The Castle of the Demon Read online

  A half-choked sound came from Burgess at this. He buried his face in his beer glass.

  ‘It seems there used to be a chapel situated out there on the Grune…’

  ‘What in God’s name is this Grune you keep on talking about?’ interjected Amanda.

  ‘It is the name given,’ said the thin archaeologist drily, ‘to the peninsula about one mile in length and one quarter-mile in width bounded by the Solway on one hand and Skinburness creek on the other which extends from Skinburness village to the headland or spit known as Grune Point. The etymology of the word has been open to some speculation in the past, but now it is generally agreed that it is a variant of “groyne”, whose modern sense is a manmade barrier against the erosion of coastland by the sea.’

  ‘Isn’t he great?’ Fenimore asked everybody with pride. ‘Anyway, there they were in the middle of this patch of gorse and furze, digging away. I offered my assistance, as a common labourer merely, and I confess I lost all track of time.’

  ‘You’ve been exerting yourself, blossom?’ asked his wife, now all loving anxiety. ‘And you with your heart condition? Come upstairs now and take one of your green tablets, and lie down for a while before dinner. Which we would appreciate hot!’

  With this last shot at the management, she ushered her unprotesting husband out of the bar, her only acknowledgment of Inwit and Plowman being an indignant glare at them as she went through the door.

  ‘Phew!’ said Burgess. ‘How’s your drink? I too like my dinner hot.’

  ‘Upon which hint …’ said Emily downing what remained of her gin. ‘Come on, lead the way.’

  It was a pleasant evening, spiced rather than spoiled by the unexpected incidents which surrounded it. They exchanged a little information about themselves, though Emily did not show much curiosity in case it was returned. Burgess, she discovered, was a personnel officer with some large concern in Manchester. She told him she was a secretary, which seemed anonymous enough till she caught him looking at her very expensive dress and accessories. To distract him, she told him about her suspicions that there had been someone in her cottage that day. He was concerned, which she had expected, but also questioned her very closely about matters of detail which had aroused her suspicions, which she found a little bit strange.

  ‘What are you trying to prove?’ she finally asked. ‘That I’m just a nervous woman living on her own and imagining things?’

  ‘I hope you are,’ he said with a grin. ‘But you don’t seem very nervous to me. I’d say you were quite capable of looking after yourself.’

  She was pleased when he did not attempt to contradict her decision not to call the police. But despite her protests he insisted on walking down from the hotel with here to the cottage.

  ‘Don’t forget Cal,’ he said, as they came out of the hotel.

  As if in answer, from the hotel garden there came a deep hoarse growling bark.

  ‘Something’s up,’ said Emily. ‘Come on.’

  In the small garden an interesting tableau awaited them. Cal, his head cocked to give maximum scope to his good eye, was standing stiff-legged, growling more in wonder than in anger at a huge jet-black cat which crouched on the lawn before him. The cat’s teeth were bared in a soundless snarl and its tail was lashing back and forward over the neatly mown turf.

  Burgess laughed.

  ‘You’d think he’d pick on someone his own size.’

  ‘Careful,’ said Emily, restraining him from moving forward. ‘That brute could tear his other eye out before he got a grip of it.’

  She bent, picked up a handful of gravel from the path and tossed it gently at the cat. The beast looked at her balefully for a second but didn’t budge.

  She picked up a second handful and took her arm back, meaning to put a little more force into it this time, but her wrist was gripped from behind with quiet strength. For a second she thought it was Burgess.

  ‘If you must use animals for target practice, try that donkey there,’ said a voice with no humour in it.

  She turned to find herself looking at the man Scott she had noticed in the smoke room.

  ‘Let go of me!’ she said furiously.

  ‘Certainly,’ he replied quietly, releasing her.

  ‘How dare you?’ she began, but her indignation died at the cold anger she saw on his face. He stepped over to the two animals.

  ‘Miranda,’ he said.

  The cat looked up, then leapt effortlessly into his arms.

  He stroked it gently and it purred with a vibrant intensity Emily could almost feel in her spine.

  ‘You really must be careful of the company you keep,’ said Scott to his cat. Without another look at Emily, Burgess or the dog at his feet, he strode away over the lawn and passed out of sight through a gap in the hedge.

  Her indignation rising again, Emily turned to Burgess whom she saw several yards away in the shadows leaning against the hotel wall.

  ‘I’m one of Nature’s cowards,’ he said. ‘I like girls who fight their own battles.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ she said ironically. ‘Who was that awful man? Is he stopping at the hotel? I’ve a good mind to complain about him.’

  One thing about being Sterne Follett’s wife, she told herself. You didn’t get treated like that. Or if you did, it was quickly and efficiently dealt with. Burgess merely seemed to find it amusing.

  ‘No, he doesn’t stay here,’ he said in reply to her question. ‘Though he seems to spend a lot of time in the back bar here. His name’s Scott. I think he’s something to do with that place there.’

  He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the college.

  ‘The college?’ said Emily. ‘I hope he’s got nothing to do with educating students.’

  Still angry, she strode vigorously down the lane which led to the shore, with Cal and Burgess trailing behind. No one spoke till they reached the cottage. She stopped at the gate.

  ‘I won’t ask you in, if you don’t mind,’ she said, surprised to hear herself speaking so defensively.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said equably. ‘I’ll just hang on out here for a second till you’re sure all’s well within.’

  ‘If you must,’ she said with a shrug, but none the less had a good look around inside before reappearing at the door.

  ‘Not a burglar in sight,’ she said. ‘Well, thanks for a very enjoyable evening.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Me too. Perhaps we’ll bump into each other again before you go. Good night.’

  Geared as she had been to resist any attempt to prolong the evening, Emily felt curiously let down by this suddenness of withdrawal.

  ‘Good night,’ she called after the rapidly vanishing figure. He lifted a hand in acknowledgement, then disappeared in the gloom.

  Thinking back on the evening as she lay in bed, Emily wondered what had caused the apparent cooling off in Burgess’s attitude to her. Or perhaps it was all in her own mind, based on the assumption of her own vulnerability and desirability which her life hitherto had given her. Odd, though.

  She began to read in her book a description of the great tempest at the beginning of the fourteenth century which carried away the road to Skinburness and part of the town itself, and a little while later fell asleep with the sound of the sea in her ears.

  At three o’clock in the morning Emily woke suddenly with a fearful sense of being watched.

  She lay quite still for what seemed several minutes, not daring to do more than strain her half-opened eyes into the gloom around. The room was full of shifting shadow and light cast by the restless movement of the sea not many yards outside her window. A light breeze stirred the flimsy cotton curtain.

  I can’t lie like this for ever, she thought desperately.

  And in the same moment she sat up and reached for the light cord above her head. For one terrifying moment she could not find it. Then it was in her hand and light—bright, unflickering, yellow light—filled the room.

  It was, of course, quite emp
ty.

  True, the window was open, but it was far too small for anyone to enter through. But when the curtain blew again, laughing at her own fears she got up to close it.

  Outside a nearly full moon shone down on a sea which looked as if it was made out of beaten silver. It was incredibly beautiful and she stood for a long while peering out at it along the silver path which stretched all the way across to Criffel and the thread of red lights seemingly suspended in air, which she knew marked the masts of the American naval base at Caerlaverock.

  A gush of affection for the place rose in her heart and with it a sense of well-being, of safety, of belonging. She took a deep breath of the salty air, decided it would be criminal to shut this out, and turned back to bed.

  And let the fresh sea air out of her lungs in a long wavering scream as she saw the face peering down at her through the internal window.

  ‘How long was it before you left your bedroom, Mrs. Follett?’ asked the police constable.

  Emily was sitting with a blanket draped round her shoulders in the kitchen of the upstairs cottage. Cal lay at her feet, yawning. Clutching a teapot in the background was Mrs. Herbert, the old woman who lived there. She looked very anxious and Emily found herself smiling reassuringly at her, then remembering it should have been the other way around.

  The interrogative twist of the constable’s eyebrows reminded her too. He seemed a pleasant young man and had cycled well over a mile to get to the scene of the crime.

  The phrase was Emily’s, not his. He was still trying to establish the existence of the crime.

  ‘A couple of minutes, I think. I don’t know.’

  ‘And the face was there all this time?’

  ‘No. No. It disappeared as soon as I screamed. I mean it. He, whoever it was, must have been standing on the couch in the living room to peer through, and when I screamed he just stepped down.’

  ‘So you got an impression of this face moving down from the window?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose I did. I don’t know. He must have done.’ The constable wrote in his notebook. It was reassuring to see that he used a ball-point pen instead of the traditional tongue-licked stub of pencil. And that he wrote a rapid but neat shorthand.

  ‘But when you got through into the living room there was no sign of him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How closely did you look?’

  Emily made an indignant noise which turned bubbly in her teacup.

  ‘Not very closely, I tell you! I ran like hell through the kitchen and out of the back door into the courtyard.’

  ‘The back door. Why not the front? It was nearer.’

  ‘Outside the front door there’s nothing but sea and shore. I didn’t fancy that one little bit. And outside the back door was Cal.’

  She bent and stroked the dog. The constable’s face relaxed into a grin.

  ‘A nice bit of thinking that, in the circumstances.’

  He stood up.

  ‘I’ll just take a look around downstairs.’

  ‘Are you all right now, dear?’ asked the old woman as soon as the policeman had gone.

  ‘Yes, thank you very much,’ Emily answered. ‘It’s been very kind of you and I mustn’t keep you up any more.’ She put her cup and saucer (Crown Derby—the best for the guest) down on the draining board. ‘I’m sure it’s all right for me to go downstairs now. I’ll give you your blanket back in the morning if I may.’

  She pulled it tightly around her. Even policemen were human.

  ‘There you are, Mrs. Follett,’ he said, as she came into the living room. He was standing on the couch looking at the internal window. ‘I think we can let you get back to bed now. If you’d just check there’s nothing missing first.’ ‘What? Oh, of course.’

  It took her only a couple of minutes to check.

  ‘No, nothing. I mean certainly nothing of mine. And as far as I can see, nothing belonging to the cottage.’

  ‘I see. Thank you very much. Well, I’ll be on my way. Perhaps you could contact us in Silloth if anything else occurs to you which might be helpful. And we’ll be in touch ourselves. You’ll be all right now?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Cal’s staying in with me. He’ll just have to sweat a little. I’ve sweated enough tonight.’

  ‘Better lock up after me, eh?’ he said, leading the way down the corridor to the kitchen.

  He paused at the door and asked casually, ‘You had to unlock this to get out into the yard, did you?’

  ‘Why yes. Of course.’

  ‘Was the key in the lock?’

  ‘Yes, it was. I think it’s sort of welded in. But it was locked. And the bolts were in.’

  Why do I sound so defensive? she wondered. He moved the upper bolt back and forward. It was rusty and very stiff. Emily held out her hand to show a grazed and reddened finger.

  ‘I did that opening it. Tell me, Constable—er …’

  ‘Parfrey,’ he said.

  ‘Was the front door locked?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. Yes, it was.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’ll be off, then.’

  But he hesitated on the threshold.

  ‘This face, was there anything … did it look like anyone you know?’

  ‘No. No. Certainly not.’

  ‘I see. Tell me, is Mr. Follett going to be joining you or are you going to be by yourself for the rest of your stay?’

  ‘No. I’ll be by myself, I mean. My husband isn’t coming,’ said Emily, stopping herself from inventing some pointless domestic reason for her husband’s absence, and wishing she had introduced herself by her maiden name and status. But it had seemed oddly wrong to misinform the police. And she’d been too shaken for clear thought, anyway.

  ‘Well, good night, then.’

  She closed the door and sensed him standing outside till the wards of the lock clicked and the bolts scraped home. She heard his footsteps over the cobbles for a moment, then silence.

  One last thing before going to bed. She hunted around through various drawers till she found a couple of drawing pins. Standing on her bed, she pinned the central pages of the Daily Mail over the internal window, then squatted with Cal at the foot of the bed to view the effect.

  The Chancellor of the Exchequer looked benevolently down at them.

  Satisfied, she nodded.

  ‘You I don’t mind.’

  But she still felt uneasy as she slid back under the single sheet which was all the warm night demanded. Should she have told Parfrey everything about the face? How could she, though? He seemed doubtful enough about its existence, as it was. He probably suspected some kind of hysterical nightmare.

  He would hardly have been reassured if she had told him the face was green.

  3

  When sleep finally came it came solidly, and it was ten o’clock in the morning when she awoke. It would have been later, but Cal, having obviously from the state of the curtain made a vain attempt to leave by the window, applied himself vigorously to washing her face with his tongue.

  It was another glorious day, already growing very hot. The Scottish shore of the Solway was perfectly clear. The smoke from Chapel Cross cooling towers was rising perfectly straight into the air. Distance removed any sense of pollution.

  A line of small boats was moving slowly against the tide which wasn’t much past full. They were shrimpers, she knew. She could see the steam rising from the boilers in which the fresh caught shrimps were boiled on the spot.

  She breakfasted rapidly on grapefruit juice and a buttered roll, then went out to join Cal who was already down at the water’s edge waiting for the stick which was the incentive he needed to plunge into the cool blue water.

  ‘You don’t have to wait, you know,’ said Emily, as he barked impatiently at her. ‘If you want a bath, just jump in.’

  He barked again. She leaned back and flung the stick she had brought with her far into the water. It had once been an Indian club, but Cal’s enormous jaws had crushed a gr
eat deal of shape out of it.

  Emily waited till she saw where he was going to land, then moved quickly away. The first shaking from Cal’s coat was like a water-cannon’s jet. Boisterously he slithered over the shingle towards her and dropped the stick at her feet. He wasn’t one of those stupid dogs who bring back a stick then refuse to give it up to be thrown again. This time drops of water flew off the club as it soared through the air and they glistened in the sunlight like a trail of slow sparks.

  About a hundred yards further along the shore a small group of people was standing. With a slight shock she recognised the uniform and the slim figure of Constable Parfrey. Her first thought was that he must still investigating the break-in (though what was broken?) in her cottage the night before. And she felt illogically annoyed that her walk might be spoilt by a renewal of questioning. She toyed with the idea of turning away towards the grassy paths of the Grune, but another familiar figure now detached itself from the group and began to move towards her.

  It was Burgess.

  She expected him to be full of concern for her safety, but nothing of this showed in his greeting.

  ‘Hello there! Taking advantage of the weather? Sleep well?’

  ‘Why yes. Or rather, yes and no.’

  But before she could go on to give an account of her adventure he jerked his head at the group he had left.

  ‘More excitement there, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh?’ she said coolly, though fully aware of the absurdity of her pique. ‘What’s the matter? Has someone caught a fish?’

  ‘Nothing like that,’ he laughed. ‘No. I don’t quite know what to make of it. It’s our friend Fenimore. He’s gone missing again.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Now she was really interested.

  ‘What happened this time?’

  ‘Well, according to Amanda, he feels the heat terribly. I can believe her! And last night it was very stuffy. She’s been playing hell about lack of air-conditioning in the hotel. She’s sure the place is controlled directly from Red China via a front organisation in Carlisle. Anyway, Fenimore got up in the middle of the night announcing he was taking a little walk to cool off and that’s the last she saw of him.’