down the luggage, Laura said to Dame Beatrice, “The murderer must have been in hiding somewhere and spotted us. Not the most entrancing of thoughts, what?”

  “He must have had a car or some means of transport, unless he lives near the Stones. I saw no car except our own. Did you?”

  “If he hid a car in the shadow of an abandoned croft cottage, there are plenty of those old, decaying dwellings still left standing, or even behind somebody’s pile of turf outside one of those houses near the stones—after all, Callanish is a village and not far off—we should never have noticed. Our own car was right out in the open, so the murderer would have spotted it and, in any case, would have spotted us. He must have done, otherwise he would never have moved the body. He had quite a bit of time to find somewhere to hide it between when we left and when the police came along.”

  “A fact which, in spite of their attitude of
kindly disbelief, will have communicated itself to them, but, as you say, there is no reason for us to change our plans. We will spend three days on your beloved island of Skye, keeping Capella with us, and then, by easy stages, make our way home.”

  “It’s not easy to see why the murderer felt it necessary to move the body,” said Laura, thinking aloud. “It’s not as though we were likely to recognise it, yet the inference is that he wouldn’t have moved it if we hadn’t come along. That’s another thing: he couldn’t have thought that visitors to the Stones would be there at that time of night. What was he doing hanging about the place? Having dumped the body, you’d think his instinct would be to scarper and put as much distance as he could between the corpse and himself in whatever time he had at his disposal.”

  “One would think so, but no doubt he had his reasons. He may have laid out the body only just before we arrived, and I do not think murdered her very long before that. The corpse was cold, but rigor mortis, which, as you know, sets in, beginning with the face, five to seven hours after death, was not present. That much I was able to ascertain and my evidence, which is not likely to be disregarded, is at the disposal of the island police if and when they ask for it. Apart from that, it might be as well to confide in dear Robert, your husband. He will know whether we ought to carry the affair any further. I hardly think we ourselves should take any definite steps. I have every confidence that the island police will find the body and then all can be left to them.”

  “I suppose,” said Laura tentatively, “it wasn’t a bit strange that young Capella should have chosen to go with us to look at the Stones at night?”

  “In the late evening. It was hardly night. You imply?”

  “Well, the body was there. Could she have known that we should find it? She took jolly good care not to be the first one of us to look at the grave.”

  “Your suggestion does credit to your imagination.”

  “No need to jibe. She was anxious enough to look at the corpse after she knew we had seen it.”