‘All right, all right,’ said Giles, ‘but we haven’t got a Wayne Sleep, so there will be three of us doing the hornpipe as usual. Peggy will play for it and Mick will dance the girl in the middle.’
‘Not in Judy’s shorts he won’t said Mick. ’I’ve got hairy legs. I’m all right in Three Meet because I’m wearing a frock and white stockings, but the hornpipe? Why can’t just the two of you do it?’
At this point, Ribble thought that unless he intervened the argument was likely to go on for some time.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘I shan’t keep you more than a moment. Just checking.’ He turned to the caretaker. ‘Well?’
‘Him and him,’ said the caretaker, pointing to Giles and Plum.
‘Right.’ He looked at the rows of chairs. ‘At what time did they hand back the keys to you?’
‘They never. They dropped them through my letter-box.’
Ribble dismissed him and addressed the company. ‘I am continuing my investigations into the death of Mrs Tyne. Does anybody want to change his story of how he spent Thursday afternoon? I’ve already found one discrepancy,’ he said austerely.
‘I don’t know why you’re looking at me,’ said Peggy.
‘No, miss? I would be glad to inform you if we could have a word in private.’
‘Oh, I say!’ exclaimed Giles. ‘Our rehearsal, you know.’
Ribble took Peggy out into the vestibule.
‘You lied to me, miss,’ he said flatly.
‘Suppose I did?’
‘It’s a serious matter, miss. I am investigating the circumstances of violent death. For your own sake it would be better to confide in me. You are known to have quarrelled with the deceased.’
‘I don’t like being threatened.’
‘That is not a threat, miss, just a friendly warning.’
‘Well, if you must know, I went to Crosswell.’
‘A good deal of time would have been saved if you had told me that at once, miss.’
‘You didn’t think I would confess to chasing after a boy, did you? Anyway, I didn’t catch up with him — Mick I’m talking about. I knew he had gone off with Willie. I had heard their plans and with Judy out of the way — of course I didn’t know what was happening to her — I went after them, but they can kick that tandem along so fast that they had left the restaurant in Crosswell by the time I got to it, and I didn’t know they had gone to the pictures. I looked round the shops and then cycled back, that’s all.’
‘What time was this, miss?’
‘I suppose I left Crossweli soon after three and I pedalled back pretty hard. I was upset at not catching Mick, you see.’
Ribble had a good deal to think about. As Peggy had lied once, she might be lying again. As for Mick, he claimed to have fallen asleep in the cinema, but what if, with or without Willie’s connivance, he had slipped out when the lights went down, met Peggy by arrangement and that together they had tracked Judy down and murdered her?
He could see the snags in this theory. It was most unlikely that they would have known what Judy’s plans were when she left the hostel. All the same, she might have confided them to Mick, owing to her special feeling for him. The difficulty was the time factor. The killing had to be done in a lonely part of the countryside and, unless Judy had made a previous assignation with Mick, it would have been simply a matter of luck whether he and his accomplice Peggy came upon Judy in the lonely spot where the body had been found.
In any case, there were still questions to be asked. Had Judy become so much of a nuisance to Mick that he was prepared to go so far as to kill her? Ribble doubted it. Then there was Willie to consider. Had Mick really fallen asleep in the cinema and had Willie been the one to slip out? But there was no evidence whatever that either of the boys had left the cinema during the performance, and they must have come back to the hostel together because their means of transport was the tandem.
Ribble abandoned these speculations for another. There was no reason, on the face of it, to suspect either Giles or Plum, but although they could find a witness, the caretaker, to the time they had arrived at the church hall to arrange the seating, there was no proof of the time at which they had left, since they had not handed back the keys, but had put them throught the caretaker’s letterbox. It seemed unlikely that Giles would have been a party to the murder of one of his troupe, particularly just before one of their shows, but anger often over-rides expediency.
Ribble sighed. It seemed that he could rule out nobody but Mick’s sister Pippa. Even the two who had gone to the swimming pool must remain suspect. He reverted to Mick and Willie. The tandem need not have had two passengers on the journey back from Crosswell. Either of the young men could have pedalled it back (with a wobble or two because of its length) and the other could have come back on the bus. There were bus routes into Long Cove Bay to connect it with other towns and the outlying villages and there could have been an arrangement whereby the boys met at the Long Cove Bay bus terminus in order to come back on the tandem to the hostel as though they had been together all the time.
Unfortunately, although he felt certain that one or more of the members of Wild Thyme could be held responsible for Judy Tyne’s death, he had not ruled out the possibility that some hit-and-run motorist had knocked her off her bicycle — how else to account for that buckled front wheel? — and, to save himself from being reported by the girl to the police, had decided to finish her off and try to hide the body.
The last possibility was that the escaped convict, desperate for money and food, had been the murderer. Ribble had almost, but not quite, rejected this theory, but while the man was still at large, no theory could be abandoned completely.
Mentally Ribble tossed up. Heads the murderer was Willie, for the Yorkshireman did not trust the dark Celt. Willie might have had every incentive to remove one of Mick’s lovers. If he had done so, the girl Peggy might also be in danger. Tails, the murderer was Mick himself. Ribble had the usual masculine distrust of fair-haired, girlish-looking boys, especially when they were under such close protection as that of the saturnine Willie. Ribble sighed again. Peggy herself, as he had already realised, must remain on the list of suspects. She had already lied about her movements and even if she had told the truth now, there were hours of Thursday for which she could provide only the most sketchy of accounts.
Chapter 10: WILD THYME (2)
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The rehearsal over, the dancers sat on the rather uncomfortable chairs and put their stockinged feet up while Peggy and Pippa were sent out by Giles to the shops in Gledge End to purchase food and soft drinks for the party. The meal was to be taken in the church hall to save time and conserve energy.
‘Take the tandem,’ said Willie handsomely. ‘If you hitch the trailer you can bring back lots of grub and plenty to drink. Your little handlebar baskets won’t hold nearly enough for all of us.’
‘Not too much liquid,’ said Giles, the leader. ‘When it’s over we’ll go to the pub, but we don’t want a lot of fizz sloshing about inside us before we dance.’
The platform in the hall, dignified, when the building was hired, by being called the stage, was on this occasion to be used to seat some of those who had bought the most expensive tickets. On one side of it there was an entrance through a doorway in the back wall to a room in which, on Sundays, a class for the youngest Sunday School children could be held, and when the hall was let on weekdays the room served as a changing-room and had a washroom attached to it. It also contained a very roomy cupboard for the caretaker’s brooms and buckets.
After the indoor picnic-style lunch the company rested while Pippa practised an obbligato she was to play with an orchestra in a concert in her own town and Giles knit his brows over the afternoon programme and hoped that Mick would be able to cope with the extra rôles assigned to him in place of Judy. The show was to open at three and was to begin with a set of three folk-songs sung by the whole company including the violinist. The plump Peggy was to wear a print dress and a sunbonnet and at Giles’s orders, although against her own wishes, Pippa was to be disguised in a beard and false eyebrows. These were in the property box, but seldom used except for the more bucolic of the folk-songs, when they were worn by Plum. Pippa had done her best to repudiate them, but Giles was adamant.