GFU04 - The Cornish Pixie Affair

by Peter Leslie

  "If it was, I never heard anything of it," the other growled. He picked up his negative again and ostentatiously turned his back on them. The blonde raised her eyes momentarily from her ledger and then looked down once more.

  They next visited Sara Bosustow, who was swarthy, meatily built, with a fine down of moustache on her upper lip, and was the most obvious equestrienne he had ever seen, Mark thought. She was trying on a silver lace-up boot with the help of a flabby woman with glittering eyes whom he imagined must be Mrs. Bosustow senior, the palmist. In a corner of her trailer lounged a man whose waxed whiskers would have branded him as the ringmaster brother even had he not boasted the characteristic family expression of mulishness combined with bad temper. The confined space, in welcome contrast to the others they had visited, was a chaos of magazines, filled-up ashtrays, boots, tights, discarded girdles and brassieres, and spangled leotards.

  None of them was particularly helpful, but neither was anyone hostile. In turn, they denied stoutly that their youngest brother was (a) bad-tempered, (b) quarrelsome, (c) the sort of person who would kill his fiancée in a fit of jealousy — especially in someone else's booth. The superintendent smiled his grim smile again. "We have witnesses who heard them at it hammer and tongs the night before she was found," he declared.

  Sara Bosustow put her foot with the partly laced boot down to the floor. "I don't know why you bother," she exclaimed hotly, hands on hips. "Surely it's obvious to anybody that only one person could have killed Sheila? He'd been pestering her for weeks, he wouldn't take no for an answer, he was the last person to see her alive — and to top it all he's the only person she knew with a nasty enough sort of mind to dream up that trick with the balls from the coconut-shy!" She stood facing the policeman, her bosom heaving with anger and her small eyes flashing.

  "Hush, Sara! You'm be gettin' yourself into trouble with talk like that," old Mrs. Bosustow said placidly. "I never did. Really, I never did!"

  "Some things have to be said, Ma," the ringmaster interrupted. "I think Sara's right — and the more people know it the better. We've had enough trouble with fancy suitors and so-called gentlemen before, and just because Sheila was soft hearted enough not to choke off our self-styled squire..."

  "Oh, Sir Gerald's all right really, son. Don't take on so," his mother soothed him.

  "Sir Gerald!" Mark interjected involuntarily.

  "Yes, Sir Bloody Gerald," Sara stormed. "Gerald Wright, the Don Juan of Penwith; despoiler of maidens with the blessings of his stuck-up wife; know-all; snob; and peeping-tom into the bargain, always prowling about with his blasted glasses!"

  In the silence which followed this outburst, a scatter of rain drops was flung at the caravan window and sounded abnormally loud. Distant church bells trembled on the wind. Ceased.

  "Ah, yes," Superintendent Curnow said, avoiding Mark's eye. "Half past three. That'll be Mary Trelawnay's wedding. Hope the weather clears up for her — they're going to the Scillies for the honeymoon... Come on, then, Mr. Slate. We'd best be on our way, too."

  "Why didn't you say Wright was the other man?" Mark asked reproachfully as they tramped back towards the car park, the moist wind tugging at their coat tails.

  Curnow had coloured slightly. "Just a lot of gossip," he said. "You don't want to be bothering your head about that. There's always two sides to a question. A woman scorned, you know... And besides I'm not sure that he really is Another Man in that sense, though the boy, Ernie will hardly agree with me! I'll just have a few words with Master Bosustow now, and then I must go."

  But the youngest Bosustow's caravan was locked and empty. Curnow led the way across to the uniformed constable still on duty at the gate.

  He told them that the dead girl's fiancé had spent the morning drinking, and had now gone back to the hut where he worked at his stone. "That's up on the southern slope of the Tor," Curnow said. "He's one of the ones who likes to work on it where it comes from. Most of the Serpentine specialists round here take a lease on a particular patch of ground, dig the stuff up and set up their little workshops right there, the way he does. I guess I'll have to put off seeing him until later: there are some routine bits and pieces back at the station right now, so I'd better be leaving you for today."

  Mark shook hands and walked back to the Matra-Bonnet. He waved goodbye to the police Wolseley and leaned down to open the low door of the sports car.

  At that moment glass starred and shattered in front of his eyes. At the same time he was aware of the sting of flying fragments against his chin and the distant report of a firearm.

  Almost in a reflex, he hurled himself to the muddy ground and peered up over the distant ridgepole of the Big Top towards the moors sweeping the sky behind the town. The shot — it had sounded like an express rifle to him — had come from somewhere over there. But the undulations of dead bracken and Cornish heath rolled up, ridge beyond ridge, towards the rocky escarpment of the Tor itself in featureless anonymity. Anyone using smokeless powder could lie low behind a rock outcrop and there remain undetected.

  He shrugged mentally and clambered back into the car on the far side, away from the invisible marksman. If he hadn't leaned down just then to reach for the handle of the door, he thought, he'd probably still be on the grass, with a hole in his head... Shivering involuntarily, he stabbed fiercely at the accelerator and sent the car lurching out of the field on to the road leading to the town.

  An hour later, after he had changed his soiled suit and set out on a little tour to see if he could discover where the youngest Bosustow worked, he was stamping just as heavily on the brake pedal. Following the directions given to him by one of the fishermen, he was climbing a steep lane towards the Tor when some sixth sense made him look upwards and over the bank overhanging the road. The shriek of the Matra-Bonnet's discs was drowned in the thundering progress of the great boulder of granite bursting through the hedge. It smashed a depression in the gravelled surface of the lane, bounced to the far side of the carriageway, and finally disappeared with a crashing of undergrowth down a slope into the valley.

  Slate's knees were trembling as he whipped out of the driving seat and pounded up the bank down which the great rock had tumbled.

  Beyond a screen of gorse and broom, the hillside stretched up to the grey sky in an unbroken line of rough grass and rock. Apart from the flapping of a pair of peewits in the middle distance, no living thing disturbed the silence.

  But although there wasn't a human being in sight, the evidence of someone's presence was not far off. To the right, the slope of the land was intersected twice: once by the roof of a small building carrying a wooden sign announcing: Bosustow — Fine Work in Porphyry and Serpentine; once, further away, by the gantries and reflectors of some kind of radar station.

  CHAPTER FOUR: AN OVERSEAS MISSION FOR APRIL

  "THAT is just the point, Mr. Solo," Alexander Waverly said to his Chief Enforcement Officer over the telephone in his office. "The crux of the matter is that Porthallow is the nearest town to the installation. The girl was only on a watching brief, of course, but it does look now as though there may have been something to watch." He listened for a moment, gazing out of the large window at the elegant tower of the United Nations building across the East River. Waverly, as Head of the Policy Department of U.N.C.L.E.'S Section One, always believed in giving a fair hearing to the opinions of the men and women who worked for him… and then doing exactly what he had intended to do in the first place anyway.

  He waited courteously now while Napoleon Solo spoke. And then, "Yes," he said, "Mr. Slate is over there. From what I gather, the situation looks as though it may become more complicated before it clears up — if you see what I mean. I have just received a second message from him, relayed through London." He picked a cablegram absently from the top of the enormous desk and stared at the strips of teletype pasted to the form.

  The voice in the receiver enunciated two crisp sentences. Waverly's lean, tired face creased into a smile. "Yes, Mr. Solo,"
he said. "That is exactly what I had planned to do, as it happens... Thank you. And you will let me know as soon as you leave Lima, won't you?"

  He replaced the instrument gently on its cradle and pressed a button set in a wooden plate screwed to the desk.

  "Yes, Mr. Waverly?" The girl's impersonally efficient voice came from a speaker concealed somewhere behind the panelling lining the office.

  "Ah, Miss Soong," Waverly said into the air. "A couple of things for you to do, if you please. Do you have your pad and pencil ready?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Right... First, please cable Mr. Vrookluyt van Meerengen in Macao. Tell him that he is on no account to reveal himself to the authorities. On no account. He's strictly on a fact-finding trip and the less the Command gets mixed up in the thing the better."

  "Very good, Mr. Waverly."

  "Secondly, telephone General Hartz at the Pentagon and tell him the golf game is on. I'll send a chopper — er, a helicopter — to fetch him tomorrow morning at ten. Thirdly, cable Mr. Illya Kuryakin at the Hotel Ambassador in Vienna and tell him request for 48 hours special leave is granted — but that I shall expect him to report back to Section Two here on Monday morning. Fourthly..." He hesitated.

  "Yes, sir?"

  "Fourthly, please ask Miss April Dancer to come in to see me right away."

  The girl shown in by Waverly's Chinese secretary a few minutes later was dark-haired and dark-eyed. Below the soft bang, her face with its full-lipped, generous mouth was warm yet alert. Her golden suede suit, whose fringed "pioneer" motif was repeated at the tops of her high-heeled boots, was richly moulded to the curves of her body.

  Despite her glamorous appearance, however, April Dancer was as courageous and resolute as any of the operational elite who formed the Command's Section Two. A New England college graduate, she was fluent in a dozen languages, a first-class sportswoman and the holder of a pilot's licence, besides being one of the half dozen general assignment agents whom Waverly privately rated as the best of his hand-picked bunch.

  She was also rumoured to be so dedicated to her job that she had steeled herself against anything more than the mildest flirtation with the personable young men who engaged, from time to time, her normal and healthy interest. Indeed, Section One's Head of Policy had once described her as having "a high I.Q., absolute emotional stability, and a scintillating animal vitality." Perhaps fortunately, Miss Dancer herself was unaware of this fact.

  As she sat down now on the opposite side of his vast desk, Waverly again observed with pleasure the lithe grace with which she leaned back and crossed her legs as she waited for him to speak. She placed a large black crocodile handbag on the floor by her chair and crossed gloved hands patiently in her lap.

  Waverly cleared his throat. "As I understand from Mr. Solo that you are — er — unoccupied for the moment, Miss Dancer," he began, "I should like you to go to England tonight and take over a little investigation from Mr. Slate. The affair has a complicated enough background, so — at the risk of boring you — I propose to spend a few minutes filling you in as the British say."

  Setting his glasses on his nose, he crouched forward over the cablegram he was still holding in one hand and added:

  "What do you know of Cornwall county, in the southwest of England?"

  "Moors, china clay and abandoned tin mines inland," the girl replied; "crabs, lobsters, cliffs and picture postcard fishing villages living off tourists on the coast." Her voice was firm, melodic and fairly deep.

  "Yes, that's all right as far as it goes," Waverly persisted, "but I was really talking — ah — professionally. In particular of the southern tip of the county, around the Lizard Point."

  "Oh. You must mean the big radar base near Helston... Goonhilly Downs, I think it's called."

  "Pronounced G'nilly, I believe. But although the British do have a fairly extensive top-secret tracking station there, it was really another name I was after. A few miles nearer Falmouth, just behind one of your picture postcard villages called Porthallow, is Trewinnock Tor."

  April Dancer expelled her breath in a sigh of mild irritation. "Of course!" she said. "The big new NATO installation. I should have known at once. I saw something about it in the Stop List on classified locales yesterday."

  "Exactly. Behind the rocky moors leading to the Tor itself lie the masts and towers and dugouts of what the Americans call E.C.10 — the lynch-pin of NATO'S chain of DEWS stations… probably the most sophisticated, and most experimental, of all the bases in Europe. Now while we are in no way responsible for the security of the Western Powers' Distant Early Warning System, being affiliated as you know neither to East nor West, we are interested in the maintenance of the balance of power between them — and one of our main tasks is to see that nothing untoward disrupts this to the advantage of one or the other."

  The girl was leaning forward in her chair now, her eyes fixed on his face, drinking in every word of the briefing.

  "I therefore thought it... expedient... when rumours and reports of espionage and/or attempted sabotage at Trewinnock Tor came to our ears," Waverly continued, "to do a little investigating. We had an agent, a part-time agent, working out of London. Her name was Sheila Duncan and in the London Headquarters listing she was identified as G.7."

  "Was identified?" the girl queried.

  Waverly nodded. "Miss Duncan's cover was running a sideshow at a travelling circus — the kind that's known here as a carnival. In this way she was able to keep thoroughly mobile and at the same time patrol fairly regularly the country areas where military establishments tend to be. Until recently, her assignment was just to keep her eyes and ears open and report to us anything unusual."

  "And recently?"

  "Recently, since the circus winters at Porthallow, I instructed her to make certain specific investigations relating to Trewinnock Tor."

  "You still haven't explained that past tense, Mr. Waverly."

  Waverly smiled bleakly. "Sheila Duncan was found dead in a circus sideshow the day before yesterday," he said. "She had been murdered in a somewhat bizarre fashion."

  "In the course of duty? Had she reported back before she was killed?"

  "Oh, yes. Several times. For reasons which I need not pursue now, she had become convinced that neither European, Middle Eastern nor Far Eastern powers were at the moment interesting themselves in the Tor. Yet the rumours did appear to be well-founded... which left us with the possibility that the espionage, and any projected sabotage, might be the work of THRUSH, who could certainly use the secrets of E.C.10 directly for their own underground armies as well as profiting indirectly from the mutual suspicion between the great powers if anything — er — happened to the station."

  "She'd neither checked out nor disproved this theory before she died?" April Dancer asked.

  "No. Which is why I sent Mark Slate down to Porthallow the moment I was informed of the murder. Slate's briefing was, simply, to check whether the girl's death was a murder unconnected with her work for us, or an assassination arising directly from it. In other words, had she found out too much? If it was the latter, naturally he was to take up the trail where she left off."

  "Is such a murder — however bizarre — likely to be unconnected with an agent's work?" the girl queried.

  "It is a possibility that has to be taken into account. Especially with part-time operatives, the screening on personal life cannot possibly be as rigorous or continuous as that under which you labour here." Waverly smiled. "There's always a chance. We never really know the full truth about how such agents pass their time off-duty, you know."

  "I suppose not. What has Mark turned up, anyway?"

  "Considering the background, he's not done too badly. You know the Cornish are originally an Iberian people, like the Welsh, the Western Scots, some of the Irish and the Bretons?"

  "Of course. Thought to have come originally from Phoenician stock, with a dash of throwback to the parent root when the Armada was wrecked off the western coasts of Brita
in in 1588," April said.

  Waverly stared at her for a moment. "Yes," he said. "Well. They still regard the rest of England, let alone Scotland and Wales, as foreign, you know. And they are, as a whole, a fairly brooding, suspicious lot of people — insofar as one can ever generalise on a whole race. The saying goes that the Cornish spend the winter indoors, counting the money they've wrested from the summer tourists and only venturing out when there's a ship wrecked on their coast whose cargo they can plunder."

  "All the same, I agree that this kind of generalised myth —"

  "Yes, Miss Dancer. Yes, yes. I was only jesting," Waverly said crossly. "It's not only in Section Two that a sense of humour is permitted."

  "I beg your pardon, sir."

  "Now where was I? — Oh yes. In such an unpromising atmosphere, then, Mr. Slate considered that he would not get far, as a 'foreigner', simply by asking questions of the locals. They clam up at once in front of strangers. So he managed to ingratiate himself with the local police superintendent."

  "Bully for Mark!"

  "Er — quite. He has discovered that the girl was selling ashtrays and such tourist trivia in her booth as cover; and that these were cut and turned from local stone by her fiancé, the son of the circus proprietor. The youth, it seems, is insanely jealous of another, older, richer, more sophisticated suitor, who, besides being married, is some kind of local squire –– and it is the squire who was the last to see the young woman alive. The boy, on the other hand, was heard to quarrel violently with the girl (presumably over the squire) not long before this. In other words, whichever way you look at it, it may turn out to be simply a crime passionelle. There are however certain aspects…"

  Waverly picked the cablegram from the desk again and studied it. He sighed. "Mr. Slate's second message," he said, "affords some interesting reflections. Firstly, the older man's wife apparently knew about the friendship with Miss Duncan and did not object to it — which would seem to restrict him somewhat as a suspect; secondly, the dead girl's booth has now been burgled three times since the murder, although nothing, it seems, is missing; and thirdly, there have been two attempts on Mr. Slate's own life..."