It's not often that I am truly surprised but she made me sit back and give her a very sharp look. I let it sink in, trying to fathom where the hell she was coming from and slowly it dawned on me that she was right. “Wow! A religious group that sacrificed a girl on Christmas Night would be a real wild card, Juliet. I've never heard of anything like that. Aren't they supposed to save all their energy until Halloween?”
She was lovely in the firelight, enough to make me wish for days long gone. The intellect was still her strongest facet, it was always there even in her teens - but experience lay on her now and I had to admit it suited her. She was a clever woman with a very agile mind and she believed there was something to all this conjecture about satanic practises and occult gatherings. I remembered then that she was also the possessor of a truly magnificent private library - though I wouldn't have expected her to be reading about Goblins and Witches!
“You don't believe so you don't truly understand Michael. A religious belief can make people do extraordinarily excessive things. I do not suppose it makes any difference whether what you believe is good or evil, the capacity to become extreme must be equal. Take Alistair Crowley as an example.”
“Yes I do know a little about him.” I admitted, trying hard now to give full credence to her argument. “Didn't he set up shop on some Greek island and sacrifice animals or something?”
“He did a lot more than that Mike. He left England under a cloud of suspicion probably to avoid going to prison either here or in Scotland. He set up over there and there are stories of heroin and coke addiction, satanic rituals that included bestiality and sacrificing animals and in the end some accusations that his commune were stealing and sacrificing children and babies. Almost without exception the people who became involved with him subsequently had mental illnesses or committed suicide. There were several fatal drug overdoses, things like that. The place they used is still to this day shunned by the local islanders as a place where evil is to be found.
She had clearly refreshed her knowledge of Crowley in order to support her information for my investigation. I listened, enjoying the workings of her intellect and wondering why she had never remarried.
“Crowley had to flee from the island to avoid charges and returned to Britain from where the Greeks tried to extradite him. There were lots of inferences at the time that he was protected from extradition by the Home Office Minister or some government big wigs. Rumours of renewed goings on in the Hell fire caves at High Wycombe, lots of naked girls and black masses, that sort of thing. The press had a field day.” She smiled; she was clearly enjoying educating me. More earnestly now she continued, “the thing is, leaving aside any talk of occult powers he definitely manifested a great deal of control over other people - both male and female. Enough to get women to do all sorts of unspeakable things and men to do just about whatever he instructed them to do. Some say that included murder and if they were sacrificing babies as the Greeks were trying to prove - you have a template for your killer Michael. You ought to be looking for a Satanist with the ability to convince people he has real occult power. Whether he actually does or not is not important. What is important is that they believe he has. They are probably terrified of him!”
I was still feeling a little surprised that someone as gentle as Juliet should be so well informed about such a subject. I'd been complacent about that fine intellect and I mentally told myself to sharpen up. “You'd need a lot of power to talk a whole group of people into ritual murder Juliet.”
Juliet looked at me, a deep penetrating look - the whole of her mind focussed upon her thoughts, “do you think that witchcraft is dead upon the Moors Mike?”
I recognised a characteristic change of tack - she can do that at will, come at you from a completely different angle to support her argument. “It’s not whether I believe its dead Juliet, it's whether I believe it's strong enough to get a group of people to risk life Imprisonment. Murdering a young girl is a far cry from prancing round a bonfire and hoping that next year’s marrows are going to be four inches longer!”
My attempt at humour went straight over her head; she was far too concentrated to be diverted. “I've lived all my life on Dartmoor Mike. It's as full of superstition today as it's been since the dark ages.” She put down her cutlery and took up her wine and I saw her relax. She was on her own ground now, talking about the Moors she loved passionately.
“Time hasn't changed the real Moor or the real Moorland folk, Michael. All the big city cottage buyers come and go again after a couple of hard winters. Both the Moor and the true Moreland people ignore them, they are irrelevant over longer time periods - nothing fundamental ever changes. There are roads up there that no one drives on between the end of September and Easter. Your Torbay tourist season only exists as a quick burst of welcome additional income in summer. A quick source of money for a few lucky families who are resident around a small group of beauty spots.”
“In the depths of an average winter Dartmoor is still in the dark ages, what people believe is still moulded very much by their upbringing in such ancient surroundings. Dartmoor was inhabited before Stonehenge was built.”
She was so patently earnest in what she was telling me that I felt my natural inclination to scoff at such things recede. “But the girl was found in the sea Juliet, not upon the Moor. Hope's Nose is a long pony ride from Postbridge. And.” I followed up before she could interject as my policeman's mind went to work, “why bother to transport a body to Torbay and risk being caught if you could bury it on the Moor with a high chance that it would never be found?”
She sat back, there was a glow on her face. She had enjoyed her diner and was enjoying both the conversation and the wine. I was enjoying it too. She gave me a smile in which there was more than a hint of mischief and I knew I was about to be surprised again. “Why do you think that old fishing communities are any less likely to retain ancient beliefs than old Moorland communities?”
Now at last the penny dropped! I realised she was talking about the symbols on the dead girl’s clothing. “The symbols on the silk?”
“You wouldn't find a printed silk with that print Mike. It was handmade – embroidered specifically for that ceremony.” She sipped at her refilled wine glass. Deliberately making me wait whilst the Dartmoor pixie in her eyes did a little dancing around the flames. “One of the symbols is Poseidon; the Hellenic God of the sea, the other is Pan, a representation of the devil. Fisherman not farmers Mike, trust me.”
“Juliet you are truly an amazing woman!” I was really impressed. I refilled her glass although it didn't need refilling and forbade any further mention of the enquiry. We laughed together whilst we talked of old times, old jokes, and our memories of being teenagers upon the Moor whilst I did my best to enslave that pixie which was still dancing in her eyes - until the wine was gone and the evening was cold outside.
The car park was icy as I walked her to her Land Rover, hoping for a kiss goodnight which I never got.
Driving back up Telegraph Hill I was aware of the dark trees on either side of the dual carriageway and the warning signs for the Deer. The County of Devon is largely open space, not just the four hundred square kilometres of the Dartmoor National Park but also much of the central and coastal regions of too. Agriculture giving way to fisheries - would there really be that much difference in the beliefs of peoples so closely linked? I didn't think so - the differences would likely be superficial.
The policeman within myself knew enough to be aware that just about any extreme piece of behaviour was possible - no matter how bizarre it was to normal people. Despite that I found it a lot easier to visualise farmers prancing around a bonfire than fisherman gyrating in heavy duty wellies. Perhaps that was only because I know how ungainly fishermen are on dry land.
The Newton Road was deserted, the bitterly cold night saving me the endless queue into Torquay which mars the resorts connections to the motorway links. Thankfully the ring road is under construction and that led
me to another thought, there were hundreds of thousands of tonnes of wonderful red topsoil exposed all along the length of the construction site, the perfect spot to try to conceal a body with the hope that it would shortly be concreted over and buried forever.
I arrived in Torre tired but happy for the first time in weeks and it was Juliet who filled my mind as I got into bed that night. She was capable of more than a little black magic of her own!
CHAPTER FOUR
MISSING PERSONS EUROPE
It was five weeks later and the meeting with Juliet and her introduction to black magic as she called it, seemed far away in time. Lost in a grind of bureaucracy and slow, plodding police work that is supposed to solve crimes, no genius's cracking the case, just the grind and the late nights and the sometimes bitter disappointments as everything led everywhere and everywhere wasn't the answer.
This time it had all failed to produce anything of significance at all and I was truly peed off with the lack of progress. The entire Police team was displaying some very advanced signs of a most pronounced 'not amused' mood. The Chief Constable was still fending off the press and trying to juggle man hours and finances to keep us on the case. Everyone wanted the girl to have her day of justice. She remained unidentified.
Burning the midnight oil, through the night just passed, had failed to produce anything of value at all, a result I had predicted to myself with great accuracy. Rather than my bed I had chosen to leave the Police Station and take the long walk down to Wellswood and up Marine Drive to Hope's Nose through another gale but nothing like as severe a storm as the day of the finding. Had I, or had we, missed something down here on the rocks?
The morning of the recovery had been something of a madness in such hazardous and chilling conditions; it was hardly conducive to good quality investigation. The dead girl’s body was finally freed from the nets and accompanied by Juliet and myself was lifted away to Torbay Hospital. Her first examination began at once. I left her to it and went back to the 'Nose' but not before I had her first Impressions clear in mind. She was unable to tell me anything that would help with the search I then had to conduct.
I hadn't envied her the task at all, had forgotten to say Merry Christmas as though anyone was interested in that anyway - but looking back it seems to me that we were one and all conscious of the religious significance of the moment.
The wind had risen through that morning until it was almost Impossible to stand, a full Easterly gale raging fury down on us as we organised a search. As the tide came in we had to abandon the rocky nose itself which was running feet deep with fast moving seawater as each wave broke upon it. Any evidence that was there was going to be lost I knew but there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
Further up on the uneven path through brambles and gorse and thorns any footprints would long since have been washed away - the rain was battering horizontally, directly onto the cliff face and water ran in untold gallons down to the rocks below to join the maelstrom of seawater. It was not an auspicious start and as January sped by it had refused to get any better.
I've been visiting Hope's Nose since I was around ten years old when I first became a mackerel angler. Lining up with all the other boys - shoulder to shoulder almost, striving to get the favoured fishing marks where the catch would be best. In those days it was not unusual to catch fish by the dozen. The Ocean was still alive then.
Now, as I reached the rocks it was deserted, too early yet for most walkers and the wrong time of year for anglers. I stood and went over it all again in my mind. Had I missed anything? I was lucky enough to grow up with a strong group of loyal friends around Torquay's Ellacombe Green and I could almost feel them urging me on to find the man who had desecrated our fishing spot. Willing myself to think it through again and find a solution. Sacrificing young women was as far from the very conservative town I grew up in as I could imagine it was possible to get.
Looking back up over the steep slope I remembered the mountain of rubbish we had collected and then carefully sieved. It had revealed precisely nothing. My instinct said that the crime was committed elsewhere and it was just chance and tide that had brought the young woman's body to rest against the 'Nose'. There never had been anything here to find.
If Juliet was right and the body had not been in the water very long at all then it must have been put in the water to the East of where I now stood. I looked along the shoreline. All so familiar to me. Anstey's Cove, Long Quarry, itself as difficult of access as the 'Nose', Babbacombe Bay, Oddicombe beach, Petitor beach, Watcombe beach. In the darkness of a stormy Christmas night it could have been cast into the sea anywhere.
No doubt whoever had put her into the sea had hoped that she would be carried away by the storm or maybe the marks around her body were the signs that her corpse had been weighted and was supposed to sink into the cold grey waters, a grim fate for a teenage girl.
Why was no one looking for her? Where was her family?
We had of course searched all the other beaches and marks hoping to get lucky and find some sign but it was just a huge blank, cold tired thankless work that nevertheless required concentration and effort. Man hours mounting up faster than the Chief Constable could tap them into her calculator. It was not the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary's finest hour and she had made sure I understood that.
I didn't know it at the time but, like a hundred other officers as I made my way back up to the stile that separates the pathway from the road I walked straight past the clue that had been staring us all in the face. To be fair it wasn't so obvious back then but now I grimace to think we all missed it. It's always the same, it’s there you just have to find it! Walking home to my bed I was thoroughly depressed, I needed some new inspiration.
The phone was an intense irritation! Dragging me back from some faraway place where the bar manager didn't have Terry's knowing look in his eyes. He had just been opening his bar as I passed it on my way home and temptation had gotten the better of tiredness.
“Inspector Milton,” I managed. Assuming it was a professional call. I don't know who I was expecting but it certainly wasn't a Frenchman! “Monsieur Milton?” The accent heavy but the words precise. “Yes,” I said, wondering if I was about to suffer my first taste of E.C. phone sales.
“I am Inspector Henry of the Belgian Branch of Interpol Inspector”. Belgian not French. Either way he certainly had my attention now. I shook my head to clear it from sleep, struggling up in the bed and trying to keep hold of the phone. I needed strong coffee, told him so and he agreed to call me back in fifteen minutes.
I showered rapidly as the water boiled, glad of the heat and then the quick burst of cold. It could only be about the girl who had screamed and struggled her way through my whiskey driven nightmare and my mind was racing when the phone rang again. I picked it up and sat at the open window with my coffee. Could this be a breakthrough at last? I was in a very serious frame of mind when he began to speak.
Leon Henry impressed me right from the start. Open and earnest, he was obviously a natural born villain chaser and it came across very forcefully, this was very much a policeman’s Copper. More importantly, we very rapidly established a working partnership. I don't know if it's me or other people, but either I get on with someone or I don't, there's no in between. I can't work to make it right and with Leon Henry I didn't have too. We came out of the same mould.
Inspector Henry told me that he had spent some years deeply enmeshed in an investigation of the disappearance of Belgian children. He informed me that they were adding four more persons every day to their lists, more if he included some French and Dutch children from around the border area. His information made me feel cold. Four a day! I was having nightmares about one!
“These figures are not well known Inspector Milton but I can tell you that in Britain you have about one hundred and fourteen thousand people reported missing a year. Most are of course false alarms and they turn up. But there is always a small percentage that don't. Only the
ones who are publicised in the newspapers are known to the general public, most just disappear and become a number on a file in my office in Brussels. If you go onto the internet Inspector you can look for an organisation called Missing Persons Europe. There you can read a great deal about missing persons.”
I knew that there was an ongoing political scandal in Belgium about missing children and politicians. I'd read it somewhere or seen it on Panorama or something. That didn't come as a surprise but the numbers were a shock. He said that there was a huge public debate now and many people in the judiciary and the government were the subject of his investigation relating to the activities of paedophiles and kidnappers and the belief that a huge cover up had been taking place for years. In the end the entire policing and Police Force of the country was re-organised
Henry had seen the Interpol Bulletin I had put out in my attempts to identify the girl from Hope's Nose. He had applied our pictures to his own database and said he was sure he had a match although the girl had been gone almost two years earlier and had obviously grown up a good bit since.
It didn't take us more than ten minutes to arrange for him to come over and I put the phone down with a sense of real relief. The breakthrough I had prayed for had happened - but would it be enough?
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