GFU04 - The Cornish Pixie Affair

by Peter Leslie

  "In the channel... No, nearer. There! Just where the waves are breaking by the entrance. Don't you see?"

  And then suddenly he did see. As each wave broke outside the harbour, rolled in between the piers and sent a further swirl of water up the channel, it nudged something floating on the surface a little nearer the wall. Something large and black and heavy. Something that rolled sluggishly in the shallow water every time a new wavelet moved it nearer...

  Before they realised it, they were running along the edge of the channel towards the gap. When they had almost reached the thing, Mark dashed ahead and waded out into the channel to get hold of it.

  A higher wave creamed into the harbour, a second crest hissing on its back, to break just short of Slate and soak him to the waist. The channel was now appreciably wider.

  "Look out, Mark! " April called. "You'll be bowled over."

  "It's... all right," he panted. "It's a nuisance getting wet, but it helped me... get this... to the edge." His breath labouring with exertion, he splashed back to the side of the channel and hauled the floating object up on to the sand. "You were right," he said grimly. "There's something about the way they lie, isn't there? You can always tell..." Bending down, he rolled the flotsam over.

  Above the waterlogged black jersey and trousers, the puffed and livid face of Ephraim Busustow's eldest son turned limply up and stared sightlessly at the moon.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: "ALL THE BEST LIGHTHOUSES ARE HOLLOW!"

  "His hands were still tied together behind his back when we found him," Mark Slate told April the next afternoon. "And Curnow is fairly convinced that his ankles and knees had been tied when he was actually killed — though, of course, he'll have to wait until the pathologist's report for confirmation."

  "Then it's definitely murder, as we thought," the girl said. "And I suppose that rules out whoever it was that we were chasing. He could hardly have been pilfering my kiosk and killing that man at the same time!"

  "Not at the same time — but the fact that it's murder doesn't rule him out, according to Curnow. The police surgeon thinks he was killed quite a long time before the tide brought him to our notice."

  "He wag drowned, though?"

  "Oh, yes. No doubt about that. In a particular nasty fashion, my superintendent believes — he said that, from the marks and bruises they had found on the body, and from certain discolorations which occur after a drowning, he thought the poor chap had been hog-tied, hand and foot, and then held up by his ankles with his head and shoulders below the surface of the water. As you know, no amount of struggling overcomes that."

  "How dreadful, Mark. Out at sea, I suppose?"

  "Yes. They think he was probably lured aboard a boat on some pretext, overpowered when they were well out to sea, and then killed. If they'd fed him, bound, over the edge of a small boat head first, and then just held his ankles at the level of the gunwale, it wouldn't take more than a few minutes to drown him."

  "It seems somewhat elaborate," she commented.

  "Oh, I don't think there was any doubt that they had meant to make it appear like accident or suicide. He hadn't been hit on the head or drugged or anything — that's why they think he was lured aboard; either that or he knew and had no reason to suspect his killers... Whoever was holding the feet would simply have taken out a knife and sawn through the ankles bonds as soon as the struggles ceased, and then cut the ropes around the knees, and finally leaned over to sever the binding at the wrists — only it was further to lean, it was rough as you'll recall, and he muffed it."

  "Is this just deduction, or is there —?"

  "There's some evidence to prove it," Slate interrupted with a smile. "Curnow told me the rope around the wrists was half sawn through. The killer — or killers — must have been in too much of a hurry, that's all."

  "And then they intended the tide to bring him ashore again in its own good time — minus bonds or marks of violence — to give the coroner another 'Accident' verdict."

  "Exactly. Curnow inclines to the view that the murderers are what he calls foreigners. He says a local man would have known that, at this time of the year, the incoming tide would have brought him straight back on the next high. There's quite a rip, apparently, out beyond the headland there... and if they didn't mean the sea to keep him undiscovered for some appreciable time, then there would have been no point at all in going through the whole boat routine."

  "Yes, that makes sense." April said slowly. "But I wonder why? What had the poor little man done?"

  "He was an offensive and objectionable man — rather large, as a matter of fact."

  "You and your fact! It's reasons that count, not facts. No, I mean I wonder if he was tied up with our killing, or whether it's just coincidence. I guess a second time makes a personal murder even less likely..."

  They were sitting on a bench in the sideshow booth that had been Sheila Duncan's, trying to fit together the pieces of their particular jigsaw. Mark had spent the morning exploiting his newly-won friendship with Superintendent Curnow — and since they had both discovered the body, and had both had to make statements at the police station, it had seemed absurd to proceed any longer with the fiction that they did not know each other.

  Accordingly, while they went over the affair in their minds, they had been investigating the booth's stock again, to see whether they might find some clue to what it was the mysterious burglar wanted.

  "It has to be important," April said for the third time. "Otherwise people wouldn't be prepared to kill for it. It has to have an obvious and incriminating connection with Sheila's death. And at the same time, it must obviously be difficult to locate — otherwise three separate burglaries, all of them so far as we know unsuccessful, would not have been necessary."

  "Do you think he'll try again?" Slate asked.

  "I don't see how he could... not with the risk there'd be."

  "So for once we're in a good position to get a move ahead of the game, as it were."

  "We're in a good position to try. Oh — and I forgot one other factor in my list of things our unidentified object has to satisfy. It must be something to which a request for a black Porphyry pixie, a non-existent pixie, can be a lead!"

  Mark ran his fingers through his short hair. "And it's all here, ladies and gentlemen," he said oracularly. "All the stock the lady possessed laid out in neat and orderly rows on counter and chair and desk and drawer and floor for your distinguished inspection! Walk up, walk up, and take a look! Take your pick — take your shovel, if you so wish — and examine carefully every single one. These are the clues — all you have to do is to interpret them to win a big money prize!"

  "And not a Porphyry pixie amongst them!" the girl said sepulchrally. "Either in black or in any other — Hey! Wait a minute, though... There are no Porphyry pixies, but there are a few Porphyry lighthouses. Black ones, too! Look, at the back there, behind the ashtrays you stood on that drawer. Where did you find that little haul, by the way? I didn't put it there."

  "The ashtrays were in a cardboard box that the dustbin was standing on. I think they must just have been delivered, all the same: they were still wrapped in tissue... The lighthouses — they're only about three inches high, as you see — the light houses were inside those tall white mugs standing on the shelf above the sink there. Come to think of it, that's an odd place to put stock when you still have shelf room to spare, and…"

  His voice tailed away. They looked at each other.

  The girl moved first. Snatching up one of the miniature stone models, she began turning it over and over in her hands. "That's all there were?" she asked absently. "Just the seven?"

  "That's all I've found," Slate said. He picked up one of the black lighthouses himself and examined it. "I've never really looked at them before," he went on. "I know they turn them up on a lathe and then polish them with a carborundum wheel, and I suppose they have something like a potter's wheel for the round boxes and ashtrays.

  "I was just thinking," the agent said sl
owly. "Lighthouses are peculiarly suitable for shaping on a lathe: from whichever point of the compass you look at them, the shape of the elevation is always the same. And the plan is simply a decreasing or increasing circle."

  "So?"

  "So you'd expect to find, at the top and bottom, a tiny mark, a trace of the hole into which the spindle of the lathe fitted, even if it had been subsequently filled up — Look, you can see it on these Serpentine ones, the big and the small... Here and here... and here, too. But not a sign on the black ones."

  "And that implies?"

  "I should say it meant that these particular lighthouses had been made in two separate sections and then screwed together. The parts where the lathe spindle had fitted would be hidden within the join, then."

  "You're right! Yes, you're' right," April said excitedly. "You can see the join where the wide curve of the base flattens out to make the main tower of the lighthouse. And I think... yes... I think it will be quite... easy... Ah! There we are!... to unscrew!" She held up the two halves of the stone souvenir.

  There was a shallow depression in the base, threaded to take the complementary extension projecting from the top half.

  But the projection from the top half was itself hollow: inside the threaded collar, a recess two inches deep and about the diameter of a fountain pen was tunnelled up into the shaft of the lighthouse.

  "It's hollow! They're all hollow," the girl exclaimed as they unscrewed the remaining half dozen.

  "All the best lighthouses are hollow," Slate said severely. "It makes it so much easier for the crew to reach the lantern gallery... The point is: what's in the hollow? In the case of real lighthouses, four or five storeys of accommodation and stores; in the case of these Porphyry monstrosities... we must see."

  But the promising "secret" compartments in the stone light houses were all empty. Or at least they appeared to be at first.

  A closer examination, however, revealed that this was not precisely true.

  For while six of the recesses were indeed bone dry, clean and empty, the seventh cascaded a small quantity of white, crystalline powder on to Slate's hand when he tapped the side of the shaft with his finger…

  CHAPTER NINE: OBSTRUCTIONS AND INTRUSIONS!

  THE police constable on duty outside the gates leading to the field in which Bosustow's Circus was wintering prised a handkerchief from the blue serge sleeve of his jacket, extruded it through the slit in his shining cape and blew his nose.

  It was almost midnight, it was raining cats and dogs, it was more than six hours before his relief arrived, and he had had a row with his wife and stormed from the house without his dinner. Between eight and ten, he had been drinking at the Crabber — and now he had a raging headache as well as the beginning of a cold. He thought wistfully of the hot Cornish pasties going to waste in Molly's oven, the uncut apple pie, the scalding coffee and the clots of buttery cream spiralling on the dark surface of the liquid. He was very unhappy.

  The rain drummed on the dome of his helmet, slid in glittering cascades down the rubber cape, and drenched the lower half of his trouser legs. Angrily, he stamped up and down, trying to pound some warmth into the sodden soles of his socks.

  For two pins, he thought, he'd nip on up the road a bit and sit down in the bus shelter at the Falmouth signpost. But you had to be careful. Only last night, Watkins had copped it properly from the Super when some villains had got into the field and started shooting at each other — or so they said: no one seemed to know what had really happened, least of all poor Watkins! He had hoped that, what with those two foreigners finding the body in the harbour, it might all have been forgotten — after all, nothing had been taken, nobody was hurt, and apparently no one at the circus itself was involved. But Sergeant Trelawnay had been really difficult about the thing and had compared Watkins floundering about with his torch to a man lost in a fog made by his own pipe. That, of course, was probably because the Sergeant still had a sore head from his daughter's wedding the day before. They did say he had consumed a prodigious quantity of drink.

  Even so, he had still been fairly narked this afternoon when he had detailed the constable for tonight's late trick. "You let anyone through that gate or over that fence tonight, Trewithick," he said, "and I'll have your liver for breakfast!"

  It was a sad thing, having men of low sensitivity for superiors, the constable reflected. Still — it wasn't worth the risk. If he did go to the shelter for a sit-down and a smoke, old Curnow just might drive past in one of the Wolseleys; somebody just might get into the field and kick up some kind of a shindig; Trelawnay just might take it into his great head to do the rounds on a bicycle, despite the rain... and if he was found to be away from his post with murders and burglaries all over Porthallow... Constable Trewithick shivered under his cape at the thought of the action which would inevitably follow such a discovery!

  He reached the end of his self-imposed beat, from the elm tree below the gate to the shuttered ticket office beyond it, stamped his feet again, swung round, and moved ponderously back towards the tree. If only it had been summer, now, he thought with a disgruntled frown, then there would have been leaves on the tree and he could have simply stood there, sheltering from this dratted rain. As it was, all the bare branches did was to increase the size of the drops which fell on him.

  Turning, he trudged back again, idly remarking the reflection in the window of the office of the metal numerals sewn to the collar of his uniform. The seven and the three, dulled by the humidity and beaded with rain, still shone well in the lamplight, he thought, regarding their reversed images with a glow of pride in the handiness of his wife.

  Then he remembered — and as his large face creased once more into a scowl, he saw something else reflected in the glass. Somebody was walking up the road towards him.

  It was a girl, he saw as he turned to face the newcomer. A pretty girl, too, in her trousers and her boots and her shining black raincoat, with the rain misting her hair and lying in large drops on the soft skin of her face. He gazed approvingly at her as she approached the gates.

  "Good evening, Sergeant," she said pleasantly, smiling. "I'm a little late tonight, I'm afraid, but I imagine you'll let me in all right, won't you?" She gave a low musical laugh, completely confident.

  And then he remembered her. Of course — it was the new girl! The one who had taken over the sideshow run by the bird who got herself knocked off. Foreigner, she was — a real foreigner, too, he had heard. South African or Australian or American or something like that. Very pretty, though, for all that.

  "Evening, Miss," he said. "It's Constable, actually. Constable Trewithick. Of course you can go in... Seeing as you live here, as it were, it'd be a bit of a liberty on my part to try and stop you, wouldn't it?" He chuckled in his turn, moving towards the big gate.

  "Oh, well," the girl said. "If all the local police were as charming as you are, I'm sure there'd be nothing but sergeants in the Force!"

  "Very kind of you, Miss, I'm sure," the policeman said, swinging the gate wide for her. Was that a blur of movement he had seen by the hedge, a bit farther down the hill there? Or was it simply a drift of rain blowing across the road in the lamplight?... Oh, well: he'd look in a minute. The girl was speaking again.

  "I really do sympathize — having to stay out on a night like this just so that people like me can sleep safely in our beds," she said. "I'm sure you will be a sergeant very soon. Then you can tell other policemen to do this kind of job, can't you?" She smiled once more.

  "Yes, Miss," P.C. Trewithick said. "Thank you kindly."

  "Look," the girl said. "Why don't you come in yourself for a moment? Let me make you a hot drink — a cup of coffee or something. You must be perished out here all night. Do."

  Trewithick was scandalized. "Oh, no, Miss, thank you," he said. "That would never do. A married man like me alone in a caravan late at night with (you'll excuse me?) a beautiful young lady! Oh, dear me no. Besides — I'm not allowed to leave my post. That's
what I'm here for: to see nobody gets in as shouldn't. Thank you kindly just the same, though."

  The girl wrinkled her nose. "Who cares what people think!" she said. "But if you're not allowed to, that's a different matter. I'd hate to be accused of contributing to the dereliction of an officer's duty, or whatever it is!... You will give me a call, won't you, nevertheless — if you change your mind about that drink, I mean. I can always bring it out to you, you know."

  The policeman smiled. "Very nice of you," he said. "But I think I'd just better stay here, all the same. It's pretty late, after all."

  "All right, then. Just as you like. Good night, officer."

  The girl walked through the open gate, waved, and hurried along between the sideshows towards the caravans. At the end of the aisle, she turned right by the roundabout and disappeared. That was odd, the constable thought. He could have sworn the murdered girl's caravan was to the left. Oh, well — never mind. Perhaps old Bosustow had given this one a different trailer... Now there was that matter of the movement he thought he had seen farther down the hill. He flashed his torch along the dripping hedge, letting its beam probe the long grasses on the bank and lance on towards the cottages beyond.

  No. He had been mistaken, after all. Nothing moved in the dark patch between the lamps. There was only the rain, slanting ceaselessly down from the overcast sky. He must have seen from the corner of his eye a particularly heavy drift blowing into the pool of light cast by the lamp. The wind had dropped all the same — that was one consolation! He shrugged deeper into the clammy cape and walked back up the hill towards the office. Somewhere among the lights winking up from the valley, the town clock chimed midnight.

  "Twelve o'clock!" April Dancer exclaimed in the dense shadow behind the Big Top. "I guess it's safe to move now. We'd better start: there's a lot to do tonight."

  "You are absolutely sure about the bobby, are you?" Mark Slate asked in a whisper. "I thought he glanced my way just as I was nipping over the hedge back there."