by Gwen Moffat
He would have to silence everyone she’d talked to... Silence? It was so quiet outside she could hear the bats.
*
A thrush sang a few notes. In the night? A blackbird was suddenly shouting full throttle, another thrush, then a wren. There was a rustle in the room. She opened her eyes to the grey light before sunrise, and the net curtain stroking the window frame in the dawn breeze. She lay still for a moment orientating herself and then she realised that Perry hadn’t come home, or that if she had then Rick had seen fit to keep her at Plumtree Yard.
He came across at eight o’clock, accompanied by the dog. He glared at her when she opened the front door; he was beside himself with some emotion.
‘She phoned!’
‘Ah, good. Where is she?’
‘In Scotland. She wouldn’t say where exactly.’
‘Come up and have some breakfast.’
He wouldn’t sit down but stalked to her kitchen window and stared out at the churchyard. ‘Why won’t she tell me where she is?’ he blurted.
She stopped breaking eggs in a bowl. ‘You dialled 1471?’
‘Yes. Number Withheld. And she said she was in a call-box, had to hurry, had no change. But there wasn’t that echo effect you get in a call-box. I started to tell her to give me the number and the line went dead as she was saying something about Bags and hound meal.’ He laughed angrily. ‘That was why she called, to make sure Bags was all right, didn’t even say why she’d left him. She’d tied him to that knob on the front door like you thought. She did say she’d be back for him, just to make sure I wasn’t going to have him put down, I suppose.’ His anger had turned to bitterness.
‘Did she say why she left?’
‘She said she saw Robson and then the police so she assumed they were together and he’d reported her after all. I said the cops weren’t after her, they were looking into that disappearance decades ago, and as I told her about the bone I remembered the craziest thing: that Bags was carrying a bone when I met them! So I said the police were searching the churchyard where he picked it up and she said he didn’t find it there, and then she changed the subject and started on about the amount of hound meal he should have, and then she insisted I keep quiet about her phoning and the line went dead without her even saying goodbye. She sounded scared.’
‘She would be,’ Miss Pink said. ‘Because she is involved. Wherever Bags found the bone, the skeleton could be close by. She’s realised that. The police will want to talk to her.’
‘Oh Christ. What do we do?’
‘Let me think.’
‘I know what we do,’ she said as she stirred the scrambled eggs. ‘We take Bags for a walk, reversing Perry’s hike from Birkdale to Orrdale. If he’s found one bone he can find the rest.’
‘So it’ll seem as if we come on it by accident? But the police will still want to speak to Perry. He’s her dog.’
‘We’ll tell the truth — more or less. She gave the dog to you and moved on. You’re in the clear, Rick; you don’t know her age —’
‘I don’t know her name!’
‘You mean she didn’t tell you her surname?’
‘I don’t even know if Perry is her first name. She told me it was short for Peregrine but people don’t call girl babies Peregrine. I think she chose the name when she —’ He checked.
‘— ran away.’
‘I don’t know that she’s on the run.’
‘It’s not important. At the moment anyway.’
*
Bags was in ecstasy to be on the fells again but he hated the lead. ‘We should have bought one of those extending contraptions,’ Miss Pink grumbled as she was jerked ungracefully up a rock step, the braid slimy in her sweaty hand. Behind her Rick had no rhythm either but that was because he had no experience of going steeply uphill.
They came to the lip of the escarpment and rested by the old ruin.
‘Bags was running loose when I met them,’ Rick said. ‘And how can he find anything if you’re on the end of the lead?’
‘I thought of that.’ She leaned against the wall of what had been the gable-end of the ruin. ‘But I’m also thinking in terms of a burial. Where did you see any soil on this slope deep enough to cover a body?’
‘In the wood?’ He looked doubtfully at the tops of the trees.
‘For my money it’s steep and rocky everywhere — oh!’ She moved forward smartly. ‘That wall moved!’
They walked round the gable-end, studying the stones. Where there had been a fireplace boulders had fallen from the chimney breast leaving the mass of wall virtually unsupported.
‘Someone should push that down,’ she said grimly, ‘but not us; you don’t know which way the top stones will fall. Come along, let’s set Bags to work. I’m going to risk letting him loose now we’re on top.’
‘If it rains won’t that destroy the scent?’
‘I’m not sure. Rain might bring out more smells to confuse him, but it’s not going to rain.’
She unclipped the lead. Bags plunged away, zigzagging excitedly about the ruin, lifting his leg at a clump of nettles, sniffing at sheep droppings. They watched him intently but he had no interest in any one spot and after a few moments he paused and glanced at them expectantly. Miss Pink sucked her lip and started up the Corpse Road, moving easily now as the path rose gently to the open moor.
Rick glanced back. ‘You could be wrong about rain.’ He was uneasy in this bleak place. ‘It looks very murky in the west.’
‘Summer storm.’ She sniffed. ‘Wind’s from that quarter but not to worry; the central fells will get it, not us.’
‘I’d hate to be up here in bad weather. You’ll be used to it of course, being a climber.’
‘Not at all. Walking on peat is hell at any time. You have to keep to the tracks on this kind of ground; that’s why the cairns are so close together.’
‘So this is where they used to dig their peat.’ She blinked at him. ‘They burned peat in Orrdale,’ he explained, ‘It says so in the booklet.’
‘Of course! These are the old peat hags.’
‘What — that black bank over there?’
‘No, that’s too high but you can make out vague lines...’ Her attention returned to Bags who was running ahead but keeping to the path, showing no desire to leave it. Even animals took the easiest way if there were nothing to divert them. She frowned but she didn’t comment.
A curlew got up and flew south, uttering its lonely trill. When it faded nothing broke the bright silence but the plod of her boots on dried mud. Rick, in trainers, made no sound. A knoll showed ahead, the path creeping round its base.
‘That has to be the British fort,’ Miss Pink said. ‘We should go and look.’
‘Bags isn’t interested.’
‘Wind’s blowing the wrong way — but he’s not interested in anything other than the walk. I’m starting to wonder if he picked up that bone on the path. It could have been carried some distance by a fox, even...’
‘Even what?’
She didn’t answer until they were climbing the knoll. She stopped and drew breath. Looking back she said, ‘There could have been a body in the wood all the time and the searchers missed it.’
‘They’d have had dogs, wouldn’t they?’
‘You’re right. I forgot the dogs.’
They reached the top and Rick collapsed on a boulder. ‘It was nearly fifty years ago,’ he said. ‘Does any of this matter?’ Plainly field-work on a hot day had changed his attitude to investigative journalism.
Miss Pink considered the question. ‘There’s the Law,’ she said heavily. ‘It’s still an open case: the body never found, no indication as to what happened to her — or where or how. Or why,’ she added softly. ‘Mysteries are fascinating, and one is compelled to know the answer.’
‘But even if we found the body — skeleton as it would be now — we’d be no nearer. Obviously the child died — the only alternative is that she was abducted, right? Could that be p
ossible: carried off by — what? Travellers?’
‘You mean if that femur is not Joan Gardner’s. No, I don’t think she was taken away, either by a group of travellers or a solitary person. The police would have considered the possibility and traced them. There’d be some record — and rumours.’
They were silent. Miss Pink regarded the surroundings. Nothing remained of the old fort but a circular raised dike and a few stones almost obscured by a rampant growth of bilberries. Bags, sprawled on a bare patch, caught her eye and pushed himself to his feet. She stepped up to the top of the dike and took the map from her rucksack.
The Corpse Road continued in an easterly direction, the line of it quickly lost in the heather. Southwards a dip in the skyline marked the head of Birkdale. To the west, behind them, a small tarn shone like a silver coin in a depression.
Bags pawed her leg. He’d settled now, he was no longer excited, just quietly happy but bored with the halt. ‘Where on earth did you find that bone?’ she mused.
‘That must be the tarn she bathed in,’ Rick said dreamily. ‘She was dehydrated. She said it was like a western movie up here that day and she thought she would die of thirst until she found the water. She saw it from the path.’
Miss Pink’s eyes traced the line. ‘She would, going west. We missed it coming east, the lie of the land was wrong. Now that could be the answer. Right’ — she was suddenly energetic — ‘we’ll go to the tarn and start again from there.’
They scrambled down the knoll and set off through the heather, Bags bounding ahead. They shouted at him but he refused to stop and by the time they reached the water he was nowhere in sight although he’d left his tracks on the sandy margin. There were old tracks too: a dog’s and those of a small trainer.
‘He’s run home,’ Rick said hopelessly. ‘He remembered being here with her and he’s gone to look for her.’
Miss Pink doubted it although it was a romantic thought, not unexpected from a young man in love. She thought the dog fickle. Letting him off the lead had been a mistake; he hadn’t bonded to either of them. He was friendly with everyone but attached to no one. He’d stay for a while, would even hang around when off the lead, but then he’d leave, just like that. They’d seen the last of Bags — and how were they going to tell Perry when she came back for him? If she came back.
There was nothing they could do. A walk without a goal was pointless; she had no desire to follow the Corpse Road dragging the reluctant Rick who, she felt sure, was blaming her for suggesting this useless caper.
They trailed back the way they’d come. They could have taken a line further left to intercept the path but that would have brought them to the deep channels and the old peat cuttings, and rough as the heather was, it was better going than the peat.
They came to the Corpse Road again and turned left. Ahead of them a swathe of light showed above the fell called High Calva and below an umbrella of plum-coloured cloud. Very faint, so faint as to be imagination, came the murmur of thunder and then, sharp and unexpected, the barking of a dog.
‘Bags!’ they exclaimed, and started to hurry.
It took an age to reach the collie. There was the heather, the peat, the sphagnum bogs on the banks of the beck that was the outlet from the tarn; there was the difficulty of locating the dog, but he never stopped barking. They knew he’d found something if only because of that, and the fact that he didn’t appear to be moving around.
He hadn’t touched anything, except probably to sniff. The leg bone must have been lying apart, the rest of the skeleton was set in a bank of black peat. Rain had washed the side of the pelvis clear and the point of one shoulder blade. The body would have been lying on its back and a tracery of ribs had started to appear but legs and arm bones on the left side were absent.
‘Foxes,’ murmured Miss Pink, taking a Swiss Army knife from her pocket. Delicately she scratched at the crumbling peat above the shoulder bone to reveal the rounded arc of the skull. The man and dog watched her intently. She stood back.
‘It’s a little skeleton,’ Rick ventured.
‘Oh yes, it’s a child.’
‘I wonder if there’s any evidence left of how she died.’
‘It doesn’t matter — much. She was murdered.’
‘How can you be so sure? She could have been lost.’
‘She was buried. Look, there’s over a foot of soil above her. There’s a running stream here in wet weather. She was buried some distance back from the edge and the bank eroded over the years. The drought did the rest.’
7
The return was an anti-climax. Miss Pink refused to speculate, Rick did nothing else. Like many people confronted for the first time with violent death, shock made him garrulous. Where would the police investigation go now? Would it involve only the men who were living in Orrdale forty-five years ago, or others further afield? How reliable were people’s memories after nearly half a century?
Miss Pink refused to respond. ‘The water level’s dropping,’ she observed, halting at the first elbow below the ruin. ‘But of course it will shrink until we have some rain.’ She focused her binoculars. ‘The place is swarming with people. As the moor will be,’ she added grimly, ‘as soon as the word spreads.’
‘Isaac’s here.’ Rick had good eyesight. ‘That looks like his old Land Rover. He’ll graze his sheep up here, you know. It could have been Isaac.’
She looked at him. ‘It could have been anyone.’ Hardly, but he needed damping down. She looked back at the village. ‘There’s only a handful of people in the churchyard.’ She was wryly amused. ‘If that’s the police they have a strenuous afternoon ahead.’
‘How are they going to find it? We didn’t mark the spot.’
She closed her eyes and sighed. She guessed exactly how it would go, there was no alternative; Rick couldn’t be expected to cope with this climb again.
The police watched their approach with a lack of interest that sharpened as Miss Pink made for the one she remembered as an inspector: DI Tyndale. Rick lagged behind, his attention divided between their reception and the behaviour of Bags who was pushing against his legs, intimidated by Isaac’s dogs. Isaac made a group with the uniformed police, two of them resting on their spades, turned earth at their feet. Everyone was watching Miss Pink, edging closer as they strained to hear what she had to say.
She told Tyndale. He didn’t believe her. He looked beyond her to Rick. Miss Pink’s eyes strayed past Isaac to the Corpse Road.
‘What did it look like?’ Tyndale asked.
She described it succinctly — after all, there was little horror about old bones. Pathos would come later when there was time to reflect on how they had got there. The others were now close, glancing from her to the inspector, waiting for his verdict: a crazy old woman who mistook sheep’s bones for human, or the genuine article?
‘How far is it?’ Tyndale asked.
She shrugged. ‘A couple of miles?’ In the mountains you measured by altitude and time, not length. Two miles sounded innocuous to the uninitiated.
‘You’ll need to show us.’ He sounded doubtful, glancing from Rick to Isaac.
Rick was appalled. Isaac said with finality, ‘I don’t know that place. My sheep graze this side’ — pointing to the fell above the road. ‘And it’s high time I were at me shepherding an’ all,’ he added, and stumped away, his dogs slinking round his heels.
Rick left for Kelleth, taking Bags. Miss Pink and the police started back towards the moor.
‘How did you know where to look?’ Tyndale asked — before they reached the steep part and while he could still walk at her side.
‘We didn’t.’ She opened innocent eyes. ‘The dog was loose and he ran off, then we heard him barking.’
‘Where’s the dog’s owner?’
She glanced back at the road, affecting to misunderstand. ‘Why, didn’t he say he was going back to Kelleth?’
‘He’s not the owner. Where’s the blonde girl?’
Who ha
d told him? Edith? Not important at this moment. ‘You mean Perry.’ She wasn’t rattled. ‘She’s gone to Scotland and she left the dog with young Harlow.’
The path narrowed and started to rise. Miss Pink drew ahead and Tyndale was forced to fall behind. The two plainclothes men managed to keep up, breathing hard, but, looking down from the zigzags, she saw that the uniformed men were lagging. She didn’t pause at the ruin but kept going steadily until the long black bank appeared. She left the path then and struck across the heather, suppressing a smile. Tyndale was wearing light town shoes.
‘I still can’t understand how you came to be here,’ he gasped, unable to believe anyone would walk on this kind of ground from choice.
‘I told you: the dog was barking.’ She stopped. Mounsey, the DS, was a hundred yards behind, the uniforms still struggling on the Corpse Road. `Mr Tyndale,’ she said firmly, ‘forty-five years ago I didn’t know this place existed. Do you really think that my finding the body is suspicious?’
He glowered at her, more put out by the heat and the rough ground than her attitude. He said tightly, ‘I think you know something we don’t. You knew the body wasn’t in the churchyard, not even near the village?’
It was a question, and he was guessing. She saw a way to protect Perry, to avoid having to confess that the girl had been here, in a sense had been instrumental in guiding them to the remains.
‘There is a story,’ she admitted. ‘I hadn’t given it much credit because there are always rumours in a case like this, but I heard that the child was seen with a man before she disappeared, that they were entering the wood — but the woods were searched. However, the book about Orrdale mentions the peat cuttings —’ Did it? Rick had said they burned peat, not where they obtained it. She plunged on, ‘I thought: peat cuttings, the ideal place for burial, and perhaps she wasn’t seen entering the wood but climbing the Corpse Road, going up beside the trees.’
