Malice in Cornwall (23 page)

Powell pushed off the safety. It was a straightaway shot, after all, but he'd let his bird sing awhile before he pulled the trigger. “Why don't you start at the beginning?”

“It was nineteen-sixty-six and I'd just moved to Pen-rick and set myself up as a publican. I'd, er, made a bit of money in London, small-time stuff, you understand, enough for a down payment on the Head. I was mortgaged up to my balls, but I needed to establish myself as a respectable member of the community and get to know the lay of the land.” He lowered his voice. “I was doing this drug deal. see. Half a ton of cannabis resin. I'd been planning it for years. I had this mate who could get the stuff from Morocco to Gibraltar, load it onto a yacht, then run it into the Channel. Then we'd switch it over to a fishing boat off Land's End and unload it at some secluded cove along the Cornish coast. Penrick seemed like the ideal base of operations.”

Sing, birdie, sing.

“I settled on Mawgawan Beach early on. It was much more private in those days. You'd get the odd adventurous type camping out there in the summer, but that was about it. The thing about Mawgawan Beach is you can get a sizable boat in mere safely at night. But the problem was getting the goods off the beach. There's no way up the cliffs there; the nearest place to get the stuff out is the Old Fish Cellar.”

“That's where Nick Tebble comes into it.” Stating the obvious with a knowing air of nonchalance rarely failed to impress. Merriman had made a career of it.

Rowlands nodded ruefully. “Christ, if I'd only known what I was getting myself into.”

“He was a bit of an eccentric, I understand,” Powell remarked sympathetically.

An edgy laugh. “Eccentric? He was eccentric all right. The thing was, I needed somebody who could handle a small boat and knew the local waters to ferry the goods from Mawgawan Beach to someplace safe. Like I said, the Old Fish Cellar seemed perfect. The place is fairly isolated, and I'd learned that Tebble lived alone and knew his way around boats.”

“How did you approach Tebble in the first place?”

“He came into the Head one night and I started chatting him up, you know how it is. Served him a couple on the house after closing time. He started coming in every night after that. He had a thing about foreigners—anyone not from Cornwall, that is—and was always going on about how hard done by the Cornish were. It was Cousin Jack
this
and Cousin Jack
that.
It was enough to make you puke. But I went along with it to get on the right side of him. It wasn't long before I had him eating out of my
hand.” He frowned. “Or so I thought. To cut a long story short, I finally put it to him one night: fifty thousand quid, free and clear, if he did his bit and kept his mouth shut.”

That explained the money. “I'm a little puzzled—what made you think he could be trusted?”

“It was obvious that he was a complete nutter. I reckoned if he squealed no one would believe him. It would be his word against mine, me a pillar of the community. It turned out that I underestimated him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was a raving bloody psychotic, that's what,” Rowlands replied petulantly, as if Tebble's mental condition, whatever it might have been, was a personal affront to himself. An errant comet orbiting around his sun.

“Would you care to elaborate?” Powell held his breath, the gun firmly seated against his shoulder now.

Rowlands's eyes were almost pleading. “If I tell you what happened, will you go easy on me? Like I said, I never hurt anybody …”

“But I think you have, Tony. All the kids who smoked that hash, for instance. Who knows how they all ended up?”

“That was thirty years ago!” Rowlands exclaimed.

Powell regarded him placidly. “If you cooperate, it will be taken into account, I can promise you that. In any case, I think you need to get it off your chest.”

Rowlands took his head in his hands and moaned. “What I wouldn't give for thirty years of peace and quiet to make up for the thirty years of hell I've been through.”

Maybe not thirty years, Powell thought, but we'll do our best. Inspector Richards was yawning in the corner,
which was annoyingly distracting under the circumstances. Powell flashed him a withering look. “Well, how about it, Tony?”

Rowlands began to speak in a monotone, like someone had pulled the cord on one of those talking dolls. “It was April eleventh, nineteen-sixty-seven. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a moonless night—overcast, like— and the tides were just right. The whole thing went off without a hitch. The plan was to keep the goods at the Old Fish Cellar for two weeks then transport them by lorry to Birmingham for distribution.” Rowlands shook his head in disgust. “But then Nick started running off at the mouth. He'd get into his cups and go on and on about the good old days—the wrecking and the smuggling. Christ Almighty! I had to shut him up more than once. It got to the point where I could no longer trust him. I mean I didn't think he'd nark on me on purpose—not if he wanted to get paid—I was more afraid he might let something slip that would point the finger to the Old Fish Cellar. To be on the safe side, I decided we'd better move the goods somewhere else until my mate in Birmingham was ready for them. I told Nick about it and gave the impression that it was all part of the plan. Fair-traders like us can't be too careful, nudge, nudge—you get the idea. So we moved the goods up to the mine one night and stashed them down one of the old shafts. I told Nick to keep an eye on the place until we was ready to ship them out.” A strange expression clouded his features. “You don't know how much I've come to regret that decision.”

Powell stared at him. “Not as much as Ruth Trevenney.”

Powell listened with an odd sense of detachment as the story unfolded. The events surrounding the murder of Ruth Trevenney, as Rowlands related them, were startling, yet not unexpected, a bit like one's first glimpse of the wild Cornish coast she had loved so well.

It seemed that Nick Tebble had taken his role as guardian of their drug stash extremely seriously. According to Rowlands, Tebble encountered Ruth at the mine one afternoon picking wildflowers. In the grip of some paranoid delusion, he forced her down one of the old adits, raped her, then slit her throat.

“He didn't say anything to me about it until after the body had washed up on the Sands a few days later. The thing is,” Rowlands said in a hollow voice, eyes averted, “the bastard was proud of himself.” He looked up at Powell. “Whatever else I might have done in my time, I've no stomach for murder. I was completely shattered by what Nick had done. I even thought about chucking the whole operation. But then I figured I'd better go through with it so I could set myself up for life, respectable
like, and not have to get involved in that kind of dodge again.”

Powell was thinking about Roger Trevenney. “Did it ever occur to you to go to the police?” he asked sharply.

“I figured I was in it too deep. Considering that Nick was two pence short of a bob, I was scared they'd try to hang Ruth's murder on me. Perhaps if I had …” He left it hanging.

If wishes were horses, Powell thought. “Go on.”

Rowlands shrugged. “Not much more to tell, really. I did the deal, we all got paid and lived unhappily ever after.”

Irony, Powell marveled; perhaps I've underestimated old Tony. “When did Tebble start blackmailing you?”

“You don't miss a thing, do you?”

Rhetorical questions, even.

“He was all right for a few months,” Rowlands continued, “then he started up again. He wanted me to plan another operation.” He shook his head. “It's not like he needed to work. I told him to piss off, but he wouldn't get off it, threatened to blow the gaff if I didn't play along. You see, Nick was handy with the practical things, but he didn't have a head for planning. That's why he needed me.”

Powell was puzzled. “Did you ever consider calling his bluff? Tebble had more to lose than you by going to the police.”

“You didn't know him—he didn't think like a normal bloke. He was like a kamikaze pilot. Looking back on it now, I suppose I could've bolted and hoped for the best, but at the time I figured I'd be better off sticking around so I could keep an eye on him. In the end we settled on a small-time operation, running goods over from France
every couple of months or so—wine, cigarettes, that sort of thing. It was fairly low risk, there was no shortage of local customers, and I figured it would keep Nick busy and out of trouble.”

“I understand that George Polfrock is a client of yours.”

Rowlands looked surprised then smirked. “Yeah, our George is quite a reader.”

”When did your little business arrangement with Tebble start to fall apart?”

”About a month ago. He came to the Head one night after closing time and told me he was tired of pissing around with booze and dirty books, he wanted to do something really big, another drug deal like the one we'd done in the Sixties. I refused flat out, of course, but once again he wouldn't take no for an answer.” His expression hardened. “A short time later your Riddle turned up— Nick's little reminder for me about Ruth Trevenney, as if I needed one.”

“How did he pull it off?”

Rowlands explained how a body had washed up on the beach at the Old Fish Cellar one day; Tebble had seen his opportunity and taken advantage of it. Tebble had been fascinated by his luminous woodpile and twigged to the idea of rigging the corpse to create a supernatural effect. When it got dark, he'd ferry it from the Old Fish Cellar to the Sands in his tiny skiff, unload it on the beach halfway between the village and Towey Head, scatter bits of the fungus all over it, then hide out in the Towans until someone out for an evening stroll happened along. After his victim had fled the scene, he'd load the body back in
his boat and head for home. During the day he kept it packed in salt in his cellar.

“No one ever reported seeing a boat,” Powell interjected.

“He used a wagon of some sort to lug it into the towans. And sometimes when the tide was out he used it to haul the body to and from his skiff.”

Powell nodded, satisfied. Now a shot in the dark.

“Do you know anything about Ruth's diary?”

Rowlands looked puzzled. “Didn't know she had one.”

Powell told him about his last conversation with Roger Trevenney.

Rowlands smiled grimly. “Nick was capable of doing whatever it took to get his way. He told me he was going to talk to Trevenney. Threatening to tip him off was Nick's way of turning up the pressure.”

“He never actually got around to it though, did he, Tony? Because somebody killed him. Somebody with something to gain, or at least nothing more to lose?”

Fear in his eyes now. “Look, Chief Superintendent, I've been straight with you up to now but—” He choked off the words. He sounded desperate. “I need to think.”

Powell spoke slowly:

Rowlands looked befuddled. “What did you say?”

“She's just like Lady Macbeth, isn't she, Tony?”

It took a moment to sink in, then an expression of awe
on Rowlands's face. “Gawd! Is there anything you don't know?”

Inspector Richards in the corner suppressed a snort.

“Why don't you tell me about you and Linda?” Powell said.

Rowlands laughed bitterly. “You've seen her, the bloody bitch exudes sex. I've always had a weakness for the ladies, and when she and that nancy-boy husband of hers rented one of my cottages, well, one thing led to another. I only wanted a bit of fun, but it was clear she was looking for a way out of her situation.” A slight hesitation. “I might have led her on a bit. You see, I've always planned to retire to Spain—I've got a villa out there—and I, uh, promised to take her with me someday.”

Powell regarded him with distaste. “Was that your intention?”

“Come on, Chief Superintendent, you and I are both men of the world. I like a nice bit of crumpet as well as the next bloke, but I'm not bloody crazy.”

“What did Jenny think of this arrangement?”

“Jenny? Why should she care—”

“Cut the crap, Tony!” Powell snapped.

Rowlands looked sheepish. “Jenny is, er, not the jealous type.”

“Perhaps I'll ask her myself.”

“She's known me for a long time … I mean, she knows what I'm like,” Rowlands said weakly, as if that explained everything.

“Tell me more about Linda.”

“After the Riddle started, I found that I was spending more and more time with her. My nerves were shot, and I needed someone to talk to. I told her about the drugs,
about Nick, Ruth Trevenney, everything. She seemed very understanding, very protective.” He looked at Powell, his face expressionless.

“What about her husband? Did he know about the two of you?”

“I've no idea. Even if he had, I don't imagine he would have done anything about it.”

“How did you and Linda manage your liaisons?”

“Jim has been reduced to taking odd jobs at various local farms to make ends meet. Linda would let me know when he'd be away for the day; I'd pick her up at the top of the lane and we'd drive to an abandoned farmhouse I know of.”

“Were you with Linda at her cottage last Saturday, the day Tebble was murdered?”

“No, I just told you we never did it there.”

“She said she was with you.”

A look of panic on his face. “I told her I couldn't— look, it's not true, I promise you!”

“Well she was with somebody that morning, and it wasn't Mr. Porter. Any idea who it was?”

“What do you mean,
with
somebody?”

“You're a man of the world, Tony. Use your imagination.”

The publican seemed to be sulking, which was rather ludicrous under the circumstances, Powell thought. “There was a small dinghy on the beach near the cottage,” he persisted.

Rowlands suddenly turned white as a sheet. He looked like he was going to be sick. For several seconds, he seemed incapable of speaking. Eventually he managed a
hoarse whisper. “Good Christ, she not only shoved a spade in his guts, she screwed the poor bastard first!”