Miss Pink Investigates Part One

by Gwen Moffat

  ‘We missed her,’ Miss Pink said.

  *

  Lavender, in black with pearls, smiled tightly. ‘Have you had a good day?’ she asked.

  ‘Quite pleasant, thank you.’ Miss Pink was equable.

  ‘But you didn’t see Madge.’ There was an infinitesimal hesitation before the name as if she didn’t like pronouncing it. From behind the bar Hamlyn regarded them both with what might be trepidation.

  ‘We missed her,’ Miss Pink said heavily. ‘Are you feeling better?’

  ‘I’m fair. I’m afraid I’m always affected by tension. As Kenneth says,’ she looked innocently at Hamlyn, ‘I shouldn’t have come to Skye. There would have been tension anyway—with him climbing every day, but it would have been even worse if I’d stayed at home.’

  The colonel said stiffly, ‘Non-climbing wives have a great deal to put up with. It’s not dangerous really, y’know; much more dangerous crossing the road.’

  ‘I’d feel so much happier if he took a proper guide,’ Lavender went on. ‘I know Madge Fraser has some certificates but so had that fellow Watkins, and no one could have been more vicious than him. Except a woman. And why has she gone up to the waterfall anyway? I know Vera has suspicions.’

  Hamlyn said, ‘I really don’t think you should express yourself in that vein, ma’am; it might do a great deal of harm if it reached the wrong ears. Press, for instance. Don’t you agree, Miss Pink?’

  She roused herself from what appeared to have been a stupor. ‘Oh, no doubt.’ She was vacuous. ‘She must have travelled at quite a speed though. On the ridge, I mean.’ She beamed at him. ‘Have you been out today, colonel?’

  In his relief at her turning the conversation, he became verbose. ‘I was cutting the grass this morning, and setting traps for those moles, but after lunch I was allowed to go out on the loch for a bit of sport. Hunt was out too. You’re having mackerel fillets with fennel tonight.’ He looked smug, then anxious. ‘You won’t be dining on toast, ma’am?’ he asked of Lavender.

  ‘Mackerel’s so rich.’

  ‘The fennel takes care of that.’

  ‘What is to follow?’ Miss Pink asked frantically, but then Maynard ran down the stairs and entered the room. He was followed by Betty Lindsay and the conversation remained—innocently and without contrivances—on food.

  But Lavender was not to be escaped so easily. After a delicious dinner with venison following the mackerel, Miss Pink was strolling on the colonel’s shaven if bumpy lawns when a figure came towards her lit eerily by the Northern Lights.

  ‘One can’t stay out,’ Miss Pink warned. ‘The midges are bad.’

  Lavender fell into step beside her. She was smoking and Miss Pink leaned gratefully into the smoke. When she spoke, the other’s voice was surprisingly cool and serious.

  ‘What is Kenneth hiding?’ she asked.

  ‘Why don’t you ask him?’

  ‘I have and he won’t tell me. It’s something to do with Madge, isn’t it?’

  ‘You heard that altercation before breakfast yesterday.’

  Lavender ignored this. ‘It’s something to do with Monday night. And Madge. What does she know?’

  Into her voice had crept the familiar ghoulish note. Miss Pink looked round the dark lawns and back at the lighted windows.

  ‘When did your husband leave you on Monday evening?’

  ‘There was a lot of Monday evening. When, between six and midnight?’

  ‘What makes you think he went to Largo?’

  In the silence that followed the bats could be heard squeaking, fainter than mice.

  ‘Did Madge say he was at Largo? But how did she know? Ah! She was at Largo and saw someone. No—’ her tone changed, became firmer, ‘—that’s what she says.’ The sharp face turned to Miss Pink, the angles accentuated by the wheeling lights. ‘You know,’ Lavender whispered, ‘it could be Madge; she can pull Kenneth up a climb. She’s immensely strong.’

  Miss Pink took the other’s arm as they moved towards the house. Her voice was low. ‘You may know too much. As Hamlyn says, it could be dangerous. I lock my door at night. You should as well.’

  Lavender stopped abruptly. ‘That’s ridiculous.’ She giggled. ‘We’re hardly young girls.’

  Miss Pink was serious. ‘I know it was a sex crime, but no one knows the motive, do they? Besides, that’s not the point. You could be dangerous in another way.’

  ‘To her?’

  ‘To someone.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  There was a further storm during the night and when morning came the cloud was clamped solid at two thousand feet. The wind was in the south-west and, standing outside the porch after breakfast, Miss Pink remarked to Ken Maynard that it wouldn’t be long before the start of the equinoctial gales. When he didn’t respond, she turned and saw that he was staring thoughtfully through the trees in the direction of Eas Mor, oblivious of her words and the resulting scrutiny.

  His uneasiness was infectious. ‘Shall we stroll up the hill and find out how the traverse went?’ she asked.

  He agreed with alacrity and they put on their boots and went up the drive. Madge owned a white Simca and when she left Glen Shira House she had parked it beside the road at the point where an ill defined path started for the waterfall. They could see the place from the entrance to the grounds but no car was parked there.

  ‘That’s quite logical,’ Miss Pink said after a moment, and as if they had been arguing, which they hadn’t. ‘She must have abandoned the traverse at a point nearer Glen Shira than Sligachan and descended to the tent direct. She could have retreated down one of the corries farther north and walked down the glen.’ Maynard was staring at her and she felt she was gabbling. ‘Let’s go up,’ she said gruffly.

  There seemed to be a tacit agreement that hurry would indicate anxiety: a feeling that it was possible for them to precipitate something; nevertheless, their strides were long and they were breathing hard by the time the tent came in sight. No one was visible, but then they were approaching the back of the tent.

  ‘She’s gone to Sligachan to pick up the car,’ Maynard said, but his companion was silent as they skirted the guy ropes.

  The tent was closed but on the grass at the entrance were the small day sack which Madge used when climbing, strapped and fastened and lying as if it had just been taken off, a pair of boots and navy-blue socks, the latter partly inside out, again as if she’d just pulled them off and left them lying. There were also two or three aluminium billies, obviously forming a set. Everything was soaked by the rain and the frying pan was brimming with water.

  ‘Should we wake her?’ Maynard whispered.

  Although all the buttons down the front of the tent were unfastened, the flaps were still held together by the small loops at their base slipped over a central tent peg. Miss Pink was eyeing a half-bottle which protruded from under the side of the tent. It held an ounce or two of amber liquid. As she didn’t answer immediately Maynard bent and parted the flaps.

  ‘There’s no one here!’

  ‘She’s gone to Sligachan,’ she said, and felt her stomach contract with tension.

  ‘Look!’ Lifting the nylon loops off the peg, he threw the flaps wide.

  Miss Pink saw a spartan interior: an expanse of ground sheet, a tidily rolled sleeping bag at the back, a big closed rucksack, an old-fashioned biscuit tin and the half-bottle that still contained a little whisky.

  They stood back and surveyed the scene.

  ‘She’s just come down,’ he said, regarding the boots and socks, the day sack which, apart from the rain, still looked as if it had just been swung off its owner’s back except that the concavity which the spine makes in an unframed pack had now filled out.

  ‘Had just come down,’ she corrected.

  His look was hostile but impersonal; his thoughts were not on Miss Pink. ‘She’d just come down,’ he amended, ‘very tired; didn’t even trouble to unfasten the tent properly—oh God!’

  She had been
following her own line of reasoning and his tone shocked her.

  ‘Was someone waiting in the tent?’ He was horrified.

  ‘Most unlikely.’ She became abstracted again. ‘Why the billies? Why start cooking before she’d even opened the tent properly?’

  ‘She didn’t trouble; she needed a drink. That whisky bottle’s too obvious for anything else.’

  ‘She didn’t have any whisky,’ Miss Pink said.

  ‘How on earth do you know?’

  ‘I don’t mean when she came down off the ridge. She didn’t have any the day before, when I was up here. She must have bought another half-bottle at Sligachan when she took the car over. She’s drunk rather a lot, hasn’t she?’

  He wasn’t listening. He was fitting the billies into their ‘nest’. ‘This little lid: the pan is missing that it should fit.’ Carrying the lid, he walked towards the burn.

  ‘She didn’t get water there,’ Miss Pink called, herself making upstream to the point where she remembered Madge emerging on Wednesday morning. There was a faint trod which, after about twenty yards, converged with the bank of the burn. At this point some slabby rock intruded into the moor and the way came unpleasantly close to the edge. The drop was about fifteen feet but a few paces further was the place where Madge must have drawn water: a broken rib of rock dropping in easy steps to a sloping slab some twelve inches above the present level of the burn. As she contemplated this she was joined by Maynard.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he pleaded. ‘That gear there—’ he jerked his head towards the tent, ‘it’s been out all night. Where is she?’

  Unhappily they started to follow the bank downstream, where, in places, the heather actually overhung the short rock walls. Miss Pink crossed the slabby patch and looked back at it from a vantage point. There was a mossy corner below the slab.

  ‘What’s that?’ Maynard was standing above the corner, pointing.

  ‘I can’t see anything.’

  ‘There’s a shoe wedged behind that rock; I’ll go down—’

  He ran back and scrambled into the burn, stumbling over the boulders to below the corner. She watched and waited with a sense of inevitability. He retrieved the object and stood staring at it, water flowing over his boots, then he waded upstream, climbed the bank and came slowly through the heather. The smell of honey was overpowering. He held out a brown sandal with a flat sole.

  ‘It’s hers.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  He turned away and she didn’t press for an answer. They continued down the bank, studying the bed of the stream. After a few yards they saw a light metal pan in the bottom of a pool and, a short distance further, cast like flotsam on a strip of gravel, the second sandal. They didn’t retrieve these but continued to the lip of the great fall where they stopped and regarded the water sliding over the edge.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked hopelessly.

  ‘If we can get into the ravine at all, it will be by way of the left bank; the right one is impossible.’

  ‘You think she’s—’ He gulped air and tried again. ‘You think we ought to go down?’ He looked at the canopy of birch foliage below them. ‘It could be dangerous.’

  But she was already crossing the burn to the left bank. He followed and they made their way round the gouge in the moor to a place where the trees stepped down at the least precipitous angle. They descended through a green gloom, slipping and sliding from trunk to trunk, came to a loose bank of shale above the water, crossed the burn, struggled through saplings on the opposite side, then came back again, the sound of the fall increasing until they could no longer communicate except by signs.

  They stumbled over rounded boulders to the foot of Eas Mor. Miss Pink was in the lead, concentrating on her footing because the rocks were wet with spray and it had occurred to her that to lie here with a broken ankle waiting for rescue, with the fall thundering above her head, would constitute a peculiar form of horror. She looked up and saw dark globules of water, like tipped rubbish, leap out against the sky. She looked down and saw the body.

  *

  The waterfall dropped to a green pool about twenty-five feet wide, and ten feet from the fall the main outlet ran off between two rocks. The body had gone through the rocks and now lay stranded on the slanting shallows beyond.

  It was very cold. The fall made air currents like a wind. Miss Pink moved forward, slipping on the stones. There was little doubt that it was the guide; they recognised the breeches and jersey. She lay face-down and barefooted. When they turned her over the features were unrecognisable, but then it had been a long fall.

  Maynard walked away and sat down. Miss Pink glanced at his back and then examined the body. The limbs were fractured in many places and quite flaccid. She stood up and, for a moment, had the impression that she was deaf because it appeared that the water was falling without sound. She moved away purposefully and Maynard jumped when she touched his shoulder.

  They climbed out of the ravine, the sense of hearing returning as the rush of the fall receded. Now they could distinguish bird calls and the soughing of birches in the breeze. Out on the open moor, Maynard turned to Miss Pink.

  ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘Sit down,’ she said comfortably.

  ‘I suppose you’re right.’ He sat on a heathery ledge and stared at the sea. ‘There’s no hurry.’ Miss Pink said nothing but she was not staring in his hopeless fashion; she was frowning, pondering, and by telepathy, he hit on the subject.

  ‘When did it happen? She’d never slip in the daylight, sober or drunk.’

  ‘There’s no stiffness in the body. In normal conditions you’d expect it to be rigid after twelve hours, but then cold delays rigor; the night temperature and the water could account for the delay.’

  ‘She must have been worn out. She came straight down from the Banachdich pass to the tent.’

  ‘Worn out after that distance?’

  ‘It’s a long way.’

  ‘She’d intended to do the whole ridge.’

  ‘She made a mistake. If she didn’t come off because she was tired, why should she come off? What’s it matter anyway?’

  ‘Then,’ Miss Pink suggested, ‘she came off in that brief storm yesterday afternoon or—later?’ Her voice rose, puzzled. ‘And when she went for water, fell in the burn?’ She frowned at him.

  ‘There was the whisky, don’t forget that. If it was a full bottle when she started, she accounted for most of it. She must have shrugged off her pack, got out of her boots and just sat there in the heather swigging whisky until she felt like eating. She put her sandals on but didn’t trouble to fasten them. That’s dangerous. Then she stumbled on that slabby bit and fell down the mossy corner, probably hitting her head. The burn did the rest. I wonder why she drank so much? Of course, it hasn’t been her week, and having to retreat from the ridge could have been the last straw on top of all the trouble in the glen.’

  This time their thoughts were running on the same lines. He shook his head in a negative gesture. ‘No. She’d never do that!’

  ‘Not deliberate?’

  ‘No. Madge lived for her family. She wouldn’t have understood suicide, let alone have contemplated the thought for herself.’

  ‘I just wondered.’ She sounded meek. ‘The burn looks too low to carry a body to the fall. You’d expect it to jam.’

  ‘It rained.’

  ‘It wasn’t a spate when we came down.’

  ‘There was another storm in the night.’ There was a pause, then he said carefully, ‘Why should she kill herself?’

  ‘Terry’s killer must have suffered.’

  ‘Not if he’s mad.’ He was equable. ‘Madge wasn’t mad.’

  ‘Madness isn’t always obvious, but you’d known her for a long time. . . . You’d seen her under pressure—well, on hard climbs. Surely she wasn’t always cool?’

  ‘She was worried if things got difficult.’ His tone was deliberate. ‘And she was relieved afterwards, like anyone
else—but this is totally irrelevant. Do you think she was a nutter?’

  ‘If she killed herself—’

  ‘She didn’t. She had nothing to do with Terry either.’

  Miss Pink said: ‘Wednesday evening, when you were drinking, you thought Vera turned Madge out of the house because she suspected Madge had something to do with Terry’s death.’

  ‘I was drunk. You said so.’

  ‘You’ve changed your mind?’

  He sighed. ‘Well, I don’t think Madge was having an affair with Hamlyn—why, she only tolerated the old fellow because he was Vera’s husband! Perhaps he’s having an affair with someone else and lied to Vera about her identity; maybe he was just boasting about Madge.’

  ‘Do they share the same room?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Vera and her husband. Do they share a bedroom?’

  ‘Of course they do.’ He stared at her as if she’d been overcome by events. ‘I’d better go down and report this to the police. And they’ll be needing a rescue team to get the body out. Are you coming down?’

  ‘I’ll make myself useful looking for an easier way out of the ravine.’

  But as soon as he’d disappeared from sight she went back to the tent where she opened Madge’s day sack and ran over the contents. The sack was made of waterproof material and the folded anorak inside was quite dry. There was a survival bag, a woollen cap, headlamp, whistle and a tin of Elastoplast, also half a bar of Kendal Mint Cake. There was no other food and no plastic water carrier.

  *

  The pass was in cloud, and the gullies which dropped away on the Coruisk side were terrifying. It was not a nice place to be alone, but Miss Pink reminded herself that Madge had often been alone, and she continued searching until, away beyond another jumbled crest, she saw the Stone Man.