Free Name To a Face by Robert Goddard Page B

an impulse he now regretted. He should have deliberated longer and harder before contacting Metherell. But he had not, and now here he was, with Spargo’s squeakily menacing voice still echoing in his ear, risking exposure as an impostor with every word he spoke.
    “It’s balderdash, I can assure you. Ray’s just working off a grudge against Barney Tozer. Although he probably drinks enough to believe his own fantasies. I’ll give him that. I daresay he’s convinced himself by now that Barney really did murder Kerry.”
    “But he didn’t?”
    “No. He may have neglected to check the equipment he and Kerry were using as thoroughly as he should have. That’s certainly what the coroner implied. So, you could argue he was partly responsible for what happened, although Kerry made things worse for herself by entering the wreck, but at the end of the day… it was just bad luck.”
    “Where are we going?” Harding glanced round at the high-hedged fields of daffodils to either side of the road. His grasp of the island’s geography was just sufficient to tell him that they were not heading for Hugh Town, where Metherell lived.
    “I thought a word with our skipper that day might put your mind at rest.”
    “Alf Martyn?”
    “Correct. He and his brother Fred grow daffodils when they aren’t ferrying tourists round the islands.”
    “And they were both on board?”
    “They were. This is their place just coming up. Pregowther Farm.”
    Metherell turned right into a hedge-screened farmyard. A four-square granite and slate farmhouse stood in front of them, flanked by corrugated-iron-roofed outbuildings in various stages of disrepair. Broken ladders, gates, fencerails and rusty harrows filled one corner, while chickens were pecking and bobbing in the long grass that encroached at another. A track led out of the yard into a daffodil field, beyond which several more daffodil fields sloped down and away towards the sea. A crudely written sign declaring bulbs for sale had been propped against the doorpost of one of the barns. But of sales staff there was no sign.
    “The Martyns are one of Scilly’s oldest families,” Metherell remarked as he turned off the engine and they climbed out. “A Robert Martyn settled here in the fourteenth century.”
    “Ray mentioned you’re something of an historian.”
    “Hard not to be, living here. Everything’s closer on a small island. Even the past.” Then he added, apparently as an afterthought: “Perhaps especially the past.”
    They walked to the front door of the farmhouse. A drift of pop music, distorted by a slightly off-signal radio, reached them from within. It cut off as soon as Metherell rapped the knocker.
    The door was answered a few seconds later by a frizzy-haired, moon-faced, scarlet-cheeked young woman dressed in cropped trousers and a smock top stretched round a distended stomach. She looked at least six months’ pregnant and was breathing heavily.
    “Hello, Josie,” said Metherell.
    “Hi, Mr. Metherell,” Josie panted cheerily in reply.
    “Alf in? Or the father-to-be?”
    “No. They’re both at the boatyard. They lavish more care on the
Jonquil
than they ever do on me.”
    “I’m sure that’s not true.”
    “You ask Fred and see if he doesn’t blush when he denies it.”
    “Maybe I will.”
    Josie laughed. “Well, if you want to catch them, they’ll likely be there till tea-time.”
    “OK. Thanks. Mind if we leave my car here and walk down through your fields to the beach?”
    “Be my guest.”
    “There’s something on the beach I want to show you before we drive over to the boatyard,” Metherell explained as he led the way at an ambling pace along the track that formed the edge of the Martyns’ daffodil fields. It led down through a succession of open gateways towards a broad and rocky bay, into which the sea was rolling and foaming. “You might as well see it while we have the chance.”
    “It’s the video I was really interested in,”