Dead on Dartmoor

by Stephanie Austin

  I saw grey sky and the tops of bare trees. Rooks, like scraps of burnt paper, rose up, calling. In front of me the roof sloped down about four feet towards a narrow gutter strewn with broken slates. In front of that was a stone parapet, about a foot in height, ornamental stone balls along its length. I placed my hands on the slates to either side of me and pushed down, wriggling my hips through the hole, out onto the roof. I sat for a moment, getting my breath. Then I stretched my legs down the slope of the roof and lay back, letting my body slide down, very slowly, until my feet were in the gutter. I bent my knees and lowered myself carefully, turning my body sideways so that I could rest in the gutter on all fours.

  I peered cautiously over the parapet. It was a very long way down. Parked cars lined up on the drive looked like toys. The audience for the afternoon concert had already arrived. I crawled along the gutter until I turned the corner of the roof and peered over again. Now I was at the back of the house, looking down at the flagstones of the terrace.

  Below me the long windows of the ballroom were open. It was a grey, still day, curiously mild. Perhaps those sitting in the concert felt a need for fresh air, but the open windows allowed the sound of laughter and applause to float up to me. Ricky and Morris were well away. All I had to do was to get down there, where they were. Somehow.

  The old wisteria had been climbing the wall for generations, its furthermost tendrils stretched to a third-storey window about ten feet below me. But those delicate stems would not support my weight. I needed to place my feet on stronger boughs, further down. I knew that if I lowered myself over the parapet, even at full stretch, I wasn’t going to reach down far enough. I would be a couple of feet short. I needed a rope, and there was no such help to hand.

  I sat down in the gutter and unlaced my boots, taking them off and stripping off my socks. They were covered in a thick layer of dust; so were my jeans, which I stripped off next. It was tricky getting out of them; I had to lie down in the gutter to wriggle them over my hips. I sat up and peered over the parapet again. I didn’t want to do what I had to do next, but little Alice Collins was depending on me. I wondered whether I should put my boots back on. But for what I had to do next I needed to be able to feel with my toes, I needed the flexibility of a bare foot.

  I took a deep breath and crawled up onto the parapet. My arms started to tremble and I felt sick, but I didn’t have time for hesitation. Dean didn’t have time. If I thought about it too long my nerve would fail. A foot away was a stone ball and I gave it an experimental shove. It didn’t budge. I looped my jeans around it and tied them in a knot, like a scarf around the neck of a snowman. Then I wound the denim legs around my wrists. They would give me another two feet or so. I was sweating, though my mouth felt sucked dry.

  I stretched one leg over the parapet, feeling for the wall with my foot, bracing my toes against the rough stone. This is the worst bit, I told myself. Remember when you did that charity abseil off Haytor? This is just the same. Except on the abseil, there were proper ropes and a safety harness, and instructors. My life did not depend on a pair of recently purchased, extra-long, pre-loved jeans. I do not pray to any conventional god. If I pray at all, it is to Cordelia. She is the saint who must intercede for me with heaven. I prayed to her now. Don’t let me fall. And I swung my other leg down over the parapet.

  For one horrible moment I dangled, legs flailing, arms at full stretch as I clung desperately to handfuls of blue denim, dreading the sound of tearing fabric, of ripping seams.

  Good old Mr Levi. The jeans bore my weight as I clung, toes scrabbling until I found a foothold, a branch sturdy enough to take the weight of my searching foot, a slenderer stem within reach of my hand.

  I let go of one denim leg and grabbed. My other foot found a place to rest. For a moment I just stayed there, breathing hard, my heart racing in my chest. Then I let go of my jeans with the other hand and grasped the stem in front of me. Applause floated up from the windows below. ‘Thanks,’ I muttered. I felt I deserved it.

  Wisteria stems, when they are young and green, twine around each other. As they thicken and stiffen with age, the stems become twisted ropes, ideal for climbing. I clung tight with my right hand as I slid my left down as far as I could reach. I didn’t want to look down, so my fingers fumbled blindly until they closed around a branch. Then I moved one foot and began to search for a lower foothold. I inched my way downward, hand and foot, hand and foot, placing each carefully, testing whether it would take my weight, before I dared to move on. Below me, I could hear Ricky playing the piano, Morris singing some fast-paced patter song, but I couldn’t identify it, couldn’t pick out the words.

  I stopped to rest for a moment. My arms were shaking, my hands so slippery with sweat I was scared stems might slide through my fingers, leave me clutching at nothing but air. Autumn had stripped the wisteria of its leaves, leaving bare stems. Now and again a blackened, withered seed pod dangled in front of my face like an ancient runner bean. Wisteria seeds are poisonous, I remembered reading somewhere, and should not be ingested. I don’t know why this struck me as funny – hysteria, I suppose – but I let out my breath in a silent laugh.

  I dared not look down, so I looked up. I was below the windows of the third storey, which meant I must be drawing level with the windows of the second. Making progress, slowly. The fall would still kill me, but I wasn’t going to fall. As I clambered down the twisted stems of the wisteria thickened and felt stronger. I dared to move more swiftly. The windows of the second storey were above me now. I risked a peep down, down to the wide-flung French windows immediately below me, down to the stone-flagged terrace just waiting to break my back, to smash my skull. For a moment the world swirled dizzyingly and I clamped my eyes shut. I clung on.

  Then I heard a voice, far above.

  ‘Look up, bitch!’

  Green Bastard Hat was leaning over the parapet, aiming a shotgun straight at me. I froze, staring up at the barrels. I was a sitting duck. He grinned, his finger on the trigger. Then two things happened at once. He leapt back, swearing, swiping at something in the air that seemed to be buzzing around his head like an angry hornet. And I experienced a sickening sense of movement as the stems that I was clutching began to tear themselves slowly from the wall. I clung on as a hundred years of growth peeled itself away from its moorings. Branches snapped, stems slid through my fingers as the old trunk groaned and the whole plant arched away from the wall, taking me with it, dangling me over the terrace like a fish on a hook. Then the old trunk snapped. I seemed to be surrounded by a moving mesh of branches that landed me in a heap on the terrace and as I let go, slid me bodily through the open windows of the ballroom. Miraculously, I landed on my feet.

  I stood there in my T-shirt and knickers, bare-legged as any warrior queen, as two hundred people turned to stare at me. Ricky, hands poised over the keyboard, gaped open-mouthed. In the one still moment before all hell broke loose, Morris, standing before the piano, managed a little smile. ‘Hello, Juno,’ he said. ‘Good of you to drop in.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  You can explain away a lot of things. You can, perhaps, explain the unexpected delivery by wisteria of a wild-haired woman in her underwear, covered in blood. But you cannot explain the presence in a locked attic of a police officer suffering from a gunshot wound. More particularly, you cannot explain it to other police officers, who seemed to arrive, as if by magic, moments after I had made my entrance into the ballroom.

  Later, when things had calmed down, I asked Inspector Ford how they had arrived so quickly. Apparently, the police had received an anonymous tip-off from someone illegally flying a drone over private property that a woman was clinging on halfway up the wall of Moorworthy House while a man on the roof was pointing a shotgun at her.

  By this time, I was decently covered in a coat belonging to Margaret, Wicked Witch of the West, and Dean had been carried off to hospital in a helicopter, which arrived, spectacularly, on the lawn; the Westershalls had been arres
ted for murder, kidnap and conspiring to kill a police officer and Mrs Johnson and Moss taken away for questioning. The last I saw of Green Bastard Hat was as he was trying to escape across the lawn, pursued by a string of uniforms. Way out in front of the pack, gaining on him fast, was none other than Detective Constable Cruella DeVille. I had to hand it to her, she could leg it.

  ‘Go, girl!’ I cheered her silently. But she came to a skidding halt, arms windmilling, struggling to keep her balance on the edge of a precipice as GBH dropped out of sight a few feet before her. Apparently, he broke his pelvis. Ha-ha.

  He did nick the next available ambulance, though. And as there was no way that Inspector Ford was allowing me to go home without visiting the local accident and emergency, I was driven to hospital in a police car. As we swept out through the gates of Moorworthy House I spotted a vehicle parked across the road, and standing anxiously on the verge, Elizabeth and Olly. They waved as I swept by. I waved back frantically and cried all the way to hospital.

  Most of the blood I was wearing was not my own. It belonged to Dean. I kept asking about him but all anyone could tell me was that he had been flown down to Plymouth for emergency surgery. Inspector Ford promised me an update as soon as he heard anything. And he would take my statement next morning. Meanwhile I had a lot of bruises and scrapes to be attended to. Elbows, knees and knuckles had come off particularly badly. I went through an hour and a half of antiseptic, gauze and wincing before I was finally allowed to go home. The doctor wanted to keep me overnight for observation, but I declined. I asked the nice nurse if she would order me a taxi.

  ‘You won’t need one,’ she told me as she swept back the plastic curtain of the cubicle I’d been treated in. Ricky and Morris were sitting in the corridor in their dinner jackets and bow ties. ‘These two gentlemen have been waiting to drive you home.’

  But the wrong man died that day. It should have been wicked Uncle Sandy who made an excuse to go into the study, who put the barrel of the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger, but it was Jamie.

  ‘Too proud,’ Sandy said sadly, as the police took him away. ‘Like his father, always too proud.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were watching Moorworthy House,’ I said naively to Inspector Ford when he visited me next day.

  He responded with the ghost of a smile. ‘Just because you have an uncanny, and some might say, unfortunate knack of discovering dead bodies, Miss Browne, does not oblige us to let you in on all of our secrets.’

  I felt like a fool. ‘No, no,’ I mumbled, ‘of course not.’

  ‘But I would like to thank you, Juno,’ he went on, ‘on behalf of Constable Collins and his wife and daughter. What you did was very brave.’

  I blushed and came over all unnecessary and mumbled something incoherent. ‘And he’s going to be all right?’ I managed at last.

  The inspector smiled. ‘He is.’

  ‘So, what happens now, to the Westershalls, I mean?’

  ‘Sandy Westershall will be charged with the murders of Nathan Parr, Ben Luscombe, Ted Croaker and the attempted murder of Dean Collins. In addition, Emma Westershall is facing certain drugs charges. Pike is in hospital under guard and will be charged with your attempted murder. Meanwhile our colleagues in London are interviewing the board members of Dravizax.’ I must have looked taken aback at all this because the inspector laughed.

  ‘Mr Moss has been very co-operative − singing like a canary, in fact. His conscience was troubling him. I don’t think Mrs Johnson has any trouble with her conscience, but she knows which side her bread is buttered − and your own statement corroborates theirs to an extent. What you and Collins discovered in Applecote Pit and the tunnel leading to the Moorworthy mine is just the tip of the iceberg. Moss and Pike have been dumping hazardous waste for Dravizax in holes all over the country. The Westershalls are not the only landowners receiving a kickback from them – and Dravizax is not the Westershalls’ only customer, either.’

  I felt sorry for Jess. Her fiancé was dead and her father would be going to prison. And she’d known nothing at all about what was going on.

  ‘And Gavin?’ I asked. ‘Is anyone going to be charged with his murder?’

  The inspector puffed out his cheeks in a sigh. ‘If Emma Westershall is to be believed, his death really was an accident. Unfortunately, we have not so far been able to lay hands on Mr Eddie Coates to get his version of events, but we will. Let’s just say our investigation into Gavin’s death is not yet concluded.’

  Poor Gavin. He should have been the hero of this story. He should have been the one to slay the evil giant Dravizax with the Sword of Virangha. I took Olly to meet his parents and we showed them the film taken by the drone, film that showed Gavin waving and looking so happy. Olly sent it to their computer, so that they would have it for ever.

  I went down to Plymouth to visit Dean in Derriford Hospital. By then the Environmental Protection Agency had moved into the mines at Moorworthy to begin removing the hazardous waste and decontaminate the site. Alec Pedrick had been taken on as a consultant to advise them about the bats. Apparently, they were due to hibernate very soon and there were great concerns about disturbing their roost.

  When I got to the hospital, Dean’s wife, Gemma, was by his bedside, along with Alice. I held the baby for a few minutes. She was sleeping soundly, her little pink eyelids tight shut. She didn’t wake, but when I moved her rosebud fist away from her mouth, I swear she smiled at me. Dean was going to be fine after a spell in hospital and plenty of TLC.

  TLC: tender loving care. It sounds great, doesn’t it? I often feel I could do with more of it myself. But after a few days of Ricky and Morris clucking round me like mother hens, during which time Ricky stole my diary and cancelled all my appointments for the week, I decided there’s a limit to how much TLC I can take. But we did rescue my van, my rucksack, my phone and, eventually, my jeans. And the Wicked Witch of the West got her coat back.

  ‘We knew something was wrong when you didn’t turn up,’ Elizabeth told me when I finally made it to tea. ‘We knew you wouldn’t let us down without contacting us.’

  Olly nodded. ‘We called you lots of times.’

  ‘I was probably in a tunnel.’

  ‘So we decided to phone your friend Pat at the animal sanctuary—’

  ‘And she was worried an’ all,’ Olly interrupted, ‘because you hadn’t turned up in the afternoon for your shift at the shop. And she’d been trying to get hold of you—’

  And she phoned Adam and Kate, I said to myself. I’d already heard all this from the various parties concerned, but I didn’t want to spoil Olly’s story. Kate had insisted on contacting the police, but until I had been missing for twenty-four hours the local station weren’t prepared to consider me a missing person. So they phoned them again next morning, when I hadn’t come home for breakfast.

  ‘It was Olly’s idea to search for you next morning with the drone,’ Elizabeth went on. ‘He was sure you’d gone to Moorworthy—’

  ‘I had this feeling!’ he declared dramatically.

  ‘We thought if we flew it over the Moorworthy estate we might see your van.’

  ‘I’d parked it on Holne Moor.’

  Elizabeth smiled. ‘I practically drove past it, but Olly spotted it. I thought you might have gone walking and got lost on the moor. But Olly wanted to fly the drone over Moorworthy House one last time − and there you were!’

  ‘I buzzed him, that fat bloke on the roof, the one with the gun, I buzzed him with the drone.’ Olly’s face was alight, blue eyes brimming with excitement. ‘Did you see it?’

  ‘Of course I did,’ I told him. ‘If you hadn’t done what you did, I’d have got my head shot off.’

  ‘We’ve got it on film. We had to email a copy to the police so they could see it. It’s ever so funny, all buzzing round his head. Do you want to see it?’

  ‘Later,’ Elizabeth said firmly. ‘Let Juno eat her tea.’

  She and Olly seemed to be getting on well.
The house was more cheerful, somehow. Olly had always kept it tidy, but now it seemed brighter, more polished, as if it had lost its dusty corners, the rooms aired and more lived-in. There was a vase of fresh flowers on the kitchen table, and there were plans afoot to redecorate Elizabeth’s bedroom.

  I was sure Olly had shot up inches since I last saw him. Free from the fear of discovery, the burden of living on his own, he seemed to be blossoming. I asked Elizabeth how things were, later, whilst he was watching the new widescreen TV that she had bought.

  ‘Bribery and corruption,’ she admitted, ‘but it works.’

  I eyed her doubtfully. ‘No teething problems?’

  ‘Of course. But I persuaded Olly that we didn’t always have to abide by Dolly’s rules, we could make up new ones of our own, as long as we both agreed on them. And so far, it’s working. Actually, I believe that he enjoys having someone to boss him a little, he feels more secure.’ Toby, who’d been luxuriating in the heat of the Rayburn, decided to stretch his limbs and strolled over, leaping up onto Elizabeth’s lap. She stroked his head pensively. ‘We’re happy here in Ashburton, Toby and me. I’ve joined the choir at St Andrew’s and I plan to find a part-time job.’

  ‘So you’re going to stay?’

  ‘There are important things to think about. Olly will have to decide on options for his GCSE exams soon. He wants to go on to A levels and university and the standard of his written English is dreadful. I’ve told him, it needs a lot of work. And I’d like to buy him a new bassoon. The instrument he has on loan from the youth band is pretty basic. He deserves a better one.’

  ‘You think he has talent?’

  ‘He has an excellent embouchure and, for one so puny, produces a pleasingly deep and mellow tone. The bassoon is not an easy instrument to play, which is why there aren’t that many players around. A bassoonist is never out of work.’ She laughed. ‘Not that Olly is considering music as a career at the moment.’