The Castle of the Demon Read online

‘Didn’t he come back?’

  ‘Not that she knows. Amanda went to sleep again, woke alone in the morning and just assumed he’d gone on down to breakfast. When the waiters told her he hadn’t, she began to worry and began to re-create the scene you saw last night. The manager finally lost his cool, and the good lady thereupon telephoned the police.’

  ‘Hence Constable Parfrey.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He looked at her quizzically. ‘You know him?’

  ‘A little. Go on.’

  ‘Well, so far, so amusing. Parfrey arrived and the rest of us all sat back waiting for Fenimore to make another dramatic entrance. But he didn’t. Instead old Chambers, one of the permanent residents, returned from his morning walk carrying a gaily striped T-shirt which Amanda immediately identified as her husband’s. He’d come across it on the shore just at the high-water mark.’

  He began to move back to the group, but Emily remained where she was.

  I don’t want to go there, she thought. Not where there’s worry, concern, fear. I haven’t come here for that. Last night was enough for me.

  Burgess stopped and looked back at her enquiringly, then grinned as a sudden squall of rain hit her. It was only Cal, returned once more with his club between his teeth.

  But this time he had brought something else. He often did this. He would make straight for the club, but if anything else swam into his ken he would happily grab it in his capacious jaws as a kind of bonus. Usually it was a piece of driftwood or some other common flotsam.

  This was different and Emily’s stomach turned over as she looked down at it.

  This was a shoe.

  Burgess saw her face and moved quickly back to her. He bent and picked it up.

  Cal barked for attention, but Emily ignored him. Burgess peered into the shoe.

  ‘American make,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

  Now she had no choice but to follow.

  For some reason she had assumed Amanda was not in the group who now turned and watched their approach. She would have expected to hear her voice even if she couldn’t see her. But now as the men (Parfrey, Roberts, the hotel manager, and two others she vaguely remembered having seen at the bar last night) turned they parted with unconsciously theatrical timing to reveal Amanda seated on the sun-and water-bleached core of a tree-trunk left by some old and violent tide.

  The only times I’ve seen her she’s been worried about her lost husband, thought Emily with a touch of frivolity which disappeared rapidly as she got a good look at the woman. She looked physically deflated. She was obviously nearer sixty than the fifty Emily had guessed. The gaily coloured floral print dress she was wearing seemed to hang loosely on her and its brightness acted as a foil to the pale deep lined haggardness of her face. One hand played nervously with a large cameo locket which hung round her neck while the other trailed loosely down to the sand clutching an obviously forgotten cigarette.

  She looked up at Emily and made a brief gesture of acknowledgement, then returned to peering out to sea.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs. Follett,’ said Parfrey. Emily glanced at Burgess to see how he reacted to this form of address, but his face did not change at all. He was either very resistant to surprise or—and this seemed more likely—he was so concerned with the business in hand, he didn’t notice.

  ‘How are you this morning?’ Parfrey went on. ‘None the worse for your adventure?’

  Now Burgess did look surprised.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you, Mr. Parfrey,’ said Emily.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Constable,’ began Burgess, holding out the shoe. Emily nudged him sharply and flickered her eyes warningly at the fat American woman. Burgess nodded and, taking Parfrey by the elbow, began to move away with him. But Amanda was not as bemused as she seemed and now looked up.

  ‘What’s that?’ she said sharply. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’

  Burgess hesitated, but Parfrey took the shoe from him and held it out for Amanda to see.

  Her examination took only a few seconds. The pause that followed it was longer.

  ‘It’s his,’ she said. ‘It’s been in the water.’

  There was a flatness about her voice which Emily recognised as the calm at the centre of hysteria.

  If she cries, I’ll slap her face, she thought. But this. What can I do for this?

  No one spoke. It was Parfrey’s job to do something, she felt, but Parfrey, she noticed, seemed to be watching the others with calm interest, waiting for them to act.

  A diversion came.

  ‘Look,’ said the oldest of the men there, Mr. Chambers, she guessed.

  He pointed along the beach towards the Point. Cantering along the sand through the shallows came a huge black horse, beating up such a spray with its hooves that at this distance it seemed to belong as much to the water as the land. It was a magnificent sight and Emily felt a surge of envy of the rider, who seemed for a moment to have as little connection with the sorrows and problems of humanity as the great beast he rode with such grace.

  Then she remembered the hoofprints which had circled her sleeping body the previous day. And with a surge of anger she knew who it was even before he came within recognition distance.

  ‘It’s that fellow Scott,’ said Chambers.

  ‘Can he help?’ cried Amanda. ‘Perhaps he’s seen something. He knows these parts well, they reckon.’

  Emily wondered who ‘they’ were and why the Castells had been talking about Scott, anyway.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Chambers, obviously glad of any kind of action.

  ‘Hey, Scott!’ he cried, his high-pitched old man’s voice being projected with surprising power.

  For a moment it looked as if Scott was going to ignore them, then he reined back his horse and came to a standstill about twenty yards away at the edge of the receding tide.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  Something stirred on the saddle in front of him and he put down a soothing hand.

  It was the cat which had so savagely offered to do battle with Cal the night before. The big dog, who had settled down patiently on the stones to wait for a resumption of his morning walk and game, now stood up growling deeply in his throat.

  ‘Steady,’ said Emily.

  Obviously Scott was coming no closer. Parfrey still held his peace and it was Burgess now who, after glancing at Amanda, began to move over the shingle towards the rider.

  If his intention was to achieve some privacy from the hearing of the rest, especially Amanda, the stillness of the morning and the clarity of Scott’s speech defeated him.

  ‘We’re a bit concerned about Mr. Castell, the American at the hotel, you’ll remember him. Have you seen anything of him this morning? Earlier?’

  ‘No.’

  The answer did not invite further intercourse, but Burgess pressed on, lowering his voice, but still audible.

  ‘We found a piece of clothing of his, you see, back there. Just on the high-tide mark. And a shoe.’

  Now his voice dropped below the audibility mark and Emily could not catch more than the interrogative note on which he ended.

  Scott sat quite still for a moment, then turned in his saddle and appeared to examine the sea.

  ‘If the shrimpers don’t net him, try Blitterlees or Wolsty Bank at the next tide,’ he said.

  A pressure of the knees and the trio, cat, man, and horse, all clothed in black, moved off down the shore. He did not look back at them as he went.

  Amanda Castell was standing now, her hand at her mouth.

  ‘The bastard, the bastard!’ exploded Emily. Cal ran forward a few paces after the horse and barked fiercely. Burgess began to walk back towards them and Parfrey seemed to reawaken to his official role.

  ‘Mrs. Castell,’ he said, ‘I don’t think there’s much more we can do here I suggest we return to the hotel. Mrs. Follett, perhaps you wouldn’t mind…’

  ‘Of course,’ said Emily. ‘Come along now.’

  She put her arm round the Am
erican, who without a word let herself be led back along the beach towards the hotel.

  She stopped in the hotel only the minimum amount of time it took to see Amanda settled.

  There had been a look of desperation in her eyes which Emily shuddered to recall as she resumed her interrupted walk. Somehow she did not feel able for the moment to face the sea again, and despite weighty nudgings and plaintive barks from Cal she kept to the path which wound over the stretch of grass and gorse between the foreshore and the farmland.

  At first her mind was full of what had just taken place. She felt that somehow she had just attended at the destruction of a human personality, a destruction almost as complete as that of Fenimore Castell. If he were dead, which seemed certain.

  But how? Why? she asked herself. Could he have been stupid enough to strip off and go swimming alone in the middle of the night? But why stupid? For all she knew he was an ex-all-American swimming champion or some such thing. He had been huge, but huge, she now recalled, with muscle that was no longer put to use rather than the fat of self-indulgence. How did he drown, then? Now she was being stupid. Heart attack. Remember the pills. Cramp. Even mere over-confidence. All killers in water. She was a strong swimmer herself, but she felt vicariously afraid as she thought of Fenimore Castell’s huge body turning helplessly over and over in the Solway’s currents. Then the fear was replaced by a more direct, personal explosion of anger at the recollection of Michael Scott’s callous answer to Burgess.

  ‘The swine!’ she said aloud.

  The sound of her voice brought her back to where she was. Cal looked round hopefully, then resumed his scavenging forays through the undergrowth. She had come quite a way, about a quarter of a mile, without noticing an inch of the ground she was walking over. But now, as she consciously shut her mind to the welter of disturbing emotions which had occupied it, she found that her surroundings accelerated the cooling-down process considerably and soon she was enjoying them with almost unadulterated pleasure.

  On either side of the path banked low was a confusion of wild roses, pink and white and red; gorse, bramble, and free-growing bracken. Everywhere she looked foxgloves, four, five, even six feet in height, and white or reddy-purple in colour, rose triumphantly above the tangle below and shook their bells down at it. The heat of the day brought out all the smells of July and soon the hotel with its tragedy, not to mention the cottage with its night visitor, seemed more than the half-mile or so they were behind.

  One smell sweeter than any of the others drifted towards her, and looking round she spotted the source: a large honeysuckle bush, its branches yellow with a profusion of blossoms. Emily found herself touched by the urge to break off a small branch to put in her bedroom, but approach from this side was practically impossible. The wisp of a dress she was wearing afforded no protection at all.

  The only hope of getting at the honeysuckle, she decided, was to work her way round to the back of the undergrowth before her and see if there was a less-dangerous avenue of approach open there. But working her way round to the back was not very easy either, she found. It was another fifty yards before a possible opening appeared to her right.

  ‘Earn your keep,’ she said to Cal, pushing him forward. ‘Blaze me a trail.’

  She had only taken a few steps, and was already crouching low to avoid an arch of bramble, when a sound made her stop short. It was the clink of metal on stone. But it was its closeness that was really surprising.

  She listened carefully. Nothing, except the buzz and hum of a variety of insects many of which were now beginning to pay her all kinds of unwelcome attentions.

  Then it came again, twice in close succession. The sound of someone digging.

  Suddenly she didn’t like it all. Didn’t like the sound. Or the place. Or her own awkwardly bent position. I can do without honeysuckle, she told herself. It probably wouldn’t last anyway.

  She began to put herself into reverse, but Cal, sensitive animal though he was, missed the nuances of her thought here, and as soon as she started to move again, albeit backwards, he pressed on ahead as he had been instructed.

  ‘Cal!’ she hissed. There was a long silence, broken finally by the clink of metal on stone again, presaged this time by the just audible thud of metal into earth. And followed almost immediately by a loud inquisitive bark.

  ‘And what have we here?’ said a man’s voice, precise, with a note of academic curiousity. And apparently very close.

  Emily shrugged at her own misgivings and set off in pursuit of Cal. Only a few yards round the next bush she found the narrow track she was following opened into a small glade. Along one side of it ran a ridge of newly distributed earth above a recently dug ditch into which Cal was peering with all a dog’s interest in excavation. Standing looking at him with a spade in his hand and contriving to look very cool in his tweedy suit was Mr. Inwit or Mr. Plowman. And standing behind him in his boiler-suit with a trenching tool in his hand was Mr. Plowman or Mr. Inwit.

  ‘Hello,’ said Emily brightly. ‘Is this where it’s all happening then?’

  ‘Where what is all happening?’

  It was the thin scholarly-looking one in the boiler-suit who spoke, the same voice she had heard before.

  ‘Where your archaeological research is all happening,’ said Emily politely, but could not resist going on: ‘and what we have here is a dog. My dog. Here, Cal.’

  Obediently the big animal positioned himself behind her and yawned, showing his solid, gleaming white teeth and apparently several yards of moist red throat.

  Tweedy-suit put the blade of his spade down carefully and laughed.

  ‘You’ll have to stop being so pedantic, Inwit. Else you’ll start to fossilise inside.’ He laughed again.

  So Boiler-suit is Inwit, thought Emily. That makes you Plowman. You look quite jolly, really. Not like your friend. He looks as if you’d just dug him up.

  Her eyes strayed to the ditch.

  ‘Well, you know about us then, Miss …?’

  ‘Salter,’ interjected Emily, wondering how people would regard her new two-name status now Parfrey was going around referring to her as Mrs. Follett. Not that it mattered. Another few days and she’d be off. One way or another, she’d leave. Where? Somewhere. It was like the emptiness over the edge of a cliff. She shut her mind against it.

  ‘Are you interested in archaeology?’ Plowman went on, his bright little eyes twinkling in his rosy-cheeked face.

  He looks more like a well-to-do farmer than a ploughman, thought Emily.

  ‘A little,’ she said with an answering smile.

  ‘How lucky we’ve been, eh, Inwit,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘First that splendid American gent who not only listened, but dug. And now Miss Salter. Not that we’ll try to make you dig, my dear. Ha ha ha!’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Emily, reminded of the morning’s events, but reluctant to be the bearer of bad news. ‘What you said—about Mr. Castell, I mean—it reminded me. Haven’t you heard?’

  Inwit shook his head jerkily. His expression had not changed, but considerable concern was etched on his companion’s ruddy features.

  ‘He’s missing again,’ said Emily. ‘And they found a shirt that was his lying on the beach.’

  ‘You mean he’s been drowned?’ said Inwit, a flicker of interest on his face now.

  ‘No, no, no, Inwit. You jump too quickly to the worst conclusions. Miss Salter didn’t say that at all. We would be wrong to assume that on such slender evidence.’

  Emily was quite touched by Plowman’s obvious determination to be as hopeful as possible, probably for her own benefit. But she shook her head slowly at him.

  ‘I’m afraid there is other evidence. A shoe, there was a shoe, one of his, floating well out in the water. He might be wandering around without a shirt, but hardly without his shoes.’

  ‘A shoe?’ said Inwit, with a slight edge of surprise.

  ‘Yes. Cal here, my dog, he found it.’

  ‘Did he now?’ said
Inwit. ‘That was exceedingly perspicacious of him.’

  He moved forward as if to pat Cal, but the dog growled softly and he stepped back again.

  ‘This is most distressing, most distressing,’ said Plowman wiping his brow with a large khaki handkerchief. ‘How can it have happened? How? That poor man. And his wife. She must be suffering tremendously. I only met her very briefly last night, but it was obvious she adored Mr. Castell.’

  He turned with sudden decision to his companion.

  ‘Inwit,’ he said, ‘I don’t feel able to carry on here for the moment. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind tidying up while I go back to the hotel to see if I can be of any service. If you’re going back that way, Miss Salter, it would be an honour to accompany you. You don’t mind, old fellow, do you? I’ll see you later. Come along, Miss Salter.’

  Emily found herself being propelled back along the track she’d entered by.

  ‘Off you go, Cal,’ she said to the dog, which trotted ahead once more.

  ‘Good morning, Mr. Inwit,’ she called over her shoulder, but the taciturn half of the partnership was already working at the trench again and did not look up. It was only a brief glimpse she had through a trellis of briar and grasses, but she got a distinct impression that he was filling it in.

  Out in the open again she shook back her hair and picked a few bits of vegetation off her dress.

  ‘Just what are you looking for in there, Mr. Plowman?’ she asked. ‘It’s a bit off the beaten track, isn’t it?’

  ‘Ah, I see your problem,’ laughed Plowman. ‘What specifically are we looking for, and is it in the middle of that clump of gorse and briar? Well, the answer is nothing and no. Ha ha ha. Inwit would disapprove if he heard me talking like this. He looks upon archaeology as a science. To me it has more of the qualities of an art.’

  Mr. Plowman seemed to have shaken off his initial fit of despondency at the news of Castell’s disappearance and was now striding out obviously enjoying the air.

  ‘But what are you looking for?’ insisted Emily.

  To her surprise he began declaiming:

  ‘For wonder of his hwe men hade,

  Set in his semblaunt sene;