by Will North
Morgan shook her head and went back to her office and desk. I should have known; nothing about DCI Penwarren is ever simple….
DAVIES KNOCKED BUT did not wait for an answer. Penwarren was, as usual, at his stand-up desk facing the wall of windows that encased much of the nearly new, three-story Bodmin Operational Hub. All the other brass in the building had desks in the power position: facing the door. Not Penwarren. His looked out across a valley cross-hatched by stone walls and dotted with white and black sheep scattered like dice thrown against a green felted playing table. Arthur Penwarren was slender and almost six and a half feet tall. Nearing retirement, he wore his silvering hair long and swept back to his collar and, despite his height, always stood erect. This was less a matter of the posture training he’d got at the much-revered Harrow School near London he’d attended as a scholarship boy and more about adjusting to the stiffness in his increasingly arthritic spine. He hated chairs.
“Do come in, Morgan,” he said without looking to see who’d entered. Morgan Davies, a twenty-five-year veteran of the force, was both his most difficult and most brilliant detective. A big-boned woman just under six feet tall in her practical low heels and wearing her usual navy blue “plain clothes” pantsuit, Morgan Davies was nonetheless arrestingly attractive—handsome was perhaps a better description. When she entered a room it seemed like she’d taken up all the space. She had presence. People took notice and it was as if time had briefly stopped whenever she showed up. But Penwarren knew she had a special instinct, almost a second sense, in murder cases that set her apart from her alleged peers. She was dogged in investigations and let nothing get in her way, including, occasionally, normal police procedure. As a woman, she worked harder and longer, but also more successfully, than any man who’d ever been under his command. He respected her immensely and was determined to see her continue to advance in the force, even if that meant him frequently having to defend her unorthodox methods to the bosses at headquarters up in Exeter.
“Okay, out with it,” she said with customary grace.
“Have a seat, Morgan.”
“I’ll stand.”
“Good. So shall I.”
“So?”
Penwarren lifted a file from his desk and turned. He still preferred paper records.
“So: Sir Michael Rhys-Jones: long time financial adviser to Prince Charles and his charity, the Prince’s Trust. Also a friend of mine. You will keep that confidence between us, are we clear?”
“Very impressive, I’m sure, but what’s this got to do with a dead cow?”
“Found on his land early this morning, but it’s not about the cow.”
“Somehow, I doubt the cow would agree.”
Penwarren turned back to his office windows. A scrim of a light rain was climbing up the valley below like a rising fog and would soon cloud his view. The view was important. Now that he didn’t get out much it kept him from feeling deskbound.
“The Rhys-Jones’s had been miners, come south from Wales to work the Cornish tin mines in the late seventeen hundreds. They did very well indeed, and started their own mines, sinking vertical shafts all along the Atlantic Coast south of St. Ives and sometimes running them far out beneath the sea floor. It was at the height of the tin boom, in the mid-eighteen hundreds, that Sir Michael’s great grandfather, Thomas, had Trevega House built. It is Sir Michael’s country estate and it is currently the home of Nicola Rhys-Jones, Sir Michael’s ex-daughter-in-law, and her partner, Andrew Stratton. They’re both ex-pat Americans.
“I’m sorry: ex-daughter-in-law?”
“Yes. She married Sir Michael’s son, Jeremy. But the son turned out to be a wife-beater.”
“Bloody hell...”
“Yes, exactly. So, Sir Michael arranged their divorce and banished his son overseas. Sir Michael loves Nicola as if she were his own daughter. She’s a talented and commercially successful painter and, according to Michael, a wonderful woman. Her partner’s an architect. They’re tasked with restoring the entire estate: outbuildings, gardens, and so forth, to make it self-sufficient from tourism income. They’ve also adopted a Boscastle girl—age nearly twelve, I think—whose parents were killed in an accident in the aftermath of the flood.”
“Jesus.”
“Yes. But the girl—her name is Lee—seems to be thriving.”
“Unlike the cow.”
“There’s more.”
“I certainly hope so.”
“But I am not at liberty to discuss it.”
“What a surprise. So I’m supposed to go on faith?”
Penwarren turned back to face her. “You have always gone on faith, Morgan, often when there was nothing else to go on. And you have almost always been right.”
“Almost?”
Penwarren smiled. “I’m still not sure about your recruiting that witch in the Chynoweth case year before last. But you got a conviction in the end. I’ve already called Calum. The animal has not been moved and only the vet has been there, so there is minimal disturbance to the scene. Calum will meet you there at three.”
“And we’re supposed to…?”
“Look for evidence, of course.”
Morgan turned toward the door. “Jesus wept,” she mumbled as she left. It was a biblical phrase the nuns at her secondary school in Wales often used when dealing with the headstrong and contrary girl.
AS WAS HIS habit, SOCO crime scene manager Calum West arrived at the Trevega estate early. He stopped at the farm manager’s house near the top of the lane. Nigel Lawrence was off moving cattle to a fresh meadow, but his wife, Annabelle, slender as a sapling despite having borne a son, welcomed him. Their toddler, Jesse, clung to her leg like a limpet to a rock but smiled shyly up at the visitor. West introduced himself, and Annabelle gave him directions to the field down by the coast where the dead animal lay.
“Detective Inspector Morgan Davies should arrive shortly,” West said.
“I’ll send him along after you.”
“He’s a she, actually. And one of the best. If anyone can get this matter sorted, it’ll be DI Davies.”
BACK IN HIS car, West took in the view. The Trevega estate and its farm spread along a broad, gently sloping shelf of coastal land that lay at the foot of a north-south trending ridge of steep moorland hills between St. Ives and Zennor. The hills above were cloaked in dense, yellow-flowering gorse and waist-high bracken fern and topped with castellated granite tors. A narrow two-lane road, the B3306, hugged the foot of the steep hills, as if sheltering from the Atlantic gales from the west. Farther down-slope was the lush coastal plateau, its verdant expanse broken into a fractal network of dozens of small, irregularly-shaped meadows bounded by stone walls.
Based far to the north in Bodmin, West had known little about this rugged coast until the Chynoweth case, which introduced him to this part of Cornwall. Ever since then, he’d been captivated by its wildness and antiquity. Now, he looked at his map and saw that two marked footpaths traversed the plateau: the famous Southwest Coast Path, which clung to the cliff edge above the ocean, and the lesser-known Coffin Way, an inland path that followed mostly level ground from one field to the next. According to the laptop in his police Volvo, that path had been used by pallbearers in the distant past carrying bodies washed up on the shore from Zennor’s sixth-century St. Senara’s Church to the cemetery in St. Ives, the scenic fishing port and, more recently, famed artist colony just to the north. Lugging a casket along this path could not have been an easy task: there were dozens of stiles built into the stone walls over which the burden would have had to be lifted and transferred, field after field, mile after mile, century after century.
THE FIELD IN which the dead bullock lay under the vet’s green tarpaulin was not one crossed by the Coffin Path. It lay instead near the western edge of the plateau, just above the Atlantic cliffs. Calum was using a magnifying glass to study the stone wall bounding that side of the field when a familiar voice called: “You’re looking positively Sherlockian, Calum,
but the dead cow is over here…”
Ignoring Morgan’s jibe, he reached into a small kit bag on the ground and pulled out a roll of sticky tape. He laid strips of it along the top of the stone wall, lifted them, and then placed the tapes in a plastic bag, sealing and marking it and returning it to his kit.
He turned. Morgan’s attention was on her black Wellies as she picked her way between fly-blown pats of cow manure. Silently, she thanked the vet for covering the dead beast. Flies would have made their task far more difficult. Morgan was not a farm girl and she marveled at the sheer mass of the animal beneath the cover. It was nearly the size of the unmarked white Ford Fiesta she’d driven to get here. Morgan’s notion of beef was that it came in sealed plastic foam trays in the meat department at her local Morrison’s supermarket. She was not prepared to consider the whole animal. She looked up at Calum as he approached: “Well, this is certainly a first as bodies go, isn’t it?”
West shook his head: “For me, too.”
“What were you doing by that wall?”
“Hedges, they’re called hereabouts,” Calum said. “Just guessing, but I suspect the locals call them that because the storms off the ocean blow away anything green. The stones are all that’s left. Given how many there are, I reckon stone was the first thing harvested to clear these fields, thousands of years ago. But this, I confess, is not my field of expertise.”
Davies ignored the pun: “The wall, Calum?”
“Oh. Could be something, could be not. A bit of disturbance, a fresh roughening to the granite cap stones and some hairs, maybe, or clothing fibers caught there, like someone had climbed over. Don’t know yet.”
“I thought the cow was our ‘scene.’”
“Yes, and we’ll get to that unpleasant task presently. But the question is how did the beast end up this way? Where’d the killer come from? How’d they get into this rather remote field? Answer: the Southwest Coast Path is just on the other side of that stone hedge.”
“How many times do I have to tell you, Calum: you do scene…”
“Yes, yes, and you do investigation. Just consider this a pro bono contribution from a mere detective sergeant to your far more important work, Detective Inspector Morgan Davies. Shall we move on?”
“Calum. I’m sorry. This whole situation seems idiotic.”
Davies had not meant to pull rank and, in any event, her promotion was still new. Plus, there was something so hopelessly genuine and unaffected about West that she knew he was never trying to pirate her patch. He was just reading the scene…and his search skills were unmatched. If there were something significant to be found, he’d find it. She reminded herself that she needed to learn to be grateful. The fact that she also loved the man, to the limited extent she was capable and given their mutual inability to express their affection, other than through jibes, helped marginally to keep their roles apart. Calum was a gentle soul, not too tall, not too thin. His hair was thinning but his face was almost cherubic in its soft and persistent youthfulness. Their dance was so complicated: prickly attraction, professional distance, and the dead weight of the losses in both their lives: her dead family, his dead wife.
“Perhaps not, Morgan. Let’s have a look at this big boy, shall we? But before we do, note that the ground around it is trampled by hooves and there’s blood everywhere. It took a while before the poor devil fell. I think the other animals were trying to help. Heart-breaking.”
They lifted the shroud. Remarkably, though the animal had now been dead for hours, it did not yet stink. There was a pool of congealed blood beneath the beast’s black head. The gash across the left side of its neck was ragged, as if someone had sawed at the animal more than once before it succumbed. In her mind’s eye, Morgan saw the terrified, uncomprehending look in the animal’s eyes as it staggered about, fell, and lost consciousness. She and Calum knelt beside the carcass for a moment and said nothing.
West looked closely at the wound and then sat back. Morgan, he noticed, was breathing hard and fast. “I don’t think there is anything more to see here, luv,” he said resting a hand on hers. “But if I discover anything, hairs or fibers, I’ll let you know, okay?”
Morgan nodded but stayed on her knees. In her long career with the force, investigating innumerable murders, she’d seldom felt so affected by a victim: a big, simple, innocent, harmless beast. Only hours before, she’d raged against being called out for this case but now her heart ached and her detective’s brain whirred: Opportunity? Certainly: could be anyone. Means? Yes, a very sharp knife. Motive? But she could not imagine one. It was senseless. Cruel and senseless.
Davies rose and brushed her blood-stained knees, then wiped her hands on clean damp grass. “I want to interview the people at Trevega House, if they’re in. Do you need to be off or would you care to join me?”
“I thought you said I only do scene,” West said, grinning.
“Oh please do shut up. There is a possibility, remote I‘ll agree, that you might prove useful. Plus, I rather enjoy your company, though Lord knows why.”
“How can I resist so warm an invitation?”
NICOLA ANSWERED THE heavy oak door beneath the pillared portico that fronted Trevega House. The granite walls of the Georgian mansion were barely visible behind its cloak of ivy. A row of tall, six over six paned windows flanked the entry.
“Oh hello! I’m sorry I took a while to respond. You must be the detectives. We almost never have people come to the front door. We’re not as grand as we seem. Would you mind very much coming back to the kitchen? That’s where I was. We practically live there. It’s much cozier and I can put tea on.”
She ushered Davies and West into the foyer, the floor of which was tiled in large black and white marble squares set on the diagonal like a harlequin’s costume. A broad oak staircase led to the floor above. There were doors left and right of the foyer trimmed with ornate plaster moldings: formal public rooms, Morgan assumed.
Davies slipped her warrant card back inside her purse. “Of course, Ms. Rhys-Jones; whatever is easiest for you. Would Mr. Stratton be available?”
“The name’s Nicola, please. I’ll call Andrew’s mobile; he’s no doubt working on one of the outbuildings. He and his partner are rebuilding them. For holiday lettings, you see.”
“And might you ask Mr. Lawrence to join us as well?”
“Yes, certainly, if he can break free from the animals.”
Davies and West followed the woman back along the central hall. The walls were hung with paintings that looked to Davies like they were from the Impressionist period, and yet they seemed to be of scenes she almost recognized. Nicola noticed her interest.
“The owner of Trevega House, my ex-father-in-law, is a collector of the work of the Newlyn School of artists who painted in and around Penzance before World War I. The best known were Lamorna Birch, Laura and Harold Knight, and Ellen Naper, but there were others. Sir Michael’s family had been both patrons and friends.”
“They’re quite wonderful,” Davies said.
“Yes, and nowadays very valuable; it is an honor to live among them.”
At the back of the hall they reached a warmly lit, slate floored kitchen big enough, Davies was sure, to swallow the whole of her cottage on Bodmin Moor. Nicola filled and switched on an electric kettle and called both Andrew and Nigel from her mobile.
“They’ll both be here shortly,” she said turning to the officers a few moments later. “I must say I am surprised to have two real detectives looking into a dead bullock. Is this Sir Michael’s doing? If so, I am sorry. He is a very sweet man and I love him like my own father, but I gather he has…um…some influence.”
“Sir Michael did indeed ask the police to look into this incident, as well he might as the property owner,” Davies answered, “but it was our own superior, Detective Chief Inspector Arthur Penwarren, who decided the event was so peculiar as to require investigation. So I think you needn’t worry about your ex-father-in-law.”
“Penwarr
en? Yes, he’s an old friend of Michael’s…”
Nicola made tea and gestured that they sit at the long oak table.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I didn’t catch your name,” she said as she filled West’s mug.
“That’s because I tend to overshadow him,” Davies answered. “This gentleman is Detective Sergeant Calum West, crime scene manager for Devon and Cornwall. I only overshadow him because he is too polite to draw attention to himself. Really, Nicola, what are we girls to do with polite and thoughtful men?”
Nicola laughed and Andrew came through the kitchen door at that moment, followed by a gangly girl.
The girl looked at the strangers. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“Lee!” Nicola said. “Manners!”
Nicola knew Lee hated surprises and that she tended to react defensively. She and Andrew were working on that.
West rose and extended his hand to the girl. “I’m Calum. We are looking into the death of the bullock you found early this morning.”
“The murder, you mean.”
“Yes, well, perhaps. I am so sorry you had to find him. But we will try to solve this for you.”
“Who’s she?” the girl said, pointing to the big woman with the short, spiky blond hair.
Morgan rose. West had two daughters; he knew how to deal with girls. Morgan did not. Following his example, she shook Lee’s hand.
“I’m Detective Inspector Morgan Davies, but you can call me Morgan.”
“What kind of a name is that for a girl: Morgan?”
Davies smiled but continued to hold the girl’s hand. “What kind of a name is that for a girl: Lee?”
A grin grew across Lee’s face, slow as a sunrise. “Reckon you’re okay then,” she said finally. “What about that bullock?”
“Well now,” Morgan said, releasing the girl’s hand. “That’s what we’re here to investigate. But I am afraid we’ll need your expert opinion on this matter.” Morgan already knew about Lee’s loss of her family. Having lost her own, Morgan felt an odd affection for the feisty girl, so like her, so long ago.