Miss Pink Investigates Part One

by Gwen Moffat

  Ted was a long time on the telephone and when he returned she regarded him with a trace of annoyance which passed as she realised that he was puzzled.

  A car was lying on its side below the cliffs west of Puffin Cove. At low water the first three letters of its registration, JCA, were visible. Although the make wasn’t known, it was pale blue — and the registration of Martin’s car was JCA. Because it had been submerged at least since Sunday afternoon there was no possibility of any occupants being alive, so frogmen would not be going down until tomorrow morning.

  The car was first sighted on Sunday afternoon by — here Ted looked at the back of an envelope — a Mrs Wolkoff who lived at Porth Bach, which lay about half a mile east of Puffin Cove. She had assumed that it was scrap and that the owner had been trying to dispose of it, so on Monday morning she telephoned the Public Health inspector to lodge a complaint. Since she was well known in the council offices for her public-spirited behaviour her protest was treated as routine and shelved until someone should have the time and energy to deal with it.

  However, after another visit to the scene and perhaps incensed that nothing was being done to recover the wreck, she telephoned the Public Health department again and said that she was wondering if the car had been stolen. The inspector’s assistant dissuaded her from informing the police, privately convinced that the suggestion that the car was stolen was merely a gambit to get it moved. It wasn’t until seven o’clock this evening that the inspector, meeting the traffic superintendent in the local sailing club, chanced to mention Mrs Wolkoff’s latest protest. Evidently the lady was known to departments other than Public Health.

  The superintendent happened to be one of the people whom Ted had contacted on Sunday afternoon in respect of the missing Jaguar, and the coincidence of both colour and registration was enough to send the police down to Puffin Cove, but since it was high water nothing could be determined even with the aid of a portable searchlight, and further investigations were abandoned till daylight.

  “I don’t think that there’s any doubt that it’s the right car,” Ted said.

  “What could she have been doing down there?”

  “We don’t know that she was there. Perhaps she drove to a rendezvous, got into a car driven by someone else, abandoned the Jaguar and it was stolen later. Saturday night’s a good time for stealing cars.”

  But they both saw the snag while he was speaking. No car thief or midnight reveller would steal a vehicle to abandon it on a remote and uninhabited stretch of coast.

  “Could it be,” Miss Pink suggested, “that Puffin Cove was where ‘X’ picked her up — no, he’d have met her close to the main road, or at least nearer to the school, not so far from Plas Mawr. And if that were the case, they’d never have driven miles out of their way in two cars just to abandon the Jaguar. That doesn’t make sense.”

  They were both avoiding the thought that was uppermost in their minds. Their eyes met and it only remained for one to say it.

  “You think she’s in it, don’t you?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Yes,” she sighed, “so all the rest is speculation: the how and why. I suppose there will be some indication . . . they seem to be able to find out anything nowadays, although —” her voice sharpened, “I would like to know what she was doing down there.”

  At ten o’clock the following morning they left the Goat and drove to Porth Bach in Ted’s car. The first four or five miles, down to the main road and along this westwards, parallel with the coast and about a mile inland, lay through flattish farmland. On their right was the line of mountains; to the left the sea and a fine rocky headland sheltering a bay on its eastern side.

  After less than ten minutes a signpost pointed left to the Schooner Hotel and Porth Bach. They took this side road until about half a mile short of the headland where they turned left again along a narrow tarred track which was only wide enough for one vehicle. At intervals there were passing-places.

  The road was unfenced and sometimes the ground dropped steeply from the grass verge to the top of the cliffs. There was a lot of gorse and dead bracken.

  After two miles the road started to dip and Porth Bach appeared below them: a wooded ravine running down to a beach. The cove would have once housed a small fishing community. There was a landing place, and a jetty in moderately good repair. Ruins showed here and there but among the trees there were four stalwart cottages. Of these, only one chimney smoked; the others were closed and shuttered against the winter and vandals.

  The road zig-zagged into the cove with a sharp angle between diagonals and ended above the jetty in a rough circle of mud and shingle where two police vehicles were parked: a car and a Land Rover with an empty trailer. A constable in uniform watched the approach of the newcomers phlegmatically.

  Ted stopped on the turning-circle and cut his engine. It was quiet but for gnomish voices and pips from the police radio. The constable, having recognised Ted, said that there was no news. Frogmen were at the wreck now and the local inspector, Bowen, had persuaded Mr Dawson, the owner of the Schooner Hotel, to come along in his launch, so everyone was out on the water.

  Miss Pink, sensing the idleness in the air and feeling superfluous, moved down to the shore.

  Two derelict boats lay above the jetty, but above the tide-line there was a varnished dinghy in good condition. At the other end of the short beach all that remained of some larger vessel was its timbers sticking up like a rib cage.

  There was nothing to do here and she decided to walk along the top of the cliffs. Ted said he would pick her up if she didn’t return before the — he hesitated — recovery party.

  She walked back the way they had driven, pausing occasionally to study the scene. This was where the canoes had started from yesterday, but whereas the Jaguar (if it was the Jaguar) lay west of the cove, the Centre’s party had paddled east.

  She looked back as she strolled uphill and saw that Ted was now on the jetty. Inland, someone was standing at the open door of the occupied cottage: a slight figure in dark clothing partly obscured by a shrub, but from the rigid posture Miss Pink realised with amusement that she was being observed through binoculars. This must be Mrs Wolkoff unless, of course, that lady didn’t live alone, but somehow the story of the finding of the car and subsequent events sounded like the behaviour of a solitary widow: someone trying to find a use for her time.

  She reached level ground but instead of keeping to the tarmac she chose to walk along the true top of the cliffs where there was a narrow and, in places, hazardous path. Most of the time the road was on a higher level and occasionally as much as a hundred yards distant.

  The sea was very calm except off the eastern headland where the surf broke silently. The nearer cliffs were about a hundred feet high, with a belt of golden lichen along their tops. The bare lower rock was black or red or almost white, sometimes firm with smooth faces, occasionally interspersed with rust-coloured intrusions that looked like vertical earth. A slight swell was running and at long intervals there came the sound of a distant watery explosion in the back of a cave.

  There was no sign of either boat or wreck but since visibility was restricted by a small jutting buttress ahead, a considerable stretch of coastline was hidden from her. Some distance away across the bay, the hotel shone white on the point. The good weather was holding and although it was mainly overcast, there were patches of sunlight on the water.

  The path curved inland to skirt the top of the buttress which was itself the miniature headland of Puffin Cove. She took a few steps to the top of the rise and looked across the stretch of water that had been hidden before.

  Below her lay the shallow cove which was little more than an indentation in the coastline. On the other side of it, about half a mile away, were two boats: the larger stationary some distance from the foot of the cliffs. There were figures in the stern. The smaller craft resembled the Centre’s safety boat and was approaching the other from the direction of the
cliffs. There were two people in this and she could hear its outboard motor.

  The two craft merged for a few minutes, then the smaller boat detached itself and headed towards Porth Bach. Because it was so low in the water and she was a hundred feet above, she could look into it as it passed. Between the sinister figures of the crew in their gleaming wet suits there was a dark bundle with pale exposed flesh but she was too far away to see who it was.

  She saw the launch come round and follow the frogmen and heard the soft throb of its engine below the urgent chatter of the outboard. She continued slowly, watching the ground, thinking, but automatically aware of stones and little breaks in the path that could cause a slip. She stopped suddenly, staring at the stamped earth.

  There was the imprint of a tyre.

  Obviously, she thought: there would be — but it brought the situation home to her more poignantly than the sight of the body. It was the question of distance: the mark was a few inches from the toe of her boot. There was only one imprint; the car would have been bouncing by the time it reached this point and only one wheel had touched. Elsewhere, tyres hadn’t marked the turf but there were gouged scrapes in the slope and new white scratches on rock: all evidence of the car’s passage when it plunged off the road.

  She prospected along the cliffs until she found a place, some fifty yards away, from which she could look back and down to the spot immediately below the tracks. It was nearly high tide and she could see nothing under the surface. If it was high tide now, at eleven, it would have been high about eight on Saturday evening, low tide at two — but even at low water the Wolkoff woman had said that the car was all but submerged. The occupant had stood no chance.

  She climbed up to the road and walked back until she could discover, by the marks below, where the Jaguar had left the tarmac. At that point there was a passing place on the seaward side of the road.

  She was still staring at the short stretch of ground between road and cliff when Ted’s car approached from Porth Bach. He stopped and Miss Pink looked a question.

  “It’s her,” he said, “well, hardly any doubt.”

  “Why should there be any?”

  “Crabs. She’s been there several days — and the window’s open.”

  She made a grimace of disgust, then said loudly, to distract them both:

  “This must be the place where she left the road.”

  “Is it?” He showed interest, and got out to study the marks.

  “She must have been turning round and put her foot on the accelerator instead of the brake,” he said. “What a mad place to turn! She’s only to go another mile and she could turn in the cove.”

  “Would she know that?”

  They looked at each other. Neither knew the extent of Bett Martin’s familiarity with the area. Ted frowned.

  “What was she doing down here?” he muttered, walking away, staring at the turf on the other side of the road.

  “This will be a popular site in summer,” he said, glancing at the gorse bushes. “Couples at night, I suppose, and picnic parties in the daytime. There’s a lot of litter . . . I wonder if she parked here — and why.” He turned and looked at Miss Pink. “She didn’t have to come for the obvious reason,” he added.

  “What else?” She was startled. “But whatever she came for, it wasn’t for something innocent. The choice of site confirms that. She didn’t want to be seen. But she didn’t come here alone.”

  “She could have done. Perhaps the person she had an appointment with didn’t turn up. She could have worked herself into a temper, waiting, and tried to turn round without thinking where she was. She could have been drunk.”

  “What do the police think?”

  “They’re coming now. Let’s see what they have to say.”

  A car was approaching from Porth Bach. It stopped and Ted introduced Inspector Bowen, an unhappy white-haired man who looked as if he suffered from dyspepsia. Miss Pink remembered that, with Ted, she was representing the Board and her thoughts went off at a tangent as she wondered if there might be time to delay Beresford’s flight to New York, but she knew she wouldn’t contact him. The accident was sordid but simple and his advice would be to keep it as quiet as possible. She listened to Ted talking about the tracks.

  The inspector hadn’t seen them until that moment. He was more intrigued by the fact that the dead woman had been turning here than that she should have come down to the cliffs in the first place. He had no doubt it was to meet a man.

  “No other explanation,” he said, “she was the type, begging your pardon, miss.”

  “Did you know her?” Miss Pink asked.

  “No, but word gets around.”

  Tactfully he offered no sympathy and it wasn’t until he’d been driven away that she wondered why he’d said nothing about finding the man.

  “Difficult,” Ted said. “He certainly won’t come forward. He’s probably married and won’t want to be compromised. We do know now that she wasn’t intending to clear off; there was no luggage in the car.”

  “He left her to drown,” she said grimly.

  “She wouldn’t have stood a chance. It would take too long to get down the cliffs even if he were a climber, even if there was a feasible route. Did you see one?”

  “There’s no place where you could get down easily and quickly in the dark. You’re right, but one would like to think he made some attempt to reach her — if there was a man. What did the divers find? Anything to indicate why she went over?”

  “Not really. The driver’s window was open, the car was in neutral gear.” He stopped and thought about this, then went on: “It’s lying on its side.”

  “Were the doors open?”

  “No. Jammed shut. They had to use a crowbar to get the body out.”

  “I wonder why he was outside the car. I suppose he was directing her as she turned.”

  *

  They sat together behind the desk in the warden’s office at Plas Mawr. They were divorced from each other by silence and their own thoughts. It was not so much that they were thinking along different lines, but similar ones. Something was wrong and neither of the directors cared to speculate on its nature.

  The door opened and seven people filed in, awkwardly and all more or less self-conscious. There were the five instructors and Sally Hughes and Linda Lithgow. For a moment they didn’t know what to do.

  “Please sit down, and smoke if you wish,” Miss Pink said pleasantly. No one took advantage of her second offer.

  It was curiously embarrassing to see them so uneasy, like schoolchildren called before the headmaster. Violent death had found the chink in their armour. They knew, of course; that was obvious.

  Ted waited until they had found themselves chairs, then cleared his throat quietly.

  “I think you know why we’ve called all the staff together,” he began, “Mrs Martin has had an unfortunate accident —”

  Miss Pink, appearing to stare vaguely at the assembly from behind her spectacles, was watching their faces intently. She saw horror, doubt, and frowns that indicated — what? Joe Slade glared at the floor, Nell’s face was set, her eyebrows raised a little giving her an air of whimsical surprise. Sally looked as if she might cry, Linda appeared angry as, indeed, did Rowland Hughes. Lithgow’s eyes widened like those of a startled colt. Wright wiped his face with his hand and Miss Pink looked at him a little longer than the rest, thinking he appeared the most affected — but no, it had hit them all. It was the shock. In a climbing community one is constantly aware that one of the climbers may be killed; the fact that people also die, and more of them, in road accidents, is forgotten.

  Ted finished speaking and there was a long silence. No one moved.

  “Are there any questions?” he asked.

  “It sounds heartless,” Sally said, “but — how does this affect us? I mean, should we do anything?”

  “I don’t think any of you will need to attend the inquest,” he assured them, “it’s up to you, of course, w
hat you do about the funeral — if it’s held here. Martin will return and stay in the village —” Relief flickered across several faces. “Where you will be affected and, indeed, the reason why we needed to see you together and formally, is in relation to the Press. They’ll be around anyway this week as soon as they hear the explosives are being evacuated — the police haven’t a hope of keeping that quiet. Miss Pink and I are concerned that no one should speak to reporters about our own particular trouble, but will refer them to ourselves. The matter isn’t going to be hushed up, but for the sake of our work here it’s better that the papers should have only one account of the accident, and that from the Board. Is that understood?”

  His tone was even but held no possibility of dissent. There was an affirmative murmur. He thanked them and they filed out. Unlike children they didn’t break into excited chatter as soon as the door was closed. No sound came from the hall. The directors looked at each other.

  “Well,” he said, “I suppose one wouldn’t expect it to go any differently.”

  “I think they were dumbfounded.”

  “Odd, isn’t it? She was asking for trouble: drinking, driving, then driving that particular car — and when it happens, they’re shocked. Death, especially violent death, is never anticipated by youth. You’re not surprised, are you?”

  “No, but I’m puzzled. How long before we know the result of the post mortem?”

  “I said I’d ring Llewelyn — he’s the police surgeon — at five. Are you thinking of suicide?”

  “I don’t think anyone would set out to deliberately drown themselves that way but it’s possible that she parked the car facing the sea, took a lot of pills, tranquillisers perhaps, and some drink, then after a while she took the handbrake off.”

  Neither of them observed that Bett Martin had shown no suicidal tendencies to their knowledge. In fact, both were starting to be weary of the subject.

  “Shall we go for a stroll?” he asked.

  But she wanted to supervise the removal of Martin’s furniture. Sally Hughes had found a van and it was coming at two o’clock.