by Gwen Moffat
He was accompanied by four dogs: three Border collies and a brindled lurcher. The oldest collie had a grizzled muzzle and a limp but its face was brilliant with concentration. The other two were siblings: young and so eager that they had to keep circling tightly to avoid over-running the sheep.
‘I don’t know why you needed me,’ Wren remarked with forced joviality. ‘You could have had t’dogs going ahead to warn traffic.’
‘The post comes early,’ Rumney reminded him. ‘I’m not having my best dogs killed by yon daft driver belting round Storms’ bend—and hitting a few of our fat lambs into t’bargain.’
‘Fat lambs! Reckon them what’s missing got blown away if these is anything to go by.’
Rumney turned cold eyes on him. ‘Who told you Ah were missing sheep?’
Wren slashed at a bramble with his stick and the lurcher jumped backwards. ‘Someone,’ he said airily, the dark glasses giving nothing away. ‘You’re missing some, aren’t you?’
Rumney’s jaw set hard but he said nothing further at that moment. Ahead of the flock the bottom of a drive showed on the right of the lane, with a track climbing the hill among mature and well-spaced trees.
He sent the old dog forward. The sheep blocked the way and the collie jumped up and ran lightly over their backs. The animals trotted on unconcerned, bearing leftwards a little, giving the gateway a respectable berth where the dog stood with straddled forelegs and a fierce grin.
‘Time you got in front,’ Rumney said. ‘Post van tears round this bend like a hell’s—’
‘He’s got to slow down to turn in Storms’ drive.’
‘What’s up then?’ Rumney was staring ahead.
The foremost sheep which, after the entrance to the drive, had spread back to fill the lane, were shouldering leftwards again, then trying to turn back.
‘There’s no car coming,’ Wren protested.
The rear half of the flock, pushed by dogs and men, crowded the front ranks and these, unable to force a way back, were burrowing and pushing sideways so that the pattern, fluid as water, became concave, then broke as they raced away up the left side of the lane, brushing the hedge and leaping high in the air as they passed one point.
‘Sod it,’ Wren exclaimed, uncomprehending.
‘There must be something in the ditch over there,’ Rumney said, advancing. ‘There is; it’s an old coat.’
Three of the dogs watched his face to see what they were meant to do about the sheep but the fourth, receiving no orders, darted to the ditch and the dark green coat (which the men saw now was not old at all), and they heard his claws scrabble as he braked. Then his head and tail went down and he yelped and ran: back up the lane towards Sandale House.
Rumney flicked a finger at the remaining dogs and they tore down the lane to turn the sheep. He stooped to the coat but where his original intention had been to pick it up, it was now obvious that he couldn’t. There was someone inside it, fitting the ditch too well, one trousered leg visible from the knee to the foot in a red suède shoe and the leg in too strained a position for the owner to be asleep. The coat hid the head but they realised that what had looked like a swathe of bright straw was hair.
‘She’s been hit by a car,’ Wren was saying. He sounded terrified. ‘I saw her last night: up t’lane a ways; her was weaving all over t’road. That’s t’second in this spot. Is she all right?’
The sheep pattered back to halt in a heaving barrier across the lane.
‘Watch they don’t get by,’ Rumney muttered.
He knelt on one knee and gently eased down the needle-cord collar. Behind him Wren gasped. The profile was unmarked, the lips parted and the eyes wide but the hair on top of the skull was matted with blood. Rumney covered the head again and got to his feet. Wren was on his knees on the grass verge.
‘We’ve got to get these gimmers off t’road,’ Rumney said. ‘Look sharp, Jackson, and go an’ open t’gate.’
The other shook his head dumbly, still bowed over the grass retching. Rumney’s lips set, he looked beyond the sheep to his dogs and called back the old collie. Dog and man changed places neatly and the farmer lumbered ahead of the flock round the almost right-angled corner they called Storms’ bend. A hundred yards ahead there was a gate into the meadows on the left. Beyond the gate the road was clear and he slowed to a walk.
The dogs held the sheep between them while he opened the gate, then the flock streamed through and Wren appeared round the bend his lurch less obvious, his face grey.
‘I should have had me breakfast,’ he complained.
‘Go and get t’doctor. I’ll stay down here.’
‘What’ll I tell ’im?’
‘Just tell him there’s a body in t’ditch.’
‘But it’s Peta Mossop!’
‘Give over waffling, lad, and get cracking; we haven’t got all day.’
Wren swallowed and started down the lane, passing the foot of the drive leading to High Hollins where the Nobles lived. Rumney and the dogs went back round Storms’ bend.
He wouldn’t have long to wait; the doctor’s house was less than a quarter of a mile past Noble’s. It was possible that, being a Saturday morning, Quentin wouldn’t be at home, but then he remembered how early they were in bringing the sheep down and he pulled a half-hunter from an inside pocket. It was just on nine o’clock.
The dogs hung back, and out of regard for them he stopped before he came to the body. The sun had not yet reached this side of the valley although the brackeny slopes opposite were brilliant in the light. It was bitterly cold. He looked across the water-meadows between him and the gorge they called the Throat and tried to give his attention to sheep, and the wisdom of putting animals down here at the back-end. Reflecting on the possibility of flooding was a constructive activity. Waiting by a dead body served no purpose. If it had been a sheep now, he’d have gone home for a spade, or taken an organ for the vet to analyse, or sent for the vet.
He heard a car changing up fast behind him and, recognising the sound of the doctor’s engine, he started walking again, calling the dogs to heel. Bright’s Maxi overtook him on the bend with two people up, and stopped. As the doctor got out, Rumney called, ‘Let Jackson take the car on or you’ll cause another accident, parking here.’
Bright turned and spoke to Wren who moved over to the driver’s seat and drove on.
‘Well,’ the doctor said by way of greeting. ‘What the hell!’
He stooped to the body and lifted the coat collar. At sight of the wound he drew in his breath with an audible hiss. He touched the skin of the forehead and, putting a hand on the jaw, turned it easily towards him. An arc of false eyelashes detached itself from an eyelid and dropped in the ditch. The left cheek was reddened as if bruised, but not extensively.
‘A car, d’you think?’ Rumney asked in a neutral tone.
‘What else?’ The tone was bitter and defeated. ‘They come round this bend like bats out of hell. It’s not three months since the last one. The Council will have to take that corner off now—and two people have to be killed before they’ll make a move.’
‘Plenty of drivers have managed to get round here without killing anyone.’
‘But two people in three months!’
Rumney nodded. ‘And they never caught the other one, but that was in summer time.’ He looked down. ‘It’s no good speculating on who did this: a local, or someone who’d had too much up at Storms, or a visitor. . . . Tourists in November? I wonder what she was doing down on the road. You’ll have to get on to the police.’
‘And there’s Mossop to be told.’
‘I’ll come with you; it’s better for two of us to be there when he’s told, just in case . . .’
Bright covered the ghastly head and they started to walk up the lane. The dogs, who had been sitting a few yards towards Sandale in a patch of sun, got to their feet with alacrity and trotted with them.
Quentin Bright strode jerkily and fast, not waiting for the other. He was a thin m
an with receding hair and passionate eyes. He worked like a horse, involved himself too much with his patients, was often ill to the point of physical debility but was saved from ultimate collapse by his nice dull managing wife. Arriving now at his car, he stared at Jackson Wren as though wondering what to do with him.
It was Rumney who gave the orders. ‘Go back and wait there till the police come, and make sure no one interferes with it.’
‘Why the police?’ Wren asked anxiously, getting out of the car.
In the act of easing into the passenger seat Rumney raised his big head and bared his teeth. ‘What time did tha see her in t’road?’
‘Late on; she were straying all over t’lane. I nearly—’ He stopped and the open mouth and opaque lenses were three black holes in his face.
Rumney shrugged. ‘The police will sort it out.’
‘When did he see her?’ Bright asked as they drove up the Storms track.
‘Last night.’
‘Do you think he hit her? Was he drunk?’
‘He’d been drinking but if he’d hit her he wouldn’t have told me he’d seen her; he’s not that much of a fool. When you consider, he’s not normally nearly so silly as he’s behaving now; it’s shock—and that’s in his favour. No, he didn’t hit her—I wouldn’t think.’
‘Someone did.’ Bright halted the car on the sweep outside the Storms hotel. They stared through the windscreen at the mountains which looked very clear and close.
‘Foul play?’ Rumney asked.
‘Well, she didn’t do that to herself,’ Bright said acidly. ‘Here’s Mossop.’
They got out of the car slowly and deliberately. Miles Mossop was a fat man who had once been powerful; he had the body of a wrestler gone to seed. He was dressed in wrinkled jeans and a grubby shirt strained over his obese stomach. He had long thin ginger hair with a bald patch, luxuriant sideburns and pale grey eyes. His face was large, soft and sagging, and he regarded them with an expression of irony tinged with contempt. If he was surprised by the appearance of the doctor he didn’t show it although his eyes did rest for a puzzled moment on Rumney in his working clothes. They greeted him and he grunted a response. The doctor looked past him to the hall.
‘What’s up?’ Mossop asked.
‘We’ve got bad news for you.’
The publican’s face was blank. ‘About what?’
‘Peta.’
‘What’s happened to her?’ The eyes flickered to Rumney.
‘She’s been hit by a car.’
‘Where?’
‘Just near the foot of the drive.’ Bright’s voice climbed as if the position of the body had suddenly astonished him.
‘I haven’t been in her room,’ Mossop said. He sounded dazed. Bright started to speak but the other went on flatly, as if he guessed the answer. ‘How bad is she?’
There was a pause in which Rumney threw a glance at the doctor, obviously wondering whether he should give more than moral support, a pause during which Mossop’s face lost its hostility and his jaw dropped, and the doctor, relieved that the other had guessed the truth, nodded.
‘She’d been dead for a long time, Miles. . . . She died immediately.’
The man’s mouth snapped shut and he glared at them, his head swinging from one to the other like a bull threatened on two fronts, then he turned his back and went into the hotel. The others exchanged a glance and followed.
He’d gone to the cocktail bar where he drew himself a large whisky and drained it at a gulp. He made a move to pour another then checked and, turning, put both hands on the counter, still holding the empty glass, and glared at them.
‘I can’t take it in. Dead. You did say she’s dead?’
‘There’s no doubt, Miles.’
His look was stricken. ‘What do I do?’ he whispered.
‘You can’t do anything at the moment,’ Bright pointed out, ‘I’ll have to report it to the police—’
‘Will they be bringing her here? The wife?’
Bright looked at Rumney. Suddenly Mossop cried: ‘How does he come into it? Did he find her?’
‘I was putting the gimmers in the meadows,’ Rumney explained easily, ‘Jackson Wren was with me.’
‘When did it happen?’
Bright said, ‘I haven’t—it’s impossible to say, yet.’
Rumney said, ‘There was hardly any frost on the coat—’ and stopped.
Mossop’s eyes opened wide. ‘She were out last night.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. I saw her go out about nine, nine-thirty. I didn’t see her come back. You haven’t told me what happened down there.’
‘She had head injuries,’ Bright said.
‘Is that what did it?’
‘I haven’t done a full examination but—it would be the head injury, yes.’
‘Was she on t’road?’
‘In the ditch, as if she’d—’
‘As if what?’
‘As if the car had thrown her there.’
Bright turned away and caught Rumney’s eye. The doctor had been about to say ‘as if she’d been put there’. He was used to seeing death from violence, impact deaths, and he was thinking that, for a body that had been thrown in the ditch by a car, it looked terribly neat.
Chapter Five
Peta Mossop’s body was found on Saturday and the resulting revelations shocked the dale, but for reasons of age or personal problems some people were able, as the week wore on, to forget about Peta, at least for short periods. At Sandale House on the following Friday afternoon, old Mrs Rumney and her granddaughter, Arabella, regarded the scones and cakes on the kitchen table and speculated on nothing more sinister than the present whereabouts of Zeke.
Grannie Rumney was pear-shaped with narrow shoulders and broad hips. Her hair was white and fine, drawn back to a plaited bun at the nape of her neck, and she had deep, hooded eyes: the eyes of a matriarchal turtle. At eighty-five her sight was not so good as it had been and, although she didn’t bump into furniture and could still measure ingredients when she was cooking, she gave the impression of looking beyond the object of her regard. Arabella said she was a seer.
‘When do we take it to the other room?’ the girl asked, indicating the food. She wore a white jersey and a red flannel skirt to below her knees, and Lapp boots. With her curling black hair and the deep Rumney eyes—a very dark blue in her case—she was a vivid complement to the old lady.
‘We don’t set the table till she comes.’ There was reproof in the tone. ‘Food would look bad in the room, catching dust.’
‘It’s doing that here.’
‘She can’t see it though.’
‘I wonder what she’s really like,’ Arabella mused, going to stand in the window. ‘Tough as old boots, Zeke says; all leather brogues and Scottish tweeds: everybody’s maiden aunt—that’s what he said, and a climber and a lawyer as well. What a wild mixture!’
‘No, it’s your uncle’s old friend, Ted Roberts, who’s the retired lawyer. This lady is his friend; I believe there’s an understanding between them.’ Arabella stared. ‘She writes love stories,’ Grannie continued, ‘and she’s a magistrate and Mr Roberts says she’ll catch the man who’s stealing our sheep.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ Arabella breathed. ‘There’s Zeke; oh look, he hasn’t changed his clothes!’
Rumney and the old collie came in the back door (which was in the front of the house but called the back to distinguish it from the main entrance which was down the street a bit). He regarded his womenfolk and the food anxiously.
‘I hope she’s not going to be late,’ he said. ‘Penelope looks as if she’s coming down.’
‘Coming down?’ Arabella glowed with delight.
‘Calving—and she’s one you have to be with all the time; she frets on her own.’
The dog pricked his ears and stared at the door. Rumney cocked his head. Grannie, who appeared to be counting the scones, asked, ‘Is that her?’ A dark Austin 1100 s
lid to a halt outside the window.
There was the familiar movement of a lady picking up her handbag from the passenger seat, then the driver’s door opened and Miss Pink stood up smoothing her skirt and regarding the façade of Sandale House approvingly from behind thick spectacles. Rumney and the collie went out by the back door in order to admit her ceremoniously by way of the main entrance. Arabella and Grannie went through to the living room, carefully shutting the door behind them to keep animals out of the kitchen.
Everyone entered the living room by different doors and Grannie launched into a little speech of welcome while Arabella took stock of the visitor.
There were the brogues: beautifully polished with huge serrated tongues; ribbed brown stockings, and a coat and skirt in a tweed which fairly reeked of peat smoke. The shirt was in cream silk and the brooch at Miss Pink’s throat was a cairngorm. Her hair was thick, grey and tapered by an expert, her face round and roughened by Cornish gales. The frames of her spectacles were large, in a fetching marbled green. She carried a tan leather handbag and soft brown gloves.
She greeted them, smiled at Grannie and Arabella and allowed herself to be seated in the best chair, which was placed by the range and opposite the jutting partition which protected the hearth from draughts. Having calculated how long she might withstand the heat from the fire, she had a momentary qualm when she observed that what she had taken for a very large dog on the hearth-rug was coloured curiously in the firelight and had far too many little legs, perfectly formed. When Arabella switched on a light this was revealed as a number of sleeping cats in an arrangement reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch but more pleasing.
She answered polite questions about the journey from Cornwall and, after a decent interval, Grannie went out to the kitchen and Arabella started to bring in the food. As Miss Pink chatted she absorbed the atmosphere of this large low-ceilinged room where massive oak pieces stood in the shadows, hams hung from hooks, and twin seventeenth-century spice cupboards were set in the plastered wall either side of the Victorian range.
Tea arrived, with home-made scones. Rumney drank delicately, his cup held in large red hands, the fingers swollen from working in the cold. Arabella explained about her being American and that normally she lived in Texas and that her mother had just parted from her second husband so Arabella had come to England not because she was unhappy but to let the others work things out, as she put it. Then she stopped talking because she thought other people’s marital affairs were boring. There was a break in the conversation.