by Gwen Moffat
‘I looked for you in the other cove,’ she said.
‘Wrong place today.’ The tone was dreamy. ‘Too violent—no; dangerous.’ She frowned at her own words. ‘The slab needs concentration,’ she explained. ‘Here, you don’t have to bother.’
‘Perhaps on a day like this you need to do something that makes demands on you.’
‘No. I’m frightened.’ Miss Pink turned her head from the sea. ‘Of the slab,’ the girl went on. ‘You can’t do something risky when you’re thinking about death.’
Miss Pink nodded. ‘One has the same feeling after a bad climbing accident. You don’t need to witness it; hearing the details is enough. Town councils exploited the reaction when they put wrecked cars at the approaches to towns one Christmas. It slowed drivers down.’
‘And they didn’t know the people who’d died in the cars.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I hated her,’ Rachel said desolately. ‘When she walked in that night I could have killed her. You know that.’
‘Primitive feelings.’ Miss Pink was equable. ‘She was the predator; you were Mum: protecting your family.’
‘As simple as that?’
‘You can make things as complicated as you like. The problem isn’t the problem; it’s your reaction to it.’
‘Say that again.’
‘Everyone has similar troubles; situations that precipitate violent emotions: fear, hatred, jealousy. The difference between people is in the manner of their reactions.’
‘Wasn’t I right to be resentful? It was my drawing room. I was the hostess. She was a threat to—my menfolk.’
‘It was perfectly natural. So why are you worried about it?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Guilt,’ Miss Pink said pleasantly. ‘That’s normal too. It’s even there when you lose the person you love most. It passes, but more slowly with sensitive people. I doubt if Norman would feel guilt, for instance.’
Rachel dribbled sand through her fingers.
‘Why should he?’
‘He was attracted to her.’
‘How do you know?’
‘No one would be normal who wasn’t.’
Rachel sighed. ‘Poor Norman. I can feel sorry for him now—now that she’s dead. Isn’t that ghastly?’
‘That depends on how you look at it. You can afford to be generous.’
The girl winced. ‘I don’t expect he’ll meet many ladies as lovely as her again, will he?’
‘I don’t think it’s important. What matters is that you’re getting yourself straight.’
‘You’re so different from Iris! When I talk to her it’s like talking to a brick wall: all comfort and clichés; she turns you back on yourself. You tear things apart and put them back again, but differently. I guess Sandra was an ordinary person really, not ordinary exactly, but not all that deviant. I’ve been thinking about her. She drank a lot and I despised her for it until now, but I expect she was lonely. She didn’t have any friends.’ She mulled this over. ‘Except Samuel.’
Miss Pink hesitated, dismissed the observation that Samuel was a colleague, and said instead. ‘She befriended Jakey Jones.’
‘Like hell she did!’ Rachel was suddenly, refreshingly angry. ‘I couldn’t forgive that! Jakey’s become insufferable over the last few weeks. He told me I was a prude when I said he was too young to go to a—well, you can guess what I called the cottage.’
‘How does he manage to get away with his truancy at school?’
‘He forges notes from his mother.’
‘Boredom,’ Miss Pink murmured. ‘There’s not much constructive activity for a boy like that in Abersaint.’
‘It’s not boredom; it’s his parents. When Grandad’s friends come here with kids of Jakey’s age, we’re always out and we’re always late for supper. They’re enthralled! They’d love to live down here.’
‘What do you do?’
‘You ask that!’ Rachel stared at her in disbelief. ‘Why, there’s everything. Some of them are as good at flowers and birds as you—well, they’re far better than me. And there are the mines, and boats, and the fort—’ she smiled engagingly, ‘—we play Vikings and Longheads instead of cowboys and Indians. That’s with the younger ones, of course. The older kids look for arrow heads and dig. Not real digging like archaeologists but we try; we take trowels with us and we spend hours working out how the old people lived. Did you see the huts up there?’ She gestured back at the depression in the cliffs. ‘They look a muddle, like the fort: piles of stones with the outline of the perimeter wall and just a few circles inside. We try to work it out: what was their design for living. It’s fascinating.’ She gazed round the cove. ‘The Stone Age lasted half a million years.’
‘It did?’
‘Can you imagine it? Five hundred thousand years and nothing happened. Isn’t that lovely? Do you think they knew guilt?’ She hugged her knees. ‘But life did change: they discovered fire and they tamed animals. What must it have been like when the first wolf made friends with the first man? How did the man feel—although it would more likely be a child, wouldn’t it?’
Miss Pink said, in the same tone of inquiry: ‘Or perhaps a child came on a litter of orphaned cubs and took them home. And the wheel; how did they think of the wheel?’
‘Kids playing with round stones, and Dad wanted to move a heavy slab. . . no, dead-end. I know! Boats move more easily on shingle than on sand. Shingle: ball bearings; he’d get the idea when he was dragging his boat up the beach. Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘Folk memory,’ Miss Pink said. ‘Anthropologists talk about the social mind, meaning an amalgam of all our minds. You remember.’
‘The stones remember; that’s what Avril says. She’s the Pritchard girl. She’s full of sayings like that. I told her about the Longheads. She said: “You mean them as goes about at night?”’
‘Is she afraid of them?’
‘God, no!’
‘Are you?’
Rachel smiled ruefully. ‘I’ve never seen them, not really. Only like now; looking round here—at Ebolion, that’s the stack—I know they were here, I know the boats were skins stretched over a frame so they’d be brown, but black against the glare—’ she screwed up her eyes, ‘—you can see them, can’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Miss Pink said, ‘I can. You should write.’
‘But I don’t know anything about them.’
‘Bone up on the facts. You’re already soaked in the atmosphere. You’re like a sponge. Find out what they ate, what they wore, what they believed in, how they buried their dead.’
‘Yes, they must have had a religion or they wouldn’t have built the cromlech. They were buried with grave goods so that means they believed in an after-life. . . . You may be right. Will you give me a book list?’
‘I’ll send one when I go home.’ Miss Pink stood up. ‘I’m going to look at the stream.’
They worked their way up the ravine, water flowing over their feet, Miss Pink calling her companion’s attention to each new plant. They explored the hut circles and Rachel insisted that the soot was deposited two thousand years ago. They stood in the garden of the cottage and wondered why rowan trees came to be a guard against witches. The place was leased to a family from Chester who came down for the school holidays.
‘It’ll be mine one day,’ Rachel said, staring at the blind windows. ‘I’d rather not.’
‘Rather not own it?’
‘Not that; when it’s mine, it means Grandad will be gone. I inherit the land, you see.’
‘I don’t think he’s worried.’ Miss Pink was cheerful.
The girl nodded. ‘That’s grief, I suppose. They’re all right, but you’re left behind.’
‘Death doesn’t matter; it’s life that’s important.’
They started back along the heath. Rachel sighed. ‘And he’s had a good life. I know. Not like people being cut off in—’ She stopped walking. ‘It was an accident, wasn’t it?’
‘Because of Tony Thorne. No, don’t go on for a moment. I know he’s gone. He took the Spitfire.’
‘That appears to be what happened.’
‘Do you know why he came to the party?’
‘To Roderick’s party?’ Miss Pink’s mind raced: the girl’s precipitate exit from the drawing room, a slamming door, Thorne’s quick arrival, Sandra saying “he went to the pub”.
‘You telephoned him?’
She nodded mutely. They started to walk again.
‘Did you make another call that night?’ Miss Pink asked.
‘No. Why should I?’
‘Someone rang the Press after midnight and leaked the story about Sandra’s book.’
‘I didn’t know about the book until the next morning.’ After a moment she went on: ‘If I had known, and had thought of it, I would have rung them. I’d have hoped it would drive her away.’
Miss Pink was walking slowly, reaching a decision.
‘There is something you have to know. The police are not satisfied about the cause of the fire.’
‘Mum said she was drinking and smoking in bed!’
‘That was the assumption. The police think differently, and they’re questioning people: about seeing the fire. It may not have been an accident. With Thorne having disappeared—’
‘Tony! You don’t mean he—may have killed her?’ She stopped and Miss Pink turned to face her.
‘The fire probably started before half past eleven. She was sober at eleven, so she couldn’t have been drunk when it started. And since she made no attempt to escape, and Thorne has gone—’
‘The fire started before half past eleven?’
‘It must have done; the glow was seen around midnight.’
Rachel began to walk quickly along the turf. Miss Pink caught her up.
‘I thought it better you should hear it from me than from the police.’
‘Yes, much better. Thank you.’ The tone was absent. ‘I didn’t see anything. I went to bed early. Norman may have done; he came up a bit later.’
‘He saw nothing, but he was working in the yard. Iris was watching television.’
‘Oh, you’ve seen him.’ She sounded surprised. ‘Yes, the yard’s enclosed by the trees; he wouldn’t see. . . . But he could have seen something when he came to bed—or wouldn’t it have started then?’
‘He went to bed after midnight. He couldn’t have looked out of the window.’
‘Well, I’m glad none of us saw it. A thing like that would be difficult to forget,’—her voice was rising—‘and there’d always be the thought that if you’d been quick you might have got over there and pulled her out. But the police think she was murdered and didn’t die in the fire. They’ll discover that definitely from the post mortem, won’t they? I suppose it is her in the cottage and not Thorne? That would put things right: a kind of poetic justice. After all, he exploited her; pimps do exploit prostitutes, don’t they? You might say it’s an occupational hazard of pimps to be killed by their—what would you call them?—victims. Yes, in this age of women’s lib. Tony is the sacrificial lamb. He came to the right place. We had sacrifices too.’
She stopped, gulping deep breaths, her mouth stretched wide, her eyes staring.
‘Peking man,’ Miss Pink said. The eyes shifted unwillingly, drawn by the sound of the voice. ‘Sacrifices and cannibalism belong to a time hundreds of thousands of years ago. Your Long-heads were a far more sophisticated culture; in fact, I’m not at all sure that the cannibals were homo sapiens, but homo erectus.’
‘Cannibalism?’ Rachel repeated dully.
Miss Pink shrugged. ‘Whether or not they were true man, it was a ritual: in order to partake of your enemy’s courage.’ She took the girl’s arm and drew her gently along the path. A sheltered dell opened at their feet and the baby rabbits went scampering into their holes. Rachel’s eyes followed them.
‘And surely,’ Miss Pink went on slyly, ‘only a vegetarian can condemn cannibalism.’
‘People are human!’
This was a well-worn channel to Miss Pink, one where she could steer Rachel clear of dangerous shoals, and which would keep them going as far as Riffli. But whereas the argument was now concerned with man the carnivore versus man the vegetarian, with dentition, nutrition, and the percentage of plant foods in the diet of the Kalahari Bushman, on a different plane of consciousness Miss Pink was wondering about the results of the post mortem and, as a corollary: the identity of the body in the mill cottage.
Chapter Ten
Something moved in the grass in one corner of the graveyard and Samuel started to stalk it with a wild hope in his eye. A jackdaw got up, squawking. Did jackdaws eat carrion? He lurched forward and tripped over a fallen tombstone.
‘Caithness,’ he cried, picking himself up. ‘Caithness, are you there?’
He trampled the grass where the bird had been, his head sunk between his shoulders.
‘Have you lost your little kitty then?’
He turned slowly. Jakey Jones was leaning against the wall of the church. He lifted a king-size cigarette to his modelled lips and exhaled through his nostrils.
‘It might not be dead,’ he said pleasantly, turning the cigarette and regarding the glowing end. ‘He could be dying—very slowly—right now.’
Samuel’s arms hung loose. He didn’t look in the least angry, indeed, he too was smiling. He took a step forward.
Miss Pink unlatched the graveyard gate and tramped up the pebble path.
‘I want a word with you,’ she said to Jakey, ignoring Samuel, ‘before the police get to you.’
The boy stiffened. ‘They’ve gone.’
‘They’ll be back.’
‘My kitten’s missing,’ Samuel said, his smile a rictus. ‘He’s got it.’
‘That’s most unlikely.’ She held Jakey’s eye. ‘He’s got too much on his mind right now.’ She beamed at the boy who wasn’t smiling any longer. There was silence from Samuel. She saw that the boy’s hand had moved surreptitiously behind his back and was in view again, without the cigarette. Jakey’s face was devoid of expression and the curiously blank eyes, without impudence or fear, moved to the gate, the back of Samuel’s house, the hotel across the water.
‘They will be back,’ she repeated. ‘Come to my cottage.’
‘I’m not going nowhere with you.’
She nodded. ‘Quite right: to remember what your father told you. Never go anywhere with strangers; there’s no knowing what they might have in their handbags, even old ladies: hypodermics, poisoned sweets,’ —her eyes dropped absently to his heels, ‘—pot.’
‘What he’s afraid of,’ came Samuel’s voice from behind her, ‘is abduction. His mother told him what happens to small boys.’
‘Male prostitution,’ Miss Pink said kindly. ‘Or modelling for blue films. I suggest we go and sit on the wall in full view of people on the beach where you know no harm can come to you, and have a little talk.’
There was no need. Samuel was making for his cottage, leaving her a clear field.
‘So.’ She became business-like. ‘Officially you were the handyman for Miss Maitland. You washed the car and cut the grass; what else did you do?’
He started to grin. ‘Is them the questions the police will ask?’
‘Are they aware of your part in it yet?’ He gasped and swallowed. ‘Were you paid hourly or by the week?’
His head had dropped, now it came up and he squinted at her like a stage villain. ‘I got a pound an hour.’ She opened her mouth but he hadn’t finished. ‘Sometimes she give me a fiver.’
‘Indeed. I will not ask you what for. How did you manage to fix it with your parents?’
‘I didn’t have to!’
She shook her head reprovingly. ‘Oh come; you’re not telling me they were aware of your real relationship with her.’
‘They didn’t even know I was up there. They thought I were on the beach, or somewhere.’
‘They knew you weren’t at school?’
‘They’re not going to know. I took me mam’s notes.’
‘Forged.’
‘What d’you think?’
‘You have a most unusual life ahead of you.’
His chin went up and his nostrils flared. His hand moved to the pocket of his jeans.
‘Do smoke,’ she cooed.
He lit up with fascinating nonchalance, watching her through the smoke.
‘Were you never resentful of other men?’ she asked.
A look of uncertainty crossed his face. ‘Why should I be? Jealous, d’you mean? Na, it was her job.’ He sneered. ‘She passed the cash on to me, didn’t she? Tax free.’
‘Thorne had to be paid too.’
‘There was enough for all of us. She was big-time.’ He drew luxuriously on the cigarette. It was obvious that although he considered they had some mutual interest in perfidy, he thought she could still be impressed—and to judge from her interest, she was.
‘She wanted me to go back to London with her,’ he resumed carelessly.
‘Would you have liked that?’
‘You have to be joking! After this dump! It’s all happening in London. And New York. I might go on to New York.’
‘When are you leaving?’ The tone was courteous, not inquisitive.
He inhaled again. ‘Soon. Quite soon.’
‘And who is going to sponsor you?’
‘Come again.’
‘Who are you going to touch for the money? Are you sure you have the right person, because if you made a mistake—’
But he’d shrunk away. The cigarette lay smoking on the ground. Lifting his feet carefully he walked down the path, not fast but tense as an animal that knows it’s lost if it breaks into a run. She stubbed out the cigarette and straightened, watching him pass through the gate. He threw her one last look and vanished beyond the wall, reminding her of a collie slinking out of a lambing field with blood on its jaws.
Samuel must have been watching from his house. He came climbing over his patio wall and strode through the grass.
