Trevor brought the conversation round to the direction he wanted.
‘I suppose most of the kids want sandy beaches, like Three Cliffs and Oxwich? It’s a bit dangerous for nippers down there, isn’t it?’
He pointed to the valley, where grey rocks could be seen where the grass and bracken ended, several hundred feet below. The shopkeeper nodded and said the very thing that Mitchell had angled for.
‘That’s true enough. We had a nasty accident a bit further along the cliffs. It was only a week or so ago, when a swimmer got drowned.’
‘Some tripper who didn’t know the dangers, I suppose?’ said Trevor, guilelessly.
‘No, it was a local lady, as it happens. Strange, because she often went swimming along here, she lived in the village and knew the coast well enough.’
‘Swimming alone, was she? Not very wise, if you get into trouble,’ said Mitchell, probing.
The proprietor shrugged. ‘She never came to any harm before and she’s been swimming here regular for a year or more. I often saw her walking in her swimming costume, she used to wear a sort of terry-towel coat over it to get dry on the way back. She only lived along there.’
He pointed with the handle of his brush to the track that led eastwards from the parking area. It was set back quite a way from the gorse and bracken that covered the undulating cliff top. The roofs and chimneys of several houses could be seen in the distance.
The detective knew when to stop his questioning, knowing he would get little more of any use. He moved back to his car and after the man had gone back inside the shop, he started the engine and drove very slowly along the rough track, the car rolling and pitching slightly over the irregular stones.
He passed a house and a bungalow, spaced well apart behind wind-blown hedges, but neither was Bella Capri. There was a gap of a few hundred yards before the next dwelling, the track passing between thick gorse bushes on the cliff side and dense elder and blackthorn on the landward verge. A pair of wrought-iron gates came into view, set back a little from the track and on one of the masonry turn-ins was a metal nameplate bearing the name he was looking for. He did not stop, but drove on a little until he found a gap between the bushes sufficient to make a three-point turn. The track deteriorated beyond this point and there seemed to be no more houses further on.
Mitchell went back towards Bella Capri and stopped the Wolseley opposite the gates. Without getting out, he looked up the drive from his seat and saw a low house, with bay windows downstairs and two gabled windows in the slate roof. There was a long front garden, entirely grassed, through which the gravelled drive went up the centre, until it swung around the right-hand side of the house, where a separate garage was visible. The main door was in the centre between the bay windows and a few yards in front of it was a circular rockery with a small ornamental pond in the middle.
Trevor sat looking for a few moments, prepared to act the nosy voyeur of a tragic house if anyone came out to challenge him. But the place remained silent and deserted. The curtains were drawn and no dog barked at him. He pondered what to do next, with such a dearth of anyone to question. Presumably, Michael Prentice would be at his factory, which Massey had told him was in an industrial estate the other side of Swansea, near the docks.
As he sat there, his problem was unexpectedly solved when an elderly lady appeared from the gate of the next bungalow down and began walking up towards him, a large black retriever running ahead of her, sniffing the bushes and cocking up its leg at intervals. Trevor expected her to pass the car, but she came to his driver’s side and rapped peremptorily on the glass.
‘What are you doing here, may I ask?’ she snapped, when he wound the window down. ‘Are you a policeman?’
Mitchell, who looked every inch a copper and was sitting in what looked like a police car, was glad that he could honestly say that he was not. ‘I’m a journalist, madam, writing an article on the dangers of solitary bathing on this coast. I’ve been looking at some of the more dangerous spots.’
It was a harmless lie and in fact, he had written a few articles for magazines on various aspects of policing in Britain, which almost made him a journalist. The rather hard-faced woman, her grey hair crushed under a scarf tied tightly under her chin, seemed mollified at his explanation.
‘We have to be careful of loitering strangers,’ she snapped. ‘We’ve had several break-ins along here.’
‘I understand that this was the house where that poor lady Mrs Prentice lived?’ he asked humbly, pulling out his notebook and pencil to validate his guise as a writer. ‘She was the reason I was asked to write this article, to point out the risks before the summer season gets going. Did you know her well? I presume she was an experienced swimmer.’
The neighbour fell for the ploy, unable to resist airing her knowledge.
‘Oh yes, she loved the sea. In good weather, she was in almost every day. I think that’s partly why they came to live here. I’m not sure that Michael was all that keen on it, I got the feeling he was more of a city man.’
Trevor also got the feeling that the old lady did not care for the man of the house nearly as much as she did for Linda.
‘Did you see her the day of the accident?’ he ventured. ‘No possibility of her being unwell and this contributing to the tragedy?’
The grey-haired woman looked thoughtful. ‘I didn’t actually see her for a few days before that,’ she admitted, rather regretfully. ‘In fact I thought she looked a little out of sorts for a week or two. I do hope that wasn’t anything to do with her death – getting cramp or something like that.’
Mitchell felt he would be sailing too near the wind if he probed much more, but he had one last try.
‘I suppose there’s no one else I could ask, to get more background on this awful business?’ he said solicitously. ‘Have any local friends or family been here since it happened?’
The neighbour thought for a moment, then shook her head. ‘They kept very much to themselves, especially the husband. I did see a blonde lady come in with Michael in his car on Friday, but I don’t know if she was family or not.’
Trevor knew when to bow out gracefully and with thanks to the lady, he said goodbye and let her march away up the track, snapping commands at her uncaring dog.
He went back into the village, which he saw from a sign was called Southgate, and found a red telephone box.
With a fistful of change, he rang a Reading number that Leonard Massey had given him, that of the dead woman’s schoolfriend, who had raised all this suspicion after receiving Linda’s letter. When he got an answer, he pressed Button A and spoke to her for several minutes, having to push several more pennies into the slot, then came out with a few more words written in his notebook.
About twenty-five miles from Pennard, on the main A48 going towards home, Trevor turned the Wolseley off onto a secondary road and made his way towards the seaside town of Porthcawl. As he drove along the promenade and out towards Rest Bay, he could see Gower on the western horizon and even identify the cliffs of Pwlldu Head, on the further side of which Bella Capri lay.
Here in Porthcawl, Trevor found the coast was very different, low cliffs and beaches giving way to miles of sand dunes, under which lay buried the medieval town of Kenfig. He was not going that far, however, and guided by the sparse information that Marjorie Elphington had given him over the telephone, he found the road that was an extension of the Esplanade, going towards the burrows and golf clubs.
All Marjorie had been able to tell him on the telephone, was that Linda had learned that her husband’s mistress was a blonde called Daphne and that she lived in a maisonette on the front in Porthcawl. Mitchell parked his car in a side street and began walking along the road which fronted the sea. The houses were built only on the landward side and included thirties modernistic houses with curved corners and flat roofs, mixed with some larger classical dwellings. Further on were smaller bungalows and he could see only one block of maisonettes. This two-storey building had four apartments, each with its own front door, two on the front, the others at each end. He walked slowly past, trying to get a glimpse of the bell pushes to see if there were any names on them, but they were too far away from the pavement for his eyesight.