The Death-Cap Dancers

‘Oh, darling, I don’t know. People do wander around when they’ve had a shock, don’t they?’

‘People vary in their reactions. However, I suppose your friends’ intentions were commendable.’

‘She’s coming,’ said Hermione, emerging from the telephone kiosk and addressing Isobel, who was waiting outside. ‘We shall be all right now.’

‘Famous last words ! ’ said Isobel. ‘Come on and let’s see if we can find this tree of yours.’

The Trent’s holiday finished on the Saturday, so while Isobel and Hermione were searching for the marked tree, John Trent came to the cabin on a neighbourly visit, probably the last, he explained.

‘I hope you’ve had no more trouble with that lad,’ he said.

Oh, no, thanks,‘ said Erica, who had answered the door.

‘Good. One wondered, because one spotted a police car here.’

‘Come in and we’ll tell you about it.’

‘I don’t know whether we are at liberty to do that until the police release the story to the press,’ said Tamsin.

‘Oh, it will come out today. The police haven’t told us to keep quiet about it. Besides, that poor girl’s friends will be making enquiries by now,’ Erica said. ‘The fact is we found a girl’s body on the moors when we were out yesterday. The police had to be told, so we went to the police station yesterday and they came this morning to ask us a few more questions.’

‘Good Lord! The girl was not anybody you knew, I hope.’

‘The body? Oh, no. Hermione saw a bicycle through the window of the car and then Isobel and I got out to have a look in case somebody was ill or had had an accident, and a bit further off we found her.’

‘How beastly for you!’

‘Yes, it was. You see, until the police got this idea that we’d run her down with our car, we thought the escaped convict must have done it, although, if so, it seemed odd that the front wheel of the bike was so badly buckled. Still, he must be desperate for money and food and there was no sign of her handbag or anything else she might have had with her. The police asked whether we had ever seen her before, which I thought was rather a silly question. Tamsin thought she might have come from the Youth Hostel at Long Cove Bay, but it was only a suggestion. Considering that the bike was lying in a slanting position with the buckled front wheel pointing away from our car, either she was cycling on the wrong side of the road or she was going towards Long Cove Bay, not away from it.’

‘If she’d been hit by a car, the bike could have been knocked clean across the road, I suppose, so you can’t prove much by the position of the front wheel.’

‘That’s true, so it’s not much use worrying about the bike. They will have got a doctor to look at the body and if he says the girl was knocked down and killed by a car, I expect that’s what happened. The trouble is that they think it was our car.’

They surely don’t think so just because you reported finding the body?’

‘Unfortunately there’s more to it than that,’ said Tamsin. ‘Hermione parked the car after we got back and on the way to the carpark from unloading me here because of my wretched ankle, she had a skid and hit a tree and marked the car. She and my sister are out now, trying to find the tree.’

‘Anything I can do to help?’

‘I don’t think so, thanks,’ said Erica. ‘Do you mind not mentioning any of this to anybody at present?’

‘Trust me.’

‘Well, I hope we can,’ said Tamsin, when he had gone. ‘We don’t want the story to be passed round until we know where we stand, do we?’

The other two came back with mixed tidings. The skidmarks were impossible to find because so many cars had used the road to the carpark that any evidence of the kind which Hermione had hoped for was destroyed. Apart from that, she and Isobel had failed to locate a damaged tree.

‘I thought I remembered pretty well where I had the skid,’ she said, ‘but I was only thinking about the bicycle and you two finding the body, so I may be wrong about where the skid took place, and, of course, there are scores of trees.’

‘We’ll all have another look later on,’ said Isobel. ‘Anyway, Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley is coming on Sunday, so with her at our side the police won’t dare to bully us.’

‘There’s only one trouble about that tree,’ said Erica. ‘Even if you do find it, I can’t see how we can prove that it was Hermione’s skid that marked it. I don’t suppose she’s the only driver to have had her wheels slip sideways on wet leaves.’

After this pessimistic observation, lunch was a somewhat silent meal. At one point Tamsin said, ‘Are you beginning to wish we had never come to this place?’ To this Erica replied with equal pessimism:

‘I bet Hermy begins to wish she had never met us.’

‘Well,’ said the superintendent to Detective-Inspector Ribble, ‘the ball is in your court now, Bob. The medical evidence — and Forensic are dead certain to back it up — is that the girl didn’t receive fatal injuries by being knocked down by a car. She may have been knocked down, but that she was actually killed by repeated blows on the head is the official verdict. Probably struck from behind with a stone first of all, and then, when she tumbled down, there must have been a frenzied attack on her. Somebody wanted to make quite sure she was dead. We may know more about that when we know who she is. One of those four girls suggested she might have come from the Youth Hostel. Anyhow, the murderer made off with her gear, we think. She must have had at least a handbag, but we searched a wide area and found absolutely nothing, so, up to now, we haven’t a clue to her identity.’

‘If she was on a solitary holiday and was a Youth Hosteller, sir, she may not be missed for days. Chances are she was a schoolteacher, don’t you think, sir?’

‘Why, Bob?’

‘Schools get a week’s half-term holiday round about now, sir. I’ve got three kids, so I know.’

‘Oh, yes, of course. Doesn’t help us until somebody misses her and comes forward. Even if she taught at a local school there would be nobody there except a caretaker and the chances are that she could have come from absolutely anywhere. We shall put out a description, of course, but I think it’s just going to be a question of wait and see. We shall try the Youth Hostel, of course.’

‘Even when we know who she is, sir, we shan’t be much further forward if this was one of those opportunist, unpremeditated jobs, and that’s what it looks like on the face of it, except those sort are usually sex motivated. You seem to have ruled out the chap who absconded a day or two ago. They haven’t picked him up yet and he was in for murder, wasn’t he?’

‘Wife-murder, yes, but he was one of these arsenic operators. This person or these persons who attacked the girl must have gone berserk. It wasn’t in keeping with anything that’s known about the chap from Hangwood.’

‘If a man’s desperate enough, sir, you can’t guarantee what he’ll do.’

‘It’s the bashing he gave her. That doesn’t fit our chap: All he had to do, if it was him, was to knock her unconscious and make off with any food or money she was carrying. If she was attacked from behind she wouldn’t be able to describe him.’

‘Perhaps she put up a fight, sir, and he lost his head.’

‘Against that is the theory that if he struck the first blow from behind her, that was the blow which killed her. Even if it didn’t, it wouldn’t have left her in any condition to put up a fight. I don’t think we can query the medical evidence, you know, and that includes one curious little fact.’

‘You mean we’ve got a clue, sir?’

‘No such luck, I’m afraid, but it’s an odd little circumstance, all the same. The doctors found a mushroom or some kind of toadstool — it hasn’t been identified yet — embedded in the head-wound. Wherever that kind grows, it doesn’t usually grow on the moors among the heather.’

‘Looks as though she was killed in the woods, sir.’

‘But who would have taken the body back to the moor to hide it when it would have been much safer and easier to put it in one of the thickets? It looks less and less like our man, to my mind.’

‘And those young women, sir?’

‘Damned if I know. They do have one of the forest cabins. I think we’ll have to keep tabs on them. Even if they are not guilty, they may know something which they haven’t told us. There must be some explanation of how that fungus came to be embedded in the wound. To go back to our man, though, he may have been fly enough to reason that a buckled bike could have been biffed by a car, and as