The figure turned left at the end of the passage, and the blur of torch-light 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—cottons 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 tell-tale 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 match box: 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 match box 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 torch-light 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 intruder. He would wait until he got some signal from Macdonald, and then they would act together, silently and expeditiously.
Unable to see what the cloaked figure was doing, Macdonald guessed by the position of the figure and the sounds which emerged. Something was unlocked. There was only one object with a lock on it in the sewing room—the box cover of the ancient sewing machine. “Not a bad place to hide anything,” thought Macdonald. “It’s so much less obvious than a drawer or a box or a cupboard. You expect a sewing machine to be a sewing machine, not a receptacle—” His train of thought was cut short by a sound which made Macdonald’s pulses jump. Dealing clumsily with the old-fashioned box cover, the intruder in the sewing room had let it slip, and it slammed down with a bang which sounded as startling as the trump of doom. “You silly fool…can’t you do it quietly?” flashed incongruously through Macdonald’s mind. But no reaction came from the silent house, and a moment later the small lock clicked again, amid the heavy breathing of the startled intruder. The shaking of tremulous hands told a story of fear, and the breath came in short gasps now. At last the cloaked figure turned away, along the passage, the way it had come. It was a second later that Macdonald heard a sound upstairs. Someone had woken up.
4
It was Emma Higson who woke up. “All in a sweat,” as she said afterwards, she lay trembling in her bed for a while, and then, with considerable courage, she got up and crept to the top of the stairs. She had in her hand an electric torch, (necessary in a house with such niggardly wiring as Gramarye). It was a bicycle lamp with a new battery, and she turned it on just as the cloaked figure reached the stairs. The beam fell on the cloak and
