Too Clever by Half

by Will North

  The concrete yard between the back of Hansen’s house and his outbuildings was swept clean as a front porch. West was thankful Hansen didn’t have cows, but he didn’t like the sterile scene. Davies wondered who’d been so fastidious. In the tractor shed the equipment was lined up in rows and the supplies in the loft were stacked in orderly piles. West had been in far more chaotic barns.

  “Everything shipshape and Bristol fashion,” he said, mostly to himself.

  “And wrong,” Morgan added.

  West nodded: “A bit too neat. I agree.”

  “No, sanitized.”

  “Yes, perhaps…”

  DURING THE NEXT few hours, West’s SOCO team, looking like rumpled polar bears in their white jumpsuits, prowled the house lifting prints, taping doorways for hair or thread samples, searching closets and wardrobes, pawing through drawers, examining every cupboard in the kitchen and every room in the big old house.

  Next, the Tactical Aid Group chaps ransacked the attic and jimmied open the door to the locked room there. West joined them as they entered, looked around the cramped, oddly louche space, and called down to Davies who was trying to make sense of the late owner’s uncharacteristically spotless kitchen, so unlike the man mess it had been not many days earlier.

  “Morgan?”

  “What?” she yelled. “I’m busy!”

  “You need to see this…”

  Davies huffed up the two flights of stairs to the attic and ducked under the low door, but not quite low enough, scraping the top of her scalp on its header.

  “Bloody hell!” she cursed. The impact brought tears, which she scrubbed away. She rubbed her scalp. No blood. When she recovered and looked up, she just stared.

  “What do you make of this?” West asked her.

  Along one low wall, a shelf held books devoted to witchcraft and Satanism. Beneath it, another shelf was stuffed with a messy collection of plastic bags containing various herbs and powders.

  “I don’t know what to make of this, Calum, but I know who will…”

  “Who?”

  Davies smiled.

  “No, wait Morgan, not Tamsin Bran. Mister warned you. The Chynoweth case was one thing; she was a person of interest in that one. Now you want to make her an expert witness? Penwarren will have your badge!”

  She locked her eyes on his. “Only if he knows, Calum, only if he knows. Look, I don’t propose that Bran be an expert witness. But she’s less than an hour away. And she knows everything there is to know about this sort of stuff,” she said waving her hand around the tiny room. “All we want to know is what this tells her about who Hansen was and what he may have been up to. Some in his grove have said they thought he was dabbling in something darker than Druidry. Maybe this is part of it?”

  “Okay, but hang on: Bran’s talent is looking into someone’s eyes and reading what is in their soul. Hansen’s dead.”

  “Yes, but she knows her witchcraft and will tell us the uses of this stuff in the bags.”

  “And you’re willing to risk your career to bring her on?”

  “No, I’m willing to risk my career, such as it is, to solve this case which, as you may have noticed, is going nowhere.” She pulled out her mobile and punched a preset.

  “Wait, you have Bran’s number on your mobile?”

  Davies smiled. “We keep in touch. I like to know how the girl, Tegan, is doing…”

  The call connected. “Tamsin? Morgan here. Look, I know this is short notice, but could you spare me a bit of your time? Today? Like in an hour or so? You can? Brilliant! I’m on the Lizard. West’s here, too. Higher Pennare farm. It’s on the Ordnance Survey Landranger map for Truro and Falmouth, near Helston and just south of Manaccan. Yes, it’s the Druid murder. Why did I imagine you wouldn’t know? There’s a little attic room full of books and potions or something. I need someone who can look at it all and tell us what the victim might have been up to before he was killed. No, it’s not official. But I need you.

  “Yes? Good. I am so grateful, Tamsin, which as you know, I seldom am.” She heard Bran laugh, rang off, and smiled. Never in a million years would Davies have imagined being friends with a witch. But she was.

  DAVIES WAS PROBING Hansen’s equipment shed with the Tactical Aid Group boys when she heard Tamsin Bran’s 1966 Morris 1000 estate wagon wheezing up the drive. The car, with its original sage green paint and varnished wooden side panels, was in mint condition. But its tiny 1000 cc engine had never been meant for highway driving. Davies could almost imagine it trying to catch its breath as it eased to a halt in the farmyard.

  Bran stepped out from the right side driver’s door and, to Davies’s surprise, Tegan St. Claire, the young girl whom Bran had adopted after the Chynoweth case, jumped out of the passenger side, trailing a black cat with one white paw on a lead.

  The girl, now eleven and, it seemed to Davies after only a year, a half foot taller, rushed up and hugged her.

  “Morgan! Morgan! Look at Desmond! He thinks he’s my dog!”

  The cat, Desmond, had been a twitchy, somewhat neurologically challenged feline when Davies had seen him last at Tamsin’s restored mill outside of Penzance, a cat given to occasionally racing about howling as if possessed. But here he was, trotting along beside the girl as if he meant to be nowhere else so happily. As she walked with him, Desmond kept checking in with his keeper, his head angling to one side to watch for signals from the leggy girl.

  “Seems to have a way with animals, Tegan does,” Bran said, smiling broadly at her protégé. “Talks to the ponies up on the moors, too. When you told me what you’d found, I thought perhaps our girl’s special skills might help.”

  Davies warmed to the phrase “our girl.” Tegan St. Claire held a special place in her heart. Not for the first time she thought: this is the kind of kid I’d want as my daughter…. Not that, at Davies’s age, she’d ever have one. That brief span of her life she’d devoted to policing, and so she held the odd girl dear. Tegan was whip-smart and well-mannered, thanks to Bran, but also possessed of certain skills that set her apart. Tegan St. Claire was genuinely clairsentient. She could see things that were happening far away from her in the present, as well as things that happened in the recent past, even though she had not been there.

  Davies explained the scene as they approached the house. West met them at the kitchen door, beaming. He could not help it. Much as he thought Penwarren would go ballistic, he was delighted to see Tamsin and Tegan again. With two daughters of his own, he could see young Tegan was thriving.

  “What do you seek from us?” Tamsin asked the two of them in her almost whispery voice. Morgan noticed that the gleaming streak of silver on one side of her jet black bob haircut had widened ever so slightly, but that she was otherwise unchanged: the woman was still disgracefully slender, elegant, exotic. Tegan, while taller, was still the same luminous girl they had met the year before. But her strawberry blond hair had been cut to chin length now and curved upward along her chiseled jawline, just like Tamsin’s.

  “What I seek of you both is wisdom,” Davies said. “A man has been killed. He had a history as a local Druid leader. He seems to have had a secret room in his attic which we have opened. I ask only that you examine that room and tell me what it says to you, if anything. I trust your special knowledge and this could be a great help in our investigation. But Penwarren must never know.”

  “Yes, DCI Penwarren,” Tamsin said, smiling. “He is a truly good man but has not yet been able to embrace those parts of experience which are beyond the reach of his lovely rational mind. But I cannot hold that against him. In the end, he became an ally and a friend, for which I am grateful.”

  Bran leaned close to Davies and whispered, “He, too, has checked on Tegan…”

  “Give him time, Tamsin,” Morgan said.

  CALUM LED, AND they climbed the stairs to Archie’s attic room. Tamsin entered first, looked around, and immediately went to the bookshelf.

  Tegan stood just inside the door
with Desmond. The fur on the cat’s back had risen nearly vertical and he began yowling.

  “Things happen here,” Tegan said. “Scary things. That I can see. So can Desmond. We will leave. This is best.”

  Bran listened and then sent the girl off. She scanned the short bookshelf and pulled out a single volume, the one that seemed to have been most heavily used.

  “Ah yes,” she said. “Paul Huson’s Mastering Witchcraft…”

  “Excuse me?” Morgan said.

  She showed Morgan the cover. “If you wanted a somewhat contemporary guide to the darkest of occult arts, this book would be it. It was published in the early nineteen seventies, a time when Wicca and other pagan beliefs were in ascendance. But Huson was no Wiccan. Huson’s vision and purpose was to use alleged ‘black arts’ from ancient times to gain mastery over others, especially for sexual conquest. A charlatan, certainly, and yet this book, and Huson’s own practices, are still followed by people on the fringe. The Old Craft, which my ancestors and I practice, has nothing to do with gaining power over others. We, and our sisters and brothers in Wicca, have mostly to do with healing and with worshipping our inherent connection with the timeless turn of the seasons, the sun, and the moon. We do not seek to control others, for sexual conquest or any other reason. But it does not surprise me that this was your Hansen’s bible, or that he is dead. I believe some people feared him.”

  Davies noticed that the tips of Bran’s fingers were white from gripping the book, as if receiving information from it.

  “Your victim was not a genuine Druid,” she said, finally. “He was an opportunist bent upon using the spells in this book, along with the herbs and other materials he gathered here, some of them opiates, by the way, to gain control over others, principally women, perhaps the women in his own Druid grove, but of that I cannot say.”

  “Why did Tegan leave?” Davies asked.

  “I think she saw things that happened in this room and it frightened her, things she is not yet old enough to comprehend. At a guess, I suspect it is sexual. Even I can feel that. I shall not ask her and hope you will not, either. But I will talk with her later if she wishes to share. We have an agreement: we trust each other and share when we need to. I do not press upon her gifts, nor she on mine.”

  “And the cat?”

  Tamsin smiled. “That cat is smarter than us all…”

  AFTER TAMSIN AND Tegan left, West said to Davies, “If Hansen was up to no good, why did whoever cleaned the rooms elsewhere leave this one as it is?”

  Davies smiled and shook her head: “Because it’s a ruse, Calum. It’s meant to direct our attention to the practices of the Druid grove, and whomever he might have offended or threatened. Otherwise, that room would have been as sanitized as the bedroom and bathroom and kitchen downstairs…”

  Now West smiled. Davies made a face: “What?”

  “Not quite as sanitized, perhaps, as someone may have thought,” Calum said. “My boys have sprayed luminol over both rooms. We got some blood. Only traces. Maybe useless. Someone was very careful, very professional, I’d say. But not quite careful enough, because I have something to show you downstairs.”

  IN ARCHIE’S CLOSET-LIKE office just off the kitchen, Calum switched on the single overhead bulb and ushered Morgan in. There was barely room for the two of them in front of Hansen’s grimy desk.

  “Notice anything?”

  “Let’s not play silly buggers, Calum; what the hell is it?”

  “Humor me. Have a look.”

  She did. “I don’t see a damn thing.”

  Calum switched on his torch and angled it along the wall where Hansen’s collection of antique swords hung. In the slanting light of the beam she could see it: like a section of wall where a painting had long hung but now had been removed, there was a faint shadow, a shadow in the shape of another sword, smaller than the ones above. A sword now missing.

  Twenty-Nine

  COVERED IN A fresh Tyvek jumpsuit, Rafe Barnes, West’s lead scene of crimes investigator, climbed down into the chamber on the southeast edge of the field to which Novak had led them. The Tactical Aid Group boys had removed the corrugated steel panel they uncovered when they’d removed the topsoil. West watched. His staff archaeologist, Beth Thompson, was at his side. She fairly vibrated with the desire to descend, too.

  After a quick look around, Barnes called up through the hole: “One of those Iron Age fogous, I reckon boss, but more primitive, if that’s the word, than the one in the Chynoweth case last year. Massive flat stone on the floor has been moved, and beneath where it sat there’s a niche. Some kind of old round clay vessel sits in the hole. Empty.”

  “Any chance of getting prints?” West called down.

  “The container is pretty dusty, Guv. The stone, too. But we’ll give it a go. Holes in the floor of the chamber look like someone anchored some kind of winch to move the stone. There’s a come-along in Hansen’s equipment shed, by the way. Could be that.”

  “Most farmers have one, Rafe.” He turned to Novak: “What’s Tregareth have to say?”

  “Only that he never went down there. Only Hansen did, he said.”

  “All the more reason, then, to try to get some prints or fibers or hairs. He was Hansen’s tenant. Reckon a treasure would have set him free.”

  “Rafe? I’m sending Beth down to look at that clay vessel before she dives down the hole on her own accord. Let her examine it before your lads go to work.”

  When she reemerged, Thompson’s face was flushed with excitement. “Iron Age, Calum. Maybe older. Sadly, also cracked. But the vessel itself is probably very valuable, a treasure of the period.”

  “I wonder why it wasn’t removed?”

  Thompson laughed, “Because whatever was in it was far more valuable, boss.”

  ON FRIDAY MORNING, first June, DC Terry Bates steered her unmarked police car through the rocky gap south of Keswick that her map told her was called “the Jaws of Borrowdale.” She was in the heart of Cumbria’s Lake District. When the narrow B5289 finally exited the Jaws, the vista below presented a pastoral, mountain-rimmed valley, its verdant bottomland crisscrossed with lush hedgerows. The little river Derwent twisted northward across the valley floor, this way and that, following the contours. She’d never seen any place more picture perfect.

  So penned in by mountains was the valley that the sun had not yet reached the valley floor and there was the sharp tang of coal smoke in the morning air. It might be June by the calendar, but you couldn’t prove that here in the far north of England: smoke curled from the chimneys of stone farmhouses that were scattered like so many grey dice across the valley floor. In the tiny hamlet of Rosthwaite, she pulled into the car park of the whitewashed Scafell Hotel to check her notes.

  After the MCIT meeting at Camborne on Wednesday morning, Terry Bates had gone straight back to the Bodmin operational hub. It hadn’t taken her long on the computer and phone to trace Hansen’s ex-wife. The Child Support Agency had been helpful, and confirmed that Hansen had indeed been sending a modest support payment for his two children to his ex-wife, and had been doing so for some years. The agency also had a postal address.

  Taking full advantage of her police car, Terry had raced north on the M6 to the Lake District the next day, thirty-first May. She stayed in the far right passing lane almost the full length of the motorway, and used the car’s hidden flashers and strobes to clear away slower drivers. She loved the freedom and power the official car gave her. In just over seven hours, with only one petrol stop and loo break, she’d reached the Lake District and had spent the night visiting with her dead mother’s sister, Annie, near Carlisle.

  Now, as she looked at the map on the seat beside her the valley narrowed to the south and split into two steep-sided branches rimmed by soaring fells. There were only two more tiny hamlets in the valley: Seathwaite, up the southeastern branch of the valley, and Seatoller, up the southwestern branch, accessible via a road which climbed up through the Honister Pass at perh
aps the steepest gradient in all of Britain, a rise of one foot for every four feet of road.

  Just after ten, she stepped into the tiny reception area of the Langstrath Inn, the lone guest house at the end of the narrow dead end lane into Seathwaite. There was no one about. She looked around the sitting room, which had somehow retained the homey comforts of decades past: plush old easy chairs, a morning coal fire left to die after breakfast, a side table with an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. In an adjoining room there were several tables where breakfast had recently been served, but not yet fully cleared. A sideboard held cereal boxes and half-empty pitchers of orange and grapefruit juice and containers of yoghurt.

  She pressed a button atop the reception desk. Somewhere far off in the house she heard a jangly ring. Some deeply English part of her felt she was violating someone’s privacy.

  A minute passed, and finally a woman emerged, via the kitchen beyond the breakfast room, wiping her hands on a stained white apron.

  “Oh, hello. Sorry, just tidying up after breakfast. Houseful of climbers we had this morning, all heading up the Scafell Massif, out our back door. Breakfast, packed lunches, the lot…”

  The woman was, Bates guessed, mid-fifties. Trim, but looking harried as perhaps anyone would be in the bed and breakfast business: face beginning to show its age, hair close-cropped and dyed the color of a ripe garnet yam. Bates could see greying roots. The woman pulled off her apron and stepped behind the desk.

  “How may I help you? I’m sorry to say that, this being June and all, we are fully booked tonight, but perhaps I can find someone else here in the valley who might provide accommodation…?”

  Bates pulled out her warrant card. “I won’t be needing a room, ma’am. May I assume you are Margie Hansen?”

  The woman recoiled as if she’d been slapped. “I don’t use that name anymore. It’s Roberts now. But I am, yes.”

  “I’m detective constable Terry Bates, Devon and Cornwall Police. I’ve come to talk to you about your ex-husband, Archie.”