by Fay Sampson
Hilary studied the picture. The slim body, the rather hunched shoulders, the face retreating under its hood. A typical image of countless teenage boys. She had taught many pupils like that. She came back to the tracksuit. The distinctive white line down the navy sleeves and legs.
She raised her eyes to DI Foulks again. What she saw behind his rimless glasses was a brightening of hope. Clearly he regarded her as a reliable witness. She felt flattered. But she knew she must disappoint him.
‘I’m sorry. Normally, I couldn’t swear I’d remember a lad in a tracksuit with the hood up. It’s a pretty common sight. But, under the circumstances, I think it’s likely that I would. The lanes around the Leechwells were rather eerily empty. The only people I remember seeing were the woman with the shopping bag I told you about – the one who found us trying to revive Melissa – and the old man with the walking stick.’
‘Yes, we interviewed him.’
‘You think this boy might be the culprit? But why? If we’re thinking in stereotypes, he might have mugged her for her handbag, but it seems a bit extreme to drown her in the well for it. Did you find her handbag?’
She had a dim memory of Veronica retrieving a dripping bag of brown cloth. The sort that could have contained a wallet.
‘Let’s just say he is someone we are keen to speak to.’
‘So someone must have seen him? When? Going to or coming from the well?’
The detectives sat silent. Of course they would not share that knowledge with her. Had they found the woman with the shopping bag, who had been only too keen to hurry on away from the body? They hadn’t mentioned her. Did that mean it was the old man with the rich Devon accent, who had told her the names of the three wells: the Toad, the Snake and the Long Crippler? Twice today she had encountered him at the well, once this morning as she was innocently scribbling away at the beginnings of her crime novel, and then in the shocked aftermath of their grisly find. Yes, she thought. If he stalks those almost deserted narrow lanes, he probably notices every coming and going along them.
It was a creepy feeling that she too was now stored away inside that inscrutable head.
DS Blunt slid the paper round to look at it again.
‘Of course, we’re not a hundred per cent sure it was a boy. Our informant thought so. The way the shoulders are hunched, the hood pulled forward. You know how teenage lads are. But without a good look at the face, we can’t be certain it wasn’t a girl.’
‘Or even a slim woman,’ DI Foulks finished.
Hilary snatched the artist’s impression back again and studied it more closely. But it did not make any difference. She had not seen anyone in that tracksuit.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I wish I could help.’
An even wearier look came over DI Foulks’ face. She realized how much hope he must have been pinning on her powers of observation.
‘Veronica might remember something.’
‘We intend to ask her. Would you be so kind as to request her to join us?’
Hilary walked back out of the cloisters towards the bar. There were spatters of rain in the wind. Gusts brought leaves whirling down from the sequoia tree on the lawn.
What if Melissa’s death lay outside the circle they had been focussing on? Not Gavin or Theresa? Not even any of the motley crew of would-be writers who had gathered at Morland Abbey? She certainly couldn’t imagine the stockily built Theresa disguised as that slim figure in the tracksuit. Was it a relief to rule her out, or a disappointment? Gavin was probably taller than the witness who had supplied that description suggested. Could the hunched shoulders have hidden that? Or was this, more likely, someone else entirely? She was frustrated by the knowledge that, if it was, she had no hope of guessing who it might be, or why he should want to kill Melissa Standforth. She simply did not know enough about Melissa’s background. Certainly, the figure with the blurred features in the artist’s sketch seemed to be the only known person who had the opportunity in the time before Hilary and Veronica found her.
Of course, it had always been obvious, if you thought about it, that Melissa had had a life of which the course members at Morland knew nothing. Only the police could gather the information they needed to solve this. Would Gavin help them?
She was almost at the door of the bar before it struck her that she was trying to play detective in just the same way she had berated those like Ben and Jake and Jo for treating this as though it was no more than a crime novel they were determined to solve before they reached the final chapter.
EIGHTEEN
It was a shock to walk back into the bar and see the expressions on the faces that turned swiftly to meet her. She read surprise, curiosity, an altered perception of Hilary Masters.
So they haven’t arrested her, after all?
Could they really have believed that jokey suggestion of Jake’s? It had been a joke, hadn’t it?
Indignation burned inside her. Couldn’t it just as well have been one of them in the tracksuit? The athletic Rob or Tania? Either of those two slim young men, Ben or Jake?
She walked towards David and Veronica, still seated at the bar. Customers unconnected with the crime course continued to chatter as before. But those who knew what was at stake watched her enter in an expectant silence. They were waiting to hear why CID had wanted to interview her again. She decided she would not give them that satisfaction. Let the detectives show them that sketch in their own good time.
Veronica and David had swivelled round on their stools. What had been going through their minds while they waited? Their faces were full of concern.
She stopped in front of Veronica. ‘He’ll see you next.’ Then, in a softer voice, ‘Nothing serious. They’ve found a witness with some new information. They need to check it out with us.’
She lifted her eyes to the rest of the group. Everyone there was still looking at her. Had they heard what she said to Veronica? Almost certainly Ben and Jake, just beyond Veronica, had. Perhaps Jo and Harry at a nearby table, too.
She was not going to say anything more. Not even to Veronica. Let DI Foulks and DS Blunt reveal this new evidence to whom they chose, in their own way. She had done her bit, though it hadn’t been much help. Still, she reflected, even negative evidence could be significant. The lad in the tracksuit hadn’t been in the lower lane by which Hilary and Veronica approached the well, or not within that narrow time frame. That was information. If he was the killer, he must have got away by one of the upper branches of the lane. Or hidden himself in the children’s playground? She remembered the two of them peering through the gate. Had it really been empty?
How long had Melissa been dead when they found her?
She slipped into her place on the other side of David from Veronica. The stool had been left empty. She waited for David’s hand to close over hers on the counter. A natural gesture of reassurance. It did not come.
Veronica was moving away, a little unwillingly, it seemed. As she headed for the door, Hilary felt David move from beside her. He too stepped down from the bar.
‘I’ll see you across the quadrangle,’ he said.
There was a stir of murmuring across the room. Heads watched the two of them retreat into the night.
Hilary suddenly felt very alone.
It was Jo nearby who said what she did not need to hear.
‘Your friend’s still a very pretty woman, isn’t she?’
Hilary blazed inside. She wanted to cry out, ‘And David’s the kindest man I know. Every year since he retired as a doctor, he’s spent time volunteering in a hospital in Gaza, or at a clinic in the Yemen, wherever they need his skilled help. He came here to Morland Abbey because he was as much concerned for Veronica’s safety as a vital witness as he was for mine. What’s so remarkable about him offering to escort her across the deserted courtyard after dark?’
But she dared not tell anyone else about the overheard conversation that had put Veronica in so much more danger than her.
Eyes were beginning t
o turn back to Hilary now, speculative or sympathetic. She was painfully aware that Veronica was a great deal prettier than she was, with her slender upright figure, her still-fair hair, softly waved around a heart-shaped face. Hilary, honesty told her, was not so very different in build and looks from Theresa. Though at least, she thought, I do take a bit more trouble over my hair.
She had to hold on to the memory of David’s arms around her in the bedroom when she walked in and found him. And, to be fair, he had offered to escort her across the courtyard to her interview. She wished now she had accepted.
Ben leaned across, as eager as ever. Would he never get over treating this as entertainment? ‘Go on then. Tell us. What’s this new info that’s got Foulks and Blunt back here working overtime? They’ve already interviewed all of us twice. Once for Dinah Halsgrove, and then to find out if we were anywhere near those Leechwells when Melissa was done in.’
Again, Hilary flinched from the lack of humanity in his avid curiosity.
Is that how a killer might talk, feigning not to know?
‘I’m afraid that’s not for me to say.’ She was aware how curt she must sound. ‘I’m sure the inspector will call back anyone else he thinks may be able to help him.’
It was her turn to cast a curious eye around the assembled writers. How many of them had gone into Totnes during their free time after tea? And would they have told the truth when the detectives questioned them about their movements?
The colonel had chosen the castle for his crime setting this morning. Had he said anything about going back to see more of the town this afternoon? Harry Walters, too, had said something about going to the castle, but she could not remember when. Probably while Jo was busy writing this morning. Could he have taken her back into town, later this afternoon, to show her, as Hilary had Veronica? And where had Ben and Jake been?
One name came back to her. A rounded rosy face. Ceri lived in Totnes. She had been at Morland Abbey for that tense session with Gavin this afternoon, ostensibly concentrating on their fictional characters, but interrupted at intervals as one by one they were called out to give evidence about Dinah’s near fatality. Had she left for Totnes after tea? If anyone knew those narrow lanes leading to the well, which most of the group had missed, it had to be Ceri. Ceri, for whom the Leechwells apparently had a particular significance.
Yet she had baulked at the idea of using them as the setting for a murder, even a fictional one.
Hilary looked around her.
Two figures caught her eye on the far side of the room. Tania and Rob, seated at a table with others whom Hilary could not name. Tonight, Tania was wearing a chunky sweater with a deep polo neck. But this morning …
It came back to her with startling clarity. The athletic-looking Tania had come to breakfast wearing a black tracksuit with white flashes on the sleeves and legs.
Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. The tracksuit in the sketch had been navy, not black. The white stripes on the arms and legs had been continuous, not these partial bands.
But how accurate was any eyewitness?
She was seized by the thought that she should hurry back to the inspector and tell him. She was already slipping down from her stool.
Jo rose from the adjacent table.
‘It’s getting pretty crowded in here. Why don’t we decamp to find some easy chairs? The book room over in the East Cloister is really quite a comfy lounge.’
The moment passed. She would tell DI Foulks, but later.
It was a short walk across to the East Cloister from the bar. A few people were already seated in the book room, but there were spare chairs and sofas.
The display of Gavin’s books still dominated one wall, set out on tables and a perspex stand. Hilary paused beside it. By far the greater number of copies were of his one bestseller, The Long Crippler. The cover artist had made that blunt head seem sinister, even at the start of this weekend. Now it had a far more ominous meaning.
She picked a copy from the rack and examined the cover. She understood that puzzling iconography now. That blind, questing, reptilian head. The slowworm, or blindworm.
That was the long middle basin, where Hilary and Veronica had found Melissa, face down.
Gavin Standforth had obviously known about the wells.
She put it back rather hurriedly, as though her fingers did not want to prolong contact with it. There were too many bad memories.
‘Have you read it?’ she asked Jo, who was following behind her. ‘I’m told it’s rather good.’
‘That!’ The younger woman almost spat the word. Then she seemed to recover her smile. ‘It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, how he can do it just once, and never before or since?’
‘Luck, I suppose. He just hit on a good idea.’
‘Oh, yes, he certainly did.’
They settled themselves in the easy chairs, with Harry joining them. Relaxing into the cushions, Hilary realized just how weary she was. When David came back with Veronica she would suggest calling it a day.
The minutes ticked by.
David and Veronica, she realized would expect to find her still in the bar. She hadn’t left a message. Would someone tell them where she had gone?
The door of the lounge opened. David and Veronica were laughing together as they came through. Hilary felt a momentary satisfaction that they had found her. Then the sight of them stabbed her with a pain she recognized a second later as jealousy. The realization astonished her. Had Jo’s barbed comment really got beneath her skin?
But what could these two possibly have to laugh about? It was the end of a horrific day. She and Veronica had found a murdered body. Hilary felt exhausted, emotionally shattered. She did not think she would be able to shut out, even in sleep, the image of Melissa’s dead face.
And yet those two were laughing. Not yet searching the room for her, but finishing something that had passed between them as they crossed the cloisters.
It was only an instant. They were suitably sober now as their eyes found her and they made their way across the room to join her. Whatever had happened out there in the quadrangle, it was something she was not going to be party to.
The room had filled up somewhat. Some course members had gone, rather dispiritedly, back to their rooms. Others sat talking quietly. Only those who had agreed to meet in the morning to brainstorm theories about Melissa’s death still had a purpose. The rest, like Hilary, were just waiting out the DI’s instructions until tomorrow afternoon. Making a pretence that they could still be of help.
Heads turned, of course, at Veronica and David’s return, as they had to Hilary’s in the bar. But something of the avid curiosity had gone. Was it because no one could conceive of sweet, elegant Veronica being arrested for murder? A different scenario had crossed the minds of at least some of them when Hilary was summoned.
Veronica sank into the easy chair beside her.
‘A gin and tonic, please,’ she said in answer to a question of David’s which Hilary had not heard.
‘What about you?’ He turned to her.
‘Tomato juice, please.’
‘Not another whisky?’
‘No, thank you.’
She did not know why she was being curt with him. He had done nothing to deserve it. Wasn’t it a gift enough that he was here with her? That they would sleep together tonight?
While David went off to the bar, Veronica gave Hilary a rather tired smile. But the laughter had gone from her violet-blue eyes. ‘That was a scary experience. Not at all what I expected. Did they ask if they could search your room?’
‘No. Why? Veronica! They couldn’t imagine it was you in the tracksuit?’
‘I suppose they have to consider all possibilities. Still, it gave me a fright. Just for a moment, I wondered whether someone could have planted it in my room.’
‘Surely not!’
Her unwilling mind was now including the slim Veronica in the list of course members who might have disguised themselves as a teenag
er in a hooded tracksuit. For all its improbability, might that have been how Inspector Foulks’ mind worked?
‘When it came to remembering someone in a tracksuit, I’m afraid I wasn’t much help to them. I don’t suppose you were, either?’
‘No.’
‘Though memory can play strange tricks on you. If you think about it long enough, you begin to imagine you did see what they asked you about. But it’s only because they’ve implanted that image in your mind.’
‘What image?’ She was suddenly aware that Jake and Ben had crossed the room and settled themselves on the sofa opposite.
Jake was leaning forward in that characteristically eager way. While Veronica was away, the young men’s conversation had drifted to singers and bands which meant nothing to Hilary. She had tuned them out, while her own thoughts raced uncontrollably over the events of that afternoon and who else might have been in Totnes when Melissa was killed. About whether the witness could have been mistaken about that tracksuit.
Now she was alert again, and on the defensive. She turned the questioning back on them.
‘Where were you two this afternoon after tea?’
Ben and Jake looked at each other, speculation evident in their expressions. Hilary studied them. Jake still had something of the flamboyant adolescent about him, though he must be in his twenties at least. Ben, more square-shouldered, swarthier, dark hair shadowing his chin. At a pinch, either of them could have passed as that teenager in the hoodie whom the artist had sketched. The thinner Jake, certainly, if he hunched his shoulders to lower his height. Ben only possibly.
But how reliable had the description been?
If the inspector could suspect Veronica enough to search her room …
‘We took a walk down to the Dart. There’s a footpath alongside the river.’ It was Ben who answered.
‘A river path? How do you get to it?’ Jo too had joined them. ‘Might be an idea for my morning run.’
