A Short Time to Live (Miss Pink Book 4)

by Gwen Moffat

  ‘This one may not be. We don’t know.’

  Cole stared at her. ‘Who’s cracking in Sandale?’

  ‘Mossop.’

  ‘No, dear; he’d have cracked by now. I’ve had him drunk.’

  ‘I see.’

  He returned to a mental list and she realised how much work he must have put in since his arrival and what a formidable memory he had. ‘Then we come to the hamlet. Harper and Wren are out of the running. That leaves Rumney.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, where was he at the relevant times?’

  ‘But it’s not logical; he asked me to come here to try to help him. He was appalled at Peta’s death—’

  ‘Who wasn’t? And he discovered all the bodies. Where was he, dear?’

  ‘There are so many times concerned.’

  ‘Your telephone call yesterday at seven-thirty. Where was he then?’

  ‘I presume: at Sandale House.’

  ‘Who else was there?’

  ‘His old mother and his niece.’

  ‘That enchanting American child? I met her.’

  ‘Harper had the first call at one o’clock on Saturday,’ she went on. ‘The others were yesterday: at midday, at one o’clock and at seven-thirty.’

  ‘I’d like to know more about Rumney’s movements.’

  ‘You’re quite wrong,’ she said firmly. ‘And then there’s Lucy Fell. We were looking for someone poor. Rumney and Lucy are rich people.’

  He was preoccupied. ‘People who look like farm labourers usually are. Labourers look like stockbrokers. That was a nice piece of tweed though—forty years ago. His jacket, I mean: the one without any buttons.’

  ‘That’s all of them,’ she said impatiently. The craving for tea was back. ‘And don’t forget the kidnapper must have killed Peta as well. There can’t be two murderers in the dale.’

  ‘Where was Lucy when Peta was killed?’

  She stared, and then decided to humour him. ‘It was a Friday. Denis Noble dined with her at Thornbarrow and stayed the night there. And Lucy’s ruled out—’

  ‘Yes, dear?’

  ‘Well, I suppose you know almost everything now. Lucy was a victim too; she wasn’t being blackmailed, but she had an abusive letter.’

  ‘Really? I noticed an odd reaction when I suggested yesterday that I might find a skeleton in her bread cupboard. What was her secret?’

  ‘Oh, it was fabricated—and Lucy didn’t keep it a secret; she told me without my prompting. Her letter accused her of burying a baby in her own garden. Why—’ she’d caught his expression, ‘you don’t believe it?’

  ‘Of course not; it’s just what you’d expect. All anonymous letters relate to the victim’s activities. Poor little Peta asking for trouble because she’s a nympho—and getting it; Sarah loses control when she drinks; Mossop is a cinch for a neighbour with a suspicious mind, and anyone would think—seeing that Lucy is the local femme fatale, and such a decorative one with that gorgeous hair and the jewels and the supercilious expression, that somewhere in the lady’s background there has to be at least an abortion. So why not suggest a live birth? They were all Aunt Sallies, but only a local person could have known their secrets, and their characters. . . .’ He was silent, thinking.

  ‘Not Rumney,’ she insisted. ‘You’ve got some kind of case, but you have no one to hang it on.’

  He said, as if he hadn’t heard her: ‘Yes, Rumney will do.’ He turned his fathomless eyes on her. ‘Not a kind of case: we’ve got it all now.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Cloud came down and drifted across the moor and the rain started in earnest. It was going to be another wet night. Miss Pink tramped stoically along the path through the heather and in no time she was soaked. She came to the top of Shivery Knott and saw figures toiling up the scree below. Two of them carried a stretcher; several were in dark uniforms. She was far too wet to tolerate delay so she turned aside and descended to the hamlet by way of the wooded slopes at the back of Sandale House.

  Grannie Rumney was scraping carrots in the kitchen while Arabella worked through a pile of washing up. At sight of Miss Pink the girl dried her hands and went upstairs to run a bath.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ Miss Pink asked, as usual having to shift a comatose cat so that she could sit to unlace her boots.

  ‘They’ve taken George Harper to the police station,’ Grannie told her, ‘and there’s a crowd of men gone up Shivery Knott with Zeke and some of the Mountain Rescue. I’m sorry that this should have happened: it must have been a shock for you.’

  ‘It wasn’t the bodies so much,’ Miss Pink said. ‘It’s the killer’s mind.’

  ‘Jackson was led astray,’ Grannie said. ‘You never could trust him. I didn’t say that to Bella because it would have sent her the other way and I thought that, seeing she’s a sensible girl, she would find him out before she suffered harm. Bella’s got her wits about her, not like that other poor child.’

  Arabella came back. She looked pale and subdued.

  ‘Jackson was not the prime mover however,’ Miss Pink said.

  The girl showed a spark of interest. ‘Who was then?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Did the police talk to you?’

  ‘Talk! They’re throwing loaded questions about Uncle Zeke! They’re mad. They’ve done nothing yet; you found the bodies, I found Jackson’s van—oh, they did find Caroline’s Lotus: in a plantation under Whirl Howe. Some forestry workers found it. Her luggage was still inside.’

  ‘I left the money there,’ Miss Pink said slowly.

  ‘I know. The police were over there, of course, and the money’s gone. What are you puzzling over, Miss Pink?’

  ‘Why was Caroline’s car at Whirl Howe?’

  ‘I thought Jackson put it there because he could come home on foot; it’s only a short distance back to Sandale over the tops: four miles or so.’

  ‘That would take him no more than an hour and a half. He doesn’t appear to have been seen by anyone, which suggests that he didn’t get here—or to Shivery Knott—until dusk, just about the time I heard him in the wood.’ Absently she started to peel off her wet jersey.

  *

  Some time later she knocked on Lucy’s back door and waited. She thought she could hear music through the sound of the rising beck. After a moment she depressed the thumb-latch, pushed the door—and the final movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony met her, played too loudly. She thought she heard someone singing below the horns, and she stepped round the inner door.

  Cole and Lucy faced each other across the room, Cole conducting with large gestures, Lucy in red velvet, sipping tea and regarding him quizzically. When she saw Miss Pink she laughed like a young girl and gestured the older woman to the fire. Miss Pink hung her anorak in the passage. The symphony ended and Cole threw himself on a sofa, red-faced and gasping.

  ‘Come in and have some tea,’ Lucy said. ‘This man has depraved tastes and thinks Beethoven should assault one’s ear drums. He’ll be deaf before he’s fifty.’

  ‘Such a glorious tone,’ Cole enthused. ‘I never thought to find a gramophone like this in the sticks—oh, pardon! I’m forgetting my place.’

  ‘Have you been taking your pictures?’ Miss Pink asked.

  ‘Not while Beethoven’s on, dear.’

  A coffee table was loaded with plates of food but Miss Pink declined tea. ‘How did your lecture go last night?’ she asked, sitting down. Lucy had taken an easy-chair and the firelight played on the red velvet. The only lights were two pale wall-lamps, and the flames flickered over their faces, making a hawk of Cole, an owl of Miss Pink.

  ‘It was interesting,’ Lucy said, as if the fact surprised her. ‘But what a journey home! There were stones all over the Throat—and the river! It was rather fun though.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Of course, you were out last night. Daniel’s been telling me. The police were here: asking questions about that wretched letter I had, the anonymous thing. It was a chie
f inspector who came, a detective; Hendry, is it?’

  ‘Fancy Harper having all that money in his cottage.’ Cole’s eyes sparkled. ‘Did you never suspect?’

  ‘No,’ Lucy said. ‘How would I?’

  ‘Of course, it was Wren broke in there last Friday,’ he said didactically. ‘The police told me. Harper’s come clean—except that he hasn’t said how he got the money.’

  ‘What else has he told them?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Why, all the details of the kidnapping, dear, but then they’ll have had most of those from Miss Pink, who would have been more coherent than poor Harper. Wasn’t she wonderful, battling through the storm and delivering the money—imagine! She could have been shot!’

  ‘Why?’ Lucy asked.

  Cole was askance. ‘He was there, wasn’t he? Hiding in the trees, watching her drop the money, darting out of cover and picking it up, running back to his car, then waiting.’

  ‘What did he wait for?’ Miss Pink asked.

  ‘For the other cars to get clear. He couldn’t risk his own car being seen in the forest and recognised.’

  Lucy lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. ‘Who was it?’

  Cole pursed his lips in distaste. ‘Zeke.’

  Miss Pink gave an angry snort. Lucy stared at the fire. ‘Zeke,’ she repeated and, as if to herself, ‘I’ve known that man for years. . . . Do the police suspect him?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘The letters—my letter, had to be from a local person; I never thought otherwise.’

  Cole looked at Miss Pink. ‘That applies to all the blackmail,’ she said, ‘local knowledge.’

  ‘Starting with Mossop,’ Cole continued.

  Miss Pink nodded. ‘Only someone from the dale could have known about the stolen whisky.’

  ‘Except that it wasn’t whisky to begin with,’ Cole put in gently. ‘It was sheep stealing.’

  ‘So he was stealing sheep!’ Lucy exclaimed.

  ‘But of course!’ Cole became chatty. ‘Although the blackmailer didn’t know that; all he knew was that he’d seen Mossop’s wagon under Whirl Howe, pulling out on the road in the middle of the night, so he rang Mossop saying just that: “What was your wagon doing . . . etc?” What a scream!’

  Miss Pink smiled. Lucy asked with annoyance, ‘What’s a scream?’

  ‘He never guessed.’

  ‘About the sheep stealing?’

  ‘No, the sheep was just a bit on the side, a one-off trick; it was too much like hard work and too risky for him to try it twice. No, he never guessed what Mossop’s real game was: commuting to the motorway night after night, picking up all the loads falling off backs of lorries all the way from Lancaster to Carlisle. Mossop was terrified.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, you’d never have guessed,’ he assured her. ‘He bluffed. He bluffed the first time the blackmailer rang; he had the feeling, you see, that he was dealing with an amateur—and also the sheep were safely sold and he wasn’t going to try that lark again. Well, the blackmailer didn’t call his bluff but a few weeks later he phoned again and this time he mentioned stolen whisky. Now the odd thing is that Mossop had none on his premises at that moment, nor anything else that shouldn’t have been there, so he told the caller to go to hell. Then they both lay low for a while, until Mossop started to operate again, very cautiously: just one crate of Scotch—and the police were tipped off immediately.’ Cole looked straight at Miss Pink.

  ‘Only one person could have known,’ she said, watching him. He nodded encouragement. ‘Peta,’ she murmured.

  ‘That’s right: Peta.’

  ‘Well, she was mad,’ Lucy said coldly. ‘How do you know so much about Mossop’s behaviour?’

  Cole’s eyes opened wide. ‘He talked, dear.’ He added, placing the words before them like small grenades: ‘And then there was Sarah.’

  ‘Sarah?’ Lucy seemed bewildered.

  ‘I’m demonstrating why the blackmailer had to be a local,’ he said patiently. ‘Now Sarah had her accident in September. Did you never wonder,’ he asked Miss Pink, ‘why Mossop agreed to help her?’

  ‘She paid him.’

  Lucy asked, ‘When did Sarah have an accident?’

  Cole seemed not to hear her but addressed Miss Pink. ‘I have a feeling Sarah hasn’t told you the truth. After the accident she drove up to Storms but she didn’t go to the main building; there’s a barn set away from the hotel, and probably she meant to leave her car there and try to see Mossop without anyone else knowing. Of course, she was drunk. And at the barn she ran straight into Mossop, unloading his wagon! It was colour T.V. sets that time. She saw him before he saw her and he hadn’t a chance.’ Cole looked at Lucy. ‘If Mossop had been a killer, Sarah’s life wasn’t worth much at that moment, but he’s a thief, not a murderer, and he struck a bargain: he’d take the damaged car away and get Sarah another one, providing she kept quiet about the load on his wagon.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ Miss Pink said, ‘but then, someone else had to know.’

  ‘You’re suggesting,’ Lucy said with interest, ‘that Sarah killed the hiker.’

  ‘Yes.’ He agreed with both of them. ‘Someone noticed that Sarah had a new car and, with the same kind of thought process that had connected crime with Mossop’s wagon being on a pass in the middle of the night, connected Sarah’s new car with a dead hiker, and this time he hit the target. Sarah paid the first instalment and he knew he’d got her.’

  ‘The devil!’ Lucy exclaimed.

  ‘And then there was Peta,’ Cole went on. ‘I don’t know what he found out about Peta. Mossop doesn’t know either.’

  ‘It isn’t relevant,’ Miss Pink said. ‘I never met her but she deserves consideration.’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed suddenly, ‘she deserved a great deal more than she got.’

  Lucy said, ‘I’m afraid I had very little sympathy for her.’

  ‘No one seems to have liked her,’ he said. ‘And yet one doesn’t kill people one doesn’t like; it has to be something stronger than that—usually.’

  ‘There seem to be two motives involved where Peta was concerned,’ Miss Pink mused. ‘Money, because she was blackmailed, but then blackmailers don’t kill their golden goose.’

  ‘Not normally.’ Cole nodded as if she had a good point. ‘Do you see a progression here—in violence—and a corresponding deterioration in reasoning power? Our blackmailer—’ she wished he would not be so familiar, ‘—starts tentatively with Mossop, and when he won’t play, the attempt is abandoned—although he has his revenge by tipping off the police—right?’ It was sharp and vulgar and directed at Lucy. Her nostrils flared.

  ‘So you say.’

  He turned back to Miss Pink. ‘Then he makes a guess with Sarah and it pays off, so he stays with Sarah. Clever not to press it with Mossop, clever to stay with the old lady. But then he starts on a neurotic girl—now that was a mistake—and a girl with no money and that, on the face of it, was stupid, but now listen: Peta had access to money, from the tills and her husband’s wallet, but it was terribly dangerous, stealing from her own husband—and such a nasty piece of work as Mossop is. No wonder she nearly went round the bend with worry. I wonder,’ he asked of Miss Pink, ‘whether that wasn’t the idea: to drive her mad—which could be so interesting and so rewarding?’

  His listeners were silent and in that silence the telephone rang. Lucy stood up with a polite smile and Cole returned it. She picked up the receiver. ‘Hello? Oh, hello, Mark, how nice to hear you. Tonight? No, I’m afraid I’ve people in. Why, yes, that would be lovely; six o’clock? I’ll look forward to it. It was rather hairy: rocks on the road and the river nearly over the banks, but I got through without damage. No, not at all, I had a delightful time. Perhaps I should have done that. Tomorrow at six then; godnight, and thanks for calling.’

  ‘That,’ she said, returning to the fire, ‘was our speaker from last night suddenly worried, twenty-four hours after the event, that I might not have reached
home safely. Not quite twenty-four hours; I left him at eleven. I could have been rolling along the bottom of the lake by now.’

  ‘You came home at eleven,’ Cole exclaimed. ‘How intrepid you ladies are; it took me all my courage to drive through the Throat in broad daylight.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to leave it so late,’ she confessed, ‘but after the lecture we went to the Saracen’s Head and it was closing time before I got away. You know how it is.’

  ‘You have great courage,’ he insisted. ‘All alone in the dark. No wonder you ignored the blackmailer.’

  She shrugged. ‘You know everything; you must be a detective.’

  ‘Now you’re teasing.’

  ‘Don’t you think he’s a policeman, Miss Pink?’

  ‘He knows a great deal.’

  ‘Ironical,’ Lucy said almost idly. ‘The people who knew a lot in Sandale died.’

  ‘Well, Peta did,’ he conceded. ‘You mean Jackson Wren knew too much?’

  ‘Of course.’ Lucy turned to the other woman. ‘Daniel told me what happened at Shivery Knott.’

  ‘Does he know?’ Miss Pink asked innocently.

  ‘Of course—’ Cole ignored the question, ‘—the reason why Wren broke into Harper’s cottage the night you gave a party, Lucy, was to steal the money. The person who became the kidnapper was very curious about Harper; as Miss Pink pointed out, Harper was a mystery man, and then he was known to the police. There was that big train robbery last spring and the villains must have had inside information. Harper worked on the railways until recently. But the police couldn’t get anything on him. However, his friends thought that it would be better for his health if he took a little holiday some distance from the home counties—’

  ‘Although quite near the Glasgow-London line,’ murmured Miss Pink, ‘where it runs through the wildest country.’

  ‘You have a criminal mind,’ Cole told her with disapproval, and continued: ‘For one reason and another the local force kept an eye on Harper; they weren’t really worried about him, as I see it, but they were interested to see if he had visitors, and who they were. Harper was worried—he has that kind of mind—although not about the police. He was worried about being watched by someone other than the police so, when there was an attempt to break in at Burblethwaite, he changed the locks. To the person who was interested in Harper, when he changed those locks, it was like Sarah paying the first instalment of blackmail money: suspicion was confirmed. Harper had something to hide.’