Malice in Cornwall Page 2
Rashid beamed happily. “Now. then, I will go and personally prepare your dinner.”
Powell demolished another pappadam and spent the next few minutes happily anticipating the gastronomic delights to come. Vegetable samosas to start: triangular pastries stuffed with mixed vegetables and lentils, deep-fried crisp and served with coconut chutney. And then the main course: karai gosht, tender pieces of lamb cooked quickly in an Indian wok with slivers of onions, fresh garlic and ginger, dried red chilies and green pepper; a side dish of bhindi: okra sauteed with onions and tomato, and flavored with cumin and coriander; basmati rice fragrant with aromatic spices and golden saffron; a small dish of spicy lime pickle; and last but not least a fluffy naan as big as an elephant's ear baked in the cylindrical clay tandoor. And then, to complete this veritable orgasm of the taste buds, a dessert created by Rashid in Powell's honor—Murder by Mango—a slab of mango ice cream splattered with raspberry coulis, the lot washed down with several cups of strong coffee. Then stagger home, burping richly. All things considered, Powell thought expansively, life didn't seem so bad from the cloistered perspective of the K2 Tandoori.
At nine-thirty the next morning Powell was at Paddington Station waiting for Detective-Sergeant Black to put in an appearance. He had arrived early and sat at a tiny coffee bar near the edge of the throng under the great curved roof of glass and wrought iron. The InterCity to Penzance, the train being rather ambitiously christened “The Cornish Riviera,” didn't depart until ten thirty-five, and he was content to smoke and sip his coffee and watch the world pass by. The world that morning seemed to consist mostly of cheerful young women, casual in jumpers and skirts, with calf muscles knotting determinedly as they hurried to and from their trains. He tried to remember what it was like at that age, young hearts full of hope and tenderness. Little did they know. Not that he was completely immune to such romantic afflictions himself. It was rather like a glimpse through the rearview mirror of some half-forgotten landmark on the winding road that descends to the cemetery. He smiled faintly. It could be worse, he supposed.
He thought about the day last week when Marion and the boys left for Canada. A rare sunny morning of spring and she woke him early to make love. It had been like that lately, after not having done it for weeks. Never rains but it pours. It was always better between them afterward, and he wondered idly if sex wasn't a bit like electro-convulsive therapy. Soothes the savage breast. Grrr.
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Er, yes, miss. Another coffee, please, and, oh, yes, you'd better bring another cup. I'm expecting someone.”
The waitress returned with the coffee, watching Powell from the side of her eye as she poured. They got all kinds in here, but not many like him. With his posh accent and just that hint of something in his eyes, she wondered if he was an artist of some sort, or perhaps an actor. Tall and dark with just a bit of gray to make him look distinguished, like. Now that she thought about it, he did look a bit like Alan Bates. She wondered if he was expecting a man or a woman. A woman probably, someone cool and sexy—being something of a film buff, she pondered for a moment—someone like Sharon Stone. If she was disappointed a few minutes later when a stocky, balding man walked in and squeezed onto the stool beside Alan Bates, she gave no sign of it.
“Morning, Mr. Powell.”
“Good morning, Bill. Raring to go?”
“It sounds interesting enough, sir.”
“Oh, I don't know. A creature resembling the hound of the Baskervilles running amok in a quaint Cornish fishing village. Should be a piece of cake.”
Black grinned. “How did we get pulled into it?”
Powell drew on his cigarette. “Evidently the local chief constable is under a bit of a cloud at the moment. Something about unnatural couplings with farm animals.”
Detective-Sergeant Black frowned disapprovingly.
“The superintendent in Camborne is an old chum of mine,” Powell continued. “Things are rather in disarray out there, as you can imagine, and they are tending to view this Riddle of Penrick business as more of a distraction than anything else. They've been taking a lot of flack from the press and are anxious to have the matter cleared up before the tourist season gets into full swing. One of the tabloids even had the cheek to suggest that the chief constable, being a dab hand with beasts, ought to take the case up himself. All things considered, they thought it best to bring in someone from outside, although it's not at all clear any crime's been committed.”
Black grunted neutrally, seemingly lost in thought. Suddenly he brightened. “A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame.”
Powell looked up, startled. “What did you say?”
“‘The Hound of the Baskervilles,’ sir.”
Powell eyed his companion closely. “Very apt.” Black was renowned at the Yard for his phenomenal memory, but impromptu literary quotations were rather out of character. Nonetheless, Powell was impressed.
Black looked pleased with himself.
Powell checked his watch. “Is that the time? We'd better take our seats.”
Roger Trevenney stared out the window of his cottage. There was a red crabber off Towey Head, making for St. Ives like a spot of blood on the blue-green swell. A luminous mist had settled over the Head, whose dark shape seemed to float insubstantially between sea and sky in a hazy continuum of light. He had been sick again that morning and the headaches were getting worse, almost unbearable at times. He longed only to see the heavenly hosts praising the loving God and to be with Ruth and Millie at last. It wouldn't be long now, he knew. Only one more thing to do. the culmination of the lonely years, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, his holy mantra. And yet, as he neared the end there had been moments when his bitter resolve faltered, when the world around him seemed illuminated with a significance that he was only now beginning to grasp. When even the air itself was suffused with a pearly light, like a translucent curtain hanging between him and the final revelation. It had been the light that first inspired his modest efforts as a watercolorist, and while he needed to paint now more than ever to give life to his vision, his body had betrayed him.
Trevenney closed his eyes. He could see Ruth again, white spring frock dazzling in the sunlight, picking bluebells in the meadow above the sea cliffs. He remembered the picnic lunches by the secret tilted stones they had discovered together, blue sea below and yellow explosions of gorse all around them. He busy at his easel and Ruth writing in her diary.
Then he remembered the time she had been searching for shells on the sliver of beach below the cottage and found a Clathrus, its shell intricately carved into exquisite whorls and ridges, a larger, more colorful specimen than he had ever seen before. She had run up breathless to the cottage to show him, and then, fancying it a visitor from some tropical shore, had put it back into the sea. And the good-humored sparkle in her eyes when she had critiqued her father's paintings those many years ago. He wiped away a burning tear. God, how he missed her! So much like her mother and yet so different. The miracle of creation incarnate, her whole life ahead of her like a silver path of moonlight on the water… He slammed his fist down on the table.
Now it was starting all over again. He searched the window glass as if it were a mirror. The mist had thickened, obscuring Towey Head from view. He cradled his head in his hands and wept soundlessly.
CHAPTER 2
Detective-Sergeant Black turned right off the B3300 just before Portreath onto the minor road that led to Penrick and to Porthtowan beyond. Powell interrupted his travelogue momentarily to lower the passenger-side window. He took a deep breath. The air was bracing with the faint but unmistakable astringency of the sea. He lit a cigarette. The road undulated over scrubby fields punctuated by occasional roofless engine houses with crumbling chimneys, abandoned mines with names like Whea
l Faith and Wheal Bounty. Stark reminders of the Duchy's past riches.
“It's amazing to think that Bronze Age men were streaming and smelting tin here three thousand years ago” Powell remarked.
Black grunted with apparent interest. “You seem to know a lot about Cornwall, sir.”
“During my annual summer pilgrimages to Bude with Marion and the boys I've found ample opportunity to dabble in the local history. I'm not much of a beach person, I'd rather be poking around some old ruins.”
“I'm the same way, sir.”
“By the way, what did you think of our session with the locals yesterday?” After arriving in Camborne they'd spent the previous afternoon being briefed by the local superintendent.
“Well, sir, I get the impression they're not exactly thrilled about our being here.”
Powell smiled. “Superintendent Harrison and I go back a long way. It's only natural to protect one's turf, of course, but I suspect he's secretly relieved to get the file off his desk. And he was good enough to loan us a car.”
“They seem to think it's a fairly routine job.”
“Perhaps. But I have a hunch there may be more to it than meets the eye; I'm hoping that Chief Inspector Butts in St. Ives will be able to fill in some of the blanks. All, no doubt, will be revealed in the fullness of time.”
The road began to rise slightly, then dipped abruptly into the grassy valley of the River Teal.
“Wasn't it Chesterton who wrote that the rolling English road was made by the rolling English drunk?” Black observed casually.
“Something like that.” Once again Powell was taken aback. It seemed there was indeed another side to his old colleague that he had hitherto not recognized.
As they descended, the valley gradually narrowed to a steep ravine with small white and cream houses clinging to its sides above a burbling stream, the roadside ditches alight with yellow primroses. After a few hundred yards the valley opened up again to reveal a fetching prospect, a fine stone church with the sparkling blue sea as a backdrop. Having delved into his collection of travel guides before leaving home, Powell knew that the church had been built in the fourteenth century and dedicated to St. Penrick, who had arrived at the estuary of the River Teal in a coracle from Ireland in the sixth century. His was a grimly ascetic order who, amongst their many rituals of spiritual purification, would stand immersed to their necks in ice-cold water amidst the granite megaliths erected by the ancestors of their newfound congregation, reciting psalters and praying for the conversion of the heathen. Powell supposed that the current vicar, in his own way, still labored in the same fields.
“Pull over here,” he directed.
The churchyard afforded a fine view of the village below and the surrounding stretch of coastline. A stone bridge crossed the stream at the foot of the steep hill below the church. A mile-long arc of tawny sand confined by two steep promontories—the larger, Towey Head, to the southwest—encircling the bay like two claws. The narrow river channel marked by straggling poles, a few brightly painted fishing boats propped up on the sand waiting for high tide, and color-washed cottages piled tier upon tier up the hillside, with the church set like a beacon on top. A spiritual lighthouse for the lost souls of Penrick.
“Lovely,” remarked Detective-Sergeant Black, who was not usually given to such outbursts.
Powell could only assume that his companion was at a loss for a suitable quotation, so he stepped into the breach:
“Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee;
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters wasted them while they were free …”
Without missing a beat, Black continued solemnly:
“Unchangeable save to the wild waves' play,
Time writes no wrinkles on thine azure brow;
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.”
Then he smiled equably. “I quite like Lord Byron.”
Any lingering suspicion that Sergeant Black was a mere literary dilettante was dispelled once and for all. Powell's casual serve had been expertly returned; he realized he would have to place his shots more carefully in the future. “We'd better get settled in,” he said. “I understand our accommodation comes highly commended by Butts.”
Amongst the cottages ran a maze of streets and alleys barely wide enough for a car, but Black eventually negotiated a route down to the water's edge. Powell experienced a sinking feeling as a closer inspection revealed that the village center consisted of a few unremarkable shops and guesthouses clustered around the tiny harbor. More promising was a plain but elegant Georgian pub, the Head, which was painted, appropriately enough, pink. There were a few people strolling along the front, taking the morning air.
They soon located the Wrecker's Rest Guesthouse, the premises of George and Agnes Polfrock, straight out of Fawlty bloody Towers, as Detective-Sergeant Black was later to remark in the Head over a pint. The best thing that could be said for the Wrecker's Rest was that it had come recommended by Chief Inspector Butts, but this turned out to be a dubious distinction indeed. Powell had to admit that its whitewashed facade with flower boxes and mullioned windows looking out over the quay, cluttered with lobster traps and crab pots, the sweep of yellow sand and the wide blue Atlantic beyond, possessed a certain superficial charm—picturesque chic was the expression that came to mind. However this notion was quickly dispelled by the pervasive aura of the proprietors, which permeated the premises like a pungent odor.
“Ooo, Chief Superintendent Powell! It isn't often we have guests from Scotland Yard,” Mrs. Polfrock gushed. She was a squarish, lumpy woman with improbable red hair. “And this must be …”
“Detective-Sergeant Black, madam,” Black volunteered.
“Yes, of course. We've prepared the Smuggler's Suite for you, Chief Superintendent, commanding a fine view of the Sands and Towey Head. And Sergeant, er, I'm sorry …”
“Black, madam,” Black prompted between clenched teeth.
“Yes, of course. We've put you in the back. Now if you'll just sign the guest registry I'll have my husband, George, show you to your rooms. Buttie didn't say how long you would be staying,” she added, as if by way of casual chitchat.
Powell cocked an eyebrow. “Buttie?”
“Alf Butts, my brother-in-law.”
“Chief Inspector Butts, oh I see!” Powell was beginning to wonder if their being maneuvered to the Wrecker's Rest was simple nepotism or Buttie putting the boot in for being muscled off his turf.
Mrs. Polfrock clucked disapprovingly. “All this publicity is bad for business, although I don't believe a word of it myself, and even Buttie says it's a load of codswallop. Don't you agree, Chief Superintendent?”
“That's what we're here to find out, Mrs. Polfrock.”
She smiled fixedly, her mouth a thick red smudge of lipstick. Then without warning she let out a bellow. “George!”
Powell swore he could feel the roof slates rattle.
George Polfrock came scurrying, a little man much smaller than his wife, balding, with nervous, darting eyes. “Yes, my sweet,” he panted, catching his breath and sizing up his new guests. He reminded one of a Pekingese, eager for a treat.
“Show Chief Superintendent Powell and, er, the sergeant to their rooms.” It was clearly an order, not a request. “By the way, will you gentlemen be taking lunch?”
“I think not, Mrs. Polfrock. Thanks all the same. We had a late breakfast in Camborae and we're anxious to get started.”
Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “As you like, but please remember that I require at least four hours' notice to reserve a place for lunch and the evening meal.”
“We'll bear that in mind, Mrs. Polfrock. Do you get many guests this time of year?” Powell inquired innocently.
A grudging shrug. “Besides you two, there's just that person from the press.” She looked as if she had just swallowed something nasty. “But in a month's time we'll be full up right through the season.”
Powell picked up his suitcase. “Splendid. Lead the way. Mr. Polfrock.”
Fifteen minutes later Powell and Black fled the
Wrecker's Rest and made a beeline for the pub.
“Bloody charming,” Black said as he tucked into his fish and chips.
They had the place to themselves and Powell, having reluctantly eschewed a selection from the surprisingly extensive wine list, savored his first pint of Cornish bitter since the previous summer. He smacked his lips appreciatively. “Ah, well, I trust we won't be spending too many cozy evenings with our hosts gathered together around the hearth.” He poked at his ploughman's. “Still, Butts has got a nerve, don't you think? Although he probably didn't have much choice, considering—”
He was interrupted by the publican, who had come over to introduce himself. Tall and wide and beginning to bulge in the wrong places, the man looked like a rugby player gone to seed.
“Tony Rowlands at your service,” he said heartily. “Is everything all right?”
“Excellent, thank you.” Powell introduced Black and himself. “Very nice place you have here.” Always wise to open with a platitude.
Rowlands smiled. “We try to add a little class to the neighborhood. I've lived here for over thirty years and I'm still working at it.” He pulled up a chair and sat down. “Just passing through?”
“We're staying at the Wrecker's Rest for a few days.”
Rowlands smirked. “There's an odd couple if ever there was one. She's a horrible old shrew and he's a raving pervert. Spies on the young girls at Mawgawan Beach with a telescope.”
Powell wasn't quite sure whether he found this display of candor refreshing or slightly off-putting. More the former, he decided, as it confirmed his own first impression of the Polfrocks.