by Gwen Moffat
Miss Pink said nothing. ‘Or protecting a woman,’ Jean said.
‘He’s not protecting you. He tried to frame you for Isa’s murder.’
‘Isa committed suicide. She was dead drunk.’
‘That last is true; she was too drunk to drive.’
‘Exactly, which is why she went through the wall.’
‘What did he tell you to account for his absence on the night she died?’
‘Nothing. He didn’t go out that night.’
‘How can you go on protecting him? I can understand your taking him back after the affair with Isa but you know he was out the night she died, that he was on the hill the day Phoebe died –’
‘That’s sheer speculation –’
‘They’ve found traces in Dwayne’s Land Rover –’
‘Then he was driving it.’
‘You’re saying Dwayne was on the hill and he killed Phoebe? And Isa? He killed her too?’ Jean was silent. Miss Pink studied her, then said quietly, ‘And he forged the salmonella letter?’
‘That was a joke,’ Jean said quickly. Miss Pink gulped and tried to hide it. Jean fidgeted. ‘It was cruel,’ she conceded, ‘but he did it to please Isa. She’d picked up the letterhead when she’d been poking around Walter’s office one time and she suggested the hoax to Martin. She was a very demanding person.’
‘He told you it was a joke?’
‘He didn’t think anything of it. He was amazed that anyone else should.’
‘You don’t think that’s significant, that he couldn’t foresee the consequences of this – joke?’ Jean’s eyes wandered and Miss Pink frowned. ‘I think Phoebe suspected,’ she said heavily. ‘I think she tackled him, perhaps that day on Gowk? It started with a confrontation over the orchids and the argument escalated? Is that how it was?’ Jean said nothing. ‘Did she call him a psychopath? He let her go – go on for some distance, and then he came down behind and ran over her.’
‘No.’ Jean was shaking her head. ‘That’s not how it was. Isa was driving and she trod on the accelerator instead of the brake. It was an accident.’
Miss Pink couldn’t believe what she was hearing. That Phoebe had suspected Blamire to be the hoaxer was unlikely – she’d surely have told Eleanor – but a nerve had been hit and the result was a revelation: not that Isa had been out with Blamire, had been driving, but that Jean should admit it. And then she knew that this was the purpose of the visit.
Jean was watching her. Miss Pink steadied her breathing. ‘Phoebe’s death wasn’t an accident,’ she pointed out. ‘She was alive when they put her in the water.’
‘We know that now, but they didn’t at the time. They thought she was dead. It was when Isa heard that Phoebe drowned that she went to pieces. Martin tried to impress on her that if she kept her head no one would ever know, it would be assumed that Phoebe fell in the beck. But Isa lost her nerve, drank a lot of Scotch and deliberately drove over the cliff.’
‘This is the story he’s going to tell the police?’
‘It’s not a story. It’s the truth.’
‘Then why didn’t he stay here and tell them instead of going on the run?’
‘He says he has to think things out.’
‘Such as why he told the police you knew about the affair with Isa all along? If you didn’t know you had no reason to murder her. And you didn’t know, did you?’
‘I didn’t kill her.’ She was lacklustre.
Miss Pink said kindly, ‘You’ve rationalized him into a lovable rogue. You’ve convinced yourself – or he’s brainwashed you into thinking that Isa was responsible for Phoebe’s death and that the girl couldn’t live with her guilt afterwards. You admit he forged the salmonella letter and you deplore the sadism of it but you’re probably thinking that a man with a twisted mind can be healed. You’re not the first woman to think that way. But when they catch up with him and he confesses, where will you be then?’
‘I’m not making excuses for him.’
‘You’re putting up a good front. You know everything. Are you going to stick to the version of events you’ve given me?’
‘He’s my husband.’
‘I can’t make her out,’ Miss Pink confessed to Eleanor and Rosie in Jollybeard’s kitchen. ‘Whether she knows the truth or is believing what she wants to believe, she’s still protecting him, but she has to know that if Isa killed Phoebe and then committed suicide, there would be no need for Blamire to have gone on the run.’
‘There is,’ Eleanor grated. ‘He put Phoebe in the beck alive. And of course it was he who killed Isa. The inquest’s tomorrow and the verdict will be murder, right?’ Rosie nodded slowly. ‘He’s a cold-blooded killer,’ Eleanor went on. ‘Society would be well rid of him. At one time he would have hanged.’
The inquest on Isa was adjourned; it was Gibson’s contention that Blamire would soon tire of a precarious existence in a city and give himself up, but he didn’t. A factor in his continued disappearance could be his horror of having to face a life sentence. In addition to Cooper’s hairs, fibres and grey hairs had been found in Dwayne’s Land Rover which matched those from Phoebe’s cottage, but the terrible clincher was her fingerprints on a wheel cover in the back. She had regained consciousness at least for long enough to grasp the metal.
When the inquest on Isa was finally held the verdict was as predicted: murder by person or persons unknown.
***
Martin Blamire had vanished like mist and he never came back. Jean stayed on in her father’s house, tending her garden and writing highly charged romantic novels. Jacob and Mabel retired, and a horsey couple bought Sleylands and turned it into a pony trekking centre. They ring-fenced and refenced and made the little quarry wood into a nature reserve. It contained two badger setts. The tip was gone, filled in by Jacob, and the resulting slope was now colonized by tiny hazels and birches.
On holiday in Patterdale some years later Miss Pink rode over to Borascal on a fell pony. She found everyone flourishing: Eleanor in her tearoom, a plumper and less springy Cooper cohabiting, and Jean: now a romantic lady novelist, stylish and confident, a confidence that faltered only slightly when Miss Pink expressed a desire to visit the new nature reserve.
They went together: Eleanor, Jean and the visitor, climbing the hillside from the gate in the lane, the track now grass-grown since no tractor had used it after Jacob left. It was late spring again, bluebells a haze below trees in early leaf, late primroses pale stars on the banks, young rabbits lolloping silently before them.
The crag rose ahead, little more than a rock step since the quarry had been filled in, the slope gay with pink campion and wood anemones, with one bare chute of soil.
‘A young boar making a sett?’ Eleanor suggested. ‘Or is it the sows who start the digging?’
‘Whatever.’ Jean was sharp. ‘They smell the old carcasses.’
‘It was a neat solution to the problem,’ Miss Pink observed, advancing to the chute and teasing a bone out of the earth. ‘Jacob didn’t have to dig a pit to bury the dead sheep, he just tipped rubble down from above. Once I started to find the bodies he was working like a Trojan.’
‘No wonder.’ Eleanor was tart. ‘He was terrified of you.’
Miss Pink turned quizzical eyes on her.
‘We all were,’ Jean said.
‘I only found a few dead sheep.’
‘You exposed all our secrets. Only little scandals of course: like Bobby being my half-brother but no one ever talked about it – and Dad leaving sheep to the foxes and ravens. And there were Dwayne and Gemma.’
‘I don’t remember saying anything about Bobby.’
They were silent then, each filling gaps in her own way, remembering the secrets that hadn’t been little scandals. Miss Pink looked at the bone in her hands: a long bone, a femur, or rather half a femur, broken, shattered when the load – earth and rocks – rained down on it from Jacob’s shovel.
‘Didn’t Martin say something about clearing this old tip when
you took over Sleylands?’
‘Often.’ It was as if Jean had expected the question. ‘He said it was difficult to work out how to do it without professional help, which would have been expensive. He was undecided whether we should remove everything or leave the biodegradable stuff like carcasses. There’s probably a calf or two in there as well.’
Miss Pink saw that a calf might explain the presence of a femur that was too large for a ewe, a man-sized thigh bone. ‘The wire was the worst problem,’ Jean was saying. ‘It was dangerous, beasts could get caught up in it.’
Miss Pink looked up at the top of the crag. She thought of a beast caught in wire in this old tip and Jacob arriving with the next load of rocks and earth, unable to hear bellows above the noise of the tractor, tipping … She thought of Phoebe drowning slowly in the underground caverns, of Isa fastened in her seat as the water rose over the MG. Carefully she pushed the broken bone back in the soil until it was hidden from view.
‘She still loves him,’ Eleanor said when they were alone. ‘Of course she can afford to now that he won’t come back and create more mayhem.’
‘Memory is selective,’ Miss Pink agreed. ‘And Jean’s a past master at blocking out unpleasant truths. She’ll remember the good times.’
‘She adored him. As a couple they seemed so right: a marriage made in heaven.’
‘That was the trouble; she put him on a pedestal, worshipped him, and when he betrayed her twice she wasn’t going to give him a third chance.’
‘Twice?’
‘First the affair with Isa, and she’d have forgiven him for that, might even have continued to protect him, to find excuses for him, but to frame his own wife for murder, that was when he went too far. He was mad but she wouldn’t take that into account. Loyalty is what Jean’s about and when he betrayed her he was signing his death warrant. You know that isn’t a calf’s bone, don’t you?’
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[*] The Lost Girls
