by Simon Brett
“Listen, Nathan, you know you’re in a lot of trouble. Circumstances dictate that you’re the major suspect for Kyra Bartos’s murder. And the fact that you’ve run away only exacerbates the problem.”
“Excuse me.” The boy looked affronted. “What’s all this ‘running away’ business?” He indicated the chain round his ankle. “Does it really look as though I’m stuck down here voluntarily?”
“Are you saying you were kidnapped?”
“Not exactly. No, I came down to Cornwall of my own accord. In all the confusion of what happened – and the kind of mental state I was in – yes, lying low for a few days did seem a good idea. In retrospect I’m not so sure it was, but I wasn’t thinking very straight after I heard about…what happened at the salon.”
“Who did you hear about it from?” asked Carole.
“My uncle.”
“Rowley Locke.”
He looked at them curiously. “Are you sure you’re not police?”
Jude promised that they weren’t.
“Because you do seem to know rather a lot about me.”
“Everyone in the West Sussex area knows a lot about you. There’s been blanket coverage in the papers and on television.”
“Yes, I suppose there would be.” He sighed and gestured to the ancient set. “That doesn’t work. Not that I’d get Sussex local news down here anyway.”
“No.”
Carole picked up his narrative. “So you were saying…you came down here of your own free will…?”
“Yes. More or less. Uncle Rowley can be very persuasive.” Both women shared the thought that they were sure he could be. “But when they got me here…suddenly he says I’ve got to be chained up.”
“Does it hurt?” asked Jude.
“Not really. It’s quite slack. Only hurts if I try to get out of it, and I gave up on that idea after the first couple of hours. And the chain’s long enough so’s I can get to the bathroom.” He grinned wryly. “No, as prisons go, I suppose this is a very humane one.”
“But don’t you get bored out of your skull?”
“Well…” He gestured to the bookshelves. “I’ve got plenty to read. And I keep comforting myself with the thought that it’s not for ever.”
“For how long, though?” asked Carole. “Did your uncle give any indication of that?”
Nathan shrugged. “Not precisely. Presumably he’s just keeping me here until the police find out who actually did kill…” Again emotion threatened. Something in his throat rendered him unable to speak his late girlfriend’s name.
“Hmm.” Neither Carole nor Jude was persuaded by the explanation.
“Uncle Rowley did say I was being kept here for my own good. He said if the cops got their hands on me, I’d never escape. They’d stitch me up good and proper.” That sounded in character from what Carole had heard of Rowley Locke’s estimation of the British police force.
“I have to listen to what Uncle Rowley says,” Nathan continued lamely. “He does know what he’s talking about.”
This was a tenet of Locke received wisdom to which neither Carole nor Jude subscribed. They both had strong suspicions about Rowley Locke’s agenda.
“Well,” Carole announced practically, “the first thing we should do is get you free from that chain.”
The suggestion brought a light of paranoia into the boy’s eye. “Oh, you’d better not do that. There’s a girl – my cousin Mopsa who – ”
“We know all about Mopsa. She’s gone off shopping.” Carole consulted her watch. “She won’t be back for at least another twenty minutes.”
“So,” asked Jude, “should we find some tools upstairs to cut through the chain?”
“You don’t have to bother with that.” He gestured towards the foot of the stairs. “There’s a key to the padlock hanging over there. Just about six feet beyond my reach. Don’t imagine I haven’t tried to grab it.”
“Right,” said Carole. “Then the first thing we do is get that key.”
“I don’t think so.”
They all looked up at the sound of the lisping voice. Mopsa stood halfway down the stairs, back-lit from the kitchen above. In her hands was the shotgun that had been hanging on the sitting-room wall.
∨ Death under the Dryer ∧
Twenty-Nine
Carole was unfazed. “Put that down.”
“No, you back off. Get away from that key, or I’ll shoot.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Move back,” hissed Nathan’s anguished voice. “She means it. She will shoot.”
Something in the girl’s eye told Carole that her cousin was speaking the truth. She retraced her steps until she and Jude stood together, an inadequate defence in front of the chained boy. The chamber suddenly felt very small.
Mopsa moved on down the stairs. “I should have been on my guard. A sudden booking out of the blue this time of year. I should have known you were up to something.”
“All we were up to,” said Jude reasonably, “was trying to find Nathan. The police are looking for him. He can’t be hidden away here for ever.”
“Oh no? Prince Fimbador spent seven years night and day in the Wheal Chamber.” There was a gleam of fanaticism in the girl’s eye as she said the words.
“Yes, maybe. But that’s not real. That’s just a story.”
“A story?” Mopsa was deeply offended. “The Chronicles of Biddet Rock tell how Prince Fimbador resisted the evil hordes of Gadrath Pezzekan. The tale of the ultimate battle of Good against Evil is not just a story.”
Carole and Jude caught each other’s eye, as into each mind sank the sickening truth. Mopsa was not sane. This was why she had not followed the course of her sister Dorcas to university. Her unhinged mind had swallowed the nonsense of the Wheal Game whole. For her the incarceration of Nathan as Prince Fimbador was completely logical. She was just fulfilling her role in the legend. And if the fulfilment of that role involved bloodshed, she would not shirk her duty.
She waved the shotgun dangerously in their direction. “You have broken through the Face-Peril Gate. Already you have invoked the Great Curse of the Leomon! The fate of all who sully the purity of Karmenka is death.”
“Mopsa,” said Carole firmly, “you are talking absolute balderdash.”
“Contempt has always been the fate of the Prophetesses of Biddet Rock.”
‘Prophetesses’ was really quite a mouthful for someone with a lisp. The situation would have been laughable but for the fact that the girl so clearly believed all the nonsense she was spouting.
“We rise above it,” she persisted. “We know the Right Course and we still pursue it till the last drop of the blood of the Leomon is shed.”
“Yes, well, fine. Let the blood of Leomon be shed, but don’t let’s shed anyone else’s. How about that?”
But Jude’s jokey approach was not the right one either. The girl pointed the shotgun very definitely in the women’s direction and gestured them to move away from Nathan’s table, till their backs were to the sea-facing wall. Not quite believing the situation they were in, but all too aware of its gravity, they did as they were instructed.
“When you sacrifice your pathetic lives, acolytes of Black Fangdar,” said Mopsa, “there must be no risk of harm to Prince Fimbador.”
Under normal circumstances Carole and Jude would have giggled, but there was nothing funny about the way Mopsa was sighting them down the barrel of the shotgun. Through both their minds went the thought that she could only get one of them with her first shot. Then, since it was a single-barrelled gun, she would have to reload. But neither felt very cheered by the increased odds on survival. And neither was about to volunteer to go first.
Mopsa cocked the rifle. The way she did it suggested a discouraging familiarity with the weapon. Her talk of shooting rabbits had not been mere bravado.
She shifted her stance, so that the sight was trained on Carole’s chest.
“Mopsa, this is daft,” said Jude, the c
almness in her voice masking the desperation in her mind. “You can’t just shoot us in cold blood. You don’t even know who we are.”
“I know all I need to know,” the girl responded implacably. “You are intruders who have broken through the Peril-Face Gate into the Wheal Chamber. You are probably Grail-seekers, sent from Black Fangdar. You are certainly a threat to Prince Fimbador, which means that you must be in the pay of Gadrath Pezzekan.”
“We are not a threat to Prince Fimbador,” said Jude.
“No, we certainly aren’t,” Carole agreed.
“We’re here to help Prince Fimbador…” God, how easy it was to slip into this nonsense talk. “Nathan. We are here to help Nathan.”
“And how do you propose to help him, you who betrayed Prince Fimbador at the Battle of Edras Helford?”
“For a start we’ll get him away from here.”
“And then?”
Neither woman answered. Neither could, on the spur of the moment, come up with a reply that they could be sure would not enrage the girl further.
“How do I know that you will not hand him over to the police?”
Still they couldn’t reply. Handing him over to the police was the solution uppermost in both their minds. The shotgun was still pointed firmly at Carole’s chest.
It was Nathan’s voice that broke the impasse. “It would be good if I could talk to the police, Flops.” Oh, God, another of the Locke family nicknames…“Clear up a few details about what actually happened that night…You know, the night when…when…”
Again he was unable to speak his dead girlfriend’s name.
“No!” Mopsa’s voice rang against the stone walls of the Wheal Chamber. “My orders are to guard you. My orders are to keep you safe from the police. And to kill anyone who challenges your safety.”
“Your father didn’t really mean that, Flops. He was just going over the top, as usual. You weren’t meant to take it literally.”
“The Prophetesses of Biddet Rock pride themselves on obeying all of their orders to the letter!”
“Well, not that one about killing people. Look, Uncle Rowley wrote me a note…”
His scrabbling in the table drawer distracted her for a moment, long enough for Carole to step forward with her hands locked and knock the rifle barrel upwards. As it jerked in her hands, Mopsa pulled the trigger. In the enclosed space the report was shockingly loud. It prompted an enraged cacophony of complaint from seabirds on the cliffs outside.
Nathan’s chain was long enough for him to leap across and snatch the gun from his cousin’s hands. Unarmed, Mopsa lost all resistance and sank to her knees, overtaken by hysterical weeping. Carole crossed to the bottom of the stairs and finished what she’d been about to do when the girl disturbed them. She removed the key from the hook where it had tantalized Nathan for nearly three weeks, crossed to him and undid the padlock on his ankle.
“Thank God for that,” he said, flexing the constricted muscles of his foot.
Carole, aware of the danger in which she had been, and slightly shocked by her action in hitting away the shotgun, felt suddenly rather feeble. “What do we do now?” she asked.
“We get the hell out of this place as soon as possible,” said Jude.
“But…” Even in these circumstances Carole could not repress the instinctive words “we booked for a week.”
Her neighbour didn’t bother to reply. Instead, she looked at the boy and asked, “Are you going to come with us, Nathan?”
He looked at Jude for a long moment, and then slowly nodded. “Yes. I’ve got to find out the truth…you know, about what happened to…to…” He still couldn’t do it. A tear glinted in his eye.
“Right, let’s assemble our things, and get out of here as soon as possible.”
As Jude moved towards the steps, Carole looked down at Mopsa, still limp as a rag doll on the wooden floor and crying in long shuddering sighs. “What do we do about her?”
“Lock her in,” suggested Nathan. “Give her a taste of the medicine she’s been dishing out to me.”
“I don’t think we need do that,” said Jude. “We don’t want to sink to her father’s level.”
“If we take away the gun, are there any other weapons in the cottage that she could use?” asked Carole.
He shook his head. “I’m pretty sure there aren’t.”
“I don’t think violence from Mopsa is going to be a problem.” Jude looked down at the weeping girl. “She’s not a threat to us any more.”
Responding to the compassion in Jude’s voice, Nathan knelt down beside his cousin. “It’s all right, Flops…Fimby’s not cross with you. Fimby forgives you. And everyone else will forgive you.”
“No, they won’t,” the girl wailed. “I have failed in my appointed task. I have not defended Prince Fimbador of the Blood of Merkerin.”
“You will be forgiven.” Nathan Locke stood to his full height and held a hand over the girl in a majestic gesture. “You have the word of the Grail-Holder Prince Fimbador that you will be forgiven!”
Mopsa apparently drew comfort from this mumbo-jumbo. The weeping eased. Nathan looked across embarrassedly to Carole and Jude and shrugged a shrug which seemed to say, “Don’t knock it. It worked.”
“Right. Let’s get ready,” said Carole, very much the teacher in charge of a school trip. “It’ll only take us a couple of minutes to get our bags. Have you got much stuff, Nathan?”
“Very little. I was rather whisked away from Fethering the morning after – ”
Jude interceded before the memory of Kyra could upset him again. “Don’t worry. You can tell us everything in the car.”
They left Mopsa in the Wheal Chamber, but did not close the Face-Peril Gate. For safety they put the shotgun in the Renault’s boot, along with their luggage and Nathan’s rather pathetic plastic carrier bag.
As Carole drove off, with the boy and Gulliver sharing the back seat, they all looked back. Mopsa was standing outside Cottage Number One, talking into a phone. Though none of them voiced it, they would all have put money on the fact that the person the other end of the line was Rowley Locke.
∨ Death under the Dryer ∧
Thirty
Maybe it was delayed shock that kept them quiet for the first half-hour of their journey back. The only one making any noise was Gulliver, who started off by panting excitedly. For him getting in the car gave the signal that he was about to be taken for a walk. But as the journey continued with no signs of stopping, he got less excited. Honestly, humans were so unreliable. The memory of the excessively long journey of the day before came back to him and he subsided into an aggrieved lump on the back seat, not even responding to friendly stroking from Nathan.
They had passed Penzance before the silence was broken. And, surprisingly, it was the boy who broke it. “I’m sorry about Flops – Mopsa. She’s…well, she’s always had problems.”
“Mental problems?”
“Yes. She’s got a twin sister called Dorcas.”
“I’ve met her,” said Carole.
“Well, Mopsa’s…Incidentally, I don’t understand how you know everything about my family.”
“Don’t worry about that for the moment,” said Jude. “Tell us about Mopsa.”
“Well, as I say, she’s a twin. Dorcas has always been the bright one…school, university, she’s done well all the way. And Mopsa could never quite hack it. In another family I think doctors or psychologists would have been consulted, but the Lockes always think they can sort everything out for themselves, so they’ve kind of protected her from the outside world.”
“As they were trying to protect you from the outside world?”
He let out a mirthless laugh. “I suppose you could say that. Anyway, there’s been a long history of Mopsa sort of dropping out of things, having breakdowns I reckon, but she’s always been at her calmest and most sane down at Treboddick.”
“That was her most sane?” Carole couldn’t help asking.
“
No, obviously she lost it when she found you’d broken into the Wheal Chamber. She’s…she’s potentially quite dangerous.”
“That was the impression I got.”
“But do she and Dorcas get on?” asked Jude.
“Yes, very well. Distressingly well. Dorcas is a strong character. I think in a way with Mopsa – and indeed with the two younger sisters – Dorcas has made them what Shakespeare would have called her ‘creatures’. She kind of controls them.”
“So how long has Mopsa been down at Treboddick?”
“She’s spent an increasing amount of time down there, you know, since she dropped out of school, or since she dropped out of the last of a series of schools. And then when Uncle Rowley remarried…well, Mopsa and Bridget were never going to see eye to eye.”
Carole agreed. “No, Bridget seems quite a sensible woman.”
“Yes, she is.” He spoke with warmth.
“I gather you and she get on well.”
“Very well.”
“You both approach the whole Locke family bonding process with a degree of scepticism.”
“You could say that. As soon as I got into my teens I got rather bored with all that Wheal Quest business…little realizing that I would end up playing it for real during the last three weeks.”
“There’s something that struck me about Bridget,” said Carole. “I’ve met your father and mother, and Rowley, and Dorcas, and the younger girls and, of all of them, Bridget is the only one who seemed worried about what had happened to you, where you’d gone to.”
“Well, she would be. All of the rest of them knew exactly where I was.”
“But Rowley didn’t tell his wife?”
“Of course not. As you said, Bridget is a sensible woman. The minute she knew that I was locked up at Treboddick – particularly being guarded by Mopsa – she would have contacted the police.”
There was a silence. Then Carole said, “I think we’ll have to get in touch with the police, Nathan.”
He made no objection. Though he didn’t welcome what lay ahead, he recognized its inevitability.
“If only to clear your name.”
“Yes.”
