by Gwen Moffat
‘Oh, no!’ He was shocked. ‘That’s not worthy of you. You’ve got the vestiges of reason left. Too many people know now. Killing me would be an embarrassment. Miss Pink knows everything. And, put all the bits of stories together: Sarah, Mossop, Harper—the stories the bodies in the caves will tell: you’d have to destroy too much to win now. Where did you get the gun?’
‘What gun?’
‘They were in Cyprus during the troubles,’ Miss Pink said.
‘There’s no proof of anything,’ Lucy reiterated. ‘It’s just a story.’
‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Something was missing for you. When were you aware of it and how did you see it: loss of youth and advancing age, the knowledge that life was behind and future existence was all downhill, and drab, and somewhere you’d missed a turning? Were you angry because you’d been a parasite for so long you’d forgotten how to live independently? You had no money, you had to keep Noble. You wanted a new life and security. Life had been sex and affluence but behind it you enjoyed power. When you thought about it you could still have the affluence and power because there was another way of getting them besides sex, and one that meant you didn’t have to be an obvious parasite. In fact, you could get your own back at society. You started on crime, carefully at first, but you were successful and the money started to come in—’
‘I don’t need money,’ Lucy said. ‘I’m a rich woman.’
‘You have this house and you have those rings; what more have you got? There are no more men; even poor old Noble was knocked for six by a neurotic kid, and Noble’s in the red anyway. No, dear, it’s all behind you, and there was never anything in front either. Turning criminal wasn’t the solution for you; you’re not criminal calibre. That’s a different kind of mind, and not much emotion. Criminals aren’t passionate, and they don’t make mistakes.’
‘There are plenty in prison.’
‘Not the successful ones.’
Miss Pink was regarding the other woman fixedly and now Lucy turned to her. ‘What do you make of all this?’ she asked curiously.
Miss Pink said: ‘Odd things have occurred to me. You had an abusive letter, not a blackmailing one. If you’d told Denis Noble that it was blackmail, wouldn’t he have insisted on your going to the police, or gone himself? Why were you the person to have the only harmless letter, given your character: a letter that was silly and patently untruthful? It seems that the only similarity between yours and the other letters was that it was anonymous and so, at first sight, you were also a victim.’
‘True,’ Lucy conceded.
‘You went out of your way to stress that you were comfortably off,’ Miss Pink went on. ‘That was vulgar. You were remarkably indiscreet about your private life. That was undignified. You’re neither vulgar nor undignified. You were abnormally excited last Friday night; one wonders why. The impression you gave was of a middle-aged woman infatuated with a younger man, but you’re not grieving for Jackson Wren; you’ve shown no sign of grief at all. Then, on Saturday morning there was a moment when you were overcome by what I thought was the horror of an anonymous letter. You had to have a cigarette and your hands were trembling. Mr Cole suggested that Wren signalled to you when he’d trapped Caroline. Could that have happened at that moment? Your window looks towards Shivery Knott.’
‘So it does.’ Lucy stood up and Miss Pink followed.
‘There is one other thing,’ Miss Pink said. ‘When Wren discovered Caroline was dead, he ran down here and straight into a house. I heard the door close behind him as I crossed the green. He came to this house.’
‘So,’ Lucy said, ‘I’m a blackmailer and a multiple murderer—if you count Caroline, but where’s the proof? What are you going to do about it?’
‘Nothing,’ Cole said. He motioned Miss Pink before him and they went out to the passage where she collected her anorak and opened the door. He closed it behind them.
Under the gable end she whispered: ‘Come up to the Rumneys’.’
‘No. Come and sit in my car. It’s on the green.’
Chapter Seventeen
The Aston Martin was parked facing Thornbarrow.
‘There isn’t a shred of proof,’ Miss Pink exclaimed, seating herself in the front and peering through the windscreen.
‘There’s the money.’
‘The fifty thousand?’
‘She’s got it somewhere.’
‘How can we find out?’
‘If it’s in the house, she won’t leave it there when she goes to Carnthorpe, but she could have hidden it somewhere between Whirl Howe and here, to be picked up later.’
‘Wei ought to go to the police.’
‘As you say: there’s no proof.’
‘There’s all this fresh information: the telephone call to Mossop after Peta left Thornbarrow—that’s damning. What made him tell you about it? He’s told no one else—so far as I know.’
‘Never mind that now. She may come out at any moment.’
‘I’m going to Carnthorpe to find Hendry,’ Miss Pink said suddenly. ‘If you’re right, she’ll make a dash for it, and she’s mad and very dangerous.’
‘It might be an idea.’ He was laconic and he yawned without apology.
‘Are you police, Mr Cole?’ He didn’t answer. ‘If you are,’ she continued, ‘is there any need for me to go?’
‘We could need Hendry,’ he murmured. ‘What kind of car—? Oh yes, she’s got a Jensen Healey.’ After a moment he added, very low and as if to himself: ‘It would have to be night time.’
*
‘It would have to be,’ she repeated aloud, driving down the lane, ‘and the floods out again.’ And no one left behind in Sandale but Grannie and Arabella, and Daniel Cole watching from the dark car on the green, and Lucy Fell.
She felt stunned. The crimes had been horrible: sadistic, ruthless, inhuman, and yet to suspect an innocent person of them was even more horrible. Miss Pink’s mind demanded proof. She would have expected a guilty person to break down, but Cole hadn’t broken Lucy. Was her control a sign of guilt? Cole had probed and crowded; his accusations were monstrous if untrue (also if true), yet Lucy stayed cool.
She drove slowly. She wasn’t delivering ransom money tonight; Hendry could wait. In any event, he didn’t even know that she was coming and, she thought grimly, it was doubtful that he’d believe her. It could sound like some macabre tale told out of school.
The water from the meadows was inching across the road. She rounded Storms’ bend, passed High Hollins and Throstle Shaw and her lights illumined the first rock wall. The windscreen wipers clicked away but the rain was easing; it was now the fine drizzle typical of Lakeland. She changed down for the first bend in the gorge.
The river was up and roaring. White water showed in the headlights and she stayed in the middle of the road peering ahead for oncoming traffic.
Where there were fallen rocks last night, there could well be tonight. She thought she must be approaching the place; it was on a straight section, she remembered, not a bend. The wipers scraped the screen, dry, and she switched them off. With perfect visibility she crept round a bend, changed into third, and braked. The road had gone.
She drove forward slowly, still on tarmac but ahead it ran into a sprawled matt mass where points of light winked back at her from stones above the level of the road. It was a landslide.
She stopped and got out. There was no moving this obstruction. Idly, hands in pockets, she walked up to the pile of earth and rocks and broken saplings. It didn’t cover the whole of the road; there was a strip of tarmac above the river, but there was no room for a car to get through, not unless one cleared some debris and then drove with both offside wheels canted at a crazy angle. One might do it, with extreme caution, but the river had undermined the bank and on the edge the tarmac was only a crust overhanging the torrent.
She manoeuvred her car to the right-hand verge, not caring if it sank in a ditch, concerned only to get it off the road. She thought she m
ight reverse out of the gorge but then she thought of Lucy driving to Carnthorpe and dismissed the idea. She took a torch from the Austin and locked the doors. She stood beside it, remembering the road through the water-meadows between high walls and with no grass verge and nowhere to go from the path of an advancing car. There was the raised footway, but it was flimsy and could be crashed. As she hesitated, she recalled that the packhorse track ran through the Throat and only about fifty feet above the road. That would be safe.
She shone the torch up the hill past the landslide. There was a fairly easy slope and an outcrop of rock. She started to scramble through the undergrowth, slipping on wet scree and earth. Level with the top of the outcrop she paused and wondered if there were a better route; perhaps she might wait and let Lucy pass. But of course, Lucy couldn’t pass. She rested on the outcrop and realised that she was inordinately tired.
Suddenly the Throat was flooded by light as cars came round the bend from Sandale: soundless and very fast. Caught like a moth in the glare Miss Pink watched without conscious thought, only her senses working. She had no time to be aware of anomaly in that the cars were not in line but level with each other, and although she saw the two pairs of headlights converge and part with an obvious quiver, she was unaware of any significance in the manoeuvre.
Her own dark Austin was revealed in the glare, and the scream of brakes climbed and held above the roar of the river. The headlights on the inside of the road swung out and those on the river side jibbed in, recovered, and swept past the Austin to cant at an angle as the offside wheels mounted the rubble. It was a sports car, low and sleek and glossy in a normal world, but now vulnerable as a tumbling beetle, rising in terrible slow motion and revealing its underparts, two free wheels spinning in the air like frantic legs. The headlights careened across the gorge, the trees and the low cloud ceiling.
The roof hit the water first and there was no splash to speak of. The car didn’t sink immediately but was carried in the foam for some distance, the lights shining through the waves until their gold faded to white and then went out suddenly and there was nothing but the river raging through the Throat.
The scene was still lit. Miss Pink brought her aching gaze back to the landslide before which the second car stood with its headlights blazing. Daniel Cole was on the tarmac staring at the river. She scrambled down to the road and at last he turned and walked towards her.
‘She had the money,’ he said.
*
‘How did you know it was the money?’
They had reversed their cars and turned, and were sitting in Miss Pink’s Austin at the foot of the doctor’s drive.
‘If she made a break for it, wasn’t she the killer?’
‘You know damn well she wasn’t, necessarily.’ She was suffering from shock. ‘There was no proof. She could have been upset or frightened by your questions and decided to go away for a while.’ There was a pause. ‘She didn’t appear to be frightened,’ she added with fairness.
‘She wasn’t.’
‘You pushed her.’
‘I was pushing all the time: trying to make her crack.’
‘I mean: in the gorge. You were bumping her as you came down the straight towards the landslide. I saw her headlights jerk as the cars touched. There will be marks on your nearside wing.’
‘I tried to block her as she left the hamlet but she managed to scrape past. As for her guilt: when her car is lifted, they’ll find the money.’
‘How did you know she was carrying it?’
‘What will you tell the police?’
‘What will you tell them?’
‘That I suspected she was the killer, that you drove away to Carnthorpe to alert Hendry while I watched to see if she’d make a break for it. When she did, I tried to stop her, but she got away and I followed.’
‘Will you say how close you were to her in the Throat?’
‘No. And I don’t think that you will.’
‘Is that a threat?’
In the growing light his head turned towards her. He said quietly: ‘You mustn’t forget Caroline: regaining consciousness in the dark and her hands and feet tied. How long do you think it took for her to die?’
She watched the light intensify over the Central Fells and wondered if anyone were up there at this moment, alone and alive.
‘I’ll tell the same story,’ she said, ‘at least until they raise the car.’
‘And when they find that the money’s there?’
‘I’ll stick to the story. But you must tell me how you knew she had the money.’
‘I didn’t know until she tried to escape, and then I put my headlights on and recognised the case. I bought it in the leather market in Istanbul.’
‘It was George Harper’s case!’
‘Poor old George.’ There was a smile in his voice. ‘He couldn’t have raised five thousand, let alone fifty. He’s broke.’
Miss Pink asked weakly, knowing the answer: ‘How did he get it?’
‘I brought it from London, dear: Saturday afternoon, after I had his phone call.’
The moon sailed clear and the meadows were flooded with quicksilver. ‘The money didn’t mean much to me,’ Cole was saying apologetically, ‘except as an instrument to save Caroline—and I owed George a favour or two. I happened to have a bit to spare.’
‘Fifty thousand!’
He coughed deprecatingly. ‘Well, it’s only money, isn’t it?’
‘So you knew Harper.’
‘Quite well; he’s a friend of mine. And Caroline, of course. I was fond of Caroline.’
‘Why didn’t Harper tell me? How could he succeed in keeping it from me? He was at his wits’ end while we waited to see if the money had been picked up.’
‘Yes, but he was frantic because he knew the money had gone and yet they hadn’t released Caroline.’
‘But no one knew the money had gone until today!’
‘George knew before you got back to Sandale last night—because I was at the drop. I waited at Storms earlier in the evening and George rang me after you left for Whirl Howe. I was in one of the cars coming up the road when you came out of the forest after dropping the money. You saved me some time by showing me which entrance to use but even then, when I reached the place the money was gone. As I said at Thornbarrow: she must have darted out of the trees where she was waiting and picked it up immediately you’d put it down by those beater things. She’d have worked out in advance where to leave her car so that it would be hidden but wouldn’t get stuck in the mud. I didn’t look for a car once I found the money was gone; I reckoned whoever picked up the case hadn’t hung around. I got back to the road and streaked into Carnthorpe but the only car I passed that meant anything to me was yours. I’m surprised she could drive so well although—’ he added darkly, ‘—she wasn’t all that good tonight.’ Miss Pink thought that he had the landslide to thank for that but she didn’t interrupt. ‘Remember,’ he went on, ‘I wasn’t sure who I was after last night, and when I reached Carnthorpe I knew that the chap I was chasing could have gone towards the motorway or to Carlisle or back to Sandale. I reckoned it was a Sandale resident because of the old blackmailing business and I thought that person wouldn’t want to be absent from home, or appearing to be absent, at the time the money was picked up.
‘I stopped in Carnthorpe and rang George to tell him that the money was gone and not to tell you because you’d have wanted to know how he knew. Then I raced up to Storms and started phoning the Sandale people to find out where they were. That was the advantage of being Press; I didn’t need a pretext for talking to people. The only ones absent were Rumney and Lucy.’
‘Is that why you suspected him? He’d be out looking at his cows.’
‘I never suspected him; I used him as a red herring. If I could make you think he was a suspect, I might use him as a decoy with the criminal. Not that I really needed him; by the time I came to Lucy I was almost sure. This morning I went to look at the hall where the lec
ture was held; it’s near the main car park and she could have slipped out easily in the dark.’
‘And the telephone call to me at seven-thirty?’
‘The lecture started at a quarter to eight—and there are two kiosks in the market square.’
‘I’m surprised that Harper didn’t tell me he knew you; I thought I had his confidence.’
‘I didn’t want a tie-up with George; the police might have become more interested in me than in Caroline. After all, she’s only a villain’s daughter to them. Besides, who trusts them? You can always do the job better yourself. Another thing: we played along with the kidnapper not to bring in the authorities or any honest citizens barring yourself, but I was different. I went to the forest to catch the one who picked up the money and if I’d got him, he’d have talked.’ There was a pause. ‘Even when I found who it was,’ he added.
‘And I thought you were a crime reporter—even someone from Scotland Yard at one time.’
‘But I really am a journalist; I do feature articles for abroad. I just played myself—well, a facet of myself; even on a conservation story I could poke around and ask all the indiscreet questions which the public thinks the Press has a licence to ask. I went all over Thornbarrow and, although Lucy ticked me off for mentioning Jackson Wren, she had to retract. I was too dangerous and she had too much to hide.’
‘Did you tell Mossop that you were—something more than a reporter?’
‘Not exactly; he has the impression that I’m one of his employers—he didn’t work on his own, of course—one of the big men come down from the Smoke to see what he’s been up to. That’s why he came clean. You see, I was in touch with George before ever I arrived so I knew that Mossop had just been caught for receiving, and George said he was a villain. So I knew what I had to deal with and it was a big break for me; he was useful, he knew a whole side of Sandale that George didn’t—the blackmailing, for instance. He got the impression that I thought he’d killed his wife and that we were annoyed because he’d attracted attention to the hotel. To protect himself he told me everything he knew about the locals, and he told me what he did when he found Peta dead, and about that telephone call saying she had tipped off the police. He guessed that the caller killed Peta but he wasn’t in a position to do anything about it. He was afraid of the big boys, you see, if he didn’t keep a low profile.’
