Free Cold, Lone and Still by Gladys Mitchell Page A

was!’
    ‘Then,’ she said, with a complete return to her usual forthrightness, ‘we’ll go home first thing tomorrow and when we get back to London you’d better see a psychiatrist. I’m not going to father my children on a man who sees a corpse where no corpse is. All that nonsense about falling over it in a dark passage!’
    ‘There was a corpse all right,’ I said, ‘but I made a mistake about whose corpse it was. I suppose I was badly rattled, and you must admit that Carbridge is a very ordinary-looking bloke. So far as his clothes are concerned.’
    ‘Well, I’m glad now that you wouldn’t let me go to the police. Nice fools we should have looked if we had reported finding a dead man who, a day or two later, was able to climb Ben Nevis and eat a hearty supper afterwards.’
    ‘Look, I made a mistake. Do I have to keep on spelling it out?’
    ‘I’ve looked a lot of times at the map since we started out. There’s no castle marked.’
    ‘It wasn’t a castle, I tell you. It was only a ruin and probably wasn’t important even in its heyday.’
    ‘Can you remember what the place looked like?’
    ‘I think so. Why? If we’re not going to the police, I shan’t need to describe it to anybody.’
    ‘Just as well, perhaps.’
    ‘Could you describe it?’
    ‘No, of course I couldn’t, but I would be willing to agree to your description if it ever came to the point. A thick mist, like the one we ran into, sends my wits wool-gathering. I never could find my way in a fog.’
    I looked suspiciously at her.
    ‘Are you trying to tell me something?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes,’ she said, with an emphasis I could not account for at the time. ‘I want you to see a psychiatrist or a doctor, or an eye specialist, or even all three, as soon as we get back to London.’
    ‘I’ll be shot if I do!’ I said hotly. ‘What are you getting at, for God’s sake?’
    She smiled in a cat-like way and repeated that I needed my head, my blood pressure and my eyes tested. I could have struck her to the ground. Instead, I attempted a verbal attack.
    ‘You’re becoming senile,’ I said. I thought the ungentlemanly shaft would hurt her. It did not. She still smiled.
    ‘Yes, but I wear well,’ she said, ‘which is more than you do. When I was your age, at least I didn’t see things which weren’t there.’
    She was four years older than I was, a fact I had always deplored.
    ‘If you are going to make nasty cracks about what I saw or didn’t see, I shall marry Jane Minch,’ I said.
    She laughed. ‘The children will look like plover’s eggs,’ she said. ‘Those freckles! Oh, my God!’

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6: A Visit to a Psychiatrist
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    W e were lucky with the train from Glasgow, where we spent the night. The run from there to Euston passed without incident and, except that I was aware that she was keeping an eye on me, I might have thought that Hera had forgotten all about what had happened. The only spoken reference she made to our excursion in the mist was in the form of a quotation from a nostalgic poem by W. J. Turner. We were reminiscing about our walk along The Way, but steering well clear of our visit to the ruins, when she said, looking at me in a commiserating sort of way which was rather galling:
    ‘ “I dimly heard the master’s voice
    And boys far-off at play,
    Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
    Had stolen me away.” ’
    ‘I am not a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, and what I saw and touched had nothing to do with the mountains of Ecuador,’ I said, ‘still less with the Grampians of Scotland.’
    ‘Knows his geography, too!’ she said, with the simulated admiration she might have extended to a bright child of five. I grinned, determined not to allow her to see that she had irritated me.
    ‘If you let out a crack like that when we’re married, I’ll clout you,’ I said.
    ‘Another infantile reaction,’ she retorted, so, as usual, she had the last word. We had dinner in Soho, then I took her by taxi to her flat