“Just fancy!” Mrs. Hancock appealed to us. “Leaving the poor girl all alone there in that lonely old place, miles from anywhere. And after all the tales you'd been telling her about the Polish girl, too.”
“What had that to do with it?” demanded the doctor.
“Something, I think,” said Piers, looking at Daphne, who, with brilliant eyes, was making the best of her embarrassment. “I should like to hear about her.”
“All right,” said Doctor Hancock. “As near as I can, I'll tell you. It happened while I was away in the Army...”
Mrs. Hancock interposed. “I can tell that story better than you. I was here at the time. Some people called Roebuck who live at Towngate End took on a Polish maid in the last year of the war. It's my belief that the girl wasn't all there. She used to drive poor Mrs. Roebuck to distraction; she never understood a word the girl said and the girl, I expect, never understood anything they said to her. She was a fine−looking girl as far as figure went, but I always thought there was something wandering in her eyes. Well, one afternoon she went out for a walk and didn't come back. She hadn't turned up by the time it was dark, and Mrs. Roebuck rang me up and asked me what she ought to do. She was imagining all sorts of things, except the obvious one which, to my mind, was that Katia—that was the girl's name—had hopped off to Nettleworth, where the Polish troops were then. Well, she kept ringing me up at intervals until midnight, getting more and more worried: she'd telephoned the Polish camp, and Katia wasn't there, she'd telephoned the hospital and she'd telephoned the police, and she couldn't hear a word of the lass. Finally, I persuaded her to leave it to the police sergeant here and go to bed.
“However, before eight o'clock the next morning she rings me up in great agitation and says she's had a phone call from the Iddendens at Blagill and they've found Katia. Would I take her over in the car to collect her. I was doing W.V.S. work then. So off we went, Mrs. Roebuck and I, to Blagill. There was Katia in the Iddendens' kitchen, looking as wild as a witch; old George grinning all over his face, young Joe looking very sheepish and young Joe's missus not looking at all pleased. Katia was wearing some of Mrs. Iddenden's things, and when we asked where her own were there was a certain amount of embarrassment. But young Joe told me the whole tale next time he came into Staineshead. It appears he'd gone up on his pony early that morning to look after some bullocks they had in Ringstones Park. On his way back he saw something white lying between those standing stones. Thinking it was a sheep that was sick, he rode over and then saw that it was a girl, stark naked, and, he said he thought at first, dead. But just as he came up, she sat up, gave one shriek and flew at him and clung to him for dear life. Poor Joe, he said all he could think of for a bit was that it was a good job there was nobody else about. However, he disentangled himself and gave her his coat and tried to tell her to stay there while he went and got his wife to bring her something to put on. But Katia wasn't having that He said she was terrified and he could make nothing of her, so, little as he liked the job, he put her on the pony and led her down to the farm and handed her over to his wife. He hadn't any idea who she was, but his wife, it seems, had heard that the Roebucks had a Polish maid, and as this seemed to be a foreigner she rang Mrs. Roebuck up.
“Well, of course, we tried to get out of Katia what had happened, but she'd lost whatever wits she ever had by then. She never had much English, and the most I could understand from her was that she'd met some people she called 'little men' and they'd played tricks on her and taken her clothes and kept her all night at the old Hall. She had obviously had a bad fright of some sort, but she didn't seem to have come to much bodily harm, except for a lot of bruises which, I suppose, she'd got through tumbling about the hillside in her birthday suit.
“The fact that she had been down to the Hall was proved when Joe Iddenden a day or two later turned up with her clothes. He'd found them somewhere among the old buildings belonging to the Hall. Katia, of course, was quite barmy. The Roebucks couldn't keep her and so they asked the Poles to collect her. But, bless my soul! they'd scarcely arranged with the Polish doctor at the camp to come and fetch her when off she flitted again. And this time they never did find her, though they got the police and the Home Guard and the Polish troops and the boy−scouts and everybody in three parishes scouring the moors for days. If she ever was found it wasn't in this neighbourhood, and nobody here has heard tell of her from that day to this.”
“And, you know,” broke in the doctor, hardly waiting for his wife to finish, “you wouldn't believe it in these days of popular science and the pictures, but somebody dropped a dark hint about the Duergar, and somebody else said, well, the Stone Circle always had been reckoned an uncanny place...”
“The Duergar?” we asked.
“Yes. I shouldn't have thought there was anybody left in Northumberland who knew the name outside a book. But it's odd how these things do linger underneath. The Duergar's supposed to be the wild man of the moors who hunts people down and carries them off underground. I haven't heard his name mentioned since I was so high and my grandmother used to tell me fairy−tales.”
“Oh, that!” said Mrs. Hancock. “That's all a lot of silly nonsense. Somebody just said that for a joke. What I was meaning was that I shouldn't have been able to help thinking of that loony flitting about the place.”
Piers wrinkled his brows. “And you'd heard about this before you went to Ringstones?” he asked Daphne. “Yes,” she said, “but I wasn't thinking about it particularly. I didn't much mind being left alone in the old
Hall. It was broad daylight, after all. And my ankle was hurting far too much for me to worry about anything
else.”
“Yes, now, but let me finish the facts,” said Dr Hancock. “I got down to Blagill, and by good luck I caught Joe Iddenden just as he was going out. I got him to yoke out the pony trap and come back with me at once. I suppose all told I was away from Daphne about two and a half hours. When Joe and I got back she was lying on the floor in a dead faint. I brought her round and we got her into the trap; but she was in a very distressed condition and I was puzzled, because the effect didn't seem altogether due to shock from the sprain, and there hadn't been all that loss of blood from the laceration of her wrist. Joe was very good. After I had given Daphne some treatment at his place he drove us all the way back here. I never thought about his adventure with the Polish girl then, but I'll bet he did! Daphne was a good deal better when we got home. We put her to bed, and apart from the sprain and a rather low temperature and slow pulse her condition was normal. By next morning she was quite well in herself. There now, those are the facts.”
“I see,” said Piers. “But you've missed out one, haven't you?” “What?” asked Daphne, quickly.
“You had lost your watch, hadn't you?”
“Yes,” she said. “That's perfectly true. The strap had broken. I put it in my coat pocket. They're shallow little pockets, and somewhere it must have fallen out. Perhaps when I fell down. I didn't miss it until Dr Hancock had left me, though.”
“Well,” I said, “but what did happen?”
I'm afraid this inquest was rather hard on Daphne. She looked very uncomfortable, and though she was obviously trying not to be self−conscious about it, I'm sure she was heartily wishing she had never obeyed the impulse to send that wretched exercise book to Piers.
“I don't really know how to explain this,” she said, as much to Dr. and Mrs. Hancock as to Piers and me. “You know I amused myself while I had to stay indoors with this sprain by scribbling in an exercise book? I didn't show you what I'd written, because, well, it seemed such nonsense when it was written down. I just couldn't believe it myself, and yet I felt I simply had to write it all down. I suppose, having written it, I ought to have kept it to myself, but something—I really don't know what... I mean, like you do with a dream, I wanted to tell it; and Piers knows me, and so, on the spur of the moment I wrote a letter saying how I had come to write it, then parcelled the thing up and sent it off. I never dreamed, of course, that Bobby hadn't posted the letter. You must have wondered what on earth it was when you got the book without any explanation. But, I mean, how could I have imagined you'd go off to Ringstones to look for me?”