His scrabbling in the table drawer distracted her for a moment, long enough for Carole to step forward with her hands locked and knock the rifle barrel upwards. As it jerked in her hands, Mopsa pulled the trigger. In the enclosed space the report was shockingly loud. It prompted an enraged cacophony of complaint from seabirds on the cliffs outside.
Nathan’s chain was long enough for him to leap across and snatch the gun from his cousin’s hands. Unarmed, Mopsa lost all resistance and sank to her knees, overtaken by hysterical weeping. Carole crossed to the bottom of the stairs and finished what she’d been about to do when the girl disturbed them. She removed the key from the hook where it had tantalized Nathan for nearly three weeks, crossed to him and undid the padlock on his ankle.
“Thank God for that,” he said, flexing the constricted muscles of his foot.
Carole, aware of the danger in which she had been, and slightly shocked by her action in hitting away the shotgun, felt suddenly rather feeble. “What do we do now?” she asked.
“We get the hell out of this place as soon as possible,” said Jude.
“But…” Even in these circumstances Carole could not repress the instinctive words “we booked for a week.”
Her neighbour didn’t bother to reply. Instead, she looked at the boy and asked, “Are you going to come with us, Nathan?”
He looked at Jude for a long moment, and then slowly nodded. “Yes. I’ve got to find out the truth…you know, about what happened to…to…” He still couldn’t do it. A tear glinted in his eye.
“Right, let’s assemble our things, and get out of here as soon as possible.”
As Jude moved towards the steps, Carole looked down at Mopsa, still limp as a rag doll on the wooden floor and crying in long shuddering sighs. “What do we do about her?”
“Lock her in,” suggested Nathan. “Give her a taste of the medicine she’s been dishing out to me.”
“I don’t think we need do that,” said Jude. “We don’t want to sink to her father’s level.”
“If we take away the gun, are there any other weapons in the cottage that she could use?” asked Carole.
He shook his head. “I’m pretty sure there aren’t.”
“I don’t think violence from Mopsa is going to be a problem.” Jude looked down at the weeping girl. “She’s not a threat to us any more.”
Responding to the compassion in Jude’s voice, Nathan knelt down beside his cousin. “It’s all right, Flops…Fimby’s not cross with you. Fimby forgives you. And everyone else will forgive you.”
“No, they won’t,” the girl wailed. “I have failed in my appointed task. I have not defended Prince Fimbador of the Blood of Merkerin.”
“You will be forgiven.” Nathan Locke stood to his full height and held a hand over the girl in a majestic gesture. “You have the word of the Grail-Holder Prince Fimbador that you will be forgiven!”
Mopsa apparently drew comfort from this mumbo-jumbo. The weeping eased. Nathan looked across embarrassedly to Carole and Jude and shrugged a shrug which seemed to say, “Don’t knock it. It worked.”
“Right. Let’s get ready,” said Carole, very much the teacher in charge of a school trip. “It’ll only take us a couple of minutes to get our bags. Have you got much stuff, Nathan?”
“Very little. I was rather whisked away from Fethering the morning after – ”
Jude interceded before the memory of Kyra could upset him again. “Don’t worry. You can tell us everything in the car.”
They left Mopsa in the Wheal Chamber, but did not close the Face-Peril Gate. For safety they put the shotgun in the Renault’s boot, along with their luggage and Nathan’s rather pathetic plastic carrier bag.
As Carole drove off, with the boy and Gulliver sharing the back seat, they all looked back. Mopsa was standing outside Cottage Number One, talking into a phone. Though none of them voiced it, they would all have put money on the fact that the person the other end of the line was Rowley Locke.
Thirty
Maybe it was delayed shock that kept them quiet for the first half-hour of their journey back. The only one making any noise was Gulliver, who started off by panting excitedly. For him getting in the car gave the signal that he was about to be taken for a walk. But as the journey continued with no signs of stopping, he got less excited. Honestly, humans were so unreliable. The memory of the excessively long journey of the day before came back to him and he subsided into an aggrieved lump on the back seat, not even responding to friendly stroking from Nathan.
They had passed Penzance before the silence was broken. And, surprisingly, it was the boy who broke it. “I’m sorry about Flops – Mopsa. She’s…well, she’s always had problems.”
“Mental problems?”
“Yes. She’s got a twin sister called Dorcas.”
“I’ve met her,” said Carole.
“Well, Mopsa’s…Incidentally, I don’t understand how you know everything about my family.”
“Don’t worry about that for the moment,” said Jude. “Tell us about Mopsa.”
“Well, as I say, she’s a twin. Dorcas has always been the bright one…school, university, she’s done well all the way. And Mopsa could never quite hack it. In another family I think doctors or psychologists would have been consulted, but the Lockes always think they can sort everything out for themselves, so they’ve kind of protected her from the outside world.”
“As they were trying to protect you from the outside world?”
He let out a mirthless laugh. “I suppose you could say that. Anyway, there’s been a long history of Mopsa sort of dropping out of things, having breakdowns I reckon, but she’s always been at her calmest and most sane down at Treboddick.”
“That was her most sane?” Carole couldn’t help asking.
“No, obviously she lost it when she found you’d broken into the Wheal Chamber. She’s…she’s potentially quite dangerous.”
“That was the impression I got.”
“But do she and Dorcas get on?” asked Jude.
“Yes, very well. Distressingly well. Dorcas is a strong character. I think in a way with Mopsa – and indeed with the two younger sisters – Dorcas has made them what Shakespeare would have called her ‘creatures’. She kind of controls them.”
“So how long has Mopsa been down at Treboddick?”
“She’s spent an increasing amount of time down there, you know, since she dropped out of school, or since she dropped out of the last of a series of schools. And then when Uncle Rowley remarried…well, Mopsa and Bridget were never going to see eye to eye.”
Carole agreed. “No, Bridget seems quite a sensible woman.”
“Yes, she is.” He spoke with warmth.
“I gather you and she get on well.”
“Very well.”
“You both approach the whole Locke family bonding process with a degree of scepticism.”
“You could say that. As soon as I got into my teens I got rather bored with all that Wheal Quest business…little realizing that I would end up playing it for real during the last three weeks.”
“There’s something that struck me about Bridget,” said Carole. “I’ve met your father and mother, and Rowley, and Dorcas, and the younger girls and, of all of them, Bridget is the only one who seemed worried about what had happened to you, where you’d gone to.”
“Well, she would be. All of the rest of them knew exactly where I was.”
“But Rowley didn’t tell his wife?”
“Of course not. As you said, Bridget is a sensible woman. The minute she knew that I was locked up at Treboddick – particularly being guarded by Mopsa – she would have contacted the police.”
There was a silence. Then Carole said, “I think we’ll have to get in touch with the police, Nathan.”