The Fethering Mysteries 08; Death under the Dryer tfm-8

by Simon Brett

  “I mean, Gulliver’s definitely going to need a long walk.”

  “Yes, and in these wonderful surroundings it would be madness for us not to go for a long walk.”

  “On the other hand…” Carole lowered her voice histrionically, “…what are we going to do about…the case?”

  “Well, anything we are going to do about the case…” Jude echoed the drama of Carole’s diction, “…is going to involve getting inside Cottage Number One. And we can either do that when Mopsa is there, which is going to set every alarm bell in the world ringing, or…we wait till she’s gone out and see if we can get in then.”

  “So that means we have to watch her front door all day until she goes out.”

  “It might not be all day.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, she might go out early.”

  “Really, Jude, I don’t think you’re taking this seriously.”

  “No. Sorry. I am really. Promise.”

  “Huh.”

  “Of course, there is another way of discovering when Mopsa’s going out.”

  “Which is?”

  “We could ask her.”

  “What!”

  Jude was only away a few minutes. Carole was washing up their breakfast things when she returned, humming. “Mopsa’s going out to the shops at about eleven.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Like I said I was going to, I asked her.”

  “But didn’t she think it was odd?”

  “No, of course she didn’t. She has no suspicion of us. She just thinks we’re a pair of punters who are – thank God – paying some rental money at the end of what’s been a very bad season.”

  “So what did you say?”

  “I said: ‘Are you by any chance going to the shops because if you are would you mind getting a few things for us?’”

  “What things?”

  “Oh, I thought of some stuff. Muesli, yoghurt.”

  I might have known it wouldn’t have been anything useful like bacon and eggs, thought Carole.

  “And Mopsa said that was fine. And I gave her some cash, and she’s going to give me some change. It wasn’t very difficult.”

  “And did she say where she was going shopping? Because that’ll give us an idea of how long she’s likely to be away.”

  “Yes. Like the man with seven wives, she’s actually going to St Ives.”

  “Must be half an hour each way.”

  “At least.”

  “Give her half an hour for shopping…we’ve got at least an hour and a half to investigate the cottage…assuming, that is, that we can get in.” Carole looked at her watch. “So what do we do in the meantime?”

  “We do exactly what two mature ladies with a dog would do if they were staying in a rented cottage in Cornwall. We go for a walk along the cliffs. But before we do that…” Jude held out her mobile, “…you ring Stephen. Then you can relax properly into a day’s sleuthing.”

  Carole did as she was told. Anxiety about what was happening in a London hospital was a constant background to all her other feelings. Her son sounded less tired and stressed than he had on their previous call. Gaby was getting very bored lying on her back all day. She just wanted the bloody baby to arrive, so that she could get on with her life. Stephen thought this bolshieness was a good sign.

  Carole was deeply sceptical about Gaby’s idea that the baby’s arrival would allow her to get on with her life, but she didn’t say anything. Every woman had to come to terms in her own way with the inevitable disruptions that motherhood would bring.

  Still, she felt cheered by the call, and did give Stephen Jude’s mobile number to use if there were any further developments.

  ♦

  The clifftop walk brought Gulliver to an eighth heaven, beyond all his previous doggy imaginings.

  And they timed their return to perfection. Just as Treboddick came into view round a curve of the cliff path, they saw the ancient Datsun leave the parking space and set off inland. Soon it was out of sight over the brow of the hill. Mopsa had gone on her shopping errand.

  “Oh dear,” said Carole. “I should have asked her to get something for me too.”

  “What?”

  “A Times. Somehow I never feel complete if I haven’t got a crossword to do.”

  “Don’t worry. Maybe there’ll be other clues for you to solve right here. After all, you were the one who worked out that ‘Biddet Rock’ was an anagram of ‘Treboddick’.”

  “That’s true,” said Carole. And she felt a warm glow.

  ♦

  When they got back to their cottage, Gulliver was locked in. He let out one feeble bark of protest, and then settled down comfortably to dream of all the exotic sights he had seen and smells he had smelled. Fethering Beach may have been seaside, but it wasn’t seaside on the scale that Cornwall was.

  “How’re we going to get in?” whispered Carole out of the side of her mouth as they walked across to Cottage Number One. Although there was no one in sight, she felt as though an entire battery of surveillance cameras was focused on her every move.

  “Well, first we’ll see whether Mopsa locked up or not.”

  “Oh, come on. She must have done.”

  “I don’t know. Everything down here seems pretty laid back. There’s nobody about, and Mopsa doesn’t seem to be the most diligent of guardians. It’s quite possible she’s left the cottage open.”

  “I’d doubt it. But, anyway, Jude, I’m not sure that we should be looking at the cottage.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, you said when Chloe was playing the role of Prince Fimbador, she talked about the Wheel Path…and we thought that was something to do with wheels that go round, but now we know that it was a ‘wheal’ as in Cornish tin mine. So shouldn’t we look at what’s left of Wheal Loveday first.”

  “Good idea.”

  Their search didn’t take long. In the bottom of the ruined pump house and round about there were a few old shafts, but all of them had been blocked up to the surface with stones and rubble. Grass had grown over some, so that they were little more than indentations in the hillside. The fact that there were no protective railings around them meant that they must be safely sealed. They offered no possible access to the tunnels below.

  “That was worth trying, but I’ve a feeling what we’re looking for has to be in the cottage.”

  Carole nodded, still feeling the scrutiny of a thousand unseen cameras as they moved towards the door. Jude’s fantasy that Mopsa might have left it unlocked turned out to be exactly that, a fantasy. But the girl’s burglar-deterrent system proved not to be very sophisticated. They didn’t have to lift many of the potted plants around the front door before they found what they were looking for.

  “I wonder,” mused Jude as she lifted it up, “whether this is the Key of Clove’s Halo…?”

  “Looks more like a Yale to me,” said Carole sniffily. She was feeling a prickling at the back of her neck at the illegality of what she was doing, and this intensified as they went inside the cottage.

  “Quick tour, looking for obvious hiding places,” said Jude. “You do downstairs, I’ll do up.”

  But they both looked crestfallen when they met again at the foot of the stairs. Every available door and cupboard had been opened. Not only had they not found anyone, they hadn’t even found a space big enough for anyone to hide in.

  Carole looked nervously at her watch. “Nearly forty minutes gone, from the time Mopsa drove off. What do we do now?”

  “Well, if there is a secret entrance…the Face-Peril Gate…we haven’t found it. Come on, you’re more logical than I am. Tell me what I should be thinking.”

  Carole was touched by the compliment – though she thought it no more than an accurate assessment of her character – and concentrated hard to come up with something that would justify it. “Presumably what we’re looking for is a hiding place that has something to do with the mine workings. The Wheal Path…that�
�s where Prince Fimbador was going to hide…”

  “Right.”

  “So logically we should be concentrating on the side of the cottage that is nearest to the ruins of the mine buildings.”

  “I like it. This is good.”

  “Maybe there’s some secret entrance in the new extension…though I think that’s unlikely…It looks like it was built in the last twenty years, and I’m not sure how many modern builders are up for making secret passages.”

  “Something in the older part would also make more sense, because it might have some connection with smuggling. Most of the secret passages and hidey-holes around here would have been built for hiding contraband goods.”

  “Good point. So if it’s not in the extension…” Carole moved through as she spoke, “…the place which is closest to the mine workings is the kitchen…” Jude followed her in, “…and this one must be the closest wall?”

  They both looked at it. There was a door to a larder, but Carole had already checked that. Otherwise, it was just a stone wall that could have done with another coat of whitewash, about a third of whose width was taken up by a deeply recessed fireplace. The floor was stone-flagged, and the individual slabs looked too heavy to hide any cunning trapdoors.

  “There’s something here, there’s something here…I can feel it.”

  “Oh, Jude, you’re not about to tell me the place has an aura, are you?”

  “No, I know you too well to bother saying that. Mind you, it does have an aura.”

  “Huh.” Carole sat defeatedly on a kitchen chair and fiddled with a pencil and piece of paper that lay on the table. “If only…if only…” A thought came to her. “Just a minute…”

  “What?”

  “Well, look, I got the ‘Biddet Rock’ anagram because the words looked funny. That’s how you usually spot anagrams in crosswords. The words don’t look quite right – or their juxtaposition doesn’t, so you start playing with them. Yes, I think whoever invented ‘The Wheal Game’ likes anagrams. ‘Biddet Rock’ sounds and looks funny…Good God, so does ‘Face-Peril Gate’!”

  Carole scribbled out the letters in a circle, the first two opposite and the others next, going round clockwise in turn. It was the way her father had done anagrams for his crosswords and one of the very few things that he had passed on to his daughter. She looked at the ring of letters and narrowed her eyes, hoping that the solution would leap out at her.

  “No, it won’t come. I can get ‘place’ out of it.”

  “Well, that’s good, isn’t it? We’re looking for a place, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, but then the rest of the letters…it doesn’t leap out at me.”

  “Well, maybe there are too many letters? Maybe you shouldn’t be using all of them?”

  “That’s not how anagrams work, Jude. You’ve got to use all the letters, otherwise…Oh, my God…” Carole’s jaw dropped as she moved forward to the paper. “You’re right. Forget the ‘Gate’. Just concentrate on ‘Face-Peril’…which is an anagram of…‘fireplace’!”

  They both turned to look at the shadowed space, blackened by centuries of cooking and heating. Jude moved excitedly forward, saying, “And Mopsa had a streak of soot on her hand! There must be something here!”

  Close to, there were definitely vertical lines either side to the grate, lines that could be the outline of a door. And the soot had been worn thin along the lines, as though the edge had been moved quite recently.

  “It’s here! It’s here! This is the Face-Peril Gate. But how on earth do we open it?”

  “Is there a keyhole?”

  Jude, oblivious to the soot that was smearing her hands and clothes, scrabbled away at the back of the fireplace. Her fingers found a narrow slot. “Yes, yes, there is! But what do we use to open it?”

  “Presumably,” said Carole, “we use the Key of Clove’s Halo.”

  “And what the hell is that?”

  This one came easily. “Forget the ‘Key’. And the ‘of’. Is there a ‘Coal Shovel’ anywhere, Jude?”

  There was. An ancient implement, rather too narrow to be practical for lifting much coal. The scoop was curved and thin, more like a garden tool for cutting plant-holes than a coal shovel. It was black, except where, abraded by familiar grooves, the dull original metal shone through.

  “I’ll see if it fits,” said Jude. “I’m so filthy already, a little more soot’s not going to make any difference.”

  The end of the coal shovel slipped into its predestined slot with the ease of long practice. Tentatively, anticipating resistance, Jude turned the handle to the right. But no resistance came. The smugglers of the nineteenth century had known their craft. The key turned.

  Cunningly counter-weighted so as to move as lightly as a cupboard door in a designer kitchen, the great plate of soot-covered steel gave way, moving almost soundlessly on rollers, to reveal a set of stone steps leading down into the void.

  ∨ Death under the Dryer ∧

  Twenty-Seven

  Both knew they should have made some kind of plan, but they hadn’t. After all, if their surmise was correct, they were about to confront a young man who might well be a murderer. Having guarded his privacy so fiercely for three weeks, how was he likely to react to the discovery of his hideaway? If he had already killed Kyra Bartos, would he be worried about the killing of two inquisitive middle-aged women, so long as it kept him safe from the attentions of the police?

  The opening of the door at the back of the fireplace, though quiet, had not been entirely silent. It was a sound their quarry would know well. Mopsa had quite possibly told him that she was going out, so he would know they were intruders. The welcome he was preparing for them could be ugly.

  And yet still neither of them said anything. Instinctively, Jude drew back and let Carole lead the way. They didn’t even look around for a torch. From whatever was at the bottom of the steps a thin light flowed.

  They had not defined in their minds what they were expecting to see, but neither had anticipated the bright airy space they stepped into. The light was natural, sunlight streaming in individual, focused beams through narrow fissures in the natural rock of the walls. These openings, created by the erosion of the exterior cliff face, were too high up the walls to offer any hope of escape. But the chamber their light illuminated was not the primitive cave Carole and Jude’s imaginations had suggested. It appeared to be a section of a circular vertical mineshaft, some twenty feet across, which would have reached the surface right next door to the Lockes’ cottage. But, many years before, the space had been separated off by a wooden floor and ceiling to form the hidden room. The carpentry had not been professional, there was a rough-hewn quality to everything. But it looked sturdy and secure. The smugglers of Treboddick had known what they were doing when they constructed the Wheal Chamber.

  These were the peripheral impressions of a nanosecond, because what arrested the attention of both women was the figure sitting at a table facing the sea. They had seen the family photographs and had no doubt that it was Nathan Locke.

  The shock they both felt, though, arose from their assumption that he had hidden away of his own accord. They hadn’t expected the chain from an iron ring on the wall which was attached to the boy’s ankle.

  ∨ Death under the Dryer ∧

  Twenty-Eight

  Whoever Nathan Locke had expected to come down the stairs into his lair, it wasn’t a pair of middle-aged women. He looked at them in frank amazement. But rather than reacting with violence, he remained seated and asked politely, “I’m sorry, but who are you…?”

  No time for aliases now. “My name’s Carole Seddon. This is my friend Jude.”

  The blankness on the boy’s face told that he had never heard of either of them.

  “And what are you doing here? Are you from the police?” His natural good manners couldn’t completely exclude a note of disbelief from the question. He looked scruffy, a wispy three-week growth of beard around his chin, but not as though he h
ad been maltreated.

  “No, we’re nothing to do with the police. You don’t need to be frightened. You’re quite safe with us.”

  He let out a bitter laugh. “I think I might be safer with the police than I am here.” He gestured to the chain on his ankle. It gave them a moment to take in the space in which he was incarcerated. There were loaded bookshelves, a cassette player, even an ancient-looking television. Jutting out from one wall was a shed-like structure with two doors, possibly leading to a kitchen and bathroom. The area had more qualities of a furnished flat than a prison.

  Jude moved forward alongside Carole. “Listen, Nathan, we know who you are and we know why you’re here.”

  “Oh, do you? I sometimes wish I did.”

  “It’s in connection with the death of Kyra Bartos.”

  The name hit him like a slap. His lip trembled and tears glinted in his eyes. At that moment he looked less than his sixteen years. “Kyra? What do you know about Kyra?”

  “That she’s dead.”

  “And that I killed her? Do you know that? Just like everyone else who seems to be so sure of it?”

  “We don’t know that. But we’d like to talk to you about it.”

  “Would you? Well, there’s a novelty.” The bitterness was back in his voice. He still wasn’t being overtly rude to them, but there was in his voice a deep weary negativity, an acceptance that he had entered a world in which normal logic did not operate.

  “A novelty, why? Because nobody else wants to talk to you?”

  “Nobody else wants to talk except to give me orders. No one wants to listen to what I have to say.”

  “We’d very much like to hear what you have to say.”

  He was tempted by the sincerity in Jude’s voice, but his scepticism remained. “Oh yes?”

  Carole decided it was her turn. Jude had been trying the good cop approach, without marked success. Maybe something harder might be more effective.