by Gwen Moffat
LADY WITH A COOL EYE
Gwen Moffat
© Gwen Moffat 1973
Gwen Moffat has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1973 by Victor Gollancz Ltd.
This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter One
It was a cold clear morning with a sprinkling of snow on the tops. In the hanging valley below the ridge Miss Pink was startled to realise that the depression which she had thought empty was full of figures approaching purposefully through the boulders.
“Quite sinister,” she commented. “You could take them for guerillas in a war film.”
“It’s the silence,” Ted Roberts pointed out. “They’ve been trained not to chat when they’re going uphill. Nell doesn’t have much time for superfluities.”
“We always talked nineteen to the dozen when we were young,” Sir Thomas recalled nostalgically.
“The present generation takes its pleasures seriously.” The fourth director of Plas Mawr Adventure Centre was the youngest, but John Beresford had grown daughters and, on the question of youth, held himself superior to his childless colleagues. Roberts and Miss Pink, lawyer and magistrate respectively, who had been observing youngsters (and adults) pass through the courts for decades, glanced his way politely, then back at their main party. They were close now: ten boys, gasping a bit despite the distant appearance of ease, and led by an expressionless young man with a broken nose whose bulky clothing didn’t hide the fact that his wide frame carried no spare flesh. His eyes flickered over the directors, he grunted what might be taken for a greeting but he didn’t stop.
“A man of few words — Slade,” Beresford observed quietly. The boys plodded past, the more confident grinning self-consciously at the group beside the track. A girl brought up the rear, long-legged and slim in breeches, gaiters and very good boots. Her pale hair was caught back in a ribbon. She stopped in front of the directors and regarded them levelly.
“They all move like guides,” Miss Pink said in admiration.
“It’s the pace,” Nell Harvey told her, “we start slowly and work up a rhythm.”
“When I started,” Sir Thomas said (he was over seventy), “people tore ahead, then stopped, and every time you caught them up, they moved off again.”
“You have to adjust to the capacity of the weakest member of the party,” Nell said. He blinked.
“Very civilised,” Beresford commented, “but that restricts the range of the group as a whole. Do the others find it irksome?”
She stared at him. “Possibly,” she said and moved off. It was obvious she had never thought about it.
“The old guides had a sense of humour,” Miss Pink said with nostalgia as they started to follow.
“It’s a different world now,” Beresford reminded her, “the young have a sense of responsibility instead.”
She made no rejoinder but concentrated on the walk — which anyone but a rock climber would have termed a climb.
Some two thousand feet below them was the valley floor with hedges and Welsh Black cattle on the river flats, stone walls and sheep higher up. Patches of hardwoods wore muted autumn tints for although it was November there had been few frosts so far. Plas Mawr stood in one such wood, distinguished by its exotic conifers, the house a pile of grey stone, the more fanciful Victorian exuberances merged in the mass.
The path that the party was following zig-zagged up the inside of a great horseshoe to emerge towards one end of the cirque. To their south was the sea and Cardigan Bay. To the north stood Yr Aran, the shapely peak that was the climax of the horseshoe. A smaller mountain, rocky and steep in its last five hundred feet, rose above them.
*
The first boy staggered as he met the wind. Ahead of him Joe Slade plodded into the dry gale steady as a rock. Miss Pink felt the preliminary gusts and knew a thrill of excitement to be on the tops again.
The others stopped on the ridge for the rear to catch up. Nell, who was the senior instructor, stood relaxed and alert, waiting. Not a brilliant girl, Miss Pink thought, not even striking but healthy, strong and competent. Through the bustle of people and the buffeting wind the older woman felt that she, too, was being watched and, shifting her gaze from Nell, saw that she was observed by Slade. Why should he watch her so intently? Possessive? The two instructors climbed together when they were off-duty. Was there a more intimate relationship? She hoped not and then found herself wondering why. On the surface they were compatible; they both had the same cool expressionless regard, they were reputed to be a good team on hard rock, they had the same interests . . . She concluded wryly that she was equating emotional relationships with emotional entanglements — and that marriage meant babies. Facts must be looked in the face, she told herself. If Nell and Joe were anything more than a climbing team, the Centre stood a chance of losing Nell, but just in case, and as an incentive to stay, perhaps a third cottage should be built in the grounds to cope with three married instructors instead of the two they employed now. She made a mental note to discuss this with Beresford that evening.
*
Plas Mawr Adventure Centre was run with money put up by the huge industrial complex of Global Minerals Ltd., but the idea of it originated with Ted Roberts who, clever but overworked, had so fired Beresford with enthusiasm one wet weekend, that the latter had returned to London and his publishing business convinced that he had evolved the scheme himself. While he persuaded Global, who were terribly self-conscious about their image in the countryside, to part with the money to finance the project, Ted, mindful of Sir Thomas Parry’s straitened circumstances since the bottom fell out of the slate market on which the Parry fortune had been built, saw to it that Global paid an inflated price for the old man’s white elephant of a mansion. Sir Thomas then moved to the coast where he was looked after by a distant cousin in a glass and concrete villa called Seaview.
Beresford threw himself into the establishment of the adventure centre, seeing the whole project as his own baby and a fitting finale to his working life and the rather tedious autobiography he was writing. He was, in fact, a good catspaw and a hard worker; once shown a course he could follow it with splendid gusto, a characteristic of which Roberts had been well aware.
Ted Roberts had come up the hard way. His father had been a solicitor but his father was a quarryman. Ted had been first a junior, then the senior partner in his father’s firm and now, retired, he retained a deep and abiding interest in people, particularly in delinquents.
Miss Pink was the odd man out only on account of her sex. Directors were offered a seat on the Board by virtue of their local standing, their knowledge of and interest in youth work and their experience of outdoor activities, but being a mountain centre and with Beresford as chairman, the bias was towards climbing.
Sir Thomas and Beresford were members of the Alpine Club and Miss Pink and Ted Roberts had been active well into middle age and were still strong walkers. She had lived in North Wales until three years ago when the shortness of the growing season (she was a keen gardener) and arthritis drove her to Cornwall where she made a comfortable income from writing features and short
stories for women’s magazines under a range of pseudonyms.
*
The first rock peak on the ridge was called Craig Wen. They came down its north ridge in the same order that they’d held on the ascent, with the directors in the rear and behind Nell Harvey, but the youngsters were now moving fast and the gap widened in front of the rearguard who had to be careful of stiff ankle joints.
Now another gap developed as Nell paused and slowed down, watching something below. Then she moved fast along the line to Slade. The file didn’t stop.
Miss Pink, waiting politely for Sir Thomas, observed this bit of byplay idly but now, seeing Slade look away from the ridge, downwards, she too looked, but a near spur of rock obscured all but a patch of plateau on the eastern shoulder of Yr Aran.
She moved forward, saw that Nell was letting the file pass in order to take her place at the end again, then the older woman came round the rock buttress and saw all the high upland ahead and below.
There appeared to be nothing remarkable about it; she wondered if there were much difference between a young person’s eyes and her own. She continued thoughtfully, hearing Sir Thomas clattering, stiffly but game, behind her. Her glance swept the country. On her right, outside the horseshoe, was the brown bowl of a cwm with a saucer containing black mud and a puddle in the middle: the top basin of a pumped storage scheme. There were disused mine tips in the cwm: triangles of grey scree in the dead grass, and a white road climbed round a spur towards them, to end just below the summit ridge. Here there was a handful of buildings and a wide tarred space where several cars were parked. It was the entrance to an old mine.
“Seen something?” asked Beresford behind her.
“What? Oh, no — nothing.” She still searched the view for some explanation for the instructors’ interest.
“What are they up to?” asked Ted, staring.
“Who?”
“The cars at the mine.”
“They’ll be walking — the occupants,” Miss Pink said absently, “you drive to there and you’ve gained a prodigious height.”
“You leave the car outside the gate.”
“What?”
“It’s Saturday too. The men don’t work at weekends and the gate’s locked. I mean, normally.”
They all stared at the mine entrance while below them, the party of youngsters stopped. Nell looked back and waited.
“Who could — who has a right to go there?” Sir Thomas asked.
“Lawson’s Explosives.” Beresford sounded testy. “But then we should have been informed.”
“Why?” Miss Pink asked, “it has nothing to do with us, nothing at all.” Her tone was acid.
She had taken a large pair of field glasses from her rucksack and trained them on the mine entrance.
“Good Lord!” she exclaimed.
“What?”
She lowered the glasses, then smiled ruefully.
“Quite a shock. There’s a man with field glasses down there watching us!”
“He could be a bird watcher,” Sir Thomas said doubtfully.
“May I?” Ted held out his hand for the glasses and focused them.
“No distinguishing marks on the cars,” he said, “except — yes — one of them’s a police car. Another is a Rover, and there’s a Bentley. Apparently a high-powered party, but no one about except the fellow with the glasses. And now he’s going into one of the buildings; the door was open. The rest are either in the hut or the mine. Of course we can’t see the entrance because it faces away from us. But who are they — apart from the police?”
“There’s that Lawson director, what’s his name? With a Bentley,” Beresford said.
“Lonsdale,” Miss Pink told him. “His chauffeur wears uniform; this man’s in plain clothes. In any case,” she added with asperity, “why should a Lawson director come up?”
“Well, you know,” Beresford said pointedly.
“Even if there were something wrong in the store, they’d never send a director, he’s too valuable. They’d send an explosives expert,” Miss Pink said coldly, “but something’s wrong, obviously.”
“It’s always been your bête noire, hasn’t it?” Beresford prompted.
“Of course,” she agreed with more composure, “I know explosives must be stored somewhere and the more remote the area the better, but you will always put some people at risk and in this case it’s Bontddu village, not to mention all the farms and hamlets and our own Centre.”
“They’ve assured us again and again that the stuff can’t explode on its own,” Sir Thomas said.
Miss Pink looked at him bleakly. “I’ll never believe it — and I’m of the opinion that that party down below bears me out.”
“Well, let’s go down and see,” Beresford suggested.
“As chairman it’s your decision,” Ted said, “but I’d prefer to do it a little more diplomatically. Through the right channels. We can do some telephoning when we get down. If you approach that driver person below he may not say anything and he certainly won’t let you in the mine to find his employer, whoever that is.”
Sir Thomas agreed. “Ring up Global from the house,” he urged.
Beresford raised his eyebrows at Miss Pink.
“We can’t do any good here,” she said, “and perhaps some harm. It might dry up communication altogether. Let’s ring London as soon as we get in.”
They moved on towards the main party which continued as soon as Nell saw them coming. Miss Pink wondered what interpretation the instructors put on the weekend visitors to the mine. On the level ridge she caught up, and asked Nell what she thought.
“We were wondering,” the girl said, “it’s probably inspectors.”
“You know about the mines being used for storage then?”
Nell gave the ghost of a smile. “Why, of course. Doesn’t everyone?”
*
Keeping to a prearranged plan the directors left the others on the pass before Yr Aran and, while the youngsters continued their traverse of the horseshoe, the veterans descended to Plas Mawr and their Board meeting.
It was scarcely surprising that at lunchtime on a Saturday none of Global’s directors could be contacted by telephone, at least, none who knew of any troublesome developments in North Wales, the basis for such inquiries being that Lawson’s Explosives Ltd., the company which stored massive quantities of stock in old mine levels under Craig Wen, was a subsidiary of Global. Beresford came to the dining room late for lunch and looking frustrated. Ted Roberts, more canny, offered to contact the editor of the local paper but he was playing golf and the best Ted could do was to leave a message for him to ring the Centre when he was free.
They assembled in the library at Plas Mawr. The warden appeared. It was the first time they had seen him today, and for Miss Pink, who had arrived late last night and gone straight to the Goat Hotel in the village, the first time this visit. She thought the man looked unwell and indeed Beresford had said the warden was feeling seedy that morning which was why he hadn’t accompanied the directors on the walk.
Charles Martin had come to the Centre from the Army. He was a handsome, haggard man going soft in the wrong places.
“Are you feeling better?” Beresford asked solicitously as they moved towards the big table.
“Quite, thank you.” The warden met his chairman’s eye. “A touch of colitis.”
Miss Pink thought it was more likely to be liver. There had been no time for the directors to have a drink before lunch but there was an unmistakable smell of whisky about the gathering.
They took their places at the table, produced reading spectacles and the minutes of the last meeting, and the afternoon’s business began.
The agenda looked harmless enough but the items provoked discussion which verged on the acrimonious for no obvious reason. When the plans were produced for the two new cottages in the grounds, the objections of Sir Thomas were predictable and there was much discussion on siting, screening, design.
“W
e’ve had three designs submitted,” Beresford said, smiling, as if they had all been submitted together rather than separately with Sir Thomas objecting to each. After twenty minutes of circular argument Miss Pink asked:
“Basically why do we need to build? Are the married couples objecting to living off the premises? I would have thought they’d prefer their present accommodation.”
There was a sudden silence, the more marked for the rambling but continuous argument that had preceded it. Sir Thomas was startled, Ted Roberts thoughtful; Charles Martin looked, if anything, sullen. The chairman stared at his papers and aligned their margins meticulously.
“It’s sometimes better to have instructors living in,” he hazarded.
“No,” Miss Pink said firmly, “when they’re off-duty, they’re off. In any case, both Hughes and Lithgow have telephones and transport and live only a mile or so from Plas Mawr. They can be here in a matter of minutes if necessary, and there is always a duty instructor in the building.”
“One can keep an eye on them better,” Sir Thomas said with an absent-minded air, “but I still think —”
Miss Pink frowned and opened her mouth to speak but Roberts said: “Lithgow has no transport so he couldn’t be here in five minutes.”
“He takes the Land Rover home,” the warden said.
“That has a bearing on the point at issue,” the chairman remarked, “unless a man has transport, it’s not convenient for him to live off the premises. And Lithgow’s cottage in particular isn’t satisfactory for the job. The water supply is unpredictable, the hot water system isn’t efficient. Staff must have hot baths available when they come home soaked to the skin.”
“I like that better as a reason for building new cottages than the fact that you want to keep an eye on them. That smacks of paternalism,” Miss Pink said. Sir Thomas looked puzzled. She stared at Beresford who refused to meet her eye: “But then why not improve the existing houses?”
“Because,” Sir Thomas waded in, on firm ground, “you can go on for ever trying to improve those old places. It wouldn’t be economic. They’d never be dry unless you dug out damp courses with a pneumatic drill, and Lithgow’s place actually stands on a stream . . .”