Miss Pink at the Edge of the World
Page 20
Then Hector laughed. “Ach, no, ma’am — you’re quite wrong there; I was so frightened I could hardly move, you’d have thought I had diver’s boots on my feet — and I had no clothes on, mind; I’d left them on the beach: the other side of the cave. An’ when I saw his fin go over, flat with the sea, so I knew he was turnin’ on his side an’ his mouth comin’ up — I thought well now, could I be gettin’ back to the stack before he took a second gulp out o’ me — an’ there was the others just beyond him. An’ I turned my back on him an’ tried to make my legs small an’ then I felt him: like a dog’s nose under water it was, an’ hard things scrapin’: nibblin’ with his teeth like a big dog playin’. An’ here I was thinkin’ this was the end — an’ it went on so long, but he never even scratched me.”
“God!” Ian breathed: “So they are harmless.”
“He didn’t know that!” Rita cried angrily.
“What I can’t understand,” Miss Pink pressed, consumed by curiosity, “is why you didn’t leave the body on the rope. Did you think the whales would be more likely to attack if it were floating free?”
“Well, you see, I didna think of the whales at all in the first place. I needed to loosen the corp so that it would float away and not be showin’ where Pincher fell off. I wanted it thought they both fell from the Head. Folk would accept one climbing accident, wouldn’t they? But not two separate ones in different places — and two top climbers killed. You’d all start thinkin’: ‘queer thing, that: two men killed in two different accidents — maybe both wasn’t accidents?’ I did think it strange the whales hadna started on him, but then there was the rope, an’ he was floatin’. But I didna care about the whales where he was concerned until I saw that he was holdin’ them bits of string and I couldna get them out of his fingers. Then I prayed that the whales an’ the fishes an the crabs would start as soon as he sank.”
“But the rope,” Miss Pink insisted: “Weren’t you afraid that it would give you away?”
“I couldna get it down from the overhangs but I didna worry. Mr Perry got his rope snagged once an’ they went back next day and got it down with everybody co-operatin’ on more ropes. ’Tis a common occurrence, I thought; folk would be thinkin’ it had nothin’ to do with Stark and Pincher bein’ killed in a fall from the Head — and indeed, until Pincher was washed up, that’s what you were thinkin’. It was the storm was my undoin’, bringin’ him back like that, poor soul.”
“What are you going to do?” Miss Pink asked.
“Why, nothin’, ma’am. ’Tis all over.” He poured himself a little whisky. “Ian is goin’ to stay in Scamadale now, an’ the others will be teachin’ him what he doesn’t know already. Sadie will be lookin’ after him.”
“Ach, I’ll look after him,” his sister echoed, and Miss Pink saw that this was Hector’s way of saying that Ian was to see that the girl came to no harm.
“This is all going so smoothly,” she said, “that I can’t help feeling — wondering why you are giving yourself up. I assume you are going to do that?” she asked carefully.
He didn’t answer her question directly. “It would have been all right,” he told her, “but for Mr Perry. He was after tellin’ me he was goin’ away. I knew what that meant — and you’ve confirmed it. You see, the police knows it was murder and not an accident, so they’ve got to have someone for it, but that one’s me. I made the mistake.”
“Oh, you think it was a mistake.”
“Of course.” He regarded her with astonishment.
“I had the impression that everyone, but most particularly yourself, thought that Stark was — not fit —”
“Oh, Stark! There was no mistake with him. No, ma’am. I mean, me bein’ so sure Stark would be the one to fall off the Old Man. If it had been him, and Pincher was spared, we’d all say it was an accident: the nail thing comin’ out because it wasn’t put in firm like. ’Twouldn’t be no good you sayin’ it was firm because all these —” his glance went round the room, “— would be sayin’ I was in the fields with the sheep.”
“But you could have said it was an accident anyway! No one could have proved the piton was loosened, nor even that the knot in the fixed rope was undone by hand. There is no evidence against Mr Perry. There is no case.”
“But Pincher was killed.”
“It’s Pinch, you see,” Rita put in earnestly, and the crofters nodded in unison: “He thinks he’s got to pay for Pinch.”
The collie growled in its throat and they stiffened. As Hector stood up and they all watched him, Miss Pink heard a car engine. He drew a small and battered suit case from under the table.
“Goodbye, ma’am,” he said, and held out his hand.
She followed as he went along the passage and opened the door. Bell was on the step. He stood aside but checked when he saw Miss Pink. The police car waited on the track, its side lights burning and the engine running.
“How did you find out?” she asked rudely.
“We didn’t; he came to us.”
And they’d let him have his farewell party. She stared at Hector, standing huge in the moonlight, the ridiculous little case at the end of a long arm. He put his hand on her shoulder and patted her.
“Don’t worry,” he said, and gestured towards the cottage: “They’ll be all right. You just be gettin’ up to the House now an’ tell Mr Perry how it is. An’ tell him I’ll be back.”
*
She watched the tail lights recede through the dunes and went on watching until they’d climbed the headwall and disappeared, then she became aware of the others crowding behind her in the paddock — and across the water came a long and ululating cry, infinitely moving.
“The seals is back.”
“Their voices don’t carry so far.”
“What is it, Ian?”
“Don’t ask me; I’m only a scientist. Ask MacLeod. It’s his grandfather’s cousin’s woman, isn’t it, Sadie?”
“You know it is, so why do you ask? Come on, he said we’d to go round the sheeps soon as he’d gone.”
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