by Will North
“Talk to her again.”
“I really don’t think…”
“Talk to her, Morgan. Find out where she was the morning Hansen was found. From what I can tell from the HOLMES II file, she’s the only one who knew about the possible value of the find besides the dead man. The only one. That’s a neon light flashing ‘opportunity’ to me. So let’s not ignore the obvious. And while you’re at it, talk to this Tregareth fellow. Says Hansen found a chamber beneath his field but also says he doesn’t know anything else. Lean on him.”
“Can the search include the field and chamber?”
“Like I said, Morgan, I’ll see what I can do. You’ll be the first to know, after Calum. For now, I think we are done here….”
“Guv?”
Penwarren sighed. “What now, Morgan?”
“This is driving all of us ‘round the twist, too.”
Penwarren smiled and looked around the table. “You people are the best I’ve ever had under my command. Carry on.”
AT TEN ON Saturday morning, twenty-sixth May, Morgan Davies paced the lobby of the Royal Cornwall Museum, the massive neoclassical granite edifice on River Street in Truro that holds the county’s most valuable archaeological, cultural, and historical artifacts. A volunteer at the front desk was trying to locate Patricia Boden, the museum’s curator for Bronze and Iron Age artifacts and the British Museum’s finds liaison officer for Cornwall.
“She doesn’t work Saturdays, usually,” the young volunteer said, “but I’m almost certain I saw her a few minutes ago. She’s here somewhere.”
Davies slapped two palms on the receptionist’s desk and barked: “She damn well better be, we have an appointment,” showing the young woman her warrant card.
The woman held up a hand as she listened to her phone. “Okay, right, I’ll send her right up.”
The volunteer stepped back from her desk and blinked several times at the woman looming before her. “She’s waiting for you in the Courtney Library.”
“Do you have cute little names for all of your rooms?”
“Actually, ma’am, the library is named after…”
“Save it. Where?”
The young woman blinked again. “Upstairs. Shall I find someone to guide you?”
“Do I look blind? Just point me.”
Stairs rose from the reception area, and she found the library immediately. It was long room, two stories high. The walls were lined with shelves and file drawers. A circular wrought iron stairway led to the stacks in the oval gallery above. Two women sat at a long table on the main level. The older of the two, at the head of the table, rose: “I’m Hilary Gracefield, the museum’s director, and this is Ms. Boden. I believe you two have spoken by phone but not met. How can we help you, detective?” The director was partridge plump and clearly protective of one of her brood.
“I don’t think we need a chaperone, director.”
Gracefield didn’t flinch: “I’ll be the judge of that, shall I?”
Davies shrugged: “As you wish.”
She turned to the younger woman and, as was her style, skipped preliminaries: “Miss Boden, where were you on the morning of Thursday, seventeenth May of this year? I do realize you may not know that straightaway. If you don’t recall, I’ll understand. You can get back to me.”
“No need. It would have been a workday. I can check right now.” Boden flipped open her laptop, punched a few keys, and turned the screen toward Davies. The computer showed she had been at the British Museum in London for a training course. Davies wondered if this whole act had been rehearsed.
“Training about what?”
“Being finds liaison officer, as it happens. There were liaison officers there from most counties. Because of budget cuts, county coroner’s offices no longer have a coroner’s officer to investigate reported treasure finds with us when we hear of them. The course was about how to use local police authorities to perform that function: how to inform them about the task and so forth. A detective superintendent from the Met presided along with a senior official from the British Museum in charge of administering the Treasure Act.”
“So that would suggest that someone can confirm that you were, indeed, there?”
“Just a minute, detective!” Gracefield erupted. “What are you insinuating? That Ms. Boden is lying, or is a suspect of some sort? That’s idiotic!”
Davies smiled. Dealing with outrage was an almost daily part of her job. Outrage beaded and rolled off her as if she were greased.
“I insinuated nothing of the sort, director. I asked a simple question. Ms. Boden here is not a suspect, she is merely a person of interest. She is a person of interest because she attempted to investigate a reported treasure find by a man who was subsequently murdered, and in a particularly brutal manner, I might add. Tortured.”
“Good Lord,” Gracefield said.
Patricia Boden stepped in: “I am sorry. What else do you wish to know?”
“You visited the farm of a Mr.…” Davies glanced at her notes. “Tregareth?”
“Yes, that was the name the caller gave when he called Bonhams, the London auctioneers. The call was then reported to the British Museum, and I was contacted by someone at the Met, who passed on what little was known. But I got lucky: there’s only one active farmer named Tregareth in Cornwall.”
“You visited Mr. Tregareth with PC Novak from the Falmouth station, is that correct?”
“Yes. But I’m sure you know that already.”
Davies looked up from her notes. “Indeed. I do. How did he strike you?”
Boden blushed. “Constable Novak?”
“Tregareth!” Davies wanted to slap her silly.
“I didn’t believe him when he said he had no idea what I was talking about. I said as much. I’m afraid I’m rather new at all this investigating,” she said, glancing at her superior. “It was Constable Novak who managed to diffuse the situation and that was how we came to know that Tregareth’s neighbor had apparently discovered an underground chamber on his property. Tregareth was right steamed that his neighbor, Mr. Hansen, had used his name. And he showed us the field where the chamber was found.”
“And yet you pursued neither Tregareth nor Hansen…?”
“That’s not true! I called Hansen’s number several times and left messages but got no reply.”
“And despite the fact that you are the county’s only finds liaison officer and items covered by the Treasure Act had reportedly been found, it did not occur to you to interview Mr. Hansen in person?”
“I hadn’t the time to drive all the way down to the Lizard without knowing Hansen would be there to meet me. I did try to make an appointment!”
Gracefield intervened: “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to run an underfunded, understaffed institution like the Royal Cornwall Museum, detective?”
“No, I do not,” Davies said, leveling a look at the director. “Nor do I care. A man who apparently found something old and valuable lies on a slab in the mortuary at the Royal Cornwall Hospital at Treliske, just up the road from this museum. The only person who knew anything about that discovery was the dead man himself and your own Ms. Boden. Thus, as I am sure even you can appreciate, Ms. Boden is a significant person of interest. You deal with past history; I deal with the present, and the present is often unpleasant.”
Abruptly, Davies rose and collected her notebook. “This is a criminal investigation,” she said to Gracefield, her voice sharp as teeth. “I came to your museum as a courtesy. I could just as well have hauled Ms. Boden up to the incident room in Falmouth for a formal interrogation, which I may yet do. Like I said at the outset, we did not need you as a chaperone. Nor, in that role, did you do anything but obstruct, which I will remember.” She passed a business card to Patricia Boden. “By Monday morning I will expect a full and signed statement covering your meeting with Tregareth and your movements and activities up to and including seventeenth May. Are we clear?”
Boden blinked.
Gracefield was glacial. Davies nodded once and left.
Twenty-Four
“OKAY, SO SOME of them thought Hansen odd, that’s clear,” Terry Bates said. “But does that make any of them murderers?”
Bates and PC Novak had just concluded another round of interviews and DNA swabs with the members of Hansen’s Druid grove. It was late Sunday afternoon, twenty-seventh May. Novak was driving their police car. They were just approaching the junction with the A394 at the eastern edge of Helston.
“You’re a man, what did you think of the women in Hansen’s grove?”
Instead of answering, Novak said, “Would you mind very much if we stopped for a few minutes at the Sainsbury’s at this roundabout? I need to collect a few things for dinner.”
Bates looked at her driver, then at her watch. “Sure. Fine. We’ve plenty of time.”
Inside the automatic entry doors to the superstore, Novak grabbed a wire basket. Bates followed. The produce section was just ahead, and he prowled it like a prey animal, plucking a small shiny green courgette from one bin, a slender purple aubergine from another, a yellow onion, a head of garlic, four ripe tomatoes, a green pepper, a small pot of fresh basil, and a plump lemon. As if he were in another world which did not include her, he strode to the back of the store to the seafood counter, where he ordered a dozen fresh prawns, their shells a bright greenish orange. “Let me smell,” he said to the young lady behind the counter. She held them out. “Fine,” he said.
In the wine aisle, where he chose a dry French rosé from Provence, Adam Novak scrutinized the label on the back. “Good,” he mumbled to himself, “twenty-five percent Cinsault.”
Bates finally spoke up: “You cook?”
Novak startled and turned. “Oh, dear. I’m sorry. I did not mean to ignore you; I was trying to be quick. Yes, I cook. Tonight I will make ratatouille with garlic prawns and lemon.”
“Hot date?”
Novak’s olive skin was too dark to show a blush. He looked at the basket for a moment instead. “No. I cook for me. It's how I separate myself from the police work, how I end my day. It calms me. We can check out now; did I take too long?”
Bates looked at her watch again and smiled. “Less than fifteen minutes. You’re a speed shopper. Impressive.” As he stood in line to pay, she began to form a very different picture of PC Novak: not a ladies man, after all, but a man’s man, comfortable in his own skin, whether as constable or cook. Interesting…
Back on the A394, Novak said, “I have been thinking about your earlier question. I think the women in Hansen’s grove were somewhere between attracted to and intimidated by him. I have to wonder if there was more going on between them and him than Druidry. I’d guess affairs. But the one I find most troubling is Mrs. Winters’s husband, Brad. As when we interviewed him before, he was dismissive of Hansen, but very high on Charlotte Johns and seemed eager to silence his wife. Did he do something once for Johns and now he’s in her debt? Or did they have an affair?”
Bates listened carefully. Novak was confirming her own somewhat vague impressions, but more succinctly. She admired his mind.
Novak had just switched off the ignition in the police lot at the Falmouth nick when he turned and asked, “You like prawns, then?”
She patted his forearm. “Thank you, Adam. That’s very sweet of you. But I’ve a long drive back up to Bodmin.”
“Hot date?” Adam echoed.
She opened the passenger door and stepped out, ducking her head in again: “You’re joking, right? I’m a policewoman…”
Novak watched Bates cross the lot toward her own car, her reddish hair dancing as she walked. The woman was slender and, at maybe five-foot-four, almost tiny. But there was strength in her. She radiated it. That bit was as attractive as the rest of her, which was saying something. He locked the car and went inside to file his report on the Druid interviews.
Bates sped up the A39 on her way home and thought: You bloody idiot, Terry....
EARLY SUNDAY AFTERNOON, as the western sun faded the sky to a pale, watery blue, Morgan strode into the Blisland Inn, just north of Bodmin. The big man behind the bar looked up, smiled, and waved. The place was, as usual, packed tight as a sardine tin with locals, the old friends calling out jibes to their chums. But they were quiet when Morgan entered. She was still a bit new and there was a rumor she was a detective.
The landlord ignored the crowd at the bar and called, “Pint of Keltik, Morgan?”
She nodded, slipped a hand through the scrim of bodies at the bar, paid, withdrew her foaming pint, and found a seat at a small table by the hearth.
Back in March, uncertain as to how her promotion to detective inspector at the Bodmin police hub would sit, and sad to leave Newlyn, the fishing port where she’d lived for some years when she was head of CID in Penzance, Morgan had decided to register her renovated former sail loft with a holiday letting agency, just in case she might want one day to return. The furnished stone building would earn her more in a summer than its mortgage would cost in a year.
Initially, after her promotion, she’d lived in a guest house and, in her off hours, would drive through the surrounding countryside looking for a village that might have some of the comradery she’d felt among the rough and tumble fishermen at Newlyn. One day, a few miles northwest of Bodmin, she’d wandered into the Blisland Inn at lunchtime. There was a welcoming wood fire in the granite hearth near the bar.
“Double vodka tonic, please,” she said to the man behind the bar.
He recoiled and pressed a hand against his chest as if wounded. “Madam, please! Spare a moment to regard this award-winning array of local cask conditioned ales we have on offer, the largest in the region, not to mention our collection of hard ciders from Somerset and Devon.”
Morgan looked down along the bar, and had to admit she’d never seen so many pump handles—nearly a dozen—for pulling ale or cider up from the cellar. Clearly the inn was a Free House, unaffiliated with any particular brewery, but it was more than just that: it was an aficionado’s haven.
“Impressive,” she acknowledged. “You the barman?”
“Landlord actually, madam: Garry Ronan, at your service. But may I just ask, given this splendid range of good and honest British brews, how you can even consider something as foreign as vodka? Vodka? That’s from Russia, yeah? Our former enemy and dodgy new friend? Come on, then…where’s your patriotism?”
The man was big, bearded, and full of playful trouble. Morgan took to him instantly.
She fished in her purse, slapped a five pound note on the bar, and said, “Give me one good reason to change.”
Ronan stroked his beard and looked at the beamed ceiling of the pub as if seeking wisdom there. Dozens of antique ceramic “Toby” beer jugs hung from the blackened beams.
“Vodka drinker. Hmm…. Well then, you’ll want something clean and smooth, not too hoppy, so not an India pale ale. Too sharp, that would be, like gin. I’m thinking something in a nice amber, with just the slightest bite, like it had a touch of tonic and lemon.”
“Your choice, but I’m only tasting,” Morgan said, her head cocked to one side, her hand on the five pound note, the picture of skepticism. “Not buying, mind you.”
Ronan placed two beefy hands on the bar and leaned across. “I can see you are a hard one. But I’ve had harder…”
She chuckled but did not correct him. He had her pegged.
He moved down the bar, considered for a moment, pulled a half pint of “Keltik Magic,” and set it before her. There was the slightest lip of creamy foam. “This is from a local boutique brewery run by a chap who knows his stuff. It’s a medium amber, a bit fruity, but also smooth, with very light hops. On the house, madam, so as to lure your delightful custom in future.”
Ronan admired the woman before him: a fine strapping lady, big but not overweight. Strong bones and sculptured facial features, spiked, bleached hair, just the hint of lipstick, but no other makeup. A woman who did not need to impress with
embellishment, is what he thought: impressive in her own right.
“Passing through or new here?”
Morgan sipped and then smiled. She’d never been much of a beer drinker, but the landlord was right: this was delicious and refreshing. Clean, but also smooth.
“New,” she said, finally answering his question. “House hunting.”
“Buying or letting?”
“You an estate agent then, too?”
Ronan shook his head. “I’ve been landlord of this pub for quite some years now. There’s not much I don’t know hereabouts, and what I don’t my customers will tell me. What are you looking for then?”
Morgan drained her glass.
“Letting, for now. New job. Looking for someplace with history, but freshly renovated. Not too big. Two bedrooms maybe. Maybe just one. Not far from here. I work in Bodmin now.”
“What at, then?”
Morgan hesitated, but this fellow was so open and genuine she decided to trust him.
“Detective. Devon and Cornwall Police.”
Ronan nodded. “Reckon that’s a good recommendation. Might be I know of something that would suit. Just up the moor a bit to the north. Lovely spot. Fine view of old Brown Willy, highest spot in all of Cornwall. Property’s an old stone hay barn renovated to high standard to be a holiday letting, except not too many people want to spend their hols up on rainy Bodmin Moor, except in summer. Weather’s too unpredictable, rest of the year. Fully furnished it is, as well. Contemporary, but comfy.”
“I can’t afford what holiday lettings go for. I’ve just listed my own house in Newlyn with a holiday agency.”
“That’s exactly my point: Offer the owner a year-round rental that would earn him more than a few weeks of summer hols, and I bet he’ll bite. Great spot it is. Big views.” He leaned forward and whispered: “Reckon I can have a word with him…”
“You get a commission or something for this?”
Ronan smiled. “What I get is a new neighbor and a customer I already admire.”
“Go on, then,” Morgan said, pushing the five pound note across the bar. “Pull me an honest pint.”