by Will North
“When you’re ready, friend—and I understand your caution, believe me—give me a bell. I’ll take good care of you, yeah?”
“Right. Yeah. Thanks.”
“Can’t buy you lunch? Terrific steak and ale pie here.”
“Got to get back to the farm, I do.” He touched his cap, which he hadn’t removed. “Ta.”
Townsend knocked back the rest of his whisky, and followed. “Parked at the Grand, are you? I’ll walk with you. Got to get back to my table there anyway...”
In the hotel’s car park, Townsend waved Archie home, but not before taking note of his registration plate. He never returned to the hotel.
Seven
MORGAN DAVIES HAD never liked the Dracaena Road police station in Falmouth. She’d been there several times when she was head of CID in Penzance. The two-story nick was virtually windowless from the ground to halfway up the second story—a blank, unwelcoming face to the public painted a cadaverous white. High up, just beneath its wide overhanging roof, a band painted black as a scowl ringed the upper floor and the dark, tiny windows punctuating that level looked like machine gun ports in a wartime blockhouse.
The ground floor was devoted principally to reception, cell blocks, and storage rooms. Local policing and response and the district’s tiny criminal investigation division were lodged on the floor above. It was the cramped CID office which served as the meeting room for the hastily-assembled Major Crime Investigation Team on Friday morning, eighteenth May.
Davies entered the crowded room, and Detective Chief Inspector Arthur Penwarren—“Mister,” as the popular DCI was known privately among his subordinates—looked up. She was late. West was there, as was Dr. Duncan, along with the head of the uniformed policing service in Falmouth, a representative of the Tactical Aid Group for Cornwall and, to her delight, her former colleague from Penzance, Terry Bates, just back from training and newly minted as a detective constable. No longer required to wear the regulation hat of a police constable, she’d let her ginger hair grow to a wavy luxuriance that reached almost to her shoulders.
“Ah, Morgan; good of you to finally join us…” Penwarren said, lifting a long-suffering eyebrow.
“Sorry, sir. Traffic.”
“Would that be the same traffic I encountered coming down from Bodmin? Curious, don’t you think, that I managed to arrive on time?”
“You were no doubt wise to leave earlier than I, sir.”
The plain fact was that Davies had left her newly-rented eighteenth century granite cottage in the high moors above Bodmin just before dawn. She had done so for the express purpose of being able to make a leisurely tour of the Channel coast enroute to Falmouth to the south, an area of her new jurisdiction she did not know well. This was the softer side of the Cornish Peninsula, sheltered from the screaming Atlantic gales by the high granite moors to the west: a world of lush, shallow inlets, valleys, and bays. The forested slopes on the Channel side of Cornwall were as prettily pastoral as the storm-wracked cliffs on the Atlantic side of the county were dark, cruel, and dangerous. And partly because of this stark contrast, this side of the county held a faintly mystical power over all who lived there.
Like a foundering ocean liner, the bow of which was the tip of Land’s End, the whole of the Cornwall Peninsula rose high along the cliffs on the Atlantic side and listed sharply down to the Channel side. The tidal creeks and rivers along the Channel that once had been havens for pirates and smugglers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries now were safe harbors filled with yacht moorings.
The waterways, though, were neither rivers nor creeks, really. That much she’d learned. They were rias, tidal fingers of the Channel itself that flushed nearly dry at low tide and rose full again at the high, as if receiving twice daily saline transfusions.
South of Truro, she’d slipped down minor roads, and paused first at Trelissick to watch the nineteenth-century King Harry ferry winch itself, like a waterborne inchworm, across the River Fal along the links of its submerged chain. Fulmars wheeled and screamed as the ferry crossed, and in the shallows of the mudflats and sandbars grey herons and snowy white egrets waited motionless on spindly legs to spear tiny fish. Farther out in the river, ducks flipped themselves beneath the surface as the ferry approached, reappearing many yards away, eelgrass hanging from their beaks.
Heading south on narrow, hedge-lined lanes, she crossed Restronguet Creek and Mylor Creek, finally detouring through Penryn before reaching Falmouth, the principal port on the Carrick Roads.
“What I was saying, detective inspector,” Penwarren said, “is that the central challenge in this case…”
“…is that the body was nowhere near a vessel of any kind, other than the one that found him,” Morgan finished.
Penwarren shook his head in amusement. Ever since their last case together, the Chynoweth murders, Morgan’s quick mind and even quicker mouth often left him feeling like a figurehead. And that was fine; he liked his detectives to be aggressive, and though his own approach to cases was very nearly gentlemanly, Morgan’s bulldog technique produced confessions and convictions even more effectively.
“Do we know who he is yet?” Davies asked the room in general.
“Kaminski, our forensic odontologist, will have a dental report soon,” Calum West said. "We interrupted his surfing holiday at Widemouth Bay.”
“Old Oleg surfs?”
“Some of us try to stay in shape, Morgan,” Penwarren said.
When Penwarren arranged for Davies to be promoted from detective sergeant in Penzance to detective inspector in the major crime unit based at Bodmin, it had taken her two regimes at the gym to shape up.
“I could deck you in a heartbeat, Guv.”
Penwarren burst out laughing and the tension evaporated. He took charge.
“Right, then, people: we have a middle-aged male victim found floating five miles off the Lizard. That’s a long way offshore, but Dr. Duncan here says the body wasn’t in the water long. A couple of hours at best. Maybe less. That rules out being swept to sea from the coast.”
“The Channel was pond calm and the tide slack and low,” Terry Bates said. “I checked.”
Penwarren nodded to the new DC. Morgan had been right about her: this one was sharp.
“So, assuming chummy wasn’t dropped from a helicopter, how does he get there? And if he fell from his own boat, where is it? If he fell overboard, couldn’t swim, and both body and vessel were adrift, current and tide would have kept them in rough proximity.”
Duncan spoke: “It was a dry drowning, sir. No water in the lungs. He’d have to have been unconscious already when he entered the water.”
“So maybe he fell in his boat, was knocked unconscious, and then pitched into the water?” Penwarren asked.
“No corresponding head injury, sir, though there are several lacerations on the body.”
“What’s your assessment of those wounds?” Penwarren asked. “Your report says they are ante-mortem.”
“They’re superficial but consciously so. Inflicted to maim. Possibly over several days. I’ve seen something like this in sado-masochistic relationships gone lethal. It’s torture. Then there’s the lab report: the victim was heavily drugged: Lorazepam.”
“Which means he didn’t fall overboard,” Davies said. “He was drugged, maimed, and then dumped.”
“I half expected you to add, ‘elementary,’ Morgan,” Penwarren said, smiling. Gentle laughter around the table. “Do we have a miss-per yet?”
It was young Bates who answered: “There are hundreds of reports in the Missing Persons Index, as usual, but none answering to this chap’s description and none yet reported during the time period involved here. Also, no reports from the Coastguard of trawler crewmen missing.”
“Thank you, Terry,” the DCI said, and he watched as Morgan smiled at her protégé.
“So let’s say he was thrown overboard,” Penwarren continued. “If someone was going to leave him to drown, why go to the trouble
of cutting him?”
“Vengeance? Satanism?” Davies said.
“Do we have Satanists down here?”
Davies laughed: “Guv, here in Cornwall we’ve got satanists, druids, wiccans, witches, warlocks, shamans; paganism’s going strong down here. Maybe this maiming was part of some ritual, who knows? Ever been to the witchcraft museum up Boscastle way?”
Penwarren gave a bemused shake of his head: “Can’t say as I have, Morgan."
“You should…Sir. Proper museum it is with a terrific library. Went there with Tamsin Bran after the Chynoweth case in Penzance last year.”
“Ah yes, the witch, Ms. Bran. Planning on bringing her in on this case too, are you?”
“Early days, boss. And I didn’t bring her in; she was already a person of interest in that case, as you’ll recall. And she helped break it.”
Smiles around the table. Calling on a witch to help solve a murder was so typical of Davies. She never let protocol get in the way of an investigation.
Still, they all loved to watch Davies and Penwarren spar…and loved the fact that the DCI seemed to relish it. Different as moon and sun, they were, but both shone. There was affection and respect there, and they all saw it.
“Barely managed to keep your warrant card after that last escapade,” Penwarren added.
“Results, sir. It’s all about results: we got our murderer.”
“For kidnapping, not for murder, as you may recall.”
Davies shrugged. “Of course I bloody well recall. But we put him away for a good long while. And I don’t fancy being him in prison when the other inmates learn about his crimes against children…”
“Well, let’s hope this new victim’s had dental work from the National Health,” Penwarren said. “Right now we’ve got only Oleg for identification, until someone reports the floater missing. I don’t mind saying, those cut marks are disturbing.”
Morgan smiled. There were times the DCI seemed almost prissy. It was his upper-class upbringing, she knew; he was a Harrow School boy, a Londoner, his speech and manners impeccable. It was one more reason working with him was such a pleasure. He treated everyone with courtesy. It was ingrained in his moral code. And for that simple decency, there were higher-ups in the force who distrusted him. He didn’t care.
“Morgan and Calum,” Penwarren said, “as soon as we ID this poor fellow, you’re in charge. Terry, you’re with Davies, as before. You seem to be able to tolerate her…”
“What?”
He swung his patrician head toward Morgan.
“But no witches this time, detective inspector. Are we clear?”
West chuckled. Bates looked at the floor. Morgan said nothing.
Eight
BOBBY TREGARETH, BROAD shouldered and thick necked as a Devon Red bull, had been raised in the soft tidal valleys and high stony fields of the Channel coast of Cornwall and had never wanted to be anything other than a good Cornish farmer with a good Cornish wife. Now he had both, and his Joellyn, plump and ripe as a melon, her golden brown eyes glowing, was due to give birth to a son any day. He could hardly credit that she had agreed to be with him, a young farmer barely making his field lease and equipment payments.
It was Archie Hansen who’d brought them together. Joey was a member of the group—“grove” they called themselves—of Druids that Archie led. Bobby’d not known much about Druidry, but Joey explained that Druids had been ancient Celtic pagans, dating back long before the Roman occupation, as far back as the Iron Age. They were said to be seers, sorcerers, and philosophers. They revered the natural world and the cycle of the seasons. And they believed that each soul after death, like everything else in nature, came back in another form, regenerated.
As a farmer, accustomed to shaping his life around seeding, nourishing, growing, harvesting, resting, and seeding again, it made sense to him, in a way, even though he did not participate in the grove’s rites.
Joey wasn’t a natural beauty, but Bobby didn’t mind. He suspected that she tarted herself up to compensate for that, and maybe perhaps because she hadn’t gone beyond secondary school and felt she had to put herself out a bit to be noticed. Bobby had gone on to agricultural college and had excelled, but he’d never thought Joey his inferior. She was spirited and, fact was, the bright lipstick and long eyelashes made her look bloody sexy.
From the moment they “tied the knot” in a Druid hand-fasting ceremony above the Halliggye fogou on the Trelowarren estate near Helston more than a year ago, the ceremony presided over by Archie and his partner Charlotte, Joellyn had wanted a baby. Her wanting was fierce. Exhausted from the farm work, he’d come home for supper and, as soon as they’d finished, she’d drag him up to bed and pounce upon him. It made him happy beyond measure but for a long time it came to naught. Then she told him she was pregnant.
And now the baby was due.
Joellyn lay in their bed, her belly high as a smooth, sun-warmed hillside. It was Sunday, eighth April, a fine evening, the freshly plowed soil in the field opposite redolent and earthy.
“I want to call the boy Archie,” she said, her voice strong. It was not a suggestion.
Bobby, who’d been undressing, stood in his skivvies, his trousers in one hand, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly, like a landed cod.
“We depend upon Mr. Hansen for so much, Bobby—for our land, for our living. It could help give us a permanency, don’t you think? Security? A connection grounded here in the earth, in the glades along the river, in the cliffs along the shore, in the fields you work every day? Archie is our benefactor and my group’s spiritual leader; he would be like a guardian to our son.”
Bobby couldn’t credit it. A son—his son—should take his name from their family, just as a daughter should. That was how it was done, down through the generations. Continuity. Tradition. What would Joey’s parents think, in their snug and smug little thatch-roofed, whitewashed retirement cottage perched above the river at Helford? What would they think; they who’d never thought much of him from the start, but let their willful daughter join him to simplify their lives? What would they think if their grandson was named Archie?
“This is all that Druid nonsense talking. It’s not about us, Joey,” he said, finding his voice.
“But that is part of who and what I am, Bobby. And it is not a nonsense. It is a way of being, a way of believing, a way of understanding where we fit in the natural scheme of things, in our place in the universe.”
AS HE EMERGED from the birthing pool at Helston Community Hospital, Archibald Robert Tregareth announced his arrival late Wednesday afternoon, eleventh April, with a scream roughly the pitch of a Hawk fighter jet on approach to the nearby Royal Naval Air Squadron at Culdrose. The whole idea of being born in the water worried Bobby, but Joey’d said it was best for the baby and, as usual, he let her have her way. Later, in the maternity ward, his wife, rosy cheeked and still a bit feverish from the effort, clutched the infant to her breast. Bobby struggled to connect with them and failed: they were a fully complete unit, Joey and the babe. And him? A visitor. Feeling as useless as wheels on a bird, he told his wife he had to get back to the farm and would visit the next morning, hoping she and the child could come home then.
Leaden clouds had settled over the Lizard like a skillet lid as Bobby crossed the car park and hauled his bulk into his old Land Rover Defender. He stared out the windscreen for a few moments. Perhaps it would rain; they needed that. Then he pulled out onto the A3083 and headed south toward home, to where he knew he belonged.
WORD HAD SPREAD fast and Manaccan’s New Inn was packed Wednesday evening. The polished wood tables and chairs in the low slung, stone-walled lounge, were fully occupied, but most folks were crowded up against the inn’s short, beamed bar.
“Lift a glass, neighbors, for our Bobby,” Archie Hansen called out. “Newly a father, a great honor and a great burden. Poor devil, he’s a young and free lad no more! More comfort to him! May he settle into the new job easy.”
&
nbsp; The gathered crowd didn’t quite credit Archie’s speech, but they did his beer, so they applauded as he ordered a new round. He was on an antic roll, the unofficial master of ceremonies, and he kept the beer and snacks coming. There were cheers and jibes for Bobby in roughly equal measure, a mix of affectionate congratulations and ribald warnings. Bobby had known most of these people since he was a boy. The sweetest moment was when Charlotte gave him a full body hug and smiled up to him: “I am so happy for you both, Bobby. Truly.” But by then his head was spinning.
“WHAT WERE YOU going on about back there?” Charlotte asked Archie as they walked up the darkening lane from the New Inn that evening. They hadn’t stayed until closing; few farmers, early risers all, had.
“What d’you mean?”
“You didn’t seem yourself, is all.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Char; I’m fit as a fiddle.”
“And spending money like a drunken lord: you bought pints for half the village.”
They went over a stile in a stone wall and followed a footpath uphill toward Archie’s property.
“Expansive mood is all.”
“Expensive, you mean.”
“Look, what I do with my money is none of your business. I’ve got it, and more to come, and I’ll do what I want with it!” He didn’t even stop to address her directly.
“More to come? From where?” she asked, trying to keep up.
“Like I said, none of your business.”
“But Arch, we’re partners. We share!”
“We’re lovers and you’ll do what I say,” he barked.
Stunned, as if slapped, she let him stride ahead through the gathering darkness.
Nine
MEASURING HIS STEPS with exaggerated care that night, Bobby climbed the steep stairs to the attic bedroom of the home he’d renovated for his wife. The house sat above Gillan Harbor, less than a mile from some of the fields he farmed. The bedroom he’d created under the eaves of the eighteenth century stone cottage was draped and furnished, thanks to Joey, in cheery chintz, like a picture in that Country Living magazine she pored over every month. It had taken him awhile and more than one blinding crash into the low oak beams supporting the roof before he managed to negotiate the room without clocking himself. Petite Joey had no such problem.