Malice in Cornwall Read Online Free PDF

creative juices flowing, not a bout of pneumonia!
    She squeezed out of the shower stall and wrapped herself in the undersized towel that had been provided. A few spring weeks in Cornwall before the hordes of holidaymakers descended, to work on her book—a sort of romantic comedy about a thirtysomething professional couple who chuck sophisticated London for a life of self-sufficiency on the Cornish coast. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. She'd be free to get up when she wished, write when she felt like it, and generally soak up the atmosphere that was so important to her as a writer.
    Her first novel had been published the previous year to some modest acclaim, and she was now under considerable pressure from her publisher to produce another. But after the first blush of success had faded, the enormity of the task had proven daunting. In fact, there were moments when she wasn't sure she had another book in her. Looking back, it seemed as if the first one had written itself, perhaps because she had thought about it for so long, to the point where she had basically composed the entire story in her head before sitting down at the keyboard. Even though it had taken nearly three years to finish, working in fits and starts with the usual frustrations and rejection slips, all she could remember was the heady rush of creativity that had characterized that period in her life. Now she was working to a deadline, which was quite a different matter. Her worst fear was that she'd exhausted her store of ideas, used up all the clever turns of phrase and erudite allusions that she'd assiduously filed away over the years. She finally concluded that the only thing for it, if she wasn't to bog down completely, was a stint in Cornwall to steep herself in the setting of her new book.
    So here she was in Penrick on the north coast of Cornwall, a spectacular spot with a romantic history of shipwrecks and smuggling and plenty of atmosphere a la Daphne du Maurier. It was just as she had imagined it. There was a catch, of course, as there always is. But in this instance it turned out to be a rather large one: the Polfrocks. The perils of Agnes the Dragon Lady were obvious and fairly easily countered, but the husband, George, who appeared to play a secondary role at the Wrecker's Rest (but apparently not, in the absence of anyevidence of little Polfrocks, a procreative one), was more of a problem. His chief hobby seemed to be creeping about and mentally undressing any woman—save his wife, one presumed—who came within a hundred yards. Jane had to continually suppress the paranoid notion that Georgie Boy was accustomed to having it off behind peepholes in the rooms of his female guests.
    But there had been trade-offs. Almost unbelievably, she had met a couple in the pub who had dropped out of the rat race a few years ago to make their living growing flowers up near Towey Head! They had provided a well of useful information for her book. And she had been in the right place at the right time to capitalize on the Riddle of Penrick, as she had so described the mysterious apparition on the Penrick Sands in her debut as a journalist.
    While reading English literature at university she had taken a course in journalism, spending a summer working for one of the London tabloids as a sort of general dogsbody. The experience had proven memorable in more ways than one. She had made a number of contacts at the newspaper, some of which she had maintained. One in particular had been romantic—and an unmitigated disaster, as it turned out. She still occasionally bumped into the bloke, who was now a senior editor at one of the larger London dailies.
    When the Riddle was first sighted a few days after she had ensconced herself at the Wrecker's Rest, she called Michael to tip him off to a possible story. He had been preoccupied with some Royal hijinks at the time and suggested that she take a stab at writing the story herself. If she agreed to file an exclusive