by Gwen Moffat
“And Hector?” Miss Pink asked.
“You remember that night Sadie stayed out,” Bridget went on, still with that high cold tone: “She was on the cliffs with Stark.”
“You mean he seduced her?”
Bridget shrugged. Miss Pink was disturbed, but not for the conventional reason.
“That’s not enough,” Marcus said loudly. Bridget stared at him. Clive said equably: “We all have motives.”
“Even I,” came Miss Pink’s cool voice. “I didn’t like seeing my friends victimized by a psychopath.”
Warmth showed in Bridget’s eyes. “Dear Miss Pink,” she said in a more natural tone. “By the way,” she went on, more casually: “Do we have any idea when Stark was killed?”
Miss Pink explained how she had arrived at an estimate of eleven o’clock if he hadn’t swum the channel.
“Oh, he didn’t swim,” Bridget commented: “He couldn’t.”
They considered this in silence, wondering what difference it made. “That means,” Miss Pink went on, “he was killed at eleven, at the earliest. It’s more logical, of course; no one would have gone up to the cliffs in broad daylight, not to —” She stopped.
“You mean, there was a question of his being killed in the daytime?” Marcus asked. “But we were all at the fire!”
Miss Pink said: “We don’t know what some people were doing in the early part of the evening — but it’s immaterial now. If he couldn’t swim, he didn’t cross the channel until ten.”
“So let’s have all your alibis for after ten,” Bridget said gaily — and then the light left her eyes, and the fine bone structure became sharp and ugly, emphasizing the fact that beauty, like fear, comes from within. “I have none,” she added, her tone still light but now as cold as her face.
“An alibi from ten until when?” Marcus asked cautiously.
“We have to retain our sense of proportion,” Clive pointed out.
“Can we?” Bridget asked.
Marcus said: “You know, anyone could have untied that knot — even a woman.”
“No one can be eliminated.” Leila’s tone was quiet and there was a strange light in her eyes.
“I think you’re wrong there,” Miss Pink demurred. “The MacLeods must be considered out of the running.”
“No!” Marcus contradicted. “Jessie’s very active for her age; she could make the top of the Head and back in an hour.”
Miss Pink smiled wryly. “But not climb the Old Man.”
Bridget hooted with laughter. “Not in one of Leila’s evening gowns anyway. Of course,” she added with one of those sudden swoops to calculation that she was subject to this evening: “that’s the best factor for elimination, isn’t it? Climbing the stack?” She looked round the company, a slow smile suffusing her face so that she was beautiful again. Marcus regarded her with growing horror.
Clive said suddenly: “We’re all exhausted. Things will appear different tomorrow when we’ve had a good night’s sleep.” He looked at Leila meaningly and she nodded. It took her a while to catch Miss Pink’s eye for her friend appeared to be studying the wall beyond Bridget’s head.
They didn’t talk on the way home to Soutra except for a brief comment on the snipe which were drumming upstream of the bridge.
They sat in the sitting room with the whisky between them. “He didn’t seem surprised,” Leila said wonderingly. Seeing her friend’s lack of comprehension, she went on with some impatience: “When I told him about the trial.”
Miss Pink was astounded. She had forgotten this astonishing fact — although it was more correct to say that it was astonishing she should have forgotten. She told herself that, as one aged, it became increasingly difficult to concentrate on more than one element of a situation at any one time.
“You had a secret,” she said, recovering herself: “That was obvious, particularly to a man who loves you.”
“It was sudden.” The voice was dull, trance-like, but the fine eyes were like those of an animal having a wound probed without an anaesthetic. “He — my husband — told me about this woman and that he’d brought her home. I’d never suspected. I was still in love with him. He was like Stark, you see. He was drunk that night and he stood by the bed and told me to get out. He’d left her in the car, he said, and he didn’t want to keep her waiting out there in the cold. I didn’t believe it, of course; I thought it was one of his jokes and he wanted me to put the car away because he was too drunk, so I went downstairs and the car was in the street. I looked inside, and the woman wound the window down. I was in my dressing gown. She said: ‘You’re not taking the car; that’s his’. It wasn’t, actually; I’d bought it. I went back to the bedroom and he’d fallen across the bed. I had a heavy silver hand mirror. I hit him with it. They said he had a very thin skull.”
“An accident,” Miss Pink observed coolly. “You’d have been acquitted in France. There was only one way Clive could take it, being the person he is.”
“It gives him a motive.”
“For Heaven’s sake, girl! Stark was dead for two days before you told Clive!”
“The police will say he knew before.”
Miss Pink stared at her. “Even if he had known, where’s the motive there?”
“To stop people getting to know his future wife is a murderess.”
“You’re worn out with emotion. Murderess indeed! Half the married women in this country have knocked their husbands over the head at some time but not had the misfortune to get a thin skull with the rolling pin or a hand mirror or whatever. Really, Leila, you: an intelligent woman!”
So, first with calculated ridicule, then with comfort and the liqueur whisky, she rallied the younger woman and sent her to bed in a more healthy state of mind. But Miss Pink was remembering Clive’s hand clutching his whisky glass when someone — Marcus? — had said they thought Stark had hoped the fire would reach the settlement — and the fact that he took a rifle to the broch. And later, the stricken look on his face as he slowly came to realise what a television film would do to his cherished community. But, worse than any of this could have been the knowledge of the relationship between Stark and Bridget, and what this meant. Clive, one might think, had stronger motives than Bridget herself. Miss Pink hoped that Leila was asleep.
Chapter Twelve
“We’re in need of your services as a consultant again.” For some reason, perhaps because of the sunshine, Bell seemed light-hearted this morning. “Would you care to demonstrate this ‘fixed rope’ business for us?”
Miss Pink was startled. “Did I say —? I can show you, but I’m not going to do it.” She was aware of Leila behind her. “Who could show the inspector how the descendeurs and the jumars work?”
“We’ve never used them.”
“But you’re all climbers!” Bell protested.
“Oh dear.” Miss Pink felt helpless. “So much explaining to do. It’s like this: these methods are comparatively recent. We’re all middle-aged and we use the methods we were brought up with, which are considerably less technical.”
“What about the naturalist, Morrison, and Miss Perry and the younger crofters?”
Leila answered him. “Mr Morrison isn’t a hard climber, and I think he’s done most of his routes with Mr Perry since he came here, so he wouldn’t know. The MacKays don’t use ropes; in fact, they would never think of themselves as rock climbers. Miss Perry might be able to help.”
The police went away and came back with Bridget and Marcus. MacPhee was carrying a loaded rucksack.
A fixed rope was rigged on the low cliffs beyond Soutra and Bridget demonstrated the use of the descendeur, then climbed the rope with the aid of the jumars. The police were astonished at the apparent ease of the performance and MacPhee had to try the techniques: on a safety rope held by Marcus, in case he made a mistake. On this sparkling morning the exercise seemed an innocuous and irrelevant incident, and Bridget treated the police with indulgent amusement until, with MacPhee’s arrival, gaspin
g, at the top of the fixed rope, Bell deliberately unclipped it from the snap-link, untied the knot, took a turn round the link and half-knelt, holding the free end in his hand. He looked at the climbers expectantly but they were silent, uncertain what was expected of them.
“Go back,” Bell ordered MacPhee.
The sergeant scrambled down easy rocks to the bottom. Bell addressed Miss Pink: “Am I holding it tight enough?”
Apart from walking away, she had no alternative but to co-operate. “Just hold it,” she said. “Be ready to take the strain and, if anything, pull against him. And Marcus,” she directed: “Keep him tight on the safety rope.”
“Tell him to start,” Bell said. He was a few paces back from the edge, beside the piton, and couldn’t see MacPhee. Miss Pink called to the sergeant to start climbing.
“Just until he’s off the ground,” Bell said.
Fascinated, she observed what she might have expected to see but which now, in reality, became disturbing because it was expected. As MacPhee struggled to transfer his weight from the ground to the rope, the elasticity in the fibres was taken up, the rope gave several inches and then rested: immobile and under stress, with the sergeant’s weight on one end some twenty feet below, Bell’s hand on the other.
“He’s off the ground?” Bell asked.
“Just. All his weight is being held by you now.”
“And if I let go?”
“Don’t! He’d fall backwards — his feet would be caught in the loops. Stop there!” she shouted to MacPhee, anxious that the inspector might push his test too far.
“Fine,” Bell exclaimed. “Now how does he get down? He doesn’t need to climb to the top again.”
“Let the rope out gently; just a few inches will be enough, then he can step down to the ground.”
As Bell did this, Marcus paid out the safety rope.
“He wouldn’t have fallen backwards,” Miss Pink murmured. “The safety rope would have held him.”
“Stark didn’t have a safety rope,” Bell said.
*
The swell had subsided now and, walking back to the settlement, having left Bridget and Marcus dismantling the gear, Bell asked Miss Pink to go with him that afternoon to the stack. He’d already arranged with MacKenzie to take them. She agreed, although with reluctance, wishing that there might be someone, anyone, in Scamadale who wasn’t likable, but then she knew from experience that the unlikable character would not necessarily be the killer. People were never black or white; even Stark had his shades of grey.
It was low tide and they were able to land on the plinth of the Old Man. Slipping on the wet rock in gum boots, Bell led the way to a spot directly underneath the snagged rope. One end was still in the sea, the other dangled short from the overhangs.
“Tell me what you found on Thursday morning, ma’am, when you came here by boat.”
“The rope was as you see it now. Everything was much the same, except for Stark’s body on the shore, under that funnel in the cliff.” She pointed. “That’s what you were looking down last evening.”
But he wasn’t interested in Stark at the moment. “Tell me what you did when you saw this rope.” He indicated the one above their heads.
He must know all this, have read it in Clive’s statement to Munro, but she remembered that then it was thought to be an accident. Statements changed character when it was known that deaths were due to murder. She told him how Ian pulled the rope in and there was nothing on the end.
“Nothing, ma’am?”
“Only the knot.”
The silence seemed embarrassed, as if it didn’t know what to do with itself. Bell looked towards the shore.
“Where’s the other way down?” he asked.
She blinked. “You mean Tangleblock?”
“Where is it?”
“It’s not visible from here; it’s past the cave and round the corner from where the cormorants are standing.”
“We’ll go and look at it.” He moved away and MacPhee came behind him like a shadow. Miss Pink had forgotten the sergeant; subconsciously she’d thought he’d been poking about in the crevices under the weed.
“Which of them told you about Tangleblock?” she asked.
“None of them. You did.”
She stopped short.
“There has to be another way down,” he went on patiently. “Someone took Pincher’s body off the rope after Stark was killed, after the fixed rope came down —”
“Why not before?”
“Why was the body pulled in at all? Remorse, a forlorn hope: to see if Pincher could be resuscitated? If Pincher was meant to be killed, the body wouldn’t have been touched.”
“Still, I don’t see why the body had to be pulled in after Stark died.”
“Because if it happened otherwise, Stark would have seen the killer and what he was doing. Stark knew as well as you do that the piton couldn’t have come out by accident, so someone in Scamadale was responsible. When a person climbs down the cliff and swims out to Pincher’s body and releases it, is Stark going to think that person’s action is idle curiosity? No, he knows the swimmer is the killer, has gone back to the cliff top. Stark isn’t going to trust himself to the last fixed rope with that person on top, particularly since he’d have had to be a moron not to have guessed that the killer was really after himself. That body was taken off the rope when Stark was dead, and since the last fixed rope fell away with Stark, there has to be another way down.”
MacKenzie rowed them ashore. They left him with the dinghy and moved along the beach to stop and stare up the rift of Tangleblock.
“My God!” Bell exclaimed.
Miss Pink, about to reassure him concerning its moderate level of severity, held her tongue. Then she said, with a hint of hope in her voice: “It isn’t an approach to the stack after all because you have to swim across the mouth of the cave to reach the stack.”
He’d seen it as they approached the shore, had been momentarily side-tracked and awed by the massed guillemots on the ledges and their weird song.
“Someone swam to Pincher,” he reminded her.
She nodded. And there had been mud on the foothold on Thursday . . . She looked out to sea, blinking erratically, a habit of hers when she was thinking hard. Behind her, the men were moving about the boulders. It was some time before she realised that the killer whales were gone.
On the return journey Bell asked questions about exposure (‘looking down’, he called it) and ropes, and the possibilities of climbing by torchlight. He treated her generally as an equal, but as his superior so far as terrain and techniques were concerned. Nevertheless, she was wryly amused to realise that she appeared to be no longer a suspect (if she had ever been) not because she had said she wouldn’t climb the stack but because he thought she couldn’t. He’d been given proof of the ease with which a good climber could ascend a rope, but like most laymen he was over-awed by the difficulties of vertical rock, most particularly when a climber had no security on it. It was obvious that he couldn’t envisage upward progress without the artificial aid of the rope.
Back on the strand he said he would like a word with her and they started to stroll along the water line. MacPhee fell in step on her other side.
“What do you know of Rita Washburn?” Bell asked.
“I don’t know much about her.”
“You knew she smoked cannabis?”
“Yes.”
“She’s admitted to us that she got it from Stark. He wouldn’t let her have any more after last Tuesday, said he’d none left. That may have been true; there doesn’t appear to be any in his effects, nor in the Mini which is where you’d expect him to keep it. What was in Miss West’s car might have been the last of it. You saw Rita Wednesday evening. How did she seem?”
“Alternately sulky and defiant.”
“Nervy?”
“Not particularly; she was smoking — Players.”
“Could she get down that climb?”
“Tan
gleblock?” She was startled; that Rita had a place in the drama tended to be forgotten. She turned to stare back at Farrid Head. In her mind’s eye she saw the rift plunging for three hundred feet below the jammed boulder: a slit of moonlit sea with the rock in deep shadow. A head torch? No rope if you fell — but Rita, she thought, wouldn’t have been afraid. She shrugged. “She could have done it.” Bell nodded. “But then,” she went on, “she had to swim across the mouth of the cave and out to Pincher’s body, then swim and climb back again — after the shock of finding Pincher dead. The previous night she’d have had the same journey, without Pincher’s death but with the strain of climbing the stack and descending it solo. It adds up to such a series of physical and psychological stresses that I can’t believe a girl so recently on drugs could have accomplished it.”
“How did she seem on Wednesday morning?”
“I didn’t see her — except as a distant shape in the Mini — until the evening.”
“And she was alternately sulky and defiant, but not necessarily nervy. She could have slept all day instead of driving around after dropping the men.” His tone sharpened. “Is Sadie MacKay nervy?”
“No.”
“I understood she wasn’t normal.”
“I wouldn’t say that; after all, who is?”
He nodded, but she couldn’t tell whether it was a gesture of acceptance or one of dismissal.
“So, there’s Sadie MacKay’s cat and her affair with Stark.”
“Hardly that,” she protested, guessing that they had got this from Rita. “The girl was on the cliffs with him one evening.”
“Yes, well, perhaps we’ll learn more about it from herself.”
They had been walking towards the rock in the middle of the bay. Now he turned and they strolled back. There was no smoke rising from Catacol’s chimney. Miss Pink felt unhappy.
“You won’t find Sadie at home at this time of the day,” she told them.
“We’ll find her, ma’am.”
They found her in the corner of a field by the wood. Bales of straw made a pen and she was watching a ewe suckling two lambs. She looked up as they approached and stared at the police stonily. Miss Pink took the bull by the horns and, ignoring the conventions, said: “Mr Bell wants to ask you some questions, Sadie, and I’ve come to see you don’t bully him.”
