for weeks. And yet, it seems, there wasn’t that much to it.
It is believed Nina Kerthen had been drinking on the night in question. There is no suspicion of foul play.
Foul play. The antiquated phrase, from the Falmouth Packet, conjures ghoulish, fairytale images of a dark man in a long cloak. A Venetian assassin, grasping a beautiful woman, and throwing her in the canal. I see a pale face staring up through the watery grey. Veiled with darkening liquid, then gone.
More pages flutter in the wind. Even the southerly breezes are fanged with freshening cold, today. Distracted for a moment, I gaze out.
There is a lone man walking the flooding sands out past Long Rock. Walking aimlessly, in circles, apparently lost. Or looking for something that he will surely never find. Abruptly he turns and stares my way, as if he senses he is being watched. A strange panic fills me, a quick and sharpened fear.
I calm my anxieties. Hints of my past. Turning back to the pages, I read on. I need to know all this detail, nail it down in my mind.
The initial idea of a murder was journalistically appealing. At the time of her death the newspapers spiced their reports with the delicious possibility of homicide.
The questions were never asked outright, but clearly they hung in the air: the captions are unwritten but the meaning is implicit. Take a look at this. Isn’t David Kerthen a bit too handsome, a bit too rich, a man you want to hate? A potential killer of his beautiful wife?
When all this was ruled out, early on, the national papers gave up, while the local journalists turned, with a rather forlorn optimism, to speculations of suicide. Who would go to a mineshaft in the dark? Why take the silly risk, on a cold christmas evening?
Unfortunately for the local press, the coroner was prosaic in his verdict.
I sip my cold coffee as I scan the coroner’s summation for the third time.
It was a clear moonlit night: December twenty-eighth. Nina was seen by Juliet Kerthen, David’s mother, walking down the valley and along the cliffs, in the vicinity of the mine stacks, as she sometimes used to do, to clear her head. She had been drinking that night, with the family.
Her actions were not unusual: the area around the mine houses was a fine place to take in the spectacular view: of the brutish sea, raging at the rocky cliffs below. Especially on a bright moonlit night.
But when Nina did not return, the alarm was raised. At first it was presumed she had merely got lost, down a path, in the dark. As her absence lengthened, speculation grew more negative. Perhaps she had fallen down one of the cliffs. Bosigran, maybe. Or Zawn Hanna. No one imagined she had actually fallen down Jerusalem Shaft: she knew the dangers well enough. But then, amidst the confusion, Juliet spoke up, and made the suggestion. Search Morvellan. That was the last place she was seen, after all: walking near the mineheads.
And it had been raining heavily in the preceding days. And the mine houses were unroofed. And she was wearing heeled shoes.
The little search party – David and Cassie – made for the Shaft House, where the door was found ajar. David turned his torch-beam down the shaft. The watered pit revealed no body, but it did offer up one significant and melancholy piece of evidence. Nina’s raincoat, floating in the water. Nina had been wearing that coat. She had surely, horrifically, fallen down the pit, then thrown off the coat as she struggled to save herself. But she had nonetheless succumbed. A person would swiftly freeze in those icy waters, then sink beneath them.
The raincoat was initial and crucial evidence. Two days after the accident, divers retrieved traces of blood and splintered fingernails from the brickwork of the shaft, above the black water. They also found strands of broken hair. The DNA was matched with Nina Kerthen: it was her blood, these were her broken fingernails, this was her hair. Here was the evidence of her desperate attempts to climb out of the mine, of her doomed and failing struggle to get out of the watered shaft. Evidence that could not be faked or planted.
Taken with the eyewitness evidence from Juliet Kerthen it seemed conclusive. The coroner delivered his verdict of accidental death. Nina Kerthen was drunk, her judgement was marred, and she therefore drowned, after falling down the Jerusalem Shaft of Morvellan Mine. Her body had sunk in the freezing water and would probably never be retrieved: lost as it was in the unnumbered tunnels and adits of the undersea mine, shifted by unknowable tides and currents. Trapped beneath Carnhallow and Morvellan, for ever.
I shiver, profoundly. The wind off the bay is cutting up, and venomed with hints of rain. I need to do my tasks, and get back to the house. Binning my empty cup, I go downstairs and do my shopping and the shopping is done in seventeen minutes. It is one advantage of my frugality, born of my impoverished upbringing. A relic of Rachel Daly, from south-east London. I rarely get distracted in supermarkets.
Spinning the car on to the main road, I take a last look at St Michael’s Mount, where a shaft of September sun is shining on the subtropical garden of the St Levans, a family five hundred years younger than the Kerthens.
Then the clouds open, and the sun shines on us all. And I realize what I need to do. I believe David’s answers, but Jamie still needs help. My own stepson unnerves me, and that has to be explained: I need to read him, to decipher him, to understand. Maybe David doesn’t need to know any more. But I do.
Afternoon
It’s taken me a week to pluck up the courage to come in here. David’s study. Where I will maybe learn more about Jamie. My husband has come and gone from London, the days have come and gone, palpably shortening now, I’ve done the school runs and talked to the gardener and read my books on marquetry, carpentry, and masonry, and I have hesitated maybe twelve times in front of this imposing door.
The house is deserted. Jamie is still at school; Cassie has gone shopping. Juliet is with friends for the day, in St Ives. I have an hour at least. So now I must do it. I know I am, arguably, going behind David’s back, but the grief in this house is too intense for me to keep asking questions, directly. That way is too painful for everyone. So I must be more subtle. Discreet.
A fine but angled autumn sun makes a rich amber patch of light on the polished floorboards. These boards creak as I step forward, and open the door.
I’ve only been in this spacious, cedar-scented room three or four times before, and always in David’s presence. Now I gaze about, in faint but definite awe. There are several ancient portraits on the wood-panelled walls. Clumsy, vernacular portraits of patriarchal Kerthens: portraits of rich men who could only commission very provincial painters.
I know the biggest and darkest of these portraits shows Jago Kerthen, the man who sank the Jerusalem Shaft in the 1720s. He had a reputation, David says, for severity, if not brutality. Damning men to death down risky pits, urging them on through day and night, his troops of willing Cornishmen with their tallow candles glued on to their little hats. Jago Kerthen’s pale blue eyes glint with avarice in the gold-framed portrait: however clumsy the artist, he caught that look well enough. Yet it was Jago Kerthen’s appalling greed that turned the Kerthen thousands into millions in the early eighteenth century.
David has positioned the portrait so that it stares out of the tall sash window, down the last of Carnhallow Valley to the just-visible blackness of Morvellan Mine. And then onwards, to the shimmering wastes
