by Gwen Moffat
‘No starters,’ Maynard murmured. ‘So what?’
‘You can have as much steak as you like,’ Ida said tightly. ‘There’s enough and to spare.’
She went away and returned with the Burgundy, which was cold. Having filled their glasses, she retreated to the sideboard where she hovered like an uneasy ghost. They did not revert to the murder. The incongruities in the normally superlative service intimidated them as much as Ida’s unwonted presence. Maynard, as if in defiance of an atmosphere which teetered on the edge of an abyss, ordered a second bottle of Romanée-Conti.
So they were quite a while over their dinner but Ida, far from being resentful, seemed grateful for their company. When they returned to the cocktail lounge the two crofting women lingered after they’d served coffee and liqueurs.
‘Where is Mrs Hamlyn?’ Miss Pink asked, knowing it was a ritual question requiring a ritual answer—which was duly supplied by Euphemia: ‘Gone to their sitting room to rest.’
Miss Pink started to pour coffee. Ida, who had brought in the tray, lifted the flap of the counter, went behind the bar and stood mutely beside Euphemia. The door to the kitchen was closed. Miss Pink paused, took a banknote from her bag and handed it to Maynard.
‘Ask the women to take a dram with me.’
The coffee was handed silently.
‘Draw the curtains, Betty.’ She was wary of the dusk outside.
The telephone rang. Ida and Euphemia looked at each other.
‘Mr Maynard will go with one of you,’ Miss Pink said comfortably.
When they’d gone, Lavender murmured, ‘She was never jealous; I knew that. As if I wouldn’t know! She was just playing the part.’
‘If she wasn’t jealous,’ Miss Pink said, ‘what was her motive?’
‘She was mad. Did you see her eyes tonight? She killed Terry, Madge found out, so she had to be killed too. Gordon must know as well, because she could only have gone up to the tent after we’d gone to bed, and they share a room.’
Maynard and Ida came back. Maynard said, ‘It’s a professor; that would be the pathologist, wouldn’t it? He wants Merrick. Says he’ll speak to you.’
The voice at the other end of the line was pleasant and cultured. The professor (who climbed) knew about Miss Pink and was prepared to chat. At length he reverted to the purpose of his call and, hearing that Merrick was on his way to Coruisk, said he would leave his message with the police station but meanwhile would she relay the salient points should the inspector return direct to Glen Shira?
A moderate amount of alcohol had been found in the bloodstream, he continued conversationally, and it was a moment before she realised he was speaking of Madge Fraser—along with a significant quantity of a barbiturate. The specific figures were in his report.
‘A barbiturate,’ she repeated stupidly.
‘Sleeping pills.’
She said nothing.
‘Are you there?’ he asked with a twinge of petulance. ‘The whisky in the bottle was unadulterated. Yes, and another interesting point is the time of death. Merrick was eager to tie that down, wasn’t he? I believe you remarked on the flaccidity of the corpse. Not remarkable if she was killed late last night and the body in cold water throughout, but you’d expect rigidity to set in quickly. It’s now—what?—eight hours since she was taken out of the burn, but there’s no stiffening. In other words, rigor has come and gone; she’s been dead well over thirty-six hours. Makes a difference, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes, it makes a difference.’
She promised to pass on the message, put down the receiver and turned away to find Maynard and Ida regarding her with a kind of apathy and realised that this was their defence mechanism against a new shock. She led the way back to the cocktail lounge and told them. There were no police here as yet and she felt that these people had a right to know everything.
Maynard’s apathy evaporated and his face was keen and intelligent again. Betty, for the moment, was vacuous.
‘What does it mean?’
‘My sleeping capsules,’ Lavender said.
Maynard was staring at Miss Pink. ‘Dead over thirty-six hours? But that means she couldn’t have done the ridge! All the time we were waiting for her on Alasdair. . . . In fact, she must have been killed Wednesday night and when we went up Thursday morning she was lying at the foot of the waterfall. Her boots and pack were probably outside the tent at that moment just as she’d put them down when— Oh no, she didn’t put them there; the killer did, and threw her sandals and the saucepan in the burn . . . on Wednesday night.’
‘Who was absent?’ Lavender asked. ‘I was in our room; I wasn’t well.’
‘Apart from yourself,’ Betty said, unaware of the faux pas, ‘no one could have gone up; we were all here—except—’ She clapped a hand to her mouth.
‘Come off it!’ Maynard chided. ‘Andrew hadn’t the ghost of a motive.’
‘He wouldn’t have stayed on the island,’ she said wildly. ‘He wouldn’t have gone to Coruisk.’ She checked herself. ‘The police are watching the ferries,’ she added tonelessly. ‘That’s why they stayed; they couldn’t get away.’
Maynard had paid no attention. ‘The cache was robbed!’ he exclaimed.
‘Emptied by the killer,’ Miss Pink agreed, ‘to add colour to the presumption that she had done the ridge. It explains the absence of the water bottle. It couldn’t be put in her day sack because the scene at the tent had already been set and the tent couldn’t be visited again. The tent was closed for the same reason that the cache was rifled: to delay discovery and falsify the time of death, all designed to suggest she had been on the ridge and so couldn’t have been killed before Thursday evening. The implication was that an accident occurred not long after she came down off the ridge.’
‘Someone had a perfect alibi for Thursday,’ Maynard breathed.
‘And none for Wednesday.’
‘When was it done?’ he mused. ‘No one—’ he glanced at Betty apologetically, ‘but no one who matters, was absent Wednesday evening; it must have been done at night, like rifling the cache. No one’s been away for long enough to get up to the ridge in the daytime—surely?’
‘Night time would mean collusion,’ Miss Pink pointed out. ‘I mean, if it was someone from the house.’
‘I don’t see why.’ Betty was bewildered.
The door behind the bar opened slowly and Captain Hunt stood there, surveying the company. ‘They’s all here,’ he said over his shoulder. He moved forward, followed by Colin Irwin whose pale hair was restrained tonight by the red brow band. At Miss Pink’s invitation they came quietly into the lounge. The captain carried a shot gun.
‘That’s us all here,’ he repeated with satisfaction. ‘There’s lights coming down the glen. That’ll be the poliss.’ He looked at his wife. ‘Are they after taking guns?’
‘I havena looked.’
He went out with Irwin. In the ensuing silence they heard the faint clatter of the cattle grid.
‘The colonel’s alive then?’ Lavender said loudly and everyone stirred and looked at her reluctantly but no one spoke.
The men returned carrying a rifle and another shot gun. Captain Hunt looked at Miss Pink. ‘She’s taken her own rifle.’
Someone gasped. There was a noise of wheels on gravel, doors slammed, and large men started to fill the hall, some in uniform.
‘Come in,’ Miss Pink said yet again. ‘You have an easy job—in one way. Everyone is here—except the owners.’
‘And where are they, miss?’ asked a man with an air of authority. Miss Pink looked towards Captain Hunt.
‘I heard the engine of the colonel’s boat,’ he said, ‘just before I came up.’
‘Which way did the boat go?’
‘There’s only one way; it put to sea, of course, but there was no way of telling who was in it, nor how many.’
Chapter Sixteen
The police had come to guard the people in the settlement—and to make sure they stayed there. Since everyone e
xcept the Hamlyns was gathered under one roof, they had nothing to do but wait for daylight and Merrick’s return. So they waited: behind closed windows and drawn curtains, in a fug of smoke and a background noise of coffee cups and snores and snatches of conversation. But upstairs, Miss Pink’s room was quiet and fresh, her window open towards the sea, and it was not surprising that, at some time during the night, in a state between sleeping and waking, she should have been the only person to hear a shot.
She got up and went to the window. The night was dark and still. She stood there for some time listening to faint animal sounds in the darkness: something that might have been a rabbit’s scream, and leaves rustling in the wood under quiet paws. Then she heard the second shot, and it seemed to come from the southern headland.
It was four o’clock. She dressed, without haste, in her climbing clothes, made a pot of tea and filled a flask, then left the house by way of the fire escape—which was unguarded. Someone would have been round in the night to make sure its door was locked but that was only to prevent entry. There was no one and nothing to stop her getting out.
The path to the headland was rocky and she wouldn’t use her torch so she had to go slowly, particularly when she crossed the burns which cut back deeply into the moor. The tide was making and the loch calm, the only sounds the splash of a larger wave, or water dripping off some unseen platform. Now and again, by small cliffs (they were low on this side), and from some submerged hole would come faint thuds and a long, heaving sigh.
This peninsula lay south-west of the Cuillin and was bounded on the east by the peak of Gars Bheinn which dropped steeply to the sea. As she approached the headland, the mountain was silhouetted against the dawn and, close at hand, the lochan by the Boat Port gleamed like an opal in the black moor.
The Boat Port had been used as shelter for over two thousand years. There was a ruined village inland and a crumbling fort on the cliff. Someone was standing by the fort and out in the loch a little boat rocked on the water. No one was in it.
Miss Pink paused. ‘Have you shot him?’
Vera shook her head. In that grey light she looked so old that, but for the rifle, she might have been one of the people from the ruins.
‘Is he dead?’
‘Yes, he’s dead.’
Miss Pink took off her rucksack at that and produced the thermos flask. Kneeling on the grass she poured tea and looked up, holding the cup.
‘You’ll be needing this. You can put the rifle down; I know you didn’t kill the girls.’ When the other made no move, she went on, ‘There are no witnesses to what we say. In any case, I know that you won’t shoot me. Here, take your tea.’
Vera stepped to the fort and leaned the rifle against the stones, then came and sat down. They ignored the empty boat and looked westward towards the Long Island. The cloud cap over Rum glowed with refracted colour. Behind them, the Cuillin corries held the darkness while the crests were gilded against an expectant sky.
‘I never convinced you then?’
‘Not really.’ Miss Pink accepted the cup and drank her share with appreciation. ‘It’s been a matter of character,’ she said, ‘or—more correctly—of people behaving out of character. You called me “dear” when you were stalling, when you were not sure how much of the truth to tell; because some of it was true, and some was partly true. Obviously, you had a strong reason for driving Madge away, but jealousy was inappropriate—for you. And seduction was out of character for Madge. All the same, I was convinced that you were sincere in trying to get rid of her—’
‘Oh, I was sincere, I was desperate! Both times—but with Madge more than Terry. I wanted Terry to go for her own protection, but Madge was my friend. She’d still be alive if I’d warned her.’
Miss Pink said, ‘I can see why Madge had to be killed but what was the motive for Terry, I mean, specifically? Or was it that she embodied what he was most afraid of: lack of control, animal high spirits—?’
‘Look,’ Vera was suddenly impatient, ‘tell me what you’re talking about.’
Miss Pink was startled, then she understood. ‘You’re conditioned to fighting for him. It’s time to relax now. That wasn’t a trap to make you start talking. I’ll tell you what I think happened.
‘Terry was sun-bathing all day: half-naked, naked, it doesn’t matter. I suspect he gave himself different reasons for going across to Largo, all highly moral and all invalidated because he went over after dark.’ Vera made a protesting gesture. ‘It had to be after dark,’ Miss Pink insisted, ‘because he would never have killed her and left the light on. I saw it at eight-thirty. It went out about ten-thirty; that’s when she was killed.’
‘Someone else could have—’
‘He needn’t have had homicidal motives when he went across,’ Miss Pink went on firmly. ‘Not conscious ones, anyway. . . . He went across when no one was in the bar. I don’t know what he said to her; perhaps he was bluff and jolly for a moment but Terry would go through that like a knife through soft butter. He would bluster and she’d laugh at him; and ridicule was—literally—fatal for her, although it’s possible he strangled her just because she raised her voice. Then he panicked—although he remembered to put out the light. He came blundering back through the wood and went straight up the back stairs to your sitting room and told you.’
Vera sighed heavily but said nothing.
‘So your confession about washing the billies was correct,’ Miss Pink went on. ‘And you had to imitate a man to get rid of Willie MacNeill. If he’d continued to think that you were Terry and that she was on her own, he’d have come down in the burn to join you. Washing the billies widened the period in which she could have been killed and lengthened the list of suspects. Her body might never have been found. Putting it down Scarf Geo would be your idea, and it was you who told him to use his own pack frame and a plastic bag from the Rescue Post, and by that time you’d got him to wear gloves, although of course, you’d have seen to it that he put his prints all over the frame again when he’d disposed of the body. It wouldn’t have done to have the frame covered with glove smudges. You wore gloves too, when you wiped his prints at Largo, rubber kitchen gloves?’
‘Fine plastic,’ Vera said, ‘like surgical gloves. So I never convinced you about his bad back either? I didn’t like that; it came too late, didn’t it?’
‘Not only that, but you insisted too much on your own strength. At twenty perhaps, not at fifty. You haven’t the muscle to carry a body for a mile, and how would you ever lift it over the fence at the end?’ Miss Pink regarded the other with compassion. ‘And then there was the style of the murders: the differences and the similarity. Terry’s was a murder on impulse, Madge’s was carefully planned. There was a plan in Terry’s case but it came after death: the disposal of the body.’ Miss Pink looked across the water to Scarf Geo. ‘It was quick, simple and, even if it didn’t succeed completely, partial success was sufficient for your motives. That particular job,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘with your collusion, was done in the middle of the night. Nothing else was.’ Vera started and stared at her. ‘Because there was no collusion on the others,’ Miss Pink pointed out. ‘On the other hand, Madge’s murder was so involved: the drugging in advance—and no barbiturate in the bottle—’
‘How did you know that?’
‘The post mortem result. He must have taken a cup with him; he didn’t empty the capsules into the bottle. He was too clever: trying to reproduce the first murder, at least by falsifying the time of death. Vanity? Either he lost sight of the fact that yours was the brain behind the first, at least in the disposal and cleaning up—’ Vera winced, ‘—or he remembered your contribution—he could hardly forget it, and thought he could emulate it.
‘I thought that in some form Terry’s was a sex murder—but Madge’s wasn’t. And although it wasn’t until late in the day that we knew Madge’s was murder, there had been a mystery earlier: two mysteries. Why did you quarrel with her, and who did she see in the wood the nig
ht Terry was killed? She saw someone because when I told her that Willie’s evidence implied Terry was alive at eleven, she became hysterical with relief. So who did she see? Maynard? But she hinted it was him so I argued that it couldn’t have been. He was a stalking horse for someone else. You? If it had been you, your quarrel with her wouldn’t have been in public on Wednesday morning. That quarrel had a staged quality, like the rumour you spread about her supposed affair with your husband. Both covered the real reason that she had to go.’
‘And I didn’t succeed,’ Vera said tiredly. ‘I thought she’d leave the island and she went to Eas Mor: a sitting duck.’
‘That was not your fault.’ Miss Pink was at her most sincere. She went on, ‘Madge was protecting someone, and you were the only person with whom she had an emotional relationship. Otherwise, as you maintained yesterday, a very cool customer, but not interested in men. She certainly wasn’t after your husband, but if he were the person she saw in the wood, she might protect him for your sake.
‘And then there was the attitude of the crofters towards you. At first I thought they were protecting Willie but they showed more than casualness when he was taken into custody, they appeared relieved, so it wasn’t him. It seemed to me that the only incomer for whom they had respect—apart from Irwin whom they seemed to look on as one of themselves—was you. And yet there was an absence of that kind of paternalism which one gets with protection: a kind of jealous regard for the person protected. It wasn’t till last night that I realised what the crofters were doing; they were leaving you an open field. It wasn’t their business, and they saw to it that other people should be kept in ignorance because it wasn’t their business either. Old MacNeill’s nerve seems to have broken, probably because Willie was too vulnerable in Glen Shira. Since he was at Largo at a critical time, the killer might think he knew more than he was telling—so as soon as Willie left the safety of the police station, old MacNeill picked him up and kept him in Portree.’
Vera said, ‘I got Euphemia to tell old MacNeill to stay away from the glen with Willie, until I said they could come back. I was afraid he would kill Willie next—or Lavender.’
