“Quite a lot and up to his usual standard.”
Maltravers related the afternoon’s conversation and they were discussing it when Helen reappeared through the kitchen, wiping paint from her hands on a cloth.
“We’ve got a dwarf all right,” she confirmed when Tess asked her. “Nick Charlton. I expect I ought to feel sorry for him, but he’s a slimy little toad. He’s lived here for … I’m not sure, at least ten years. Keeps himself alive with odd jobs and summer work. Why?”
She pulled a face of distaste as Tess explained. “He was breaking into Martha’s cottage? The bastard.”
“That’s only our assumption,” Maltravers said. “But why else would he have been around there at this time of night? Where does he live?”
“Behind the harbour front,” Helen told him. “There’s no reason for him to be up Fern Hill.”
“If it was him,” Maltravers added. “I don’t imagine dwarfs are thick on the ground round here, but the Cornish are descendants of pocket-sized Ancient Britons. It could just have been a small person.”
“No way,” Tess contradicted. “It was a dwarf, so it must have been this Nick Charlton.”
“Will you tell the police?” Helen asked. “Apart from anything else, he did attack you.”
“It’s not worth the hassle. Anyway, I can’t prove anything and …” Tess stopped and shook her head uncomfortably. “But it was nasty and, I don’t know, spooky. Not just because it happened in the dark, but …”
She looked at them both helplessly, unable to explain her feelings.
“But because it felt evil?” Maltravers suggested quietly. Tess stared at him, startled that he had instantly touched the precise word she had been searching for. “I’m afraid we’re back with Mortimer. If he’s not gone to bed, I’ll ask him in for a nightcap and another chat.”
Twenty minutes later there was a long silence in the room as Tess finished repeating her experience. Lacey had dismissed Maltravers’s apologies for disturbing him almost as if he had expected his arrival. He had asked no questions while Tess had been speaking, but his eyes had grown increasingly sombre as he had listened.
“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes?” Maltravers said softly as Tess finished.
“Yes it does.” Lacey sounded slightly distant. “In Shakespeare’s day they were much closer to truths people either don’t understand or laugh at now. Very foolish of them.”
“So Charlton is our source of evil?” Maltravers suggested.
“Perhaps …” Lacey’s hands traced patterns of uncertainty in the air. “But don’t jump to conclusions. I recognised Nick Charlton for what he is the moment I met him. He’s spiteful and has a disturbing amount of hatred in him. He’s certainly capable of evil, but up to now he’s gone no further than mischief.”
“Mischief?” Maltravers echoed. “That’s what children get up to.”
“That’s how it’s used now, but it’s a degree of evil,” Lacey replied. “Look it up in a dictionary. The point is, has something happened which has made him go the whole hog?”
“And how far’s the whole hog?” Maltravers asked.
“I don’t know, but it’s within his nature to go a very long way.”
“As far as murder?”
“Quite possibly.” Lacey shook his head. “But why? He’s calculating and would not kill somebody without a reason, and I can’t see one with regard to Martha Shaw. Did they even know each other, Helen?”
“They certainly weren’t friends if that’s what you mean,” she replied. “But he’s been working regularly in Martha and Ruth’s garden for some weeks now and he hangs around with the whole crowd of them in the Steamer. They’ve sort of adopted him because he’s different. Like they are in another sort of way.”
She turned to Maltravers. “Remember that argument I told you they had in there last winter? Nick was with them that night.”
“Was he involved in the row?”
Helen frowned as she thought back. “Not as far as I recall. They were all sitting in that alcove by the window and he was stuck in the middle. When they all got going they just ignored him.”
“And that was over Martha becoming a Roman Catholic,” Maltravers recalled. “Can you remember any details of what they said?”
“No. Nobody took much notice until they really began going for each other and by that time they were bawling their heads off and it was impossible to make any sense of it.”
“So we have a link between Charlton and Martha,” Maltravers said.
“Yes, but I never saw them alone together and the village grapevine would have picked up anything like that,” Helen argued. “He knew them all, but none any better than the others.”
“However, he was working at the cottage when Martha was killed,” Lacey added quietly.
“How do you know that?” Helen demanded.
“Somebody mentioned it to me when I got back to Porthennis this morning. I can’t remember who.”
Ice in Maltravers’s gin clinked against the side of the glass as he rotated it in his fingers while he thought. Lacey was watching him, apparently waiting for him to speak.
“All right. He was on the spot, which means he could have had the opportunity,” he said finally, looking from Helen to Lacey. “But you can’t see any reason for him killing Martha.”
“No, but what was he doing skulking around the cottage tonight?” Helen asked.
“There must be things worth stealing,” Maltravers pointed out. “Perhaps nothing of great value, but enough to make it worthwhile. Have you any reason to think he’s done that sort of thing in the past?”
“Not as far as I know,” Helen replied. “I wouldn’t trust him, but nobody’s ever suggested he’s actually criminal.”
Maltravers glanced at Lacey. “Are your antennae picking up any vibes?”
Lacey shook his head. “I don’t know what may be in Nick Charlton’s mind, but I can’t imagine he’s taken to burglary by chance. There are plenty of other empty cottages in Porthennis if that was his idea.”
“So is there something special in Martha’s cottage?” Maltravers asked rhetorically. “And why does Charlton want to get his hands on it?”
“I don’t know, but I can tell you this much,” Lacey said. “And Helen knows this as well. Nick Charlton is much too calculating to take a risk — and after all Tess might have caught him — unless it was important.”
“Like the evidence that someone murdered Martha?” Maltravers drew on his cigarette as he thought. “But that would mean he must have a reason to think she was murdered. You appear to be the only one saying that, Mortimer, and I can’t imagine you’ve made the suggestion to him.”
“I only talk to Nick out of unavoidable necessity,” Lacey replied. “If he knows anything about Martha’s death, he didn’t hear it from me.”
Maltravers leaned back in his chair. “So where do we go from here? Stick bits of bamboo under his toenails until he confesses?”
“It’s awfully tempting, but I think I’ll pass on that.” Lacey returned Maltravers’s look piercingly. “Try following your instincts, Gus. What do you want to do?”
“I think … What do I think?” Maltravers put his head back and gazed at the ceiling for several moments. “Nothing immediately occurs regarding this Charlton character, but without the slightest logical explanation, I think I’d like to see where Agnes Thorpe disappeared.”
Helen stared at him in disbelief. “What on earth for?”
“Because ever since you told me about her in the Steamer, it keeps coming back,” he replied. “Mortimer’s telling me to follow my instincts and that’s where they’re leading me. Perhaps he can explain.”
Lacey shook his head. “No, I can’t. But if that is really what you want to do, you’d better get on with it.”
*
Carved into the side of the land falling steeply from the moors to the sea, Fern Hill climbed straight up out of Porthennis until the whole village was visible behind M
altravers and Tess as they reached the level again. It was a Sunday-calm morning with few people about and the temperature was rising steadily. On one side of the road open fields ran upwards, on the other the land fell abruptly to immense wave-smoothed boulders piled along the beach. After less than a mile, they reached a five-barred gate, blackened with age and askew on rotting hinges, which took them on to a narrow coastal footpath squeezed between gorse and high ferns. Maltravers consulted Helen’s Ordnance Survey map, annotated with neat pencil instructions.
“That must be Cat’s Head.” He pointed to where a rock with the necessary resemblance to those with imagination was fringed by the lace of low breaking waves. “We go down the next coombe.”
An opening appeared in the brambles and gorse on their left as they walked on. Winding snake-like, the descent was shallow and the coombe was not overgrown. It appeared to be used regularly, although the tiny cove was empty when they reached it and climbed over the rocks to where the edges of the sea curled into thin scallops as it lapped the shore. Tess kicked off her sandals and walked out until water touched denim shorts then pulled off her T-shirt and turned to where Maltravers was sitting. “Catch!” She hurled the shirt to him, then threw herself forwards and began a slow, elegant crawl. He watched her swim almost to Cat’s Head then turn and wave before continuing in an arc around the little bay.
“You’re wet,” he remarked as she waded back through the shallows, shaking long hair stained dark with seawater. “And this is not a topless beach. You have to appear at Penzance magistrates court in the morning, preferably exactly as you are.”
Tess scattered droplets over him with waving hands before lying on her back on the warmed flat rock, hair spread out in a fan of shining rust, and closed her eyes.
“I’ll teach you to swim one day if it kills me,” she murmured.
“It’s more likely to kill me,” he replied. “I am living proof that the human body does not float in water, whatever science says.”
He gazed round the cove, secluded and private under drooping greenery overhanging a cowl of land spooned out by the sea. The silence was broken only by the far-off purr of a speedboat, crumpled white ribbon of foam glittering in its wake.
“There are worse places to die,” he remarked. “Wrapped in a shroud of peaceful water on a summer evening.”
“Very poetic.” Tess did not open her eyes. “Is that what happened?”
“That’s the story.” Ripples broke the surface of a sun-bright rock pool at his feet as he flicked a pebble into it. A disturbed crab scuttled along a patch of sand at the bottom and vanished under waving fronds of weed. “Agnes Thorpe came down here on her own and swam away to Avalon. Perhaps the last thing she saw was her theatre. Did you go out far enough to see it?”
“Just. You can see Cat’s Head from the stage.” Tess looked up at him, eyes crinkled against the sun. “Now we’re here, have you any idea why you wanted to come?”
“Frankly, no,” Maltravers acknowledged. “Why her body never turned up is a mystery everyone’s forgotten now.”
He twisted round and looked back up to where the outline of the coombe was just visible descending through the undergrowth. “But think of this. She leaves her clothes — or at least some clothes — here, possibly on this very rock, goes back to the path and walks to Morsylla — which is where we’re heading — where somebody is waiting for her? Then the suicide note turns up and everyone assumes she drowned. It’s plausible, and it explains why they never found her body.”
“But why?”
“God and Agnes knows … Have you learned anything about her at the Botallack?”
“I’ve read about her in the permanent exhibition they’ve got,” Tess replied. “There are photographs of what it was like when she started and the work in progress and a few details about Agnes herself.”
She sat up, a half-moon of damp left by her hair steaming off the rock. Already the front of her body was almost dry.
“She was born in 1912 and her parents were fringe members of the Bloomsbury Group. She wanted to be an actress like her mother, but wasn’t good enough. She had the idea for a theatre when she came here in the 1930s and started work on it when her parents died in a car crash three years later. Apparently they left her quite well off.”
“A lady of independent means,” Maltravers remarked.
“Yes, but not filthy rich,” Tess corrected. “And she was careful with her money. Most of the Botallack was built by volunteers — including the original members of the Porthennis School — after the war.”
“Helen told me that. It was what Agnes had begun that brought them down here,” Maltravers said. “Did she ever marry?”
“No, but she was planning to.”
“Who? One of the School?”
“No. Someone called Robert Jenkins who owned a pottery in the Midlands,” Tess replied. “He was a widower and they met when he came here on holiday. Later he put money into the Botallack.”
“A Black Country manufacturer with a soul?” Maltravers raised his eyebrows. “Or he must have been in love.”
“It certainly seems so. After they officially gave up looking for her body, Jenkins still spent a fortune trying to find it … which knocks any idea she ran off with him on the head.”
“What would have been the point anyway?” Maltravers agreed. “Perhaps there was someone else, but I’m only playing guessing games.”
He picked up Tess’s T-shirt and passed it to her. “Make yourself decent. You don’t want to start a riot in Morsylla.”
It was a spectacular walk above restless sea, the path now twisting down between centuries-old hedgerows of tangled hawthorn, elderberry, ivy and ferns, then climbing up again over crude steps hacked into the earth. It plunged through a belt of dark and cool conifers, dead pine needles packed beneath their feet, before taking them out into the open again and on to the highest part of the cliffs where they had to cling to clumps of coarse grass and edges of boulders as they stretched their legs across sheer drops that fell to liquid jade water noisily swirling in pits and crevasses. Eventually Morsylla appeared half a mile ahead, car park and beach cafe at the end of a deep slash in the hills, their path now falling between white bells of convolvulus, beds of gorse and huge thistles. By a stone bridge over a stream, Maltravers took a photograph of Tess standing next to a towering gunnera plant which looked like the biggest rhubarb in the world, then they bought sandwiches and drinks from the cafe. As they sat on the boulders of the beach, he took out Helen’s map again and pointed to Seal Bay, just over the next headland.
“We can reach the main road from there if we want and go back that way.”
“I’d love to see seals,” Tess said. “If you watch them, perhaps you’ll learn to swim.”
“Sure,” he replied cynically. “And if they watch me, perhaps they’ll learn to write.”
Chapter Six
Swept in swift strokes, charcoal conjured perspective as Edith Hallam-West skilfully sketched the northern headland of Seal Bay, one of Cornwall’s multitudinous tentacles groping the fringes of the Atlantic. Subtle smudges with her finger gave monochrome depth and distance to the horseshoe curve of cliffs and restless water beneath cloud-patched sky. In the foreground, firm lines shaped jumbled rocks and patches of sedge. She sat on a folding metal stool at the top of the beach, a slender figure in an emerald green trouser suit and broad-brimmed white hat. Maltravers and Tess saw her as they reached the crest above the bay and she looked up when their feet dislodged scatters of stones as they made their way down, then returned to her work.
“Good afternoon,” Maltravers said as they reached her. He regularly defied English reticence over greeting strangers on a country walk.
Blue-green eyes looked at him above half-moon gold spectacle frames. She was seventy-three, the remains of what must once have been a very beautiful woman preserved in her face. Creases of age added a patina to ivory skin, enhancing without dimming, and still-abundant silver hair shone beneath
the edges of the hat.
“Good afternoon. Gorgeous day.” The voice was firm and educated.
“Glorious.” Maltravers indicated her drawing. “May we see?”
“By all means.” She held the paper at arm’s length, examining it with casual criticism before turning the pad towards them. “It’s only a working sketch though.”
“As I can only draw breath and wages, I envy your talent,” Maltravers said. “What will it end up as?”
“An oil.” Her charcoal indicated a rock dominating the picture. “With a seal on there.”
Tess looked round excitedly. “Are there really seals? Where?”
Edith Hallam-West laughed. “You’re in for a disappointment, I’m afraid. They don’t hang around sunning themselves when people come this close.”
Tess turned to Maltravers in mock annoyance. “You promised me seals. I’m going to sulk.”
“Perhaps this lady will paint one for you.” Maltravers paused uncertainly. “Are you by any chance a wildlife artist called Edith something? I can’t remember the surname.”
“Hallam-West. How nice to be recognised. I’m flattered.”
“I was guessing, but we’re staying in Porthennis with Helen Finch and she’s told me about the resident artists’ School and at least part of your name stuck.”
“Helen? Oh, yes.” Realisation crossed Edith Hallam-West’s face. “She mentioned you were coming. You’re her cousin or something aren’t you? The writer. I saw Green In Judgement on television. It was very good.”
“Nice to be recognised. I’m flattered.” They both laughed. “This is my girlfriend Tess Davy. She’s appearing at the Botallack.”
“Of course!” Edith Hallam-West stood up and offered her hand. “I was there the other evening and should have recognised you, although you look different off stage. I’ll be coming again next week.”
She smiled nostalgically, still holding Tess’s hand. “I was taken to the opening night of Private Lives for my fifteenth birthday. The Phoenix Theatre, September twenty-fourth, 1930. Noel Coward, Gertrude Lawrence, Laurence Olivier and Adrianne Allen. It was my first visit to a real theatre — pantomimes didn’t count — and I wore a grown-up dress of blue satin. I met the man who became my husband that night.”
The Dying of the Light Page 7
