Mrs. Plunkett

Mrs. Plunkett, Combe Island’s cook for twelve years, is a steady presence in the island’s working life and an unusually valuable source of local knowledge. Her kitchen is where Adam Dalgliesh and Kate Miskin interview her, and her recollections help connect the island’s everyday frictions to the histories and motives under investigation. She does not present herself as a detective; her importance lies in noticing what people do, remembering what they have told her, and giving those details a plain, practical interpretation.

Identity and Work

Mrs. Plunkett has worked on the island since the previous cook, Miss Dewberry, retired. Before taking over, she regularly came to help Miss Dewberry during busy weeks. She describes herself as a widow with no children and time to spare, and says that she learned to cook from her mother, who could manage anything in a kitchen. Miss Dewberry, a trained cook who had worked in smart restaurants, taught her about sauces and eventually recommended her as a successor. Mrs. Plunkett considers herself a good cook in her own right, not merely the beneficiary of another woman’s instruction.

Her work is shaped by the small scale of the island’s hospitality. There are at most six guests, and staff mostly look after themselves, so even the earlier cook was not constantly busy. Mrs. Plunkett’s account gives her professional history a matter-of-fact quality: she began as a helpful extra pair of hands, learned from an experienced predecessor, and took over when that predecessor recognized her ability. The continuity of the kitchen rests on practical skill and familiarity rather than ceremony.

When Dalgliesh and Kate come to interview her, she is working at the Aga. The room has a long scrubbed table, Windsor chairs, an oak dresser, and a separate corner with a rocking chair, a low table, and cookbooks. Dalgliesh finds that the kitchen recalls the rectory kitchen of his childhood, which he remembered as the heart of the house. The setting also suits the interview: he believes Mrs. Plunkett is more likely to talk in her own working environment than in Seal Cottage. She trims pork chops, coats them in seasoned flour, browns them, and transfers them to a casserole before sitting down to peel onions and prepare green peppers. Her work continues around the questioning, making the kitchen an active workplace rather than a formal interview room.

Knowledge of the Island and Its Conflicts

Mrs. Plunkett says that she hardly saw Nathan Oliver and could not imagine him coming to her kitchen for a friendly chat. Her knowledge of him is therefore less personal than observational, grounded in what staff experienced and what they heard. She has heard that Oliver meant to move to Combe Island permanently, a plan she expects would have displeased the staff as well as Emily Holcombe. She also understands that Oliver and Dan Padgett repeatedly came into contact because Dan delivered meals and did odd jobs in the cottages.

In her account, Oliver or Miranda Oliver would complain that Dan had failed to bring what they ordered or that the food was not fresh. Mrs. Plunkett rejects the charge on the kitchen’s behalf: she insists that nothing leaving it is not fresh. She interprets the repeated complaints as Oliver picking a quarrel with someone, with Dan an easy target because his work brought him into contact with the family. Her testimony makes the dispute concrete: the tension was expressed through ordinary deliveries and criticism of meals, not only through the larger conflicts about island residence and employment.

Mrs. Plunkett’s first estimate of Dan is protective but also revealingly limited. She cannot imagine him having the courage to kill even a chicken, although she recognizes that he is nearly thirty; she still thinks of him as a boy. Yet she also knows that he was not really at home on Combe Island. She recounts that Dan told her his mother had long dreamed of visiting the island. As a child she and her parents had stayed in Pentworthy each August, but the island was not then open to visitors. When his mother was dying, she longed to come, perhaps believing that the island might cure her. Dan did not want to refuse her, but Mrs. Plunkett judges that they were wrong to conceal the severity of her illness when applying for work.

She remembers the last month of Mrs. Padgett’s life as a period when others took on the nursing. Joanna Staveley returned from London and assumed much of that care; Adrian Boyde also helped, which Mrs. Plunkett connects to his former life as a clergyman. The women did much of the nursing, while Dan neglected his own duties. After Mrs. Padgett died, Mrs. Plunkett was cleaning the cottage while Joanna Staveley had laid out the body. Dan asked for a lock of his mother’s hair. Mrs. Plunkett found an envelope for him, but remembers him tugging the hair out and seeing an expression she did not read as loving.

She also passes on Dan’s account of his family’s earlier hardship. His father had inherited a small printing business, took on a dishonest partner, and went bankrupt; he later died of lung cancer without having insured himself. Dan was three and did not really remember him. Dan and his mother then lived with her older sister and the sister’s husband, who had no children but did not take to him. Mrs. Plunkett says they belonged to a puritanical sect that treated enjoyment as sinful and made him change his name: he was christened Wayne, while Daniel was his second name. She believes he resented both parents. Her recollections do not establish what Dan felt with certainty, but they preserve the childhood history against which his later anger can be understood.

Her View of Other Residents

Mrs. Plunkett’s judgments of other islanders combine practical appraisal with sympathy. She describes Millie Tranter as a good worker when the mood takes her and says she has no complaint about her. Jago Tamlyn had found Millie begging in the streets of Pentworthy and, concerned for her, asked Rupert Maycroft to find her a room and work rather than leave her to the police. Maycroft arranged for her to assist Mrs. Burbridge with linen and help in the kitchen. Mrs. Plunkett observes that Millie does more sewing than kitchen work and that Mrs. Burbridge worries about her. The island, she thinks, is not a suitable permanent place for a young girl who needs her own age group and a proper job, although her presence brings some welcome youth to Combe.

Of Miranda Oliver, Mrs. Plunkett is frank without being wholly unsympathetic. She finds Miranda more inclined to criticize than to thank, but considers that she has had a difficult life, tied to an ageing father and always at his beck and call. Mrs. Plunkett has heard from Mrs. Burbridge that Miranda is engaged to Dennis Tremlett, her father’s former secretary. She hopes the couple will be happy and remarks that they will not lack money. The judgment is not intimate knowledge of the engagement; it is the view of someone who has watched Miranda’s constrained position and heard island discussion about her future.

Evidence and Investigative Importance

Mrs. Plunkett’s recollection of Dan and his mother becomes significant when Dalgliesh later assembles the clues. In particular, her description of Dan pulling out a lock of his mother’s hair and seeming not to look loving takes on a different weight. Dalgliesh reasons that Dan may have understood that DNA testing required the hair roots and that resentment toward his mother could have grown from the silence surrounding his parentage. Mrs. Plunkett does not supply that deduction herself, but her precise memory contributes a detail that allows the investigator to make it.

Her evidence is valuable partly because it is domestic and unpolished. She recalls work, meals, nursing, a body laid out in a cottage, and a lock of hair placed in an envelope. Those circumstances give the family history physical form, while her own assessments remain distinguishable from what Dan told her and what she merely heard as rumor. Her confidence that Dan was too timid to kill a chicken contrasts with the later interpretation of the same history as a possible source of anger and motive.

The kitchen remains useful to the investigation even after that interview. During the emergency, Benton proposes using Kate’s apartment as an incident room and his own for meals; he has spoken with Mrs. Plunkett about supplying salad and cold meats. The arrangement reflects her place in the island’s practical network, where food and routine help sustain the police work as well as the residents. Her cooking is not incidental background: the kitchen is a place where people meet, where complaints about Dan’s work are registered, and where information about the island circulates.

Combe Island’s Future

After the deaths and the SARS crisis, Mrs. Plunkett tells Kate what she has heard about the Trust’s discussions over Combe Island’s future. Some trustees had considered making it a holiday home for deprived children, but Emily Holcombe opposed the proposal. Mrs. Burbridge suggested a memorial use for overworked city clergy in honor of Adrian Boyde; Holcombe rejected that idea too, believing such visitors would favor modern worship, whereas she values the Book of Common Prayer despite not attending church herself.

Mrs. Plunkett expects the island to reopen because former visitors are already writing to ask when they may return and because changing the Trust’s purpose would not be easy. She also reports that plans to receive especially important visitors, who would come alone, will no longer proceed. The Staveleys, she says, are returning to their London practice. Guy Staveley has become a public hero in the press for recognizing SARS quickly, and Mrs. Plunkett regards his departure as understandable after his diagnosis helped contain the outbreak. In relaying these competing proposals and likely changes, she serves as a grounded chronicler of how the island may resume its former function after violence and isolation. Her attention stays with workable arrangements, familiar routines, and the people who must live with the consequences.