‘Something’s happened to her.’ said Peggy, somewhat hysterically, ‘and it’s my fault! It’s all my fault! She’s met with an accident! She’s in hospital! She’s had an accident and fallen off her bike. She went belting off at such a rate that anything could have happened to her.’
‘Yes, it’s happened to her,’ said Giles. ‘She won’t be coming back because she’s dead.’
Ribble showed up at Mrs Beck’s cottage again at half-past six and asked whether the troupe had been given the news of Judy’s death.
‘I told the leader,’ she replied, ‘and he will have told the others by now.’ She took the inspector over to the hostel just as the shocked company was about to begin the rehearsal upon which Giles insisted. Ribble summed them up and made his own announcement. It was received in mixed fashion. Pippa, who had been crying, burst into tears again. Her girlish-looking brother put his arm round her and said nothing. Giles said, ‘O Lord! The police!’ Plum said, ‘If only she’d stayed with us!’ Ronnie found Peter’s hand and squeezed it so hard in his emotion that Peter, with an oath indicative of pain, wrenched the crushed fingers from his neighbour’s grasp and massaged them. He said, ‘She knew about the convict on the moor. There was a notice up.’ Willie agreed, but added, ‘It was a car. Must have been.’ Peggy said, ‘I never meant to quarrel with her,’ and joined in with Pippa’s tears.
Judging, from these reactions, that Plum and Giles were the least emotionally affected, Ribble decided to interview them first.
‘Perhaps, sir,’ he said to Giles, ‘you would accompany me to Mrs Beck’s cottage, where she has placed her sitting-room at my disposal. She will remain with the rest of the party over here. You, sir,’ he addressed Plum, ‘will come across when this gentleman returns. As the matter may turn out to be more serious than a road accident, I shall be obliged if, on your return from the cottage, neither of you discusses what has been said there until I have spoken with every one of your party.’
‘Is that the reason for bringing Mrs Beck over?’ asked Giles. ‘To make sure they keep their mouths shut, I mean.’
‘Yes, sir. At any rate, it is one reason,’ Ribble replied, ‘and the same applies to the rest of you.’
‘I say!’ said Peter. ‘I don’t like this! Shouldn’t we have a lawyer present or something?’
‘As you wish, sir, but you will appreciate that if this death was not caused by a hit-and-run driver — and I have reasons for keeping an open mind about that — to insist upon having your lawyer present would hamper my enquiries because, by the time you had got in touch with him, a good deal of police time would have been lost and possible clues might have been destroyed.’
‘Oh, don’t be an ass, Peter,’ said Giles. ‘Do you want the inspector to think you did it? Lawyers indeed!’
‘Now, sir,’ said Ribble, when he had taken him across to Mrs Beck’s cottage and the warden had remained in the hostel commonroom, ‘perhaps you would give me an account of the circumstances which led to the young lady going off alone on her bicycle yesterday.’
‘I don’t want to say anything against her now she’s dead.’
‘Anything you say against her will hardly be as shocking as what somebody has done against her, sir, and may help me to apprehend this party of the second part. Either he is a cowardly and utterly callous motorist, or else, as we are inclined to suspect, we have to look for a deliberate murderer. I shall be grateful for anything you can tell me. The circumstances of this girl’s death must be cleared up, so — the whole truth, if you please, sir.’
‘Yes, all right, then. Well, I ought to explain that Judy was almost a newcomer to the gang. She was a replacement, in fact, for Cynthia.’ Abandoning his first attitude, Giles went into detailed explanations. There had to be nine people in the troupe. Nine was a magic and mystical number in folklore. There were the Nine Muses, the Nine Men’s Morris, the Nine Stones of Winterborne Abbas, ninepins, the nine gods of the Etruscans, the nine Worthies, the nine points of the law, Milton’s nine enfolded spheres, the nine days of Deucalion’s ark before it was stranded on Mount Parnassus.
Ribble let him go on, realising that the young man was under more strain than he had thought. Giles continued his recitation.
‘Then there are “dressed up to the nines”,’ he said, ‘and the nine earths with Hela the Norse goddess of the ninth one, and there are nine Orders of angels, not to mention the nine virgin goddesses of the ancient Gallic religion, the nine days it took the rebellious angels to fall from heaven, the nine fairies of the Armorica, the nine serpents worshipped in Southern India, the nine-headed Hydra, the nine lives of a cat and the cat o’nine tails — tell me,’ he interrupted himself, ‘is one of us suspected?’
‘Suspected, sir?’
‘Oh, come now, Inspector! You wouldn’t be wasting your time with us if you even suspected that Judy was killed by a hit-and-run car. You said as much. Do you think one of us is a murderer?’
‘All I need to find out at present, sir, is how the deceased came to be cycling alone when she was a member of your company. According to Mrs Beck there had been some cause for disagreement between two of the young ladies.’
‘Good Lord! It wasn’t serious enough for Peggy to have done Judy any harm.’
‘Probably not, sir, but I should like to hear about it. When did the disagreement take place?’
‘Last Wednesday; two days ago. It wasn’t about anything much, but you know what girls are. They fly off the handle for anything or nothing. This was all about the hornpipe.’
‘The hornpipe, sir?’
‘Yes. You see we are always trying to put new things into our show, so Peter suggested this sailors’ hornpipe, and everybody thought it a good idea, catchy and sort of patriotic, if you know what I mean. I mean jolly Jack tars and all that. It was to follow a couple of sea shanties we were all going to sing. I think the real trouble was that Peggy was to play the fiddle for the hornpipe, whereas Judy thought her concertina would be better.’
‘Are you telling me that this was the first time the two young ladies had fallen out, sir?’
‘Well, they never did get along very well together. This was only one of a number of skirmishes. There was really nothing in it at all, but Judy decided to make an issue of it and took herself off on Thursday morning.’
‘So the quarrel was on Wednesday. How did you yourself spend Thursday?’
‘Plum and I went on our bikes to Gledge End to confirm the arrangements for tomorrow’s show.’
‘Did you catch up with or pass Judy?’
‘No, but I expect we were on a.different road. A number of roads from here lead across the moors.’
‘Only one, sir, from near the hostel.’
‘Oh, you mean the turning as you go towards Long Cove Bay. We went right into the town and took the main Gledge End road from there. It’s a better surface and more direct. Where was Judy when — when it happened?’
‘Near a turning to the village of Wayland, which is on the border of the Forestry Commission’s property. At what time did you get to Gledge End, sir?’
‘I don’t know exactly. We didn’t rush things. When we got to the town we had a bite to eat and then we went to the church hall and arranged the chairs ready for our show. We don’t use a stage, you see. We make a hollow rectangle to dance in and put three rows of chairs round to enclose it, so there was a quite a bit of work for us to do and we were at it until about three o’clock. Then we cycled back along the road by which we had come and got in just before the others turned up.’
‘Did you expect that Judy would think better of her departure and turn up again that evening?’