by Gwen Moffat
A well wisher.
“It’s Stark, isn’t it?” Leila asked her friend. “Was, rather.” Her eyes widened to a stare.
“Most likely.” The older woman regarded the inspector comfortably. “You’ll find cannabis in Miss West’s car, of course.” Leila stared at her in amazement. “You don’t keep it locked,” the other reminded her. “There’s probably cannabis in the MacKay’s cow shed, and in Scamadale House.”
“Would you allow Mr MacPhee to look at your car?” Bell asked Leila.
She nodded. “I’ll show you where it is.”
“It was Stark who dealt in cannabis,” Miss Pink said matter-of-factly while the others were out of the room.
“So we understand, but how did you know, ma’am?”
“I was told by a girl called Rita. She’s — was — camping with them here. I don’t know her surname, but I believe she gave a statement to the police when they came for Stark’s body.”
“Rita Washburn. We’ve seen her this afternoon and she confirms that Stark was a pusher.”
She noticed that ‘confirms’; they must have been in touch with London.
Leila returned. The older woman went on: “So since you know that Stark was a pusher, you’ll realise that any drugs you find in Scamadale were almost certainly planted by him. As Miss West said: it doesn’t seem a valid reason for sending a chief inspector . . . Are you members of a drugs squad?” she asked suddenly.
He looked surprised. “There have been two violent deaths,” he pointed out. “We always investigate violent deaths.”
“Climbing accidents?” Leila asked.
“Oh yes; we always want to know what happened.”
The younger woman smiled. She was well in control of herself now and her voice was steady: “So, because Stark found out about my past, you think I killed him to preserve my secret.”
Miss Pink’s lack of reaction at this was significant in itself and Bell’s dark intensity didn’t waver.
“We don’t jump to conclusions,” he said phlegmatically. “We’re investigating two sudden deaths and we’re going to talk to everyone who might know anything about them.” He looked towards Miss Pink.
“People in other places beside Scamadale?” she asked. “If he was in the drugs trade he would have had important contacts in London.”
“Important, ma’am?”
“Significant, I should say. He’d be a very unpopular man — even more so than he appeared.”
“How did he appear to you?”
“He enjoyed antagonising people.” She went on to tell him about her first meeting with the climbers at the inn but her talk with Rita she mentioned only in passing, and she didn’t say that the girl had been smoking cannabis.
“Yes,” Bell commented. “That fits in with what we know of Stark: rounds him off, as you might say. A nasty character.” His tone changed as he stood up. “Mr Perry has made arrangements for us to stay with a Mrs MacKenzie. How long will you be in Scamadale, ma’am?”
“I’ve no time table,” Miss Pink assured him untruthfully. “I shall stay at least another two weeks.”
“And yourself, ma’am.” He turned to Leila, painfully polite. “You’ll be staying?”
“Of course. This is my home.”
She showed him out, came back and sat down.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Miss Pink was firm. “Past history is gone, my dear: water under the bridge. One has every right not to divulge it.”
“I should explain now.”
“Not right now, because, d’you see, the details of your secret aren’t important compared with the present situation. The importance lies in the fact that Stark found out who you were and now he’s dead.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“Of course not. But what I would like to know is, how did he find out?”
Leila gave a little shrug. “My climbing record — that and the fact that I come from St Albans originally. Although it happened that is, my husband died, in Plymouth. I suppose it made a stir in St Albans; there were pictures in the papers. Didn’t you notice Stark staring at me that first evening? A middle-aged woman climbing at my standard would have drawn his attention in the first place, and then he would have remembered my appearance from the time of the trial; it wasn’t so long ago. The fact that I was living under a different name would suggest to him that people here didn’t know about me. I tried to keep out of his way, hoping he wouldn’t make capital out of what he knew, but that was a forlorn hope. I think he knew who I was that first night, when he realised I was too competent a rock climber to be a novice. Of course,” she added bitterly, “the fact that I insisted I was a novice would have convinced him that I had something to hide. He must have guessed that I was Betty Maynard that first evening — and everyone in St Albans knows what happened to her.”
“Betty Maynard? That was the name he used in the letter — and it rings a bell . . . I remember! But you’re not like — How did you change your appearance? I’ve seen you, in the Alps, in Chamonix, I believe, but that must be a long time ago.”
“It’s over twenty years since I was in Chamonix. I was a thin girl with red hair and spectacles. Well, hair goes grey, people fill out, and I wear contact lenses — not from vanity, but deliberately to change my appearance. I started to go grey abroad, I completed the process in prison.”
“You stopped climbing. Didn’t you go to New Zealand? People used to wonder what had happened to you.
“I went to Australia and then to the East Indies: working as a secretary, housekeeper, anything in order to travel. I loved travelling. I was in India for some time: long enough to be able to fabricate a story about spending most of my life there with a brother. I was in South America when I met my husband: in Montevideo. He was a salesman for typewriters and we went on travelling, but eventually we came home and he was working in the West Country so we lived in Plymouth. I gave up climbing because he didn’t like it; he made fusses. It was in Plymouth that it happened; it didn’t make headlines nationally: merely in the West Country and, presumably, St Albans. Most climbers I’d known wouldn’t have recognised me anyway; I’d been away for nearly twenty years and the trial of a middle-aged housewife called Betty Stevens wasn’t associated in the minds of former friends with Betty Maynard: a girl who went to Australia. The odd person would have wondered; Stark must have filed the knowledge for future reference.”
“Does Clive know?”
“I haven’t told him.”
They looked at each other with a wealth of understanding. “But,” Miss Pink stated almost sotto voce, “you didn’t kill Stark.”
“No. I could have killed him to stop Clive from knowing. The police will discover our relationship — and I have everything to lose: home, fiancé, security. But I didn’t kill him.” She spaced out the words carefully.
“Bell didn’t seem interested in Stark’s contacts in London. There would be a number of people with a motive for —” She stopped, and then went on: The police are working on the theory that he was killed, murdered, and we’ve fallen in with that!”
“It’s the knot, isn’t it?”
“Yes, the knot: a knot on the cliff that came undone — and a piton on the stack which came out when we both saw it hammered home.”
“I must go!” Leila was suddenly urgent. “I have to talk to Clive, must tell him before he hears it from the police — about my being Betty Stevens, I mean.”
“Wait until I’ve found out if they’re still in your garage.”
But at that moment they heard an engine start. The police were finished with Soutra for the time being.
Leila was so concerned to find Clive quickly that she left without speculating if they had found cannabis in her car.
*
At six o’clock there was a knock at the door. Miss Pink laid down her book, open at a page on knots, and found the chief inspector on the terrace. She asked him in and closed the door. In the sitting room his glance flicked ov
er the open book.
“I won’t sit down.” He was as polite as ever. “I’d like to ask you to come up to the top of the cliffs with us. MacPhee and I are at a considerable disadvantage; we’re not climbers and I need a lot of things explained: mechanical things, about ropes and so on.”
She nodded. It wasn’t unexpected. They had to find someone to interpret the techniques, and short of sending for a climbing policeman or a guide — which would take time if they could find either — they had to appeal to her. The Scamadale residents, she reflected grimly, couldn’t be termed disinterested. Nor, indeed, was she, and as she drew on her boots she was wondering if Bell and MacPhee were the tyros he implied. Was Bell’s request as innocent as it sounded? Or did their suspicions include herself — and were they proposing to check on her in the field?
“Did you find cannabis in Miss West’s car?” she asked casually.
Bell nodded. “Not very much. It was in the tool kit.”
“Isn’t that an obvious hiding place?”
“Oh yes, ma’am.” He grinned indulgently. “We don’t think Miss West was a pusher. The idea behind that letter was just to get us out here to make trouble. But Stark didn’t know when he wrote it what kind of trouble we’d be investigating when we arrived. You might say he was anticipating things a bit.”
She stared at him in astonishment and saw that his eyes were crinkling at her; he’d been joking, after a fashion. She smiled a little weakly, thinking that if the police considered Leila had an adequate motive for murder, how much more interested they would be if they were aware of Bridget’s connection with Stark. However, she didn’t enlighten him, not because she proposed to obstruct the course of justice, but because she felt that, as yet, it was not necessary for him to know about Bridget, nor even about Marcus and his surely irrelevant — indiscretions?
Chapter Ten
The piton looked lonely without a rope attached to it. “Is this it?” Bell asked. “Is this where they went over?” He took a step towards the edge.
“Come back!” Miss Pink’s tone was peremptory. “If you want to look over, we’ll put the rope on.”
He glanced at her, then gave a quick nod. “You’re the expert,” he acknowledged, and stepped back, winning her respect.
MacPhee put down the rope he’d been carrying and she uncoiled a few feet of it. Then, from her rucksack, she took a heavy snap-link which was similar to, if not the same as that which had held the fixed rope originally. It was made of an alloy, oval in shape, and measured about four inches longitudinally. One side was spring-hinged, like the clip on a dog’s lead, and the gate could be held closed by a small circular screw.
They watched with professional interest as she clipped the link into the eye of the piton then, taking a bight in the end of the rope, made a figure-of-eight knot which, she told them, could be easily untied after the rope had been loaded. She clipped the knot in the snap-link and took a pace towards the cliff.
“Just a moment,” Bell said. “What’s this for?”
He was fiddling with the screw on the snap-link.
“If you screw that up, you secure the gate which means the link can’t come open by accident and release the rope.”
“Why don’t you screw it up now, then?”
“Well, the rope can hardly jump out of its own accord, can it?”
“But what’s the screw for?”
“Sometimes a rope becomes kinked and opens the gate itself. It’s unlikely but it has happened. A man’s life depends on this one point of security so one takes every precaution. In no circumstances must the rope come out of the link, and the screw takes care of the most unlikely contingency. Since I’m only demonstrating, I hadn’t bothered to tighten it.”
“Would it be tightened — or screwed up — when the climbers were going up and down these ropes?”
“Oh yes.”
“How was it when you found it yesterday?”
“It was unscrewed.”
Her face felt wooden as she turned to the edge of the cliff. “If I were setting up a fixed rope,” she said without expression, “I would throw the coils over now.”
Bell tore his attention away from the snap link and regarded her blankly. “Can you get to the bottom on that?”
“No, only about a hundred feet: into the bed of the gully where I’d stop and take stock and plan where to put the next fixed rope.”
“Now can I look over the edge?”
She tied him to the end of the rope and, clipping this in the snap-link, told him to go out to the edge and lie down. She went with him, his rope now running back to the link and out to her again. She held it in one hand. He glanced at her and then back to the link.
“Is that safe?”
“You mean, can I hold you? I think I could stop you even if you tried to throw yourself over. Look, the rope is at an angle of 360 degrees at the snap-link; you’d need a lot of force to move it. With only slight elaboration of the technique one man can lower a stretcher with a casualty on it. Go forward a little.”
“I can’t; the rope’s holding me back. Ah, I see what you mean. What were the positions of Stark and Pincher when they were doing this?”
“This has nothing to do with them. I’m merely proving that it’s safe for you to look over the edge, and incidentally demonstrating how a snap-link works as a pulley — and how the rope won’t run easily through an acute angle. You can look down now; you’re quite secure.”
He looked and closed his eyes. She kept a tight hold on the rope. Behind them MacPhee watched with intense interest. She started to talk comfortably: about the elasticity of ropes, plaited ropes, hawser-laid ropes. Bell opened his eyes. He was very white. She commented on the plants in the gully, on the structure of the sandstone. A fulmar drifted past, regarding them casually.
“Where did he fall?” Bell asked roughly.
“From about twenty feet below us.”
“How high are the cliffs?”
“Three hundred feet. Shall we move back a little?”
She stood up but he wriggled back for some distance before he followed suit. MacPhee held out his hand.
“What’s that for?”
“The rope, sir. You’ll want me to see?”
“Bowline, isn’t it?” he asked happily as he tied on. “I was in the Scouts.”
He wasn’t cocksure however. He lay down as Bell had done and wriggled to the edge. She watched him curiously. He looked down the gully and his eyes widened, but not in terror. He turned to her in amazement, then curbed it.
“Do they go down hand over hand?”
“No, they slide down, but it’s a controlled technique with a metal aid. I’ll show you in a place where it’s more practical. I don’t propose to demonstrate here.”
“Hard, is it?”
“Not at all, but I’m certain I couldn’t get back again.”
“That’s strenuous, coming back?”
She nodded. “Of course, this isn’t really rock climbing; these techniques of sliding down the rope and climbing up it are methods for negotiating steep or overhanging rock which you can’t climb, or which takes too long by conventional methods. In this case they were using the techniques in order to get down the cliffs and reach the stack, which was the main objective.”
“The cliffs are just the approach?” Bell was incredulous.
“Oh yes.” She looked down the gully with disapproval. “There’s nothing here to interest a climber.”
“So he fell from twenty feet below us,” MacPhee observed. “How do you know that?”
“They climb the rope with clamps. Those — or rather the one which stayed clipped to the rope, the other came off — that one was about thirty feet from the end which showed he’d got to within that distance of the top — in this case, from the piton. That is about ten feet back from the edge so he was twenty feet below us when he came off.”
“Where would his partner be at that moment?”
“I think you’d better come back,”
Bell called.
They retreated and sat on the turf. Bell lit a cigarette. “Where would Pincher have been when Stark fell?”
They were obviously thinking that the two climbers had been near each other at that moment. She explained the significance of the burns on Stark’s hands which, in conjunction with the snagged rope left on the stack, indicated that Pincher had fallen from the Old Man. There had been two unconnected accidents.
Bell said nothing. “Different,” MacPhee observed: “In time. Not necessarily unconnected.”
Bell stared at his sergeant. “Connected?” He turned to Miss Pink suddenly. “Show me how this knot came undone.”
“I have no idea.”
“It was undone. That was in Munro’s report and he got it from Perry. There was no knot in either end of the rope. Did you see their equipment as they were using it before the accident?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of knot were they using?”
“The same as this.”
MacPhee extended his hand and tried to undo the knot, but he was hampered by the snap-link. When he took the knot out of the link, he could untie it fairly easily.
Bell said to Miss Pink: “But there’s been no load on this rope. How many times had they climbed up and down theirs?”
She calculated with closed eyes. “About eleven times. The knot would have been much tighter.”
“So to be untied, it would have to be removed from the snap-link, and your finding the screw undone confirms this. Now, how does this mystery man at the top of the cliff — where we are, in fact — manage to untie the knot when another man is climbing the rope?”
“He couldn’t.”
“So how was it done?”
Less out of compliance than because she was innately inquisitive, she considered the problem, her mind turning to complicated systems involving a second rope or, at the least, lengths of line and running knots which could take the strain of a loaded rope while . . . Her eyes narrowed as she saw what MacPhee was doing.
He had threaded the unknotted end of the rope through the snap-link twice. He held the end in his hand and looked at her for comment.
