Exactly how his life had become so complicated in the course of a single weekend was a mystery Harding pondered as he disembarked from the helicopter at St. Mary’s Airport. It had seemed such a simple errand at the outset. But at every step he had uncovered a disturbing secret. And he sensed his visit to Scilly would be no different. It was too late to turn back, though. He had to find out what was at stake. He had to give himself the advantage of knowing the truth.
“Mr. Hardy?” A tall, stout, bearded man wearing a flat cap, Barbour and corduroys moved forward from the vehicles parked behind the small terminal building. He unzipped a broad grin and extended a hand. “I’m John Metherell.”
They shook. “How did you recognize me?” Harding asked, more than slightly perturbed by the possible answers that occurred to him.
“Easy. You’re the only solitary male aboard I don’t recognize.” Metherell nodded to a couple of departing passengers he evidently knew. “Tourists are thin on the ground in February.”
“You didn’t say you were going to meet me.”
“Spur-of-the-moment decision. Plus I thought it might be useful if I showed you what the diving expedition was all about. Before you saw the video.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“Wait and see. Hop in.”
They clambered into a battered white Honda and set off. “So, you knew Kerry Foxton?”
“Yes.”
“But… you lost touch.”
“I, er, went abroad. Lost touch with everyone. You know how it is.”
“Can’t say I do, actually.”
“Anyway when I heard she’d died, I… wanted to find out as much as I could.”
“How well did you know Kerry?”
“Very. For a while.”
“I don’t remember her father ever mentioning you.”
“I never met him.”
“Right.” Metherell paused to watch for traffic at the end of the airport access road, then pulled out. “Who put you on to me?”
“Ray Trathen.”
“Ah. Good old Ray. Was it he who told you about the video?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m puzzled. He has a copy himself as far as I know.”
“Mislaid.”
“Really?”
“So he says.”
“Well, he’s capable of mislaying anything, I suppose. Still peddling his murder theory, is he?”
“Yes.”
“With sufficient conviction to make you think it’s just possible Kerry’s death wasn’t an accident?”
“Exactly.” Harding was treading carefully and could only hope how carefully was not apparent from his tone. His cover was thin and could easily be blown. He had chosen to use a pseudonym on an impulse he now regretted. He should have deliberated longer and harder before contacting Metherell. But he had not, and now here he was, with Spargo’s squeakily menacing voice still echoing in his ear, risking exposure as an impostor with every word he spoke.
“It’s balderdash, I can assure you. Ray’s just working off a grudge against Barney Tozer. Although he probably drinks enough to believe his own fantasies. I’ll give him that. I daresay he’s convinced himself by now that Barney really did murder Kerry.”
“But he didn’t?”
“No. He may have neglected to check the equipment he and Kerry were using as thoroughly as he should have. That’s certainly what the coroner implied. So, you could argue he was partly responsible for what happened, although Kerry made things worse for herself by entering the wreck, but at the end of the day… it was just bad luck.”
“Where are we going?” Harding glanced round at the high-hedged fields of daffodils to either side of the road. His grasp of the island’s geography was just sufficient to tell him that they were not heading for Hugh Town, where Metherell lived.
“I thought a word with our skipper that day might put your mind at rest.”
“Alf Martyn?”
“Correct. He and his brother Fred grow daffodils when they aren’t ferrying tourists round the islands.”
“And they were both on board?”
“They were. This is their place just coming up. Pregowther Farm.”
Metherell turned right into a hedge-screened farmyard. A four-square granite and slate farmhouse stood in front of them, flanked by corrugated-iron-roofed outbuildings in various stages of disrepair. Broken ladders, gates, fencerails and rusty harrows filled one corner, while chickens were pecking and bobbing in the long grass that encroached at another. A track led out of the yard into a daffodil field, beyond which several more daffodil fields sloped down and away towards the sea. A crudely written sign declaring bulbs for sale had been propped against the doorpost of one of the barns. But of sales staff there was no sign.
“The Martyns are one of Scilly’s oldest families,” Metherell remarked as he turned off the engine and they climbed out. “A Robert Martyn settled here in the fourteenth century.”
“Ray mentioned you’re something of an historian.”
“Hard not to be, living here. Everything’s closer on a small island. Even the past.” Then he added, apparently as an afterthought: “Perhaps especially the past.”
They walked to the front door of the farmhouse. A drift of pop music, distorted by a slightly off-signal radio, reached them from within. It cut off as soon as Metherell rapped the knocker.
The door was answered a few seconds later by a frizzy-haired, moon-faced, scarlet-cheeked young woman dressed in cropped trousers and a smock top stretched round a distended stomach. She looked at least six months’ pregnant and was breathing heavily.
“Hello, Josie,” said Metherell.
“Hi, Mr. Metherell,” Josie panted cheerily in reply.
“Alf in? Or the father-to-be?”
“No. They’re both at the boatyard. They lavish more care on the Jonquil than they ever do on me.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
“You ask Fred and see if he doesn’t blush when he denies it.”
“Maybe I will.”
Josie laughed. “Well, if you want to catch them, they’ll likely be there till tea-time.”
“OK. Thanks. Mind if we leave my car here and walk down through your fields to the beach?”
“Be my guest.”
“There’s something on the beach I want to show you before we drive over to the boatyard,” Metherell explained as he led the way at an ambling pace along the track that formed the edge of the Martyns’ daffodil fields. It led down through a succession of open gateways towards a broad and rocky bay, into which the sea was rolling and foaming. “You might as well see it while we have the chance.”
“It’s the video I was really interested in,” Harding tentatively objected, fearing that he was being ever so subtly sidetracked.
“What did Ray tell you about the Association?” Metherell pressed on.
“That it sank among the Western Rocks in, er… 1707.”
“Correct. The bay ahead of us is Porth Hellick, where a lot of the bodies were washed up.”
“Really?”
“Including that of Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell. I’m writing a book on the disaster.”
“So Ray said.”
“It’s as good as finished. Due out in October of next year, for the tercentenary It’s a tricky business, though, judging when you can safely sign off on a project like that. There’s always the possibility that some new discovery might be made.”
“After three hundred years?”
“That’s the thing with the Association story. It seems to have tendrils that keep on growing. Shovell was in command of a fleet of twenty-one men-of-war returning to Portsmouth from operations in the Mediterranean. It was the primitive navigational methods of the time that did it in for him. Principally the impossibility of accurately measuring longitude at sea. Three other ships went down that night. About fourteen hundred men were drowned and a fortune in gold and silver coin was lost. The disaster prompted the Government to put up a prize for a solution to the longitude problem.”
“Won by John Harrison with his marine chronometer.”
“Bravo, Mr. Hardy. You evidently know all about this.”