A Short Time to Live (Miss Pink Book 4) Read online

  ‘Oh, definitely.’ But Miss Pink’s mind had snagged on something else, like wool on a bramble. ‘Where was Denis Noble tonight? Doesn’t he usually dine with Lucy on a Friday?’

  ‘Why, so he does. But he couldn’t be there when Lucy was so obviously smitten with Jackson. When you think about it, isn’t it curious that she should have a party at all? She’d have much preferred to be alone with Jackson.’

  ‘Probably he looked in uninvited; and we weren’t there for long: less than three hours. She has him to herself now, and I wouldn’t like to be in his boots.’

  ‘Because of Caroline?’

  ‘Naturally.’ Miss Pink was prim. ‘He was asking for trouble. Lucy looked quite ugly when she came in from the kitchen.’

  ‘I didn’t see her face. I saw his and he looked sly; he’s probably thinking he can run two women at once.’

  ‘Only for one day. If she climbs tomorrow—and they were making arrangements to do that—she’ll have to leave on Sunday.’

  ‘That’s just as well; we’ve had enough entanglements in the dale already; Caroline landing in the middle of it is like a cat loose in a dove-cot.’

  ‘Cote,’ Miss Pink corrected. ‘I would hardly term the Sandale residents doves.’

  ‘Agreed, unless doves have nasty private lives like chickens. Lucy is very beautiful, isn’t she?’

  ‘Most of the time. I’m surprised you didn’t warn me.’

  ‘I hadn’t realised it until tonight. She’s old, of course, but she has the sense to wear things that hide it. I can’t help feeling sorry for her; she does like the good things of life: like clothes and jewels and going up to London often. If she gets involved with Jackson he’ll cheat her terribly and Zeke says she’s not well off really. I do think men are horrible. Someone,’ she added darkly, ‘ought to tell her.’

  ‘In her present state of mind, and knowing you and Jackson had been so close, she would merely think you were jealous. It’s obvious that she finds the situation passionately exciting—and she’s middle-aged. The combination could be very unpleasant if she thought of herself as being obstructed.’

  ‘You could say something very delicately.’

  ‘People have to get hurt; you can’t protect them.’

  ‘I don’t like seeing old people hurt, particularly when I know what it’s all about.’ She caught Miss Pink’s doubtful eye. ‘I mean, I know Jackson; you don’t. Neither does Lucy. It makes me miserable.’

  ‘Wait and see. It may all be over in a few days; these things can fizzle out as quickly as they start. Jackson may even follow Caroline to London. By this time tomorrow things could be entirely different.’

  Chapter Eight

  Overnight the weather broke and in the morning the cloud was down to a thousand feet but as yet there was no rain. After breakfast Miss Pink left on foot for the doctor’s house. At Rumney’s instigation Quentin Bright had agreed to see her, though reluctantly.

  She took the old packhorse track which crossed the green under Coneygarth, then rose gently to contour the oak woods above the big houses of the lower dale. She glanced at Coneygarth as she passed: an old longhouse with the barn adjoining. The bedroom windows were tightly closed and she assumed either that Wren had left already to climb with Caroline or that he was still asleep.

  She opened a gate in a stone wall and the path started to mount over block scree. The rocks were covered with cushions of moss and the old oaks were twisted, their crumbling bark scurfy with lichen. Above her the slope steepened and there were glimpses of rock walls. She was traversing under the crag known as Shivery Knott and soon she crossed the beck coming out of its main gully.

  At this point the trees thinned and she looked down on the chimneys of a large house. This would be the Storms Hotel. Another few hundred yards and a rash of rhododendrons proclaimed more grounds and a second house. She smelled wood-smoke. At nine-thirty she came to the third and a steep trodden way zig-zagging down to the doctor’s backyard.

  For all their penchant for mock-Gothic, the Victorians had a good eye for position. The Brights’ house, Throstle Shaw, stood on a site some fifty feet above the water-meadows and looked up a long dale to the heart of the Central Fells. This dale was drained by a stream which joined the Sandale beck on the far side of the fields and from the confluence the river ran deep and wide and, marked by alders, to the dramatic exit from these flat bottom-lands: the rock gorge called the Throat. This was invisible from here, hidden by the lie of the land and the ubiquitous oaks. Regretting that she was not free to go to look for kingfishers, Miss Pink completed the descent to Throstle Shaw and tramped round the house to its front entrance.

  *

  ‘No,’ Quentin Bright said brusquely, ‘Peta didn’t ring me that Friday night, and I know nothing about anonymous letters except that Zeke told me he’d had one. He persuaded me to see you,’ he went on, ‘but I don’t like it.’

  ‘I don’t like delving into people’s medical history either, Miss Pink confessed. ‘But she can’t be hurt now, and isn’t it likely that her death is connected with her past life? And then Rumney wonders if there can be a link with his sheep—’

  ‘I can’t believe that! A link between his sheep being stolen and Peta’s death? It’s preposterous!’

  ‘More preposterous than her murder? There are other links: anonymous letters, for instance, and Mossop.’

  ‘We don’t know that she was getting letters.’

  ‘True, but someone wrote to Rumney; that person wants his—or her—letter investigated. They wouldn’t have written otherwise.’

  Bright looked out of the window of the drawing room. ‘That letter could have been the work of a disturbed person.’

  ‘Have you seen it?’ He shook his head. She handed it to him and he read the short message.

  ‘It appears to have been written by a stable person—so far as one can tell.’ He sighed. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Was there a basis for threats?’

  ‘Given her state of mind, and Mossop’s nature, yes.’

  ‘You mean someone might have threatened to tell Mossop something which his wife didn’t want him to know?’

  He shifted uncomfortably. ‘That’s about it.’

  ‘But you’d prefer not to give the details.’

  He responded at a tangent. ‘Have you met Mossop? No. They had a strange relationship: unhealthy. They fought like cat and dog. He neglected her shamelessly: went off for days at a time leaving a manager to run the hotel even in the height of the season. He spoke to her in public—and of her—in a despicable way, and yet all the time he seemed proud of her—I mean, proud that she was promiscuous. Very unpleasant. But in spite of all that there was a strong mutual dependence. That breakdown of Peta’s three years ago: she took an overdose, but she rang me at the penultimate moment, and with Mossop’s help I managed to get the stomach washed out. He was distraught; I had the devil’s own job with him. In his own way he loved her.’ He considered for a moment, and added, ‘Although it makes me wince to remember the way he spoke of her on other occasions.’

  ‘Why did she take an overdose?’

  ‘I suspect she’d had an unhappy affair; perhaps the fellow got tired of her. That was her trouble: rejection, or rather, imagining herself rejected. What made it worse that time was that she was pregnant.’ He pondered this. ‘Rumney says you’re to be trusted,’ he commented ingenuously. ‘Well, once she recovered from the overdose what did she do but take herself off to a back street abortionist, and he bungled the job. She managed to get to hospital but she was lucky to survive; as it was, she could never have another child. Mossop had gone to Newcastle for a few days but she was terrified he might find out. Mossop, you see, wanted children and when they had none, he blamed it on her. Her pregnancy disproved that, but unfortunately it wasn’t Mossop’s child, nor could have been, she told me. So she told him she’d been in hospital to have a cyst removed and I backed her up.’

  Miss Pink asked: ‘Why was she
so afraid of him knowing she was pregnant if he didn’t mind her being promiscuous?’

  ‘God knows! Perhaps it was that she could have had children had they persisted but now she felt she’d spoiled her chances. Whatever it was, she was terrified that he would throw her out, and Peta’s driving need was for security. You must remember that we’re not talking about an integrated person. Peta’s fears were irrational.’

  ‘Not all of them,’ Miss Pink murmured. ‘If she had anonymous letters, one can assume that the threats they conveyed had a basis in fact. How had she seemed recently?’

  ‘I hadn’t seen her for some weeks. The last time she consulted me she was certainly jumpy and couldn’t sleep but she wouldn’t tell me what the trouble was. I prescribed tranquillisers and Mogodon.’

  ‘Do you keep your medical records locked up?’

  ‘Why? They’re in a filing cabinet in the surgery,’ he wait on slowly. ‘That’s kept locked, along with the dispensary. You’re not suggesting someone got a look at her record?’

  ‘Can I see your surgery?’

  He hesitated, then conducted her across the hall to a door which he opened with a key on his ring. Miss Pink ran a practised eye down the jamb. It was unmarked.

  It was the usual surgery of a country doctor: an old flat desk, a couch with a dark blanket, a filing cabinet, glazed bookcases. The window was discreetly netted across its lower half. She crossed the room and lifted the curtain.

  ‘Your putty needs a coat of paint.’

  ‘It’s fresh; the house was broken into when we were out one day in October—’ He trailed off and stared at her. She looked from him to the woods at the back of the house. ‘They threw a brick,’ he went on in a dull voice. ‘It was lying here on the carpet.’

  ‘Had they taken anything?’

  ‘Nothing, and there were no prints on the window-frame. The police said that if they came in, they’d worn gloves. The first thing we thought of was the drugs but the dispensary was still locked and nothing was missing anywhere else. My wife had left her handbag on her bed but her wallet hadn’t been touched. There were fourteen pounds in it.’

  ‘Was the filing cabinet locked?’

  ‘I don’t know. Everyone was concentrating on the drugs, you see, then going round the house to see if anything was missing. We were so confused and worried. Who would have thought of the records?’

  A woman put her head round the door, smiling. ‘Coffee?’ she asked.

  He introduced his wife and they returned to the drawing room where Amy Bright said as she passed a cup of coffee to Miss Pink: ‘Why would vandals be interested in medical records?’ She smiled at her husband reassuringly. ‘I heard you mention the records and I wondered at the time: the hole that brick made was awfully near the window-catch although the catch was closed when we got home. I wondered if anyone had actually entered the surgery but when we found nothing was missing I forgot about it.’

  Amy Bright was a large placid woman with wiry hair and an open face. Miss Pink regarded her thoughtfully and asked: ‘Was Peta comfortably off?’

  ‘She hadn’t a bean,’ Amy said in surprise. ‘She had to ask Mossop for her bus fare to Carnthorpe.’

  ‘You can’t know that,’ Bright protested, then turned to Miss Pink. ‘But there was no money there to pay a blackmailer; I’m sure you’re on the wrong track.’

  ‘Peta being blackmailed!’ his wife exclaimed in astonishment. ‘But that’s quite impossible. I mean, blackmail’s a long-term thing, isn’t it? A matter of small regular sums, or rather, discreet sums geared to the victim’s income, and kind of jollying the victim along, never pushing him too hard? But you see, Peta was hopelessly unpredictable: no money, no chance of even donating little sums, and always on the verge of hysteria—’

  ‘My dear!’ Her husband was shocked.

  ‘But you can blackmail for reasons other than financial,’ Miss Pink pointed out. ‘Perhaps the blackmailer wanted something else from her—that is, if she was being blackmailed. Since she was neurotic is it possible that she was being used in some way—a way which had nothing to do with money?’

  But they looked at her in bewilderment: two rather simple nice people to whom the thought of using a human being was outside their comprehension.

  *

  Miss Pink went back to Sandale. It was eleven o’clock and a thin drizzle was falling when she knocked at the door of Thornbarrow. She shifted her feet on the damp slates and observed that there was little wind; the smoke from Harper’s chimney drifted down the dale, blue against the trees.

  The door opened and Lucy Fell regarded the visitor vacantly. Behind her a gramophone was playing the music from Delibes’ Sylvia. Miss Pink beamed. ‘Good morning! Coming on to rain. I hope I’m not disturbing you?’ She was poised to step indoors. ‘I came to thank you for a very pleasant evening.’

  Lucy smiled stiffly. ‘Won’t you come in, Miss Pink? I was just about to have coffee. You’ll join me?’

  ‘That’s very kind of you.’

  ‘Let me take your anorak. Why, it’s quite wet. . . .’

  ‘I’ve been walking. I’ll just take my boots off.’

  ‘Oh, there’s no need.’

  Lucy turned the music low. This morning she was in fuchsia pants and a cream Guernsey. She still seemed tense but she wasn’t hostile. Miss Pink heard her filling a kettle in the kitchen. When she came back to the fire she sat down facing the window.

  ‘Did you have a good walk?’

  ‘Passable. It was a trifle damp. Is Mr Wren at Coneygarth?’

  She followed the other’s gaze. The window looked up the green past Coneygarth to Shivery Knott silhouetted, softly now because of the drizzle, on the skyline.

  ‘You’ve not seen him this morning?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘I hesitated to call; I thought he might still be asleep.’

  The kettle started to sing and Lucy excused herself and went to the kitchen. When she returned, Miss Pink took a cup of coffee and a brandy snap and regarded her hostess benignly. ‘How many anonymous letters have you had?’ she asked.

  Lucy tensed and her eyes had the flat slate stare of last night. In the silence Miss Pink thought she heard the gutters start to run.

  ‘How many people have had them?’ Lucy asked coolly.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a tragedy when this kind of thing happens: all the neighbours watching each other, and that terrible dread of the postman, and the relief when the letters are all normal. We had it in Cornwall.’

  ‘Was the writer found?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘The name would mean nothing to you; it was a sick person of course.’

  ‘Why “of course”?’

  ‘They always are.’ Miss Pink was faintly condescending.

  ‘Not always,’ Lucy said.

  ‘These are certainly written in a firm hand,’ Miss Pink admitted, ‘but not many people are totally mad; the inspiration is diseased but the graphology’s normal. I see no inconsistency.’

  ‘What I’m wondering,’ Lucy was smiling, ‘is who sent you the letter and what it said.’

  ‘No one wrote to me.’ Miss Pink sounded petulant. ‘I’ve only just come here. I’ve been shown a letter but naturally I can’t divulge its contents.’

  Lucy’s fingers smoothed the muscles of her throat.

  ‘It was the work of a cultured person,’ Miss Pink added.

  The other sighed with exasperation. ‘You’ve worked me into such a state of curiosity that it’s almost unbearable.’ She spoke as if she were humouring her elderly visitor rather than raging with inquisitiveness. ‘For heavens’ sake, who had a letter? One of the Rumneys—or have you visited someone else this morning?’

  ‘Peta had letters as well.’

  Lucy caught her breath and her eyes were shocked. ‘Are you sure?’ Miss Pink nodded seriously. ‘I didn’t believe it,’ Lucy said, ‘I thought she’d made it up, as she did some telephone calls she had a long time ago:
when she had a breakdown. She said she had telephone calls this time but no one thought there was anything in it. How can you know for sure? She did tell us she’d had an anonymous letter, then said she’d lost it. But you don’t lose anonymous letters; you take them to the police or you burn them.’ She shivered. Miss Pink looked at the fire. Lucy said, with false gaiety, ‘Let’s talk about something pleasant.’

  But Miss Pink was not to be side-tracked. ‘Peta didn’t say what was in her letter?’

  ‘No. I said, we didn’t believe her. I don’t believe it now.’ She stared at the other defiantly.

  ‘But there are letters going around,’ Miss Pink persisted.

  Lucy shrugged. ‘I didn’t know that until you told me. If I’d known that other people were getting letters, then I might have been more sympathetic towards Peta. Denis was inclined to believe her because he knew about mine. Possibly I was trying to deny their existence even to myself: to block them out because I found them so revolting.’

  ‘Were your letters an attempt at blackmail?’

  ‘Why, no; I don’t think so.’

  ‘Demands for money are usually unmistakable.’

  ‘I had one letter; it didn’t ask for money.’

  ‘Were you threatened?’

  ‘The whole thing was a threat. It was signed “A Watcher”. That was ghastly.’ She was deeply disturbed and pressed her hands over her eyes while she took several deep breaths. ‘It accused me of burying a baby in the garden,’ she said.

  She got up and went to the table for cigarettes. The match-flame trembled. With her back to the fire she inhaled, then turned quickly, apologised and offered her guest a cigarette.

  ‘One thinks one is so mature,’ she said, sitting down again, her eyes rather wild, ‘but there are some things which rip the mask away.’

  ‘A sick person,’ Miss Pink repeated.

  ‘Of course you’re right; I’ve been repressing it. But it makes me feel better to know that I’m not on my own. As I said, I had only one letter and that must have been all of three weeks ago; I’d tried to forget but the mornings, before the postman comes, are dreadful. How many people are getting them—and where do you come in?’