To Perish in Penzance (12 page)

“But surely she knew how ill you were! You
had
told her?”

“I'd told her, but she refused to accept it. For people like her, the golden people, there is no such thing as death. She was quite wealthy, you know. She was sure that if we could find the right specialist, he would cure me. She had heard there was a good man living in Cornwall. He was retired, but she intended to persuade him to look me over. ‘Just as soon as you're rested,' she'd say. ‘And while you get your strength back, I'll go and find my father.'”

She lay back on her pillows. “Find her father! I think she found him, right enough.” She closed her eyes.

There were so many questions still to ask, but Eleanor had had enough. I stood up.

“I'm tired,” she said faintly.

“I know. I'm leaving. Try to rest.”

Before I left the room, I spoke again to the policewoman. “Look, tell me to mind my own business if you want to, but in America we have organizations called hospices. They specialize in the care of people who are dying, especially cancer patients. Is there such a thing here?”

The woman smiled. “Of course. The hospice movement was, I believe, founded in England.”

“Oh. Sorry. Anyway, when the doctor comes, could you ask him if he could set up visits by hospice people? I agree with you. Mrs. Crosby is very ill indeed, and I think she needs skilled medical care, but there doesn't seem much point in tying up a hospital bed, does there?”

She smiled again. “I will talk to the doctor, Mrs. Martin. I had already planned to do so.”

Feeling more than a little useless, I slipped out of the room.

I
MADE
Alan join me in a walk. I'd had enough of sitting inside a stuffy sickroom. The tide being out, we walked along the beach while I told him the whole story.

“So she was looking for her father,” Alan said.

“Yes. I'd guessed as much.”

“Of course, but it's useful to have it confirmed. And I think I remember that she thought, or at least her stepmother thought, that he was someone important, influential.”

“Yes, but Eleanor could be quite wrong. It's not much to go on, Betty's tone of voice, her laugh when she talked about him.”

“No, but it isn't to be dismissed out of hand, either. You say she's an intelligent woman, Mrs. Crosby. She struck me that way, too, although I have only a glancing acquaintance. And we mustn't forget that she knew Betty Adams very well.”

“Ye-es.”

Alan quirked an eyebrow at my tone, and I tried to explain.

“It's just that she's so prejudiced in Betty's favor. In the gospel according to Eleanor, Betty could do no wrong. She had a lot of boyfriends, but she wasn't promiscuous. She liked to have a good time at parties where there were drugs, but she never did anything really wrong. She couldn't hold down a steady job, but she was really a dependable kind of person. And so on. I'm not sure she, Eleanor, I mean, is entirely reliable on the subject of Betty's feelings and insinuations.”

“Hmm. I see what you mean. Were they lovers, do you think, Betty and Mrs. Crosby?”

“Eleanor said not, remember. Without my asking.”

Both of Alan's eyebrows rose at that. “Protesting too much, perhaps?”

“I don't know. The number of Betty's boyfriends, and the fact of Lexa's existence, would seem to suggest that Betty, at least, wouldn't have been interested in a lesbian relationship. If you want my honest opinion, I think that Betty looked upon Eleanor as a mother figure, and Eleanor, a lonely woman, was pretty well content with the role. All the same, I intend to take Eleanor's character judgments, of either Betty or Lexa, with a large helping of salt. Mothers are notoriously biased toward their children, especially daughters.”

“Right. However, I say again, I don't intend to dismiss her intuition about Lexa's father. For one thing, the number of influential men of the right age, while large, is far smaller than the number of men without that distinction. Anything that narrows the field of search is useful, even if it's only a working hypothesis.”

“Okay, I'll buy it, for now. So how many influential men would there have been in Penzance in 1968?”

“Nineteen sixty-seven. That's when Lexa was conceived. And don't forget, the man must still be here.”

“Only if we throw in another working hypothesis, that the two murders were by the same hand.”

“Confound it, Dorothy, you're beginning to think too much like a policeman.” He grinned, but shook his head. “We can't examine the universe all at once. If we define the problem narrowly and get nowhere, then we can expand our definition.”

“All right, all right, I'm just trying not to jump to conclusions. A habit of which you often accuse me, I might add.”

“A hypothesis is not a conclusion. All right, then, influential men between the ages, at present, of—what, would you say?”

“Let's see. Betty would have been twenty-one, or thereabouts, when she got pregnant, twenty-two when Lexa was born. She'd be fifty-five or so now if she'd lived. I wouldn't think she'd have had much to do with a younger boy. The difference between twenty-one and nineteen, say, is vast. So the boy was probably at least her age.

“But an upper limit? Oh, dear, I remember myself at that age, falling head over heels for a visiting professor at Randolph who was at least thirty years older than I was. He was English, and I thought he was
so
suave and sophisticated. And he could dance like Fred Astaire.”

I smiled reminiscently and then shook my head. “I hadn't met Frank yet, of course.”

“Yes, love, I get the point. Back to the problem in hand. We're looking for someone at least fifty-five, then, up to—well, still able to totter about.”

“Better than that. Someone reasonably fit and mobile. That cave isn't at all easy to reach.”

“Except by water.”

“Oh. I hadn't thought of that.”

“To continue. Someone, mid-fifties or older, who lived in Penzance in 1967 and still lives here—”

“And who might have known Betty Adams,” I added.

“That doesn't narrow it much. How do we know whom she might have known?”

“Well, we know what kind of parties she liked to go to.”

“Yes, but if we're talking about a respectable type, he'd probably have disguised his interest in that kind of party. So it could still have been anyone.”

“You're right. Golly, it's going to be a long list.”

“Not necessarily all that long,” said Alan. There was an odd edge to his voice.

“You've thought of something.”

“You say the Crosbys arrived on Monday.”

“That's what Eleanor said. The day before we got here.”

“And they didn't know Penzance.”

“They both told us that.”

“Then what was the best opportunity for Lexa to meet people?”

“Well, we don't know what she did on Monday or Tuesday—oh! The party, with us, of course.”

“The party. And there may have been a fair number of influential people there, but it's a shorter list than the entire upper-class population of Penzance, especially when one weeds out those who weren't living in the vicinity in the late sixties. It'll certainly give the police something to run through their computers.”

“I shudder to think how they used to do that sort of thing before there were computers.”

“The old-fashioned, slogging way. And missed out on a number of possibilities, probably. When I remember the hours I used to spend as a constable—ah, well, it doesn't bear thinking about.”

I dismissed that. “Well, there's nothing we can do about that list until the police get busy. Are they already working on it, do you think?”

“Probably. I told them about the party, of course.”

“Yes, of course. By the way, shouldn't I get this tape over to them?”

“I'll do that. I want to ask them a few things, as well.”

“Like what?”

“For example, we saw Lexa that night, walking past the restaurant. I could bear to know where was she going, and I suspect Colin's people have begun that trace, as well.”

“Goodness, I don't envy them that job. It wasn't a good night for people to be looking out their windows, was it? And after the rain started in again, I wouldn't have thought anybody'd have been on the street who didn't have to be.”

“Such are the frustrations of a policeman's life. But let's do some thinking, Dorothy. It was, as you say, a ghastly night to be out. So why was Lexa?”

“Search me. We agreed at the time she probably wasn't going to dinner.”

“She certainly wasn't going for a nice walk, not in those high heels.”

“Or that weather. Lexa took a lot of exercise, but even she wouldn't have felt obliged to do it then. So I give up. Where
was
she going?”

“Lexa,” said Alan thoughtfully, “was a very single-minded young lady. She had come to Cornwall to find her father. At a guess, I'd say Lexa had managed to locate a fertile source of information.”

“Oh, stop being mysterious and tell me!”

“You haven't taken her age into account, Dorothy, her single condition, her glamorous profession, any of that, or you'd have thought it out for yourself. And think how she was dressed. Where, these days, does a young, beautiful, single woman go to meet and talk to people?”

I frowned. “Not a pub, surely. No—no, wait, it's coming—a place where there's music. And, oh, she knew there were some places like that around here somewhere, because the superintendent and the rector were going on and on about it at the party, right behind us. Yes, and those young men she captured that night of the party—they'd have known exactly where to go. You're thinking of a rave club, aren't you?”

Alan's face was grave. “I am. I may be wrong, of course, but it's the most logical conclusion, given her clothes and everything else. She was a little old for that sort of thing, but she appeared much younger. She was looking for someone who, once upon a time, gave her mother LSD. She knew he'd be middle-aged by now and perhaps no longer into drugs, but she needed to try to find a link to him. What more sensible place to begin than by finding a distribution center for the modem drug that's taken its place?”

“Ecstasy.”

“Or MDMA, as it's more formally known.”

I tried to remember what I knew about the drug. “It can be very dangerous, can't it?”

“It can, for many reasons. Its proponents claim it induces peaceful, happy feelings, so no one on an MDMA high would ever harm anyone. There may be some truth in that, but it's not the whole truth. Part of the trouble with the drug is the reaction, the crash, which in some people can be severe. But even worse, MDMA is often adulterated with a similar drug called PMA, or para-methoxy amphetamine, if I have it right.”

“I'll stick to PMA, thanks. What is it?”

“It's a copycat drug, sometimes added to or substituted for MDMA, and it's a killer, Dorothy, really diabolical stuff. It elevates the body temperature, as ecstasy does. It makes the victim feel warm and pleasant and happy. The trouble is, the body temperature carries on climbing, and climbing some more, until the person dies. The temperature can get to 107 degrees, 108. The victim virtually cooks from the inside.”

I shuddered. “What a terrible way to die!”

“Yes. And if Lexa did go to a rave club, and did find out who her father might be, I'd lay you long odds that the autopsy will find club drugs of one sort or another in her body.”

“She wouldn't have taken them, Alan! She didn't use drugs.”

“She said she didn't.”

“She was a model! She had to keep herself looking wonderful, and she knew the best way to do that was to stay healthy.”

“All right, all right, now
I'm
thinking like a policeman. If she didn't die of something obvious, and we've agreed she probably didn't, then she died of something else. I'll concede that she probably would not have taken ecstasy or a look-alike. At least not knowingly.”

As that one sank in, I dug the toe of my shoe into the sand, found a pebble, and kicked it with all my strength. When I spoke, my voice was shaking.

“I understand now, Alan. About you and those murderers and rapists and drug dealers. I didn't before, not quite, but I do now. I'm not going to rest until we find the man who did this to Lexa, and when we do, I'd better be physically restrained or I'm going to hurt him very badly.”

We stood for a while looking at the sea before turning back toward the hotel.

I
LOOKED
in on Eleanor when we got back to the hotel and found the police surgeon with her. The three of us chatted for a moment, and then I followed the doctor out the door.

“How is she? And before you answer, I should tell you that I do know she's dying. I don't mean that. I mean, is she in pain, and how is her mental and emotional state?”

The doctor, thank heaven, wasn't the self-important type. He answered readily enough, “Mrs. Crosby suffers very little physical pain now. The disease has passed that stage. She is strong mentally, quite alert, even a trifle combative. Her physical strength will vary from day to day, though naturally the slope will be downhill in the long run. Emotionally, of course … well, she's suffered a very great loss. Just now I would say she's drained, or ‘numb' might be the word. That's a mercy, of course, but unfortunately it won't last. She'll go over the tragedy in her mind again and again, until she either comes to terms with what's happened, or else—”

“Or else the strain kills her,” I finished.

“It might well do. The will to live is a far more powerful force than many people realize, and of course the opposite is equally true. When someone is terminally ill, it is often the will
not
to live, rather than any definitive physical change, that will bring about the end.”