Chapter 25
A steady wind still blew up the inlet when Alec stepped out into the early morning sun.
Walking into the village, he noted that the great swells rolling up the inlet had not subsided overnight, as he had hoped.
He would without fail be thoroughly seasick if he took the ferry to Abbotsford. It was out of the question.
That meant Sergeant Tumbelow would have to give him and DS Horrocks a lift to the station. Though unattractive, the discomfort of the motor-bicycle was immeasurably to be preferred to the agonies of mal de mer.
But when he saw Horrocks’s pale face and the gingerly way he used his injured hand, Alec decided taking him along was out of the question.
Young Vernon, haled out of bed long before his usual hour, put on a fresh dressing and prescribed aspirin and a sling.
“I don’t think it’s infected,” he said cautiously, “but perhaps you’d better go along to my uncle’s surgery at ten.
After all, I’m not actually qualified yet, don’t you know, and animal bites can turn nasty. ”
“I’m quite all right to go to Newton Abbot wi’ you, Chief Inspector, sir!”
“Not on your life. I’m sure Inspector Mallow can make use of you here. Vernon, would I be taking my life in my hands if I asked you to
drive me into Abbotsford to catch a train? You did say you own a car?”
“She’s just a little Gwynne, but she’ll get you to Newton Abbot faster than the train. Even if I obey the speed limit,” Vernon added with a grin, “having a copper on board. Or does being on police business give me licence to speed? Anyway, I’ll take you all the way, sir.”
He was as good as his word. By ten o’clock, Alec had called in at the Newton Abbot police station and was knocking on the door of the hideous, jerry-built, modern bungalow where Olive Coleman’s dairy-maid friend resided.
Daisy slept like a log. When at last she awoke, the pillow beside her was dented, so Alec must have been there. She hadn’t the faintest recollection of his arrival or departure.
The clock on the mantelpiece opposite the bed said nearly ten o’clock.
Twelve hours’ sleep! No wonder she felt bright and full of energy.
She also felt ravenous. She gave her abdomen an apologetic pat.
“Sorry, you must be starving, baby. Breakfast’s long over, but I expect Cecily will give us some bread and butter to keep us going till lunchtime. ”
Alec had left a note on the dressing-table. He had to go to Newton Abbot to interview Olive Coleman, but hoped to wrap up the case this morning and, with any luck, be back for lunch.
What were the girls up to in Daisy’s absence? She washed and dressed quickly and went downstairs.
Cecily looked round from the flowers she was arranging on the hall table. “Good morning, sleepyhead,” she said with a smile. “Bacon and eggs in five minutes?”
“Really? Yes, please! I’ll come and eat in the kitchen if it’s more convenient. It’s too noble of you—I was hoping to beg a crust of dry bread.”
Leading the way to the kitchen, Cecily laughed. “When the others finished breakfast with no sign of your appearance, Belinda begged
me to leave out something cold for you. She said you’d be dying of hunger. What a dear that child is!”
“Isn’t she? Where are the girls?”
“On the beach.”
“Alone?” Daisy asked anxiously. “Have the waves gone down?”
“They’re about the same, but the tide is an hour later. Peter said they’re safe for a while yet, but he and Mr. Baskin went with them anyway. I popped down to see what was going on, and you’ve never seen two grown men have such fun messing about in the sand!”
How Cecily had changed in a few short days, Daisy thought, as sizzling bacon filled the kitchen with its heavenly smell.
Her sins were forgiven, her husband safe from arrest, and her aloof diffidence metamorphosed into cheerful sociability.
If Alec had not been on hand, Peter Anstruther might now be languishing in a gaol cell, while his wife tried frantically to find a good lawyer to defend him.
It was worth the loss of half their holiday—not that Daisy didn’t intend to make sure Superintendent Crane gave Alec another holiday to make up.
As she was finishing her breakfast, the beach party came in, covered with sand.
Daisy sent the girls to wash and change into clothes suitable to walk into the village.
She needed yet more postcards, Belinda ought to write again to her grandparents, and Deva must write to her mother.
Baskin decided to go with them to drop into the parish hall and find out what was going on.
“I hope your husband has made an arrest by now,” he said privately to Daisy as the girls raced ahead along the track, “so that he won’t have to trouble Elizabeth.”
“I hope so too, so that he can have a few days to enjoy this beautiful place before we go back to town!”
Having bought their postcards and stamps and exchanged their library books, Daisy and the girls headed down the busy street towards the quay. They were halfway down the hill when an earsplitting crrrack startled them to a halt. Everyone in the street looked up as a
series of bangs rang out and a burst of fiery multi-coloured stars sparkled high in the blue sky.
“A rocket!” Deva exclaimed.
All the local people were suddenly in motion, most of them running down the cobbles to the waterside. Daisy couldn’t move.
“For the lifeboat,” said Belinda. “You remember, Mummy, like when Daddy found the body and they fired a rocket—they called it a maroon—so the lifeboatmen would come to man the boat.”
“To go and fetch the body, Mrs. Fletcher, ’member?”
Daisy remembered all too clearly. Not another body at the bottom of a cliff. It couldn’t—mustn’t—be another murder!
“Come on, Mummy. Let’s go and watch them launch the boat. Everyone’s going.”
She let the girls shepherd her down to the quay. Everyone was talking at once, the broad, slow Devonshire accent confusing her ears.
The lifeboat house at the end of the quay was bedecked with fading bunting in celebration of the centenary of the RNLI. Its doors stood open. Half the population of the village seemed to be helping to drag the white, blue and red lifeboat out on its wheeled carriage and easing it down the slipway.
Mrs. Hammett emerged from the crowd. “It’s the idiot, that Sid Coleman,” she told Daisy.
“A couple of fishermen saw him climbing into a cave. They say it’s quite safe in the ordinary way, but today’s the spring tide and wi’ the waves kicked up by the storm and a strong onshore wind, the cave’ll fill wi’ water and drownd him. ”
“Why didn’t they go and stop him?” Daisy was horrified. It was her fault Sid had been driven from his humble home and gone into hiding, all because she had told Alec he was Olive’s uncle. If he drowned, she’d never forgive herself.
“They shouted and waved, is what I heard, but he just went the faster. Their boat not being built for inshore work, they came back in a hurry to call out the lifeboat. Though why a dozen able-bodied men should risk their lives for an idiot is more than I can tell!”
“They’ve volunteered to help anyone in danger, haven’t they? Not to pick and choose. And they have life-jackets.”
The boat was floating now, and several men were in it, shrugging into the bulky life-jackets. Two of them looked familiar to Daisy, but she couldn’t place them. A couple more came running. Timing their jumps to the rise of the boat on a swell, they dropped down.
“Mummy!” Belinda pulled urgently on Daisy’s sleeve. “Mummy, it’s the men who were so horrid to Sid! The ones who were going to steal his cart. They’ll frighten him. He’ll never go to them if they call to him. He’ll go farther into the cave and get drowned, for sure.”
Daisy moved without thinking. Afterwards, she was quite unable to explain or even recall exactly what she did. She would remember her own voice, in her mother’s best grande dame manner, saying, “Help me aboard, please, I must go with them.”
The next thing she was fully aware of was an educated voice shouting irritably, “No, we can’t stop to put her ashore. Wind and tide are against us. Lean to those oars.”
She was seated on a locker. One of the men she recognized—Ned Baxter?—was guiding her hand through the armhole of a life-jacket. The boat was already several yards from the quay.
“Let’s get the other arm through this here hole, missus,” said Ned Baxter patiently, “and I s’ll lace un for ’ee. I dunno what you’ve gone and took into your head, to come along o’ we, like, but if so be you was to fall overboard we don’t want you a-drownding of afore we can pull you in.”
“Gosh, no!”
Daisy saw Belinda and Deva up on the quay, staring after her in horror. Baskin was beside them. He would look after them. They’d tell Alec where she had gone.
Alec was going to be absolutely, enormously and justifiably furious. She must have run mad!
“I been’t going back. You can’t make me!” Olive Coleman’s pudding-face was not improved by a sullen pout, but she had the voluptuous
figure of an Edwardian chorus girl, and Enderby’s taste in women was already proven to be catholic. It might have appealed to other men, too. Alec hoped he wasn’t going to have to investigate all Coleman’s farm-hands.
In Alec’s eyes, the girl’s true beauty was her hair, spun gold, braided and pinned up in an old-fashioned coronet about her head. No doubt that would not last, judging by her friend’s crimped bob.
“I’m not trying to take you home, Miss Coleman,” he said. “At present I just want to ask you some questions.”
“Don’t know nothing.”
“In that case, you won’t be able to give me answers, will you? But I must ask the questions all the same, and you might prefer that your friend not hear them.”
“I’ll stick by you, Olive.” Mrs. Dabb’s face was avid with curiosity. “Is it about this murder, then, that’s in the papers? The landlord at the Schooner, as fell off of the cliff? ’Tweren’t that far from the farm, was it?”
Olive looked mistrustfully from her friend to Alec and back. “I don’t know nothing. I din’t do nothing.”
“I’m not here to charge you with any crime, Miss Coleman, but you may request a lawyer if you wish. Or your friend may stay, or I can call in a constable, or—”
“No,” she said sulkily. “I don’t want nobody. You don’t need to stay, Mavis.”
“You sure, dear? Well, then, I’ll be right next door in the kitchen if you was to want me. Just call out.” Mrs. Dabb whisked out, not quite closing the door behind her.
Alec remedied the omission and turned to face the room. Olive stood by the gas-fireplace, fidgeting with a garish china clown holding a concertina with A Present from Paignton written on it.
“’Tis a music box,” she said. “Listen.” In tinny tones, “Oh, I do Like to Be Beside the Seaside” started up. “I never seen one afore.”
Alec let her listen. Whatever she had done with Enderby, she was
still in some ways a child, he thought. He wished Daisy was with him, to reassure her, to win her confidence.
The tune ended. Before the mechanism started a repeat, Alec said, “Do sit down, Miss Coleman.”
Clutching the tinkling clown, she subsided into the nearest armchair, one of a suite upholstered in shoddy tangerine plush. Her healthy colour had faded, and she moistened dry lips with the tip of her tongue. “What is it, then? What d’you want to know?”
Alec sat down on a matching chair, and discovered that it was as uncomfortable as it was hideous. “Think back to Sunday,” he said. “Just four days ago. Tell me about it.”
She took him literally, beginning with getting up at dawn to help milk the cows. The recital of the morning’s chores in dairy and house seemed to calm her, so he didn’t interrupt.
“And then we had dinner, roast beef wi’ apple pie after.” She paused. “No, I tell a lie, it were plum pie. And then me dad got hisself into a fine taking, so I cut and run. When me dad flies off the handle, you don’t hang around if you don’t want a thick ear—or worser.”
“He followed you.”
“He come out roaring for blood.”
“So it was you he was angry with, not your mother. What did you do to upset him?”
“’Tweren’t nothing I done,” she whined. “Mum tole him some gossip Aunt Ellen tole her. She’m a terrible tattler, Aunt Ellen.”
“She told him you had been seen meeting George Enderby.”
“Well, if so be you knows, why ask?”
“I want to hear your version, Miss Coleman.”
“All right,” she said uneasily, “so I met Mr. Enderby a couple o’ times, when I were out walking. Bain’t nowt wrong in talking to a fella that I knows on.”
Enderby was not available to be charged with causing the deliquency of a minor, Alec reflected, so, for the moment at least, what
exactly had occurred between them was not material. The way she called her lover “Mr.” was rather pathetic. “How far did your father chase you?”
“’Tweren’t no distance. I hid, and he stamps about a bit, shouting. Then he yells out, ‘Just wait till you get home, you’ll get what’s coming to you.’ And off he goes down the lane.”
“Then you come out of hiding and set off across the cliffs, and he turns around and follows you.”
“That he did not! I went ever so careful. I’d stop and watch to see were he coming after, and he weren’t. He were certain sure I’d have to go home soon or late and he’d get me then.”
Lips compressed, Alec swore silently. If anything was “certain sure,” it was that Olive had no desire to protect her father. It looked as if Coleman was out of the running.
“And he can wait forever,” Olive continued. “I bain’t going home and you can’t make me!”
“How did you get to Newton Abbot?”
“Mr. Enderby give me money for the bus fare. He give me earrings, too, but I lost one o’ they,” she said sadly. “He were nice to me and I be sorry he’s dead.”
“How did you come to lose the earring?”
Olive scowled. “He were a-watching of us! Disgusting, I calls it. I seen him peeping and tole Mr. Enderby and up he jumps, and I pulls down me frock and I were in that much hurry to get away I must’ve dropped the earring wi’out noticing.”
So much for meeting the man to talk! But who was the observer? “Your father caught up with you and watched … what you were doing?”
“Dad? Nay, I tole you I lost him,” the girl said scornfully. “’Twere me simple uncle, Sid.”