by Gwen Moffat
Grannie asked politely: ‘Do you think you’ll like the Lakes?’
‘I like them already,’ Miss Pink pointed out. ‘I’ve often come here on holiday; I’ve even walked down Sandale, but I’ve never spent any length of time here.’
‘I don’t think you’ll have to now,’ Grannie said.
Rumney turned his head inquiringly to his mother and Miss Pink asked carefully, ‘What makes you think that, Mrs Rumney?’
The old lady looked at a spot over the visitor’s shoulder. ‘You’ll soon find who killed Peta Mossop,’ she said.
There was a short silence and then Arabella said, ‘I thought Miss Pink had come here to try to find out who was stealing our sheep?’
Rumney stirred. ‘I’ll have to go and look at Penelope in quarter of an hour.’ Miss Pink’s brows rose. ‘My cow,’ he explained. He looked at the old lady. ‘Mother is very perceptive. . . .’ Grannie watched the flames, her face expressionless. ‘I’ve only spoken to Miss Pink on the phone,’ he reminded his family, ‘so she doesn’t know what’s been happening: not the latest developments.’
‘You’ve found out who stole the sheep?’ Miss Pink asked politely.
‘Oh no. No. By the latest developments I meant the post mortem and the inquest on Peta Mossop. I told you that there’d been an accident at Storms’ bend; you’ll know the place if you know the dale. Well, it wasn’t an accident.’
Silence.
‘It was murder,’ Arabella said.
Miss Pink frowned, unable for a moment to bridge the gap between stolen sheep and murder.
‘The inquest was adjourned,’ Rumney said. ‘Her face was bruised and the post mortem found that the bruise was made some time before death—not long, but it didn’t coincide with the blow on the skull that killed her. That was caused by some blunt instrument. And they think she was put in the ditch late at night, or rather, in the early hours of Saturday morning because there wasn’t much frost on the coat, and the fields were white. She was definitely put there; she’d died somewhere else and been moved—something to do with post mortem staining? And then the wound had bled the wrong way, you see, for how the body was lying in the ditch.’
Miss Pink followed this attentively but Grannie could have been listening to a report on the sheep sales.
‘On Friday night,’ Rumney went on, ‘Peta was at Lucy Fell’s place—that’s the house opposite, down past our barn. Lucy’s a widow and friendly with Denis Noble who was with her that night. Peta turned up after dinner, uninvited and rather drunk, and left about ten-thirty. They seem to have been the last people to see her alive. Mossop saw her go out about nine-thirty but didn’t see her come back. The police grilled him for forty-eight hours—he says—but apparently they couldn’t shake his story.’
‘What’s that?’ Miss Pink asked. ‘In detail?’
‘He closed early: around ten-thirty, and then he says he checked that there were no cigarettes burning anywhere and went to bed. Peta wasn’t around but he didn’t think anything of that.’ His eyes held Miss Pink’s. ‘It’s a somewhat irregular household. He’d locked up but she had a key, of course. She takes—took—sleeping pills and was a late riser. They had separate rooms and when the doctor and I arrived on Saturday morning after finding the body, he didn’t even know she was missing.’
‘Who gave you all these details?’ Miss Pink asked, merely for the record; she was a countrywoman.
‘It gets around, and the police have questioned most, if not all of us.’
Miss Pink regarded him with a singular lack of expression. Arabella, who had been dying to interrupt, succeeded. ‘But you said you asked Miss Pink to come here to see if she could trace the sheep. Peta’s murder can’t have anything to do with that!’
Rumney said heavily, ‘Mossop’s got a cattle wagon, and very good dogs. You know Sheepbone Moss?’ Miss Pink signified that she did. ‘Our sheep go up by Gathering Hill and right along the watershed above Rannerdale; they can—and do—go as far as the pass at Whirl Howe. You could bring them down off Whirl Howe and into a wagon hidden in the forest below the pass.’
‘What makes you suspect this Mossop?’
‘Apart from his knowing the fells and sheep—he’s got a few himself—he’s dishonest. He was up in court last week: stolen whisky was found on his premises. I don’t necessarily suspect Mossop; it’s just that whoever’s stealing our sheep knows our fells. I can’t think of any of our neighbours I dislike as much as Mossop.’
Miss Pink considered this. ‘You think there is a connection?’
‘I’ve had a curious letter.’ Even his mother evinced interest as he extracted it from the pocket of his disreputable jacket, got up and, skirting the cats, handed it to the visitor. It was printed in regular characters on blue Basildon Bond paper and read simply:
peta was getting anonymous letters.
Miss Pink studied this and said, ‘It does seem odd to receive an anonymous letter about anonymous letters; the implication being that there are two letter writers: a “good” one trying to expose an evil one? Did you keep the envelope?’
He shook his head. ‘That must have been cleared away. The address was printed in the same way—it caught my eye—and the postmark was Carnthorpe.’
‘Do you know anyone else who’s had similar letters?’
None of them knew of anyone.
‘Have the police seen this?’ she asked.
‘No. I reckon everything’s related; sheep stealing’s big business nowadays, and if Mossop was the villain, it’s an odd coincidence that his wife should have been murdered. Who sent anonymous letters to her and what did they say? Who sent this letter to me? I’d rather not bring the police into it. We’re a bit clannish in Sandale,’ he explained, ‘and sheep stealing’s not the kind of thing you want noised abroad.’ She nodded; she’d lived most of her life in sheep country. ‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘suppose it isn’t Mossop taking the sheep—which there’s no proof of anyway, any more than there’s proof of his killing his wife? They could have been stolen by some other neighbour.’ He thought about this. ‘That would be horrible.’
Grannie said regretfully, ‘It’s a great pity it couldn’t be someone from outside.’
‘He knows our fells too well, Mother.’
‘It was right not to bring the police in.’ She nodded to herself. ‘We’ve always settled our own affairs.’
Miss Pink caught Arabella’s eye. The girl said: ‘Sheep stealing, murder and anonymous letters: all in one tiny dale; there must be some connection. Where do you start?’
Rumney turned to her. ‘What story will you tell people to account for your being here?’
‘I shall be looking for a cottage,’ she said firmly. ‘Is there a ruin which I might spend some time poking around?’
‘There’s an old barn across the beck that belongs to some people called Dalton who own Burblethwaite. They applied for planning permission to convert it but I’m not sure what the position is about that. You could go and have a look at the place and even inquire of the tenant. Burblethwaite is let to a fellow called Harper.’ Arabella giggled and he went on good-humouredly, ‘I must attend to Penelope. Arabella will tell you about Harper, or rather, his visitor; I daresay she’ll do better at it than me.’
He went out. Miss Pink looked at Arabella and thought what an expressive little face it was, far from conventionally beautiful with its broad nose and wide mouth but interesting to watch.
‘Mr Harper is a visitor from Surrey,’ Grannie intoned.
‘Oh, he’s not interesting, Gran—but that’s the point—’ Arabella turned to Miss Pink eagerly. ‘An old man—’ she began, and checked herself immediately, disconcerted, ‘well, middle-aged, but so dull! He had to sell his business because of the economic situation and he came here for a rest. He’s completely inarticulate and he doesn’t do anything but potter in the garden: digging up the Daltons’ bulbs and putting them back again furtively as if he’d found a grave, and going for little walks up to Dal
ehead—not farther because he says the mist comes down like a stone! And he’s terrified out of his life of burglars. Someone tried to break in at Burblethwaite and he had all the locks changed: front and back, even the coal shed! He’s got something called mortice deadlocks now.’
‘They have a lot of burglaries in the south,’ Grannie put in. ‘He told me. He’s worried about the stuff in the, place.’
‘Oh, Gran! An old television set and George Harper’s transistor! He’s so obsessed with the thought of campers breaking in, he’s forgotten it’s winter time and all the campers have gone home. And this is the astonishing thing—’ she turned to Miss Pink with saucer eyes, ‘here’s this funny little guy, who’s scared of his own shadow, entertaining the most marvellous person: well, what you can see of her as she goes by. . . . She drives a Lotus Europa—that is, she owns it; she can’t drive.’ She pursed her lips primly. ‘It’s O.K. doing a hundred on freeways if you’re very beautiful, because you can’t do any harm and you won’t even get a ticket from the traffic cops, just a proposition if they’ve got the nerve, but to do fifty up Sandale lane is not on. Funny,’ she mused, ‘George Harper can’t drive either.’
‘I take it,’ Miss Pink put in, ‘that you mean they’re bad drivers as opposed to non-drivers.’
Arabella grinned. ‘I exaggerate,’ she said carelessly. ‘Oh, this gorgeous lady can drive after a fashion, and one can forgive a lot, that is, until she hits one of our sheep, or a person on Storms’ bend.’ She shuddered.
‘What is her relationship to Mr Harper?’
‘Oh, she couldn’t be his wife!’
‘His daughter?’
‘Why, that never occurred to me. You’ll think we’re obsessed with sex in Sandale, but we all thought . . . Of course, that’s far more reasonable. Poor George, what would he have to attract this kind of girl? I don’t mean to be rude but she is lovely and she wears the most gorgeous clothes.’ She looked down at her skirt. ‘No matter what I pay for an outfit, I can never look elegant. My mother does, and so does Lucy Fell; it’s a matter of height. This lady at Burblethwaite is built like a racehorse: all legs and a small head and a beautiful mane of chestnut hair. I saw her walking up the outrake before they went driving this morning. She moves like a model. Probably that’s what she is.’
‘And how long is she here for?’
‘No one knows. No one knows anything. She arrived some days ago and since then they’ve gone out in her car in the mornings and not come back till after dark. George creeps across for the milk and Zeke’s far too gentlemanly to ask questions. I go down for the milk but I’m sure George hides round the corner until I’ve gone. The girl hasn’t crossed the bridge to our side since she’s been here, except in her car, and they never stop. And George gives a feeble grin and kind of contracts inside his sheepskin as if he’s embarrassed. I guess that’s why we thought it was a sexual relationship.’
‘How many people are there in this hamlet?’
‘Besides us and George Harper, there’s Lucy Fell at Thornbarrow, and above the green there’s Coneygarth which is ours and is let to a guy called Jackson Wren—’ her face was momentarily blank. ‘It’s Lucy who’s friendly with Denis Noble. He makes pet food and Zeke says he’s not doing so well. He’s got a house just above the Throat and his wife is an alcoholic so we don’t see much of her.’
‘Your uncle said Peta Mossop was drunk at Lucy Fell’s house on the evening before she died. Do you know anything about that?’
‘Yes, well, Zeke leaves out the best gossip so there are big gaps. Peta had an affair with Denis. I can’t think why; he’s old enough to be her grandfather and they’d known each other for years; you wouldn’t think there was much mystery left. Anyway, Lucy gave a party—in September, wasn’t it Gran?—and Peta seduced Denis. After that and for several weeks they had a wild affair and then they cooled it, just like that. Denis and Lucy went away to London last week and came back and then they started their little Friday night dinners again (everyone knew about it; all very comic opera), and Peta walked in on them. Now you ask me, I don’t know what the scene was about—if there was a scene. It couldn’t have been anything important. Perhaps the inspector told Zeke, or Lucy did. Did he say, Gran?’
‘Peta was getting telephone calls.’
‘Oh those!’ Arabella turned back to Miss Pink. ‘She had a breakdown three years ago and she said she had telephone calls then. Afterwards she said she made it up. This was the same kind of thing.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Why, it must have been. It was obvious she’d gone over the edge again: imagining nasty people threatening her on the phone. She was paranoid.’
‘But someone was threatening her.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Someone thought Peta was threatened,’ Miss Pink elaborated, ‘otherwise why write to your uncle saying so? In any case, it’s logical to assume she was being threatened, since she was murdered, isn’t it?’
Chapter Six
A fire of coal and birch logs burned in the room allocated to Miss Pink. The little iron grate was surrounded by tiles, each painted with a different wild flower. The wallpaper featured tiny floral sprigs, and the quilt was patchwork. Rag rugs covered the floor which was composed of huge and slightly undulating planks with iron studs for nails.
She put out the light and went to the window. After some minutes her eyes became accustomed to the dark but there were no other lights visible, only the suspicion of a glimmer down on the right where, she suspected, Rumney attended Penelope.
She felt curiously at a loose end and wondered, as Arabella had wondered, where she should begin; particularly since the beginning was farther back than the finding of Peta’s body. Anonymous letters were more Miss Pink’s style than sheep stealing, which was really Rumney’s department. The murder was a police matter; she was hardly in a position to grill people for forty-eight hours, as was supposed to have happened to Mossop. So her focal point should be the letters, or rather, the letter, for only Rumney’s was a fact; if his had been written by an unstable person, then those to which it referred could well be fantasy.
She took it from her pocket. peta was getting anonymous letters. Good printing, concise and accurate. ‘Anonymous’ spelt correctly. The communication of a literate person and perhaps a cultured one. There appeared to be no attempt to disguise the hand, only the small gesture of capitals instead of lower case, but surely a person intelligent enough to pen this statement would guess that printing could be traced?
*
‘Who were Peta Mossop’s friends?’
In Donegal tweed and a shirt in eau de nil, Miss Pink sipped Tio Pepe in Rumney’s office. Once the parlour, this was now utilitarian with an old rolltop desk holding letters, bills, copies of the Farmer’s Weekly and several editions of The Shepherd’s Guide.
‘I don’t know that she had any friends,’ Rumney said slowly. ‘The police asked who disliked her, which seems more to the point. Friends. Let’s think about it. There’s Noble, of course; the police questioned him for a long time, although not as long as Mossop. Noble could have felt bad about the way he’d treated her but that wouldn’t make him feel friendly towards her; irritation would be more his attitude. As for Lucy Fell: she must have hated Peta; Peta was the opposition: the younger woman challenging the establishment. Jackson Wren? He had nothing to do with her.’ His mouth snapped shut and Miss Pink didn’t comment. After a while he took a deep breath. ‘You’ve hit on something,’ he admitted—as if she’d spoken after all, ‘in fact, Wren is the real reason that I asked you to come to Sandale.’ She nodded; she’d thought that the invitation was odd and that subsequent explanations kept something back. ‘Wren knew my sheep were missing before I told him,’ Rumney went on, ‘and he was embarrassed when I picked him up on it. But that exchange occurred the moment before we came across Peta’s body, and I’ve not mentioned it since. I wasn’t happy about the situation. Arabella’s keen on the fellow, d’you see. She
says it’s over, but you know these youngsters. . . . I’d like to think it’s over, even without the sheep business, but I can’t be sure. He wants to start a pony trekking centre but he’s got no money; Arabella’s attraction for him is financial. But there, you must judge when you see him—and perhaps Arabella will talk to you; she’s very subdued over it with us. But there’s something odd about Wren; he’s shifty. He’s a local man but he’s been away from the valley for a long time. He’s a drifter: one of those who can turn his hand to anything, but won’t; lazy and more than a bit greedy but, as I said, you must judge.’
‘Short cuts are necessary sometimes,’ she murmured. ‘How does he come to be occupying your cottage?’
He looked rueful. ‘He convinced me that he was hardworking and ambitious. He’d live there rent-free, he said, and modernise the place: put in a ring main, dig drains, build a septic tank. Eventually he would lease land from me for grazing his ponies.’ Rumney shook his head. ‘He’s glib; that’s how he fascinated Arabella: with talk, but she’s got to find out about him the hard way.’
‘Why haven’t you given him notice to quit?’
‘He’s only been at Coneygarth a few months; before I’d got his measure Arabella arrived from the States and took to him immediately. If I’d sent him packing then, she’d have gone with him—Mother saw that. But he knows my patience is wearing thin, and now may be the time to do something about it except that I don’t know how things stand between him and Arabella.’
‘I wouldn’t give him notice at the moment if I were you. So you think there might be a connection between him and Mossop where the sheep stealing’s concerned?’
