‘And try to bend her round to your way of thinking?’
‘In these latitudes, as you should be well aware, such effort would be wasted. People up here are not malleable.’
‘They cling to their opinions with the single-minded tenacity of limpets clinging to rocks, you mean. Yes, I suppose they do. What’s my part in all this?’
‘The humble but essential office of scribe. I do not care to use a tape-recorder. People distrust them.’
‘Well, they are a kind of bugging device, I suppose.’
‘And, being evil-minded, as all mechanical contraptions, in fact, all inanimate objects, are, they may go wrong at crucial moments. I prefer the written word, even though it does not appear originally in longhand.’
‘Forward, Sir Isaac Pitman,’ said Laura. ‘You say you’re sending those four girls home. Didn’t Hermione chafe a bit? She’s an independent young madam, I thought, as a general rule.’
‘Fortunately Hermione is in no position to object to her deportation. The cabin is booked in the name of Miss Erica Lyndhurst and she agreed with me that the four of them are better out of the way.’
‘But why? You must have said something which convinced her.’
‘Oh, I did.’
‘Any use asking what it was?’
‘I took her aside and told her that the greatest danger was to the young Tamsin Lindsay. I thanked her for upholding my authority and advised her to vacate the forest cabin forthwith. They left this morning.’
‘I don’t get it. Could you supply chapter and verse, or is it one of those guessing games?’
‘By no means. When we have heard the stories which the dancers have to tell and can co-relate them with what I have heard already from the cabin party, you will know as much as I do and, I have little doubt, will come to the same conclusion as I have done.’
‘You know my methods, Watson. Apply them,’ said Laura. ‘Right. Fair enough. When do we start?’
Chapter 14: TWAYBLADE
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Pippa reminded Dame Beatrice of Tamsin, for the girls had three things in common. They were much of an age, both were in a state of alarm and uncertainty and both were artists, Pippa with her flute, Tamsin with pencil and brush.
The young men had been asked to remove themselves to the bedrooms while Dame Beatrice interviewed Pippa in the sitting-room of Ribble’s requisitioned forest cabin in which a policewoman had been Pippa’s companion.
‘None of us did it, you know,’ said Pippa defensively. ‘I mean, how could we? We were all together all the time.’
‘You are referring to Saturday afternoon. What can you tell me about the previous Thursday?’ Dame Beatrice asked.
‘Oh, well, we weren’t together then, of course. We didn’t rehearse until after tea. We wouldn’t have rehearsed then if things had been normal. It was Judy going off and not coming back which upset things. ’
‘You yourself spent the day on a farm, I believe.’
‘Well, only in the farmhouse, actually. Mrs Ramsgill will tell you.’
‘Was the farmer at home?’
‘No, only to lunch. She said he wouldn’t be coming back much before six, so I didn’t wait to see him again. Oh, but he had nothing to do with Judy’s death. He had never even met her, so far as I know.’
‘You did not, any of you, go to the farm for butter or eggs or milk?’
‘Oh, that? I didn’t think that counted and anyway it wouldn’t have been Mr Ramsgill we saw. It would have been Mrs Ramsgill or the dairymaid.’
‘Ah, yes, of course.’
‘Detective-Inspector Ribble told us that you would be coming. He said you are a psychiatrist. Does he think one of us is mad?’
‘My work is concerned more with the emotionally disturbed than with what you would call the insane,’ Dame Beatrice replied. She nodded to Laura, who was poised, a shorthand notebook in front of her. ‘Now, Miss Marton, we come to last Saturday. Will you give me an account of your whole day until the time you reached Miss Lyndhurst’s forest cabin? There is no need to elaborate. Just give me the plain facts, please, and answer my questions as accurately as you can.’
‘Are you going to question our men as well as me, to make sure we all tell the same story? You see, I shall have to include what others did, and they would have to tell about me,’ said Pippa.
‘Just tell the story in your own way. I am trained to separate the wheat from the chaff.’
‘When will they let me see my brother?’
‘I cannot say. Meanwhile, please render me all the help you can. The sooner the police apprehend his aggressor, the safer this part of the world will be for everybody.’
‘Poor Peggy!’
‘Yes, indeed. Her sudden appearance in that dressing-room may have saved your brother’s life. I also think she may have seen her murderer face to face.’
‘So you want to know who else might have gone into that room besides Peggy after the show was over. My account won’t help you. I’m sure that, whoever killed Judy and Peggy, it wasn’t one of our lot.’
‘It’s a dirty bird that fouls its own nest. Your loyalty does you credit, but is not likely to be helpful.’
‘It isn’t loyalty. It’s absolute conviction.’
‘So be it. At what time did your Saturday begin? We may exclude breakfast.’
‘We didn’t get away from Mrs Beck and the hostel much before ten. Ten o’clock in the morning is the deadline, you see, for hostellers. The boys had loaded up the trailer which carried costumes and props — the wooden swords, Willie’s claymores and kilt, the morris sticks and all the rest of the gear. We had put all those things ready the night before, so that the trailer had only to be hitched on behind the tandem in the morning. All our individual private gear had to be left till last. The men’s bikes have those long, capacious leather holdalls, but we, the girls, have only a smallish saddlebag behind us and a basket on the handlebars, but everybody carries a rucksack or a haversack as well.’
‘So you left at about ten.’
‘And rode our bicycles straight to Gledge End and took over the church hall as arranged. We needed a rehearsal because, except for Giles and Plum, who had gone over on Thursday to arrange the seating, none of us had seen inside the place to know how much space was available for the dances or where the piano and the musicians were going to be put. We had a picnic lunch in the hall, then a rest for about an hour after we’d swept up the crumbs—’
‘You swept the floor?’
‘Oh, yes. Giles found a soft broom in the broom cupboard where — well, you know.’
‘Yes, I know. So Giles knew that the cupboard was unlocked. Did any of the rest of you know?’
‘He came back into the hall with the broom and Plum took it back and put it away, so he would have known.’
‘Oh, well, I shall be talking to both of them later on.’
‘Then we rehearsed and had another rest and then we changed for the songs and I put on my beard and the caretaker came to ask whether we were ready to open the doors for the audience to come in, and that’s about all I know.’
‘I see. My next question is important, so please answer it carefully. You may prove to be extremely helpful. Your part in the programme was as flautist, you told me, with an occasional gravitation to the piano. Did you at any time notice whether anybody in the audience left the hall during the performance?’
‘I wouldn’t know whether anybody left during the last item because I was doing the hobby-horse and I had to concentrate like mad so that I didn’t get in the way of the dancers. I hadn’t a chance to notice anything except what they and I were up to.’
‘Yes? Well, now, to return to my vital question: you may not have noticed anybody leaving the hall during the
