As they curved gratefully round the corner of Shield’s Tower into the reassuring sanctuary of its moonshadow, they could plainly see a figure, taller, softer and more benign than the stone grotesques, standing in the pale light of the gibbous moon. It was standing between the first pair of yew trees of the avenue and from the way it peered anxiously into the night it was plain that something was terribly wrong.
Atticus hailed him: “Hello there. Is something amiss?”
The figure started and turned sharply and the moon revealed it as Mr Collier, the butler.
“Mr and Mrs Fox, thank goodness you’re back! Have you seen anything of Miss Armstrong on your travels by any chance?”
Atticus and Lucie exchanged a glance and Atticus said, “No, we haven’t. Why do you ask? Is she missing?”
Collier nodded. “I think so. Twice a week, Miss Armstrong visits a lady-friend who lives alone up on the moors, but she is always returned by ten o’clock sharp. She’s very particular on that score. Tonight she’s still yet to return, and what with the two murders today – Dr Hickson’s and Albert’s – I truly fear for her safety, especially as she always stops by the madman’s cottage on her way back to deliver him his food parcel.”
“We have just come from Britton’s cottage ourselves,” said Atticus. “We didn’t see anything of her there, nor of him, come to that. Perhaps she might be still at her friend’s cottage?”
“I presume you know where this lady’s house is?” Lucie asked.
Collier nodded. “Yes, of course, ma’am, it’s not far at all; no more than a mile and a half from here.”
“Then get a lamp and lock the doors of the Tower securely. We’ll go with you to seek her.”
As Collier hurried off to do as he was bidden, Atticus turned to his wife and frowned.
“There are still two of Arthur’s Hallows left, Lucie: the Spear of Destiny and the Holy Platter, and I can only pray that I’m wrong about them. I declare, why any person would want to venture out alone onto the moors after today’s awful events is quite beyond me, and particularly just to pay a regular house-call.”
“I don’t think Miss Armstrong would be easily intimidated,” Lucie said quietly.
Atticus had to agree. “She’s a strapping, well-built lady to be sure,” he said. “I for one wouldn’t want to take her on, but notwithstanding…”
“And it was surely more than just a house-call,” Lucie added.
She seemed amused by his suddenly puzzled expression. “You really haven’t guessed have you?”
“Guessed what, my dear?”
“Atticus, Bessie Armstrong is quite obviously a sapphist.”
“She’s a what?”
“A sapphist – a uranist, a lesbian woman. Can’t you tell?”
Atticus was aghast.
“A woman who prefers… who prefers intimacy with other women?”
Lucie nodded.
“No, I hadn’t an inkling of it. Good Lord! Are you sure? I’ve heard of such women of course, but I never dreamed I would ever actually meet one. Perhaps I might in Paris or even London, but certainly never here in Northumberland.”
“Well I should say there are two in the county at least. It’s a lady-friend that Miss Armstrong visits on the moors after all.”
Collier’s sudden reappearance stifled the conversation. He had a pistol in one hand and a large, copper bullseye lantern in the other.
“I’ve locked the doors as you ordered, Mr Fox,” he panted. “All except the scullery door but Grey, the coachman, is guarding that with a fowling piece. James isn’t back yet from Hayden Bridge.”
Frantic concern seemed to lend wings to the trio as they half-walked, half-ran between the yew trees of the avenue and up the steep lane beyond. The air chilled perceptibly as they climbed to the high ground of the moorlands and it seemed no time at all before the dark verges on either side of them gave way to the broad junction of the Hayden Bridge road.
“It’s not far now,” Collier said.
Instead of the right-hand route to Hayden that they had followed earlier in the day, he pointed them to their left, which the black letters of the wooden signpost opposite announced was the road to the strangely named village of Twice Brewed.
It was as they looked along the sweep of that road, uncannily white in the moonlight and stark against the black tangle of the moorland around it, that Lucie screamed.
It was a brief scream but shrill, a scream truncated by her own natural courage, and by her long familiarity with blood and the sight of the human form at its most grisly. Perhaps it was this scream that somehow fortified Atticus; that prevented his usual, visceral reaction as he stopped short and could only stare across the lane at what lay in front of them.
Standing proud and erect from the shadows of the roadside verge was what he recognised immediately and with heart-stopping certainty as the missing lance. His eye was drawn down the long length of the slender, wooden shaft, through the bleached stalks of the grass, white in the combined lights of the moon and Collier’s lantern, to the unmistakeable shape of a human body.
As if to a silent cue, they all at once ran to the macabre scene. It was the murder Atticus had dreaded was inevitable. Not inevitable in the fact that the body spread on the grass before them in its man’s shirt and dark slacks was instantly recognisable as that of Sir Hugh’s housekeeper; indeed, in the very moment he had seen her there, the theories that had begun to gradually form in his mind during the three days they had been in Northumberland had all at once been blown apart. It was inevitable only in the fact that the instrument used to murder her was a Hallow. It was the Holy Lance, the Spear of Destiny.
He gazed down at the dead woman, her face frozen in pain and terror. What was it Lucie had called her, a sapphist? He had heard her kind called the ‘third sex’; a woman who, despite opportunities to be married and settle down to a ‘proper, practical life’ had continued to choose intimacies only with other women.
“Her sapphism has killed her,” he murmured.
“What on earth are you talking about? Being a sapphist didn’t kill her; some monster killed her, Atticus!” Lucie’s rebuke was furious as she stooped to examine the wound.
The lance had penetrated deep into Bessie’s lower guts and the prolonged agony of her death was revealed by the hideous contortions of her face and by her hands, which still clutched the shaft as if even in death she was yet trying to pluck it out.
“No, no, Lucie!” Atticus protested, “I didn’t mean it in that way. Please don’t misunderstand me; I only meant that…”
“Hello there!”
There was a shout from the dark void behind them and the sound of heavy boots pounding on the metal of the road. They whirled round to see the two constables hurtling towards them, capes billowing behind like the wings of avenging angels.
They clattered to a halt.
“Mr Collier! What the bloody hell has happened here?” the local constable demanded. “We heard a scream.”
He caught sight of what lay in the grass and stared incredulously.
“That was me,” admitted Lucie, “when I saw the spear and Miss Armstrong’s body lying there.”
The constables continued to stare, speechless.
“Bessie Armstrong, the housekeeper at Shields Tower,” Collier added.
“Why is she dressed as a man?” the constable they didn’t know asked after a moment.
There was another awkward silence, filled only by the distant purr of a nightjar, which Lucie eventually broke.
“I believe she felt more comfortable dressed in that way.”
A briefer pause.
“I see. Well thank you, ma’am; we’ll take charge here now.” He stepped forward and firmly grasped the shaft of the lance.
“Don’t do that!” Atticus exclaimed sending something unseen scuttling away through the grass. “You’ll compromise the evidence.”
The constable looked sideways at him. “We are police constables as you can clearly see, sir, and this situation is under police control now. There is no need for any of you to worry further.”
With a brief but appalling sucking noise, he heaved the lance tip free from Bessie Armstrong’s body and, smeared in thick, congealing blood as it was, held it up in front of his face, regarding it with detached interest like a smith inspecting his art.
“Is this the lance you asked us to get for you?”
Atticus nodded. “Yes.”
The constable turned to look at him at last. “Well we have it now but you’ll be welcome to collect it from the station in Hexham – once the detective superintendent has finished with it, that is.”
Lucie had stooped low over the corpse and gently pulled aside its hands. The silver moonlight illuminated two, long, bloody gashes drawn across the shirt beneath.
“Britton’s ripped her heart oot an’ all,” the constable growled.
Lucie was carefully probing the intersection of the gashes with her fingertips.
“No, I don’t think so. Not this time.”
“What?” Atticus forced his attention back to the body.
Lucie dabbed her fingertips into the wound once more. “Do you see? The cuts are only superficial. No-one has removed the heart or anything else from this body.”
“How peculiar,” Atticus said.
“I wonder if this murder might have been committed by someone else.” Lucie continued, “Someone copying the manner of the others but without perhaps knowing the full details?”
“That’s possible, Lucie,” Atticus agreed. “Except it was committed with one of the Hallows.”
“The detective superintendent will have a better idea,” the constable said firmly. “We need to get Miss Armstrong back to Shields Tower. We can have a better look at her there.”