by Gwen Moffat
She could have sworn that Davies’s nose quivered but probably it was merely the effect of his nostrils distending as he drew a deep breath.
‘And his friend, Evans: did he have high blood pressure?’
‘Friend?’ Waring was affronted. ‘Evans was his employee, a handyman – and a poor one at that. I’d never have hired the fellow myself, but then in a place like this – Of course,’ he went on smugly, ‘you can get good staff if you provide the right conditions and pay decent wages. We’re served well enough ourselves. I understand Mrs Judson had some difficulty in keeping servants.’
‘So they were left with the execrable Evans?’ Davies mused and, in the face of Waring’s silence, pushed it: ‘Yes?’
‘And his wife.’
‘Execrable too?’
‘That depends where you stand,’ Miss Pink put in crisply, unable to bear Waring’s squirming longer, squirming because he refused to admit that he didn’t know the meaning of a word. ‘Objectively the Evanses are ordinary village people; he was a handyman, his wife is a cleaner.’
‘Ordinary enough,’ Davies agreed. ‘What makes a handyman commit suicide? From an objective viewpoint?’
‘Inbreeding,’ she told him promptly. ‘There’s a lot of it about.’
‘I come from these parts myself.’ She smiled in sympathy. ‘You mean Evans wasn’t all that bright,’ he continued doggedly. He was a stayer.
‘Exactly. How many suicides have you covered in Wales?’
‘I’ve never covered one like Evans’s. It’s wild. There was a fellow jumped off a high-rise in Liverpool after tying himself to the fridge, but there’s no going back from the tenth-floor balcony. This one had only a few feet of air and a few feet of water. I have visions of the poor devil changing his mind when he hit the water.’ He stared at Waring in horror. ‘Can you imagine that?’
‘There are no high-rise buildings here,’ Miss Pink reminded him. ‘One has to make do with what’s to hand.’
‘He must have been mad.’
‘Well, it takes all sorts,’ Waring observed. ‘Can I serve anyone before I go for my lunch?’
Davies pushed his glass across but Miss Pink said something about being hungry and went to the dining room. Waring followed her when he had pulled the beer.
Davies remained alone with his half pint, looking and feeling as if he had been abandoned to the quietude of the river room. Below the lawns the oakwoods climbed the slope like tiers of spectators. He had the feeling that he was observed although there was no one in sight, and no sound in the kitchen. Perhaps it was the absence of sound that was menacing. He had a ridiculous thought concerning peepholes. It was small wonder that anyone should choose to commit suicide in this place, he told himself, staring with cold hostility at those lush slopes beyond the river that could hide a multitude of sins.
He started to prowl round the room, glass in hand, occasionally glancing across the terrace, unwilling to believe that any country could be as empty as this appeared. There were no cows visible, no sheep, not even a crow. It was one o’clock and the temperature must be eighty in the shade. He was about to step outside when he paused; his sharp eyes had detected a flash of movement on the far side of a hedge that ran down to the river. Two boys were approaching the back of the hotel and the fact that they were on the far side of the hedge and had come from the woods gave them, to Davies’s mind, a furtive air. Besides, they were something to take an interest in, a change in the pattern.
He gulped the remainder of his beer and, lifting the flap in the counter, walked to the back of the bar. The door to the kitchen was closed. He tensed as heels clacked across the hall, and his hand went to the beer pump. The sound changed direction; now it came from behind the closed door. He heard a voice and put his ear to the crack.
‘... salad.’
‘... she hungry?’
There was no response to that. The sound of heels reversed themselves to the dining room, there was a distant murmur of voices, then suddenly, from the kitchen: ‘Good God! Don’t you ever make me jump like that again, Bart Banks! D’you want me to drop down dead?’
The reply was indistinct, then: ‘You’ve only got to say something before you reach the door – Why, what’s the matter?’
The tone was sharp with concern. The reply took a long time. Davies strained to hear but he could make nothing of it. He thought then of how much his ear would suffer if someone suddenly pushed the door, but that wasn’t the kind of anticipation that made a good newspaperman. He watched the empty hall like a hawk, ready to spring upright at the slightest sound, or at the sight of a shadow on the sunlit tiles.
‘All right,’ the original voice said tightly, and a pan clattered on a metal surface, ‘get some foil – in that drawer; there’s a loaf in the pantry, Dewi ... Will that be enough? Look, is this –? Are you sure?’
Davies straightened, grimaced, relaxed his facial muscles and opened the door, holding his glass in front of him.
‘Do you think someone could –’
Three people stared at him: two boys, one holding a sheet of foil, the other a wrapped loaf. The third person was a heavy woman in a white overall, black hair piled in coils above a plump face, and startled eyes. In one hand she held a wicked butcher knife, having just cut two huge slices from a cold roast sirloin.
‘I’ll be with you immediately.’
She was dismissive. She speared the slices with a fork, slapped them on the foil in the boy’s hands, said coolly: ‘That’s you settled then, now let’s see to the gentleman of the Press.’
She came towards him, smiling roguishly, wiping her hands on her overall, pushing him backwards by her presence alone. He retreated through the door.
‘You poor man,’ she said. ‘No one to serve you. You’re old enough to have learned by now how to pull a pump handle. What do they teach you at school nowadays? I suppose it is bitter; you don’t look like a mild man.’ She giggled as she filled the glass. ‘Twenty-four pence, please.’
‘Bart’s shooting up,’ he said, handing her the money. ‘He does you credit.’
‘He takes after me. When did I see you last?’
He returned her gaze. ‘Round about the time a waiter got shot, would it be?’
Lucy beamed at him. ‘Whose side are you on, love?’
‘Someone else around here appears to be pretty handy with a shotgun,’ he said.
‘That remark isn’t in the best of taste.’
‘How are the widows taking it?’
Her large bosom rose and her eyes glittered.
‘Lying in wait with shotguns?’ he hazarded.
‘Well, no one’d have much of a target in you,’ Lucy said scornfully. ‘There’s not enough of you to hit. I’d take a pea shooter to you.’ And she smiled.
‘You sound as if you’ve got something to hide.’
‘What I’ve got is all on show.’
‘I might take you up on that. I hear you keep open house.’
Her eyes flickered. Miss Pink had appeared in the hall doorway.
‘Phone first,’ Lucy said. ‘It gives me warning to get the dog in.’
‘You’ve got a guard dog too?’ He became aware of Miss Pink. ‘I’m amazed,’ he told her: ‘What goes on around here that everyone’s got savage dogs?’
‘Mine’s all right once he gets to know you,’ Lucy said earnestly.
‘And it’s not illegal providing he stays on his own territory.’
‘What is he?’
‘A Dobermann.’
‘Good God!’
‘That’s not going to work,’ Miss Pink said, listening to his tyres scrunch gravel as he drove out of the forecourt. ‘He’ll only check with the locals.’
‘He’s got no proof they’re telling the truth. He’s Welsh; if they say I haven’t got a dog, he’ll think they’re setting him up for a greeting from a nice friendly Dobermann. The tacky little rat. Never seen him in my life before, so far as I know, but he knows of me – and Bart. These report
ers pick up gossip like a dog picks up carrion.’
‘What does he know about Bart?’
‘Now I come to think of it, only his name, apparently.’
‘If he knew the truth, would it matter?’
Lucy regarded her speculatively.
‘It depends how you look at it.’
‘Well, he’s under age.’ Miss Pink was thoughtful.
‘He’s not in any trouble, as such.’ Lucy’s eyes were innocent. ‘No, he’ll probably get away with a fine and a warning. I’ve no doubt that basically they’re good boys and that within a year or two they’ll settle down, but they’ve got to learn to respect the law. A sensible magistrate, even a Welsh one, isn’t going to be bothered about Judson’s car so much as their impertinence in taking it. They have to be pulled up sharp. That will be the view of the Bench.’
She reflected that this was the first time that she had seen Lucy at a loss.
‘How did you know?’
‘Why –’ Miss Pink tried to remember how she had found out, ‘– I think the boys pieced it together themselves.’
‘That’s how it would be. They didn’t tell you direct though, did they?’ Miss Pink shook her head. ‘Gave themselves away,’ Lucy said, with a kind of satisfaction.
‘Can you persuade Bart to tell you what they found when they reached the cottage?’
‘What they – found?’ Lucy had gone white.
‘Outside, I mean.’ Miss Pink observed her with interest. ‘Find out if there was a light in the cottage, or another car at the gate. If they recognised that car. They had to wait in the forest for darkness. If they didn’t see a second car ask them if they heard one at any time. There had to be one.’
‘I don’t see why,’ Lucy said.
Miss Pink hesitated. At length she said: ‘Providing you all know, there’s no danger, but for the boys’ own sakes you must persuade them to talk, and then tell Pryce.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Lucy said.
‘Judson was murdered.’ Miss Pink’s tone was brutal. ‘If Bart and Dewi saw a second car at the cottage that night, it was almost certainly the murderer’s. Now do you see?’
‘Oh, no,’ Lucy breathed. ‘Never! They never saw another car. I know they didn’t. They’d have told me if they had.’
‘Lucy Banks knows something she’s not talking about,’ Miss Pink said.
‘She’s not the only one.’ Pryce was gloomy.
They were on the bank of the river below the hotel, a place where their conversation wouldn’t be overheard. Pryce and Williams had seen the Warings, Cross and Bowen the Owens; nothing had been learned of further importance.
‘Mrs Banks is frightened for her son,’ Williams said.
‘Taking and driving away?’ Miss Pink was dubious. ‘She’s a sensible woman but she’s neither relieved nor angry that he’s been caught; she’s frightened. And that kind of woman isn’t afraid of what she knows is going to happen, such as her son coming up before the Bench; there’s something else –’
She stared so fixedly at Williams that he started to shift his feet in embarrassment.
‘Miss Pink!’ Pryce said sternly, recalling her attention from some nebulous distance beyond his sergeant’s head.
‘Yes?’
‘Is she in a state of terror, or did you say something to alarm her?’
‘Not terror; fear – wariness – like Noreen Owen, of course –’
Miss Pink looked fatigued. ‘They’re both thinking of their sons –’
‘But it’s only taking and driving away,’ Williams reminded her, ‘unless they think ... But they’d never protect the boys if they’d –’
‘Of course they would,’ Pryce said firmly. ‘They always do. It’s high time we had a talk with those lads.’ He smiled bleakly. ‘We’ve got one hell of a handle there: smudged prints in the cottage, wiped prints on the Volvo. That’s going to scare the daylights out of them.’
‘Everyone knows to wipe their prints off nowadays, or use gloves.’ Williams sounded desolate. ‘They learn as soon as they’re old enough to latch on to what’s coming out of the telly.’
‘Telly’s one thing,’ Pryce said. ‘Two real live detectives is another. So’s suspicion of murder, even these days when we’ve given up hanging. Those lads are new to trouble and they’ve never been taken in. Let’s go and find them and see what they have to tell us.’
They had nothing. They had vanished. Gone climbing, Lucy said, and no, they hadn’t said where they were going.
Chapter 13
GLADYS JUDSON WAS snipping dead-heads from her roses, working slowly and methodically, dropping the withered blooms in a trug. As Miss Pink came across the lawn, apologising for the intrusion, Gladys stopped snipping, her face momentarily bewildered – and then she winced. Miss Pink was overcome by contrition but etiquette dictated that she stand her ground and offer sympathy. It was received in the same manner as if the object of it had died quietly in his sleep, but there was no peculiar formula for commiserating with the widow of a murder victim. Having offered her condolences and declined tea Miss Pink was about to retreat when Gladys broke with tradition.
‘Do stay for a while,’ she pleaded. ‘If you don’t, then Ellen will start, and where she’s concerned I’m at the end of my resistance, such as it is.’
‘Start what?’
‘Talking. Just talking. But it goes on and on, like Niagara. After a session with Ellen I feel battered, and one is forced to endure it; I can’t tell her to go away, not in the circumstances. But it’s a great strain.’ She smiled wanly. ‘At times I feel paranoid myself; I feel that Ellen is the last straw, that it’s not fair. If you’d stay it would be a brief respite. Otherwise she’ll insist I have tea in the kitchen with her.’
‘I’ll stay,’ Miss Pink said. ‘You mustn’t let her bully you.’
‘It’s my own fault. She is rather managing – but quite efficient about the house, so I’ve rather got into the way of allowing her to run things.’
Miss Pink said firmly: ‘There’s a danger of domineering people progressing from running your house to running you.’
Gladys sighed. ‘I can’t say that it bothers me.’
Ellen brought them tea in the drawing room. Like her employer the woman had lost weight, but where Gladys appeared listless in the aftermath of shock, Ellen glittered. Her eyes were bright and searching, her spectacles flashed, her movements were quick and still deft. She hovered over the table making little darts at objects: adjusting the handle of the tea pot, placing a spoon in a saucer, correcting the position of the sugar tongs – and all the time delivering a monologue which, as Gladys had implied, was like falling water: without cessation, without tone and, unlike a waterfall, nasty.
‘We were all foreigners,’ she had told Miss Pink, à propos of nothing that had been said but probably giving voice to a conversation in her own mind: ‘Evans and me from Criccieth, and Mr and Mrs Judson inheriting from a relative, none of us ever one of them. “Peasants,” he would say to me: “you’ve got to keep them in their place; they need a strong master” – and Mr Judson was strong all right, but it’s all changed now, isn’t it? You got people driving delivery vans and treating their betters like dirt, and her a woman as couldn’t hold down a job as a waitress if she had to work. That’s the trouble, of course: living on the dole and social security and drugs ... They go mad, they think they can fly: walk straight out of high windows they do. Corruption –’ Ellen paused and smiled at Miss Pink. ‘She’s corrupt. Rotten.’
Gladys looked up from the tea tray.
‘Thank you, Ellen. I’ll ring if we need more hot water.’
‘Yes, mum.’
She turned and left the room. Miss Pink swallowed and leaned back on her cushions. She started to speak and the door opened.
‘Miss Pink will be able to advise you about brothels,’ Ellen said. ‘Lloyd and the two lads makes three. There’s no doubt to my mind. You ask her.’
‘I will. Close t
he door after you, Ellen; there’s a draught with the windows open.’
‘She’s gone mad,’ Miss Pink said weakly. ‘Brothels?’
‘She’s paranoid. By foreigners she means ourselves: us and the Evanses: incomers. Apparently that’s how he used to talk to her. Now she imagines there was a conspiracy against us, centred on Maggie Seale. The fact that the girl’s been here only a few days doesn’t signify; as you say, she’s irrational. And since the cottage that Joss Lloyd lives in belongs to the estate, Ellen has dreamed up this way of getting rid of both Lloyd and Seale: of evicting them on the grounds that it’s being used as a brothel. Ellen says that Bart Banks and Dewi Owen go up there. She goes on like this all the time, with variations.’
‘Has she seen a doctor?’
‘She’s always seeing the doctor: for her nerves.’
‘You ought to go away for a time.’
Gladys put down the tea pot with an air of finality.
‘You know, there are times when I feel that Heaven is no more than ten miles down the valley: at some place, any place, on the sea cliffs. Not a positive feeling, just negative – because Ellen wouldn’t be there.’
‘Why don’t you go?’
‘There are things to do here. You know how it is.’
‘Look,’ Miss Pink said. ‘It’s quite early; there are hours of daylight left. Shall we go for a drive and have dinner at The Brigantine? It will get us away for a few hours.’
‘How kind of you. You must forgive me if I don’t seem wildly enthusiastic, but I do appreciate the gesture.’
‘It wasn’t merely politeness. I’d like to drive down to the coast myself – and The Brigantine has a reputation for good food. May I use your telephone to book a table?’
In her time Miss Pink had been involved in a number of murders but she had not, despite her reputation among people like Pryce and Ted Roberts, solved them, although she had contributed to the solution. She was a fair judge of character, she thought, and of motives, not only concerning why people killed but what made them tick. The motive for Evans’s murder was elimination – he knew too much; in the case of Judson it was sex. His murder was a crime passionnel.
