A Cornish Revenge (The Loveday Ross Cornish Mysteries Book 1) (5 page)

  Loveday didn’t know much about boats, but the Blue Lady was a stunner by any standards. It was white, and sleekly elegant, with three dark blue flashes running from bow to stern. Cassie unlocked the door and the smell of affluence wafted out as Loveday followed her down three steps into what felt like a mahogany palace. Ahead, between two banks of seating, upholstered in a sumptuous blue fabric, was a dining table. Beyond that in the bow of the boat, Loveday could see two double berths in the same luxurious fabric. To her left, a cooker and tiny sink gleamed in the galley, and more berths were visible in the stern. The polished mahogany walls continued behind them, where a small office space with a desk had been fashioned into another corner.

  Loveday gazed around her. Every nook and cranny had been utilised. It was a marvel of technology. ‘It’s amazing,’ she said. ‘How do they manage to pack away so much in such limited space?’

  ‘Oh it’s an art, all right,’ said Cassie, ‘You should see the business end up top.’

  Loveday spun round. ‘Have you done all this, Cassie?’

‘Just the fabrics…and a few other refinements.’ She put her case on the table and took out a file and pen. ‘The refurb is all but complete. I just need to check that the fitters have done their job and that everything meets with the specifications of the client.’

  ‘Who did you say they are?’ Loveday asked, wandering around the cabin for a closer inspection.

  ‘Magdalene Carruthers. She’s an interior designer. I think this was a kind of experiment to see if she could break into the yachting market.’

  ‘You mean she’s going to pinch your business?’

  Cassie laughed and shook her head. ‘Magdalene’s not interested in working on boats. But people who own expensive yachts also have grand houses, so we can put business each others’ way. It works really well, actually, and anyway, Magdalene has pots of money in her own right, she doesn’t need to pinch my business.’

  ‘What about Mr Carruthers?’

  ‘I don’t know much about the husband, except that his name’s not Carruthers. I caught a glimpse of him climbing aboard one day when I was in the car park. He’s some kind of legal eagle, I think. They’ve only recently moved to Cornwall from Cambridge. That’s where Magdalene started her business in her maiden name and it just stuck.’

  ‘Carruthers of Cambridge does sound familiar,’ Loveday said, racking her brain for the connection.’

  ‘She’s the daughter of Judge Henry Carruthers, You remember him? He used to sit on all the big court cases.’ She grinned, ‘The ones nobody else would touch.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Loveday said as the penny dropped. ‘I remember now. But didn’t I read something about him dying?’  

  ‘That’s right, a few years back. That’s where Magdalene’s money comes from.’

  ‘I see,’ Loveday said, continuing her prowl around the boat. There was a watercolour of the Blue Lady on the wall, and she went to take a closer look. She gasped when she saw the signature. ‘Lawrence painted this?’ She asked incredulously, wheeling round to stare at Cassie. ‘Did you know about this?’

  ‘Of course,’ Cassie said. ‘I introduced him to Magdalene.’

  Loveday’s eyebrow arched.

  ‘She asked if I knew anyone who could paint.’ She shrugged. ‘I thought of Lawrence.’

  Loveday remembered the broody landscapes that had hung on the walls of the St Ives gallery. ‘It’s not his usual kind of thing,’ she said.

  Cassie came to stand behind her. ‘He’s come a long way since the early days, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Has he? I don’t know much about how he got started, he never talks about it.’

  ‘You’re right, he is a bit of a mystery man. I met him when he first moved to Cornwall, about five years ago. In those days he would paint anything people were willing to pay for.’

  Loveday gaped at her. This was not the Lawrence she knew.

Cassie was thinking back to the day she’d spotted the scruffily dressed, bearded man sitting on the beach sketching St Michael’s Mount. She’d been surprised at the quality of the drawing and asked if he ever painted boats.

  ‘We got chatting,’ she explained, ‘ He was scratching a living painting the more picturesque pubs and cottages and selling the finished pictures to the owners. We agreed a price for a painting of Adam’s boat.’ She smiled, remembering, ‘It was Adam’s birthday present that year.’

  ‘Lawrence has never told me any of this.’ Loveday said.

  Cassie frowned thoughtfully ‘No…he’s not one for talking about his past, is he?’

   Loveday well knew his skillful avoidance of subjects he did not want to discuss – and his life before Cornwall was one of them. She turned back to the painting, and felt an involuntary shudder sweep through her. Why would he keep something as innocent as this a secret?

  Inspection over, Cassie began packing her files away, then noticed the slightly open drawer in the office area. She 'tut-tutted'. What had the fitters been doing in that part of the boat? They’d had strict instructions to leave it alone. She got up and slid the drawer closed. It had been empty anyway. Magdalene and her husband wouldn’t be naïve enough to leave private papers just lying about. After one final check around, Cassie nodded her approval. ‘I think we can go, now.’

They went back up the polished steps and, satisfied the Blue Lady was once again locked and secure, walked slowly back along the pontoon to the car.

   On the drive home Cassie clicked on the car radio, and they listened in silence to Radio Cornwall’s latest news bulletin. The Borlase man, as Loveday had now come to think of him, was the first item.

‘Police are still trying to identify the body of a man found in Borlase Cove two days ago. It’s understood that the body was partially covered by water when discovered by members of the public on the remote cove. An air sea rescue helicopter from RNAS Culdrose was scrambled to the scene, but it was too late to help the casualty. The body was recovered by the St Ives Lifeboat. The results of a post mortem are expected later today. A spokesman for Devon and Cornwall Constabulary said no further comment could be made at this stage.’

For a moment neither of them spoke, then Cassie said, ‘It’s a weird way to kill anybody…I mean, staking him out, like you told me, to drown like that. The poor man must have gone through agony.’

Loveday shivered. ‘Thanks, Cassie, I’ve been trying not to think about that.’

‘It’s how the Cornish used to deal with folk who betrayed them, you know…in the old days.’

‘Come again?’

‘You know…when all the little fishing communities around the coast were involved in smuggling. If one of their own shopped them to the authorities they would take that person down to a deserted beach and tie them down to drown.’ She glanced up. ‘Just like that poor man.’

‘You don’t believe that?’

But Cassie nodded. ‘Oh, I think it’s true. There’s a pub along the coast from here where they say a former landlady met that very fate.’ She gave a shudder. ‘Gives you the creeps just thinking about it.’

She glanced at Loveday. ‘Why don’t you come over to us this evening? Adam and the kids will keep you too busy to brood on all this.’

‘Thanks, Cassie, that’s kind of you, but I’ve already made arrangements with a long scented soak in the bath.’

  At five o’clock Magdalene Carruthers’ red sports car swept up the wide gravel drive, coming to a halt at the point where the house came into view. She sat staring at the fluted columns flanking the front door, imagined climbing that short flight of steps, sliding her key into the lock – and shuddered. She still couldn’t believe what she and Martin had done. Her hands shook and she steadied them on the steering wheel as she moved the car forward to park at the rear of the building.

Trenmere, the impressive Georgian villa, had been her reward for agreeing to move to Cornwall with Paul eighteen months before. It had been a mistake, of course. Not even the Blue Lady could make up for having to leave her old life behind. The pungent, sickening smell of the lilies hit her as soon as she opened the front door. She hated the austere white blooms. He knew it, which was why he insisted on having them.

  ‘Lilies might not suit you, my love.’ She could still hear the sneer in his voice. ‘…But they suit me just fine. So you’ll have to put up with them.’

  Magdalene was suddenly back in that church, walking behind her father’s coffin, eyes fixed on its mass of creamy white lilies.

She was in the house now and the suffocating fragrance was everywhere. She felt a wave of nausea rise in her throat. Grabbing Paul’s flowers, she hurled them through the open front door. The porcelain vase shattered on impact, sending feather-light petals cascading in all directions. She stood back and surveyed the mess – a futile gesture, which she immediately regretted. But everything had changed now. There was no going back.

CHAPTER FOUR

Detective Constable Amanda Fox extricated the pen she had absent-mindedly pushed into her tangle of ginger curls and used it as a pointer to run down the list in front of her. She and Sam had been going through the reports in the tiny room that the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary economically described as his office. The crime scene had yielded nothing apart from the metal tent pegs and twine used to pin down the body. He looked across the desk at her. He liked Amanda’s brusque, no nonsense approach to the job. You knew where you stood with people like that, although she did have a tendency to antagonize some witnesses.

An involuntary smile flickered across his face as a picture of her on the cliff top taking Loveday’s statement came into his mind. He could see the journalist, a determined tilt to her chin, no doubt giving as good as she got. Maybe, he conceded, Amanda didn’t intimidate
everybody
.

‘I’ve been through these at least three times,’ she sighed ‘and there’s nothing.’ She held up her hands in defeat.

‘There’s never
nothing
,’ Sam said. ‘It’s there…we just haven’t found it yet. What about the journalist woman’s pictures?’ He resisted referring to her as Loveday, even if it was how he thought of her.

‘Completely useless,’ Amanda said, not quite able to suppress the satisfaction. ‘No sign of any murderer hiding in the bushes.’

She looked up and met her senior officer’s cold dark stare, but was saved from any further embarrassment by the appearance of another member of the team, waving the post mortem report on the murder victim.

‘At last,’ Sam turned, hand outstretched. ‘Thanks Alan.’

He scanned the pages and then looked up, frowning, and flipped them across the desk to Amanda. ‘Doesn’t help much - death by drowning.’

  ‘Well that wasn’t rocket science,’ she murmured as her eyes ran over the report. ‘At least we have an accurate time of death.  We can check what the sea conditions were like then. Maybe he got there by boat.’

That was Loveday’s theory, and Sam had already decided she was probably right. He pointed a pen at the report. ‘Our man died some time on Saturday, between early evening and midnight. Let’s double check if anyone saw him that night.’

He saw Amanda glance at the clock and gave her a wry smile. ‘Tomorrow will be fine. You can get off home now.’

After she’d gone, he got up and stood by the window. It overlooked the busy main route in and out of the city and, despite the traffic lights at the roundabout below, it was constantly clogged with daytime traffic. But it was almost seven now, and the city was quiet. He toyed with the idea of calling in at the pub. He knew Merrick Tremayne would probably be there. A pint of his favourite brew was his way of winding down after a working day. Sam liked Merrick and was prepared to set aside his instinctive distrust of journalists to be friends with the man. God knows he had precious few of those.

It was dark as he turned down into Marazion. The entrance to the Trevillicks’ place was concealed, but he’d been here before and knew to watch for the high stone pillars that flanked the entrance to their drive. The cottage was tiny in comparison to the main house, and he pulled alongside Loveday’s white Clio. The sounds of squealing children drifted across from the big house and he stopped to listen. Bath time…he remembered nights like this. Seemed like a lifetime ago now.

  Loveday never closed her sitting room curtains. It was comforting to see the lights of Penzance and Newlyn twinkling across the water. So she had spotted the low sweep of the car’s headlights as it swung into the drive, and had the door open before Sam even lifted his hand to knock.

  ‘Inspector…we meet again.’

  ‘I’ve brought your card back,’ he said, more gruffly than he had intended.

  He could have trusted this to even his most junior recruit. She sighed…so there was to be more questioning. She wondered if the rest of the witnesses were receiving the same attention. Perhaps he suspected her…or maybe DI Sam Kitto just didn’t trust journalists and he was here to warn her not to sell her story to one of the tabloids? Yes, that was probably it, she thought.

  She stood back to allow his tall frame to pass and the soft tweed of his jacket brushed against her arm. It immediately reminded her again of the Harris Tweed jacket her father wore for his fishing days. It was his lucky jacket, he’d told them all, laughing, because when he wore it, no salmon could resist swallowing his hook.

  Loveday had lit the fire when she got in earlier and Sam went straight to it, warming his hands at the flame. The room suddenly looked crowded.

  He made no attempt to hand over the card. She’d turned on the lamps and the room was cosy. She caught him glancing at her half-empty glass.

  ‘I’m sorry. Would you like a drink?’ She thought of offering him tea or coffee but that would have been childish. ‘Only Chardonnay, I’m afraid.’ Was that a smile?

‘That would be very acceptable,’ he said.

  Loveday went to the kitchen and returned with the bottle and another glass, which she filled and handed to him before replenishing her own.  He was still on his feet and she gestured towards the sofa as she settled into her own chair with her feet tucked under her.

  ‘Nice cottage,’ he said, looking around him. ‘How long have you been here?’

  Her eyes searched the ceiling. ‘Three years. I rented the place from Cassie and Adam, next door, when I got the job on the magazine.’

  He was on the point of asking why a career woman like her hadn’t taken a flat in Truro, but then in these surroundings, and dressed in those jeans and thick white sweater, the career image didn’t really suit her. She was watching him, so he sat down, placing his glass carefully on the small table beside him. ‘It’s not an interview,’ he said. ‘Sorry if it came across like that.’

  Loveday raised an eyebrow and Sam realised she was waiting for some other explanation for his visit. He fumbled in his jacket pocket and produced a small brown envelope. ‘Your card,’ he said, offering it across.

  Loveday reached out to accept it. ‘Any use?’ she asked.

  ‘We haven’t analysed the pictures yet.’

  Still the policeman, she thought, and giving away nothing. They sipped their drinks in silence for a few minutes then DI Kitto said, ‘It must have been a terrible shock…coming across a sight like that.’

  He saw Loveday’s fingers tighten around her glass. She was back on the cliffs and staring down into …horror. She gave a sudden shudder.    ‘How could anybody be so cruel?’

  ‘You’d be surprised just how nasty some characters can be.’

  ‘I suppose you see this all the time, in your job.’

  Sam put down his glass. It had been nine months since his last murder case in Redruth, a drugs-related stabbing. They had caught their culprit the next day. ‘Thankfully we don’t have too many murders in Cornwall,’ he said, his face still grim from the memory of yesterday.

  Loveday was thoughtful. ‘It’s how the Cornish used to deal with those who betrayed them.’

  Sam was staring at her and she realised she had spoken her thoughts aloud.

  ‘Come again?’ His eyebrow had lifted. He was getting comfortable.

  She coloured, feeling foolish that she’d said what she had been thinking, but he was still staring at her waiting for an explanation.

  ‘It’s just something Cassie told me. There’s a pub along the coast where something similar is supposed to have happened years ago.’

She repeated the story as he watched her with growing amusement. She pointed a warning finger. ‘Don’t you dare say it’s an old wives’ tale.’

  He grinned. ‘I would never be so disrespectful.’ …Well, not out loud anyway, he thought.

  ‘So you have a better explanation then as to how this poor man got there,’ Loveday said accusingly.

  ‘We’re still working on it,’ Sam said.

  ‘Do you at least know who he was?’ Loveday persisted. ‘I mean, was he local?’

  Sam’s look was non-committal. ‘We haven’t identified him yet.’

  He was the policeman again and Loveday realised her journalist training had unwittingly taken over. She was quizzing him…and DI Kitto was giving nothing away.

  They sipped their drinks in awkward silence for a few moments before Loveday said, ‘You really don’t trust journalists, do you, Inspector?’

  His brows knitted. ‘You really don’t trust policemen, do you Miss Ross?’

  Loveday couldn’t suppress her grin. She raised her glass. ‘Truce?’

  Sam did the same. It was the first time she had seen him properly smile and the effect surprised her.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ she asked, trying to remember what her fridge had to offer. ‘There won’t be much, but I could probably manage an omelette and a few bits of salad.’

  ‘No, I’m fine, thanks,’ he said abruptly, draining his glass as he stood up to leave.

  Loveday shrugged. Apparently an offer to share her supper had been a step out of line and he was putting her in her place by refusing. He really
didn’t
like journalists. He went out and she winced as he bumped his head again on the low lintel over the front door. She should have reminded him about that.

  ‘Thanks for bringing the card back,’ she called as he slid in behind the wheel of his car. She watched as the red taillights pulled away, and stayed watching as they moved along the drive and out towards the main road.

  Sam stopped to pick up fish and chips when he reached his home village. He ate them from the wrapping with a can of cold beer in front of the television – and imagined Loveday enjoying her omelette with another glass of Chardonnay.    

Magdalene had been pacing the room, wondering if she dared ring Martin when the pictures of Borlase Cove flickered across the giant flat screen television that Paul had insisted placing above the fireplace. She cringed every time she saw it. An announcer was reading the local news headlines.

  ‘Police have still not identified the body of a man found in a cove in West Cornwall on Saturday.’

  She stopped, reaching for the remote and turned the sound up. ‘The body was discovered by tourists on a painting holiday in the area. Detective Inspector Sam Kitto of Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, who is leading the inquiry, said in a statement that the man was believed to be aged around 40, 5ft 11ins tall and of slight build with thinning ginger hair.’

  Magdalene stared at the screen and felt the bile rise in her throat. It was Paul! They had found her husband’s body!

Her hand shook as she punched in Martin’s number, then immediately cancelled it. Wait, she told herself. Think first! In her mind’s eye she could see Paul, as he’d looked last Friday evening, striding across the room towards her. He hadn’t expected her to return. She’d forgotten her mobile. His grip tightened round the brandy glass he was holding as he tipped the contents down his throat. He slammed it down on the desk, his face contorted with rage.

  ‘Did you think I didn’t know about your fancy man?’ He’d moved forward, and his mouth was twisted into an evil grin. She could feel his breath on her skin. ‘I’ve had you followed…Oh yes,’ he scowled, ‘you didn’t know that, did you? Well you and your holy boyfriend – or should I say unholy boyfriend? – You’re going to get what’s coming to you…won’t that be a nice little scandal?’