Wreckers Island

by L K Harcourt

  ‘In terms of the fact that no rope was found attached to the harness, my guess is that, having put the harness on originally, Mr Penhaligon had simply not attached the rope or had taken it off subsequently, or possibly it had sheared off.’

  ‘Thank you Dr Atkinson. I must ask you,’ said the Coroner, ‘while being mindful of the fact that this is not a criminal court, whether you feel there is any reason to suspect foul play? Might this blow have been deliberately administered to Mr Penhaligon?’

  ‘All I can say sir, is that in my professional opinion, the blow to the head was what killed him, or what brought about his death from drowning, whether that was by accident or design I cannot say for sure. Given the circumstances in which he was found, there may well be an innocent explanation but there has to be room for doubt,’ added Dr Atkinson.

  John, Dan, Louise and Emma listened to the pathologist with a look of glazed shock on their faces. Dan could feel Emma trembling alongside him. He prayed that she would be able to hold it together for the duration of the hearing and they could then get her away quickly.

  ‘I am indebted to you Dr Atkinson,’ said the Coroner. ‘Am I correct in thinking that the police are no longer pursuing this as a criminal investigation?’ he asked, looking over to the officer attending.

  The constable stood up and said, ‘no sir. My colleagues in CID carried out a painstaking probe into the matter and the file remains open but no evidence was gathered indicating foul play of any kind.’

  ‘Thank you, officer. Now, ladies and gentleman I am about to start summing up the evidence we have heard so far. I note that several members of Zachariah’s family are present today, would any of you like to address the inquest? You are more than welcome to do so.’

  A man, who looked to be in his late 60s, got to his feet. ‘Mr Coroner I would like to address you if I may. I am Zachariah’s father, Ezekiel Penhaligon.’

  ‘Please go ahead,’ said the Coroner, gently.

  ‘Well sir, my son, he were a bad man in some ways,’ said Mr Penhaligon senior. ‘He were always getting into mischief ever since he were a boy. But I tell you this sir, he had a heart of gold underneath and was much loved by my wife and myself. We are heartbroken at our loss. But if he met his death out at sea then he died where he most loved to be. For he loved the sea and knew of its dangers.’

  His voice faltered and Mr Penhaligon could only croak, ‘thanking you for the opportunity sir,’ before sitting back down.

  Emma was visibly shaking with distress and Dan and John were getting extremely alarmed. She looked at Mr Penhaligon with abject misery in her eyes. The boys understood how she must feel but were terrified she might start to attract attention to herself. Louise, meanwhile, still seemed in a world of her own, looking more bothered about the discomfort of the airless surroundings and having her right flank squashed by one of the burly Penhaligon clan.

  ‘Thank you very much Mr Penhaligon for that touching tribute,’ said the Coroner. ‘It is always the most distressing aspect of my job holding inquests into tragedies such as this to meet members of the family who must come to terms with the untimely death of a loved-one. It is regrettable in some cases, such as this, that having heard all the available evidence it is not possible to conclude with absolute certainty how and why death occurred.

  ‘In summing up, I am satisfied that the body of the man found in sea water adjacent to Gunwalloe Cove was that of Mr Zachariah Penhaligon on the evening of Tuesday, June 12th, a 45-year-old man from the nearby village of Porthlevnack. I am satisfied also that death occurred at some stage during the 24 hours prior to discovery.

  ‘There remains doubt however, about the actual circumstances of his death with the most likely explanation being that it was directly caused or at least, triggered, by a severe trauma to the head. We don’t know how or where this was sustained but it seems likely that Zachariah Penhaligon was injured while crewing at sea since he was wearing a ship’s safety harness and that he was subsequently lost overboard.

  ‘The skipper of this boat has never been traced, nor sought to report the loss of a crewman to the authorities and one can only speculate as to the reasons for such reticence. Given what I know and the mystery surrounding the exact circumstances of Zachariah Penhaligon’s death, I hereby record an Open Verdict.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Penhaligon you will now be able to obtain a death certificate for your son from the registrar. A small charge of £3.50 is payable. Thank you everyone for your attendance,’ said the Coroner rising to his feet.

  ‘Court rise,’ bawled the usher again.

  This time, John and Dan weren’t going to risk hanging about and getting trapped in their seats for a third inquest. As the extended Penhaligon family staggered, grieving, to their feet, they politely offered several ‘excuse me’s’ as they bundled Emma out.

  The Penhaligons noticed Emma’s distress and a woman who looked likely to be Zak’s mum thrust out a fat arm to her as she passed.

  ‘Thanks for coming luv,’ she said, dabbing her eyes with a soiled hanky. ‘Zak were always a one for the ladies, it be right nice that one of his fancy pieces could make it. He’d be made up that you came and ye havin’ yeself a good sob in his memory.’

  Emma nodded at her through her tears as John and Dan gently led her away. Louise followed behind looking puzzled. Whatever was going on? She couldn’t make head nor tail of it.

  ‘Come on Emma, let’s get out of here. Just hold it together until we’re clear of this place and we’ll all have a talk,’ whispered Dan in her ear. He was relieved when they got her outside the court precincts which bristled with police officers, lawyers and security staff, and where every wall had ears.

  ‘Let’s all go to the park,’ suggested Dan, trying to sound matter of fact, ‘and digest everything we have learned this morning.’

  ‘What we have learned,’ said Emma, in a tremulous whisper as they walked through the court car park, ‘is that I killed Zak. I murdered him, didn’t I?’

  CHAPTER 29

  ‘No Emma,’ said Dan sternly, a hard edge to his voice. ‘I don’t mean to snap at you but you must not say that. You wouldn’t be capable of such a thing, at least not on purpose. Now come on please, this is not the place for us to hold this conversation.’

  ‘Dan’s right, Emma,’ said John. ‘Let’s all walk to the park and find a bench to sit down on or tree to sit under and we’ll talk things through calmly.’

  The four of them trudged without further conversation to the park in St Perro. It was a warm October day and the great horse chestnut trees looked rather splendid in the sunshine, their leaves starting to turn slowly from green to yellow, orange and brown.

  ‘Let’s grab that bench,’ said Dan, pointing, ‘and we can talk things through.’

  Emma had managed to compose herself a little now, although her face looked pale and her eyes were puffy and bloodshot.

  ‘Actually, can we sit in a circle on the grass if it’s dry,’ said Emma. ‘That way we can look at each other properly as we talk.’

  ‘Yes fine,’ said Dan, and he shot an uncomfortable glance at John which Emma also noticed.

  ‘Ok,’ said Emma, slowly, as they spread their coats out under the horse chestnut. ‘Let’s talk about exactly what happened to Zak. Looking directly at Dan and John, she said, ‘I killed Zak – didn’t I? It was the whack on the head that I gave him. According to the pathologist, the trauma he suffered was likely to have been the fatal blow.’

  ‘Now Emma, be reasonable, you don’t know that,’ objected Louise, ‘and you can’t expect Dan and John to know either. That’s not exactly what either the pathologist or the Coroner said. They said the blow to the head might have been fatal, or it might have been sustained after he was swept into the sea from whatever boat he was on. But clearly, that wasn’t your doing since in order to have got on that boat, Zak must have picked himself up from the tunnel floor, rubbed his head, cursed a few times and then made off back down the tunnel the other way to the shore.r />
  ‘He was then fit and well enough to board a dodgy boat engaging in God knows what, drug smuggling probably,’ continued Louise, ‘and had some sort of accident out at sea. He falls into the water either already dead or unconscious and he drowns. That is clearly what happened.’

  Well done, thought John to himself, it almost sounds plausible. Emma might buy that.

  But Emma didn’t. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I simply don’t believe it. The forensic pathologist identified a single hard blow to the top of the skull, delivered with sufficient force that his skull caved in, causing severe brain injury. That must have been the blow that I inflicted, or there would have been two. I had no idea at the time that I’d caused such damage, but if I did then Zak would have been in no position to walk off rubbing his head and boarding a boat, would he? From what we know of his injuries, it sounds highly implausible that he could even have got up from the bottom of the shaft after he fell. So how come his body was found in the water, the other side of the bay?’

  No-one said anything. Louise couldn’t answer that and the two who could, John and Dan, were desperate to avoid doing so.

  Emma looked hard at them both. ‘Why aren’t those pair saying anything?’ she asked. ‘Why aren’t they jumping into this conversation right now and agreeing with you, Louise?’

  ‘John, Dan, tell Emma you know nothing about Zak’s death,’ said Louise, looking exasperated.

  The pair of them remained silent, not knowing what to say for the best or which tree to stare at next.

  ‘I want to know what you’re hiding,’ said Emma. ‘You both behaved very oddly in that inquest. Why, when the name Zachariah Penhaligon was read out, did you both stiffen up and look alarmed? Why did you fidget so uncomfortably during much of the hearing? And why did you exchange relieved glances with each other when the police officer said he thought it was just an accident and why John, did you mouth ‘thank God’ to Dan at that point?’

  ‘Oh come on, Emma, are you seriously suggesting that John and Dan killed Zak?’ asked Louise, horrified.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Emma. ‘But I have got a dreadful feeling that I did. And what’s more, John and Dan realised it, because they would have both seen Zak lying there in the tunnel. And . . .’, Emma paused, barely able to get the words out, her voice quavering, ‘and they must have decided to secretly dispose of the body.’

  ‘Then why would the police and the doctors have found a ship’s safety harness around Zak’s chest?’ objected Louise. ‘I don’t recall seeing him wear that when we crossed his path.’

  Emma fell silent, that didn’t make much sense either. It strongly reinforced the theory that Zak had been on board ship when he was injured. Could that be true? Oh if only.

  John and Dan looked at each other, trying to read each other’s minds as to what they should do next. They both knew that the moment had come either to step in with monstrous lies to throw Emma off the scent or to come clean. John was still trying to decide which way to leap on that when Dan spoke up, unable to deceive her any longer.

  ‘The safety harness around Zak’s chest came from the stores in the outbuilding,’ Dan said, quietly. ‘It probably belongs to your parents, Louise. Emma’s right, John and I realised that Zak was dead and we put the harness on him because it allowed us to winch his heavy body up the shaft and into the outbuilding. We would never have been able to lift him otherwise. It wasn’t done on purpose to make it look like he’d fallen overboard, that never occurred to us. But admittedly it subsequently proved useful that the police made that assumption. We carried him, wrapped in tarpaulin, to Louise’s boat. We then took the body out to the entrance to the caverns near the bay and rolled him into the sea. We brought the tarpaulin back and washed it in a rock pool.’

  Emma sobbed uncontrollably as Dan confessed. ‘Oh God, oh my God, it’s true then. I killed Zak. I killed him, I murdered him, I took away a father and mother’s beloved son. That woman, his mother I presume, who grabbed my arm at the end of the inquest and thanked me for coming and for the grief I showed, was unwittingly talking to her son’s murderer.’

  ‘Emma, listen to me,’ said Dan, looking at her earnestly. ‘You did not murder him, you must not use that word. Murder is to take someone’s life deliberately. You killed Zak accidentally in the most trying of circumstances.’

  ‘I still killed him though, I killed another human being,’ wailed Emma, refusing to be consoled.

  ‘Yes, but you were suffering the most enormous distress,’ said John, aware that it was time he said something. ‘You sincerely believed that the boyfriend you loved with all your heart had been stabbed to death by Zak – as we all did – and as he lifted himself out of the shaft with that cutlass held above his head you honestly thought that we would all be his next victims. You acted in legitimate self defence of your life and ours, with no intention of doing anything other than repelling him. No jury would find you guilty of murder or even manslaughter for that.’

  ‘Then if I had such a wonderfully strong case, why did you agree to move the body?’ said Emma, struggling hard to bring her emotions under control and to discuss things calmly. ‘I suppose you did it because you didn’t want such an inconvenient matter as a dead body hanging around a few yards away from the place where we had found the treasure.

  ‘You didn’t want us to be called to give evidence to two inquests, one after the other, the first into the treasure we had found and the second into the man we, or rather I, killed as we sought to guard it from him. We were like a pack of wolves.’

  Dan took her hand in his but she pushed it away angrily. ‘Emma, you can believe what you like, but the reason we decided to move the body was above all to protect you. To spare a sensitive, vulnerable, wonderful individual like you – who wouldn’t harm a hair on anyone’s heads – the ordeal of knowing what had actually happened and the possibility that you would unjustly get into serious trouble over it.’

  ‘I hurt a lot more than the hair on someone’s head, didn’t I?’ retorted Emma, furiously. ‘I literally smashed someone’s head in with a spade.’

  ‘But why should you suffer because of that miserable, gloating, greedy creep who not only wanted our treasure – and it is rightfully ours – but also tried to bribe Louise into having sex with both him and that sleazebag Jake?’ asked John. ‘As Dan has already said, you did what you did instinctively, to protect us all, out of fear for your life.’

  ‘Emma, we weren’t willing to let you face the invidious prospect of a police investigation, possible charges, and a trial for his murder or manslaughter,’ said Dan, looking her directly in the eyes. ‘Of course you almost certainly would have been acquitted at the end of it, but I did not want to see you put at risk of going through that with all the damage it could do to your university course and your future.

  ‘Zak brought his death on himself and while nobody would have wished it on him, that’s the case. But Emma you did not deserve to be dragged through the courts over it and I swear on anything you like that I acted as I did in helping John because I love you with all my heart and I did not want you to suffer. And John felt the same way.’

  Emma looked at him stony-faced and then turned her attention to John. ‘Is that right John, were your motives purely about looking after my best interests?’ she asked him.

  ‘Yes to a large extent because we are all very fond of you Emma – Louise and I both adore you, you know that. But yes, I’ll admit I was also worried that our title to the value of the treasure would have been compromised if criminal proceedings had arisen.’

  Emma nodded. They were both being frank with her, it would appear. Dan had clearly acted out of love and devotion and John also, but to a lesser extent and with an eye firmly on the treasure, although that was understandable. But either way in her mind, it didn’t change anything.

  ‘I still killed Zak, and now by being party to a cover-up, I am committing a further serious and jailable offence – attempting to pervert the course of
justice,’ she said. ‘I am also denying his family the right to know the truth about their son’s death and turning a blind eye to the fact that I now know that crucial information was not available to either the police or the Coroner.’

  ‘It’s the right decision though Emma, given the circumstances,’ said Louise.

  ‘I haven’t made a decision!’ shouted Emma at her, coldly and furiously. ‘And you are not going to tell me how to think or what to do, Louise. I cannot leave things as they are, it is immoral and I am an honest and decent person – well, I thought I was. I feel I must tell the police what has happened and put myself at their mercy. It is my Christian duty.’

  ‘Look Emma,’ said Louise, not knowing when to shut up. ‘All this is very noble but in a sense you ought to be thanking John and Dan, not making them out to be some sort of villains. They risked their own skin to save yours and if you go and fall on your sword on this matter to salve your own conscience, you take other innocents down with you. For their sake, please don’t take this any further – they don’t deserve it after all they’ve done to try and help you.’

  Emma’s eyes blazed. ‘What did you say?’ she snarled at Louise, her voice icy and harsh. ‘Did you just use the word “innocent” then? Did you really say that I will “take other innocents” down with me? They aren’t even remotely innocent, nor am I and, I’ll tell you this Louise, nor are you. You yourself are now complicit in the crime of perverting the course of justice by actively seeking to dissuade me from doing the honourable thing.’

  ‘Yes Louise, keep out of it,’ snapped Dan at her, his usually soft grey eyes hardening. ‘I will not have you emotionally blackmailing Emma. Can’t you see how distressed she is?’

  ‘In fairness to Louise,’ said John, ‘she is simply trying to protect us now, as we tried to protect Emma. The ones in line to face criminal trial and forfeit their right to the treasure are the three of us,’ he said, pointing to himself, Dan and Emma. ‘Louise has done nothing wrong. She might well even be declared sole beneficiary and inherit every penny. So don’t accuse her of acting out of self interest.’