Slated for Death (12 page)

Just as Bethan started on her second cup of tea, a strong gust of wind shook the cottage, lifting up the slates on the roof. They settled back down with a clatter. The two women looked at each other.

“This storm is making me a bit nervous,” said Penny. “I've never seen anything like it. I've always felt safe and sheltered here, but tonight…” The savage wind picked up at that moment, sending a howling blast swirling around the cottage while the rain drummed harder on the windows. “I hope this storm won't prove too much for the cottage.”

“This cottage has stood here for a hundred years, Penny, and it'll be here tomorrow. But there's a good chance you could lose your power. I think we'd better start charging your phone and laptop. Torches with batteries are safer than candles, but let's start gathering up whatever you've got. And make sure the Rayburn is well-stoked and you've got lots of coal in. That's the great thing about a Rayburn. They give off a bit of light but more importantly, heat. And you can always brew a cup of tea or heat up some soup when others can't cook.” They got up from the table and went to the kitchen. “Oh, and just to be on the safe side,” said Bethan, “let's fill some containers with water so there's some to drink or for tea making. We don't know how bad this storm is going to be or how long it's going to last.”

They gathered up the supplies Bethan had suggested and checked the torch to make sure the batteries worked. “I'll leave it here on the table,” she said. “And when this is over, be sure to get in some new batteries so you're prepared for next time. We could be in for more weather like this.”

Penny nodded and sat down. As she did so, Bethan's phone rang. She pressed the button and listened. “Right. On my way.”

Penny stood up. “No rest for you, then.”

“Afraid not. The Conwy River has burst its banks and a man and his dog have been swept away.”

“Oh, no!”

“Why on earth people insist on walking there in this dangerous weather I will never know. But they do. It makes me so mad. And now we have to put our lives at risk to rescue them.”

“Sometimes the dog gets swept away and the human goes in to save the dog,” Penny said.

“Yeah, and the dog climbs out further along the bank and the human drowns. Well, I hope that won't happen this time.”

“I hope not, too.”

Bethan pulled on her coat. “We weren't finished with him.”

“Him?” asked Penny.

“It's Ifan Williams, the choirmaster. We had a few more questions for him about Glenda Roberts. Apparently they didn't get on very well.”

She opened the door and said, “Well, thank you for dinner.”

“Take care, Bethan. I mean it. Be very careful.”

The police officer started her car, turned on the windscreen wipers, and started to reverse. The car's headlights illuminated the slanting rain driven by the moaning wind and then picked up the figure of Penny running toward the car, holding a raincoat above her head. Bethan lowered the window.

“Take this.” Penny held her hand through the window and shouted to be heard above the storm. “It's the key to the cottage. Come back when you've finished. You'll be tired and coming here will save you the drive home. You know where the spare room is.”

With a wide grin, Bethan took the key and Penny ran back into the house.

She closed the door against the night, and grateful for her cozy, comfortable sitting room picked up the phone just as the lights went out.

 

Twenty

As the early morning light filtering under the window blind signalled the start of a new day, Penny flicked the switch on her bedside lamp. Nothing. She picked up her phone and checked the time: 7:47. She pushed back the duvet and shivered as the frosty air made contact with the exposed skin of her bare legs. Not bothering to remove her nightdress, she pulled a heavy jumper over her head and stepped into a pair of long thermal underwear that she normally wore only on winter sketching trips. Even the clothes were cold and it would take a few minutes for her body heat to warm them to a comfortable temperature. She stepped out into the hall and at the top of the stairs, she reached for the light switch before remembering that there was no power. So holding the railing, in the dim light, she crept downstairs. Bethan's police-issue boots, caked in mud and bits of grass, sat forlornly on the mat in front of the door. She hadn't heard Bethan come in, but was glad she had. She must be exhausted. Penny had put an extra blanket on the bed in the spare room the night before and hoped Bethan had been warm enough.

When Penny had arrived in Britain over two decades ago very few houses had central heating and winters were long and cold indeed. Sitting rooms were heated with one or two-bar electric heaters or a coal fire. People huddled around the fire, and dried clothes on wooden racks in front of it. When you left the room you closed the door behind you to keep the heat in, and then hurried through an unheated hallway to get to another room. Kitchens were warm from cooking, but bedrooms were usually unheated and always freezing. Her cottage had been like that until the recent renovation. And now, with the power out, she was very glad she had kept the elderly, but still serviceable Rayburn cooker.

Penny filled a pot with water and set it on the Rayburn. With the well-banked Rayburn, she was better off than most people in a power cut. As Bethan had said, she had heat and the means to cook when other people did not.

Leaving the water to boil for coffee, she turned her attention to the refrigerator. She pulled out a half-full carton of milk that should still be okay for coffee and cereal. And thanks to the Rayburn, they could make toast under the grill.

Of course there was no television for news of the storm, which seemed to have blown itself out, and its aftereffects, but she could probably find something on her phone, which, she remembered, she had left on her bedside table. Should she go back upstairs to get it and risk waking Bethan? Bethan had had a late night, so it might be better to let her sleep. And while she was wondering what to do, Bethan herself answered the question. Footsteps overhead signalled that she was up and about and a few minutes later she opened the door to the kitchen and closed it quickly behind her.

“Oh, thank God for the Rayburn—it's nice and warm in here! Morning, Penny.”

“Morning, Bethan. Did you sleep all right? Were you warm enough? I'm just organizing breakfast. There's toast and cereal. Fruit in the bowl. Coffee. What can I get you?”

“Coffee and toast would be wonderful, thanks.”

“We'll eat in the kitchen where it's warm,” said Penny. She handed Bethan a cup of coffee. Bethan, wearing a pair of navy cargo pants and a ribbed police jumper with shoulder patches and a crest on the left shoulder, leaned against the counter.

“Well, I expect you want to know about Ifan Williams,” she said. “It's good news and bad news. He'd managed to get himself out of the river by the time we arrived, but his dog was not so lucky. He was swept downstream. There wasn't much we could do in the dark, at the height of the storm.”

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah, we all felt bad about that. But we mustn't give up hope. He was young and a good size, so he may have been able to climb out on his own.” She gave Penny a reassuring, professional smile. “Let's hope so, eh? I told Ifan what we always say in these circumstances—try not to worry too much. But you could see that he was really distressed.”

“Well, I'm glad Ifan's okay. I rang Victoria last night to tell her about him and his dog going in the river and she was beside herself because if anything had happened to Ifan, she would have had to take over the music part of the program. Choir and musicians. All the arrangements, including practices.” Penny gave a light laugh. “She said all the things that are going wrong with this concert are starting to cause her to lose the will to live. Because after Glenda, I ended up agreeing to organize the concert. Did you know that?”

“Can you cancel it? I'm sure people would understand.”

“We discussed that, and I wish we could, but there are too many contracts already in place. So, no, this show must go on. And not because we're determined, spirited troupers and all that, but because we have no other financial choice. If we cancelled, we'd still be liable for a lot of payouts, so we have to hold the concert to cover the costs. We can't find any indication there was cancellation insurance.”

“I see. Well, would it help if I bought a ticket?”

“It sure would! I've got about seventy-five more to sell. Sales haven't exactly been brisk, despite Glenda's optimistic promotion. We really need to get the word out.”

“Well, I'll see what I can do. If you've got a poster, maybe I can put it up at the station. And you know, pensioners who are fit enough might like to go. Many of them, I'm sure, have long family ties to that mine. It was such a big part of the economy of this area.”

“You're right about that. Rhian's grandfather worked down there.”

“Rhian? Oh, right. The receptionist at the Spa.”

“That's her. She said her granddad would have been appalled by the very idea of holding a concert down that mine. I guess having worked there he sees it as being nothing more than a dark, damp, claustrophobic place that sucked the life out of everybody.”

Bethan looked at her watch. “Have to think about getting ready to leave. It's going to be a busy day as the storm cleanup begins. I wonder, do you have an old brush or something I can use to clean the mud off my boots? I'll do it outside.”

Penny reached under the sink and retrieved a brush with stiff wire bristles. “Here, try this. I use it on my boots sometimes when I'm back from a sketching ramble.”

“Great.” Bethan took the brush, put on her overcoat, and then looked down at her feet in their warm woolen socks. The two women walked to the hall and Penny picked up a pair of green Wellies and handed them to Bethan. “Here. These should do,” she said. She pulled on her coat and a pair of hiking books and the two women stepped outside into a damaged landscape. Her garden looked as if a ruthless giant had taken a scythe to most of the wintering bushes and trampled on whatever plants remained. Small branches littered the walkway. But the air smelled fresh and renewed.

Bethan held a boot away from her body and began attacking it with strong, swift strokes. For a moment, the only sound was the scratching, scraping sound of the wire bristles. And then Penny spoke.

“About Glenda. I can't stop thinking about the mine. I can't work out why she was killed there, of all places. Have you considered that the mine might have had a special significance to the killer? And the slate was left in her hand as a kind of calling card?”

Bethan paused, the boot covering one hand and the raised brush in the other.

“We can't go there, Penny. We can't think like that. The DCI told me about that kind of thinking ages ago, and in recognizing the dangers of it he was a bit ahead of his time.”

Penny frowned. “What do you mean?”

“It's called confirmation bias and it's very dangerous in some lines of work. Like policing. Or journalism. Or intelligence.” She took a half-hearted swipe with the brush. “It's a psychological thing. It means the tendency to accept evidence that confirms our beliefs and to reject evidence that contradicts them. It's a filter that we all use to make sure reality—as we perceive it—fits with our expectations. In other words, people search for information that confirms their view of the world and ignore what doesn't fit.”

“Sorry, I'm not following.”

“Okay. Here's an example. I saw this on telly recently. An American sheriff's deputy called 911 to report that his girlfriend had just shot herself. The evidence didn't show suicide; the evidence suggested homicide and in my opinion, led directly to him. But the police could not accept the evidence because they could not bring themselves to believe that one of their own could possibly do such a thing. So they ignored the facts that pointed to homicide and accepted the suicide theory. They twisted the facts to make them fit what they wanted to believe.”

“So are you saying that people see what they want to see and disregard the rest?” asked Penny.

“Something like that. And we all do it, this confirmation bias. Sometimes we do it to hide a truth we cannot face or accept.”

“Like the wife who ignores signs her husband is cheating on her.”

“Quite possibly. We had to do a course on this. It's to do with perception. Perception is reality. Let me see if I can remember how it works. Because Every Person Counts. That's the little memonic I made up to help me remember. BEPC. Beliefs shape expectations, which in turn shape perceptions, which then shape conclusions. Thus we see what we expect to see and conclude what we expect to conclude.

“So when police officers approach a case believing something to have happened or to be true—and it's not true—under this theory, they twist the evidence to support their theory. And that leads to all kinds of problems, like the wrong person being charged, or a terrific waste of time and resources.

“Sorry this is turning into a lecture, but what I'm really saying here is I don't know if Glenda's death had anything to do with the mine. The investigation might take us back there. Or it might not. We don't go into an investigation with theories … we let the facts lead us to the truth.” Bethan looked a little sheepish and resumed brushing the last of the mud off her boot. “Or at least we try to. We try to keep intuition and hunches out of it. They keep reminding us not to get obsessed with an idea, no matter how clever we think it is.”

Penny glanced up at the winter sky, threatening more rain in the distance, and then she gazed at the hills, their tops shrouded in mist, rolling away into the distance. She then turned to go back in the house.