by Nicola Upson
‘She’s not an idiot, Archie – far from it.’
‘I know, and I’m sorry to ask you to lie for me.’
‘That doesn’t bother me, particularly. But I know she’s important to you, and I don’t want to be responsible for destroying your friendship or making her feel any more betrayed than she does already.’
‘To be honest, I think she’s past caring. She told me nothing else could hurt her.’
‘Yes, but when that’s how you feel, something can come from nowhere and destroy you completely. Don’t underestimate the effect that the smallest thing could have on her state of mind at the moment.’ He said nothing, so she left it at that. ‘William’s asked me to have dinner with him and the girls tonight. Will I see you there?’
‘I’ll do my best, but it depends how the rest of the day turns out. I’m at the house at the moment, but there’s a lot to do this afternoon.’
‘You haven’t stolen my thunder with Ronnie and Lettice, I hope?’
‘No, a promise is a promise, and your reputation is still intact. Which is more than will be said of my young assistant if I don’t get back to him.’
‘Is Ronnie still on the prowl?’
‘Yes, but she’s having problems getting past his dog.’
He heard her laugh again and realised how glad he was to have her to talk to – now more than ever. ‘I’d better let you go, then,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any news on Christopher Snipe, is there? It would be nice to tell Loveday something positive.’
‘No, I’m afraid not, but you might find out gently from her if she has any idea where he could be – without worrying her, obviously. We’re off to Jago’s now – I’m sure there’s something he’s not telling us, and it might help.’
‘You know, he strikes me as a man who wouldn’t let anything get in the way of a principle.’
‘Jago?’
‘Yes. They probably call it honour here, but it still sounds remarkably like violence to a Scottish ear.’
She was gone before Archie could ask her what she meant, and he walked thoughtfully back to the hall. Trew was there on his own, waiting patiently. ‘Mr Motley asked if there was anything he could do, Sir, so I told him about the search. He’s going to sort out some manpower for us. You’re just to let him know where you want them – he’s down by the stables.’
‘Our lads are going to start by the church, aren’t they?’ Trew nodded. ‘Then William’s men should do the woods on the other side of the lake. We’ll tell him on the way out, and I’ll ask him to oversee it for the next day or two. Have my cousins gone?’
‘Yes, Sir. Miss Motley offered to look after Treg for me, but he didn’t seem too keen. I hope she wasn’t offended. It was kind of her to think of it.’
‘Very kind,’ said Archie, smiling as he led the way back out to the car. ‘She’s good like that.’
Chapter Fifteen
Jago Snipe lived on the western side of the Loe Pool, half a mile or so along a narrow track which formed the boundary of William’s land. The house – a modest, stone-built cottage with a rain-slicked slate roof – had its back turned to the estate’s woodlands and looked out across cultivated fields to the village, just a ten-minute walk away. Penrose let Trew get out of the car, then parked close in to the hedge to keep the track clear. There was no sign of Jago’s van. In fact, with the exception of the rabbits which scuttled to left and right – delighting Treg, who stuck obediently but reluctantly to Trew’s heel – there was no sign of life at all.
‘At least, being the undertaker, he’ll be straight with us,’ Trew said as they walked up to the door.
‘You think so?’ Penrose asked, raising a cynical eyebrow at his companion. ‘He’s a Cornishman, Trew, and what was it someone said about us? Beware the fluency of the Celts – it makes their lies more convincing than a Saxon truth.’ He knocked smartly at the door, and lowered his voice. ‘The first time he talked to me about Christopher’s disappearance, he was certainly holding something back, but it wasn’t official then and I couldn’t press him. This is different. It’s a murder inquiry now and it’s up to us to make sure he’s straight with us – but I don’t think he’ll do it as willingly as you might suppose.’
There was no sound from inside the house. Penrose knocked again, but without any real hope of a response. ‘He’s obviously not here either,’ he said after a moment.
‘Looks like we’ve had a wasted trip, Sir.’ Trew sounded disappointed, but Penrose’s attention was fixed on a group of tumbledown shacks a couple of hundred yards further down the track.
‘Not entirely,’ he said, ‘although it’s not the man we were after. I’d forgotten that Caplin lives down here as well. He’s having a good look at us, so we might as well satisfy his curiosity and find out why he wasn’t where he should have been last night.’
As they walked over to the cluster of outbuildings, the man standing at the door to the nearest one made no attempt to look away or pretend he was otherwise occupied. ‘Afternoon, Joseph,’ Penrose called, and, when they were close enough, held out his hand. The other man hesitated, then shook it guardedly. ‘We were after Jago, but he’s not in.’
‘Been gone an hour or more,’ Caplin said.
‘Don’t suppose you know where?’ The older man shook his head. ‘Perhaps while we’re here we could have a word with you about last night?’ Caplin shrugged, as if to say that it made no odds to him what other people did with their time, and Penrose could trace the slow progress of alcohol in the lines on his face and the redness around his eyes. It was the face of someone who had long ceased to care how his days were filled, and that was hardly surprising; the tragic accident which killed his daughter – it must be fifteen years ago now, or more – had shocked the whole estate; it would have been a miracle if he had recovered. Penrose remembered how surprised he had been yesterday to see Caplin at the Minack at all; he wondered why the man had bothered to take part in something so alien to the solitary life he chose, and asked as much.
‘Same reason you did, I suppose,’ he said gruffly. ‘Mr Motley asked me to.’ He must have sensed Penrose’s disbelief, because he added: ‘God knows I’ve got little enough to be grateful for, but what I have got is down to him – a job, and a roof over my head. If you’ve spent as many years as I have thinking about how you’ve been wronged, you remember when someone plays fair by you – and he’s always done what he could, for me and for a lot of other people. We might fight among ourselves, but you won’t find many around here who’d wish him ill.’
Touched, Penrose glanced involuntarily across the yard at the roof to which Caplin referred. He remembered that William had found the farmer somewhere else to live after the tragedy, knowing it would be torture for him to remain on his own in rooms which held such appalling memories. The house was small – barely bigger than one of the squatters’ cottages, built between sunrise and sunset all over the west country – but, although it showed signs of neglect, it was structurally sound and obviously regularly maintained, due more to William’s efforts than Joseph Caplin’s, Penrose guessed. Nevertheless, there was a bleakness about the property which depressed him, and he marvelled at how different the reality of a rural existence was from the way in which it was frequently depicted. Often, in London, his work would take him into the homes of clerks and shop assistants and rent collectors, and invariably there would be a picture of the yearned-after country cottage somewhere on those optimistic middle-class walls – one of those romanticised images by Allingham and her contemporaries, specialists in creating houses which existed only in their imagination. He found the smug cosiness of it all particularly offensive today; no landlord worked harder than William, but even he could only do so much.
‘Do you want to come inside?’ Caplin asked reluctantly.
‘No, thank you. We won’t keep you for long,’ said Penrose, who could only imagine what the interior of the house was like and had no intention of humiliating the man by forcing him to make it
public. ‘I’ll come straight to the point. I’d like to know where you were last night when Nathaniel was killed.’
‘Over by the rocks on the other side of the stage, waiting for the next crowd scene.’
‘You didn’t have a more specific role?’
‘No. I’m not what you might call the theatre type.’
‘We’ve been told that you were supposed to be on the backstage path, making sure that nothing went wrong when Nathaniel jumped from the balustrade.’
Caplin smiled, but there was no humour in it. ‘Ah. I see what you’re getting at. You think I gave him a shove while I was down there.’
Penrose met his stare. ‘It’s a possibility I’d like to discount.’
‘Well, your information is a bit out of date. It’s true – the woman who owns the place did tell me to stand there throughout the performance.’
‘Miss Cade?’
‘That’s her. It was early on, when I first got there. She was having some sort of tantrum about making sure everything was safe, and I happened to be in the firing line. She made me go down there with her and showed me where I had to be. It could have been anyone, though – I don’t kid myself that I had any special qualifications.’
‘So why weren’t you there?’ Penrose asked, ignoring the sarcasm.
‘Because as soon as Morveth Wearne arrived and heard about it, she changed things round. Said she’d do it herself, and I should go back to where I was.’
That made sense to Penrose. Morveth would never have trusted Nathaniel’s safety to someone as unreliable as Caplin, although it didn’t explain why she had not been in the recess later on. ‘Did you see Morveth at all once the performance was underway?’
‘No. Did you? You had the best view going from what I remember.’
‘And when the play was stopped – did you notice anyone leaving the theatre or acting strangely?’
‘If you ask me, we were all behaving strangely by being there in the first place – how would I know what was supposed to happen and what wasn’t? I just did what I was told and, as far as I could see, everyone else did, too.’
‘When you went down to the path with Miss Cade in the afternoon, did you actually go into the recess or did she just show it to you?’
‘I went in, and stayed there until Morveth fetched me. It was nice to be out of the way for a bit, if I’m honest.’
‘Did you see Nathaniel talking to anyone during the rehearsals?’
‘You. And Morveth.’
‘And you didn’t speak to him yourself?’
‘About what? God and I haven’t really been on the best of terms over the last sixteen years, and if I’ve nothing to say to the organ grinder, I’m hardly likely to strike up a conversation with His monkey.’
‘Would you mind showing us the soles of your boots?’ Penrose asked. He recognised the futility of the question – Caplin had admitted to being in the recess and, even if his boots matched the imprint perfectly, it got them nowhere – but he asked it anyway. Caplin lifted his leg up behind him, apparently amused to see the so-called sophistication of Scotland Yard reduced to such pedestrian measures, and Trew went round to examine the pattern. He shook his head at Penrose, but added a valiant attempt of his own. ‘What about your other boots, Sir? Could we see those?’
‘How many pairs do you think I’ve got?’ Caplin asked scornfully. ‘You’ve seen all there is to see. Now, can I get on with some work?’
Penrose nodded, then thought better of it. ‘Just one more thing,’ he said. ‘You weren’t sorry about Harry’s death, were you? That toast you made at his wake didn’t seem like a slip to me.’
For the first time, Caplin looked genuinely interested in the question he had been asked, but he responded in the same flippant way. ‘Why should I shed tears over someone like Harry Pinching?’
‘I didn’t say you should, but drinking to his death suggests you hated him, and I just wondered why that was?’
‘I hated him because he had no idea how lucky he was,’ Caplin said simply. ‘He had his whole life ahead of him, but he treated it like a game. I watched him in the bar of the Commercial on the night he died, drinking and gambling, fighting and playing with women’s affections just because he could.’
‘Any woman in particular?’ Penrose asked.
‘Any woman he saw. Men like him have no idea of the lives that stand to be ruined by their cheap talk and their easy smiles – I should know, I lost my wife to one of them. I hated Harry Pinching because he had no respect for anything – and I’m not ashamed of hating him, either. Christ, the stupid bastard even cared so little for himself that he rode his horse into a lake. Those years he had and wasted could have been better used by someone else – someone who might have valued them.’
He turned back to his cottage and Penrose let him walk away, unable to defend Harry against the charge of recklessness which must seem so justified to a man who had lost everything through no real fault of his own.
‘What was all that about, Sir?’ Trew asked.
‘Grief,’ said Penrose, ‘and guilt, but not the sort that involves us. He doesn’t need any cell that we could offer him – he carries his own around with him. Come on,’ he added, ‘I thought I heard a car engine. Let’s see if we can salvage something from this afternoon.’
Jago’s gate was open when they retraced their footsteps past his cottage, and they knocked again, this time with more success. The undertaker, still wearing his hat and coat, answered immediately. ‘Is it Christopher?’ he asked before Penrose had had a chance to speak, then glanced anxiously at Trew’s uniform. ‘It’s bad news, isn’t it?’
‘No, no,’ Penrose said quickly. ‘It’s not bad news, but I’m afraid we haven’t got anything positive to tell you either. We would like to talk to you, though – about what happened yesterday and about Christopher. I need to know anything that might help us find your son – any small detail, no matter how irrelevant it seems.’
‘And last night?’
‘We’re questioning everyone who was there – anything you can remember about the evening might help us piece together what happened. Can we come in?’
Jago nodded, and stood back to allow them into a small, neatly kept but functional front room. ‘Sit down,’ he said, gesturing towards a table which was still laid with breakfast crockery. ‘I’ve only just got back from Nathaniel’s family,’ he explained, carrying what he could over to the sink, ‘so I haven’t had a chance to tidy up.’ Penrose was moved to see that he had bothered – out of habit or longing – to lay a second cup and plate for Christopher. As Jago returned it unused to the dresser, he tried to imagine the effort it must have taken for the undertaker to comfort parents who were mourning their son when he was frantic with worry for his own child’s safety. ‘I never thought there’d be another tragedy so soon after Harry’s death,’ he said, more to himself than to his visitors. ‘Please God, let it stop there.’
‘We’ve got as many men as possible out looking for Christopher,’ Penrose said gently. Jago sat down heavily in the chair opposite and rubbed his hand wearily over his eyes. ‘It’s going to be a long job and I’m not promising miracles, but if he’s still on the estate, or if he’s left any clue as to where he might have gone, we will find out. In the meantime, my sergeant is organising a national alert from London, just in case he’s ventured further afield.’
‘Are you looking for him alive or dead? Tell me honestly, Archie.’
‘I really don’t know – and that’s the truth,’ Penrose insisted as Jago looked at him doubtfully. ‘If Christopher has run away of his own accord, then he won’t be able to lie low for long with the kind of resources that we have available to us. I’ve found nothing to suggest that any harm has come to him but, in light of Nathaniel’s murder, I don’t want to give you false hope.’ He paused, wondering how best to break through Jago’s stubborn refusal to be completely open with him, and decided to take the most direct approach. ‘Look, Jago – I give you my word tha
t I won’t keep anything from you in this investigation if it’s relevant to Christopher’s disappearance. We’ll do everything possible to find him, but how can I do that efficiently if you’re holding something back?’ Jago began to protest, but Penrose refused to let him interrupt. ‘With what happened last night, the time for secrecy and half-truths is long gone. Shall we start again?’ The undertaker hesitated, then nodded. ‘You told me you had no idea where Christopher might have gone – was that the truth?’
‘Yes. I’ve asked round the rest of the family, just in case, but nobody’s seen him. I can’t think of anywhere else to try.’
‘What about his friends in the village?’
‘He didn’t really have any friends,’ Jago admitted. ‘The sort of work we do – it gets respect from people of a certain age, but it’s hard when you’re young. The people Christopher went to school with – they don’t want to hang around death all the time. He tried to keep in with them at first, went out for a drink at the weekends, that sort of thing, but they teased him about what he did for a living. He brushed it off and said it didn’t matter, but I know it upset him. In the end, he just stopped going.’
‘What about Loveday?’
Jago looked up sharply. ‘I told you the other day – I put a stop to that before it started. Christopher didn’t have anything to do with Loveday, except at Harry’s funeral. They hadn’t seen each other for weeks.’
Perhaps not to Jago’s knowledge, Penrose thought, but he had no doubt that the friendship between Christopher and Loveday had continued in spite of any rules laid down by his father. ‘On Monday, you told me that Christopher’s disappearance might be some kind of punishment. You must have had a reason to say that, and it’s not a word that just comes out of the blue, so I’ll ask you again – what did you mean by it?’
Jago looked uncomfortably at Trew, and Penrose realised that whatever he was hiding would only be brought out into the open if it were just the two of them. ‘While we’re talking, would you mind if Angus took a look at Christopher’s room?’ he asked. ‘We’d like to see if there’s anything there which might help us find him.’
