GFU04 - The Cornish Pixie Affair

by Peter Leslie

  THE GIRL FROM U.N.C.L.E. No. 4

  The Cornish Pixie Affair

  PETER LESLIE

  Based on the MGM television series

  The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.

  CHAPTER ONE: MURDERER'S SHY

  MIST, drifting across the sea as the sun rose, had been dispersed by a westerly breeze before the first fishing boat chugged out of the harbour. By the time the cracked bell of the town-hall clock spelled out eight o'clock, the wind had freshened and veered two points to the north, ripping the sky into ragged banners of cloud that streamed over the moorland which cradled the port and shrouded the gaunt bulk of Trewinnock Tor a mile and a half along the coast road towards The Lizard. Half an hour later, as those few shopkeepers whose shops remained open in the winter walked, rode or pedalled to work, it began to rain.

  It was a thin rain, more of a drizzle really, drifting in over the cliffs, in gusts across the sea wall, pitting the surface of the swell which heaved at a line of yachts in their canvas covers and rocked dinghies at their moorings. But it was penetrating too — and soon the shallow slate roofs of the pink and white-washed cottages, themselves reflected in the shining streets, were glistening along each side of the valley leading to the cove.

  Around the granite Customs House, water chortled in the old guttering and splashed down ramps slanting past lobster pots and rusty winches towards the beach. The rain blew in through windows and doors, formed puddles around the bandstand by the lifeboat station, and drenched the subtropical foliage sheltering stonework and porch. It cascaded down the steep hill winding back to the main road. It dripped from eaves and buttresses and balconies, and swelled the pools which lay among the sagging awnings of a circus above the town...

  And it saturated the body of a girl which was slumped across the flimsy counter of a sideshow booth.

  There was a garish red and yellow sign above the booth announcing: Koko, The Naughty Clown — Pelt Him As Hard As You Like And Teach Him A Lesson! Twelve Shies A Shilling! And then, sprawled forward through the plastic curtains which normally parted only to reveal the bobbing clown's head as it ducked to avoid the hurled balls of corn pressed cotton, was the body…

  Below a tweed coat dark and sodden with moisture, the girl's head hung down over the front of the counter. Her hair, long and blonde, was tangled and matted by the rain. One arm was caught behind her by the curtain; the other, flung forward with the fingers of the hand outstretched, seemed in its despairing attempt to grasp nothing only to accentuate the lifelessness of the figure as a whole. Collapsed there in the gaudy framework of the booth, the girl looked like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

  But there was visible evidence of a more sinister kind.

  The lightweight cotton balls with which the clown in the sideshow was pelted were stacked in a bin behind the curtains. But on the muddy ground outside, three iron-hard wooden spheres from a neighbouring coconut shy lay wetly beneath the corpse's lolling head.

  Although the circus was laid up for the winter in the big field at the head of the valley, the sideshows and amusement arcades were opened each afternoon to allow the proprietors to make some of their running costs from the townspeople and the occasional visitor during the close season. Towards the end of the morning, therefore, there was a stirring around the double line of caravans beyond the closed Big Top, and soon men and women were hurrying across the waterlogged grass to prepare the attractions for the coming day.

  At twelve-thirty, a teenage boy shouted in astonishment into the wind, and a few minutes later there was a knot of people grouped around the kiosk home of Koko The Naughty Clown.

  Shielding his face from the driving rain with an upraised arm, the boy hared back to the caravans. Two minutes later, he returned. Behind him, picking his way over the grass and ducking under guy ropes, an old man in a flat cap followed. Under the awning of a shooting gallery, there was a discussion going on, with gesticulation and argument. The man in the cap walked to an elderly Buick parked at the far end of the field, coaxed the motor into life, and drove through the gate and down the road looping towards the huddle of wet roofs round the harbour.

  Soon afterwards, the car returned, accompanied by a black police Wolseley. Helmeted constables in shining raincapes arranged a tarpaulin screen around the booth while an officer in a peaked cap with silver stars on his shoulders interrogated the circus staff.

  Half a mile away, a man parked on a shoulder of the lane, climbed the bleak moorland towards Trewinnock Tor and focussed a powerful pair of Zeiss field glasses on the scene. By now another police car had arrived and he could see the occasional flare of photographers' flashbulbs from behind the screen. Faintly above the pounding of the rain on the car roof, the watcher heard the shrilling of bells. An ambulance lurched into the field and backed up to the booth. Later, a Fire Service salvage tender arrived, hesitated near the Big Top, and then turned and slowly crawled back down the hill into the town.

  A policeman was standing at the gates trying to move on a sprinkling of those sightseers who materialise, like swallows on the first day of summer, anywhere in the world at the first hint of a disaster, private or public. Others shepherded members of the circus staff towards one of the caravans in which the officer with the silver stars appeared to have made his headquarters. Presently a third police car whined down the hill from the main road leading to Helston and disgorged three plainclothes men who quickly busied. themselves about the booth.

  The man with the binoculars seemed to find all this of equal interest. Even when everyone had disappeared inside the caravan, the kiosk, or one of the other tents in the field, leaving only the massive figure of the constable at the gate, he continued to stare at the site, raking the flaps of wet canvas inquisitively from time to time.

  The rain stopped eventually. The sightseers straggled away to lunch. Policemen crossed and recrossed the wet grass beneath the scudding clouds.

  But it was only when white-coated ambulance men shuffled out of the booth carrying a sheeted figure on a stretcher that the watcher relaxed. Momentarily, his knuckles whitened around the eyepieces of the glasses. Then, when the ambulance doors had slammed shut and the vehicle had bumped over the field and out into the road, he sighed, dropped the binoculars back into a leather carrying case slung around his neck, started his car, turned round and drove slowly back down the hill towards the town.

  News of the death at the circus spread rapidly around the bars and cafés of the port, for a murder is a rare occurrence in a Cornish fishing village, and everybody felt sure the girl had met with foul play.

  The ambulance men discussed it in the hospital canteen. The police surgeon, the county coroner, and the Chief Constable theorised in the smoking room of the Conservative Club. Local newspapermen enthused on the telephone over the event as they called the News Editors of the London dailies they represented.

  And a fair-haired young man at the wheel of a sports car talked about it over a short-wave radio as he thundered southwest from the capital that night.

  For the dead girl, besides earning a modest living as the holder of a sideshow concession at the circus, had also been working for an organisation based three thousand miles to the west across the Atlantic — an organisation identified by the curious initials of U.N.C.L.E.

  CHAPTER TWO: MARK GETS SET

  THE Crabbers' Delight at Porthallow is one of those peculiarly English pubs, bulging with horse brasses and copper pans and spurious souvenirs, which despite its Olde Worlde atmosphere still manages to attract a clientele of genuine locals. It stands just across the Hard from the Customs House, and behind it there is a green lawn sloping down to the bathing beach on the other side of the cove where customers sit and d
rink in the summer.

  At lunchtime on the day after the discovery of the girl's body, the big general bar — which with a tiny "snug" comprised the whole of the inn's drinking quarters — was fuller than usual for a winter weekday. Fishermen in jerseys and peaked caps mingled with sober-suited bankers and shopkeepers from Fore Street and Harbour Road; several swarthy young men from the circus exchanged pleasantries with long-haired boys from the local tech; two bearded painters and their wives were being plied with gin by newspapermen from London.

  In a beamed alcove bright with chintz and bottleglass, the fair-haired driver of the sports car who had arrived early that morning talked with the landlord and a weatherbeaten individual in a yachting cap who said that he was the Harbourmaster.

  The visitor's hair was brushed forward in the modern manner. His suede Chelsea boots were only slightly scuffed. And his suit, minus lapels and with a bright thread playing hide-and-seek among the checks, was sharp in the cool style that stopped just short of vulgarity.

  "Journalist, eh?" the Harbourmaster was saying in his soft West Country voice. "You'm best be gettin' along over to them other fellers around the bar, then. Writin' chaps from London, all of 'em ... though what they think they'll get out of our painters, I don't know! Proper sponges they are."

  The landlord was a nutlike little man obscurely ill-at-ease in his grey pinstripe. He would have been happier, one felt, in his shirtsleeves or a baize apron. He paused now, resting his weight on one foot, his hands full of the empty glasses he was returning to the bar, and stared at the young man as though he was seeing him for the first time. "Did 'ee want to be introduced then, sir?" he asked. "Silly of me not to have thought of it afore. You come right on over by there, and I'll —"

  "No, really, thanks," the fair-haired young man interrupted. He seemed almost anxious not to meet the newspapermen from London. "We're — er — different branches of the profession, you see. Oil and water, you know. I'm here to work out a holiday feature on the southwest... you know: how to spend your money at home instead of abroad. That sort of thing. And they're all here, one imagines, because of the murder. News reporters."

  "Right you are, my dear," the Harbourmaster said. "Never visit the place from one year's end to another — but at the first breath of scandal, the whole village is crawling with foreigners."

  "Foreigners?"

  "The English, he means," the landlord said. "To a Cornishman, any visitor from across the River Tamar is : I'm a Devonport man myself."

  The Harbourmaster sighed and sank his nose into his tankard. "It's a bad business, all the same," he said a few minutes later, coming up for air. "Bring you a few more pints just now. But it'll be bad for business in the long run, mark my words."

  "Local girl, was she?" the visitor prompted.

  "Not to say local, my dear. Come from somewhere up north; Somerset way, I believe. But they'd been wintering here for several years now, and we'd begun to get used to them in a way. Even had boats, some of 'm."

  "What was it all about? Do they know who did it?"

  An invisible shutter dropped over the landlord's face. He reached for the Harbourmaster's tankard and turned away.

  "Come now, gentlemen," the visitor urged. "The same again? Landlord? You'll take another pint with us, won't you?" He swung back to face the Harbourmaster as the licensee nodded reluctantly and threaded his way towards the bar. "You were saying...?" he persisted softly.

  The man in the yachting cap shifted from foot to foot. "It's nothing, really," he said defensively. "You know what local gossip is in a place like this. Sheila Duncan was a pretty girl and she liked a good time... But it seems she'd settled down and was goin' steady with young Ernie Bosustow up along the circus when up pops Mister Right with his motor car, and his experience, and his money — ay, and his wife, too, if it comes to that."

  "A triangle? Do you mean the motive for the murder may have been jealousy? But which one of the heavenly twins... Who is your Mister Right, by the way? The inevitable Older Man, I suppose."

  He broke off as the Harbourmaster coughed loudly and turned aside. The man's seamed cheeks had gone brick red. Following the direction of his gaze, the young man saw that a police officer in uniform had come in with a distinguished-looking civilian — a middle-aged man with white hair, a lean and rakish face, and an impeccable weekend suit.

  Waylaid as he was returning with their drinks, the landlord stood awkwardly passing the time of day with the newcomers. "Gentleman," he managed to interpolate at last, "I don't think you'll have met our latest guest... Mr. Mark Slate, from London. This is Sir Gerald Wright, Mr. Slate; and, of course, Superintendent Curnow of our local Force."

  "From London?" the baronet drawled as he shook hands. "I must say this is the time of the year when we least expect visitors from what the locals persist in calling Up-along." His voice was deep and mellifluous.

  "It's just right for me," Mark Slate said. "I'm a writer."

  "A writer! How interesting! But not, I hope, one of those hatchet men trying to hack a story of national interest from our small local tragedy?"

  Slate shook his head. "You can rest easy," he said with a smile directed more at the policeman than the other. "I'm strictly travel. No news for me, even if I do seem to have happened on a murder."

  The superintendent was a big man with bushy black eyebrows almost meeting above a blade of a nose. He laughed now, showing a gleam of gold teeth, as he stripped off his wet raincoat and sank into a chair. "Here's where no news is good news, then!" he said. "For a moment there I was afraid you'd be another of those chaps badgering me for a quote. You know — the police are confident of an early arrest. That sort of thing... Or perhaps a simple first-person description of the scene of the crime!"

  "It is a crime, then?" Slate asked casually.

  "Oh, yes," the policeman said. "It's a crime alright."

  "Come on, Curnow," Sir Gerald Wright called from the bar. "I've ordered up one of Bertie's special rum punches for us. You'd better help me bring them over, for the glasses are devilish hot!"

  By the time they had settled themselves down in the alcove with their steaming grog, the Harbourmaster had left and the landlord was busying himself with customers waiting to climb the old oak staircase to the dining room on the first floor.

  "What kind of travel stuff are you working on down here, Slate?" Sir Gerald asked. "Surely it's an odd time of the year to be doing that?"

  "Not really," the young man said with a smile. "First week of January, every paper in the country carries a special issue on holidays, mostly foreign, with bags of features on the best places to go and so on, and page after page of ads tied in from the package tours and travel agencies. That's all over now and the time's right for a follow-up piece — after all the shouting what are we really going to do this summer? And what are the chances of spending a good holiday at home?... I think they're okay, specially around here, so I've come down to get some local colour at first hand."

  "And what are your suggestions going to be, if one may ask?"

  "Obvious enough. I shall just point out the advantages of this place, villages like Coverack, Cadgwith, Porthgwarra, Portscathe. Falmouth if you like the big towns. It's all been done before, but what the hell!"

  "I shall look forward to seeing it. What paper are you doing it for?"

  "A syndicate. Features people. I don't expect you've heard of them."

  "Where do you hope to sell, then?"

  "Oh," Mark said carelessly, "the glossies. You know."

  Soon afterwards, Wright made his excuses and left and Slate was alone with the policeman.

  "It must be nice always being in the swim — or even one jump ahead of fashion," Curnow said wistfully. "In a little place like this, it's only when some accident like this affair of the girl pushes us into the headlines that we realise how far behind the times we really are."

  "Oh, I don't know. You've got permanence down here. And character. And much, much less of that terrible strain all th
e time that we have up there. That's one of the main points I shall make in my piece."

  "If you don't mind my saying so," the superintendent observed suddenly, "that's a very splendid suit you have there. Really with-it, that is."

  Mark smiled. "Think so?" he said. "It's from Carnaby Street, actually!"

  "Ah, yes... Carnaby Street. We've read about that. I've even been there — but it's no good going to London or places like that as a tourist. You only feel more of a country bumpkin than ever. You have to belong..." The superintendent's voice tailed off dolefully.

  "Look here," Mark said abruptly. "Have you lunched? No? Then why don't you have lunch here with me? Be my guest — and I can tell you one or two things about London that might change your metropolitan-slanted mind!"

  Once they were settled upstairs in the panelled dining room with its ship's chronometer and its portholes and its nets on the wall, he set himself out to win the policeman's confidence, talking gaily and amusingly of life in a dozen of the world's capitals. It was not until they were sipping their brandy that he returned to the subject of the girl who had been murdered in the circus above the town. "I'd love to know the way you set about a murder enquiry," he said. "I mean, really know what you actually think, when it's all starting."

  Curnow's blue eyes twinkled shrewdly below his tangled brows. "You may not be a newsman now, Mr. Slate," he said, "but I guess old habits die hard, eh? Once a reporter, always a reporter!"

  "Just call it simple curiosity," Slate grinned. "But I promise that nothing you tell me will in any sense be used for a newspaper piece. I can — er — safely say that I have no intention whatever of writing anything at all about the unfortunate young woman." He paused, smiled a small, private smile, and then swallowed the last of his coffee.

  The policeman stared at him for a moment, and then went on: "After all, why not? It's supposed to help us clarify our ideas if we have a Watson — at least it does in the books…"