by Gwen Moffat
Paul closed his eyes.
“Joe, Nell. Jim breakfasted early and left as I came in. He had to do something to a canoe.”
“Do you know why the lighter is important?”
“Sally told me. It must have been put there deliberately — where it was found. Someone doesn’t like Rowland.”
“Not necessarily,” Miss Pink said, “they could be indifferent to him but wanting to shift attention from themselves.”
“That’s a bit of an understatement, isn’t it?”
“It happens more often than you think.” Ted helped himself to brandy and served Paul absently. Miss Pink smiled amiably.
“How did you get on with Bett?” she asked.
“I hated her — but I didn’t kill her.”
“I know —” He glanced at her quickly. “— You were in the bar. Why did you hate her?”
“She said absolutely revolting things about Charles and me. We just happened to like going to the Schooner; sometimes we went out with Dawson fishing. She found out about it and created hell. What I found most obscene was that I got the impression she didn’t really mind what Charles did or who his friends were; she was just wringing all the enjoyment out of the situation that she could. She loved scenes; she was always looking for diversions and if there weren’t any, she invented them.”
“Did you stop going to the Schooner with Charles after she found out?”
“Yes, we thought we’d better for the sake of peace.”
“When did this happen?”
“About a month ago. Poor old Charles. He drinks, you know, but he was drinking with us, after that he started drinking on his own. It was too bad.”
He drank his brandy at a gulp and stared at the table.
“The others will be wondering where I am,” he muttered.
“The others?” Miss Pink exclaimed.
“Yes, we’re all out in the hall; we couldn’t stand Plas Mawr tonight.”
“Then who’s on duty?”
“Sally.”
“For goodness sake! Why?”
“It should be Rowland on duty tonight — and she wanted to be doing something, I think. The kids have come along with her, and Linda’s there too.”
“Perhaps it’s the best thing for Sally,” she admitted after he’d gone, “now why on earth did he tell us that rigmarole about Charles Martin?”
“To put himself in the clear; besides, how does he know that Martin hasn’t talked, or that she didn’t leave a diary or some other record — with details? Do you think she would blackmail them?”
“But Paul’s got an alibi.” She told him what she had learned from Miss Devereux.
Ted was in a carping mood: “He certainly couldn’t have got from here to the cove on foot in half an hour, but that works only on the premise that she was killed before eleven, and for that we’re depending on Hughes’ story.” He was silent for a moment. “We keep coming back to the problem of transport. Wright had none. Nell and Slade were in her van. But I wonder what Lithgow’s alibi is.”
“Of course, Slade and Nell were pub-crawling. That leaves only him.”
*
In the few seconds that it took to pass from the dining room to the hall Miss Pink regretted the perhaps undesirable objectivity of the cosy dinner table and realised with astonishment that until this moment she hadn’t really faced the fact that the killer must be a member of the small community at Plas Mawr; she had always held the hope that the possibility was nothing more than a device: a fixed point from which the investigation must make a start. Once school staff had been eliminated the net would be cast wider. Factors which pointed to a murderer in the school, motive for instance, even the theft of the lighter, these she hadn’t accepted as conclusive (she realised now); she knew that acceptable explanations could be found for the most bizarre situations.
In a similar way that dreamers can span long periods in a few seconds because the brain acts like a computer and, from a memory bank of total recall, delivers an impression that is a distillation of the relevant events, so, in a few steps along a passage, five days of life and the lives of a handful of people (so far as she had knowledge of them) were processed and, as Ted held the door for her and she walked towards the small group by the fire, she felt that one of them was a murderer. She was imaginative but not fanciful. She wouldn’t have said that there was a miasma of fear in the room but as a nightmare differs from a bad dream in that only the first implies panic, so she knew that the common factor between bad dreams and this moment was the sense of menace. Someone in the room was taking her measure. As she sat, and innocuous remarks were exchanged, she was aware of one emergent fact: the only person who they knew had command of transport on Saturday night and who hadn’t volunteered an alibi was Lithgow — who used the Centre’s Land Rover to go home.
Olwen appeared and accepted an order with the lack of expression she would use only on the most formal occasions. Miss Pink observed the others.
Lithgow and Slade looked unusually neat and conventional in shirts and ties and jackets of good Welsh tweed. Nell wore a dress in burnt orange with shoes the same colour and dark brown tights. Round her neck was a leather thong with a copper beech leaf between her breasts. She looked cool and beautiful and Miss Pink wondered how much the girl knew about Lithgow. He was saying in answer to a question from Ted that the weather forecast was poor and that tomorrow they would keep the boys low. He was referring to the expedition which would start the following morning and end at tea time on Friday. This exercise, the climax of the course, would be unaccompanied, the boys doing their own navigation but the instructors manning check points at selected sites. There were two ranges to traverse, the boys working back to the Centre from the dropping point in the north to which they’d be taken by coach.
The directors listened with only half their attention to Lithgow’s account of recent modifications to the programme and from these mental sidelines they watched as a discussion developed concerning the earliest date that ice axes should be taken on the hill during these expeditions. They displayed a morbid humour as they recalled long falls down snow slopes.
Miss Pink, leaning back in her chair, wondered what they were up to. Paul looked disgruntled, Lithgow was at his most mischievous, and the other two, Nell and Slade, seemed to be abetting him. There was an atmosphere of hysteria in the group.
After letting them have their heads for a while Ted, smiling his foxy grin, said urbanely:
“We’re trying to trace when Rowland lost his cigarette lighter. Can anyone help?”
The words dried up chatter and artifice like a sponge. Slade glared; Lithgow’s lips thinned without smiling but his eyes danced and he didn’t look at anyone in particular. Nell was suddenly grave and quiet.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said, “of course, when a man’s been a smoker since you’ve known him, it’s difficult to remember when he started lighting his cigarettes by a different method. And where something as ordinary as smoking’s concerned, it carries no impact.”
“No one else smoked,” Ted pointed out.
“Meaning he should stand out? Perhaps we got used to him, even blocked it out, which would make recall more difficult.” She smiled and shrugged, glancing at Lithgow.
“I can’t remember,” he said.
Paul said defiantly: “He had it Monday at breakfast time.”
“Did he?” Nell asked with interest. “Well, who was with him after that?”
“I was,” Lithgow said, “we did the canoe trip. He wouldn’t have smoked in a canoe.”
“On the way to Porth Bach perhaps,” Ted said, “in the Land Rover.”
“I don’t remember.”
“I don’t see how it’s important,” Slade said aggressively.
“Of course it is,” Nell turned on him, speaking with the easy familiarity of one who often took him to task for being obtuse. “The lighter was found by the passing-place. If Rowland had it Monday, either it was stolen and put there, or
he went back himself.”
“How much do you know about it?” Ted asked pleasantly.
“Most of it,” Nell smiled. “The kitchen staff are full of it, and we talk among ourselves. How often does a murder happen in an adventure centre? Sally’s told us about the lighter and, of course, she wants us to remember seeing it after Saturday . . . To be quite honest, we knew so much already, I mean before Bett disappeared,” her eyes flickered over Paul, “that what’s happened since seems almost like filling in gaps.”
“What d’you mean by that?” Paul was leaning forward, gripping the arms of his chair.
“Why, relationships . . .” She spun the word out, staring at him. “I meant Rowland and Bett; was there something else?”
Slade said with a surprising grin: “He thought you meant him being pals with Charlie.”
Paul went white.
“For goodness sake!” Nell said impatiently. “That was all Bett’s doing! You are a fool, Joe,” she frowned at him in exasperation. “I explained that to you at the time —”
Lithgow gave a curious snigger.
“Don’t take any notice of Joe,” Nell told Paul. She looked across at the directors with the flustered air of a hen trying to collect chicks: “Bett made a lot of trouble at the time: a whispering campaign. We didn’t take any notice.”
“Did she?” Paul breathed. “The bitch! If I’d known I’d —”
“Fortunately,” Nell went on loudly, “the instructors stuck together; we hadn’t any time for Bett and not much for Charles. You might say we ran the Centre, under Jim, and Charles just limped along behind.”
“It was an easy enough place to run,” Lithgow admitted. “You can work up a rhythm with good staff.”
Olwen came in to tell Ted that he was wanted on the telephone.
“Do you know what’s happening?” Nell asked Miss Pink.
“No, nothing more than you.”
They went on to talk about the next course in a desultory fashion. Nell was unenthusiastic; most of the students would be police cadets and these were unpopular at the Centre. “Poor physique,” the girl explained. “They’re not hard like the boys on this course. You’ve got to watch police all the time on the hill; they’ve got no resistance. Their officers are a bad example; there were some in the Saracen’s on Saturday. You saw them, Jim.” She glanced at Lithgow and he nodded. “Why is it military personnel are so much harder than police? Is it diet?”
They started to chatter again, about food and exercise and physical types, until Miss Pink, curious to know who had telephoned Ted, took the chance to excuse herself and went upstairs. His door opened before she reached it.
“Hughes is still with them,” he said, standing aside for her to enter.
“You told them Paul remembered the lighter?”
“And gave them Sally’s information about the alibi but I’m afraid they’re strongly in favour of collusion. It happens, you know.”
“I do know, but not in this case, I think. And they think Paul’s in collusion too?” She appropriated Ted’s easy chair. “That was a curious scene downstairs between Nell and him. Is Master Paul quite so honest as he seemed in the dining room? There could be more to it than appeared when he told it. But if there was collusion between Sally and Hughes over the lighter, it would have to include Paul.”
“And Hughes doesn’t like Paul, so why should the boy lie — except for Sally’s sake —”
“No,” Miss Pink said, “I don’t think anyone’s lying about the lighter — oh, someone is, but not Sally or Paul.”
“Well, the police don’t agree with you. There’s news about Martin, however. If he isn’t in the clear, he’s certainly no deeper. They must have more men on the job, not counting the chaps keeping guard on the Porth Bach road. Martin’s been drinking with Dawson this evening. Their conversation was quite innocent and above-board.”
“Did Pryce have a man in the bar?”
“No, the Schooner’s closed for the season. He says the room they were in was on the ground floor and there was a window open.”
“Gracious!” Miss Pink glanced at the drawn curtains.
“It’s gone some way towards clearing Martin,” Ted pointed out. “Incidentally, I told Pryce about your visit to Mrs Wolkoff and he wants to see her, too. This morning he thought she was senile; he changed his mind since he talked to headquarters about her. She was out this afternoon when he telephoned.”
“How does he account for that lighter being found at the passing-place if he thinks Hughes is lying?”
“He thinks Hughes went back to clean up, to see that he hadn’t dropped anything.”
“And dropped his lighter! Pryce is mad.”
“It’s only got Hughes’ prints on it — apart from yours.”
“Of course, he was fiddling with it in the kitchen.”
They lapsed into a morose silence from which Miss Pink said without animation:
“About that affair of Lithgow’s: it must have been Bett, not Nell, and I’ve been thinking about a curious remark he made to Linda when she threatened him with divorce. He said ‘that won’t be necessary now’ or something similar.”
“This was Sunday morning?”
“When she told me; he said it on Saturday night, I believe. The point is, Bett was dead when he said it but only the murderer knew that. Is that what made him say divorce wouldn’t be necessary?”
“But Linda retracted the following day.”
“No, she didn’t retract; she merely substituted Nell in the name part, as it were. If Lithgow killed Bett and then discovered that Linda had told me he’d been having an affair with her, he’d want to deny any association so he’d persuade Linda to change the story — or rather, the principal character.”
“Linda would guess why as soon as the body was found.”
“Isn’t it a feature of sex murders that the killers are often protected by other women?”
“That’s true — and a feature of this case is the wives’ loyalty, with the exception of the dead one. But Lithgow a sex murderer!”
“And after all, Nell mentioned this evening that Lithgow was in the Saracen’s Head on Saturday night!”
Ted pondered for a moment.
“I’d like to do some checking tomorrow,” he said, “we’ll go to the Saracen’s and I’ll also call on Mrs Wolkoff. She must know more than she’s told you; I can’t believe, from what you said, that anything could happen in that cove without her knowledge.”
“But it didn’t happen there; the Jaguar is over a mile from Porth Bach — unless Bett went down to the cove to turn round after all. For Mrs Wolkoff to know anything it would have to take place near her house. The old lady couldn’t be harbouring anyone I suppose: like an escaped train robber or someone waiting to get over to Ireland? I think this morning there was someone else in the cove.”
“Like the mine?” he asked.
“Imagination plays tricks,” she admitted, “and I’m not certain about the mine, although a stone did drop in the loom and I’m pretty sure that young man was trying to distract my attention —”
“The lorries,” he interrupted, “they’ve found two more.”
“At Clapham?”
“No. In Somerset, in the Mendips.”
“Caves again. Had these run off the road?”
“No, they were abandoned in a barn; they were very low on petrol.”
“It doesn’t show much foresight, does it? To run out of petrol.”
“On the contrary, they’d probably served their purpose.”
“There’s still one missing.”
“I expect it’s waiting to be found. Like to take a bet on its whereabouts?”
“No. It could be anywhere in limestone country. South Wales perhaps.”
Chapter Twelve
Miss Pink was wrong. At eight o’clock the following morning the radio announcer said that the fourth lorry had been found in a wood near Clapham. It was a minor news item and probably only included becau
se now all the vehicles had been recovered. So that was that, she thought, wondered briefly where the drivers were, and then applied herself to the business of the day: breakfast first, then the renewed search for information, starting with Lithgow’s alibi.
The Saracen’s Head was in Bontddu, about fifteen miles north of Bethel and approached by a tortuous route which contoured below the satellite hills of Yr Aran. The road was narrow and, once the coastal plain was left behind, ran through huge gorges where occasional rock faces impended above them heralded by notices warning motorists to beware of falling stones.
The gorges were wooded with old gnarled oaks and fine conifers, the latter giving an alpine atmosphere to the country, enhanced by a brawling torrent in the bottom which was noted for its salmon. The road followed the river and progress was slow. Short of using a helicopter there was no way of travelling fast between the coast and the Saracen’s Head.
At ten o’clock in the off-season the hotel was a bright and cheerless place, whitewashed, with imitation leaded windows and frosted nasturtiums wilting in the flower beds. The manager was French, or rather he spoke with a French accent and sported a Van Dyke beard; he disowned all knowledge of the public bar but the questioners were bland and difficult to dismiss. In the end he capitulated and gave them the address of the barman whom, he added as a parting shot, they would find in bed.
The river flowed through the town and its banks were bordered by a miscellany of houses. There were one or two large Victorian edifices, built of stone and slate with hideous facings of yellow brick, and charming lawned gardens sloping to the river; and there were terraces of holiday cottages with pastel paint and picture windows among which the occasional indigenous house showed up like a rotting stump in a set of gleaming dentures.
They knocked at a peeling door several times before it was opened by a pale fat man with a red beard and dissipated eyes. He had a bad cold and, as the manager had foretold, had plainly just got out of his bed. They apologised for disturbing him and asked if he could spare them a moment.
He led the way along a narrow passage that was further encumbered by a sideboard and a bicycle and appeared to be paved with broken quarry tiles and plastic toys. There was a strong smell of Friar’s Balsam.
