by Carola Dunn
“You! You’re the woman from that charity shop. It’s all your fault everything’s gone wrong!”
“My fault? I had no idea—”
“You can’t really imagine the police haven’t worked it out by now,” he raved. “I’m not sticking around to be arrested as an accessory to murder because my idiot of a nephew killed the creep who beat me up! I’ve got to get away.” He grabbed her wrist and pulled her into the hall. “I’m going to tie you up and hide you where you won’t be found till after I’ve left the country.”
Eleanor had no intention of letting that happen. What if she wasn’t found in time? Her reflexes were slower than they used to be, or she would have reacted the instant he reached for her, but though he was younger, a few inches taller, and heavier, those apparent advantages could be used against him, especially as he was obviously out of shape. Better still, the way he stood and moved told her he had no training in the martial arts.
It was a pity she was wearing a skirt, but it couldn’t be helped. She’d just have to make allowances, to adjust her moves. As all this flashed through her mind, she was already stepping back into hanmi stance, knees bending to drop her centre of gravity—
“Uncle Wilfred!”
Still gripping her wrist, he swung round. “Trevor!”
Two to contend with, one of them young and capable of murder, though he looked more like a scarecrow than ever. Reassessing her tactics—and her chances—Eleanor broke Donaldson’s hold.
“Trevor! I’m so glad you’re here!” Camilla was behind her, blocking the doorway and the only way of escape.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The phone on Megan’s desk rang a couple of minutes after Scumble had sloped out without explanation but with that shifty look that meant he was going to the loo. He still couldn’t bring himself to tell her he was going to the bog, or whatever male euphemism he preferred.
“Everett here.”
“Hello, Inspector. How are your floods?”
“Going down nicely, thank you, though there’s a lot of people won’t be able to go back home for a while. Including the bunch you’re interested in. You mentioned a laddie by the name of Jake—that helped sort them out.”
“Wonderful. Are they talking?”
“Singing like dicky-birds, they’re that grateful for being rescued from the rooftop.”
“Do you want to talk to DI Scumble?”
“No, you’re the one that was there, Miss Pencarrow. I won’t have to do so much explaining.”
Megan took down his report verbatim, easier than trying to reconstruct it from notes. Scumble came back halfway through. He looked over her shoulder, but seeing she was writing shorthand, he sat down at his own desk. He sat there looking ostentatiously patient until she had thanked Inspector Everett for his help and hung up.
“Well?”
“Bristol, sir. Camilla’s friends had to be rescued from the roof of their squat.”
“So they decided the fuzz aren’t so bad after all?” He rubbed his hands together in satisfaction. “What’ve you got?”
Megan quickly scanned her notebook. She never managed to absorb the information properly while she was taking it down in shorthand. It went straight from her ear to her fingers without, apparently, passing through her consciousness.
“Well?”
“Uhhh . . .”
“Can’t read your own shorthand? Need a refresher course, do you?”
“No, sir! They confirm that the victim was known to them as Norman Wilmot.”
“Known to them? Cautious buggers!”
“None of them knew him before he turned up and joined their squat. But I gather that’s nothing out of the ordinary. People come and go.”
Scumble grunted his incomprehension of young people today.
“None of them liked him particularly, but it’s against their principles to turn anyone away.”
“Spare me the sermon!”
“If he was friendly with anyone, it was Trevor—Trevor Brand, one of them thinks. They all recognised the composite picture as Trevor.”
“Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Trevor, unlike Norman, was generally considered a ‘good bloke.’ He has an uncle he visits now and then—could be once a month, but they’re all very vague about time.”
“Dopers! They’re going to make lousy witnesses.”
“At any rate, the uncle apparently gives him an allowance. Not generous, but he always came back to Bristol with money in his pocket.”
“What about their recent comings and goings?” Scumble demanded impatiently.
“There was a good deal of disagreement but one, who has a part-time job and has to keep track of the days of the week, is pretty sure—”
“ ‘Pretty sure’ convinces no juries!”
“No sir, but as you said, they’ll make lousy witnesses anyway. To the best of his recollection, Trevor and Norman left together the day before the robbery. They returned very early Saturday morning and left again on Monday. I’ll have to check the report, but I think Camilla said she didn’t see Trevor again—”
“That’s right.”
“A couple of the others claim he came back after they’d seen the photo of Norman in the chip paper. They told him to bugger off. They wouldn’t turn him in but he wasn’t welcome any longer.”
“Good to know there’s something they draw the line at!”
“Norman had had a warning. He blacked someone’s eye, and—” Her phone rang.
Scumble nodded to her to take the call. As she lifted the receiver, his phone followed suit. Before she became involved in her own call, she heard him say in a tone of horror, “Reverse the charges? Who—?”
“Megan?”
“Ken! You have something solid for us?”
“As solid as a neighbour’s memory of a chance remark a couple of years ago.”
“Oh. Well, better than nothing. We’ll take what we can get.”
“It’s the neighbours who were in Majorca. They came home late last night. The wife, Rosalyn McLoughlan . . .” Ken spelt it and added the address and telephone number. “She found out this morning about the robbery and Donaldson’s disappearance, and she rang us. At a guess, she’s the sort who buttonholes people whether they want to chat or not and winkles their life histories out of them willy-nilly. We know Donaldson isn’t the sociable sort. Why should he tell her he has a cottage in Cornwall—”
“In Cornwall!”
“I thought you’d be interested,” he said smugly. “Near one of your odd saints that no one’s ever heard of. She remembers the name because she’d recently visited Kew Gardens.”
“Not St Kew?”
“St Kew. I looked it up, and it’s not far at all from Port Mabyn. Believe it or not, she even got the name of the cottage out of him.”
“Don’t tell me she remembers that!”
“ ‘Such an odd name, Sergeant,’ ” he said falsetto. “ ‘And I do love willows, don’t you? They always remind me of Henley.’ ”
“Willow Cottage?”
“Withy’s End. Apostrophe s.”
“Withy’s End, near St Kew. We’ll find it.”
“You have a photo of him?”
“I stuck one from a newspaper into the file.”
“That’s all we’ve got. Lord knows where they dug it up. We’re trying to get the original from them, but you know the press. Oh, and his car’s a maroon Jag.” He gave her the registration number. “If you don’t find him we’ll put out a call for that. Don’t forget we have an interest in the man, too.”
“We’ll keep you informed. Thanks, Ken. We’re getting somewhere at last.”
“Assuming he’s there, they’ll probably send me down again to talk to him. Start thinking of a good place, a really nice place, I can take you for dinner.”
“Ken, I—” But he had hung up.
Scumble was staring at her with his eyebrows raised questioningly. His ear was still glued to the receiver and he made occa
sional inarticulate responses. She guessed he had someone on the line whom it would be impolitic to cut off, though he wasn’t learning much of use. Someone who stood on his rights: If he rang the police to offer assistance, he felt they should pay for the call; if they were rude, he’d complain.
But the inspector wanted to know at once what Megan had been told.
“Sir, that was the Yard. They—” Her phone rang yet again.
Scumble rolled his eyes in exasperation but waved to her to pick it up.
“Sergeant, DC Polmenna just radioed in. Wilkes and him, they’ve lost Mrs Trewynn and the girl.”
“They what? How the hell—No, don’t tell me. How long ago?”
“Last sighted going into a hairdresser’s at noon.”
“Noon!” Once they realised the pair was missing—which might have been quite a while considering how long some women spent at the hairdresser’s—they’d have made frantic efforts to find them before reporting the fiasco.
“They want to know if they should stay in Port Mabyn.”
“Yes! No, wait, I’ll have to ask Mr Scumble. Hold on. Sir, Wilkes and Polmenna have lost Aunt Nell and Cam. Mrs Trewynn and—”
“What? Ye gods, I’ll—No, sir, I beg your pardon, I was not speaking to you. I’m afraid a bit of an emergency has come up. I’m going to have to ring off. Thank you for your assistance, sir . . . Yes, yes, of course I’ll ring you back.” He hung up. “When hell freezes over,” he said to the phone, then addressed Megan as he shrugged into his coat. “The bloody schoolmaster. They lost your aunt, or your aunt lost them?”
“I didn’t get the details, sir. They want to know if they should stay in Port Mabyn.”
“Of course they should bloody stay in Port Mabyn! And go on searching. And if they haven’t found them by the time I arrive, then God help them! Let’s go!”
As Megan drove out of Launceston, she told Scumble about Donaldson’s country cottage. “So do you want to go there first, rather than to Port Mabyn?” she asked.
“Do you know how to find the place?”
“I know roughly where St Kew is, sir. There’s a signpost off the A39. But the cottage, no. Aunt Nell’s bound to know. If we can find her.”
“Port Mabyn first. We may want to take those bloody useless idiots with us when we call on Mr Donaldson.”
Surprised, Megan was going to ask why they needed back-up when going to talk to a crime victim. She didn’t get a chance. Scumble started talking on the car radio, giving instructions to contact the GPO, PC Leacock, or as a last resort the local milkman to get directions to Withy’s End. She was quite glad he was distracted from her driving. Worried about Aunt Nell, she zipped along as fast as the traffic allowed. The trunk road was quite busy for Cornwall, but still quicker than the twisting, turning back lanes, however empty.
She was very much afraid Camilla must have something to do with Aunt Nell’s disappearance. Why had she ever thought it was good idea to dump the girl on her aunt?
What worried her most was that DI Scumble was worried. He was trying now to raise Wilkes and Polmenna’s car, without success. They must be combing the village. He switched back to the Launceston nick. Megan concentrated on overtaking a pair of lorries dawdling up the hill onto the moor.
“Leacock’s out and his radio’s malfunctioning again,” Scumble said savagely. “The postman is out on his rounds. The milkman’s gone home to some obscure village and he’s not on the telephone.”
“My aunt’s bound to know where Donaldson’s cottage is. She knows all the lanes like the back of her hand. With any luck, she’ll have turned up by the time we get to Port Mabyn.”
Scumble closed his eyes as she took advantage of a gap in oncoming traffic to pass a tour bus. He remained silent until they turned off the A39 at St Teath.
Then he said, “We’ll go to the shop first, the LonStar shop. That woman, the vicar’s wife—”
“Mrs Stearns.”
“—probably knows where your aunt’s gone. D’you know what it smells like to me?”
“Cows?” said Megan, jamming her foot on the brake as a lowing herd of Guernseys strolled down the lane in front of her towards their milking shed, a black-and-white dog at their heels.
“Insurance fraud.”
“But that would mean . . .” She turned her head to stare at him. “Donaldson’s a crook?”
“Keep your eyes on the road!”
Not another word would he utter until they were safely parked. Megan spotted Wilkes and Polmenna’s panda car in the car park at the top of the hill and pulled in beside it.
As they hurried down the hill, he said, “Find out whether your aunt’s taken her car. Meet me at the shop. And if you come across that pair of nitwits, bring them with you.”
“Yes, sir.” If the nitwits had read the reports, they’d have known Aunt Nell kept her car in the shed in the car park by the stream. They would have checked. But they’d been sent up to Launceston from county headquarters in Bodmin and then rushed off to Port Mabyn. Maybe they hadn’t had a chance to catch up on all the details.
Megan hurried down, picked her way across the soggy field, and opened one of the shed’s double doors. No Incorruptible.
Or maybe they really were nitwits. They were the same two who had followed the car from Launceston the night of the gale. Surely they had seen Aunt Nell leave it in her shed. If they had been watching, they could hardly have missed the departure of a pea-green Morris Minor.
Except, Megan remembered as she squelched back across the grass, Nick Gresham had been driving when they were following. Had they been told it was Aunt Nell’s, not his? Nick would have parked it for her that night. Could he have taken it out for her today, because the field was boggy? In fact, the layer of mud presently wrecking her shoes suggested it had been flooded, so perhaps he’d parked up one hill or t’other? But that was beside the point. Wherever the car had been, might he have moved it to help Aunt Nell elude Wilkes and Polmenna? They hadn’t been told to keep an eye on him, only on Aunt Nell and Camilla.
Instead of hurrying to join Scumble at the LonStar shop, Megan pushed open the door of Gresham’s gallery. He was sitting on a high stool behind his counter, wrapping a parcel. He looked up when the bell jangled.
“Hello,” he said cheerfully. “I thought we might be seeing you.”
“Did you help Aunt Nell evade the constables watching her?”
“Yes. She’s not a suspect. Why not?”
“Why? Why was she so keen to get away unseen?”
“She was fed up with having her every step watched. But actually, I think it was mostly Camilla’s idea. She didn’t want the cops following her—”
“I knew it!” Megan’s thoughts whirled. Camilla was a friend of Trevor’s, and Trevor was Donaldson’s nephew, and Donaldson was a crook. “Where did they go?”
“Eleanor intended to take Camilla home. To her parents.”
“We must find them. Come on.”
He tapped the parcel. “I’ve got to get this to the post.”
“Don’t be so bloody bolshie! She may be in danger. Come on!”
“In danger?” Gresham said incredulously, but he followed her, locking the gallery behind him. “Eleanor? From that child? What the hell are you talking about?”
In the LonStar shop, they found Mrs Stearns at bay.
“I’ve told these officers,” she said, speaking to Scumble and gesturing at DCs Polmenna and Wilkes. “I won’t lie and claim Eleanor didn’t say where she was going, but I promised I wouldn’t tell.”
“Madam,” said Scumble sternly, “you are obstructing—”
“Mrs Stearns,” Megan interrupted, “Aunt Nell may be in danger. We must find out where she’s gone.”
“In danger? Are you sure?”
“No, we’re not. Do you want us to wait until we’re sure? Too late?”
“Oh dear! Nick . . . ?”
“Better safe than sorry. Tell them.”
“She’s taking Camilla to Ta
unton.” Mrs Stearns took a folded paper from her pocket and handed it to Scumble. “Going by the back roads to start with, and picking up donations on the way. This is her route.”
Megan wasn’t tall enough to read over the inspector’s shoulder, but she peered round his bulk and her finger shot out at the same moment his pointed at a name on the list. In unison, they pronounced, “St Kew!”
“It’s one of my husband’s parishes,” said the vicar’s wife. “I know it well. Eleanor can hardly come to any harm there.”
Scumble gave her a hard look. “Do you know a house called Withy’s End?”
“It sounds familiar. It’s not one of our flock . . . Oh, I know where I’ve seen the name. We’ve had paperwork. One of our donors, LonStar, not the church, lives there, so Eleanor might well call in.”
“Can you tell us how to find the place?”
“I’m sure I’ve driven past it. I couldn’t give directions but I can picture it—”
“I know where it is,” Gresham interrupted. “I’ve biked past it. I can show you the way.”
“So can I,” Mrs Stearns put in.
“Let’s go!” said Scumble.
Megan, Gresham, and DC Polmenna reached the car park ahead of the other three, older and slower. Megan unlocked the unmarked car, but when she looked round, Polmenna was already behind the wheel of the panda car, starting the engine, and Gresham was about to get in.
“Wait, I’ll come with you!” They should have someone with them who had at least some idea of what was going on.
She dropped the keys on the driving seat. Gresham stood back to let her climb into the back, then folded himself into the front passenger seat and slammed the door as Polmenna put his foot down.
“Left, through the village,” said Gresham.
They roared down the hill, over the bridge, and up the other side. Fortunately the street was not very busy at this time of the afternoon. By the time they were out of the village, Scumble and Mrs Stearns were on their tail, with Wilkes at the wheel. When they reached the main road, Gresham told Polmenna to turn right.
“And then the second left.”
