Too Clever by Half

by Will North

  Townsend sat on a low, snow white Scandinavian divan scattered with richly colored wool pillows that looked to have been made from pieces of old Persian rugs. The house itself, like so many postwar bungalows, was characterless, but she’d made its interior shine.

  Charlotte brought two brimming glasses of white wine and a plate of sliced vegetables with a small bowl of garlic aioli dip and set them on the table next to them.

  They touched glasses. Dicky thought, how intimate this gesture can seem…

  Charlotte placed her hand on his knee. “Tell me: what is the danger, Dicky?”

  Townsend paused. “Has Archie any sort of criminal history, Charlotte?”

  “No! Oh well, yes, I suppose, if you include selling X-rated videos some years back. But he was never convicted of anything, is what he told me…”

  “Ah.”

  “What is it?”

  “My sources tell me he’s been in touch with a dodgy character called Reg Connor. Used to be a distributor, I hear, of…um…naughty videos.”

  “That was before I met Archie, Dicky.”

  “Oh, I was not suggesting you were involved in the videos.”

  She smiled, patted his knee, and then leaned back against the arm of the divan, crossing her legs, her skirt slipping higher on her thigh. “I have nothing against naughty, Dicky…”

  Townsend cleared his throat. “Yes, well, it turns out Connor’s moved on to art and antiques. Your Archie apparently contacted him a few weeks ago, about the same time he met me at the coin show in Bristol. Playing two sides against each other for the best deal, I reckon he is.”

  Charlotte nodded. “That would be Archie, all right...but he is no longer ‘my Archie,’ Dicky.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Charlotte rose and went to the doors overlooking the garden. “It all begins to make sense now.” For a few moments she said nothing. Then she turned to face him.

  “I’ve been betrayed, Dicky, by the man I’ve given myself to so completely these past several years. I’ve been a fool.”

  “Do you mean he has yet to tell you about the treasure?”

  She laughed, but her throat caught: “The treasure’s the least of it, Dicky.” She took a breath. “He’s selling the farm. Hasn’t said a word to me about it. I found this out by accident, just yesterday.” A tear traced its way down her right cheek.

  As if lifted by her grief, Townsend rose, crossed the room, and took her into his arms. She lifted her face and kissed him, first shyly, then almost desperately. She curled her tight little body into his, lifting one leg high behind his and pulling him close.

  Early the next morning, the sun having not yet crested the lip of the valley, she awoke beside him in her small upstairs bedroom and smiled. At last, she’d found a man who could find his way to her very core, a man who was as gentle and caring a lover as he was lusty. She had not needed to serve him; he had served her. She felt transformed. It was sudden, but also suddenly and finally, right. So much wasted time. She’d found her match. Maybe Archie had big plans. But now, for the first time in memory, she did, too.

  “LET ME GET the photos to some of my buyers, Char,” Townsend said as he ducked into his car later that morning.

  She loved that he called her Char, the first letter soft: Shar. She leaned into the car’s window and kissed him.

  Townsend grinned. “It may take a couple of days. You do understand, don’t you, that you’re going to have to obtain the treasure at some point? Others are after it. You should think about how that might happen…”

  Charlotte smiled. “Oh, I have, Dicky. I have.”

  TOWNSEND WAS BANGING north on the A30 and just approaching Exeter when his mobile chirped. He recognized the number.

  “Hello?”

  “My patience is not unlimited, Dicky-boy.”

  “Reg! Hi! Hang on a moment, let me pull over.”

  “Didn’t know you were such a safe driver…”

  Townsend wasn’t. He was buying time to think. He moved left into the slow lane and then onto the hard shoulder.

  “Right then, I’m off the motorway.” The stopped car lurched from the blasts of air from each auto and lorry that rocketed past.

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “Devon. Returning from a wild goose chase, I reckon.”

  “Explain.”

  “Set up a meeting with Hansen for today at the Jamaica Inn up on Bodmin Moor, right? Got a private room and all and set up to photograph his trove, like you told me. Only he never showed. Squirrely bastard is our Archie, I’m tellin’ you, Reg. On again, off again. Trusts no one.”

  “And you didn’t continue on to Cornwall to find him because…?”

  “His girlfriend, Reg, if that’s the right term for a woman in her forties at least. Met with her briefly a couple of weeks ago, another time Hansen was supposed to be there but wasn’t. Told her then that me and Archie were chums from way back. Said I did a quality review of the New Inn at Manaccan for Sharp’s Brewery, ran into him there, and he told me to stop by for lunch next time I was in the area. She was supposed to arrange that, but when I got to his farm a week later, no Archie. I think she knows something’s up with him, but doesn’t know what. I figure she made sure he wasn’t around. Tried to pump me for information, she did. Gave me the whole tea and biscuit routine.”

  “What’s all that got to do with today?” Dicky took note of Connor’s rising volume. Connor had a volatile temper, his anger soaring like a spiking fever in moments.

  “Weekends are when she’s at Hansen’s place, see?” Dicky said, his voice matter-of-fact. “I figured it was too risky to run down there today. And he’s got something else going, I think. I don’t know what yet. Said when I rang him that he’d waited all this time for a photo session because he had other plans to make first.”

  Reg Connor said nothing for several seconds: “All right, Townsend. But you’d better not be playing me. Do that and I promise you the consequences will be extreme.”

  The phone went dead, and Townsend smiled: Afraid he’s losing it, old Connor is. Threats instead of reason, poor old bastard. Doesn’t even imagine I know I’ve been tailed by one of his people.

  Twenty-Three

  “WHAT HAVE YOU got from Saga?” Davies barked into her mobile when her call connected. It was early Friday morning, twenty-fifth May, and she was at her makeshift desk at the incident room in the St. Michaels Hotel in Falmouth. “You’ve had it long enough.”

  “And a fine good day to you, too. Morgan,” Calum West said. “How is Cornwall’s loveliest detective inspector this day?”

  “Piss off.”

  “I’ll take that as a not too good, then, shall I?”

  “Blood. From the boat. What have you got, Calum?”

  “You’re just no fun, Morgan. You might try it sometime, just for a change. As to the boat, let me remind you: we SOCOs are about preservation of evidence, you CID people are about investigation. We work methodically to make sure you have rock-solid evidence so you can get a conviction, savvy?”

  “Blood, Calum?”

  “Okay, so the short answer is that the interior of the boat was bleached practically toxic. We found nothing there.”

  “What’s the long answer, then?”

  “Ah, you do pay attention, after all, don’t you?”

  Morgan took a breath, consciously slowing herself. “All right, what else, Calum?”

  “My boys found a smudge of blood under the gunwale near the bow.”

  “The what?”

  “Gunwale. It’s the rim that runs around the upper edge of the hull. In olden days it was the edge of the deck where canons were mounted. Thus, the gun.”

  “I don’t need the whole damn video, Calum. What’s the blood type?”

  “Might have a bit of luck there. It’s AB positive. Only three percent of the UK population have it.”

  “Find someone with it and find the killer?”

  “Maybe. Could be unrelated, though.�
��

  “You are so cheering…”

  “But there’s something else. You’ll remember that the helm of the Saga is on an upright console amidships, yes?”

  “Where the wheel is? Yes, I’ve not entered my dotage yet, Calum.”

  “Something’s missing from the console.”

  “I’m waiting, but not patiently.”

  “There’s a round mark, just over two inches in diameter. Faint, as if scrubbed clean. And two screw holes. A Ritchie Trek Surface-Mount Compass was mounted there, according to my boys. Inexpensive and commonly used by recreational fishermen hereabouts in case they get fog-bound. Only kind with that dimension.”

  “Bloody hell! There goes Pythagoras….”

  “Pythagoras?”

  “Never mind. Long story, involving navigation and a second boat, but which, apparently, was not involved after all.”

  “Wait. I’m with you, Morgan. Five miles, right? No land?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good reasoning, but easily managed with this compass. But why would someone then remove it?”

  Davies considered: “For the simple reason that it would lead us astray. But the next question is why hide the boat up Frenchman’s Creek? It was bound to be found eventually.”

  “Perhaps that was intentional, too,” Calum said. “Look, five miles out in the Channel they had no idea the body would be found so quickly. Let’s face it: that was pure chance. But they also couldn’t bring the boat back to its mooring at Flushing because they might have been seen. But if they ditched it up that creek it looks like someone trying to get away fast, someone who knows little about boats—remember that incompetent knot—but that someone is smart enough to clean the boat and strip it.”

  “Okay, I like it. Thank you, Calum. One boat, but operated and hidden by whom?”

  “That’s your department; I’m just the scene guy. But I’m always here for you, luv.”

  “You coming down for the MCIT meeting in Falmouth this afternoon?” she asked.

  “Get to see you, even if only officially? Of course!”

  She rang off and stared off across the busy room: PCs were on phones to boatyards and yacht clubs along the River Fal looking for any boaters who might have been cruising off the Lizard on the morning of seventeenth May. She listened to the hum of their voices, and yet it was Calum’s voice she heard, a soft baritone with just that edge of mischief: Always here for you, luv.

  It was true: ever since the Chynoweth case he’d been there for her, there to pull her back from whatever cliff she was about to jump from in her headlong rush to solve a case, there to support her in the force whenever she was her own best enemy. She wondered whether he’d been a factor in her promotion to detective inspector.

  So maybe Calum West really was looking after her, really did care about her, but if he did, what the hell was wrong with him? She rose and walked to the windows overlooking the gardens that led down toward the shore. Weather was coming in from the southwest. Rain soon. She had no experience of anyone caring for her: father and brother dead before she was born, emotionally shattered mother in an asylum, drunken and bitter grandmother who raised her. Her brief marriage? Almost professional: long talks about cases over supper, okay sex. But she’d always known she was the strong one in that relationship. It was one reason it ended…that and his affair with the woman now his wife: younger, pretty in a pale, porcelain sort of way. Sweet, undemanding, unthreatening. No wonder Max had left her. Then she thought about Calum’s two impish young daughters and how she’d so enjoyed playing with them at the Bodmin HQ Christmas party. She thought about the death of his wife from cancer, how he’d somehow managed to re-balance himself over time. Maybe it was the girls that had centered him. Or his devoted mother-in-law, Ruth. They needed him and he responded. Had anyone ever needed her? She knew that answer.

  She thought, too, about how she and Calum had tussled ever since they’d met and, truthfully, how much she enjoyed their give and take. And it occurred to her that he was the closest friend she had: a friend who told her the truth about herself and who cared about her, if at a distance maintained by their perpetual verbal sparring.

  Oh bugger! she said to herself as she returned to her desk and picked up the phone.

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, DCI Arthur Penwarren—“Mister”—sat at the head of the long table in the Starboard Room at the St Michaels Hotel. The rest of the incident team sat along the sides. Rain lashed the windows; an unseasonably vicious storm had crossed the Atlantic and was threatening to uproot trees the length of Southern England.

  Penwarren rose and stretched his back. Slender and exceptionally tall for a Cornishman, the DCI privately cursed the world’s chairs and tables for being so low. In his office at Bodmin he worked standing up. Though he was still a few years from retirement, his backswept, longish, non-regulation hair already had gone silver at the temples and his lower back was increasingly troublesome. Arthritic degeneration, the NHS doc had said. He seldom did field investigation work anymore, preferring to urge his detectives to lead and lending them his support. Though he believed in that management style, it was also a cover for his gathering infirmity.

  “Let me say that I fully understand the difficulty of this case,” he began.

  Nods around the table.

  “And I have made that clear to headquarters in Exeter.”

  More nods.

  Here it comes, Morgan thought: The But…

  “But it is becoming more and more difficult for me to justify the cost of this investigation with the big boys up there when we have had so little progress.”

  Silence.

  “So let me try to summarize where we are…”

  Morgan sighed and crossed her arms beneath her ample chest. Here we go…the review. The DCI turned to face the window, as if the jagged lines of rain there were a script from which he read.

  “We have a naked and apparently maimed body, found far out in the Channel. We have a woman who claims the deceased is her partner, whatever that means these days, and that he texted her to say he’d gone fishing with a friend. We have a small coastal skiff found up a creek, hidden and bleached so completely that no evidence of foul play remains, although the bleaching itself definitely suggests foul play and the boat is now in evidence.”

  Finally, he turned to face them: “How am I doing so far?”

  No one moved.

  “In the meantime, Bates and Novak here”—he nodded to them—“have uncovered evidence that the members of our victim’s Druid grove, which I gather is what they call their little congregation, thought their leader an odd sort of fellow, one given to strange augmentations to their official rites, yes? He was not, it seems, universally revered.

  “Still with me?”

  “If I might comment, Guv?”

  “No, you may not, Morgan. I am not finished.”

  As if as one, the rest of the team took a breath and did not look at her.

  “What I suggest is that we forget about boats and harbors and yacht clubs and focus on those who actually knew the victim. We’re looking for someone, or some people, who had a reason for wanting Archie Hansen dead, someone with a serious grudge: the Druids, the neighbors, the man’s own partner, nearby farmers, the woman at the Royal Cornwall Museum who knew about the treasure but, dare I say it, conveniently failed to interview him? Was she after it?

  “Footwork, people: Footwork.”

  Penwarren folded himself into his seat.

  “Guv?”

  The DCI rested an elbow on the table, his forehead in the cup of his left hand. “What is it, Morgan?”

  “The farm, sir. Who inherits? Terry here says the farmhouse alone is so old it’s practically a Heritage Site.”

  “Terry?”

  “Ancient cob farmhouse, Guv, maybe mid-seventeen hundreds, possibly earlier. Very rare.”

  “And you know this because…?”

  “My dad. He’s an architect. He specializes in restoring historic houses. Took
me along on site visits as a kid, what with my mum dead and all.”

  Davies nearly stopped breathing. She’d had no idea Bates’s mother, like her own family, was dead.

  “House and farm like that? Worth a fortune, I reckon,” Bates added.

  “Hansen’s partner, Ms. Johns, says she doesn’t know who inherits, despite their having been together for some years,” Davies said. “Is there a will? Johns says Hansen was divorced. Where’s his family? Do they stand to benefit? May I suggest it is time to have Calum’s SOCO boys do a thorough search of that house for any documentary evidence we might discover? Time for us to find his lawyer, perhaps? Bank and phone records?”

  Penwarren smiled. He was tired, but pleased, yet again, with this incorrigible but relentless detective. “It’s a bit irregular—no surprise, that, given it comes from you, Morgan.”

  Knowing smiles around the table.

  “Calum?” Penwarren asked.

  “It’s the victim’s house and land, not a suspect’s, and not a murder site. And therefore it’s not within SOCO’s remit. We’d need a search made legal.”

  “Right, then. I’ll see what I can do. Meanwhile, Bates and Novak: find out exactly where Hansen’s Druid grove members were the day he was found. You spoke to them before. Go back. And take DNA swabs. Each and every one of them is a person of interest. But make sure they understand we’re not targeting them because of their religion or whatever it is. That’s persecution and it would be all over the media. They’re persons of interest solely because of their association with the victim. Meanwhile, somebody remind me who talked to the museum lady...”

  “I did, Guv,” Morgan said.