A Knife in Darkness Read online

  ‘Mrs. Napier! Oh, Mrs. Napier, such terrible news! And you only new to the village!’

  ‘You mean Colonel Verney and his man? I know: isn’t it awful?’

  It was the Strong sisters, the elderly pair who had visited her the other day. They could be mistaken for nothing but sisters, for they were exceedingly alike: both broad-jawed, sensible-looking women with wiry grey hair and surprised, faded brown eyes. In character, however, they were at variance.

  ‘And you were really there?’ asked the younger, Miss Ada Strong. ‘What was it like? Was there,’ she lowered her voice, ‘a very great deal of blood?’

  ‘Ada!’ admonished her sister. ‘I am sure that if Mrs. Napier was indeed there the memory is far too upsetting for a genteel girl like her to wish to relive it!’

  Hippolyta, who had had her mouth open to tell Miss Ada all the details, shut it again sharply.

  ‘But Mrs. Napier is married to the handsome Dr. Napier: she must know about such things as blood!’

  ‘There was a certain quantity of blood,’ said Hippolyta, with what she hoped was a genteel expression of distaste on her face. ‘It was all very distressing.’

  ‘And Dr. Napier went to attend to the bodies, no doubt?’ Miss Ada went on. Her eyes, Hippolyta noticed suddenly, took on an expression when she mentioned Patrick’s name that she had not thought to look for in one so old.

  ‘Ada!’ snapped Miss Strong. ‘You have taken Miss Verney under your wing, I believe, Mrs. Napier? Very good of you.’

  ‘Naturally she had no wish to stay in the house, and as others had kindly offered to sit with the Colonel and his man, and she had had a very grave shock which required my husband’s attention, it was thought sensible to bring her back to our house.’

  ‘Well, and a distraction for her, too,’ said Miss Ada, ‘though not perhaps a very timely one,’ she added quickly, as though she had said something out of place. Her sister, Hippolyta noticed, elbowed her sharply.

  ‘We shall of course call to pay our respects,’ Miss Strong said firmly.

  ‘Aye, and it’d be lovely to see the young doctor, too!’ Miss Ada added with an expansive wink that left Hippolyta quite speechless.

  The sisters bade her good day and passed on, and she had just about recovered her breath when she met, by the church, appropriately enough, the minister and his wife. She struggled briefly to remember their name: oh, yes, Douglas.

  ‘Mrs. Douglas!’ She curtseyed.

  ‘We have just heard the most distressing news,’ said the minister in his low voice. ‘Colonel Verney …’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Hippolyta. Really, news seemed to travel on wings around here. ‘It is more than sad.’

  ‘A murder!’ Mrs. Douglas’ mousy treble trembled. ‘In our little town! Such a thing has never been heard of!’

  ‘It is very distressing,’ agreed her husband. ‘Their throats slit, I understand?’

  ‘Um,’ said Hippolyta, anxious not to be thought ungenteel again, ‘yes, I’m afraid so.’

  Mrs. Douglas turned quite white.

  ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘I wish to go home! If two strong men can be killed in such a terrible way –’

  ‘In their own home, though, Alison,’ said the minister, with clumsy assurance. ‘You’d be better out here, I think.’ Seeing her begin to flutter her hands in agitation, he tried again to soothe her. ‘Alison, Alison, keep in mind, dearie: there are people in a worse state than ourselves for whom we should be strong.’

  Hippolyta could not quite imagine little Mrs. Douglas being strong. A thought struck her.

  ‘I imagine there is a kirkyard near the town? For I see there is none around the church here.’

  The minister, his wife’s tiny hand in his bear-like paw, turned his attention back to her.

  ‘Oh, aye, there’s a place where the Tullich kirk used to be before the laird had this one built,’ he said, with a jerk of his shoulder at the church. ‘It’s out bye, no far away.’

  ‘And are Episcopalians buried there along with – with your flock?’ she asked: a goose had walked over her grave, for the thought came to her suddenly that it might well be where she would be buried herself, when the time came.

  ‘Aye, aye, but by their own – your own – ministers, ken?’

  ‘Of course. I must see if Miss Verney has considered that,’ she added, half to herself. If the clergyman only came from Banchory once a week at a gallop, where did that leave funerals?

  The rest of the day passed in a kind of suspension: Hippolyta sat and drew with Miss Verney, hoping by that to keep their minds from the worst of the horrors they had seen. Miss Verney, in addition, wrote to the bishop in Aberdeen asking for a clergyman to come and bury her uncle and Forman, and Hippolyta went out once again to send it with the coach at the inn. On the way back she met Patrick, returning from Pannanich, and walked with him, arms linked, back home.

  ‘How is Mr. Brookes?’ she asked, aiming for an innocent tone.

  ‘Mr. Brookes? Oh, he is quite well. He mentioned you.’

  ‘Did he?’ she asked vaguely. ‘When you say he is quite well, how ill is he, actually? Can he get up and walk around the place – for a constitutional, that is – at all?’

  Patrick laughed a little.

  ‘No, no: he is quite bedridden. He has a servant who carries him down to that public parlour where we met him each day, when he feels well enough. He had yellow fever, I believe, and made a recovery, but his strength is quite broken and he has not walked for some years, he tells me.’

  ‘Poor man.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  Basilia brightened when they returned, and ate a little dinner with them, then rested. After supper, when Patrick had been playing the piano a little, and toying with Moore’s “Oft in the Stilly Night” to please Hippolyta, Basilia asked,

  ‘Dr. Napier, will you be so good as to play the plaintive from “The Almond”?’

  Patrick, always happy to play Oswald’s songs, obliged immediately with a simple setting for the piano. The mournful air rose and fell in the little parlour, where the late sunlight stretched dim up the walls, patterned with leaves lifted by the evening breeze. Basilia listened a little as Patrick sang the words, then turned to Hippolyta, beside her on the sofa, fell into her arms, and cried her eyes out.

  ‘How long are they staying, then?’ demanded Mrs. Riach the next morning.

  ‘I have no idea, I’m afraid,’ said Hippolyta. ‘And I am sorry that Robert Wilson has had a relapse.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Mrs. Riach lugubriously. It was hard to tell whether she was convinced by Wilson’s state or not. ‘What am I to feed you all on the day?’

  ‘I heard Mr. Strachan had some nice hams in.’

  ‘I tellt ye,’ said Mrs. Riach sharply, ‘that Dr. Napier disna like ham. He willna countenance it.’

  ‘Then perhaps a hodge podge? We could use yesterday’s mutton.’

  ‘Aye, mebbe,’ said Mrs. Riach, consoled by Hippolyta’s tone. She gave one of her brutal curtseys – unaffected, it seemed, by any pain in her hip – and vanished from the parlour. Struck by a sudden thought a moment later, Hippolyta followed her through the door at the back of the hall: she had meant to ask her to find a little fish for the mother cat.

  Through the door the house looked more complicated than she had expected. A set of stairs turned up to her left, and an unlooked-for passage headed to her right, as well as the short one ahead to the kitchen. She listened. There was silence. She turned right, and was surprised when a cupboard door in the passage shut quickly at her approach. She tried it, but the door would not budge.

  She stepped back and looked at it sternly. There was nothing out of the ordinary about it: it was a plain panelled fir door. Had she imagined that it had moved at all?

  After a moment, she turned and went back to the kitchen, which was where she expected it to be. Mrs. Riach was at the fire with her feet up, while Ishbel peeled vegetables.

  ‘I meant to ask if you could find some
fish when you were out, please.’

  ‘There’s speldings in the pantry,’ said Mrs. Riach, drawing herself reluctantly to her feet.

  ‘It’s for the mother cat. She’s called Bella.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Mrs. Riach, in that flat way she seemed to have perfected. Hippolyta glanced at Ishbel, who was concentrating hard on her vegetables, then left the room.

  ‘I must go and sit with my uncle today,’ said Basilia, pale as a lily, as they sat at breakfast.

  ‘Of course: would you like me to come with you?’ Hippolyta asked. She had thought to put on black this morning, so would not have to change.

  ‘Oh, would you? You are so kind, Mrs. Napier!’

  ‘Not at all. I could not see you go on your own.’

  So after breakfast they took their sewing and walked up to Dinnet House, which managed to look even more forbidding despite the sunshine.

  Mrs. Kynoch, roused apparently from a doze by their arrival, greeted them with due solemnity and no hint of the awkwardness involved in welcoming Basilia to her own home in such difficult circumstances. She showed them to the dining room on the ground floor, where she and the woman from the village had laid out both Colonel Verney and Forman.

  ‘We thought it not inappropriate,’ she explained, keeping her squeaky voice down to a gentle croak, ‘for Colonel Verney had, I believe, fought alongside Mr. Forman and in other circumstances their lying in the same place would not have been thought out of place, even though one was an officer and one a common soldier. And with only two of us to watch them … I hope you will feel we did right, Miss Verney.’

  ‘Yes, yes of course,’ said Basilia quickly, but her eyes were on her uncle. They had laid him out in clothes they must have found in his rooms, a neckcloth high around his neck and another around Forman’s, hiding, as Hippolyta had hoped, the awful gashes at their throats. She could not quite believe now that she had been so calm the previous day. Both men were that waxy, yellow colour in the candlelight that Hippolyta had seen before in the dead. Basilia bent over her uncle and kissed his brow. ‘I have written to the Bishop for someone to come and take the funeral services.’

  ‘Of course.’ Mrs. Kynoch, who was wearing the same odd assortment of clothes she had been wearing yesterday, stood with her head bowed at the doorway.

  ‘Mrs. Kynoch,’ said Hippolyta, ‘perhaps you would like to go home and rest? We’ll be here for a while, no doubt.’

  ‘Are you sure, Mrs. Napier? That would be most kind.’

  ‘Not at all: you have been so kind in arranging everything.’ She walked with Mrs. Kynoch back towards the hallway. However silly a woman, she thought, Mrs. Kynoch had behaved very practically and generously in this instance.

  ‘We have done our best to clean up the hall and the kitchen,’ Mrs. Kynoch added to Hippolyta when they were out of Basilia’s hearing. ‘She won’t want to be troubled with such things just now, but later it will be less upsetting for her that they are done. The woman who cleans came to help in the afternoon.’

  ‘Good: I’m sure it was hard work,’ said Hippolyta. She pictured the darkened floorboards in the kitchen, and swallowed. ‘I know she will be grateful when she is a little recovered. Tell me, though, Mrs. Kynoch: was there any sign of a blade of any kind, when you moved Mr. Forman’s body?’

  ‘A blade, dear?’ Mrs. Kynoch frowned for a second, and then realised what Hippolyta meant. ‘No, there was not. There was no sign at all that Mr Forman made away with himself.’

  ‘Patrick thought there wouldn’t be,’ Hippolyta murmured, half to herself. ‘They were both killed. At least Miss Verney won’t have to think that poor Forman murdered her uncle.’

  Mrs. Kynoch put a hand out and touched Hippolyta’s sleeve.

  ‘She is fortunate to have found a friend like you at the right time,’ she said, smiling. ‘She has always seemed a little lonely, without much female company.’

  ‘Then I hope to continue to remedy that, at least until she knows what her future must be.’

  Mrs. Kynoch nodded approval, and took up her bonnet from the hall table. She departed down the drive, and Hippolyta returned to the darkened dead room to keep her new friend company.

  The next few hours passed uneventfully. Basilia sat close to her uncle’s corpse, with occasional glances at Forman, and wept periodically. Hippolyta sat in the window seat, stitching her first shirt for Patrick as neatly as she knew how. There was more light than she had expected, for the shutters were as old as the house and did not quite meet. At dinner time, however, she was delighted to see the man himself appear at the end of the driveway, carrying a large wicker basket. She hurried to meet him at the door.

  ‘I bring you dinner!’ said Patrick, waving the basket with some difficulty. ‘Mrs. Riach said you had come here, and Miss Verney, too. I’m sure you would both benefit from some food.’

  ‘Indeed I’m famished!’ Hippolyta agreed, kissing him almost as much for the food as for his own self. ‘Will you come in? There is only the two of us here: the village woman –I don’t yet know her name – has gone home for now, and Mrs. Kynoch is off for a rest.’

  ‘I have brought enough for three!’ said Patrick, ‘though it is a solemn enough place for a picnic.’

  They took the basket to the kitchen and served the food on to plates, added a bottle of wine to the collection and some glasses, and carried all on trays back along the passage to the dining room. They set everything on one end of the dining table, and encouraged Basilia to leave the bodies far enough to come and eat.

  ‘Your physician insists,’ said Patrick with mock sternness. ‘You will do no one any good by fainting from hunger, however unhungry you might feel.’

  ‘Then of course I must do my best,’ said Basilia, though she still moved as if in a dream. She managed a moderate quantity of food before sighing and excusing herself to return to her uncle’s side. Patrick and Hippolyta finished what they could, then took all back to the kitchen to tidy away.

  ‘It is strange to have a wooden floor in a kitchen,’ Hippolyta remarked, trying not to picture Forman’s body lying on it.

  ‘There’s an extra step from the passage into the room,’ said Patrick. ‘I think perhaps once the floor was stone just like most kitchens, but it was covered over, perhaps because it was damp, or unusually cold.’

  ‘The whole house is a cold one,’ said Hippolyta, with a shiver. Patrick’s arms slipped round her and she leaned back on him, wanting his warmth as well as his comfort.

  ‘I think it best if Miss Verney stays with us again tonight,’ he said. ‘Such a cold place after such a shock: I should worry about her taking a fever.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. But presumably Robert Wilson will be away tomorrow?’

  ‘Ah, not quite,’ said Patrick, dropping his arms from her waist. ‘He’s still very giddy.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind: the thought of someone not quite well handling a team of strong horses like that: it seemed to me very unwise.’

  ‘Of course: no, I don’t mind at all, not at all.’ But what would Mrs. Riach say, she thought. Then she remembered her confusion in the servants’ quarters at home. ‘Patrick, how did you come by Mrs. Riach?’

  ‘Come by her?’

  ‘I mean, was she recommended? Or did you find her through an agency?’

  ‘Oh, I see! Well, neither, really. She came with the house.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes – I told you I rented the house from Dr. Durward, didn’t I? Well, he insisted on it, really. He was living there, and when I came here – pretty much at his invitation, that is – he said he wanted to move into somewhere smaller, and would I mind taking on the house as he had no wish to sell it, and he was concerned that any tenant might be worried by people turning up on their doorstep looking for the doctor. Of course I was quite happy to take it on: the rent is low, for it is not a convenient house except in terms of its situation. But if you don’t like it, my dearest, if there is anywhere else we
can afford …’

  ‘It’s a charming house!’ cried Hippolyta, and meant it. ‘But sometimes I do wonder … So Mrs. Riach was Dr. Durward’s housekeeper?’

  ‘I suppose so: I don’t imagine she simply moved in after he left.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose so.’ She frowned. It was not so much Mrs. Riach, nor indeed Ishbel, who seemed a very promising young girl. But what had it been that had disappeared into that locked cupboard?

  Well, whatever it was, she had no time to attend to it now. Miss Verney needed her. The pair of them returned in silence to the dead room, to find that Dr. Durward himself was sitting quietly with Basilia, paying his respects to the corpses. He stood when they entered.

  ‘Good day to you both,’ he whispered, a shadow of his usual ebullient self in the presence of the dead. Hippolyta curtseyed, pleased to see him. She was grateful to Dr. Durward, or for his laziness: many doctors, she supposed, would cling on to their practice to the very end, and not have the sense to hand it over gradually to a younger man, as Dr. Durward seemed happy to do. His financial good fortune should therefore also be theirs. She wondered, as she settled again at the window seat, that a gentleman of money should have become a physician: or perhaps he had come from a mercantile background, and an ambitious father had pushed him towards medicine. She liked to speculate on people. Mrs. Strachan, for example, she thought, her mind wandering. She seemed very genteel for a merchant’s wife. Who were her family? Had Mr. Strachan made an advantageous match, a good business deal?

  Dr. Durward was rising to go, murmuring something about having just dropped in between patients. Patrick walked out to the hall with him, talking in low tones. They left the door ajar, and Hippolyta crossed to close it against the draught, but caught a little of their conversation.

  ‘Yes, I saw both wounds,’ her husband was saying, and her ears sharpened. ‘A narrow blade, I should say, extremely well honed, and a slash from left to right, perhaps from behind – that would be more likely than a left-handed assailant.’

  ‘I’ll bow to your learning in medical jurisprudence,’ she heard Durward reply seriously. ‘From behind, eh? Well, it would be easy for almost anyone to reach Verney, seated in his chair, but Forman was a tall fellow. Are we looking for someone equally tall? Or was he, too, seated?’