Miss Pink at the Edge of the World

by Gwen Moffat

  “Damn it!” Bridget exclaimed. “The fixed ropes are there, so they never took them up! Be your age, darling.”

  He was petulant. “I don’t know why we’re so obsessed by it. The chap’s almost certainly dead; we’re being morbid.”

  “All the same,” Miss Pink observed: “It’s curious that they shouldn’t have removed the ropes, almost as if Pincher wasn’t with him when Stark was climbing back up the cliff.”

  Clive and Marcus had found nothing on Tangleblock and had seen no traces; what Miss Pink had seen at the bottom might well have been a mark made by a falling stone, Marcus told her. She didn’t agree. Falling stones make scars, they don’t shed fragments of mud bearing the fragmented imprint of a climber’s moulded sole. Nor would one expect to find traces on the upper part of the climb; by that time the soles would be clean.

  They had returned from the cliffs bringing the rucksacks and the snap link but leaving the piton. Now Miss Pink, with Bridget and Marcus, was sitting in the bay window and enjoying the evening’s spectacle.

  The wind was rising. There was no colour as such. The sky was a thick grey, the rocks black, the sea khaki. Rollers creamed in on the strand and the watchers heard their thunder from behind the closed window. Spray bloomed all along the foot of the cliffs to the northern headland.

  “You’re going to have a noisy night,” Marcus told Miss Pink.

  “It’s low tide in the small hours,” she said thankfully. “I’ll sleep the better for knowing that those breakers are more than a few feet away.” At the moment the spray was flying over Soutra’s roof.

  They heard men’s voices outside and Clive came in with a uniformed police inspector and a sergeant. People were introduced. The inspector was a Munro and the sergeant a Campbell. Munro was full of the journey from Kinloch.

  “We’re sheltered here,” Clive told him, handing him a whisky, “but we can tell from the state of the sea now that it’s blowing great guns on the top.”

  Apparently the police car had crossed the moor in convoy with the ambulance and the driver and his mate were now in the kitchen.

  “They’re wanting to get back over the moor while it’s light,” Munro said. “I’ll just take a look at this body before they put it in the ambulance if ye don’t mind.”

  Clive went out with them and Marcus chuckled. “That’s to make sure it was an accident. I wonder what they’d do if they discovered it was foul play — in fact, what qualifications have they to judge?”

  “You’re being vulgar,” Bridget said. “Do they take statements from everyone? What about dinner?”

  “Only from Clive and Rita, I would think,” Miss Pink told her. “I hope they wait till afterwards; I feel extremely hungry.”

  “It’s reaction. I’m famished. I’d rather not eat with the fuzz though; there’d be a certain air of restraint. We couldn’t abandon ourselves.” She sparkled at Marcus, whose expression, habitually on the defensive when she addressed him, relaxed, and hope bloomed there like an opening flower.

  Leila came in, said — rather surprisingly — that Rita had gone with Sadie to milk the MacKay cow, and that the ambulance men were being fed in the kitchen. She poured two small whiskies and went out with them. Clive returned with the police.

  “Did you notice Stark’s hands?” he asked Miss Pink.

  She frowned. “Well — yes.”

  “The palms of them?”

  “No. What’s wrong?”

  “They were burned.”

  “Burned!” Marcus and Bridget exclaimed together.

  “By a rope?” Miss Pink asked.

  “Yes. Only slightly, but a rope had run through them.”

  “Does that mean anything to you, ma’am?” Munro asked.

  “If Stark was burned,” she said slowly, “it could mean that his leader fell and Stark couldn’t hold the rope. It’s the running perlon that makes the burns, d’you see. One wears leather gloves usually.” She was looking at her host. “Where on earth did that happen: that he had to hold a falling leader — and why was Pincher leading?”

  “Is it important, ma’am?”

  It was not a rebuff; Munro was curious. Miss Pink considered. “Perhaps not,” she conceded. “It’s merely that if we knew where Pincher fell — if we’d known, we might have found him. Unless, of course, it wasn’t a fatal fall.”

  Once again she thought of the muddy hold on Tangleblock.

  The body was loaded in the ambulance and Stark left the glen for the last time. No one at the House watched, but they were all alert for the sound of the vehicle leaving, then they returned to speculation. Where was Pincher? Alive and making for some destination? Concussed and wandering in the rising storm (they stirred uneasily and glanced at the rattling windows), or was he at this moment being bowled along the sea bed like a large but flaccid shell?

  “Funny thing,” Clive remarked to Miss Pink when the two of them were alone for a moment in the drawing room: “but when they asked if the burns had any special significance for you, they’d already asked me.”

  “You mean he didn’t believe you? He was checking with me?”

  “Simple explanation: Munro’s a traffic chap. He’ll be regretting his lost opportunities — like the rest of us; besides, the police are continually being frustrated at their total inability to investigate this particular type of violent death: climbing accidents. They think we get away with murder half the time. Munro was playing detectives.” He smiled at her but not with his eyes. “Best to keep information to a minimum; we don’t need to indulge them.”

  Chapter Nine

  Pincher came back to Scamadale next morning, his body left behind on the strand as the tide receded. It was carried up to the stables at the House and placed on the trestles so recently occupied by Stark.

  Miss Pink, who hadn’t missed seeing the cortège stumbling up the sand, went to the House after breakfast. She approached by the back way and found Ian and Clive in the loose box which was doing duty as a mortuary. Her attention focused immediately on the body’s right hand which was clenched on one of three red slings. The latter formed a length of roughly ten feet, joined by snap links, and the fingers had grasped this length about a foot from one end. The slings would have been a nuisance as the body was carried and they’d been placed on the chest where they rested still. Miss Pink straightened them. At the other end from the hand was a piton, a snap link connecting its eye with the first sling.

  “They’re the same slings as those which were on the stack,” she said. “I’m sure of that.”

  Clive nodded. “That piton couldn’t have been firm.”

  “It was firm; I heard it go in,” Ian said quietly: “It looks as if they were starting to dismantle the equipment, and Pincher trusted — or used — the arrangement just as the piton was ready to come out.”

  “No.” Miss Pink was adamant. “They were experts; Pincher would never put weight on a piton after it had been loosened. Besides, his hand is in exactly the correct position for doing the swing.”

  “For going upwards,” Clive elaborated. “There’s no doubt he was using it to aid progress, not dismantling it. You’d never remove a piton by pulling on slings, would you? You take a piton out, after it’s been loosened by the hammer, by rocking it with your hand. No, he was using it: for going up. The easiest way down was the crack at the side of the slab.”

  The younger man looked puzzled. “If it was easier for going down, it was for ascent as well. I know we assume they wanted to use the slab variation for this film, but once he’d proved that the slab was feasible, why not use the crack for the rest of the reconnaissance?”

  “Because Pincher hadn’t tried it,” Miss Pink pointed out: “At least, not while we were watching them. So presumably Stark wanted to see what another climber made of it; when they made the film there would be a whole team of people involved: substitutes and porters, amateur cameramen on the stack. He’d need to know how hard the slab was for the lowest common denominator. Pincher was the guinea
pig.”

  They looked at the body on the trestle. Although the helmet was still in place, the frontal bones of the skull were severely fractured.

  “He must have hit the plinth before he went in the sea,” Ian observed.

  “That’s when the rope would have snagged!” Clive exclaimed. “The short end would just reach to that stance below the slab. Stark would be there when Pincher went up to try the pendulum, and he untied after the fall. He had to do that and leave the rope dangling because he couldn’t retrieve it.”

  “Then Stark climbed down,” Miss Pink took up the story: “And he couldn’t pull the body in because he couldn’t reach the rope. That’s curious: why couldn’t he reach it? Surely, with the plinth —”

  “The plinth is narrow there,” Ian reminded her. “It’s wide enough for Pincher to strike it as he fell but if he went out a bit — and then floated, as he would have done for a while — then Stark wouldn’t be able to reach the rope to pull him in.”

  “But —” She stepped forward to peer at the climbing harness round the body. It was basically a webbing belt with a heavy-duty snap-link clipped to it. “Who unclipped his rope? Surely he was dead by the time he hit the water?”

  “Oh yes,” Clive said, “or as near as makes no difference. It must have been Stark.”

  “But the rope was hanging well clear of the plinth,” Ian insisted. “He couldn’t have reached it.”

  “Who else could it be?” Clive was patient. “There was no one else, was there?”

  “And then Stark fell,” Miss Pink said.

  *

  “So the mystery is cleared up,” Marcus said. “You had me a trifle worried when you insisted someone had climbed Tangleblock recently.”

  They were standing by the rockery admiring the gentians. Now he started to move away from the House and Miss Pink accompanied him.

  “Bridget’s a different girl now it’s all over,” he went on. “One is at a loss to understand the hold some people have over others; she was confiding in me. She rationalises, of course: says she had felt how wasted he was: clever, resourceful, courageous — he just had a kink, but if that could be straightened out, he could become a happy and useful member of the community. Load of balderdash! It was just sex.”

  “It couldn’t have been.”

  He turned his slightly protruberant eyes on her. “Biggest sexual challenge going: trying to restore a chap’s virility.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “It’s all psychological,” he assured her. “She disliked him intensely but there was still this compulsive attraction — you saw how disturbed she was when he appeared in Scamadale. She couldn’t get away from him, and he knew it. Just by coming here, he was retaliating in some measure for her having the temerity to throw him over, to reject him. Now he’s dead and she’s back to normal. She’s a lovely girl.”

  Miss Pink looked wary.

  “Is your silence a form of disapproval, Mel?”

  “I don’t know the circumstances.”

  His eyes lit up and she saw the unmistakable joy of one who has been awaiting his moment. There was nothing she could do about it now, she had played into his hands. They sat on a rustic seat and he started to talk.

  It had begun when she was sixteen and he had compared her with his own rather dumpy daughters, but he hadn’t seen much of her then until recent months when he’d met her at a mountaineering dinner in London. He had glimpsed her across a room and fallen overwhelmingly in love. There was nothing he could do about it, he assured Miss Pink, and she saw that he believed this himself; it must, he said in a moment of perceptiveness, work itself out. He had taken her to the best restaurants, to see the latest films, to the opera, to galleries. He had offered her presents: books, jewellery, flowers, a fur coat, and all except the books and flowers had been declined — which drove him to further excesses. He sent her a beautifully bound bestiary and she sent it back. He gave it to her over lunch at Scott’s. She gave it to Oxfam. But she had eaten his food and drunk his wine and acknowledged his adoration. She was playing with him but he loved her company so much that he would rather she teased him than ignored him. At least she smiled — and every time he met her he became more infatuated — except that he called it love. He haunted the studios where she worked for a time, took her to photographers, insisted on her meeting important people who, he assured her, could further her career but who, Miss Pink guessed, had more significance as an admiring audience before which he could display her.

  He’d known that she had a lover but he’d not been aware that it was Stark. The fact of another man might have had a traumatic effect on him had the situation not been in existence when he fell in love with her; as it was, he forgot his age and his elderly appearance and had regarded the other as one who was about to be supplanted rather than the one who had ousted him.

  Now, his eyes gleaming with satisfaction as he recounted this, and more details — Bridget coming towards him in a crowd; saying goodbye at railway stations: “a tragedy if only for a weekend” — he looked like a man who had emerged victorious.

  “What are you going to do now?” she asked.

  He smiled euphorically. “Wait for her.”

  She nodded amiably. “That should be all right. I’ll leave you to find something to occupy you both for the afternoon. I must go back to Soutra.”

  As she walked away, she was mentally shaking her head in disbelief, wondering if all old men were so suddenly bereft of reason when they became obsessed by young girls — or were these of a type which carried a seed of instability already?

  *

  After lunch she walked to the northern headland with Leila. The gale was moderating now but the wind was still strong on the cliffs. The sea, coldly brown from suspended sand, was levelling out to a heavy swell and when they stood above the squat triangle of the Pagoda they heard, under the strike and fall of the surge, deep muffled explosions as tons of water piled into hidden caves.

  As they were returning they saw an ambulance leaving the glen.

  “Poor Pincher,” Leila said with feeling, and Miss Pink agreed.

  “But now there’s Rita,” she pointed out. “I wonder what she will do.”

  Coming down to Soutra they saw three men approaching across the fields and now Miss Pink could see a strange car parked beside her Austin. One of the men was Clive but the other two weren’t known to her. Clive made the introductions. The others were detectives: a Chief Inspector Bell and Sergeant MacPhee. The party returned to Soutra. Miss Pink, responding to some query of the inspector’s concerning their walk, looked past him to Leila and saw that her face was ashen.

  At the front door the younger woman turned to Clive and looked at him sadly. “Thank you for looking after my visitors,” she said. “I’ll come over to the House when I’m free.”

  He hesitated but he was too well-mannered to argue with such a dismissal. He was concerned, but he left.

  Miss Pink, once again removing her boots on the terrace, once again refusing to speculate but deliberately allowing all preconceived theories and shadows of theories, to recede and leave the mental slate clean, concentrated on knots in laces and on the fact that she could hear five distinct bird calls without trouble: curlew, oyster catcher, herring gull —

  “Can I ask you to join us?” Leila asked from the doorway.

  Miss Pink smiled her sweet smile and walked into the kitchen in her stocking feet.

  “Tea, then,” she said. “We’ve been out all afternoon — and the visitors will welcome a cup.”

  “Mr Perry gave us tea, ma’am,” MacPhee said politely from the doorway.

  Miss Pink beamed at him while she waited for the kettle to boil. Leila was taking shortbread from a tin and filling plates. Miss Pink fetched a tray, arranged cups and saucers and the shortbread, and looked out of the window. “And turnstones and eider duck,” she murmured.

  “On the shore?” Leila asked in a voice like ice.

  “Feeding on the weed. I
’ll make the tea. You take in the tray.”

  Bell was a dark chunky man: young for a chief inspector, so he would be competent. He looked a little coarse, like a Gorbals boy who’d made good; their appearances were back to front: MacPhee, the sergeant, had the thin fine face of an ascetic: blue eyes, acquiline nose, small ears and hands. He might have been a Sunday School teacher in a cathedral city.

  “The chief constable had a letter this morning, ma’am,” Bell said, looking at Leila. “It referred to yourself.”

  Miss Pink wished she would say something; she looked like a deer facing the hounds.

  “You are known as Miss Leila West?”

  “Yes.” It was a whisper.

  “You were Mrs William Stevens.”

  Miss Pink continued to regard the inspector with an appearance of placidity. Leila must have made some gesture of assent for he went on: “You were in Holloway Prison for three years after being found guilty of the manslaughter of your husband, William Stevens, in 1967?”

  “Yes.” Her voice had changed. “I’ve served my sentence. It has nothing to do with you.”

  “That may be so, ma’am, but we’ve had this letter.”

  “Are the police so over-staffed they can afford to send a chief inspector to check on an anonymous letter? I assume it was anonymous?”

  “The letter’s a side-issue — possibly.”

  “But you checked on me.”

  He didn’t comment on that. Instead he asked: “Have you any idea who could have written it?”

  “I can guess.” She sounded apathetic. “May I see the letter?”

  “Certainly.” His willingness seemed suspicious. He took out his wallet and extracted a sheet of paper. Leila started to read, then gasped in astonishment. She passed it to Miss Pink in silence. It read:

  Leila West, alias Betty Maynard from St Albans (she married and did three years for killing her husband) is pushing pot to young people in Scamadale and Kinloch. Look in her car.