A Suitable Vengeance (Inspector Lynley, #4)(80)

“She’s at Cribba Head?” Mark Penellin asked. His hair was slicked back, drenched from the rain.

“According to what we know right now,” Lynley replied. “What’s happened to you?”

Mark tentatively touched his fingers to a fresh plaster above his right eyebrow. Abrasions covered his knuckles and the back of his hand. He shook his head self-effacingly. “I was trying to fix the shutters so the baby’d stop crying. Nearly knocked myself out in the process.” He turned up the collar of his oilskin and buttoned it at the throat. “You’re sure it’s the Daze?”

“It seems to be.”

“And no word of Peter?”

“None.”

“Bloody fool.” Mark took out a pack of cigarettes, offering it to both Lynley and St. James. When they refused, he lit one for himself but only smoked for a minute before crushing it out.

“You’ve not seen Peter?” Lynley asked.

“Not since Friday afternoon. At the cove.”

St. James glanced at the boy over his shoulder. “Peter said he didn’t see you then.”

Mark raised a brow, winced, touched the plaster there. “He saw me,” he replied, and with a cautious look at Lynley added, “Maybe he forgot.”

Following the Austin, the Rover crawled along the narrow lane. Aside from their vehicles’ lights and the occasional glimmer from a cottage or a farmhouse window, the darkness was complete, and the gloom, in conjunction with the storm made the going slow. Water filmed the road. Hedgerows bent perilously towards the car. Their headlamps glared upon the torrential rain. Stopping twice to clear the road of debris, they took fifty minutes to make what should have been a quarter of an hour’s drive.

Outside of Treen, they jolted over the uneven track to Cribba Head, pulling the cars to a halt some twenty yards from the path that led down to Penberth Cove. From the rear seat, Mark Penellin handed Lynley a fisherman’s oilskin which he pulled on over his worn, grey guernsey.

“You’d best wait here, St. James.” Even in the closed confines of the car, Lynley had to raise his voice to be heard over the wind and the roar of surf which pounded the shore below them. The Rover rocked ominously like a lightweight toy. “It’s a rough walk.”

“I’ll come as far as I can.”

Lynley nodded, shoving open his door. The three of them climbed out into the storm. St. James found that he had to use the entire weight of his body to shut his own door once Mark Penellin hopped out.

“Jesus!” The boy shouted. “Some blow, this.” He joined Lynley in pulling ropes, life jackets, and life rings out of the car’s boot.

Ahead of them, the fisherman had left his headlamps burning, and they illuminated the distance to the cliff. Sheets of rain drove through the arc of light, angled by the bellowing wind. The fisherman began to trudge through weeds which clung to his trousers. He carried a coil of rope.

“She be down in the cove,” he shouted over his shoulder as they approached. “Some fifty yard from shore. Bow to stern, northeast on the rocks. Most o’ the mast and yards ’s gone, I fear.”

Bent into the wind which was not only fierce but icy cold, as if it took its inspiration from an Arctic storm, they struggled towards the cliff’s edge. There, made slick and dangerous by water, a narrow path led steeply down to Penberth Cove where lights glimmered from small granite cottages at the water’s edge. Torches bobbed and glittered near the surf where locals brave enough to contend with the storm were watching the broken sloop disintegrate. There was no way they could get to the boat. Even if a small skiff could have managed the surf, the reef that was destroying the Daze would have done as much for any other vessel. Beyond that, storm-driven waves impeded them, crashing upon a natural spur of granite, sending plumes of spray towering into the air.

“I can’t manage it, Tommy,” St. James shouted when he saw the path. “I’ll have to wait here.”

Lynley lifted a hand, nodded, and began the descent. The others followed, picking their way among the boulders, finding handholds and footholds in outcroppings of rock. St. James watched them disappear into a patch of heavy shadow before he turned, fighting the wind and the rain to get back to the car. He felt weighted down by the mud on his shoes and the snarl of weeds that tangled in the heel piece of his brace. When he reached the Rover, he was out of breath. He pulled open the door and threw himself inside.

Out of the storm, he stripped off his ill-fitting oilskin and sodden guernsey. He shook the rain out of his hair. He shivered in the cold, wished for dry clothes, and thought about what the fisherman had said. At first it seemed to St. James that he hadn’t heard him correctly. Northeast bow to stern on the rocks. There had to be a mistake. Except that a Cornish fisherman would know his directions, and the brief glimpse St. James had had of the sloop acted as confirmation of the fact. So there was no mistake. That being the case, either the boat wasn’t the Daze at all, or they needed to take a new look at their theories.

It was nearly thirty minutes before Lynley returned with Mark at his heels, the fisherman a short distance behind them. Hunched against the rain, they stood at the Austin talking for a moment, the fisherman gesturing with hands and arms. Lynley nodded once, squinted towards the southwest, and with a final shouted comment, he tramped through the mud and weeds to the Rover. Mark Penellin followed. They stowed their gear in the boot once again and fell rather than climbed inside the car. They were soaking.