by Will North
Charlotte Johns sat at the edge of the settee, her hands clasped around her knees, and attempted small talk with DC Bates, mostly having to do with her passion for gardening and organic vegetables. When Davies entered finally, Bates left the room and slipped into the dimly lit observation room, which was manned by a surveillance officer who adjusted the audio and video remotely.
After dispensing with the usual legal formalities, Davies said, “I want to begin by thanking you, Ms. Johns, for agreeing to this interview about the death of your partner, Archibald Hansen.”
“Yes. Archie…”
“We are sorry for your loss. It must be very hard to take in…”
“We were so close.”
“Yet you never married?”
“We are Druids; we do not marry.”
“Close, and yet you did not live together?”
“He preferred it that way. Archie was a very private man. He had been hurt before in marriage. He kept a distance.”
“Except when he was with you, is that right?”
“Yes, then he was very loving.”
Davies shifted gears, an interrogation technique she used often: “Hansen had a police record. Did you know that? Dealing in pornographic videos, some years ago. Was that part of his ‘loving’?”
Johns bristled: “I don’t know what you mean. That was before I met him, before his divorce.”
“Yes, yes, I understand. But were there aspects of your relationship with him that strayed into practices that ever troubled you?”
“Not at all.”
Davies wished she’d asked the question differently. The answer was ambiguous. She switched subjects again.
“You reported Mr. Hansen missing on Saturday morning, nineteenth May. If you were accustomed to being with him beginning Friday evening, as you have said, why the delay in reporting?”
“He did not call me that Friday. Sometimes he just didn’t.” Johns lowered her head. “It was not always the relationship I’d hoped it would be.”
“Yet you stayed.”
“Yes. Many people do.”
“Why, Ms. Johns?”
She looked up and smiled. “There were offsetting benefits, detective.”
“Financial?”
“No. Use your imagination.”
“I see.”
“I doubt you can.”
“Well then, let me ask you this: Did Mr. Hansen ever betray you? Was he unfaithful?”
“Of course not.”
“What if I told you our Scene of Crimes people confiscated the computer in the room just off his kitchen and our tech experts in Exeter discovered evidence of infidelity?”
“Impossible. He was loyal to me. I made sure he was. I attended to his needs.”
“I am going to show you a video on the screen against that opposite wall, and I want you to tell me if you recognize anyone…”
Davies clicked the remote on the coffee table and the video appeared. Johns watched, expressionless.
“And?” Davies asked when it ended.
Johns sat motionless before finally responding.
“Yes,” she said finally.
“And these people are?”
Johns stiffened. “They are, as I’m sure you already know, detective, Archie and Joey Tregareth, his tenant’s wife.”
“Did you have any knowledge of this relationship?”
“No.”
“You’ve never seen these images before?”
Johns looked away. “No.”
“Then may I ask why your own fingerprints are on his computer keyboard? Because, you see, our computer experts in Exeter say this video was viewed just a few days before your partner’s death.”
Johns smiled again, a bitter smile this time: “Maybe he liked watching it. Like those movies you mentioned….”
“So you deny using Hansen’s computer?”
“I do not. I do not have a computer; we share—shared—his. He would start it up or whatever you call it and bring up Google for me. I also use the computers at the library, too, though I am not very adept.”
“For what, may I ask?”
“Organic gardening tips. I am an avid gardener and vegetarian.”
“Gardening. Very satisfying, I’m sure.”
“Yes, it is.”
“And as we’re on the subject of digging in the dirt, what about the treasure…?”
“The what?”
“You know, the treasure Archie found in that underground chamber in one of his fields a few weeks ago. A fogou, those ancient chambers are called. Learned about them in a previous case, I did. Date back to the Iron Age. Can you imagine? That’s thousands of years ago, even before the Romans invaded. Amazing. Anyway, we have evidence that Archie tried to get a London auction house to sell what he’d found. But he didn’t get anywhere. Turns out it’s illegal to sell them privately, because that sort of stuff belongs to the Crown. According to our information, he used Bobby Tregareth’s name instead of his own.”
“I haven’t a clue what you’re on about, detective. It is preposterous. He’d have told me straightaway if he’d found something. We were partners and had been for years!”
Davies nodded toward the television screen. “Despite that?”
She ignored this. “And as for that Bobby Tregareth, I should be wary of him if I were you. Slippery character and none too bright. Unreliable with his rent payments, Archie said, and chasing my skirts whenever he came to visit. Farming partners, they were, him and Archie, working fields nearby. Often came for tea on weekend afternoons, checking me out when he knew Archie wasn’t here. Flirting.”
“Did he indeed?”
“Yes, and these questions are getting tiresome and intrusive. If you’ve had enough of delving into my private life, perhaps someone can take me home?”
“I have just one more question, for now at least, Ms. Johns. Given Mr. Hansen’s text message to you on the day he disappeared, we need to examine your mobile phone and place it in evidence. We can get a warrant, but it would be simpler if you would relinquish it voluntarily. You’ll receive a receipt and it will be returned.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t. I’ve lost it somewhere, I can’t imagine where. But it hardly matters, as Archie was the only one who called me on it. Are we done now?”
“Certainly, Ms. Johns, and I thank you for your cooperation.” Davies twisted briefly and nodded to the control room to end the session. Then she rose from her seat and opened the door of the suite. “Someone will be right with you, Ms. Johns. But let me ask you this: Why would a strapping young man like Bobby Tregareth lust after a woman as old and worn as you, a woman nearly twice his age? I find that curious…” Davies smiled and left the room.
In the corridor outside, Bates waited. “I’d hate to be on the wrong side of an interview with you,” she said.
“Pressure and surprise, pressure and surprise. It breaks them down,” Davies said. “But she’s a tough one, either innocent or one hell of an actress. I’m about to identify her as our prime suspect, but there has to be someone else. She could not have arranged this killing herself. Meanwhile, call Calum. Ask him if his team have found a mobile. If not, have him bring us her credit card and phone bills. We’ll start there.”
Bates nodded. “On it, Morgan.”
Davies hesitated, then put a hand on Terry’s shoulder. “I know you are, Terry. Apart from Calum, I’ve never had an investigating officer I trusted more than you. You’ll go far. Meanwhile, Johns is trying to implicate Tregareth. It’s plausible. Could be he helped her and now she’s distancing. Let’s talk to him next. Send Johns home and meet me at the Falmouth nick.”
CALUM WEST PACED the sitting room of Charlotte’s bungalow in his Tyvek jumpsuit. The sun streamed in through her patio doors and the heat gain had him beginning to feel like a poached chicken inside his coveralls. His team was finding nothing of value. There were no blood traces. There were few identifiable hairs or fibers attached to door jambs or furniture. There were fe
w fingerprints in the house and all them were Johns’s. The place was otherwise spotless. Either the woman was obsessive about cleaning—and it certainly looked that way—or she was hiding something. But what? There were a few somewhat provocative clothes in her bedroom but Calum had seen worse. Private lives. Where was the evidence of Johns' daily life? His people had taken into evidence all of the woman’s bills and other paperwork, which they’d found stuffed into one drawer in a dresser in the kitchen, the shelf of which displayed what looked to West as hand-thrown earthenware platters and serving plates. The paperwork would be copied and returned.
Outside, his people searched around the house, beneath the shrubbery, and well beyond the home’s property limits. Like the interior of the house, the grounds were well-kempt and the woman’s vegetable garden, even at this early stage in the growing year, was thriving in artfully-built raised beds, a picture of neat and efficient cultivation. There were Oriental salad greens, collards just coming into their own, pea shoots already reaching for the sky on their trellises, wintered-over leeks fattening, a patch of fast-growing radishes just forming their cotyledons, and young lettuces bursting with new leaves.
West looked over the garden and could think only of his dead wife, Catherine, and of her love of gardening. Before she’d succumbed to cancer, she’d had him build a small glassed-in greenhouse so she could start tomatoes early, and his daughters, Meagan and Kaitlin, haunted that greenhouse almost daily waiting for the first fluted leaves to appear, as if their appearance would cancel their mother’s gathering infirmity: life in the face of death. He’d ignored the greenhouse since Catherine’s death and her garden had gone to weeds. It made him feel guilty to let it go but the thought of working in it paralyzed him. But his daughters were pressing him. So was their Gran, Ruby, who looked after the girls. They all wanted continuity. He’d have to get on to it, and soon.
Thirty-Six
TERRY BATES SWUNG Morgan’s unmarked white Ford estate into Bobby Tregareth’s farmyard at eight in the morning, Wednesday, sixth June. The small house, whitewashed stone and probably Victorian, had a broad view of the lower reaches of Gillan Creek and out toward the Channel, which, on this morning, was choppy. There were several outbuildings in the farm compound. Morgan was hoping to catch Tregareth before he went out to tend his fields. His tractor was still in his barn, a good sign. She knocked at the kitchen door facing the farmyard and, eventually, Tregareth appeared, barefoot, unshaven, and in pajama bottoms only.
“Who are you and what do you want at this hour?” Upstairs, a baby was wailing. Tregareth looked like it had been a long night.
Davies showed him her warrant card. “Devon and Cornwall Police, Mr. Tregareth, Criminal Investigation Division. I wonder if we might have a word?”
“What’s this to do with?”
“The death of your neighbor, Mr. Archie Hansen.”
The baby’s cries intensified.
Bobby nodded. “I need to attend to the boy. Come in and sit.”
When he returned, still barefoot, but with the baby, he had on a khaki work shirt and farmer’s blue coveralls. He cradled the fussing infant in the crook of a beefy arm. With his free hand he began heating water to warm a bottle of formula. Bates rose to help him. The baby seemed comforted at last in the big man’s arms.
“Where’s your wife, then, Mr. Tregareth?” Terry asked as she busied herself at the cooker. “Joellyn, isn’t it?”
Tregareth walked to the kitchen window and stared out, as if he might find his wife out there: “Gone off, she has. Hasn’t called.”
Bates crossed the kitchen and gave him the warmed bottle. “And left you with the baby?”
“Never much cared for the baby once she’d had him,” he said as the infant began nursing.
“How old is he, then, this lovely boy? What’s his name?”
“Just coming up on nine weeks, he is. Legally, he’s Archibald Robert. She calls him Archie, but I call him Robbie.”
Both women let this sink in. Finally, Davies spoke.
“Some weeks ago, Mr. Tregareth, a woman from the Royal Cornwall Museum came to see you…”
“Yeah. Thought I’d found a treasure or summat. Like I’d ever…”
“And you reported that your neighbor, Mr. Hansen, had come upon an underground chamber while plowing and had you help him get into it, am I right?”
“Yeah,” Bobby said, adjusting the bottle as he fed he baby. “Yeah, but I never went down into tha’ hole. He wouldn’t let me, see. Said I was to keep mum so English Heritage wouldn’t shut down his field and all. Good field it is, you see. Plenty fertile.”
“And so you deny,” Davies continued, “ever calling Bonhams to try to get this treasure, as you call it, sold?”
“Who’s Bonhams when they’re at home?”
“London auction house, Mr. Tregareth. Famous.”
“You’re talkin’ riddles, you are. I know nothing about a treasure but what that museum woman said. Like Archie’d ever have told me anyway, if he’d found something?
Tregareth bounced the boy to make him burp. Bates got a tea towel to put on the man’s shoulder.
Davies switched subjects abruptly: “Well, of course Hansen’s dead now and there’s this video of him and your wife…”
Tregareth thrust the baby back to Bates.
“How’d you know ‘bout that?”
“We collected the late Mr. Hansen’s computer during a search of his house. Our tech people got into it. I am sorry to have to bring this up.”
Tregareth took the child back into his arms and paced the kitchen, head down. Finally he straightened, looking away, and said, “When I was a boy, before we came to the Lizard, my dad farmed up near Falmouth. The rail line ran right along the east edge of our fields. I would go down there by the tracks and wait for the trains. As they whizzed by, the sound they made was like, wheee-oooh.”
“It’s called the ‘Doppler Effect’,” Davies said.
“It’s been like that with her: that fading away sound...”
Davies let a moment pass and then asked, “How did you know about the video, Mr. Tregareth?”
“That Charlotte. She showed it to me.”
“Charlotte Johns? Why?”
“Reckon she was angry and wanted me to be angry, too. But then things fell into place: why the wife’s been cold to me and all, and why she left here when she heard Hansen was dead. Never twigged they had something going. Never. She said her absences were about that Druid stuff.”
“Of which you were not a part?” Davies asked.
“No. Her world, not mine. Very involved, she was. Joey had a secret book I come across by accident a while back—a grimoire it’s called. Summat like a diary about all that Druidry. Full of her secrets, it is. Rites and spells to do this or that. Like being attractive to men or getting pregnant and so forth. Seemed just plain odd to me. But now, well, it makes a bit more sense. Maybe you should see the book? That Charlotte looked at it, she did, but she told me little about its meaning.”
“You have it? That could be most helpful,” Davies said.
The big man rose, gave the quiet infant back to Bates, and went upstairs, returning shortly with the book.
Davies scanned the Grimoire and found most of it unremarkable, the majority of entries associated with seasonal pagan ritual days, as would be expected. The entries about how to become pregnant were strange, but then the whole memoir seemed bizarre. She could see a simple woman, superstitious and credulous, open to any suggestion, accepting whatever was told her. It offended her. She passed the book to Bates.
“May we take this into evidence?”
“Well, what good is it to me?”
Davies rose and stood directly before the farmer. “Did you kill him, Mr. Tregareth? Did you kill Archie Hansen, perhaps in a fit of rage over that video?”
Color rose in Tregareth’s face. “Listen here, lady,” he said, his voice barely controlled. “I’m a farmer. I grow things. I don’t kill them. You go
t that?”
“Not even a man who was having it on with your wife?” Davies pressed.
Bates watched as Davies provoked Tregareth.
“What do you want from me, lady, a bloody confession? Well, you’re not getting one, you hear? You know anything about tenancy? Of course you don’t; big shot detective and all. This here’s the lowest rung of farming. It’s where you start. That Hansen owned the land I farm, understand? I farm it at his sufferance and pay him rent. The farming is what keeps us and I put a bit aside so’s that one day I’ll have my own land. But meantime, you reckon I’m gonna thrash the bastard when our lives depend on him? Huh? I got more than just an unfaithful woman to consider; I have a son!”
Though she was uncertain whether to do so, Bates intervened, giving the baby back to the farmer to calm him: “When did she finally leave, Bobby?”
Davies glared at her but said nothing.
Tregareth sat down at the kitchen table across from Davies and took a deep breath, calming himself and holding the now sleepy child to his chest.
“Hard question to answer, that is. Reckon the leaving started just after that Druid festival, Beltane, first May: May Day. She just seemed to pull away after that. Avid partner she’d been before that, if you take my meaning. After that, it was like that train I mentioned: the sense of her speeding away. She’d been a Druid long before I met her, she had. Seemed harmless enough practice to me and never seemed to affect us.”
“And you didn’t join her in these activities?” Bates asked.
“Like I said earlier, no. Plus, dance around in silly white robes? Not for me, that. Mind you, I respect their beliefs—all about cycles of the seasons and our place in the natural world. Farmers, well, we already understand that, we do. But no need to make it a religion or something.”