Wycliffe and the Pea Green Boat

by W.J. Burley

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

Synopsis

When Cedric Tremain is charged with murdering his father by booby-trapping his fishing boat, all the locals are agreed that he is an unlikely murderer. But the case against him is strong: he has the motive, the opportunity and the know-how; not to mention the fact that there is some hard circumstantial evidence against him. So Cedric is arrested.

But Chief Superintendent Wycliffe has a strong sense that something about the case just doesn't fit. As he quietly continues his investigations a confusing picture emerges. Twenty years ago Cedric's cousin was convicted of strangling his girlfriend and served fourteen years of a commuted death sentence.

While the wheels of justice begin to grind Wycliffe searches for a link between past and present...

Read by Jack Shepherd

(p) 2008 Orion Publishing Group

Release date: December 16, 2010

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 224

Sample

ON THE MORNING of Wednesday 24th June, Morley Tremain lay, between sleeping and waking, vaguely aware of familiar sounds from the shop below and from the street. Every now and then came the jangling of the shop door-bell, a sound which had been part of the background of his life for as long as he could remember. And there were voices, his mother’s and the customers’, audible only as a confused murmur. Down the street, the baker, who had a hole in the roof of his mouth, was loading wire trays of cakes and bread into his van and greeting passers-by in his garbled speech.

Morley opened his eyes and looked at the clock. Half-past eight. He was on holiday, in the second week of his annual leave from his job at the clay works. He was a wages clerk, though his mother told people that he was an accountant. The sun was shining as it had been for four or five days and, through the window with its little square panes, he could see blue sky above the roofs of the houses opposite.

The shop was always busy at this time of day with people calling for their morning newspapers. The papers arrived in a large parcel, by bus, at eight o’clock and, most mornings of the year, Morley caught that same bus to work.

Alice Weekes, in her blue, linen overall, would be in the room behind the shop marking off the contents of the parcel, scribbling people’s names on papers and magazines which had been ordered and ticking them off in an account book. From time to time his mother would call, in her strident shop-voice, ‘Mr Taylor’s Mail, Alice!’ or, ‘Guardian for Miss Clarke!’

He closed his eyes again and thought about Alice.

She had been employed in the shop for no more than a week when he had plucked up courage and asked her to go to the pictures with him. She had looked up, her blue eyes solemn, her lips unsmiling, ‘Do you really want me to?’

He had had little experience with girls and he felt awkward and gauche in their company. The girls at the office laughed at him more or less openly. But Alice was different; her serious manner impressed him. She said little, rarely expressing a point of view about anything, but she was a good listener. When he was with her he took the lead and she seemed to expect it. In this, as in so many things, she was the very opposite of his cousin, Eunice, the only other girl with whom he had spent much time. But sometimes he wondered what might be hidden by her smooth brow, her calm eyes and her gentle, rather sad expression. Did she really hang on his every word? At any rate he had decided that she was the girl he would marry. He was twenty-two and earning good money by village standards. They had been going together for three months. But there was no hurry; step by step was his policy in everything and it usually worked. He would give his mother time to get used to the idea.

He got out of bed. A tall, skinny young man in pyjama trousers. He had prominent ribs and bony protuberances on the shoulders; jet-black hair and a pallid complexion. His chest and fore-arms were covered with fine, black hairs. He put on his glasses which enlarged and darkened his brown eyes. After a wash and shave in the little, windowless bathroom at the top of the stairs he dressed carefully. Grey slacks, white shirt, navy-blue blazer with brass buttons and a maroon tie.

Downstairs, in the living-room, one end of the dining-table had been laid for his breakfast, bread and butter already cut. All he had to do was boil himself an egg and make tea. It was the same every morning, whether he was going to work or not and it had been the same when he was a boy and had to catch the same bus to the grammar school. In fact, nothing had really changed since his father’s death when he was ten years old.

‘I’ve never let the shop interfere with bringing up my son and it hasn’t been easy, a woman on her own.’

How often had he heard his mother say that to customers?

He settled down to breakfast, a book beside his plate. His mother bustled in, as she always did, to see how he was getting on. Her greying hair was wispy and her cheeks were slightly flushed.

‘All right, Morley? Got everything you want? More tea? More bread-and-butter?’

‘Yes, yes. No, thank you, mother.’ Ritual responses to ritual questions. He did not look up from his book.

The shop was part of a corner house in the main street of the village and the living-room window looked out on a short, narrow access-road to the harbour. When one of the fish lorries went by it blocked the light completely and its sideboard almost brushed the wall of the house.

There were tourists about, though in 1953 they were not the sole reason for the continuing existence of the village. But already, at just after nine in the morning, they were wandering down to the harbour, peering at everything, even into the room where Morley was eating his breakfast.

When he had finished he put his dishes in the sink and went through to the shop. Alice had finished marking off the papers and was serving a young man, a stranger, with cigarettes. He was smiling at something she had said and Morley turned quickly to his mother.

‘I’m going out.’

‘Anywhere special?’

‘Just for a walk.’

He went out into the street, closing the shop door behind him. The door still had a brass handle with a thumb latch and the inscription, FRY’S CHOCOLATE, in white enamelled letters stuck to the glass. The H was already missing when he first noticed such things. The sign-board over the shop still carried his father’s name in faded letters: SIDNEY TREMAIN. TOBACCONIST AND NEWSAGENT. They were still known as the Sidney Tremains to distinguish them from the Harry Tremains, his uncle’s family.

He walked the hundred yards or so to the harbour, shoulders back, head held high. He was always conscious of people watching him and he guessed that they made disparaging remarks as he went by in his blue blazer with the brass buttons. More like a tourist. But he told himself that he didn’t care, it meant that he had got somewhere and, if he was embarrassed when his mother told people that he was an accountant, he was not unwilling to be regarded as an up-and-coming young man.

Another glorious day with the sea sparkling under a cloudless sky. The village was celebrating its Coronation Carnival Week, everything was Coronation that year. Strings of flags, bleached but gay, fluttered in the breeze and there were tubs of flowers outside some of the buildings on the waterfront.

It was half-tide and falling; there were few craft in the basin, a couple of launches running trips for visitors and a few moored dinghies. It was the long-lining season and the fishing boats were at sea, not due back until evening. Tourists had taken over the fishermen’s quay-side seats, long baulks of timber propped up on concrete blocks.

He went for a walk on the cliffs and came back for lunch which, because of the shop, was a cold dish with meat out of a tin. After lunch he was in the shop with Alice; his mother was lying down as she always did at this time. It was a quiet time of day with few customers and Alice was unpacking cartons of cigarettes and stacking them on the shelves. For a long time he was content to watch her at work, scarcely exchanging a word. Her long, blonde hair seemed to ripple every time she moved her head.

‘Shall I see you tonight?’

‘It’s difficult, I promised mother I would stay in and do the ironing.’

‘Tomorrow, then? There’s a good film on at the Scala.’

‘All right.’

He was never importunate, there was no need. In any case he liked to think of her taking her place in the home, quietly capable. It proved that she was not like some of the girls at the office who boasted that they could not boil an egg.

When his mother came down stairs it was the signal for another walk. He thought of tramping the five miles across the cliffs to Porthquiddick and catching the bus back. It would be a change, but as he came out on to the quay he was surprised to see his uncle’s boat, Green Lady III, berthed near the Brays’ fish store on the main quay. She was four or five hours early, which meant that there must have been some kind of trouble. There was no sign of Green Lady’s crew but Alfie, one of the Bray brothers, was hosing down the cobbles in front of his store.

‘Trouble, Alfie?’

‘They got their line snagged in an old wreck and lost upwards of a thousand hooks. They’re in the loft baiting up and I reckon, if you’ve nothing better to do, your uncle would be glad of another pair of hands.’

‘Any catch?’

‘Three stone of whiting, hardly worth going out for.’

A thousand hooks meant half-a-mile of line. When he was younger he had spent a lot of time in his uncle’s fish loft, baiting up and, several times, he had gone out long-lining but his mother had disapproved, fearing that he might make fishing his trade.

He made his way back along the quay to the house, changed his clothes, then went to the loft. He found his uncle with two crewmen, sitting on up-turned oil drums, making up a new line.

‘Want a hand, uncle?’

His uncle nodded. ‘Pull up a drum, Morley. You can give Jimmy a hand with the baiting.’

The loft reeked of tar and fish. Double doors stood open to the quay, framing the brilliant scene outside like a still from a Technicolor film. But the interior of the loft was dimly lit and cool. His uncle and Willie Matthews bent the strops of new hooks to a length of line while Jimmy Tregaskis baited the attached hooks with strips of mackerel. A mackerel was dexterously cut into twenty or thirty pieces and each piece was doubly secured to the hook. His fingers soon became sticky with tar from the line and slippery with blood from the fish but it did not take him long to recover the rhythm of movement which kept the baited line feeding into the basket at his feet.

True to his Tremain stock, his uncle was lean, dark and sallow. He had no moustache but a fringe of black beard along the line of his jaw. A man in his forties, a difficult man and, by all accounts, mean. His crewmen rarely stayed with him for more than a single season and some years he would be looking for a man at the height of the pilchard driving. Often there was trouble over the share-out.

Now and then visitors strolling along the quay stopped to look in and, occasionally, one of them tried to take a photograph in the tricky lighting conditions, but the four men behaved as though they were totally unaware of what was going on.

Willie Matthews was in his second season on the Tremain boat but Jimmy Tregaskis had retired from fishing and had been persuaded to come back for a few weeks to help out. Willie was short, stout and clean shaven with smooth, brown skin which shone as though it had been burnished. Jimmy was wizened, without teeth and he looked out on the world through eyes which were permanently narrowed to slits.

‘How’s Alice?’ Willie Matthews, the stout crewman, his smooth features wrinkled in a smile.

‘She’s all right.’

‘Taking her out tonight?’

‘Not tonight.’

‘Pretty young maid, sure ’nough.’ Jimmy Tregaskis wheezed away over some secret joke. He was a lascivious old man, well known as a Peeping Tom and more than once accused of showing himself to young girls. ‘I bet she’ll let you put ’n away whenever you have the fancy.’

‘None of that, Jimmy!’ Harry Tremain turned to glare at the old man. ‘You know I’ll have none of that talk in my loft.’

Harry Tremain, like most of the family, was a Methodist; he sang in the choir and, occasionally, preached at various chapels round the circuit.

Jimmy said no more and they worked in silence. Their blunt, clumsy-looking fingers never faltered though they rarely looked at the wicked little hooks with their needle-sharp points. By six o’clock they had completed the new line and the two crewmen left. Morley would have gone with them but his uncle called him back.

‘Are you serious about this young woman, Morley?’

‘I don’t know what you mean, uncle.’

His uncle was slow of speech and conversation was always punctuated by long silences.

‘You know exactly what I mean. You’ve got no father and it’s my duty to tell you when I see you make a fool of yourself. Those two just now, they were laughing at you, boy.’

‘Let them if they want to.’

‘That’s not the point; they’ve heard the same gossip as I’ve heard. The Weekes family are newcomers to the village. They came here, as you know, from Redruth, but the girl’s reputation has caught up with her. What surprises me is that your mother hasn’t got hold of it, she’s usually quick enough. Now if you’re thinking of marriage —’

But Morley had turned on his heel and walked out.

That evening he stayed at home with his mother in the upstairs sitting-room, next to his bedroom. He read while his mother knitted. She sat in the bay window watching the harbour which could be seen through a gap in the houses along the front. Monty, their neutered, grey tabby, slept, curled up, on the window-seat. The sky was glowing turquoise, beginning to pale as the sun, hidden behind the houses, dropped to the horizon. The little room was filled with yellow light, evening light, intimate and melancholy. It was so quiet they could hear the footsteps of people walking in the street.

From time to time his mother cleared her throat and made a remark or asked a question, making conversation. He knew that she was preparing the ground, leading up to something. At last it came.

‘You’re seeing a lot of Alice, aren’t you?’

He stiffened. ‘I’d have a job not to, seeing she works here.’

‘You know what I mean, Morley.’

‘We go out sometimes.’

‘Do you want to marry her, dear?’ She was busy casting off but she stopped to watch his face.

‘I’ll probably marry her if she’ll have me.’

‘Have you asked her?’

‘No.’

His mother laughed in a patronizing way which he always detested. ‘She’ll have you all right, Morley, if you give her half a chance. But don’t be taken in by that innocent Miss Prim look, she’s calculating. That young woman’s got her eye on the shop. I’ll not deny she’s a worker and that’s something these days. She’s also got the makings of a good head for business, but things like that don’t make a marriage, Morley, I should know. If you want my opinion —’

He stood up and threw his book on to the chair. She looked startled. ‘What’s the matter? Where are you going?’

‘Out.’ He was incapable of having a row so that his only course was to avoid provocation.

Her voice was tremulous. ‘When will you be back?’

‘I’ll be back.’ A grudging concession, part of a bargain which had never been explicitly agreed but always kept. Twelve years before, his father had walked out one evening and never come back. Next morning his body had been found, hanging from a beam in Harry Tremain’s fish loft.

Suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed.

He remembered that evening.

His father and mother had never quarrelled but his mother sometimes nagged with the maddening persistence of a dripping tap. On this occasion his father had walked out and slammed the shop door so that the bell continued to jangle after he had disappeared down the street. Morley remembered too, the next morning, when they heard the news. He had not grieved much because he found it impossible to believe that he would never see his father in the shop again. Now he recalled him as a stranger, a kindly, urbane man, dressed in a long, grey overall, always with a cigarette between his lips. He had a lush black moustache discoloured at the edges by nicotine.

Nineteen forty-two, when the war was at its worst. His father had not been conscripted because of a heart condition.

The sun had set, but in the west the sky was barred by clouds which still glowed orange and red. Elsewhere sky and sea were bleached and it was hard to distinguish any colour among the hulls of the boats in the harbour. Some of them carried feeble masthead lights. The quays were deserted but as he passed the Robartes Arms he could see, in the bar, a row of men in blue jerseys, sitting motionless as though they were in a chapel pew.

He was upset by what his mother had said but also, paradoxically, relieved. She had not mentioned any gossip and she certainly would have done had she heard i. . .