To Perish in Penzance (26 page)

“I've been very curious about that incident. It doesn't seem to fit anything very well. Would it be a terrible burden for your men to ask the manager again? Perhaps his memory might have improved.”

Cardinnis still looked puzzled, but he promised he would do that. I saw him wink at Alan, who smiled back, but then looked at me, a speculative frown on his face.

“It may be tomorrow before I can spare anyone, Mrs. Martin. We've got rather a lot to do today, I'm afraid.”

“Of course you do. Tomorrow will be splendid.” Any delay, in fact, increased the likelihood of an honest answer. I stood and flexed my shoulders. “Alan, do you suppose we could go back to the hotel? If I have to sit on that rock any longer, various portions of my anatomy will never be the same. Besides, it's long past lunchtime and I'm hungry.”

Alan looked a little shocked. I knew he thought I was unfeeling, thinking about my posterior and my stomach when poor Mr. Boleigh was dead. But I hadn't known the man well, I hadn't seen him with a bullet hole in him, and I had an agenda of my own.

However, Alan responded with his usual courtesy. “Of course. I've kept you here far too long. Unless there's anything else we can do, Colin?”

“No, no, you've been a very great help. I'll never be able to thank you enough for finding that money. It's a great load off my mind. I'll ring you, Mrs. Martin, as soon as I have an answer to your question.”

“Thank you, Superintendent.” I waved and we trudged toward the cliff path.

“Pure luck,” I murmured in Alan's ear.

“Mmm?”

“Finding that money. Nothing but luck. You were accepting that poor man's praise as if you'd done something remarkable.”

“One must preserve one's image,” he said imperturbably. “And it wasn't luck at all.”

“Of course it was!”

“No, indeed. It was due entirely to your intuitive insistence that I was there in the first place, and in fact due to your agitated cry that I fell against that confounded stone door. I've you to thank.”

I grunted. The path was getting steep. “And I suppose you told Colin that.”

“Certainly not. One cannot admit to reliance upon intuition. No, don't turn around, you'll fall! I may deserve a smart slap, but you mind your step.”

We were quiet on the way back to town. I don't know what Alan was thinking about, but I was putting together the pieces of a very complicated puzzle.

I came up out of my brown study when we got to the roundabout just at the edge of town. “Alan, I don't want to go back to the hotel yet.”

“My dear, I thought you were hungry.”

“I am, but there's something I want to do first. Swing by Mr. Pendeen's antique store, will you?”

Yes, Mr. Pendeen was in, we were informed by the starchy clerk. He was very busy. She doubted he could see us.

I signaled Alan with my eyes. Obligingly, he engaged the clerk in conversation about a small desk in the window. We had seen it and were interested. Was it mahogany? Ah, rosewood! And made, he supposed, around …

I slipped away and made for the back of the store.

Mr. Pendeen was genuinely busy, but he'd made the mistake of not quite closing his office door. Two men who I suspected were political cronies sat in the chairs in front of the desk, smoking pipes and talking. I tapped on the office door and walked in, uninvited.

“Oh, I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to interrupt, but I have a very quick question I thought you might be able to answer for me, Mr. Pendeen. I can come back later if—”

I relied on the mayor having better manners than mine. I was right. “No, no, come in, Mrs. Martin. I am rather busy, but—”

“Yes, of course, and it really is a quick question, I promise. I suppose it's none of my business, to tell the truth, but when Alan and I visited Mr. Boleigh the other day, I couldn't help noticing that he has such lovely antiques in his home. I wondered if he inherited them, or perhaps bought them from you, or …” I let the question trail off and crossed my fingers, hoping Mr. Pendeen was eager enough to get rid of me that he wouldn't stop to wonder why I wanted to know.

“Oh, no, his family had very little money and certainly no priceless heirlooms. His immediate family, that is. It was when his uncle died and left him that fabulous inheritance that he began to buy lovely pieces from me, and from other dealers, of course. I think I may say that some of his choicest pieces came from me, however.”

“Goodness, the uncle must have left a
great
deal of money.”

“Not money, dear lady. Art treasures, you know, a remarkable collection. Fetched incredible prices at Christie's and Sotheby's, and from private collectors, as well. Now, if that really was all …”

“It was, and I do thank you. My apologies for the intrusion.” I nodded deferentially to each of the men in turn and beat it out of there before Pendeen could start thinking clearly.

“I was looking for the rest room,” I said in response to the clerk's lifted eyebrows. “You don't seem to have one, and I'm sorry, Alan, but I really must—um—”

He nodded gravely and whisked me out to the car. “All right, what was that little charade all about?”

“Alan, have you ever done jigsaw puzzles?”

“In my youth.”

“Then you may remember that, as you near the end, you become convinced that there aren't enough pieces left to finish the thing. In particular, that piece you need with the corner of the house and the little bit of sky, the one shaped sort of like a horse, must have gotten lost. It isn't anywhere. And then you're down to three pieces, and you turn the last one the right way 'round, and there it is, house and sky, horse-shaped, and you can't understand why you didn't see it before.”

“I seem to remember something of the sort.”

“Well, I've just found the next-to-last piece.”

“Indeed.”

There was a pause.

“I suppose the last piece will be the answer you get from Colin Cardinnis? About the man at the rave club?”

“If it's the right answer, yes. If it's the wrong answer, the whole puzzle falls apart.”

“And do you intend to tell me about it, or is this an Ellery Queen novel? ‘You have all the necessary information to solve the problem,' et cetera.”

“Don't be silly. Of course I'll tell you, but if you don't mind, I'd like to have lunch first, or tea, or whatever we can get at this hour. Then I'll sit down and work it all out in my own mind to make sure I won't make a fool of myself when I try it out on you. And if it all holds together, including Colin's piece, when we get it—well, then I think we should go see Eleanor Crosby.”

T
HE
days are drawing in,” said Alan, looking out the window of our room at the tireless sea and the serene, cloudless sky. Though it was only a little after six, the sky was beginning to take on that opaque look that comes just before light fades and the first stars appear.

“‘Light thickens, and' … and I can't remember the rest.”

“It's unlucky to quote from
Macbeth
.”

“Only in the theater, or so I've always understood.” I rearranged the dishes and silverware on my tea tray. I'd been doing that, I realized, for quite some time. I pushed the tray away. “Alan, it does all make sense, doesn't it?”

He turned away from the window. “Granted the one supposition, the rest hangs together. I find it hard to believe … but you could be right. We'll soon know, I suppose.”

I picked up the evening paper, a national daily. Issued from London with a noon deadline, it had nothing about the death of a prominent Penzance man, but the event had headlined the local television news an hour or so earlier. Alan and I had turned the set off.

I was reading the same item for the fourth time. I still had no idea what it said. I threw down the paper.

I'd sketched out everything for him, my conclusions and the reasoning that had led up to them. I was almost convinced I was right, though I wasn't a bit happy about it. But I wished I
knew
.

The phone rang. I jumped, nearly upsetting the tea table. Alan looked at me. I shook my head. He picked up the phone.

“Nesbitt here. Yes, Colin.”

I hadn't thought my nerves could get any tighter. I was wrong.

“Yes. I see. Yes, a bit of a shocker. Oh, well, that's good news, anyway. Thank you so much. No, don't bother, you've a great deal to do. I'll tell her, and thank you again.”

I didn't need his few words of explanation to tell me I was right. I stood up, suddenly almost calm now that it was nearly over. “We'd better tell Eleanor. She may have heard of Boleigh's death, and she'll be wondering what it means.”

“Yes. It's a terrible story, but she deserves to be told.”

We tapped on Eleanor's door, got no answer, and opened it quietly. She was dozing in bed, a supper tray in her lap. She had eaten almost nothing.

“Eleanor,” I said softly.

She woke at once. “Oh. I thought you were the maid, to take away the tray.”

“You haven't eaten.”

“I'm not hungry. Would you mind moving that thing?”

Alan set the tray on the tea table.

“You know something,” said Eleanor. Her voice had sharpened. “I can see it in your faces. What's happened now?”

“Something
has
happened, Eleanor, several things, in fact, but we came to you because we think we've unraveled most of the story.”

“Which story?”

“The whole story,” said Alan. “Betty, Lexa, Pamela—the lot.”

Eleanor frowned. “You say you
think
you know. Can you prove it?”

“Some of it can be proved, not all. When we've finished I think you'll agree that proof is a secondary consideration. Suppose I let Dorothy tell you.”

“Very well, but I warn you I want proof, proof that will stand up in court! I want this devil punished!”

“Yes, we understand. Dorothy?”

We pulled chairs up to the bedside and I began.

“I started thinking today, really thinking and not just chasing ideas around in my head. I thought about Betty and a beautiful old cross given to her by her lover, Lexa's father. And I began wondering where he might have gotten such a thing, thirty-odd years ago.

“It's over four hundred years old and extremely valuable, and not of English manufacture. Well, of course, there are many ways such a thing could have come to these shores, maybe centuries back, so that didn't give me much to go on. But then Alan found a broken chain, an elaborate one of similar age, in the cave where Betty and Lexa died. There's a hidden part to that cave, you see, an old mine shaft, actually, that Alan found quite by accident, just this morning. That started all kinds of wild ideas buzzing around.

“What if pirates had hidden their plunder there, ages ago? That cross and chain could well have been a part of such a hoard. Or there was another theory, less romantic but maybe more likely.

“Lexa spent some time in the library when she first came to Penzance, and talked to you about a shipwreck. I read a few things about shipwrecks, too, and one little item I remembered was that a German ship was wrecked near Penzance, sometime close to the end of World War Two. That reminded me of something Alan had said about Nazi art treasures, and I put two and two together. Suppose that wrecked ship had been carrying some of those looted treasures out of Germany to some safer place? I read somewhere that the Nazis did that as the war heated up, hoping to save them if their German strongholds were badly damaged. Just suppose someone had seen that ship wrecked, seen it before anyone else, and had known a place to hide the treasures? Or the treasures might even have drifted to the cave on the currents—things do, in that area—and been found by our someone, who then went to look for more. And suppose that someone had died before he could do anything further with his booty, and it was found only twenty-odd years later, by Betty's lover?”

“Pure speculation,” said Eleanor restlessly.

“Not quite. There was that chain, remember.”

“Precious little to support such an elaborate story.”

“You're right. There's more, but I have to tell this my own way. Do you mind if I help myself to some of your water?”

Eleanor waved an elegant hand, thin to the point of transparency, and I opened her untouched bottle of water, poured some into her untouched glass, and continued.

“You see, the chain wasn't the only thing Alan found in that mine shaft. He also found quite a cache of drugs and a great deal of money, banknotes. The police have determined that the money was from that bank robbery the other day, and the drugs are probably heroin, cocaine, and ecstasy.”

I had her entire attention now. “And then something happened, something that helped me put the whole thing together. A yacht that had been cruising in the bay suddenly set a course straight for shore and crashed into underwater rocks at high speed. While I went to phone for help, Alan swam out and boarded her, and found that John Boleigh had been at the controls. He was dead of a gunshot wound, the gun in his hand.”

“He'd killed himself?”

“It looks that way. Of course, we won't know for sure until the police check some things, and in fact we may never know, unless the police can get the yacht off the rocks.”

“Some luck there, possibly,” Alan put in. “Cardinnis mentioned it when he phoned. With the spring tide, they've been able to float her enough to tow her to shore. They'll be able to search her in safety now.”

“Good. But you were pretty sure, weren't you, Alan? About the suicide?”

“Not sure, no.” He spread his hands. “It seems the most likely solution.”

“He'd lost his granddaughter,” said Eleanor. “I can understand.”

“I think there may have been more to it than that, Eleanor. Quite a lot more, in fact. When I'd had a chance to think over the whole business clearly, I had two questions. I asked one of the mayor of Penzance, who is also an antique dealer, and the other of the police. The answer to both was the answer I expected.”