by Will North
Still, she wondered if the loss of their mother wasn’t perhaps fading for the girls—Kaitlin would only have been eight back then, Megan barely five. Morgan had been surprised at how naturally Calum’s daughters had taken to her, and how easy and oddly comforting it felt to slip into this—what—family? Morgan knew nothing about family. Hers had been snuffed out during the 1966 Aberfan coal tip disaster in her native Wales: her brother buried alive beneath the wall of slurry that hurtled down into the valley and engulfed his primary school; her father, a coal tip manager who’d warned about the danger to no effect, then committed suicide; her Mum driven mad by her losses and institutionalized. Morgan was only an infant at the time and was raised by an alcoholic grandmother who believed in “tough love” when she was sober enough to love at all. Despite damning prior evidence about the coal tip’s dangers, the National Coal Board was exonerated, no one jailed, no one fired.
In one way or another, Morgan reckoned she had been seeking some admittedly inchoate form of justice ever since she’d joined the police force more than two decades earlier. She’d risen steadily through the ranks, but not without her elbows out. She was a detective, yes, but a female detective, one of just a handful at that time, surrounded by legions of ambitious and resentful men. She developed a reputation for being relentless in her investigations, and also often a rule-breaker. But she seldom got more than a mild reprimand from above because she solved cases and got convictions. Twenty years and counting…
She undressed, pulled on the oversized tee shirt she used as a nightgown, and slid into the narrow bed, pulling the old-fashioned rose-colored bedcover up to her chin. She smiled. The room was so “not her.” Her own barn-conversion house high on Bodmin Moor was sleek and contemporary within its centuries-old granite walls, almost stark, the predominant colors black, white, and stone, like the ground from which it rose. She had plenty of chaos at work; she liked it simple and clean at home. Still, she had to admit that Calum’s bungalow, high on a coastal ridge with a distant view of the ocean, had its family-cluttered charms. The kitchen where she made breakfast for the girls each morning overlooked a garden with a western exposure to capture afternoon sun. A well-laid stone wall shielded it from the wind off the sea. Morgan wasn’t much of a gardener, but she could imagine Calum’s late wife coddling the perennials as tenderly she did her daughters.
The sitting room was cozy, with well-used overstuffed chairs, a sofa she recognized from a Conran’s mail order catalogue. It was upholstered in dusty sage green and scattered with contrasting plump pillows. There were bookcases crammed untidily with a mix of novels, histories, sports books, and children’s picture books. On the wall opposite was a small coal fireplace. Above its mantle was a flat screen television and Morgan made sure that, some nights, “we girls” got to watch a movie together after Megan and Kaitlin’s schoolwork was done.
The wire frame of the shade on her bedside lamp projected a pattern on the ceiling like a grid of windowpanes. She stared at them as if trying to see into the future. Get a grip, girl, an inner voice interrupted, you’re not meant for domestic bliss. You tried that years ago, with another cop, and look how that turned out. If this feels good, it’s because it’s temporary; don’t kid yourself. She was still arguing with herself when sleep overtook her.
Day Two
Four
A SHIV OF daylight sliced through the muddy gray clouds that lay low and heavy above the chilly moor Tuesday morning; the rain had held off but frost crusted the moorland turf. A neoprene-clad police diver rose from the black slime of Rough Tor Mire, pulled off his face mask, and gave the thumbs up to signal that he’d secured the body. Then he lay as flat and still as he could at the surface of the quivering bog to keep from being sucked back in.
Rafe Barnes, Calum West’s SOCO deputy, nodded to two men in his crew. The diver was tethered, and they hauled him back to solid ground as if reeling in a shark. Then they did the same for the body, which the diver had roped beneath its armpits. Barnes watched his men struggle and joined them, their rubber Wellies slipping on the soggy margin as they tugged. The body that finally emerged was barrel-chested, broad-shouldered, and heavily built: a man, certainly, but a man whose face was horribly mutilated. They lifted him onto a sterile white plastic sheet and the frozen clumps of deer grass beneath crunched as the body settled.
AN HOUR EARLIER, at dawn, Jan’s father, Randall Cuthbertson, stiff-backed as a cavalry general, had ridden a chestnut stallion to lead Detective Sergeant Bates and the Devon and Cornwall Police’s Scene of Crimes Office investigators to the remote site where his daughter had seen the body the evening before. She did not accompany them. The police and SOCOs followed behind the horse in three all-wheel-drive BMW SUVs their sides emblazoned with the iridescent yellow and blue Battenburg livery of the uniformed force, garish against the prevailing dun-brown of the autumn moor. The vehicles crawled up the mountain slope in first gear and zig-zagged around rock ledges and boulders, climbing more than three hundred feet before veering around the northern slope of Showery Tor and descending steeply into the valley below. Black-faced sheep scattered as the vehicles approached. A small band of piebald wild ponies grazed in a hollow on the slope. As one, they lifted their heads at the intrusion, stared unperturbed, and resumed grazing the thinning vegetation.
From the passenger seat of the lead SUV, Terry Bates studied the rider ahead. Randall Cuthbertson wore a tweed Norfolk jacket, a tattersall dress shirt, an olive-green wool tie, and riding breeches. He sported a bushy silver mustache, and his bristly salt and pepper hair was cut so short that it looked like a hedgehog sat atop his skull. His face was full and ruddy, like someone who worked a lot out of doors, but his jowls were slack and the paunch hanging over his belt suggested the coloration was more likely due to whisky than to exposure to the elements. She reckoned him to be at least seventy.
As she watched him lead, she could not help but think of Gilbert and Sullivan—the very model of a modern major general—and wondered if Cuthbertson had ever served in the military. Having been notified in advance, he’d been waiting, already on horseback, when their vehicles had arrived at Poldue’s forecourt. His only greeting had been a distracted nod.
When finally they reached the mire, the SOCO team cordoned off the edge and a patch of solid ground with metal stakes and yellow police tape. Outside the cordon, Cuthbertson remained motionless on his horse like a statue in a village square, offering neither comment nor guidance.
RAFE BARNES LOOKED at the dead man lying on the thick plastic sheet.
“Facial recognition won’t help us ID this one, doc,” he said.
“Master of the obvious, you are.”
Dr. Jennifer Duncan knelt beside the muck-covered corpse and studied it. The willowy forensic pathologist, who’d confused many detectives and mortuary directors by looking at least ten years younger than her real age, which was late thirties, wore the same sterile white Tyvek jumpsuit the SOCO boys did and had her long blond hair tucked into a light blue elastic bonnet. Her hands were encased in a double pair of blue Nitrile gloves, the top pair eventually to be entered into evidence.
Before she began her preliminary field examination, Barnes hovered over the body taking record photos with his police Nikon. The victim’s sodden clothes consisted of black jeans and a red hoodie with the crest of the Liverpool Football Club printed on the left side of the chest. There was only one shoe, a black trainer; its mate was gone, stuck deep, no doubt, somewhere in the mire. Matching black socks. Rafe photographed the clothed body first and the face—or what was left of it—last.
Terry stood beside him as he worked. She’d been to several murder scenes in her short career under Morgan’s wing, but this victim’s shredded head turned her stomach and she struggled to maintain her composure. Bodies had faces. Faces had identities. This one’s identity was erased, a savaged blank slate.
“What a horrible way to die,” Barnes mumbled, finishing. “Torn apart like that.”
Duncan
had been studying the crest printed on the red hoodie. The team’s motto scrolling across the top of the crest read: You’ll Never Walk Alone. There was a single pencil-thin hole just to the left of the dirty crest.
Yes you will, she thought to herself.
“It wasn’t the hawk. Come here you two.”
She pointed to the hole. “Entry wound, unless I miss my guess. Close-up photo, Rafe, please; I need to have a record of the precise location. I’m going to end this field examination right now until I can do the formal autopsy. These conditions create too much opportunity for contamination.” She lifted an arm that was limp as a dead cod.
“Under normal circumstances, rigor would have been well-advanced by now, but immersion in that frigid bog has held it off. I’ll have more for you after the post-mortem, but I’m guessing time of death would have been sometime yesterday. The body is well preserved. The bog is oxygen-starved and acidic; aerobic organisms can’t begin to go to work on it as they would have had our boy been on land. But the head already has some blowfly damage. They’re aggressive opportunists, those little devils; there are eggs but no larvae yet. That’s instructive.”
Then, as if on marionette strings, Bates, Barnes, and Duncan turned toward the sound of a fast-approaching motor from the west. Cuthbertson’s horse skittered sideways. A tandem all-terrain vehicle appeared from around the north flank of Showery Tor and jounced down the slope. A young woman drove, her streaked hair streaming behind her: Jan Cuthbertson. She brought the vehicle to a stop just shy of her father’s fidgety horse. Her passenger, DCI Penwarren, climbed down from the passenger seat, waved a greeting to the old man on horseback, received no reply, and approached the cordoned crime scene. The young woman remained in the ATV.
“Terry, Rafe, Jennifer: thank you for all this work,” Penwarren said as he reached them. Usually so well dressed, this morning he wore a worn black anorak, baggy brown corduroy countryman’s trousers, and muddy black wellies. He waved at the other SOCO team members prowling the site. They returned his salute.
“Great to have you here, boss,” Bates said, though not with enthusiasm.
Penwarren caught the implication and smiled: “No reflection of my confidence in you, Terry, or any of you.” He tilted his head almost imperceptibly toward the old man on the horse and mumbled, “I was summoned.” He looked across to the dark mire and then squatted beside the body. “Nasty business, this. Peculiar, too. What have you got, Jennifer?”
Duncan summarized her preliminary findings.
“Truro next?”
“Yes, sir. Formal post-mortem.”
“The undertaker’s van is waiting at the car park at the end of Rough Tor Lane, the one the walkers use. Can you get the body there over this terrain?”
“My men and I can handle that, sir,” Barnes said. “Maybe the young lady with the ATV will help?”
Penwarren stood. “That’s Cuthbertson’s daughter; she found the body yesterday. I’ll have a word.”
Barnes nodded. He and Duncan folded the white sterile sheet over the body and then Barnes had his men zip it into a heavy black PVC body bag with two handles on each side. He locked it with a plastic ratchet seal and took down the serial number. It took four of his team to secure it to a rigid body board. They lugged it across the waterlogged, uneven ground and strapped it to the short rear flatbed of the ATV. Barnes climbed up to sit beside Cuthbertson’s daughter.
“All right?” he asked her.
She shrugged, put the vehicle in gear, and they crawled over the ridge toward the waiting undertaker’s van. Barnes would stay with the body all the way to the mortuary. It was SOCO’s responsibility now.
PENWARREN LOOKED OUT over the moor toward the whale-backed mass of Brown Willy to the south as the SOCO team cleaned up. He knew this wild, inhospitable place, had explored it often with Rebecca, his ex-wife. Becca and her older sister, Beverly, had grown up on the “soft” side of Cornwall. Their family had a whitewashed, thatch-roofed stone cottage on the leafy slopes above the Helford River on the English Channel coast. But they’d both somehow fallen for the weather-wracked wildness of Bodmin Moor after Beverly married the much older Cuthbertson. Given the age difference, he’d once asked Becca what she thought the attraction was. She’d laughed: “Lady of the Manor!”
Bodmin Moor’s wild desolation had never appealed to Penwarren. He preferred the rocky Atlantic coast cliffs and the heaving ocean below. This lonely expanse of barren hills, the sodden earth, and the somber, shattered granite tors depressed him. It was like a wet desert and, to him, nearly as lifeless. The moor’s wild ponies were this desert’s camels.
This particular morning the air was still, as if awaiting the predicted rain. He’d been up here when the wind blew in so hard off the Atlantic it whipped around the tors and howled like a child in pain. And then it might cease suddenly without even an echo and the moor would turn silent as a crypt. It was a stillness that did not suggest peace, a stillness that reminded him of the mute prehistoric stone monuments scattered all across this moor: cairns, walled settlements, prehistoric field systems, stone circles—sentinels from the Iron Age and earlier, the people long gone but the story of their presence preserved in mute stone. Sometimes, if the season were right, the trilling call of a golden plover might send its music across the waste ground, but not this morning. It was as if the moor were holding its breath. Away to the east, a band of ponies crested the low ridge of Maiden Tor. The brightening dawn was behind them and their stocky bodies, already growing a thicker coat for winter, steamed in the cold morning air. There were six of them: four piebald, one Appaloosa, and a brown stallion with a white forehead blaze, their apparent leader. Sensing them even across this distance, the stallion tossed its head and the horses vanished behind the ridge again, their hooves making barely a sound on the spongy turf.
Penwarren ventured closer to the mire and saw there were hoof prints sunk deep into its soggy border. Terry Bates appeared at his side.
“The SOCO lads will be taking casts. They are deep but fairly fresh. Unweathered despite last night’s mist. Think they’re from Bodmin ponies?”
“Hard to say at this point, Terry.” He looked over his shoulder toward Randall Cuthbertson’s horse. “Are they from one horse or several? Any evidence of horseshoes? Could someone on horseback have hounded this poor sod down into the mire and shot him there? I find that hard to credit.”
“Jennifer agrees. The question is how the devil did he end up way out there in the first place, sunk in that mire?”
Penwarren smiled and touched Terry’s elbow as he turned toward the vehicles. “Terry, you’re doing a fine job here; Morgan would be proud. Not that she’d ever tell you, mind. But she would be. You’ll attend the post-mortem? Your first, isn’t it?”
Bates nodded.
“You’ll be fine.”
“Thank you, boss. And it’s time for me to leave the rest to Calum’s people. I’ll drive you back down to your car. Any news on when they’ll both be back?”
“Davies and West? Soon, or so Morgan tells me. West’s like a caged animal at home, she says.”
“I wonder what he says about her?”
Five
JENNIFER DUNCAN PACED the corridor outside the control room of the radiology department of Truro’s Royal Cornwall Hospital, a cup of burnt black hospital coffee going cold in her right fist.
With a shooting victim, the first thing they did was run a full body CT scan to locate the bullet, or its fragments, or any other foreign presence. From a forensic point of view, the CT scan was preferable to x-ray because it could be done with the body bag still sealed and locked. That guaranteed what the county coroner demanded: continuity of evidence, preservation from tampering or contamination. It also protected the radiology staff from having to look at the sort of gruesome body damage to which they were not normally exposed. Their world was about broken bones and diseased organs, not bullet trauma. But for all her impatience, the CT scan also made Jennifer’s life easier: it w
ould tell her where to search for the bullet when she cut open the body.
The radiologist emerged and waved her into his office where they studied the images on his computer screen.
“You won’t need to fish around for the bullet; there isn’t one. It went straight through the right upper lobe of the heart, grazed a rib, and exited just below the shoulder blade. A very lucky shot.”
“Not for him.”
“No. But I want you to see something else that’s puzzling. He clicked on other images and began pointing. “These lines are bone fractures: two in the left femur, one in the left pelvic girdle, another in the left humerus. Some compression fractures in the lumbar vertebrae as well.”
“Which tells you?”
“I honestly can’t say. Could be anything: car crash, industrial accident, maybe even some kind of fall. He must have been pretty brittle, although I see no osteoporosis. Some men just are.”
“When do you reckon those injuries occurred? Old? Sometime before he was shot?”
“Unlikely. These look to be post-mortem.”
Jennifer’s pale blue eyes widened. “Because?”
“Healing. There is none. These breaks are new.”
“Post-mortem makes no sense if he was already dead…”
“Unless…I don’t know…somebody ran him over afterwards?”
“But why bother?”
“To make it look like an accidental death?”
“Then why not report it?”