by Will North
Davies smiled. She was getting nowhere and sought a truce. “In the fullness of time, MacLeod, we will let you know what we know when we know. We have only just begun this investigation.”
“This murder investigation?”
“I did not say that, if you recall.”
MacLeod bowed. “No, you did not. But I’ll be in touch.” Then the reporter withdrew and walked around the Trevean property mumbling observations into his recorder.
Davies returned to West.
“Nicely done, Morgan.”
She shook her head. “He’ll write something nonetheless. It will be speculative but he’ll pitch it as news…and Mister will be angry.”
“I’m usually who they want to talk to about the scene. Thank you for stepping in on my behalf.”
West still looked haggard. She pulled him off the step and hugged his arm. “Go home now, Calum.”
“Yes. My little girls will be waiting.”
“Not so little anymore, your Meghan and Kaitlin…what, eight and ten now?”
“Yes, and their Gran, Ruth, isn’t getting any younger. I can see the wear the girls put on her. She adores them and they do her, but I am being unfair to continue to ask her to look after them.”
“I reckon those girls keep Ruth on top of her game, though. Pushing seventy now, isn’t she?”
West nodded.
“And no real sign of failing, last I saw her. But if you have a heart attack or stroke or something, Calum, they’d be sunk.”
“Yes. Yes, I know. I hear you.”
BACK AT THE Bodmin Hub late Friday afternoon, Terry Bates had found several holiday letting agencies serving Cornwall, but most were national organizations. It was at a local service, “Cornish Cottages,” where she finally found Mary Trevean’s listing. As she expected, there was no direct computer link to a website or even photos for the property, only descriptions, reviews, and a home phone number, so she called the agency directly. A recording said, “If you wish to make a reservation, please contact the owner; Cornwall Cottages lists and represents our clients, but we do not handle their reservations. However, if you have a billing problem, please leave a message…”
Terry left a message as brutally explicit as she could manage about Mary Trevean and did not have long to wait.
“Mary’s…gone?” Julie Weston said, her voice barely a whisper on the phone. “I can’t believe this. She was a wonderful client and her vacationers always gave her five stars. What in heaven’s name has happened?”
Terry explained, briefly.
“Good Lord. This can’t be…”
“I’m afraid it can, Ms. Weston. I only have one question for you: who were the last persons to rent Mrs. Trevean’s cottages?”
“Oh, my dear, I cannot say.”
Terry wondered if, had her voice been male, she’d be referred to as “my dear.”
“Cannot or will not, madam?”
“No, you misunderstand! We never have any idea who has rented a property from one of our clients; we are simply a connection between renter and owner. A conduit, so to speak. If you think about old phones, we’re just the line between the caller and the receiver.”
“And yet I reached you on a line that is supposed to be devoted to billing questions.”
“Yes, oh yes indeed. You see we only step in when a customer—or a client, for that matter—has a problem. Then we get the particulars and follow up. It’s part of our service.”
“And in the case of Mrs. Trevean?”
“Nothing, I’m afraid. I checked before I returned your call. She never had a complaint. Like I said, customers loved her.”
Bates rang off and beat her fist on her birch veneer desk. She could almost feel Morgan closing in. She wanted to be ahead, to have significant information to add to the case file. She was getting nowhere.
She lifted the phone again and punched in the number of the private police line direct to British Telecom.
THE LIGHT WAS fading late Friday when Morgan Davies stalked into the incident room at Bodmin, her chin, as usual, leading as if it intended to arrive a few moments ahead of the rest of her large and lushly appointed body. The sunlight that usually illuminated the office had begun to dim and she turned on the lights.
Bates was seated before a computer at one of the desks. “Good evening, Morgan!”
Morgan slumped into her usual chair. “I can see from the smug look on your face that you have something. I’ve been to the murder scene. It’s already been a long day. What do you have?”
Bates described her largely fruitless search of holiday letting agencies and the uselessness of the small company that handled Mary Trevean’s cottages.
“That’s it?”
“No. I’ve been on to British Telecom, using our single point of contact access. They gave me Mary Trevean’s itemized call record, both incoming and outgoing.
“And? I am not interested in pulling teeth here, detective.”
Bates lifted an eyebrow. Her boss was behind the curve and clearly annoyed about it.
“So, while we can trace the renters she had up until just a couple of weeks ago and also before,” Terry said, “it seems there were no calls from holiday-renters during the last two weeks, except the couple who found her. The weather’s been filthy. It was pissing down until late this last week. There are local calls, of course. But only one other that wasn’t.”
“Yes?”
“It was from a mobile. BT were able to give me the IEMI number.”
“The what?” Morgan had been using mobiles for a few years but hadn’t a clue how they really worked.
Bates smiled. “Okay, so every phone has an international mobile equipment identity number—that’s the IEMI. According to the number, BT says this phone was purchased somewhere outside the UK. It could also have been stolen.”
“But we can track down the caller with that number?
“Actually, no. See, the phone is just the body, it’s not the brain. The brain’s the SIM card inside, the subscriber identification module.”
Morgan rolled her eyes skyward. “I know what a SIM card is, Terry.” She did, but only vaguely.
“Right. Okay. But here’s the thing: a SIM card can be moved from phone to phone. And anyone can get a SIM card just by signing up at any High Street retail mobile phone shop for a pay-as-you go subscription. They give them away.”
“So, the card tells us the identity of the caller?”
“Only theoretically. A bad guy can get one using a false ID, make a call only once, then chuck the SIM card into a bin somewhere and get another one. No way to trace identity.”
“And the—what’s it?—the IEMI?”
“Useless. The phone itself is little more than a shell.”
Morgan looked around the room as if for deliverance. “So, the net result of all this techno-chat is nothing?”
“No. It tells us that someone contacted Mary Trevean, possibly a cottage renter, but also someone who might have had something to hide, someone who did not want to be identified by their phone or traced. I think that’s helpful. It suggests a stealthy person of interest, identity as yet unknown. But a person of interest in her murder nonetheless.”
“West’s people say one of the cottages, the Chicken Coop, was practically bleached clean.”
“Could be our person of interest, our anonymous caller. Oh, and by the way, Mrs. Trevean had Internet service, although Calum’s people have found no computer.”
“I know.” Morgan shook her head, but not in disappointment. It was admiration, not that she’d ever underestimated the young detective. Morgan had been in the force for coming up on twenty-five years. She could sense retirement rising slowly from just below the far horizon of her long career. She liked to think of it as a sunrise, a beginning. It would be soon—not this year, nor the next, perhaps—but it was coming, assuming the force didn’t chuck her out for insubordination first. Terry Bates would be an able replacement, of that she was sure. But Morgan had no c
onscious plan for retirement. Not yet, anyway. If she thought of it at all, which she seldom did, all she had were vague dreams about how her life might become different.
One dream involved Calum West who, though he was a constant thorn in her side, she’d come to love, if that was even the right term. She didn’t really know a lot about love. But their affection and respect kept growing, unaided by romance. That had to mean something. She reckoned the rest might follow if they ever stopped sparring…or even if they didn’t. And then there were those two sweet daughters of his. She could see a dream there: being Calum’s partner and the girls’ stepmum, though she had no experience with children, not even a sibling. Still, she felt drawn to the girls as if moon-driven. Was it maternal? If so, it terrified her.
Then there was big, bearish Garry Ronan, the landlord at the Blisland Inn, her new local. There was nothing not to like about the gentle giant. They’d met at the inn soon after she’d been promoted to the Major Crime Investigation Team and moved north from Newlyn after the Chynoweth case. She’d been looking for a friendly village near Bodmin and had found both a friendly inn and a friendly innkeeper. He’d treated her like a queen from the start. He’d also arranged for her to rent a house, a newly-renovated old stone hay barn on the flanks of Bodmin Moor, which it turned out he owned and had restored himself. He was sweet on her, no question. But was she really available? Was he? She’d married and divorced long ago. Considering something like that again seemed more daunting than facing a suspect with a gun, and possibly just as dangerous. But late at night she thought about being with the bear.
Then there was St. Mary’s, the main island in the Isles of Scilly, southwest of Cornwall, where she’d gone on holiday several times. The Isles were an archipelago washed by the still-warm remnants of the Gulf Stream, the great current having swung east and south, clockwise, from North America all the way to the Isles. The climate there was mild, supporting hardy palm trees and other sub-tropical plants and flowers, and the beaches were so white they seemed made of grains of glass crystal worn smooth. The water was as clear as the Aegean and, in summer, almost as warm. There she had found a pace of life that brought her a level of inner peace that did not come to her naturally. She smiled at how simple she really was: all it took to create that peace was a seat at a waterside island pub, a plate of freshly grilled local fish, a tossed salad, some crusty bread, and a bottle of crisp white wine: heaven. But also a lonely heaven? She loved the Isles, but maybe that was a fantasy, too. She couldn’t decide and didn’t want to.
The plain fact was that what gave her life meaning, what catapulted her out of bed each morning, was her passion for solving crimes. Without cases to solve she did not know who she was…or could ever become. It was her calling. It was all she’d ever done and all she’d ever wanted to do. Did she even need someone, a man, in her life? The whole question was a huge annoyance so she ignored it and plodded ahead, as if through a dim tunnel of her own creation. She didn’t see a light ahead.
Later that evening, just before heading north to the Blisland Inn for supper, a chat with Garry, and then home, Morgan was in the incident room trolling through the database on the Trevean case. West had just logged in a new entry about SOCO’s search of the scene. She scanned it and was about to close it out when a name in the file leapt out at her: Eldridge Biggins. West had said a neighboring farmer had walked them around the Trevean property. The farmer was Biggins, the same man who had been one of her tablemates at Zennor’s Tinners Arms: Eldridge, his “sainted wife” Alice, and Billie, the duck man…
“ALL RIGHT, YOU ragamuffins, off to bed!” Calum yelled to Megan and Kaitlin that Friday night. He’d chased his daughters around the house, arms wide to scoop them up, even though they were getting too big to scoop. They screamed and ran ahead and dove into their beds.
“Where’s Granny Ruth?” Megan, the younger daughter, demanded.
Calum struggled to catch his breath. He was so strong in other ways; why was his heart failing him?
“Granny Ruth has the night off. Needs a break. You two delinquents would drive anyone batty. It’s a wonder I haven’t locked you up in the nick already for disruption of the peace!”
“Like you’d ever,” the older and wiser Kaitlin said.
He hugged her.
“But we need a story first!” Megan protested.
Calum turned to their bedside bookcase. “Right then, what shall it be?”
“Not a book, silly,” Megan cried, mischief like a mask spread across her face, “a real story!”
He saw Kaitlin raise an eyebrow. There were times he thought his eldest was already grown, she was that perceptive: comes from my side of the family, he mused. She’s the thinker. Meagan, now, she’s the emotional one, the enthusiast, just like her Mum was.
“What kind of story?” he asked.
“From today! From your job!” Megan demanded.
They thought his job terribly exciting. He sighed and thought for a moment.
“Okay, so today was a remarkable day,” he began. “You’ll never believe what happened…”
He waited. They waited.
“I had to climb all the way up to the summit of Brown Willy, to the very highest place in all of Cornwall. Thousands of feet high, it is, mind you.
“And you’ll never guess why I did.”
They did not try.
“I got a call on my mobile, you see… I had to go all the way up there to arrest the dragon.”
“What dragon?” Megan cried.
“The Brown Willy Dragon, of course!”
“A dragon…” Kaitlin looked at the ceiling.
“But that was dangerous,” Megan cried. She pulled her covers up to her dimpled chin.
“Not really. The Brown Willy dragon is pretty peaceful most of the time. Sits up there, eats the occasional sheep…”
“Yuk!”
“…and mostly just guards the summit.”
Kaitlin cocked her head to the right, waiting for the next implausibility.
“But lately he’s been bothering walkers…”
“Bothering?”
“Yes. He’ll hear them huffing and puffing up to the summit, just like I did today, and what do you think he does?”
“He eats them?”
“Good Lord, Megan,” Kaitlin said.
“What, then?”
Calum lowered his voice and leaned close to his youngest. “He waits in his cave until they pass and then he creeps up behind them…”
Megan waited, breathless…
“...and goes BOOO!”
Megan jumped but recovered. “He does not! You said he was a good dragon.”
“Maybe sometimes he’s in a bad mood,” Kaitlin said, as if to herself.
“Maybe he is, Kaitlin,” Calum answered, thinking she might be having a bad mood, too.
“What did you do next?” Megan demanded.
“Hauled him down to the station in Bodmin, read him his rights, and locked him up, I did.”
“You didn’t!”
“I did.”
Kaitlin shook her head. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed. “But he wanted to call his lawyer, right?”
“How did you ever guess?”
“That’s what they all do.”
“Did you get him one?” Megan demanded.
“Do you have any idea, Megan West, how hard it is to find a dragon lawyer in this county? Especially late on a Friday afternoon?”
Megan sat up. “You made that all up.” He could tell she was hopeful that this was the case.
“Well, my dear, you said you wanted a story…”
He tucked Megan in and beckoned Kaitlin out with his finger. They sat at the top of the bungalow’s stairs.
He hugged her close. “The dragon isn’t the only one in a bad mood, is he?”
Kaitlin looked at him. “Maybe not.”
“What is it, dear girl?”
The girl looked away. “We need a new Mum. Granny Ruth loves us, that’
s certain. But she’s old. She sleeps a lot in her chair in the lounge with the telly on. I worry about her.”
“I hear you, my love.”
Not for the first time, Calum thought about Morgan.
Seventeen
THE MAJOR CRIME Investigation Team gathered in the incident room at Bodmin at nine Saturday morning.
DCI Arthur Penwarren turned away from the window overlooking the countryside he so loved and from which he took such comfort. Morgan was there, of course, and Terry Bates. Calum West had arrived with some of his Scene of Crimes people from the previous day’s investigation. Penwarren also recognized PC Adam Novak, who represented the St. Ives station, and welcomed him back. Dr. Jennifer Duncan, though, was in charge.
Penwarren nodded for her to begin.
“Okay, Mary Trevean: healthy and well built, as it were, but not overweight,” she began. “No apparent disease or infirmity. An attractive widow, early middle age. Homicidal asphyxiation. The evidence is clear. Calum’s people have identified the cushion used.”
“Calum?”
“From her sofa, boss. Possible trace of sputum, which we’ve sent off for analysis. Might be other traces on the other side of the murder weapon, too, if a cushion can be called that. But, as you know, the DNA tests take a while.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” He turned back to the pathologist: “What else, Jennifer?”
“As I noted in the file, she had sex but I cannot determine if it was pre- or post-mortem. There are vaginal abrasions. It was rough.”
“Jesus,” Morgan mumbled.
“I have possible fibers from under her nail clippings, which remain to be analyzed. Probably from the cushion. But no skin. Little evidence of a struggle, though she may have, unless she was already unconscious from the alcohol.”
“The alcohol?”
“Yes. High blood alcohol count: enough in a woman of her size to render her inebriated, possibly semi-conscious. Stomach contents suggest she’d also had a pasta dinner, so wine is the alcohol source I’m going to say.”
Morgan watched Jennifer report. Duncan, who always looked like she’d just stepped out of a fashion shoot at these meetings, was wearing an ankle-length natural linen skirt, low heeled saddle brown sandals, and a man-tailored white blouse, tails out and cinched with a thin brown belt that matched her shoes. There was a short necklace of bleached shells around her neck and her blond hair was pulled to one side in a saucy ponytail. She must have worked well into the evening in the mortuary but managed to look fresh this morning nonetheless. Morgan tried not to hate Duncan, her friend and colleague. She admired her greatly.