The Japanese Girl (20 page)

I tried to think of a way of continuing. ‘Yours did not?'

‘Ah, so I see you have heard.'

‘The barest details.'

He was looking up at the beams of the ceiling with an intent stare.

‘It's an intensely unpleasant death, being strangled by a rope,' he said. ‘I suffered it and then they brought me round. It wasn't fair. She was the last of the Pencarrions. I suppose you know that. She persuaded me to buy this place. It had been out of her family for a century and she wanted it back. Sometimes I have thought she wanted the house more than she wanted me. When we got here she tried hard to persuade me to change my name to Pencarrion. I wouldn't … She was a beautiful woman. Dark hair, milk skin, features like a doe. I was fascinated by her. The last of the Pencarrions! My father was a postman.'

I dragged up the eiderdown and pulled it round my shoulders. He watched my movements carefully.

‘But I wouldn't change my name. What utter damned nonsense all this pride of name is, this glorifying of ancestry! The Fitz-something-this and the De-something-that go back only as far as the name of the humblest labourer. We come out of the stewpot together, and when we're done we go back in. Annabel wouldn't see that. She took pride in the most ridiculous things. Shade of her ancestors! They'd been a lawless lot; but by the time it came to my wife the Pencarrion blood was running thin.'

Boduel got up restlessly with the knife in his hand and walked to the window. ‘You've been pruning the apple trees, I see.'

‘Yes.'

‘I could never get the things to fruit. Good blossom, and then the wind would come.' He felt the edge of the knife with his thumb. ‘Are you quite alone here?'

‘What happened?' I asked.

‘What happened where?'

‘Between you and your wife.'

‘Oh … We quarrelled from the start. She'd a sort of weak stubbornness, a thin pale obstinacy more durable than any anger. I'm not a vicious man. I'm not a brutal man. I was an ordinary human being asking for human companionship and affection. But the only interest she showed in anything or anyone was an intellectual one. No; a sham intellectual one, for intellect isn't separate from life, is it? She'd a mind with blinkers on, fastidious, selective, afraid of the mud.' He went slowly back and sat down again. ‘Of course perhaps I wasn't entirely without blame. Have you ever heard of the Gorsedd?'

‘How did you get in?' I asked. ‘All the doors were locked, weren't they?'

He considered me. ‘The Gorsedd is a Cornish thing in which they elect Bards and parade about in white robes like Druids. Utter damned nonsense. I'm as Cornish as can be, but this dressing up, this trying to revive something that never was, it makes me sick! Annabel got involved in it. Last descendant of one of the oldest families. It suited her perfectly – all the make-believe. She lived on make-believe. And after a while she took up with a Cornish poet called Trelowarren. He wrote poetry in the Cornish language! Can you match that! As if there aren't enough languages in the world without trying to revive one that never was any good anyhow and never had any literature of its own. Could anything be more futile? I used to laugh at her, deride her. I used to say, could anything be more futile, Annabel. She didn't like that at all!'

It was almost full light now. His clothes were in a bad way and there was thick mud on his shoes. He looked as if he had been out in yesterday's gale.

‘D'you get on with your wife?' he demanded suddenly.

‘Yes.'

‘No doubt you make allowances sometimes. I tried hard to. I tried to believe we could go on as we were. I knew other men envied me. But it wasn't any good. In the end things went too far. This poet, this Trelowarren fellow, left the district. He made his
living
out of insurance or something, and his firm sent him to South Africa. Of course they'd been very friendly for some months before he left. By chance I found one of his letters. It was full of sympathy for her, with ridiculous quotations from his own poems, a sort of metaphysical love-making; and
pressing
her to leave me and join him. Then I intercepted one of her letters to him and found it a distortion of my every act, representing herself as martyred purity, talking about the sacredness of Celtic culture … and –
promising
, making a pledge to leave me and join him as soon as it could be conveniently arranged, while I was away. Have I struck you as mentally deranged up to now?'

‘No.'

‘No indeed. But maybe this shows that I am after all – because I didn't let her go.'

‘You – didn't let her go?'

‘No, I didn't let her go. Instead I stormed up to our bedroom – this bedroom – with her letter in my hand – and
there
she was standing in front of the mirror in her white Gorsedd robes admiring herself! Over there it was. The long mirror was against that wall. I – I waved the letter at her and told her what I thought of her, and for once she lost her temper too and called me all the names her high mind could remember. She said she supposed I was used to opening letters since my father was a postman and no doubt had done it before me. It went on and on and on, and a great bitterness welled up in me. I took her by the neck and shook her. It was not unpleasant. I often think that damned Gorsedd robe was partly to blame.'

Boduel paused and sighed through his large yellow teeth.

‘Are you cold?' he asked.

‘No,' I said carefully.

‘I was cold,' he said, ‘when I'd done it. Just for a little while I was cold. D'you remember that Browning poem of the man who strangles his mistress and then sits all night holding her head against his? What utter damned nonsense. You can't love a corpse. You can't even hate it. There's only one thing you want to do and that's get rid of it. It was midnight when I'd finished and the servants slept out. You know the old tin mine in the orchard?'

‘Yes.' My mind was racing ahead of his story.

‘It goes down thirteen hundred feet and links with all the disused workings in the vicinity. It's been flooded for sixty years. I carried her downstairs and through the orchard dressed just as she was in her Druid's gown. There was no moon. Many times I've dropped things down that shaft. And some of them have made more noise than she did. Then I went back to the house, packed her suitcase and threw it after her. That was a gesture that pleased me somehow. Then I came back and unlocked the front door and went to bed.'

Boduel got up restlessly again. ‘ I don't like your furniture,' he said. ‘ I had some Sheraton antiques in here; and a four-poster bed with a figured canopy. God, that dressing-table!'

‘We did our best,' I said humbly, ‘with what we could afford.'

‘I suppose things are different these days. But tell me, is every murderer a madman? If not, why am I? The thing worked well enough. She had stolen out in the night – and I was broken-hearted. I told people she was away for a holiday, but I let the vicar know in confidence that she had left me for Trelowarren, and that way it got about. The whole thing was quite clever, I thought, because even if anyone had suspected the truth there could have been no proof of it. To do that they would have had to spend £200,000 draining the mines. Even with the present price of tin you can't afford to lay that much out.'

He went across to the window, and peered out again. The light glinted on knife edge, signet ring, tie-pin, bald head. Then he went to the door and opened it an inch and listened. A man's voice could be heard downstairs.

‘That's only one of my farm hands,' I said nervously. ‘He'll do you no harm.'

He smiled sadly. ‘I came back to see what it was like. Living in that other place I used to
wish
myself back here. I used to dream about it. But there's no
real
life for me here. Things have moved on. They always do. I'm a stranger now, an intruder. Besides … they'd look for me here in the end.'

‘What are you going to do?'

‘In a way I suppose she's won, the bitch. So it would be appropriate if I joined her. I've always wondered what it must feel like to go straight down an air adit.'

‘Don't be a fool!'

‘These rugs,' he said. ‘They're terrible. You should go to Wherry's of Plymouth. They import direct. Mention my name, if you like.' He stood half in the door brooding. ‘But they'll have
forgotten
. Everything is forgotten in a few years. That's why I'd like you to remember me and what I've told you. Nobody else knows the truth. I did want someone to know.'

He was gone.

In the December daylight I found myself staring at my own cold face in the glass. It was drawn and older than I remembered it last night. Then the front door slammed. I dug my feet into slippers, snatched a coat from the wardrobe, ran downstairs and out. Round the corner Aukett was standing gaping.

‘That man, sur, he's just been in your 'ous. He looked like –'

‘Stop him!' I shouted.

I ran through the walled garden with the remnants of ungathered prunings cracking under my feet. I could hear the tramp of Aukett close behind. At the broken gate I stopped. Boduel was already on the wall beside the mine, his stocky figure like a pin-man against the bright morning sky. Beside him was the ruined finger of the mine chimney.

I shouted to him and ran on, but he jumped down the other side. I got to the wall and pulled myself over. He was already on the rim of the low wall round the air shaft. I shouted again.

He saw me and lifted an ironical hand in which the butcher's knife still gleamed. Then as I started forward again he jumped.

From where I was I couldn't hear much, but as I reached the wall the echoes of his fall were still coming up the shaft.

They recovered his body. A difficult, job, but fortunately it was lodged about three hundred feet down on some timbers across the farther drop. The woman's body wasn't found.

I wired Philippa to stay away until the inquest was over. It was an unpleasant business altogether.

Thinking it over in the weeks that followed I wondered, as he clearly wondered, with what degree of greater ingenuity a supposedly sane man could have acted, always supposing the sane man had wished to dispose of his wife. The course he had followed – once embarked on – had the merit of simplicity, spontaneity and tidiness. The stumbling-block in so many crimes is, of course, just that disposal of the body. Get rid of it and even the utmost suspicions and the cleverest detectives are likely to stumble and fail.

That Boduel had made one mistake – in spite of his claim – did not become apparent until months afterwards, until well into the following summer. Philippa, who just never will allow things to rest, eventually located his wife, now living as Mrs Trelowarren in South Africa, where she had fled with a man who in his spare time still writes Celtic poetry.

Business was bad when the young man came in. There'd been two customers all morning and there was nobody in either of the chairs. The young man sat in one of them and Bristow came across and met the other's eyes in the big mirror.

‘Haircut?'

‘Not a cut. Hardly even a trim. But there's one or two ragged edges. See here. And this. Then I'll have a shampoo.'

Bristow tucked in the none-too-clean sheet round the young man's neck and fitted a strand of cotton wool between his neck and his collar. He began to snip, but warily, because the young man's dark hair was the length that a girl's used to be at the time when Bristow learned his trade. Bristow was forty-nine, a stocky rather stolid man who had none of the superficial chatter that successful barbers are supposed to have.

So there was not much talk for a time, except about the way the young man wanted his hair done, and when that was finished it stopped altogether during the shampoo. Bristow rubbed the hair dry with a couple of small towels and then began to comb it out.

‘Thanks,' said the young man, whose name was Morgan, ‘I'll do that myself.' Bristow stepped back resentfully and watched him.

‘Stranger round here?' It was the best he could do in small-talk.

‘Yeah. Never been in Crowchester before. Pretty quiet, aren't you?'

‘Yes, quiet.'

‘I suppose it's the time of day.'

‘No, it's quiet most times.'

‘Town seems pretty busy.'

‘Town may be. This is the wrong trade.'

The young man was carefully and skilfully parting his hair, a hand and a comb flicking the heavy, still-damp hair into place, patting it and pressing it so that the natural slight wave was encouraged and moulded.

‘You know how to do that,' said Bristow grudgingly.

‘Yeah?' The young man was examining his reflection.

‘Like something on it?'

They discussed sprays and pomades for a minute or two. The young man chose a spray. After the mist had died down and he had used his comb again he said: ‘Ought to know how to do this. It's my trade too.'

‘What is?'

‘Hairdressing. Or one of 'em. I've been out of it for a couple of years.'

‘Where did you work?'

‘Brighton.'

Bristow shook out the sheet. ‘You got out the right time.'

‘Oh, I don't know. What makes you say that?'

‘All these …' Bristow hesitated in time to avoid insulting young men who grew their hair long. ‘Fashion. Nobody has their hair cut any more.'

‘Maybe not. Or not in the same way. Chap I worked for in Brighton seems to be doing all right still.'

‘Yes?'

‘What made you leave, then?'

‘I got a better job. Or thought it was.'

‘And wasn't it?'

‘It was for a year or so. Then it folded. Some ways I'm sorry I left Brighton.'

‘Why don't you go back?'

‘Someone else has my job. You're right on that. They're not taking on any
more
assistants.'