The Hunted Hare

by Fay Sampson

  Sian had just been ushered into the house in the custody of DS Lincoln.

  Lorna looked, startled, across the lounge crowded with the Davisons and the police. When she saw Sian in handcuffs her mouth fell open in dismay. The earthenware urn started to slip from her protective arms.

  Aidan dived forward to catch it.

  He stood, cradling it as she had. He was half afraid his shielding arms would crush the fragile pottery. Hairs prickled on the back of his neck. This might really be what Caradoc Lewis believed it was, or wished others to believe. A sacred object from thousands of years ago. The ancient hare of Pennant Melangell.

  But a very twenty-first-century drama was crackling across the space between the black-haired girl so close to him now and the woman who had very nearly killed Jenny to protect her.

  Inspector Denbigh looked from one to the other. He was taking his time. Aidan sensed his dilemma. All the proof he had that Lorna had stabbed Thaddaeus was the fact that Sian had boasted to Jenny that she could have killed her employer more discreetly if Lorna had asked her to. And that Jenny had heard someone running to Lorna’s bedroom just after the time of the murder. Hearsay. Circumstantial evidence.

  In all probability, Sian would confess to the murder to save Lorna.

  A new voice broke into the tension. Euan Jones’s deep Welsh accent.

  “It wasn’t her. I did it.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  THE YOUNG GARDENER’S FACE looked yellow, which was as pale as his weathered skin would allow. His dark brown eyes were wide and fearful.

  Aidan glanced swiftly round at Lorna. Her white, proud face showed no change of emotion. There was none of the shock she had shown when she saw Sian in handcuffs. Could it be true? Had Lorna known all along that it was Euan who had murdered her uncle?

  But what had Jenny meant about Sian’s admission of Lorna’s guilt?

  His eyes went back to the handcuffed Sian. At once he registered the change in her. Her head was up. Her eyes had brightened. He knew she was seeing a way out for Lorna.

  Neither woman said anything. They let Euan’s confession stand.

  Could he really have done it?

  Chief Inspector Denbigh walked slowly across the lounge. He rested his hand on the teenager’s shoulder.

  “Now, boy. Why exactly would you do a thing like that?”

  There was something of the hunted hare in Euan’s face.

  “H-he bullied her. I couldn’t stand it.” It came out as an uncertain croak.

  Denbigh turned to address Lorna. “Is that true?”

  The muscles of her face hardly moved as she answered. “That he bullied me? Yes. I had a quarrel with him that morning. Mr Davison knows about it.” Her eyes met Aidan’s. “At least, he saw me running away from him. He asked me why I was upset.”

  “And you told Euan?”

  “Yes.”

  True or not, Euan’s doing this because he loves her, Aidan thought. But she doesn’t care about him. He’s offering her a way out and she’s taking it.

  But the chief inspector had not finished with Euan. There was still that air of the weary schoolmaster that had impressed itself upon Aidan when they first met.

  “So, boy. You decided to get rid of Mr Brown. You’re the gardener. You have a shed full of tools, any one of which could serve as a murder weapon. Would you mind explaining to me just why you chose an arrow to kill him with? You must have known that suspicion would fall immediately on the young woman who stood to gain by his death and who was one of the few people here who could use a bow. The very person you say you wanted to protect. Lorna Brown.”

  Euan gulped. His eyes darted round the room full of intently listening faces. They came to rest on the sofa where Jenny sat. He pointed.

  “You’re wrong. It was her. Mrs Davison. She’d been shooting at the butts that morning. I hoped they’d think it was her.”

  “I se-ee. A guest who had just arrived at the House of the Hare the previous day. Who had never met Thaddaeus Brown in her life before. What possible motive could we find to charge her?”

  Aidan shuddered, remembering Jenny’s defiant display of her archery before the chief inspector. Of the nightmare in which he had feared that Jenny really might have shot Thaddaeus. He was glad that the inspector had never got to hear that.

  Denbigh shook his head sorrowfully. “Nice try, boy. But it doesn’t add up. I could charge you with wasting police time, or trying to subvert the course of justice. But we’ll let that pass.”

  He moved across the lounge to the foyer, to stand in front of Lorna.

  “Lorna Brown, I am arresting you on a charge of murder.”

  Sian Jenkins let out a yowl like an injured cat.

  Euan’s face crumpled in grief.

  Lorna’s sapphire eyes looked back at the inspector in stony silence.

  After a paralyzed moment, Aidan’s eyes suddenly sought Melangell. In his ears there rang her glad confidence of a few days ago. “I don’t think she did it. She’s nice.”

  Melangell had gone trustingly to the waterfall with Lorna.

  The child’s eyes, a paler blue than Lorna’s, were wide with shock. She turned imploringly to her mother. Jenny took her hand.

  Aidan knew a burst of anger then that almost made him hurl the Iron Age pot at Lorna’s head. Wasn’t it enough that she had murdered her uncle, whether for money, or to escape from his pressure on her, or to save the valley? Did she have to shatter Melangell’s trust in humankind too?

  He strode across the lounge to his daughter.

  Jenny was stroking her hand. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. We thought the same. That Lorna was innocent and someone else was trying to blame it on her.”

  “You’ve hurt your neck,” Melangell said suddenly to her. “Did Lorna do that too?”

  “No, sweetheart. That was something else. I’m all right now.”

  “Aidan Davison, I could kill you!” Marcus Coutts’s voice broke across them. “The perfect shot! Mother and daughter, back from the brink of death. Reunited. And you smashed my camera!”

  Aidan set the urn down very carefully on a coffee table.

  “Unless you remove yourself from this house in the next ten seconds, I might just conceivably smash your head in as well. And I don’t care if half the police in Powys are listening.”

  “Aidan,” said Jenny, quietly. “Peace. It’s over.”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  AS THE DAVISONS CAME DOWN the stairs, a sense of the emptiness of the house struck Jenny.

  “It doesn’t look as if the Ewarts have come back. Do we know there’s even going to be any supper?” she exclaimed. “Who’s in charge now?”

  Aidan laughed at the alarmed face Melangell turned up to them. “Don’t worry, kid. It’s only two miles to the pub.”

  Jenny pushed open the dining room door. She half expected to find the tables bare.

  She hardly had time to glimpse the linen tablecloths, the fluted napkins and the gleaming glasses when the half-forgotten figure of the teenage waitress came bouncing to greet them.

  “Mair! I thought you were back at college.”

  “Well, you’ve got to help out in an emergency, haven’t you? And it’s Friday. Shocking, isn’t it? Who’d have thought it? First Mr Brown. Now Lorna and Sian up for murder. Josef’s in a right state. Lucky it’s just the two tables. And you’re off tomorrow morning, aren’t you?”

  As they took their seats, Aidan looked round at the other table laid for the evening meal. There were two places set.

  “Guess the detectives must be coming back after they’ve taken Lorna and Sian to the police station. Though I can’t think why.”

  Mair was back with the menus. “The police have cleared out that barn they were using. Most of them have gone. What would you like? Josef says he can do you a chicken consommé or a grilled goat’s cheese for starters.”

  When the main course came, Jenny looked down at the medley of courgettes, carrots and beetroot. Into her mind c
ame the vision of the chopping board in the kitchen. The crimson-stained knife. The door opening behind her as Sian came in. She put down her knife and fork.

  Aidan’s hand covered hers.

  They took their coffee on the patio in the padded wicker chairs. Mair brought a little plate piled with squares of fudge.

  “Go on.” Her eyes twinkled at Melangell. She appeared to be revelling in the excitement. “Spoil yourselves.”

  Melangell fell on the fudge with glee.

  It was quiet when Mair had gone.

  “It’s strange having the place to ourselves,” Jenny said. “Almost as if it were our own house.”

  “I wonder what will happen to it now?” Aidan said. “Those guys Secker and McCarthy were supposed to be holding a trust fund for Lorna, since her uncle didn’t change his will. But I don’t suppose she can inherit if she’s… If they find her guilty.”

  “I don’t know the law on that. I don’t imagine they allow you to profit from murder.”

  There were voices barely audible in the dining room. Two men.

  “Sounds like Denbigh and Lincoln are back,” Aidan said.

  “Good. I wanted to say goodbye to them, and thank them. Especially the inspector. He has that wonderfully lugubrious face, like a bloodhound, but he’s a sweetie.”

  They let the stillness of the evening lengthen. There was a faint scent of azaleas. Jenny had positioned her chair so that her back was to the bank of shrubs that masked the archery butts. She focused resolutely on the bed of pink tulips and misty blue forget-me-nots that brightened the space before Euan’s vegetable garden.

  “I wonder what will happen to them now? Josef, Euan. And Mair’s mother does the cleaning. There can’t be much employment around here.”

  There were sounds approaching from the lounge. The two men who had been dining came out on to the patio to join them.

  Mr Secker and Mr McCarthy.

  Jenny started, making the coffee cups rattle. She laughed in embarrassment.

  “Sorry! We thought it was Chief Inspector Denbigh and Sergeant Lincoln in the dining room.”

  Aidan was looking at the men with barely disguised dislike.

  Mr Secker, the smaller of the two, with the round purplish face and wiry curls, rubbed his hands together.

  “No. The good gentlemen of the constabulary – and the delightful WPC Watkins – have folded their tents and departed.”

  “So why are you here?” Aidan asked, brusquely.

  Secker’s thick eyebrows rose. Behind him, the taller figure of McCarthy, with his sleek blond hair, stiffened.

  “A fair question, I suppose.” Secker smiled, thinly. “If Thaddaeus had lived a little longer we should have been in charge of the trust fund he intended to put in his will, to manage his estate until Lorna is twenty-five. But as it is…” He shrugged. “We are still his executors. And as you can imagine, there is quite a legal tangle to sort out. In the meantime, it is in everyone’s interests to keep the House of the Hare as a going concern. Thaddaeus owed us a considerable amount of money for it.”

  “We’ll arrange for one of our staff to come over and manage the house, until we can put it back on a proper footing,” came McCarthy’s deeper voice.

  Aidan was staring at them in incomprehension. “But… you said the trust fund would only have kicked in if Thaddaeus changed his will.”

  “That’s right. Unfortunately. Recent events aside, Lorna was too young for the responsibility he was going to give her.”

  “She had some strange ideas,” McCarthy added.

  “But surely it was the other way round? You had a row with Thaddaeus before he died because he wanted to add a codicil rescinding the trust fund and giving Lorna sole charge of the money.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Sian…”

  Jenny watched Aidan’s features rearrange themselves as the realization struck him.

  “Did she, now?” Secker settled himself into a wicker armchair at the adjacent coffee table. His eyes behind their spectacles were oddly bright. “And you thought that we stood to gain, and Lorna to lose, by the death of her uncle before this codicil was signed?”

  Aidan’s colour rose.

  McCarthy seated himself beside Secker. “No doubt Miss Jenkins wanted to divert your suspicions from Lorna. That might explain why your manner towards us was a little, shall we say, hostile?”

  Jenny thought about the Jaguar speeding down the lane towards them, forcing their own car back. No, she thought, maybe you’re not quite the bad guys we once thought you were. But you could still learn some manners.

  “So what are you going to do now?” she asked. She heard an edge of hostility in her own voice. “I suppose, if Lorna is out of the picture, you’ll go ahead with your plans to turn this into some sort of executive playground. Hang-gliding and bungee jumping from the cliffs by the waterfall.”

  “Sadly, no,” McCarthy put in. He steepled his fingertips and looked at her over them with his pale blue eyes. “We are only Thaddaeus’s executors. And we may not be able to prove his will until we know the result of Lorna’s trial. Until then, we shall look after his affairs. It was unlikely we’d have got planning permission anyway, given the fuss there was over just building this delightful house. And now, with Mr Lewis’s discovery of a collection of bones…”

  “You mean the hare?” Melangell cried. “He didn’t find it. Lorna and I did.”

  “Exactly,” Secker smiled at her. “Well done.” He turned a more businesslike stare back at Jenny and Aidan. “It’s hardly a money-making proposition, I fear. But the man is determined to make something of it. With a newly discovered pagan sacred site, as well as the medieval shrine church…” He shrugged. “Well, you can imagine, anything more commercially viable is going to be on the losing side.”

  “But there’s still the House of the Hare,” Jenny said. “More people will want to come to it now, won’t they?”

  “I rather think we may have the remarkable Mr Coutts to thank for that. He seems determined to get his murder story all over the pages of the tabloids. But the upmarket press will pick up on this hare thing too. Plenty of free publicity.” Secker swung round to Aidan. “You’re a photographer, too, I gather. I take it you had your camera out when the urn with the hare bones was found. If you have a young woman charged with murder digging it up, think what a photograph like that would be worth.”

  Aidan stared at him, speechless. Then he managed to choke out the words.

  “No! I… did… not… take… photographs! I was looking for my kidnapped daughter, for heaven’s sake!”

  Mair appeared with another tray of coffee.

  “There! So you’ll tell Josef he’s still got a job, will you? And Euan?”

  She winked as she offered the second plate of fudge to Melangell.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  AIDAN WATCHED JENNY putting clothes in a suitcase. Even in the few days they had been here, he thought the light fuzz of new-grown hair was more visible, sleeker. His breath caught. It made her look just a little less vulnerable than before. But it was an illusion. He must not waste time counting the weeks, the days.

  Today was all that mattered. Jenny knew that. The day they might not have had together.

  “There’s something you’ll want to do before we go,” he said quietly.

  “Yes, but they won’t be open yet.” She turned and smiled. “Breakfast?”

  As they descended the stairs, they met a small plump woman in a flowered nylon overall. She beamed at their look of surprise.

  “I’m Mair’s mum. Well, somebody’s got to do your bedrooms, haven’t they?”

  In the dining room, Aidan nodded curtly to the two financiers who were already finishing their breakfast.

  Afterwards he caught Mr Secker in Sian’s office behind the reception counter.

  “We prepaid the accommodation, but I’ve got a bar bill to settle. Who do I pay?”

  He wondered if the man might waive the small account
, considering the circumstances. But the florid face beamed back at him.

  “Me.”

  He went to fetch the notepad from the bar, in which Sian had recorded their purchases, and produced a credit card machine.

  “Thank you,” said Aidan, at a loss for the right words. “It’s been an interesting stay.”

  Secker’s face darkened, as though he was not sure of Aidan’s sincerity. He did not apologize.

  With an effort, Aidan made himself smile. “I hope you can keep this place open. In spite of everything, it’s a lovely house. This is somewhere people ought to visit.”

  “We’ll try.”

  Jenny and Melangell were already loading Jenny’s suitcase and Melangell’s flowered holdall into the boot.

  “You should have waited for me,” he scolded.

  “We took the lift.” Jenny smiled at him. “We can manage, can’t we, love?”

  “Of course,” Melangell said.

  “Do you want to walk round to the church, or stop the car on the way out?”

  “It’s on our way. We’ve nothing to come back for.” She straightened up and looked at the façade of the House of the Hare. Morning sun was creeping over the hilltops, gilding the floor-to-ceiling windows and lighting the dramatic angles of its slate roof.

  “Such a shame,” she said. “It’s beautiful. But it will still be here after we’ve gone, for other people to enjoy.”

  She would not be coming back.

  Aidan stopped the car outside the church. He let Jenny walk ahead up the churchyard path. He reached out to restrain Melangell, but she had already darted away to the giant yew tree with the cave-like hollow in its trunk.

  He followed Jenny at a discreet distance. The familiar weight of the camera round his neck felt like an old friend rediscovered. But he was in no hurry to use it. He had all the photos he needed of St Melangell’s Church.

  The interior was not the haven of peace he had anticipated. A small army of helpers was already at work with cloths and buckets and scrubbing brushes. They were busy scouring the smoke-blackened walls and floors of the tower rooms. He recognized Mother Joan and Freda Rawlinson among them and lifted a hand in acknowledgment.