To Perish in Penzance (13 page)

“Yes, I understand. That's why I'm so glad you came to check on her. How did she react to you? Does she resent your coming?”

“No, she was quite gracious about it. She's realistic about her illness, as you've probably realized.”

“Yes, but she's pretty prickly right now. Now let me ask you something. You probably know that my husband and I are—well, if I said ‘assisting the police,' I'd give the wrong impression, but in fact that's what we're trying to do.”

“Yes. I should also add, Mrs. Martin, that I knew Mr. Nesbitt slightly back in the old days, and I've followed his career with interest. I live in Newlyn, you see.”

And that, given the tightly knit English sense of community, did explain his interest.

“Well, then, you know that Alan and I are going to need to talk quite a lot to Mrs. Crosby, ask her questions from time to time, painful questions, searching ones. Is she strong enough to stand that sort of thing?”

“You're asking, I think, how long she has to live.”

“More or less.”

“I can't tell you that. I don't know, and even if I did I wouldn't say. There is such a thing as confidentiality, you know. I can, though, tell you what you probably know much better than I, and that is that Mrs. Crosby seems to be a woman who knows her own mind. If she wants you to solve the question of how her daughter died, she'll not take kindly to anyone—me or anyone else—who tries to interfere. Furthermore, she'll almost certainly live until the case is solved, unless it drags on forever. That driving need to know what happened, to find the villain, gives her a powerful incentive to keep going. I'd say, go ahead and ask your questions whenever she feels up to talking. If it's too much for her—well, she'll die doing what she wants to do, and that's more than most of us can say, isn't it?”

“Indeed. Is a policewoman going to stay with her?”

“No, she's said she'd rather be alone, and she seems able to look after herself, more or less. We have notified hospice. I understand that was your suggestion.”

“Well, I mentioned it, but the policewoman had already thought of it.”

“Yes. At any rate, they'll be popping in from time to time, making sure she takes her pain medication when she needs it, helping her with bathing if she needs help, that sort of thing. I suggested that she'd be better off at home, but she doesn't want to leave Penzance, and I can understand.”

“That all relieves my mind a good deal. I'll look in again this afternoon and make sure she's had some lunch.”

We shook hands and I went to join Alan for lunch.

We had decided there was little I could do until Eleanor was able to talk to me again. Alan, however, set himself the task of tracking down the rave club.

“I'll go and have a chat with John Boleigh. The police will certainly have talked to him already, but I want to get the names of the men who whisked Lexa off at the party. One of them is likely to have been her date Thursday night. Once I find him, it ought to be fairly easy to find the club.”

“Then what?”

“That's the sticky part. I can hardly go charging in myself, asking all sorts of awkward questions. I'd get no answers, and I'd terrorize the wildlife.”

“True. You look an awful lot like a policeman.”

“It was a great handicap to my career, and in this case I don't think you can help, either. You don't look like a policeman, but I'm afraid you don't look like someone who would frequent a rave club, either.”

“No, I doubt that gray hair and flowered hats feature prominently among the patrons there. Anyway, my hearing's not so good that I'm prepared to risk it on the decibel levels in a place like that. I don't understand why all teenagers aren't deaf.”

“Many of them are, actually, or on the way. At any rate, let me try to find out what I can about the club, or clubs. We'll work out a plan to infiltrate it later.”

So I sent him off with a hug, and sat down to figure out what I could do for the good of the order. After fifteen minutes of sitting in our room with a blank pad of paper and an equally blank mind, I had achieved nothing but frustration. My strengths are with people, talking to them, gaining their confidence, sometimes learning their secrets. But here in an unfamiliar setting I could think of no one to talk to—except for Eleanor, and she needed her rest.

Very well. I slapped the pad and pencil down on the desk and stood. If I was exiled from my natural habitat of tea tables and cozy kitchens and other breeding grounds of gossip, I'd go to my other home away from home, the library, and see what I could learn there.

Back in my teaching days, I was often guilty, I admit, of the favorite academic cop-out: “Well, Johnny, I don't know the answer to that myself, but let's look it up.” The funny thing was that it often worked. The whole class would go with me to the school library at the first opportunity and descend like locusts on reference books, history books, science books, biographies, even works of fiction that dealt with the question at hand. They found out the answer, and they also learned how to use a library. A few learned to love libraries almost as much as I did.

It took me only a few minutes to reach the one in Penzance, and when I got there, the librarians were kind and helpful.

I had decided on the way that my most useful strategy at this point was to learn all I could about the terrain, if that's the right word for an area that includes far more than its fair share of water. There had to be a reason why the bodies of two women had been found in a particular cave miles from anywhere. Maybe I could get some sort of clue from books about the Mount's Bay region.

There were a good many books. I filled most of a reading table with them and sat down to my task.

At the end of three hours, my eyes were tired and both my head and my back ached, but I had acquired knowledge.

I knew, for one thing, a great deal more than I had about the geography of the southwest extremity of England. I had figured out exactly where Mount's Bay was, and its relationship to Prussia Cove and its components, Bessie's Cove, Piskie's Cove, and King's Cove. I knew more about the history of Bessie's Cove, and its topography, than I was ever going to remember. I had learned (with a shuddering thought of Betty Adams's body) that the shore currents often brought flotsam to the caves of Bessie's Cove. I could reel off, with great fluency, the names of famous Cornish smugglers and something of their histories.

I knew about the tin and copper mines that had flourished of old, their shafts extending out under the sea, and the flooding that had often put an end to operations and, occasionally, to miners' lives.

I had read, too, about shipwrecks along the treacherous coast, and the extent to which Cornishmen profited from the plunder of the doomed ships' cargoes. (There was disagreement among various accounts as to whether those same Cornishmen might, perhaps, have
caused
some of the wrecks by the placing of misleading lights on a rocky shore.) I had read of famous wrecks, including that of a German ship in 1944, and had learned, with some astonishment, of the spectacular wreck in 1997 of a containership, the
Cita,
in the Scilly Isles a few miles off Land's End. That one provided bounty for the Scillonians for months, though one did wonder what they had done with the container full of fifteen hundred wooden toilet seats.

There were books about famous rock formations out on the moors, about valuable china-clay deposits. About saints, holy men, legendary figures. There were quite a number of books about King Arthur at Tintagel, up on the north coast: myth or history? The chroniclers quarreled about that, too. There were books about Cornwall's historic industries, about her ancient and now almost defunct Celtic language, with its strong links to Welsh and Gaelic.

It was all engrossing stuff. One could understand why books and books and books had been written about it.

What it was not, as far as I could tell, was helpful. There was nothing in the masses of material I had read to give me any idea why two women, mother and daughter, had gone out on stormy nights over thirty years apart, never to be seen alive again.

I noted down a few books I'd like to buy, if I could find them, thanked the librarians for their help, and trudged back to the hotel, better informed but no further enlightened.

Alan hadn't come back yet. I sat down on our lovely, comfortable four-poster bed and thought about a nap. My head did ache, after all, and a nap might help. Afternoon naps are a sad waste of time. Unfortunately, as one grows older, they become more and more attractive. At home, with the cats always willing to curl up beside me, the temptation is often irresistible.

I stood up and shook myself, rather like a wet dog. This would never do. Eleanor Crosby might be awake, and my convenience took second place to hers. I would, I had every reason to hope and trust, have many more years to take naps at my leisure. I might have only days to talk to Eleanor. I let myself out of our room and walked up the single flight of stairs to hers.

She answered my tap on the door almost immediately. Not only was she up, she was dressed, casually but elegantly, in trim beige slacks and a silk shirt. She even wore a little makeup: rouge, lipstick. It only emphasized her pallor, but it showed she was making an effort, for which I was grateful. If there really was anything in the “will to live” theory, Eleanor wasn't going to die just yet.

“What progress have you made?” she asked eagerly. “Oh, sorry, please do sit down.”

I drew up a small chair and conscientiously turned on my tape recorder; she sank down in a comfortable armchair. “Very little, I'm afraid. Alan is out right now trying to get a line on where Lexa might have gone that night, and with whom.”

“The night she died,” Eleanor said, her voice perfectly steady and somewhat dry. “I try not to avoid the word, Dorothy. I prefer to call a spade a spade, and in my present circumstances it would be idiotic to do anything else. Please don't feel you must be diplomatic around me.”

I swallowed hard. “I'll do my best. I'm pretty much of the spade school myself, but I do try not to cause anyone pain, if I can help it.”

“Pain.” Eleanor smiled bleakly. “It means little anymore. I have felt every kind imaginable in the months past. Dorothy, are you a religious woman?”

I never know how to answer that question. “My beliefs are important to me. I don't know how well I live up to them in practice.”

“Do you believe there is a life after this one?”

“Yes.” About that, anyway, I had no need to temporize. “I can see no sense to this life if it all ends after such a brief time. And I believe, profoundly, that the universe is meant to make sense.”

“I've never been able to make up my mind. If you're right, then I'll see Lexa again, and Betty, too. And soon. Even if you're wrong, I'll soon be beyond pain. That, even if there is nothing else, is a great comfort.”

Eleanor dismissed the matter, coughed, drank a little water, and settled down to the business at hand. “The night she died, you said. You want to know where she went.”

I nodded.

“It's the obvious question, of course, and the first thing the police ask me. I could tell them no more than I tell you. I don't think they believed me, but I don't know where she went. She wouldn't tell me.”

“I'm not surprised, actually. She knew you disapproved of this whole quest. She wouldn't want you to know the details.”

“You see that, do you? I wasn't sure the policeman understood. He seemed to think I was trying to keep something from him. As if I wouldn't do anything in my power to bring her murderer to justice!”

I didn't mention the fact that Lexa's death was not yet officially classified as murder. Eleanor knew that, just as we both knew we were treating it as such. “What, exactly, did she tell you? You did know she was going out, didn't you?”

“Yes, she would never leave the hotel without telling me. She had the adjoining room, and she knew I liked the idea of her being there. Not to play nursemaid, mind! I didn't want her to feel under any obligation. It was only that her very presence, nearby, was comforting.”

Eleanor turned her face away, blew her nose. I feared she would apologize for letting her grief show, but she was evidently past that, as she was past the need for polite evasions. When she looked back, tears were still on her face; she made no attempt to wipe them away. I hoped I could live up to her terrible need for honesty.

“So she said—what?” I prompted.

“I can tell you her exact words. I will never forget them, for they are the last words she ever spoke to me. She came in to me, in this room, dressed like a teenager. Well, almost like a tart, truth to tell. I didn't know she owned such clothes. Short skirt, tight top, high-heeled boots, and her hair hanging loose and wild. She'd overdone her makeup, too. She really didn't look at all like herself, and I must have looked disapproving, because she laughed at me.

“I'm off to a masquerade party, Mum,' she said, and twirled around to show me the full effect. ‘You didn't know I could look eighteen again, did you?'

“Well, I didn't say what I thought. I couldn't say anything for a moment. She looked and sounded so much like her mother, I—oh, it terrified me. I felt foolish, though, and I couldn't find the right words. I wanted to tell her not to go, or not looking like that, but she's—she was a grown woman. I'd left off telling her what to do long since.

“But she saw what I was thinking, I know, for she said, ‘Don't worry. I've no intention of doing anything foolish. I'll leave all that to the others.'And then she told me she'd probably be very late getting back, perhaps nearly morning, and I was not to wait up. Then she kissed me good night, and …”

The tears were open this time, and I admit I shared them. It was a poignant picture, the vibrant young woman, the older one so desperately ill, the casual, affectionate leave-taking …