Checkmate

by MARY HOCKING

  Mary Hocking

  CHECKMATE

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  To the Ellerys

  who are not in any way

  to be confused with the

  Jorys

  Chapter One

  In 1948 Melita Jory ran away with a stranger and was not heard of again. Her mother-in-law went into mourning. Rhoda Penryn said that she did this because she liked black; it was certain she had never liked Melita.

  No one was surprised when Melita went. The local people had said that no good would come of it when Silas Jory returned from the war with a Syrian bride. ‘His mother will have something to say about that!’ Although they did not like the old woman, they sympathized with her; Silas Jory had never done anything without his mother’s consent, it seemed an impertinence that he should take a wife without so much as a by-your-leave, and an infidel at that. But in three years she had gone, leaving only an infant daughter to mark her stay at the farm.

  She was soon forgotten and for many years her name was not heard in the village. Eighteen years, to be precise.

  Few tourists came to Polwithian. So everyone noticed the stranger; before he reached The Cod and Lobster there were speculations about him. He stood in the saloon bar, a big man, dark-haired and swarthy, sweating as he drank his beer.

  ‘Haven’t you a car, then?’ the landlord asked, wiping a dirty rag over the counter.

  ‘No.’ His voice rasped as though the dust from the hot lanes had filled his lungs. ‘I walked from the bus stop.’

  ‘But that’s out on the Truro Road.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’re wanting to stay here?’

  It was a long time since anyone had stayed in the one room available. Jeth, the labrador, came in to get a smell of the stranger. The labourers in the bar had stopped talking.

  ‘It seems a pleasant place.’ The man’s face was expressionless.

  ‘There’s only the one room and the bed’s not aired.’ The landlord was not given to effusive welcomes. ‘And we can’t give you a midday meal.’

  ‘It sounds just what I’m looking for.’

  He paid for his beer and went out, leaving his suitcase to stake a claim. The men in the bar turned their heads, as cattle turn to watch a strange creature in their pasture.

  Even in the bright June sunlight, Polwithian was not a pretty place. Inland the chimneys of the old tin-mines added to the moorland desolation, while the seashore was marred by old fortifications which had long lost their sense of purpose. There was a marshy area around the mouth of the river which had cut the village in two and prevented development. But the bay itself was magnificent. The fine white sand covered the man’s shoes and blew in his face, but he walked quite a way out before he turned. From here he had a good view of Polwithian. While he was looking at the main street which climbed towards the east cliff and then petered out exhausted, he was joined by one of the younger inhabitants. The youth had a thin, sallow face and long, lank hair; his only garment was a pair of tight trousers, the legs turned up to the knees. He looked mediaeval rather than one of the beat generation.

  ‘No bloody good staying in this place,’ he said.

  The wind tore at the man’s open jacket and the boy’s hair tangled in his eyes.

  ‘What is that ugly building in the middle of the high street?’ the man asked. He had a habit of throwing out questions as though he did not care about the answers.

  ‘The bloody Methodist godhouse.’

  The man looked towards the headland and the boy said: ‘That’s the Jory farm.’

  The sand had caked the man’s face; he turned his head away from the wind. They began to walk back towards the jetty. The boy looked at the man, but the man did not seem interested in his companion.

  ‘Are you from London?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Why do you think I’m from London?’

  ‘No Cornishman would bother to come to Polwithian.’

  ‘Do the Jorys still farm?’ the man asked.

  ‘Not since I can remember.’

  ‘Don’t the men work?’

  ‘Men?’ The boy spat. ‘There’s only Silas. He’s a bloody solicitor’s clerk.’

  Still the man paid no attention to his companion. The boy’s face grew pinched with anger. The sea was coming in now, they could smell it on the wind. The boy said:

  ‘If you aren’t from London, where are you from?’

  ‘I came on the bloody bus from Truro.’

  The boy drew in his breath and his thin chest hollowed. They had come to the edge of the beach; there were a few stone steps, slimy with seaweed, leading to the jetty. When the man had taken three steps the boy pushed him hard.

  ‘Then take the bloody bus back to London, Mister Clever!’

  The man fell hard against the stone wall of the jetty. He pulled himself up and sat for a minute or two with his head in his hands. An elderly woman ran out of a draper’s shop which overlooked the jetty and came stumbling down the steps to him.

  ‘Oh, that boy! One day he’ll do something really dreadful.’

  The man looked up at her; he was laughing. The old woman was in rather worse condition than he was as she stood beside him, anxious, breathless, wispy hair blown all ways and a quivering chin from which a few hairs sprouted. She put her hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Come and sit down for a moment. Your cheek’s bleeding.’

  ‘Why, so it is!’

  He followed her meekly. She took him through the dingy shop, calling to an unseen assistant to take over at the counter. The back parlour into which she led him looked out on the high street. There were net curtains at the windows, looped and tied with lilac ribbon. It was a small room and the man was like a bear in a doll’s house. The old woman looked at him uneasily, wondering what she had done by bringing him in here.

  ‘You had better sit there,’ she said pointing to a tub chair covered with faded pink and blue chintz.

  He sat down and felt the sides of the chair clamp against him; he wondered whether he would be able to extricate himself without taking the chair with him. The room was full of ornaments and pictures, but he noted that everything dated back to the era of the First World War. Nothing of interest had happened to her since then, it seemed. He supposed she must be in her late seventies. The wallpaper went back a long time, too; it was yellowed and the floral pattern was barely discernible. The ceiling was cracked and there were cobwebs in the corners that were beyond her reach; but all the bits and pieces on the mantelshelf were well-polished and the crocheted antimacassars were clean though frayed. He examined one of the antimacassars and found that it was tatting, not crochet-work. The old woman came back while he was looking at it.

  ‘I couldn’t do that now,’ she said regretfully, ‘My eyes aren’t good enough.’

  She put a bowl down on the table and began to bathe his face.

  ‘Who is the youngster?’ he asked.

  ‘Gabriel Harkness, the minister’s son.’

  ‘That would be the Methodist minister?’

  ‘Yes.’ She wrung out the flannel. The water in the bowl was dyed red: Gabriel had drawn quite a lot of blood. ‘A good man, but harsh with the boy.’

  ‘You’ve lived he
re a long time?’

  ‘All my life.’ She sounded shocked at the suggestion that she might have lived elsewhere, but then conceded: ‘I might have moved to Bodmin, but that was not to be.’

  The man looked at the photograph of a sailor on the mantelshelf and allowed a moment’s silence before he said:

  ‘I came here once years ago. Polwithian hasn’t changed much, has it?’

  ‘Not to you, perhaps.’ Her faded eyes looked into the past reproachfully, as though it had played a trick on her.

  ‘There was a house on the headland with a stone wall around it.’

  She nodded. ‘The Jory farm. It’s still there.’

  ‘I always wanted to climb the wall.’

  She took a bottle down from the shelf behind him. ‘You’d get more than a grazed cheek if you did that!’ She sounded as though she was talking to a small boy.

  ‘They’re still there, then? Silas and the old woman?’

  ‘Yes. And Catherine.’

  ‘And Melita?’

  Her rheumy old eyes stared at him; he had dug up a bit of the past that time had silted over and it was by no means clear that she liked him for it. He sighed. One tended to imagine that the old and the young were simple and straightforward. She came to him and dabbed hard at his face. He flinched in spite of himself: he was paying the penalty of over-simplifying this afternoon.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she chided. ‘All that fuss over a little iodine.’

  She turned away and went out with the bowl. The room was stiflingly hot; he wished she would open the window. Seventy years, he thought; seventy years in Polwithian, probably living in this house! But to imagine that nothing had happened would, of course, be another over-simplification. The door opened and there she was, standing in the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron and looking at him uncertainly. She regarded him as potentially dangerous, but she was reluctant to let him go.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘That would be very nice.’

  When she had gone he eased himself out of the chair and went to the window. The high street was narrow and cobbled. Opposite was a dairy with a cat stretched out luxuriously in the doorway, secure in the knowledge that no one would come to disturb it at this time in the afternoon. There was a window above, lace-curtained; he saw the curtains move slightly and guessed that he was being watched. Polwithian was not the place where a stranger could ever hope to lose himself. The sun sparked on the stones; it was cruelly hot and his head was beginning to ache. He was glad when the old woman came back with the tea-tray.

  She looked at him standing by the window and said, ‘It’s a long time since I’ve had a man your size in the house.’ She was quite unselfconscious, age allowed her this kind of candour. ‘I like a big man. Big men are never mean.’ She did not often have the chance to talk and now she was excited and her thoughts rambled on as she poured the tea. ‘I can’t stand meanness. It’s because of that that I’ve some sympathy with old Hester Jory. There’s not many in Polwithian would say that.’ She handed him a cup of tea; good strong tea in a good-sized cup. ‘But her husband was a mean man, mean with his money and mean in spirit. People say she behaved wickedly to him, taking over the running of the farm, making him feel useless and unwanted, but it must have been hard for her, very hard . . .’ Her voice was sad; but her face was pink with the pleasure of reminiscence, she would have trouble with her blood-pressure later. ‘She was handsome when she was young, a handsome woman. She could have had any man . . . some say she had several anyway.’

  ‘What made her marry Silas’s father? I don’t know his name.’

  ‘Matthew. He was her cousin. They were brought up together at the farm. It was for the farm she married him, folk always said.’

  ‘An inbred family?’

  ‘Yes. That was why Silas’s marriage was such a shock to everyone. It had been assumed that he would marry Catherine. Instead of which . . .’

  They had come back to Melita quite naturally. The old woman said:

  ‘She was a foreigner, you know.’

  He waited. But she sat quietly sipping her tea and he realized that Melita had been dismissed.

  ‘Is she dead?’ he asked.

  ‘Hester? Far from it.’

  ‘I meant Melita.’

  ‘She ran away. With a gypsy.’

  ‘A gypsy!’

  He had taken all the information indifferently up to this moment, as though he was leading her along a path he already knew. Surprise caught him off-guard. His face relaxed and he laughed, just as he had laughed when the boy tumbled him.

  ‘It does sound rather unlikely, doesn’t it?’ The old woman gave him a sly, conspiratorial look. ‘I’ve always thought so myself. But it was my sister.’ Unconsciously she lowered her voice, as though her sister was out in the passage. ‘There was a fair over at Bodmin and one or two of the people came into the village. My sister said she saw this man hanging around the Jory farm. When Melita ran away, she said that it must be the gypsy. She likes to have the answer to everything, does Eleanor. But, of course, if it wasn’t the gypsy, it’s hard to know who it can have been. Melita never went anywhere to meet a man.’

  ‘There must have been men working at the house from time to time.’

  The idea that Melita might have gone away with an odd-job man did not appear to shock her. She merely said:

  ‘But none of them disappeared. So it must have been the gypsy.’

  ‘Suppose she just ran away?’

  She looked at him in surprise.

  ‘Without a man, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She looked down at her cup. ‘There would have been a man.’ She did not say any more, but her silence told him better than words could have done why there would have been a man.

  ‘Did she make trouble with the men in the village?’ he asked.

  Instinctively her eyes went to the window. He could imagine her, sitting there, watching behind the lace curtains. And the men, too, had they watched? Not the young ones, they would have followed Melita openly if they had had a mind to. But the others? Had they stood back in their parlours, out of sight, watching the Eastern woman walk by? It was hot in the street; as hot as it had been in Damascus, when last he was there, and as stony. The same contrast of light and shadow, stone and all too yielding flesh. A time when desire was strong . . .

  The old woman said, ‘Men are men.’ She was not condemning them, but it was plain that she had no more to say.

  The man finished his tea, thanked her, and went out. It was three o’clock. The heat was intense, even the cat had moved into the shade. The wind had died down, there was hardly a ripple on the water in the bay. He walked down to the jetty. By the evening it would be all over the village that the stranger had asked about Melita Jory. He wondered how long it took rumour to reach the Jory farm. He began to walk towards the marshy land away to the west, in the opposite direction to the headland. He had plenty of time.

  Chapter Two

  ‘To what do I owe the honour?’ Rhoda Penryn asked as she came round to the front of the cottage and found Gabriel Harkness with his head inside the bonnet of her car.

  ‘You said the bloody battery wanted looking at.’

  ‘And my word is your command?’

  She put down the basket of weeds and looked at him in tolerant disbelief. She was a small, wiry woman with bright red hair and a wry, freckled face; although not unkind, she was not in the least sentimental and had few illusions. Gabriel liked her.

  ‘I can’t find anything wrong,’ he confessed.

  ‘I’m not surprised. I took it into the garage at Trewillian yesterday.’

  ‘If you’d waited . . .’

  ‘You will have to learn to take your customers’ temperaments into account, Gabriel, if ever you run a garage. I’m not a patient person.’

  Gabriel closed the bonnet. ‘Have you ever wanted to kill anyone?’

  ‘Frequently.’

  ‘Really kill them
?’

  Rhoda, who had once wanted to kill her husband, was not hypocritical enough to feign dismay. She merely enquired:

  ‘Whom do you plan to kill?’

  ‘I don’t think I could plan to kill anyone. I should have to do it suddenly, without time to think . . .’

  ‘It would certainly be more agreeable that way.’

  He looked at her sullenly. ‘You’re laughing at me.’

  ‘A little laughter’s not a bad thing. You take yourself too seriously.’

  ‘It was because he laughed that I wanted to kill him.’

  She looked at him in surprise. Until this moment she had imagined that he was talking about his father, but whatever Jonas Harkness’s faults, undue levity was not one of them. The boy was glaring into the shrubbery as though seeing someone there; his face betrayed the angry confusion of youth confronted with something it does not understand. He was moved, she suddenly realized, by fear rather than hatred. She put the basket down and sat beside it on the grass, her arms clasped round her knees. As her body was thin and supple, she looked, in this pose, younger than her thirty-five years. Gabriel sat on the dashboard of the car. It was very hot still and they could smell the warm grass. Rhoda liked to feel the sun on her hair; she wondered whether Gabriel also enjoyed this sensation or whether the heat simply added to his physical discomfort. Perhaps he was not aware of it. Youth was a time when one was obsessively concerned with emotion, unable to detach oneself for a moment to appreciate the profligate beauty of nature.

  ‘Who has been upsetting you?’ she asked.

  ‘A stranger.’

  ‘In Polwithian!’

  ‘He’s staying at The Cod and Lobster.’

  ‘Good God! He’ll have pneumonia in no time at all so you needn’t bother to kill him.’

  ‘It would take more than a damp room and an un-aired bed to kill him.’

  ‘What is he? A commercial traveller?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘In that case he won’t be here long. Polwithian is hardly the place to run up an expense account.’

  ‘It must be nice, mustn’t it, to be free to come and go, to cause a little havoc and move on.’