by Gwen Moffat
He went out with Irwin. In the ensuing silence they heard the faint clatter of the cattle grid.
‘The colonel’s alive then?’ Lavender said loudly and everyone stirred and looked at her reluctantly but no one spoke.
The men returned carrying a rifle and another shot gun. Captain Hunt looked at Miss Pink. ‘She’s taken her own rifle.’
Someone gasped. There was a noise of wheels on gravel, doors slammed, and large men started to fill the hall, some in uniform.
‘Come in,’ Miss Pink said yet again. ‘You have an easy job—in one way. Everyone is here—except the owners.’
‘And where are they, miss?’ asked a man with an air of authority. Miss Pink looked towards Captain Hunt.
‘I heard the engine of the colonel’s boat,’ he said, ‘just before I came up.’
‘Which way did the boat go?’
‘There’s only one way; it put to sea, of course, but there was no way of telling who was in it, nor how many.’
Chapter Sixteen
The police had come to guard the people in the settlement—and to make sure they stayed there. Since everyone except the Hamlyns was gathered under one roof, they had nothing to do but wait for daylight and Merrick’s return. So they waited: behind closed windows and drawn curtains, in a fug of smoke and a background noise of coffee cups and snores and snatches of conversation. But upstairs, Miss Pink’s room was quiet and fresh, her window open towards the sea, and it was not surprising that, at some time during the night, in a state between sleeping and waking, she should have been the only person to hear a shot.
She got up and went to the window. The night was dark and still. She stood there for some time listening to faint animal sounds in the darkness: something that might have been a rabbit’s scream, and leaves rustling in the wood under quiet paws. Then she heard the second shot, and it seemed to come from the southern headland.
It was four o’clock. She dressed, without haste, in her climbing clothes, made a pot of tea and filled a flask, then left the house by way of the fire escape—which was unguarded. Someone would have been round in the night to make sure its door was locked but that was only to prevent entry. There was no one and nothing to stop her getting out.
The path to the headland was rocky and she wouldn’t use her torch so she had to go slowly, particularly when she crossed the burns which cut back deeply into the moor. The tide was making and the loch calm, the only sounds the splash of a larger wave, or water dripping off some unseen platform. Now and again, by small cliffs (they were low on this side), and from some submerged hole would come faint thuds and a long, heaving sigh.
This peninsula lay south-west of the Cuillin and was bounded on the east by the peak of Gars Bheinn which dropped steeply to the sea. As she approached the headland, the mountain was silhouetted against the dawn and, close at hand, the lochan by the Boat Port gleamed like an opal in the black moor.
The Boat Port had been used as shelter for over two thousand years. There was a ruined village inland and a crumbling fort on the cliff. Someone was standing by the fort and out in the loch a little boat rocked on the water. No one was in it.
Miss Pink paused. ‘Have you shot him?’
Vera shook her head. In that grey light she looked so old that, but for the rifle, she might have been one of the people from the ruins.
‘Is he dead?’
‘Yes, he’s dead.’
Miss Pink took off her rucksack at that and produced the thermos flask. Kneeling on the grass she poured tea and looked up, holding the cup.
‘You’ll be needing this. You can put the rifle down; I know you didn’t kill the girls.’ When the other made no move, she went on, ‘There are no witnesses to what we say. In any case, I know that you won’t shoot me. Here, take your tea.’
Vera stepped to the fort and leaned the rifle against the stones, then came and sat down. They ignored the empty boat and looked westward towards the Long Island. The cloud cap over Rum glowed with refracted colour. Behind them, the Cuillin corries held the darkness while the crests were gilded against an expectant sky.
‘I never convinced you then?’
‘Not really.’ Miss Pink accepted the cup and drank her share with appreciation. ‘It’s been a matter of character,’ she said, ‘or—more correctly—of people behaving out of character. You called me “dear” when you were stalling, when you were not sure how much of the truth to tell; because some of it was true, and some was partly true. Obviously, you had a strong reason for driving Madge away, but jealousy was inappropriate—for you. And seduction was out of character for Madge. All the same, I was convinced that you were sincere in trying to get rid of her—’
‘Oh, I was sincere, I was desperate! Both times—but with Madge more than Terry. I wanted Terry to go for her own protection, but Madge was my friend. She’d still be alive if I’d warned her.’
Miss Pink said, ‘I can see why Madge had to be killed but what was the motive for Terry, I mean, specifically? Or was it that she embodied what he was most afraid of: lack of control, animal high spirits—?’
‘Look,’ Vera was suddenly impatient, ‘tell me what you’re talking about.’
Miss Pink was startled, then she understood. ‘You’re conditioned to fighting for him. It’s time to relax now. That wasn’t a trap to make you start talking. I’ll tell you what I think happened.
‘Terry was sun-bathing all day: half-naked, naked, it doesn’t matter. I suspect he gave himself different reasons for going across to Largo, all highly moral and all invalidated because he went over after dark.’ Vera made a protesting gesture. ‘It had to be after dark,’ Miss Pink insisted, ‘because he would never have killed her and left the light on. I saw it at eight-thirty. It went out about ten-thirty; that’s when she was killed.’
‘Someone else could have—’
‘He needn’t have had homicidal motives when he went across,’ Miss Pink went on firmly. ‘Not conscious ones, anyway. . . . He went across when no one was in the bar. I don’t know what he said to her; perhaps he was bluff and jolly for a moment but Terry would go through that like a knife through soft butter. He would bluster and she’d laugh at him; and ridicule was—literally—fatal for her, although it’s possible he strangled her just because she raised her voice. Then he panicked—although he remembered to put out the light. He came blundering back through the wood and went straight up the back stairs to your sitting room and told you.’
Vera sighed heavily but said nothing.
‘So your confession about washing the billies was correct,’ Miss Pink went on. ‘And you had to imitate a man to get rid of Willie MacNeill. If he’d continued to think that you were Terry and that she was on her own, he’d have come down in the burn to join you. Washing the billies widened the period in which she could have been killed and lengthened the list of suspects. Her body might never have been found. Putting it down Scarf Geo would be your idea, and it was you who told him to use his own pack frame and a plastic bag from the Rescue Post, and by that time you’d got him to wear gloves, although of course, you’d have seen to it that he put his prints all over the frame again when he’d disposed of the body. It wouldn’t have done to have the frame covered with glove smudges. You wore gloves too, when you wiped his prints at Largo, rubber kitchen gloves?’
‘Fine plastic,’ Vera said, ‘like surgical gloves. So I never convinced you about his bad back either? I didn’t like that; it came too late, didn’t it?’
‘Not only that, but you insisted too much on your own strength. At twenty perhaps, not at fifty. You haven’t the muscle to carry a body for a mile, and how would you ever lift it over the fence at the end?’ Miss Pink regarded the other with compassion. ‘And then there was the style of the murders: the differences and the similarity. Terry’s was a murder on impulse, Madge’s was carefully planned. There was a plan in Terry’s case but it came after death: the disposal of the body.’ Miss Pink looked across the water to Scarf Geo. ‘It was quick, simple a
nd, even if it didn’t succeed completely, partial success was sufficient for your motives. That particular job,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘with your collusion, was done in the middle of the night. Nothing else was.’ Vera started and stared at her. ‘Because there was no collusion on the others,’ Miss Pink pointed out. ‘On the other hand, Madge’s murder was so involved: the drugging in advance—and no barbiturate in the bottle—’
‘How did you know that?’
‘The post mortem result. He must have taken a cup with him; he didn’t empty the capsules into the bottle. He was too clever: trying to reproduce the first murder, at least by falsifying the time of death. Vanity? Either he lost sight of the fact that yours was the brain behind the first, at least in the disposal and cleaning up—’ Vera winced, ‘—or he remembered your contribution—he could hardly forget it, and thought he could emulate it.
‘I thought that in some form Terry’s was a sex murder—but Madge’s wasn’t. And although it wasn’t until late in the day that we knew Madge’s was murder, there had been a mystery earlier: two mysteries. Why did you quarrel with her, and who did she see in the wood the night Terry was killed? She saw someone because when I told her that Willie’s evidence implied Terry was alive at eleven, she became hysterical with relief. So who did she see? Maynard? But she hinted it was him so I argued that it couldn’t have been. He was a stalking horse for someone else. You? If it had been you, your quarrel with her wouldn’t have been in public on Wednesday morning. That quarrel had a staged quality, like the rumour you spread about her supposed affair with your husband. Both covered the real reason that she had to go.’
‘And I didn’t succeed,’ Vera said tiredly. ‘I thought she’d leave the island and she went to Eas Mor: a sitting duck.’
‘That was not your fault.’ Miss Pink was at her most sincere. She went on, ‘Madge was protecting someone, and you were the only person with whom she had an emotional relationship. Otherwise, as you maintained yesterday, a very cool customer, but not interested in men. She certainly wasn’t after your husband, but if he were the person she saw in the wood, she might protect him for your sake.
‘And then there was the attitude of the crofters towards you. At first I thought they were protecting Willie but they showed more than casualness when he was taken into custody, they appeared relieved, so it wasn’t him. It seemed to me that the only incomer for whom they had respect—apart from Irwin whom they seemed to look on as one of themselves—was you. And yet there was an absence of that kind of paternalism which one gets with protection: a kind of jealous regard for the person protected. It wasn’t till last night that I realised what the crofters were doing; they were leaving you an open field. It wasn’t their business, and they saw to it that other people should be kept in ignorance because it wasn’t their business either. Old MacNeill’s nerve seems to have broken, probably because Willie was too vulnerable in Glen Shira. Since he was at Largo at a critical time, the killer might think he knew more than he was telling—so as soon as Willie left the safety of the police station, old MacNeill picked him up and kept him in Portree.’
Vera said, ‘I got Euphemia to tell old MacNeill to stay away from the glen with Willie, until I said they could come back. I was afraid he would kill Willie next—or Lavender.’
‘Lavender?’
‘She knew I wasn’t jealous. She knew there was something more important, and Lavender is inquisitive. I hadn’t much influence left with him. After Tuesday night he thought of me as being on Madge’s side, at least while she was alive.’
‘It was Tuesday that Madge told him that she’d seen him in the wood?’
‘Yes. The police had arrived and were with you in the writing room. Gordon brought you tea and Merrick kept him there, do you remember? At that time Madge was upstairs with me in our sitting room. I thought she was subdued and I’d been trying to draw her out as to what was bothering her. You realise that until then she hadn’t attached any importance to hearing Gordon blundering through the wood the evening before; if she guessed he’d come from Largo, she’d have thought he’d merely had a tiff with the girl. All day Tuesday she was on the other end of the Cuillin and she heard that Terry had been killed only when she got back, with Maynard. That’s why she was preoccupied in our sitting room.
‘When Gordon came up from talking to the police, I left them for a few moments and I went down to make some coffee. I was away too long.’
‘Did he attack her? She accused him?’
‘She didn’t accuse him. She asked him what story he had given the police.’ She turned to Miss Pink angrily. ‘That girl was ready to work out a story to dovetail with his, to cover him, just because she and I were friends!’
Miss Pink nodded in agreement. ‘A very loyal person. The relationship between you was alive and active; Terry was dead, and your husband was merely a pawn. If Madge had had any respect for him she wouldn’t have died, because she’d have known it was too dangerous to stay in the glen.’
Gratitude filled Vera’s face, then it hardened. ‘I don’t know how he reacted when she asked him what his story for the police had been. He would have blustered; she would have become impatient—not realising that I knew everything, and wanting to get her questions answered before I came back. He told me, as if in justification of his attacking her, that she was “without a trace of feeling”—for Terry, he meant! He denied everything, so she told him she’d seen him in the wood. I came in just after he’d thrown himself on her. She was in an easy chair and his weight held her down. I rushed over and hit him across the bridge of the nose. Of course, I had no idea what had led up to that but I pretended to misunderstand. It seemed to strengthen his position if I was ignorant of what had happened at Largo.’
‘Or it could have been that your mind refused to accept that here was another homicidal attack.’
‘Possibly. At any rate, after I’d bawled her out for seducing my husband—I’ll never forget the way she looked at me, she was in pain too; he’d got her by the throat—she left, and then he told me about her seeing him in the wood. I thought at first that I’d go to her room and work out a story; after all, she’d been prepared to do that originally, but I held back—for her sake. I felt it was too much to ask after what he’d done to her. Do you know, I don’t think she realised that he’d tried to kill her? Or did she think he was always violent towards women? Otherwise why did she accept the whisky the following night?’
‘She was a strange person,’ Miss Pink said, ‘like Terry. It was as if the powers of assessment were concentrated in one direction; in Madge’s case: towards rock, and that all normal sense of caution regarding human beings was lacking. One wonders if judgement had never developed, or had got partway and atrophied. I can understand Madge stubbornly refusing to be driven away until she’d done the traverse of the ridge, but her moving to Eas Mor was an open invitation to the killer.’
‘It was suicidal! She should have gone to Sligachan. I wanted to warn her, but would I have been able to make her go even if I told her the truth? I compromised and watched Gordon. He stayed down all Wednesday; he knew I was watching—and then he came to me and told me he couldn’t bear to see me so anxious about Madge’s talking; that she never would, she thought too highly of us. In a roundabout way he told me that she had nothing to fear from him and I could stop worrying . . . but if he’d said he was going on the hill on Thursday, I’d have gone with him. I was completely hoodwinked at the times when he did go up there.’
‘In the fog on Wednesday,’ Miss Pink put in, ‘while we were at dinner and you were serving in the kitchen, and again, while you relieved him in the bar and we thought he was in the Rescue Post.’
‘He told me this evening—last evening.’ Vera was listless. ‘She accepted the whisky. She wasn’t in the least frightened. He told me that her not being afraid made him angry. I can see a mad logic in Gordon’s actions.’
‘Oh yes.’ Miss Pink was definite. ‘He was able to justify himself: on the premise
that he was a superior person.’
‘He said to me, “She ought to have been afraid! It was unnatural!” He asked her to forgive him, said I’d sent him up. He wished her well on the traverse and said that we both expected her to come back to the house when “it had all blown over”.’
‘He told you all that?’
‘Yes. He said she was quite friendly. My guess, knowing Madge, is that even in those circumstances, she was a little bored—’
Miss Pink nodded. ‘She would be.’
‘And then he produced the whisky and a wee metal cup he carries and they drank to her climb the next day.’
‘My God!’
Vera’s voice was cold. ‘And he came away, and went back when she was comatose and smothered her with a jersey in a plastic bag. He was clever enough to know the jersey on its own would leave fibres. . . . He put the rucksack outside the tent, the billies—you know all the rest. Except before, before—’ She shuddered uncontrollably.
‘She was dead when he threw the body over,’ Miss Pink said gently.
Vera smiled—a kind of smile. ‘How long does it take to die with a jersey and a plastic bag over your face?’ It was Miss Pink’s turn to shudder and then she noticed that Vera was staring fixedly at the water, but the only sign of life was a pair of gannets patrolling lazily. ‘Drowning takes four minutes,’ she said.
‘And the cache?’ Miss Pink asked on a high note. ‘He emptied that yesterday, on his way to Portree.’
‘He left the car in the forest, along the forestry road, and went very fast up Coire a’ Ghreadaidh.’
Miss Pink nodded. ‘Both Irwin and I heard him in the mist; Irwin thought he saw him—he did see him. Hamlyn left the Stone Man just before I got there. He must have heard me coming. He was cutting things very fine. The water bottle and the food would have been thrown down some gully. . . .’
‘He was over the edge,’ Vera said. ‘Mad. It would have taken only a minor thing to make him kill again. Either that or suicide. He was obsessed by death and seemed to have got other people’s muddled with his own, as if killing them was a form of suicide?’
