Wildfire at Midnight by Mary Stewart Read Free Book Online Page B

wrong with it?"

    He stopped and glanced down at me. He looked surprised, almost blank. "Wrong with it?" He repeated the phrase half mechanically.
    "Yes. Why does everyone shy off it like that? I'm sure they do. I can't be mistaken. And if it comes to that, what's wrong with the people in the hotel? Because there's something, and if you haven't noticed it—"
    "You don't know?"
    "Of course I don't know!" I said, almost irritably. "I've only just arrived. But even to me the setup seems uncomfortably like the opening of a bad problem play."
    "You're not far astray at that," said Roderick Grant. "Only we're halfway through the play, and it looks as if the problem isn't going to be solved at ail." He paused, and looked gravely down at me in the gathering dusk. "It's a nasty problem, too," he said. "The nastiest of all, in fact. There's been murder done."
    I took a jerky little breath. "Murder?"
    He nodded. His blue eyes, in that light, were dark under lowered brows. "Two and a half weeks ago it happened, on the thirteenth of May. It was a local girl, and she was murdered on Blaven."
    "I—see." Half unbelievingly I lifted my eyes to the great mass ahead. Then I shivered and moved forward. "Let's get to the top of this hill," I said, "and then, if you don't mind, I think you'd better tell me about it."
    We sat on a slab of rock, and lit cigarettes. Away below us, cradled in its purple hollow, Loch na Creitheach gleamed with a hard bright light like polished silver. Two ducks flew across it, not a foot above their own reflections.
    "Who was the girl?" I asked. "And who did it?" He answered the latter question first. "We still don't know who did it. That's what I meant when I said it was a nasty problem. The police—" He frowned down at the cigarette in his fingers, then said: "I'd better start at the beginning, hadn't I?"
    "Please do."
    "The girl's name was Heather Macrae. Her father's a crofter, who does some ghillying for the hotel folks in summertime. You'll probably meet him. His croft's three or four miles up the Strath na Creitheach, the river that flows into the far end of this loch. . .. Well, it seems Heather Macrae was 'keeping company' with a lad from the village, one Jamesy Farlane, and so, when she took to staying out a bit later in the long spring evenings, her folk didn't worry about it. They thought they knew who she was with."
    "And it wasn't Jamesy after all?"
    "Jamesy says not. He says it very loud and clear. But then, of course," said Roderick Grant, "he would."
    "And if it wasn't Jamesy, who could it have been?"
    "Jamesy says he and Heather had a quarrel—yes, he admits it quite openly. He says she'd begun to avoid him, and when finally he tackled her with it, she flared up and said she was going with a better chap than he was. A gentleman, Jamesy says she told him." He glanced at me. "A gentleman from the hotel."
    "Oh no!" 1 said.
    "I'm afraid so."
    "But—that doesn't mean the man from the hotel was necessarily—•'"
    "The murderer? I suppose not, but there's a strong probability—if, that is, he existed at all. We only have Jamesy Farlane's word for that. What we do know is that Heather Macrae went out on the evening of May the thirteenth to meet a man. She told her parents that she 'had a date.' "
    "And—on Blaven, you said?"
    His voice was somber. "This bit isn't nice, but I'd better tell you. At about midnight that night, some men who were out late on Loch Scavaig—I suspect they were poaching sea trout—saw what looked like a great blaze of fire halfway up Blaven. They were mystified, but of course not alarmed. It's bare rock, so they weren't afraid of its spreading. They went on with their job, whatever it was, and kept an eye on the fire. One of them had a look through some night glasses, and said it was a column of flame, like a big bonfire, but that its base was out of sight behind a rocky bluff."
    He paused. "Well, they got more and more puzzled. Who on earth would light a bonfire away up