Manna from Hades (4 page)

A few minutes later, Teazle scampered down the stairs ahead of her, as if determined to put the morning’s unpleasantness behind her. She gave Megan an ecstatic greeting, embarrassing Megan and making Scumble scowl.

“Mrs Trewynn,” he said, “are you aware of anything missing from your flat, or not in its usual place?”

“I don’t think so.” She looked around. How could she tell after Jocelyn had tidied?

“We’ll have to do a thorough search of the premises, the flat and the shop. We’ll try to disarrange things as little as possible. We’ll need your fingerprints, both of you, for elimination purposes. Constable?”

Megan took their fingerprints, a process Eleanor had been through more than once in some of the places she had travelled, but which exasperated Jocelyn.

“So messy!” she objected.

“Can’t be helped, I’m afraid, madam. Now, Mrs Trewynn, is there somewhere you can go while we—?”

“Eleanor will come home with me,” said Jocelyn.

“You’re the vicar’s wife, madam?”

“Yes, the Reverend Timothy Stearns. Our house is the vicarage. Anyone can direct you.”

“Good,” Scumble grunted. “We’ll probably have more questions for both of you.”

“You’d better pack up a few things for the night, Eleanor. You won’t want to sleep here.”

“Oh no—It’s very kind of you, Joce, but I’d rather come home, if Mr Scumble says I may.”

“Possibly, though I doubt it. In any case, please don’t remove anything just yet. If necessary, DS Pencarrow can fetch what you need later.”

“There, then, that’s settled. I’ll just get Teazle’s lead. Come on, girl, let’s go and see Uncle Timothy.”

The little dog bounced to the door and looked back impatiently. Uncle Timothy carried biscuits in his pocket for any stray children he happened to meet. He could often be persuaded to grant well-behaved dogs the status of honorary children.

“You’d better give me your keys, Mrs Trewynn,” the inspector said dryly, “so we can lock up when we’re done. I’ll see they’re brought to you at the vicarage.”

“Yes, of course. Er . . . I wonder where I put them?”

Scumble’s eyes once again turned up to the heavens. “If,” he said to the ceiling, “they are anywhere on the premises, we shall find them.” He stood up, crowding the room. “Good day, ladies. Please don’t discuss the incident with anyone, especially the press.”

FIVE

As the door closed behind her aunt, Megan braced herself for a scathing comment from the inspector. All he said was, “You know this artist chappy next door, Sergeant?”

“Not much more than to say hello, sir.” Long hair and the smell of turps did not attract her.

“Seen his work? Any good? You reckon he makes a decent living at it?”

“I’ve never looked around the gallery. It’s mostly tourist stuff—picturesque villages, cottages, fishing boats, heather-covered cliffs, I gather. You know the sort of thing, old stone bridges, donkeys at Clovelly.” She gestured towards Aunt Nell’s painting.

“That one of his?” The floor creaked as Scumble crossed for a closer look. “Hm. I’ve seen worse.”

“It’s quite good of its kind. I can’t think why he’d go on painting it if he wasn’t making some sort of living.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that his other stuff is quite different, sir. Abstract, Aunt Nell—Mrs Trewynn—told me. More . . . well, high-brow, I suppose. “

“Ambitious, eh?”

“I don’t think he sells much of it.”

“You reckon he’d take Mrs Trewynn out for the evening deliberately to leave the place clear for a confederate to burgle?”

“Surely not, sir! He’s not stupid. If I were a burglar, I wouldn’t choose a charity shop to rob. I doubt if there’s anything here worth more than ten quid or so.”

“Let’s hope you don’t turn burglar,” Scumble said with a return to his sour manner. “You’d better not be involved in searching your aunt’s place. Go and interview Gresham.”

“Yes, sir.” Megan escaped with relief.

Halfway down the stairs, she stopped. Ambulance men were carrying a stretcher out of the stockroom, manoeuvring with difficulty around the corner into the narrow passage. The skinny, dirty, pathetic boy was just a lumpy bulge under a strapped-down sheet. Was someone, somewhere, wondering why he hadn’t come home? Or had they given up on him months, perhaps years ago?

Megan followed the men along the passage and out into the street, now completely blocked by the ambulance. She heard the collective gasp from the crowd, a mixture of locals and early visitors by the look of them, held back by the police barriers.

No one said, “It’s not
So-and-so,
is it?”

Just some feckless runaway from God-knows-where. They might never discover his name.

She turned down the hill to the gallery next door.

The bell on the door jangled as she entered. Nick Gresham was behind the counter at the back, busy making change for a customer. He gave a casual wave to acknowledge her arrival.

She had met him a few times, over polite afternoon tea at Aunt Nell’s. They had treated each other with the wariness of dogs wondering whether they were going to have to defend their territory. She had never been in the gallery before, and she looked around with interest.

On the walls and a couple of folding screens hung paintings of Cornish beauty spots, aimed at emmets, as the Cornish call tourists. They were better than most of their kind. Somehow the artist had caught the transparent blue light of Cornwall, sea reflecting sky reflecting sea, never far off even when no sea was visible in the picture. A panel of one screen displayed a number of miniatures of wildflowers. A shelf held sleek porpoises, seagulls, and seals, carved from serpentine mottled and streaked in blues and greens and browns; drawing-pinned to the shelf was a card with the sculptor’s name. Not a Cornish piskie, a fake horse-brass, nor a lighthouse table-lamp in sight, she noted.

Half listening as Gresham assured his customer that he knew nothing about what was going on next door, but it was bound to be on the local telly news, Megan wandered behind one of the screens. The painting on the wall opposite her stopped her in her tracks.

It was all dark greys and purples and black, slashed with white, and somehow suffused with brilliant light. It should have been gloomy, even frightening, but it projected a magnificent, powerful energy. She read the title card pinned up beside it:
Storm over Rough Tor.
Yes, there in the lower left corner was a hint of massive solidity—not a clear depiction of the huge, heaped boulders of the tor but enough to anchor the whole in reality. Though she didn’t know much about painting, this was obviously of a quite different order from the sunlit seaside scenes behind her. She stepped back to get a better view.

When Aunt Nell first told Megan about her neighbour, she had described Nicholas as making her think of a Georgian aristocrat. Knowing he was an artist, Megan had pictured a foppish dilettante, but the vigour of this picture was a reminder that Georgians were also swordsmen—duellists—and neck-or-nothing riders.

The jangle of the doorbell as the customer left interrupted her contemplation. She emerged from behind the screen. The proprietor had vanished.

“Hello?” she called.

“I’ll be with you in half a tick.” Nick Gresham’s voice came from somewhere to the rear, beyond the counter. A door stood open, through which he entered a few moments later, wiping his paint-stained hands on a paint-stained rag. There was a dab of blue on one cheek, too. “Sorry. Most people like to look about a bit before I pop out of my . . . Aha, I didn’t recognise you for a moment in that garb. It’s your policewoman incarnation. Or do you prefer ‘lady detective’?”

“Detective Sergeant Pencarrow, sir,” said Megan through gritted teeth, taking her notebook from her shoulder-bag.

“Come to give me the third degree, have you?”

“Do I need to?”

“I shouldn’t think so. How is Eleanor holding up?”

“Pretty well. She’s not exactly your common-or-garden little old lady.”

“Far from it.”

“Mrs Stearns has swept her off to the vicarage.”

“Good. I hope your . . . er . . . large companion doesn’t consider her a suspect?”

“He wouldn’t discuss it with me if he did. And not only because she’s my aunt. He doesn’t believe in women in the police, let alone as detectives. In fact, he doesn’t even really believe we should be allowed behind the wheel of motor vehicles.”

“Do I detect a note of disgruntlement?”

Megan pulled herself together. “I’m supposed to be asking the questions.”

“Go ahead. But come on back to the studio. I can’t afford to lose the light, and there’s been a stream of customers this morning, wanting to know what’s up next door.” He led the way. “I’ve sold three pictures!”

Contrary to her expectations, the room Nick called his studio was reasonably tidy. The far wall was mostly windows, with a view of the slope rising to the headland, like Aunt Nell’s. Several paintings leant against the low wall below the glass. If she went over close to the windows, Megan thought, and looked down to the left, she’d be able to see the inlet, with the sheer rock wall on the far side and the crooked finger of the quay, and perhaps the inner harbour. Two easels stood facing the windows, one draped with a length of unbleached muslin, frayed along the visible end. The other held a canvas, of which she could see only the back. Beside it was a high wooden stool with a palette and a jar of brushes on it.

One side wall was taken up by wide, deep drawers below open shelves crammed with paints, brushes, a bottle of linseed oil, and a large tin of turps—the smell was quite strong in here—and various paraphernalia Megan couldn’t readily identify. The other wall, the one he shared with the LonStar shop’s stockroom, was occupied by stairs going up, with a sink and a workbench below, where he apparently framed his own pictures.

“Before you get started, I have to take your fingerprints.”

“What the hell for? If you think I—”

“Because you were in the stockroom and there are prints all over the place, and we can’t tell which are yours.”

“Ah yes, for elimination purposes. You should read detective novels, then you’d have the jargon at your fingertips.”

“As a matter of fact, when I left London, war was being waged against jargon.”

“Come now, that’s hardly fair to the authors of crime fiction! Still, I don’t suppose there’s much chance of its succeeding.”

Megan took his prints. He cleaned his fingers fastidiously, though apparently oblivious of the paint on his face.

She leant against the bench as Nick took his place before the undraped easel, chose a brush, and resumed work on a half-completed painting of a lifeboat putting to sea.

“What time did you first see Aunt Nell—Mrs Trewynn—yesterday?” she asked.

“Quite late.” He scratched his ear with the wooden end of the paintbrush. “The sun was setting. I’ve no idea what time it was, but no doubt the police have access to such information. I heard her car.”

“From here?”

He gave her a look as if she was a total cretin. “Hardly. I was sweeping up out there, in the gallery.”

“You recognised her car by the sound?”

“I’m not
that
fascinated by cars. I heard a car stop next door and glanced out of the window. Since it was a pea-green Moggie, one of the few cars I can recognise on sight, I deduced that it was the Incorruptible, and further deduced that Eleanor had just come home. As she’d mentioned the day before that she was planning one of her collection runs, I went out when I finished sweeping to see if there was anything heavy I could help with.” Falling silent, he dabbed delicately at the canvas.

“And?” Megan asked.

“And?” he echoed absently.

“And was there anything heavy?”

“A couple of boxes.”

“Something valuable?” she asked eagerly.

“Paperback books. There may have been a couple of hardbacks. I didn’t check.”

“Oh, books.”

“Don’t you read books?”

“Of course I do! When I get time. But no one’s going to break into a building to steal books. You’d be surprised how often they’re shoplifted, though.”

“I wouldn’t. Any book I particularly want to borrow from the library is sure to have been pinched. Or misshelved.”

She wondered what he like to read. Books about art, probably, or something equally high-brow. “You carried the two boxes to the stockroom?”

“What?” He was concentrating on the painting again.

“The boxes of books.” She held onto her patience with both hands, determined not to end up like Inspector Scumble. “You took them to the stockroom.”

“Well, of course. That’s what I went out there for. And to invite Eleanor out to dinner as I’d had a bit of good luck fleecing a rich American.”

Megan frowned. “Fleecing?”

“Don’t scowl like that. It doesn’t suit you. His wife liked a picture of mine but it wasn’t big enough for the bit of wall she wanted it for. So I painted the same scene the size she wanted, on commission, cash up front. He paid through the nose for it. Bigger equals better equals worth a whole lot more money.”

“Oh.” A disappointing attitude to an artist with aspirations, she assumed. “I suppose you would have noticed if there had been a body in the stockroom when you went in there?”

“Probably,” he said infuriatingly. “I didn’t root around, but Mrs Stearns keeps everything shipshape and Bristol fashion. I can’t state categorically that it wasn’t there, but I’d be surprised to hear I’d overlooked it.”

“Fair enough. What next?”

“I took the Incorruptible down to Eleanor’s shed—you know she rents a shed down by the harbour?—then came home, cleaned myself up a bit, and went to pick her up.”

“What about the car keys?”

“Car keys? Well, I must have taken them out of the car, because the key to the shed’s padlock is on the same ring.”

“Did you have to stop the car, unlock the padlock, and restart the car to drive it in.”

“No, actually. Eleanor leaves the padlock unlocked when she’s using the car. There’s nothing pinchable in the shed.”

“So you could have locked the car away without using the key.”

“You’re right. A deduction worthy of Sherlock Holmes. So I could have locked the keys into the shed, though I’m pretty sure I didn’t as I have a vague memory of handing them back to her. Still, I gather Mrs Stearns holds a spare padlock key against just such an inevitable occurrence.”

“Aunt Nell’s sure to do it sooner or later,” Megan agreed, “if she hasn’t before now. She has no idea which doors, if any, she locked last night. If you’re not absolutely sure you gave her back the keys, and we don’t find them in the flat, at least we’ll know to look in the garage. What time did you pick her up?”

“No idea. Just a minute, this is a tricky bit.”

He picked up a different brush and bent close to the canvas. When he straightened again, it looked no different to Megan, but Nick gave a sigh of satisfaction.

“Sorry, what was the question?”

“You said you don’t know what time you picked up Aunt Nell.”

“You’d better make sure you write ‘Mrs Trewynn’ in your report, not ‘Aunt Nell.’ They might be able to tell you at the Wreckers what time we got there.”

“You went straight there?”

“Yes, and they know me pretty well, though I go to the Trelawney Arms more often.”

“Why the Wreckers last night then?”

“Oh, er . . . As a matter of fact . . .” His face turned pink. “You see, the . . . er . . . the daughter of the house—the Arms—seems to have taken a bit of a shine to me.”

“You don’t return her affections?”

“I do not!”

“Pity. You could have celebrated your sale with her last night.”

“She’s half my age! Too young to go out for a drink, even if Eleanor weren’t much better company.”

“She’s twice your age.” Megan felt as if she was betraying her aunt.

“But very good company. Is this relevant? Or are you trying to protect Eleanor from the heartbreak of falling in love with a younger man? No chance of that.”

“We can never be sure what might turn out to be relevant,” Megan said with as much dignity as she could muster. She would have to leave that bit out of her report. “How long were you at the Wreckers?”

“Long enough for me to quaff a pint and Eleanor to sip a small sherry. Again, you’ll have to ask the landlord if you want times. Come to think of it, I did look at the clock, but only to make sure we weren’t going to be too late to eat at Chin’s. The actual time didn’t register.”

Megan’s sigh was not expressive of satisfaction. So far she hadn’t learnt a damn thing Aunt Nell and Mrs Stearns hadn’t already told Inspector Scumble. “You left the Wreckers at some yet to be determined time, and . . . ?”