Buried in the Country

by Carola Dunn

  Dawson opened the rear door of the chief inspector’s Land Rover and winked at her encouragingly as she climbed in. The step was on the high side for Teazle. He picked her up and handed her to Eleanor. Scumble got in the other side, and Dawson took the front passenger seat. Meanwhile, Eleanor was desperately trying to make a coherent narrative of her “rescue” of Carpenter and the bits and pieces he had told her.

  She gave up. It would probably be better for Scumble’s blood pressure if he didn’t know she had pulled the villain back from the brink. And Carpenter’s story had emerged in response to her random questions; coherence was not possible without time to think.

  “Well?”

  “Oh! The first thing he said was that he’d murdered the Sandman.”

  “Just like that? Out of the blue, when you walked up to him?” Scumble sounded exceedingly sceptical, and she couldn’t very well blame him.

  “Not exactly.” Inspiration struck. “He seemed to have a sort of phobia about dogs. You can ask Jay—DS Nayak. He was terrified of Kali.”

  Dawson snickered.

  “Do you mean to tell me, Mrs. Trewynn, that a self-confessed murderer was afraid of Teazle?”

  “I couldn’t swear to it, but when she jumped onto him and did her tramping-about thing— They say it’s to make sure there’re no snakes in the bed, but if you ask me, if there were a snake, trampling on it would make it bite. Anyway, Teazle did it, and Carpenter didn’t utter so much as a squeak. She went to sleep on his back. Which was good, because I knew she’d warn me if he moved to get up.”

  “He was lying on his—? No, never mind! Could you possibly put your mind to recalling his exact words when he confessed to murdering Stone?”

  Eleanor thought back to the moment when she had come round the tor and seen the man standing on the brink of the quarry. He had told her he was going to throw himself over. But she didn’t want to get into that with Scumble.

  “The moonlight was bright by then. He must have known you were close on his heels. I said something—I can’t remember what—and he said, he’d killed Stone. Then: he said, ‘He deserved it, the dirty rotten bastard.’”

  “He didn’t mention how he killed him?”

  “Oh yes. Apparently Stone tripped over a rock and fell in the mud. Carpenter said, ‘I put my foot on his back and held him down’—let’s see—‘held him down till he stopped moving.’ Something horrible like that.”

  “No reason given?”

  “He told me Stone had killed his sister.”

  “His sister!”

  “So he said. And her name is—was really Rosie Stone. She was married to Victor Stone. But I’m sure you know that already.”

  “Not exactly. DI Eliot found hints to that effect in her house. Let’s not worry about what I know already, just go on with what Carpenter told you.”

  Eleanor did her best. When she thought she had wrung her memory dry, Scumble prompted her with painfully patient questions, and more details emerged. At last, he gave up hope of further revelations. Eleanor’s relief was tempered by a niggling feeling she had forgotten something important.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Trewynn.” He leaned forward as if eager to move on. “You’ve been tremendously helpful. It was a lucky accident that you happened to come across Carpenter—”

  “Accident! That’s what I was trying to remember to tell you.”

  Scumble leaned back with a sigh. “Go on. What accident?”

  “Carpenter insisted that Stone didn’t mean to kill his wife. He hit her because he was angry—no wonder she hid from him!—and she happened to knock her head on the raised hearth. It’s just dawned on me: As her husband, he would inherit from her if she died intestate. Isn’t there some law to that effect? Or is that immaterial now that he’s dead?”

  “Not really. Having helped her into the other world, he couldn’t profit from her death anyway. Her estate would probably go to her brother. But then her brother murdered her husband.… All I can say is that it’s going to give the lawyers a lot of work.”

  “Freeth and Bulwer, I expect. But perhaps she didn’t die intestate? If Alan Freeth was there to draw up a will for her, it would explain his presence, though not why he was there for several days. I suppose it might have been complicated—but still, he was only a few miles from home and his office, so why—”

  “A waste of time speculating, Mrs. Trewynn. Let’s hope he’ll be able to inform us. I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you that Eliot found burnt papers in the grate that could well have been a will.”

  “Aha! I still want to know—”

  “There are plenty of questions unanswered, but you’ve pointed me in the right direction to start, even if you should never have been here in the first place.”

  “I didn’t have a great deal of choice, Mr. Scumble. And before you go blaming Megan, nor did she. If we hadn’t followed immediately, there’d have been little or no chance of catching them before they disappeared in London.”

  “I know, I know. She’s done an excellent job under difficult circumstance, and I’ll try to remember to tell her so. It should ease her recovery from whatever Sir Edward Bellowe’s going to be saying to her. Again, my thanks, Mrs. Trewynn. If you think of anything else before you sign the statement tomorrow, please let me or Dawson know. He’s going to drive you home now.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Dawson, kindly restrain your urge to break the land speed record while you have Mrs. Trewynn in your car. When you’ve delivered her safely, go back to the nick and type up your report.”

  “Of this conversation, sir?”

  “From the moment you joined in the bloody—beg pardon, Mrs. Trewynn—chase, including this conversation. But for pity’s sake, leave the African laddie out of it!”

  “Right, sir. Uh, sir, it’s not going to be that easy getting my car out of here. It’s the second in line, after DS Pencarrow’s.”

  “Well, she’s already left, so there must be a way. At least, she hasn’t come back to say she’s stuck. Go and look.”

  Dawson got out, opened the door, and held it for Eleanor. Teazle jumped down. Reminded of the high step of the vehicle, he offered Eleanor his arm. In his eyes, all too obviously, she was a frail little old lady, in spite of having apprehended a murderer single-handed.

  Ah well, his heart was in the right place. Accepting his help, she said, “I’m pretty sure I know how to get back to the road. If you just go straight ahead along the old railway, we’ll come to the quarry, and the main track from the car park ends up there, too.”

  “Makes sense.” They trudged up the row of cars and found Megan’s gone. “Looks as if Sarge got out somehow. Hope she hasn’t come to grief like the van.”

  “The van went astray trying to hide off the beaten path.” Seated in Dawson’s patrol car and once again jolting over the stone sleepers, Eleanor went on, “Carpenter said their plan—the Sandman’s plan—was to drop off their hostages halfway to London, but with Megan closing in from one side and you from the other, they had to get rid of the evidence fast. Not very clever, either of them.”

  “I wouldn’t call it very clever of Carpenter to blab to you. What on earth possessed him?”

  “I suspect he was simply in a state of shock. He’d seen his sister killed in front of his eyes and been coerced into kidnapping and abandoning two strangers to their fate. He’s no saint, but he isn’t a thoroughgoing villain like Stone. Weak and selfish and not very scrupulous. He was horrified by what he’d got into and would have babbled to anyone, the first person he saw.”

  “‘A waste of time speculating,’ as the guv’nor would say. Ah, here we are. You were dead right, Mrs. Trewynn. As nice a turnaround as you could ask for.”

  “We’re in the quarry. The railway was built to move the granite.”

  Dawson peered up at the top of the cliff. “I see the tors up there. So that’s where you found Carpenter?” He drove on down the slope towards the car park.

  “Yes.” She wasn’
t sure whether he was questioning her or just chatting.

  “What took you up there?”

  “I wasn’t sure where I was. The fog was beginning to break up, so I thought if I just climbed as high as I could, I’d be able to see the cars, or the village, or some landmark. Even a glimpse of Rough Tor would have told me which direction was which. Mr. Dawson, could you possibly take me to the hospital before we go to Tintagel? I badly want to see how Nick—Nick Gresham—and Alan Freeth are, and you know how impossible it is to persuade hospitals to give information on the phone.”

  “Course, why not? Bodmin they were taken to, so it’s on the way for you, and it makes no odds to me.”

  “It’s very kind of you.”

  “Not really. The guv’nor’s done for my plans for the evening, and I like driving.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Not to worry.” He sounded as if he were grinning. They reached the road and he turned right. “The guv’nor said to take it easy, and I will.”

  “In the normal way, I wouldn’t mind a bit of speed,” Eleanor said apologetically, “but after racing through the lanes earlier, round blind corners and flying off humpback bridges, and watching you nearly collide with the van on the old aerodrome…”

  “That was a bit of fun, that was! We don’t often get the chance of a real car chase hereabouts.”

  “I imagine not.” And a very good thing too; in Eleanor’s opinion, the best place for car chases was in James Bond films.

  “You have to be behind the wheel, though. It sounds as if those poor buggers rolling about in the back of the van got pretty badly bashed up.”

  “I do hope they’ll be all right.”

  “Gresham’s a neighbour of yours, isn’t he?”

  “Next-door neighbour. And it’s my fault he was there to be kidnapped. My car broke down, so he took me to Tintagel, and he couldn’t get home again because of that dreadful storm.”

  “Blame the storm, not yourself, Mrs. Trewynn. Or better, blame the Sandman. What I heard is, Gresham’s not too bad; it’s the solicitor who’s in bad shape, and him being there was nothing to do with you. Lucky for him that Sarge happened to be on the lookout for him when he was kidnapped, else he wouldn’t’ve been found so soon.”

  “Poor Mr. Freeth! I wonder whether they’ll send him to the Plymouth hospital, like Kalith.”

  Jay Nayak’s young cousin Kalith had been too ill for the local cottage hospital’s facilities, but he had been suffering from exposure and pneumonia as well as concussion. Alan Freeth hadn’t been lying out on the moor, exposed to cold and damp, for very long, thanks to Jay’s dog.

  Concussion alone could be very serious, though. Eleanor hoped Megan had remembered to ring up Jocelyn and ask her to break the news to Roland Bulwer.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Megan and Tariro had reached the parking lot in time to see the ambulance carrying Nick and Freeth turn right into Minions village.

  “Damn,” said Megan, “that means they’ll be taken to the hospital in Bodmin. Makes it more difficult for me to visit. What’s more, the Bodmin coppers won’t like cooperating when one of us goes to take statements from them. Still, that’s for the super to worry about.” She turned left.

  “We’re not going back the same way?” Tariro asked.

  “You can’t get there from here.”

  “Huh?”

  “The moor’s in the way. Only the A30 crosses it, and it runs northeast to southwest. We want to go northwest. I think it’s slightly shorter going round the north side, which is pretty much the way we came, but without all the van’s diversions in their effort to lose us.”

  Tariro checked his watch. “It’s still surprisingly early. It felt as if we were being ‘diverted’ and then tramping about for ages, but with luck we’ll get back in time for dinner. There’s a phone box,” he added as they drove into Alton. “You said you promised Mrs. Trewynn to ring the vicar’s wife.”

  “If it’s functioning…” Megan pulled up next to the red box. Its light was on; phones in villages were vandalised much less often than in towns and cities. It even had a directory for North Cornwall, including Port Mabyn. And no one had torn out the one page she wanted. She found the Stearnses’ number.

  The disadvantage of a rural phone was old-fashioned equipment that took only old coinage. Megan had nothing but new pence in her purse. She pushed open the door and called, “Tariro!” He rolled down the window. “Have you got any old pennies or sixpences, by any chance?”

  “A couple of sixpences. One is George the Sixth. I was going to keep them as souvenirs.”

  “I’ll replace them, promise, King George and all.”

  He handed over his treasures. She returned to the phone, shoved the Elizabeth II coin in the slot, dialled the number, and listened to it ringing: Brr-brr, brr-brr … If no one answered, she’d have to stop again on the way to Tintagel.

  “Hello?” said a tentative male voice.

  Megan pressed button A. “Mr. Stearns? This is Megan Pencarrow. Mrs. Trewynn’s niece.”

  “The detective.” The vicar sounded pleased with himself for remembering. “What can I do for you, my dear?”

  She was about to tell him, when she recalled that Aunt Nell had specified his wife, though he was the obvious person to lend aid and comfort to Freeth’s partner. “May I speak to Mrs. Stearns, please, if she’s available.”

  She heard him calling, “It’s for you, dear. That nice detective…”

  “Megan? Megan, I hope you’re going to explain—”

  “Mrs. Stearns, sorry to interrupt, but I’m using a public phone and my time is running out. Please listen. Mr. Freeth—Alan Freeth—has been seriously injured. He’s been taken to Bodmin Cottage Hospital. I’m passing on a plea from Aunt Nell asking you to inform Mr. Bulwer. This is not an official request, but I hope you—”

  “Of course, Megan. Timothy and I will go to him at once and ring the hospital from his house. I hope Eleanor is not in any trouble?”

  “She’s fine. I’d better let her tell you all about it herself.”

  “Whatever happened to Alan Freeth? A car crash?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t talk about it. Thank you, Mrs. Stearns. I must go. Good-bye.”

  She managed to escape further questions. Hanging up, she automatically pressed button B, though she supposed as a police officer she probably shouldn’t. Tariro’s sixpence did not reappear in the little cup.

  Returning to the car, she gave him five pee. “That’s to pay for the call. I didn’t have to use the George sixpence—here you are—but I’ll replace the other, honestly.”

  “That’s all right, there are plenty of Queen Elizabeth coins still in circulation. Did you get through?”

  “Yes.” She drove on through Alton. “I’m sure Jocelyn Stearns will do everything that’s necessary. She’s a formidable woman.”

  “So,” said Tariro, “is your aunt.”

  “She is. Fluffy and sweet and formidable. I wonder what really happened up there above the quarry. Did she tell you, as you were walking down together?”

  “She said you wouldn’t like her to talk about it, and Detective Inspector Scumble would wax mighty wroth. All I know is what she told us when we found them. The way he was lying, though, flat on his back— He seemed to be scared stiff. I wish she were going to be there at the hotel to protect me from Sir Edward!”

  “I don’t think you need worry about that,” Megan said drily, “as the whole aim of the meeting is to conciliate and win you over, isn’t it? I’m the one who’s going to get it in the neck.”

  Tariro laughed. “I expect I can protect you from that. I can witness that you had no choice but to follow the van, and I absolutely refused to be left behind. I would have refused, if you’d had time to offer to drop me off. In fact, he ought to be grateful to you. You’ve given me a new appreciation of the British police.”

  “Favourable, I hope.”

  “But of course. And of the English countryside,
also. I’ve always thought it a bit tame, compared to Africa, but our country walk today could hardly have been more exciting had we unexpectedly met a lion or an elephant.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I have to admit I enjoyed the expedition, though I’m sorry your boyfriend and the lawyer were hurt.”

  “He’s not— Oh, all right, I suppose he is. Sort of.”

  “I don’t understand how he—how either of them got mixed up in the murder of Mrs. Mason.”

  “Nick was just spending a couple of nights there as a bed-and-breakfaster. They both seem to have arrived at her house at just the wrong moment. That’s about all I know.”

  “It’s all very well for you,” Tariro grumbled. “You’re bound to find out all the details sooner or later, when you read the reports or whatever. I’ll probably never find out.”

  “Don’t worry, it’ll be in the press. The North Cornwall Times, for sure. Their reporter, David Skan, adores Aunt Nell. I’d be surprised if it doesn’t make the nationals, too.”

  “Send me a copy of the North Cornwall Times, will you? Care of my college, Brasenose, will reach me.”

  “Without your surname? Yes, I daresay it would. Can’t be too many Tariros studying there. If you weren’t so damned incognito, you’d probably be called to testify at Carpenter’s trial.”

  “Really? Damn! But I suppose I’d better not offer myself as a witness. Sir Edward would blow a fuse. Speaking of which, I hope you intend to go in with me to help me explain my absence.”

  “Scaredy-cat? I don’t believe it. I’m not supposed to use the outside door—”

  “You’re not supposed to have taken me on a car chase and a hunt for killers in the fog on the moor.”

  “True, but all the same … Don’t tell him too much. No names. Otherwise, I’ll leave it to your discretion, and I’ll give you time to butter him up before I make my appearance through the correct entrance.”

  “You don’t think suppressing his irritation with me will bring his blood to the boil in time for your— Oh lord! I’ve just thought! How am I going to explain Mrs. Trewynn’s absence? Shall I say she’s been detained by the police? Helping them with their enquiries?”