A Cornish Revenge (The Loveday Ross Cornish Mysteries Book 1) by Rena George Page A

but he saw none. ‘What exactly did she tell you?’
      ‘That there had been an accident. That you were driving. That a woman in the car with you had been killed.’
      He wondered if Magdalene had sweetened the pill by not mentioning the circumstances.
      ‘Did she tell you about the babies? Did she tell you the dead woman had been expecting twins?’
      Loveday nodded, her expression grim. A couple dressed in walking clothes brought their drinks to a nearby table and settled themselves down. Lawrence glanced uneasily at them.
      ‘Let’s walk, Loveday,’ he said, reaching for his jacket.
      They left the bar and took the rough track behind the pub that wound past ancient boulder-strewn fields and ended by the cliff path. The air was bracing and tasted of salt. Loveday zipped her jacket against the wind, plucking at strands of dark hair that had blown across her face.
      ‘This is quite a place,’ he said, his eyes narrowing as he took in the expanse of wild terrain. The sea was to their right, waves crashing noisily over the rocks below. Suddenly Bentine’s body was there again in her mind, a ghoulish image on that shingle beach. She looked away, trying to shut out the sea and the awful recurring horror it provoked.
      Lawrence was still tracking the horizon, his eyes narrowed against the wind. ‘Did you know it was Paul Bentine who represented me in court?’
    She nodded.
    ‘I was at Borlase the night he was killed.’
      Loveday stopped in her tracks, and looked up, staring at him. Had she heard right? He couldn’t have been at Borlase that night…he’d been with her at the gallery in St Ives…at his exhibition. That’s what she had told the police. But Lawrence had arrived late…She remembered how moody and distant he had been all evening.
      Her eyes never left his face. ‘You didn’t kill him, Lawrence! Tell me you didn’t kill him!’
      Lawrence let out a gasp. ‘Of course I didn’t kill him! I didn’t even see him that night.’
      ‘Then why…?’
      ‘It’s a long story, but…in a nutshell, Bentine had been blackmailing me.’
    The path was close to the cliff edge and Lawrence picked up a stone and hurled it out into the surging sea.
      ‘There was a letter,’ he went on. ‘Someone pushed it through my door. I thought it was from him.’ He grimaced at the memory. ‘It said if I didn’t want my past to be made public then I had to meet the sender at the pub at Borlase that evening. I wanted to finish this thing with Bentine once and for all, so I went along. I sat there for half an hour nursing a pint, but no one turned up to meet me.’ He shrugged. ‘So I left.’ 
    The wind whipped at Loveday’s hair. ‘I don’t understand. What thing with Bentine?’
    Lawrence zipped his jacket to his chin and turned up the collar, watching the waves cresting as they hit the rocks below.
      ‘After prison, I came to Cornwall to start a new life. Nobody knew me here - and that’s how I wanted it. I changed my name.’ He looked at Loveday. ‘I’m Lawrence Kennet.’
      She swallowed as he described his meeting with Cassie on the beach at Marazion.
    ‘Anyway, after that she put some more work my way…painting a picture of the Bentine’s boat for one, although, at the time, I’d no idea it had anything to do with Paul Bentine. As far as I knew it was a commission from a local businesswoman, Magdalene Carruthers.
    ‘The Blue Lady had a mooring down at Helford Passage at that time and I was doing the preliminary sketch from the beach when someone came up behind me. It was Bentine.
    There was a large boulder on the path ahead and they sat on it.
      ‘Bentine was threatening to blackmail me, Loveday.’ He said flatly. ‘He was quite blatant about it…said I could be useful to him. He was smiling…he said he could go to the police and tell them everything any time he wanted.’
      Loveday’s brows creased. ‘I don’t understand. How could he blackmail you about