Die Like a Dog (16 page)

He halted, nostrils flaring like a colt's. Miss Pink sat on a stump below the brambles, her binoculars lowered, looking faintly annoyed.

‘Woodpecker,' she said. ‘You frightened it.'

‘Where?'

She gestured downhill. ‘It's gone. A great spotted. Not climbing today?'

He carried no pack and was wearing track shoes.

‘No. We're having an off-day.'

‘Oh yes. I've been talking to Dewi.'

He squatted on his hunkers, then, finding the slope too steep for that, sat down, but he didn't sprawl. He looked as if he might leap away at any moment. Like a faun, she reflected, regarding him blandly, waiting for his question.

‘What did he have to say?'

‘We've straightened out a few points. The dog, for instance, and the Volvo.'

He stared at her. ‘
Dewi
has?'

‘And his parents. And Joss Lloyd. Tell me: when you took the car, was there a light in the cottage?'

He looked thoughtfully in the direction of the village.

‘What car?'

‘The Volvo.'

‘You don't mean Mr Judson's Volvo? The one what was stolen? But was it stolen? There's a story going round that he drove it to that car park himself, someone picked him up and drove him away. Is that just gossip?'

She ignored the question and put one of her own.

‘What time did you leave Dinas on Saturday?'

He thought about it. ‘After dinner. Midday dinner – lunch, I mean.'

‘And you went straight there?'

‘To Craig yr Ysfa, yes. We biked round to the Conway Valley and walked up to the foot of the cliff.'

‘And you climbed on Sunday.'

‘We told you that last night.'

‘So you did. But you were very late doing Pinnacle Wall.'

‘We were?'

‘In midsummer the sun doesn't leave the lower pitches until the evening.'

‘So?'

‘So what were you doing earlier in the day?'

‘Dewi –' He stopped. When he spoke again he was polite and careful. ‘You're asking a lot of questions, miss.'

‘I want to get at the truth,' she asked simply and then, with a burst of exasperation: ‘For Heaven's sake, man, if you weren't doing anything criminal, where's the harm in it?' She started to talk fast, as if sparing only a glance for thoughts that tripped through her mind: ‘You can't get a word in edgeways with his father ranting away; if Lloyd and Seale were on the cliff, why not say so?' He gaped at her. She raced on: ‘Did you talk to them? Did you cook something up between the four of you? But they wouldn't have been on Amphitheatre Buttress; it's too easy for them. Did you see something else, across the amphitheatre – go round and meet them on the top? Is that why you were so late getting to Pinnacle Wall? Because, having done the Buttress, you spent so long talking?'

‘No, we didn't meet Lloyd and Seale.'

His slow words contrasted sharply with her garrulity.

‘So what happened when you'd done the Buttress? What's Dewi holding back?'

‘We just lay around on the top and talked about what we'd do next.'

‘You mean you did nothing other than Amphitheatre Buttress and Pinnacle Wall?'

‘No.'

She suppressed a sigh. Her hands were wet on the binoculars.

‘Is that all the questions?' he asked, not impertinently. ‘Can I ask you one?'

‘Go ahead.'

‘Why
are you
asking questions?'

‘Because Lloyd and Seale have been taken to the Police Station, and Evans drowned but he had a bruise on the back of his head. He couldn't have done that himself. He was hit before he went in the water and the police suspect Lloyd and Seale.'

He absorbed this, his mouth twitching uncontrollably.

‘Do you think they did it – miss?'

‘No.'

He smiled: an open boyish grin that lit his eyes, but as suddenly as it came, it was wiped away.

‘So what's it to you?'

‘I want to help. I want to find Mr Judson.'

He hesitated. ‘You said something about the Volvo.'

Miss Pink got to her feet and he followed suit.

‘Dewi said nothing about it,' she told him.

‘Of course not; he don't know nothing.' He watched her narrowly. ‘What's this about a light in a cottage when the Volvo were stolen? What cottage? Was that a trap?'

She was acutely aware of her vulnerability: of her age and weight, and his lithe power. They could hear the sounds of the village: a muted background of animals, children, and traffic passing on the main road, a background in which a stifled scream would be absorbed as effectively as that of a rabbit. And that was why she didn't press him about the Volvo, about that discrepancy in the accounts of what they'd climbed before Pinnacle Wall. She had spared him a twinge of compassion when he stepped into that trap; he had no more idea than she what time the sun left the lower pitches but he'd been rocked further by her meaningless gabble about Lloyd and Seale and had seized the offered straw: Amphitheatre Buttress. But Dewi said they did Great Gully.

There was no need to revert to the Volvo and, in the face of his bleak stare, it was undesirable.

‘You're quite right,' she said. ‘It was a trap.'

‘You know the country well enough,' Pryre said, ‘but are you sure it can be done in the time available?'

She had found them at the Bridge, drinking coffee after a long session with Lloyd and Seale. They had driven up the lane for privacy and were now parked in the gateway near the pool where Evans's body had been discovered. Body and cooker had gone to morgue and laboratory long ago but occasionally they caught glimpses of men among the gorse bushes on the bank of the stream, searching, so far unsuccessfully, for traces.

The car windows were rolled down and Miss Pink was sitting in the back, with Pryce. Williams was in the front. On Pryce's knees was the Ordnance Survey map of the area.

‘It's possible,' she asserted, ‘no doubt about that, and it's a boy's trick, isn't it? Designed to cause the maximum of inconvenience, even scandal. The quarrel between the Warings was noisy and violent enough to be heard by everyone in the kitchen, and the grapevine works fast in these tiny villages. So Anna leaves Dinas and Judson follows, and in some way those two boys already knew about the cottage on the moor. After lunch they go off on their bicycles, ostensibly for a weekend's climbing. It's only twelve miles to the cottage; they had hours of daylight in which to reach it, to hide their cycles in the forest and wait for darkness. Then they would have crept up, stolen the car – possibly pushing it for a distance – and driven it to the car park under Tryfan.'

‘Can either of them drive?'

‘It shouldn't be difficult to find out. I can't imagine Barn Banks not being able to drive his mother's car.'

‘And you reckon they walked back to their bikes: thirty miles or more in a day?'

‘Part of the night too. It would be no trouble to them, even without hitching: they're as fit as fleas. They'd have three ranges to cross but they'd have had a map and they wouldn't be earning loads. It's just the kind of wild adventure that would appeal to them: walking through the rest of the night and the following day, chuckling over Judson's fun, when he woke up and found his car had been stolen, and his being forced to report it. Bang goes the secret of his love-nest.'

‘They had to cross main roads,' Williams put in. ‘They wouldn't want to be seen, would they? They'd committed a criminal act. They were thieves.'

‘Who'd take any notice of two young lads crossing a road in the middle of the summer in Snowdonia?'

‘Anna Waring was in Chester,' Pryce said thoughtfully, ‘so when they reached the cottage on Saturday night, there'd only have been one car. They'd have known she wasn't with Judson.'

‘It would make very little difference. If Judson were alone, he'd still be furious when he went down and found the garage empty. But there may have been a second car at the cottage. Not Anna's, one belonging to some – other – woman.'

Pryce leaned back in his seat, his face drawn with fatigue; he'd had only two hours' sleep this morning.

‘Yes,' he said at last, ‘we have to talk to those two lads. And from what you say it looks as if we're going to have our work cut out. You admit you won their confidence because they respect you as a mountain climber. How do you suggest we go about it?' The sarcasm was laboured.

‘I don't have any suggestions,' Miss Pink said, her mind on that hypothetical second car at the cottage on the moors.

‘You don't think they're killers? They're sixteen years old. There've been ruthless killers of that age before now, ma'am.'

‘But did they hold up under questioning? I wonder. Wouldn't you have the feeling, talking to killers of sixteen, listening to them, that you were in the presence of a hard and vicious mentality?'

‘You didn't get that kind of feeling with young Banks?"

‘I had a doubt,' she admitted. ‘I wouldn't have liked to push him. But the doubt was based on reason, I was thinking: I don't
know
that this boy is not a killer, I must be careful, particularly in a place where there are no witnesses. On the other hand my instinct didn't warn me that I was in the presence of something evil. I watched his eyes. The stolen car is in character: the desire to watch the enemy writhing. That terrible hatred that needs to see the hated person wiped off the face of the earth is not.'

‘Have you come across anyone in this village capable of that kind of hatred?'

‘Given the right circumstances –' She stopped short of the trap. She caught the flicker of a smile on his face and rallied with the first ammunition to hand.

‘Both deaths resemble suicides.'

‘Resemble is the operative word, but Evans was unconscious when he hit the water. There's no way he could have banged his head on that cooker as he fell, not to cause the bruise he has. But think of it as a murder. The killer needs to simulate a suicide but you can't persuade a conscious man to tie a rope round his neck before you push him off the bank, tied to the cooker. So you knock him out when he's bending down, looking inside a tent, for instance. It's only a matter of a few yards to drag him to the bank above the pool.'

They were silent. Suddenly Seale was in the picture again.

Pryce continued: ‘Judson's death is more straightforward; his prints are on the gun – and it's his own gun. Gladys Judson identifies it.'

She frowned. ‘That was suicide?'

‘Again, it looks like it at first glance but the only prints are about the trigger guard. The weapon should be covered with 'em. There are some certainly, but others are overlaid. By smudges.'

‘Gloves?'

‘And wiping, ma'am. Like the latch on the front door that should have Judson's prints on it or, at the least, the prints of someone who was at the cottage with him. There should be prints on that latch and there aren't. Someone came to the cottage after Judson arrived, and that person wore gloves.'

‘And even if he'd met a woman there, she wouldn't be wearing gloves on the moors in the middle of summer. Are there other prints in the cottage?'

‘Anna Waring's. We were prepared for those, of course.'

‘So you've taken her prints. What about Lloyd and Seale?'

‘We haven't found theirs in the cottage.'

‘And on the cooker that you removed from the pool?'

‘Innumerable fragments and smudges, but probably a lot of those come from animals that have been licking it and rubbing against it.'

‘Were Evans's prints on it?'

‘Yes, ma'am.'

‘You took a long time before you told me that.'

He shrugged. ‘If the killer put Judson's prints on the gun, it stands to reason he'd press Evans's hand on the cooker.' He folded the map carefully. ‘There's the question of motive,' he said.

She stiffened. ‘Yes, motive.'

‘Evans suspected that Lloyd killed the dog –'

‘Just a minute.' He raised his eyebrows. ‘I'm sorry to interrupt –' she didn't sound in the least apologetic, ‘– but couldn't we consider the motive in general terms – at least for the moment?'

‘Go on.' He could have been humouring her.

‘Leave the dog out of it because, rightly or wrongly, no one except Evans considered that shooting the dog was a crime. But, assuming that Judson was killed on Saturday night – which seems likely because he didn't report his car stolen on Sunday – then was Evans getting close to the murderer, at least inadvertently?'

‘You're coming back to the dog.'

‘Not really. Certainly Evans was after the killer of the dog but could he have stumbled on something else? Not something concerning the dog's killer but Judson's. I mean, we know they're different. Young Bart shot the dog; he didn't – I reckon he didn't – shoot Judson. Now Evans didn't know that Judson was dead but could he have come across something significant without realising its significance? Evans had the – attributes for that. He was extraordinarily determined, inquisitive, and very stupid.'

‘A murder of elimination,' Williams suggested.

‘Could be,' Pryce admitted. ‘Then you come to the motive for Judson's death. Did you know that he was pestering the girl, Seale?'

‘It was obvious.'

‘And that she responded?'

‘No! I don't believe it. Who told you that?'

‘She did.'

Miss Pink flushed. After a while she said coldly: ‘Are you going to give me the details?'

He appeared not to notice her tone.

‘I think we can do that, not that we didn't have some trouble getting it out of her. They're a fine crew: those boys and Lloyd and Seale; you've got to fight for every inch of ground. And the girl's the worst of the lot; she doesn't resist you, she's continually pretending to miss the point of the question.'