[The Girl From UNCLE 04] - The Cornish Pixie Affair - Leslie Peter - Страница 6

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Sara Bosustow put her foot with the partly laced boot down to the floor. "I don't know why you bother," she exclaimed hotly, hands on hips. "Surely it's obvious to anybody that only one person could have killed Sheila? He'd been pestering her for weeks, he wouldn't take no for an answer, he was the last person to see her alive — and to top it all he's the only person she knew with a nasty enough sort of mind to dream up that trick with the balls from the coconut-shy!" She stood facing the policeman, her bosom heaving with anger and her small eyes flashing.

"Hush, Sara! You'm be gettin' yourself into trouble with talk like that," old Mrs. Bosustow said placidly. "I never did. Really, I never did!"

"Some things have to be said, Ma," the ringmaster interrupted. "I think Sara's right — and the more people know it the better. We've had enough trouble with fancy suitors and so-called gentlemen before, and just because Sheila was soft hearted enough not to choke off our self-styled squire..."

"Oh, Sir Gerald's all right really, son. Don't take on so," his mother soothed him.

"Sir Gerald!" Mark interjected involuntarily.

"Yes, Sir Bloody Gerald," Sara stormed. "Gerald Wright, the Don Juan of Penwith; despoiler of maidens with the blessings of his stuck-up wife; know-all; snob; and peeping-tom into the bargain, always prowling about with his blasted glasses!"

In the silence which followed this outburst, a scatter of rain drops was flung at the caravan window and sounded abnormally loud. Distant church bells trembled on the wind. Ceased.

"Ah, yes," Superintendent Curnow said, avoiding Mark's eye. "Half past three. That'll be Mary Trelawnay's wedding. Hope the weather clears up for her — they're going to the Scillies for the honeymoon... Come on, then, Mr. Slate. We'd best be on our way, too."

"Why didn't you say Wright was the other man?" Mark asked reproachfully as they tramped back towards the car park, the moist wind tugging at their coat tails.

Curnow had coloured slightly. "Just a lot of gossip," he said. "You don't want to be bothering your head about that. There's always two sides to a question. A woman scorned, you know... And besides I'm not sure that he really is Another Man in that sense, though the boy, Ernie will hardly agree with me! I'll just have a few words with Master Bosustow now, and then I must go."

But the youngest Bosustow's caravan was locked and empty. Curnow led the way across to the uniformed constable still on duty at the gate.

He told them that the dead girl's fiance had spent the morning drinking, and had now gone back to the hut where he worked at his stone. "That's up on the southern slope of the Tor," Curnow said. "He's one of the ones who likes to work on it where it comes from. Most of the Serpentine specialists round here take a lease on a particular patch of ground, dig the stuff up and set up their little workshops right there, the way he does. I guess I'll have to put off seeing him until later: there are some routine bits and pieces back at the station right now, so I'd better be leaving you for today."

Mark shook hands and walked back to the Matra-Bonnet. He waved goodbye to the police Wolseley and leaned down to open the low door of the sports car.

At that moment glass starred and shattered in front of his eyes. At the same time he was aware of the sting of flying fragments against his chin and the distant report of a firearm.

Almost in a reflex, he hurled himself to the muddy ground and peered up over the distant ridgepole of the Big Top towards the moors sweeping the sky behind the town. The shot — it had sounded like an express rifle to him — had come from somewhere over there. But the undulations of dead bracken and Cornish heath rolled up, ridge beyond ridge, towards the rocky escarpment of the Tor itself in featureless anonymity. Anyone using smokeless powder could lie low behind a rock outcrop and there remain undetected.

He shrugged mentally and clambered back into the car on the far side, away from the invisible marksman. If he hadn't leaned down just then to reach for the handle of the door, he thought, he'd probably still be on the grass, with a hole in his head... Shivering involuntarily, he stabbed fiercely at the accelerator and sent the car lurching out of the field on to the road leading to the town.

An hour later, after he had changed his soiled suit and set out on a little tour to see if he could discover where the youngest Bosustow worked, he was stamping just as heavily on the brake pedal. Following the directions given to him by one of the fishermen, he was climbing a steep lane towards the Tor when some sixth sense made him look upwards and over the bank overhanging the road. The shriek of the Matra-Bonnet's discs was drowned in the thundering progress of the great boulder of granite bursting through the hedge. It smashed a depression in the gravelled surface of the lane, bounced to the far side of the carriageway, and finally disappeared with a crashing of undergrowth down a slope into the valley.

Slate's knees were trembling as he whipped out of the driving seat and pounded up the bank down which the great rock had tumbled.

Beyond a screen of gorse and broom, the hillside stretched up to the grey sky in an unbroken line of rough grass and rock. Apart from the flapping of a pair of peewits in the middle distance, no living thing disturbed the silence.

But although there wasn't a human being in sight, the evidence of someone's presence was not far off. To the right, the slope of the land was intersected twice: once by the roof of a small building carrying a wooden sign announcing: Bosustow — Fine Work in Porphyry and Serpentine; once, further away, by the gantries and reflectors of some kind of radar station.

CHAPTER FOUR: AN OVERSEAS MISSION FOR APRIL

"THAT is just the point, Mr. Solo," Alexander Waverly said to his Chief Enforcement Officer over the telephone in his office. "The crux of the matter is that Porthallow is the nearest town to the installation. The girl was only on a watching brief, of course, but it does look now as though there may have been something to watch." He listened for a moment, gazing out of the large window at the elegant tower of the United Nations building across the East River. Waverly, as Head of the Policy Department of U.N.C.L.E.'S Section One, always believed in giving a fair hearing to the opinions of the men and women who worked for him… and then doing exactly what he had intended to do in the first place anyway.

He waited courteously now while Napoleon Solo spoke. And then, "Yes," he said, "Mr. Slate is over there. From what I gather, the situation looks as though it may become more complicated before it clears up — if you see what I mean. I have just received a second message from him, relayed through London." He picked a cablegram absently from the top of the enormous desk and stared at the strips of teletype pasted to the form.

The voice in the receiver enunciated two crisp sentences. Waverly's lean, tired face creased into a smile. "Yes, Mr. Solo," he said. "That is exactly what I had planned to do, as it happens... Thank you. And you will let me know as soon as you leave Lima, won't you?"

He replaced the instrument gently on its cradle and pressed a button set in a wooden plate screwed to the desk.

"Yes, Mr. Waverly?" The girl's impersonally efficient voice came from a speaker concealed somewhere behind the panelling lining the office.

"Ah, Miss Soong," Waverly said into the air. "A couple of things for you to do, if you please. Do you have your pad and pencil ready?"

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