Buffet for Unwelcome Guests

by Christianna Brand

  And Nancy and Blodwen, creeping back down the side of the mountain, along the sheep track, the short cut to Llangwyn. Been to the cinema—there’s sinful! A dirty old picture—Blod’s big brother Idris had told her about it, warned her not to tell Mam. But once there, they hadn’t dared to go in to the picture house after all. Blod had seen Mam and Da talking to a man—it was mart day—and suppose they’d glanced up and seen her, and Nancy in that bright red dress! ‘Well, all right, say there’s lots of red dresses like that,’ said Blodwen impatiently. ‘We was never in Llangwyn, we was sitting over there in the fields below Cwm-esgair, reading our books.’ They had at least contrived some somewhat highly coloured magazines. ‘Come on now, get to the fields!’ Nancy was silly, really; and fancy coming to the Llangwyn at all in such a bright dress! ‘One day, Nancy James, I won’t be best friends with you any more.’

  Primmy had returned from her errand. Her lovely face was very grey and strained but she was triumphant. ‘I had a better idea, I put the note on a bush near the entrance to the cave. Anyone passing down the path would see it. Otherwise, if no one went into the cave—and they mightn’t for ages—’

  ‘Did you—see her, Primmy?’

  ‘Well, I… I just went into the middle of the cave, where you can begin to see the river. She’s still there. I could—I could see her legs.’ Plump, sun-burned legs, like a child’s legs, toes turned down and digging into the grass. She confessed: ‘I couldn’t bear any more.’

  ‘There was no point,’ said Melisande in her own kind, comforting way. ‘You couldn’t do her any good, if she was dead.’

  Christo struggled to his feet again. ‘If no one goes to the cave—she’ll be lying there. She might lie there all night. We can’t leave her, we couldn’t.’

  ‘Christo, love, she’s dead.’

  If Christo found a dead creature in the woods, he made a grave and buried it: not with little crosses and sentimentalities—he just said it wasn’t decent, it was too pitiful. Even to animals, he showed respect. And now…‘Just lying there—with her head hanging down into the water…’ He said miserably: ‘It was bad enough to run away and leave her: even for a little while. If it hadn’t been for the cave—but it seemed to be pressing down, lowering down, just there behind me. We can’t leave her there all night.’

  ‘If someone sees the note—’

  ‘Who’ll be using that path?’ said Melisande, reluctantly.

  ‘It gets more and more awful,’ said Christo, ‘to think I just left her there.’ He took a huge and frightening resolve. ‘I must go and tell the police.’

  They were terrified. ‘Wait, Christo, wait! There must be another way out.’

  ‘If it was children that found her!’ said Evaine; there were two small children always playing about at Penbryn, across the valley.

  ‘We could pretend we were all going along the path,’ said Primmy, ‘and saw the note and went into the cave and found her.’

  ‘Who’ll believe us?’ insisted Abel.

  Christo was coming out of his state of shock, out of the claustrophobic horrors that had driven him from the cave. ‘I can’t leave her there and that’s the end of it. All night and perhaps the next and the next… I’ll go to the police. I’ll simply say that she’d asked me to meet her and I found her there.’

  ‘At least, at least, say that you saw the note?’

  ‘Well, all right, I’ll say that I saw the note. Actually, I thought I heard someone moving and as she wasn’t in the glade, I went through to the river.’

  ‘Christo! It could have been the murderer!’

  ‘Well, then I’ll tell them—No, I can’t if I’m going to say the note was there.’ He looked shocked and horrified, nevertheless.

  ‘We’ll all go down now,’ said Abel. ‘We’ll—we’ll get her out of the water. We’ll go to the police and tell them about it, say that you rushed back and told us. Only you’ve got to swear that you’ll say you saw the note.’

  Evaine stayed with the babies. The rest went down to the woods, hurrying, lest anyone should observe them, as though on an anxious errand. Through the fields, skirting the growing crops, over a gate tied as usual intricately with string which a farmer must each day patiently unknot: why not a simple noose or even a metal catch they never could understand—but that was farming in dear Welsh Wales. Into the cool of the woods and so, crossing the path, to the green glade, the late sunshine thrusting its bright slanting rays down through the branches, like the golden rays from old pictures of God the Father in heaven.

  No one had passed that way. The dampened paper still hung, pierced through by a thorn, blue-grey against the whiteness of the starry blossom. Christo picked a sprig of it, wrenching it off from the tough parent bough, and carried it with him, creeping after them, tense again with the suffocating horror of the dark cave, close about him. ‘Is she still there?’

  She was still there: still in both senses, a lump, a thing, lying on the low bank, two humped shoulders where the head disappeared hanging down into the water; one arm trailing, the other bent behind her. Christo, half fainting, turned aside as they lifted her out and laid her on the bank. Her face was terrible, turned up to the afternoon sunshine, lank hair spread across it like dark weed. He knelt down beside her and looked with juddering self-control into the blank blue eyes; and placed in the drowned hand his little sprig of May. ‘Someone must stay with her,’ he said. ‘We can’t leave her alone again.’

  ‘I’ll stay,’ said Rohan at once. ‘Mellie and I will stay. You three go down to the village and tell the police.’

  They toiled along the narrow path to the tiny police station; saw, unastonished, the freezing of the constable’s face as they filed wretchedly in. They had done no harm, never been brought to his attention, but—the Hippies! Christo said steadily: ‘We came to tell you that we’ve found a girl dead, down by the river. She’s been drowned.’

  ‘It’s Megan the Post,’ said Melisande, in the Welsh idiom.

  ‘Megan Thomas? Drowned? Duw, duw!’ said the man. He looked at them for a moment suspiciously but accepted the obvious way out. ‘Drowned herself, is it? Lost her health, poor thing, everyone knew it. Not too surprising after all.’

  ‘She left a note,’ said Abel. He handed it over. ‘It seems to have got wet.’

  The constable peered down at it: looked up sharply, suspicious again. ‘Funny she wouldn’t write it in Welsh?’

  Primmy went ashen. Stupid, stupid mistake—of course a girl like that would write in her familiar tongue! But Abel said coolly: ‘We think it was meant for—him—so that’s why it would be in English.’ He told the little story, quietly, reassuringly. The man accepted it readily enough. To his somewhat simple mind, the likelihood of a mad girl’s drowning herself seemed pretty logical. ‘Duw, duw! Well, well—poor girl!’ And when they brought him to the Corot-green evening gloom of the bank by the water, he knelt over her and, seeing how they had laid her out, reverently, with the sprig of blossom in her hand, said again: ‘Poor girl—there’s pitiful!’

  But he wore a very different look when next afternoon he came with the sergeant from Llangwyn, to the cottage. He had known the dead girl from her childhood and now was black with anger. He summoned them all into the single big room which they had constructed from all the little downstairs parlours and larders and kitchen, now thrown into one; and said to the three men, viciously, not waiting for his superior: ‘Well—which one of you, then?’

  ‘She was pregnant,’ said the sergeant. ‘And murdered. Held down by her shoulders with her head in the stream. You heard what the constable said. Which one of you?’

  ‘We found her there, dead.’

  ‘He found her,’ said the constable, hand fisted, lifted as though he could hardly restrain himself from hitting Christo in the face. ‘Or so he says. But she wasn’t dead, was she—not yet?’

  They stood with the big, scrubbed wooden table between them—six, bunched close together, quivering with fear; and The Law. ‘She told me
she was in great trouble,’ said Christo, ‘and asked me to come there.’

  ‘And you’re the one who got her into great trouble.’

  ‘No, I never touched her.’ He did not know that he straightened up his thin shoulders and spoke out boldly a truth about himself. ‘I wouldn’t harm anyone so helpless and innocent.’

  ‘So someone else got her pregnant,’ said the sergeant, ‘but it’s you she turns to.’ Tell me another one, his voice insinuated.

  ‘She thought he was terribly good,’ said Rohan. ‘She thought he was a sort of saint.’

  ‘She thought he was Jesus Christ,’ said Primmy.

  ‘For Christ’s sake—Jesus Christ!’

  ‘Because of his face and his beard,’ said Melisande. ‘And because of himself. It’s true; he would never hurt anything or anyone. She could understand that, she could recognise it. So she turned to him.’

  ‘And he turned her—over on her face with her head in the water.’

  ‘You’ve got the note,’ said Rohan.

  ‘A bit of old printing, all wet. How do we know he didn’t write it himself?’

  The girl had been dead some hours, the doctor had said, by the time he saw her. She had left her home at about half past two. If this young man’s story were true, she might well have waited down by the cave for quite a long time before he came along; and after all, these were not the only young men in the valley. They had eliminated most of them, but… Facts stirred uncomfortably in the constable’s mind. Idris Jones, Dai Jones Penbryn’s boy—his name stank not at all sweetly in the nostrils of the local farmers. A man from Llangwyn had gone the rounds last night with brief, routine questions: Idris had said simply that he’d been in the yard all the afternoon, never saw nothing, never moved from the farm. Nothing to confirm that. On the other hand… A bit awkward it was for Constable Evans: Dai Penbryn was a good friend of his and a deacon of the chapel. A better way, he thought, than starting a lot of special enquiries, might be to bring Idris into it as though as an outsider and just keep an eye on his reactions. He suggested: ‘The children from Penbryn—they’re always all over the place, up the mountain, down by the river. They could have seen something: people coming and going.’ He suggested to the sergeant, all innocence: ‘Why not take this lot over there and ask them?’

  ‘Good idea,’ said the sergeant; not innocent at all of the tortuous methods of conducting police enquiries in isolated communities.

  So they all went over to Penbryn and stood in the farmyard like children at a game in the school playground, divided into two vague clumps, confronting one another. Beneath their feet, the cobbles were clean and swept by Idris’s labours yesterday; running down to the stony garden of rough grass, patched with bare earth, ridged where the children’s feet had kicked or drifted along the ground, starting or stopping the swing. Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Jones glancing dark and uneasy at the sullen face of his son, Idris, Mrs. Jones darting looks of angry unreason at the Hippies with their beards and long hair, the girls carrying each a small child, in the Welsh fashion, almost weightless, in the folds of a shawl, formed into a sort of sling at the left shoulder, brought round under the right arm and tucked in at the waist. Idris shuffled a little, head bent, scuffing back grit with his feet, like a hen sorting grain; Ianto and his friend Llewellyn stood side by side, serge coat-sleeves touching, twitching hands signalling danger; Blodwen faced uncertainty thankful that chicken-hearted Nancy was not here to give secrets away; Gwennie and the inevitable Boyo Thomas the Post, gazing up with large, scared eyes. The heat hung like a haze, heavy with the scent of the hay, the sour tang of the empty silo pit. The sergeant laid the situation before them briefly. ‘All we want to know is—did any of your family see anything—anything at all, never mind what—yesterday afternoon?’

  Everyone waited for everyone else to speak. He prompted: ‘You young ones, for example?’

  ‘We was playing on the swing,’ said Gwennie with the easy untruth of small-childhood.

  ‘What, the whole afternoon?’

  ‘True it is, sergeant, they’ll play on that swing all day.’

  ‘All right, Mrs. Jones, I understand that. But you might have gone down to the trees a bit, Gwennie, when it got too hot? Nothing wrong with that?’ he suggested, an eye turned to the mother. She shrugged and shook her head. Nothing to tell fibs about in that.

  But, ‘No, sir, never, sir,’ insisted Gwennie, small fat hands now beginning to tremble. (If they’d known she’d been down to the cave to show Boyo her chest!)

  ‘Not by the river? There’s cool on a hot day, the river! Down by that old cave, perhaps?’ suggested the constable, temptingly.

  Mad Megan, Boyo’s sister Megan, lying on her front out beyond the cave by the river’s edge. Drinking they’d thought she was but now it seemed that she’d been dead, been drownded. And the Hippy had come, running and calling, and gone at last into the cave where she was lying, and they’d scampered away. ‘No, sir, we was on the swing,’ insisted Gwennie, growing a little tearful.

  Idris spoke for the first time; idly, casually but looking up shiftily from under his eyebrows. ‘That’s right. I was working in the yard. They was playing on the swing.’

  ‘All afternoon?’ said the sergeant, sharply: this was an alibi that might too conveniently break both ways.

  ‘From dinner time,’ said Idris, hardly able now to keep the insolent challenge from his voice.

  The little ones had turned upon him large round eyes of astonished gratitude. Had Idris guessed? Was he protecting them? Idris himself was ‘dirty’—dirty old pictures he kept hidden in the barn, Blod had told Ianto so, and Gwennie had heard. He wouldn’t give them away. And this must be it—for after all, they hadn’t been in the yard. First they’d been quite a long time up on the mountain; and then by the river.

  The sergeant turned slowly. Beside him, the constable said: ‘Idris—Mr. Jones’ eldest son.’

  ‘You had nothing to do with this business, Idris?’

  ‘Me? I told you, I told the man last night. I was here, working in the yard.’

  ‘You have a bit of a name round here, I believe?’

  The constable looked wretchedly, anywhere but at Mr. and Mrs. Jones. Got to do your duty, there you are!—but these were his friends. The sergeant observed his expression and interpreted it. ‘Everyone knows it,’ he said.

  ‘I never touched the girl,’ said Idris. ‘Not in the way of—of killing her, or any other way.’ He added in a voice of contemptuous dismissal: ‘She was mental.’

  ‘That would make her easy,’ said the sergeant. ‘Easy to kill—and easy “any other way”.’

  ‘I was in the yard,’ repeated Idris, sullenly. ‘From dinner time on.’

  Here was some capital to be made for Ianto and Llewellyn. If Idris said that he and the little ones had been in the yard at Penbryn all the time—then it would be safe to have seen them there; and if they had not been in the woods after kites’ eggs. Ianto gave the touching hand a warning twitch. ‘We could see them in the yard, sergeant. We was up on the mountain across the valley.’

  ‘Could you see the Hippies’ place?’

  ‘Not from there, sergeant. Only Penbryn. We could see Penbryn all the time, sir,’ said Llewellyn, officiously, ‘and the little ones swinging.’

  ‘And Idris?’

  ‘Yes, sir, Idris doing the silage and then the hay and then clearing up the yard….’

  ‘Nancy and me could see them too, sergeant,’ said Blodwen. ‘In the fields we was, reading our books, but we could see Penbryn, and Gwennie and Boyo Thomas on the swing.’

  ‘And Idris?’

  ‘Yes, sir, Idris starting with the silage.’ When Idris had started on the silage, Blodwen and Nancy had been in Llangwyn. ‘But we never saw no Hippies, sir: only over to Penbryn.’

  ‘All right,’ said the sergeant. He had been keeping Idris Jones in reserve but here were three separate alibis which seemed to have no reason behind them but simple fact. ‘All the other boys r
ound here have been eliminated,’ he said to Christo—and surely the man must be guilty, just standing there, dumbly. The sergeant averted his gaze from the horrible shaking of the thin hands. ‘Now this one, too. So what about it, then?’

  Christo stood utterly immobile but for the terrible trembling; paralyzed with a black, an animal fear. If they should arrest him! Shut him up in a cell! I should go mad, he thought: and knew that, literally, it was true. I should go mad. Shut up there, closed in, helpless, in the dark, alone… He would go mad and he knew that he must pray for nothing less: that madness would be best for him then.

  They watched him, terrified: watched Idris, watched the shifty lout with his cocky face, safe in the circle of his convenient alibis, a pack of kids under his thumb. ‘You!’ said Abel, breaking out at him, violently. ‘Everyone knows the sort you are! You got her into trouble; and—knowing she was meeting him, perhaps—you got to the cave first and murdered her.’

  The sergeant stood with a light hand on Christo’s wrist. He said coolly: ‘So why did she leave a suicide note?’

  ‘A note?’ said Idris, in a curious voice. ‘She left a note?’

  The note!—which they themselves had written and placed there. ‘Perhaps… Perhaps,’ suggested Abel, ‘she intended to kill herself so she wrote the note. But she couldn’t do it and he found her there and held her head down in the water.’

  ‘The same could go for him,’ said Idris with a jerk of the chin towards Christo; and now he spoke confidently, subtly jeering.

  ‘Or the murderer wrote the note himself?’ suggested the sergeant, smoothly. That reaction of Idris’ hadn’t escaped his notice.

  ‘He’d have had to,’ said Idris, triumphantly. ‘She couldn’t write.’

  Couldn’t write? She couldn’t write? Rohan hung on to his swinging senses. ‘All the more reason to say that you did it. You killed her, you wrote the note—’ But his voice trailed away in despair.