The Wounded Snake

by Fay Sampson

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Gavin’s smile was thin. ‘You’ll find once you put them into an imaginary situation that they start acquiring a life of their own. You may start off with someone’s physical characteristics and personal foibles, but as your story gets under way, they’ll increasingly depart from the person you know in real life to become a genuinely new individual. It’s rather like a kaleidoscope. You start with all these little coloured pieces of genuine memory, and then you give the tube a twist, and lo and behold, they fall into a completely new pattern no one’s ever seen before.’

  He’s said this dozens of times, to other classes, Hilary thought. The words are just falling off his tongue. His mind is somewhere else.

  Gavin’s eyes flicked once more to the door as Harry Walters was called. Hilary tried to imagine the cheery husband of the more intelligent Jo being shrewd enough to remember any details which might be significant in the hunt for an attempted murderer.

  Still less that he might have attempted anything sinister himself.

  At last she laid her pen down from her aching hand. She had not realized that creative writing could be physically such hard work. She felt oddly drained. Still, she was rather pleased with the way her young Bartholomew was developing, more romantic than she had been expecting, but astute, as he investigated the strange death of his grandfather at the Leechwells.

  ‘Thank you, everyone,’ said Gavin, with evident relief that the session was over. ‘Tea is on its way. Then you’re free until suppertime. This evening, we’ll meet again to see what you’ve come up with in the way of vibrant characters, whether that’s the investigator, victim or murderer.’

  The word fell uncomfortably in the listening room.

  Hilary put her notepad away in her shoulder bag.

  ‘Right,’ she said to Veronica. ‘Get some of that fruit cake inside you. Then there’s something I want to show you.’

  TWELVE

  ‘Do you mind if we walk into Totnes?’ Hilary asked. ‘I need to clear my head.’

  ‘That’s fine by me.’

  They stepped out down the road through the Morland estate. On one side, fields sloped away to the hidden windings of the River Dart.

  ‘I was so looking forward to coming here,’ Hilary said ruefully. ‘The special atmosphere of the Abbey, that Great Barn, the wonderful grounds. Now, I can’t wait to get away from it for an hour or two. I haven’t a clue what’s going on, but it’s not healthy.’

  ‘In the midst of life we are in death,’ Veronica suggested.

  Hilary swung round to give her a hard look. ‘Nobody did die.’

  ‘No, but …’

  ‘You’re still worrying about what you heard from the tiltyard, aren’t you? Look, you’ve told the police. It’s in their hands now.’

  ‘All the same, I can’t help feeling the shadow of something. How do I know if Gavin and Theresa aren’t plotting something else? Or could it be Melissa, and they’re covering up for her?’

  ‘Dinah Halsgrove should be safe enough in hospital, once she’s got over that scare. They’ve probably got a police officer on the door. I’m sure Inspector Foulks will have that pair in again after what you said, and give them a harder grilling this time. Gavin was acting scared this afternoon. With good reason, I’d say.’

  ‘It’s queer, but I didn’t feel any reaction from Theresa. She just sat there in our group, watching us write. So absolutely still, but I couldn’t help feeling it was me she was watching.’

  ‘Have you ever tried to find a toad in a pond?’ Hilary asked. ‘You know it’s there, because you’ve heard it croaking, but you search and search, and you can see nothing. Then, all of a sudden, what you thought was a dried-up leaf on the surface turns out to be this warty face with two bright black eyes, staring at you. It can give you quite a shock.’

  Veronica shuddered. ‘I know. It’s probably because I do have something to hide. I expect I’m imagining that she’s particularly interested in me.’

  ‘Of course you are.’ Hilary kept a prudent silence about her own fears that either Gavin or Theresa might have belatedly seen Veronica leaving the tiltyard. Might have put two and two together and seen the very real danger that she could have heard them.

  What then? In the midst of life we are in death. Veronica’s words came back to haunt her. It would appear to be the elderly novelist whom Theresa and Gavin had designs against, yet was it melodramatic to fear that Veronica was on their list now? How seriously would the police take the danger to her? Did they even think she was in danger?

  She looked behind her. The road from the abbey was empty. There were no pavements. It would not be difficult for a car to come hurtling down the hill and fail to stop before it ploughed into two pedestrians.

  She pulled Veronica further on to the verge.

  They came through the gateposts which marked the limits of the estate and found themselves among modern houses. Ahead, they met the busier main road that took them on into Totnes.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ Hilary mused, ‘is where Melissa fits into all this … if she does. Did you know she’s Gavin’s wife?’

  ‘Yes, I’d heard that.’

  ‘So is she in on whatever Gavin and Theresa are plotting? Do you think what you heard included her? Or have we got the wrong end of the stick? Is she the one being plotted against, and Halsgrove’s attack just a red herring? Could the other two be having an affair behind her back, and want Melissa out of the way?’

  ‘That’s a bit overdramatic, isn’t it?’ Veronica protested. ‘There are easier ways of ending a marriage nowadays than bumping off your spouse. And it was Dinah Halsgrove who collapsed, not Melissa.’

  ‘Hmm. I suppose you’re right.’

  ‘Though there was what Gavin said at the end: “I’ll shut her up”.’

  They crossed the railway bridge and entered the town. Hilary’s eye was caught by a newspaper stand that shouted: CELEBRITY COLLAPSES AT MORLAND ABBEY.

  She grabbed a paper and paid for it.

  The front page showed nothing but fighting in Syria and gloomy news about the economy. She turned it over, and then turned another page. Finally, tucked away in a small paragraph on page six, was the news that famous crime novelist Dinah Halsgrove had been taken suddenly ill during a course at Morland Abbey and rushed to hospital. A hospital spokeswoman refused to comment on Miss Halsgrove’s condition. The author is ninety-two. Conference organizer Gavin Standforth said, ‘Given her age, we are gravely concerned about her.’

  ‘Hmm. That must have been last night. Too soon for them to have the news that she was still alive this morning.’

  ‘But Gavin does get a small mention.’

  ‘Hardly enough to boost his book sales. It’s not as if she’d died. If it was meant as a novel means of publicity, it failed.’

  Hilary led the way across the High Street, past the place where she had parked that morning.

  ‘This came as a surprise to me,’ she confided to Veronica. ‘I thought I knew Totnes. The Brutus Stone, with the legend about the town being founded by a Trojan. The Norman castle. The Elizabethan market. Eco-friendly Transition Town with its own currency. All the New Age stuff, plus a colony of local Buddhists. There’s some nonsense about the church having a leper squint where the poor outcasts could watch the eucharist through a hole in the wall. Rubbish, of course. But there was also talk of a leper path leading down from the old Maudlin hospital. Yet somehow I’d missed this gem.’

  She led Veronica down some steps, to the beginning of a narrow lane.

  ‘This is a shorter route than the one I first found. After I’d finished writing, I followed my nose downhill, instead of going back up along the way I came. And, lo and behold, it brought me out to this very car park where I’d left my trusty Vauxhall.’

  The narrow path bent away between ivy-clad walls. The noise of the town fell away behind them. Their own footsteps echoed louder than they should have done from the old stones. No one passed them.

  �
�It’s a funny thing about this path. No windows in the walls. Nobody overlooking it. And there’s hardly a soul about. In all the time I was here, I only saw three people.’

  She could hear them now. The laughter of the two boys as they clashed their conkers. Their jeers as they saw her sitting with her feet in the well. And the old man’s stick, tapping its way on up the hill. A stick she had not heard coming.

  ‘Just round this bend and up a bit more,’ Hilary encouraged her companion. ‘It’s worth the walk.’

  ‘You said there were no openings in the wall,’ Veronica said suddenly. ‘But there’s this.’

  The blank stone wall had been breached by two brick pillars and a slatted iron gate. Between its vertical bars they could see a garden, with trees and flower beds. There were rustic picnic benches and children’s play equipment.

  ‘This must be what Ceri was telling us about. Their campaign to make a children’s garden here, instead of a car park. It was a rather lovely story of the inauguration, with the locked gate and three friendly giants peering over the wall. Presumably Mr Toad, Mr Snake and Mr Slowworm.’

  ‘Hmmph! That’s all very well. But I can’t help the feeling that the original figures were not quite as jolly as that.’

  The last stretch was the steepest. Hilary hauled herself up it and stopped dead. There in front of her, at the meeting place of the lanes, was the rectangular pool that contained the three springs, set back within stone walls hung with ivy.

  What she had not expected was to find a woman face down in the shallow water of the middle trough, seeming to fill the basin with her long body, her burgundy embroidered skirt, her peasant blouse. Her long lank brown hair trailed in the wet beneath the central spring. The one, Hilary remembered, dedicated to the Long Crippler.

  There was barely enough water to cover the cobbled floor. In the three troughs, it stood only a couple of inches deep. Could someone really drown in it?

  Hilary stood transfixed, unable to move or speak. It was so like the scene she had been imagining as she scribbled the opening pages of her novel. Bartholomew’s grandfather, dead like this in the holy Leechwells.

  It was Veronica who broke the shocked silence. ‘Oh, Hilary! It’s Melissa!’

  She ran forward to pull the prostrate woman from the water.

  Something seemed to pierce the protective film which had Hilary enclosed in a bubble of disbelief. She lunged to help Veronica lift her sodden burden away from the well. As they laid her on the tarmac and turned her over, they saw what had not been evident before: a bloody wound in her left temple.

  ‘Oh, Hilary! She’s not breathing.’

  Tossing back Melissa’s streaming hair, Hilary bent her face to the cold white one beneath her and began to administer a vigorous CPR.

  Veronica was ringing 999. ‘Yes. The Leechwells, I think it’s called. It’s in this narrow lane … I can’t tell you for certain. My friend is applying CPR … Thank you.’

  Hilary was aware of silence behind her.

  ‘Hilary?’ Veronica must have asked something before.

  ‘Yes? What?’ Hilary panted between chest compressions.

  ‘I said, do you think we should ring Gavin? We must tell him, mustn’t we?’

  ‘If you’ve got his number. They used to have good old Directory Enquiries. I haven’t a clue what you’re supposed to ring nowadays.’

  ‘I think I’ve got the Morland Abbey number somewhere.’

  Veronica searched in her bag and found a green-and-white brochure. ‘Here it is. They’ll get him.’

  ‘Assuming he isn’t all too well aware that his wife is dead.’

  ‘Hilary!’

  She was beginning to despair of breathing life into the long, collapsed body. Had Melissa drowned in the shallow water of the Long Crippler, or was it that nasty-looking head wound? Liquid leaked from Melissa’s sodden clothes, to seep away across the tarmac under Hilary’s knees.

  There were rapid footsteps. A woman screamed.

  Hilary paused to push the hair from her sweating face and looked up. A middle-aged woman with a jute shopping bag had stopped in horror, her hand to her mouth.

  ‘Is she … dead?’

  ‘Not if I can help it.’ Hilary’s voice came out hoarse. She was tiring. ‘Let’s wait till the medics get here.’

  ‘You’ve rung nine-nine-nine?’ The woman appealed to Veronica.

  ‘Of course. They’re on their way.’

  ‘Well, if I can’t …’ The woman’s feet were edging round Hilary and Melissa in the narrow space.

  ‘No. You go. There’s nothing useful you can do,’ Hilary grunted, returning to her task.

  There was another noise coming towards them down the narrow lane. Hilary remembered that sound from this morning. The tap-tap-tapping of a stick on stone. She did not lift her eyes from the steady rhythm on Melissa’s chest.

  The remembered voice spoke almost above her.

  ‘’Er’s a goner, idn’t ’e? You be wasting your time.’

  ‘I’m doing my best,’ she panted through tight lips.

  ‘There’s life in them there springs, and then there’s death. ’Tisn’t always but a hairline between the two of ’em.’

  ‘Thank you,’ gasped Hilary. ‘That’s all I wanted to hear.’

  The insistent wail of sirens was beginning to make itself heard from the street beyond. Hilary realized how tired her arms were. She bent one last time to breathe life into Melissa’s lungs. The saturated clothing beneath her hands was cold.

  There were rapid steps now. Two paramedics in green overalls burst on the scene.

  ‘Right, m’dear. You’re doing a great job. We’ll take over now.’

  To her surprise, Hilary found she needed to be helped to her feet. Her folded limbs straightened painfully. She stood swaying slightly.

  ‘You all right, love?’ the female paramedic asked. ‘No, of course you’re not. You’ve had a nasty shock. Here. Is there somewhere we can sit you down?’

  There was not. Hilary remembered perching on the stone that led down into the well to write her crime scene. She did not want to step down into it now.

  The woman addressed Veronica. ‘I’d say take her to a tea shop. Nice hot cuppa. But the police will want to have a look at this one. Funny sort of accident, if you ask me. You and your friend will have to wait until they get here … What about you, sir?’ She turned to the old man with the walking stick. ‘Were you here when they found her?’

  The man was taller than Hilary remembered, his grey head stooped forward, not unlike the way Melissa had walked. His voice was gravelly.

  ‘It’s the Long Crippler, you see. That’d be where they found ’er. You’ve only got to look at ’er.’

  A shiver ran through Hilary. She realized her own clothes were wet now. They had indeed found Melissa lying face down across the pool, with her head beneath the pipe from which the water spouted into the Long Crippler basin. How could he have known that?’

  ‘Jasmin,’ called the paramedic kneeling beside Melissa’s still body. ‘Give us a hand here.’

  A police car was inching its way down the narrow lane from the road above. A uniformed sergeant stood in front of Hilary and Veronica. A constable hurried over behind him, his younger face alive to all that was going on around the well.

  ‘Any luck?’ the sergeant asked the paramedics.

  ‘Doesn’t look like it.’

  ‘Now, then.’ The sergeant opened his notebook and turned back to Hilary and Veronica. ‘I take it you’ll be the ladies who found her? Names, please.’

  THIRTEEN

  ‘You again.’

  Hilary should not have been surprised to find herself facing Inspector Foulks and DS Blunt again, this time in Totnes police station. Melissa Standforth had, after all, been a significant figure in Dinah Halsgrove’s collapse. It couldn’t just be coincidence.

  A worm of guilt twisted in her gut. She had convinced herself that Melissa was the most likely person to have administered a n
ear-fatal dose to the novelist. But now it was Melissa who was dead.

  ‘I had the misfortune to take Veronica back to show her where I’d been working this morning.’

  She was annoyed that the lean, lugubrious Foulks should make her feel responsible. There was no way she could have known what she would find.

  ‘Did Mrs Standforth know you’d been at the Leechwells this morning? Might she have been expecting to meet you there?’

  ‘No!’ Hilary was shocked into vehemence. ‘I wasn’t in her group when we shared our writing before lunch. I was in Theresa’s.’

  The grey eyebrows rose. ‘Did anyone else know you were going back there?’

  Hilary was momentarily uncertain. ‘No … No, I don’t see how they could have. It was just something I suggested to Veronica after tea, when Gavin said we were free for a couple of hours.’

  The steely eyes regarded her. ‘So, it was just coincidence that Mrs Standforth was found by a member of her writing class?’

  Hilary flushed. ‘Well, yes … Are you suggesting that I was meant to find her? Or …’ She swallowed the inference of his questions.

  ‘I’m assuming nothing.’

  Again that thoughtful silence.

  Then the inspector sighed. ‘Right, Mrs Masters. Let’s take it step by step. What time did you go to the Leechwells? Which route did you take?’

  ‘About four forty. Uphill from the car park behind the High Street.’

  DS Blunt cut in. ‘Did you see anyone else in the lane?’

  Hilary thought. ‘No. In fact I commented to Veronica on how few people were using it when I was there this morning.’

  ‘So what was the first thing you saw?’

  She would rather not have relived that.

  Hilary came out of the police station feeling shaken. Her clothes were still depressingly damp. She perched, rather uncomfortably, on the jagged stone wall at the roadside, within sight of the police station door. The late afternoon was cloudier than she would have liked, but she had been reluctant to stay inside, though a kindly policewoman had offered her a seat while Veronica was questioned. She had an oddly guilty feeling. She did not want Veronica to come out from her interview with DI Foulks and find her on the phone to David.