Festival, page 13
‘OK when you’re ready.’
‘Ready now. Let go, and we’ll move out slow ahead.’
The man pulled in and coiled the stern-line and the schooner moved gently towards the mouth of the cove.
The two women watched the manœuvre, the one referred to as Margaret holding the baby. As soon as the schooner had cleared the quay the woman addressed as Harriet picked up her kitbag. ‘Where’s the car?’ she asked.
‘It’s in the hotel car park – I didn’t think they’d mind at this time of the evening, and the place is still half-empty. You wait here with Victoria and your bag, and I’ll get the car and pick you up.’
That gave Piet time to get into his own car. Assuming that the women were going to Pendenna they would go out on the road he had come in by, passing his car where it was parked on the verge. He’d let them pass, he thought, and then follow. His car, fortunately, was facing the right way.
He didn’t think it mattered much if either of the women noticed him, but he leant over the handbrake when their car passed, as if he were adjusting something. Probably they did not even realise that another car was there. He let them get out of sight round the next of the road’s hairpin bends, and then followed. If he was right in the identity of Harriet, and there didn’t seem much doubt about it, they would be making for the drive from the main road to Pendenna House.
*
They were. Piet followed at a safe distance. He saw the car ahead turn into the drive for the big house, but confident that he could find the house when he needed to, he stopped on the main road. Was the other woman staying at Pendenna House? He decided to wait for half an hour, and if she had not returned by then to go to the house on foot. If the car had been put away in a garage or stable, or seemed parked for the night, he would assume that both women were staying there, and make further plans in the morning. If the woman called Margaret returned, he wanted to see where she went.
He did not have long to wait. Within a quarter of an hour the car did return from the drive. Again he followed, and was slightly surprised to see it turn off down the narrow lane leading to the Pendenna cottages. He did not follow in his own car. It was now nearly dark, and a pursuing light would be immediately noticeable. Moreover, the lane did not lead anywhere except to the cottages, and a pursuing car would make the woman in front wonder what was happening. So he left his car, and went down the lane on foot. The car naturally was several minutes ahead, but this did not bother him, for unless it turned round and came back, which would seem fairly pointless, it had only one place to go. He was right in his reasoning here, for when he reached the end of the lane and took the track to the cottages he saw the car parked on the open space available for residents’ cars, and he saw lights go up in what was probably a bedroom window in the cottage at the end of the row. There was plenty of cover from rocks and bushes, and he found a good position from which he could see if anyone went into or came out from the cottage, and in which he himself would not be seen. He thought it unlikely that anything would happen, but he was taking no chances.
After three quarters of an hour the lights in the cottage went out, and he felt that he could safely leave things for the night. He walked back to the main road and returned to his hotel.
He had been too intent to think of eating, and the pork pie in his pocket had turned into a crumbled, rather greasy mess. He now felt slightly sick, and although he needed food he thought he would wait until he got back to his room, and could relax a little. It was possible that the hotel might provide something a bit more appetising than the crushed remains of his pork pie and packet of potato crisps, but it was half-past eleven, and he had no great hopes.
In this he wronged the hotel. It was not the sort of place to go in for room service late at night, but it had what was much more human than most forms of hotel room service – an old-fashioned, friendly night porter. When he collected his key, the man said, ‘If you’re staying in the hotel and fancy anything to drink, sir, I can get it for you.’
‘I could certainly do with a Scotch, but I’d be even more grateful for something to eat,’ Piet replied.
‘Well, there’s no kitchen staff on at night, but I could probably find a plate of ham, with a tomato and some bread and butter.’
‘That would be marvellous.’
‘Do you like mustard? And what about the Scotch?’
‘Yes, I do like mustard. And you can make the Scotch a large one.’
*
In about five minutes the night porter was back with a generous plate of food and the whisky. ‘Shall I take it up to your room, sir?’ he asked.
‘Please don’t bother. It’s only one floor, and I can manage the tray myself. I’ll walk up, I think – I don’t need the lift.’ Piet paid for the food and drink, adding a lavish tip which he felt admirably earned.
*
He left the whisky until he had had his meal. Feeling much restored, he sat looking out of the window, savouring the Scotch. What had he learned? He had discovered a woman who was apparently the sister of the dead Jane Partridge, and, most significantly, she had had a baby with her. Harriet, Jane, and baby – they seemed to match perfectly the trio on the Downs. But Harriet and the baby couldn’t have been there, for they had been on a boat. This was a shock to his reasoning, and for a moment he felt hopeless. Then he realised that everything depended on when the schooner had left Padstow. She might not have sailed until that morning, or even during the afternoon, and if so there would have been plenty of time for Harriet to get back to Padstow from Avebury or thereabouts. Jo’s kidnapping was now the day before yesterday. Assuming that Harriet and the baby had come straight back, there would have been a clear twenty-four hours in hand. But if his theory of the substitution of Jo for the baby with which the two women had turned up at the country house hotel was anywhere near right, it ought to have been Jo who was brought back by Harriet. The other baby, though, would have had to come back too, for apparently she belonged to the woman called Margaret. It would have been easy enough for Harriet to bring back two babies – a bit tiresome, perhaps, but quite practicable, for both could have been strapped in carrycots. But if it had been like that, where was Jo now? Could she be at Pendenna House, within ten minutes’ car run of where he was sitting?
Half of him wanted to call out every policeman in Cornwall and raid Pendenna House forthwith, but his more rational half told him that he had still got to wait. There wasn’t a scrap of evidence that Jo was anywhere near Pendenna. The reasoning that had brought him to Cornwall was almost wholly circumstantial, and although the appearance of the baby apparently belonging to the woman called Margaret could be held to contribute to the net of circumstance, there could be a thousand innocent reasons for it. And if Jo was at Pendenna House, who had been looking after her while Harriet with the other baby was at Padstow, or at sea? He had to find out a great deal more, and he decided to start early in the morning with Margaret and the Pendenna cottages. He would take easel and canvas, set up his stool, and hope.
*
There was the sea to be considered, too. If he could find time for a visit to Padstow he should be able to learn when Morning Star had sailed, but for the present that would have to remain guesswork. He did not know the North Cornwall coast. Almost all his boyhood sailing with his father had been in the Thames Estuary and off the East Coast, but in one memorable summer they had chartered a small yawl from Padstow and sailed her to Milford Haven and back. His father was a master mariner and although never very fit after his ordeal when the armed merchantman he commanded was sunk during the war, he retained his passionate love of sail and enjoyed sailing with Piet more, perhaps, than anything else in life. Piet recalled now his own excitement at sailing in new waters, and his father’s respect for the grim North Cornwall and North Devon coast. He remembered some of the names –the Doom Bar coming out of Padstow, and the two great rocks with the curiously sinister name of Quies, the Eastern and the Western Quies.
It had been a happy cruise, but boyhood was a long time ago – and his father did the worrying. He had kept the yawl well clear of the ironbound coast, and they had called only at Lundy Island on the way to the marvellous waters of Milford Haven. Lundy had been exciting, and to land there as a boy from a sailing boat was as near heaven as this world holds . . . Fine memories, but now was not the time for memory. How long would it have taken Morning Star to get from Padstow to Port Gaverne? He had no chart, but the Ordnance map was good enough to scale off distances. It was not far. They had to round the peninsula with Pentire Point at its western end and Rumps Point to the east, keep clear of the Mouls Rock, and stay to seaward of Port Quin Bay to clear Kellan Head and Varley Head. After that, as long as there was enough water to get into the cove, it was a clear run to Port Gaverne. Depending on how far they had stood out to sea to round the Pentire peninsula, the distance need not have been more than fifteen miles, and might have been less. What was the wind doing? He didn’t know what sort of wind there had been earlier in the day, but by late afternoon it was a moderate westerly, a fair wind for the course beyond Pentire, and although it could have been nasty coming out of Padstow Bay there didn’t seem to have been enough wind to make difficulties for a skilled crew. In any case, there was the diesel, and although he had no knowledge of its power, it had taken the schooner out of Port Gaverne steadily enough, and he recalled that the man at the wheel had said that he was only going ‘Slow ahead’. With the engine the schooner should be able to make at least six or seven knots, and with a fair wind probably more. Put the speed as low as five knots, and they wouldn’t have needed more than three hours for the trip. So they needn’t have left Padstow before late afternoon, or even, since five knots was a highly conservative estimate, early evening. He had no Pilot Book, and without knowing the set and rate of tidal streams, his reckoning at best was rough, but over such a relatively short distance it probably didn’t matter much. What did matter was that there had been ample time for Harriet and baby – or babies – he shivered slightly –to spend a night and a day at Padstow or on board the schooner if they had wanted to.
*
How did the schooner fit into things? He remembered his father’s telling him that coastal shipping under sail remained important until after the First World War. It was not the railways that put paid to coastal shipping as an integral part of British transport – the railways ran to big towns, and large areas of the countryside still depended on ketches, schooners and Thames barges for coal, building materials, and often ironmongery and household goods as well. The trading vessels would work their way into almost every little cove, sometimes unloading on to the beach if there were no harbour quay. And they took away local produce, as in the Cornish slate trade. The motor lorry, often a one-man haulage business set up by ex-Servicemen who had learned to drive during the war, changed things almost overnight. It could get to the most out-of-the-way places, delivering from the nearest railhead. With more opportunities in industry, fewer men were willing to accept the hard life of the coastal seaman, so with the coming of the motor lorry the crews available for the little trading ships diminished. And it was not only the crews that departed. Many a coastal ketch or schooner could have been kept going by a family crew, making the boat their home, and content to live on next to nothing for the sake of the life they understood, but the local sail lofts and ropewalks that had kept the little ships supplied with gear vanished, too. Morning Star was a survival from a working past, but her upkeep now was that of a yacht. The Partridge business must at one time have been extensive, and apparently profitable, but times had changed against it. Piet did not know how long ago the last load of Cornish slate had been shipped by sail, but he doubted if this could have been much after the early 1920s. Morning Star had probably never been a real working boat, but had been built on the lines of a slater to please the late Major Partridge, or, perhaps, his father, who presumably had enough money left then to indulge a fancy and a love for the sea. From what the old barman had said, there did not seem to have been any business for a good many years. The schooner might bring in a bit in charter fees, but Piet doubted if they would be enough to pay for her keep. How was she still in commission? How did Harriet normally use her? If the family had fallen on hard times, one would have expected that a luxury like the schooner would have been among the first things to go.
*
How relevant was any of this? Piet had been looking into the night following his train of thought; he might even have dozed a little. He woke up suddenly to the realisation that he might be wildly wrong about everything, that Miss Harriet Partridge and her schooner might have nothing whatever to do with Jo, and that his own escapade in Cornwall might be a sheer waste of time. This was a dispiriting thought, but he pulled himself together. He might still be without any real evidence, but there were certainly indications that his thinking, if not right, was at any rate on the right lines. And it was too late to go back. Having set out to test a theory, he could do nothing now but get on with the job. Time had evaporated as he sat thinking, and it was now after two o’clock in the morning. He decided to turn in briefly, but to be in Pendenna with his easel around eight.
*
That meant a skimpy breakfast, for the Blue Ocean, being a holiday hotel, did not serve breakfast before eight. The staff, however, were as friendly as the night porter had been, and while he couldn’t have a cooked breakfast before eight, he could have coffee, bread and butter and marmalade. Fortified by this on top of his late supper of cold ham, Piet set off for Pendenna.
The weather seemed to be changing. It was still quite warm, but the brilliant early morning sunshine of the past few days had gone, to be replaced by a thin overcast, and what looked like thickening cloud coming in from the north-west, with more wind than there had been the night before. At least it wasn’t raining, and the halftones of colour under the overcast sky were as beautiful, and in some ways more interesting, than the land and seascape in bright sunlight.
*
Fundamentally, Piet was more painter than policeman, and he was a good policeman essentially because he was a good painter – his acute visual imagination was his greatest strength, though it could lead him into error (and for himself sometimes needless pain) in imagining things that did not happen: things that did not happen, rather than could not have happened.
He decided to paint the view from the track, where it began to descend steeply, bringing in Margaret’s cottage at the end of the row, the narrow thread of water in Pendenna cove, and the massive cliff on the eastern side of the inlet. With a brush in his hand and the canvas on his easel he was at once nearly absorbed in what he was doing, although the rest of his mind was sharply alert to why he was doing it. He had been at work for about half an hour when he was conscious of somebody behind him. He did not look round, and a moment later heard a woman’s voice, ‘That’s really not at all bad!’
‘Thank you,’ he said, looking up. It was the woman called Margaret. He had not seen her come out of the front door of the cottage, so she must either have been out already and be walking back to her cottage, or have come out at the back and walked round to where Piet had stationed himself.
‘Do you paint?’ he asked.
‘Yes, though I can’t say that I make much of a living by it.’
‘Who does?’
‘Well, some people do, though to make real money out of pictures, I think you have to be dead, and then the money goes to dealers, not your family. It always enrages me to see the saleroom prices for Van Gogh, say, and to think how Vincent had to exist when he was alive.’
‘He had to teach people how to see. The way people look at things is largely a matter of fashion, and if you see things in new ways you can’t expect to be fashionable.’
‘It’s hard, though. Are you a professional? Your work has a professional look about it.’
‘I paint for a living, but I don’t pretend to be much of an artist. I have to paint what I can sell.’
‘What do you sell?’
‘Occasional pictures in a local exhibition, or an art gallery. My bread and butter is doing county calendars – a picture for each month. They make useful Christmas presents – anyway, people seem to buy them. The ones for this Christmas are all printed – the publishers like to work at least a year ahead. I’m doing Cornwall for next year.’
‘I wish you’d give me some advice, though it’s cheek to ask you, and to interrupt your work. My name’s Margaret Claridge. Would you like a cup of coffee? I live in the cottage in your picture.’
‘I’m Andrew Johnson. I’d love a cup of coffee, and perhaps I could see some of your work. Do I have to pack up, or will my things be safe here?’
‘Safe enough, I think, though there’s quite a bit of wind, and it’s blowing more or less straight into the inlet. You can leave your stool and the easel, but it would be wiser to bring your canvas into the cottage – it wouldn’t do it any good to be blown down while the paint is still wet. And I’d put away the palette and brushes – they’ll be covered in grit if you just leave them.’
‘Right.’ Piet packed up his painting box and closed the lid. Carrying his unfinished picture, he followed Margaret to her cottage.
*
The front door opened straight into the living room, which was furnished as a studio, and there was a pram with a baby lying asleep. ‘Sorry about the domesticity,’ the woman said. ‘Victoria was awake late last night, that’s why she’s asleep now. I’ll make coffee for us, and then she’ll probably wake up and want her breakfast. I don’t know if you have any experience of children. They get in the way of painting, rather.’
‘Alas, no. I quite like painting children, though. I’ve done quite well from time to time with miniatures for lockets. People who wouldn’t dream of buying a picture for themselves, will often spend money on a portrait of a child.’
