Bury Her Deep Read Online Free PDF Page B

began, ‘that I have no great expectations about solving this for you. If it’s a mare’s nest I doubt whether anyone knows who started it, much less why. These things do tend to take on a life of their own. Look at the Loch Ness Monster, for instance. Whose fault is that? And even if the dark stranger exists, if no one knows what he looks like then catching him at it seems the only hope, and unless we can discover some kind of a pattern to the thing, we won’t know where to look. So, please, be sure that I will do my best but do not, I beg you, get your hopes up.’
    Mr Tait nodded and appeared to take my protestations to heart.
    ‘Like you,’ he said, ‘I don’t know whether to hope that he exists or not for each possibility is as unappealing as the other. But as to a pattern, that’s very clear. Didn’t I tell you? It’s the SWRI that’s the pattern, my dear. It always happens after one of their meetings. That’s half the trouble. It always happens on a night when just about every man in the place is on his own and no wife to say where he’s been. It always happens on a night where almost every woman is out walking in the dark, when the very best of them might fall prey to fancy.’
    ‘Except they’re not out walking in the dark, are they?’ I said, recalling what he had told me. ‘It’s the full moon.’ Mr Tait put his head in his hands and groaned.
    ‘Yes,’ he said, straightening up again at last and heaving a mighty sigh. ‘There is that. A man out prowling the lanes or a woman making up silly stories would be bad enough, but it has to be said: there is that too.’

3
     
    There was hardly a moment between tea by the fire and the early dinner which was to allow Lorna and me to get to the meeting on time, but Mr Tait just managed to show me the few points of interest in his church – a stone pulpit carved all over with representations of twining branches which made it look rather varicosed and a gargoyle grimacing from the top of a pillar – while I snatched the chance to run through my plan for the evening.
    Such as it was. Mr Tait had sent me the names of the women who had reported encountering the dark stranger and I had committed them to memory but my intention was to accompany home another of the ladies, someone who lived a fair walk from the village, in the hope that tonight she might be the one and I might be a witness – a very faint hope since all the previous victims had been alone.
    ‘Are the women organised into parties now?’ I asked. ‘Surely none of them is brave enough still to walk home without a companion? Come to that, I find it odd that the meetings are rolling on at all. If this has been going on since the spring, I mean. I wonder the husbands and fathers haven’t put their feet down and ordered their womenfolk to stay away.’
    ‘I rather think most of them go along with the police sergeant’s view of things,’ said Mr Tait. ‘And in a couple of cases I know that the wives have encouraged them in it, precisely because they would otherwise put their feet down and the women would never get off the farm again. As to banding together  . . . I did suggest that Lorna might get my old Napier out and ferry them – she can handle it although it’s a bit of an antique now – but they seem to relish the fresh air and the extra measure of freedom that their moonlit walks afford them.’
    We had come out of the church again and were threading along the gravel path between the gravestones towards the gate. Out on the green, the skipping game was still going strong, two volunteers keeping the rope whipping round as a chain of girls wove in and out of it, concentrating fiercely and singing as they went:
‘Here she comes, there she goes,
Here she comes, there she goes,
Here she comes, there she goes  . . .’
    It was rather mesmerising and Mr Tait and I paused to watch them. On and on it went and I was beginning to wonder if they would simply keep going until called into