by Will North
“For example, what time did you find the animal?”
“Just before six this morning. Sometimes I wake up early, and so me and Randi, we go out for a walk along the cliffs.”
“Randi and I,” Andrew corrected.
Lee ignored him. “Me and Randi, we walk the cliffs a lot. Beautiful they are in the morning, with the sun just tipping over the moor tops.”
“I’m sorry, Randi?”
“Our dog,” she answered. “He’s a big Siberian husky and he’s way smart.” The girl skipped over to the kitchen door, opened it, put two fingers between her lips, and launched an ear-splitting whistle. She left the door open. Moments later, what seemed to Davies the most handsome dog in the world bounded in and danced around the girl. He looked just like a wolf, but a wolf with a smile.
“Sit, Randi,” Lee ordered, and the dog did so immediately.
“Has a way with animals, our Lee does.” This from a man who’d followed the dog into the kitchen.
“Nigel, come have tea,” Nicola said. “These are detectives Morgan Davies and Calum West, here to look into that dead bullock.”
Nigel nearly bowed: “Annabelle told me you’d come. We’re most grateful.”
“So, Lee…” This was West asking: “Did you hear something on your walk? Something that drew you to that particular field?”
Lee screwed up her face to remember. Her freckles seemed to dance across the bridge of her nose. “It was Randi took me there. We’d just climbed up out of River Cove along the coast path when he started acting strange: ran ahead, then ran back to me and barked twice. That’s his warning bark.”
West looked at Nicola and she nodded.
“I had to run to follow him. There’s a long narrow field, just two fields below the Coffin Way, and that’s where we found the poor animal along with the others who were right frightened. They milled around him, sniffing, their breath steaming. But he’d died before we reached him…not that I think I could have done anything, you know. There was blood everywhere.”
“Did you see anyone else nearby, Lee?” Morgan asked.
“No, but I wasn’t looking, was I? I was just being with the dead animal, kinda stroking its big warm head. I remember the black hair was almost silky. Even dead it had such a sweet and gentle face. Randi, he stayed with me but he barked a lot. Maybe he saw something or maybe he was just upset like me. I don’t know.”
No one said anything for a moment.
The head was still warm, was what Calum heard. “Lee, are there places near there where someone might hide, even for a little bit? I mean, if they’d seen you and Randi coming and needed to get out of sight?”
Lee thought for a moment. “It’s pretty bare down there by the cliffs. Just gorse and bracken fern. Bramble, too.”
“Hang on,” Nigel interrupted. “There are a few old mine shafts from the tin mining days almost two centuries ago. They’re filled now for safety, but maybe someone could have ducked down into the depression of one of them.”
“Can you show them to us, Nigel?” West asked.
“Of course. Would take no time at all. Just down the hill they are.”
Just down the hill turned out to be a walk of more than fifteen minutes. Morgan was not pleased. But when they reach the depressions in the earth, marked with warning signs, West stopped Morgan, Nigel, and Lee and approached on his own. He had his SOCO kit with him. The site was thickly overgrown as Lee had said, presumably left that way to keep people away, but he could see a recent disturbance to the foliage, too big to be the work of, say, a badger: bent branches and crushed leaves. West squatted just outside the damaged area and did not move.
“What’s he doing?” Lee whispered to Morgan.
“Studying. It’s what he does. He touches nothing and just absorbs the scene like a sponge. Looks like he’s doing nothing but you’d be dead wrong to think so. We’ll just leave him be. If there’s something to find, he’ll find it.”
“Sounds mystical,” Lee replied.
“For him, I think it almost is. He loses himself in the scene.”
After several minutes, Calum finally moved, but very carefully. He reached into his kit bag and removed a pair of sharp scissors normally used to cut clothing off bodies. Using sterile gloves, he clipped a branch of spiny gorse, its blossoms yellow as lemons. Then he pruned a length of bramble and, like the gorse, slipped the sample into a clear plastic bag. Using a black indelible marking pen, he wrote on both bags. Then he rose and backed carefully away from the mouth of the disused shaft.
“Any joy?” Davies asked.
Calum smiled. “Possibly.”
Four
HE HEARD A knock at the low front door. The afternoon was waning, the sun sliding slowly west into the restless sea. There was a slight rose tint to the watery sky; perhaps weather was coming. He’d been renting this holiday cottage at Treen Farm in the tiny hamlet of Boswednack a few miles south of Zennor for the last two weeks. The single-story slate-roofed stone building had once been a chicken coop but had been converted to a handsome one-bedroom flat with a sparkling new kitchenette and a furnished sitting room complete with a small cast-iron, coal-burning fire. Even in early summer, what with the chill wind off the Atlantic, the fire was often welcome. And the tariff was fair.
So was his landlady, Mary Trevean. She could not be much older than forty but was already a widow, she’d said over tea the day he first arrived. She always invited her guests for tea when they’d got settled. She liked there to be a personal touch.
He admired her as she served. She had mischievous green eyes and a head of wavy salon-blond hair: an immigrant from Ukraine, she said, original name Marina. She was just on the slender side of what might one day become voluptuous. She was not tall, but she held herself in a way that made her seem taller. She’d immigrated to the United Kingdom more than two decades earlier as a young concert pianist and met the man who became her husband, Bert Trevean, at a reception after a recital in the garden of Penlee House, the famous gallery and museum in the heart of Penzance. He was older but their connection had been immediate.
“We married and were together for almost twenty years when one morning Bert just dropped dead in the dairy barn during the milking: heart attack. We neither of us knew about his condition and his regular checkups with our National Health Service doctor had never indicated it even existed…not that it would ever have slowed down my Bert.”
She explained that Treen Farm had been in his family for generations and that when moneyed people from London began looking for holiday rentals in Cornwall Bert was quick to catch the trend. He’d converted three properties in all: a two-story stone hay barn away across the fields by the Atlantic cliffs, a Victorian-era miner’s cottage where Bert’s mother and father had lived in their later years and which she now rented to larger families, and the old chicken coop. Mary’s job then was to run the cottage letting business. The properties often were booked months in advance.
“You’re lucky I had a vacancy, actually, but I am glad to have you. Are you comfortable in the cottage?”
Like a dog, he tilted his head as if to understand. She went to the window and pointed up to the lane at the cottage. “Okay?”
“Si. Si!”
He was Italian and seemed to have little English. Perhaps embarrassed by that, he finished his tea, rose, and bowed. She walked him to the door and watched as he ascended the drive.
She and Bert had been well matched, she’d always thought, both of them hard workers. But they’d never been able to have children, an emptiness that never seemed to leave her. It was as if she’d missed a chapter in the book of her life. After her husband’s death she carried on. She sold their land and livestock to a neighboring farmer who had been a dear friend for years. But she retained the farmhouse and the outbuildings, and now lived off the rents from the holiday cottages and the substantial investment income from the property sale. She was comfortable and safe, if often lonely.
RESPONDING TO THE knock, h
e swung open the door. “Signora Trevean! Bella signora, mi fa piacere! Vieni, vieni!” He waved her into the cottage.
“I brought you some fresh eggs. I thought you might like them. Eggs. You understand?” She opened the small plastic container.
“Uova! Grazie, grazie! Lei vorrebbe qualcosa? Un bicchiere di vino rosso?”
She didn’t understand and blushed. She still held the container of six eggs in her hand. He scooped it away and gestured to a white wicker chair in the kitchen area.
“Per favore, accomodatevi. I make una frittata, yes? Uova, finocchio, cipolline, Pecornio romano…”
“Oh no, I could not possibly!”
He waved her off, poured red wine from an open bottle, and touched her glass with his.
“You give, I cook. Va bene cosi.”
Refusing argument, he turned and busied himself at the cooker. He heated a pan, turned on the oven, cracked and whisked the six eggs in a bowl with salt and freshly ground pepper, added chopped wild fennel and ramsons he’d discovered in the field beyond, diced a leftover cooked potato and finally sprinkled in grated Pecorino. He buttered the heated pan, poured in the egg mix, swirled it to coat the edges and slowly cooked the bottom.
“Goodness, you seem quite the chef!”
“Capocuoco? No, no, signora; love to eat!” His broad grin and expressive hands, spread wide, made her laugh.
She watched him work and enjoyed the wine. He was not tall, certainly less than six feet, with a bit of weight but not too much, and, she guessed, in his late forties. His beard, trimmed close to his face as if it were only a week or two old, had traces of silver and gave him a slightly rakish look. His hair, a glossy brown dark as molasses but also with streaks of gray, was long and swept back from a high forehead. She supposed it was a European thing, the long hair; Cornishmen kept theirs short. He wore slim, faded blue jeans and a dress shirt white as puffy clouds, the top buttons open revealing a bit of graying chest hair. His tan slip-on shoes looked soft, as if the leather had been oiled, and he wore no socks. There was no ring on his left hand and, given his looks, she wondered why. Maybe, like her, he’d had a loss as well.
She relaxed into the cushioned wicker chair and crossed her bare legs. It had been a warm afternoon but a chill was drifting in off the ocean. She wore a sleeveless, calf-length dress she’d made from cotton lawn mail-ordered from Liberty in London. The fabric had a white daisy and pink poppy pattern on a pale yellow ground. A butter-yellow knit woolen shawl lay across her bare shoulders and fell to her elbows.
“Why did you come to Cornwall?” she asked. “We’re at the end of the world down here, really.”
“For…” He slipped the pan into the oven and looked up from the cooker at the cottage’s beamed ceiling as if searching for the English word there. “For the nature, signora.”
“Plenty of that around,” she giggled. She was not used to drinking wine. “Miles of it we’ve got here and not much else! But please, call me Mary…”
“Ah, Maria! Like our Virgin!”
She laughed again, her hand over her mouth, her eyes dancing: “Too late for that, I’m afraid!”
They moved to the small round dining table that separated the kitchen from the sitting room and sat, mostly gesturing, their languages like stone hedges dividing them. He’d cubed some crusty bread and poured olive oil into a small bowl.
“Un antipasto,” he said, pointing to the bread and the oil. “Mangia!.”
She picked up a chunk of the bread but did not know what to do next. He noticed, took a piece, dipped it quickly in the greenish oil, and took a bite.
“You see?”
She followed suit and they nibbled as they sipped the wine. Sometimes she had to catch the oil as it slipped down her chin. She could not remember the last time she’d sat with a man, except perhaps with neighbors at the Tinners Arms just up the road. She was there most Saturday evenings now, nursing a pint of St. Austell’s Cornish Best and just enjoying their company. Everyone had been very kind to her after she’d lost Bert. They’d kept her above water until she finally was able to cope on her own, for which she was eternally grateful. But then they’d moved on, most of them, to their own routines and now she was left to her own devices. The cottage rentals kept her busy: booking in, washing linens, sweeping, cleaning kitchens and bathrooms. She’d considered bringing on some local girl to help but realized she’d be at a loss without the work. Better to be busy.
Perhaps fifteen minutes of halting chat passed when he rose and pulled the pan from the oven, a tea towel wrapped around its hot handle. He gave it a shake until the frittata loosened and then ran a large chef’s knife through the center and slipped the two sections onto plates. He halved a few cherry tomatoes as garnish, the knife cutting through as if the little red globes were made of butter.
“Ecco ci qua,” he said, setting hers before her with a bow and pointing. “Buon appetito!”
She’d never eaten such a thing before and, again, waited for her host to begin. He smiled, cracked bit of pepper from a pepper mill, cut a bite from his own plate, and gestured that she do the same.
“Attenzione, Maria!” he warned. “E caldo.”
“Cold?”
He laughed, a deep rumbling laugh, and blew on his fork to show: “Hot!”
She nodded, did the same, and took a bite. It was splendid and savory: crusty on the outside, soft on the inside, and redolent of the fresh herbs. He refilled her glass. She pointed to her plate, smiled, and waved her hands to show delight. He nodded.
Such a gentleman, she thought. Language is no barrier.
When they finished he rose and cleared the table. Outside, the dusk deepened. He lifted a green apple from a bowl, slicing and coring it expertly with the chef’s knife, handling the blade as deftly as if it were a small paring knife. Then he splayed the slices in an arc across a small plate, sprinkled them with a bit of light brown demerara sugar he normally used for coffee, and gestured that she begin. But first, he removed their glasses, rinsed them, took a bottle of Pinot Grigio from the fridge, uncorked it, and poured again.
“Vino bianco complimenta con frutta buonissima! Salute!”
At no time in her life had anyone ever catered to Mary Trevean, not even her Bert. He’d been steadfast and solid, but not especially attentive. Here, in this cottage which she had designed and decorated but in which she’d never lived, she felt completely at home: relaxed for the first time in so long she could not remember—not in the big empty house she called hers and which now seemed alien, but here, in this cozy new place. And she felt oddly embraced and warmed by her tenant’s graciousness. They ate the apple slices using only their fingers and she thought: He must be well bred.
She hugged the shawl closer and he noticed. There was a small coal fire glowing in the grate in the sitting room and he gestured to her to sit on the sofa opposite it. She settled in as he added more coal, drank more of the wine, and then thought: This is lovely but I should leave.
But she did not.
IT WAS THE sun streaming through the lace curtains that awakened her. She blinked and rolled over but the bed was empty. Her bed was always empty. It took her a moment, though, to realize that she was not in her own bed.
She sat up. “Geremio?” she called.
Silence.
Naked, arms wrapped around her and wishing she had a robe, she padded out to the kitchen where she found on the table a clean mug with a tea bag, a filled electric kettle, a currant scone beside a pot of butter, and a note: per la mia bella Signora…
The cottage was chilly. She switched on the kettle and hurried back to bed and huddled beneath the covers until she was warm again. Warm. She did not think she had ever been as warm as she had been the night before. He’d kept the coal fire stoked to warm them as the night deepened. They’d finished the Pinot Grigio.
Then he’d set her on fire as well.
Mary’s Bert had been a good and gentle lover, if less than imaginative. But last night: Oh, Lord. It began on
the antique Persian rug by the fire and then moved into the bedroom. His tongue had a mind of its own and found all her sensitive places. He seemed to have no end of ways to make love to her, and no lack of staying power. He was passionate and rough, which was a bit of a shock, but her repeated orgasms were like nothing she’d ever known before. Now, in the morning light, she did not know whether to be happy or horrified.
She showered, the hot, needle-sharp spray tingling her skin and warming her limbs. She put on the clothes in which she arrived and made tea, wondering where he’d gone. Maybe he was embarrassed by what they’d done. Maybe he’d needed to walk to clear his head. She’d expected to feel rough from all the wine, but instead she felt uncommonly alive. At the same time, she also felt suddenly vulnerable. He’d opened her to a level of passion she’d never known lived just beneath her skin. It was frightening, but also thrilling. She felt bigger, more complete. It was like finding that she had a twin sister who was bolder than she’d ever been.
And she wanted more.
“DENIM TWILL, I’M afraid, common as spit,” Calum West reported Tuesday morning. He’d studied the tiny fibers he’d collected from the top of the stone hedge. He and Morgan Davies were in DCI Penwarren’s office at Bodmin, seated on blue swivel chairs at a small round table topped in birch veneer. The sunlight flooding in through the tall windows turned motes of dust in the air into dancing flecks of gold.
Penwarren shook his head. “Not your fault, Calum. Smart of you to inspect the stone hedge, though. Well done.”
“My job, sir: find the denim jeans and we could test for granite particles…”
“Unless the trousers have already been laundered,” Davies said. “I have to think there’d have been blood on them. There was blood everywhere.”
“Much as it pains me to admit it, I’m sure you’re right,” Calum said.
“Look Morgan, I know you think this dead animal is a waste of time and far out of your remit…” the DCI began.