unkeep.
Occasionally Mrs Beck made it one of the hostellers’ chores to get to work on the gorse bushes, brambles, bilberries and crowberries, and a bill-hook and secateurs were kept in the warden’s cottage for this purpose. The job was an unpopular one, however, as the hostellers maintained, with some reason, that they were responsible for keeping the house tidy but that their obligations did not extend to the garden.
Ribble took Dame Beatrice straight to Mrs Beck’s cottage. The warden was in and greeted Ribble with a grim smile.
‘I expect you’ve heard we’ve had more trouble with your dance lot,’ Ribble said.
‘More trouble? I’ve heard nothing.’
‘This is Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley. May we come in?’
‘Happen you must. What’s amiss now?’
Ribble told her.
‘Dame Beatrice is consultant psychiatrist to the Home Office,’ he said. ‘We think we’ve got a homicidal maniac on our hands.’
‘I should think so, too. Nobody’s safe these days, are they?’
‘I think you are wise to keep a dog,’ said Dame Beatrice, giving the Alsatian her fingers to sniff. ‘I wonder whether I might look at your register of guests? I am anxious to establish any possible overlaps.’
‘Overlaps? Oh, I see what you mean. Folks that were staying with me at the same time as the dancers. It won’t help you. The dancers came in last Wednesday evening and, except for poor Judy Tyne, stayed Thursday night and Friday night. I had nobody else except a party of four schoolteachers on Wednesday night and they went off first thing Thursday morning. I’ve had them before and I’m sure I can vouch for them.’
‘Were they cyclists?’
‘No, walkers. They couldn’t possibly have picked up Judy on her bicycle.’ Mrs Beck produced her records. Dame Beatrice took down the names and addresses of the teachers. They were all women and she could see why Ribble had not troubled, in his own phrase, to chase them up.
‘The only help we might get from them,’ she said, when she and the inspector were back in his car, ‘is if they heard anything of the quarrel which caused Mrs Tyne to take herself off on Thursday morning.’
‘I can find that out while you’re busy on your own course of action, ma’am, but from what I’ve been able to find out, the row was nothing more than a cat-fight between Mrs Tyne and this other dead girl.’
‘You spoke of what seems to be an alibi for the death of Mrs Tyne, Inspector.’
‘Won’t take five minutes, if you’d like to call on Mrs Ramsgill, ma’am.’
Mrs Ramsgill, like Mrs Beck, had not heard the news of the second death and the injury to Mick. She was deeply concerned.
‘To think that Ramsgill and I were actually in that hall just before it happened!’ she said. ‘Well, I never did! How upset poor little Pippa Marton must be to think of her brother being set upon like that!’
‘Ah, yes, Miss Marton,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘She was with you on the day Mrs Tyne was killed, I believe.’
‘Never went outside the door, once she got here, until she left at after five to go back to the hostel. Young Adam did his best to wheedle her into going out on the back of his motorbike, but she said she’d come to see
‘Was the young man disappointed?’
‘Oh, I don’t really think so. He put on a bit of a show, but you know what boys are. If they can’t get one girl, they know they can get another. That’s what he did. Picked up a girl in a pub, he told me, and they had a champion time together.’
There was mist on the moors as Ribble drove Dame Beatrice back to the Ewe and Lamb. She thought she had never gazed upon a more desolate scene. The hills looked higher than they had done on the outward journey, their outlines blurred and yet magnified by the combination of eerie mist and the fading light.
She invited Ribble in for a drink when they reached the comfortable, friendly little hostelry, but he excused himself on the grounds that he had paperwork to do when he got back to the police-station.
‘I’ll pick you up and take you to where they are holding the inquest,’ he said. ‘We shall ask for an adjournment, of course, so the proceedings will be brief and we’re not calling any of the dancers this time. We shall need them later, I expect, when we resume. After the inquest I shall have to go to the Lostrigg hostel to pick up those young people and put them in their forest cabin. Perhaps you would care to accompany me and get your first impression of them.’
‘You think one of them is your murderer, don’t you?’
‘Difficult to put anybody else in the picture. I shall have to see the caretaker again, but I think I’ll be wasting my time unless something helpful has occurred to him now he’s had time to think things over. I wish, when I’ve got them treed in the forest (sorry for the pun, I’m sure — not intended) you would have a real good go at the five boys, ma’am. Not an alibi among the lot of them, neither for the job on the moor or the murder at the hall. With a mixed troupe like that, and most of them what you might call artistic, there’s no knowing what went on behind the scenes, is there?’
Dame Beatrice agreed, but in an absent-minded way which indicated that her mind was not entirely occupied with speculations upon the young men members of Wild Thyme.
The inquest next day was as formal as the inspector had promised and in the afternoon he and she drove to the hostel at Lostrigg. Its situation was very different from that of the house at Long Cove Bay. It was surrounded by high green hills of a benignity unimaginable after the bleak, forbidding uplands of the moors. The house itself was gracious, too, and was flanked by decidous woods, the trees showing brown, copper-coloured, gold and with some of their boughs still green. The mansion was double-fronted behind a beautifully-kept lawn, and the approach to the house was by an equally well-maintained broad gravel path. There were projecting wings to the house and beyond the trees were bright green upland pastures divided here and there by drystone walls.
The overall impression was one of peace, stability and moderate prosperity, and it was difficult to believe that the way to it had been by a road which writhed across the high moors and then made long sweeps and curves past isolated stone-built shepherd-huts until it reached the lower ground and entered the beginning of arable and pasture-land.
Ribble’s driver pulled up at the side of the house and the other police cars, two of them, (for there were to be six passengers from the hostel), drew in behind him. Ribble and Dame Beatrice walked up to the front door of the hostel.
The warden this time was a man. Moreover, he lived on the premises, was married, and had a sitting-room, a bedroom and a private bathroom on the second floor of the building. He was a bearded, expansive individual and when he saw the police cars he went to the door himself.
‘They’re a bit restive, Inspector,’ he said. ‘I had to tell them you were coming again, otherwise I couldn’t have kept them here. It’s all a little bit off-beat, isn’t it, wouldn’t you say?’
‘The warden, Dame Beatrice,’ said Ribble. ‘Mr Conyers, this is Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley. She is consultant psychiatrist to the Home Office and we are going to relieve you of the guests I mentioned over the phone.’
‘I shall be glad to be rid of them. It’s strictly against regulations to keep them here all day and all of yesterday, as I explained, but police business is police business, of course. You didn’t give me any details when you brought Miss Marton along, but I gather the affair is serious.’
‘About as serious as it can be,’ replied Ribble. ‘There may be a murder charge against one or more of them.’
‘Good heavens! Come up to my sitting-room and I’ll send for them.’
‘Yes, they may as well hear what I’ve planned while they are all together. We can sort them out separately when we get them back to Wayland Forest.’
Given the news that they were virtually in custody, the remaining members of the Wild Thyme group were shocked into absolute silence for a minute or two. Dame Beatrice noted that they avoided one another’s eyes. The first to speak was Willie, the dark Scot.
‘But the tandem,’ he said. ‘It went, you know. What happened to the tandem? We thought the two of them had gone off on it until Pippa told us that Peggy was dead and Mick in hospital.’
‘We shall find the tandem in good time, sir,’ said Ribble. ‘Well, now, we want you all to come back with us to
