Frank shook his head. He stood on tiptoe to peer over the hedge into the next garden.
"I shouldn't think so. There's a stain like it on the Collinses' doorstep as well."
"Really?" I drew closer to Frank, both to see over the hedge and for moral support. The Highlands hardly seemed a likely spot for a mass murderer, but then I doubted such persons used any sort of logical criteria when picking their sites. "That's rather… disagreeable," I observed. There was no sign of life from the next residence. "What do you suppose has happened?"
Frank frowned, thinking, then slapped his hand briefly against his trouser leg in inspiration.
"I think I know! Wait here a moment." He darted out to the gate and set off down the road at a trot, leaving me stranded on the edge of the doorstep.
He was back shortly, beaming with confirmation.
"Yes, that's it, it must be. Every house in the row has had it."
"Had what? A visit from a homicidal maniac?" I spoke a bit sharply, still nervous at having been abruptly abandoned with nothing but a large bloodstain for company.
Frank laughed. "No, a ritual sacrifice. Fascinating!" He was down on his hands and knees in the grass, peering interestedly at the stain.
This hardly sounded better than a homicidal maniac. I squatted beside him, wrinkling my nose at the smell. It was early for flies, but a couple of the big, slow-moving Highland midges circled the stain.
"What do you mean, 'ritual sacrifice'?" I demanded. "Mrs. Baird's a good church-goer, and so are all the neighbors. This isn't Druid's Hill or anything, you know."
He stood, brushing grass-ends from his trousers. "That's all you know, my girl," he said. "There's no place on earth with more of the old superstitions and magic mixed into its daily life than the Scottish Highlands. Church or no church, Mrs. Baird believes in the Old Folk, and so do all the neighbors." He pointed at the stain with one neatly polished toe. "The blood of a black cock," he explained, looking pleased. "The houses are new, you see. Pre-fabs."
I looked at him coldly. "If you are under the impression that that explains everything, think again. What difference does it make how old the houses are? And where on earth is everybody?"
"Down the pub, I should expect. Let's go along and see, shall we?". Taking my arm, he steered me out the gate and we set off down the Gereside Road.
"In the old days," he explained as we went, "and not so long ago, either, when a house was built, it was customary to kill something and bury it under the foundation, as a propitiation to the local earth spirits. You know, 'He shall lay the foundations thereof in his firstborn and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it.' Old as the hills."
I shuddered at the quotation. "In that case, I suppose it's quite modern and enlightened of them to be using chickens instead. You mean, since the houses are fairly new, nothing was buried under them, and the inhabitants are now remedying the omission."
"Yes, exactly." Frank seemed pleased with my progress, and patted me on the back. "According to the vicar, many of the local folk thought the War was due in part to people turning away from their roots and omitting to take proper precautions, such as burying a sacrifice under the foundation, that is, or burning fishes' bones on the hearth—except haddocks, of course," he added, happily distracted. "You never burn a haddock's bones—did you know?—or you'll never catch another. Always bury the bones of a haddock instead."
"I'll bear it in mind," I said. "Tell me what you do in order never to see another herring, and I'll do it forthwith."
He shook his head, absorbed in one of his feats of memory, those brief periods of scholastic rapture where he lost touch with the world around him, absorbed completely in conjuring up knowledge from all its sources.
"I don't know about herring," he said absently. "For mice, though, you hang bunches of Trembling Jock about—'Trembling Jock i' the hoose, and ye'll ne'er see a moose,' you know. Bodies under the foundation, though—that's where a lot of the local ghosts come from. You know Mountgerald, the big house at the end of the High Street? There's a ghost there, a workman on the house who was killed as a sacrifice for the foundation. In the eighteenth century sometime; that's really fairly recent," he added thoughtfully.
"The story goes that by order of the house's owner, one wall was built up first, then a stone block was dropped from the top of it onto one of the workmen—presumably a dislikable fellow was chosen for the sacrifice—and he was buried then in the cellar and the rest of the house built up over him. He haunts the cellar where he was killed, except on the anniversary of his death and the four Old Days."