Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 111, No. 1. Whole No. 677, January 1998

Slow Burn by Gwen Moffat

© 1997 by Gwen Moffat

“Landscape is an important component in the work of Gwen Moffat,” said the authors of By a Woman’s Hand. This is no less true in her short stories than in the 20 crime novels she has penned, many featuring Miss Pink, a heroine as formidable as the narrator of this story. Ms. Moffat lives in the English Lake District and travels in the western U.S.

Whether or not you believe in original sin, Darren Jones never stood a chance. It didn’t seem that way at the time. For nearly a year he appeared to hold the whip hand because, terrified of retaliation, Mrs. Tilney didn’t dare protest. It became so bad you started to wonder what she would do if driven beyond endurance.

Thirza Tilney had her hostages to fortune: her cherished cat, and the cabin from which she watched the seabirds that nested on the cliffs below the coast-guard station. She was old, turned seventy, small and frail, and she’d depended on her husband for everything: from changing a light bulb to paying the bills, and for emotional support. Darren had his father for protection, a lumbering bear of a man, who drank. Thirza had had her husband and she’d clung to him like ivy to a wall.

Charles Tilney was a solicitor, and although not an unkind man, he couldn’t always conceal his impatience with his wife. We have our share of eccentrics in this remote corner of Wales: dog breeders, horsey women, lone retirees who’ve been in positions of authority. Charles met a number of these in his practice and Thirza, more a shadow of himself than an individual in her own right, would make a poor showing in contrast.

Charles died: a heart attack in the cabin while he was watching his beloved birds — for it was Charles who was the ornithologist; Thirza maintained she was only a bird-watcher. She went to the cabin because he did, although on the one occasion I was there with the two of them he ignored her — not pointedly, it was just that he was more interested in the birds. But he was alone when he died. Thirza felt guilty about that. Afterwards she continued to go to the cabin. “It’s a comfort,” she told me. “I feel him all around me there.”

I was the only person she confided in, but then I’m a good listener. A hospital matron has to be. I knew my nurses called me a Rottweiler behind my back, but I’ve mellowed in retirement. There’s no longer any need to assert my authority except on rare occasions with impertinent tradesmen or small boys. I never had any trouble with Darren Jones. Thirza, looking for a substitute, would have become as dependent on me as she’d been on Charles, if I’d allowed it, so I was careful. I saw to it that she came to my cottage only on invitation and I didn’t go to the cabin on the cliff at all. I preferred to watch birds from the old coast-guard lookout. In any event, it was bright and airy; I found the cabin claustrophobic.

Charles had built his retreat on a point above a cove, and the structure faced the cliffs below the coast-guard station. The lookout, sited on the opposite point, gave the reciprocal view: the cliffs below the cabin. The cabin was little more than a hide really, with slit openings which were closed by shutters when no one was in occupation. My feeling of claustrophobia started the very first time I went there. Charles was alive then and Thirza had been with us. It was a blustery day with an offshore wind, and the cabin moved alarmingly, straining against the cables that secured it to the bedrock. Charles closed the door when we entered, but after we’d been observing the ranks of auks for a few minutes, through the noise of wind and birds I heard a soft clack! from the direction of the door. I turned.

“Only the drop bar,” Charles said carelessly. “It’s fallen into the holder.”

“It’s how we keep the door shut when we leave,” Thirza explained. “How do we get out?”

“Ah!” She was coy. “Shall we tell her, Charles?”

He was concentrating on a colony of razorbills and he didn’t lower the binoculars. “Of course, you tell her! How’s she going to get out if it happens when she’s in here on her own?”

“I didn’t think of that.” She reached up to the ledge above the door and produced a rusty table knife. Inserting it in the crack between door and jamb, she prised up the bar and the door opened. She replaced the knife and the door closed again under pressure from the east wind. A moment later a gust shook the cabin and I heard the bar drop.

“I’ll never come here on my own,” I said flatly. “Suppose a tourist — or some child — came in and took the knife?”

“No one ever comes here except us,” Charles was quite casual about it.

“You ought to carry your own knife,” Thirza said. “I do.” She saw my surprise. “Charles insists on it,” she explained. “So useful. You can cut the sheep free, for instance; they’re always getting hung up in the brambles.” And she pulled a Swiss Army knife from the pocket of her parka. I was amused. Thirza Tilney armed with a lethal weapon!

After Charles’s death we rallied round her, particularly the elderly among us, and no doubt she thought that, with so many men on hand, they would go some way towards filling the gap, at least where material assistance was concerned. She hadn’t made friends of her own, these were Charles’s associates, but even intimates would have tried to persuade her to stand on her own feet eventually, once the period of grieving was over.

She hadn’t a clue about the most mundane matters; she needed help with her income-tax returns, with insurance forms, with selling the car. That was another problem: She couldn’t drive, and she wouldn’t ride a bicycle because she was terrified of tractors in our narrow lanes. If she didn’t catch the bus she depended on other people to take her to town. As for the cabin, which was over a mile from the village, she walked there. It was a pleasant enough walk, across little fields with flowery banks in spring. The fields stopped before the sea cliffs, and the cabin was approached across a stretch of moor, the haunt of curlews and other ground-nesting birds.

The months that followed Charles’s death saw a deterioration in Thirza. She started to let herself go. She still went out to the cliffs and fussed about the garden but I felt that she kept up these interests because of their association with Charles. In her person she became — well, slovenly. She didn’t keep her house clean, and as for her clothes: her cuffs and collars were frayed, her boots caked with mud, and I don’t think there was a pocket in her parka that didn’t have holes. She was always shedding things through the holes.

As Charles’s friends dropped away, she was forced to employ handymen to do the jobs around the place that Charles had done as a matter of course. There was the tendency to attach herself to me, which I discouraged, trying to chivvy her gently into pulling herself together, to take up the reins again, live sensibly like other solitary women. Naturally I was careful not to imply that if I could do it, so could she, but in any case I had no success.

She continued to frequent the cliffs so at least she was involved with the natural world. From the coast-guard station I would look down on the cabin and see the shutters were open, so I’d know she was inside. Occasionally, walking back to the village, she would overtake me — I am a little short-winded and she was a fast walker. I took to returning home by a different path. I found her something of a trial — and now she was becoming paranoid about the children.

Charles had been a keen gardener: flowers, fruit, vegetables. There were drystone walls between his garden and the pasture at the back. The children climbed the wall, she said, and picked all the strawberries. Eventually they broke the wall down and sheep came through the gap. Drystone walling is expensive so she had the gap fenced, and every time she looked out of a back window she was reminded of the children’s depredations. She said they were led by Darren Jones, which was highly likely. He was ten years old at the time and would serve as a role model for younger boys. If a gate were opened and cows got in a garden, trampling lawns, eating the flowers, Darren was the chosen suspect, but no one voiced his suspicions. It was holiday cottages belonging to English people that were targeted, and Darren’s dad was vehemently opposed to rich incomers. In our part of Wales you stay on the right side of men like Hughie Jones. Arson is their favoured weapon.

Darren was a beautiful child. There was no other word to describe him. Not “engaging” or “enchanting,” because the wide blue eyes could go cold as a goat’s. But the cherubic features were there: the corn-blond hair, the chiselled lips — he had his looks from his mother, who resembled a Botticelli madonna when she wasn’t bruised by her husband’s fists. However, if Darren were crossed, something moved behind those bleak eyes that made even me catch my breath.

Charles Tilney died in the spring. As the year progressed his widow became obsessed with Darren. I visited her out of a sense of duty, but not often; a house is too intimate, a place where things are confided that should stay secret. Alas, a car can be intimate too, but there was no way I could pass the bus stop when people were waiting there to go to town. If there was more than one it was all right, but if it happened that Thirza was alone I felt as if I had the Ancient Mariner sitting beside me, except that Thirza’s albatross was very much alive.

Darren had trampled Charles’s delphiniums. He had thrown dirt at her bedsheets on the line. In the autumn he stole her apples; with the first fall of snow he threw a snowball at her kitchen window and there must have been a stone inside it because he broke a pane.

“You wouldn’t consider having a word with his father?” I suggested after this last offence. Immediately she retracted, asserting that she could have been mistaken, that it might not have been Darren every time, perhaps any time; her eyes weren’t so good any longer. (She could distinguish a razorbill from a guillemot on the other side of the cove.) No way would she approach Hughie Jones. In the circumstances, I wouldn’t either, not because I was frightened of the fellow but simply because any complaint made on her behalf would exacerbate matters. Darren would understand that she was terrified and be inspired to greater mischief.

Matters came to a head nearly a year after Charles died. I was watering my houseplants when Thirza crept past my window, her head averted, one hand to her face. It was my day for Avril, the girl who cleans for me. “What’s wrong with Mrs. Tilney?” I asked at our midmorning break, “Toothache? She looked odd going by.”

“Oh, don’t take no notice.” Avril was dismissive. “He never meant no harm. She imagines things.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. Well, you know that young Darren — but he’s a good boy, Miss Roberts; she just fell down, he never touched her.” She stopped. I waited. “And the radio!” she resumed fiercely. “Just fiddling with it, wasn’t he? Didn’t know the old lady were in the house. He wanted to hear the football on the radio, you know what boys are.”

“He went to her house to steal her radio?”

“Never! Not steal. He’s a good boy.”

“And she caught him in the act — and he knocked her down?”

“He panicked. He thought she’d gone out and forgot to lock up. Time was when we didn’t lock our doors. Things have changed, what with the summer visitors and all. He went in — you do when you’re calling, don’t you? And he looked around...”

“And spotted the radio.”

Avril pursed her lips. “You don’t want to believe everything that one tells you,” she said tightly, meaning I shouldn’t believe anything Thirza told me. “What happened was she was upstairs having a lie-down and she come down and she were between him and the door so he panicked and pushed past her and he forgot he still had a hold of the radio, and he dropped it, and she hit her head against the sideboard.”

Her nose was broken. As I discovered when I made it my business to visit the health centre later that day. Thirza had attended for treatment, but she was adamant that she had fallen, and she never mentioned that a thief had been in her house. I did. It was a good idea to warn people that he was now using violence; it could be worse next time, as it gets worse with battered wives. Now we had children battering old-age pensioners. Never mind that she could have fallen because he pushed past her; that was as bad, and it could be the thin end of the wedge. Thirza wasn’t so paranoid after all.

I called on her when I came back from town. She didn’t like my visiting at that moment. I didn’t think she was embarrassed at my seeing her with a dressing on her nose, I thought she was terrified. Several times she glanced towards her cat, a red marmalade tom that she treated like family.

“Shall I open the door?” I asked. “Cooper wants to go out.”

“I’m keeping him in,” she said quickly. “He’s off-colour. I don’t want him wandering.”

I stared at her. She wouldn’t meet my eye. “Did Darren make threats?” I asked. It’s a popular taunt among naughty boys: “You’ve got a cat, haven’t you?” Said with an evil smirk.

Thirza was shaking her head miserably. “Let me speak to his mother,” I urged. “Or his teacher.”

“No, no, please. It’ll only make things worse.”

She was right, of course. And she wouldn’t bring charges of assault, and nothing was done. The neighbours rationalised, convincing themselves that since she wouldn’t do anything, then she had indeed fallen down. It was all her fault, startling the boy, creeping downstairs unexpectedly so that he panicked and knocked the radio over. He was only visiting, after all.

He came visiting again. Someone talked, probably someone at the health centre. The story came back to the village that I’d said Darren had been caught in the act of stealing Mrs. Tilney’s radio and he’d hit her. No one dared approach me, but Thirza’s cat disappeared.

Thirza was stony-faced, obdurate. She said it was no use looking for Cooper, she’d never find him. I guessed she didn’t want to find him, didn’t want to know what had happened to him. I was raging, and coming down the street from her house, I saw Darren outside my cottage, eyeing it thoughtfully. I lost all sense of caution.

“No good,” I snapped. “I don’t have a cat, or a dog. And hospital matrons know more ways of killing without being found out than you could think up in a month of Sundays.”

His head jerked. He wanted to say he didn’t believe me but I saw his doubt. I glared at him and switched my attention to his hands. No scratches. Perhaps he’d used some kind of club. I hated that boy. I wondered how Thirza could be so stoical. Perhaps she felt that she had nothing else to lose now. She adored that cat.

I didn’t see her for two days and then she sought me out. An old shirt soaked in petrol had been put through her letter box. That was all, it hadn’t been followed by a match. But Darren had just stopped her in the street and said wasn’t it shocking that now school was out for the Easter holidays those children were setting the moors afire. Wicked children, he said, bored they were, with nothing to do: kids looking around for mischief. Next thing we knew they’d be putting rags soaked in petrol through folks’ letter boxes in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep, and following it up with a match. Someone was going to get hurt. “But,” Thirza said bleakly, “he said I had nothing to fear, he’d take care of me. He knew where I lived.”

I shuddered at the phrase: culled from television, used in earnest. “You have to go to the police,” I told her. “I’ll come with you.”

I don’t think she heard me; she was following her own trail. “I just hope he doesn’t set fire to the moor on top of the cliffs,” she said. “All those nests: wheatears, larks, curlews. And the cabin’s not insured.”

“He’d never dare!” But I knew he would, as soon as he thought of it. It was becoming a seasonal pastime among young children: setting fire to moorland during the Easter break. But still Thirza wouldn’t go to the police, perhaps thinking that if she did, the rag pushed through her letter box would be followed by a match, like he said.

Easter Monday was cool and misty, the cloud so low that you thought you had an eye problem until you realised the intermittent specks were gulls appearing and disappearing above your head. The light was good for bird-watching, however: no glare, and there was only the faintest onshore breeze. I walked out to the coast-guard station.

I watched the birds for a while, ate a sandwich, went for a walk, looked for seals. It was a curiously soft day and I lost myself in a world of water, air, and rock. There were rafts of auks on the sea, and cormorants beating fast across the surface. “Wee black devils,” Charles had called them. I remembered that he had died on Easter Monday. I guessed Thirza would come out to the cabin today.

I strolled back to the coast-guard station and into mist. It seemed to be a combination of sea fog and low cloud, and eerie beyond words there on top of the cliffs. Acoustics were distorted and I seemed to be surrounded by noise. There was no swell running and yet surf smashed randomly on rock far below, while through the crooning from a thousand feathered throats came piercing cries: gulls mostly, sometimes screaming. The screams made the hair rise on the back of my neck, what with the fog and the absence of wind and me all alone up there in the old coastguard station.

In fact, there was a slight breeze. A window appeared in the mist, allowing me a glimpse of wrinkled water, the stream of the current marked by trails of foam. Birds were scurrying back and forth through a flare of sunlight. Somewhere a breaker burst with a muffled thud. The cabin was still obscured. I doubted that Thirza was there. Perhaps she’d been and gone, intimidated by the lack of visibility and those screams. The gulls must be bothered about something. I wondered if there were a peregrine falcon about. I’d never known a peregrine on these cliffs and I felt a twinge of excitement, waiting for the cloud to lift again so that I might discover what was bothering the birds. Curiously, it was only the gulls that were alarmed, and after a while they settled down and then there was only the busy chorus of the auks. I smelled heather smoke. The children were at it again.

The breeze strengthened. Seaward, the cloud melted suddenly and the sun came blazing through. There was a band of cumulus above the Irish mountains. The islands where the puffins breed looked close enough to touch — and across the cove the cabin was on fire.

My first thought was that at least the birds were safe, the cliffs wouldn’t be touched, and as for the moor, which was also alight, the ground-nesters would escape and their eggs were not yet hatched. More would be laid.

The cabin must have been burning for some time; flames were streaming back before the onshore breeze and even as I watched, the roof fell in. The fire in the heather was less dramatic, in fact — I stared in amazement: there was an untouched section between the cabin and the smoking moor. Two fires had been set.

The mist still lingered inland so I could see no sign of children; they’d be well away by now, probably on mountain bikes. There was nothing I could do except get home as fast as possible, call the fire department, and hope they’d save some of the moor. The cabin was gone; it was roofed with some kind of tarred sheeting and was burning like an oil blaze.

I heard the fire siren before I reached the village. I shunned the task of telling Thirza and sneaked past her cottage like a criminal, hoping she was in the kitchen at the back. Once in my own place, I poured myself a stiff whisky to try to subdue the rage I felt against fire-raisers — or was it just one? I remembered Darren’s threat to Thirza: “I know where you live.” I wondered if she could be persuaded to move house.

The police came to me that evening. Someone had seen me return from the direction of the cliffs. The body of a child had been found in the ruins of the cabin. There was a bike outside in the heather. His father identified it as Darren’s. Darren himself couldn’t be identified until they had his dental records.

The little I could tell them only confirmed their theory. Darren had set two fires, had taken a petrol can inside the cabin, and the door had blown shut and the bar dropped. Thirza had told the police about the old kitchen knife but Darren wouldn’t have known about that. They did find the partially melted remains of a Swiss Army knife, so he could have had the right idea, but the blades were closed; he hadn’t had time to use it to open the door. And the viewing slots were too narrow for even a small boy to escape that way.

The police were surprised that I hadn’t heard anything. “I could have,” I said, “but the gulls were making such a racket, screaming—” And then I realised it wasn’t the gulls that had been screaming.

Hughie Jones said his son didn’t own a Swiss Army knife. “He would say that,” Thirza said. “Mine disappeared the day he broke my nose.”

She didn’t rebuild the cabin. She sold her cottage to an English family for some inflated sum and moved into a luxury apartment in town. I visited her when she was settled and found her much improved. She was a different woman, far more outgoing in this light and airy flat above the harbour: neatly dressed, and she’d even had her hair styled. A red marmalade cat dozed on the window sill.

“Why, you’ve found a cat just like Cooper,” I exclaimed.

“That is Cooper, dear.”

“I thought — didn’t you think—”

“I put him in a cattery when Darren told me what could happen to a cat that strayed.”

“But you could never have him back while Darren — while he lived in the same village.”

“While he lived,” she amended. “He was a good boy,” she added, raising an eyebrow as a gull screamed close by, startling Cooper. Her tone mimicked the local accent.

“He was evil,” I said firmly. “A kind of justice was done out there on the cliffs. No way do I go along with the coroner and his verdict of accidental death — although I agree with his rider about the dangers of children playing with fire.”

“Justice?” she repeated.

“The door would slam shut only in an offshore wind,” I said. “And it was the cabin shaking in a gust that made the bar drop. There was only a light breeze that day, and it was onshore.”

After a while she said, “He wouldn’t have burned to death. He’d have been unconscious before the flames reached him.”

“Smoke inhalation?”

“Something like that.” She smiled. “I’ll put the kettle on and we’ll have a nice cup of tea.”

She could have been speaking the truth to the best of her knowledge. She may have left him unconscious, and she’d been too far away to hear his screams when he recovered. How had she done it? Lured him out there by dropping well-placed hints that the cabin wasn’t insured, known he was following her, waited inside with a raised weapon (something wooden, something that would burn), spilled the petrol, struck the match? She’d made a mistake, dropping the Swiss Army knife through a ragged pocket. She’d remedied the mistake superbly. Darren had stolen it.

She came in with the tea tray.

“How did Darren carry a petrol can in broad daylight without being seen?” I asked.

“He didn’t. It was already there. He must have taken it there in the dark.”

“So why wouldn’t he set fire to the cabin then?”

“He wanted me inside, dear. He thought he had his chance. Stupid boy. But then all criminals are stupid, aren’t they?”

“No. Just the ones who get caught.”

Our eyes locked. That we had the same thought was obvious from her next words. “There’s no proof, and you won’t talk. Suppose you did? A senile old woman suggested a fantasy about turning the tables on a naughty boy. That’s all.”

She was right. She had changed out of all recognition — but of course it was Darren who had changed her: uttering his threats, looking at her cat with his cold goat’s eyes, never realising that he was being measured for size by a tigress.