…Sweet spot, so quaint and unspoiled. Sure I shall like it. One feels the tug of earth and sea. The ‘pub’ (!) is really genuine and goes back to smuggling days. Kept by a gentleman. Major B. I take my noggin “of an evening” in the taproom and listen to the wonderful “burr” in the talk of the fisher-folk. All v. friendly…Major B. kept looking at me. I know your sort, sez I. Nothing to object to, really. Just an awareness. The wife is rather peculiar: I am not altogether taken, a man’s woman in every sense of the word, I’m afraid. He doesn’t pay her v. much attention.
Alleyn read on for a minute or two. “It would take a day to get through it,” he said. “This is her first visit to the Island. Two years ago.”
“Interesting?”
“Excruciating. Where’s that list of dates?”
Fox put it on the desk.
Alleyn turned the pages of the diary. References to Major B., later K., though veiled in unbelievable euphemisms, became more and more explicit. In this respect alone, Alleyn thought, the gallant Major has a lot to answer for. He turned back to the entry for the day after Wally’s cure. It was ecstatic:
I have always believed in fairies. The old magic of water and the spoken rune! The Green Lady! He saw her, this little lad saw her and obeyed her behest. Something led me to this Island.
She ran on in this vein for the whole of the entry. Alleyn read it with a sensation of exasperated compassion. The entry itself was nothing to his purpose. But across it, heavily inked, Miss Cost on some later occasion had put down an enormous mark of interrogation and, besides this, had added a note: “Sept. 30th—8:45.”
This was the second of the two underlined dates on the paper. He turned to it in the diary:
I am shocked and horrified and sickened by what I have seen this evening. My hand shakes. I can hardly bring myself to write it down. I knew, from the moment I first set eyes on her, that she was unworthy of him. One always knows. Shall not tell K. It would serve him right if I did. All these months and he never guessed. But I won’t tell him. Not yet. Not unless — But I must write it. Only so, can I rid myself of the horror. I was sitting on the hill, below the spring, thinking so happily of all my plans and so glad I have settled for the shop and ordered my lovely Green Ladies. I was feeling the magic of the water. (Blessed, blessed water. No asthma, now.) And then I heard them. Behind the boulder. Laughing. I shrank down in the bracken. And then she came out from behind the boulder in her green dress and stood above the pool. She raised her arms. I could hear the man laughing still but I couldn’t see him. I knew. I knew. The wicked desecration of it! But I won’t believe it. I’ll put it out of my mind forever. She was mocking-pretending. I won’t think anything else. She went back to him. I waited. And then, suddenly, I couldn’t bear it any longer. I came back here.…
Alleyn, looking increasingly grim, went over the entries for the whole list. Throughout two summers, Miss Cost had hunted her evening quarry with obsessive devotion, and had recorded the fruits of the chase as if in some antic game book: time, place and circumstance. On each occasion that she spied upon her victims, she had found the enclosure padlocked but had taken up a point of vantage on the hillside. At no stage did she give the names of the lovers, but their identity was inescapable.
“Mrs. Barrimore and Dr. Mayne,” Alleyn said. “To hell with this case!”
“Awkward!” observed Fox.
“My dear old Fox, it’s dynamite. And it fits,” Alleyn said, staring disconsolately at his colleague. “The devil of it is, it fits.”
He began to read the entries for the past month. Dr. Mayne, Miss Cost weirdly concluded, was not to blame. He was a victim, caught in the toils, unable to free himself and therefore unable to follow his nobler inclination towards Miss Cost herself. Interlarded with furious attacks upon Miss Emily and covert allusions to the anonymous messages were notes on the Festival, a savage comment on Miss Emily’s visit to the shop, and a distracted reference to the attack of asthma that followed it. “The dark forces of evil that emanate from this woman” were held responsible. There followed a number of cryptic asides. (“Trehern agrees. It’s right. I know it’s right!”).
“It is the Cause, it is the Cause, my soul,” Alleyn muttered, disconsolately. “The old, phony argument.”
Fox, who had been reading over his shoulder, said: “It’d be a peculiar thing if she’d worked Trehern up to doing the job, and then got herself mistaken for the intended victim!”
“It sounds very neat, Br’er Fox, but in point of fact, it’s lousy with loose ends. I can’t take it. Just let’s go through the other statements, now.”
They did this and Fox sighed over the result. “I suppose so,” he said — and added, “I like things to be neat, and they so seldom are.”
“You’re a concealed classicist,” Alleyn said. “We’d better go back to this ghastly diary. Read on.”
They had arrived at the final week: Rehearsals for the Festival. Animadversions upon Miss Emily. The incident of the Green Lady on Miss Emily’s desk.
He did it. K. I’m certain. And I’m glad, glad. She, no doubt, suspects me. I refused to go. She finds she can’t order me about. To sit in that room with her and the two she has ruined! Never.
Alleyn turned a page and there, facing them, was the last entry Miss Cost was to make in her journal.
“Yesterday evening,” Alleyn said. “After the debacle at the spring.”
The thunderstorm, he was not surprised to find, was treated as a judgment. Nemesis, in the person of one of Miss Cost’s ambiguous deities, had decided to touch up the unbelievers with six of the cosmic best. Among these offenders Miss Emily was clearly included, but it emerged that she was not the principal object of Miss Cost’s spleen. “Laugh at your peril,” she ominously wrote, “at the Great Ones.” And, as if stung by this observation, she continued, in a splutter of disjointed venom, to threaten some unnamed persons. “At last!” she wrote…
After the agony of months, the cruelty and, now, the final insult, at last I shall speak. I shall face both of them with the facts. I shall tell her what was between us. And I shall show that other one how I know. He — both — all of them — shall suffer. I’ll drag their names through the papers. Now. Tonight. I am determined. It is the end.
“And so it was,” Fox said, looking up over his spectacles. “Poor thing. Very sad, really, these cases. Do you see your way through all this, Mr. Alleyn?”
“I think I do, Br’er Fox. I’m afraid I do. And I’ll tell you why.”
He had scarcely begun, when Bailey, moving rather more quickly than he was wont, came through from the shop.
“Someone for you, sir. A Miss Williams. She says it’s urgent.” Alleyn went to the telephone.
Jenny sounded as if it were very urgent indeed.
“Mr. Alleyn? Thank God! Please come up here, quickly. Please do. Miss Emily’s rooms. I can’t say anything else.” Alleyn heard a muffled ejaculation. A man shouted distantly and a woman screamed. There was a faint but unmistakable crash of broken glass. “Please come!” said Jenny.
“At once,” Alleyn said. And to Fox: “Leave Pender on the board, and you others follow as quick as you can. Boy-and-Lobster, Room 35 to the right of the stairhead on the first flight.”