Murder on the Commons (A Davies & West Mystery Book 4)

by Will North

  “But you do now,” Morgan said softly.

  Bishop shook his head so slowly it was like it hurt to move it. “Reckon I do.”

  Day Twenty

  Forty-Three

  PENWARREN AND THE MCIT team were all in the incident room on Saturday morning, waiting for the hospital’s ambulance to bring Jan Cuthbertson in to make her formal statement. She was adamant about doing so, even though the hospital questioned her release.

  Terry’s mobile rang. She looked at the screen and her eyebrows rose.

  “Superintendent Dunleavy! Hello!”

  Penwarren looked up from the table where they’d gathered.

  “While I should love to natter on with you, Detective Bates,” Dunleavy said, “I confess I rang to speak with your superior, DCI Penwarren, but yours was the only number I had.”

  She laughed. “I’ll try not to be insulted but, as it happens, he’s right here.” She passed the boss her phone.

  “Superintendent Dunleavy, sir,” Penwarren said. “Top of the morning to you, if I may use a tired old Irish phrase. What can we do for you?”

  “We’ve not met Inspector, but if you put that bright lass Terry on your team you have my respect. And the name’s Roger. Yours?”

  “Arthur. But everyone around here just calls me Penwarren. Or boss.”

  “I’ll go with Penwarren, then. Are you free to talk? It’s sensitive.”

  “Yes.” Penwarren glanced at the clock over the incident room door. “We’ve had some new excitement here associated with the same case and we’re waiting for someone to arrive to make a formal statement this morning. Will this take long?”

  “It shouldn’t. I have a question but I think I can guess your answer. I’m about to call Merseyside CID with the name of the worm in their apple. But if your system works like ours, you were risking your pension by nosing around in Liverpool’s patch at all, yeah? Not foolhardy, perhaps, but a trifle gutsy, we might say.”

  “We might. But I have a murder to solve. It led there.”

  “And I now understand the connection. But here is my question, my friend. Now that I know the worm’s name, I should think it would be best if I, rather than you, revealed it to Merseyside, and told them we are pursuing it. Keep you at a safe distance as it were, eh?”

  Penwarren looked around the table at the people he’d put in jeopardy with his Merseyside digging. He did not hesitate.

  “Yes. Yes, that would be for the best. Thank you for being so thoughtful. But I will need your help to close this case. Terry told you about our fugitive, Ronald O’Dare. He turns out to have had a plane, an ultralight. We think he’s been bringing drugs in from Ireland to be sold here in Cornwall, and that our murder victim was his local partner. Something happened Thursday that blew his cover and we believe he’s flown back to Cork. We know when he took off and we’re trying to get real time satellite images of his route from our Ministry of Defence. If we assume he’s returned to Cork, it would be helpful if you could identify places where he might have landed.”

  “Not Cork International, presumably.”

  “Exactly.”

  “A private airstrip, then. Near the coast. I’ll put my lads on it, you have my promise. Have Terry give me the departure time. And then I need to know who I should contact now at Merseyside with my happy news.”

  “That would be DCI Ralph Waggoner. But let me warn you. We think he may be involved in this game. It’s not clear how. All we know is that he is living well above his DCI’s salary. The money must be coming from somewhere, so tread carefully. I’ll pass the phone back to Terry. She’ll give you his contact information. And Roger, thank you. I owe you a favor.”

  Dunleavy rumbled a soft chuckle. “Just send that lass back for lunch again sometime.”

  “Official business?”

  “I don’t think we’re done yet.”

  Penwarren saw the reflection of emergency lights below bounce off the ceiling of the incident room. He handed Terry her phone and went to the windows. Jan, in a wheelchair, was being lowered to the drive from a lift at the back of the ambulance.

  “Break time, people,” he said to his team. “Morgan, Jan’s arrived. I want you to conduct her interview. I think you have her trust.”

  THEY MET HER in the lobby atrium. Jan smiled and waved with her good arm, but her face was pale. A uniform took her into Interview Room 3 on the ground floor, a small, sparely furnished, windowless box with beige sound proofing panels on the walls. A table with steel legs and a birch laminate top stood in the center and a large oval lamp hung above the table. There was no other lighting, but the room was bright. There were two steel chairs on either side of the table. The uniform pulled one chair aside and wheeled Jan into its place. There was a large mirror on one wall. Two-way.

  The uniform had placed the spare chair out of Jan’s line of sight for Penwarren, but the DCI leaned against the back wall instead. Morgan sat at the table opposite the girl.

  She smiled. “I think I can speak for all of us that we are relieved that you survived being shot, Jan, and that you seem to be recovering well. I suspect all those miles of moor-walking have made you strong.”

  Jan craned her neck to see Penwarren and immediately regretted it. She winced but did not cry out. “Before we begin,” she said, looking back at Morgan, “can you tell me how my mother is?”

  Penwarren spoke: “Better, Jan. I should have said something sooner. The hospital says she is healing and out of danger. She’s receiving pain medications but is alert, and asking after you. They’ve told her you’re likely to be released today or tomorrow.”

  Jan closed her eyes for a moment. “Thank you, Artie. You said released. To custody?”

  “Yes, but at home. You’ll have a caregiver and, I’m sorry to say, a female police constable. Not my choice, but it’s regulation in your case.”

  Morgan continued. “And speaking of your case, you and we are in an unusual position, in that you are both a witness to your father’s shootings and also an accessory to a different crime, the distribution of illegal drugs. As a consequence, this interview is being recorded and I am required to caution you that while you do not have to say anything, it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Jan said. “I want to cooperate. I have nothing to hide.”

  “Good, then we understand each other. For the record,” she said to the microphone suspended above the table, “this interview with Jan Cuthbertson begins,” Morgan looked at the clock on the wall behind the girl, “at 10:30 am on this date. DS Morgan Davies is the interviewer. DCI Arthur Penwarren is also present.”

  The formalities dispensed with, she leaned back in her chair. “Now then, let’s begin at the beginning. When did you first meet Ronald O’Dare?”

  Jan took a deep breath. “Last Christmas, the party at the Sun Inn, near Altarnun. He asked me to dance.” She looked over Morgan’s shoulder, as if viewing that moment and gave a rueful smile. “He was gracious. Charming. Handsome. There was this inner strength that he radiated, a confidence I’d never felt in younger men, at school for instance. It was powerful. And that lovely lilt to his voice…”

  “You began seeing each other?”

  “If you mean did we become lovers? Yes. Through the spring and summer. But secretly.”

  “Because?”

  “Because my father, despite having never met him, hated Ronnie for buying Davidstow, not inheriting it from an ancestral line as long as ours. The fact that money was all it took to become a Lord of the Manor on Bodmin Moor infuriated him. It’s perfectly legal, but my father’s mindset sometimes is almost medieval.” She made a face. “It’s part and parcel with his disgust that his only child was born female. No male heir to his little kingdom. He’s never let me forget that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Morgan said.

  She looked up: “I’m sorrier. Now. My God, in th
e span of, what, a few months, his mind has gone completely. I wasn’t paying attention. Then, the shooting. It’s like he is no longer in this world. I didn’t know how much my mother was covering for him. It saddens me. He is—was?—my father. What will happen to him? Will he be prosecuted?”

  “I suspect not. Taken into a care home, I should think, for whatever time he has left. Was your affair with O’Dare a kind of rebellion?” Morgan asked with an abruptness that surprised the girl.

  Jan shook her head. “I don’t know. In retrospect, perhaps. But at the time it was infatuation. There was a mystery about him that was magnetic.”

  “Mystery?”

  “He shared little about himself. And he made it clear that I was never to show up without an invitation. I guess that made me feel special.” She shook her head, slowly, in disbelief. “He gave the impression that he’d bought the Davidstow estate for the development potential of its private land, outside the boundaries of the Area of Natural Beauty, that is. That’s what he said he did in Ireland, property development. I had no clue that he was involved in something else altogether. Not until this week.”

  “And what changed this week, Ms. Cuthbertson?”

  Jan took a deep breath. “He invited me to be his ‘business partner,’ as he put it. He told me that he moved illegal drugs in Cornwall. I was to be his distributor here, making deliveries and collecting payments.”

  “And you agreed?”

  Jan nodded.

  “Yes or no, Ms. Cuthbertson.”

  “I’m sorry. Yes.”

  “Did you understand then that doing so was illegal, a criminal activity?”

  “Yes. I suppose I did.”

  “Suppose?”

  “In the moment it seemed, I don’t know, like an adventure? I take managing our moorlands seriously. But it isn’t much of an occupation. I wanted so much to please him I didn’t give it much thought. I’d never done anything so risky in my life. I didn’t think much about the consequences. It felt very grown up, and I was proud, I suppose, that he would trust and respect me—the way my own father never did.”

  Morgan stared at the woman before her and struggled to make sense of what she was hearing. From childhood, Morgan had been given little choice but to fend for herself. Because her own family was destroyed by the Aberfan coal tip disaster in her native Wales, there had been no one to ‘please’ and no one who could have responded anyway. The notion that Jan Cuthbertson had been so “lovesick” and that she had no concept of the danger she’d brought upon herself was beyond Morgan’s ken. She wanted to give the girl a shake, but she reckoned being shot had been enough to bring her to her senses.

  “That was on Tuesday morning. How did it work, these deliveries?”

  Jan described the locations of each exchange, the routine with the marked Tescos bags, and the people with whom she’d made the exchanges.

  “You told DCI Penwarren yesterday you thought you could identify these individuals if presented in a police lineup. Do you still believe that to be true?”

  “I would certainly try. One of them was an older woman, the only woman, and the only contact who spoke to me. Another was known to the staff at the bakery shop where we made the exchange in Penzance as ‘Michael.’ As for the others, I can only say I’d do my best. But how would you even know who to pick for identification?”

  Morgan smiled. “Let me just say that constables on the beat often have a pretty good idea who the bad guys are and, of course, we have CCTV on the streets. We’ll also check on the businesses you mentioned. Most of them have cameras now. The only issue is how quickly they erase them. Let me also say that your help in identifying any of these people,” and here she glanced at Penwarren for affirmation, “will no doubt go a great way to help in your defense should your involvement in O’Dare’s enterprise come to trial. But to go back to the older women you mentioned, she actually spoke to you, is that correct?”

  “Briefly, yes. She asked me a question.”

  “Which was?”

  “‘Where’s the big bloke?’ or words to that effect. I didn’t know what she was talking about.”

  Morgan made a note on the writing pad she had brought.

  “Now, let’s move on to what happened Thursday afternoon, after you arrived at Davidstow Manor.”

  “He was furious with me. I’ve never seen him so angry. We were supposed to be partners now, okay? And I wanted to talk to him.”

  “About what, Jan?”

  “About the ‘big bloke’. The person I was to replace; I figured he’d quit, or Ronnie had fired him.” Her face clouded suddenly and her head dropped.

  “And?”

  “Ronnie killed him. He said the guy was skimming and he’d caught him. There was a fight. The big guy jumped on him, grabbed Ronnie’s throat with one hand, he said, and pulled a gun with the other. They wrestled for control of the gun and Ronnie pulled the trigger. Apparently the man died instantly. Right on top of him. When he told me, he just shrugged and smiled and said it was his lucky day: ‘self-defense,’ he said. I couldn’t believe it. He killed him and didn’t have a care!”

  Penwarren levered his body away from the back wall but did not move into her line of sight. Morgan looked up and he nodded.

  “Did O’Dare tell you this man’s name?” she asked.

  “Lugg. I don’t know if that was a nickname because he was big, or a surname. Just ‘Lugg’.”

  “The man whose body you discovered in Rough Tor Mire.”

  “Yes, apparently. I never made the connection until he told me. That poor man.” Her chest shuddered and her eyes welled with tears.

  Morgan sat back. “Perhaps it’s time we took a break. Can we get you anything, Ms. Cuthbertson? Coffee? Tea?”

  “Tea would be lovely. Yes, thank you.”

  “Interview suspended,” Morgan said to the microphone. She rose and Penwarren followed her out the door of the interview room, first placing a reassuring hand on Jan’s good shoulder. “You’re doing fine,” he whispered.

  Forty-Four

  IN THE CORRIDOR outside the interview room, Morgan was about to speak when Penwarren’s mobile dinged. He held up a hand.

  “It’s a text from Calum.” He read the message and smiled. “At last, he’s got ‘scene.’ His people have been scouring the hanger and one of them noticed a fresh scar in one of the old wooden beams supporting the structure. Calum reckons it’s from a bullet and that the hanger’s where Lugg was shot. He’s called in forensics to find the bullet. They’ll send it to ballistics for analysis.”

  “Thank God,” Morgan said.

  “Yes. It’s progress.”

  “No, thank God I won’t have to listen to him moan about having no ‘scene’ anymore!”

  “How is that going, by the way?”

  “What?”

  “You and Calum.”

  “I confess I am smitten.”

  “He’s a very good man.”

  “Not by him, by his girls! They’re wonderful.”

  Penwarren shook his head, then gestured toward the interview room door. “How do you want to proceed when we go back in there? With the sexual assault?”

  “I don’t see a reason to make her relive that. Let’s get right to her father’s arrival and the shootings.”

  “I TRIED TO reach Mum, but the pain was so great I couldn’t.” Jan was sobbing. “I thought she was dead.”

  “What about your father?” Morgan pressed.

  “I remember Ronnie dragging him down from the horse and kicking him. I don’t think Daddy had any idea what he’d done, or even where he was. It was such a nightmare. And then Ronnie just drove off and left us there on the ground. I called out to him, but he ignored me. Then, I must have passed out. All I remember is the medics sliding me into the ambulance, and the pain. Then nothing.”

  “They sedated you and took you directly to Truro A and E.”

  “But why did he leave us there? Where did he go?!”

  Penwarren carried the
spare chair to the table and sat beside Morgan. “Did you not know about the plane, Jan?” he asked.

  The girl blinked. “The what?”

  “He had a small plane. At the old Davidstow aerodrome. We believe he was moving those drugs from Ireland to Cornwall that way. We believe he is connected to the IRA in Cork, was aided by someone in Liverpool, and that he’s fled to Ireland, because the shootings would expose the entire enterprise. The Irish Garda are trying to find out where he landed. He never told you about the plane?”

  Jan opened and closed her mouth like a beached fish. “No! He had a plane?”

  Penwarren put a hand on hers. “He could have killed you. You knew too much. But he didn’t. And he couldn’t stay. There was no way for him to explain away all the wounded in his courtyard, despite your father’s illness. His enterprise was exposed, so he fled.”

  “But he left us there!”

  “He called 999 so medics would come.”

  “Mum and I could have died!”

  “But you didn’t. You’re going to recover, and your Mum, with any luck, will too, although she will, I suspect, take much longer. She will need your help, Jan.”

  “But if you arrest me?”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary.” Penwarren nodded to Morgan and she ended the recorded interview.

  “You’ll return to the hospital this afternoon. When they release you, perhaps as soon as tomorrow, you will go home. Your movements will be restricted. As I mentioned earlier, someone will be with you. I can’t tell you what the Crown Prosecution Service will decide should a case be presented, but I will be there for you—and for your Mum when she, too, is released. I promise.”

  Morgan nodded to the two-way window, rose, and left them.