bellow a lot. By the time we reached it it was too late and nobody could do anything.” I shuddered at the memory of it, watching those terrified eyes as the huge beast finally disappeared beneath the surface with a horrid sucking sound.
“Everyone said he was a good rider, and he certainly knew the area well,” Darcy said. “What would have made him go near the mere he’d warned us against?”
“Something could have spooked his horse,” I said, and I told him the story of the white flapping thing that came up at me and how it had taken a while to regain control of Snowflake.
“A swan, you think?” Darcy nodded thoughtfully. “They can be quite aggressive, I know, but when a man is riding his own horse, he should be able to calm it down right away.”
“There was one other thing,” I said. “I saw Wild Sal up there. She looked like a pale flapping thing too. She stepped out right in front of my horse and stopped me from going in the direction of the bog. She showed me the right way back to the road.”
“Wild Sal, eh? What was she doing wafting around on the high moor?”
“Doesn’t she have a cottage somewhere up there?” I asked.
Darcy shook his head, smiling. “This village is too much, isn’t it? Wild women and village idiots and aged spinsters . . . it’s almost like a caricature of ye olde English village. Hard to believe it’s real.”
That’s it exactly, I thought. It’s hard to believe it’s real. Even harder to believe that every day somebody dies.
“You know what they’d say, don’t you?” I turned to him. “They’d say it was the Lovey Curse taking a person every day until the end of the year.”
“Now that,” Darcy said with a smile, “is definitely hard to believe.”
“It’s not funny, is it really?” I said, swallowing back the lump in my throat. “I mean, every day somebody dies. It’s as if a giant hand is hovering over us, waiting to snatch up the next victim.”
Chapter 24
STILL DECEMBER 26, BOXING DAY
We reached Gorzley Hall and I gladly handed Snowflake back to her groom. She aimed a parting kick at me. Those who had not taken part in the hunt greeted us with enthusiasm, wanting to know if we’d killed a fox. Of course they hadn’t heard about the master and we had to tell them.
“Do this many accidents usually happen in this part of the world?” Mr. Upthorpe demanded. “I’d always thought the countryside was a quiet, boring sort of place. If I had this number of things going wrong in my factories, they’d shut me down.”
“I assure you that our corner of the countryside is usually most peaceful,” Lady Hawse-Gorzley said. “Why don’t we all go up and change and then meet for sherry before lunch in the library?”
When Queenie had run a bath for me I had her return Bunty’s jacket before she could somehow ruin it. Then we went down for a late lunch.
“You’ll find we are eating simple meals today,” Lady Hawse-Gorzley said. “It’s Boxing Day, you see. The servants are allowed to spend the day with their families.”
The simple lunch was quite adequate: a hearty soup, then more pasties and cold meats and game pies, followed by a large sherry-laden trifle. I would have liked to visit my grandfather to tell him about this latest occurrence, but Lady Hawse-Gorzley asked me to run a skittles tournament in the ballroom and thus keep everybody happily occupied until teatime.
“Dashed glad you’re here,” she said to me, drawing me closer to her. “Frankly, I rather wish that I hadn’t invited them for this long. Seemed like a good idea at the time, with the hunt and the Lovey Chase and the Worsting of the Hag and all that. But ten days of them—not only feeding them but entertaining them, too. It’s a bit much, isn’t it? And they are such a frightfully dreary bunch. No concept of entertaining themselves.”
I noticed that the colonel limped off for an afternoon snooze while Johnnie and the Sechrests had not reappeared after riding their own mounts back to their respective homes. However, the rest of them had a good cutthroat game of skittles and today made short work of the rest of the Christmas cake at teatime.
We were just finishing the last crumbs of food when Sir Oswald came in, still dressed in his “mucking out the pigs” outfit.
“Damned police fellow has shown up again,” he said. “Wants to talk to young Georgiana.”
“Me?” I think it came out like a squeak.
“I’ve put him in my study.” Sir Oswald gave me a commiserating smile.
I went through and found Inspector Newcombe sitting there. He rose to his feet as I came in.
“Oh, good afternoon, my lady,” he said, “and please forgive me for calling you ‘miss’ last time. Slip of the tongue, I’m afraid. And I’m sorry to disturb you on Boxing Day, but I wanted to ask you some questions about the man who disappeared during the hunt today. I’m told you found his horse, up by Barston Mere.”
“I did,” I said. “It was just wandering aimlessly and it had obviously hurt itself, because it was lame in the left foreleg.”
“Did you see what happened before that? Where he might have fallen off?”
“No, not at all. He passed me some time before and my horse was being so antisocial that I rather lost touch with the rest of the hunt and found myself alone with no idea where I was. Then my horse was spooked by a horrible flapping noise and a big white thing came at me. I suspect now it might have been a swan on the lake, but at that point I didn’t even know that I was near any water.”
“So you saw no trace of where he might have fallen?”
I shook my head.
“Nobody else anywhere near?”
“Well, yes. I saw the woman they call Wild Sal. She stepped out in front of my horse and told me I was going the wrong way and set me on the right path down. If she hadn’t appeared, I might have ended up in the bog.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding.
“You think that’s what might have happened to the master, don’t you?” I asked.
“My men have been up there with dogs, scouring the moor all afternoon, and have not found a trace of him,” he said. “Now I’ve looked at the horse and its foreleg is quite badly cut. And what’s more, there were bits of bracken caught in its mane, so I have to assume it fell at some stage. And the other strange thing—the cut is quite a clean one. Not a skinned knee, which would have happened if it had clipped the top of a wall.”
He looked at me, waiting for me to say something. “And we found some traces of blood between two Scotch pine trees.”
“I saw that row of trees,” I said. “I wouldn’t have ridden between them myself. Too many branches sticking out at odd angles. But if the master did—” I paused. “A clean cut, you say. Is it possible that somebody put a trip wire between those trees? They say he was rather reckless—so somebody might have guessed that he’d take that route—a shortcut really.”
Inspector Newcombe was staring at me, frowning. “If that’s the case then we’re looking at a deliberate act of malice, if not of murder.”
I nodded. “I fear so,” I said.
He gave a deep sigh. “Until now I kept telling myself that these deaths were just an unfortunate string of accidents. But now I had better face facts and admit that there is either a deranged killer or a clever one, or both, operating on my turf. And I’m buggered—I mean, I’m dashed—if I can understand what the motive could be.”
I paused before I said, “You don’t possibly think that Wild Sal might have had anything to do with it, do you? She stopped me from going where the master had gone. Did she know that there was a trip wire waiting for me?”
The inspector brightened up considerably. “You know, you may be right. There’s one thing I’ve just remembered. I went to look at the place where that van drove off the road yesterday—and I did see some footprints in the snow nearby. Bare feet, they were. And I commented to the lads and one of them said, “Oh, that’s just the crazy woman who lives in Tiddleton. She runs around barefoot all year.” He paused as his brain processed the next step. “And you say she stepped out right in front of your horse? What if she stepped out right in front of that van? He’d swerve to avoid her and on that icy road he’d plunge straight down into the river, wouldn’t he?”
“In which case I should mention one more thing, or rather two more things,” I said. “The first time I met her, she gave me a sinister warning. She told me to watch my step or I’d come a cropper. I took it to mean slipping in
