GFU04 - The Cornish Pixie Affair

by Peter Leslie

  April listened for a moment to the drumroll of the waves clamouring to enter the harbour below, and then moved on, keeping to the shadows as far as possible. A few paces later, the street lamp whirled away and the wet grass flew up and hit her coldly on the cheek. She had tripped over a carelessly placed guy rope in the dark.

  She rose to her feet and made some attempt to dust off the muddy knees of her trousers: then, without warning, a hand fell on her arm as she was about to cross the brighter space separating her from the dark line of the booths.

  "Hold it a minute, lovely," Mark Slate's voice whispered urgently. "We have visitors and I have a feeling it may not be convenient to call."

  "Mark! You startled me for a moment!... What are you doing here? I thought our date was at the booth."

  "It was. This blasted wind pushed me up the hill faster than I had expected and I was here five minutes early — fortunately, perhaps. Because as I approached the place, having circumnavigated the bobby on duty at the gate, I noticed a momentary flash of light within. Before I could make up my mind what to do, I saw it again. Aha! thought I. 'It's burglars, is it? Very well, we shall wait until our numbers are swelled and then we shall act."

  "Wait until what yelled?" April demanded over the blustering of the wind. In the sudden lull which followed her words, they heard the chimes of the town-hall clock, swaying and distorted in the turbulent air, telling the half hour.

  "I said wait until our numbers are swelled," Mark said as loudly as he dared. "Wait until you showed up, in other words. Now perhaps we can try some kind of circling movement and take them from two sides at once. However hard you try, you simply can't do that all on your lonesome!"

  "Of course not. You were right to wait, Mark... You didn't see anything in the brief flash of light, by any chance? I mean, it didn't last long enough for you to see inside and to catch a glimpse of what they were doing?"

  "Afraid not. It was simply the suspicion of a gleam through the shutter. And then, once my interest was caught and I watched properly, I saw the same thing again — only this time it was fractionally longer and I was able to positively identify that it came from inside and wasn't some stray reflection."

  "What do you make of it, then?"

  "Seems to me that kind of light is made only by someone who knows the place backwards and just shows a glim to verify the position of something."

  "Working practically by instinct, you mean," April said. "Yes, I agree that's what it sounds like. Come on... you know which booth it is; third from the left in the line at right angles to the children's roundabout. I'll take the door at the back; you stand by at the front in case whoever it is tries to exit over the counter and through the curtain."

  They sped across the area lit by the street lamp and melted into the shadows behind the sideshows. While the girl tiptoed round to the door of the third kiosk, Slate stood guard a little to one side, at the front. A foot away from the door-handle, April paused. The wind was still whistling around the stays and guy ropes of the circus, flattening the grass which showed up in a bar of light piercing the dark through a passage separating two booths.

  Before she moved, another source of light fleetingly revealed itself nearer at hand. As Mark had told her, there was someone inside with a flashlight: for the briefest of moments, she had seen the keyhole and the crack around the door etched against the night… then everything was dark again, by contrast even more so than before. She stretched out her hand and grasped the handle.

  Afterwards, she was never able to decide exactly what it was that gave her away. Perhaps, unknown to herself, she had made some telltale noise which carried over the tumult of the wind; perhaps the intruder happened to be looking towards the door and the bulk of her body had cut off some faint illumination filtering through the keyhole; perhaps he had noticed Mark's previous arrival and had been lying in wait for them.

  At all events, whatever the reason, she had scarcely touched the handle when it turned violently in her grip, the door was jerked open, and flame spat towards her three times from the muzzle of a heavy calibre revolver.

  The ingrained training which had led her automatically to stand to one side as she prepared to throw open the door probably saved her life. Even so, she felt the wind of the slugs on her face as they sang past her. An instant later, almost in a reflex action, she had leaned down and inwards and — guided by the position of the flashes from the gun — had seized the burglar's wrist and pulled.

  There was a flurry of movement, a grunt of surprise, and the intruder, speeded on his way by a perfect hip throw, sailed through the open doorway and crashed to the ground outside.

  April whirled round and cast herself to the floor of the booth in a single movement as the gunman scrambled to his feet in the dark and loosed off two more shots into the doorway. She was herself unarmed in the conventional sense, and unless she could manoeuvre herself into a position where she would be at much closer range, there was little she could do to combat his fire power. If, as she thought, the gun was a revolver, there must presumably still be either one or three shots left in the cylinder, according to whether there were six or eight chambers. If, on the other hand, she was mistaken and it was a heavy automatic pistol, there could be as many as seven or even ten shots to come. She decided to gamble on it being the former and try to draw her adversary's fire.

  There was a faint scraping sound transmitted through the flimsy structure of the booth as Mark Slate inched his way to her rescue, his back pressed in the shadows to the outside wall.

  Reaching behind her, April groped on the floor and found something hard and cold and disc-shaped — probably a Serpentine lid from one of the small stud boxes, she thought. She flipped it to the side of the doorway farthest from the scraping noise.

  The flash of the explosion, drowning the small clatter of the lid on the wooden floor, seemed to her to come only inches away from her head. The intruder must have been stealing towards the door and was now only just outside.

  Before the ringing in her ears had died away, there was a confusion of sounds — feet pounding, a smothered cry, a heel jarring on wood — culminating in two further shots. Simultaneously Mark shouted something unintelligible and she heard panting sounds and the noise of a struggle. As she scrambled to her feet, her nostrils tingling to the acrid stench of cordite, something heavy slammed against the wooden wall of the hut with a force that shook the small building.

  A moment later the sound of running feet receded into the distance.

  "April! Are you all right, April?" Mark Slate was shouting. Before the voice had died away the bulk of his body had blotted out the faint rectangle of less intense darkness which marked the doorway.

  "Yes, yes, I'm all right," the girl said quickly, taking his arm. "What happened?"

  "Came up the side of the hut, feinted one way to draw his fire, closed with him — and then found he was more than a match for me... Unarmed combat," Slate panted. "Threw me against the wall... got away…"

  "Which way did he go?"

  "Towards the gates. Do we follow?"

  "Of course we do. If he's heading downhill, for the town, I've learned a shortcut that may cut down his lead a bit," April cried. "Come on!"

  From the booth, they raced out of the shadows and into the patch of light thrown by the street lamp, skirted the round about, and plunged into an alley of blackness between the Big Top and the caravans. Several of the trailers now had lights in their windows and in one of them a querulous voice, its owner obviously awakened by the shots, was raised in protest. In the other direction, a bobbing flashlight advancing from the gates charted the lumbering progress of the policeman who had been left on night duty. He must have seen them flit across the pool of light, for above the clamour of the wind they heard him call out to them to stop, and the torch altered course m their favour.

  "Never mind about him," April panted. "Here, between these two tents and across the car park."

  They pelted down between the rows of bulg
ing fenders and tarnished chrome, to reach a wire fence which proved to be on top of a bank. Fifteen feet below them, the road curved around the end of the property and plunged on down towards the town.

  Closely followed by Slate, April sprinted up to the fence, placed a hand on one of the concrete posts, and vaulted over. After a headlong rush down the bank, they pulled up in the middle of the road and listened. "If he did come this way, he should still be in earshot," the girl whispered. "If not — if he went on up hill towards the Falmouth road — we might as well give up and go home. . .

  The wind was now blowing strongly and steadily into their faces. From below, reverberated the incessant booming of the waves. Above and behind them voices were shouting. To one side, something on a hinge creaked and swung as the breeze freshened then subsided.

  And ahead, faint but unmistakable, there was the sound of running feet.

  Without another word, they set off in pursuit. The road angled down between rows of thatched cottages, turned to burrow under a bridge that had once carried the railway to Porthallow, and slanted more steeply still past a line of shops whose stepped pavement was protected by an iron railing.

  The dark patches which lay between the pools of light cast by the widely-spaced street lamps were not so shadowy that they could hide a human being, and they could see the street stretching emptily ahead all the way down to the central square with its bandstand. Yet the pounding of their quarry's feet was still clearly audible.

  "I know!" Mark exclaimed. "There's an alley that runs parallel with this street. He must have cut through between two of the cottages and taken that. Come on!"

  As they ran, the moon rode out from behind a cloud and the sea appeared improbably above the roofs in silver-grey. At the foot of the hill, a figure detached itself from the shadows, streaked across the square and disappeared behind the band stand. "There he is!" the girl called. "After him!"

  By the bandstand, they pulled up and listened again. For a moment, they could only hear the wind and the sea, much louder now, and then again the sound of hurrying footsteps echoed into the night.

  But which way had he gone? To their left, Fore Street stretched emptily towards the harbour, awash with yellow sodium light. Ahead was the evergreen foliage of the ornamental gardens, tossing in the breeze, with the bulk of the lifeboat station flattened into a cardboard cut-out by the moon. And on the right was Market Street, curving back up the opposite side of the valley.

  Before they could make up their minds, the footsteps abruptly ceased.

  "The beach, of course!" Mark cried. "He's gone down to the cove!... Look, if we can hear him, he can obviously hear us. Okay?... Right. Well, he'll realise we must be following him by ear rather than by sight, so what's he going to do? He's going to make sure he goes somewhere where his footsteps won't sound, isn't he?"

  "I guess you're right at that, bright boy. And what better for deadening footsteps than a nice stretch of sand!"

  "Exactly."

  "How do we go, then? Which street did he take?"

  "Not a street proper. Another of these alleys the amateur photographers find so enchanting. It twists down behind the Customs House and ends in a flight of steps leading to the bathing beach. There's also a way through to the harbour — past the pub I'm staying at."

  "Okay," the girl said. "We'll give it a tumble. Once again: let's go."

  They ran across the deserted square and into a dark passage cleaving a huddle of ancient houses. Parked cars choked the first hundred yards on one side, and then the thoroughfare became too narrow for wheeled traffic. Soon, they clattered on to a small space behind the Customs and Excise building and there was only a stone wall between them and the sea.

  Mark ran to the steps leading down to the beach and halted. The wind snatched at his hair and he had to shout to make himself heard over the roar of the waves. "He forgot that even though you can't hear footsteps in the sand, you can see them!" he cried. "Look!"

  It was low tide, and the sand stretched, virgin and untrodden, to the line of breakers creaming against the cliff on the far side of the cove.

  "Unless he's taken a dive and intends to swim for the Channel Islands, then, it's got to be the harbour," April said. "Watch out when we go down, though. He's probably reloaded and he may be lurking behind a boat, waiting to take a shot at us. We'd be sitting targets from below, silhouetted against this sky with the moon out, wouldn't we?"

  Thirty years ago, there had been three dozen fishing boats in Porthallow harbour. Small coasters could tie up against the original jetty and a packet had plied between Falmouth, Porthallow, Penzance and the Scillies. Today, only five fishing boats remain and the harbour is too shallow even for the smallest coasting steamer. The rivers, foul with industrial pollution, which have driven away the fish from their inshore breeding grounds and robbed the fishermen of their traditional livelihood, have also silted up the cove. And now, despite Smiley's Pier, the second arm enclosing the tiny port built in 1938, the whole harbour is drained and empty at low tide.

  There was a lacework of foam rolling to a halt between the two stone piers marking the entrance as April and Slate, seizing their opportunity while the moon was behind a cloud, scrambled down the steps opposite the Crabber's Delight. But the whole of the rest of the port was firm, dry sand, shelving gently down towards the one shallow channel of water which remained in the lee of the main breakwater.

  From the foot of the stairway, they could make out a single line of footprints zigzagging away between the stranded hulls of yachts lying on their sides like beached porpoises.

  Taking advantage of every scrap of shadow, they dodged from boat to boat, picking their way over hawsers and drooping anchor chains hung with seaweed, skirting the buoys which marked the moorings rented by the amateur sailors who were now the port's chief source of revenue, pausing by the dinghies the receding tide had left pointing in every direction. Down here, below the sheltering walls, the wind was only a whine in rigging slanted against the sky somewhere above their heads, and the sound of waves was a distant roar from the world out side. There was a moisture in the air and a pungent and fishy smell on every side.

  Mark Slate caught April by the arm when they had crossed rather more than two-thirds of the harbour. "The moon's going to slide out again in a moment," he murmured. "Let's just scan the terrain before we go on— just in case."

  As the undulating sand was slowly flooded with pale light, they saw that the line of footprints they were following had taken on a sharper definition between the black shadows of boats. They circled a depression still full of sea water, crossed a sandbank and disappeared into a black chasm between two blue fishing boats propped against the jetty on the far side.

  There was no sign of movement and no sound above the distant noises of wind and surf.

  "We'll have to chance it," Slate muttered. "Keep apart from me and swerve as you run, in case our gentleman friend is between those boats with his gun at the ready."

  "I did the defensive techniques course, too," the girl reminded him with a smile. "Which brings me to another point: do we know it is a gentleman?"

  "If you'd been slammed against that booth as I was," the agent said ruefully, "you wouldn't give it a second thought! No woman could have done that, not even an Amazon — it wasn't judo or karate, but sheer, brute strength."

  They looked at each other in the moonlight and April nodded. Together, they sprinted for the shadows beneath the far wall.

  But no flames lanced the dark; no explosion thundered from the salty blackness shrouding the space between the fishing boats with their high stern cabins. Evidently, their adversary wasn't waiting to dispute the day: he was pressing on.

  On the wet sand under the bulging sides of the boats, the footprints ceased. Mark tutted in exasperation. "Blast!" he said irritably. "He could have gone anywhere now. Either doubled round behind the hulls of these trawlers, climbed the wall, or even gone to earth in one of the boats. A number of people — and not only fisherm
en — do live on them."

  April shook her head. Mutely, she pointed at the great squares of masonry which formed the jetty. At the top, where the moonlight silvered the stones above the shadows of the boats, a rope ladder with wooden rungs was draped over the edge. It was still swinging slowly from side to side.

  Mark swarmed up and stood on the jetty listening, his head on one side. After a moment, he shrugged and called down:

  "Not a sight nor a sound of him. I can't hear anything up here but wind and waves. There's a network of little streets on the far side of the wall here, just beyond the fish market. He could be in any of them, waiting. Or he could have got away altogether. I'm afraid we'll have to give it up; we're just that little too late..."

  Slowly, he climbed down again and the two of them began to walk back across the ridged sand. When they reached the trough of sea water which remained in the lee of the other pier, there was a soft swirling noise and a wavelet curled past them up the channel, to spend itself by the steps leading back to the inn.

  "Tide's turned," Slate commented as a second small surge of water swept past them. "Look at the gap between the piers. The foam's just that little bit higher than it was a few minutes ago, see! In a quarter of an hour, another channel will creep round behind those dinghies there and join this one by the steps, making this sandbank we're on into an island. In a half hour, the whole floor of the harbour will be covered."

  "We'd better get out quick, then," the girl said. "I don't particularly want these boots full of water! How deep is the water in the harbour at high tide?"

  "Between fifteen and eighteen feet, I believe, according to the season. But don't worry, we're all right for a few minutes."

  "Mark!" There was a sudden urgency in April's voice. "Look! There!"

  The agent turned and stared in the direction of her pointing finger. "What is it?" he asked. "Where? I don't see any thing."

  Another swirl of water, more copious than the first two, rippled past them. A wavelet broke over his shoe and sank slowly into the sand.