The Fire Child. S. K. Tremayne

coat. The last thing she wore, that coat with her blood, from the mine. Read the report, from the inquest. And also a few of her favourite things. Books. Jewellery. You know.’

      He has fairly and candidly answered my questions. I sit back. Half relieved, half creeped out. A body. Under the house, in the tunnels that stretch under the sea. But how many bodies are already down there, how many drowned miners? Why should another be any different?

      ‘Look, David, I know I’ve been pretty hard on you, it’s like, well – it was a shock. That’s all.’

      ‘I understand entirely,’ he says. ‘I only wish you hadn’t found out this way. How is Jamie, anyway?’

      ‘He’s all right, I think, he calmed down after that outburst. He seemed fine this morning. Quiet, but fine. I drove him to football practice. Cassie’s picking him up.’

      ‘He is getting used to you, Rachel. He is. But, as I say, he’s still confused. Look, I have to go. We can speak later.’

      We say our goodbyes, and I slip the phone in my pocket.

      A sea wind from Marazion, laced with the tang of salt, ruffles the printed pages as I take them out of my bag and set them on the table. There is a lot of information: I googled and printed for an hour.

      Nina Kerthen’s death was, as David said, definitely a news story. It even got as far as some national papers for a day or two. And it filled the local press for weeks. And yet, it seems, there wasn’t that much to it.

       It is believed Nina Kerthen had been drinking on the night in question. There is no suspicion of foul play.

      Foul play. The antiquated phrase, from the Falmouth Packet, conjures ghoulish, fairytale images of a dark man in a long cloak. A Venetian assassin, grasping a beautiful woman, and throwing her in the canal. I see a pale face staring up through the watery grey. Veiled with darkening liquid, then gone.

      More pages flutter in the wind. Even the southerly breezes are fanged with freshening cold, today. Distracted for a moment, I gaze out.

      There is a lone man walking the flooding sands out past Long Rock. Walking aimlessly, in circles, apparently lost. Or looking for something that he will surely never find. Abruptly he turns and stares my way, as if he senses he is being watched. A strange panic fills me, a quick and sharpened fear.

      I calm my anxieties. Hints of my past. Turning back to the pages, I read on. I need to know all this detail, nail it down in my mind.

      The initial idea of a murder was journalistically appealing. At the time of her death the newspapers spiced their reports with the delicious possibility of homicide.

      The questions were never asked outright, but clearly they hung in the air: the captions are unwritten but the meaning is implicit. Take a look at this. Isn’t David Kerthen a bit too handsome, a bit too rich, a man you want to hate? A potential killer of his beautiful wife?

      When all this was ruled out, early on, the national papers gave up, while the local journalists turned, with a rather forlorn optimism, to speculations of suicide. Who would go to a mineshaft in the dark? Why take the silly risk, on a cold christmas evening?

      Unfortunately for the local press, the coroner was prosaic in his verdict.

      I sip my cold coffee as I scan the coroner’s summation for the third time.

      It was a clear moonlit night: December twenty-eighth. Nina was seen by Juliet Kerthen, David’s mother, walking down the valley and along the cliffs, in the vicinity of the mine stacks, as she sometimes used to do, to clear her head. She had been drinking that night, with the family.

      Her actions were not unusual: the area around the mine houses was a fine place to take in the spectacular view: of the brutish sea, raging at the rocky cliffs below. Especially on a bright moonlit night.

      But when Nina did not return, the alarm was raised. At first it was presumed she had merely got lost, down a path, in the dark. As her absence lengthened, speculation grew more negative. Perhaps she had fallen down one of the cliffs. Bosigran, maybe. Or Zawn Hanna. No one imagined she had actually fallen down Jerusalem Shaft: she knew the dangers well enough. But then, amidst the confusion, Juliet spoke up, and made the suggestion. Search Morvellan. That was the last place she was seen, after all: walking near the mineheads.

      And it had been raining heavily in the preceding days. And the mine houses were unroofed. And she was wearing heeled shoes.

      The little search party – David and Cassie – made for the Shaft House, where the door was found ajar. David turned his torch-beam down the shaft. The watered pit revealed no body, but it did offer up one significant and melancholy piece of evidence. Nina’s raincoat, floating in the water. Nina had been wearing that coat. She had surely, horrifically, fallen down the pit, then thrown off the coat as she struggled to save herself. But she had nonetheless succumbed. A person would swiftly freeze in those icy waters, then sink beneath them.

      The raincoat was initial and crucial evidence. Two days after the accident, divers retrieved traces of blood and splintered fingernails from the brickwork of the shaft, above the black water. They also found strands of broken hair. The DNA was matched with Nina Kerthen: it was her blood, these were her broken fingernails, this was her hair. Here was the evidence of her desperate attempts to climb out of the mine, of her doomed and failing struggle to get out of the watered shaft. Evidence that could not be faked or planted.

      Taken with the eyewitness evidence from Juliet Kerthen it seemed conclusive. The coroner delivered his verdict of accidental death. Nina Kerthen was drunk, her judgement was marred, and she therefore drowned, after falling down the Jerusalem Shaft of Morvellan Mine. Her body had sunk in the freezing water and would probably never be retrieved: lost as it was in the unnumbered tunnels and adits of the undersea mine, shifted by unknowable tides and currents. Trapped beneath Carnhallow and Morvellan, for ever.

      I shiver, profoundly. The wind off the bay is cutting up, and venomed with hints of rain. I need to do my tasks, and get back to the house. Binning my empty cup, I go downstairs and do my shopping and the shopping is done in seventeen minutes. It is one advantage of my frugality, born of my impoverished upbringing. A relic of Rachel Daly, from south-east London. I rarely get distracted in supermarkets.

      Spinning the car on to the main road, I take a last look at St Michael’s Mount, where a shaft of September sun is shining on the subtropical garden of the St Levans, a family five hundred years younger than the Kerthens.

      Then the clouds open, and the sun shines on us all. And I realize what I need to do. I believe David’s answers, but Jamie still needs help. My own stepson unnerves me, and that has to be explained: I need to read him, to decipher him, to understand. Maybe David doesn’t need to know any more. But I do.