Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 121, No. 2. Whole No. 738, February 2003

The Survival of Miss Todd by Gwen Moffat

The following story by Gwen Moffat has never before appeared in print, but it did air on BBC radio sometime in the 1960s. It should be of particular interest to the author’s fans in that its protagonist is a forerunner of her popular series character Melinda Pink. The latest book in that series, Retribution, was published in England in 2002 and is avail-able in the U.S. in large print (as are several other Moffat novels).

Miss Todd had waited a year for him to come back. She’d stopped typing for a moment and was staring across the lawn when she heard the drumming. She tried to focus on the dead sycamore but she could see only the blurred outline of its trunk. She removed her reading spectacles with shaking hands. The woodpecker was perched against the tree, his black and white back quivering with tension, his bill rattling away at the wood. Then he stopped, flew down, and inspected a hole. This hadn’t been there last April when a pair had come and prospected, and flown away. Miss Todd had made the hole herself, standing on a kitchen chair and stabbing with a skewer.

The bird pecked at the bark and Miss Todd held her breath. With the scarlet flash on his nape, the woodpecker was like a visitor from the tropics. The female appeared, and together the pair started to enlarge the hole. Miss Todd was enthralled. “Really,” she breathed, “I am most fortunate.”

The first cuckoo, the first swallow: These were events in her year eclipsing even the first primrose, but nothing could compare with a pair of great spotted woodpeckers come to nest in her garden.

Until she retired Miss Todd had been secretary to an accountant. Living with an invalid mother, her life had been busy but it lacked romance — Miss Todd’s kind of romance, that is. Through forty years of high finance and home nursing she cherished a dream of living in wild country, and when her mother died she took her small legacy and her savings and bought a croft house in the West Highlands. Then she started to write.

In ten years she wrote ten romantic novels. They were never reviewed in national newspapers but they brought in a few thousand pounds a year. Not enough for even her frugal lifestyle but she augmented her income by writing nature notes for the local paper and with illustrated lectures on the countryside.

This April morning, staring entranced at the woodpeckers on the dead tree, she saw more than two birds preparing a nest site; she saw a new sequence of colour slides for the village halls next winter, she saw all the summer’s nature notes with the woodpeckers’ progress like a serial. She even allowed herself to dream of a book: My Life With the Highland Birds, or maybe Denizens of the Glen. By the time she had convinced herself that the birds would stay, she had forgotten lunch. Empty with hunger and excitement, she drove to the village for a frozen fish pie.

The store was crowded with local wives who seethed with indignation. The telephone kiosk had been vandalised and young Willie MacKenzie — too strapped for cash to afford phone bills — going out at two in the morning to ring for an ambulance to fetch his wife, who was starting her second, had been forced to rouse the minister for the use of his telephone.

“It’s criminal!” exploded Shuna Campbell, who ran the store. “Shooting’s too good for ’em.”

The others supported her vehemently, except Miss Todd, who asked after the new baby.

“It isn’t the local lads...” Deliberately Shuna left it hanging but everyone knew what she meant. The pony-trekking centre had taken on two new hands recently: not country boys but from somewhere down south, Glasgow probably. Miss Todd thought they had unformed faces: loose and pale with blank eyes. She’d heard they drank a lot, and although she didn’t like gossip — not that kind of gossip — she’d ignored them when they thumbed her for a lift one night. They’d been holding each other up on the grass verge. She’d been disturbed, even a little frightened, because they would have a long walk home and she knew they would have recognised her old Volvo. It was the only one in the area. When she met them some days later, walking in the glen with their guns, they grinned at her but they didn’t speak. She didn’t like those grins; their eyes hadn’t changed.

Since they’d come to the village there had been a spate of incidents: telephone kiosks wrecked, cars taken and found miles away — with no fingerprints, the policeman’s wife told Miss Todd, and everyone knew from the television that people who left no prints most likely have a criminal record. The village hadn’t been the same this spring.

Some weeks went by and Miss Todd knew that her woodpeckers were sitting on eggs. The village, proud of what they called their “authoress,” followed the birds’ progress with interest.

“They must be about to hatch,” Miss Todd announced proudly to Shuna one afternoon.

“There! And how many eggs, Miss Todd?”

She drove home deploring the ignorance of folk who thought you could find out how many eggs a bird was sitting on without disturbing it. She put her shopping basket on the kitchen table and went to the living room to look at the tree.

In the grass at the foot of the trunk was a splash of black and white. She stared. Nothing moved in the garden.

She went out and approached the sycamore. The female lay dead among the withered daffodils.

She picked up the body, so small, so light in the hand. There was a smear of blood on the white feathers.

When she was thinking clearly again she went indoors and got out the chopping board and a sharp knife. Very carefully she plucked the bird, laying the feathers in a little heap. Shortly she found the first piece of gunshot.

She wrapped the body, the plucked feathers, and the shot in a piece of silk and buried the package below the sycamore. There was no sign of the male bird and she knew he wouldn’t come back. She recalled seeing the two lads from the trekking centre coming up the lane as she drove to the village. They had been carrying their guns.

The following night she was lecturing on the other side of the pass. She left early because she couldn’t work beside the open window that looked out on the dead tree. She drove slowly over the mountain, trying to fill in time.

About two-thirds of the way up, right on a hairpin bend, the road had been widened to make a passing place. The gradient was very steep here, and she usually took the hairpins in a rush with her wheels spinning and her teeth clenched. But today the hill held no terrors; she was purged of fear, she even welcomed the prospect of danger.

She stopped at the big hairpin and pulled into the passing place. She switched off the engine, left the car in gear, and stepped out.

There was a kestrel hovering above the trees in the gorge far below; she could see its chestnut back against the new leaves. She sighed and stared idly at the mountainside dropping away below her for several hundred feet until the turf met the lip of the gorge. There a hidden burn ran below cliffs that must be all of eighty feet high. There was no wall below the passing place; if a car failed to round the hairpin on the way down, the occupants didn’t stand a chance.

On the top of the pass there was a big weatherproof box containing a stretcher and first-aid equipment. Originally it had been placed there for injured mountaineers, but its contents had been taken out more than once for motorists, although when rescuers reached the smashed cars in the gorge it had been too late for any kind of treatment.

Miss Todd returned to her car and, to her surprise, managed to start on the hill and negotiate the rest of the bends without incident.

Her lecture that evening was a success, and she was detained for some time answering questions. It must have been eleven o’clock when she came slowly up the far side of the pass and saw the summit cairn in her headlights. There was a van parked beside the cairn. She felt the vague uneasiness which always came in lonely places at night on such occasions, but this time she saw people clearly, not as embarrassing shapes in the back of the vehicle. Two men were standing beside the box that housed the rescue stretcher. The box was open and the stretcher lay on the ground. They were smashing it with a sledgehammer.

They would have been making too much noise to hear her approach, and a spur of the mountain hid her lights until the last moment. Besides, as they looked up, startled and lurching against each other, she saw that they were drunk. She recognised them immediately: the pale loose faces and the pale eyes, hostile now. They knew her car and they’d guess that she was alone.

One stepped into the road, then wavered back as she floored the accelerator. She heard savage shouts.

She didn’t think, didn’t work things out. She knew the consequences: They had been caught in the act and now the other outrages would be tied to them. She would go straight to the police when she reached the village. They could get away in the van (which was surely stolen) but she had an eye for detail and a good memory; she had its number. And then she saw the snag. She was the only person who knew.

Before she reached the first downhill bend she saw headlights in her mirrors. They gained rapidly and at the second hairpin they were a few yards behind. On this single-track road there was no room to pass. She waited for them to sound their horn, expecting a continuous blast, but all she heard was the whine of the van in low gear, looking for the chance to overtake.

The road widened for the curve and they swung out to pass on her off side. She pulled over, blocking them. The van dropped back and swung to the other side but now they were round the curve, the road narrowed, and she saw their lights tilt in the driving mirror. She had squashed them into the mountain and their wheels had gone in the ditch.

On the straight stretch the van nosed up again on the off side and she felt a bump. Now they were trying to force her off the road. She saw the van’s fender edging forward, she felt a nudge. Below and ahead she saw the start of the hairpin where she had stopped that afternoon. She braked before the bend and pulled close to the hill. The van roared and swerved into the passing place on her right. As it did so she sent the heavy car diagonally across the road, twisting the wheel at the last moment for the bend, so she caught the van only a glancing blow between its nearside wheels, but that was enough. The driver, who’d had inches to spare before, now had nothing. He couldn’t make it back to the road; thrust sideways and forward by the big car, the van tilted above the drop. She had a brief glimpse of its side lifting, the curious indecency of its exposed belly with helpless wheels turning in the air, then she was rounding the bend and the next, her hands clenched on the steering wheel.

She stopped on the straight and wound down the window. She heard the clank of metal on stone with long pauses between; she saw great shafts of light wheeling down the mountain; there was a crumpling crash and the lights went out.

There was silence for a moment, then a white glare in the gorge. Flames climbed the trees, throwing the mountain into black relief. There were crackling sounds and little popping explosions. Miss Todd was reminded of woodpecker colours and pork roasting in the oven.

Copyright © Gwen Moffat.