Wycliffe and Death in a Salubrious Place

Book 0: The Cornish Detective

by W.J. Burley

Genres: Mystery; Cozy Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

There was no doubt at all that the girl was dead. The front of her skull and her facial bones had been splintered like the cracked shell of an egg. What made it even more shocking was the setting of the murder – an idyllic corner of the Scilly Isles where violent crime was almost unknown.

Angry and distressed, the villagers instinctively turn against the only stranger in their midst, the famous pop star and teenage idol Vince Peters. But Superintendent Wycliffe is not so sure. Slowly, methodically, he begins to dig beneath the calm surface of the community – and soon uncovers a violent undercurrent of fear and guilt...

Read by Jack Shepherd

(p) 2009 Orion Publishing Group

Release date: December 16, 2010

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 157

Sample

Sylvie died without knowing why. In the instant when she had realized his intention and before the blow fell, when it was already too late to make the smallest effort to escape, she had experienced not only a paralysing fear but profound astonishment. It is said of some who die by violence that their features express neither horror nor fear but only intense surprise. Had it been possible to discern any expression on the battered face of the girl it might well have been one of blank incredulity. She died because she had not listened, because she was indifferent.

For twenty minutes the man had walked beside her when, above all else, she wanted to be alone. With the masochistic self-indulgence of deeply injured pride she wanted only to relive the moment, probe the wound, extract the last scrap of pain and humiliation from the experience. But she had not wanted to die. Even in the depths of her misery a small voice whispered that it would pass. A tiny part of her mind was beginning to make healing adjustments; even, perhaps, to skirmish with the practical problems which would now confront her. At heart, she was a realist.

It was late. Overhead, in a cloudless sky, the stars were brilliant points of cold light. Nearer the horizon they twinkled through thickening mists. The landscape in the starlight was pale, almost bleached.

They had climbed the slope out of the valley. Salubrious Place was behind them, two or three lights, orange rectangles, tawdry compared with the pure light of the stars. Without thinking about it she saw him stoop and pick up a sort of bar with a loop at one end. The area around the quarry was littered with odds and ends of scrap from the machinery which had once been used to work it. He liked to have something in his hand when he walked over the downs. Usually it was a stick and he would cut and slash at the brambles bordering the path like a destructive small boy.

They walked, picking their way round the big stones, avoiding the pot-holes but they saw almost nothing, their consciousness was not involved. His voice punctuated the silence. Intense, soft, sometimes stung to anger by her failure to respond. To her, with her present preoccupation, it was no more demanding of attention than the sound of waves breaking lazily on the beach or the mournful tolling of the bell-buoy out to sea.

Then, suddenly, her attention was arrested, but it was too late, she did not even raise a hand to ward off the blow. She crumpled. It is possible that he delivered another blow while she lay on the ground but afterwards he could not remember. Perhaps he stood over her for a time, certainly he was stunned. Then he heard voices and laughter, for a moment he could not remember where he was or what had happened, it was like waking from a vivid dream. But memory came flooding back and he realized that he still held the iron bar with its looped end. He threw it away from him with all the energy he could muster and heard it clatter, metal against metal; perhaps it had fallen into the quarry, striking one of the rusting, broken trucks which were strewn over the quarry floor among the boulders. So much the better. He rubbed his hand vigorously against his jacket.

The voices were getting closer; they had finished their session at the Barn and were on their way home. In a couple of minutes they would be with him. He stooped and lifted Sylvie’s body. It was a struggle. Her weight surprised and dismayed him. For a moment he swayed and almost fell with her but he managed to stumble away from the track through a gap in the brambles and gorse. In a small clearing he rested, trying to control his breathing and the beating of his heart. They were level with him now, shouting, laughing absurdly, jostling each other. Ten yards away but more remote than the mountains of the moon. Their footsteps and their voices died away at last.

He had another ten or fifteen yards to go. For the first time he noticed the mist drifting in from the sea, eddying, swirling, dispersing. He must try again. He put out his hand and touched a warm stickiness which made him want to vomit. He had been careful not to look at her head and face, now, accidentally, he had touched. He rubbed his hand on the short turf. He had carried her so that her head was well away from his clothing but it was still possible … He took off his jacket and placed it carefully on the ground then he bent to lift her once more. He would have dragged her body to the quarry but already his instinct for self-preservation was at work. If he could get her to the quarry without leaving too many traces her death might be put down to accident. He knew the weather in the islands, this mist would thicken to fog in a short while and it might then be supposed that she had lost her way.

Another effort which taxed his strength to the limit and he had her body more or less securely over his shoulder. He tottered the distance to the quarry edge, dropped her to the ground for fear of being carried over with her. He had a dread of heights. With his foot, he gently propelled her body to the very edge then kicked vigorously. It seemed a long time before he heard a splash and a muffled thud. She had fallen in the water and soft mud which lay at the foot of the quarry face.

He walked back to where he had left his jacket but before putting it on he took off his shirt and rolled it inside out, just in case. His jacket felt cold and damp against his naked body. He was trembling and shivering at the same time.

All through the summer night the islands had been blanketed in sea fog and measured bleats of the signals on Temple Rock and on Ship Island had punctuated the moist silence, blending in a complex rhythm. Now it was full daylight, a diffused opalescent brilliance from no apparent source revealing a tiny world of gorse and bracken.

‘She’ll clear directly.’

Two men in reefer jackets and sea boots trudged along a stony track.

‘We’re wasting our time, Matt, until she clears a bit.’ He spoke almost pleadingly but the other man seemed not to hear.

The two men represented contrasted island types: Matthew Eva, thickset, powerful, blond, with thinning, curly hair and a ruddy complexion; Jack Bishop, thin, small-boned, dark and sallow. The lion and the jackal.

‘There’s nothing can have happened to her, Matt. She’ll have lost her way in the fog and decided to sit it out somewhere. Your Sylvie’s a sensible girl, got her head screwed on. She’ll be on her way home by now.’

‘You reckon?’ Matt was cynical, not consoled.

Moisture stood out in little beads on their jackets and glistened on their features like sweat.

Suddenly, magically, the curtain of mist lifted and their range of vision increased from a few yards to a mile or more. They could see the rough moorland sloping away to the sea on their left and to their right, Carngluze, a rugged outcrop of granite, the highest point in the islands, emerged spectrally from the mist and was lost again.

‘There!’ Jack Bishop said as though he had contrived the miracle himself.

For more than an hour they quartered the rough ground. The mist still hid the carn and there was a grey, impenetrable wall not far offshore. There was no sign of Morvyl or Biddock nor any hint of the Western Rocks. From time to time they stopped and shouted, their voices small, ‘Sylvie! Sylvie!’

‘We’d best get back and if she isn’t home we can get together a party and make a proper search …’

‘I’m going to look in the quarry.’

‘The quarry? She wouldn’t have had any call to go near the quarry.’

But Matt was already ploughing through a thicket of gorse.

The quarry had been cut and blasted out of the side of the carn to provide material for almost all the buildings on the island which antedated the era of the concrete block. Now it was deserted with the rusty stanchions of a derrick, a giant winch and the corroding shell of a steam boiler, as monuments to an age that was gone.

The two men stood on the lip of the quarry with the granite face dropping sheer for thirty or forty feet below them. At the bottom brambles grew among the rusting bogies of overturned tram-trucks and, nearer the face, there was a pool of grey-green water fringed with some kind of rush.

‘There she is.’ Matt spoke seemingly without surprise or emotion as though he had only found what he expected to find.

A girl in a red wet-look mackintosh, her body curiously twisted, was lying in the rushes, her face in the water, her blonde hair floating like weeds. ‘My God!’ Jack Bishop whispered.

They followed round the edge of the quarry to where a tram-track ran down a steep slope to the floor. Their sea boots slipped and slithered on loose gravel and once they were down they had to scramble over the bramble-covered debris of granite blocks and scrap iron which littered the ground. When they bent over the girl they were standing in several inches of soft grey mud. They lifted her and carried her clear of the rushes then laid her on a granite slab which was more or less flat.

Matthew Eva looked down at his daughter, his china-blue eyes hard and cold. There could be no possible doubt that she was dead, the frontal bones of the skull and her facial bones had been splintered inwards like the cracked shell of an egg.

It was not the first time the two men had encountered violent death; wrecks, drownings and cliff falls marked the calendar of the islands. All the same …

She was blond, like her father, and her skin, where it was undamaged, was delicate and translucent. Under her mackintosh she wore a white blouse and a tartan pinafore dress. Jack Bishop looked from her to the rim of the quarry and back again finding no words for the emotion he felt. All he could say was, ‘She must’ve mistook her way in the fog and just walked over …’

‘Don’t give me that!’ The intensity of anger in Matt’s voice frightened him. ‘You fetch Freddie Jordan, I’m stopping here.’ Freddie Jordan was a sergeant of police, the law in the islands.

The sun was winning the battle overhead and by the time Bishop got to the top of the ramp he was sweating. He glanced back once and saw that Matt had covered his daughter’s body with his coat. It was two miles to the town and when he reached the slopes above the bay the church bell was tolling for Holy Communion. Eight o’clock. Sunday morning.

A perfect crescent of sand stretched for a mile beyond the town, white in the sun; the sprawl of grey houses and the patchwork of lichen-covered roofs reached up the hill towards him.

By the time Sylvie’s body had been brought in and laid in the mortuary the church bells were pealing for the ten-thirty service and the pleasure boats were loading with trippers for the off-islands.

The little grey, granite police station was on the waterfront and Sergeant Jordan lived in the house next door. With the help of two constables he policed the islands under the direction of a subdivisional headquarters on the mainland. He was an islander and, on the whole, he had a soft billet. A spot of illicit salvage, a few domestics, petty thieving, and the occasional punch-up on the quay.

‘My girl was murdered.’

Jordan ran his hand over his thinning and greying hair. ‘You can’t say that, Matt, you heard what Dr Ross …’

‘To hell with Ross!’ Matthew Eva leaned across the sergeant’s desk to make his point. ‘Did you see my girl’s face and head?’

Jordan nodded.

‘Forty feet at most that quarry is, from top to bottom, and a quagmire to fall on, soft as a feather bed …’He broke off as a new thought struck him, his voice fell. ‘You saw my wife when they picked her up?’

Jordan nodded once more. ‘I saw her.’

‘Ninety feet off Cligga Head and solid rock below. Did she look like Sylvie?’

‘No, Matt, she didn’t, but you know as well as I do no two cases are alike. We’ve seen a few falls between us …’

‘Apart from anything else,’ Eva went on, ignoring the sergeant, ‘is it likely that the same accident would happen to two members of the same family – mother and daughter, inside two years?’ His voice had become husky with fresh grief and the sergeant spoke sympathetically.

‘Believe me, Matt, you have the sympathy of everybody in the islands and from nobody more than me. There will be a full investigation. I’ve reported to my bosses and they’ll see to that, but there’s nothing more I can do.’

Eva wore no jacket and his shirt sleeves were rolled up; his massive freckled arms, covered with golden hairs, rested on the desk. He tapped the desk with a broad forefinger. ‘You know as well as I do that Sylvie was murdered and that Peters killed her. If you don’t do something about that, I will.’

The sergeant was provoked, he stood up. ‘If I were you, Matt, I should guard my tongue; that sort of talk will do you no good and it won’t bring Sylvie back. As to threats, don’t force my hand. If you put a foot out of line I shall have to run you in.’ His voice softened. ‘Don’t be a fool! We’ve got to do our job according to the book but that doesn’t mean that it won’t be done.’

Matt Eva stood up also and the two men faced each other across the desk. Eva was a head shorter than the sergeant but his was the more impressive figure. ‘If that’s how you want it …’

Jordan remained cool. ‘That’s how it’s going to be, Matt.’

Eva snatched up his coat from a chair, slung it over his shoulder and stalked through the outer office on to the quay, leaving the door open. He stood for a moment, hesitating in the sunshine, then made off along the wharf. Once he had an idea in his head there was no shifting it. A stubborn man, a good friend and a bad enemy, liable to fits of violent temper.

The pleasure boats were on their various ways to the off-islands. A few tourists strolled in the sun, family groups trudged along with their packed lunches in the direction of the beach. M. V. Islander was at her berth unloading mixed cargo with her own derricks. Like any other fine Sunday in summer.

And, as on other off-duty Sundays, at twelve o’clock Matthew went into the Seymour Arms, though today he stole in furtively, feeling that what had happened should have separated him from his routine, but unable to face the aching loneliness of his empty house.

Somehow, over the years, the locals had kept the public bar of the Seymour for themselves. Through the small archway behind the bar it was possible to catch a glimpse of floral dresses and shirts, of red, peeling faces and shoulders in the saloon. And laughter and shouting provided a clamorous background to the decorous silences in the public.

Jack Bishop was playing cribbage with Charlie Martin and half a dozen other men sat on the wooden benches round the walls. They looked up as Matthew came in and acknowledged him without a word. He went to the bar, collected his drink. . .