They parked at Lanyon Rose, then picked their way along the riverbed. Pete swears to this day they were quiet as rabbits themselves and hadn't used the lamps but found their way by full moon, which was why they'd chosen that night. But when they came out on the cliff, careful to keep below the horizon, there stood Jack Linden not half a dozen paces uphill from them, his bare hands lifted from his sides. Kenny Thomas afterwards kept on about his hands, so pale and prominent in the moonlight, but that was the effect of the occasion. The knowing recall that Jack Linden never had big hands. Pete prefers to talk about Linden's face, which was set, he says, like a chunk of bloody blue elvan rock against the sky. You'd have broken your fist on it. There is no dispute about what took place after that.
"Excuse me, but where do you gentlemen think you're going, if I may ask?" says Linden with his customary respectfulness but no smile.
"Lamping," says Pete.
"Nobody's lamping here, I'm afraid, Pete," says Linden, who had only set eyes on Pete Pengelly a couple of times but seemed never to forget a name. "I own these fields, you know that. I don't farm them, but I do own them, and I let them be. That's what I expect other people to do as well. So I'm afraid lamping is out."
"It is, is it, Mr. Linden?" Pete Pengelly says.
"Yes, it is, Mr. Pengelly. I won't have sitting game shot on my land. It's not fair play. So why don't you all please empty your guns and go back to the car and go home and no hard feelings?"
At which Pete says, "To hell with you, boy," and the other three gather to Pete's side so that they are all four bunched and looking up at Linden, four guns against one fellow with the moon behind him. They had come straight on from the Snug, all of them, and were the better for a beer or two.
"Get out of our bloody way, Mr. Linden," says Pete.
Then he makes the mistake of fidgeting his gun under his arm. Not pointing it at Linden: he swore he would never have done that, and those who know Pete believe him. And the gun was broken: Pete would never in his life have walked with a closed and loaded gun at night, he says. Nevertheless, as he fidgeted the gun, making it clear that he meant business, it is possible he snapped the breach shut by mistake; he will grant you that. Pete does not claim to have a precise and accurate memory of everything that happened, because the world by then was turning on its head around him, the moon was in the sea, his arse was on the other side of his face, and his feet were the other side of his arse, and the first useful information Pete could put together was that Linden was standing over him emptying the cartridges from his gun. And since it is true that big men fall harder than small men, Pete had fallen very hard indeed, and the impact of the blow, wherever it had hit him, had robbed him not only of his breath but of his will to get up.
The ethics of violence required that it was now the turn of the others, and there were still three of them. The two Thomas brothers had always been quick with their fists, and young Jacob played wing forward for the Pirates and was broad as a bus. And Jacob was all set to go in after his brother. It was Pete, lying in the bracken, who ordered him off.
"Don't touch him, boy. Don't you ever bloody go near him. He's a bloody witch, Go back to the car, all of us," he said, climbing slowly to his feet.
"Empty your guns first, please," says Linden.
On Pete Pengelly's nod the three men emptied the cartridges from their guns. Then all four trooped back to the car.
"I'd have bloody killed him!" Jacob protested as soon as they had driven off. "I'd have broke the bugger's legs for him, Pete, after what he done to you!"
"No, you wouldn't, my handsome," Pete replied. "But he'd have broke yours for sure."
And Pete Pengelly, they say in the village, changed his manners from that night on, though perhaps they are a little hasty to link cause with effect. Come September month, Pete married a sensible farmer's daughter from St. Just. Which is why he is able to look back on the episode with distance and tell about the night Jack Linden damn near did for him the way he did for that fat Aussie.
"I'll tell you one thing, boy. If Jack did do him in, he made some neat job of it, that's for sure."
But there's a better ending to it than that, even if Pete sometimes keeps it to himself like a thing too precious to share. The night before Jack Linden disappeared, he walked into the Snug and laid a bandaged hand on Pete Pengelly's shoulder and bought him a bloody beer, man. They talked for ten minutes, then Jack Linden went on home. "He was puttin' it right with himself," Pete insists proudly. "You bloody listen to me, boy. Jack Linden was setting his bloody house straight after he done his business with the Aussie."
Except that his name wasn't Jack Linden by then, which was something they couldn't properly get used to, and perhaps they never will. A couple of days after his disappearance, Linden-of-the-Lanyon-with-an-i-and-an-e turned out to be Jonathan Pine of Zürich, wanted by the Swiss police on suspicion of embezzlement at a fashionable hotel where he had been a trusted employee. "Sailing Hotelier on the Run," the Cornishman sang, over a photograph of Pine alias Linden. "Police seek Falmouth boat trader in case of missing Australian. 'We are treating this as a drug-related murder enquiry,' says CID chief. The man should be easily identified by his bandaged hand.' "
But Pine was not a man they knew.
* * *
Yes, bandaged. And wounded. Wound and bandage were both integral features of Burr's plan.
Jack Linden's hand, the same as he had laid on Pete Pengelly's shoulder. A lot of people, not just Pete Pengelly, had seen that hand bandaged, and the police, at Burr's instigation, made a fair fuss of who they all were, which hand it was, and when. And when they'd got the who and the when and the which, then, being police, they wanted the why. Which is to say. they wrote down the conflicting versions that Jack had given for having his right hand done up in a big gauze bandage, professional, and the fingertips tied together like asparagus. And with Burr's help, the police made sure these found their way into the press.
"Trying to fit a new pane of glass at my cottage," Jack Linden told Mrs. Trethewey on the Thursday as he paid her out his cash wrong-handed for the last time.
"Teach me to help out a friend," Jack had remarked to old William Charles when the two of them chanced to meet at Penhaligon's garage, Jack for petrol for the bike, William Charles for passing the time. "Asked me to pop by and help him mend his window. And now look." Then shoved his bandaged hand at William Charles like a sick dog with his paw, because Jack could make a joke of anything.
But it was Pete Pengelly who got them hot and bothered. "Of course it was in his bloody woodshed, boy!" he told the detective sergeant. "Trimming a pane of bloody glass, he was, up at the Lanyon in his woodshed, and the cutter slipped, blood all over the place. He put a bandage on it, bound it tight and drove himself one-handed to hospital on his bike, blood running up his sleeve all the way to Truro, told me! You don't make that up, boy. You bloody do it."
But when the police dutifully inspected the Lanyon woodshed, they found no glass, no cutter and no blood.
Murderers lie, Burr had explained to Jonathan. Too consistent is too dangerous. If you don't err, you won't be criminal.