Missing Susan Read online

  Elizabeth sighed. “I’d better come with you, then.”

  For anyone afraid of heights, the top of Roche Rock could fuel twenty years of nightmares. The roofless ruined chapel was missing walls on two sides so that only one’s sense of balance separated the climber from a sixty-foot plunge to the jagged rocks below. The space within the chapel was about the size of a walk-in closet, so that the climbers had to be very careful not to bump into each other as they changed positions to look at the scenery.

  “You’re right about the view,” said Nancy Warren. “You can see for miles. Rowan, look almost straight down on the back side. Is that a schoolyard? What are those boys playing?”

  “Football. Well, soccer to you,” Rowan replied. “What a perfect place to watch the game from. I wonder none of the school’s football fans has thought of it.”

  Maud Marsh, who was looking across the fields to the northeast, motioned for Rowan to come and stand beside her. “That’s an odd-looking mountain over there,” she said, pointing to a bare hill with an escarpment of white clay.

  “I’m afraid that what you’re looking at is a bit of industrial blight,” said Rowan sadly. “This part of Cornwall is the source of the clay used by the makers of fine china. You know, Wedgwood… Spode… all those wonderfully delicate works of ceramic art. That mound that you’re looking at is a refuse heap made by the china clay industry. They take the earth they want, and leave the rest behind in ugly mounds to sully the landscape. Ugly, isn’t it?”

  Maud Marsh looked stern. “They’d never get away with that in Berkeley!”

  “No,” said Rowan. “I expect your environmental terrorists would begin picketing before they’d deposited more than four shovels full of waste dirt.” Still, he felt a pang of sympathy for the clay quarriers. They made it possible to fashion creations of great and lasting beauty, but all anyone ever seemed to notice was their refuse dump. In his darkest drinking moods, he saw his life like that: superior intelligence and achievement that went unrewarded, while the world carped about his credit rating and his marital problems. He wondered if his much-contemplated actions were about to change his luck or whether the deed would only prove to make his spiritual refuse heap so much the greater. He reminded himself that this was not the time for philosophy.

  “You’d think there’d be a better way up here than that stupid iron ladder!” Susan Cohen’s voice floated up to them several moments before her scowling face appeared at the top rung. She heaved herself onto the flat rock floor of the mined chapel and looked around while she caught her breath. “No barriers!” she exclaimed, edging forward to peer over the precipice. “That’s negligence if I ever saw it. If somebody fell off this thing, whoever owns this could get sued for a bundle.”

  “We are up here at our own risk,” said Rowan. He hoped that Mr. Kosminski would not be crass enough to recoup his assassin’s fee by suing the landowner of the rock. It was definitely a consideration, but unfortunately for Rowan’s scruples, his time was running out and he could not afford to be overly fastidious in his choice of methods. “Walk around a bit,” he said to Susan. “The views are quite spectacular.”

  Elizabeth MacPherson crept up the ladder, resolutely refusing to look down. She eased her way out onto the barren rock in a posture that was somewhere between a crawl and a catatonic seizure. “This is intense,” she managed to whisper. “And there’s nothing below us but rocks, whichever way you fall.” She edged her way to the one wall of the chapel that was still standing and sat with her back to it, gripping a small outcrop of rock and taking slow deep breaths while she mustered her composure.

  Susan seemed undisturbed by the imminence of death. She ambled around the tiny square of rock as if it were the interior of a gift shop. “This is a funny place for a chapel,” she announced. “Like they wanted to look down on everybody. You know that Father Brown story called ‘The Hammer of God’? According to him…”

  Rowan Rover, who had been standing next to the ladder, suddenly moved in behind Susan. Furtively he took in the positions of everyone else. The group down below were talking among themselves and weren’t looking up at the rock anymore. Charles Warren, still at the base of the iron ladder, was out of the line of sight. Maud Marsh and Nancy Warren were on the eastern edge of the precipice, watching the schoolyard soccer game. Fortunately the position of the afternoon sun meant that the people in the schoolyard could not clearly see the top of the rock. Elizabeth MacPherson seemed to be taking in the scenery or recovering from the shock of the heights; at any rate, she was oblivious to her companions. Now! he thought.

  He edged in closer to Susan, so that he was standing beside her, but a few inches back, out of her range of vision. They were six inches from the rock floor’s ending in open space. He felt his stomach turn over as the wind touched him, reminding him of the emptiness beyond. Moving his arms slowly, so as not to attract attention, he maneuvered himself behind Susan, preparing to give her a fatal shove in her back and send her plummeting over the edge. He put his left foot forward and shifted his weight onto that foot as he leaned out, palms upright, ready to deliver the coup de grace.

  Rowan pushed.

  Susan moved.

  The soccer game had caught her attention and, in the last split second, she moved sideways along the rock to get a better view of the playing field. Rowan Rover, hands outstretched and braced for a collision, found himself pushing molecules of air that were only too willing to step aside.

  Rowan Rover pitched forward into the welcoming abyss, with an obscenity caught in his throat. His mind, which was racing in overdrive, was considering all the Famous Last Words entries in reference books. If the anthologists were to be believed, people never seemed to say “Oh shit!” as their ultimate utterance, but he was willing to bet that in accidents, that phrase topped the list of final remarks. In his terror-driven brain, properties like gravity and inertia had switched to slow motion and there seemed to be endless time left to contemplate his life-and various other philosophical points of interest. And, he reflected, if he did go to hell, he might be able to find out who Jack the Ripper actually was. A tempting prospect. He wondered if he could come back as a ghost and taunt Donald Rumblelow with the information.

  As he reached a horizontal position, with a clear view of the underbrush, the rocks, and eternity, something stopped his forward catapult, so that instead of diving into space, he slammed against the edge of Roche Rock and dangled in a dizzying jackknife position halfway over the side. The obscenity lodged in his throat managed to find its way out, meandered for a short jaunt up into his nasal passages, and finally emerged triumphantly through his open jaws, leading a parade of expelled air for maximum volume. Fortunately, perhaps, for the schoolboys’ innocent ears, the word was lost amid the general screams on the precipice.

  The pain of incipient bruises coursed through his body on the way to his whirling brain, and he had to sift through injury, fright, and bewilderment to ascertain why he wasn’t plummeting to his death. A further check of his senses told him that someone was holding onto his leg. Shortly thereafter he noted that he was being shouted at.

  “Hold on to something, Rowan! Somebody! Help!” Elizabeth MacPherson, thought Rowan idly. Amazing that her reflexes were that good and that she could manage to hold on to him. All those shopping forays must have strengthened her grip. Obligingly, he grabbed the rock. It was shortly thereafter that he lost his celestial objectivity about the situation and began to grip the rock until his knuckles whitened, bellowing to be pulled up.

  A moment later he felt another weight on his legs, very like someone sitting down on them. It secured his attachment to the rock, but did nothing to remove him from his dangling position off the side.

  He heard Nancy Warren say, “I’ve got him. Where’s Charles?”

  An out-of-breath masculine voice responded. “Here! I’ve got his feet. You grab his shoulders to steady him, Nancy!”

  “It’s all right, Rowan,” called Elizabeth MacPherson. “It
was lucky for you that I was coming over to ask you something about Constance Kent; otherwise I’d never have caught you in time.”

  As they hoisted him back over the rim of the rock, Rowan heard Susan Cohen saying, “You’re not such a mountain goat after all, are you, Rowan?”

  He closed his eyes and vowed to get safely down from Roche Rock, if only for the pleasure of seeing Susan Cohen dead and silenced.

  “We hardly know any instance of the strength and weakness of human

  nature so striking, and so grostesque, as the character of this haughty, vigilant, sagacious blue-stocking… with an ounce of poison

  in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.”

  – THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

  CHAPTER 11

  CORNWALL

  THE ONE FORTUNATE aspect of the entire incident was that no one seemed to have noticed that Rowan had been attempting to push Susan at the time he fell. He told them that he had suffered a dizzy spell from the heights. Their concern for his health assured him that there were no suspicions to the contrary. Aside from bruised knees and a few minor scrapes, he found that he was quite uninjured and, fearful of losing another chance at Susan, he insisted that the tour continue uninterrupted.

  On his instructions Bernard continued to drive down the length of Cornwall to a picturesque castle across the inlet from Falmouth. St. Mawes, a military fortification rather than a residence, was built by Henry VIII as part of his chain of coastal defenses. Its massive guns protected Carrick Roads, still used as a berthing for oceangoing vessels. The guide took a perverse pleasure in marching his restive charges through the village high street, past any number of inviting shops, without letting them stop for even a postcard, let alone a cup of tea or a quarter of an hour of browsing. With only a trace of a limp, he led them up the hill toward the castle, past an assortment of private homes with lovely views of the inlet, and into the castle. Nancy Warren wanted to stop and examine the magnificent bushes of hydrangeas with blue flowers as big as cabbages, but Rowan was firm.

  It was just past five o’clock when he herded them back to the coach, telling Bernard to forget the regular route to St. Ives. He knew a shortcut.

  “We’ll take the King Harry Ferry,” he announced. “It’s just north of here.”

  Bernard rolled his eyes, but, in the best British tradition, he concluded that it was not his to reason why; though if the do or die killed the bus, the company would go into fits, he was sure. Without a word of argument, he put the coach in gear and headed north on a winding, shady country road, labeled B3289 on his road atlas.

  No one said very much along the way. It had been a tiring day of long walks and melodrama. The tourists were glad of a break. Rowan spent the time considering his contingency plan and wondering if the wretched Susan had nine lives-or only nine cats.

  After a twenty-minute drive at a leisurely speed, they went down a long hill toward the river and joined the line of cars waiting for the ferry, which was on its way back to the dock.

  “We’re the only bus in the ferry line!” Frances Coles remarked.

  Bernard heaved a weary sigh and shook his head. One by one the small cars ahead of them were driven onto the flat deck of the small river ferry. When the huge coach lumbered up to the embarkation point, three ferry workers crowded about to see them safely aboard. With many hand signals and shakes of the head, they succeeded in getting the coach down the ramp with only one major scraping of the fender, to which Bernard reacted as if he had felt it personally.

  The river was only about a quarter of a mile wide, approximately a five-minute journey on the ferry. The tourists amused themselves by studying the large ships anchored just downstream and by looking ahead to the tiny hillside village on the other shore. When the ferry docked, Bernard managed to get the coach onto dry land without much difficulty.

  “There!” said Rowan Rover heartily, to disguise his relief. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  He had spoken prematurely. Fifty yards from the ferry dock, Bernard began to search for the road that would lead them out of the village. It was just as Rowan spoke that he discovered the route-and the fact that it involved a series of corkscrew turns up the side of the hill, at intervals approximating the length of the coach.

  First Bernard stared, then he looked for another way out of the village and found none. Finally he took a deep breath and said to Rowan, “You’ll owe me a pint for this one, mate.”

  “Done!” said Rowan, who was seeing his shortcut in a new light. “I’ve never been this way in a battleship before,” he explained.

  “I’ll never do it again,” Bernard assured him.

  With steering maneuvers resembling acrobatics, he negotiated the twisting climb and emerged on the straightaway at the top, cheered on by the passengers.

  “There’s nothing else today, is there, Rowan?” asked Bernard. “First you try to throw yourself off a cliff, then you nearly wreck the coach on a bloody ferry, and finally we have to bend the coach in half to get it up a corkscrew. There won’t be land mines up ahead, will there? Or bridges woven out of fraying jungle vines for us to cross?”

  “No,” said Rowan, reddening a bit at this recital. “We’ll reach St. Ives within the hour.”

  For once, he happened to be right.

  Without further misadventure, Bernard navigated the narrow country lanes of Cornwall and drove into St. Ives, familiar to him from previous tours. Soon he was parking the coach beside the Tregenna Castle Hotel, a stately old building, perched atop the tallest hill in St. Ives, where it offered a commanding view of the bay and the city below.

  “Is this old?” asked Kate Conway, gazing up at the ivy-covered castle with a tower at each corner and a row of battlements like jack-o’-lantern teeth.

  “It is eighteenth century,” Rowan told her. “I suppose that in southern California that is practically prehistoric. Here we don’t make so much of it.” He turned to the rest of the group, engaged in claiming their luggage from the below-carriage compartment. “I’m going to see you checked in and then I shall go home for a few hours. I shall be in the bar at half past seven, if anyone would like to join me for a drink. Dinner is at eight tonight. I have arranged a special treat for you.” Like a bloody fool, he finished silently.

  “Not another murder play?” sighed Martha Tabram.

  “God forbid,” said Rowan. “No. I have asked three of my friends to dine with us. They are police officers here in Cornwall, I’m sure you’ll find it intriguing to talk to them about crime.” Especially, he thought, since there’s going to be one.

  Kate Conway and Maud Marsh were just settling into their room when there was a knock at the door. It was Elizabeth MacPherson, whose room was in the passageway across the hall. They had discovered that the castle was a rabbit warren of short corridors, long passageways, and culs-de-sac, all carpeted with the most garish floor coverings imaginable, guaranteed to clash with any decor.

  Elizabeth came in and spent a long moment gazing at their avocado-green bedspreads and the curtains of turquoise and orange. “You’d think that anyone who could afford a castle would have the taste to furnish it correctly.”

  “They probably can’t afford to,” said Kate. “Imagine what it would cost to carpet this place! You wouldn’t want to pull it up every time you painted the walls.”

  “How’s your room?” asked Maud.

  “About the same,” said Elizabeth. “Except that mine has a door leading out to the roof, so I can walk the battlements tonight like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. I came to see you because I wanted to talk to everyone before we see Rowan tonight at dinner. Do you know what we’re scheduled to do tomorrow?”

  Kate Conway nodded without enthusiasm. “Smugglers’ caves.”

  Maud Marsh looked solemn. “Sounds risky. And after today’s performance, I think Rowan is in more danger than anyone. What do we do if he falls into a fifty-foot pit?”

  “Exactly,” said Elizabeth. “Besides, we’ve been in E
ngland for six days-and I’ve only shopped for an hour!”

  “So you think we ought to ask him to give us a free afternoon?” asked Kate. She drew the curtain aside and peered down at the white cluster of buildings encircling the bay. “We could visit St. Ives, I suppose.”

  “It looks like a perfect place to shop,” Elizabeth agreed. “But we have to present a united front. I’ll go and present our scheme to the others. Then we’ll tell Rowan in the bar before dinner.”

  Kate’s eyes widened. “He’s not going to like this one bit! You know what a stickler he is about our schedule and how much he hates shopping. He’ll think we’re frivolous. Who’s going to tell him?”

  “I will,” said Elizabeth, laughing. “What can he do? Kill me?”

  By half past seven the conspiracy was well-established. Elizabeth had talked to all the others and, while not everyone was keen on shopping, there was general agreement that they needed a day of peace and quiet. No one wanted to clamber through damp uncharted smugglers’ caves with a man who almost fell off a sixty-foot rock. Elizabeth was the unanimous choice to break this news to Rowan Rover. She found him in the bar, clutching a double Scotch and chatting amiably with three men in business suits: the police who came to dinner. By the time she went to the bar and got herself a half of cider, the other members of the tour had come in and were being introduced to the officers and she was able to have a private word with the guide.

  “Listen,” she said, blinking a little bit from nervousness, “about the plans tomorrow…”

  Rowan beamed in anticipation. “It’s going to be marvelous, isn’t it? I know some caves that no one ever goes to! There’s no telling what we might come upon. You’re lucky to have someone who really knows Cornwall to show you about, aren’t you?”

  “Er-well…” Elizabeth blushed to the top of her ears. “That’s what I wanted to discuss. We all got to talking about the plans for tomorrow and we decided that, while it’s really terribly generous of you to want to show us the local sights…” She took a fortifying breath. “What we really want is a free day.”