The Shadow by Neil M. Gunn Page B

re-reading your letter.
    A silent world it is in which I hear the iron gate click. I stand at the window waiting. The policeman appears. He is coming to the house. I step back so that he may not see me but I keep my eye on him. I am not disturbed or nervous. He must be coming in connection with me but I really think of him as going to Aunt Phemie. It’s not my concern. I may have told him a lie about being with a man and there’s that handkerchief, but I do not positively think of them. I know that when I am called downstairs I shall be perfectly cool, polite but distant. Something was emptied out of me when I collapsed and I am quite well again. I am grateful for this because it will keep me from making a fool of myself. When I hear him pull the bell I go and watch as he waits for Aunt Phemie. We have no maid at the moment. He lifts a forefinger to his hat. There are some words. He enters. A door closes upon them.
    Well, why not? Let them talk if they want to.
    They talk a long time. The situation must be involved. But my position is perfectly clear. Until this moment I had not realised how simple and obvious. Had I met a man of a certain description?—and I reply: Well, a man like that did say good day to me in the birch gorge. It simply had never occurred to me that the police might be interested in one so obviously a gentleman, taking a stroll. And this handkerchief? Oh, it is the handkerchief I had lost on my walk and did not miss until I had come home. I am glad it has been found. Where did you find it? Thank you very much. I can answer any question at once. The man was a complete stranger to me. I have no interest in him. Far from being upset by the policeman’s eyes, I shall have pleasure in answering him with the utmost lucidity.
    When I hear the door open and the policeman taking his leave, I have a distinct feeling of being let down. Somehow I don’t want Aunt Phemie up here at the moment, so I open my own door and as I begin to go down she waves a white rag from the hall. Here’s your hankie! she calls, laughter in her voice. What on earth’s happened? I ask, grateful for the warmth that has come into my own. I hate pretending to Aunt Phemie. And soon we are deep in the policeman’s news.
    The policeman had finally left the Wood where we met and, going across the moor towards the hill burn, had come on the hankie in the heather. So I had not dropped it in the gorge. Aunt Phemie was able to assure him I had lost it, and my initials completed the evidence. I was genuinely glad about this. It might so easily have been otherwise. In fact we got some fun out of imagining it as a dramatic exhibit in court. The tame returning of it by the policeman was an anti-climax. No author of detective stories could live and throw away a clue that had been so naturally “planted”. I did my best about this, and then Aunt Phemie went one better: the police are hunting a definite man, thin, with lank greying hair.
    It’s really a miserable story. A shell-shock case from the last war; a local man, who has completely disappeared since the murder. They think he is hiding in the countryside somewhere. Probably has taken to the hills and is lying up in some hole. But unless he dies there, he must come back for food, so there are night patrols. There is a terrific amount of feeling about it, at least the countryside can talk about nothing else. It’s everywhere, like the stalking shadow of the man himself. Mothers get their children in early.
    In the city we never seemed to come across men suffering from shell-shock (all here call it shell-shock anyway). But in the country things are different. Human beings are living individuals somehow, one apart from the other. Last winter four stacks of hay were burned one night, without rhyme or reason—out in a field where no-one could have been taking shelter—not insured, and a dead loss to the farmer, a decent man. Other more horrid things