Miss Pink Investigates Part One

by Gwen Moffat

  ‘Do you keep your medical records locked up?’

  ‘Why? They’re in a filing cabinet in the surgery,’ he wait on slowly. ‘That’s kept locked, along with the dispensary. You’re not suggesting someone got a look at her record?’

  ‘Can I see your surgery?’

  He hesitated, then conducted her across the hall to a door which he opened with a key on his ring. Miss Pink ran a practised eye down the jamb. It was unmarked.

  It was the usual surgery of a country doctor: an old flat desk, a couch with a dark blanket, a filing cabinet, glazed bookcases. The window was discreetly netted across its lower half. She crossed the room and lifted the curtain.

  ‘Your putty needs a coat of paint.’

  ‘It’s fresh; the house was broken into when we were out one day in October—’ He trailed off and stared at her. She looked from him to the woods at the back of the house. ‘They threw a brick,’ he went on in a dull voice. ‘It was lying here on the carpet.’

  ‘Had they taken anything?’

  ‘Nothing, and there were no prints on the window-frame. The police said that if they came in, they’d worn gloves. The first thing we thought of was the drugs but the dispensary was still locked and nothing was missing anywhere else. My wife had left her handbag on her bed but her wallet hadn’t been touched. There were fourteen pounds in it.’

  ‘Was the filing cabinet locked?’

  ‘I don’t know. Everyone was concentrating on the drugs, you see, then going round the house to see if anything was missing. We were so confused and worried. Who would have thought of the records?’

  A woman put her head round the door, smiling. ‘Coffee?’ she asked.

  He introduced his wife and they returned to the drawing room where Amy Bright said as she passed a cup of coffee to Miss Pink: ‘Why would vandals be interested in medical records?’ She smiled at her husband reassuringly. ‘I heard you mention the records and I wondered at the time: the hole that brick made was awfully near the window-catch although the catch was closed when we got home. I wondered if anyone had actually entered the surgery but when we found nothing was missing I forgot about it.’

  Amy Bright was a large placid woman with wiry hair and an open face. Miss Pink regarded her thoughtfully and asked: ‘Was Peta comfortably off?’

  ‘She hadn’t a bean,’ Amy said in surprise. ‘She had to ask Mossop for her bus fare to Carnthorpe.’

  ‘You can’t know that,’ Bright protested, then turned to Miss Pink. ‘But there was no money there to pay a blackmailer; I’m sure you’re on the wrong track.’

  ‘Peta being blackmailed!’ his wife exclaimed in astonishment. ‘But that’s quite impossible. I mean, blackmail’s a long-term thing, isn’t it? A matter of small regular sums, or rather, discreet sums geared to the victim’s income, and kind of jollying the victim along, never pushing him too hard? But you see, Peta was hopelessly unpredictable: no money, no chance of even donating little sums, and always on the verge of hysteria—’

  ‘My dear!’ Her husband was shocked.

  ‘But you can blackmail for reasons other than financial,’ Miss Pink pointed out. ‘Perhaps the blackmailer wanted something else from her—that is, if she was being blackmailed. Since she was neurotic is it possible that she was being used in some way—a way which had nothing to do with money?’

  But they looked at her in bewilderment: two rather simple nice people to whom the thought of using a human being was outside their comprehension.

  *

  Miss Pink went back to Sandale. It was eleven o’clock and a thin drizzle was falling when she knocked at the door of Thornbarrow. She shifted her feet on the damp slates and observed that there was little wind; the smoke from Harper’s chimney drifted down the dale, blue against the trees.

  The door opened and Lucy Fell regarded the visitor vacantly. Behind her a gramophone was playing the music from Delibes’ Sylvia. Miss Pink beamed. ‘Good morning! Coming on to rain. I hope I’m not disturbing you?’ She was poised to step indoors. ‘I came to thank you for a very pleasant evening.’

  Lucy smiled stiffly. ‘Won’t you come in, Miss Pink? I was just about to have coffee. You’ll join me?’

  ‘That’s very kind of you.’

  ‘Let me take your anorak. Why, it’s quite wet. . . .’

  ‘I’ve been walking. I’ll just take my boots off.’

  ‘Oh, there’s no need.’

  Lucy turned the music low. This morning she was in fuchsia pants and a cream Guernsey. She still seemed tense but she wasn’t hostile. Miss Pink heard her filling a kettle in the kitchen. When she came back to the fire she sat down facing the window.

  ‘Did you have a good walk?’

  ‘Passable. It was a trifle damp. Is Mr Wren at Coneygarth?’

  She followed the other’s gaze. The window looked up the green past Coneygarth to Shivery Knott silhouetted, softly now because of the drizzle, on the skyline.

  ‘You’ve not seen him this morning?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘I hesitated to call; I thought he might still be asleep.’

  The kettle started to sing and Lucy excused herself and went to the kitchen. When she returned, Miss Pink took a cup of coffee and a brandy snap and regarded her hostess benignly. ‘How many anonymous letters have you had?’ she asked.

  Lucy tensed and her eyes had the flat slate stare of last night. In the silence Miss Pink thought she heard the gutters start to run.

  ‘How many people have had them?’ Lucy asked coolly.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a tragedy when this kind of thing happens: all the neighbours watching each other, and that terrible dread of the postman, and the relief when the letters are all normal. We had it in Cornwall.’

  ‘Was the writer found?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘The name would mean nothing to you; it was a sick person of course.’

  ‘Why “of course”?’

  ‘They always are.’ Miss Pink was faintly condescending.

  ‘Not always,’ Lucy said.

  ‘These are certainly written in a firm hand,’ Miss Pink admitted, ‘but not many people are totally mad; the inspiration is diseased but the graphology’s normal. I see no inconsistency.’

  ‘What I’m wondering,’ Lucy was smiling, ‘is who sent you the letter and what it said.’

  ‘No one wrote to me.’ Miss Pink sounded petulant. ‘I’ve only just come here. I’ve been shown a letter but naturally I can’t divulge its contents.’

  Lucy’s fingers smoothed the muscles of her throat.

  ‘It was the work of a cultured person,’ Miss Pink added.

  The other sighed with exasperation. ‘You’ve worked me into such a state of curiosity that it’s almost unbearable.’ She spoke as if she were humouring her elderly visitor rather than raging with inquisitiveness. ‘For heavens’ sake, who had a letter? One of the Rumneys—or have you visited someone else this morning?’

  ‘Peta had letters as well.’

  Lucy caught her breath and her eyes were shocked. ‘Are you sure?’ Miss Pink nodded seriously. ‘I didn’t believe it,’ Lucy said, ‘I thought she’d made it up, as she did some telephone calls she had a long time ago: when she had a breakdown. She said she had telephone calls this time but no one thought there was anything in it. How can you know for sure? She did tell us she’d had an anonymous letter, then said she’d lost it. But you don’t lose anonymous letters; you take them to the police or you burn them.’ She shivered. Miss Pink looked at the fire. Lucy said, with false gaiety, ‘Let’s talk about something pleasant.’

  But Miss Pink was not to be side-tracked. ‘Peta didn’t say what was in her letter?’

  ‘No. I said, we didn’t believe her. I don’t believe it now.’ She stared at the other defiantly.

  ‘But there are letters going around,’ Miss Pink persisted.

  Lucy shrugged. ‘I didn’t know that until you told me. If I’d known that other people were getting letter
s, then I might have been more sympathetic towards Peta. Denis was inclined to believe her because he knew about mine. Possibly I was trying to deny their existence even to myself: to block them out because I found them so revolting.’

  ‘Were your letters an attempt at blackmail?’

  ‘Why, no; I don’t think so.’

  ‘Demands for money are usually unmistakable.’

  ‘I had one letter; it didn’t ask for money.’

  ‘Were you threatened?’

  ‘The whole thing was a threat. It was signed “A Watcher”. That was ghastly.’ She was deeply disturbed and pressed her hands over her eyes while she took several deep breaths. ‘It accused me of burying a baby in the garden,’ she said.

  She got up and went to the table for cigarettes. The match-flame trembled. With her back to the fire she inhaled, then turned quickly, apologised and offered her guest a cigarette.

  ‘One thinks one is so mature,’ she said, sitting down again, her eyes rather wild, ‘but there are some things which rip the mask away.’

  ‘A sick person,’ Miss Pink repeated.

  ‘Of course you’re right; I’ve been repressing it. But it makes me feel better to know that I’m not on my own. As I said, I had only one letter and that must have been all of three weeks ago; I’d tried to forget but the mornings, before the postman comes, are dreadful. How many people are getting them—and where do you come in?’

  ‘I don’t know how many victims there are. I know about it because Zeke Rumney had one.’

  There was a pause as Lucy considered this. ‘And what was he accused of?’

  ‘You’ve got two anonymous letter writers in the dale—’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Rumney’s letter said that Peta was getting anonymous letters.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s quite simple. One of the victims of the first writer wants the criminal exposed without exposing herself—or himself.’

  ‘That’s logical. Why did you come to me?’

  ‘It could have been you who wrote to Rumney. You’re a likely victim. Your way of life could upset, say, someone with a Puritan mind and then, if they were after money—’ Miss Pink shrugged. It was a compliment to one who was well-favoured financially.

  ‘No money was asked for,’ Lucy repeated dully. She looked round the room and nodded slowly. ‘It’s all based on jealousy, isn’t it? And I suppose, to that kind of mind, I do seem to flaunt my—advantages.’ She looked at her rings which she wore even now, in the morning. ‘I always feel they’re safer on my hands,’ she said apologetically, ‘and I suppose I’m vain. . . . I do like the good things of life and if you’ve got a little money and no family, no one at all to leave it to, what do you do? Let it accumulate and watch it lose its value? It won’t be long before I’m fifty, and my looks are starting to go; in five years time I won’t be able to enjoy my money, and I’m so happy in London at the ballet and the opera and all the latest shows. . . . And I adore clothes and I don’t look too bad in them; naturally I buy the best—but really, it’s only my party things that are expensive. As for entertaining, plenty of people in our position eat out once a week; I can do a better meal at home on half the money. Oh, granted my friends are hard on my drinks but, so what? I give a party—I don’t mean last night, that was just drinks—and I like to serve champagne—a few bottles anyway. Why not? I suppose that’s thought vulgar in Sandale, but I notice no one’s backward at drinking it.’ Her eyes clouded. ‘I wonder if some bastard was drinking my champagne that night and planning that letter at the same time?’

  ‘What night was that?’

  ‘My last party, in September; the time Peta got drunk and made an exhibition of herself.’ She grimaced. ‘She could have written the letters,’ she said lightly, ‘even the one to herself. It could account for the murder, couldn’t it?’

  Chapter Nine

  George Harper was holding a fish slice when he opened his door, and the appearance of domesticity suited him.

  ‘Were you preparing your lunch?’ Miss Pink asked mildly, in no more mind for obstruction than she had been with Lucy.

  ‘No, not at all. Won’t you come in?’ He stood back and she stepped straight into his living room. It was raining quite hard now, and the day had darkened, but Harper had his light on and a good fire going on the open hearth. It was a single-storey cottage, modernised, but with a view to only temporary use. There was a lot of shabby chintz and a smell of paraffin. Deal bookshelves held a collection of tired paperbacks and on the window-sill was the usual holiday trove of rams’ skulls, bits of rock and driftwood. Harper seemed to have put no mark on the place.

  ‘I came to ask you about your barn,’ she ventured.

  ‘The barn?’

  ‘The building next door; it does belong to the Daltons, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, the barn! Yes, I keep my car in it.’

  ‘Rumney said the Daltons might be willing to sell, and I understand there’s planning permission.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘To be converted into a house.’

  ‘That would take some doing, wouldn’t it? Why don’t you offer to buy this place?’

  ‘I didn’t know it was for sale.’

  ‘I don’t know that it is, but if you want to buy a house it would save you a bomb if you bought one ready-made instead of trying to make a house out of that barn. There’s nothing inside: just rotting floors.’

  Miss Pink looked anxious. ‘Would this cottage be worth buying in your opinion?’

  ‘That depends what they’d want for it but it’s got everything; you’d never think it from the outside, would you? There’s a bath and toilet, electricity, a telephone. . . . Look, I’ll show you.’

  He was like a proud housewife and she accompanied him through all three of the very ordinary rooms producing murmurs of admiration as he exhibited their innocuous features. The bathroom held nothing other than the usual three-piece suite except for soap and a towel but, ‘Panelled’, he said of the bath, drawing her attention to some bulging black hardboard. She expressed astonishment. In the bedroom hardboard had been used again for a scalloped pelmet above draped curtains in pink nylon net. ‘A lady’s room, really,’ he told her, looking embarrassed, ‘Caroline said it was a joke.’ The bedclothes had been roughly pulled up under a white candlewick spread. The wardrobe door was closed and there were two suit-cases on its top. There was no dressing table but a small green chest of drawers which bore a grubby comb, a shaving mirror and a crumpled handkerchief which he crammed in his pocket.

  ‘There’s not a lot of room,’ she remarked dubiously, returning to the fire.

  ‘You can put people up in here; this settee opens out to a double bed. Caroline slept on it and she said it was very comfortable.’

  ‘Ah yes, Caroline; where is she?’

  ‘She left after breakfast: to go back to town.’ He looked sad. ‘She’s all I’ve got; her mother died when she was five and we only had the one.’ He patted a cushion absently. ‘Seems a long time ago now.’ His lips stretched in a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. ‘You’ve got to go on, haven’t you? And I had Caroline; she’s a good girl.’

  ‘And so beautiful,’ Miss Pink said warmly.

  ‘Everyone says that. It makes me very proud.’

  ‘Young Jackson Wren was bowled over like a rabbit.’

  He shook his head vehemently. ‘He’d be no good for her, that fellow; no character, nothing, not the right sort for my girl at all.’

  ‘I don’t think she was so attracted by the man as by the fact that he’s a climber. It’s the glamour—’

  ‘Oh no. No. I wasn’t having that.’ He saw she was amused. ‘I know all you people climb mountains and think nothing to it but you’re experts; but my girl; it was another world to her—’

  ‘That’s the attraction,’ she murmured.

  ‘—and far too dangerous. Why, you’ve only got to look at her! She’s not built for any rough stuff. I was
n’t having her going up no rocks. . . . I’ve seen them, you know, I’m not ignorant—’ he glared at her in his sincerity, ‘I seen them on the telly; I’m not talking out the back of me neck. She agreed with me. I said, “You’ve got these pictures to pose for on Monday,” I said. “How’s it going to look if you’re all over cuts and bruises?” I said. “You can’t model nothink like that, my girl.” Of course, I didn’t give a damn about the modelling, did I? It was the danger I was thinking of, but when I said “bruises” that did it.’ He chuckled and nodded in remembered triumph, then sobered. ‘Only child, you see; you know how it is?’

  Miss Pink said placatingly, ‘In any case, he wasn’t really a suitable person for her.’

  ‘I’ve got no time for him,’ he agreed firmly, then, almost unwillingly: ‘Someone broke in here last night, when we was across at Mrs Fell’s—’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Through the pantry window.’ He opened the door to a cubby hole he hadn’t shown her until now. Sure enough, there was no glass in a tiny window pane.

  ‘Put his hand in and undid the latch,’ he explained.

  ‘Was anything stolen?’

  ‘No; there was nothing to steal.’

  ‘What about Caroline’s things?’

  ‘He was after money—and it wasn’t the first time. It was Wren, of course; he’s been hanging around the place ever since I came. If I didn’t see him, I heard him in the woods; people make more noise than sheep.’

  ‘What makes you so sure it’s Wren?’

  He shot a glance at her. ‘I did think it was campers at first; that was back in September when someone tried to force the door and I changed all the locks. Then a week ago I caught Wren up here in the dark. I didn’t like that. He said he was coming back from a walk but I’d seen him across at Coneygarth just before dusk. Then there was last night.’ He smiled at her but not pleasantly. ‘So it wasn’t just because I think climbing’s dangerous that I didn’t want my girl to have anything to do with him.’

  ‘I see. It would have been a terrible day for climbing anyway; she’d have got soaked. In fact, the best way to put people off for ever is to send them out on a day like this.’