A Red Herring Without Mustard

“The Colonel’s no shooter,” he went on, “and all the world knows that for a fact. So where’s the harm in ridding the place of a pest that does no more than eat your garden and dig holes in your shrubbery? Where’s the harm in that, eh?”

I noticed that he was repeating himself—almost certainly a sign that he was lying. I didn’t know the answer to his question, so I remained silent, my arms crossed.

“But then I saw a light inside the house,” he went on. “ ‘Hullo!’ I said to myself, ‘What’s this, then, Brookie? Who could be up at this ungodly hour?’ I said. ‘Could someone be sick?’ I know the Colonel doesn’t use a motorcar, you see, and then I thought, ‘What if someone’s needed to run into the village to fetch the doctor?’”

There was truth in what he said. Harriet’s ancient Rolls-Royce—a Phantom II—was kept in the coach house as a sort of private chapel, a place that both Father and I went—though never at the same time, of course—whenever we wanted to escape what Father called “the vicissitudes of daily life.”

What he meant, of course, was Daffy and Feely—and sometimes me.

Although Father missed Harriet dreadfully, he never spoke of her. His grief was so deep that Harriet’s name had been put at the top of the Buckshaw Blacklist: things that were never to be spoken of if you valued your life.

I confess that Brookie’s words caught me off guard. Before I could frame a reply he went on: “But then I thought, ‘No, there’s more to it than that. If someone was sick at Buckshaw there’d be more lights on than one. There’d be lights in the kitchen—someone heating water, someone dashing about …’ ”

“We might have used the telephone,” I protested, instinctively resisting Brookie’s attempt to spin a web.

But he had a point. Father loathed the telephone, and allowed it to be used only in the most extreme emergencies. At two-thirty in the morning, it would be quicker to cycle—or even run!—into Bishop’s Lacey than to arouse Miss Runciman at the telephone exchange and ask her to ring up the sleeping Dr. Darby.

By the time that tedious game of Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button had been completed, we might all of us be dead.

As if he were the squire and I the intruder, Brookie, his rubber-booted feet spread wide and his hands clasped behind him, had now taken up a stance in front of the fireplace, midway between the two brass foxes that had belonged to Harriet’s grandfather. He didn’t lean an elbow on the mantel, but he might as well have.

Before I could say another word, he gave a quick, nervous glance to the right and to the left and dropped his voice to a husky whisper: “ ‘But wait, Brookie, old man,’ I thought. ‘Hold on, Brookie, old chum. Mightn’t this be the famous Gray Lady of Buckshaw that you’re seeing?’ After all, miss, everyone knows that there’s sometimes lights seen hereabouts that have no easy explanation.”

Gray Lady of Buckshaw? I’d never heard of such an apparition. How laughably superstitious these villagers were! Did the man take me for a fool?

“Or is the family specter not mentioned in polite company?”

Family specter? I had the sudden feeling that someone had tossed a bucket of ice water over my heart.

Could the Gray Lady of Buckshaw be the ghost of my mother, Harriet?

Brookie laughed. “Silly thought, wasn’t it?” he went on. “No spooks for me, thank you very much! More likely a housebreaker with his eye on the Colonel’s silver. Lot of that going on nowadays, since the war.”

“I think you’d better go now,” I said, my voice trembling. “Father’s a light sleeper. If he wakes up and finds you here, there’s no telling what he’ll do. He sleeps with his service revolver on the night table.”

“Well, I’ll be on my way, then,” Brookie said casually. “Glad to know the family’s come to no harm. We worry about you lot, you know, all of us down in the village. No telling what can happen when you’re way out here, cut off, as it were …”

“Thank you,” I said. “We’re very grateful, I’m sure. And now, if you don’t mind—”

I unlocked one of the French doors and opened it wide.

“Good night, miss,” he said, and with a grin he vanished into the darkness.

I counted slowly to ten—and then I followed him.

Brookie was nowhere in sight. The shadows had swallowed him whole. I stood listening for a few moments on the terrace, but the night was eerily silent.