by Gwen Moffat
‘One assumes—’ she emphasised the verb heavily, ‘that she was tired when she reached the pass—perhaps she’d damaged an ankle—and she decided to come down at that point. She would come straight down the headwall and the corrie to the tent. The objection to that is the absence of food wrappings anywhere, either in the hole by the Stone Man or in her pack, and the missing water bottle.’
‘I get the impression,’ Merrick said, ‘that there’s a fringe element among climbers who wouldn’t be averse to a bit of pilfering. Surely food and drink on a mountain would be most welcome?’
‘No one would know it was there. She put a stone across the hole.’
‘If it was necessary: this food,’ Ivory put in, ‘would she have to abandon the trip if it was stolen?’
‘It isn’t essential, but if she was tired and found there was no food, if she reached the cache during a storm—yes, I think finding it stolen could be the final straw and she’d abandon the trip.’
‘Surely that’s irrelevant,’ Merrick said. ‘Whether she ate the food or someone else did, it’s most likely she came down the corrie?’ After some hesitation Miss Pink nodded, but her expression was doubtful.
They’d come out on the lip of the ravine and now they stopped to look across at the waterfall. She had a sudden vision of a body going over the top and she winced.
‘I hope she was dead.’
‘If she was alive at the top, death was instantaneous at the bottom.’ Merrick had read her correctly.
‘I heard that a pathologist came up. Did he help you?’
‘Not really, not at this stage. He was surprised to find no rigor, but then she was in cold water all night; that would delay it. He’d expect it to set in very quickly once the body was removed from the burn.’
‘It was only in a few inches of water; it wasn’t submerged.’
‘We’ll have to wait and see whether she died from a fractured skull or was drowned. You know we have the autopsy on the Cooke girl? Manual strangulation, no pregnancy, no recent intercourse. We’re looking for Watkins and Lindsay,’ he added grimly. ‘None of the common motives for a sex crime apply in Cooke’s case—she wasn’t pregnant, wasn’t raped; perhaps we’ll give motive a miss, eh, and just go for the chaps who made off as soon as they saw their chance?’ He was angry. Miss Pink asked diffidently: ‘Have they left the island?’
‘If they have, they didn’t take that van. We’ve got the numbers of all the vehicles going over to the mainland and Watkins’ Ford isn’t among them.’
They made their way round the lip of the ravine to the top of the fall where Miss Pink followed the bank so meticulously that they were able to inspect every yard of the burn’s course.
‘We’ve removed the sandals and the pan,’ Merrick told her. She nodded absently. ‘What are you interested in now, ma’am?’
‘The depth of the water, and the rate of flow.’
‘The Fiscal came up here; he said these burns rise and fall very quickly, that there was no question but a body would be carried down when the water was in spate.’
‘I agree, but there was no spate yesterday; the burns were very low indeed, and we never had enough rain for a flood.’
The tent was still in position but Madge’s possessions had been removed from the grass. Suddenly Merrick said, ‘You’re a climber, ma’am; could you explain the sequence of events when she came down from the climb: having regard to how her things were disposed when you came up this morning?’
‘You mean, a reconstruction?’
‘Not physically. If you want, but a commentary on her movements might help. Shall we try it?’
‘Yes. Well, she’d approach the tent from the corrie—if one assumes that she came down from the pass—’
‘Just a minute,’ Merrick interrupted. ‘When you came down yesterday with Maynard, can you remember how the tent was?’
‘As it is now.’
‘With these buttons done up?’
‘You couldn’t tell from the Coire Lagan path; it’s two or three hundred yards away—but the flaps must have been fastened to the peg as they are now or the outline would have looked different.’
‘Go on, ma’am; what would be the sequence when she arrives at the tent?’
Miss Pink walked away a few paces, came back and stopped. ‘She’d take off her rucksack first—’ She glowered at them, trying to identify with the dead guide. ‘You’ve taken the whisky bottle away?’
‘Yes.’
She frowned at the tent flaps. ‘That whisky would have needed to be remarkably close to the entrance for her to reach inside without undoing the flaps.’ She looked at Merrick. ‘I think she must have flicked them off the tent peg. She had to.’
‘She’d take her gloves off first?’
‘She wouldn’t be wearing gloves.’ She smiled politely. ‘No one wears gloves at this time of the year; not coming down a corrie anyway.’ She flicked back the tent flaps. ‘I see you’ve taken all the gear. She was a tidy person; I think the whisky would have been in the big rucksack that was at the back of the tent, hidden from sight if someone looked in casually. She would have a drink at this point, then she’d take off her boots and socks.’
‘The bottle?’
She was puzzled. ‘She’d put that down.’
‘After screwing the top on,’ Ivory pointed out.
She saw that there was more to the whisky bottle than she’d been thinking herself, but she didn’t comment.
‘After she’d taken off boots and socks, she’d go back to the tent for the billies, disassemble them if they were fitted together, take the little saucepan. . . . At some point she put on her sandals but didn’t buckle them. That was unbelievably careless when she was going to climb down into the burn for water. She must have had more whisky. Of course she did! There was so little left. You must take it as read that, between these actions, of finding the billies and putting on her sandals, she takes an odd swig of whisky.’
‘Rather a chore, isn’t it?’ Merrick observed.
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘Not so much a chore as a muddle: take a dram, put the top on, fetch the pans, another dram, fetch the sandals, a dram—’
‘Maybe she just sat down and drank.’
‘Yes, ma’am. You’ve got your sandals on, unfastened, and you go to the burn with the pan.’
They tramped through the heather to the slabby section above the fifteen-foot wall.
‘Maynard showed us where he found the first sandal,’ Merrick told her.
‘She could have stumbled and gone over here,’ Miss Pink suggested, ‘or she slipped when she was actually getting the water a few feet upstream, but if there was enough water to carry the body down, you’d expect the sandals to have floated farther.’
‘So she went over and hit her head. On what, do you think?’
‘Any rock down there.’ Miss Pink was morose. ‘You can take your pick.’
‘The hazards of camping,’ Merrick remarked facetiously as they made their way back to the tent. The flaps hung loosely as Miss Pink had left them.
‘When are the flaps closed?’ she asked. No one answered her. ‘Well,’ she conceded, ‘if there were a sudden shower when she went for water, she could have slipped the loops over the peg to prevent the rain blowing in, but then she forgot to throw her socks inside. Dark, perhaps? And she was drunk.’ She looked at Merrick. ‘I don’t like that whisky. She had none on Wednesday.’
‘Maynard told us, so she must have bought another bottle when she took her car to Sligachan.’
‘Have you rung Sligachan?’
‘No. We will.’
‘It’s the only explanation,’ Miss Pink said, ‘that she was drunk. She could never have fallen in a burn sober, not Madge.’ Her face creased with bewilderment. ‘But you don’t drink a great deal of whisky when you come down off the hill; you need pints of fluid like tea. I saw her take a dram once at the end of the day, but another time, when she was thirsty, she drank lager.
She’d certainly be dehydrated yesterday; the sun was blazing above the fog.’
‘The autopsy will tell us how much she drank, if she drank much.’
‘Who would have drunk the rest?’
‘If it was a full bottle to start with? That may be difficult to determine. There was one good set of her prints on the bottle, that’s all.’
‘You’d expect—’ She blinked and started as the statement penetrated. ‘One set!’ She remembered her reconstruction of Madge’s behaviour, the number of times the guide must have handled the bottle. ‘It should be covered with her prints!’
‘One set,’ he repeated, ‘and under that it’s a mass of greasy smudges.’
‘It had been wiped.’
‘Or handled by someone with gloves.’
‘So that’s why you wanted to know if she’d be wearing gloves.’ She paused, then stated coldly, ‘She had a visitor. That would explain it. He was waiting for her when she came down, he’d got cold and put on gloves. It wasn’t cold though. When she arrived he drank most of the whisky; she had one dram and left her prints on it.’
‘Then he went down and she fell in the river,’ Merrick said baldly. ‘The billies have got smudge marks on them too, over her prints.’
‘And the pan in the water?’
‘Her prints only.’
*
Back at the house tea was ordered for three in the writing room. Ivory disappeared, and while they waited, Merrick asked Miss Pink who had been absent from the cocktail lounge last evening.
‘I was absent myself for a few minutes after dinner; I was in the garden with Lavender Maynard. I didn’t notice any gaps before dinner; certainly no one was absent afterwards. Vera Hamlyn joined us. Her husband was behind the bar, and the Maynards and Betty Lindsay were there. Nothing untoward happened at all. I went to bed about eleven. The Maynards had gone up then. I thought the others followed me. You’re only interested in the time after dark, surely? Before dark, anyone would have been seen going up to the tent.’
He was thoughtful. ‘Unless he’d gone up much earlier, gone in the tent to wait for her, and come down after dark.’
‘No one was absent from the house for that length of time.’
Ivory came back and held the door for Euphemia bringing the tea. Her face was blank. When she’d gone, Merrick nodded to his sergeant.
He had telephoned the Sligachan Hotel. One of the maids had been off-duty on Wednesday afternoon when Madge Fraser arrived in her Simca. She’d parked it behind the hotel, locked it, waved to the girl (who knew her by sight), and started straight back. She hitched the first car that came along and it picked her up. She was never nearer the hotel than the lay-by where she left the car, so she didn’t buy the whisky there. Her Simca, Ivory added, was still where she’d parked it at Sligachan.
Merrick passed a cup of tea to Miss Pink. ‘And you’re certain she had no whisky that morning, ma’am?’
‘Not certain; I believed her, and I saw the empty bottle.’
‘There’s no empty bottle among her effects,’ Ivory said, handing the scones.
‘The Fiscal doesn’t like it.’ Merrick was gloomy. ‘Two violent deaths in four days. Both to young girls. Of course, you do get coincidences.’ There were long pauses between his sentences. ‘The other one was murder. We let Willie MacNeill go yesterday; nothing to hold him on. He was only helping us. Some help he was!’
‘Does he still tell the same story?’ Miss Pink asked.
‘About the woman washing billies in the burn? Funny, both these cases. . . . Yes, he sticks to that. Why did Madge Fraser leave the house, ma’am? When she asked my permission to do so she intimated that Mrs Maynard objected to her presence here.’
‘There was an enormous amount of tension after Terry’s death. Everyone was snappy and liable to jump to conclusions. Vera Hamlyn thought that Madge was too friendly with her husband.’
‘Anything in it?’
‘I—don’t know.’
There was a knock at the door and Ida Hunt looked in. ‘There’s a telephone call for Inspector Merrick,’ she told him coldly.
He excused himself and went out. In his absence Miss Pink learned that Ivory disliked hotels and was homesick for his wife’s cooking. He wasn’t enamoured of the Terry Cooke case; it wasn’t what he was used to, except the disposal in Scarf Geo. They were not unfamiliar with bodies on tips; particularly burning tips—
‘But drowning will be more familiar,’ she put in firmly. ‘You’ll have had a few of those. Rather run of the mill?’
‘Well, no; Madge Fraser is quite interesting: did she fall or was she—’ He stopped and grabbed clumsily for a scone.
‘The C.I.D. don’t investigate accidents.’ She was casual.
‘We were on a murder case,’ he said with dignity, ‘and the Fiscal didn’t like it.’
Merrick came back. ‘Message from the pathologist.’ His eyes were keen and hard in the haggard face. ‘She was smothered.’
There was a long silence during which Merrick poured himself a second cup of tea, Ivory studied the floor and Miss Pink’s mind changed gear. She experienced a blankness at first, then came the awareness that at least some of the pieces were about to click into place.
Ivory spoke first. ‘The Fiscal was right then.’
Merrick addressed Miss Pink. ‘You expected it, ma’am; you drew our attention to the whisky, and the tent being fastened. Then there was the level of the burn.’
‘There was something wrong. But I didn’t expect—I’m shocked at the method. What was the rest of the report?’
‘It was only a preliminary and only a message. He knew I’d like to know as soon as he discovered that. There’s a lot of work to do yet. There are stomach contents and blood to be analysed. But we’ve got enough to be going on with—’ He stopped and regarded her with raised eyebrows. ‘And you can vouch for everyone from—when?’
‘Six-thirty perhaps; long before dark.’
‘Until eleven, except that you say the Maynards went up before. How long before?’
‘About a quarter of an hour.’
‘Two married couples and Betty Lindsay.’ He looked at Ivory. ‘We’ll see them next, but unless a couple’s in collusion, or it’s Betty Lindsay, it wasn’t done after they went to bed—not, that is, by a resident of this house. Failing that, it was someone from outside, or it wasn’t done when we assume it was. We don’t know the time of death. Who was the last innocent person to see her alive?’
‘So far as we know,’ Ivory said, ‘the people who picked her up at Sligachan.’
‘They’ll have to be traced. That still leaves twenty-four hours during which someone must have seen her. We want some help back here.’ He was brisk now. He addressed Miss Pink. ‘If you’ll give Ivory a list of people’s movements from when you came down to the house yesterday. . . .’ His voice dropped. ‘Alibis can be faked—’
‘No one can fake his presence,’ Miss Pink said stoutly. ‘If she was killed when X was under my eye in the lounge, then X can’t be the killer, not in this context.’
‘That follows. So we have to fix the time of death. What is the earliest time that she could have reached that pass?’
‘That’s a difficult one. We don’t know what time she started, but even if she was north of Alasdair when we reached it, I don’t think she’d get to the pass before two, and an hour to reach the tent. . . . But we came down at four-thirty and she wasn’t at the tent then! It was closed.’
‘Would you see that gear: the little rucksack, the boots and socks, from the path you were on?’
‘No, that would be quite impossible.’
‘So she could have been there and asleep inside the tent.’ He turned to Ivory. ‘We’ll make a start on people’s movements then, double-checking wherever possible. We’ll have help within the hour. We’ll intensify the search for Watkins and Lindsay because if it was someone outside the house, my money’s on them rather than Colin Irwin. And although everyone’s under su
spicion, it’s got to be impressed on them, that no one must do anything, go anywhere, alone. That applies particularly to you, ma’am. Cooke’s appears to have been a murder on impulse, but this last one was carefully worked out. There’s a very clever killer somewhere and even now, with this second murder, we don’t know why he killed.’
Chapter Fifteen
Excluding herself there were thirteen people whose movements the detectives were anxious to determine. Ivory made a list; Miss Pink, searching her memory, told him where people had been to her certain knowledge, but when whereabouts were a matter of assumption or hearsay, the information was queried.
At the end they sat back and regarded each other: Ivory showing resignation, Miss Pink annoyance; there was a query against every name on the list. But as she rejected the possibility of collusion between the married people in the house, she remembered the disappearance of sleeping capsules from the Maynards’ room. Ivory noted the information stolidly but lifted his eyebrows at the thought of the killer slipping from the house after dropping Tuinal in a nightcap.
As for the movements of the crofting women: Ida had waited at dinner and subsequently there had been glimpses of her and Euphemia, and Vera Hamlyn, in the kitchen, when Hamlyn went through for ice. The women had gone home about eight thirty. After that they were an unknown quantity as, indeed, were Captain Hunt and Irwin for the whole of the period under review: yesterday afternoon and evening—and night.
Lindsay, Watkins and the two MacNeills were the remaining suspects, and the only help she could give there related to the MacNeills. She repeated Irwin’s information that the old man had gone to Portree, ostensibly to join Willie. The son had left the police station at eleven o’clock yesterday morning, Ivory told her. The MacNeills seemed to have vanished between Portree and Glen Shira.
At five-thirty Euphemia served Miss Pink with a large sherry and she went upstairs to steep gently in her bath. Before she dressed, she made a personal list. She wrote: ‘Where is the water bottle, and why is it missing?’—‘Why was the tent fastened?’—but almost immediately she answered that one: ‘To delay discovery.’ She contemplated this at length, then queried it. The third question needed careful framing: ‘If X took the whisky to the tent in order to get Madge drunk, how was she induced to drink it?’ and ‘Is half a pint sufficient to stop the victim struggling when smothered?’ No one could imagine Madge being easy to kill.