by Will North
“Who found it?” This was Macleod.
Crawley hesitated and looked at Penwarren.
“A walker,” Crawley said finally.
“Name?” Macleod demanded.
Penwarren leaned toward Crawley and mumbled.
Crawley nodded. “A local resident,” he answered.
“The victim?”
“No, the walker.”
“It’s now Sunday, Detective Chief Superintendent Crawley,” one of the blond TV reporters said into her mike. “Why the delay in announcing this discovery? And is this a murder case? I see your major crime team is here.” She pointed to the group beneath the canopy, which included Bates and Novak, standing in the rear.
“Is the victim male or female?” she pressed.
“Male. And yes, we are treating it as a murder. We are still trying to identify the victim and to locate and inform next of kin.”
“Why’s that, Crawley?” Macleod barked, not wanting to be upstaged by a woman reporter. “Why the problem in identifying the victim?”
Crawley flushed, looked at Penwarren as for an answer, but Penwarren was looking at the sky and the approaching weather. Crawley did not want the reporters to think the police had been slow to investigate.
“Because,” he blurted, “the body was submerged neck deep in Rough Tor Mire and carrion birds had torn off his face.”
Penwarren turned and leaned back as if slapped. He wanted to strangle the idiot. Davies put her hand to her forehead in disbelief and turned away. Crawley had just handed the media a story to feast upon and feast they would. But it was already too late; the previously silent female reporter who’d been recording the proceedings walked away, followed by her cameraman, and was already talking breathlessly into the camera about the faceless body found on Bodmin Moor.
“Who is he, then?” Macleod persisted. “Is he local, too?”
But Penwarren, Davies, West, Bates, and Novak had already stepped away from the canopy and microphone into the rain.
Crawley looked around and realized he was alone under the tent. “We will provide more details as they emerge.” Then he, too, retreated to his car, leaving the uniformed constables to take down the canopy. The wind was up and squall was intensifying, slinging shards of rain sideways across the bleak hillside.
“THIS IS NUTS,” Morgan said pausing to catch her breath. She and Calum were now about halfway up the northwestern flank of Rough Tor. They’d stayed at the car park and had ascended right after the squall off the Atlantic had passed. These sudden squalls rolled in like waves and just as quickly sped east. A faint rainbow formed behind this one. It did not improve Morgan’s mood.
“I don’t know who will kill me first if you drop dead doing this, Calum, your doctor, your daughters, or Mister.”
Ahead of her, Calum kept trudging up the slope. “I’m fine. And the doctor said I could resume normal activities.”
“This is normal?”
“Mild exercise only, and do try to keep up, won’t you?”
Morgan would have slugged him if she’d been able to catch up, but he was pulling away.
“Remind me, why are we doing this?”
“Because it is scene and scene is what I do.”
“You could just read Rafe’s report, you know,”
“Which, of course, I did. But it’s not the same as being at the site. Besides, you haven’t been here either. Our younger colleagues have been in charge. I need to see the scene. You can sit on a rock ledge here and wait for me if you don’t wish to continue.”
“Go to hell.”
“Yes, almost certainly.”
Morgan tried to catch up. She wondered if Calum worried about being eclipsed by the younger members of their team. She wondered if she were worried too, but dismissed it. Impossible: she was Morgan Davies.
“We don’t need to climb the whole damned tor, you know,” she said between breaths. “We can just go around the north side, unless you are determined to sight-see from the top.”
“I prefer to be a site-seer. I just want to see the site where he was found.”
“Morbid curiosity?”
“My stock in trade.”
When she finally caught up with him, Calum was sitting on a rocky outcrop on the east slope of the tor. Rough Tor Mire lay far below. The open water, what there was of it, was the color of used motor oil. Off to the southeast, the lacy remnants of the squall fell like a widow’s veil.
“What are you doing?” Morgan asked as she joined him and tried to get her chest to stop heaving.
“Nothing.”
“Yes, remarkably, I have already ascertained that. But what are you doing, seeing, thinking?”
“Just looking.”
“Don’t you want to get closer?”
“No need. Plus, I don’t fancy climbing up from way down there.”
“We came up here just so you could take in the sights?”
“Yes.”
“You’re infuriating. Did you know that?”
“It’s not news. My late wife sometimes said the same.”
“Yes, but she had the good sense to die and I’m still stuck with you.”
Calum turned to look at her.
Morgan slammed her palm against the side of her head. “Bloody hell, that’s not what I meant to say at all. I’m so sorry. That was so insensitive.”
Calum laughed. “You are perfectly correct: that was insensitive—but also so truly you. And you’re right, you are stuck with me. I rather like it, you know.”
She paused for a moment, stifling a smile, and waved a dismissive hand. “So, if we are not going down to where the body was found, what’s the point of being here?”
“Scanning the landscape. Surveying. Thinking.”
“That tells me nothing.”
“I know.”
Morgan pressed her hands against her skull in frustration. “But it tells you something?”
“Yes.”
“Care to share?”
“Not really. Shall we return to the car?”
Fourteen
A FEW MILES from the press conference site, Jan Cuthbertson inched closer to the man sitting on an antique, high-backed oak settle that they shared in a corner of the lounge bar of the Rising Sun, a pub near Altarnun, on the northwest edge of Bodmin Moor.
“We need to be more careful,” she whispered in his ear.
“What about?”
“Us, silly man! The police came Monday night. They saw you leave.”
“They saw a car for a moment, that’s all. And it was dark. Was this about the body?”
“Of course it was about the damned body,” she hissed.
“What did you tell them?”
“How I found it. What the hell else would I say? Its face was ripped off and I couldn’t have got close anyway. It was late and the weather was closing in.”
“Relax. You discovered a body. Your parents left for that meeting. If anybody asks, I’m just the neighbor you called for comfort in their absence, okay?”
“Not a chance…but you’re very good at comfort, neighbor,” she murmured in his ear.
“And you’re very good at arousal. Amazing, actually.”
She ran a finger up this thigh. “Can’t help it. You do that to me.”
Ronnie O’Dare had met Jan months earlier at a Christmas party at the same pub. Isolated and frankly tatty looking from the outside, with a rainbow sign above its door that looked like some hippie had painted it on a bad drugs day in the seventies, locals knew the Sun’s secret: remarkable food and wide range of local ales. There had been music and dancing in a cleared area of the formal dining room that night. He’d seen her standing to one side with an older couple he assumed to be her parents, begged a dance, and afterwards they moved into the low-beamed, noisy bar. Between the laughter, loud holiday greetings, and music, the din was such that it was nearly impossible for her to communicate except by shouting. Even the vicar of Altarnun was there, weaving unsteadily among the throng a
nd spilling his pint. So dense was the crowd, that there was barely room to move, but she seemed to enjoy being pressed up against her dance partner.
They’d been carrying on, as circumstances permitted, ever since…in secret. Her father, who’d never shared a word with O’Dare, despised the mere thought of him—an outsider who’d simply bought the title and estate to the north of theirs instead of inheriting it. Too much of that going round as far as he was concerned, far too much. It needed to be stopped. Plus, the fellow was rumored to be an Irishman newly come into money. No old Cornish history at all.
O’Dare, tall for an Irishman, was trim, clean-shaven, and had a head crowned with unruly black curls: “Black Irish,” his mother had claimed, descended from survivors of the Spanish Armada ships that had wrecked on Ireland’s Atlantic coast in 1588. Though there were a few silver threads among the curls, he looked much younger than his forty-two years, had a winning, slightly crooked smile, and a lilting almost musical accent he told his mates back home was his “golden leg-spreader” in England.
Jan couldn’t get enough of him. She’d had lovers at school, of course, but none remotely as mature or skilled as Ronnie O’Dare. He took her places erotically she’d never known existed. He wasn’t an in-and-out kind of bloke like the others. Oh, no. He was slow, achingly slow, his fingers tracing lightning strikes across her body, his rumbly voice whispering thrilling dirty talk until she begged. He made her scream when she crested, and it didn’t embarrass her in the least. She loved him. And she wanted more.
Jan scanned the bar. It was another raw autumn day with a mist settling on the moor and they sat close to the fire. A crowd was gathering to take advantage of the pub’s infamously generous traditional Sunday roasts—beef, lamb, or turkey. They’d already gone through most of a bottle of Australian Merlot while waiting for their lunch to arrive: his, beef sliced off the bone, Yorkshire pudding, and all the usual fixings; hers, seared breast of duck with a cherry glaze, served on a bed of mixed greens. When their plates arrived, courtesy of a plump perspiring waitress—“Goodness, this crowd!”—Jan stopped his hand just as he started to eat.
“I have a proposition for you,” she said, her eyes giving nothing away.
“Isn’t propositioning my job?”
“Yes, well, full points to you on that score…so far, anyway.” She flashed a lascivious smile.
“Is it a surprise?”
“Of sorts. But it’s much more an opportunity—for you and for both of us.”
She took a breath while O’Dare uncorked the second bottle of Merlot.
“You’ve made your fortune, you told me, in real estate, correct?”
“Yes, during the ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom in Ireland.”
“The what?”
“Technology and real estate boom—bubble, really—in the early 2000s. I’d been in construction and got lucky.”
Jan chuckled: “Luck of the Irish.”
“No, brains of the Irish. We built upscale homes in developments near the new technology parks—couldn’t build them fast enough.”
“You did this on your own?”
O’Dare paused and scooped up a slice of roast beef and a corner of gravy-soaked Yorkshire pudding.
“No, I had good partners with deep pockets,” he said, chewing. “We did well. Very well indeed, and we were smart enough to get out before the bubble burst. Other builders thought we were bonkers; then they all went bust in 2007. Maybe we lost just a bit at the peak, but when it all collapsed we laughed all the way to the bank.”
O’Dare grinned and stroked Jan’s thigh. She was wearing a short skirt for autumn, and stockings instead of tights. There was the slightest bit of soft, bare thigh just above the lacy top of her hold-ups.
She patted his hand beneath the table and then pushed it away. “What if I told you there may soon be a very significant real estate investment opportunity for you right here in Cornwall?” She let the question hang and picked at her duck breast.
He put his fork down. “I’m listening.”
“COME AFTER TWO,” Beverly had said when Penwarren called her after the press conference. “He naps then. After his pills.”
He’d finished writing his report on the press conference and had fielded more than a dozen calls from media, including the London tabloids, about “the dead man with no face.” They’d gone first to Crawley, but he bounced them down the line to Penwarren. The conversations were typically brief and, on the journalists’ side, typically aggressive. Penwarren’s preternaturally calm answer was, “We simply do not have anything more to share at this time.”
“Does that mean you have information you won’t share?”
“No. It means we have nothing more to share. Also, we have yet to identify the victim and notify next of kin.”
“Was it someone local?”
“We don’t know that, either.”
“What the hell do you know, Detective Chief Inspector?”
“Precisely what I have told you already. There was no identification on the victim’s body and missing persons checks have come up with nothing matching the victim.” This was technically true. He didn’t mention the dental identification or Morgan’s research.
“As soon as we have more, be assured we will make it public…”
And so it went until he stopped taking calls.
Fifteen
BEVERLY HEARD PENWARREN’S car approaching well before he arrived at Poldue. The Austin Healey’s big engine sounded like a swarm of angry hornets and the low roar carried across the fields. She hadn’t realized how much that sound had meant to her not so long ago when her younger sister and he had visited. She’d always admired him, a gentleman in every way—even fancied him if she were honest with herself. Her sister divorced him, she’d said, because of his uncertain hours, called out any time of the day or night. Her sister was an idiot.
She was waiting at the open door when he pulled into the forecourt and silenced the engine. He hauled himself out of the roadster, stretched his back, and ascended the front portico steps, where he was greeted with air kisses to both cheeks. So European and, he’d always thought, so empty of meaning. Beverly took his hand and led him inside. The marble-tiled entrance foyer was chilly, but she had a fire blazing in the sitting room. She closed its door behind them to keep in the heat and offered him a drink from an elaborate inlaid mahogany and black walnut Art Deco drinks cabinet that stood like an inappropriately dressed guest in a corner of the otherwise late eighteenth-century Georgian room. Beyond the glass French doors, the garden was sere, withered and weedy. Yes, winter was coming, but Penwarren had never known Beverly to so neglect the border garden that had been her pride.
Given that he was now, as far as he was concerned, off duty, Penwarren accepted a whisky, neat. She poured the same for herself, adding a splash of water, and stretched her long legs out on an overstuffed loveseat.
Penwarren stood by the fire. The Healey’s heater had a somewhat whimsical notion of its intended purpose and he was glad for the warmth. He wondered if Beverley was warm enough. He was used to seeing her in riding togs, but this afternoon she was wearing heels, stockings, and a nearly ankle length, close-fitting knit dress the color of pale Spanish sherry. She had always been taller and more inherently graceful than her sister, but he’d not taken notice before. They’d all been married. Now he noticed. He lifted his glass slightly by way of encouragement for her to begin.
She sipped her drink and stared at the fire. “I don’t know where to start.”
“I’m in no hurry.”
“Thank you, dear man. It is so strange. He’s here, Randall is, physically, and yet not here, mentally. And it’s been so fast.”
“Detective Inspector Davies explained.”
“That Morgan person, yes. She’s remarkable, that woman. She pushed Randall hard until he revealed himself, and yet I could see that her heart was gentle. She was kind and thoughtful with me.”
“She’s my best detective…”
“I don’t doubt that.”
“…and my most difficult.”
“Why?”
“She breaks rules. Ignores procedure.”
Beverly laughed and it surprised him. “I seem to remember cases during your Penzance years when you got into trouble for doing the same. But you got convictions in the end. I’ve always been so proud of you.”
Penwarren tilted his head in her direction and nodded. It was almost a bow. He didn’t know how else to respond to the compliment.
“Morgan has her own set of rules. I’m always having to defend her to the brass up in Exeter.”
“Why do you do it?”
“Because so often she is right even when the rest of us don’t see it. It’s something instinctive, I think. A sixth sense that she has. I’ve learned to trust it. More than I trust my own instincts sometimes.”
“You are lucky.”
There was silence for a few moments.
“Tell me about Randall.”
She looked at the sitting room’s ceiling and the intricately carved plaster rosette at its center, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath.
“He’s mostly okay in the morning—by which I mean he is gentle, though often disconnected from what is going on around him. Sometimes, it seems like he’s on autopilot. He decided to go riding this morning, for example. I did not stop him, but I followed at a distance. He rode up to Crowdy Reservoir, looked at the water for a while without dismounting, didn’t even let his horse drink. Then he turned to come back here, but he let the horse take him up toward Rough Tor. I intercepted them and drew them back down to the track leading home. He seemed both surprised to see me and grateful to be guided.”
“That’s not the Randall I know.”
“No. It’s not. He’s becoming like a child. Except in the evening.”
“The evening?”
“When the light fades, as it does now earlier and earlier, he gets anxious and quarrelsome. He drinks too much—to calm his mind, I think. Nothing I do is right, apparently. Sometimes he gets violent. He’s hit me. Punched me in my chest and knocked me down one evening after dinner when I was helping him upstairs to bed. I sleep in another room not far from his, with the door open so I can hear him if he calls out in the night. He does that now. Never did before. Dreams, I suppose.”