by Will North
“Archie Hansen led her group, her ‘grove,’ I understand they call it?” Davies asked.
“Yeah. Last couple of years. Way I heard it he and that Charlotte pushed out the old fellow who’d long been their leader—Phillip St. Martin, his name was. Was Charlotte’s lover before Hansen came along, if you can credit it. Nice enough chap, I understand, but getting on in years.”
“How did that go over with the other members of the grove?”
“Don’t know, do I? I’m not one of them.”
“What about your wife? What did she think?” Davies asked.
“Oh, she were all for it.” He looked away for a moment. “Reckon she would be, given what’s happened…”
“Where is she now, Bobby?” Bates asked gently. “Where is your wife now?”
The baby had fallen asleep. Tregareth closed his eyes for a moment. “Don’t rightly know, do I? But I reckon she’s at her family’s place, just down in Helford, by the river. Thatched cottage hard by the Shipwright’s Arms.”
“Address?” Davies asked.
“Number four, Orchard Lane. But why are you asking?”
“Archie Hansen, the man with whom she was having an affair, is dead,” Davies answered. “I’m afraid that makes her a person of interest in our investigation, just as it does you.”
“But Joey could never…”
Davies held up a hand: “I did not say she was a suspect, Mr. Tregareth. Just a person with whom we need to have a chat. Like we just did just now with you, and we are grateful for the time you have given us. We truly are.”
Even as she said this, Davies marveled at the farmer’s loyalty to a wife who had both cuckolded and left him. A small part of her softened. But, given his passionate responses, she had no doubt that he could have killed Hansen. The question was how and when. With Charlotte Johns’s help, almost certainly, but how to connect those dots…?
Thirty-Seven
DAVIES AND BATES were just descending from Manaccan to Helford that Wednesday afternoon when Davies’s mobile vibrated.
It was Calum West.
“I’m busy,” she barked into her phone.
“Do you think the rest of us are just sitting about on our hands, Morgan?”
“What have you got?”
“I am thinking a bit of time at a finishing school might not have been a bad investment in your youth.”
“I had no youth. And no one to invest in me. And I’ll never be ‘finished.’ What have you got, dammit?"
Aberfan, again, Calum thought. It was actually one reason why he kept teasing her: to lift her from that childhood horror. He’d so far been only occasionally successful. But he wasn’t about to give up. She meant too much to him…not that he’d ever let on. He reckoned he might even love the prickly, brilliant detective, but the slow death of his own wife from cancer was still fresh, and still hurt.
“I’ve been thinking about that rare blood type on the Saga’s gunwale smear…”
“I’m listening, but do get on with it.”
“I can’t imagine a scenario in which someone close to Hansen is not involved.”
“What about the farm girl who found the boat?’
“Took a blood sample. The kid was quite brave. She loves the whole mystery element and was thrilled to help.”
“And?”
“Not a match. So I’m thinking there are very few people associated with Hansen and that one of them is a match to this rare blood type. Doesn’t make him or her a murderer, mind you, but certainly a person of interest. So I’m suggesting we keep the focus narrow.”
“And this is because you’ve been promoted to detective inspector, is it, sergeant?”
“Stop it, Morgan. It’s because I am trying as hard as you are to make sense of this maddening crime scene. I’m suggesting I have my people check the blood types of each of the members of that Druid group. That should all be in their NHS records.”
“Druid grove.”
“Yeah. Whatever. I’ve looked over the HOLMES II interview files and I can’t help but think something’s not right there.”
“You mean besides being Druids?”
“Now, now, detective: Druidry is an ancient and revered Celtic tradition. No, it’s something else…”
“What’s that?”
“Hansen’s sudden ascension to priest. He comes out of nowhere, yeah? And then he’s their leader. Why? How?”
“Tregareth says it was Charlotte Johns’s doing.”
“Which makes me wonder: how do the others feel about that?”
“They voted him in.”
“Don’t you wonder who or what swayed them?”
TERRY BATES PULLED their car into the little car park at the top of Helford village just as Davies rang off. She was smart enough not to enquire about the call but guessed the content. As they crossed the lot, Davies ignored the parking fee ticket dispenser. They descended the steep hill and fetched up beside an old stone cottage so festooned with hanging flower baskets and curbside flower pots it looked like a florist’s shop.
“Bloody horrible fate, this tarting up is, for an honest old fisherman’s cottage,” Davies grumbled. “Had a heritage, this house did. Prettied up now, like the past didn’t exist.”
AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN of perhaps thirty, slender with chin length hair dyed rust red, answered their ring.
“Joellyn Tregareth?” Davies asked.
“No, Beatrice…Bea…actually. Her sister. What can I do for you?’
Davies flashed her warrant card. The woman’s eyes widened.
“We should like to talk to your sister. Is she here?”
“Bea, what is it?” a loud voice called from another room. In short order, Joellyn Tregareth bustled into the foyer.
“Who are you and what do you want?” Her voice screeched like chalk on slate. She was older than the sister and just this side of frumpy.
Clearly, Beatrice got all the good genes, is what Morgan thought.
“They’re police, Joey,” Bea said.
“We’d just like a chat with you about a few things.”
“Nothing to do with me,” she spat.
“What’s nothing to do with you, Mrs. Tregareth?” Davies replied, her voice level despite rising anger: “Your abandonment of your child and husband, or Archie Hansen’s death? Which is it?”
“Good Lord,” her sister gasped.
“Shut up, Bea, and disappear.”
The younger sister fled down the hall in the direction of the kitchen.
“Bobby is not my husband and I am not ‘Mrs. Tregareth.’”
“You’ve arranged a divorce so soon?” Bates asked, astonished.
Joellyn turned on the constable: “Never married the man, got that? Not legally. Just ‘hand-fasted’ him within our Druid grove. Doesn’t count, legally.”
“Seems to count to him, though,” Davies said. “We’ve just come from him. Probably matters to your son as well, or will one day….”
“I don’t have to answer your questions.”
“Actually, legally, you do regardless of your informal…what did you call it… ‘hand-fasting?’ We can chat here or we can haul you up to the police station in Falmouth and put you in an interrogation room. Not very comfy, really, those rooms. Actually, they’re just repurposed jail cells. But it’s your choice. By the way, what is your actual surname? Just in case you already have a criminal record…” Davies nodded to Bates for her to begin taking notes.
“Masters, and I have no record…” she snapped, just as her sister emerged from the kitchen with a tea tray and cups, as well as a plate of biscuits.
“Christ, Bea, this isn’t a bloody tea party!”
“I just thought, as we were making it anyway…” the younger woman began.
“I’d love tea,” Terry Bates said, smiling and accompanying Bea into a sitting room overlooking the creek that emptied into the Helford River. The tide was full and the water glittered.
“She’s not been herself,” Bea whi
spered to Bates.
Davies entered next and Joellyn Masters followed, as if drawn by the power of her own anger.
Three of them settled into chairs. Joellyn remained standing.
“You left your…your what, ‘partner?’ Is that what you call him? And that was when, Ms. Masters?” Davies asked, helping herself to the tea. Bea jumped to fill the other cups.
“What does it matter?”
Terry Bates took a teacup from Bea and wondered at Joellyn’s belligerence.
“Just answer the question,” Davies said.
“The day after I learned Archie was dead.”
“And how did you learn about his death?”
“Bobby told me. He’d heard from Charlotte.”
“It must have come as a great shock, given your relationship with him, Joellyn…”
“What relationship?” the woman demanded.
“Oh, dear,” Davies said. “Did he not tell you he was videotaping the two of you? You know, upstairs in his attic? Having sex? You didn’t know?”
Bea stood abruptly and tipped over her teacup. “Joey?”
“You’re hopeless, Beatrice. Always have been, Sit down and do try to keep silent.” The sister immediately did so.
“Bobby Tregareth, I’ll have you know,” she began, her voice suddenly almost pitiful, “is a beast. Alcoholic. Abusive. A wife beater. A sexual attacker; a rapist of his own partner, me. If I did not comply, he beat me and he is so much stronger than I am.” A tear wandered down the woman’s left cheek. “He’s horrible.”
Behind her, Bea rolled her eyes and shook her head.
Terry Bates came to her side. “Did it never occur to you to report this abuse, Joellyn? You could have been in grave danger, you and the baby both.”
“No one believes a battered woman,” she answered, her voice clipped and dismissive. “But Archie looked after me.”
“Well, that video suggests he certainly did,” Davies said. “And I reckon from the video you looked after each other equally well…”
“You know nothing about this.”
“You’re probably right, Ms. Masters. But here’s what I do know: in my experience of twenty five years on the force, a jury in a domestic violence case would find it very hard to believe an adulteress and liar like yourself who made a claim against a guiltless farmer who loves you still, poor bugger, and who dotes on your son. And so, Ms. Masters, I think we are done here. But we will want to see you again, more officially, in an interrogation suite. Tomorrow would be good. We’ll arrange to collect you and take you to Pool.”
“Wait! You don’t understand!” Joellyn shouted: “We were starting all over, Archie and me! He's put his farm up for sale with Savills and bought us a house in the Costa del Sol!”
“Wrong verb tense, Ms. Masters: Archie’s dead,” Davies said as she turned to the door. “That dream's done and dusted. Time for you to start a new fantasy, but perhaps one which does not involve slandering the very good man who loves and cares for your son. Just a suggestion, yeah? We’ll be back for a proper interrogation.”
Davies marched out of the cottage, Bates following. There might as well have been steam coming out of Davies’s ears. “Makes you hate being a woman, a slag like that.” A local parking citation was tucked under the wiper on their windscreen. Davies pulled it off and threw it to the ground before settling into the passenger seat.
“Here’s what I don’t get,” Terry Bates said as she guided their car through the narrow lanes out of the Helford River valley. “Why’d she marry—or whatever she did—to Tregareth in the first place?”
“Immature romantic with limited prospects, is my guess.”
“Sorry?” Bates asked as she turned onto the B3293 toward Helston.
“Well, look at her. Hardly a pin-up beauty, yeah? Reached a point where she’d have latched on to anybody who’d have her. Turned out to be Bobby Tregareth.”
“Jesus, Morgan, am I hearing this from you? That’s so completely sexist!”
Morgan smiled. “There’s sexism and then there is realism, Terry. I reckon this was Joey seizing the day while she had the chance. When she saw another chance, a better one, with Hansen, she seized that one, too. And poor Tregareth’s the casualty. Him and the baby.”
“Tregareth said she wanted a baby something awful, at least until she had it. Why do you reckon she abandoned her own son?”
“Ever had a baby, Terry?”
“Of course not.”
“Nor I, but I reckon the caretaking engulfs you. You’re either made for it or you’re not. I reckon Joellyn isn’t. She’s far too self-absorbed to care for a child. Bobby Tregareth stepped in and she despised him for his patience and strength. His caring shows up the fact that she doesn’t have what a mother needs. So she creates a legend that he’s a beast...not that she wants custody of the boy, mind. Leave the baby with the beast. Not too clever is that Joey. If Bobby Tregareth’s an abuser, I’ll put my ticket in.”
On the way back to Falmouth, Morgan thought again about Calum West: a widower, two young daughters to raise, a job with long and unpredictable hours like hers. Yet he still made time for his girls. She’d never given it much thought until Bobby Tregareth came along. She stared out the passenger window at the hedgerows flashing by. Pretty heroic, when you think about it. Quite a good man. And how about you, Morgan? Would you have had what it takes in the same situation?
But she already knew the answer.
Thirty-Eight
THURSDAY, SEVENTEENTH MAY, dawned soft as the best of spring days. The air was still, the barely lightening sky wide and clear with just a touch of haze. An aging Land Rover Defender, its diesel engine barely idling, chugged along the single lane road that followed the creek’s northern bank. It pulled up beneath a stand of sessile oaks whose gnarled branches overhung the water. The tide was coming in and had nearly filled the basin.
A shallow draft outboard skiff waited below. The woman in it clutched a low branch to hold the boat to the bank. The man driving the vehicle got out, opened the Land Rover’s big rear door, and hauled a large parcel wrapped in black plastic down to the road. As he dragged it over to the bank, the plastic tore and the back of the body within scraped on the macadam. As the man slid the bag down the steep slope to the boat below, the air was filled with the sharp tang of crushed wild garlic blossoms. With the woman’s help, the man wrestled the bag into the belly of the skiff and they covered it quickly with an old brown tarp. Another black plastic bin bag lay in the stern, filled with bloody sheets, among other items.
The woman stepped out of the boat and climbed the bank to the lane above.
“I’ll leave the car in the tourist car park at St. Anthony-in-Meneage, near the church. It’s only a few hundred yards ahead,” Charlotte said. “No one will take notice of it there. Coast Path walkers use the car park all the time. I’ll be back shortly. Stay low and quiet.”
Charlotte was hurrying back up the lane to the hidden boat when she came upon old Dorothy Trugwell walking along the lane toward her cottage, the former parsonage at St. Anthony. She knew the old woman from the hospital, where she’d been an occasional patient. Trugwell was overweight and in her late seventies. Her doctor had recommended exercise to ward off late-onset diabetes. She used a cane to keep herself steady for her walks. She considered the wheeled walker the hospital had given her an abomination.
“Fine morning for a walk!” Trugwell said she chugged past Johns without looking up. It was as if the old woman was on autopilot.
“That’s why I’m doing the same,” Charlotte answered, wanting to throttle the old girl for even existing.
A few minutes later, the skiff slipped out the mouth of Gillan Creek and into the English Channel.
COMMS NOTIFIED DAVIES and Penwarren as soon as they got the report from Helford’s Godophin Road police station a few hours after Davies and Bates had interviewed Joellyn Masters in Helford that Wednesday, sixth June.
Car pitched over the edge of a ravine above the
creek south of Manaccan, rolled several times before landing upside down in shallow water. An older model Ford Cortina. Driver, a woman: Joellyn Masters, according to her license. Being transported by South West Ambulance to Royal Cornwall Hospital, Truro.
Davies called Calum West as soon as she got the message from Comms.
“Where are you, dammit?” she barked.
“I’m on the way down from Bodmin. I get the same Comms feed as you do.”
“I only interviewed her a few hours ago, Calum!”
“Things happen, Morgan.”
“Come off it: things just ‘happen’ to someone associated with a murder, whom I’ve just interviewed?”
“Calm yourself, my dear. My SOCO team are on the way already. I’ll be there in under an hour. Will you?”
“Bloody hell, where else would I be? I’m at the Falmouth nick and leaving now.”
“It’s not a race, Morgan. Careful how you go…and when you get there, let my people do their job, okay?”
THE CRASH SITE was just south of Treworgle Mill at a sharp left turn beneath a steep decline in the narrow road on the way to Newtown-in-St-Martin. Traffic had been diverted and now Davies was on her knees examining the skid marks the woman’s tyres had left on the lane. She didn’t hear Calum West approach.
“Communing with the macadam are we, Morgan?”
“Don’t sneak up on me like that!”
“It’s just I’ve never seen you on your knees before…Interesting perspective.”
She rose. “Have you no sense of the gravitas of this situation, you idiot?”
“I find it useful to focus on data. Helps solve crimes, you see. And is she dead?”
“That’s so crass and I don’t know.” She stood and brushed off the knees of her trousers.
“Just asking. The tyre marks are interesting. The question is what caused the driver to brake hard and yank to the right. This driver didn’t just stray off the road in a moment of inattention or recklessness.”
“Okay, you’re not an idiot after all. Some obstacle, Calum. Something in the way, that caused an avoidance reflex. Please note, if you will, the farm gate directly opposite the point where the car went over the edge.”