From Devon With Death

by Stephanie Austin

  ‘Have you seen him?’ I asked. ‘His name is Luke.’

  Mick said nothing, just flicked a glance at my face before looking again at the photograph.

  ‘He’s in a bit of trouble with the police,’ I went on, and Mick gave a grunt that could have been a chuckle.

  ‘But he’s not in as much trouble as he thinks. He needs to know that it’s safe for him to come home. If you see him, will you tell him? Tell him Juno said. He trusts me.’

  Mick nodded to himself as he studied the picture.

  ‘He was in prison once,’ I told him, ‘but he’s just a boy really.’

  There was a movement in Mick’s beard, a smile. He’d been in prison himself. He cleared his throat of what sounded like the phlegm of centuries. I guess he hadn’t needed to speak in a while. ‘I haven’t seen ’un,’ he growled. He took a swig from the cough medicine.

  ‘His family are worried he’ll do something stupid.’

  ‘I’ll tell ’un, if I see ’un. First light, I’ll go look for ’un.’

  ‘Thanks, Mick.’

  ‘Be getting dimmet out there soon.’ He nodded towards the open mouth of the cave. ‘Stay here the night, maid, with Duke and me. We’ll keep ’ee safe.’

  ‘I can’t, Mick. Thanks. I’ll be all right.’ Beyond the mouth of the cave the sun was still staining the sky red. It was not yet full dark. In any case I had a torch. ‘I’m parked up by Whiteworks and the walking’s easy enough.’

  But Mick was shambling to his feet. ‘We’ll walk ’ee back to the road,’ he insisted.

  So we strode back together in the gloom, Duke loping along ahead, Mick happily rolling a thin cigarette from a few wisps of tobacco as he trod by my side. He stopped within sight of the car park and I went on alone. As I reached the car, I turned to give him a wave, but he and Duke had vanished like ghosts. I could see no sign of man or dog on the path we had just walked.

  I got back in the van and turned onto the road that would take me back to Ashburton. The sun was almost gone, but there was still some light in the sky, which was clear save for a few strips of dark cloud above the horizon. I was reluctant to go home. I wanted to find Luke, find him and tell him everything I knew, convince him it was safe to come home. Then I saw a fingerpost pointing to a place not far away, a place that I had seen pencilled in stark greyness in Luke’s sketchbook: Foggintor.

  You can’t see Foggintor from the road. That’s because it isn’t there any more. The Victorians quarried it away to build Dartmoor prison and Nelson’s column, amongst other things, and what is left of it now is a deep quarry that over time has filled to become a lake. I left the van at Yellowstone Farm and followed the track for almost a mile, a straight level path patched with giant slabs – the old granite tramway. Ahead of me the sky was red, throwing the ruins of derelict cottages into dark silhouettes of crumbling walls and chimneys and sightless windows.

  I had to leave the track so that I could get into the quarry on its southern side, where an entrance between rocks led down to the lake shore. If I took the wrong path, I could find myself on the edge of a sheer cliff, the water way below.

  It was uneven ground, a clamber over grassy hummocks and granite boulders in failing light. By now the sun had gone, but the sky was light enough to show me the steep granite walls of the quarry all around, a sheer curtain of rock, rising to a hundred feet on the other side of the lake. I stopped at the water’s edge. The surface was still, the water deep enough to tempt swimmers in good weather. But granite boulders lurked in the shallows and there was always a need to be careful. Luke had been drawn to this place, sketched its stark grandeur. There was a chance he might be here now. I yelled his name. My shout sent a ripple of panic across the surface of the lake, waterbirds rising and flapping, their cries piercing the air. I yelled again, my voice echoing around the rocky walls.

  I waited, but there was only stillness and silence and the air getting colder. I yelled again, digging my torch from my rucksack. Then I saw him on the high rim of the cliff, his body darker than the dimming sky, striding towards its edge. I yelled again, flashing the torch and waving my arms above my head. He stopped. He saw me.

  ‘Luke!’ I yelled, my voice echoing. ‘Come down and talk to me!’

  ‘It’s no use, Juno!’ he cried, his voice raw and cracked in the cold air. ‘I’m not going back to prison.’

  ‘You won’t. It will all be all right! I promise you!’ I ran along the lake edge towards the foot of the rock on which he stood, the torch beam waving wildly as I ran. I stopped, breathless. ‘Please!’ I called out to him. ‘Come down! Come back home with me. We can talk.’

  ‘It’s no use!’ he yelled back. I stopped. He was poised very still on the edge of the rock wall, gazing down into the water like someone hypnotised. Then he raised his arms. ‘Tell them I’m sorry!’

  Fear strangled my voice. It came out in a whisper. ‘Luke! Don’t!’

  He stepped off the edge quietly: no noise, no fuss, no cry, a silent fall, then a sound like a gunshot as his body crashed beneath the water.

  He didn’t come up again. A police diver retrieved his body as soon as it was light. I had stumbled along the lake shore, waving the torch beam wildly, screaming his name, splashing into the shallows, but I knew he had gone, that he was lost, that there was nothing I could do to save him.

  I struggled back over the rocks, staggering along the track, choking back sobs, until at last I reached a point where I could get a signal on my phone and call for help. And then I’d waited for it to arrive while a clear sky darkened above and showed me a spangled vault of stars that on any other night would have set my soul singing, but now seemed pitiless and cruel.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ‘I’ve already given my statement to the police.’

  Dean was at my front door. I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to talk to police ever again. I would have slammed the door in his face if he hadn’t already taken the precaution of wedging his foot in it. ‘Juno, we need to talk. Let me in.’ I let the door go, leaving him to follow me upstairs if he wanted.

  ‘I’m sorry. I really am,’ he said as he climbed the stairs behind me.

  I’d spent the night before giving my statement at the police station and most of the next day at Honeysuckle Farm. By then, the police had already given Luke’s family the bad news, but I told them about his last moments, and then sat with them in their kitchen, feeling like a pariah while Pat and Sue sobbed uncontrollably and Ken sat grim-faced and silent and refused to speak a word.

  ‘We just didn’t realise how vulnerable he was,’ Dean went on.

  I turned to face him when we got inside. ‘You could have let Luke off the hook.’ My voice was shaking. ‘You could have told him that he was no longer a murder suspect.’

  ‘Well, in the case of Bryant, he wasn’t, but—’

  ‘And now he’s killed himself.’

  Dean just stared at me, as if he was slowly turning over in his mind what he should say. ‘Unless …’ he began at last.

  ‘Unless what?’

  ‘His suicide is an admission of guilt.’

  I couldn’t help it, I laughed. ‘Well, that would be mightily convenient for you, wouldn’t it?’ I couldn’t believe that he could seriously think that. ‘You think he killed Jessie and Verbena? Why? What was his motive?’

  ‘Well, that we don’t know,’ he admitted.

  ‘You’ve got no evidence …’

  ‘The evidence is circumstantial,’ he agreed loudly, his voice rising to match the level of mine, ‘just a lot of coincidence. We don’t like coincidence …’

  ‘Yes. I’ve heard you say it before.’

  ‘And we’ve also got this.’ He reached into the briefcase he carried and pulled out something in a plastic evidence bag. ‘I think you should see this.’

  ‘That’s Luke’s sketchbook,’ I said numbly.

  ‘We found it in his rucksack.’ Dean slid it from the bag and put it on the table. ‘You’ve
seen it before?’

  I nodded. ‘He showed it to me in the pub.’

  He was turning the pages, showing me the sketches I had already seen, including the one of myself. He turned to the last page. ‘Have you seen this one?’

  I was looking at a drawing of a woman lying on the surface of the water, her skirts spread wide, her hair floating, dead eyes staring upward, like Ophelia.

  ‘Verbena Clarke,’ I said, turning away. I didn’t want to look at it. ‘That’s not her face. Luke had never met her … and there’s no ribbon around her neck.’

  ‘No, you’re right, it’s not her face,’ Dean agreed, ‘but you’re not looking at it properly. Look again, Juno. Look closely.’

  Sighing, I turned back to the picture and studied it again. As I stared it was as if a dead numbness settled inside me. I drew in a breath. Dean was right. It wasn’t Verbena’s face that Luke had drawn on the dead woman. It was mine.

  Verbena Clarke didn’t drown, so Dean informed me. She was strangled, but not with the red ribbon. This was tied around her neck afterwards, by her killer.

  ‘The same killer?’ Elizabeth asked next morning. ‘She was killed by whoever killed Jessie?’ We were sitting in the shop, nursing cups of coffee. I had already received the Juno-you-look-dreadful-you-should-be-at-home-in-bed lecture. But I couldn’t stay at home. I couldn’t sleep. Questions reeling in my brain were driving me to the edge of madness. I’d never been so grateful to get up and walk the Tribe.

  ‘The police think so,’ I responded miserably. ‘She was killed in her house, apparently. They found signs of a struggle.’

  ‘And they think Luke is their man?’ Elizabeth was quiet for a moment, thoughtful. ‘The picture of you as Ophelia that he drew,’ she asked gently, ‘it doesn’t disturb you?’

  ‘Of course it disturbs me.’ I’d been able to think of little else in the hours since Dean had shown it to me. But I refused to believe that Luke was ever a threat to me or that his drawing meant that he’d killed Verbena.

  I could sense before she spoke that Elizabeth didn’t agree. ‘You don’t think, perhaps your friendship with Luke is blinding you to what some people might consider pretty damning evidence?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ Luke was distressed, confused after hours of police questioning. He’d taken refuge in the isolation of the moor and in his art. He had drawn from his imagination, from memory, that was all. I was sure of it. Certainly, it was strange he’d drawn my face on the drowned Ophelia, but he had never seen Verbena. ‘I can’t believe Luke was a murderer.’

  ‘Perhaps you don’t want to believe it,’ Elizabeth suggested, ‘for Pat’s sake.’

  I let out a sigh and pushed a hand through curls that felt matted. I didn’t remember going anywhere near a hairbrush since I’d crawled out of bed that morning, or anywhere near a mirror. God knows what I looked like. ‘The whole family is in pieces.’ It was bad enough that poor Luke was dead, unthinkable that they should have to face the thought that he was a killer. ‘We won’t be seeing Pat in here for a while.’

  ‘What about this man, Bryant?’ Elizabeth asked.

  ‘The police have arrested some criminals in London for his murder. They don’t seem to think there’s a connection between his death and the murders of Jessie and Verbena. The only tenuous link is Luke.’

  ‘You said he didn’t know Verbena. What about Jessie, did Luke know her?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. He hadn’t been staying in Ashburton long. He might have known that she’d been telling tales about his being in prison, if Pat had told him.’

  Elizabeth tapped her fingers thoughtfully. ‘It’s hardly a motive for murder, is it? The fact that he was tried in a court and sent to prison is information in the public domain. It’s not something you can keep secret. So, setting the murder of Bryant aside as being unconnected,’ she went on, drawing a notepad towards her, ‘what have we got?’ She picked up a pen. ‘I think we need to go right back to the beginning, make a list.’

  I smiled in spite of myself. She might have been discussing organising a birthday party or dealing with some minor administrative problem. ‘So,’ she added, her pen poised, ‘where do we begin, with finding Jessie’s body?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘with finding the effigy in the river.’

  After a great deal of discussion, this is what we wrote:

  Who made the effigy and put it into the water?

  Who killed Jessie Mole and why?

  Who sent me the picture of the drowning Ophelia?

  Who cut her throat with a red marker?

  Who killed Verbena and why?

  Are all these ‘who’s the same person?

  I don’t know that it helped much. We could have added another hundred questions, but Elizabeth was determined to keep it simple. She refused to be discouraged. ‘I think we should begin with the picture, with finding out who sent it to you. How many antique shops are there in Ashburton?’

  I pulled a face. Too many. ‘Last count, I think about sixteen.’

  ‘So, it is possible that whoever sent it to you might have bought it locally. You don’t sell a picture like that every day. I’m sure if someone had sold it in the last few weeks they would remember. They might even remember who they sold it to.’

  ‘I suppose it would be worth asking around,’ I conceded.

  ‘You don’t need to lug the thing around, just take a picture of it on your phone, but make sure you include the frame. You could get around all of the antique shops in a couple of hours.’ She put down her pen. ‘Why not do it now?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘It would give you something to focus on, my dear.’

  Stop me brooding about Luke is what she meant. ‘I can’t go this afternoon. I’m helping Chloe Berkeley-Smythe with her packing.’

  Elizabeth laughed. ‘She’s off again, is she?’

  ‘Oh, it’s only Cyprus!’ I mimicked Chloe’s fruity tones. ‘Then she’s transferring to a different boat for a trip around the Croatian islands. She won’t be back for weeks.’

  ‘Has she got shares in the cruise line?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised. They gave her a medal once for being their most loyal customer for the last ten years. Anyway, I can’t let her down, so that’s my afternoon taken care of.’

  I left Elizabeth in charge of the shop. It was a good idea to ask around the other antique traders. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before, but it would have to wait until another day. She was right, I needed to focus. But for the moment I took refuge in work. I called on Tom Carter, cleaned his kitchen and picked up his prescriptions, then went around to Maisie, changed her bed, did her washing, walked Jacko and got back to her with her shopping before lunchtime. I couldn’t be bothered to go home, grabbed a wrap from the deli in town and then climbed up Stapledon Lane to Chloe’s cottage.

  She was just completing the demolition of a large schooner of sherry and a prawn sandwich and after insisting on making us both a cup of coffee, let me get started on her packing. The only items Chloe always packs herself are her make-up, her medication and her jewellery.

  I have a method. It begins with carting all the empty suitcases downstairs into the hall to pack as they’ll be too heavy to lug down once they’re full. Chloe usually needs to lie down after she’s watched me struggle with this and so I get on by myself. I have a very good idea now of what her ‘can’t manage without’ clothes and shoes are, and so I pack those, including nightclothes and underwear. Then I pack all her new stuff, garments she’s bought specially since the last cruise she went on. Then it’s simply a question of asking her what else she wants. She doesn’t always know, and if she does, she doesn’t always describe it very coherently, so there’s a lot of holding things up on hangers to get her nod, or not, of approval as she lies on the sofa. This can take hours.

  We were halfway through this procedure when the doorbell rang. I offered to answer it as I was in the hall and tiptoed my way carefully around the open suitcases
.

  I opened the door to Meredith Swann. I don’t know which of us was the more taken aback. For a moment we just stared at each other. I thought she looked tired and pale, her dark eyes huge and bruised with shadows. ‘How’s your head?’ I asked.

  She seemed surprised that I knew about it. ‘Oh … better, thanks.’

  Again, we hesitated, as if neither of us wanted to be the first to speak Verbena’s name.

  ‘Is Mrs Berkeley-Smythe at home?’ she asked suddenly, and the tension was broken.

  I stood back to let her in. ‘Watch your step. It’s a bit of an obstacle course in here, I’m afraid.’

  ‘My goodness!’ Meredith whispered. ‘What a lot of luggage!’

  ‘This is just for a short trip,’ I murmured. ‘You should see it when she’s going around the world.’

  I led her into the sitting room where Chloe was reclining. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt,’ Meredith said pleasantly, ‘I can see you’re busy.’

  ‘I’m off the day after tomorrow,’ Chloe told her. ‘I’m exhausted with all this horrible murder,’ she sighed, as if it were happening to her personally. ‘I can’t wait to get away. Anyway, nice to see you, my dear, what can I do for you?’

  ‘Well, I was bringing you one of these,’ she said, handing Chloe a gilt-edged card, ‘seeing that you’ve shown an interest in Anthony’s work …’

  Chloe frowned, puzzled and slightly suspicious. Her polished fingertips hovered near the card nervously as if she thought it might bite her. Meredith pointed to the ceramic otter she had bought in her gallery, which now had pride of place in her inglenook fireplace. ‘Anthony is the sculptor.’

  ‘Ah!’ she cried, enlightened.

  ‘I’m holding an exhibition of his work soon at the gallery. I’ve brought you an invitation to the opening.’

  ‘What a shame I’m going away!’ Chloe responded in a voice that indicated it wasn’t a shame at all. She took the invitation and looked at the date. ‘I’m afraid I won’t be here.’