The Murder of Busy Lizzie mb-46 Page 12

  What, to Sebastian, would have been a hazardous exploit, was to Laura, an experienced rock-climber who had done the ‘Pinnacle Route’ on Sgurr-nan-Gillean and the west traverse to the top of Bruach-na-Frithe, nothing in particular. Nevertheless, she did not believe in taking chances, especially on cliffs and rocks she did not know, so she had enlisted the aid of two sturdy young men and two girls with whom she had struck up an acquaintance in the bar of the hotel and arranged for them to act as watchmen willing to go for help if she got stuck or had an accident.

  She met her helpers at the appointed time and at the appointed place, but apparently the word had gone round that an assault on the cliffs of the terrifying west side was to be attempted, for at least a dozen of the younger ornithologists were assembled at the trysting-place anxious to witness the hazardous feat.

  Laura, naturally, had not given her real reason for wishing to make the descent. She stated that she had seen seals on the flat rocks at the base of the cliff, and she also confessed to a desire to watch the plunging guillemots who would make the four-hundred-foot dive from the top of the cliffs for fish, plummeting down with boldness and accuracy in one of the most spectacular sights to be seen on the bird-haunted island.

  As soon as she began the downward scramble seawards, she realised that it was not going to be too difficult, after all.

  Although, looked down on from above, the face of the cliff appeared to be sheer and wall-like, she found plenty of foot and hand-holds and, after a month of unexpectedly dry weather, there was not much chance of her slipping. Owing to years of experience of rock-climbing and mountaineering in Scotland, Laura had a great head for heights, but she knew better than to look down until she guessed that she must be getting near the foot of the cliffs. As she disturbed them, sea-birds wheeled and screamed, and, adding a threatening bass to their discordant shrieking, the sea below her snarled and thundered as it hurled itself against the immovable granite.

  Thirty feet above the waterline she came to an outcrop of rock which made a convenient ledge. On it she rested for a while and turned to look down at the sea. As she watched the waves crashing against the foot of the cliffs, she could see that a rocky shelf ran out some way into the water. It was similar to the shelf off the bathing beach at the southern end despite the water-waves which broke on it so threateningly, it had a friendly appearance which Laura recognised.

  Where she was standing, her back against the cliff-face, clumps of sea-pinks were growing. To Laura they formed a welcome landmark. She had not climbed down the cliff vertically, but had been edging gradually away to her right, and she knew from her survey through field-glasses of the terrain, as it disclosed itself from Dimbleton’s boat, that she must be almost directly above the cave she had seen as a black hole in the cliff. The rocks among which Eliza Chayleigh’s body had been found were also well within view and were not far from the mouth of the cave.

  ‘Good thinking,’ said Laura, self-approvingly. ‘Now to get into the cave.’

  This proved to be the most difficult part of the undertaking. She scrambled to within four feet of the water and was immediately drenched with spray and half-deafened by the noise of the waves as the incoming tide flung the whole of its force at the granite fortress of the Atlantic coast of the island. Disregarding all this, she worked her way, precariously but with great caution, still further to her right. Here the rocks which had harboured the body were taking the full force of the assault, so at one place the water did no more than cream in over the island shelf. Laura decided to chance her luck. She got within two feet of the water at this quieter point, glanced down, watched the retreating wave, dropped in, and the next oncoming breaker washed her into the cave.

  ‘Shouldn’t want Gavin to see me do that,’ she thought, as she floundered forward into the darkness and found the water getting shallower. ‘Wonder whether my torch still works?’ Realising that, even if she did not need to enter the water, she must inevitably be soaked by the spray when she reached the foot of the cliffs, Laura had wrapped her electric torch in a bit of oil-skin and buttoned it in the zipped pocket of the waterproofed anorak she was wearing. Scrambling onward into the cave and at last finding that her feet were on dry sand, she got out the torch and switched it on.

  ‘I went back to my gang on the top of the cliff,’ said Laura, reporting to Dame Beatrice on her return to Puffins, ‘and mighty surprised they were when I came upon them from the rear. They’d seen me drop into the water and disappear and the girls said they were a bit worried, but the boys, after their easygoing masculine manner, said I’d be all right and the girls were not to panic. They were going to give me an hour and then, if I didn’t show up, they would raise the alarm. Well, I found that the water only comes about halfway up the cave. After that it’s quite dry and, of course, being another of these smugglers’ hidey-holes, there’s a way out from the back. The ladder I found is pretty new and on the sand there’s a scuffle of footprints in the form of an almost perfect circle. If you ask me,’ concluded Laura impressively, ‘the cave is now the meeting-place of the witches and witches may be the smugglers. What do you say to that?’

  ‘Imaginative, ingenious, inspired and, of course, quite probable.’

  ‘I’ll tell you another thing, although it will change the subject. Dimbleton has an empty pig-sty in his garden.’

  ‘The trouble will be to find out when last he had a pig in it. But to revert to the smuggling, if it is what Robert and the others suspect, what can be gained by it?’

  ‘Well, there don’t seem to be any coastguards, so supposing the goods are not so much smuggled into the island as out of it? Gun-running to some trouble spot somewhere, for instance? No bother about getting the things either in or out, you see, and a fat profit at the other end.’

  ‘There I admit that you open up an avenue for thought.’

  ‘I guessed perhaps I might,’ said Laura, squinting modestly down her nose. ‘Of course, all the islanders must be implicated. You couldn’t risk having informers.’

  ‘But what has all this to do with the death of Eliza Chayleigh?’

  ‘I have no idea. But don’t you think my theory about the empty sty needs following up?’

  ‘Your ideas are always picturesque.’

  ‘And bear no relation to reality, I suppose!’

  ‘Reality is always relative, dear child. So far as the death of Mrs Chayleigh is concerned, I think first we must find out why she died, for we must remember that, so far, we cannot be certain that she was murdered.’

  ‘But you think she was, don’t you?’

  ‘It is as likely and as unlikely as that she committed suicide or was killed as the result of an accident, but I prefer to await the result of the inquest before I make up my mind.’

  ‘Meaning,’ said Laura shrewdly, ‘that you don’t propose to be bound by its findings. Is that your attitude?’

  ‘I have no more to say. Speculation is useless at the moment.’

  ‘Then shall we get on with the memoirs?’

  ‘I should prefer to take the air. Will you show me whereabouts on the cliff-top the bolt-hole from this cave comes out? I do not propose to scramble down the face of the cliffs as you did, but your ‘fairly new’ ladder sounds a possible means of descent, even for one of my advanced years.’

  ‘Well, all right, so long as we get back in time for our next meal. So you do think this was murder, and not accident or suicide, don’t you? I wish we knew why she really consented to come to this house and who it was she met here. Incidentally, the passage up from the back of the cave comes out at the end of the quarries, so one way of reaching it, if you wanted to throw people off the scent, might be to start from the back of this house, worm your way into the quarries and approach the entrance to the passage that way. You’d never be spotted unless somebody was actually in the quarries at the time, because they’re all overgrown with plants and small bushes and so there’s plenty of cover. My bet is not only that Mrs Chayleigh was conned into coming
to this house and murdered here, but that the body was taken to the cave and put into the sea on an outgoing tide. What do you think of that for an idea? There must have been more than one murderer, of course. That’s why I thought of the smugglers. I don’t believe one person could have managed all that alone.’

  chapter eleven

  The Witches’ Cavern

  ‘Dame, dame! the watch is set:

  Quickly come, we all are met.

  From the lakes and from the fens,

  From the rocks and from the dens,

  From the woods and from the caves,

  From the churchyards, from the graves…’

  Ben Jonson

  « ^ »

  What made you think that the cave had a second exit?’ Dame Beatrice asked as they climbed the knoll at the back of Puffins.

  ‘There’s a similar way up out of the cave I use as a bathing hut. There may be others on the island, for all I know, and there’s also a deep gorge which goes halfway across the island where the stream runs. This place must have been a smugglers’ paradise at one time and I believe it still is. Stuff comes in from the Continent, or further east, and goes out to Ireland and maybe to Cuba, or it comes in from America and goes out to the Middle East. There are all sorts of possibilities and apparently, on the island itself, no restriction. But the smugglers can wait for a bit, don’t you think? I feel that our immediate concern is with the death of Eliza Chayleigh.’

  From the top of the knoll a well-trodden path led to the top of the old quarries. These had been so long untouched that they were pleasantly overgrown by climbing plants, bracken, heather and wild flowers. For fifty yards or so Laura still followed the path and this kept to the line of the old railway track, which also sprouted wild plants, grass and gorse-bushes. When they came to the end of it against a huge pile of rubble and discarded blocks of stone, a further path led along the cliff-top towards the old lighthouse. Here Laura stood still.

  ‘Now the fun begins,’ she said. ‘Oh, damn! We’ve got company.’

  The company to which she referred was that of Sebastian and Margaret, who greeted her as they came towards her from the direction of the old lighthouse. Dame Beatrice leered at them kindly and asked how they did.

  ‘Well,’ said Margaret, when they had returned her salutation, ‘I’m glad we met you. Mrs Gavin—Laura—there’s a marvellous story going around among the bird-watchers at the hotel that you climbed down the cliffs on the end of a rope, took if off and left it dangling and came up by another route. We thought that could only mean you’d found another cave like the one we use for bathing. Do show us the exit. We’ve looked everywhere.

  ‘Another smugglers’ hole, in fact, it is. Quite right,’ said Laura. ‘I’m going to show it to Dame Beatrice. So you want to come along? All right, then. But I had no rope.’

  Behind the heap of stone and rubble there were bushes. Laura parted these and held them apart for Dame Beatrice to follow her before she plunged into a sea of bracken through which a narrow path led away to the left and fairly steeply downwards.

  ‘Mind how you go,’ she said. ‘There are chunks of stone and all sorts of rubbish down here, but I think we’re pretty well hidden from view from up top.’

  Dame Beatrice thought so, too. The sides of the quarry, although they were not precipitous, were steep and almost perpendicular, but the reason for Laura’s assumption was the dense growth of vegetation, chiefly gorse, bracken and small hawthorn bushes, which covered the sides. Even the sky, except for the blue slit directly above their heads, was seen through a maze of green and gold.

  It was rough going and they took it slowly. The quarry broadened out and became a square instead of a narrow rectangle. Laura plunged across it and on the seaward side there was an opening from which crudely-hacked steps descended to a tunnel.

  ‘This is where I came out,’ Laura explained, ‘and quite pleased to see a spot of daylight, I don’t mind telling you.’ She produced a torch and switched it on. ‘I reckon the quarrymen were in cahoots with the smugglers and between them they blasted this passage down to the sea.’ It led downwards fairly steeply and Sebastian, who was bringing up the rear behind his sister and Dame Beatrice, estimated that they must have covered more than half-a-mile before Laura said, in tones that reverberated, ‘You’d all better stand still for a minute. The last bit is a ladder. It’s quite firm, but we have to go one at a time. I’m going down now, and I’ll light the rest of you.’

  The ladder, an extremely steady and stable affair, as Laura had indicated, consisted of only a dozen rungs. When all four explorers were on the sandy floor of the cave, Laura cast the beam of her torch around and they could see, on the dry floor, the shuffled outline of a circle.

  ‘Your surmise that the island witches use the cave seems to be borne out by the evidence,’ said Dame Beatrice, who had also produced a torch.

  ‘Perhaps folk-dancers practise down here,’ said Margaret, giggling nervously because she found the echoing surroundings eerie.

  ‘Folk-dancers,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘do not usually place candles at the four cardinal points of the compass.’

  She walked round the outside of the scuffled circle. Plainly to be seen in the light of her powerful torch were the marks of four sets of candle-droppings. Then she led the way towards the mouth of the cave, but kept well back from the edge of the water. Here she and Laura switched off their torches, for it was brilliantly sunny over the sea. The force of the waves, as Laura previously had discovered, was broken on the series of black rocks which stood about ten yards out and among which the corpse of Eliza Chayleigh had been caught and held. Dame Beatrice, after studying the scene for several minutes, during which none of the others disturbed her thoughts, turned away and said decisively.

  ‘I do not think Mrs Chayleigh’s body was ever in this cave.’

  ‘No?’ said Laura. ‘But it would have been so easy. Knock a person on the head in our present dwelling, get the body into the quarries, cart it down here—you’d be screened all the time, once you got into the quarries—heave the body into the water from the mouth of the cave on an out-going tide, and there you are.’

  ‘Yes, that sounds feasible, I know. My objection is this: those rocks where the body was found constitute a natural barrier to the force of the incoming tide.’

  ‘Granted.’

  ‘They also act as a foil to the outgoing tide. There is never sufficient strength in the ebb to carry a body beyond those rocks and out to sea.’

  ‘Well, we know that’s true, so what?’

  ‘The people who know of this cave must be dwellers on the island, I think. If that is so, they must be well aware of the point we have just raised. They would know that the body would get caught up among the rocks and that, when it did, it would be seen from the old lighthouse and also from the cliff-top. They might just as well have left the body in the cave.’

  ‘With all those witches, or whatever, coming down here to hold their meetings?’

  ‘Well, but the witches would equally well have seen the body caught up among the rocks. It seems to me that the murderer’s most sensible plan would be to get the body carried out to sea and for it to remain in the water long enough to become unrecognisable. The fact that the body got caught up among rocks makes me wonder whether the murderer (and I am not necessarily assuming that Mrs Chayleigh was killed and disposed of by only one person) was a stranger to the island and not a native of the place, otherwise surely he would have allowed for the rocks and the tides.’

  ‘It could have been a witchcraft plot, you know,’ said Laura. ‘Had you thought of that?’

  Dame Beatrice cackled.

  ‘Do you mean that the whole coven was in a plot to rid the world of poor Eliza Chayleigh?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, I’m keeping an open mind,’ declared Laura, stoutly. ‘Has everybody seen enough? I’m getting hungry.’

  They were about to return by the way they had come when Margaret murmured,

  �
�I think there’s somebody coming.’ Instinctively she flattened herself against the dark wall of the cave and, such is the herd instinct, her brother and Laura did the same. Dame Beatrice remained where she was. From the top of the ladder came an oath and it was followed by a woman’s voice saying in frightened tones:

  ‘Somebody down there!’

  ‘No matter. Just carry on,’ said a man. ‘It’ll only be some of the bird-watchers and they’re innocent and harmless enough.’

  ‘Yes, do come down. Don’t mind me,’ said Dame Beatrice, her beautiful voice echoing oddly around the cavern.

  ‘Out of the way, then, ma’am. Us be carrying a table and that,’ said one of the women, ‘and it’s kind of ockard on this here ladder.’

  One after another, five persons climbed down the ladder into the cave, Dame Beatrice politely lighting their descent with her torch. In silence they stacked what they were carrying against the back wall of the cave. There was only one man. Of the women, one was young, the others middle-aged. In illuminating their labours Dame Beatrice also contrived to shine her torch into their faces and was rebuked by the woman who had already spoken to her.

  ‘Keep that torch out of my eyes, and thank you kindly,’ she said, curtly but not offensively. ‘ ’Tis a powerful light and makes me go quite blind.’

  ‘Oh, I do beg your pardon,’ said Dame Beatrice, who had seen as much as was necessary. ‘Do tell me, are you preparing for a picnic?’

  ‘Ay, you might call it that, then.’

  ‘But where is the food?’

  ‘Coming later,’ said the man briefly.

  ‘You won’t tell nobody as you’ve seen us, like, will you?’ said the woman. ‘Don’t want interlopers. Some of they tourists would be all over us if they thought there might be a free supper.’