by Gwen Moffat
“You said you could hold me if I fell over the edge,” Bell remarked. “What weight could a man hold if he’d taken a turn round the snap-link like this? Of course, it still doesn’t tell us how he undid the knot while Stark was actually climbing the rope.”
“That’s not how he did it.” Her mind was clear now. “He’d untie the knot before Stark appeared in the gully: while he was climbing the lower ropes. He’d take a turn round the link and wait.” She remembered how plainly she had heard Marcus some hundred feet below her on Tangleblock. “He’d hear Stark as soon as he reached the gully; you can’t move up scree without making a lot of noise.”
“Wouldn’t Stark know by the feel of it that the rope wasn’t secured — was only being held by a man?”
“There might be an inch or two more ‘give’ because it wasn’t knotted; he wouldn’t worry about it.”
“And then all this chap had to do when Stark was near the top was to let the end go.”
“Exactly.”
There was a long silence, broken by Bell. “This Pincher — what was he like?”
“Dazzled by Stark and behaving out of character, I would say. Before Stark appeared on the scene, he seems to have been a rather ordinary, harmless young man — even kind. He was good to his girl friend.”
“Not a man to make enemies — like Stark?”
“There could have been hostility between them over Rita — or because of the fire —”
“I beg your pardon. I meant: he didn’t make enemies as Stark did? No. So you think they might have quarrelled over the girl. Pincher’s death was caused by a — piton, is that the term? — coming out. That so?”
“Yes.”
“Can we see the site of that fall from here?”
She led them to the top of the cliff above the great cave. “No belay here,” she told them, “so you can’t be secured; you’ll have to lie down again but you don’t have to look over, merely across. There’s no need to go so near the edge as in the other place.”
“What’s a belay?”
“Why, the way you’re tied on. You were belayed back there when your rope was through the snap-link. It’s a verb and a noun.”
He nodded briefly but she had the feeling that every word, even a point of grammar, was recorded, and what might miss him wouldn’t get past MacPhee.
She pointed out the features of the Old Man. The swell was rolling landwards in long lines to crash on the plinth and send spray halfway up the tower. As the water fell back, they could glimpse the rope still caught in the overhangs. Gulls screamed — and suddenly there was a tremendous impact: a deep and subterranean boom, muffled but incredibly powerful. The cliff trembled.
Miss Pink recovered first. “It’s the swell in the back of the cave,” she said weakly. “I should have warned you.”
Bell swallowed. “You’re mad! I mean, climbers, on these cliffs, above that!” He gestured wildly at the sea.
“No. On the days when they were climbing it was calm and sunny: very beautiful. You can’t imagine what it was like.”
She showed him the remaining fixed ropes which were still on the cliff. They had been tossed about by the storm and in places were snagged on jutting rocks but they indicated the rough line of descent. The tide was nearly full and where there should have been a channel was a boiling cauldron: part of the seething mass which surrounded the Old Man. The tower rose with a kind of sublime arrogance out of its watery bed. It looked impregnable. She tried to show them the slab but failed. To a layman it was a spike of rock with no features and no association with humanity. MacPhee said with awe: “I can’t imagine a man on it; I can’t fit him into the picture.
“How did they get there?” Bell sounded frustrated and angry.
She explained about the channel but he stared at the white water in disbelief. “I can’t see how we’ll ever get across,” he muttered. “But we’ll have to, of course.”
“You can be landed from a boat. When the swell goes down, you’ll see; it’s as simple as coming in to a jetty.” She didn’t add that the exercise seemed pointless.
“This slab you were talking about,” he pressed stubbornly, determined to overcome his own ignorance: “Can you draw it?”
MacPhee produced his notebook and a biro and she sketched the tower carefully, marking the slab, the stance below it, the crack and the overhang. With dotted lines, she drew the routes above the stance and marked the site of the piton. She sketched in detail the system of slings and explained how they were used as aid to cross the slab.
“Why did the piton come out?” Bell asked, then he saw her expression and re-phrased it: “How does a piton come out?”
“It can fail because it wasn’t firm in the first place, so it comes out when weight is put on it, but this one was firm. They sing when they’re driven in and bite the rock — so did this one. Also I saw Stark swing across the slab using the slings. When pitons are firm the only way to get them out is with a hammer.”
“Can you think of any way one might be loosened other than by human agency?”
“Only by a rock fall.”
“Has there been one on the stack?”
“No.”
“And the knot on top of the cliff: is there any explanation for that apart from someone untying it?”
“I can’t think of one.”
“And you’ve tried hard,” he acknowledged. “So both deaths were murder — and carefully premeditated at that. How many people in Scamadale climb?”
“All of us.”
“What! You could climb that!”
She studied the stack. “Oh yes, I could — but I wouldn’t. I’m frightened of exposure.”
“Exposure!”
“The drop below.”
After a pause he went on: “And everyone else in Scamadale climbs?”
“It’s not unusual in this part of the world. It’s not so long ago that their economy depended on catching birds and I understand that the girls used to go on the cliffs with the young men.”
“So anyone could have climbed up there and loosened the piton.”
She looked dubious. “There’s an old couple you can rule out: the MacLeods. There are others whom I can’t imagine going up there, but then it’s difficult to imagine anyone climbing the Old Man to loosen a piton in order to kill a man at some unspecified hour in the future. It’s cold-blooded — inhuman.”
“This is really a closed case,” Bell said. “It couldn’t have been someone from outside that Stark had made an enemy of because the knowledge about the piton is so localised. If he’d been —”
“It wasn’t Stark was killed on the stack . . .” MacPhee put in.
“What? Why did I say that?”
“Because you’d been thinking of Stark as the leader,” Miss Pink observed. “And I told you the leader was killed on the stack, but this raises a point. Anyone who loosened the piton would be expecting Stark to be leading, but Pincher led at that point. Stark pushed him into the lead. Could Stark have loosened the piton himself? I mean,” she added quickly, clutching at straws: “if it is murder?”
He disregarded the hopeful query. “But then who undid the knot so that Stark was killed? Makes two killers, doesn’t it? — a coincidence. Let’s assume there was only one killer. A piton was loosened and a knot undone by someone who wants only Stark dead, Pincher’s death being an attempt on Stark which failed. That person is in Scamadale. Where were they all when the deaths occurred? When did the deaths occur? Is there any way of whittling down the time?”
Miss Pink said: “You could get some idea from the state of the tide. Since you can cross the channel only two hours either side of low water, and Stark couldn’t swim —” she hesitated. “I suppose he could have tried.”
“Could he swim?”
“Rita said he couldn’t, and he appeared frightened of water; there were killer whales about. He didn’t like those.”
“Killer whales,” Bell repeated tightly: “That’s all I needed. Why didn�
�t they go for the bodies?”
“The resident naturalist thinks that they don’t attack but Stark was very concerned about them, I’m certain of that.”
“Let’s assume then that he didn’t swim the channel. Can you work out a time table of his movements? Wait a minute: let’s find a place where it’s more comfortable.”
But she pointed out that the light was going and they had no torches; it would be advisable to descend the rock band while they could still see the path. Before she left, she studied the landward side of the stack, the men watching her curiously, then they collected the rope and snap-link and started down. Lights were coming on in Scamadale.
*
It was late when they reached MacKenzie’s place and she wanted her dinner but Bell seemed impervious to hunger. He commandeered the parlour, shut the door leading to the kitchen and invited Miss Pink to take a seat. Elspeth had switched on a small electric heater and the room was impregnated with a smell of burning dust. MacPhee produced his notebook again.
“Your time table,” Bell prompted.
“You know about the fire?” He nodded an affirmative and she wondered how long they’d been talking to Clive before she and Leila returned from the northern cliffs. “Stark fired the moor quite early,” she went on, “about ten perhaps, then they had to walk to Farrid Head, descend the fixed ropes and cross the channel to the stack. I would reckon that they couldn’t have been on the plinth before one o’clock, probably nearer one-thirty, but it can’t have been later than two because it was low tide around midday so they couldn’t cross to the stack after two. But if they arrived on the plinth about, say, one-fifteen, by the time they’d climbed to the stance below the slab, and allowing time for the accident to happen and Stark to descend again, the channel would be too full for him to get back. If he couldn’t swim he was stranded on the stack till two hours before the next low tide. Low water about midnight would mean he could cross around ten. The plinth is covered at high tide but there’s a kind of ledge on the landward side of the stack above high water mark. I think he might have waited there till the tide receded again.”
“So you think he crossed the channel at ten. How long would it have taken him to climb those ropes back to the top of the cliff?”
“At the rate they were doing it when I watched them on the first day, about three-quarters of an hour, but on Wednesday night Stark’s hands were injured. I’m surprised he could do it at all, and it would certainly have taken longer. I wouldn’t think he could do it in less than an hour.”
“So he could have been killed about eleven. When the men came back from the fire: what time was that?”
“It was tea time: five o’clock.”
“Who was in the party?”
“All the men: Clive Perry, Marcus Bowles, Ian Morrison, and the three crofters. Miss West, Bridget Perry and I had come down earlier.”
“Did you see all the men return?”
“Yes, we gave them tea in the kitchen.”
“Who left first?”
“The crofters and Morrison went after about half an hour.”
“And then?”
“Mr Perry and Mr Bowles went out when Bridget said that the Mini had returned.”
She saw what was coming and waited.
“Why did they go to meet the Mini — to tackle Stark?”
Thus he learned about Clive and Marcus visiting the broch, but that they returned very shortly. She wasn’t asked what they took with them so saw no reason to mention the firearms. She answered all his questions about that evening objectively, considering the developing picture as she did so but as yet making little sense of it. It appeared that no one could have been on Farrid Head until six o’clock on the Wednesday evening — and that excluded Clive and Marcus who, apart from their brief excursions to the broch, had spent the early part of the evening at the House. Ian had dined there too. But Stark couldn’t have been killed until after ten because that was when the channel became passable, so the early part of the evening had no importance — or had it? The night was a different matter. In addition to Ian Morrison who would have been alone in his cottage, any of the others, with the exception of MacLeod and MacKenzie who, presumably, slept with their wives, could have slipped out quietly in time to reach Farrid Head by eleven.
“Then there’s the time that the piton was loosened,” Bell reminded her. “When would that be?”
“It was placed there on Tuesday afternoon. It must have been tampered with on Tuesday night.”
“Do we have this same difficulty about crossing the channel? Are the locals frightened of killer whales?”
“The crofters think they attack human beings. The rest of us are dubious.”
“The channel would be passable an hour earlier on Tuesday night?”
“Roughly that: from nine till one in the morning.”
“And what time did all the residents go to bed on Tuesday night?” he mused. “But that’s not conclusive, is it? How many people in Scamadale swim?”
Miss Pink said: “At a rough guess: everyone.” Her expression was carefully neutral.
Chapter Eleven
Miss Pink walked away from the MacKenzie’s croft, her shoulders slumped with fatigue. She looked across the river but there was no light in Soutra. She came to the slope which led to the House and climbed the stile.
Through the glass panels of the door she saw Bridget approaching along the passage. “Why did you ring, Miss Pink? People always walk straight in. We’ve been waiting ages but we’ve put something in the oven; it won’t be very fresh, I’m afraid.”
In the dining room Clive poured her a glass of burgundy. He seemed overcome with solicitude. “Now you’re not to hurry; we’re all in the drawing room —” he emphasised the ‘all’, “— but take your time; you look as if you’ve been through the mill.”
Such well-intentioned but devastating kindness, coupled with Bridget’s casual disregard of her Christian name, made her feel even more decrepit, and she was grateful to be left to recover on her own. Realising that she was hungry, she concentrated on her roast lamb and, after a decent interval, Leila came in with an iced pudding and cheese. Her eyes were untroubled but she, too, looked tired.
“I’ve told him.” She answered the unspoken question in the other’s mind. “It’s going to be all right. Have some more wine.”
Miss Pink patted the younger woman’s arm. “I’ll be with you in a moment.”
“There’s no hurry.” The rejoinder was automatic.
She took them at their word, relaxing, feeling the wine start to do its work, then she went to the drawing room, accepted brandy from Clive and regarded them benignly: Leila, Bridget, Marcus and her host.
“I’ve recovered,” she told them. “Fire your questions.”
“Tell us first where you’ve been — or rather, what you did,” Marcus demanded. “We know you went to the cliffs with the police.”
They followed the account of her evening with care, and before she came to Bell’s verdict, she saw that mention of police interest in the knot on the fixed rope and her sketch of the slab had been enough: the expressions on their faces showed that they had anticipated the conclusion. It was murder — and none of them showed any surprise.
Clive cleared his throat. “Do they suspect anyone?”
She regarded him steadily. “All of us, I’m afraid. Because of the piton having been loosened it has to be someone who knew it had been inserted; that means someone in Scamadale.”
Clive took off his spectacles and started to polish them. “We can’t dodge it,” he said, looking casually round the circle, perhaps not seeing them very well: “It was one of us.”
“Well, someone in Scamadale,” Miss Pink corrected. “There are others, besides ourselves in this room.”
Bridget enumerated: “The MacLeods, the MacKenzies, the MacKays, Ian. And Rita, of course.”
“Where did Rita go?” Miss Pink asked.
“She’s with Sadie.”
; “What! Not at Catacol?”
“Why not?” Bridget stared at her. “She hasn’t left the glen. She couldn’t orientate herself this morning after Pincher’s body was found, and Clive wouldn’t let her drive. So she just hung around the house and talked to me and then I suggested we redecorate one of the rooms. We were doing that when the police arrived. They talked to her and when she came back to me she said they’d asked her not to leave. She’s sleeping here tonight.”
“Rita, too,” Miss Pink murmured.
“What are the police doing now?” Leila asked.
“I left them at the MacKenzie place. Bell didn’t tell me what he intended.” She was unaware of the irony of this.
Marcus asked without much curiosity: “Why was Pincher untied?”
Miss Pink stared at him. “Pincher untied?” she repeated stupidly.
“He must have been on the rope when he fell; it didn’t break any more than the fixed rope did.”
“We were talking about that this morning,” Clive told him. “Stark must have pulled the body in to the plinth.”
“But if it’s murder, it doesn’t have to be Stark,” Bridget stated. “It could have been the killer, but how could anyone reach the body? Ian says the angles are all wrong; if you were even on the edge of the plinth there, the rope would be way above your head.”
A boat, Miss Pink thought, and looked at the others’ careful eyes.
“Who had a motive?” Marcus asked.
The question produced another silence, then Bridget said in an artificial voice: “Everyone.”
“Is that true?” Clive asked gently. “I think we can eliminate some: the crofters, for instance.”
“The MacLeods and the MacKenzie’,” Bridget agreed: “Not the MacKays.”
Miss Pink looked at her sharply.
“Stark killed Sadie’s cat,” the girl went on angrily: “It was making off with their bacon and he threw a rock at it. Rita told Sadie.”
“Poor Sadie,” Miss Pink sighed, then she added: “Would it be enough?”
“Yes,” Clive said, and since they all knew how Sadie had been after her cat died, no one contradicted him.
