Free Bury Her Deep by Catriona McPherson Page A

me inhospitable, I beg you, but I’m not following you. Did someone tell you I was ill?’
    For just a fraction of a second, she and I eyed one another. She knew that I knew, I knew that she knew and we both knew that no one was going to give in. Her look to me seemed to say ‘Let battle commence’ and I hoped that mine to her said the same.
    ‘Mrs Hemingborough, dear,’ I said. ‘I understand absolutely if you want to keep it quiet and I’ve told no one except Mr Tait, but no matter what he did to you you have nothing to be ashamed of and you must not bottle it up. Now, Mr Tait told me that your dreadful experience was not the first and he told me too – quite shocking! – that the police are dragging their feet, which almost beggars belief.’
    ‘I don’t want to be rude,’ said Mrs Hemingborough, and still she spoke quite gamely but was betrayed by a tiny tremor in the hand which lay on the table top as she sat down and faced me, ‘but I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
    ‘Why, the attack,’ I said, all innocence. ‘The dark stranger. Last night.’
    At this Mrs Hemingborough drew herself up magnificently, so magnificently in fact that I began quail. What if Jessie had been imagining things? I remembered the feathers and, with that thought, rallied again.
    ‘I see someone has been telling tales,’ said Mrs Hemingborough, ‘but I can assure you, Mrs Gilver, there is no such person as this “dark stranger” and even if there is he made no attack on me last night.’
    ‘But Mrs Hemingborough,’ I said, gearing up for my master-stroke, ‘my dear, I saw it. I was looking out of my bedroom window at the back of the manse, you know, and in the moonlight, I saw the whole thing. Now, Mr Tait asked me to make his apologies to you for not immediately coming round to help, but the truth is that I didn’t tell him until this morning. I could hardly believe my eyes, you see, and I put it out of my mind, or tried to. And then when I did mention it, at breakfast, of course Mr Tait assured me that it was not a trick of the moonlight at all. It was just the latest instalment in this horrid affair. Well, you can imagine how I felt then. But I daresay, since Mr Tait is not a young man he would more likely have been hindrance than help to any search party and he assured me that you have a good handful of men about the place better suited to it, and your own telephone to summon the police. I suppose it’s too much to hope that they found him?’
    At last I stopped talking and I watched her intently to see what the effect of this outpouring might be. She licked her lips with a quick darting gesture and clasped her hands together on the scrubbed table top, but remained silent for so long that my attention began to wander. Around me, the farmhouse kitchen spoke of an ordered, capable life; the life of the woman who could pluck a chicken on her lap, no less. The kettle was on the back of the burnished range, an array of irons sitting on the hotplate before it, and above the range the dolly groaned with the rest of the wash, jerseys and men’s overalls turning the air soft as they dried. In the sink, however, an unwashed porridge pot balancing on top of a frying pan told the tale of a morning rushed and upset by the need to go out in the lane and pick feathers as soon as the sun had come up.
    Mrs Hemingborough cleared her throat; she had gathered her wits about her once more.
    ‘I don’t know how to account for it,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid you’re mistaken. I know the story you’re referring to – a lot of silly nonsense – and I can assure you nothing happened to me on the way home last night.’
    ‘But I saw it,’ I said again. ‘I can’t for the life of me imagine why you would deny it. Oh!’ The exclamation escaped me before I could bite my lip, for all of a sudden I could see. I did see. ‘Oh dear.’
    Mrs Hemingborough raised an eyebrow at me with an admirable attempt at detachment, but