By ten o’clock, dressed in a warm coat in case I ended up sleeping in the motor car, I was huddled in the porch of the side door plucking up the nerve to start walking. The stable block is just around the corner of the billiard room and across the yard and it was a trip I made daily without thinking, being generally too impatient to wait for my little Austin motor to be brought round. Now though, as I set off, the carriage house doors seemed to dwindle into the distance and the yard stretched endlessly in front of me. The stone chippings too crunched explosively under my tread, like horses eating apples, and my neck grew stiff with the effort not to peer around me.
Alec had urged me to take his hired motor but my own, ramshackle as it might be, was at least familiar and was small enough for me to roll it out of the garage with one foot on the running board and one on the ground. This I soon did, then hopped in and pulled the door to without slamming it. I hoped against hope that it would continue to roll down the gentle slope of the yard and the back drive and that I should not have to start the engine until safely away from the house. It was agonizingly slow at first, barely moving. I could hear individual stones on the drive popping under the tyres as I inched towards the first of the gates, then gradually we gathered some speed, hurtling down the bumpy drive and shooting at last out of the gates on to the road and away.
It was light by the time I pulled off on the moor above Gatehouse, but too early for visiting, and I thought anyway that my mission would be the better for waiting until I had rested. Now, sick and gritty-eyed with exhaustion, I did not feel I could rely on myself to navigate the extraordinary interview I hoped was to come. I walked around the motor car a few times until my back and neck began to ease and then got into the passenger side, curled up and closed my eyes.
Awakened by the sound of a cart clopping past on the road beside me, I opened my eyes on to dazzling brightness and felt sure I had slept away the morning, but a glance at my watch told me that it was only just seven o’clock. Melting hot in my thick coat, still screwing up my eyes against the glare, and with my throat so dry that it clicked when I tried to swallow, I started the car and began the descent towards the town. Fearing to drive down the main street and pass Dr Milne on an early call, however, I veered off to the west at the fork in the road and from there picked my way among the criss-crossing lanes towards the sea until I arrived at my destination, stopped the car and let myself in at the gate. The cabbages looked in very good heart, I noticed as I made my way to the front door, hardly any slug holes at all.
I saw through the kitchen window that Mrs Marshall was dispensing porridge to an astonishing number of assorted large sons and small grandchildren and she came to the door with the ladle still in her hands. She cried out in delight at the sight of me and lifted her arms like a runner breaking the winning tape (causing flecks of porridge to leap off the ladle and spatter the floor around her). I wondered for a moment why my appearance should cause such immoderate joy, and then I remembered that the last thing I had promised was to tell her when naughty Cara was found and brought home again. My face must have betrayed something of what I felt because hers fell, and her mouth was turned down at the corners as she nodded me towards the parlour and returned to the kitchen.
‘Just leave they plates and get on with you,’ I heard her say. ‘Jock, Willie, your pieces are ready standing at the back door. Peggy, tie your ribbon or you’ll lose it. Jean, put the wee one’s boots on his right feet before you go. And don’t any of you come through the room, mind. Granny’s busy.’ She sidled back into the parlour and sat opposite me.
‘Mrs Marshall, I’m so very sorry,’ I began. ‘But I don’t have time to tell all just now.’
‘From your face, I don’t think I want to hear it,’ said Mrs Marshall. ‘Just tell me, was she in thon fire, after all?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘She is dead, I’m afraid, but she didn’t die in the fire. I’m sure of it.’ I felt a fraud and a heel at the relief that suffused her face, slackening the drawstring purse of her mouth and softening the swimmy old eyes in their baskets of wrinkles.
‘So what are you after?’ she asked, in a bright voice.
‘I need to speak to whoever it is around here who lays out corpses,’ I said. ‘I don’t mean the undertaker.’
‘You mean Nettle Jennie,’ said Mrs Marshall.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I expect I do.’
‘I’ll tell you where to find her, madam, and glad. She has a wee hoose on the Cally estate up by Gatehouse, just on the edge. But you mind out for yourself when you go there.’ I looked at her enquiringly.
‘The thing is, you see, madam, Nettle Jennie is a witch.’
I had anticipated as much. For all that reading the Bible and feeling glum were still the only Sunday pastimes in the respectable homes of Scotland, one only has to mention felling a rowan tree or eating a wild mushroom to realize that St Columba did not make a very thorough job of it. And I have no call to be superior for my legs were trembling as I approached Nettle Jennie’s house. It was a tiny building, but with something about it that hinted at a nobler purpose than a worker’s cottage sometime in its history. Small wonder, though, that the local witch was welcome to it: it was gloomily situated on the banks of a slow-moving burn surrounded by large trees, and midges were dancing in the air and rising from the ground in front of me as I made my way through the long grass to the door.
Almost too grotesque to be anything but comical was the way the door swung open as I approached it and a disembodied voice said: ‘I’ve been expecting you.’ Almost, but not quite, and I was equally balanced between trepidation and amusement as I bent my head under the lintel and entered.
The interior was dark but while the darkness of Mrs Marshall’s cottage rooms came from the thick walls and tiny windows, here it arose from walls panelled with black wood and from the fact that, although there was a large arched window of leaded diamond panes set in the end wall, most of the light from it was blocked by a collection of stoppered bottles, one jammed into each diamond, wedged right in if they fitted, held in by putty and string if not. The effect was that of a home-made stained-glass window, and it was this thought which led to the realization that Nettle Jennie’s house had once been a chapel. I wondered if this added to or detracted from the lore. It seemed rather macabre to me. The woman herself as well, once my eyes adjusted to the dimness, was revealed to be satisfyingly to type. Thick, grey hair in a plait, the creased dark skin of a gypsy and eyes set so deep in shadowed sockets that their light was the dull gleam of velvet rather than any kind of shine. Set against all of this, however, was her blue work dress and clean white pinny, and her voice – clear and sweet, and pure Galloway in its vowels. She had been at work on some greenery, piled on newspaper on her table, and she returned to it now, stripping leaves from branches and separating them into piles. Not having been asked to sit, I leaned against a cupboard and watched her.
‘I saw you at the inquiry,’ she said. ‘And I heard you were asking questions.’
‘I dearly wish you had come to me then,’ I said. ‘What a lot of bother it would have saved.’
‘That’s not my way,’ said Nettle Jennie. ‘I keep myself to myself and people come to me. They wouldn’t come if they thought I’d go running with tales.’ I could see the sense in this, but I slumped with disappointment.
‘I don’t suppose then,’ I said, ‘that you would be willing to be a witness. To come to the police, I mean.’
‘Well, now me and the police, we keep our distance, see? Suppose you tell me what it is you want to know.’ She nodded towards a chair at last and I sat, while she carried on with her picking over of the stems and branches. Every so often she would put one of the leaves into her mouth, as I have seen Mrs Tilling do shelling peas in the yard in the sunshine. The leaves might have been spinach for all I knew, but still it made me shiver.