help.’
‘You know, he strikes me as a man who wouldn’t let anything get in the way of a principle.’
‘Jago?’
‘Yes. They probably call it honour here, but it still sounds remarkably like violence to a Scottish ear.’
She was gone before Archie could ask her what she meant, and he walked thoughtfully back to the hall. Trew was there on his own, waiting patiently. ‘Mr Motley asked if there was anything he could do, Sir, so I told him about the search. He’s going to sort out some manpower for us. You’re just to let him know where you want them – he’s down by the stables.’
‘Our lads are going to start by the church, aren’t they?’ Trew nodded. ‘Then William’s men should do the woods on the other side of the lake. We’ll tell him on the way out, and I’ll ask him to oversee it for the next day or two. Have my cousins gone?’
‘Yes, Sir. Miss Motley offered to look after Treg for me, but he didn’t seem too keen. I hope she wasn’t offended. It was kind of her to think of it.’
‘Very kind,’ said Archie, smiling as he led the way back out to the car. ‘She’s good like that.’
Chapter Fifteen
Jago Snipe lived on the western side of the Loe Pool, half a mile or so along a narrow track which formed the boundary of William’s land. The house – a modest, stone-built cottage with a rain-slicked slate roof – had its back turned to the estate’s woodlands and looked out across cultivated fields to the village, just a ten-minute walk away. Penrose let Trew get out of the car, then parked close in to the hedge to keep the track clear. There was no sign of Jago’s van. In fact, with the exception of the rabbits which scuttled to left and right – delighting Treg, who stuck obediently but reluctantly to Trew’s heel – there was no sign of life at all.
‘At least, being the undertaker, he’ll be straight with us,’ Trew said as they walked up to the door.
‘You think so?’ Penrose asked, raising a cynical eyebrow at his companion. ‘He’s a Cornishman, Trew, and what was it someone said about us? Beware the fluency of the Celts – it makes their lies more convincing than a Saxon truth.’ He knocked smartly at the door, and lowered his voice. ‘The first time he talked to me about Christopher’s disappearance, he was certainly holding something back, but it wasn’t official then and I couldn’t press him. This is different. It’s a murder inquiry now and it’s up to us to make
There was no sound from inside the house. Penrose knocked again, but without any real hope of a response. ‘He’s obviously not here either,’ he said after a moment.
‘Looks like we’ve had a wasted trip, Sir.’ Trew sounded disappointed, but Penrose’s attention was fixed on a group of tumbledown shacks a couple of hundred yards further down the track.
‘Not entirely,’ he said, ‘although it’s not the man we were after. I’d forgotten that Caplin lives down here as well. He’s having a good look at us, so we might as well satisfy his curiosity and find out why he wasn’t where he should have been last night.’
As they walked over to the cluster of outbuildings, the man standing at the door to the nearest one made no attempt to look away or pretend he was otherwise occupied. ‘Afternoon, Joseph,’ Penrose called, and, when they were close enough, held out his hand. The other man hesitated, then shook it guardedly. ‘We were after Jago, but he’s not in.’
‘Been gone an hour or more,’ Caplin said.
‘Don’t suppose you know where?’ The older man shook his head. ‘Perhaps while we’re here we could have a word with you about last night?’ Caplin shrugged, as if to say that it made no odds to him what other people did with their time, and Penrose could trace the slow progress of alcohol in the lines on his face and the redness around his eyes. It was the face of someone who had long ceased to care how his days were filled, and that was hardly surprising; the tragic accident which killed his daughter – it must be fifteen years ago now, or more – had shocked the whole estate; it would have been a miracle if he had recovered. Penrose remembered how surprised he had been yesterday to see Caplin at the Minack at all; he wondered why the man had bothered to take part in something so alien to the solitary life he chose, and asked as much.
‘Same reason you did, I suppose,’ he said gruffly. ‘Mr Motley asked me to.’ He must have sensed Penrose’s disbelief, because he added: ‘God knows I’ve got little enough to be grateful for, but what I have got is down to him – a job, and a roof over my head. If you’ve spent as many years as I have thinking about how you’ve been wronged, you remember when someone plays fair by you – and he’s always done what he could, for me and for a lot of other people. We might fight among ourselves, but you won’t find many around here who’d wish him ill.’
Touched, Penrose glanced involuntarily across the yard at the roof to which Caplin referred. He remembered that William had found the farmer somewhere else to live after the tragedy, knowing it would be torture for him to remain on his own in rooms which held such appalling memories. The house was small – barely bigger than one of the squatters’ cottages, built between sunrise and sunset all over the west country – but, although it showed signs of neglect, it was structurally sound and obviously regularly maintained, due more to William’s efforts than Joseph Caplin’s, Penrose guessed. Nevertheless, there was a bleakness about the property which depressed him, and he marvelled at how different the reality of a rural existence was from the way in which it was frequently depicted. Often, in London, his work would take him into the homes of clerks and shop assistants and rent collectors, and invariably there would be a picture of the yearned-after country cottage somewhere on those optimistic middle- class walls – one of those romanticised images by Allingham and her contemporaries, specialists in creating houses which existed only in their imagination. He found the smug cosiness of it all particularly offensive today; no landlord worked harder than William, but even he could only do so much.
‘Do you want to come inside?’ Caplin asked reluctantly.
‘No, thank you. We won’t keep you for long,’ said Penrose, who could only imagine what the interior of the house was like and had no intention of humiliating the man by forcing him to make it public. ‘I’ll come straight to the point. I’d like to know where you were last night when Nathaniel was killed.’
‘Over by the rocks on the other side of the stage, waiting for the next crowd scene.’
‘You didn’t have a more specific role?’
‘No. I’m not what you might call the theatre type.’
‘We’ve been told that you were supposed to be on the backstage path, making sure that nothing went wrong when Nathaniel jumped from the balustrade.’
Caplin smiled, but there was no humour in it. ‘Ah. I see what you’re getting at. You think I gave him a shove while I was down there.’
Penrose met his stare. ‘It’s a possibility I’d like to discount.’
‘Well, your information is a bit out of date. It’s true – the woman who owns the place did tell me to stand there throughout the performance.’
‘Miss Cade?’
‘That’s her. It was early on, when I first got there. She was having some sort of tantrum about making sure everything was safe, and I happened to be in the firing line. She made me go down there with her and showed me where I had to be. It could have been anyone, though – I don’t kid myself that I had any special qualifications.’
‘So why weren’t you there?’ Penrose asked, ignoring the sarcasm.
‘Because as soon as Morveth Wearne arrived and heard about it, she changed things round. Said she’d do it herself, and I should go back to where I was.’
That made sense to Penrose. Morveth would never have trusted Nathaniel’s safety to someone as unreliable as Caplin, although it didn’t explain why she had not been in the recess later on. ‘Did you see Morveth at all once the performance was underway?’
‘No. Did you? You had the best view going from what I remember.’
‘And when the play was stopped – did you notice anyone leaving the theatre or acting strangely?’
‘If you ask me, we were all behaving strangely by being there in the first place – how would I know what was supposed to happen and what wasn’t? I just did what I was told and, as far as I could see, everyone else did, too.’
‘When you went down to the path with Miss Cade in the afternoon, did you actually go into the recess or did
