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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781448300983 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Severn House Publishers |
| Publication date: | 08/12/2013 |
| Series: | A Dorothy Martin Mystery , #7 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Sales rank: | 546,796 |
| File size: | 319 KB |
About the Author
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To Perish in Penzance
A Dorothy Martin Mystery
By Jeanne M. Dams
Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 2001 Jeanne M. DamsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4483-0098-3
CHAPTER 1
September in England can be quite a lovely time of the year. The roses pretend that June is only just past, the trees cling to their green summer drapery, the flower beds delight both eye and nose with their extravagant profusion. Days have grown a bit shorter, true, but twilight lingers long in sweet, gentle melancholy, and when night comes, the air is still soft.
On the other hand ...
"If it rains for another five minutes, I am going to go stark, raving mad!" I threw my book on the couch beside me, startling Esmeralda, my British blue, out of my lap. She skittered over to the hearth rug where Samantha lay dozing and cuffed her on the ear. Samantha, who is half Siamese, uttered sounds indicating she was being killed (diva fashion, dying on a high E-flat) and joined battle.
"Ah," said Alan placidly, shifting in his easy chair and turning a page of the Evening Standard. "In that case, I'd best ring up the asylum and arrange for you to be admitted straightaway. The Standard says rain for the next four days at least."
"Alan, for pity's sake put down that paper and talk to me. Quite honestly, if I sit here any longer listening to that miserable rain, I'm going to lose my temper. Enough is enough, and a week of steady rain is far too much. I'm going stir-crazy."
"Anything you say, my love. What would you like to talk about?"
There are certain characteristics that even the best of men share with their less pleasant brothers. They won't ask directions, they can walk right past a mess without seeing it, much less cleaning it up, and they don't understand that talk needn't be about anything.
One must make allowances. I sighed and pointed to the Standard. "Isn't there anything interesting in the paper?"
"I haven't finished reading it," he said pointedly. "Nothing in particular has struck me thus far. Politics and scandal and crime — the mixture as before."
"Crime. Now, there's a subject that ought to pique your interest."
For Alan, before he retired, was a policeman, and an exalted one — chief constable for the county of Belleshire, in southeast England. The story of how I, Dorothy Martin, an American widow, came to live in Sherebury, Belleshire's principal town, and meet and marry the widowed Alan Nesbitt, is a long and absorbing one, at least to me. But since Alan and I both knew it, it wasn't good conversational material. Crime was much more promising.
"Not the sort of crime in tonight's paper." He slapped it in disgust. Sam instantly abandoned her mortal battle with Emmy and jumped on the nice rattly paper. Alan stroked her absentmindedly. "An old lady's handbag was stolen in Canterbury, actually in the cathedral, which I suppose is a piquant touch. Football louts are at it again in Liverpool. Some poor soul jumped off Tower Bridge. They think he'll survive, by the way, if he doesn't die from the germs he swallowed along with several pints of the Thames."
"No juicy murders?"
Alan moved his hand in a dismissive gesture; Sam attacked it. "Now, now, madam! Sheathe those claws, if you please. One murder in London. Domestic. A drunken brawl. Man who'd been beating his wife for years finally killed her. Disgusting, horrifying, but not what I'd call interesting."
"No." I shivered. Alan dumped Sam out of his lap and got up to put another log on the fire, but my cold was internal and not so easily warmed. "What a lot of pain there is in the world, Alan."
"Pain and evil. It isn't fashionable these days to talk of evil as a noun, an entity, but it exists. Lord knows I've seen enough of it in my time." He poked the fire expertly and then came to sit by me, draping one long arm across my shoulders. "We're very lucky, my dear."
I snuggled nearer to his comforting bulk. "We are, indeed. I can't even begin to imagine what you must have had to deal with in your career. We've never talked about it much."
"Most of it doesn't make good listening. A policeman's lot is not a fascinating one. Long stretches of boredom alternate with short stretches of horror. Neither aspect is dinner-table conversation. Speaking of which, are we going to eat at some time in the near future? You may not be hungry, but the cats and I could both do with some sustenance."
I heated up some stew while Alan fed our two little tyrants, and we settled down to a homely but satisfying meal in our warm, cozy kitchen. As we were polishing off the last of the apple crisp, I broached the subject again.
"Alan, I'd be interested in your stories — if you don't mind talking about them, of course. I know you loved your job. There must have been at least a few interesting cases in — what, forty years?"
"About that." He stirred his coffee, staring at the Aga. I knew he was seeing, not a stove, but a life.
"I joined the force in the late fifties." He sat back and tented his hands, fingertips pressing to fingertips. It was his narrative pose. I sipped my coffee and prepared to listen.
"I lived in Cornwall then. I've told you that, haven't I? My father was a fisherman. I was brought up in Newlyn, where fish and crabs are the main source of income, and I suppose the smell of fish is one of my earliest memories. My mother couldn't get it out of Dad's clothes, no matter how hard she tried.
"And she did try. She was an educated woman, taught music in the local primary school, and she wanted us and our house to be clean and neat. I was the only child, and she had ambitions for me, too. I think she wanted me to go to university, but I had no inclination toward the academic life, not then, anyway. I'd wanted to be a policeman always. I can't remember making the decision; it was simply what I knew I wanted.
"So as soon as I left school, I joined the force as a lowly constable in Penzance."
"Penzance? As in Pirates of?"
"The same. But whatever Gilbert and Sullivan may have made you think, pirates are actually much less important in Cornish history than smugglers. Smuggling is an old and honored tradition in Cornwall, though there's far less going on there now. The glory days for Cornish smugglers were back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nowadays it's airports we have to watch, mostly for guns, drugs, uncut jewels from Holland, the odd piece of art — prosaic stuff. At any rate, I had nothing to do with smugglers. I walked a beat, tried shop doors to make sure they were locked, saw the occasional drunk safely home, directed lost American tourists, the lot. Not exciting, but I learned the town and the people like the back of my hand.
"Gradually I worked myself up the ladder. I was keen on my job and was promoted to sergeant rather early on, and then, when I showed a bit of aptitude for working out puzzling situations, to detective inspector. And after a couple of years — murders aren't two a penny in this country, you know, the way they are in America — in due time, I was given my first murder case. And I came a cropper."
I expressed suitable astonishment and waited for him to go on.
"In sixty-eight, it was. We were beginning to have our hands full about then with drugs problems. Cannabis was the most popular, and the hardest to trace and eradicate. Still is, for that matter. But LSD was growing to be a serious problem, and we worried more about it than the cannabis. So many young people — it was almost always young people — were having bad trips and getting into all sorts of trouble. A few were badly injured from jumping out of windows, thinking they could fly."
I nodded. "That happened back home, too, only one student died in Hillsburg. Well, a student from Hillsburg. He was visiting some friends in Chicago who lived in a high-rise apartment. They had a party on the seventeenth floor, and ..." I spread my hands.
"That, more or less, is what happened in Penzance, late one evening in July 1968. Or at least what was thought to have happened. A girl of about twenty apparently jumped off a sea cliff onto the rocks far below. No one saw her jump, and her body wasn't found until several days later, but from the nature of the injuries it was easy enough to deduce what had happened.
"We were inclined at first to consider it a suicide, but when the autopsy turned up large quantities of LSD, it looked like death by misadventure." Alan got up and made more coffee.
"Wait, I thought you said it was a murder."
"I'm still convinced it was, but we were never able to prove anything. In the end there was an open verdict. The case was never closed, so far as I know. I used to look it up now and then, throughout my career. Turn over what we knew, see if there was anything we'd missed. Never came up with a single lead."
"What made anyone think it was murder, then?"
"There were anomalies. For one thing, we never identified the girl. She wasn't local, that was certain. We circulated her description, of course, but we couldn't circulate a meaningful photograph."
I made a face. "Fish, I suppose, if the tides had gotten at the body."
"Fish, and crabs, and simply the abrasive action of water and rock. All in all, there wasn't much left of her face. We tried to match her up with all the missing-person reports, but nothing came of it. When we learned about the LSD, of course, the investigation slowed down."
"Yes, it would." I thought for a moment. "Why the delay in finding her body? I'd have thought she'd have been found right away. Isn't Penzance something of a seaside resort, with people all over the place?"
"Very much so, but she didn't go over actually in Penzance. I've misled you. The Penzance police dealt with the case because we were the nearest town of any size. She jumped, or fell, or was pushed at a place called Prussia Cove, about five or six miles east of Penzance. Fetched up in a smuggler's cave, rather a famous one used by a gang of brothers in the nineteenth century."
"Oh, so there must be a village or something there. At the top of the cliffs, I mean. A place where the smugglers could take their booty."
"Actually, no. A few farmhouses, widely scattered, and an abandoned hut. That's all. In fact, that's the main reason I was never satisfied about the case."
He sat down, poured out fresh coffee, and tented his fingers again. "The weather had been wet for a solid week when she was found. Everyone was upset about it; bad for the tourist trade. Anyway, the pathologist said she'd died probably four to five days earlier. Now why, I said to myself and anyone else who'd listen, why would a girl dressed for a party go clambering about on cliffs, miles from anywhere, on a wet night?"
"Oh, she was in party clothes? You didn't tell me that."
"Well, they hardly looked festive when she was found, but one of her boots was still more or less intact, and it was white patent leather, calf-length. Enough of her skirt was left to show that it was a Mary Quant knockoff — remember Mary Quant?"
I nodded. "Carnaby Street, miniskirts, all the girls wanting to look like Twiggy — all that."
"This girl did in fact look like Twiggy. At least her figure did, or the lack of it. She might have weighed all of six and a half stone — that's ninety pounds or so to you Yanks — and that despite the fact that she'd borne a child, according to the autopsy, only three or four months before she died. I could never see the appeal in the starved look, myself, but a lot of chaps did. Her hair had probably been beautiful, long and blond and I suppose ironed straight before the sea snarled it. I remember she'd been wearing beads, a long strand of rather pretty, carved red ones, old-fashioned looking. They'd been strung by hand, and the string had broken, of course. The beads were scattered about the cave. Rather pathetic, that."
"Poor child! All dressed up, and the only place she ended up going was over a cliff."
"Yes, and how did she get there? That was the other thing. We could never trace where she'd come from or how she'd got to Prussia Cove. No car left behind, no bicycle. She couldn't have walked far in those boots; three-or four-inch heels they had. We were never able to turn up a taxi driver or anyone else who would admit to driving her out there."
"No one saw her that night?"
"Well, remember we couldn't say for certain which night it happened. Too much time had passed by the time she was found, and the sea and the rocks had changed the body too much. The pathologist could narrow it down to only a two- to three-day span, and that made things much harder. Besides, asking at a seaside resort in the late sixties about a tall, slender blond in a miniskirt, white boots, and scarlet beads was like inquiring after a particular seagull. Everyone had seen someone who might have been our corpse, but no one could tell us anything useful."
We sat in silence listening to the rain dripping dispiritedly from the stopped-up gutter. "I applied for a transfer not long after that," Alan said finally. "No one blamed me over the case. There was no blame going, actually. The whole thing was too nebulous for that, but I couldn't quite get the taste of what I considered a failure out of my mouth, and I wanted away. So I did a stint with the Metropolitan Police, then went for a command course at Bramshill, got one of their scholarships for university work — one thing led to another, and I ended up in Sherebury as chief constable."
He finished his coffee and started clearing the table. "I'll do the washing up, my dear, if you'll choose a video we might enjoy."
I chose one with lots of sunshine in it and lots of laughter, but as we sat and watched I brooded, and later, after Alan had drifted off to sleep, I lay awake and made plans.
CHAPTER 2I tackled my husband the next morning, just as soon as he'd ingested enough caffeine to be reasonably alert.
"I have an idea," I announced brightly.
"Mmm?" He was deep in The Times.
"I'd like to get away for a little while. This weather's getting to me."
He put the paper down and looked at me consideringly. "I suppose the budget would run to a week or so in the south of France. No rain there this time of year. Or Spain might be cheaper."
I've lived in England for several years, but this notion of casually taking off for France still leaves me breathless. He was suggesting a trip no longer than, say, from southern Indiana to somewhere in Iowa, but Going to Europe sounded to me like a wild, exotic adventure. It also sounded appealing, but I stuck to my plan.
"I was thinking of somewhere much closer. Like, perhaps, Cornwall."
Alan's eyes narrowed.
"I've never been there, and I've always wanted to see Land's End up close. Frank and I used to see it from ships or airplanes, sometimes, that lonely spit of land with the lighthouse. It looked so romantic, one's first glimpse of England after an eternity of ocean, and it was always a welcome sight because it meant we were almost back in the place we loved."
"Dorothy, you'd hate Land's End now. They've Disneyfied it, put up 'attractions.' It isn't a bit the way you imagine it."
"Well, St. Ives, then. Who knows, we might meet a man with seven wives. Or Mousehole. I've been looking at the map, and I'd dearly love to visit a place called Mousehole."
"It's pronounced Mowz'l, not mouse-hole, and it's about as big as our Cathedral Close."
"Well, I didn't exactly expect Manhattan, did I, not with a name like Mousehole — or Mowz'l — and anyway, who cares? It sounds picturesque. And St. Michael's Mount is nearby, too, I've heard a lot about that, and —"
"Dorothy."
I closed my mouth.
"What do you think you're up to?"
I tried to look innocent. "I'm tired of rain, and we were talking about Cornwall last night, so I looked up the weather in the paper this morning, and it isn't raining there, it's lovely and warm, and I just thought —"
This time he simply looked at me.
Then he sighed. Heavily. "My dear, I appreciate your concern, truly. Yes, I do still worry now and again about that old case. Yes, I do still wish I'd been able to solve it. But the thing happened over thirty years ago, love. There is nothing more to be done. Some things in life must simply be accepted, and I long ago accepted the fact that we will never know who that girl was, or what happened to her."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from To Perish in Penzance by Jeanne M. Dams. Copyright © 2001 Jeanne M. Dams. Excerpted by permission of Severn House Publishers Limited.
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