Trevega House

by Will North

  “Something else is going on. I just don’t know what yet.”

  Stein nodded: “You’ll sort it; you always do. Let me get you a bottle of wine. I have an organic chardonnay I recently discovered from America: Badger Mountain, from the Columbia River Valley in Washington State. No added sulfites, either. Crisp, clean, with a taste of green apple and just a touch of vanilla at the finish. I think you’ll approve.”

  “I’ll try it. What’s best tonight, Rick?”

  “Ah, I love that question! Like there were some dishes not worth your custom?”

  “I didn’t mean…”

  Stein shook his head: “I know, don’t fuss. But if I were you, I’d go with the poached monkfish in a roasted red pepper cream sauce on a saffron rice base. A few new peas tossed in for color. Maybe a small side salad.”

  “You’re the boss, Rick. And thank you.”

  Stein paused and leaned down. “You look like hell, Artie, if I may say so. You have ever since your Rebecca walked out what, a year ago? I see you out and about here on weekends sometimes, wandering about the harbor like some lost soul.”

  Penwarren looked away to the windows for a moment, then back. “Such a lovely and elegant lady, Rebecca. I didn’t deserve her, really. And she certainly deserved better than a cop. She wanted me to choose: her or the work. I couldn’t.”

  Stein shook his head. “Why do you keep at it?”

  “Same reason you do with your food empire, I expect: I believe in it. I have splendid people working for me. But that’s not really it: the truth is I keep at it because my victims need someone who never stops caring about them. That’s what I do: I close their story and bring them home. Or at least I try. I’m not always successful.”

  “I read about that last case, the body found in the Channel? It was in The Cornishman.”

  “I’d hoped for a more severe sentence in that case, but the best we could do was conspiracy to murder. Never found the accomplice.”

  Stein put a hand on his old friend’s shoulder. “Dinner’s on me tonight, Artie, and it’s my pleasure.”

  “You know I can’t accept that, Rick…”

  “It’s my restaurant and you’ll do as I say. We need more people like you in the world, my friend. Monkfish it is…”

  The wine came in minutes, the bottle thrust into an ice-filled stainless chiller beaded with condensation. His waitress, a plump and pony-tailed blond who could have modeled for the description “fine English rose,” poured him a taste. It was, as he expected, splendid: crisp, clean, perfect for fish.

  He nodded. “Yes. Thank you.”

  Her cheeks flushed even rosier: “Mr. Stein’s pleasure, sir.”

  He remembered, wistfully, when young women did not call him “sir.” He did not know how, exactly, he’d arrived at this older and now solitary late chapter of middle age. It was like he’d stumbled into it, unawares, and upon looking around did not recognize the landscape. He wondered how you could feel lonely and disoriented in the very center of your own life. Then he smiled to himself: middle-aged? What, was he going to live to a hundred twenty?

  He watched couples stroll by the windows and thought about his ex-wife. He’d met Rebecca soon after he’d been posted to Penzance as detective sergeant, the Criminal Investigation Division’s top job in the market town that anchored southwest Cornwall. Rebecca Campbell owned a trendy women’s shop called Mount’s Bay Trading on Causewayhead, the central pedestrian-only shopping street. She had a special talent for discovering young European designers who created unusual, often asymmetrical dresses and tops in unique fabrics that could add spark to the simplest of skirts or trousers, which she also sold, as if they were backdrops to the main event. She and Penwarren met during a reception at The Hypatia Trust in Chapel Street, an organization that championed the literary, artistic, and scientific achievements of women, especially Cornish women. The night they’d met the Trust had featured the luminous, serene, and softly layered work of Kathy Todd, a painter from the Isles of Scilly, the rocky archipelago south of Land’s End.

  He’d had a glass of white wine in his hand and was scanning the shelves in the Trust’s spacious upstairs library, alone. He wasn’t the mingling type and had avoided the crush on the main floor.

  “Writer or reader?” an impish, bell-like voice behind him asked.

  He turned to face a petite, stylishly dressed brunette who, her high heels notwithstanding, rose barely to his chin.

  “Um, cop…detective, actually. CID.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes.”

  Birdlike, she tilted her head slightly and smiled. There were tiny creases at the outer corners of her gray-green eyes. Over fifty, he decided. And lovely.

  Her face brightened. “Oh! You’re that Penwarren chap I keep hearing about!”

  “Hearing about?”

  “From the uniformed constables who stop into my shop from time to time to make sure all is well, which I do appreciate, I must say. I ask them what’s new and their stories tend to be about some case the CID is on. I guess just walking the beat doesn’t offer much excitement, so they talk about you.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “Admiringly, I might add.”

  They’d married six months later in a private ceremony: her second marriage, his first. She’d had no children. They lived in her Victorian-era terrace house on Morab Road, opposite the library, walking distance to the police station and to her shop as well. Like her shop, the rooms in her home were artfully composed and decorated like a magazine feature: understated, tasteful, contemporary. Earth colors. Not a hint of chintz.

  But his own life—long hours, constantly being called away in the middle of the night, little chance for time just for the two of them—finally had driven her away. He didn’t blame her. They were still friends but she’d found someone else in short order, an estate agent: very successful, and reliable in a way he’d never been able to be.

  Later, and very briefly, he’d considered dating Morgan Davies, whom he admired and respected, despite her rebelliousness…or perhaps because of it. It would have been interesting to discover what lay behind that lovely but turtle-tough shell, but it would have been unprofessional…and, he suspected, far more turbulent than he could handle. He’d decided just to champion her rise in the force instead.

  Nine

  “KIND OF YOU and Nicola to make us supper last night.”

  “Come on, Jamie,” Andrew said, “that’s not kindness, it’s a joy. We’re so glad she’s back and mending. And besides, you’re family. Wouldn’t you do the same for us?”

  “Reckon we would, but the food wouldn’t have been as good. I’m not much of a cook. What do the police and fire people say?”

  “Arson. No question. They found a bit of evidence, but nothing yet to connect with whoever started this.”

  Andrew and his building partner were standing inside the charred shell of the gardener’s house on Saturday morning.

  “So, what do you think, Jamie? Do we tear it down?”

  Jamie shook his head and smiled.

  “What?”

  “Stone doesn’t burn.”

  Andrew looked at the heat-scorched walls. “No kidding, but…”

  “Look, if we had used mortar to bind the exterior walls, like most builders do, the fire’s heat would have corrupted that bond. You can tell: the mortar changes color, turning a dark pink. That’s the sign it’s lost its strength. It becomes crumbly. In that case, we’d have to tear down the whole structure. But we’ve been building those walls dry first, like they did long ago, using the stone’s own weight and strength to lock in the bond. Later, we’d have tied it all together with a vertical sandwich of mortar and thin concrete blocks on the interior surface, then solid-core insulation, and finally drywall. Thankfully, we never got that far.”

  “What’s next, then?”

  “Pressure-wash to take away the soot and stench, right down to the clean stone, flush it all out, then carry on as we have been. The wa
shing’s messy but the walls will hold and we want this stink gone. Everything else? The interior framing? The roof? We start over. We’ll need to salvage the roofing slates, though, as many as are not broken. Worth a fortune they are now that the slate mines are nearly gone. We’ll look for reclaimed ones to match. I know a source.”

  Andrew ran his fingers through his curly salt and pepper hair. “Thank goodness Sir Michael is insured.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “But still, Jamie, why would someone set fire to an empty building that was under construction?”

  “Because they could, Andrew, because they could. Put your professor’s brain aside for a moment. It was here. It was easy. And, because whoever did it had no idea Lee and Randi or my Flora would have been involved, it was safe, like lighting a bonfire on Guy Fawkes Night.”

  “So, you think it was some sort of prank?”

  Jamie looked at the ruined interior. “Oh no, Andrew. Not at all.”

  “ZIP LIGHTER CUBES are produced by Standard Brands, a big international conglomerate,” Detective Constable Terry Bates said on Monday morning. “Their lighter production facility is north of Dublin, just south of the border with Northern Ireland.”

  “Convenient, that,” Morgan Davies mumbled from her desk opposite.

  “Sorry?”

  “Incendiary devices. The Troubles? The bombings? Oh, you’re too young for all that. Forget it. What do you have?”

  Bates hadn’t a clue what Davies was on about. This was often the case. But she carried on: “That batch number fragment pressed into the cardboard—I wish we had more of it—tells us, according to the company, that it was shipped to southwest England somewhere. But that’s the best they can do without the rest of the numbers. There’s a small Co-Op supermarket in St. Just that carries Zip cubes, they say. But they’re available in almost every market in Cornwall and Devon as well.”

  “So we have nothing.”

  “Right.”

  “Bugger…”

  EVER THE HUSKY, Randi was leading far ahead as Lee rounded Porthglaze Cove just before noon on Monday. It was as if he needed to clear the way and make sure the path was safe for her. He’d run ahead, then run back, panting, to lead her. Today, she was on her way to explore the ruined and overgrown hut circle above Boswednack Cliff. When she’d first moved here, Drew had taken her to Chysauster, the preserved Iron Age settlement a few miles to the south, near Penzance. It amazed her: the walls of the round houses and the storage and livestock shelters were still there, weathered to only a few feet high, sure, but intact, thousands of years later. So now she’d decided she’d be the explorer who’d find new mysteries in this ruin closer to home.

  She was watching the sun dance on the waves coiling into the cove below when, over the boil of the surf, she heard Randi scream.

  He was still screaming and writhing when she found him, his right foreleg clamped and bleeding in a leg hold trap. There had been some kind of meat atop the trigger plate of the shallowly buried trap. She didn’t know much about traps but she sensed something about this whole situation was wrong. Back at the farm in Boscastle, her parents had used peanuts or peanut butter as bait to lure badgers into wire cages. Then they released them to the high moorland. That much, she knew. But leg holds? They were illegal, her father had said. And besides, right along the coast path?

  Lee tried to pull open the jaws clamped against Randi’s foreleg but the spring was too strong and she could only get it open a fraction of an inch before it clamped shut again. Randi was frantic, thrashing. She kept her head, looked around, and began collecting stone fragments from the ground. She pried open the clamp as far as she could, wedged a shard of rock into the hinge, then repeated with ever-larger pieces until she finally was able to extract Randi’s bleeding leg.

  Randi lay in the grass exhausted from the shock and the struggling, bleeding heavily. Trying not to panic, she tore a sleeve from her tee-shirt and tied it tight above the wound to stanch the flow. Then she squatted, wrapped her wiry arms around the dog’s deep torso, bent her legs, rose unsteadily, and set him atop her bony shoulders, clutching his good legs. Randi did not fight, but he weighed three stone, Lee barely eight. She did not know where the strength came from and there was no way she could ever carry the whimpering dog all the way home, but she hoped she could make it at least to the Tinners, less than a half mile away. She staggered along the Coffin Way through the daisy-dotted meadows, lifting the crippled dog over one stone hedge after another, resting a few minutes on the other side, shouldering him again, and starting over. She talked to him constantly. A walk that should have taken fifteen minutes took nearly an hour. Her legs were rubbery with fatigue. She pushed the pub’s door open with her head and collapsed to her knees on the stone floor. Randi rolled off her shoulders and screamed. Her clothes were covered with blood. Lunch patrons froze. Clare called David down from the office upstairs.

  The watcher who had followed at a distance slipped down the farm lane beside the pub to the coast path and turned south.

  “HE HAS DAMAGED tendons but no metacarpal fractures,” the doctor at the St. Ives Veterinary Surgery explained later that afternoon.

  “What’s that mean?” Lee demanded. The girl was angry and afraid. She was still in her bloody clothes.

  “Please, sweetie, try to calm down,” Nicola said, knowing her words would have little effect. Randi was the girl’s closest companion. There was no calming her.

  The vet understood. “Here, come look at this x-ray. See these four bones just above his paw?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “They’re called metacarpals. Look closely: do you see any dark lines cutting across any of those bones?”

  She peered at the image. “No.”

  “Correct. That means none are fractured. That’s the good news. But the jaws of that trap, well, they dug into a few of the tendons that connect his leg muscles to those four bones. Must have hurt like anything. None were severed, thank goodness, but they’re damaged a bit and certainly sore. They need to mend. The blood came mostly from his skin, which he tore up trying to escape. I’ve used a few stitches to sew him up safe and sound. I’ll remove them in time.”

  “How much time?”

  The vet smiled at her impatience. “He’s a strong, healthy boy and he’ll mend quickly. But your friend won’t be able to run around the countryside with you for a while. You’ll need to keep him safe at home. He’ll need to keep still for a week or more and then not run loose from your house for a bit. You’ll need to keep him on a lead. I’ll see him again in two weeks. I might be able to take the sutures out by then.”

  “How will he pee and poop?”

  The doctor chuckled: “He can come out on a lead for just a few minutes. He’ll know enough not to put weight on that foreleg. He’ll get by on only three.”

  “You sure about this?”

  “Do you want your dog back in tip-top shape?”

  “That’s a silly question.”

  “Correct. So, do what I’ve said and he’ll be right as rain in no time, okay? I promise.”

  Lee looked at the vet as if judging his competence. Finally, she nodded. “Does he come home now?”

  “Certainly. I’ve got a big carrier kennel for him. He’s ready to go. He’ll stay in the kennel for a while as he heals. I’ve given your mother antibiotic and anti-inflammatory pills, as well as painkillers should he need them.”

  “She’s not my mother.”

  “No?”

  Nicola looked at Lee.

  “Well, almost,” the frightened girl said.

  Ten

  THE INCIDENT ROOM for the routine Tuesday morning briefing at Bodmin was more crowded than usual, but it was mostly because of departmental sightseers: word was out that they had a visitor. Davies was there, along with Terry Bates. Some of Calum West’s SOCO people were, too, as well as Bodmin’s manager of the HOLMES II crime data management system.

  Detective Chief Superintendent Malcolm Crawley, bal
ding and paunchy, tricked out as usual in his crisp black officer’s uniform with the four glittering white bars of rank on each shoulder, starched white shirt and black tie, had come down from headquarters in Exeter, as if from the mount, for one of his rare flying visits.

  Crawley was a Devon man. He’d served for many years in Barnstaple, on the River Taw in North Devon, before being transferred to the increasingly geriatric Victorian-era resort town of Torquay on the English Channel in South Devon. As a detective, he’d been adequate. As an ambitious bureaucrat rising in the force, though, he’d been brilliant. He’d become a DCS not for his case-solving skills but for his dogged cultivation of his immediate superiors. And while Cornwall was now within his jurisdiction, the far southwest tip of England was so alien to him that it might well have been a foreign land. He didn’t understand the people or their odd, ancient customs and didn’t care to.

  Detective Chief Inspector Penwarren presided. Crawley sat some distance behind him; he felt sitting with the others at the conference table was beneath his rank. He’d tucked his black brimmed officer’s hat with its checkboard head band and badge of office under one armpit, as if at attention even while sitting. To his very great discomfort, the rest of the investigative team ignored him; their loyalty was to Penwarren.

  Crawley disliked Penwarren. The DCI was so polite and well-bred he could answer a question, smiling, and make it quite clear without ever saying so that you should have figured it out on your own. Of course, Crawley never did. But Penwarren solved cases and Crawley needed him to bolster his own position at headquarters. So, they co-existed: Penwarren and his team succeeding, Crawley sopping up the commendations.

  But before Penwarren could begin, Crawley asserted himself: “What’s all this going on down in West Penwith? These people at, what’s it called? Trevega House? Why are these minor events taking up CID’s time?”

  The heads of the Major Crime Investigation Team members pivoted to Penwarren as if controlled by invisible wires.