by Gwen Moffat
The broad scene was one of confusion but individuals had themselves well in hand. On the edge of the crowd Rachel talked earnestly to Miss Pink, a knot of people surrounded Norman and herded him away, Pryce approached Roderick.
‘We haven’t taken those flags up in the kitchen. We have to now, of course.’
‘Of course,’ the old man murmured, and, with an attempt at levity: ‘I’ll expect them to be re-laid level.’
People started to drift away from the cliffs; they’d only been waiting for the police party to get a good start. Doreen and Rachel walked ahead deep in conversation. The rest of them walked as if dazed. Miss Pink was with Samuel. After a time he said: ‘I’m thinking of my kitten: totally without viciousness—you know?’
‘Don’t forget the people: Rachel, her family, friends. They weren’t vicious.’
‘They make it worse: their suffering. And Sandra.’
‘Don’t opt out. You’re going to be needed.’
They walked on, holding the gates politely for each other. The cromlech squatted beside the path, massive and imposing even in the sunshine. Doreen turned back to them, her face drawn and anxious.
‘Samuel, she wants to go home with you.’
‘To my place?’
‘Yes. She can’t go to Riffli and she knows we’ll be talking at the hotel. She can’t face that. Take her home, please, Samuel.’
‘Of course I will.’
He sped after the solitary figure at the other side of the field.
‘A sensible solution to that problem,’ Miss Pink remarked. ‘He’s a good friend.’
‘Rupert says she ought to have married him, but it’s always been platonic. He’s much too old, of course, but perhaps that’s what she needs: an older man.’ Miss Pink said nothing. ‘You’ll come back to the hotel,’ Doreen stated, but diffidently. ‘If you’re not too tired. . . .’
*
Rupert and Doreen, Roderick and Miss Pink were in the sitting room at the hotel. On a coffee table lay the object which Miss Pink had shown to Norman Kemp. It was about four inches square: a piece of flesh-coloured plastic with a bubbly black splodge in the middle. The Bowens regarded it with blank faces. Miss Pink placed it on her bare arm.
‘Burn!’ Roderick gasped. ‘A third degree burn. Where d’yer find it?’
‘In the box-room at Riffli. Someone had been in there recently and that attracted my attention. Besides, I had an idea what to look for by then.’
‘There’s a batch of ’em: plastic wounds for First Aid exercises. Verisimilitude. What’s it got ter do with this business, eh?’
‘I know,’ Doreen said, staring at the plastic patch with revulsion. ‘That was Rachel’s nightmare. You tell them, Melinda; I can’t trust myself.’
‘This nightmare—or hallucination—’ Miss Pink said grimly, ‘—was the sight of Iris supposedly being tortured with a red-hot poker. My showing the burn to him broke Norman because Rachel never told me at the time that Norman was in the kitchen with Iris and he was putting the poker in the fire. In other words, he was the torturer. That’s why she came rushing down to the village; there was no one left in Riffli to appeal to.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Rupert protested. ‘You mean Iris had some of those objects stuck on her. . . . A trick? Why?’
‘Some time before this happened, Rachel saw something else, and she told Iris. She was shocked but by this time she had doubts about her own state of mind so Iris was able to convince her that it was an hallucination, and she got her to bed and gave her brandy and tranquillisers. But she was too strung up for them to have much effect and some time later when she heard a scream downstairs she went down to investigate. The kitchen door was locked so she went out in the yard and looked through a window. The light was on. You know what she saw.’
‘Go on,’ Roderick ordered.
‘What was the other thing she saw?’ Doreen asked tightly. ‘The first thing?’
‘She saw Jakey’s body in the freezer. She’d been in her bedroom and the drawing room all evening. Norman and Iris said they were watching T.V. in the dining room; that was a concocted alibi. We don’t know yet what time Jakey arrived at Riffli but for part of the time they’d be frantically clearing up after killing him. No one was in the dining room. Rachel must have been upstairs when Jakey was killed. She got restless and went to talk to Iris but on her way to the kitchen she saw that the dairy door was open. She looked inside, thinking Iris would be there, saw the freezer lid wasn’t closed properly and went to see what was stopping it. Literally she couldn’t believe what she saw. She walked in the kitchen and found Iris washing the floor.’
‘And asked Iris what the body was doing in the freezer,’ Doreen put in. ‘And Iris acted the good old earth mother and got her to bed. I see.’
‘Which of them killed Jakey?’ Rupert asked loudly.
‘You heard Norman on the cliff,’ Miss Pink reminded him. ‘He wouldn’t have made that up. When he said she let the clothes rack down on Jakey, he was referring to Iris. Doreen misinterpreted that and rushed in with the first lie that came to mind. Norman saw her mistake and saw a chance to inculpate Rachel. That doesn’t matter. What does matter is the method of the murder. The clothes rack was empty when Samuel and I arrived at Riffli with Rachel. Letting it down on Jakey and stabbing him through the clothes would account for there being no blood on anyone. There’d be plenty on the clothes of course, on Jakey’s shirt and on the floor. So she washed the floor, burned the floor cloth and all the stained clothes. That cooker was going at full blast when we arrived. It takes a long time to burn a pile of clothing.’
‘What part did Norman play in this?’ Roderick barked. ‘Did he take the body to the cliffs?’
‘He must have done. Perhaps he put it in the woods after Iris told him Rachel had seen it in the freezer. Probably he took it to the shaft much later at night, after we’d left Riffli and you and Rachel had gone to bed. That was when he would have put the clothes on the beach too.’
Doreen said: ‘So the purpose of that ghastly charade with the burns was to convince Rachel she’d had an hallucination and so she’d believe the body in the freezer was imagination too?’ She looked at Miss Pink coldly. ‘I wish she’d lived; I wish I’d got my hands on her.’
‘Why did she kill Jakey?’ Roderick asked.
‘He was blackmailing her. She killed Sandra.’
‘It wasn’t Norman then?’
‘They were working together. She must have killed Sandra because Norman had to be the one who made the telephone call imitating the local police.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ Rupert said.
‘Do yer know the whole story, Mel?’
‘Most of it.’
‘Did it start with that attempt on me life?’
‘That was the first thing.’
‘You knew, right from the start, that someone tried to kill Dad?’ Rupert was belligerent.
‘Oh no; at the start I held the same opinion as you: that Roderick’s imagination had run away with him—’ the old man shot her a resentful glance, ‘—I was worried though, because I knew there was a sadist loose in the village; I’d seen Jakey roll a rock down the funnel, just to frighten me, and Rachel gave me a graphic description of the boy. But if the branch had been put on the steps deliberately, at that time I attributed it to mindless hooliganism, not to a plot. And it was ousted from my mind as other things occurred. They started to happen at your party, Roderick, although I knew before the party that Rachel hated Sandra.’
Doreen stirred. ‘Small wonder at that.’
‘Yes.’ Miss Pink’s tone lacked conviction. ‘At the party Sandra became very indiscreet and mentioned her book—’
‘But we know all this,’ Rupert interrupted. ‘We want to know why Sandra was killed.’
‘Let Mel tell it,’ Roderick growled.
‘As I see it, sweetie,’ Doreen said, ‘she was murdered because of the book.’
‘The book disappeared,’ Miss Pink conc
eded, ‘so we thought it was the motive for the first murder. Actually it had no importance; probably it was burned in the fire. At the same time it was its disappearance, and the absence of Thorne and the Spitfire, that first roused suspicion—that and the fact that Sandra wasn’t drunk when the television men left the cottage, couldn’t have been drunk when the fire started, yet had made no attempt even to get up from the bed. I don’t think accident was implied so much by the presence of the bottle and the lighter in the debris, as murder—and murder by Thorne. Iris had guessed he wouldn’t stay to face the police and she guessed correctly. What she didn’t bargain for was Jakey Jones staying behind after the party at the mill cottage. Why he stayed is anyone’s guess; Thorne had caught him once doing a Peeping Tom act. But he saw something that night; perhaps he was lurking in the woods and he realised that someone else was there; a young boy would be quieter in bushes than Iris. And, being Jakey, if he knew someone else was keeping a watch on the cottage, he’d hang around and try to find out why. He certainly saw Iris; perhaps he saw her enter the cottage after Thorne left. And he knew—or guessed—what happened inside; why otherwise should he go to school next day, leaving on the school bus at eight-thirty when the television men didn’t report the fire until after nine? Ossie Hughes says he was subdued all day, and then talked about getting money from someone when they came home to the village. Then he disappeared.
‘But that day, before Jakey talked to me about money, I’d talked to Rachel. A curious thing happened there: a sudden change of mood. At first she was very sensible—and she wasn’t in the least morbid. And she seemed to accept quite calmly that Norman had been attracted to Sandra. But later I mentioned the time of the fire and that Norman had been working in the coach-house and Iris watching television in the kitchen. At that point Rachel flew off the handle and wildly tried to incriminate Tony Thorne. She called him a sacrificial lamb.’
‘Why did she change?’ Roderick asked. ‘Because she knew Norman—no, you said Iris killed Sandra.’
‘Both of them. What’s important is that they alibied each other. I told Rachel the fire started before eleven-thirty. She’d gone to bed around ten. She woke, thought it was very late, and Norman hadn’t come to bed. She was used to that. She went down to make herself a cup of tea, only to find lights everywhere and the television going in the kitchen. It was eleven-fifteen. Obsessed with the idea that Norman was with Sandra, she put no significance on the absence of Iris. She returned to bed and when Norman came up after midnight, she said nothing. She told me she was sick of scenes. It wasn’t until she learned the time the fire started, and when I told her that Norman said he never left Riffli that evening, that she started to see a connection. Eventually she came to remember that Iris was also missing but she assumed the woman had gone to bed and left the television on, perhaps for Norman to watch. And if Iris says she watched until very late, then she was protecting Norman and therefore an ally. You have to remember that Rachel was very confused at this time.’
‘Did you say she was used to Norman coming to bed late?’ Doreen asked. ‘Where was he then?’
‘With Iris.’
‘Iris! Under the same roof? Oh no, not Iris.’
‘You saw him on the cliffs. She was dead and he was devastated. He turned on his wife.’ They were silent, remembering. ‘So,’ she went on, ‘Rachel protected Norman, and you all protected her. As anyone would have done,’ she added smoothly, ‘particularly in view of her bizarre behaviour the night Jakey was killed: the so-called hallucination of Iris being tortured. The thought of a black-out, or black-outs due to drugs and drink, crossed my mind. What else could it be? And then, the following morning, I met Carter—’
‘Yes, who is Carter?’ asked Doreen.
She told them, and she told them the story he’d recounted at Captain’s Cottage. ‘Why should he come down here with such a tale if it were untrue? If he thought Thorne had murdered Sandra and stolen the typescript, he would have gone after Thorne. Carter seemed to me to be a man who had nothing to lose, in his way an honest man, but utterly ruthless: a man bent on revenge. And the story fitted. There was the place where the Spitfire could have been parked, the telephone nearby, rising ground from which Norman could have signalled to Iris and vice versa. I’ve no doubt Norman will confess in order to save his own skin. He’s broken already, only the details are left. My guess is that he drove the Spitfire away from the cottage as the reporters were leaving. At ten-thirty or thereabouts it would be dark enough that no one would pay any attention. The reporters weren’t sober anyway. Iris would be hidden in the woods waiting for the last car to leave. Even if Thorne had gone to the door with the television men and seen that the Spitfire was missing, what would have happened? The T.V. men would hardly have stayed to help him find it; the assumption would be that a reporter had taken it for fun. The T.V. men would have left, and Thorne stayed fuming in the cottage. It’s very doubtful that he would have rung the police. Now I wonder if Iris knew that he had a record?
‘But he didn’t come to the door. Iris would then signal to Norman that there was no one at the cottage except Thorne and Sandra. It was a pre-arranged signal; a flash would be enough. She had only to climb the bank of the stream to be within sight of that rising ground above the main road. It may have been that signal Jakey saw; it would have whetted his appetite.
‘When Norman saw the signal, he put through the call purporting to come from the police. When Thorne left, Iris went into the cottage, knocked Sandra out, took the typescript—I feel sure that there would have been a key to the filing cabinet in Sandra’s handbag—and set the fire. They both returned to Riffli, Iris by way of the stepping stones across the river. I found Avril Pritchard obliterating the prints this morning.’
‘The Pritchards are in this?’ Roderick exclaimed.
‘Avril did it for Rachel who thought Norman had made the prints. Everyone covering up like mad, you see, but one person threatening exposure: Jakey. He was sharp, but not sharp enough, and he was conceited. He’d got away with all his mischief to date. I remember feeling completely frustrated at one point. What could one do with a boy like that? If he’d been caught for a comparatively minor offence and sent to Borstal, he’d have come out worse than he went in. No, Jakey was heading for disaster; his mother knew that.
‘When I found Rachel hiding in the cavern I played it that way: that Jakey was dead. I was led to do it by her “confession”. What she told me was a string of lies and omissions but they were telling me more than I’d have got from her with point-blank questions, so I told her about Jakey’s clothes being found. She assumed that his body would turn up shortly, and she assured me that he was dead before he was put in the water—’
‘But he wasn’t in the water!’ Rupert said.
‘And that was the clincher—for me,’ Miss Pink continued. ‘She knew he was dead, but not where his body was. There was a lot she didn’t know. Thorne never mentioned to Carter that the typescript was on Sandra’s bed but Rachel, assuming it played some part in the affair, said she was reading it. She also said she hit Sandra with a candlestick. That was significant. A brandy bottle was found near the bed and could have been the weapon to knock her unconscious. But only the killer would have known what weapon was used. Rachel saw my question as a trap, remembered that some brandy bottles are flask-shaped and not handy weapons, so she made a wild guess at an alternative. But the glaring omission in that false confession was any mention of the telephone call to Fleet Street that brought the reporters flocking to the mill cottage.’
‘I’d forgotten about that,’ Roderick said. ‘Didn’t the agent—this Carter feller. . . . No, that was what was assumed at the time.’
‘Rachel’s not mentioning it recalled it to my mind. By this time, you see, I was almost certain that Norman was the killer but what part did that call play? It wasn’t made by anyone who feared exposure from the book because they were drawing attention to it. Sandra and Thorne found the sudden publicity embarrassing. Coul
d the motive have been to drive them away? Pryce thought so. It was after Sandra announced her intention of staying that she was killed. Then I remembered Waterhouse, one of the reporters, telling me that the person who made the call to the Press said Sandra was known in London as Cynthia Gale. The only people who knew she was writing a book were at your party, Roderick. Thorne knew but he was discounted when Jakey’s body was found. When the boy was killed Thorne was in custody. But who was at the party who knew Sandra as Cynthia Gale?’
‘You’re presuming someone else besides Norman,’ Roderick said. ‘How did yer tumble to Iris?’
‘Caradoc went back to the kitchen and told Thirza Jones and Iris about the book and the two women went round to the front of the house and saw Sandra through the drawing room windows. That was the first time Iris saw Sandra. She made that telephone call. And next day Roderick told you, Doreen, that he’d have Sandra at Riffli and ask her to leave. Was Iris waiting on you at tea-time?’
‘She was,’ Doreen said. ‘Anyway the door would have been open in that heat. She was the sort of person who listened at doors.’
Rupert said, frowning: ‘You seem to have jumped a bit. How did you decide it was Iris who made the call to Fleet Street?’
‘Elimination,’ Miss Pink said. ‘Think of the other people who were present at Roderick’s party. Roderick couldn’t have killed Sandra; he was immobilised on the night she died.’
‘But,’ Doreen broke in, ‘you were looking for Norman’s accomplice.’
‘Yes. And the killers didn’t take a car to the mill cottage. They walked there and back. There was yourself.’ She shrugged. I could not see you working with Norman. There was Samuel: highly unlikely from what I knew of him but he couldn’t be eliminated. There was Rachel who, unless she were a genius at acting, told too many lies to be the killer. Rupert had an alibi for the time of Jakey’s murder. Caradoc and Thirza wouldn’t have murdered their own son. There was only Iris left. She saw Sandra but couldn’t risk Sandra’s seeing herself. First she tried to drive the girl away, then she killed her.’
