Death on the Lizard by Robin Paige Page A

tale — and Cornwall is the perfect setting for it!
    â€œI should think we had better finish the project we’re working on before we start thinking about the next,” Kate muttered testily. But she reached for the binoculars she had just unpacked, brought in the expectation of watching birds on Goonhilly Down. She put the glasses to her eyes and adjusted them.
    The pale shape blurred, and then resolved itself into a small, red-haired girl wearing a blue dress and a plain white pinafore, half-hidden behind an oak tree. Kate could not see her expression, but she seemed to be watching Lady Loveday.
    A girl? Beryl asked curiously. Whatever is she doing behind that tree? Is it some sort of game, do you suppose?
    But there was no answer to Beryl’s question, and when Kate looked again, the girl had vanished.
    Well, if you ask me, that was no girl, Beryl said firmly. She was a fairy. They’re everywhere here, Kate. On the moors, in the fields, in the woods. Everywhere.
    â€œOh, don’t be silly,” Kate scoffed. But when she put the binoculars down, she was frowning .

CHAPTER FIVE
    On the land side our surroundings were as sombre as on the sea. It was a country of rolling moors, lonely and dun-coloured, with an occasional church tower to mark the site of some old-world village. In every direction upon these moors there were traces of some vanished race which had passed utterly away, and left as its sole record strange monuments of stone, irregular mounds which contained the burned ashes of the dead, and curious earthworks which hinted at prehistoric strife.
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The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Jenna Loveday had been right about the road, which zigzagged across the peninsula from Penhallow on the east to the village of Mullion on the west. It was not a long drive, but it was certainly dusty, and as Charles drove, the Panhard trailed a long gray cloud, like a ragged scarf blowing in the wind. But there was no doubting the beauty of the vast brown moorland, empty of everything but a few dwarfed trees and the ancient stone tumuli built by some vanished civilization.
    The road along which they traveled was also empty, until, not far from Mullion, they encountered a farmer’s cart, pulled by a horse which had apparently never before seen a motor car. The stone walls were built so closely on either side of the narrow road that there was no room to pull off, and Charles had to reverse the Panhard for quite a distance to find a spot where it could be stopped and the engine turned off. The horse (now blindfolded) was at last led reluctantly past, the farmer muttering imprecations into his beard and Charles wondering aloud whether bringing the motor car had been a good idea, after all.
    â€œOf course it’s a good idea,” Bradford growled, climbing back into the car after cranking the engine. “The trouble is that these country folk are so bloody backward.” He snorted derisively. “Did you hear what Jenna Loveday said? People complaining about noise from the wireless station!”
    â€œThe trouble is,” Charles said, putting the car into gear, “that the new ways of doing things disrupt people’s lives. You can’t blame them for being angry.”
    Cornwall was the most remote corner of England—one of the reasons Marconi had chosen it, Charles knew, so that he could carry out his experiments out of the public eye. But he also knew that many of the people here still clung to their own Cornish language and spoke reminiscently of the days not long past, when Spanish and Portuguese galleons driven onto the rocks yielded a bounty of gold and goods to those who plundered the wrecks, when smugglers hauled their kegs of brandy up the rocky cliffs to be hidden away in barns and cottages. Except for fishing and mining, there had never been much industry here, and with the decline of the pilchard fishery and the closing of