The Hunted Hare

by Fay Sampson

  But she could not speak. In a few moments, she would not be able to breathe.

  “Aidan!” her heart screamed out. “Where are you? I need you!”

  There was a brilliant flash of light in her face.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  THEY HIT THE ROAD below Blaen-y-cwm farm. As the gateposts of the House of the Hare swung into view, Aidan felt a release of tension that they were back at last, and yet a growing anxiety about what he might find. He slowed the car, expecting Lincoln ahead of him to swing into the drive.

  “Daddy! What are you doing?” Melangell demanded. “I wanted to stay with Lorna and the hare. I found it, didn’t I? It’s important. Wait till I tell Mummy. She’s going to be so jealous.”

  “Yes, sweetheart,” Aidan said, preoccupied.

  Further down the lane, a tall figure was crossing the road from the church. Caradoc Lewis.

  Lincoln’s car accelerated forward, and stopped abruptly just short of running him down. Aidan followed. The man turned in shock and fury.

  Aidan was out of the car only seconds after DS Lincoln. “Where’s Jenny?”

  Lewis looked at him with withering contempt. “Your wife? I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  Was he bluffing? Could this whole bizarre thing about the hare and Melangell’s abduction really have nothing to do with the fact that Jenny had vital evidence about the identity of Thaddaeus’s murderer? Was she safely back at the House of the Hare? Should Aidan be getting Melangell back to her as soon as possible, instead of standing here?

  He had not seen the other car approaching from the opposite direction. Now Caradoc Lewis stood hemmed in between the bonnets of the two detectives’ vehicles. Chief Inspector Denbigh got out more heavily than his younger sergeant had.

  “Caradoc Lewis, I am arresting you on suspicion of arson. You do not have to say anything…”

  The words of the caution faded in Aidan’s ears. Surely this was about one murder and the fear of another? He had followed Lincoln because he believed that where Caradoc Lewis was, Jenny would be. Or had been. It was a thought so chill that he dared not pursue it. Caradoc Lewis had come from the church and its graveyard.

  But arson? Did it really matter that the tower of St Melangell’s had been engulfed in flames?

  For the first time he noticed that Mother Joan and Freda Rawlinson were standing at the entrance to the church car park. From the shocked expressions on their faces, he guessed they had had an uncomfortable encounter with Caradoc. The fire investigation officer joined them.

  “No doubt about it, I’m afraid. Accelerant, probably paraffin. Your chap targeted the table in the middle of the room. Didn’t even have the sense to make it look like faulty wiring.”

  Caradoc tossed his long black hair contemptuously. “Idiots! Christian saints! Pretty little stories about a beautiful woman hiding a cuddly bunny under her skirt. Do you think that’s what the Hare and the Lady is all about? Sentimental piffle!”

  He rounded on Aidan and Melangell, his face eager. “She found it, didn’t she? You saw it. You took the bait. You were there when she unearthed it? That’s what the world needs to know about. Not this!” He waved a scornful hand at the church.

  The crowd was growing. Police officers were coming down from the hill fields and up from the meadows by the river. Euan’s worried face was among them. Josef was looking shiftily at the police on either side of him.

  “You’ve got the kid. Thank God for that!” The uniformed Sergeant Morris, who had been so dismissive of PC Watkins, raised himself in Aidan’s eyes with his heartfelt joy at the sight of Melangell.

  It was hard not to be caught up in the sudden explosion of cheering and clapping. Melangell looked suddenly confused and startled. But when she saw them all smiling at her, she beamed.

  “Sergeant,” Denbigh addressed the local man. “Take one of your constables and get this character back to your station. He’s wanted for setting fire to this church. I’ll be along later.”

  He got back into his car. “Lincoln, if we could sort out what happened to this young lady… Maybe we could go back to the house. I’m sure her mother’s dying to see her.”

  “Parkinson’s bringing Lorna Brown in,” his detective sergeant told him. “She doesn’t know yet she’s back on a murder charge. She thinks it’s about making off with this young lady.” He nodded at the smiling Melangell.

  The smile vanished from the child’s face. She looked up at the men around her in sudden alarm. Aidan could only bundle her back into the car. Explanations must wait.

  Lincoln and Aidan turned their vehicles in the car park and followed the inspector’s Rover back to the house.

  Was it all over? Caradoc Lewis under arrest for arson. Lorna soon to be charged with murder. Was Jenny really safe now to give her evidence in court? How long did it take a murder case to come to trial? Would Jenny still be fit to testify? Might she be in the hospice by then? Or…? Aidan pushed the worst thought away.

  After all, it was only circumstantial evidence. Footsteps of someone unseen running along the corridor. The fact that Lorna Brown had had time to change her clothes before she met Euan. All it proved was that Lorna could have killed her uncle.

  His mind was churning with conflicting emotions. At least he was bringing Melangell back safe. Surely that was the most important thing.

  Caradoc and Lorna were under arrest. There was no one now to threaten Jenny.

  He jumped out of his own car, without waiting for Lincoln to park.

  The House of the Hare had a feeling of emptiness. The sky was clearing at last. A shaft of sunlight fell on the landing above him.

  The silence was not surprising. Everyone had been out searching for Melangell. He stood with her at the foot of the stairs. She was unnaturally quiet.

  Would Jenny be in the bedroom? She ought to be resting, but he knew that she would not have been able to stay still while everyone else hunted for her daughter. Still, he doubted that she would have had the strength left to go far.

  “Jenny!” he called.

  Silence.

  “Run into the lounge and see if she’s there,” he told Melangell.

  She darted off.

  He climbed the stairs. His footsteps echoed on the polished wood.

  Through the patch of sunlight, past the vase of dried flowers on the windowsill, into the darker corridor. The bedroom door was half open. He stepped through it softly, just in case she was asleep on the bed.

  The bedding was rumpled. There was no sign of Jenny. He went out on to the balcony and scanned the garden. Nothing moved.

  Faintly, he heard Melangell’s voice call, “Mummy? I’m back.”

  No answering cry of joy.

  He went downstairs more quickly. PC Watkins came through the front door and stood in the foyer, looking up at him.

  “Have you seen Jenny? My wife?”

  “Yes, she was here. I was searching the house and she came and joined me. I last saw her in Lorna Brown’s bedroom, though I’d already been through it with a fine-tooth comb.”

  Aidan ran back up. Lorna’s bedroom was unlocked. And empty.

  His feet clattered down the stairs again. He caught up with Watkins outside the French windows of the lounge as she greeted Melangell enthusiastically.

  “We found the hare!” Melangell was telling her, her face bright with excitement again. “Lorna says it’s thousands and thousands of years old. It was in the ground by the waterfall. We dug it up. Lorna knew where it was because Mr Caradoc has a picture of a special stone that used to stand there. And she let me help her. It was in this…”

  “Was anyone else in the house?” Aidan interrupted.

  PC Watkins turned her kindly face, trying to switch from Melangell’s enthusiastic account to Aidan’s urgency. “No. They’d all been detailed to search the grounds, or check the village. As soon as they heard Melangell was missing, everyone offered to join in. The staff here, people from the houses by the church. I was told to do a thorough s
earch of the house.”

  Sergeant Lincoln emerged from the corridor beyond the reception desk that led to rooms not used by guests. He shook his head.

  “Then where is she?”

  Watkins’ face creased with concern. “She wasn’t well, was she? And then all this upset. You don’t think she had a fainting fit? She could by lying somewhere.”

  Aidan was suddenly conscious of time racing past, when anything could be happening to Jenny. He seemed to hear her voice calling inside his head. “Aidan! Where are you?”

  “Wait a minute!” Watkins exclaimed. “There was someone. I didn’t see her, but I heard her voice. I’d just finished checking the house and I was crossing the foyer on my way to join the boys outside. It was down that way.” She nodded towards the corridor leading to the kitchen.

  “Whose voice?”

  “Sian. The manager. I thought she must be talking to Mrs Davison.”

  Sian. The former PE teacher in her bushranger’s outfit. Sian, folding Lorna in her arms, fiercely protective of her. Sian in the kitchen talking to Jenny.

  Aidan flew down the corridor and threw the door open.

  The kitchen was empty. His eye immediately registered the wickedly pointed knife on the table. Its blade was smeared with red.

  Beetroot, he told his thudding heart. It’s only beetroot.

  He turned a pleading gaze on Lincoln. A distant part of his mind told him that Denbigh was no longer with them.

  “Where can she be?”

  He saw the sergeant struggling with the unanswerable question.

  His own mind was racing through the possibilities. And horror was growing all the time. Why was Sian in the house, when everyone else was outside looking for Melangell? Even PC Watkins had finished searching the rooms and had gone to join them. Until she had passed the foyer and heard voices, she thought she had left only Jenny in the house.

  What possible reason could have brought Sian to the kitchen, except that Jenny was here? Alone.

  He cursed himself for the time he had spent chasing up the valley to the waterfall in pursuit of Melangell. For the delay while they searched Caradoc’s house. For waiting while Lorna unearthed that stupid urn, which must be either a plant or a fake. For the nerve-wracking moments it took for Secker and McCarthy to reverse down the track to let them pass. For believing that the arrest of Caradoc Lewis for arson was all that it needed to ensure Jenny’s safety. And all that time…

  He was nearly sick.

  But the more he concentrated on that smiling picture of the muscular Sian Jenkins, the more other images were falling into place. Sian, showing Melangell where to find the croquet mallets. Sian, eager to introduce Jenny to the archery range, helping her to choose the most appropriate bow.

  All the images coalesced in sudden sharp focus. The small sports hut at the start of the archery range. Its shadowed interior crowded with bows, arrows, mallets, spikes. Any one of them could be an instrument of death.

  He almost threw Melangell back to Watkins. “Look after her.”

  He was out of the side door into the gleam of late sunshine. He almost expected to find Josef sitting smoking on his bench. But there was no one.

  He raced round the corner of the house and along the patio that fronted the lounge. Wicker chairs went flying.

  Lincoln was pounding alongside him. “Where are we going?”

  “The hut,” was all Aidan could gasp.

  They were past the house now, and bursting through the wall of laurels and camellias that screened the lawn from the archery range.

  A sudden surprise of space. Grass gleaming brilliantly green after the rain. The multicoloured circles of the butts. And at the nearer end, the dark-stained timbers of the hut.

  There was someone already outside.

  Chief Inspector Denbigh.

  Aidan flew towards him. He could not bear to imagine what he might find inside.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  SIAN STAGGERED BACKWARDS as the camera flash exploded in front of her face.

  “Luvverly!”

  “Aidan…!” The joy of recognition died on Jenny’s lips as her dazzled eyes realized the true identity of the photographer.

  Marcus Coutts stepped forward and felled Sian with a right hook.

  Darkness claimed Jenny. She fell forward against the tightening bowstring.

  A voice came from a long way away.

  “You realize that I’m not in a million years going to let you use that photograph. I’m impounding your camera now as key evidence.”

  “But, guv! You can not be serious! That’s the shot of a lifetime! Jenny in the noose. The killer alongside. It’s worth a fortune!”

  “Are you going to let Mrs Davison down, or stand there and let her strangle to death?” Inspector Denbigh ordered.

  The unbearable tension suddenly went slack. Jenny tumbled off the box. The freed cord was still close around her neck, but it had not tightened fatally. Hands were prising it loose. She was going to be sick. Marcus Coutts was holding her steady.

  When she could speak she gasped, “Sian’s not the killer. It was Lorna all along. And she’s got Melangell.”

  The chief inspector straightened from the prostrate form of Sian. The manager was struggling against the handcuffs he had snapped on her wrists. Sudden surprise rearranged the creases of Denbigh’s face.

  “Lorna?” He stepped forward to release Jenny from the reporter’s hold. “Don’t upset yourself, Mrs Davison. Melangell’s safe and well. But what makes you blame Miss Brown?”

  “Sian told me.” It was cruelly painful to speak. “She said she would have done it for Lorna, if she’d asked. But now she… she was covering up.”

  “By silencing you? So you couldn’t testify to what?”

  “That I heard Lorna come back to the house. It wasn’t more than half an hour after the murder, as I thought. It must have been straight after. I heard her run to the bedroom to change her clothes.”

  “And what would make Miss Jenkins think you’d remembered this?”

  Even as he spoke, he swung round to Coutts.

  The journalist flared. “Have a heart! I’ve got to get a story, haven’t I? It’s my living.”

  “You told Sian Jenkins information that could have cost Mrs Davison her life? You followed them here so that you could get your ‘shot of a lifetime’, as you call it? What kind of reptile does that make you?”

  “I got it, though, didn’t I? All the proof you need to put her away.”

  “And Mrs Davison?”

  “I wouldn’t have let her swing. That’s God’s truth. Give us a break, guv! I stopped Sian, didn’t I?”

  Jenny’s appalled imagination showed her the front page of a tabloid. Her own contorted face struggling against the noose.

  A figure catapulted past Denbigh and snatched the expensive Leica from Coutts. Aidan hurled the camera across the grass. It shattered against the stone boundary wall.

  Coutts let out a scream of rage, but Lincoln had him in an armlock.

  Jenny stumbled into Aidan’s embrace. “Don’t be too hard on him,” she whispered. “He did rescue me.”

  Denbigh went to retrieve the shards of the journalist’s camera.

  “It would have been helpful to remove the disc first, before you gave vent to your understandable feelings. But I dare say the lab will be able to get what they want from this.” Sian snarled from the floor beside him. “Charge her with attempted murder, will you?” Chief Inspector Denbigh told DS Lincoln.

  Aidan had his arm firmly around Jenny as he guided her back across the lawn to the house. She felt the most precious burden in the world. He could hardly believe that she was here, alive, even though she was still breathing painfully. From now on, every moment he had her was doubly miraculous.

  Melangell came running across the grass to meet them. Her springy curls bounced with her enthusiasm.

  “Mummy! You should have been there! Lorna took a spade and Mr Caradoc had a picture which showed her
where to dig. And he was right! I helped her lift it out and it was the hare! Wasn’t it, Daddy?”

  “It looked like it,” he said, cautiously.

  Jenny leaned against his shoulder, smiling weakly. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, but it sounds very exciting. Can it wait till I sit down?”

  He helped her across the patio, into the lounge. She was just sinking into one of the leather sofas when there were fresh sounds from the foyer. Aidan looked round to see Parkinson escorting Lorna in through the front door. Lorna was still holding the pottery urn cradled in her arms like a baby.

  “That’s it!” squealed Melangell. “Look!”

  Lorna’s exquisite face looked defiant.

  Does she know? Aidan thought. No, she can’t. She doesn’t know Sian identified her to Jenny as the murderer. She thinks she’s just being brought in for questioning because she took Melangell away without permission. And Melangell’s safe, so she assumes it’s no big deal. She’s got what she wanted. Lincoln and Parkinson and I were all there to witness her unearth her precious urn of bones.

  Caradoc must have planted them, mustn’t he? He wasn’t there himself to arouse suspicion. He stole the urn and bones from the museum and buried them there for her to find. He told her where to dig.

  A niggle of suspicion gnawed at his mind. That old engraving laid out on Caradoc’s desk. A carved stone pillar set at the foot of Pistyll Blaen-y-cwm. It wasn’t there now. It had been embedded in the motley of masonry that was Capel-y-Cwm. But once it must have marked a significant spot. Why? Was that how he knew that Lorna had to dig for the urn there? Was it even possible that her find was genuine?

  He looked at Melangell with renewed admiration, and even jealousy.

  Then a voice he had never wanted to hear again came from behind him.

  “Don’t tell them anything, Lorna!”