Picnic At Hanging Rock (Vintage Lindsay) by Lindsay Joan

Author:Lindsay, Joan [Lindsay, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

9

GIRL’S BODY ON ROCK – MISSING HEIRESS FOUND. Once again the College Mystery was front page news, embellished with the wildest flights of imagination, public and private. The rescued girl was still unconscious at Lake View, and the Hon. Michael Fitzhubert was not well enough to be questioned. Which added fuel to the flame of gossip and rumoured horrors to be later disclosed. The police search of likely and unlikely places in the locality had been resumed with extra men from Melbourne, the dog and tracker brought back on the remote possibility of unearthing a clue to the fate of the other three victims. Drains, hollow logs, culverts, waterholes: an abandoned pigsty where someone had seen a light moving last Sunday. At the bottom of an old mineshaft in the Black Forest a terrified schoolboy swore he had seen a body; and so he had – the carcass of a decomposed heifer. And so it went on. Constable Bumpher, still conscientiously sweating over notebooks filled with unanswerable questions, would almost have welcomed a brand new murder.

At Appleyard College the news of Irma’s rescue was briefly and formally announced by the Headmistress directly after prayers on the following Monday morning; a carefully considered procedure that allowed a full hour for its assimilation before the first classes of the day. After a moment of stunned silence it was received with outbursts of hysterical joy, tears, fond embraces between people barely on speaking terms. On the staircase, where loitering was strictly forbidden, Mademoiselle had come upon Blanche and Rosamund locked in tearful embrace – ‘Alors, mes enfants, this is no moment for tears’ – and felt her own, long unshed, rising to her eyes. In the kitchen, Cook and Minnie rejoiced over a glass of stout, while on the other side of the baize door Dora Lumley clutched the cheap lace at her throat as if she too had been rescued upon the Rock. Tom and Mr Whitehead, at first jubilant in the potting shed, had soon passed on to murder in general, winding up with Jack the Ripper and the gardener gloomily supposing he must be getting back to his lawns. By midday the inevitable reaction from the rapturous relief of the morning was general. Afternoon classes assembled to an undercurrent of whisperings and mutterings. In the governesses’ sitting-room the subject of Irma’s discovery was barely touched on. As if by common consent the thin veils of make-believe obscuring the ugly realities were left intact, and only the headmistress, behind the closed doors of her study, permitted herself a cold-blooded scrutiny of this new turn of affairs. With the finding of only one of the four missing persons, the situation as it affected the College had actually deteriorated.

Strong-minded persons in authority can ordinarily grapple with practical problems of facts. Facts, no matter how outrageous, can be dealt with by other facts. The problems of mood and atmosphere known to the Press as ‘Situations’ are infinitely more sinister. A ‘situation’ cannot be pigeonholed for reference and the appropriate answer pulled out of a filing cabinet.

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