by Gwen Moffat
Samuel gasped.
‘She’d been drinking,’ Miss Pink said.
‘She wasn’t that bad.’ Samuel’s voice sounded strange. ‘There was an Alsatian loose in the woods and she wanted help to catch it before it got among the sheep.’
They waited, bristling, for the next thrust. Etiquette was a thing you took for granted until it was torn to shreds like a spider’s web ripped by a bull. Miss Pink stood in her own house and was afraid to show him the door. He was more than clever; he appeared to know what she was thinking. Now he said quietly:
‘I won’t trouble you any longer; I’m not in a hurry and I’ve got nothing to lose.’
They both knew it was a threat. Neither of them moved. He walked to the door, then turned. His head was lowered slightly and in the dim corner his eyes gleamed.
‘She was beautiful,’ he said. ‘And helpless.’
The door closed quietly behind him.
Chapter Twelve
Samuel was the first to speak.
‘Do you believe it?’
Miss Pink roused herself. ‘As Carter says: it fits the facts—but so would a fabricated story if a clever man made it up.’ She removed her spectacles and massaged the bridge of her nose. ‘We might do some checking; the last field on the left before the main road, he said. You take the kitten home; I’ll get the car out.’
Within a few minutes they were driving round the green, slowing to a crawl as they encountered a gaggle of small children trailing towards the beach and licking ice creams.
‘There’s Ossie Hughes on the bridge,’ Samuel said.
She stopped the car. ‘He may know something. Act casually; see if you can draw him out.’
They strolled towards the bridge exchanging chat about the basin. ‘. . . Would hold far more boats if we could get it dredged,’ Samuel was saying. ‘Morning, Ossie. No school then?’
‘No water at school.’ Ossie squinted against the sun. ‘’Cos of the drought, innit.’
‘Huh.’ Samuel’s face appeared to mirror the other’s: the jaw slack, the eyes bored. ‘Going swimming?’
‘No one to swim with.’
‘It was bound to happen eventually; he’s got tired of you trailing after him all the time and he’s gone off on his own.’
‘It weren’t like that!’ Ossie was near to tears. ‘Me mam wouldn’t let me go, would she? No good asking her even.’
‘Chicken,’ jeered Samuel. ‘Jakey wouldn’t ask his mam; he’d walk out.’ Ossie shrugged mutely. ‘When’s he coming back? I’ve got a job for him.’
The boy was startled. ‘Jakey’d never work for you!’
Miss Pink put in her oar. ‘I’ve been talking to his parents; I forgot to ask for an address. He’s given you one, of course?’
‘Address?’
‘For writing letters.’ Samuel mimed scribbling on his palm.
‘Yeah, I know,’—indignantly, ‘—he didn’t give me no address.’
‘It will be the same as Tony Thorne’s.’ Miss Pink tossed this casually to Samuel but Ossie’s face was blank.
‘Why didn’t he go with Thorne instead of following him?’ Samuel asked in a tone that echoed Miss Pink’s indifference.
‘What’s it got to do with Tony?’ Ossie was bewildered.
‘He has to join a gang,’—Samuel became patronising—‘he doesn’t know any of the big names, like the Krays and the Richardsons. Hell, man, he doesn’t even own a shooter!’
Miss Pink decided he’d over-played it but as she turned to stroll back to the car, Ossie said stoutly: ‘He will then! He said as he’d get a shooter—and a Mini, he said: a brand-new one, not like Kemp’s old banger—’ He checked and, with a fine disregard for priorities, muttered: ‘That’s Mr Kemp up at the big house.’
Before Samuel could comment on this, Miss Pink asked inquisitively: ‘Why didn’t you go with him? He could have used you. He was talking to me last night. After London: New York, he said. You’d have made a good lieutenant.’
Ossie blinked and dropped his head. His fingers worked a piece of mortar out of a cranny and he hurled it in the stream. ‘He didn’t ask me.’
She sighed sympathetically. ‘So all you could do was see him off, pretending you didn’t really mind—’
‘Didn’t know he’d gone till I got up!’ He brushed his eyes with the back of his hand and glowered at her.
‘Didn’t he tell you last night that he was going?’
‘I never saw him after tea. Me mam called me in and he went over to the church. You was there.’ He turned accusing eyes on Samuel.
‘Who told you he was gone?’ Miss Pink asked, but the boy merely stared at her.
‘He’s not gone,’ Samuel sneered. ‘You’re making it up! He’s hiding somewhere. You’re in it too. He’s not run away at all.’
‘He has then! His mam came down to our place before breakfast. He didn’t come in last night and she said as how he were out wi’ me. I didn’t even know he’d gone! Why d’you all think I know where he is?’ His lip protruded. ‘He said he were going to London but he didn’t say when. He’s gone, ain’t he?’
‘There’s the money angle,’ Miss Pink said meaningly to Samuel, who nodded.
‘Who gave him the money?’ he asked roughly.
‘What money?’
‘The train fare—the shooter, the new Mini: all the bread he was going to get. Who’d he get it from?’
Ossie looked blank. ‘I dunno.’
‘When did he tell you about the money?’ Miss Pink asked.
‘Before tea time yesterday: here on the bridge.’
‘Why didn’t he tell you during school?’
‘I dunno. I didn’t see much of him. He were quiet, funny like; he didn’t talk to me till we got home.’
‘What kind of guy is that: can go up to another guy and ask for—’ Samuel rolled his eyes, ‘—over two thousand quid, with the Mini?’
This was too much for Ossie. An expression of acute helplessness made him look like an idiot. ‘He allus talked like that; I didn’t take no notice.’
‘What use would a Mini be to him anyway?’ Miss Pink was disgruntled. ‘He can’t drive.’
‘He can then! He drove her car.’
‘Pull the other one.’ Samuel was bored.
‘He did! He use ter drive to the road-end and back again. She taught him.’
‘Was he a good driver?’ Miss Pink asked.
Ossie blossomed at the opportunity to answer a question without having to think about it. ‘He were fabulous! It were all going for Jakey!’
*
‘Did you notice,’ Samuel observed as they drove up the valley, ‘that he used the past tense most of the time?’
‘Yes . . . but he’s not intelligent. If Jakey’s left the village, Ossie might think of him as having gone away for good, hence the past tense.’
‘So soon? It looks black for Jakey. Still,’ he added grimly, ‘if they start with animals, they’ll go on to people eventually. A psychopath—not a budding one: he’s fully-fledged, at fourteen!’
‘He came into my mind when Roderick said someone deliberately placed a branch at the top of the granary steps.’
‘You thought of Jakey then? Before anything happened at the mill?’
‘Roderick said there’d been an attempt on his life. Jakey was the only person I’d met or heard of who might fit the bill; in fact, he fitted very well after I’d seen him roll a boulder down the cliff on—’ she hesitated, ‘—nesting kittiwakes. There have been killers of his age before now; as you say, they start with animals.’
‘There have been rumours about cats,’ Samuel said tightly. ‘That’s why I reacted like I did yesterday. And he’d be aware that I knew of the rumours so his taunts were the essence of sadism—’
‘Where’s the gate?’
‘It’s round the next bend; there it is. Slow down. . . . Why are you going past?’
‘Tracks. We’ll park on the main road.’
A hundred yar
ds west of the Abersaint signpost was a large lay-by and a telephone kiosk.
‘Telephone handy,’ Miss Pink observed, getting out of the car. ‘Would you think that Jakey could imitate the voice of a man? A young man, say.’
‘The call that lured Thorne away from the cottage—if Carter’s speaking the truth. It strains credibility. I’ve used disguised telephone voices in my comics but I’ve no idea whether it can be done in practice.’
They walked back to the road-end and down the lane. ‘Dry as a bone,’ she observed, studying the grass verge outside the gate. ‘There are tracks here but they could have been made by tourists’ cars.’
The gate was fastened by a rusty cow chain. Its timber was by no means new but it opened in one piece, enough to allow the passage of a car. On the farther side there was a brackeny shelf before the paddock dropped steeply to the river in its belt of alders. The bracken had been lightly crushed by wheels and the tracks were fresh.
‘It fits,’ Samuel said.
Miss Pink stared absently at the crop of foxgloves in the hedge. She said slowly: ‘My mind had been running on the theory of Jakey’s having seen the killer and blackmailing him, but if Jakey drove the car—and killed the girl—why would he be touching anyone for money? What would he have to sell?’
‘The typescript. He’s taken it to London to find a buyer.’
‘He’s not clever enough to make a deal like that.’
‘He’s pathologically conceited.’
‘There is that,’ but she sounded dubious. ‘If he rang Thorne, posing as a policeman, from the kiosk in the lay-by, how long would it take him to reach the cottage from here—but across the fields? He couldn’t run down the lane because Thorne would be coming up it. Thorne would never go across the fields in the dark; he wouldn’t know the way.’
‘It’s roughly two miles across the fields, about the same distance as by the road. He couldn’t do it in less than half an hour, with all the banks to climb over in the dark. There’s no path.’
She led the way out of the field and he fastened the gate. As they strolled up the lane she said: ‘I’d like to get a look at the lie of the land. We don’t have to go high—’ she was looking at a sloping field beyond the signpost, on the other side of the main road.
‘You can’t see the cottage from here; it’s hidden in its dell; didn’t you notice when you were there? It was its main attraction: the privacy.’
But Miss Pink was determined and Samuel had to toil up slippery grass behind her in his Hush Puppies. However, she stopped after a couple of hundred feet and they sat down and surveyed the view.
To the south-east stretched the patchwork plateau of small irregular fields broken, in the middle distance, by the valley of the millstream: a caterpillar of woodland with a blue bloom on the foliage from the heat haze.
‘Is it really two miles?’ she asked.
‘A mile and a half perhaps; it’s still going to take a while to run it in the dark.’
Back at the car she got out her large-scale map and studied it.
‘I’m going to look for Rachel,’ she said. ‘Will you run me to Corn and take the car back to the village?’
He bristled with suspicion. ‘Why do you want to see her alone? And how do you know where she is?’ She regarded him speculatively and the hostility faded from his face. He said simply: ‘I’d do anything for Rachel; you see: I love her.’ He bit his lip and scuffed in the gravel with the toe of his nice shoe.
Miss Pink was suddenly galvanised into activity. ‘Right. Let’s go to the headland, and we’ll go by way of Corn so that we don’t attract any unwelcome hangers-on in the village.’
‘Like Carter?’
‘Carter, Pryce, anyone.’
*
They stood at the top of the funnel. Nothing moved in the searing heat: not even a gull showed above the lip of the cliffs.
Miss Pink said: ‘You don’t like steep ground, do you?’
‘I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Rachel.’ He couldn’t face the funnel squarely and was squinting down it from the corner of his eye.
She left him sitting on a rock on the level heath and, promising not to be long, she descended to the top of the slab.
The tide was ebbing and the exposed barnacles were a wet brown fringe at the edge of the navy sea. The cliff plunged, first the colour of claret, then black, straight into the cove and the water was flat as the surface of a pond. A huge jelly fish drifted in the shadows. The shag were not out today but occasionally a kittiwake dropped from the roof of the hidden cavern and flew languidly out to sea. There was no sign of people.
She retreated to the miners’ track then traversed into the shaft, skirting the awful drop. A bat flew out of the depths and jinked away in the sunshine, then she heard the singing.
It came from the shaft: pulsating and familiar. It was blow-flies. Pritchard had lost a sheep. She hoped it wasn’t alive.
She climbed the funnel to the old mine level above the scree tip. It was forty feet deep, Rachel had said. The roof was just a little too low for her to walk upright and she had to proceed in a kind of half crouch. She penetrated a few yards then waited against the wall, allowing the light to show her the next stretch and her eyes to get used to the dimness. The floor of the tunnel was flat and firm but scattered with small spiky stones. There was mud in the interstices and the tracks of little cloven hoofs. The walls dripped. There was no sign of a human footprint.
She reckoned she’d gone thirty feet when the level changed direction slightly but enough to ensure that the rest of it was dark although points caught the light: a streak of wet rock, a puddle, odd unidentifiable things. She didn’t think there could be a hole in the floor and since there was no level below, the ground could not give way suddenly—which was always a possibility in old Cornish tin mines, but an atavistic fear of the dark and of falling forced her to go down on all-fours and edge forward, carefully sweeping the ground with her hand.
It was very dark. She turned her head and saw the empty passage, the walls bulging against the secondary light beyond the bend, and she saw something move.
She held her breath, feeling a stone under the palm of her hand, clutching it. The thing moved again. It was water dripping, catching the light against a shadowed crack.
She exhaled, turned slowly and extended her hand. It touched hair.
She shrank back against the wall. There was no sound except, at long intervals, a drop falling from the roof into a puddle. ‘Rachel?’ she breathed. No sound.
She edged forward and groped: the feel of hair at her fingers’ ends before she touched it, and so she realised now that it was very coarse hair, frizzy hair—it was wool.
She prodded it in an excess of relief. The sheep didn’t move. Her hand felt over the fleece to the leg, but it wasn’t a leg; it was a bone—as it would be. If it had been an animal that had died recently, like the one in the shaft, she wouldn’t have got this far for the smell—at least, not without knowing. If the one in the shaft wasn’t smelling, that meant it was very recent indeed.
She felt round the walls of a little bulbous chamber that marked the end of the level. Her feet scrunched among skulls. She wondered why they’d died.
‘Where did you go?’ Samuel asked curiously on her return.
‘Exploring an old level.’
‘No sign of her?
‘Only sheeps’ skeletons.’ She started for the stile. ‘Rachel gets on well with the Pritchard girl, doesn’t she? Let’s go and have a word with them.’
The Pritchards were still hay-making. As Samuel and Miss Pink approached the man switched off the tractor and got down to the ground. Two collies came streaking towards the walkers, their bellies low, but at some signal and without checking their speed, they curved away to the bank where they dropped in the shadows. Their movements were fast, neat and totally silent. Miss Pink was reminded of hunting dogs trained to run soundlessly. She regarded the Pritchards with interest.
The man and h
is daughter were short and heavy but Mrs Pritchard was a slight middle-aged person with smudged grey eyes, sparse hair and a cigarette dangling from the corner of her thin mouth. Avril Pritchard was a pudding of a girl in a dipping brown skirt and black pullover, her bare feet thrust into laced walking shoes crusted with dung.
Mrs Pritchard took the cigarette out of her mouth revealing, not the hard face of a slattern, but an expression full of amiable curiosity. Samuel was introducing them.
‘Like a smoke?’ Mrs Pritchard asked affably.
The visitors demurred. ‘It’s very hot,’ Samuel protested. ‘We—er—were thinking of having a swim.’
‘You come past Pentref,’ Avril said.
‘Pentref?’ Miss Pink glanced at Samuel.
‘You shoulda swum there,’ Avril pointed out, ‘where the old people live.’
No one corrected her tense. Miss Pink sought for an innocuous topic. ‘You’ve lost a sheep in the old mine shaft, Mr Pritchard.’
‘There are no sheeps in the mines.’ Mrs Pritchard was smug. ‘That’s why we put the new fence up: to keep ’em inside. You saw an old body.’
‘I saw nothing. How could I? There are flies in the bottom of the shaft.’
‘Bones sing,’ Avril said, and giggled.
‘We’re looking for Rachel,’ Samuel told her firmly, like a school teacher.
‘Everyone’s looking for someone today.’ The girl grinned and scratched her thigh. ‘There’s Norman and you after Rachel, and the other one after Jakey Jones.’
‘What other one?’
‘Him what’s sick.’
Samuel glanced at Miss Pink for help; he wasn’t so much at home with the Pritchards as with Ossie Hughes. Thinking of Pryce’s paunch, she said: ‘The police don’t get enough fresh air and exercise.’
‘Was he police?’ Mrs Pritchard asked of Avril.
Miss Pink asked: ‘Did he have lines here—’ she traced lines from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth, ‘and was he very thin and rather sad?’
Avril nodded. ‘He’d lost something. He was after Jakey Jones but we don’t know where he is so we couldn’t help. And we can’t help you neither: ’bout Rachel.’
