As the bats cut erratic tangents across the pale sky and white owls floated silently on the warm scented air, it occurred to Macdonald that Monica Emily Torrington had cast a shadow on the village: that her power was still felt, undercutting all the confidence and serenity which should be the normal complement of neighbourliness. “Peel was right,” thought Macdonald. “Everybody here is involved in this thing one way or another. They started by refusing to admit what they knew to be true, and it’s gone on and on, getting more fantastic with every effort of concealment. It’s time it was stopped.”
When the enveloping twilight had deepened so much that a man could be seen only at fairly close quarters, Macdonald got up and began to stroll silently round the containing wall of Manor, Dower House, church, and Gramarye itself. Each was hedged around with impassable clipped hedges of yew or holly or thorn, in which gates were set, but they were all contained within the ancient stone wall, close up against the hedges in some places, in others the wall and hedges parting company. Gramarye was entirely in darkness, but the Manor and Dower House showed lights in the graceful mullions and oriels of the ground floor. The Manor House windows were curtained, but those of the Dower House were open, their lights shining gaily out across lawn and flower borders and hedge. John Sanderson’s house showed lights in the lower windows, but the village street was dark now, candles all put out.
Just before eleven o’clock, Macdonald went through the park gates into the garden of Gramarye, keeping in the shadow of the ilex trees until he came to the garden door—a small side door which opened into a passage between Sister Monica’s office and the parlour. He turned the handle of the door and found it yielded silently to his touch as a well-oiled door handle should, and the door opened with neither creak nor groan. Closing the door behind him, Macdonald stood still in the darkness, as he had stood so often in other buildings. Houses, barns, shops, flats, warehouses, all dark, as this passage was dark, but having in the darkness their own character because each had its own peculiar smell. Gramarye smelt of floor polish and carbolic and soap: something of the unwelcoming smell of an institution, but behind the overlay of modern cleanliness, the smell of the ancient house declared itself, of old mortar, of stone walls built without damp courses, of woodwork decaying under coats of paint, of panelling and floor boards which gave out their ancient breath as the coldness of the stone house triumphed over the warmth of the midsummer evening. It flashed through Macdonald’s mind that he would remember the village of Milham in the Moor through the fragrance of midsummer, new-mown hay, roses and clove pinks and honeysuckle, the “unforgettable, unforgotten river smell”—and lime trees in flower: all these wafted on the warm air in sensuous delight. But he would remember Gramarye for its chill stone smell, coupled to the soap and polish and disinfectant which were so virtuous in intention and so comfortless in achievement.
He walked along the dark passage to the little square entrance hall, where he could see a rectangle of half light—the diamond-paned window beside the front door—and he stood and listened to the creepy rattle which told of mice scuttling or nibbling in the ancient beams. It was next to impossible to rid an ancient house of mice, unless you kept a company of cats. “She would have thought cats were unhygienic,” thought Macdonald, who liked cats. He went slowly and silently upstairs to the first floor, and sat down on the top stair. He knew that all was well in the silent house. Reeves was here—somewhere—as good as a watchdog and an insurance policy in one. Reeves would have been all over the house, as silent as a shadow, prying and guarding both. He would have looked in at the two sleeping women, quite calm and unembarrassed. Reeves was a very domestic character.
There was nothing to do but to wait, so Macdonald settled himself comfortably on his top stair: “Waiting for somebody else ‘to be helpful,’ ” as he told Reeves the next day.
2
It was midnight before anything happened. The church clock had just struck, with maddening deliberation, slower than Big Ben. Then Macdonald thought: “It’s generally a cold draught. This time it’s warm.” Somebody had opened the garden door quite silently. They must have left it open, wide, for the still air of the stone house was astonishingly animated by a breath of warmer air laden with the scent of hay and clove pinks. Incredibly the fragrance of the summer night was diffused into the institutional carbolic of Gramarye, and the song of nightingales became suddenly louder and closer.
Macdonald stood up on his top stair and moved a step to the left, waiting for a sound from below. It wasn’t long in coming: the footstep was quiet enough, the faintest shuffle of list slippers, but the person who moved was heavy in body, and the old boards creaked and sprang . . . crack . . . crack . . . crack. “The Warden would have used that door when she came in from her midnight wanderings,” thought Macdonald, and then, strangely, came a deep sigh from below: a sigh compounded of fear and physical weariness and mental stress, sounding preposterously loud in the enclosed space of the panelled
