A Colourful Death_A Cornish Mystery

by Carola Dunn

  Even if they did, plenty of people would listen to rumours and believe Nick was guilty, as long as the real murderer was at large. How lucky that Margery had invited Eleanor to the farm. If only she had some notion what she should be looking for in the way of clues!

  Surely nothing so easy to find as the weapon, which had been left in the body. With fingerprints all over the haft, Eleanor remembered. Had Stella mentioned to DI Pearce that she had grabbed it? Or had she left the police to find out for themselves, and if so, how was she hoping to explain it?

  Naturally one wouldn’t want her to get into trouble for such a mistake, especially when she was so upset by the death of her boyfriend, but if it served to divert suspicion from Nick—

  “Are you okay, Mrs Trewynn? Not falling asleep again?”

  “Oh!” Eleanor was startled. “No, thank you, Sergeant, I’m fine. Just thinking.”

  Doug came down and Margery went up. Eleanor wondered whether she or Nick would be next. She tried to prepare herself, sorting out in her mind what were her own impressions, which needn’t be passed on unless they were helpful to Nick, and what were facts that must be told to the police, however detrimental. It was no good trying to suppress facts. They’d winkle them out, and then their having been suppressed would make them look worse than they really were.

  They were bad enough. Eleanor shuddered as she recalled the viciously slashed pictures, those that were his livelihood and those irreplaceable few that expressed his dreams. In someone less well-balanced than Nick, they might indeed appear to provide sufficient motive for murder.

  And, unfortunately, he had been quite sure Geoff was the destroyer.

  She needn’t tell the police so, need she? It wasn’t exactly fact, just an expressed belief. No one but Eleanor herself had heard him. She wished she could consult him, to make sure they agreed on exactly what must be reported.

  But that, of course, was why the police didn’t allow them to talk.

  Suddenly she remembered Stella’s note. That was an indubitable fact she could hardly suppress, so she’d have to tell them Nick knew who had wrecked his work.

  Margery came down, followed by DI Pearce and DC Wilkes. Wilkes looked over at Eleanor with a grin and a wink.

  What on earth did he mean to convey?

  She soon found out. Pearce announced, “That’ll be all for tonight. We can’t have Mrs Trewynn complaining that she was questioned when half-asleep. You’ll be spending the night at the Rosevears’, madam?”

  “Yes, I think … You’re sure that’s all right, Mrs Rosevear?”

  “Of course, dear.”

  “Then please remain there in the morning until someone has come to take your statement.” The inspector turned to Nick. “As for you, Mr Gresham, I’ll have to ask you to accompany us to Bodmin.”

  “Under arrest?” Nick demanded.

  “Oh no, sir, merely helping the police with their enquiries. Not under arrest. Not yet.”

  SEVEN

  The Rosevears’ vehicle was a mini-bus. Judging by the effluvium, it had recently been used to transport pigs. At the best of times, Eleanor did not travel happily in a mini-bus. She just hoped she could hold out until they reached Upper Trewithen Farm. It was just as well her stomach was empty.

  Luckily, even the worst Cornish lanes were an improvement on many she had been driven over in the Third World, and English drivers were less inclined to leave their own and their passengers’ fates in the hands of Allah. Still more luckily, the farm was just a couple of miles outside Padstow. The last few hundred yards, though, were over a rutted, potholed track that tried Eleanor severely.

  As Doug helped her down, she swallowed a last attempt of her stomach to rebel and thanked him.

  There was just enough light left in the west to see that they had stopped in a cobbled yard in front of a two-storied house. On either side ranged outbuildings of various sizes and shapes, three or four of them with squares of light, some curtained, some bare.

  “Soup and cocoa,” Margery said decisively.

  Her offer nearly undid the good effect on Eleanor of cessation of motion and escape from the smell of swine. She was firm with herself. She had eaten nothing but a couple of biscuits since lunchtime. If she was to do Nick any good, she must keep up her strength. She accepted.

  Then she wondered whether so much liquid so near to bedtime was a good idea. Did the farm have indoor plumbing? Stumbling about in a strange place in the dark was not an attractive prospect, no matter how often she had done it in deserts and jungles. She had been younger then.

  Margery opened the front door of the house and flipped on an electric light switch. She led the way into into a wide, slate-floored, dark-beamed kitchen-living room, with a huge Aga on one side, old wooden settles, and a couple of comfortable, overstuffed chairs on the other.

  Following her, Eleanor said, “Mrs Rosevear, I must wash my hands before supper. And—oh dear! I haven’t any night things.”

  “We’ll rustle something up. The bathroom and loo are through that door there. Light switch on the left. You’ll find a clean towel in the airing cupboard and there should be a new toothbrush in the drawer. Stella, dig up a pair of pyjamas for Mrs Trewynn. You’re nearer her size.”

  Stella, drooping gracefully in the doorway, pouted. “I don’t see why I should be expected—”

  Eleanor closed the door on Margery’s sharp retort. Teazle sticking close to her heels, she found herself in a white-washed corridor with two doors on either side and one at the far end. The farther door on her right stood open. At a peek, it appeared to be the farm office. On the left were a fully modernised bathroom, created, she suspected, from a scullery, and a loo that had probably once been a pantry. The latter was windowless but had a circular ventilator, the kind with a fan that revolves at the slightest breath of wind, high in the thick stone wall.

  All electrically lit, thank heaven. Eleanor remembered well the pre-war days of paraffin lamps and even candles to light one to bed in the country.

  Here is a candle to light you to bed,

  And here comes a chopper to chop off your head …

  The sinister old rhyme focussed a sense of unease she hadn’t recognised, being preoccupied with her uneasy stomach. It dawned on her suddenly that she might conceivably be in danger at the farm. Margery Rosevear’s invitation had seemed an unmixed blessing. Yet here, in the community where Geoffrey had lived, was surely the most likely place to find someone who had hated him enough to kill him.

  Suppose the murderer were to realise that Eleanor was the only person who could give Nick an alibi and thus force the police to look elsewhere? Too late, Eleanor wished she had insisted on giving her statement that evening.

  With her Aikido experience, she was reasonably confident of foiling most attacks from in front, barring firearms, and unarmed attacks from behind, but a silent knife in the back was another matter.

  Apart from vigilance, the best course of action was to find out as much as she could about the residents at the farm. With any luck she might work out who, if anyone, posed a danger to her. Since only Geoffrey’s killer had any cause to silence her, identifying him would also serve her primary aim: to convince the world of Nick’s innocence.

  Her course of action settled, Eleanor looked around the bathroom as she combed her hair. It seemed surprisingly clean and neat for a communal situation. She had never come into contact with an English commune before, though she had seen similar living arrangements in other countries. The Bushmen of the Kalahari, for instance, survived in rigorous conditions without much of a hierarchy, at least until they came into contact with agricultural communities.

  However, in individualistic Britain, she would have expected everyone to leave uncongenial tasks to someone else. Perhaps one of the residents actually enjoyed housework.

  Or perhaps the commune wasn’t any more truly communistic than the ones in the Soviet Union. Nick had called it “half-baked,” she recalled, and had also referred to it as a colony.
Doug Rosevear owned the farm so perhaps, as well as keeping pigs and making hay, he ran the colony and kept its artistic members up to the mark. He hadn’t struck Eleanor as a very forceful personality, though.

  More likely she was thinking up unnecessary complications and the others simply had their own washing facilities.

  Through the window, left a couple of inches open for ventilation, came a chilly draught and the sound of rain. Eleanor glanced at herself in the medicine-cupboard mirror and decided lipstick would be superfluous in view of the promised soup and cocoa. She never had been able to keep lipstick on while eating. Come to think of it, she didn’t have one with her anyway.

  Closing the bathroom door behind her, she returned to the kitchen. Here any draughts were kept at bay by the cosy warmth of the big iron range. Margery stood before it, stirring something steaming in a saucepan.

  “That smells delicious,” said Eleanor. Her roving life had never allowed her any opportunity to master the culinary arts and she greatly appreciated other people’s abilities.

  “I hope you like lentils.”

  “Oh yes.” She had once, after an extended sojourn in India, vowed never to eat another lentil, but that was long ago. “So versatile.”

  “So cheap and filling,” Margery retorted, “and easy to reheat. When you have as many mouths to feed as I do, and most of them extremely erratic as to keeping an eye on the time, you don’t waste a roast on them. At least, not often. The idea is I have a meal on the table at seven every evening, but I always have stuff available so that they can make a sandwich or, as in this case, heat up some soup. This is so thick it’s more like a stew, really, and full of vegetables.”

  Eleanor couldn’t have asked for a better opening. “How many do you cook for?”

  “It varies. Not that they usually bother to let me know when they’ll be out. Sorry, I’m being grouchy. Doug was up at four to get the hay in, and then Geoff … It’s been a long day. Do sit down. We won’t bother with a tablecloth at this time of night. It’ll be ready in just a minute. You’d like bread and butter, I expect, and some cheese.”

  “I’ll get them.”

  “Thanks.” Margery pointed out the bread-bin, an old-fashioned wooden one with a roll-up lid. “And that’s the larder, there.”

  Eleanor took a bread-board from behind the bin and put it on the long, well-scrubbed table. In the bin she found a bread-knife and an unsliced wholemeal loaf of somewhat irregular shape. “You make your own bread, Mrs Rosevear?”

  “Marge. Yes, I like baking. I don’t really mind cooking for a crowd, you know, though there are times … But Doug couldn’t have kept the farm without doing something on the side, and taking in boarders was the obvious solution in this part of the world. It was my idea to collect a flock of artists who’d stay year-round, instead of summer visitors. I had artistic leanings in my youth.” The ironic tone of her last words had a tinge of wistfulness.

  In the larder, Eleanor found a wedge of cheddar, and the butter in a small crock of unglazed earthenware, covered with cheesecloth and standing in water to keep it cool. Also home-made, she thought, but she didn’t ask. She didn’t want to distract Marge from the subject of her paying guests.

  “A group of artists must be more interesting than the general run of summer visitors,” she observed, emerging from the larder with the butter as Marge set out a variety of unmatched pottery bowls and plates on the table. “Less work, too, as they don’t keep coming and going.”

  “Yes, and we get all their rejects, too,” said Marge, adding a particularly lopsided greenish-blue plate to the collection.

  They looked at each other and laughed.

  “How can you laugh?” Stella stood in the doorway, glaring at them accusingly. Swathed in a scarlet hooded cape, she was a figure of wrath straight from some bloody myth. “Have you forgotten already that Geoff is dead?”

  Margery was guilt-stricken. “Of course not, dear. I’m sorry. Come and sit down. You’ll feel better when you’ve had something to eat.”

  “I’m not hungry.” She turned, the cape swirling about her ankles, and disappeared into the night.

  “Oh dear.” Margery sighed. “She’s right, I shouldn’t have laughed.”

  “It’s a pity she heard us,” Eleanor agreed, “though I think she would have been angry regardless. Grief takes some people that way. They’re looking for someone to blame, and failing that, they’ll turn their hostility on anyone within reach.”

  “But Stella knows who’s to blame.”

  “Nick did not—”

  “All right, sorry, I spoke out of turn,” Margery said wearily. “I’m too tired to think straight. The police will sort it out. As Stella isn’t going to grace us with her presence, let’s just not talk about it over supper, right?”

  “All right,” Eleanor conceded. Nick’s vindication would take more than her protests of his innocence and the inevitable decision of the police not to charge him. “Tell me about your artists. How many are there living here?”

  “Seven at present, not counting the bungalow we built to rent out ten or twelve years ago. Geoff has—had—that. Then we converted the barn and stables and byres into six bedsitters and a flat, all with studios attached, of course. They’re the old farm buildings, good, solid stone. It meant we had to put up those ugly modern metal outbuildings behind the house, but…” She shrugged. “You cut your coat according to the cloth. Doug says they’re easier to keep clean.”

  “The silver lining. Are they all painters? No, Stella’s a sculptor, and you’ve got a potter.”

  “Jeanette paints. Wildly abstract, things with titles like Green Diagonal and Blue on Blue. She does sell them occasionally, but her bread and butter is illustrating books for children. She specialises in rolypoly puppies and kittens with enormous eyes, often playing musical instruments.”

  “Good heavens! Each must come as something of a relief after the other.”

  “I never thought of it like that, but I daresay you’re right. You’re just in time, dear,” she said as Doug came in through the door to the bathroom and office. “Soup’s ready.”

  “Soup! A working man needs something solider than soup.”

  “There’s cheese. And I forgot, there’s the last of the ham off the bone. I put it on the top shelf. As long as no one’s found it…” She disappeared into the larder and returned with a plate. The scraps of meat were abundant, if inelegant—as inelegant as the plate, another reject. “Mrs Trewynn, please help yourself while I dish up the soup. Oh, what about the dog?”

  “Thanks, but I don’t think she’d better have anything else on top of that sandwich.”

  While Margery ladled soup into the bowls, Eleanor passed the plate of ham to Doug and cut some slices of bread.

  “Who is your potter?” she asked.

  “Tom,” said Margery. “You mustn’t judge his work by these. He makes beautiful stuff and it sells very well.”

  “Must have a packet put away,” Doug grunted. “More like a businessman than an artist. Never late with the rent. I’ve got no patience with some of ’em, always coming whining with excuses for paying a few days—or weeks—late. Stella’s all right, and to give the devil his due, Geoff was usually on time.”

  Eleanor pricked up her ears at this evidence that Geoff had not been universally popular.

  Margery said hastily, “Oswald’s another painter. Cornish landscapes, like Nick, but I have to admit not as good. Then there’s Quentin. He sculpts, but on a massive scale. He’s been working on the same hunk of granite for three or four years now. Luckily he has a rich aunt who thinks he’s going to be the next Henry Moore.”

  Doug snorted. “Some hope!”

  “Leila does the most beautiful shell-work. I’m sure you know the sort of thing. Ladies in hooped gowns and jewelry boxes encrusted with shells, but also hangings and necklaces and so on based on African and Asian designs. Beautiful mobiles. Some silverwork, too, set with local stones. More craft than art, strictly speaking
, and so is Bert.”

  “Who cares, as long as the rent’s paid.”

  “What does Bert do?” Eleanor asked.

  “He knits.” Margery threw a warning glance at Doug, who was grinning. “Don’t say it! He pays on time, doesn’t he? And by your own words, that’s what counts. He creates his own patterns, Mrs Trewynn, really gorgeous things. Used to design for a big knitwear manufacturer up north. He sells both designs and one-of-a-kind jumpers. You have to admit, Doug, the one he made for me is simply smashing. I’ll show it to you tomorrow, Mrs Trewynn.”

  “I’d love to see it. And everyone else’s work, too, if they won’t mind showing me.”

  “That’s one thing you needn’t worry about,” said Doug. “They’re all keen as mustard to show off their stuff.”

  Perfect, thought Eleanor. She wouldn’t have to think up excuses to call on all her prospective suspects. If she couldn’t get them talking about Geoffrey Monmouth, or whatever his real name was, then she had somehow managed to lose all the skills that had taken her round the world as LonStar’s roving ambassador.

  What was more, even artists were human, and it would be only human to be eager to discuss the murder of one of their company.

  She hoped they wouldn’t be too eager, to the point of being ghoulish. Were they even now talking to Stella, hearing her description of the scene of the crime, absorbing the supposedly gory details? Would Stella already have prejudiced them against Nick, before Eleanor had a chance to explain what had really happened?

  The poor girl had had a frightful shock. It was not surprising she’d been making wild accusations. Also, considering her partial responsibility for the damage to Nick’s paintings, there might be a bit of “attack is the best method of defence” in her ranting. All in all, she must be in a thoroughly confused emotional state.

  “Do you think Stella is all right?” Eleanor asked.

  “I’ll pop over to see her before I go to bed. But let’s go up and make up a bed for you first. You look all in.”