GFU04 - The Cornish Pixie Affair

by Peter Leslie

  The girl gave an unladylike whistle. "If that's what goes on in the villager there," she said, "I'd hardly fancy visiting the towns!"

  "Precisely. The matter is complicated. That is why I wish you to go tonight to take over the investigation from Mr. Slate. He will remain and collaborate with you as long as may be necessary... You are quite satisfied with him as a colleague, I take it?"

  "Perfectly. There is nobody I would rather have — on this or any assignment, Mr. Waverly."

  "Splendid. It looks as though he may be on to something, anyway, if attempts are being made on his life. Perhaps by the people who keep burgling the sideshow booth. That suggests to me an attempt, so far unsuccessful, to locate some object, presumably incriminating, and remove it before it is found either by Mr. Slate or the police... Anyway, you had better go now to Operations and draw the necessary equipment, documents, money and so on. They will furnish you with papers detailing your cover and some further background on the assignment. Please keep in constant touch with HQ London by radio. They will service me."

  "Very good, sir. How do I go, by the way?"

  Alexander Waverly gave her something very like a grin. "I have found it increasingly difficult to maintain our 'disengaged' image," he said, "when I am constantly borrowing aircraft from the Navy Department in this country. It looks to outsiders as though we are an American-sponsored organisation — although in fact I would cheerfully borrow Soviet or Chinese planes if they were geographically as convenient. But it does look bad, one has to admit… so I have at last persuaded our Appropriations Committee to advance me a sum sufficient to purchase for the Command a Trident — a quiet and comfortable jet ship that is very fast. Our standby helicopter will take you from the rooftop here to La Guardia. The new Trident will ferry you to London. And local Headquarters there will get you to the small airfield at Land's End in a Cessna."

  He rose and held out his hand. "Good luck, my dear," he said.

  There was something strangely forlorn, unnatural even, about him standing there, April thought, patting the pockets of his baggy tweed suit. He looked quite lost for a moment. And then suddenly it clicked... His pipes! There wasn't a pipe in the place — and usually they filled the mantel, sprawled across the desk, overflowed the coffee table and littered every surface in the huge room...

  "Your pipes!" she was startled into exclaiming aloud. "Where are they? There's not one to be seen!"

  Waverly looked guilty. "Er — I've given up smoking," he said sheepishly. "Doctor insisted. Bad for the health, you know. Not used to it yet."

  April smiled fondly. Throughout the Command, Waverly and his multitude of pipes were perennial in-jokes — for although he was eternally filling them, one after another, he had never been seen actually to light one, nor had anyone in the organisation ever seen him take a single puff of tobacco!

  "I think your courage is beyond praise," she said gravely. She picked up the big crocodile handbag, smiled at him again, and walked gracefully to the door.

  CHAPTER FIVE: IN THE STEPS OF THE DEPARTED

  MARK SLATE took the Matra-Bonnet over the moorland road from Land's End airfield, near Sennen Cove, towards Penzance. Reclining beside him in the black leather passenger seat, April Dancer listened with half-closed eyes as stage by stage, he recounted the events of the past forty-eight hours. After the monotonous drones of aircraft, the whine of the sports car's gears, the variable crackle and snarl of its exhaust, seemed to her to be paradoxically soothing and restful.

  They had just negotiated a saddle in the high ground from which they could glimpse the Atlantic behind them, with the English Channel only a few miles ahead, when the girl suddenly opened her eyes wide and leaned forward. "But this is fabulous," she breathed. "Why did nobody tell me the place was beautiful too?"

  Before them, the moor undulated down in a series of dun ridges streaked with ochre and burnt sienna and gamboge. Beyond this, where the ribbon of road stitched together a patchwork of woods and small fields to cover the outcrops of granite, the swell of country was dramatically gashed by a steep valley at whose father end a wedge of blue sea appeared. For the moment, the bad weather had withdrawn eastwards, and the pale sunshine flooding from the sky bared every detail of the winter landscape, from the moss on the nearest boulder to the white horses decorating the vee of water framed by leafless trees at Porthcurne.

  Slate flicked a glance at the enraptured girl, grinned, and pushed the gear lever into third for the steep descent. "Out of season's the time to come," he said. "That's what the Cornish themselves tell you. I always imagine this is rather like the coast of Maine — you come from New England, April, don't you? — or even Massachusetts around Cape Cod. Am I right?"

  "Oh, no," the girl laughed. "Cape Cod's quite wild sometimes, weather-wise, but Maine's much quieter than this — and anyway both of them are far more... well, kind of cosy, than this. Nearer to the stockbroker belt, too. This is so empty and so big!" She flicked aside her hair with an imperious jerk of the head and settled back in the seat. "You'd better fill me in (I think that's what Waverly said) on the rest of the details. What was this bit about your local squire's wife being a complaisant one, by the way?"

  "Willco. Roger and out," Slate drawled in a burlesque Oxford accent. "Some investigators are made, not born — and this bird just dropped into my lap, as you might say. Not literally, of course. Not during office hours. But she did drop."

  "Perhaps a little background first," April prompted.

  "Right. Well, there's this chap… kind of a squire type — clean-limbed, rakish face, old but good tweeds, early middle-age. And the gent appears to have been doing a line with our Sheila, dazzling her with his worldliness and so forth. So much so that her fiancé, the son of the circus, has a stand-up row with her about the man, threatening to do her in if she doesn't cut the said squire out. So much so that S.S. himself is the prime suspect in the eyes of many, he being the last person to have seen her alive."

  "What would his motive have been — according to these many?"

  "Well, that's just it, love. To stop his wife finding out about une petite affaire that had become too clinging and too troublesome — and therefore too dangerous. Only as it happened she knew already. And didn't mind, as I say."

  "Now tell me how you know that."

  "I was sitting in the Crabber last night — that's the pub where I'm staying — and I got into conversation with this woman. You know how it is."

  "Yes," April said. "I know how it is."

  "She was very much the county type — tall, you know, with that kind of ageless fair hair and rather well made-up. Good figure. Good conversationalist — and quite witty, too, as a matter of fact —"

  "What was she wearing?" April interrupted.

  "Waisted tweed jacket over a white polo-neck sweater, with jodhpurs and a cute little velvet cap. I think she had been out riding."

  "You must be joking! ...Still, that would no doubt make the point she wanted to give satisfactorily."

  "Look, you haven't even seen... Oh, never mind! Anyway, the conversation veered round to the local murder. All conversations here do, as you'll no doubt find out! And she said something like: 'Gerry — that's my husband — was rather fond of the girl. They used to see a lot of each other and they'd been as thick as thieves for months.' And I said: 'But don't you mind?' And she said no, she and her husband had an Understanding; each could go their own way, she said, and make whatever friends they liked. And if anyone specially attracted them, she said, they were free to react as they wished. And then she asked could she buy me a drink..."

  "Oh, Mark, Mark!" April laughed. "Don't ever change, will you?" -

  "Well, anyway, when I found out from the barman that 'Gerry' was Sir Gerald Wright, suspect number one in the case, and that he and his wife lived in a big house on the moors above the town, well, I thought it prudent to sit tight and hear what she wanted to tell me."

  "How do you mean — what she wanted to tell you?"

  "Wel
l, all this was very nice — but it was just the tiniest bit contrived, you know. The dear lady came into the bar and sat down three tables away from me. She went to powder her nose — and when she came back she sat down only two tables away. Later she went to the bar itself and returned to ensconce herself at the next table to mine. And then, when a waiter came up, she asked him a question she knew very well he couldn't answer — but I could. Something about London. Naturally, he turned to me to ask. Naturally I replied — and there we were, talking. It was beautifully done, but it was a set-up."

  "I see," April said slowly. "And what do you think it was that she wished to plant on you? The fact that her husband had no motive for murdering Sheila?"

  "No, I don't think so. After all, how could she possibly know that I was investigating the killing — or even that I was interested in it? My mate Superintendent Curnow would have been the obvious recipient for that line."

  "True. Perhaps she just arranged the meeting for the obvious reason: your animal attraction."

  "You're very kind. But seriously, I believe she did have an — er — ulterior motive—"

  "That's what I just said."

  "— other than the obvious one. And I think she has already achieved her objective."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, I think the bit about her husband and Sheila was simply a conversational gambit — one of several she made — and that the real purpose of the operation was just to scrape an acquaintance with me."

  "But why, Mark?"

  "We shall know later. Phase One was to get to know me. Having gained that objective, she was too clever to press further. But I'm certain that, in some way or another, the acquaintance is going to be exploited soon."

  "You realize what that would imply, though, don't you?" April objected. "If anybody bothers to employ a subterfuge to get to know you — apparently just a newspaperman on assignment — then they must know, or suspect, that you are not what you appear to be."

  "There's a possibility that I may be blown already. I know." He sighed.

  "But good heavens, how? Who could possibly have found out?"

  "That's what we have to find out, April."

  "Yes. And that brings us back to Square One, doesn't it? If they — whoever they are — do know about you, then the woman might have had a reason for sowing the idea that her husband couldn't have killed Sheila, don't you see? For in that case she would in fact know that you were investigating the murder."

  Slate was silent for a few minutes as he drove the car expertly through a series of tight bends which followed the course a stream along the bottom of the valley. He was frowning when he spoke again. "You're quite right, of course," he said. "The corollary is so simple that it had escaped me. But it adds up to the same thing: we must view any future contacts with the lady — or with her husband, for that matter — as potentially dubious. For the time being, at any rate... And that brings me to a suggestion I was going to make regarding your own modus operandi."

  "Which is?"

  "That as we have to allow for the possibility that I may be blown, it's obviously going to be much better if there's no apparent connection between us. If I'm suspect, obviously any stranger I'm seen with is also suspect."

  "Of course."

  "So, although it's going to be inconvenient, I propose that we act as though we had never met, once we get to Porthallow."

  "Pass each other in the street with our respective noses in the air?"

  "Precisely."

  "Make like our beautiful friendship had never been?"

  "Even so."

  "Well, in that case you'd better drop me off somewhere before we get there, so that I can arrive independently by bus or something."

  "If you bail out in one of the back streets of Helston and catch a bus, there's a train from London that you could have come by, a few minutes earlier," Mark said. "The bus will land you in Porthallow at four-thirty... Look, there's the fishing village called Mousehole down there. You can see why it's on every Cornish picture postcard and souvenir ashtray in the book, can't you! We'll be in Penzance in a few minutes."

  He went over his actions since he had arrived from London, hour by hour, as they threaded their way through the grey streets of the town, skirted the great bay islanding the fortress village of St. Michael's Mount, and drove past the bleached waste of Prah Sands.

  "But tell me, Mark," the girl asked — they had turned inland now, across the checkerboard of farming country where the sky above the bare branches was black with rooks — "tell me about these two attempts on your life. Do you think they were made just because you were with the policeman? Has anyone tried to get at him? Or do you read them as further evidence that you're blown?"

  "Oh, Point Number Three. Definitely. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced. Even in the short time I've been talking to you about the affair, I've become practically certain of it. And anyway, nobody has taken a pot-shot at Curnow, so why try to bend an unknown assistant unless you have some further reason for rubbing him out?"

  "Yes, that makes sense, I'm afraid. Have you found out anything about the attempts themselves? How they were worked, I mean."

  "As much as one can. The shattered window on the car has been taken out — witness the draught howling in over my arm! — and I retrieved the slug from the door trim on the other side. I don't want to tip off Curnow that there's anything out of the ordinary about me — at least not yet — and so I can't very well get the bullet to a ballistics expert down here. From my own limited knowledge of the subject, I should judge that the gun was an express rifle, as I suspected — probably a Mannlicher — that it had been fired something over a thousand yards away, and that, if you produced the line between the place where the bullet lodged in the door and the opposite window where it entered, it would slant up over the tents to the moor above the town."

  "And would the place where this line hit the moor be a thousand yards away?"

  "Give or take a hundred in each direction, yes. But it doesn't really help: there's an awful lot of moor, and a great deal of it's a thousand yards away from the circus field! A two degree error in the arrival line of the slug — even if I'd estimated it, which I didn't — would give you a quarter of a mile or more up among those rocks. It was useless looking — and it could have been anybody, anyway. Anybody but Curnow, that is: he was with me!"

  "And the case of the rolling stone?"

  "Easier to pinpoint what happened; just as difficult to pin it to a person. The boulder was one of those local rocking stones. It had been perched about fifty yards above the road, on the hillside — just far enough for it to get up speed as it burst through the hedge and took the bank. Someone had worked it almost over with crowbars — you can see the marks in the turf — so that the smallest push would topple it down the slope when required."

  "But how did they know when it would be required?" she frowned.

  "Given the fact that my cover is blown in some way, it's not so very mysterious. First, they would be watching me any way. Secondly, if it was known that I was professionally interested in Sheila's death, it was a reasonable bet that I'd be going to see her fiancé — and the lane is the only road to his hut, where he spends most of his time. Thirdly, I hadn't been especially discreet about hiding the fact that I wanted to see the boy — at that time, there was no need to be. Fourthly, this car is somewhat distinctive and the lane is in full view of the place where the rock was. All they had to do, once they knew I'd be going there, was wait."

  "Even so, it's a pretty crude, imprecise method of trying to… I mean, compared with a high-powered rifle, it's a bit of a hit or miss —"

  "I know what you mean," Mark interrupted. "But it's not all that bad if you think of it merely as a means to try and frighten someone off."

  "Oh, you think that's what it was?"

  "I think it might be. The rifle shot could have been a deliberate near-miss for the same reason. When you think of it, the boulder idea is so melodrama
tic, so unscientific, so unlikely to succeed because there are so many variables — the car's speed, the boulder's speed, the terrain, the direction, for example — that it would seem absurd for anyone to try it if they seriously wished to kill or maim their victim. In particular for the sort of person who dreamed up the rifle idea and the coconut-shy routine."

  "I see. Any idea of the perpetrator, just the same?"

  "It's wide open. Practically the whole town used that road yesterday afternoon for some reason! It leads to the Coverack road over the Tor."

  "Could they all have done the trick with the stone?"

  "Most of them could! The hut where the fiancé turns his Serpentine lighthouses is a couple of hundred yards away; Wright's house is just over the brow of the hill, looking towards the radar station; Curnow used the lane only a few minutes before me, on his way to St. Keverne; the landlord of the pub brought some stuff down it in a shooting brake just after lunch. Even the Harbourmaster was out walking, it seems!"

  "How many of them could physically have done it, time wise?"

  "Provided they had already loosened the boulder in anticipation, any of them."

  "Oh, dear," the girl said. "Dead end. What do you suggest then?"

  "I suggest you leave that to me. It'll already be known that I'm meddling in something, anyway. So far as you're concerned... What did you say your cover was?"

  "I hadn't yet. New Zealand girl, ex-university graduate, ex-barmaid, working her way round the world, on the lookout for any employment. Waverly hoped the antipodean bit might excuse any departures from the norm in my English accent!"

  "But that's perfect!" Mark exclaimed. "Old Bosustow was complaining every five minutes how difficult it would be to find someone to take over the booth Sheila had, at this time of the year. With that background, you can quite legitimately go and see him and ask if he's any work. You've come to the southwest because London's too cold for you in the winter.