“Constance Kent,” said Elizabeth. “I’m fascinated by what Rowan said last night-that just because she confessed doesn’t mean she was guilty. The books I’ve read always assumed that she was guilty, and I had never thought to question it.”
“If she didn’t kill her little brother, who did?” asked Frances.
“I don’t know,” said Elizabeth. “But I want to find out more about the case. Maybe we can figure it out.”
“Didn’t Rowan say that she was only a teenager when the murder occurred? I wonder what became of her?”
“I’ll ask him,” said Elizabeth. “I think one of my books said that she changed her name and emigrated to Canada. The author didn’t know what became of her after that.”
With studied casualness, Alice and Frances turned to look at Martha Tabram, eating her porridge in blissful ignorance of their suspicions.
Elizabeth noted the direction of their stares. “No,” she said. “Francis Kent was killed in 1865. That would make Constance 142 years old by now. Besides, she was a blonde.”
Martha Tabram looked up from her spoon to find an entire table of her fellow travelers gazing at her in silent contemplation. She gave them a bewildered frown, and they smiled and waved before hastily looking away.
“She probably thinks we’re crazy,” muttered Alice.
“It’s time to go anyway,” Frances Coles replied. “Aren’t these tiny jam jars cute? Just the right size for one serving.”
“And so portable, too,” murmured Elizabeth, handing over her own unopened jar of strawberry preserves. Frances added it to the provisions already in her bag.
Rowan Rover, in his pseudo-uniform of khaki slacks and windcheater, took up his accustomed position at the microphone. “We have a long way to go, ladies and Charles,” he said, when everyone had taken their accustomed seats. “I want us to be in Cornwall by lunchtime, and that means only short rest stops this morning. If all goes well, we shall be lunching on Bodmin Moor at Jamaica Inn.”
Several of the older members of the group murmured Daphne DuMaurier’s name, recognizing the coaching inn as the namesake of her classic novel about the Cornish shipwreckers.
“Although we won’t be doing any walking tours this morning, this morning’s route is not without its points of interest.”
“That’ll be the B3212, right?” said Bernard, starting the engine.
“Correct. A scenic minor road through the heart of Dartmoor, and, incidentally, the road that leads to Dartmoor Prison.”
“Can’t we go inside?” said Elizabeth MacPherson.
“I’d rather not,” said Rowan.
“Is there anyone there that we know?” asked Elizabeth, referring, as Rowan well knew, to the more notorious murderers of recent years.
“I know a few gangsters currently in residence,” Rowan replied, “but since your interests are confined exclusively to amateur murderers, I cannot think of anyone you’d recognize.”
“Ian Brady?”
“He’s up north. Scottish family.”
“Peter Sutcliffe?”
“Up north. He’s the Yorkshire Ripper, remember.”
“Dennis Nilsen?”
“Oh, yes, the fellow in north London who cut up his victims and stuffed them down the sink-and then wrote to his landlord to complain that the drains were blocked. I’m not sure where he is. But I did hear a funny story about him. It seems that a movie company was considering making a film about his crimes, and when Nilsen heard about it, he wrote to the producer and asked that the cast be listed in the order of their disappearance.”
“Even if some famous murderers were in Dartmoor, the prison officials wouldn’t let you talk to them, Elizabeth,” Susan pointed out. She had settled into the seat behind Bernard with a paperback crime novel and the chocolate bar from her room.
Kate Conway shivered at the thought. “Why would you even want to talk to a convicted killer?”
Elizabeth considered the question. “I don’t know. I know they’re probably all crazy. I guess I’m just curious to see what a murderer would be like in person. Would he seem like everybody else? Would it be frightening just to be in the same room with him? What do you think, Rowan?”
He looked startled by the question. “I suppose it would depend,” he stammered. “I’ve known one or two gangsters who had put people away. They seemed rather crass and insensitive, but then, so do many bankers and minor bureaucrats, so it’s difficult to say. Some of my friends in the constabulary say that the safest prisoners to be around are those who’ve killed just one person, a girlfriend or a family member. They’re usually model prisoners, and they seldom repeat their crime.”
The only stop that morning was at Postbridge, just over halfway between Moretonhampstead and Dartmoor Prison. “Photo opportunity,” said Bernard, pulling the coach into a graveled lot alongside a country store. “People always want to take snaps of the old bridge.”
The three-arched stone bridge over which the road ran seemed old enough, but fifty yards downstream from it was such a quaint-looking span that everyone sprinted from the coach, cameras in hand, to examine it. It was a footbridge over the River Dart, consisting of three thin slabs of granite laid end to end across the water, supported by two piles of balanced stone slabs in midstream and an additional pile of rocks at each bank. Had the river not been visibly shallow, no one would have ventured onto the bridge, but the sight of a retriever wading happily near the bridge encouraged the group to brave the stone span. They spent a happy quarter of an hour photographing the bridge, each other, each other on the bridge, and the red-berried rowan tree at the edge of the field (with Rowan in the foreground, as a visual pun).
As their guide herded them back to the bus, they bolted into the roadside shop for an orgy of postcard purchasing, but since the store’s merchandise was limited and its floor space minuscule, they soon emerged and climbed back aboard with reasonable punctuality.
A few minutes later, before Susan had begun her nap or Frances had finished her first postcard, Rowan Rover was on the microphone again, calling their attention to an assortment of four-storied gray buildings across an expanse of fields on the left side of the road. “There it is, ladies and Charles,” he said with a dramatic hush in his voice. “With the gorse in bloom and the grass still summer green, it doesn’t look like such a forbidding place, I suppose. But one prisoner called it the Siberia of England. I assure you that winter on Dartmoor can be very bleak indeed.”
The tour members craned their necks for a better look at the circular granite compound, reminiscent of a nineteenth-century factory complex.
Rowan consulted his tour notes. “When I was at home this weekend, I found this quote in one of my reference books. It was written by a young American prisoner named Charles Andrews, kept here during the War of 1812.
“How old is it?” asked Charles Warren.
“It was built in the early 1800s to house prisoners from the Napoleonic wars,” said Rowan. “It has been modernized over the years, of course. I believe the chief problem now is overcrowding.”
“Does England have the death penalty?” asked Susan, looking up from her novel.
“No. It was abolished in the mid-Sixties.”
“Too bad. It would have solved the problem.” Susan went back to her book.
Bernard took a side road that enabled them to circle the prison and to come back out on the main road again. Charles and Elizabeth snapped photos from the moving coach, but the others seemed to lose interest in the prison after their first look. Rowan, too, was glad to leave the ominous compound behind. In another hour they would cross the River Tamar and go into Cornwall, where his attempts to murder would begin in earnest. Just after lunch, in fact.
