A Suitable Vengeance (Inspector Lynley, #4)(51)

“Of course you’re right,” he said and added reflectively, more to himself than to the other man, “How Father would have hated to see a mine sealed.”

“Times change,” Penellin said. “Your father wasn’t a man to hold onto the past.” He went to the filing cabinet and removed three more folders which he carried back to his desk. Lynley rejoined him.

“How’s Nancy this morning?” he asked.

“Coping.”

“What time did the police return you?”

“Half past four. Thereabouts.”

“Is that it, then? With the police?”

“For now.”

Outside, two of the gardeners were talking to each other as they worked among the plants, the clean sharp snap of their secateurs acting as interjections between their words. Penellin watched them through the blinds for a moment.

Lynley hesitated, caught between his promise to Nancy and his knowledge that Penellin wished to say no more. He was a private man. He did not want help. That much was clear. Yet Lynley felt that beneath Penellin’s natural taciturnity an undercurrent of inexplicable anxiety was flowing, and he sought to find the source of the other man’s worry in order to alleviate it as best he could. After so many years of relying on Penellin’s strength and loyalty, he could not turn away from offering reciprocal strength and loyalty now.

“Nancy told me she spoke to you on the phone last night,” Lynley said.

“Yes.”

“But someone saw you in the village, according to the police.”

Penellin made no response.

“Look, John, if there’s some sort of trouble—”

“No trouble, my lord.” Penellin pulled the files across the desk and opened the top one. It was a gesture of dismissal, the furthest he would ever go in asking Lynley to leave the office. “It’s as Nancy said. We spoke on the phone. If someone thinks I was in the village, it can’t be helped, can it? The neighbourhood is dark. It could have been anyone. It’s as Nancy said. I was at the lodge.”

“Dammit it all, we were standing right there when you walked in after two in the morning! You were in the village, weren’t you? You saw Mick. Neither you nor Nancy is telling the truth. John, are you trying to protect her? Or is it Mark? Because he wasn’t home either. And you knew that, didn’t you? Were you looking for Mark? Was he at odds with Mick?”

Penellin lifted a document from within the file. “I’ve started the initial paperwork on closing Wheal Maen,” he said.

Lynley made a final effort. “You’ve been here twenty-five years. I should like to think you’d come to me in a time of trouble.”

“There’s no trouble,” Penellin said firmly. He picked up another sheet of paper, and although he did not look at it, the single gesture was eloquent in its plea for solitude.

Lynley terminated the interview and left the office.

With the door closed behind him, he paused in the hall, where the old tile floor made the air quite cool. At the end of the corridor, the southwest door of the house was open, and the sun beat down on the courtyard outside. There was movement on the cobblestones, the pleasant sound of running water. He walked towards it.

Outside, he found Jasper—sometime chauffeur, sometime gardener, sometime stableman, and full-time gossip—washing down the Land Rover they’d driven last night. His trousers were rolled up, his knobby feet bare, his white shirt open on a gaunt chest of grizzled hair. He nodded at Lynley.

“Got it from ’un, did you?” he asked, directing the spray on the Rover’s windscreen.

“Got what from whom?” Lynley asked.

Jasper snorted. “’Ad it all this morning, we did,” he said. “Murder ’n police ’n John getting hisself carted off by CID.” He spat onto the cobblestones and rubbed a rag against the Rover’s bonnet. “With John in Nanrunnel ’n Nance lyin’ like a pig in the rain ’bout everthing she can…’oo’d think to see the like?”

“Nancy’s lying?” Lynley asked. “You know that, Jasper?”

“Course I know it,” he said. “Weren’t I down to the lodge at half ten? Din’t I go ’bout the mill? Wasn’t nobody home? Course she be lyin’.”

“About the mill? The mill in the woods? Has the mill something to do with Mick Cambrey’s death?”

Jasper’s face shuttered at this frontal approach. Too late Lynley remembered the old man’s fondness for hanging a tale on the thread of innuendo. In reply to the questions, Jasper whimsically chose his own conversational path.

“’N John never tol’ you ’bout them clothes as Nance cut up, did ’e?”

“No. He said nothing about clothes,” Lynley replied, and as bait he offered, “They can’t have been important, I suppose, or he would have mentioned them.”

Jasper shook his head darkly at the folly of dismissing such a piece of information. “Slicin’ um to shreds, she were,” he said. “Right back of their cottage. Came ’pon her, me and John. Caught her out and she cried like an ol’ sick cow when she saw us, she did. Tha’s important enough, I say.”

“But she didn’t talk to you?”

“Said nothin’. All them fancy clothes and Nance cuttin’ and slicin’. John went near mad ’en he saw her. Started into the cottage after Mick, ’e did. Nance stopped ’im. ’Ung onto ’is arm till John run outer steam.”