Daidre couldn’t imagine his surviving the loss of such a woman and she couldn’t see how anyone could ever come to terms with this loss being precipitated by murder.
“Twelve years old,” he’d said. “No one knows why he shot her.”
“I’m so sorry,” she’d said. “She sounds perfectly lovely.”
“She was.”
Now, Daidre made the turn she always made, using Polcare Cove’s small car park to point her car in the direction that would take her out of the area. Behind her, she heard the breakers collapsing onto the toothy slate reef. Before her, she saw the sweep of the ancient valley and Stowe Wood above it, where the trees were coming into leaf. Very soon beneath them, bluebells would bloom, carpeting the woods with a colour that tossed in rhythmic undulations in the springtime breeze, like sapphire linen.
She made her way up and out of the cove. She followed the lanes in the crisscrossing pattern dictated by the lay of the land and its ownership. In this way, she came to the A39 and there she headed south. The drive she intended was an extended one. At St. Columb Road, she stopped for a coffee and decided to have a pain au chocolat at a bakery café. She spoke at length about guiltless chocolate consumption to the young man behind the till, and she went so far as to ask that he give her a receipt for her food and her drink, which she tucked into her wallet. One never knew when the police were going to require an alibi of one, she decided wryly. Best to keep records of one’s every movement. Best to make certain people along the way have a vivid memory of one’s visit to their establishment. As far as the pain au chocolat was concerned, what were a few unnecessary calories in the cause of substantiating a claim of innocence?
When she set off again, she gained the roundabout that took her onto the A30. From there, the distance wasn’t great, and the route was familiar. She skirted Redruth, recovered quickly from one wrong turn, and at last ended up at the junction of B3297 and a numberless lane that was signposted for the village of Carnkie.
This part of Cornwall was completely unlike the vicinity of Casvelyn. Here, Daidre parked her Vauxhall in the triangle of pebble-strewn weeds that served as a meeting point of the two roads, and she sat with her chin on her hands and her hands on the top of the steering wheel. She looked out at a landscape green with spring, rippling into the distance towards the sea, penetrated periodically by derelict towers similar to those one found in the Irish countryside, the domiciles of poets, hermits, and mystics. Here, however, the old towers represented what remained of Cornwall’s great mining industry: each of them an enormous engine house that sat atop a network of tunnels, pits, and caverns beneath the earth. These were the mines that once had produced tin and silver, copper and lead, arsenic and wolfram. Their engine houses had contained the machinery that kept the mine operational: pumping engines that rid the mines of water, and whims that hauled both the ore and the waste rock in bucketlike kibbles up to the surface.
Like gipsy caravans, the engine houses were the stuff of picture postcards now. But once they’d been the mainstay of people’s lives, as well as the symbol of so many people’s destruction. They stood all over the western part of Cornwall, and they existed in inordinate numbers particularly along much of the coast. Generally, they came in pairs: the tower of the mighty stone engine house rising three or four floors and roofless now, with narrow arched windows as small as possible to avoid weakening the overall structure, and next to it-often soaring above it-the smokestack, which had once belched grim clouds into the sky. Now both the engine house and the smokestack provided a nesting place for birds above and a hiding place for dormice below and, in the crannies and crevices of the structures, a growing place for herb Robert’s pert magenta flowers that tangled with yellow bursts of ragwort as red valerian rose above them.
Daidre saw all this at the same time as she did not see it. She found herself thinking of another place entirely, on the coast opposite the one towards which she now gazed.
It was near Lamorna Cove, he’d said. The house and the estate upon which the house sat were together called Howenstow. He’d said-with some evident embarrassment-that he had no idea where the name of the place had come from, and from this admission she’d concluded-incorrectly or not-his ease with the life into which he’d been born. For over two hundred and fifty years his family had occupied both the house and the land, and apparently there had never been a need for them to know anything more than the fact of its being theirs: a sprawling Jacobean structure into which some long-ago ancestor had married, the youngest son of a baron making a match with the only child-the daughter-of an earl.
“My mother could probably tell you everything about the old pile,” he’d said. “My sister as well. My brother and I…I’m afraid we’ve both rather let down the side when it comes to family history. Without Judith-that’s my sister-I’d likely not know the names of my own great-grandparents. And you?”
“I suppose I did have great-grandparents somewhere along the line,” she’d replied. “Unless, of course, I came like Venus via the half shell. But that’s not very likely, is it? I think I’d have remembered such a spectacular entry.”
So what was it like? she wondered. What was it like? She pictured his mother in a great gilded bed, servants on either side of her gently dabbing her face with handkerchiefs soaked in rose water as she laboured to bring forth a beloved son. Fireworks upon the announcement of an heir and tenant farmers tugging their forelocks and hoisting jugs of homebrew as the news went round. She knew the image was completely absurd, like Thomas Hardy meeting Monty Python, but stupidly, foolishly she could not let it go. So she finally cursed herself, and she scooped up the postcard she’d brought from her cottage. She got out of the car into the chilly breeze.
She found a suitable stone just on the verge of the B3297. The rock was light enough and not half buried, which made its removal easy. She carried it back to the triangular juncture of the road and the lane, and at the apex of this triangle she set the stone down. Then she tilted it and placed the postcard of the gipsy wagon beneath it. That done, she was ready to resume her journey.
Chapter Seventeen
THE FINAL REMARK TAMMY HAD HURLED AT HIM BEFORE GETTING out of the car in Casvelyn was, “You don’t understand anything, Grandie. No wonder everyone left you like they did.” She hadn’t sounded angry as much as sad, which had made it difficult for Selevan Penrule to counter with anything abusive. He’d have liked to fire a verbal missile in her direction and, with the satisfaction that comes from long experience in the field of vocal warfare, to watch it hit its mark, but there was something in her eyes that prevented him, despite the pain that her parting shot caused him. Perhaps, he thought, he was losing his touch. Either that or the girl was getting under his skin. He hated to think that might be the case.
He’d confronted her when they were on the road to Clean Barrel Surf Shop, and he had been quite proud that he’d mastered in himself the compulsion to tackle her on the previous afternoon. He didn’t like secrets, and he hated lies. That Tammy possessed the first and acted on the second disturbed him more than he wanted to admit. For despite her oddities of dress, behaviour, nutrition, and intention, he liked the girl, and he wanted to think her different from the rest of the world’s furtive adolescents, who had clandestine secondary lives that appeared to be defined by sex, drugs, and bodily mutilation.