To Perish in Penzance (6 page)

“I only got a glimpse, and from the back, at that. It was probably someone else. Forget it. Do you suppose there's any tiramisu? I'm still hungry.”

I ate my dessert, and we both had some espresso, and then we walked back to the hotel. The wind was in our faces going back, sweeping up from the coast of South Carolina over thousands of miles of cold Atlantic, and the rain had begun again. I'm not a lightweight, and Alan is a tall, solid man, but we were nearly blown backward. By the time we'd covered the two blocks to the hotel, I was exhausted from the chill and from fighting the wind, and we were both soaked to the skin. We went straight to our room. I took a hot bath and then climbed into the inviting four-poster bed. Alan stopped reading his book and put out the light.

He was snoring softly in a few minutes, but I couldn't seem to sleep. The wind and rain battered the windows, howling through the chinks and rattling a loose pane. Wind has always frightened me, and even Alan's comforting presence couldn't quite still my vague fears. Or maybe it was the espresso. I kept seeing that girl, her hair blowing wildly, her short skirt and tall boots, going through the storm to—where?

When I slept I dreamed of her, wishing I could see her face, but it was always hidden from me.

Alan, having slept soundly, awakened early. He lay quietly in bed, but he woke me by his very wakefulness. I turned over and buried my head in the pillow, but it was no use. Morning was definitely upon us. “If you love me,” I muttered, yawning, “make me a cup of tea.”

Once my eyes were properly open, I could see it was a beautiful day, and I began to scheme. We ate breakfast in a dining room that was nearly deserted, the hour being so early, and as we were finishing I made my suggestion to Alan.

“I've been thinking,” I said as he sipped his second cup of coffee. “Would this be a good day to go exploring those smugglers' caves you've been telling me about? It all sounds very romantic, and very unlike anything one would find in America.”

He smiled. “Oh, I'm sure there's something similar in America, if one knows where to look. England never had a monopoly in smugglers. Most of them were, and are, your run-of-the-mill criminals, nothing romantic about them. But there was a certain bravado about some of the Cornish ones, I suppose, and once a criminal passes into legend, the more grisly aspects of his career are often forgotten.

“Yes, we'll go and see some of the caves, if you like. You'd best dress warmly. I know the sun's shining, but the wind's still fierce and the seas are still high. You're apt to get wet, clambering about over rocks. And don't forget your sunscreen.”

I was not to be deterred by all the recommended precautions. If Alan was seeing dead girls walking down the street, there were ghosts to be exorcised. I had no intention of allowing my husband to go on stewing about a crime long past. If, as I hoped, an expedition to the caves would give him a chance to open that murky corner of his mind and spirit and let daylight in, I'd clamber till I dropped. I pulled my only pair of blue jeans out of the drawer, added a sturdy shirt, a lightweight, waterproof jacket, and a pair of clunky running shoes. With a pull-on denim hat, I was ready to go.

“We might as well do the most famous ones first,” said Alan when we got to the car. “The three little inlets that make up Prussia Cove.”

Where the dead girl was found, I remembered. I didn't mention it. “Oh, yes, you talked about some brothers who plied their trade there.”

“A trade it was, too. Almost, by the standards of the day, an honorable one. The brothers were the Carters, three of them: Harry, John, and Charles. It was John, in fact, who named the place Prussia Cove and called himself the king of Prussia.”

Alan negotiated a tight curve. “He
was
something of a king, I suppose, or he and his brothers were, between them. They were born somewhere around the mid-seventeen hundreds, and by the 1770s they were famous throughout Cornwall. Not only as smugglers, mind you. They were staunch Methodists, and Harry, the leader of the bunch, had quite a name as a fiery preacher. He wouldn't let his crew swear, I seem to remember from the old stories. Oh, and once when one of their shipments was seized and locked up in the customs house, John organized a raid and got it back. There were other goods in there as well, but John wouldn't let his men touch them. He didn't consider that honest.”

I giggled. “I suppose even the devil has a conscience.”

“Oh, the Carters weren't devils. They provided a service, according to their lights. I must say they had something of a point. The duties on tobacco, brandy, sugar, and tea were iniquitous, often running to several hundred percent. Men like the Carters reckoned that if they could buy a pound of tea for two shillings in France and sell it in Cornwall for five, they made a reasonable profit for their trouble and risk and at the same time acted as public benefactors, because the duty alone ran something like six shillings.”

“Yes, I see. All the same …”

“Yes, all the same, it was a dangerous game, and not only for the smugglers who died when ships were wrecked on the rocks or revenue officers put a musket ball through their heads. Society in general suffered, because widespread defiance of even a bad law leads to disrespect for law in general. Eventually, 'round about 1850, parliament saw the wisdom of that argument and reduced the duties to reasonable levels, which took away the smugglers' profits and put them out of business. Amazing, really, how long it took the government to grasp the fact that collecting a small duty all the time would net them more income than never collecting a large one. Not to mention paying good money to customs agents into the bargain.”

“Well, it's a good, full-blooded story, anyway. I can just see them, sailing into the cove on a moonlit night—”

My loving husband snorted. “Not if they knew what they were about, they didn't. You're thinking of those romantic old pictures. Sensible smugglers landed when there was no moon, and preferably clouds to veil even the starlight. And in most of Mount's Bay,
this
was the coastline they had to contend with on those pitch-dark nights.”

We were driving along the top of a cliff, the sea visible from time to time through trees and brush. Alan pulled the car into a turnout, a place where there was a break in the undergrowth, and stopped. “Get out and take a look at Piskie's Cove, the first inlet of Prussia Cove.”

“I thought you said it was Mount's Bay.”

“That's the whole area, Porthgwarra or so right 'round to The Lizard.”

“Oh.”

“Never mind. I'll show you a map later. Just look.”

I stepped out into the wind, moved close to the edge of the cliff, and gasped.

The sea was far below me, but its noise was loud, even up here. Waves rolled in and broke on the rocks in ceaseless tumult. The rocks were sharp and cruel, tossed down as though to lay a trap for an unwary sailor. Landing a sailing craft there would be the act of a madman in broad daylight, let alone on a moonless night.

“Alan, how did any of them survive? It looks impossible.”

“We'll drive a little farther, to Bessie's Cove where we can park, and I'll show you.”

Bessie's Cove turned out to be a rough half-moon carved out of the cliff by centuries of wind and water. At the top of the cliff was a lovely green meadow that afforded a tiny parking place. A farmhouse or two stood far back from the cliff, and near its edge there was a small, deserted stone building that might at one time have been a shepherd's hut.

Down below there was a broad, fairly flat, rocky shelf sloping up gradually from the water's edge. After fifty feet or so, though, the shelf met the body of the cliff and rose almost straight up in a series of uneven ridges.

The rocks were nearly black and must have been very hard, for they didn't seem to be very much weathered. They had broken off here and there and left boulders at the edge of the sea. Basalt, perhaps, I thought, for the edges looked sharp.

“Well, it's bigger than Piskie's Cove, but it looks just as dangerous to me.”

“Let's go down,” said Alan. “There's a path that's not too bad, but I'll go first. Give you something soft to land on.”

“I hope it won't come to that,” I said, gritting my teeth and grasping my walking stick so tightly my knuckles were white. With my unreliable knees, going down is always much worse than going up. Ah, well, if I had to do any slithering, at least my jeans were tough.

Alan paused about halfway down to give me a chance to catch my breath. When I had, I pointed. “Alan, what are those grooves in the rock? On the flat part, see? They look for all the world as though railroad tracks had been there and been taken up at some point.”

“You've got the track part right. Those were made at least two hundred years ago by the wheels of the smugglers' carts. They didn't sail their cutters right up to the rocks, of course. You were right about that; it would have been impossible. They anchored as close in as they dared and then took the cargo off in small boats, or, in the case of rum, floated the casks right in to shore. Once they got the cargo to the rocks, they loaded it into carts and trundled it to the caves, where they'd store it until it could be taken up the cliff.”

“Good heavens.” I sat on a convenient rock and looked, and listened. The hypnotic clamor of the waves, the cry of the gulls, the smell of salt water and seaweed. A sky so blue it looked like a touched-up photograph, bright sunshine warming the rocks. Such a peaceful scene, but this place had been the site of dangerous, desperate activity, night after moonless night, for enough years to wear permanent tracks in the rock, tracks that another two centuries of high tides had not yet worn away.

“Are you game to go on down to the caves? The tide's coming in, but I should think we've a bit of time before the footing gets sloshy.”

“Sure. I came to see everything, and I'd better do it now, because I guarantee you'll never get me down this path again. I may not be able to go inside the cave, though, or not very far. It depends on how big it is. I managed Fingal's Cave all right, but little ones …”

He nodded. He knew about my unfortunate quirk. I'd had to explain to him once, when we'd visited a wonderful castle, why I couldn't see the dungeons or climb the narrow, winding, enclosed staircase to the roof.

“I hate it. It's stupid and irrational and it keeps me from doing a lot of things I want to do, but a phobia's a phobia, and I've been told there's very little, short of hypnotism, to be done about claustrophobia.”

So I followed Alan down with some trepidation. I was eager for him to revisit the cave, but I personally wanted nothing to do with it.

The path soon reached the flattened rock shelf. The footing was uneven and slippery, but my stick helped a good deal, and Alan's arm was useful more than once. Still, I was panting again, and not entirely from exertion, when we rounded one last point and stood just inside the entrance of the biggest cave.

I blinked, trying to accustom my eyes to the gloom. There was something at the back of the cave. I thought at first it was a large bunch of seaweed, carried by the tide to the back of the cave.

Alan's stillness told me, just a second before my own senses did.

“Don't move, Dorothy. Don't go any closer.”

I waited there, hardly breathing, while he went to investigate. He touched nothing, looking carefully before he put a foot down on the rocky floor. When he had seen what he had to, he came back to me.

He looked sick as he took my arm and led me to a big rock just outside the cave. He made me sit, and he watched me for a little while before he said anything.

“Can you bear to stay here, do you think, or is the cave too troublesome? We must get help, and the mobile's in the car. I can climb the rocks faster than you can.”

“I'm fine. The cave doesn't bother me as long as I'm not actually in it. The sooner you go, the sooner you'll be back.”

He looked hard at me and pressed his lips together, then turned and loped off across the rocks.

I stared resolutely out to sea and tried not to think about the body in the cave. The body lying casually on its back, wearing calf-high boots and a miniskirt, the body whose long, honey-blond hair spread out in a little pool of seawater and moved as the wind reached the water, moved in a grotesque imitation of life.

The body of Alexis Adams.

I
T
seemed a long time before Alan came back down. I sat on my rock, shivering a little in the chill wind from the sea, but grateful all the same that Alan had remembered about sunscreen. I burn very easily, and skin cancer is not high on my list of Things I Want to Experience. I tried not to move much. We'd already compromised the crime scene, if crime scene it was, simply by being there. I didn't want to add any more extraneous evidence, or ruin any that might be there.

Not that there was likely to be much. The floor of the cave was solid rock, no good for footprints, and anyway, a line of seaweed many yards up the rocky beach showed how far the last high tide had reached. The floor of the cave, the rock where I sat so restlessly, the cart tracks—all would have been covered by two or three feet of water at high tide.

Would it have reached the back of the cave?

No, I wouldn't let myself think about that. I would think about waves, hypnotic waves rolling in, creaming over the rocks, retreating, rolling in … the ageless rhythm of the sea.

The gulls cried, screaming harshly, swooping, fighting over choice tidbits of something on the rocks.

Dear heaven! Were gulls scavengers?

In a panic, I stood and ran at them with a shooing motion. Those birds mustn't get into the cave!

They wheeled away, jeering. I stood and took deep breaths, trying to stop shaking, trying not to be sick.

Alan had looked sick when he left the cave, caught up in his own personal nightmare. This body, so like the other, in the same cave … this couldn't be real, it couldn't be happening. I was in the nightmare, too. I'd wake soon.