The Hunted Hare

by Fay Sampson

  Aidan walked slowly out on to the lawn. His thoughts were somersaulting. From the moment he had seen that Jaguar forcing his own car back along the narrow lane, the men inside it had seemed like a malevolent force. It had been so easy to imagine them casting a dark shadow over the House of the Hare. Threatening Thaddaeus. Even Jenny. Yet everything had pointed to Lorna having the most to gain from her uncle’s death. Now the situation had been turned upside down. If the codicil taking away their power over Thaddaeus’s estate had remained unsigned, they had every reason to kill him before he could do so. And Lorna had every motive to keep him alive.

  Chapter Nineteen

  AIDAN’S MIND WAS WHIRLING with altered possibilities, his thoughts peopled with a shifting range of suspects. It was several moments before he registered the fact that the lawn was empty.

  He looked around. The croquet hoops stood where he and Melangell had set them. His mallet lay where he had dropped it when Jenny and DS Lincoln had emerged from the path through the azaleas. There was a scatter of coloured balls. But no Melangell.

  The emptiness screamed at him.

  Though the sun was bright, there was a blackness crowding in over his eyes. He had not felt on the edge of fainting since he was a schoolboy in a crowded assembly hall. But now the world swam in front of him. He was deathly cold.

  He made himself take deep, slow breaths. There must be a reason. He could not afford to give way to weakness now. Jenny needed him. It was Jenny who was in danger…

  Melangell was missing. The possibility struck him with the force of wrecker’s ball. What if whoever DS Lincoln thought was threatening Jenny had seized Melangell to ensure her silence?

  Fool! his panicked conscience yelled at him. I should never have left her alone, even for a few moments.

  A thought occurred to him on a wave of relief. He spun round. Sian was still busy cleaning the huge windows. She would have seen everything that happened on the lawn. He started to stride towards her when he heard a childish voice.

  “Oh, there he is.”

  The slight, mop-headed figure of Melangell, in blue shorts and a red Shrek T-shirt, was stepping out of one of the many paths that wound among the ornamental shrubs. In her hand was the yellow croquet ball. And just behind her came a figure in mud-smeared jeans and a tartan shirt. Dark hair flopped over his head, which he hung self-consciously. Euan Jones, the gardener.

  Melangell turned to look up at the young man with a radiant smile, then back at Aidan. “Euan found my ball for me. I gave it a most tremendous hit and it disappeared into those bushes. And there he was. So here it is.” She flourished the ball at her father.

  The sun was warmer now. Aidan flashed a grin of gratitude at Euan. “Thanks for that. Sorry if she’s been a nuisance. I got held up, talking.”

  “You always do,” Melangell scolded him.

  “Less of that, young lady.”

  He raised his eyes again to find that Euan had lifted his own head and was looking directly at him. Not smiling.

  Something about those dark brown eyes disturbed him. This was the first time he had come face to face with Euan Jones since the day they had discovered Thaddaeus’s body. There had been venom in the young gardener’s voice then: “He deserved it.”

  Since then, Aidan had glimpsed him in the distance, about his work. He had seen him in the lounge with the other staff and guests, uncomfortably waiting his turn to be questioned.

  But a memory was coming back to him of something Jenny had told him. Something that had happened while he and Melangell were out on their waterfall walk, leaving Jenny alone at the archery butts. She had said that Euan had emerged out of the shrubbery and collected her arrows from the target.

  Aidan pictured the scene now as distinctly as if it were framed in the LCD screen of his camera. But as Jenny would have seen it. Euan, walking across the grass towards her. Those earth-stained fingers gripping a fistful of red-flighted arrows. Like the one that stabbed Thaddaeus. Advancing on Jenny in her wheelchair.

  The ground trembled under Aidan’s feet.

  He grasped Melangell’s thin wrist, hardly conscious that he was doing so.

  “Croquet’s over. Come on. We’re going.”

  “Where?”

  “Never mind.”

  He hauled her indoors, nearly upsetting a surprised Sian on her stepladder. Through the foyer, pounding up the stairs. He should have gone back and told Jenny to lock the door.

  “Daddy!” Melangell wailed. “You’re going too fast. You’re hurting me.”

  Conscience-stricken, he let go of her wrist. “Sorry, love. But we have to hurry.”

  “Why?”

  He burst into the double bedroom.

  Jenny lay curled up in the big bed, asleep. His heart ached to see how thin her face was, the smudges round her eyes. She had taken off her scarf. There was a sheen of tiny fair hairs just starting to cover her scalp again. Every instinct of compassion made him want to leave her there, undisturbed, wrapped in the arms of healing sleep.

  But a more imperative voice was telling him he had to snatch her up and carry her away. Now, before whoever was stalking this valley with murderous intent could realize that Jenny alone might hold the clue to the killer’s identity.

  He seized their suitcases from the corner where he had stacked them. He threw one on the bed.

  Jenny stirred. She opened bruised-looking eyelids, then gave a cat-like yawn. She rubbed the backs of her hands over her eyes.

  “Is it time to get up?”

  Then she focused on Aidan, on Melangell hovering in the doorway, on the suitcase weighing down the other half of the bedclothes. She struggled to sit up.

  “What’s going on?”

  Aidan was rapidly emptying the drawers on his side of the bed, and piling the contents into the suitcase.

  “We’re leaving.”

  “Now? But it’s only Thursday.”

  “I know. But I’m not letting you stay here a moment longer. I should have taken you away as soon as the police had questioned us. When Harry and Debbie went.”

  She reached a hand towards him, but he did not stay still long enough for her to hold him. The hangers in the wardrobe rattled as he slid the clothes off.

  “Love, we went over all this. Whether to go or stay. We decided it was safer here, with the police all over the place, than heading off on our own, and not knowing who might be following us.”

  “I was wrong. When I got downstairs, Melangell was gone. Euan Jones found her looking for a ball in the shrubbery. Where were the police then? How do either we or the police know it wasn’t Euan? Or anybody else? They can’t be everywhere.”

  Obediently, Jenny started to ease her feet out from under the duvet. She looked drawn and tired, but he must not let short-term sympathy cloud his brain.

  Then she checked, her bare feet not yet on the floor. She turned her serious grey-blue eyes on him. “I can’t go.”

  “Oh, yes, you can. I’ve made my mind up.”

  “No. I’ve been lying in bed, thinking about what that newspaper headline said. How I might be the only one who saw or heard something just before Thaddaeus was killed, or straight after.”

  “That’s why we’re going. And not telling anyone where.”

  She went on as though he had not spoken. “He was right. I just have this feeling at the edge of my mind that there was something. But every time I try to focus on it and remember what it was, it goes.” She raised her eyes to his. “But I desperately need to remember it. Properly. The police need me to remember. Everyone here, Lorna, Sian, they need me to remember. I can’t just run away and put it all behind me. If there’s any chance of my calling that memory back, it’s going to be here, where it happened. When I was lying on this bed, in this room.”

  Her eyes begged him to understand.

  “Even the police think you’re in danger.”

  “Haven’t we talked about this before? Didn’t Martin Luther King say something? ‘What matters is not how long
you live, but why you live, what you stand for, and what you are willing to die for.’”

  His mind was shouting at her, “But we have so little time left!”

  What he said was a plea, “Jenny!”

  She said nothing, just went on looking at him, willing him to acquiesce.

  He knew her. That steely resolve. He would not get her to change her mind if she thought this was what she had to do.

  He raised his hands in a gesture of loving helplessness. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have woken you up.”

  He turned to Melangell, who was biting her thumb. “As you were, partner. Let’s get those croquet balls rolling.”

  He waited until Melangell had reached the head of the stairs. Then he put his head back around the bedroom door. “Lock this behind me. Don’t let anyone in. I’ll give three knocks when I come back, so you’ll know it’s me.”

  Every step he took down the sunlit staircase felt like a move away from safety, into the unknown.

  Chapter Twenty

  WHEN THEY HAD GONE, Jenny hesitated, then locked the door, as Aidan had ordered her to.

  It felt overdramatic. DS Lincoln had only told her that she might be in danger. Aidan was acting as though it was a real and immediate fact. She was trying to be sensible. Yet it was difficult not to let some of his fear communicate itself to her.

  If only she could pinpoint just what it was she was on the verge of remembering. The shadow of apprehension grew colder as she realized that she did indeed hold crucial evidence. She must be very careful not to confirm this to anyone but Aidan and the police.

  She had a sudden longing for the elderly, world-weary Chief Detective Inspector Denbigh. It would be reassuring to unburden herself to him. But it would be pointless to go to him until she had something definite to tell him.

  She lay down on the bed again. But sleep would not come. Her mind replayed over and over what little she knew about the time of Thaddaeus’s death. She had seen the Everts leaving after lunch, and Secker and McCarthy arriving. She had heard raised voices, which must have been the two financiers angry that Thaddaeus could not be found. But others had heard that too. Then she had lain down, here on this bed. Sometime around then, Thaddaeus had been murdered. She had not heard or seen him leave the house and walk away into the shrubbery, where Harry and Debbie had found the body.

  She couldn’t have seen anything. Lying in bed, she had a view of the tops of the mountains. Sunlight on the patches of young bracken and the darker shadow of the gorse. Blue sky above. Nothing of the garden below unless she went out on to the balcony.

  It had been some forty minutes later when she had got up and done that. And then she had seen Lorna running back into the garden and Euan’s arms. By then, according to the pathologist, Thaddaeus had been dead for at least half an hour.

  She sighed and rolled over.

  There was a light tap at the door.

  Jenny sat up and listened. The tap came again. It was definitely not the three knocks that Aidan had arranged as a signal that it was him.

  She swung her feet quietly to the floor. She wished now that she had not agreed to that overreaction of locking the door. Far from protecting her, it heightened her sense of danger. What did she think she had locked it against?

  Her bare feet padded to the door. Her eyes widened as she saw the handle twist slowly. The door shuddered as someone tried to open it. The lock resisted.

  Her throat was dry now, but she needed to confront whatever was happening. She had faced up to the diagnosis of cancer, and to the news that it had returned more aggressively. She would face this new threat with the same clear-eyed determination.

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me. Lorna,” came the subdued reply.

  Jenny unlocked the door with a sense of anticlimax. What had she expected? Those strange men in suits, who had driven their Jaguar so dangerously down the Welsh lanes? Euan Jones, prowling the upstairs corridor with a sharp-edged gardening implement?

  She saw with concern that the teenage girl looked as tense as she had felt herself. The intense blue eyes in her heart-shaped face went past Jenny to the tall window.

  “Sorry to disturb you.” There was a faint Welsh lilt to her voice, which Jenny had not noticed before. “You weren’t asleep, were you?”

  “No,” Jenny said truthfully, though she had wanted to be.

  Lorna walked across the room to the balcony. “You’ve got a lovely view. You can see most of the garden from here, can’t you? And the woods and mountains.”

  “Yes, it’s wonderful. Doesn’t your room have the same sort of view?”

  “No. I’m at the end of this corridor. I look down the valley, the way you drive to get here. I can see the kitchen garden and the tennis courts. Not that anybody but Thaddaeus and I have used them yet.”

  “Do you miss your uncle?”

  “What a strange question? Of course I do. He was all the family I’ve got. Since my mam died.”

  “It must have been a very close relationship.”

  “It was.”

  They were skirting around the subject that Jenny had dared not press her on, the last time they had spoken about Thaddaeus. This time, she felt bolder. She did not know why Lorna had come into her bedroom at a time when Jenny could be expected to be alone. But it suggested that she wanted to share a confidence. Perhaps it was something that was easier to say to a sympathetic stranger than to someone she knew well, like Sian.

  Jenny sat down on the bed and wondered how to phrase it.

  “Forgive me if I’m putting my foot in it, but we wondered… Your uncle seemed a very forceful personality. Don’t get me wrong. He was very warm and genial towards us. The perfect host. But it must have been difficult for you, just eighteen, and living and working so close to someone as dominant as that. Did you ever feel… under his influence? I don’t just mean in business affairs. I know he was teaching you the ropes. But something more personal?”

  Lorna had her back to the window now, staring at Jenny. The deep blue eyes were wide but shadowed.

  “What do you mean, personal?”

  “Look, I know I’m sticking my neck out. But we were worried about you, Aidan and I. The day Thaddaeus was murdered, Aidan said he and Melangell met you coming away from the waterfall. You looked upset. And your shirt was torn. Later, Aidan saw Thaddaeus not far away. We couldn’t help wondering if he…”

  The cupid’s bow of Lorna’s mouth fell open, revealing pearly teeth. Her voice rose an octave. “You think… you think Uncle Thaddaeus was making a pass at me? That he was behaving like a dirty old man? How dare you!”

  She took a step towards Jenny, her eyes flashing anger now. Jenny jumped to her feet. Cancer and chemotherapy had weakened her, but she had once been a competent athlete. She balanced on the balls of her feet, wondering if Lorna was going to attack her.

  She held up her hands peaceably. “I’m sorry if we got the wrong end of the stick. But you hear about it. Older male relations abusing their power over a girl in the family. And now you’ve no one else to turn to, I thought…”

  “I’ve got Sian.”

  “So there was never anything like that with Thaddaeus?”

  The door crashed open behind Jenny. She turned abruptly to find Aidan. His bearded face was blazing with rage.

  “What’s she doing here?”

  “Aidan! I let her in.”

  “I told you to keep that door locked.”

  Lorna looked from one to the other. “Is something wrong? Why did you have to lock your door?”

  Jenny scrambled to put the words back in the box from which they should never have escaped. “Aidan was worried about someone disturbing me while I was sleeping. No, it’s all right. I actually wasn’t asleep when you knocked. I thought perhaps you wanted to talk. I’m sorry we went off down the wrong track.”

  She looked back at Aidan, then at Lorna. Whatever it was that the girl had come to say, it was unlikely that she would unburden herself now in fron
t of Aidan, or even to Jenny, since she had made that disastrous misjudgment.

  “Well, I’m sorry to have disturbed you. Excuse me!” With a flash of teenage tantrum, Lorna flounced past Aidan out of the room.

  Jenny sat down on the bed again, shaking. “Well, between us, we fouled that up.”

  “You should never have let her in, without me. I told you. We can’t trust anyone.”

  “Oh, come on, now. It was only Lorna.”

  “Who was the police’s prime suspect on Tuesday.”

  “But they let her go. And I found out something else which cuts the ground from under the scenario we’d worked out about her. Thaddaeus wasn’t abusing her. Whatever happened at the waterfall that morning, it wasn’t him.”

  “Is that what she came to tell you?”

  “No. I asked her. She looked really shocked.”

  “So why did she knock on your door?”

  “I don’t know. We didn’t get around to that before you burst in.”

  “Oh, so it’s my fault now? She looked as though she was about to attack you.”

  “Only because I’d made an inexcusable suggestion.”

  “And you’ve really no idea why she came?”

  “None. All she did was walk across the room and say what a nice view I had.”

  “A view! Of the grounds. Where Thaddaeus died.”

  “Aidan, I’ve told you. Thaddaeus wasn’t forcing her to have sex with him. She had no motive to kill him.”

  He gazed at her for several moments. Then he sighed. “No. I didn’t tell you, did I? About Thaddaeus’s will?”

  “It hasn’t been made public yet, has it? I suppose Lorna will inherit most of what he had.”

  “Yes. But this afternoon Sian told me that there were strings, if her uncle died before he signed a codicil. Those hoodlums in the Jaguar. Thaddaeus had arranged for them to manage a trust fund for her. But he was going to change his will and put Lorna in sole charge. They had an argument about it on Monday. Lorna would only get her hands on the money if he lived to sign that codicil.”

  She stared back at him. Her mind struggled to make sense of what he was telling her.