by Gwen Moffat
‘In the circumstances that’s a little ironical. I didn’t “get at” Madge, not like some people.’
‘Just a few choice words at selected moments.’ Betty was mildly vicious. ‘Although, I must admit, Vera was the one who drove her away. She had good cause though.’
‘Had she?’ Lavender looked from Betty to Miss Pink. ‘I suppose she had.’
‘God! She caught the girl seducing Gordon in their sitting room!’
Miss Pink stirred. ‘Vera told you that?’
‘That’s the story that’s going around; there was a hell of a row in their sitting room on Tuesday evening. Someone must have heard it and talked.’
‘I wonder who?’ Miss Pink mused. ‘I was the nearest to their sitting room. I heard nothing.’ She didn’t add that she’d come on the scene too late: as Madge was slamming into the lavatory, presumably just having come—been ejected?—from the sitting room. ‘What was Vera’s reaction to Madge’s death?’ she asked.
‘It must have been an awful shock,’ Betty said.
‘She’ll blame herself.’ Lavender savoured the words. It was obvious that neither of them had been present when Vera heard the news of the tragedy.
From the top of the wood came the clatter of the cattle grid. They watched the drive expectantly and the Hamlyns’ Avenger appeared, the back piled high with provisions. The colonel waved to them as he drove round to the stable yard. Betty had leapt up. ‘He doesn’t know! He left just after breakfast! What a shock for him. I must go and give him a hand with that stuff anyway; his back’s bad today.’
Miss Pink followed the other with surprising speed. ‘What’s wrong with his back?’
‘Damn! I shouldn’t have said that. Don’t let on that you know. Vera told me. She didn’t want him to drive to Portree; it’s agony when he gets these bouts, but he would go. Friday’s their shopping day—’
They entered the kitchen to find Ida and Euphemia at the sink. Hamlyn came in the back door with a box full of meat. He greeted the ladies with his usual courtesy but his puzzled glance went to Betty’s apron.
‘You haven’t heard the news?’ she asked.
His face went stiff. ‘My wife?’
‘No. Vera’s all right, but Madge has had an accident.’
He didn’t relax and pain appeared in his eyes. ‘A bad one?’
‘I’m afraid so, Gordon.’
He felt for a chair and sat down. The crofting women drew together and watched. ‘Dead,’ he stated flatly.
After a pause, Betty said: ‘I’m sorry.’
He sighed deeply. ‘Where did it happen?’
‘She fell over Eas Mor.’
He frowned and shook his head. ‘What Eas Mor?’
‘The waterfall at the back.’ She gestured vaguely.
‘What? Just over the road—our Eas Mor? No.’ He stared at them in disbelief. ‘Eas Mor,’ he muttered. ‘How, for God’s sake?’
Maynard put his head round the inner door and beckoned to Miss Pink. Merrick wanted her in the writing room. Leaving Betty to cope with Hamlyn she went out into the passage.
‘What kind of mood is he in?’ she whispered.
‘Not healthy. I’m going up for a bath.’ He looked appallingly tired.
*
A card table had been set up in the writing room and on it was a one-inch map which Merrick and Ivory were studying. They turned at her entrance and she saw that they were tired too. Merrick wasted no time in preliminaries.
‘Good afternoon, ma’am; would you show us where you went this morning, and the place where the deceased put this food?’
It was an old map, and the rash of symbols for scree and crags totally obscured the grand design of the Cuillin. She traced the line of her route up Coire na Banachdich to the cache, a proceeding which they observed in silence and, she felt, without comprehension.
They sat at the large table and she gave her statement as it had happened. Ivory took it down in shorthand. Merrick interrupted only on minor points of fact, like the height of the waterfall, but even that didn’t constitute a fact. She thought it was about one hundred and twenty feet. Innocently she asked what his estimate was, but he wouldn’t commit himself. He glanced at his notebook.
‘We have quite a collection of facts,’ he said. ‘I think I understand some of them, but I haven’t got the feel of what happened. I need these facts interpreted by an independent witness who’s thinking carefully, not by a rescuer glancing at a big drop and making a guess, and I’m not just talking about the length of the drop. Would you come up to the tent with us and show us how you think it happened? You’re not committing yourself; we had to go up there again anyway. You’ll be giving expert assistance; neither of us knows anything about mountain country.’
They were wearing gum boots and she felt sorry for them; such footgear must have been perilous in the ravine. As they climbed the slope she was able to indicate the approximate position of the cache, and they surveyed the headwall with some alarm.
‘Maynard said a pass,’ was Ivory’s comment.
‘It’s an easy way to Coruisk and there’s no climbing involved.’ Seeing their expressions, she added earnestly, ‘One can stroll up—and down, at least in daylight.’
Merrick sighed. ‘It’s another world. No wonder we can’t understand it.’
‘That back wall of the corrie is innocuous,’ she insisted. ‘If you saw some of the things that Madge has climbed, you’d say they were impossible. What I don’t understand is how she fell over a fifteen-foot drop and killed herself.’
It intrigued them. ‘That’s why we’re here,’ Merrick said. ‘To get that straight. Maynard couldn’t help us there: delayed shock, I reckon; she was his guide, wasn’t she? When it was obvious you’d disappeared, he suggested you’d gone up to this cache to see if that could tell us anything. Could it?’
‘The hole where she put the food is empty.’
‘Is it? But are you sure there was food in it?’
‘There should have been food and water; I saw her put the water bottle in her pack on Wednesday.’
‘Perhaps she never took it up to the ridge.’
‘That bottle has to be somewhere. If she didn’t take it, it should be in the tent.’ He shook his head. ‘Then she ought to have brought it down. It wasn’t in her small sack; I looked.’
‘That’s a help to us; your prints are on the headlamp.’
‘You compared those quickly.’
‘Oddly enough, we had the Glen Shira people’s prints in the car when we came over.’ They exchanged bland stares. ‘What’s your feeling about this empty cache, ma’am?’
They were climbing very slowly. Miss Pink, as befitted her sex and years, had the path while the detectives stumbled through the heather.
‘One assumes—’ she emphasised the verb heavily, ‘that she was tired when she reached the pass—perhaps she’d damaged an ankle—and she decided to come down at that point. She would come straight down the headwall and the corrie to the tent. The objection to that is the absence of food wrappings anywhere, either in the hole by the Stone Man or in her pack, and the missing water bottle.’
‘I get the impression,’ Merrick said, ‘that there’s a fringe element among climbers who wouldn’t be averse to a bit of pilfering. Surely food and drink on a mountain would be most welcome?’
‘No one would know it was there. She put a stone across the hole.’
‘If it was necessary: this food,’ Ivory put in, ‘would she have to abandon the trip if it was stolen?’
‘It isn’t essential, but if she was tired and found there was no food, if she reached the cache during a storm—yes, I think finding it stolen could be the final straw and she’d abandon the trip.’
‘Surely that’s irrelevant,’ Merrick said. ‘Whether she ate the food or someone else did, it’s most likely she came down the corrie?’ After some hesitation Miss Pink nodded, but her expression was doubtful.
They’d come out on the lip of the ravine an
d now they stopped to look across at the waterfall. She had a sudden vision of a body going over the top and she winced.
‘I hope she was dead.’
‘If she was alive at the top, death was instantaneous at the bottom.’ Merrick had read her correctly.
‘I heard that a pathologist came up. Did he help you?’
‘Not really, not at this stage. He was surprised to find no rigor, but then she was in cold water all night; that would delay it. He’d expect it to set in very quickly once the body was removed from the burn.’
‘It was only in a few inches of water; it wasn’t submerged.’
‘We’ll have to wait and see whether she died from a fractured skull or was drowned. You know we have the autopsy on the Cooke girl? Manual strangulation, no pregnancy, no recent intercourse. We’re looking for Watkins and Lindsay,’ he added grimly. ‘None of the common motives for a sex crime apply in Cooke’s case—she wasn’t pregnant, wasn’t raped; perhaps we’ll give motive a miss, eh, and just go for the chaps who made off as soon as they saw their chance?’ He was angry. Miss Pink asked diffidently: ‘Have they left the island?’
‘If they have, they didn’t take that van. We’ve got the numbers of all the vehicles going over to the mainland and Watkins’ Ford isn’t among them.’
They made their way round the lip of the ravine to the top of the fall where Miss Pink followed the bank so meticulously that they were able to inspect every yard of the burn’s course.
‘We’ve removed the sandals and the pan,’ Merrick told her. She nodded absently. ‘What are you interested in now, ma’am?’
‘The depth of the water, and the rate of flow.’
‘The Fiscal came up here; he said these burns rise and fall very quickly, that there was no question but a body would be carried down when the water was in spate.’
‘I agree, but there was no spate yesterday; the burns were very low indeed, and we never had enough rain for a flood.’
The tent was still in position but Madge’s possessions had been removed from the grass. Suddenly Merrick said, ‘You’re a climber, ma’am; could you explain the sequence of events when she came down from the climb: having regard to how her things were disposed when you came up this morning?’
‘You mean, a reconstruction?’
‘Not physically. If you want, but a commentary on her movements might help. Shall we try it?’
‘Yes. Well, she’d approach the tent from the corrie—if one assumes that she came down from the pass—’
‘Just a minute,’ Merrick interrupted. ‘When you came down yesterday with Maynard, can you remember how the tent was?’
‘As it is now.’
‘With these buttons done up?’
‘You couldn’t tell from the Coire Lagan path; it’s two or three hundred yards away—but the flaps must have been fastened to the peg as they are now or the outline would have looked different.’
‘Go on, ma’am; what would be the sequence when she arrives at the tent?’
Miss Pink walked away a few paces, came back and stopped. ‘She’d take off her rucksack first—’ She glowered at them, trying to identify with the dead guide. ‘You’ve taken the whisky bottle away?’
‘Yes.’
She frowned at the tent flaps. ‘That whisky would have needed to be remarkably close to the entrance for her to reach inside without undoing the flaps.’ She looked at Merrick. ‘I think she must have flicked them off the tent peg. She had to.’
‘She’d take her gloves off first?’
‘She wouldn’t be wearing gloves.’ She smiled politely. ‘No one wears gloves at this time of the year; not coming down a corrie anyway.’ She flicked back the tent flaps. ‘I see you’ve taken all the gear. She was a tidy person; I think the whisky would have been in the big rucksack that was at the back of the tent, hidden from sight if someone looked in casually. She would have a drink at this point, then she’d take off her boots and socks.’
‘The bottle?’
She was puzzled. ‘She’d put that down.’
‘After screwing the top on,’ Ivory pointed out.
She saw that there was more to the whisky bottle than she’d been thinking herself, but she didn’t comment.
‘After she’d taken off boots and socks, she’d go back to the tent for the billies, disassemble them if they were fitted together, take the little saucepan. . . . At some point she put on her sandals but didn’t buckle them. That was unbelievably careless when she was going to climb down into the burn for water. She must have had more whisky. Of course she did! There was so little left. You must take it as read that, between these actions, of finding the billies and putting on her sandals, she takes an odd swig of whisky.’
‘Rather a chore, isn’t it?’ Merrick observed.
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘Not so much a chore as a muddle: take a dram, put the top on, fetch the pans, another dram, fetch the sandals, a dram—’
‘Maybe she just sat down and drank.’
‘Yes, ma’am. You’ve got your sandals on, unfastened, and you go to the burn with the pan.’
They tramped through the heather to the slabby section above the fifteen-foot wall.
‘Maynard showed us where he found the first sandal,’ Merrick told her.
‘She could have stumbled and gone over here,’ Miss Pink suggested, ‘or she slipped when she was actually getting the water a few feet upstream, but if there was enough water to carry the body down, you’d expect the sandals to have floated farther.’
‘So she went over and hit her head. On what, do you think?’
‘Any rock down there.’ Miss Pink was morose. ‘You can take your pick.’
‘The hazards of camping,’ Merrick remarked facetiously as they made their way back to the tent. The flaps hung loosely as Miss Pink had left them.
‘When are the flaps closed?’ she asked. No one answered her. ‘Well,’ she conceded, ‘if there were a sudden shower when she went for water, she could have slipped the loops over the peg to prevent the rain blowing in, but then she forgot to throw her socks inside. Dark, perhaps? And she was drunk.’ She looked at Merrick. ‘I don’t like that whisky. She had none on Wednesday.’
‘Maynard told us, so she must have bought another bottle when she took her car to Sligachan.’
‘Have you rung Sligachan?’
‘No. We will.’
‘It’s the only explanation,’ Miss Pink said, ‘that she was drunk. She could never have fallen in a burn sober, not Madge.’ Her face creased with bewilderment. ‘But you don’t drink a great deal of whisky when you come down off the hill; you need pints of fluid like tea. I saw her take a dram once at the end of the day, but another time, when she was thirsty, she drank lager. She’d certainly be dehydrated yesterday; the sun was blazing above the fog.’
‘The autopsy will tell us how much she drank, if she drank much.’
‘Who would have drunk the rest?’
‘If it was a full bottle to start with? That may be difficult to determine. There was one good set of her prints on the bottle, that’s all.’
‘You’d expect—’ She blinked and started as the statement penetrated. ‘One set!’ She remembered her reconstruction of Madge’s behaviour, the number of times the guide must have handled the bottle. ‘It should be covered with her prints!’
‘One set,’ he repeated, ‘and under that it’s a mass of greasy smudges.’
‘It had been wiped.’
‘Or handled by someone with gloves.’
‘So that’s why you wanted to know if she’d be wearing gloves.’ She paused, then stated coldly, ‘She had a visitor. That would explain it. He was waiting for her when she came down, he’d got cold and put on gloves. It wasn’t cold though. When she arrived he drank most of the whisky; she had one dram and left her prints on it.’
‘Then he went down and she fell in the river,’ Merrick said baldly. ‘The billies have got smudge marks on them too, over her prints.
’
‘And the pan in the water?’
‘Her prints only.’
*
Back at the house tea was ordered for three in the writing room. Ivory disappeared, and while they waited, Merrick asked Miss Pink who had been absent from the cocktail lounge last evening.
‘I was absent myself for a few minutes after dinner; I was in the garden with Lavender Maynard. I didn’t notice any gaps before dinner; certainly no one was absent afterwards. Vera Hamlyn joined us. Her husband was behind the bar, and the Maynards and Betty Lindsay were there. Nothing untoward happened at all. I went to bed about eleven. The Maynards had gone up then. I thought the others followed me. You’re only interested in the time after dark, surely? Before dark, anyone would have been seen going up to the tent.’
He was thoughtful. ‘Unless he’d gone up much earlier, gone in the tent to wait for her, and come down after dark.’
‘No one was absent from the house for that length of time.’
Ivory came back and held the door for Euphemia bringing the tea. Her face was blank. When she’d gone, Merrick nodded to his sergeant.
He had telephoned the Sligachan Hotel. One of the maids had been off-duty on Wednesday afternoon when Madge Fraser arrived in her Simca. She’d parked it behind the hotel, locked it, waved to the girl (who knew her by sight), and started straight back. She hitched the first car that came along and it picked her up. She was never nearer the hotel than the lay-by where she left the car, so she didn’t buy the whisky there. Her Simca, Ivory added, was still where she’d parked it at Sligachan.
Merrick passed a cup of tea to Miss Pink. ‘And you’re certain she had no whisky that morning, ma’am?’
‘Not certain; I believed her, and I saw the empty bottle.’
‘There’s no empty bottle among her effects,’ Ivory said, handing the scones.
‘The Fiscal doesn’t like it.’ Merrick was gloomy. ‘Two violent deaths in four days. Both to young girls. Of course, you do get coincidences.’ There were long pauses between his sentences. ‘The other one was murder. We let Willie MacNeill go yesterday; nothing to hold him on. He was only helping us. Some help he was!’
