Angel With Two Faces (5 page)

‘We don’t see you down here often enough, Archie,’ she said warmly, reaching up to give him a hug.

Archie smiled, genuinely pleased to see her, even if he would have chosen a different moment. He had known Morveth all his life, first as his parents’ closest friend and then as the person to whom he had turned in his own moments of crisis. She was one of the few people who played a full part in the life of the Loe estate – bringing in its babies, teaching its children, laying out its dead – yet who managed to keep her distance from it, living alone in a small, thatched cottage on the outskirts of the village. When Archie had come home to Cornwall after the war, still grieving for the loss of his closest friend and believing Jack’s death to be entirely his fault, he had gone to that cottage to heal. The feeling of peace which he found in those afternoon visits was hard to describe and, for someone who had trained in science and whose career relied on logic and analysis, hard to understand, but Morveth’s wisdom – her ability to make good, for want of a better phrase – was one of the very few things in life which he had never questioned.

‘How are you?’ she asked.

‘I’m well,’ he said, marvelling at how little she had changed in all those years, ‘but I wish we hadn’t had to meet here like this.’

Morveth watched Morwenna as she walked back towards the house. ‘You’ll have noticed quite a change in her, I expect?’ she said, and Archie nodded. ‘It was the waiting that nearly killed her. It nearly killed us all, to tell you the truth – watching the two of them by the water’s edge every day, pale as death themselves and praying he’d be found. Loveday thought it was some sort of game, I think – best that she didn’t understand, perhaps – but Morwenna had to be half dragged away each night. First thing the next morning, though, she’d be back. She
couldn’t rest until they’d got his body. The lake played a cruel trick in keeping him for so long.’

Not for the first time, Archie thought about the darkness that was masked by the beauty of Cornwall. He busied himself with violence on a daily basis in London, but the close proximity to death in which people lived their lives here still had a way of unsettling him. ‘Why do you think Harry let go of the reins, Morveth?’ he asked.

She looked at him for a long time before speaking. ‘Don’t search for things that aren’t there, Archie,’ she said at last. ‘It will only bring unhappiness.’

Archie had searched often enough to acknowledge privately how right she was, but he was reluctant to let the subject drop so easily. ‘Unhappiness for whom?’ he asked urgently, aware that Jago Snipe was on his way over to join them.

‘For people you care about,’ she said, then added more quietly, ‘perhaps even for you.’

There was no time to press her any further. He nodded at the undertaker, whose greeting – or so Archie fancied – was uncharacteristically suspicious, and they talked for a few minutes about the weather before Christopher Snipe excused them both from the effort of finding something else to say.

‘Dad, I need to talk to you,’ he said, and his earnestness made him look even younger than he was.

‘Not now, Christopher – I’m talking to Mr Penrose.’

Archie was surprised at the response. His conversation with the undertaker was hardly too important to be interrupted, and he knew how close father and son were; their relationship had been Jago’s only solace after his wife died in childbirth.

The boy seemed reluctant to be dismissed so easily. ‘But it’s urgent,’ he said.

‘Even so, this isn’t the time or the place,’ Jago snapped. ‘You’ve already done enough for one day.’

The boy blushed and walked away. Feeling sorry for him, Archie said: ‘Loveday must be glad to have Christopher around at a time like this.’

‘What makes you say that?’ the undertaker asked sharply.

‘Nothing, really, except I noticed that he was kind to her at the funeral. With everything that’s happened, having a friend near her own age must help.’

‘They’re not friends, particularly, and being kind is what we do. If Christopher spent any time with her today, he was just doing his job.’

Archie apologised without really understanding what he had said to cause such offence. Feeling more like an outsider than ever, he excused himself to go and find Lettice and her father.

Jago and Morveth watched him walk back up the lawn. ‘Did she tell him anything, do you think?’ Jago asked.

‘I don’t know. He asked about the accident, but then he would, wouldn’t he? That’s only natural. I’ll find out what he knows, though. Leave it to me.’

‘Don’t get sucked in, Morveth,’ Jago warned. ‘I know you were close to the family and Penrose is a good man, but he’s not one of us any more. If it comes to loyalties, I know which side he’ll be on. Just be careful.’

‘One of us?’ The scorn in Morveth’s voice was out of character and took Jago by surprise. ‘Don’t be so naive. Harry was one of us, and look how he behaved. He went too far, but if we’d thought more carefully about what we were doing, he’d still be alive and none of this would have happened.’

‘It has, though,’ Jago said, regaining his composure and,
with it, his authority. ‘Now we just need to make sure that we keep it to ourselves.’

Christopher hung around outside the cottage, trying to find the courage to talk to his father again and waiting for a moment when he might get him on his own. It was vital that he got to speak to him soon, before some do-gooder like Shoebridge found out what was going on and tried to interfere. It had to be Christopher who broke the news. He had sat by the church for a long time after the funeral, wondering what words he should use and watching Loveday, who had slipped back to the graveside while everyone else drifted off to the wake. She was beautiful, even there. Her white-blonde hair fell forward over her face as she looked down into the grave, taking some of the flowers from the netting around the side and dropping them gently on to her brother’s coffin. Intent on her task, she hadn’t noticed him at first, but a smile lit her face when she glanced up and saw him and, in that second, he was overwhelmed with relief that Harry was dead and buried. He wouldn’t have stood a chance with Loveday otherwise; the undertaker’s son would never have been good enough for Harry Pinching’s little sister. He remembered the time he had seen Harry coming out of the Commercial Inn with a bunch of his friends; buoyed up by beer and bravado, he had taunted Christopher and told him to keep away from Loveday, saying that his hands were only fit to play with the dead. It had made him so angry, and he smiled to himself now to think that his tormentor was suddenly a lot less free with his mouth.

Christopher had grown up in a house that lived with death and had never known anything else, so he found people like Harry – who covered their fear with mockery or superstition –
difficult to understand. When he talked to girls in the village, he knew that they always had half a mind on what he did for a living; he might as well have worn his mourning suit all the time because it hovered around the edges of even the most inconsequential conversations. Loveday was different, though. She could see beyond the black. The first time they were together – properly together – she had sensed his hesitation and gently kissed his fingers one by one, letting him know that she didn’t mind, telling him without words that he should be proud of his work, that the dead deserved to be cared for as tenderly as the living.

It was always assumed that he would help his father run the business when he was old enough, and he had been happy with that – happy, and a little nervous at first. There was a lot to learn, but he enjoyed the camaraderie of working alongside his father and the satisfaction of doing a job which really mattered. Only once had he been truly afraid, and that was early on, when he had just turned thirteen. It was winter, the evening before a funeral, and he and his father had gone to a farmhouse half a mile or so out of the village on the Penzance road to make the final preparations. They were given a warm welcome – Jago Snipe knew everyone and was well respected in the community – and the dead man’s widow, glad of the company, had insisted on making tea. As she busied herself with the kettle, his father handed him a screwdriver and nodded towards the door to the stairs. ‘You start to screw him down, lad,’ he whispered, ‘I’ll be up in a bit.’ Christopher took the screwdriver, desperate not to let his father down, and made his way upstairs, looking more confident than he felt. His courage deserted him at the third stair from the top and he sank down onto the step, staring straight ahead at the room
where the coffin lay, wanting to go on but reluctant to leave behind the comforting sound of voices from the kitchen. He sat there for half an hour or more, until he could barely make out the door in the darkness, and all he could think of was the first dead body he had ever seen, carried easily over Jago’s strong shoulders, pale hands tapping the backs of his legs as he walked. When his father came up to look for him, he realised immediately that he had asked too much of his son and gave him an apologetic hug. They went in together to shut the light out on the corpse for the final time, but the incident made such a strong impression on Christopher that he could still remember every detail of that room – the Bible under the dead man’s chin, the spectacles and pipe placed carefully under the coffin lining, the clock stopped at five minutes past three.

After that, his father was more careful about what he asked Christopher to do, ever mindful that he was still a young boy. Even now, he was not allowed to help with bodies which came in from the sea or after violent deaths – his father said there would be plenty of time for him to witness that sort of sadness when he was older, and always sent him on some sort of convenient errand when such a job was on. He was grateful for his father’s consideration, and knew how much he was loved, but today, thinking about what he had to do after the funeral, he was back on that third stair from the top – uncertain of what to say, scared of letting his father down, and wanting more than anything to run away. This time, he couldn’t count on reassurance and a hug – not when his father heard about Loveday, and certainly not if he ever found out that Harry Pinching’s death was Christopher’s fault.

The sun sank lower over the trees, taking with it all the blue from the lake and transforming the surface of the water into a metallic palette of silvers and blacks. A heron took off from the tangled mass of shrubs on the opposite bank, its slate-grey plumage in perfect keeping with the rest of the landscape and, from her window at the Lodge, Josephine watched its languid progress across the water, enjoying the familiar, rhythmic beat of its wings until it reached the other side of the lake and disappeared into the impenetrable shadow of the trees. In the distance, a delicate curl of smoke from one of the farm cottages was the only indication of human activity. Except for the occasional drumming of a woodpecker from the trees at the back of the house, all was quiet and still.

The estate lodge was a handsome building of pale-grey stone, dating back, Josephine guessed, to the mid-nineteenth century and conceived in Victorian Tudor style. There was a small, sheltered garden at the side – well stocked with foxgloves, rose bushes and gnarled old apple trees – and she found it hard to imagine a more idyllic location. She had yet to see the main house, of course, but it seemed to her that in exchanging the worries of the estate for this peaceful retreat, the Penrose family had got the more desirable end of the bargain. She tried to imagine Archie here, but found it hard to separate him from their familiar London circles. The demands
of Scotland Yard and the glamour of a West End first night were worlds apart, but he seemed equally at home in either and moved between them with an effortlessness which she admired, and occasionally envied; perhaps there was another, more rooted side to him which she was still to discover. He had always spoken lovingly of his parents, but never in much detail, although it may well have been her own tendency to compartmentalise areas of her life that discouraged Archie from sharing everything about himself. Certainly, looking around now at the images of a family home, stamped deeper with every generation, she realised how little she knew of his background, despite their long friendship.

She could scarcely believe that she had known Archie for twenty years: so much had happened since that first meeting, a year into the war, when her lover, Jack, had invited his closest friend – a fellow medical student from Cambridge – home to Inverness for the month. The three of them had spent much of that summer together, walking barefoot for miles over the soft, yielding moss of the flats by the loch, then climbing heathery slopes which recent burning had left too rough to cross unshod. As time went on, she had come to value Archie’s humour and sense of adventure as highly as Jack did; he, in turn, fell immediately in love with Scotland and – she knew, although it had never been spoken aloud – with her. They shared a passion for history and romance – in later years, it would be Archie who reawakened her fascination with theatre – and, while tramping over the white sands at Nairn or collapsing, exhausted, on the flat top of Tomnahurich, dark with cedar and with legend, they would entertain Jack for hours with richly inventive tales of Scotland’s heroes, both real and imaginary. For all of them, the month had been tinged with
sadness: when it ended, both Jack and Archie were off to war, swapping the heroics of the past for supposed glories of their own. Jack’s death at the Somme just a few months later had created an awkwardness between Josephine and Archie from which they were only just recovering, and she looked forward to seeing him now, free of the strain that had hung over them for so long.

On the table in the kitchen, as if to echo her optimism, she found a box of Miel chocolates with a Bond Street stamp, a bottle of Burgundy, and a note from Archie propped up against a jug of bluebells. She read it and smiled: making herself at home wouldn’t be difficult, although the combination of beauty and indulgence boded ill for her work ethic. She had written her first mystery novel in a fortnight to meet an impossible deadline, but that was six years ago and the effort had nearly killed her, sitting up until three every morning and falling half dead into bed. She had vowed never to do it again. This book was bound to take longer, but if she could leave Cornwall with a satisfactory plot and a few thousand words, the hardest part would be over. Personally, she felt she had too logical a mind to write a real shocker, but the last novel had sold well enough to make her publisher eager for another, and she enjoyed the demands of a medium which was as disciplined as any sonnet. In any case, it would be nice to see Inspector Alan Grant again, she thought, selecting a chocolate from the box. She had grown rather fond of him in the fortnight they had spent together, not least because she had borrowed heavily from Archie to create him, and it was about time he had another murder to get his teeth into; an unbeaten case record was hardly an achievement if she only gave him an outing every decade.

In the meantime, there was dinner in a strange house to get through. The first night of any social visit was always an ordeal for her, no matter how much she liked her hosts and, even though the Motleys were easy company, the prospect of meeting their father brought out a shyness of which no amount of fame could cure her. Resisting a second chocolate, she went upstairs to change and was dismayed to find that the two suitcases which she had packed for every occasion now seemed to contain nothing remotely appropriate. Nerves made her impossible to please, and outfit after outfit was removed from its tissue paper and flung into the wardrobe with a contemptuous shake of the head. How formal would dinner be, she wondered, hesitating over a pale gold satin evening dress; then she remembered Ronnie’s casual instructions and picked up something less showy instead. In the end, annoyed with herself for making such an issue of it, she settled for a compromise, put on a blue silk trouser suit, which she hoped would impress the girls with its daring, and left the house before she could change her mind and her clothes yet again.

The heat of the day had subsided, and a slight edge to the air reminded Josephine that summer was still in its infancy. She crossed the narrow gravel driveway which ran past the Lodge and walked down to the water’s edge, where a small wooden boathouse reminded her that there was good fishing to be had in the Loe if she found time. Once again, a nagging little voice with a definite Highland twang whispered the word ‘deadline’ in her ear, but she chose to ignore it; a rowing boat in the middle of the lake would make a very satisfactory study for the preliminary plotting, she decided in her own defence, and if she came home with a couple of trout for supper, no one could
accuse her of idleness. From where she now stood, she could see that an odd sort of vessel was moored at the front of the boathouse. It was more a barge than a boat, about the length of a punt but slightly wider, with a flat bottom and a raised platform rather like a bier at its centre. It seemed half decorated for something: green ribbons hung from the stern, trailing down into the water. On the floor in the middle of the craft, tucked under the platform, were some candles and what looked like a pile of garlands, presumably waiting to be draped around the edge of the barge. She couldn’t begin to imagine what sort of occasion demanded such efforts, but Ronnie’s opinion of the decor was bound to be worth hearing.

She set off for Loe House, leaving the lake behind for a moment and skirting marshes and parkland before joining the main driveway through the estate. As she followed the road around to the left and towards a tiny bridge, she saw Archie in the distance, on his way over to meet her, and realised to her surprise that she was a little nervous of seeing him, too. It was over a year since they had spent any amount of time together – and that had been in the middle of a murder inquiry which affected them both deeply and which had led to recriminations on either side as harsh as they were honest. His recent letters had been warm and friendly, but the next couple of weeks would show to what extent the air really had been cleared between them. He waved when he saw her, and she waited on the bridge, glad of the chance to spend a few minutes alone with him before meeting the others. Dressed casually in a blazer and flannels, and already tanned from the early sun, he looked more relaxed than she had seen him since that first Highland summer, before the war made him disillusioned enough with life to give up on medicine and choose
instead a career which demanded a less idealistic view of human nature.

There was no sign of cynicism now, though, as he lifted her off the ground, smiling broadly. ‘You look wonderful,’ he said, ‘and I’m glad to see you made it here in one piece. I had no doubts about the train, but your escort from Penzance worried me a little – she’s been known to take three days to find her way back to the house from there. Have you settled in all right?’

‘Yes, it’s lovely,’ Josephine said, giving him a hug. ‘But the flowers on the table were enough – you didn’t have to decorate a whole boat.’

Archie laughed. ‘So you’ve seen the ferry to Avalon already?’

She looked bewildered. ‘To where?’

‘Avalon – or at least our version of it.’ They sat down on the edge of the bridge for a moment, looking back towards the lake. ‘Did I tell you that lots of the towns and villages down here still celebrate their own feast week?’ Josephine nodded. ‘Well, ours is this week – the play at the Minack is part of it, but there’s also a cricket match on the Bar, a fair down on the beach, and various processions and blessings. The boat by the Lodge is for the final night. You see, the Loe was where Excalibur was thrown when Arthur died.’

She raised a doubtful eyebrow. ‘Oh yes – the Loe and a thousand other lakes. Don’t forget – I live next door to the Loch Ness Monster. You’re talking to an expert in legends for the gullible.’

‘Kings and oversized eels are hardly the same thing,’ he said, feigning offence. ‘And anyway, none of those other lakes has Tennyson on its side. It’s all in “The Passing of Arthur” – an old chapel near a dark stretch of land, with the ocean on one side and a great water on the other.’

‘Oh well, that’s different,’ said Josephine with good-natured sarcasm. ‘If it’s that specific, it must be true.’

‘Quite,’ said Archie, laughing. ‘So every year we cast a sword into the Loe from the bank outside the Lodge, and send Arthur – otherwise known as a chap from the village – on his last journey across the lake to the sea, accompanied by three lamenting queens.’

‘Let me guess – otherwise known as three girls from the local Co-operative stores,’ she said wryly. ‘What happens when they get to the other side – sorry, when they get to Avalon?’

‘They have a glass of cider and a sausage sandwich – made by the Snipe if she’s here – and that’s it for another year.’

Josephine was torn between amusement and scepticism. ‘Is it all as peculiar as it sounds?’

‘Surprisingly, no. It’s actually quite spectacular – they put candles round the edge of the boat, and if it’s a clear night with the moonlight shining on the water, it looks beautiful. The lamenting can get a bit out of hand, though,’ he admitted. ‘It depends what the Co-operative has to offer. But you’ll see for yourself on Thursday – it all goes on just below your window.’

‘It’s still going ahead, then? Even after the death here?’

‘Apparently so. William offered to call it off this year because he was afraid it might be in poor taste, but Harry’s sisters insisted on having it. It’s probably a good thing – the feast week tends to bring the whole community together, and from all the bickering I saw today we could do with a bit of that right now.’

Won over by his enthusiasm, Josephine said: ‘The Lodge is stunning, but you didn’t have to move out for me. You don’t get much time here, and I could have fallen in with the girls.’

‘You wouldn’t have had any peace, though, and I know you need to work. Anyway, the Lodge is special and I wanted you to
have a chance to spend some time there. I don’t mind – I quite fancy a couple of weeks in the big house, seeing how the other half lives.’

‘Playing at Lord of the Manor? I didn’t know you were really in line for it.’

‘Ronnie told you that? Thank God the family had the sense to bow out gracefully. I could never see myself taking this lot on. William’s dedication to it is extraordinary, but I don’t know where he finds the patience. I used to think the challenge of my job was dealing fairly with so many different people and trying to keep the peace in a community, but believe me – a day in Tottenham Court Road has nothing on this place. I wouldn’t last five minutes here before the temptation to bang their heads together got too much for me.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Josephine said, thinking again how at ease Archie looked. ‘You seem quite at home to me.’ She touched his forehead playfully. ‘It’s a long time since that hasn’t been knitted together in a frown. I might have to rethink my prejudice against aristocratic detectives.’

‘I wouldn’t bother. There are more than enough of those already.’ He stood up, and they walked on towards the house. ‘By the way, Bill sends you his regards.’ Archie’s sergeant at the Yard was an avid reader of crime novels in general, and a big fan of Josephine’s books in particular. ‘Between you and me, I think he’s hoping for another appearance in this new one.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she promised, ‘although I can’t say I’m feeling very diligent at the moment, and somewhere as beautiful as this is hardly likely to put me in the mood for murder.’

‘Don’t you believe it.’ He told her briefly about the funeral, Morwenna’s fears, and the tensions at the wake afterwards.

‘What a terrible suspicion for his sister to have to live with,’
Josephine said. ‘I can understand why she’s angry. Do
you
think there’s more to it than an accident?’

‘I don’t honestly see how there could be, but there’s no doubt that certain people are closing ranks about something. It’ll be interesting to see if William’s got anything to say about Harry’s death, although obviously I can’t talk about suicide. You know how indiscreet Ronnie and Lettice can be, and Morwenna wouldn’t thank me for spreading that round the estate. It’d be me they’d have to fish out of the lake next.’