A Colourful Death: A Cornish Mystery by Carola Dunn

quite at home. Eleanor had hung up her blouse and skirt to air, and in the hope of getting rid of some of the wrinkles. The results were not entirely successful. She really ought to try to get over her prejudice against dacron and terylene. Everyone said they were so easy to care for, and she wasn’t one of those people like Jocelyn Stearns who could wear a linen suit all day and emerge uncreased.
    On the other hand, slightly crumpled cotton was less likely to arouse mistrust in a colony of artistic types than Joce’s immaculate smartness. No one could guess from her appearance that the vicar’s wife clothed herself almost exclusively from the LonStar shop.
    Eleanor dressed and went down, again preceded by Teazle. At the bottom, Teazle waited at the closed door. A babble of voices came from the kitchen, both male and female. Pausing with her hand on the doorknob, Eleanor heard Nick’s and Geoff’s names, and once her own, but she couldn’t make out much else. She opened the door and went in.
    For a moment no one noticed. Then, abruptly, silence fell. The only sound was the spitting of frying bacon on the range and the click of Teazle’s nails on the stone floor as she headed straight for the heavenly aroma.
    “Gosh,” said Eleanor, “I do adore the smell of bacon. It always makes me ravenous.”
    Someone laughed, uncomfortably.
    A tall, muscular man—the large-scale sculptor with the rich aunt?—stood up from the table, pulled out the chair next to him, and said, “Mrs Trewynn, I presume. Do come and sit down. I’m Quentin. These chaps are Tom, Albert, and Oswald. You’ve met Jeanette and Leila, haven’t you? And Margery, of course. That’s the lot of us, except Stella … and Geoff.”
    “Good morning,” said Eleanor and wondered how on earth she was going to keep them all straight. “I’m sorry you’ve lost … one of your number.”
    Amid a general murmur, one voice—male—emerged: “No great loss.” It was the oldest person present, other than Eleanor. He looked about her age, on the small side, balding, with a face like an intelligent monkey. His clothes were the most conventional present, a suit of pale grey, lightweight summer worsted, with a pale blue shirt open at the neck. “I won’t miss him.”
    “Really, Albert,” said Margery, “that’s not very nice.”
    “But true. It’s a loss to you, of course, Mrs Rosevear. You’ll have to find another tenant for the bungalow. But, to call a spade a spade, Geoff had a nasty tongue on him and I defy anyone here to claim otherwise.” Albert had a trace of an accent that was not Cornish. North of England, Eleanor thought; Yorkshire, perhaps.
    No one contradicted him.
    Leila stood up and leant with both fists on the table. “He was an arrogant pig. Albert’s right. Now, is anyone going to drive me down to Trevone Bay while the tide is low?”
    “I will,” Albert offered, “assuming the bus is available.”
    “Doug doesn’t need it till this afternoon,” said Marge.
    “You can drop me off at the shop,” said Quentin, Eleanor’s neighbour at the table. “It’s my day and I don’t mind getting there early.”
    “Shouldn’t we stay closed today?” proposed Jeanette tentatively. “Out of respect, I mean.”
    “No!” There was nothing tentative about red-bearded Oswald’s outburst. “He chose not to belong to the co-op. Even Quent does his day in the shop, though he doesn’t have anything to sell. I don’t see why we should lose sales because Nick Gresham did us all a favour and did away with Geoff.”
    Eleanor was going to suggest that everyone should stay at the farm until the police had come to question them. However, DI Pearce had said nothing last night about wanting to see Geoffrey’s colleagues, if that was the right term. As soon as he found out Nick was not the killer, he would certainly need to check where they had all been at the time of the murder, especially once Eleanor told him how unpopular the victim had