Fear by Night by Patricia Wentworth

her mouth, for he’d been sweet on Martha before she married Jem Ricketts that was landlord of the Jug and Bottle. And his mother ups and says, ‘It’s all right,’ she says, ‘Jem’s been took, and if you’re not afraid of his ghost, I dare say Martha’ll take you into the business for the matter of a wedding-ring.’ And that’s how you come by your great-great-grandmother—and a nice bit of money she had in her stocking foot.”
    The two men went off in the boat again after lunch. Ann watched them go from the high heathery knoll at the top of the island. There had been a mist all the morning, but the sun had drawn it up and the loch reflected the pale, cloudless blue of September. She saw the boat swing into the channel and pass out of sight under the lee of the island.
    Could it have been a boat that she had seen last night?
    No, it wasn’t a boat.
    Why wasn’t it?
    â€œI don’t know—but it wasn’t.”
    She put her head in her hands and tried to think why it couldn’t have been a boat. Her closed eyes gave her the scene again—half light; and water; and sonething breaking the surface. That was it. A boat doesn’t break the surface unless—A submarine would break the surface just like that. It would be very reassuring to think that what she had seen was only a submarine. Would it? Would it ? She wasn’t sure. The cold, black terror touched her again. She threw up her head and opened her eyes wide on the sunlight. She jumped up. She was a perfect fool to sit there frightening herself.
    â€œI probably saw Jimmy’s boat, and there’s an end of it.”
    She looked out over the water and wondered where the boat was now. It ought to be coming into sight again if they were going out to sea.
    When she had watched for ten minutes, she was puzzled. If they had gone up the loch, she would have seen them long ago. They must be close in under the island, or she would be seeing them now.
    She went scrambling down towards the water until she came to the steep overhang, which stopped her. She worked along it in the direction of the house. Sometimes there was a slippery cliff, and sometimes a lot of great boulders piled cliff-high.
    Quite suddenly she stopped. She thought that someone had spoken her name, and as she turned, bewildered, to see who it might be, it came again, and this time the direction was plain enough.
    It came from under her feet.
    She was in a cleft among the great huddled boulders, with the sea below her and out of sight. The rocks were over her head on either side, and behind her they ran away to a narrow rift down which a thread of water trickled. She had swung herself round one jutting point and was wondering whether she could manage the next. And then, there was her name echoing up from under her feet. It didn’t come from the sea. After the first moment of astonishment she felt sure of that. It would have sounded clearer off the water—and different.
    She turned her back on the loch and crept as far into the cleft as she could. When she couldn’t get any farther, she bent down and listened again. A whispering of voices came indistinctly to her ear, mixed with the dropping of the tiny stream. The most devastating curiosity filled her to the brim. Whose were the voices, and where were they coming from?
    As voices they had no more individuality than the rustling of dry leaves. They were just sound. And the sound came and went. Ann cupped her hands over her ears and leaned her forehead against the rock, and at once the sound changed tone and ran into a word—a strange and awful word which set her pulses thudding. One voice said, “Murder,” and then another voice broke into laughter that crept and echoed in the unseen windings of the cleft. She felt her forehead wet, and did not know whether the moisture came from the clammy rock or whether it was the dew of sudden fear. The echo smothered