The Hunted Hare

by Fay Sampson

  From an inside pocket of his jacket, Sergeant Lincoln drew a folded newspaper. He spread it out and turned it to show her.

  It was one of the tabloids. The headline screamed at her.

  DOES FAMOUS AUTHOR HOLD MURDER CLUE?

  There was a photograph of her wide-eyed face.

  She felt the blood drain from her cheeks in shock.

  “That Coutts man! He got into the house almost straight after the murder. He was taking photos of all of us. Aidan was furious.”

  The sergeant’s face was grim. “He’s well known to us, Marcus Coutts. He has a sixth sense for violent crime. The slightest scent of blood, and he’s there. Sometimes before we are. I’m sorry we weren’t quick enough off the mark to stop him.” He smiled slightly. “Are you a famous author?”

  “Only if you’re keen on Celtic saints. I’ve been on TV a few times. History programmes.”

  “It’s tabloid-speak, isn’t it? To them, the words ‘famous’ and ‘author’ automatically go together. They don’t sell millions of copies printing articles about ‘obscure historian’. I’m sorry! I didn’t mean that to sound rude.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  He grew grave again. “The question is, is it true?” He read from the smaller print. “‘TV celebrity Jenny Davison was a guest at the hotel. I found her sitting only yards from where the murderer struck. Most other guests were out for the afternoon, but the famous author could hold the vital clue. Her bedroom overlooks the archery range where the body was found.’”

  Jenny gasped. “How did he know?”

  “There’s worse. ‘She told me she may have seen something significant, but refused to say what.’”

  “That’s a lie. I didn’t tell him anything.”

  “Men like Marcus Coutts make their living by changing nothing into something sensational… The thing is, is he right?”

  He caught her move of protest, and held up a placatory hand. “I don’t mean you told him anything. I’m sure you didn’t. But if I remember your statement correctly, you were up in your room at the crucial time.”

  Lincoln took his notebook out. He turned back several pages to find the record of her first interview. His dark head, with its circle of lighter scalp, bent over it.

  He straightened. “You last saw Thaddaeus about two.”

  “It was earlier than that. I was coming out of the dining room after lunch. I saw him going off down the corridor that way.” She pointed to the end of the house nearest the butts. “Then I went upstairs for a rest. I’d gone back to bed after my archery in the morning. But I was still tired. Even sitting down, it was pretty hard drawing a bow after… all this time.” Her voice dropped. She did not want to go into the years of treatment that had marked off this life from the one she had known before.

  “I understand.” His voice was sympathetic.

  “I saw the Ewarts going out and Messrs Secker and McCarthy coming in. That was from the landing. And then… nothing. I fell asleep.”

  “You said you saw Lorna Brown coming back to the house. Running to meet Euan Jones.”

  “That was later. After I woke up.”

  “You saw no one at the back of the house around two?”

  She shook her head. “Sorry. I picked up a book, but I was asleep in no time.” She frowned. “At least…”

  The sergeant waited.

  “No. I’m sorry. It’s gone.”

  “What’s gone?”

  “I’d tell you if I knew. It’s just… I have this feeling. Just as I was dropping off. I think there was something. Only I can’t remember what.” She puckered her brow in an effort at recollection. “I’m really sorry. But the harder I try, the fuzzier it gets. Like trying to remember a dream when you wake up in the morning. Perhaps it was a dream.”

  “Let’s suppose it wasn’t. If you were in bed, it couldn’t be anything you saw. Something you heard, then?”

  When she didn’t answer, he tried again. “As Marcus Coutts says, your bedroom is at the back of the house. Was the window open? Could you have heard something from outside?”

  “I’m sorry. I really can’t remember. And anyway, how would it help? If I didn’t see who it was?”

  “The murderer can’t be sure of that, can he, or she?”

  The dark eyes were looking hard at her now. Suddenly she understood what he was trying to tell her. The hammering in her heart took on a different meaning. Detective Sergeant Lincoln was giving her a warning. Her eyes widened.

  “I don’t want to alarm you, Mrs Davison. As long as the murderer thought we were looking for an archer, you were even a possible suspect. That must have amused him, or her. But now we know that anyone with the opportunity could have gone into the grounds and stabbed Mr Brown, then you might be the only one who could identify that person. And this article…” he stabbed the paper viciously, “hints that you can.”

  “But I was asleep!”

  “You can’t prove that, can you? For all Mr Brown’s killer knows, you could be the only person with vital evidence of their movements. And as yet, you may not have given that evidence to the police. I don’t wish to sound melodramatic, but I think you should be careful. Mr Brown was a rich man. Whoever killed him was playing for high stakes. We’ll have officers on duty ourselves, of course. But it might be as well if you didn’t let yourself be found alone.”

  The light on the lily pond dazzled her, as a fish broke the surface. The sergeant’s words echoed in her mind meaninglessly. Then, gradually they fell into place, as the ripples on the pond settled.

  She swallowed. “You think he… she… could kill again?”

  The black eyes were steady, expressionless. “That is a possibility, yes.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  MELANGELL’S BALL SPUN across the lawn to knock Aidan’s out of reach of the hoop for the seventh time. She burst into floods of giggles.

  “You little horror! Croquet suits you, doesn’t it? It brings out the mean and malicious streak in your nature. And I’d always thought you were such a nice child. Can’t think where you get it from.”

  “You’re just cross because I’m winning.”

  “You’re not. You’re just making sure I don’t.”

  He would not have played well anyway. His eyes kept going up from the coloured balls at his feet to that path among the azaleas where Jenny had disappeared with DS Lincoln. His memory was haunted by the look of fear she had given him. Pain stabbed his conscience. He should never have sown that apprehension about the police suspecting her of an accidental killing. Too late, he wanted to put his arms round her and comfort her. Now that the post-mortem had concluded that the arrow which killed Thaddaeus had probably not been fired from a bow, Jenny was no longer one of a very few people who could have been guilty. The police simply needed to widen the field of their questioning, as they had with him. Jenny had been in the house all that day. She, as much as anyone, might have seen something.

  “Daddy! It’s your turn.”

  He grinned at Melangell and sent her blue ball spinning away from the hoop.

  “That’s not fair!”

  “No, but it’s fun.”

  He stiffened. They were coming back. Jenny looked sober. Aidan found the sergeant’s expression difficult to read. DS Lincoln set off across the grass, away from the house, to the workshop.

  As she approached, Aidan saw that Jenny was not only grave but pale. He dropped his mallet.

  “You ought to be in bed. Is the pain bad?”

  She nodded slightly. “That’s not the worst of it.” She glanced at Melangell. “I’ll tell you upstairs.”

  They took the lift. He helped her on to the bed and took off her shoes. “There. Lie down and have a sleep. I’ll get your tablets.”

  “Aidan.” She caught his hand. “Sergeant Lincoln showed me this.”

  She reached into her shoulder-bag and thrust a newspaper at him. The same vulnerable face in front of him was splashed across the page of the tabloid. He read the text w
ith growing horror.

  “Marcus Coutts! For two pins, I’d take an arrow myself and run it straight through him! This is appalling.”

  “Sergeant Lincoln thought so too. He says they’ve fixed the time of the murder either side of two. Aidan, I didn’t see anything. I was in bed then. But this article makes it sound as though I did.”

  His eyes went up to hers, not understanding.

  “What if the murderer thinks I did?”

  The bottom of his stomach seemed to fall away.

  “And if it’s someone here, or in the neighbourhood…”

  “He told me to be careful. Not to be alone.”

  Aidan leapt up. “I’m going straight over to that office of theirs. I’ll tell them they have to put a twenty-four hour guard on you.”

  “Wait!” She caught him back.

  He subsided on to the bed and watched her rub her thin hands over her cheeks.

  “I don’t know what to think,” she sighed. “It seemed so simple at first. Either Lorna had done it, because he was abusing her, or Sian took matters into her own hands to protect her. But now… We’ve tended to think that it had to be someone in the house. Like those old-fashioned whodunits which take place at a house party on an island. A closed community of suspects. But then this morning… I found myself looking at all those people in church. And at lunch afterwards. They seemed such nice, good people. But how do we know? We’ve only been here four days. And we’ve just met a few people outside the house. We’ve no idea of all the undercurrents that might have been going on since Thaddaeus turned up with his plans. It’s horrible. I can’t look at anyone now without thinking, ‘Did they do it?’ And now…”

  He grasped her hands. “Now you’re wondering, ‘Do they think I saw them?’ Don’t worry, love. I’m not going to let you out of my sight. We can pack up and go. Harry and Debbie did.”

  She gave a trembling sigh. “He said something else. ‘Whoever killed him was playing for high stakes.’ If that’s true, they could follow us, couldn’t they? Here, we’ve got police all around us.”

  Aidan’s mind raced over multiple possibilities. His fingers combed his beard. “I need time to get my head round this. But they must know you’ve given the police all the evidence you can. If you had seen anything, it would be out by now.”

  “I keep wondering. What if it wasn’t anything I’d seen. What if I could have heard something, even lying in bed?”

  “Did you?”

  “I can’t remember clearly. I was asleep, mostly. But I keep feeling there was something. Voices, a door banging, a car engine? I can’t pin it down. And I can’t be sure whether I’m just imagining it with hindsight, or if it was something I heard earlier in the day.”

  “There was a car. It nearly mowed us down in the drive. That Jaguar again. But that was about three. We’d just got back.”

  “Those two men. I wish I knew where they fitted into this. They look almost stereotypically sinister.”

  “I’m sure the police are looking into it. And they’re not here now, are they? Get some sleep.”

  He bent over and kissed her.

  As he made his way downstairs to rejoin Melangell it occurred to him that he had promised not to let Jenny out of his sight. It was a manner of speaking, of course. She was hardly going to be attacked in her bedroom. And the window with the balcony was in sight from the lawn.

  He glanced up as a new thought struck him. Should he have told her to lock her door?

  Aidan had reached the bottom of the stairs when anger overtook him. What right had Marcus Coutts to put her in danger? What were the police doing? If they thought that Jenny might be at risk, why weren’t they protecting her? He glanced out of the glass panels of the front door. There were probably still officers around, but no one was in sight outside.

  The chill reality of what Jenny had told him was sinking in. If she was in danger, it could be from anywhere. Did the police really have no idea who had done it? Or was Chief Inspector Denbigh keeping it close to his chest? If so, Aidan would have to make him tell him. He and Jenny couldn’t go through the rest of this week starting at every noise, looking over their shoulders, suspecting anyone and everyone, inside the house or out.

  The Tanat Valley, which had seemed such a peaceful, serene place when they entered it, had become a world of menace.

  Would it really be any better if they left, until Thaddaeus’s killer was found?

  Mr Brown was a rich man. Whoever killed him was playing for high stakes.

  Those sinister visitors in the Jaguar. From the world of high finance? Euan Jones the gardener, planning to marry an heiress?

  He walked into the lounge and was surprised to find Sian on a stepladder, cleaning the windows.

  “Is that your job?”

  She threw him a rueful smile. “Life goes on, doesn’t it? I ought to get Mair’s mother to do more hours on the cleaning, but we’re not balancing the books as it is.”

  He paused in front of the French windows. On the sunlit lawn beyond, Melangell was getting in some practice with the croquet mallet, aiming balls through hoops. She was getting quite good at it.

  His heart turned over. This was what it should have been like. A communion service in the shrine church. A child playing in the sunshine. Young bracken springing green on the mountaintops. The silver thread of the waterfall at the head of the cwm.

  Now, even these innocent things were underscored by the black line of menace. What was sacred, precious, had been tainted with murder.

  Eden lost. The bitter days between the crucifixion and Easter.

  On an impulse, he looked up at Sian, who was vigorously rubbing the glass with a chamois leather. The rounded arms, like a Raphael angel, showed muscle, not fat. He remembered that she had been a PE teacher. The provision of games equipment at the House of the Hare was her doing.

  “Those two men who visited the house on Monday and Tuesday. Who were they?”

  She had her head turned away from him. Her blonde curls obscured her face.

  “Business partners of Mr Brown.”

  The answer was crisp. It did not invite him to enquire further. But he pressed on.

  “They seemed rather impatient, from the style of their driving. Was something wrong?”

  She rubbed away in silence, polishing the window with a duster. Then she sighed, and climbed down the ladder. Her blue eyes gave him a long, considering look.

  “Well, I suppose it’s not really confidential now. Thaddaeus’s will, I mean. Now that Lorna’s in the clear, it should go through probate.”

  But she’s not in the clear, Aidan wanted to remind her. They let her go because they didn’t have enough evidence to arrest her. But she must still be a suspect, along with everyone else.

  “Lorna is the chief beneficiary, I take it.”

  “She was all the family he had left. He was apparently very fond of her mother. She died of cancer, you know.”

  She studied his face as she said this.

  “I know,” he answered quietly. “I gather that’s why Lorna persuaded him to build the House of the Hare. For people like Jenny to come to Pennant Melangell. I’m very grateful to her. Or I would have been if…”

  “If he hadn’t been murdered while you were here. Very inconvenient of him.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I’m not Colin Ewart. But it’s not how I thought Melangell and I would remember this week after… Jenny is gone.”

  “You don’t believe in the healing power of the shrine? Or the yew trees?”

  “There are different ways of healing. I know it’s helped Jenny. We shall have to wait and see how… So Lorna stands to inherit this? And the rest of Thaddaeus’s business? Is that where Secker and McCarthy come in?”

  “They put up the money for this house. And they’re not too impressed with our bookings this first season. I told them, it’s early days yet. It needs to get known. Word of mouth. People like you. Or so I hoped.”

  “And so we would have. We fell in l
ove with it at first sight. I don’t know that you’d have much joy out of Colin Ewart, even without the death. I bet he’s the kind of person who writes stinking reviews for Trip Advisor.”

  “And Harry and Debbie felt it was over their budget. Well, it was always meant to be more than a youth hostel.”

  “So Secker and McCarthy wanted to change the game? Attract a different kind of clientèle? Outdoor types with serious money to spend, rather than people in need of healing.”

  “That’s about it. Thaddaeus was wavering. Well, he comes from that sort of world, where everything depends on the bottom line.”

  “But Lorna would feel differently? She told Jenny about her mother. I got the impression this meant a lot more than money to her.”

  “Yes. Oh, they’ll get their investment back from somewhere. But maybe not the sort of high returns they want. That’s why they were putting pressure on Thaddaeus not to change his will.”

  “What do you mean? They wanted her to inherit?”

  Sian dipped the chamois leather in a bucket and wrung it out. “Of course not. But she’s only just eighteen. There was this trust fund. He put it in his will when she was younger. With them in charge, of course. They’d make the decisions and she’d get a share of the profits, at their discretion. I think it was meant to last until she was twenty-five.”

  “And Thaddaeus was going to change that?”

  “There was a big argument on Monday. He’d decided to give her a free hand, now she’s eighteen. But they must have talked him into reconsidering. They came again on Tuesday. Thaddaeus had gone to see that nutter Caradoc Lewis about something. But I heard him come back. I went to look for him, but I couldn’t find him. He must already have been…” Her voice faltered. “Anyway, they weren’t best pleased when they had to go away empty-handed again.”

  “So the codicil was never signed? The trust fund stands? Lorna doesn’t get a free hand.”

  “That’s about the size of it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got work to do.”

  She moved her cloths and cleaning liquid to the next window and set to work energetically again.