Death on the Lizard by Robin Paige Page B

the tin mines, there was precious little employment to be had, except for catering to trippers and tourists.
    Charles glanced at Bradford and raised his voice above the clatter of the car, adding, “Perhaps that’s what’s behind the trouble at the station—some of it, anyway. People resent the disturbances.”
    â€œWell, if that’s what it is,” Bradford said roughly, “we’ll soon put it right. These ignorant country people need to learn that they can’t stand in the way of progress.”
    In another few minutes, they were entering Mullion Village, where they found themselves surrounded by a gaggle of shouting children and barking dogs. As they clattered along the narrow street, the doors of the houses flew open and astonished adults ran out to watch the noisy parade. Bradford shouted and brandished his stick threateningly, and Charles—stopping to keep from driving over a pair of women with baskets of laundry—thought to himself that he had been right. Bringing the car to this out-of-the-way place had been a serious mistake, for it attracted attention when he would rather have come unannounced. Better to park it somewhere and find a pony cart or a bicycle.
    At last they were past the square gray stone tower of the Church of St. Mellanus and through Mullion Village. Ahead, as they looked across the windswept plateau toward the sea, they could see four tall wooden towers, odd-looking man-made intrusions. They were huge and ugly, Charles thought. He could see why the local people might not like them.
    Bradford shouted over the clatter of the motor car, his voice full of pride. “Two hundred feet high, those wooden towers. We put them up after the first masts were blown over. Those trusses are built to stand up against any storm, even a hurricane. They won’t come down, by damn.” He pointed. “And you see that aerial wire? That’s what transmits and receives the signal, eighteen hundred miles across the Atlantic. Eighteen hundred miles, Sheridan! Marconi’s miracle, they called that first transmission, eighteen months ago. But that was just the beginning. Why, we’ll be flinging signals around the globe in the next decade.”
    â€œYou’re sure the original masts were sabotaged?” Charles asked.
    He pulled the Panhard to a stop and cut off the motor at a spot some distance from the wireless station. His ears ringing in the sudden silence, he pushed up his goggles and looked toward the transmitter building, a substantial structure of plastered brick with a roof of gray-blue slates. It had been erected in the center of a fenced compound of about an acre in size, with a wooden tower at each of the four corners. The four wooden towers, one at each corner of the compound, supported the aerial, which was connected to the transmitter building by a radiating web of wires. Not far away stood the Poldhu Hotel, an imposing gabled edifice which looked out toward the sea to the west and a golf course to the north—a challenging golf course, Charles had been told. He didn’t play golf, but had heard Conan Doyle talk about its notorious twelfth hole, where the golfer had to drive his ball across a sixty-foot chasm, the white surf churning on the rocks below. A golf ball graveyard, Doyle called it.
    â€œOf course it was sabotage,” Bradford replied grimly. “Just damn lucky nobody was killed. When the masts came down, one of them barely missed George Kemp, who was working here at the time. Another inch and he would’ve been a dead man.” He took out a cigar and lit it. “The company, of course, put it about that the damage was entirely due to the storm. They didn’t want it known that we’d been the target of sabotage.”
    â€œAnd so it’s been on the other occasions? The company covering up?”
    Bradford nodded. “Accidents, they say, mishaps, mistakes, that sort of thing. Never sabotage, for fear of