‘West is where all days will some day end; where the colours turn from grey to gold …’
Some strange music was emanating from Ivan Youlen’s cottage, number 85 on a little cobbled square that looked as though it had been laid with pebbles from the beach. After climbing up the narrow path from the harbour Suzie and Danny turned into the square, away from the sunshine that rippled light on the water below, which was enjoying an unusually high tide in Mevagissey Harbour. The music was not only loud, it was menacing – sufficiently so as to make Danny and Suzie pause a moment before knocking on the front door. They listened some more, and Danny noted the lyrics ‘Into the West, smiles on our faces, we’ll go’. He had an inspired thought and found Justyn’s phone number on his mobile.
Followed by Suzie, he retreated several doors down the cobbled street and, relieved to get a signal, made the call. ‘Justyn, Danny here. Suzie and I are about to go and see Ivan Youlen at his cottage. Don’t ask why.’ Justyn, sensing the urgency in Danny’s voice, dispensed with his usual flippancy and on being quoted the lyrics recognized the song.
‘It’s “Refugees” by Van der Graaf Generator, a cult band of some distinction from the late 1960s and 1970s. They were great, one of my favourite bands, but it sounds to me as if Ivan might be expecting you, setting a bit of mood music,’ warned Justin. ‘I should be careful. The song continues along the lines of “West is where you shall spend the final days of your lives”.’
Danny appeared shaken as he returned to Suzie.
‘What did he say?’ she asked anxiously.
‘We could be walking into a trap. Justyn warned me that this music might have been deliberately chosen by Ivan to set the stage for us.’ The silence that fell between them was dominated by the strains of ‘Refugees’, now even louder and more threatening than before, as they heard a chorus about ‘Mike and Suzie’.
‘In the summertime the August people sneered,’ went the song.
Danny thought he had heard the words before. ‘That must have been us,’ he said, recalling how Ivan would have viewed them back in the old days: the grockles and other holiday-makers of yesteryear that invaded his county every August. They moved slowly back to the front door, still unsure of their next move.
‘Let’s wait a moment,’ urged Suzie as she saw a vision that drained the blood from her face and filled her with astonishment and horror. She had been half expecting an ambush of sorts, maybe Trevor Mullings lurking around the corner or even the reappearance of Ken Holford, but never in her worst dreams had she expected to see the shadowy, skeletal figure she was sure she had spotted through the half-open front door.
It was her father’s dreaded first wife. She had last seen her collapsing in the front hall at her family’s holiday hotel back in 1972, and now she was here. She thought how unfair life was: Father long dead and Estelle still breathing. For Suzie, Ivan’s modest home now resembled a cottage from hell.
‘Give me strength,’ she muttered before regaining control. ‘Sssh, they don’t know we’re here. The volume of the music has seen to that. Let’s move back down the street and wait and see what else Ivan might have in his horror show today.’
While Suzie and Danny were biding their time, Caroline and Grant had turned off the A30 and were hurtling at break-neck speed down the winding roads from Indian Queens towards St Austell. They were no more than twenty minutes away when Caroline dropped her bombshell. ‘You know, Grant, I have my own reason for pursuing this. I need vengeance, too.’
‘What? What? I mean, tell me.’ He was all too aware that they would very soon be in Ivan’s village. This was a very strange and inconvenient time for Caroline to bring something up he was fairly sure was going to be significant. He recalled the foreboding he had experienced as a child on being prepared for very bad news, such as before being told of the death of his grandfather. He saw that disconcerting look on her face was leading somewhere, a place he instinctively knew he didn’t want to go. His fears were to prove only too real.
‘Yes,’ Caroline continued, now in a distinctly dark mood. Grant had always considered her a very cheerful character, almost to the point of blandness, and he was alarmed. ‘You see, Grant, it was Richard Hughes-Webb who suggested Daddy’s electroshock therapy.’ She said this in a girlish ‘hey-diddle-diddle’ sarcastic sort of way, and Grant feared a storm coming.
‘Well, he didn’t administer it. He would only have been trying to help,’ he suggested lamely, although why he should now seek to defend Hughes-Webb fairly shocked him.
The Porsche swept through the winding roads to Mevagissey, still travelling far too fast for Grant’s liking. Caroline negotiated the bends at alarming speed, seemingly oblivious to danger. Grant gripped his seat, captive and fearing a further onslaught.
‘No, he was playing God.’ Her voice was hard and sharp. ‘Richard Hughes-Webb talked to the doctor who arrived at the hotel, the doctor he summoned when Mummy couldn’t get Daddy out of bed, and he kept looking at that depressing poem, and he suggested the treatment.’
‘Well, he couldn’t have known that it would …’ ‘Couldn’t he?
Couldn’t he?’ Caroline had been transformed into some kind of demented force, the threatened storm now unleashing hell fire. ‘He should have known that Ernest Hemingway committed suicide in 1961 after receiving the same treatment. Just read what Sylvia Plath said in The Bell Jar about how the treatment affected her: how two metal plates on either side of her head were buckled with a strap that dented her head and how she had to bite on wire and how great jolts seared through her body, making her feel her bones were breaking. And didn’t you see One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?’ she yelled.
‘OK, OK, I’m so sorry. I had no idea you carried …’ Grant had never seen Caroline like this and feared she was out of control. He thought of asking her to pull over so that he could take over the wheel.
‘Baggage,’ she responded, finishing his sentence for him as she floored the accelerator to overtake a tractor just ahead of the next hairpin bend. Grant, held his breath, terror-struck, as she completed the manoeuvre.
He recovered his composure and tried to sound calm. ‘No, well, yes, but I understand. Just as I’ve spent forty years fearing my mother was implicated, possibly involved, in a murder because of a man with whom she had an affair as my father lay dying of cancer, you have spent forty years thinking Hughes-Webb helped kill your father. I do understand. I really do.’ Grant knew he had to express sympathy while being assertive. She had released an elemental force that had raged away inside her for forty years. Why had she never mentioned it before? Why did she wait until now when they were almost upon the scene of a showdown?
‘Yes,’ she replied, calming down a little. ‘Yes, you got it.’
Grant was palpably relieved as Caroline relaxed her foot on the accelerator, regaining a modicum of control. He sensed the storm had moved away, but he still feared her mood and now understood her motive for wishing to join him in Cornwall. For an uncomfortable moment he wondered whether she carried a gun as well.
‘Just one thought,’ he continued, aware that he could still be treading on eggshells. ‘How come you could be friends with Suzie after what her father helped to do?’
‘Keep your friends close but your enemies closer. I stayed in touch with her because I wanted to find out the truth, Grant. Just as you did. It’s just that now you’ve got yours. I don’t have mine. When you started this whole private investigation I didn’t want to get involved. I thought I had moved on, but as it’s unravelled I discovered I have the same fixation. You see, I had buried my resentment of Daddy’s treatment for a long time. I was in denial, but I had always thought Suzie must know the truth – she was so close to her father. So now, here, today, I will get my confirmation one way or the other.’
‘And that’s why we are hurtling down to Mevagissey together?’
‘Yes, I must find out. I must know why Daddy died!’ Caroline was close to breaking down again, but she drove more calmly through the villages left ravaged by the closure of the china-clay pits. Grant decided diplomacy was not only the best but the only option.
‘I understand. We are peas in a pod. We have both suffered torment. We both had to know, but we are very nearly there, and we need to think how to play this when we arrive.’
Caroline, calm once more, was mute. Grant was relieved that she appeared to be concentrating on the road.