Die Like a Dog

by Gwen Moffat

Pryce turned to Ellen who said carefully: ‘I was going along with Miss Seale. I didn’t hear no Land-Rover.’

  He closed his eyes in disgust.

  Seale said, as if there’d been no interruption: ‘I overheard what they were talking about in here before I showed myself. I didn’t know that Bart and Dewi had disappeared. Lloyd and I did know they’d pinched the Volvo, of course – in fact, it was Lloyd suggested their cover story, about climbing Pinnacle Wall on Sunday. They knew the route because he took them up it a couple of months ago –’ she grinned at Miss Pink, ‘– when the sun was lower in the sky. None of us would make good criminals.

  ‘When I heard them talking about the boys hearing a car engine I was as flummoxed as the rest of them but when I walked in here I pretended to know a lot more than I did. I was trying to set myself up, you see. Initially, the gun was loaded. I unloaded it before I came in. I wasn’t going to get myself shot – and I reckoned someone might tryjust that. I pushed as hard as I could. I’m sorry, Lucy; I wasn’t trying to break you so much as to break up this circle. If one person went wild, panic would spread. I picked on you as the weak link, and kept hammering.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ exclaimed Miss Pink: ‘Just as if you were the one dealing with a terrorist!’

  That bewildered all of them – except Gladys.

  Lucy said: ‘I wasn’t bothered about you calling me names and I didn’t give a damn if you suspected me of being the murderer. What I was terrified of was everyone insisting it was me who sent the boys away. Of course it was me. And I reckoned Gladys killed her husband – and a fat chance I’d have had convincing the police of that – but I knew that once Gladys realised who stole that Volvo from the cottage she was going to come after my boy –’

  ‘You sent those boys off?’ Pryce was furious.

  Her contempt matched his anger. ‘Look where your investigations got you!’

  He breathed deeply, getting himself under control.

  ‘So all you ladies have been suspecting each other.’ He stood up.

  ‘Mrs Banks, perhaps you’d have no objection in coming down to the Station with us, where we can talk in private?’

  Behind him Seale raised her voice: ‘Why was Evans killed, Mrs Judson?’

  Pryce turned reluctantly. Everyone waited for a reply but Gladys said nothing. Ellen came and sat on the sofa and regarded her employer with ghoulish interest.

  ‘You were the last person to see Evans,’ Seale persisted. ‘The two of you had been discussing us, probably in this room –’ she looked round thoughtfully, ‘– Evans said he was going up to Lloyd’s cottage and he went across to his own place and upstairs and told Ellen where he was going. He left the cottage by the back door and he went to my tent.’ Again she raised her voice. ‘Why did he go to my tent, Mrs Judson?’

  Gladys looked up.

  ‘He went to your tent because you weren’t there. He was coming up to the cottage afterwards.’

  The silence was electric until Pryce said softly: ‘It’s the first time you’ve mentioned that, ma’am: that Evans went voluntarily to Miss Seale’s tent. Mrs Evans insists that he said he was going up to Lloyd’s cottage.’

  ‘He went out of his back door,’ Miss Pink put in. ‘If he’d been going down to the tent he’d have gone out the front.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘The only way she could have known he went to the tent voluntarily is because she told him to. She must have been waiting in the woods close to his cottage.’ For a moment no one spoke, then Miss Pink resumed, speaking to Gladys, slowly and carefully: ‘You told him to go up to Lloyd’s and he told Ellen that was where he was going, but when he left the cottage you were waiting outside. You countermanded that order and told him to go to Seale’s tent. You went with him.’

  Gladys looked at Ellen. ‘He didn’t suffer,’ she said earnestly. ‘I’m certain of that. He didn’t come round, you know; I watched. He never struggled.’ In the heavy silence she continued, with a faint air of bewilderment: ‘I can’t remember why it had to happen.’

  ‘It was obvious,’ said Pryce; ‘obvious that Evans had stumbled on something. We only had to wait. She told us everything in the end.’ He was sitting with Miss Pink and Ted Roberts in Ted’s house on the sea cliffs. The two friends had been climbing in the Lake District and on their return they had invited Pryce to dinner. Over the brandy he filled in gaps.

  ‘Evans,’ he said, ‘was killed because he saw Judson’s shotgun on the Saturday afternoon, after Judson left, ostensibly for Liverpool. Of course, Evans thought nothing of it at the time but on the Monday evening he discovered it was gone. Evidently he’d decided he’d prefer to be armed when he went up to Lloyd’s cottage and, guessing Gladys wouldn’t give him permission to take the gun, he thought he’d sneak it out of the house. But it wasn’t there – and then he remembered seeing it on the Saturday. So he went back and told Gladys.’

  ‘Did he try to blackmail her?’ Miss Pink asked.

  ‘She doesn’t say so. Remember, Judson’s body hadn’t been found then; no one – except Gladys – knew that he was dead. So they sat down and discussed the missing gun.’

  His listeners tried to imagine the scene, their faces reflecting their difficulty. Then Miss Pink said: ‘Poor Evans.’

  Pryce continued: ‘Gladys told him that the gun must have been stolen by Lloyd or Seale. She told him to go across to his cottage and get some warm clothing and a torch but not to say a word to Ellen about the gun. She said that if Ellen knew it was missing she’d get hysterical and ruin their plans for the night. You know, Gladys may be mad now but she was fiendishly sane then. You see the idea? She’d already decided to kill Evans. He was to tell Ellen he was going to Lloyd’s place and that would make Lloyd the prime suspect if we saw through the attempt to rig Evans’s death as suicide. Her mind worked like a computer. But Ellen mustn’t know about Judson’s missing gun because that gave Gladys a motive for Judson’s death; she’d solved these problems in half an hour or so!

  ‘After Evans left Parc for his own cottage, she got a piece of rope and a pick-axe handle – yes, you may well look surprised, but that’s what she tells us, calm as you please – and she tied the rope round her waist under her coat and followed Evans to his cottage and listened from the stairs to what he was telling Ellen. He was talking about Lloyd and Ellen said: “But he’s got a gun!" so Gladys knew he hadn’t mentioned Judson’s gun. He hadn’t had time; if he had, they’d still have been talking about it by the time Gladys reached the cottage.

  ‘She waited for him in his garden and said she’d decided after all they’d go down to Seale’s tent to see if there might be some trace of Judson there. She’d persuaded him that Seale and Lloyd had a hand in Judson’s disappearance, you see.’

  ‘What about the pick-axe handle?’ Ted asked. ‘She couldn’t hide that.’

  ‘Yes, I asked her. She was surprised. “I needed it for protection,” she said, “there were two murderers loose in the combe and we were unarmed.” I felt as if she’d convinced herself as well as Evans that they really were setting out on a bit of detective work to prove that Seale and Lloyd were murderers or kidnappers. Gave me a queer feeling, I can tell you.’

  ‘A natural actress,’ Miss Pink said, ‘a dominant personality – and a stupid man who was emotionally retarded. It was an exciting game he’d got himself involved in and he thought he was playing it with someone who was on the same level as him. If he’d had any doubts he would have consoled himself with the thought that there was no harm in it.’

  ‘No harm,’ Pryce repeated heavily. ‘She stunned him when he stooped to unzip the fly sheet of the tent. She didn’t have far to drag him to the cooker; she was a strong woman.’

  ‘Too strong,’ Ted put in. ‘If she’d only broken before ... But she’d put up with Judson for years. There was Anna Waring, Lucy perhaps, certainly others; there was always gossip about him. So why did she suddenly go off the rails? If she’d known all these years – Did she know? About the cottag
e and how it was used?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Pryce said. ‘Judson told her that he’d sold it but she came across a bill for a double mattress which Judson left lying around, and they hadn’t bought a new mattress for Parc. She didn’t say anything about it to him but she had her suspicions and she rang the local rating office under an assumed name, pretending to be interested in the cottage as a potential buyer. They gave her the name of the owner. It was still Judson, of course. That was years ago and for years she’d guessed that he took women there. When he said he was off to Liverpool for the weekend she accepted that “Liverpool” meant the cottage. When Anna Waring rang from Chester on Saturday afternoon, that was the end for Gladys; she’d accepted all the others but she couldn’t take Seale.’

  His listeners absorbed that in silence but then they started to think about it. Pryce sipped his brandy appreciatively and looked out at the gleaming water.

  ‘Why not?’ Ted asked. ‘Was it just that Seale was so very different from the other women, or was it that she was the last straw?’

  Miss Pink stirred. ‘Something of both probably. Think of the situation she walked into: Judson and his hole-in-corner life, a double life. His long-suffering, humiliated wife. His quarrels with the local people, their knowledge of what he really was, their contempt. And Lloyd raging against him impotently, and the two boys, Bart and Dewi, worshipping Lloyd and loathing Judson. What an example to them: the local magistrate who sat on the Bench handing down judgements when he was flouting the rules himself. And then Seale comes along with an entirely different set of values. All right, you can say that because they’re based on enjoyment, she’s selfish, but where she clashed with the status quo in Dinas was that she isn’t bothered about appearances. And she’s her own woman. Gladys didn’t hate Seale; she revolted against her own terrible life. It was Seale who made her aware of her humiliations, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, I don’t see that,’ Pryce said. ‘To my mind, Gladys concentrated all her pent-up energy on the one woman her husband went overboard for and who wouldn’t have anything to do with him.’

  ‘What about Lloyd?’ Ted asked, knowing Pryce would never see what Miss Pink was getting at. ‘Is Seale staying with him?’

  ‘Is she, hell! Excuse me, ma’am, but there you are: spends a few days with the man and then takes off. Left a forwarding address in London, spent a night there, sold her van, and left for California. That’s where she belongs if you ask me, among the weirdos: drugs, perverts –’

  Miss Pink was laughing. Ted smiled.

  ‘Don’t get me on the raw,’ Pryce grated. ‘Do you know what the statistics for murder are in Los Angeles?’

  ‘You’re quite right, Mr Pryce, and if you quote figures I wouldn’t dream of questioning them. Did she leave a forwarding address in California?’

  ‘She didn’t but the London people got it out of the owner of the flat where she spent the night.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘Disneyland, that’s what it is.’

  ‘What’s the address?’ Ted asked.

  ‘I’ve got it here.’ He reached for his wallet and extracted a sheet of paper. “‘Sunnyside, Yosemite, Calif.”. It’ll be one of those hippie communes. She’s gone back where she belongs.’

  ‘Yes,’ Miss Pink said, beaming at a sudden vision of Seale back where she belonged on the gaunt white walls of the Sierra Nevada.