Cliff Edge: a gripping psychological mystery

by Florrie Palmer

  Option Three: Same as Two except that someone helped him get away and that someone is most likely to be Sara de Vries. Might she have driven her car to the nearest parking place and waited while he set the scene by dragging himself across the ground to the edge in order to leave evidence? Then he walked to her waiting car so she could drive him to make his escape.

  If that were the case, it was likely those two were romantically involved. So, did Mike murder Bette on his own or did the two together plot to kill her? If the latter, then Sara knows a great deal more than she has been telling them.

  They decide to discount Option Two since, although it might have been a clever plan for a clever man to come up with, there has been a major manhunt for him and no trace has showed up. Someone somewhere would have spotted him, sold food to him, given him a lift or seen him on public transport.

  So they are left with Mike killing himself or being killed. But by whom?

  They definitely need to bring Sara in for questioning again.

  Trying a different angle, Jane wonders whether Sara had some sexual relationship with either the male or the female. She has nothing to lose by trying to goad a reaction.

  ‘Did you find Mike attractive, Sara?’ Jane fixes a deep gaze on her and watches the woman warily.

  ‘I think you are trying to catch me out, Inspector. I was not having an affair with him if that’s what you’re getting at. I was not even contemplating such a thing and never would. He was all right though. Yes, I suppose he was attractive in a way, but I never considered it as he was my friend’s partner and I am not the type to allow such a thing to cross my mind.’

  ‘Fair enough. Do you think he fancied you?’ Jane half smiles in recognition of their game of cat and mouse.

  This time, Jane thinks she sees the hint of a blush tint Sara’s cheeks.

  ‘Certainly not. No, of course he didn’t, no.’

  A raw nerve has been touched, it seems.

  But however hard Jane tries, she gets nowhere. Sara is not going to give. So she tries another tack. ‘Then, perhaps, Bette was more to your liking?’

  Now Sara demurs. ‘You’re going too far, Inspector Owen. I am not that type.’

  ‘You mean, you don’t contemplate women as sexual partners?’

  ‘No, I most emphatically do not.’

  Jane wonders why she protests so much and thinks of the lady’s insincere overacting in Hamlet’s play within the play. Maybe she’s a closet lesbian. She prods away on this line for a while longer but gets nowhere fast. Sara is a quick learner and has altered from super-helpful to someone who now feels trapped and is turning super-difficult. Whatever Jane tries, however many insincerities she thinks she has extracted from Sara, she gets nowhere nearer to who killed Bette Davies and/or Mike Hanson. She and the team keep coming back to the same old problem. There simply is no tangible evidence and nothing to go on except Sara’s word, reliable or unreliable as it may be.

  The main part of the investigation is now moved back to Llangunnor. With no witnesses, no actual evidence and nothing to go on but what they have been told, all they can hope for is to find Mike Hanson.

  The case has led to nothing but dead ends and although there is no trace of him, Mike is still wanted for the murder. No living relatives have come forward, so the police go ahead and arrange Bette’s funeral. The death of Bette Davies becomes a cold case.

  19 January 2018, Llangunnor

  A call comes into the station that a female body has been found by a man walking his dog by woodland on the side of a small lane near a place called Porthyrhyd. There has been a recent partial thaw although there are still pockets of snow and ice on the ground in places.

  The half-frozen corpse is brought to Max Granger who can tell that it has been iced up for some time where it was lying on the ground in what was probably a large snow drift.

  There are no marks of violence on the body or any incriminating evidence to suggest she was taken there, but it has snowed quite a lot since the time she went missing and it is clear she has been there for at least two, maybe three weeks. On account of the cold conditions the body is perfectly preserved.

  There are no tyre tracks or other signs of wrongdoing to be found.

  The puzzle is why is she there and why is her coat lying beside her? The first is explained by the fact that she may have been overcome by cold, as she was not wearing clothing for walking far in the snowy weather conditions in early January.

  Max’s explanation for her coat lying beside her was that twenty to fifty per cent of hypothermia deaths are associated with ‘paradoxical undressing’.

  When Jane asks him about this, he says, ‘Your body responds to cold by constricting blood vessels, stopping warm blood from getting cooled at the extremities. But in hypothermia, the body becomes exhausted fighting the cold and the tiny muscles holding the blood vessels closed tire out. The blood vessels open up and blood rushes back to the skin causing a hot flush, which makes the person tear off their clothing.’ He flips over the page of his report and looks at Jane before he continues. She can feel herself blushing. There is something so charming about the way he looks at her. She thinks she spots a glimmer of amusement in his eyes when he says, ‘Of course, it could simply be because in this case the brain was so disorientated that it decided it was really hot, so the lady started to discard her clothing, increasing, therefore, the rate of heat loss.’

  Having originally presumed it might turn out to be a case of looking at the brain and finding dementia or Alzheimer’s, on close examination Max found some sticky substance on the lips, nose, cheeks and hair and also on her wrists. It seems the poor woman had her wrists and mouth bound with insulating or duct tape. The tape was then removed. Perhaps in the hope that it would look like what Max first thought it might be.

  But it has turned out to be murder.

  DNA tests have established that it is Gwyneth Edwards, the woman missing from Moylegrove.

  The body is nearer Swansea, though, so Gwyneth Edwards’ son, Aled is the first person they look at.

  The first thing to establish is what might he gain from his mother’s death. Evans checks the worth of her cottage in Moylegrove which is about £140,000 – but the place could be rented during the high season for up to £700 per week. Quite a motive. From their earlier interviews, they know he is comparatively poor. They know he works at a factory on the northern outskirts of Swansea, so Jane calls him and asks for the address there. He gives it to her and asks if there’s some news of his mother and she says there is and that she is coming to talk to him as soon as possible. He sounds extremely anxious.

  Jane takes Evans, PC Roberts and another constable to the factory where Aled helps assemble electronics on a production line. They ask at reception for the manager to speak to them. They explain that they have found the mother of Aled Edwards and that it looks likely she may have been murdered. They ask for a quiet room where they can break the news to Aled and interview him. The manager complies, allows them to use his office and disappears off to the assembly line to find Aled and bring him to them.

  They stand as Jane breaks the news to him and he covers his face with his hands, sinks into an armchair and blubs. ‘Oh no! Not Mam!’

  They give him some time.

  ‘I’m so sorry to break this news to you, Aled.’ Jane clears her throat. ‘What is very much worse is that it looks like she was murdered.’

  ‘Murdered?’ He is incredulous. His hands drop from his face. He wipes his eyes. ‘Murdered? But how? Why? I mean who would murder her? Mother? For what possible reason?’ He seems genuinely upset, but then they all do.

  ‘I am so sorry, Aled but we are going to have to ask you to accompany us to the station at Llangunnor as we need you to identify the body and ask you a few more questions.’

  The sobbing man stands up. ‘She was all I had left. My dad drowned, my wife left me, I hardly see my daughter and now Mother. I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it.’ He looks like a broken man. But Jan
e doesn’t feel sorry for the man who only seems to feel sorry for himself, not his poor mother who must have known terrible fear and suffering.

  Jane watches Aled like an eagle when he sees his mother’s body and he seems deeply upset. She, Evans and Roberts drive the heartbroken man back to the Gelli Rhedyn development at Fforestfach near the M4, over three miles north of Swansea.

  ‘Mind if we come in, Aled? We’d just like to have a look around where your Mum spent her last days. All right?’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  Aled leads them into a slightly grubby, cramped two-bed flat that smells of cooking oil and is in need of redecorating. The single bedroom door is open and as they pass, they see a child’s room with a few tired toys on a shelf. Jane recalls that his wife left him some time ago and that his child visits only from time to time. He is polite and offers them some tea which they decline. They find nothing and leave the man to grieve alone.

  Meanwhile, tests show Aled’s fingerprints on his mother’s coat and handbag and in spite of his strong denials, some duct tape is found in his flat and it is seen that he has been ‘borrowing’ money from his hard-up mother.

  The autopsy reveals a large quantity of sleeping pills in the victim’s stomach and it turns out that the son has an almost finished packet of the very same drug, widely prescribed by doctors. Although the evidence is circumstantial, there is a great deal of it. Aled is arrested and brought to trial for matricide. The jury are not out for long, the crown prosecutor having made a far stronger case than the defence. The jury returns a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree. Given a full life sentence with a minimum term of twenty years for what the judge describes as a ‘thoroughly evil, cruel and despicable act,’ still swearing his innocence, Aled Edwards is sent away to prison for a long time.

  There is great celebration in the police station at Llangunnor and Jane is clapped and cheered when she gets back to the office. So this has turned out to be her first solved murder case after all, the Bette Davies case having gone cold.

  23

  February 2019. Durrum Castle, Scotland

  The best memory is the one I’d been building up to all that time where I’d had to feign friendship with that awful woman and achieved it with such ease. What a silly bitch, thinking Mike had loved her when he had clearly not. It had been me – not her – he had loved. No doubt about it.

  Losing that child has turned out to be the very best thing. Where would I be now if things had been otherwise? I remember the fearful argument that shook the rafters of Cliff Edge and how he had started yelling and screaming that he had researched into newspaper archives and discovered Bethan had stolen her parents’ life savings of £38,000, run away and changed her name. He had left Cliff Edge in a black rage. I can almost feel the cold as I ran out after him into the dark. It was snowing a blizzard and he jumped into his car ready to drive off. I remember standing without my coat, freezing in the dark in front of his car, begging him to calm down.

  Finally, he had agreed to come back into the house. Even then, I had been able to push the right buttons to win the man around.

  We agreed that the following day we would drive up to Cemaes Bay to see whether there was a way to resolve the trouble.

  I must admit to a shiver of enjoyment that I persuaded him to believe me. It is a delightful memory, the getting him to agree to drive us to his favourite spot and try to recapture the wonder he had felt on seeing it for the first time the previous year. At breakfast the following morning, I made him a large mug of extra strong coffee and a couple of his favourite poached eggs.

  But when he had driven us there, I let him have it. Just how stupid was that to leave those sexy texts on his phone. It is making me angry now to recall that message coming through on his mobile when he was in the shower:

  Mike I am desperate. Please, please, I need to talk to you urgently. I’ll be in Cam Café between 12-1 today. x

  Pathetic! I suppose she was going to tell him she’d miscarried. What could the man have possibly done about that? Honestly!

  I, of course, deleted that text and went myself to Cam Café. How simple to follow her from there to where she lived, trail her for a couple of days and what luck to discover she had a collie and where she generally walked it. Now I had the perfect excuse to talk to her. From there, it was a doddle. I gleaned as much as I could about the slag shagging my man.

  And I’ve got to hand it to him, Mike was a good lover. He had a high sex drive like me and was an attentive man who always made sure I orgasmed before him… But how very dare he fuck someone other than me? How DARE he? He’d adored me and all along had been fucking someone else.

  Because I had been pregnant, that wet excuse for a man had been so worried to do anything that might damage the baby, he had barely touched me throughout the pregnancy. It wasn’t as if I’d ever wanted the wretched child anyway but I had had to relent to his insistence.

  In sight of him and others, I was great at the role of doting mother, but when that man wasn’t around, I would shut all the doors and keep away from the wretched child who did nothing but cry. A few times, I was so fed up with it that I went out and left it screaming in its cot.

  Going back through his messages, I found quite a few others he had failed to delete. It hadn’t been hard to work out that he’d been screwing the bitch for ages. What a moron he’d been not to get rid of all those stupid, soppy texts.

  God, I so enjoyed seeing their faces when they saw each other at Cliff Edge. Mike did a half-reasonable job of hiding it but she – she just went to pieces! I had thought she would. Brilliant!

  Before I killed him, I told Mike how easy it had been to track down his girlfriend and to befriend her. I whispered to him as he had become groggier, how easy it would be to lure that fucking bitch to the Cauldron and push her over the cliff edge to where the witches belong.

  Mike’s driving became increasingly erratic as he drove us down the track to that remote place by the hugely high cliffs. By the time he had parked up near the edge, where there wasn’t a soul for miles around, he’d started to become very sleepy.

  I sat in the car waiting for him to slip into unconsciousness – those sleeping pills the doctor had prescribed worked really well in the coffee. I think it was nine I added, crushed, of course. The strong coffee had disguised their taste.

  I got a heavy torch found in the glove compartment, dragged him out of his treasured car and hit him over the head with all the strength I had.

  Over and over again I smashed his head until a gaping crack had appeared in the skull and I could see the membrane that covers the brain. There was a lot of blood on the snow; pretty colours.

  After checking to ensure his pulse had gone, and that his phone was in his pocket, I lugged and dragged him to the edge where I rolled him over it. I took off his boots to leave clues for the police. It took a major effort but it was so worth it to watch him fall like a lead weight before he smacked into the sea. Dropping 500 feet, a body makes a huge splash as it hits the waves, causing a high spume of seawater and sending a massive spray into the air. I watched it turn into a small cyclone of water that revolved violently around the sinking man before he ended on the seabed. I was sure he had gone out far enough to remain out of sight in his sea grave and not to reappear when the tide went out. Once he had been in the water a while, the lungs would fill up with air to more than twice their usual size and the body would be buoyant. But by then, the currents would have taken over.

  Before I left, I took out a spade from the boot Mike kept in case the car got stuck in a snowdrift or mud and although the ground was almost frozen, I managed to chip away at it to disturb it enough to bury as much of the blood as I could and the rest I shovelled into an old hessian sack (thank you, painstaking Mr Mike Hanson) kept to put under the tyres for extra grip in the event they got stuck in icy snow.

  I walked away from the car confident more snow would cover my tracks. It was tough to leave such a lovely car. It was worth a l
ot of money and I racked my brain to think how I could keep it. But once the police started looking for Mike it would be high on their search list. So, I had to harden my heart and leave that shiny BMW where it was. I walked away and back to Cliff Edge. Walking back along the coastal path, into the ocean went the spade and the sack into which I had shoved my blood-spattered gloves and the torch. When I had got home, I had told my ‘friend’ that after a long talk, darling Mike had insisted he went back to Cambridge and that the two of us should stay until we wanted to leave. I told her he’d dropped me off before heading home.

  This had rattled the bitch, who had tried to hide it, but I could tell. But no more had been said until the next day up by the Cauldron. Then, and oh what fun that was, I let that fucking whore in on just how much I had known.

  A week before the police had arrived at Cliff Edge, which I’d made sure of by tipping them off, I ordered some nitrile gloves online. I wore them all the time while I swapped the framed photo for one of him and the whore together at Christmas. I’d got it printed by an online company and sized to fit the frame she’d given us and it had come back in good time. Of course, the frame had her DNA on it. I was particularly pleased with myself for that idea.

  And also, still wearing the gloves, what a brainwave to leave the hair in the bed and the toothbrush in their bathroom. Knowing the police would be thorough, I swapped all my own possessions from my room to hers. Testament to my fine character was the diary with all those soppy entries as an extra bit of insurance.

  All those thrillers I had read in the summer came in handy.

  At Cliff Edge earlier, before we set out to visit the Cauldron, I’d deliberately dropped my phone on the floor and the whore had bent to pick it up. The police would test it for fingerprints, so that was covered. I wanted it to look as though someone had tried to get rid of the SIM but left it near enough the phone for the police to find. They might test the SIM for prints too so before they had left, I used a pair of eyebrow tweezers to extract it from the phone case. It had been inserted by the phone shop when I bought the mobile and I had never removed it until that moment. Without touching it, I placed it carefully in an envelope and pocketed it in the coat I wore that day. I knew the police would comb the place for clues. After the whore had gone over the edge, I dropped her phone and tipped the SIM out of its envelope a few yards away. I wanted the cops to read it so to protect it from the weather I used a bit of litter to cover it and partially hid it with snow. I knew the cops would see, pick up the packet and find the SIM underneath.