Unreliable Witness (a serialized novel - Part 5)

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3.

Colour blindness can be difficult to detect, particularly in children with an inherited colour vision deficiency. A child may identify colours they can’t see. Taught the colour of objects from an early age, they will know, for example, that grass is green and strawberries are red.

Judith Glenn sat on the colourless grass eating the colourless strawberries she’d bought from a colourless supermarket, the latter being nothing to do with her condition. In front of her lay the beauty of Mount’s Bay. Judith watched as visitors crossed on foot to St Michael’s Mount, the low spring tide revealing the footpath that the sea would totally submerge in the next half hour. As a child, Judith had often daydreamed what would happen if all the seas in the world dried up; what wonders would it reveal, what histories and stories? Meghan had once explained that Mounts Bay has a prehistoric submerged forest, sometimes revealed at low tide. Meghan said they looked like bones, teak knuckles of a giant hand that had gripped the land and never let go.

In the past, storms had revealed two to five metre trunks of pine and oak and the remains of hazel thickets with well-preserved cob nuts and acorns washed out by streams running across the beach. At Chyandour to the east of Penzance, the tides exposed rooted stumps in situ in peaty soils and massive trunks washed out onto the rocky foreshore. It was amazing, Meghan had said, how stuff can survive being submerged under the sea for thousands of years, deterioration only beginning when exposed to the air.

Finishing her sandwich, Judith looked back at the notes she had taken during her interview with the Penzance resident who’d been walking her Jackapoo, Murray, on the night in question. Mrs Clegg was a retired nurse who had moved to Cornwall with her husband, formerly an accountant, now deceased, some ten years before. She had an excellent memory, she insisted, and although she couldn’t tell Judith the exact time, Murray was as regular as clockwork so it would have been around 10.25pm. She said she had seen a red glow out to sea toward the Lizard. Judith rather suspected Mrs Clegg was someone who would enjoy the warmth of attention and interest she’d received for quite a while after this case was closed, and Judith would not have given her much thought if she hadn’t added as a parting shot:

‘I heard a noise though, just before I noticed the light; an odd noise, like a distant boom or bang out at sea. Maybe like a gunshot? Quite a way off, but I heard it. I didn’t remember it until I got back home. I’d just made my hot milk and put a tot in it—my husband always made it like that—and then I remembered.’

Judith made a note and thanked Mrs Clegg profoundly, her mind now partly on getting a Chinese takeaway en route back to Meghan’s. The day had been very low on credible evidence from a witness point of view but high on what was best about Cornwall on a good day: the extraordinary light, the clean air, the sun bouncing off the sea at an angle that seemed to make the entire world shimmer, the off-season traffic. Except for tractors (of which there were many) and buses (of which there were few) Judith thought she would enjoy the drive back to the Lizard Peninsula, stopping off in the market town of Helston in time for the opening of the best Chinese takeaway in the town. She also decided she’d pick up two bunches of seemingly all-season chrysanths to cheer up Meghan’s cottage a bit. Despite obvious attempts to make the cottage seem welcoming, there was a pall that hung over the place. She might have been imagining it, but Judith didn’t think so. Any joy of life had left the place when Sarah died. Meghan should have moved out a long time ago, but even Judith didn’t have the heart to say that to her. Not yet, anyway. The time would come, though.

While Judith was pontificating about what would make Meghan’s life worth living again, Meghan stood next to Davey in Frank’s cottage, aghast at the sight in front of her.

‘Done it all now. No going back.’

Frank was standing amid a shroud of torn wallpaper, ripped by hand from the walls of his living room despite his tremor. He’d moved the furniture out into the centre of the room, covered it in bedsheets to keep it from becoming covered in the smaller shreds of paper he’d had scraped off.

Meghan looked at Davey, who was doing his best to hold back the tears. She had no idea what it must feel like to watch a parent deteriorate, to watch their behaviour becoming more and more bizarre, to love them and bear the pain of loving them and the shame of sometimes not feeling that love.

Davey swallowed.

‘Sure, we can sort it out, Dad.’

Meghan didn’t know if that would ever be true.

‘Let’s get the kettle on,’ Meghan said as brightly as she could muster, ‘then we can get tidied up, think about how you’d like the walls to look.’

Meghan went into Frank’s tiny kitchen and filled the kettle. Davey followed her in.

‘I don’t want him put away.’

‘That won’t happen.’

Meghan stared out of the window toward the horizon, where the sky met the sea.

‘It’s a blip, Davey. He’s having a blip, that’s all. Get him back on his meds, after a few days he’ll be his old self again.’

‘What if it goes deeper than that? What if he’s failing? Sandra won’t have him. There’s room now Andrew’s away at college but…’

Davey tailed off, his shoulders rounding as he leaned with his hands gripping the old Butler sink. The emptiness of his marriage was something he hadn’t really noticed until his son left to go to university. The fact was his wife, Sandra, was also finding the hole in the family difficult, but was not prepared to fill it with the fiercely stubborn and independent Frank who, she said, would only get under her feet.

It had been a long day and they could achieve nothing more until Davey had spoken with Frank’s GP. Meghan opted for a distraction.

‘Any news on the mysterious body that washed up?’

‘It’s on ice, literally, while the various authorities decide which way to go. It’s not a sudden death, that’s pretty certain, but where it came from and how it got to wash up off the Lizard, your guess is as good as mine.’

‘And the remains are definitely mummified?’

‘All the signs indicate.’

‘So, a forensic archaeologist then?’

‘Not likely to be much in the budget for that, not these days. The pathologist up at Treliske has taken a good look. Female: clothing Victorian in style, several layers, petticoats, dress, stays–whatever they are…’

‘Corsets.’

‘Right. Pathologist thinks the body was—’

‘Kettle’s boiling!’

Frank was standing in the doorway, arms full of torn paper.

‘Let’s get that paper in the bin, Dad.’

Meghan let Davey and Frank pass through to the back door outside to the dustbin and then took three old mugs off the paper-lined open shelf. She smiled to herself. So different to its neighbour next door with its glossy, characterless units and granite worktops and Italian floor tiles. Importing the twenty-first century into the nineteenth was the order of the day in coastal Cornwall. Maybe it had to be that way. Cornish ranges and dodgy electrics might make for a romantic novel but could be hell to live with. Well, for some at any rate. Meghan had been living with little more for over four years. It was her comfort zone. Basic, the past firmly rooted in the present, as was so often the way. The thought caused Meghan to wonder about the body that had washed up on the shore just as Davey and Frank came back in, windswept and damp. Behind them, Meghan could see the mists off the sea hanging in the air.

‘Tea for three.’

They took the sheets off the furniture and held a light to the wood and paper in the fireplace that Frank had set before the leaves had fallen from the wallpaper and his world had drifted.

‘The district nurse came round then, Dad?’

‘Yizz.’

‘Getting you some more tablets?’

‘So ‘e sez.’ Frank paused. ‘I saw the captain of the Mohegan. Went past the other day. Soaking wet he was. And runnin’ away. They’ll get him, mark my words. They’ll get ’im’.

4.

The queue at the takeaway was long for a Wednesday. While she waited, Judith thumbed through the previous week’s West Briton. Scanning the headlines and photographs of school groups, outraged neighbours, planning disputes and court reports on the ne'er-do-wells, she mused that if they removed the place names, the stories could be from any local newspaper anywhere in the UK. A large aerial photograph of the Lizard Peninsula showing the Manacles dominated the front page, along with the headline:

‘Luxury cruiser sinks on Mohegan anniversary’.

The name rang a bell, but Judith couldn’t remember the context. Before she had a chance to read further down the page, a young man with a strong Cornish-tinged Chinese accent called her name and placed a bulging plastic carrier bag on the counter. As she became the focus of waiting customers, any chance of deftly removing the newspaper article unseen disappeared. Judith beamed, walked to the counter, and picked up her takeaway before returning to where she’d been sitting, bent down as if to pick up a menu, put the takeaway bag on top of the West Briton, then picked up the menu, food bag and newspaper without missing a beat.

Back in the Audi, she settled herself in the driver’s seat, pulled the seatbelt firmly across her substantial chest, then secured the bulky takeaway carrier bag with the passenger side seat belt, slipping the newspaper underneath to catch any leakage. Pulling onto the last bit of urban road she’d see for the next fifteen minutes, she mused on her interviews to date.

What had quickly become clear were the marked similarities and differences between the witness statements. All had seen and spoken of a red light in the sky. One reported seeing a flare. Another reported seeing two flares, and a third had heard a noise like a whip or the crack of a gun. No one could agree exactly on a time, but all had placed the event somewhere between ten and eleven at night on the 14th October.

Judith was very aware that each eyewitness had a unique perspective. Some were at sea level, others much higher up. Would that make such a difference to what they saw, Judith wondered? The pub customers at Porthallow were close to the incident, but cliffs obscured their view of the reef hit by the Cleopatra. They knew last orders hadn’t been called but hadn’t checked the time further. The fisherman and the sous chef had reported the most similar event in time, and the sous chef had taken a photograph of the red sky which gave a time probably close to the event, but the second flare the chef thought he’d seen, that was an oddity, as was the noise heard by the Jackapoo owner in Penzance. And the timing was way off for her. But to be fair, Judith added, the bowels of a Jackapoo would not stand up in court. But she could rule nothing out and hunger and the smell of the Chinese food was too distracting to think further.

Continues with Part 6 on 21st December or purchase now as an ebook or paperback at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Unreliable+Witness+Elaine+Ruth+White&ref=nb_sb_noss