He turned his attention to her companion. He was not so young as he had at first imagined. Tremaine put him at somewhere near thirty. He was well-built, with broad features and thick, curling hair. He had an easy charm of manner and he was looking at Helen Carthallow in a way that would have flattered any woman.
Mordecai Tremaine took an instinctive dislike to him. Here, he decided, was the gigolo type, able to attract women and quite ready to make the most of it.
All the enjoyment had gone out of him. He felt that he was peeping through a window at a sordid intrigue. He saw that next to Charles I there hung the Rokeby Venus of Velasquez. There was something ironic in the nude study.
So far he did not think that Helen Carthallow had seen him. He took a step backwards and then went slowly out of the gallery, as though he had noticed nothing beyond the pictures on the wall.
He was remembering the inflection in Anita Lane’s voice when she had told him that sometimes it was better to have one’s head in the clouds; was recalling her evasiveness when he had asked her later what she had meant. She had, of course, known all about this.
Quite suddenly he was feeling sorry for Adrian Carthallow. It was the first time his emotions concerning the artist had been so clear. Until now his state of mind had been confused; he had not known whether to like him moderately or dislike him intensely. Now, his sympathy for him as one who was being deceived bathed him in a mellow light. Carthallow was a much injured man and could therefore be forgiven many things.
He reached the exit door and stepped into Trafalgar Square with the sensation that one of the pillars supporting a world he had thought stable had been swept away. He wished he had never decided to visit the National Gallery; wished he had not seen Helen Carthallow.
But that would not have altered one single fact. It would not have cancelled out the truth.
He tried not to meet Adrian Carthallow again. Carthallow’s circle and his own touched only at such points as Anita Lane, and all it was necessary for him to do was to make sure that he did not accept any invitations from her when there was a danger of the artist being present.
Not that he ceased to have news of him. The newspapers continued to feature his activities. An exhibition of his paintings was held at a famous private gallery—an exhibition to which Mordecai Tremaine carefully avoided going—and it seemed that his reputation was steadily climbing.
There were, of course, other events. For instance, Jonathan Boyce, after spending days in pursuit of the evidence that would enable him to bring home a conviction, went down with pneumonia. At first it was touch and go. Mordecai Tremaine went to the nursing home on the day of the crisis and for a time he was afraid. But the Yard man’s tough constitution pulled him through and it was not long before he was obstinately convalescent.
Adrian Carthallow had gone to Cornwall. Tremaine saw the announcement on the morning after he had learned that Jonathan Boyce was not, after all, going to die, and had heaved a sigh of relief at the thought that he could now walk abroad without the fear of a chance encounter with Helen Carthallow or her husband. The item stated that the artist was spending a few months at Falporth, where, of course, he owned the house called Paradise, built entrancingly out over the Atlantic and joined to the mainland only by an iron bridge. He intended to spend his time in a pleasant mixture of painting and relaxation.
Three weeks later a pale and shaky Jonathan Boyce called upon Mordecai Tremaine with the news that the Commissioner was insisting upon his taking extended sick leave. The Commissioner did not, he had stated, want a Chief Detective Inspector whose legs were liable to fold under him.
“I’m going to Cornwall,” said Boyce. “The old man swears he won’t let me back until I’ve a cast iron bill of health.” He looked at Mordecai Tremaine. “How, Mordecai,” he went on, “would you like to come with me?”
Mordecai Tremaine pursed his lips.
“I haven’t been thinking,” he said, “of spending a holiday in Cornwall. What’s in your mind, Jonathan?”
“As a matter of fact,” said Jonathan Boyce, with a smile, “I’m hoping to take you on tour. I’m staying with my sister and her husband. I’ve told them a lot about you and they’re anxious to see what a great detective really looks like. I thought you might act as my meal ticket!”
There was a twinkle in Boyce’s eye, and Mordecai Tremaine, who knew the real Jonathan now, was aware that despite his apparent cynicism the invitation was kindly meant.
“Maybe,” he said, “it mightn’t be a bad idea. Whereabouts in Cornwall does your sister live?”
“Falporth,” said Jonathan Boyce, and behind his pince-nez Mordecai Tremaine’s eyes were suddenly bright.
“Falporth!” he whispered.
This was the final gesture from fate, the ultimate sign that it was written that his own path and Adrian Carthallow’s were destined to meet.
“Well, Mordecai,” said Jonathan Boyce, “what do you say? Will you come?”
“Yes, Jonathan,” said Mordecai Tremaine. “I’ll come.”
He knew that there was no other answer he could make.
7
FALPORTH WAS BIG enough to contain an adequate and attractive shopping centre and several cinemas and theatres, and yet it was not a victim of that peculiarly seaside adiposity that produces a bulging waistline composed of artificial promenades, amusement arcades and overcrowded beaches.
It was far enough from the main railway line to make development expensive and difficult but not frankly impossible, and it had retained much of its natural beauty. A line of hotels and boarding houses ran along the steep cliffs and dipped into the old town, which lay clustered around the tiny harbour sheltered by Falporth Headland. The cliffs on the far side of the headland carried only a scattering of houses, mainly purely residential and occupied by people who had discovered the advantages Falporth had to offer and had decided that they could do no better than find a house overlooking the rugged splendour of that magnificent coast.
Kate and Arthur Tyning, who were Jonathan Boyce’s sister and brother-in-law, lived in a detached house that stood near the edge of the cliff on the outskirts of the town. As soon as Mordecai Tremaine saw the neat, carefully tended garden and the green shutters and the sun terrace he knew that he was going to enjoy his stay.
Kate Tyning was a mellow edition of her brother, like him in features but without the occasional brusqueness that crept into Jonathan Boyce’s manner and was the result of his official duties. Her husband was a grey-haired, quietly speaking man, with a pair of blue eyes twinkling out of a weather-beaten face that had evidently been tanned by many a Cornish wind. A sniper’s bullet in the first of the world’s all-in wars had left him with a permanent limp but it had not warped his sense of humour.
Both of them welcomed the visitors with genuine enthusiasm. No mention was made of Mordecai Tremaine’s reputation but he sensed a certain reserve, as though they were not quite certain of what his reaction would be if they spoke of his connection with Chief Detective Inspector Boyce, of Scotland Yard.
But Mordecai Tremaine was already sure that he was among friends.
“I’m not really,” he said.
Arthur Tyning looked at him enquiringly, but with the twinkle in his eyes already revealing that he thought he understood. Tremaine smiled.
“A real Sherlock Holmes,” he explained. “If Jonathan’s been telling you that I’m so good that it’s a wonder they go on keeping any policemen at all at Scotland Yard then he’s been exaggerating. I’ve done my best to act up to the part, of course. I’ve even forced myself to get used to a pipe to build up the right atmosphere. But it’s only bluff—I’m quite harmless.”
The ice was soon completely broken, and after dinner that evening they sat on the terrace outside the house watching a red sun dip into a steel-blue sea. Arthur Tyning was pointing out features of interest around the bay, for it was a wonderful vantage point, emphasizing his remarks with a stabbing pipe stem.
“That’s Ro
scastle Point,” he said, with a gesture towards the long arm of rock that formed one side of the great bay on which Falporth was set. “You can see the lighthouse guarding the submerged rocks. On this side of it is Trecarne Head. The cliffs are three hundred feet high just there and there’s a sheer fall down to the sea. There are caves in the cliff face. Smugglers are supposed to have used them and there are stories that they had a secret entrance a mile or so inland. If it’s true the entrance must have been blocked long ago because there’s no sign of it.
“The caves aren’t used now. Even at low tide the rocks make it a nasty stretch of coast and most people like to keep clear of it. If you go for a stroll up that way,” he added, “watch your step. The cliff edge isn’t guarded and it’s liable to crumble. There were one or two heavy falls of rock last winter. No one was hurt, fortunately, but there’s no telling when the next slide will come.”
He turned in his chair and his pipe described a semi-circle and came to rest pointing up the coast in the opposite direction.
“On the other side of the headland there,” he went on, “is St. Mawgan. It isn’t much more than a fishing village although just lately it’s been developed quite a bit. It’s about twenty miles by car because you’ve got to go so far inland to reach the main road, but if the weather’s good you can take a boat round the coast and be there in half the time.”
“Do you happen to know,” said Mordecai Tremaine, lighting a pipe which, as usual, was going out with monot-onous frequency, “a house called Paradise near here?”
Arthur Tyning chuckled.
“Everybody knows Paradise. It’s the local showpiece. Adrian Carthallow lives there—the artist. You’ve heard of him, of course.”
“Yes,” said Mordecai Tremaine, “I’ve heard of him.”
“You must take a walk up that way,” Tyning went on. “It’s only a mile or so up the coast. You can’t mistake it. The house is built on a headland that’s broken away from the main cliff. You can only reach it by an iron bridge.”
“Sounds a depressing place to live in during the winter,” observed Tremaine.
“In the winter,” said Tyning, “no one does live there. Carthallow usually spends part of the summer there but the rest of the year it’s closed.”
Mordecai Tremaine had managed to get his pipe going by now. He settled back in his chair and blew out a smoke cloud with a certain boastfulness.
“A house like that,” he said, “built out over the sea, must have a history.”
“The locals have all kinds of tales about it,” said Tyning. “They say that during the winter it isn’t empty at all, but that all the lonely tormented spirits on this part of the coast come back there for shelter. They say that it’s a doomed house and that sooner or later tragedy will come to anyone who lives there. It’s all nonsense, of course. It springs from the fact that the man who built it didn’t enjoy any happiness there.”
“No?” said Mordecai Tremaine hopefully, and thus encouraged Arthur Tyning told him the story of the millionaire who had built Paradise.
As he listened he felt again the premonitory stirrings within him that had their birth in his imagination and that he yet knew he could not entirely ignore. Perhaps the tragedy of Paradise had not been fully played out; perhaps there was another tale of violence and unhappiness to be told. In his mind he saw the house, grey and bleak, shuttered against the storms, with the wind driving the white seas up the cliff face, a fitting background for a tale of darkness.
Determinedly he drove the image from him. He said:
“Do you see much of Carthallow?”
Arthur Tyning shook his head.
“I’ve met him occasionally—sometimes he goes sketching along the cliffs—but we’re not exactly acquaintances. Not that he’s stand-offish. As a matter of fact, he’s usually ready to pass the time of day. But Kate and I don’t lead what you could call a social life.”
“What,” said Mordecai Tremaine carefully, “do they think in the district about having a famous artist for a neighbour?”
“Oh, people are used to it now,” Tyning returned. “Carthallow’s been coming here for several years. Everybody follows his career, of course. He’s looked upon as a kind of local possession.”
Mordecai Tremaine’s ears, trained to detect the false note, conveyed a subtle warning to his mind. He looked at Arthur Tyning. Did the weathered face seem to be disconcerted?
But he did not make any comment. He tried, indeed, to tell himself that he had been mistaken.
For what had he seen and heard of Adrian Carthallow and his wife to lead him to the belief that they were anything other than a happily married couple, enjoying Carthallow’s increasing success as an artist?
A word or two he might have invested with more significance than they had really possessed; an impression here and there that might have been over-coloured in his mind; the fact that he had seen Helen Carthallow in the National Gallery with the gipsy who had been at the Allied Arts Ball. Did those things really form a reasonable basis for the vague suspicions within him?
Viewed at this distance of time even the incident in the Gallery had lost the sharp quality with which it had at first impacted upon him. He knew his own weakness. He was aware that his leanings towards romanticism had more than once led him astray. It was quite possible that Helen Carthallow had met a chance acquaintance and had merely stayed to exchange a friendly word. There might have been no more than that for his imagination to falsify.
And yet, despite his newly arisen doubts, he could not banish that first reaction. He could not forget the look he had seen in Helen Carthallow’s eyes. The look of a woman in love.
8
THE NEXT MORNING, with Jonathan Boyce as his guide, he set out to explore Falporth.
The task was easily accomplished. There was very little depth to the town; most of it lay behind the road that ran along the top of the cliffs for a couple of miles or so before turning sharp inland. They ended their tour with a coffee at one of the numerous cafés and finished the morning with an hour’s laze on the firm sands of the main beach before going back to lunch.
Mordecai Tremaine was highly satisfied with what he had seen. There were enough visitors to bring the colour and vitality he enjoyed but not so many of them that life became a series of queues. He watched the children scrambling among the rock pools and was very glad that he had accepted Jonathan Boyce’s invitation. For a while he even forgot to think about Helen Carthallow.
The afternoon took them further afield. It took them, in fact, to Trecarne Head, the precipitous cliff Arthur Tyning had pointed out to them on the previous evening. The warning he had given them about the crumbling nature of the rock had been amply justified. They could see where a great section of the cliff face had fallen into the sea comparatively recently, and at one point a small headland had been almost completely separated from the main cliff; only a narrow path remained.
Far below them they could see a tumble of jagged rocks among which the sea was swirling angrily, although the day was calm. Mordecai Tremaine watched the waves come surging in, saw them rolling up out of the blue sea, gathering strength until the moment when their crests began to break and they flung themselves against the cliffs in a wild fury of cascading waters, only to recoil defeated in a white, frustrated foam.
He counted them, held by their constant assault against a black pinnacle of rock thrusting itself sullenly in their path. Sometimes as early as the sixth, sometimes as late as the ninth, but bitterly inevitable, a wave would come larger than the others. It would lift itself out of the ocean as it neared the land, racing forwards in a long green line that would hammer against the rock as if it would hurl it back into the waiting cliffs, and then in that moment disintegrate into a hissing mass of spray beneath which the pinnacle would vanish for an instant before rearing unbeaten shoulders, shrugging off the flatly falling water from which the life seemed to have been drained.
There was fascination in that turmoil of rock and foa
m and spray but there was cruelty, too. Instinctively Mordecai Tremaine drew back from the treacherous edge a yard or two away. There would be no chance for anyone who lost his footing on the shaly lip of rock that marked the beginning of that sheer drop, and to slip would be unpleasantly easy. He wondered how many men had gone to their deaths at this point in the dark of a winter’s night when they could not see how near they had strayed and when the wind perhaps was tearing with greedy shrillness.
He envied Carthallow the gift that enabled him to capture such a scene and preserve it in oils or water colour if he chose. Odd that Carthallow should have come into his mind. He tried and failed to retrace the manner in which the thought had come.
As they were walking back over the cliff path Jonathan Boyce said:
“Don’t forget I’m supposed to be an invalid, Mordecai. I’m proposing to take things easily. So don’t worry about me whilst we’re down here. Go ahead with your own plans.” He added: “I imagine you have one or two plans?”
He gave his companion a significant glance. Mordecai Tremaine said:
“Well—perhaps.”
“All I hope,” went on Boyce, “is that you aren’t contemplating getting mixed up with any more bodies.”
Mordecai Tremaine looked shocked.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Dear me, no.”
It was a direct result of this conversation that, on the following morning, he set out alone, leaving the Yard man happily settled in a deck-chair with his pipe and a book. This time he walked in the opposite direction to Trecarne Head. He tried to tell himself that it was because he was anxious to explore a fresh part of the coast, but he knew that the real reason was that it would take him towards the house called Paradise.
There was no mistaking the place, as Arthur Tyning had said. When he was still some distance off he saw the island of rock upon which it was built, and a few moments later the bridge which was its only connection with the mainland also came into view.
So Pretty a Problem Page 11
