Too Clever by Half

by Will North

  Novak bowed and smiled. “My family is from Eastern Europe. I suppose we do it differently there. Shall I begin again?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  Bates watched this little vignette with mounting disgust. The chocolate coating on the biscuit in Charlotte’s hand was melting beneath her fingertips. She slipped two fingers and a thumb between her lips and slowly withdrew them.

  Good Lord, she’s flirting with him!

  Now she took a bite and sipped her tea, winking thanks to Novak.

  “I reckon now the blossoms have faded, Archie would next harvest the bulbs, yes?” Bates asked. “What would he plant next?”

  “Grains, I should think, wheat or barley,” she answered returning her attention finally to the detective. “Like I said earlier, he’d rotate, depending upon what that particular field needed or could provide.”

  “I see,” Bates said, sipping her tea. Except she didn’t. There’d been no seed bags for either wheat or barley in the loft above Archie’s farm equipment, or anything else. The bulbs languishing in Hansen’s fields would have been harvested by now had he lived, but she’d seen no evidence of preparations for either harvest or a following crop. It was as if he’d simply abandoned farming one day, like someone fleeing with his family from an impending invasion and leaving the table still set for supper.

  THEIR CAR HAD just cleared the village of Manaccan and was headed for the A394 back to Falmouth when Bates finally said, “So?”

  “So, an interesting house,” Novak answered. “Sort of lived in, sort of not.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Too clean, you know? At least the rooms that were used regularly—the upstairs loo, the main bedroom. Like a charwoman had been in to clean the place. The other rooms? Stuffy, unused.”

  “What did you think of the costumes in the bedroom wardrobe?” She didn’t look at him; she was waiting to see how bold Novak was.

  “Costumes?”

  “The sex costumes. Don’t play the innocent, it doesn’t suit you.”

  Novak slid a look at her, and returned his eyes to the road ahead of him; he was driving just over the posted limit, eager to get home.

  “That’s some imagination you have, there, detective…”

  “You didn’t search that wardrobe?!”

  “Of course I did: a few work shirts, denim and cotton flannel, a shiny old blue wool suit, and one dress shirt that once had been white. Pile of clean coveralls folded at the bottom.”

  “No Viking maid outfit?! No black leather dominatrix getup? Nothing like that?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, shit…”

  Novak slowed the car a bit. “You all right, Terry?”

  “No, I’m bloody well not! Someone’s sanitized the scene. The sex costumes were there last time we visited, Davies and I. Only Johns didn’t know I’d found them.”

  “And you found them…how?”

  “Did a little walkabout on my way to the upstairs loo—which was filthy at the time, by the way.”

  “Which is to say,” Novak said without taking his eyes off the road, “your search is inadmissible as evidence, just like mine?”

  “Yes, and please shut up.”

  Bates watched the fields blur by and tried to think like her boss: Hansen disappears and is discovered dead. Johns, while apparently shattered, is smart enough to know that eventually the house will be searched. She doesn’t want their private games exposed. Too embarrassing. So she clears the costumes out. Does she bin them? Somehow, Bates didn’t think so. So she hides them. Not on the farm; too easily found. Where? Her own house, then? But what if her own house was searched? Bates pulled out her mobile and called Davies.

  “Good work, both of you,” Morgan said when she heard Bates’s report. “But the costumes are irrelevant. What people do in the privacy of their bedrooms is not a police concern, however kinky…unless it is connected to a crime and we have no such connection as yet. Plus, there’s another problem.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Stop that.”

  “Sorry. Habit. The other problem, Morgan?”

  “If Johns is only a sometimes playmate, what’s our boy do for fun the rest of the time, you know? Randy farmer like that? Does someone else use those costumes? Is it just our Ms. Johns?”

  Bates made a face at the phone and rang off. One day, she’d be ahead of Davies. One day…

  A FEW MINUTES later Davies called another number.

  “Morgan! What a delightful surprise!” West answered. “Let me take my blood pressure medicine, just to be safe.”

  “Oh, shut up. Got a new twist in this Hansen case.”

  “Given how little we’ve got to go on, any twist is welcome.”

  Davies filled West in on the two previous “informal” examinations of Hansen’s house, and explained Bates’s latest report: “The house has been thoroughly cleaned. Do we think that’s just to hide their role-playing? I doubt it. If Hansen was maimed before he was thrown into the Channel, where might that have happened, if not his own home? I think that’s why the house has been sanitized.

  “The maiming could have happened anywhere. His barn? A field?”

  “Occam’s Razor, Calum. Occam’s Razor.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Don’t play stupid: Middle Ages English friar and philosopher, William of Ockham. He said, basically, the less complicated the solution, the more likely it will be correct.”

  Calum smiled to himself. He knew exactly who Ockham was, and what Morgan was saying. He just liked to wind her up.

  “So I suggest Hansen’s place is the scene of a crime which, as I recall, is your department, yes?” Davies said.

  “Well, if you put it that way...”

  “Which I do.”

  “…then I’ll need to get Mister’s okay. But honestly, Morgan, he might need to go upstairs for this one. It’s a bit irregular.”

  “Then put him on a lift, Calum. I feel as if we’re losing evidence every day…”

  Twenty

  AS DAYLIGHT FADED on Thursday night, third May, Bobby Tregareth walked with his colicky son along the stone wall bordering the field closest to his house. The baby was only just over three weeks old, but had already begun screaming, arching, and twisting his tiny spine almost every evening, not long after Joey had breast-fed him. Normal, she said it was, but she said she was fed up with it: she was off to her parents’ cottage in Helford for a break. And so Bobby walked, the child in agony, and himself struggling to cope with the boy’s piercing cry. There were moments like this when, helpless to calm the child, it was everything he could do to keep from dashing his brains out on one of the stone walls. His fury at his powerlessness frightened him, as if the emotion were a wild thing living just beneath the surface of his skin, a barely contained raging beast wanting nothing but peace. Did all fathers feel this way, or was he crazy? He wanted the noise to stop. He wanted the child to rest. He wanted an end to it. But though his brain was afire, he kept walking, patting the wailing baby’s back and talking to him as they wandered in the grass beside the field. He talked incessantly to create an alternate noise, something that might calm the struggling babe, and calm himself as well, as if his own sonorous voice could be a balm. He talked about everything and nothing.

  “Now, now, Rob, my boy,” for he could not bring himself to call his son Archie, “this here’s my fallow field, which I just plowed calcareous sand into. That’s calcium and lime from shells, that is, and it’ll correct the pH in the soil, make it sweet. And after that I’m seeding with clover to build up the nitrogen. That’s the proper way to manage land and it keeps down the need for bought-in fertilizer, you see. And when I turn that clover under, all that goodness will go into the earth and the tilth’ll be rich and crumbly for the bulb planting this fall.

  “Our neighbor there, Hansen,” he turned so the cranky infant could face the opposite field, “he does none of that. Just lays down more chemicals and his soil’s going barren. Set in his ways,
he is, and won’t hear of other ideas. Us, well, it won’t be long now before we’re certified organic. Yields’ll be lower at the start, but the cost of our inputs will be lower, too. No expensive chemicals, see? And the price we get will be higher. And the soil will get richer. Better for everyone, I reckon that is.”

  The infant was quiet now, finally, but Bobby stayed outside. He thought about the field where Archie’d found that chamber and wondered what mischief the man was up to. Treasure Act? Artifacts? Using his name? Bobby knew it wasn’t right. He should confront the man, but he didn’t dare. Archie could ruin him.

  The early May night was fragrant with awakening earth smells. He walked back to the walled kitchen garden he’d built for Joey just out the back door of their cottage. Young lettuce, spinach, peas, and turnip and beet greens had already broken the surface. When the soil got warmer, which it would soon, he’d plant scarlet runner beans beneath the tripod trellis he’d built, and tomatoes he’d started in their little glass garden shed. He sat on the bench he’d set at the head of the garden, rocked the quiet child gently at his shoulder, and puzzled over another problem.

  Fact was Joey had drawn away from him ever since the boy’s birth, and he missed her, as if a limb had been severed. Maybe distance was normal after an event as painful as childbirth. He couldn’t imagine what it might have been like for her. Maybe she blamed him for the pain. He wasn’t sure. Then there was post-partum depression; the doc had warned him about that. But as for the babe, now it seemed to him she only did what she had to and left the rest to him, as if he didn’t have a farm to tend.

  What he did know was that it was as if there were an invisible wall between them in their bedroom now, the same room, the same bed that had been such a haven for them both. And the only thing that seemed to interest her these days were her Druid grove meetings, to which she had returned.

  He didn’t understand that, either.

  JUST AFTER EIGHT that same evening, two days after the Beltane celebration in which she had played such a central role, Archie opened the kitchen door at the back of Higher Pennare farmhouse to admit Joey Tregareth. She wore a hooded white cloak, the very one she’d worn for Beltane.

  “I am here for you, my lord Thor,” she said, her voice strong, confident in herself.

  “Good. You have done well. Tonight, we will celebrate Beltane in our own fashion, having been kept from doing so on May Day by…circumstance. But tonight we also celebrate a new beginning for the two of us, a life that will continue into the years ahead. A life together, far from here.”

  “Can it finally be?”

  “It is being arranged. I will soon share everything and you will see. Shall we ascend?”

  The woman nodded and turned to the stairs. She knew the way.

  Up in the attic of the ancient house, a dim space packed with the clutter and dust of generations, Archie unlocked a low door, so old its frame and panels groaned when moved.

  “Our place. Our sanctuary,” she whispered as she entered. “Prepare it, my lord,” she ordered. “Prepare our sacred place.”

  It was little more than an alcove tucked beneath the eaves, but a rosy light from two wall-mounted sconces with red shades suffused the room with a warm blush. A half dozen books on witchcraft were stacked along a low shelf on one wall, and on the shelf above were several dozen labeled plastic bags filled with herbs and other substances. There was a small table covered in black velvet upon which sat a granite mortar and pestle, a bottle of red wine, two glasses, and an antique silver candlestick, tarnished almost black. While Joey reclined on a low settee along the opposite wall, Archie lit the candle and began the process of grinding several ingredients.

  “Did you do as I instructed?” he asked as he worked.

  “I did, my lord. I sent the man I handfasted out to walk the child and drank the scented wine you hid in the box hedge beside the door.”

  “Well done,” Archie said as he passed a glass of red wine infused with the herbs he’d just blended. While Joey drank it, he disrobed and wrapped himself in a white cloak matching hers.

  Moments later, her eyes ablaze, Joey said, “Your magic is so powerful...”

  He pulled her to her feet. She rose on tiptoes, kissed him, and then she repeated the words he’d spoken at Beltane, which perhaps only the two of them had truly comprehended:

  “The young son

  Aengus the Harper

  Son of the Dagda

  Whose staff is the strongest

  Born of enchantment

  Son of the Mother

  Sing, O enticer

  Delighter of Maidens

  Sap in the branches

  All making merry

  Bee to the blossom

  Hei to the Maying

  Raise now the May-rod

  Aengus we name you

  Wonder child rising

  Come to our calling!”

  “I am not yet healed, my lord, from the child,” she reminded him.

  “You have your ways, my queen…”

  Then she knelt before him and opened their cloaks. “Give me your May-rod, my lord, that I may be your queen always.”

  Catching his breath a few minutes later, he said, “We will be leaving here soon. Are you ready?”

  She smiled up at him. “With you, my lord, I am always ready.”

  LATER THAT EVENING, Archie fished Townsend’s card from his beat-up leather wallet and called him on his mobile.

  “Archie, my friend! Thought you’d lost my number!”

  “Needed to think and plan, I did. But now it’s time we met again and decided what to do with these…ah…items.” Archie didn’t trust the security of mobiles and reckoned it best to be oblique. “Somewhere private, mind, and not here at the farm.”

  “I hear you, Archie. Let me think a moment.” But Townsend was way ahead of him. He’d found the perfect spot on his way north after meeting with Charlotte: the isolated Jamaica Inn, just off the A30 high up on Bodmin Moor, not far from the Devon border, and immortalized in the novel of the same name by Daphne du Maurier.

  “The Jamaica?” Archie said. “Hardly private. Bloody tourist trap these days is what I hear.”

  “Precisely my point, Archie; no local would ever go there. Plus it has one important advantage.”

  “What’s that, then?”

  “There’s a hotel attached to the Inn now. I’ll book a room, ring you with its number, and you can meet me there so I can photograph your…items. See?”

  Archie considered. “Reckon that’s fine, then. When?”

  “Tomorrow work for you? About eleven in the morning? Guests will have gone then, new ones not yet arrived.”

  “Charlotte’s usually here on the Saturday.”

  “I’m sorry, Charlotte? Who’s that?” Dicky lied.

  “Girlfriend, she is. But reckon that’s done.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Forget it. Private matter. I’ll have to leave early anyway to get way up there by eleven. So you take pictures of the items and then what?”

  “Well, Arch, while I was waiting to hear from you I did a bit of research, and I have a few buyers who might be eager to see those photos. Foreigners, they are. Love that old stuff, they do. Pay well, too.”

  “Right, the Jamaica at eleven, then.”

  Hansen rang off and stood in his kitchen, looking across to the old stone shed where the treasure rested. Rest. Yes. That was his aim. Farming no more. He and his new woman would be shot of this damp peninsula for good. Coast of Spain somewhere. Malaga or thereabouts. Practically a British colony these days, it was. English spoken. Sun. Good pubs. No worries. And free of Charlotte’s addictive control, so hard to escape, like a prison of need. Free of that, like breathing again. And this time, with this woman, he would be in control. He’d had a good teacher, after all, and now he had a willing and submissive student.

  Twenty-One

  ON THURSDAY MORNING, twenty-fourth May, seven days exactly after the floater had been found, Mor
gan Davies stood in front of an upright cork board in the Falmouth hotel temporary incident room and stared at an Admiralty Office nautical chart of the English Channel pinned there. In her head, it was like she was in a helicopter hovering high above the Lizard coastline, everything in view. Somewhere out there, far beyond the Manacle Reefs, which had brought so many ships to grief, out where it was deep and where water stretched to every horizon, a body had been dumped the previous Thursday morning.

  Then a light came on.

  “Somebody get me the number for Culdrose!” she barked.

  A PC in the incident room clattered at his computer keyboard, then called the number out. Morgan snapped open her mobile.

  “Again!” she ordered. He repeated, and she punched in the number.

  Culdrose, the Royal Naval Air Station situated at the northern edge of the Lizard, was the largest search, rescue, and attack helicopter base in Europe, and also home of the Royal Navy’s 736 fighter jet squadron. It took several tries before Davies found someone at Culdrose who could tell her that if she wanted imagery of the Channel she needed to speak not to them, but to the Royal Air Force satellite imagery center in Lincolnshire, in eastern England. But that turned out to be a dead end, too. The RAF’s satellites had no images for Cornwall on that or any other day; they were focused on strategic hot spots of concern to the UK elsewhere in the world. Cornwall wasn’t one of them.

  Davies slammed a fist on her desk. Everyone in the incident room turned, but said nothing. Powerlessness was a condition that drove Morgan to fury. She knew its genesis and had long struggled with its effect. Her brother, father, and mother all had been destroyed, in various ways, by the notorious 1966 Aberfan coal tip disaster in her native South Wales, when a mountain of saturated coal mine waste broke loose, buried part of her village, and killed more than a hundred souls, most of them children in a primary school. But no one associated with the National Coal Board had ever been fired, demoted, or fined. Because there were no regulations governing coal mine waste, none had been violated, the judge decided. In one way or another, Morgan Davies had been fighting authority and seeking justice ever since. It was why she was such a good cop; also, why she was a difficult one. She was driven, relentless, a rule-breaker. It helped that DCI Penwarren was her advocate, almost her protector, in the force.