Too Clever by Half

by Will North

  Next, she tried the Internet. In minutes, she found a private company in Surrey that collected satellite images of coastal conditions in the UK on a daily basis. When the firm understood there was a murder investigation underway, they immediately saw a new source of potential revenue in police investigations and readily responded. But when the imagery Davies ordered appeared on her computer screen, it turned out there were more than a dozen boats in the several square mile area of the Channel that day. What’s more, there was no way to zoom in to identify them. It would take weeks to track down these boats by investigating their sat-nav records, if they even had any. She didn’t have weeks, but she passed the assignment on nonetheless. Someone else’s responsibility. Meantime, she’d have to explain to DCI Penwarren how she’d bought the imagery without authorization. She smiled: It’s always easier to get forgiveness than permission. It was practically her mantra.

  She returned to the Admiralty chart and studied it yet again. Something about it nagged her still. Suddenly, her eyes widened and she slapped the standing cork board so hard it nearly toppled.

  “Bloody Pythagoras!” she shouted. Everyone in the incident room froze.

  Morgan had gone directly from secondary school into the police force as a lowly police constable, pounding the pavement. But the instructors at St. Dyffd’s School in Merthyr Tydfil, the town where she’d been raised by her grandmother, had been rigorous.

  It was Terry Bates who spoke up: “Pythagoras?”

  Morgan shot her a look. “Hansen couldn’t have been dumped from the Saga. Where was his body found?”

  “Just off the Lizard.”

  “Five miles isn’t ‘just off,’ detective.”

  Bates looked around the room. No one else moved. “It was a clear day,” Bates said. “Very calm. Terrific visibility.”

  “That’s where Pythagoras comes in.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Where’s your schooling? It’s all about the curvature of the earth. Pythagoras sorted this out around 500 BC. Let’s say I’m standing in the bow of the Saga. I’ve just chucked Hansen’s body overboard, yeah? Now it’s time to head home. But which way’s home?”

  “The coast, of course.”

  “But guess what? I can’t see the coast. All I can see is water everywhere. The farthest I can see from the bow of the Saga is three miles. Pythagoras proved that. The curvature of the earth is such that three miles is as far as I can see on a clear day. So, if I’m in a boat meant for fishing just along the coastal cliffs, I have no idea which way Cornwall is. I’m lost.”

  “What about the cliffs? Couldn’t you see the cliffs?”

  “Too low. Lizard’s basically a plateau; a hundred meters or so high at best.”

  Bates considered. “Okay, what if someone dumped Hansen in view of the Lizard and let the body drift out? The post mortem said that the body could have been in the water for as much as four hours. That’s a lot of time for the tide to move it.’”

  “Duncan also said not less than one hour, so it could be any time within that three hour period. And the fact is, you answered that question already, Terry, at the last MCIT meeting. The tide was low and slack, you reported. If the body went anywhere next it would have drifted toward shore on the returning tide, not away. And anyway, it was found before the tidal shift.”

  Bates was silent for a few moments, her eyes cast aside as if regarding something from a distance, a finger pressed against her left temple.

  “A second boat,” she said.

  Morgan smiled. “Well done, detective constable. Exactly. Without navigation equipment, Saga could never have been that far offshore. Some other boat was. What else?”

  “A second individual.”

  Davies smiled. “Ms. Johns says she got a text message from Hansen saying he was out fishing with someone called ‘Charlie,’ though Johns says she does not recognize the name. Maybe Hansen uses his skiff to meet up with Charlie’s better-equipped boat somewhere, anchors or moors his, and climbs aboard the other.”

  Bates was silent again. “Yeah, Charlie…”

  “Yes?”

  “Look, Charlie is street slang hereabouts for heroin.”

  “Tell me something I don’t already know.”

  “So maybe Hansen had moved on from porn videos to drug dealing. I’m wondering whether maybe he was making a heroin pickup and the deal somehow went all pear-shaped. Or maybe he owed them money he couldn’t pay.”

  Davies looked at Bates and smiled. “You haven’t got any dimmer in the year you’ve been in training, have you, Terry?”

  Bates grinned. “Reckon you’ll have to be the judge, Guv.”

  “Okay, let’s push this forward: so Hansen motors out in the Saga and heads where? South along the Lizard coast it’s too rugged for a rendezvous, so he heads north, toward Falmouth and the Carrick Roads. Lots of safe moorings there. Or maybe just to the mouth of the Helford River.”

  “Or he meets this Charlie, or whomever, and they just raft up anywhere to meet,” Bates said. “Calm sea. No need for a mooring.”

  Davies stared at her for a moment, then punched her shoulder.

  “That’s it! You just figured it!”

  “Sorry?”

  “No need for a mooring! What if Saga was tied astern of the bigger boat and towed out far into the Channel and Hansen simply was pitched overboard from his own boat! No contamination to the other vessel. You are brilliant, Terry!”

  “But who’s Charlie, Morgan? Why did he want Hansen dead?”

  LATER THAT DAY, Brad and Cheryl Winters sat, like two parakeets on a perch, upon matching stools at the high work table in Blooms, their florist shop on Meneage Street, the narrow, sloping commercial road in central Helston. Bates and Novak sat on the other side. At the news Bates gave them, the pair blinked as if their eyes were driven by the same mechanism. The police had not yet released the victim’s name.

  “Archie?” Cheryl whispered, as if others were listening. “He’s dead?”

  “Yes. Murdered, apparently.”

  “Good lord.…”

  “He were fine when we saw him last,” her husband said in a tone so bereft of emotion he might have been commenting on the weather.

  “And that would have been when?” Novak asked, his notebook open.

  “Sorry?”

  “When you saw him last. When was that?”

  Davies had assigned Novak to Bates for the interviews of Hansen’s Druid grove members because she was constantly on the prowl for candidates for the next generation of detectives. Novak was in her sights. This interview was their last. Their first three had been notably unproductive, the grove members being suspicious and guarded, as if the interviews were somehow a judgment about the legitimacy of their beliefs and not a murder investigation. They all had alibies for where they were the day Hansen was found, and none had a boat. Only Brad and Cheryl Winters seemed to be willing to cooperate. Or at least Mrs. Winters was.

  “Beltane, that was,” Cheryl answered, looking off as if to a movie in her head.

  “Sorry?”

  “First May,” Brad answered. “May Day to most folks, but it’s Beltane to pagans, including Druids like us: a celebration of the fertility of spring.”

  “Dancing around the Maypole and all that?” Bates joked.

  Brad Winters frowned. “This is a sacred moment on our calendar, detective. No Maypole dancing. That’s a much more recent invention, more symbolic than real. Nothing to do with Druidry.”

  “So, how do you celebrate it, if I may ask? I’m sorry, I don’t know much about Druids,”

  She watched Cheryl’s face color.

  “There is a solemn ceremony during which we bid farewell to the God and Goddess of Winter and welcome the Queen of the May and her consort, the fertility God,” Brad answered, as if quoting from a script.

  “And, as your leader, Mr. Hansen presided?”

  “Yes,” Brad said.

  “But he were acting strange,” Cheryl added quickly.
r />   “Shuddup, woman, he were always acting strange.”

  The woman blinked several times, as if slapped.

  Bates ignored the husband. “In what way strange, Mrs. Winters?”

  “He was all got up with that Viking stuff he sometimes wears. Nothing like old St. Martin, our previous leader. A gentle soul, he was, and wise. Pushed him aside for Hansen, she did.”

  “Who did?”

  “That Charlotte,” Cheryl said, and then she leaned close to Bates: “Charlotte the Harlot, I call her. Threw her lover Phillip St. Martin over soon as she met Hansen, she did…”

  “Phillip were ailing anyway,” Brad said. “Time for a change.” The fact that Charlotte had once seduced Brad and that, as a result, she had a hold on him when it came time to vote to elevate Archie, was something he did not choose to share.

  “So what happens in this ceremony?” Bates pressed.

  Cheryl answered this time: “Well, we thank the departing winter and welcome the fertile spring. But this time, Archie had one of our grove, young Joey, who’d just had a child a few weeks back, appear naked, or nearly so, as the May Queen. A right shock, that was, I can tell you!”

  “Naked?”

  “But for a girdle of rhododendron branches at her waist, yes,” Cheryl replied. “Topless, I guess you’d say, detective."

  “She were perfect as the May Queen,” Brad interrupted. “The image of fertility, having just had that babe. Not something we could have done,” he said, cutting a look at his wife. “Us being childless and all…”

  Cheryl said nothing.

  “I understand Hansen had got into the habit of adding spells—is that the right word?—to your get-togethers.”

  Cheryl ducked her head. “He believed he could make magic happen. Wanted us to believe that, too. He would focus on one of us, chant and scatter powders…”

  “Bloody nonsense, near as I could tell,” Brad barked. “Nothing came of it anyway.”

  “What was he looking to have happen?”

  “No idea. Never said. It was all mysterious, like.”

  Cheryl looked away, smiling.

  Bates took this in. “So let’s go back to this Beltane ritual. What happens next?”

  Cheryl brightened and flushed. “After the ceremony, we all run into the woods and make love, of course. It’s the fertility festival!” She clapped a hand over her mouth, but her eyes were dancing.

  Novak stopped taking notes.

  Twenty-Two

  FRIDAY EVENING, FOURTH May, Charlotte arrived at Archie’s farmhouse as usual, just after five. But the house was empty. Archie’s Land Rover and tractor were both in the shed, but that was normal: work done, he’d have walked down the hill to his local, the thatch-roofed, whitewashed New Inn, as he did almost every Friday evening. They often had supper there. A few minutes later she pulled her car into the car park above the back of the pub and was just descending the rear steps leading to the lounge bar below when she heard loud voices from the door to the men’s toilet in a rear annex.

  “Up for sale, is what I heard,” one voice said, the man’s words echoing off the loo’s ceramic tiles.

  “Higher Pennare? You’re jokin!” another voice said.

  Charlotte stopped.

  “What I heard, okay?”

  “Yeah, but. Fine house and all, ancient, and the land Hansen’s got there’s good, that’s certain. But what’s he mean to be doin’ sellin’ up?”

  “Haven’t a clue. Retirin’, I reckon…”

  “On what?”

  “Dunno, do I? Mebbe he’s done a whole lot better than the rest of us. Tight-fisted bastard, Hansen is. Mebbe that’s it. Saved up and got no loan to pay off. Plus that old house of his must be worth a pretty penny.”

  “Goin’ off somewheres with that woman, Charlotte, is he?”

  “Dunno that either, do I? Heard this from a lady friend of mine at Savills Estate Agents, up in Truro.”

  “Savills is it? Must be some pretty fine lady with that posh firm!”

  “Go on, just a friend, she is…”

  “Your missus know about this friend?”

  Charlotte turned and climbed back up the steps to the car park and sat in her car, poleaxed. Was this some surprise Archie planned to spring on her? Yes, this had to be a surprise, a reward for the years she’d spent serving and pleasing him. This had to be about the treasure, too, that was it! He had a fortune in his grasp. Not to mention the value of the ancient farm. She thought about reentering the pub to ask him, but felt paralyzed with excitement. She drove home and waited for Archie to beckon her to Higher Pennare.

  He did not call.

  THE NEXT MORNING was overcast but dry. That was good, Dicky thought. There would be no glare for the photos. Townsend spread a black velvet cloth atop a table he’d pulled toward the hotel room window at the Jamaica Inn so as to catch the natural light. He checked the battery strength on the camera and turned.

  “Right then, Archie, what’ve we got?”

  Hansen hesitated, his hand resting on a leather carrying case that itself looked an antique.

  “It’s okay, Arch, we’re just taking pictures.” He pointed at the draped table. “If I was aiming to rob you, would I have gone to all this trouble?” He raised his hands. “You want to pat me down?”

  Hansen shook his head. “Just bein’ careful, is all. Nature of us Cornishmen…”

  “And that’s always wise, I say…”

  Hansen released the latch on the case and, with some effort, pulled out a dirty burlap bag, laid it on the bed, and tipped it open.

  It was everything Dicky could do not to gasp. There were two thickly braided gold torcs, almost a matched set. The tarnished bronze brooch he’d seen in Bristol was there, too, along with several others, each intricately incised with a pattern of vines, and in one case, the image of a bird. There were half a dozen bracelets, also bronze, as well as several pieces in silver alloy shaped like miniature shields. Finally, there was a large number of Celtic-era coins, some gold, but most in silver, and these ones fused together by time just like the coin masses Townsend had seen in the British Museum: Archie’s “dull stuff,” so rare that they alone were worth a king’s ransom.

  Townsend put on white cotton gloves, and pulled out his loupe, inspecting each piece so intently Archie began to wonder if Townsend thought them fakes.

  Finally, Townsend straightened and placed the loupe back in his jacket’s breast pocket. Based upon his earlier research, he reckoned Archie’s trove was worth between five and ten million pounds Sterling.

  “You are, sir,” he began, “a very lucky and, I daresay, a potentially very wealthy man. This is a find of historic importance. There have been only a handful of such Iron Age treasure troves discovered in Britain. These two gold neck ornaments, for example, are called torcs and are very rare. The brooches are from the same period. These miniature shields I’ve not seen before, but I suspect they were good luck charms carried or hoarded during times of tribal warfare. I’ll need to research them. The coins too, are pre-Roman, Celtic. If they had been Roman, they’d have had the image of an emperor on them. These do not. This discovery is worth a fortune, my friend. How big a fortune, however, depends entirely on what you decide to do next.”

  “Sell them is what I want. Soon.”

  “Let me just remind you, then, of something I told you back in Bristol: your best bet to gain the highest price for these items is to report them to the county coroner in Cornwall under the Treasure Act. Might take a couple of years of evaluation, but you’d likely receive full value from the Crown.”

  “You said you could sell them.”

  “Oh, indeed I can, Archie. But those transactions are private and essentially illegal and, as a result, you’d get only a fraction of the true value of these pieces.

  “How much, then?”

  “I honestly can’t tell you yet. I’ll have to contact certain buyers I know. That’s what the photos are all about, so they can see and value them. But,
if I may say so, even at the discount you’d have to accept in such sales, you would still be a wealthy man. Very. Maybe a million, possibly more.”

  Archie sat in a chair against the hotel room wall and passed a hand across his eyes. There was dirt under his fingernails. “Get on with it, then,” he said finally.

  One by one, Townsend positioned the pieces on the black velvet and took shots from several angles.

  “Funny doing this here, at the Jamaica…” he mused.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Old smuggler’s inn, this was.”

  “So?”

  Townsend looked up from the table and smiled: “Think about it…”

  JUST AFTER THREE that Saturday, Charlotte stepped out of her bungalow as the car came to a stop in her drive. She looked at the older Ford Fiesta Dicky was driving and said, as he approached her door, “Where’s your Mercedes?”

  “Too conspicuous. I was followed last time we met. Borrowed this motor from a mate,” he lied.

  “Followed?”

  “Yes. This game has become dangerous, Charlotte. For you, for Archie, and for me as well.”

  Charlotte pressed a palm against her chest. “Come inside. Please.”

  Charlotte’s house was the antithesis of Archie’s. Hers was a stuccoed post-war bungalow nestled on a south-facing slope at the edge of the scrubby heathland of Goonhilly Downs. The house had originally been painted the color of clotted cream, but moss had begun to cling to the rough edges of the stucco and to the slate roof as well.

  Where Archie’s ancient farmhouse was packed with generations of antiques, Charlotte’s was minimalist. She’d decorated her cottage in simple, spare, bright, and cheap furnishings she’d mostly accumulated, as she could afford them, from IKEA in Bristol. She’d designed the space to be bright and airy. Sliding glass doors in her living area opened to the raised bed vegetable garden just outside. She’d built the garden as a landscape feature, the beds artfully arranged to face the sun. Though it was only early May, they were already bursting with early greens, young onions, beet leaves, pea shoots, maturing cabbage, and cauliflower—all cool weather crops she’d soon follow with scarlet runner beans, tomatoes, squash, leeks, mid-season potatoes, and herbs, each as the earth warmed.