Chapter Six
SIX
A uniformed constable Megan didn’t recognise—from Bodmin, presumably—guarded the street door into the passage beside the LonStar shop. “Move along, please, miss,” he said to Megan in the automatic monotone of words oft repeated. “No one allowed in until further notice.”
“Detective Sergeant Pencarrow. I’m working with DI Scumble.”
“Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it.”
In silence Megan took her warrant card from the pocket of her suit jacket and held it up six inches from his nose.
His eyes crossed and he moved back half a step, till his back was pressed against the door. “Oops, sorry, miss. No one told me we got lady detectives nowadays. No offence meant.” Saluting, he moved aside.
Megan wasn’t sure of the truth of either statement, but he wasn’t openly grinning, so she let it pass.
She’d met the same attitude before in the few months since she moved from London back to Cornwall, in spite of her promotion to sergeant.
Perhaps because country manners were still old-fashioned compared to the modern lack of manners in the city, so far no one had been openly rude.
Until and unless that happened, she had decided the best way to deal with it was to ignore it.
At least the present oaf had reached behind him as he moved to swing the door open for her.
She had feminist friends who would have objected to the assumption that a woman was incapable of opening a door for herself, but Megan was not looking for confrontation.
With a nod of acknowledgement, she went in.
The door from the passage to the shop was open. Within, surrounded by racks of second-hand clothes and shelves of second-hand books and china, Scumble stood glowering at a bin of colourful woolly animals. A grass-green, yellow-bellied, goggle-eyed frog grinned back at him.
Megan stopped in the doorway, behind the counter and cash-register. The inspector transferred his scowl to her.
“Dusted! Everything in this place that can be polished has been polished within an inch of its life,” he said gloomily.
“Mrs Stearns,” Megan assumed. “Did the intruders get into the shop, sir?”
“Probably not.” His gaze returned to the frog and its companions. “We haven’t found anything they might have been after. I’m wondering whether there could be something hidden in one of these ghastly animals. No doubt Mrs Stearns will disembowel me if we disembowel them.”
Megan was stunned by this evidence of a sense of humor, however grim, in her grumpy boss. “Couldn’t we just squeeze them?” she asked cautiously. “That would catch anything but a very small piece of paper. Or drugs.”
“Drugs are a possibility. The boy ponged of Mary Jane, remember, though the doc didn’t find any obvious sign of the hard stuff. We’ll have to impound them, at least until we find out where they came from. Anything helpful from Mrs Trewynn’s arty boyfriend?”
“Not her boyfriend, sir!” Megan realised too late that he was just trying to get a rise out of her. And succeeding. Lamely she added, “Just a friend. He’s half her age.”
“What’s wrong with him that he can’t get a girlfriend his own age? A pansy, is he?”
“Could be, I suppose. I don’t think so.”
“Drugs?”
“Not noticeably. The smell of turpentine in his studio would cover pot, but I can’t see him smoking in there, with customers in and out of the gallery.”
“All right, get on with it.”
Megan gave her report. She knew she hadn’t extracted much useful information from Nick Gresham, but under Scumble’s sceptical gaze it shrank to virtually zero. “At least we know Aunt—Mrs Trewynn locked the street door when they went to the restaurant,” she finished in desperation.
“Unfortunately,” he pointed out, “we still don’t know whether she locked the back door. You didn’t ask whether he waited long for Mrs Trewynn to come back down?”
“No, sir. Uh, why?”
“Oh, just in case he said she came straight back, and she said she was gone for several minutes, feeding the dog, say.”
“Sir, you can’t think he was downstairs knocking the victim on the head while she was upstairs feeding the dog!”
“You never know. However, having forgotten to mention bringing the dog home, your aunt is not in the least likely to remember how long she took about it.” He went over to the door to the stockroom and stuck his head in. “Not finished with that bloody list yet?”
“The list’s just about done, sir,” said Chapman, the scene-of-crime sergeant, “except we’re still going through all the blasted pockets.”
“Well, don’t be all day about it. What have you found in the way of possible weapons?”
He went in. Megan followed him. Laid out on the long, narrow table were a rolling pin; a bundle of brass stair-rods tied with garden twine; an old-fashioned flatiron; an even more old-fashioned copper warming-pan, for which some rich American might pay a pretty penny; and a bent golf club that could conceivably be of use as a garden stake.
“That’s it?” Scumble demanded. “Load of rubbish. Any blood or hair?”
“Not that we can see, sir.”
“None of ’em looks likely, but we’ll let the experts decide. Where’s the man who went to the Chinese and the pub?”
“Golloping or gulging,” said PC Killick enviously. A true Cornishman, he was given to deliberately incomprehensible pronouncements in the local dialect, though not attempting the renascent Cornish language.
“He better not be,” said Chapman, who apparently understood at least those two words, as did Megan. After all, she had grown up in Cornwall.
“Eating or drinking,” she translated discreetly to Scumble, who was turning crimson.
It did not noticeably decrease his choler. “He’d better not be!” the inspector seconded the sergeant.
“All the same, sir,” said Chapman, “is it okay if we get some pasties in from opposite?”
“I suppose so. Let’s have your list of the stuff in here. When the house-to-house people come in, and that includes the grub and booze man, get their reports. If we’re not back, bring them to the vicarage. DS Pencarrow and I are going there now.”
His sigh was deep enough to have originated in the Antipodes.
Eleanor was invigorated by the walk up the hill with Jocelyn to the vicarage, Teazle trotting at their heels.
The sea breeze was refreshing and she didn’t mind that it brought with it the beginnings of a sea mist. Crookmoyle Point and Slee Head, to the south of the harbour, were already invisible, and from the lighthouse came the hollow moan of the fog-horn.
But the village would probably suffer no worse than a pervading dampness in the air.
The Reverend Timothy Stearns, tall and thin and swathed in yellow oilskins, awaited them on the vicarage’s front step. In front of him in the street stood his tan Vespa motor scooter, polished to a gleam. He raised a hand in greeting as he caught sight of them.
“Good morning, Mrs Trewynn,” he called out with punctilious courtesy, coming to meet them, then asked anxiously, “Jocelyn, can this be true? Three parishioners have telephoned to say a body has been found at the LonStar shop. Surely they must be mistaken?”
“I’m afraid not,” his wife said grimly. “Eleanor found him in the stockroom.”
“Who . . . who is it?”
“A stranger, dear.”
“Oh dear! Should I . . . I wonder . . . last rites, do you think?”
“It’s much too late for that. He was dead when he was found, and for some time before that. Besides, they’ve already taken him away.”
“My dear Mrs Trewynn, what a terrible shock.” He held out both hands to Eleanor, dropping his sou’wester. “May I offer . . . That is, do you feel a need for the consolations of religion?”
She took his hands, gave them a gentle squeeze, and released them.
“That’s very kind of you, Vicar.” Though she attended Christmas and Easter services at the little grey stone church because she liked the hymns, Eleanor was not a communicant.
In fact, after a Congregationalist upbringing, a Quaker school, and her world-wide travels, she leant towards Buddhism, if anything.
“But, truly, I’m over the worst effects of the shock, thank you. I’ll be all right.”
He nodded gravely. “Jocelyn, do you suppose there’s a family in need of support?”
“He hasn’t been identified yet, dear. I think you’d do best to get on with your regular rounds. It’s your day for St Endellion, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I was about to leave when I heard . . . Don’t you think I ought to . . . ? But old Mrs Lockhart is expecting me . . .”
“You mustn’t disappoint her, Timothy. Off you go, now.” Jocelyn picked up the sou’wester. She kissed his cheek, plonked the hat on his head, and tightened the strap under his chin. “Ride carefully, and if it gets very foggy, wait till it clears.”
“Yes, my dear. A little medicinal brandy, perhaps, Mrs Trewynn . . . ?”
“I’ll take care of Eleanor, dear. Goodbye.”
At last the vicar seated himself on his Vespa and started its tiny motor.
Teazle backed away, barking her head off.
He buzzed away, crouched over the handlebars, like a giant yellow grasshopper as Nick Gresham had once remarked.
A benevolent but indecisive grasshopper, he had three parishes in his charge.
Without Jocelyn, Eleanor thought, he wouldn’t be able to cope even with one.
They went into the vicarage, a cosy, comparatively modern bungalow that had replaced a huge, hideous, draughty Victorian house.
The sitting room was furnished in eclectic style, a few good inherited pieces and some cheap odds and ends from the Stearns’ early married days, filled in with once good but slightly shabby charity-shop finds.
Two of Nick Gresham’s paintings graced the sitting-room walls.
One was of Mevagissey; the other of Rough Tor—unless it was Brown Willy, Eleanor was never sure which was which—in sunshine, with a shaggy pony in the foreground.
A Welsh dresser displayed a Royal Doulton dinner service, inherited from Jocelyn’s parents.
The blue-grey broadloom carpet was courtesy of the Church Commissioners.