THE SEA CAVE
Alan Scholefield
© Alan Scholefield 1983
Alan Scholefield has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1983 by Hamish Hamilton Ltd.
This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
PART ONE
The First Inquest
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
PART TWO
The Second Inquest
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
PART THREE
The Trial
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
PART ONE
The First Inquest
Chapter One
The body was found on a lonely stretch of coastline on the Saxenburg estate. In the 1920’s it was a wild place where you could walk for mile upon mile and see nothing but the bleak plains on the one hand and the restless, wind-chopped sea on the other. Over the centuries these turbulent waters at the southernmost tip of Africa had been the graveyard of nearly two hundred ships; more than a thousand dead bodies had been washed ashore.
But not this one.
It was found in a small bay about three miles from the town of Helmsdale, overlooked by Saxenburg House itself. The bay was in the shape of a horseshoe. The house stood on one headland, the other had been worn away over the millennia into a jagged point, part of which occasionally collapsed. Here there was a sea cave, a grotto, a dark place.
When the tide was high, the cave was filled with rushing water which scoured it of dead seaweed and dead sea creatures. The water made a low, hissing noise as it came over the shingle, a kind of counterpoint to the waves breaking on the India Reef.
The body lay unmolested in the sea cave for several hours. Then, as the tide turned, water began to creep up to it. Slowly, the sea lapped over its feet, moving upwards until it covered the chest and head and finally lifted the body from the sand and dragged it down the shelving floor into the deep water beyond the entrance.
It started on its last journey.
The India Reef lay about a mile from the cave and the body drifted towards it. Had it reached the dark rocks no one would have seen it again, for they were the home of sharks, barracuda, crabs and crayfish – all good scavengers.
But the reef was surrounded by rip tides, whirlpools and contrary currents, and one of these currents began to pull the body in a sideways motion parallel to the shore.
Soon it reached an area where the swells ran into the bay, unimpeded by rock or reef. It was picked up by a wave and moved a few yards towards land. The next wave brought it a few yards closer, the next closer still.
Saxenburg Cove, as the small bay was called, had a sandy beach that looked inviting but was, in fact, dangerously rocky. However, there were three rock pools which changed the nature of the place. Each was about six feet deep and half the size of a tennis court. They were linked by short connecting channels. Rocks formed their walls and at low tide the sea could not reach them. Then, the water in the pools was crystal clear and you could swim from one to the next. At high tide the swells flowed over the rocks, renewing the water. Sometimes a fish or an octopus or a piece of flotsam would be deposited in the farthest pool.
High tide brought the body to the rocks which formed the barrier of the outer pool. Water pushed and pulled it, scraping its face and shoulder on the barnacles, until at last it slithered into the pool. The tide retreated, the body remained.
Dawn came, hot and windless.
The body lay face down, its arms outstretched, its legs dangling. Seemingly with a will of its own, it gradually floated through the connecting channels until it reached the pool nearest the beach. There it stopped, for there was nowhere farther to go, and there it was found by an early bather.
Chapter Two
The inquest was held four days after the body was discovered. The day was hot, with only a slight breeze.
Kate Buchanan was standing on the verandah of Saxenburg House when she heard the motor come to the front door. Smuts called through the chauffeur’s window, ‘Is she down yet?’
‘No.’
He lit a cigarette and waited, then he said, ‘It starts at eleven. We have to be there fifteen minutes early.’
‘I know. She won’t be long.’
The fact that Mrs. Preller was coming downstairs in the morning was an event in itself. She had decided to attend the inquest since the body had been found on her estate.
Kate rubbed her hands on her dress. They were damp with perspiration, not only from the heat, but from the knowledge of the ordeal to come. And there were other fears, private fears, that she had made a terrible mistake and that it would eventually catch up with her.
She looked down at Saxenburg Cove, below her. The rock pools were invisible, but she knew where they were. She knew exactly where the body had been, for she had found it. A picture flashed across her inner eye of Miriam’s face, and she felt her stomach turn. It had been like raw meat after its scraping on the barnacles. She fought the images. How long, she wondered, would it take for the picture to be erased from her mind?
‘Miss Kate.’ It was Lena’s voice.
Kate turned and saw the Cape coloured house-keeper at the door. ‘Madam is coming down now, Miss Kate.’
She crossed the verandah and reached the door as Mrs. Preller emerged into the sunlight. She was dressed as usual for an outing in a suit with a hobbled skirt, a long, light coat, buttoned boots, a dark hat and a veil that half hid her face: a post-Edwardian fashion plate nearly twenty years out of date.
Kate could make out the dead white face behind the veil and the red slash of the lips. She looked out of place in the sunlight, like some etiolated night creature.
‘Is everything ready?’ she said.
‘Everything is ready.’
‘We must go, then.’ Her Viennese accent was marked. She pronounced ‘we’ as ‘ve’ and rolled her r’s and often her syntax was idiosyncratic.
Smuts held the door open for them and gave Kate a wink as if to say, ‘Cheer up, my friend, you’re not dead yet,’ which was an aphorism often on his lips.
The large black motor proceeded out of the drive and across the headland towards the road that ran along the cliffs.
‘I do not like doing such things in the morning,’ Mrs. Preller said. ‘But it is my duty. Her body was found on Saxenburg. Why here? She could have swum anywhere.’
‘She liked the rock pools. We went there together once. She was a good swimmer.’
‘Not so good, I think. And look what her carelessness does to her poor father. I hope you will be careful on this coast. Is that not right, Smuts?’
‘Right, Miss Augusta. It’s the most dangerous coast in the world.’
‘I order you to be careful.’
‘I will be.’
The motor turned onto the cliff road, making for Helmsdale, which lay in its own bay about two miles away. As they changed direction, Kate looked back at the house. It was the angle from which she had first seen it two months before, when she had arrived at Saxen
burg. Smuts had picked her up at the station and brought her here in the dusk of a spring day. ‘There it is,’ he had said, and she had looked through a gap in the undulating country and seen the house standing on its headland.
She had seen it a hundred times since then, but that was the picture she would always retain: the great house, etched against the darkening sky.
‘See that white line beyond the bay?’ Smuts had said. ‘They call it the India Reef. Three Indiamen went down on her. Somerset, 1756; St. Giles, 1767; Heron, 1807. There have been others, but it’s the Indiamen people remember.’
The foaming white line started about a mile from shore and travelled at right angles to the cliffs for about the same distance. Rip tides surged one way, then another, and rollers from the Southern Ocean boomed as they struck.
‘When it’s calm you can hardly see the reef,’ he had said. ‘That’s what makes it dangerous.’
The wind had been blowing that evening, a tearing gale from the south-east which battered at the motor and blew the road surface away in clouds of dust. Kate had stared at the house. It had been built to withstand wind. It crouched on its headland, seemingly part of the organic structure of the dark rock itself: square, massive, a kind of Krak des Chevaliers out of time and place, designed to endure against the battering of the gales.
‘They didn’t call this place Cabo Tormentoso for nothing,’ Smuts had said.
‘Who didn’t?’
‘The Portuguese when they first came. Cape of Storms. Cabo Tormentoso. More accurate than Cape of Good Hope, my friend.’
The dying day, the house, the wind, the reef which had claimed so many lives, the strange little man at the wheel, had combined to increase Kate’s feeling of unease, but she had pushed it aside. She had made her decision; any decision was better than none. She had learnt that the hard way.
It was then she had noticed the faded elegance of the car’s interior; the seats of grey plush, the windows’ blue glass and the small silver vases in brackets on either side of the back seat, filled with purple everlastings.
They had bumped along at less than twenty miles an hour, winding in and out of rocky outcrops and the occasional great dune of white sand partly overgrown by mesembryanthemums. Sometimes the road would leave the cliffs and cross the edge of a great flat plain covered in what she now knew was called ‘fynbos’ in the local Afrikaans language. Finebush. A mixture of grasses and heaths and gnarled, twisting shrubs, none of which grew to a height of more than five or six feet, crouching, like the house, close to the ground, offering as little resistance as possible to the gales. Nowhere on that desolate plain had she seen a single tree.
‘Be careful where you walk in that stuff,’ Smuts had said. ‘We get snakes around here: cobras, puffadders.’
He was a small man, almost bald, and his sunburnt neck was criss-crossed by lines. He was about sixty and so short he could hardly see over the big, wooden steering wheel. The first thing she had noticed about him was that he looked and walked like a jockey. He even dressed like one, in riding breeches and brown leather boots.
As she studied him in the half-light, something had reared up beside the car, only inches from her face. She had given a gasp of fright. It was tall and sinuous and she thought then that it was one of the snakes he had mentioned.
‘Don’t worry, he won’t hurt you,’ he had said.
The creature, pale, white and about as thick as her wrist, had kept pace with the car. Then suddenly it had bent in the middle and a head had appeared at the window, with thick, spatulate lips, staring eyes and bristles that seemed to cover it all over.
‘It’s only old White Neck,’ Smuts had said.
‘What is it?’
‘Ostrich. Have you never seen an ostrich before?’
‘No.’
‘Look there.’
She had followed his pointing finger and seen a flock of fifty or sixty huge birds standing beside the road, some grey, some black with white tail feathers. All their heads, on the long white columns of their necks, were turned to look at the car.
‘You should have seen this place in the old days,’ he had said. ‘There were thousands.’
‘Ostrichs?’
‘Didn’t you know this was the biggest ostrich farm in the world?’
‘Nobody told me. You mean, for eggs?’
‘That’s rich! Feathers, my friend! Feathers. Before the war, everyone wanted our feathers. France, Germany, America, England. We couldn’t get enough. People say the fashion will come back. Who knows? Boss Charles built this place on feathers, my friend.’
‘You mean the ostriches were killed for their feathers?’ A picture of an inferno of gore and feathers had risen in her mind.
‘You don’t kill an ostrich.’ There had been contempt in his voice. ‘A good bird used to cost hundreds of pounds. What would you want to kill it for? No, you pluck them every season.’
She had remembered then a hat belonging to her mother. There had been two ostrich feathers on it, one white, one black. When she was a child she had seen rich women in Edinburgh going into the luxury hotels, the Caledonian and the North British, wearing ostrich feather boas and shawls. It had never occurred to her to wonder where the feathers came from. All she had known was that they were beautiful, and too expensive for the likes of her.
‘Boss Charles always said you couldn’t depend on fashion. That’s why he put his money into other things.’
‘Is that his nickname? Boss? I haven’t heard anyone call him that.’
‘No, no! Boss Charles is dead. Boss Charles was Miss Augusta’s husband –’
‘Miss –?’
‘Mrs. Preller. Your employer,’ he had explained. ‘I’ve always called her Miss Augusta. You know Master Charles, the son. He’s not Boss Charles!’
Now, on the morning of the inquest, Mrs. Preller had clearly been brooding on Miriam’s death. She always sat as far back in the corner of the seat as possible, as though to hide her face. She turned to Kate and said, ‘I did not want her on the place. She used to bicycle over, sometimes even walk. I told Charles it was unwise. The coloured people get drunk, you know, and anything can happen. Is that not so, Smuts?’
‘That is so, Miss Augusta.’
‘Boss Charles told her father. That was soon after her mother died. He told him about the dangers. But Sachs could never control her. She used to swim naked.’
‘She swam naked with me,’ Kate said.
‘You see? I mean, you cannot do such a thing. There are always coloureds somewhere.’ Kate thought of Jonas with his fishing-pole. He was like one of the rocks: a permanent fixture in Saxenburg Cove. ‘It is not very nice to say so, but she was . . . what is the English word, Smuts?’
‘For what, Miss Augusta?’
‘For Miriam Sachs.’
He thought for a moment, and said, ‘You mean she was Jewish, Miss Augusta?’
‘Of course she was Jewish, but that is not the – head-strong, that is the word. Head-strong. Her father could not control her. There were stories when she went to school. They found her with boys.’ She sat back and was silent for a moment, then said, ‘I never liked their friendship.’
‘Whose?’
‘She and Charles. When they were little she always wanted to be alone with him. I found them in a cupboard once and she had . . . well, I will not say. But she was . . . what is the word in English, Smuts? Oh, ja, forward; forward for her age.’
Kate thought of the big, full breasts, the rounded thighs, the jet black hair and the jet black eyes. Yes, Miriam had been forward, if by forward Mrs. Preller meant what Kate thought she meant.
‘. . . dark places,’ Mrs. Preller was saying. ‘She used to take him to the grotto. I forbade it. Boss Charles found them there. No clothes on and the tide coming in. Well, I said: No more! And now look what has happened.’
Kate had met Miriam for the first time on the train coming to Helmsdale. They had shared a compartment but had hardly spoken until the train was cros
sing the wide plain that ended at the coast. Then Miriam had asked Kate why she was travelling to Helmsdale.
‘To work,’ she had said. ‘I’m a secretary.’
‘In the bank?’
Miriam had made it sound as though this was the only place in Helmsdale for such work.
‘No, for Mrs. Preller.’
‘You mean out at Saxenburg?’
‘Is there another Mrs. Preller?’
Miriam had given a short, bitter laugh. ‘No, only one, thank God.’
Chapter Three
The inquest was to be held in the Magistrate’s Court on the edge of town. Beyond it was the small gaol, the local school’s playing fields, then nothing but the plain stretching to the distant mountains. Little knots of people stood in the shade of blue-gum trees, waiting to see who would enter. As Smuts parked the car, Dr. du Toit came towards them.
‘Good morning, Augusta.’
‘Hello, Hennie.’
He smiled at Kate. It was the smile she thought of as his ‘intimate’ smile, the one she liked least. He was a big man, as tall as Tom, but as wide as a barn door, and was running now to fat. His skin was olive and his mane of hair silver. He was vain about his hair and used pomade to keep it in place. He parted it in the middle, then drew the long frontal strands back in two wings. She estimated his age as in the early fifties, but it was not easy to judge because his face was plump and unlined and he had two dimples in his cheeks. He had done his internship at Guy’s Hospital in London and had captained the rugby team there. He was a widower of fairly recent vintage and his children had left home some years before. He was Mrs. Preller’s physician and came to tea at Saxenburg every Friday.
Once, soon after she had arrived, Kate had gone to his surgery to collect a package for Mrs. Preller. It was about six o’clock in the evening and he had been on the point of closing. The surgery formed part of his single-storeyed villa and he had asked her to have a drink with him.
He had given her a glass of sherry and had taken a large brandy and water for himself.
The Sea Cave Page 1
