Macdonald slipped like a shadow into a room immediately behind him, where drawn blinds kept out the faint luminosity of the starlit northern sky. He slipped behind the door, which was half open. It was one of the children’s playrooms, and as such would be of little interest to the unknown “helper.” Macdonald stood so that he could see through the crack of the door should a glimmer of torchlight be shown. “They’ll have to use a light sometime. Even a cat would be defeated by this floor of the house,” thought Macdonald. “Reeves again. He’s pulled all the blinds down, thoughtful fellow. If ever a chap learnt by experience, it’s Reeves.”
The stairs creaked so loudly that Macdonald thought that even Emma Higson would wake up, though he had noticed she was a bit hard of hearing. Evidently the nocturnal visitor thought so too, for there was a full minute’s cessation of movement. The only sound was laboured breathing, heavy, distressed, and quite unreasonably loud. Then the shuffling footsteps moved on, along the passage to the right, and a slender upright of light showed down the hinged edge of Macdonald’s door: the torch had come into operation.
Macdonald moved out from behind the door and stood flat against the wall beside the doorjamb, whence he could see through the doorway along the passage without being seen if the visitor turned round. Against the faint glimmer of torchlight a dark figure showed for a moment in silhouette, and even Macdonald’s well-disciplined nerves contracted in response to the totally unexpected. The dark figure was cloaked and veiled: against the uncertain torchlight was the silhouette of a tall form clad in the garments of an old-fashioned hospital nurse. “If Hannah were here to see that, she’d scream the place down,” thought Macdonald. “Spirits and souls of the righteous . . .or angels and ministers of grace defend us. I never thought of that one.”
The figure turned left at the end of the passage, and the blur of torchlight showed only the line of the old wall, a bulging, leaning line, where the wall of the ancient passage turned to form a recess which had once been a powder closet. The recess was now occupied by a built-in linen cupboard and a small matchboarded apartment called the sewing room. It held a sturdy table, an old-fashioned sewing machine with a box top and shelves on which sewing materials—cotton and tapes, and buttons and hooks, scraps of patching materials and pins and needles—were arranged in appropriate boxes: a neat, efficient little apartment, but quite lacking in interest, or in any place of concealment for anybody or anything.
Macdonald came out of his dormitory and began to move down the passage towards the sewing room. He kept close to the wall, so that the telltale boards should not creak. At the far end of the passage, another bedroom door would give him cover and an opportunity to observe what was going on in the sewing room. Step by step he moved, putting to account all that years of training and experience had taught him about the matter of moving silently. Macdonald had listened so often to other people who were trying to do that most difficult thing—to move without giving warning of their movement to one who might be listening. He had emptied his pocket of coins and cigarette case and matchbox; he had taken off his wrist watch; he had not smoked for several hours. The omission of any one of those precautions had served as a signal to him when he was tracking others in the dark. Coins can clink unexpectedly; a matchbox can obtrude itself through the stuff of a pocket and scrape the angle of a wall. In profound silence even the tick of a watch can become audible. The rest was physical training and physical fitness: the ability to breathe silently, the balance to maintain immobility when another step would be a giveaway. Silently he moved on, aware of rustlings and fidgetings and clinkings from the sewing room, and of that laboured breathing which is the unconscious accompaniment of mental stress.
When he gained his doorway and turned towards the sewing room, the sight he saw in the dim torchlight was fantastic enough to have frightened the whole village into hysteria. The cloaked, veiled figure had its back to Macdonald, and he knew it must be so exactly like that mythical figure—Sister Monica. Anyone knowing her might well have been convinced that the dead walked. Sergeant Peel had said: “They’re a superstitious lot.” Cash in on the superstition—a sound way of avoiding a challenge in a village where nerves were already on edge.
3
Macdonald stood and watched while the cloaked figure fumbled, the dark body, with the cloak stretched out by the elbows, obscuring the hands. Macdonald knew that he had only to take three sure and silent steps to be able to put his hand on the solid shoulder beneath the cloak. But he did not move because he knew what the reaction would be—a howl of fear, a crash of overturned furniture which would sound like bedlam let loose through the silent house. Upstairs Hannah Barrow lay sleeping, and Macdonald was a humane man. Whatever she had done in the bitter circumstances of a harsh life, he did not want to frighten her into gibbering insanity by breaking into her sleep with an uproar which a false move might cost now. In any case, what was the hurry? Reeves was in this house, and Reeves would know all about the
