Trevega House

by Will North

  “Okay, so we have opportunity, yes?” Morgan said. “And the assailant was likely known to her. And we have means: suffocation by a sofa cushion. But why? What’s the motive? Mary Trevean seems to have lived an uncomplicated and quiet domestic life: she cared for her guests; they loved her and were repeat visitors. Well-respected locally, as well. Who could want her dead?”

  The room was silent.

  “I wonder if I might direct our attention next to Trevega House,” Penwarren suggested.

  A few days earlier, Morgan would have exploded at the shift away from the murder. She would have admitted that the events at Trevega were bizarre: a dead cow, a fire, a ruined well, a hurt dog, a car crash. A series of misfortunes at best and no evidence to the contrary. But the apparent attack on the girl, Lee, changed everything for Morgan. She and Lee were sisters in grief; they both had suffered terrible, life-changing losses. But no one had ever attacked Morgan, and they—whoever they were—had nearly killed Lee. A protective fury was building within her, as if the girl were her own.

  She took a breath. “You want to fill us in on Trevega House, Sir?

  Penwarren paused. How much could he reveal?

  “The people at Trevega House, the family called Rhys-Jones, are close to and deeply loyal to the Crown. I have known them since my Scotland Yard days. I respect them.”

  He looked around the table. “If any of you can make an argument that these events, one after another, are circumstantial and unconnected, I am eager to hear your analysis. I am serious. Someone please disabuse me of the notion that something dangerous may be going on there.”

  Morgan said nothing; she was deep into her fear for the girl. There was a pause and then Terry Bates said, “Really, this is a maths problem, isn’t it?”

  Penwarren tilted his head. “Go on.”

  “It’s a matter of statistical probability. How many strange and random events occurring in a single place during a fixed period of time have to happen before it begins to add up to something no longer random: a pattern?”

  Penwarren smiled. “My point exactly.”

  “And how long,” Bates continued, “before it leads to the attempted murder of young Lee, or even, perhaps, the very real murder of Mary Trevean only a few miles away? When does it all become statistically significant?”

  Silence.

  Terry saw her colleagues’ disbelief. “I think they are related, Trevean and Trevega,” Terry continued, almost in a whisper, “but I have no evidence to support that conclusion.”

  “For what it’s worth, Terry, I have no evidence either,” Penwarren said. “They could be entirely unrelated. But it’s time we questioned that.”

  Morgan Davies looked at her clasped hands for a moment, as if her knotted fingers could contain the information she held but knew she must share.

  “I have something that may be relevant,” she said.

  Penwarren looked at her; he’d never known her to be indirect.

  “You sent me down to Zennor and the Tinners Arms for a night to chat up the locals. It was chilly and I sat at a table by the fire with a farmer called Eldridge Biggins, his wife Alice, and their friend Billie.”

  Penwarren nodded.

  “Last night I read the SOCO team’s report on the scene of the Trevean case. The neighboring farmer who showed Calum’s people around Mary Trevean’s properties was Biggins. In fact, after Trevean’s husband died, Eldridge Biggins bought up their pastures and livestock. I checked the property records early this morning. Biggins was a quiet sort; his wife did most of the talking, and he professed only admiration for the people at Trevega House.” She paused and took a breath. “But I suggest he may be a person of interest.”

  Penwarren turned back to his window overlooking the valley and pushed his fingers, slender as piano ivories, through his long graying hair.

  “It is a lead, certainly. Interview him, Morgan. Camborne station. Adam, can you bring him up from Boswednack?”

  “Yes, sir. Of course. When?”

  “This afternoon, if possible. Let’s move quickly. But make sure he understands this is just a routine interview of people known to the victim, one of several we’re doing. He is not a suspect. Anything else, then?”

  Adam Novak spoke up. “About that brake line failure, sir? That was definitely intentional.”

  “I read your report, Constable. Please follow up when you can.”

  Eighteen

  SIR MICHAEL RHYS-JONES arrived at Trevega House midday on Saturday in a police car with a uniformed Devon and Cornwall Police constable as his driver. Nicola, in the laundry room on the ground floor at the back of the house, heard tyres crunching on the crushed gravel rear terrace. She thought it must be Andrew and Lee coming back for lunch.

  Nicola stepped out the door to the terrace as an old man in a bespoke suit climbed out of the police car.

  “Daddy!”

  Sir Michael was not Nicola’s father. He was the father of her violently abusive ex-husband, now banished from his own family. But they were as devoted to each other as father and daughter. She ran across the drive and wrapped him in her arms.

  “Why do you never tell us you’re coming?” she demanded, kissing his cheek. “You’re impossible!”

  “Nature of my work, my dear; nature of my work. Sorry. Don’t mean to be so secretive. Or rude, come to that. Happened to be down here on business and thought I’d pop in. Might there be something for luncheon?”

  The Rhys-Jones’s, miners who’d come south from Wales to work the Cornish tin mines in the late seventeen hundreds, had done very well indeed. In time, they started their own mines, sinking vertical shafts along the Atlantic Coast south of St. Ives. It was at the height of the boom, in the mid-eighteen hundreds, that Sir Michael’s great grandfather, Thomas, had Trevega House built.

  Nicola pulled her mobile from her rear jeans pocket and called Andrew: “Get down here! Michael’s come! And bring Jamie and Lee!”

  Nicola ushered Michael into the big kitchen, opened a bottle of claret, poured a glass for him, and busied herself preparing a platter of sliced meats and cheese and fresh salad greens from her spring garden. She slapped a crusty granary loaf on the breadboard at the table and gave Sir Michael a serrated knife.

  “Here: do something useful,” she ordered. Then suddenly she turned and said, “Where’s your driver, then? Get him in here, you old cad. The man has to eat, too!”

  Sir Michael had just roused his stunned driver when Andrew’s Land Rover Defender, now returned but still dented, bounced up the rutted back lane to the big house.

  “Sir Michael!” Andrew called as he climbed from the Defender. He was still recovering from his concussion and moved with care. Jamie followed.

  Michael took Andrew’s hand. “It’s Michael, Andrew. Or Dad. Time you got used to that, my boy. No standing on ceremony here. And Jamie, my friend: how are you?”

  “Not bad for an older chap, Michael,” he said. “Come to check our progress, have you?”

  “No, come to see this young lass, I did!”

  Even though her shoulder and arm were in a cast, Lee had managed to squirm out from the back of the Land Rover.

  “Who are you?” she demanded as she marched up to him.

  “Lee!” Andrew said.

  “I’m Michael,” the old man answered, bowing, hands on his hips. “I own this place. But I have heard all about you, young lady. Therefore, is it so beyond consideration that I might want to meet you? Especially after your accident?”

  The girl scrunched up her freckled nose. “People don’t come to see me and I wouldn’t know what to do if they did.”

  Sir Michael nodded and took her good hand. “Then that is their loss. Come, let’s us go inside and see what Nicola’s arranged for luncheon, shall we? Can you eat with you left hand?”

  “I’m left-handed.”

  “Are you indeed! The story goes, down here in Cornwall, that left-handers are witches. Are you one?”

  “Not yet,” Lee said, d
ucking her head shyly as if suddenly caught out. “Working on it.”

  “ALL RIGHT,” SIR Michael confessed when they’d finished lunch. He’d dismissed his driver. “I happened to be down here on another assignment and I thought I’d check on this restoration project in which I’ve invested so much. I know about the fire and whatnot but this young lady’s accident troubled me.”

  “It wasn’t an accident. I felt it coming,” Lee said. She was sitting next to him and, under the table, holding his hand. She didn’t know why.

  “If so, young lady, that is most remarkable and wondrous. Are you a bit like Jamie’s lady, Flora? She has many skills, I understand.”

  “I’m not like Flora. She’s a witch. I’m different; I sense things others don’t.” She looked away from the old man. “It’s…it’s hard to explain, but Flora understands.”

  “You needn’t try to explain,” he said, squeezing her hand. “We are all the richer for your gift, aren’t we?” he said, looking at the rest.

  “We most certainly are…” Nicola said, beaming.

  “Now, as the financier of all the work allegedly going on here, I should like a tour, Andrew and Jamie, if you have something to show…and if this young lady beside me might pardon me for leaving.”

  Lee tilted her head and squinted at the old man.

  “I help them, too, you know. I tell them where to put the stones.”

  “Do you indeed?”

  “She does, sir; has the knack, the vision,” Jamie said.

  “But that’s hardly a lady’s job…”

  “Why not?” Lee demanded.

  “I wouldn’t go there, Michael, you’ll only lose,” Andrew said, laughing.

  “Oh, go on then, you three,” Nicola said. “Lee and I will clean up after you, as we women so often must….”

  As they left, Lee looked at Nicola as if she’d lost her mind.

  “Look,” Nicola explained, “sometimes men have things they need to talk about alone, just like we girls do. Just my instinct in this case. Let’s give them a chance.”

  “What is he up to, Nicky?”

  “Who?”

  “That Sir Michael.”

  “Haven’t a clue, sweetie. I never have. The man’s a walking mystery. But I know enough to trust him. You should, too. He’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a loving father. He loves us, all of us. He gave us this estate to look after. He gave you this safe home, too. That’s enough for me. How about you?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  The girl looked out the kitchen window and watched them leave in the battered Land Rover. “Is he like my step-grandfather or something?”

  “If you’d let him be I suspect that would thrill him down to his toes.”

  Lee considered. She was not one for snap judgments. “Okay, I’ll give that a go. He’s important, isn’t he?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  Lee made a face. “Fancy clothes, police driver, owns this place and who knows what else? Come on…”

  ANDREW LED SIR Michael first to the burnt gardener’s cottage. He and Jamie had already cleaned and exposed the granite walls but the house was still open to the sky.

  “I know, Michael. It’s not much to look at right now, but we’ll soon begin framing and roofing. This will be a two-story, two-bedroom, one bath, self-catering unit overlooking the garden Nicola’s about to restore. The garden will include flowers, of course, but also vegetables for the bed and breakfast business we hope to establish at the main house. Nicola is even considering doing evening meals: a couple of meal choices, local ingredients, and a short wine list.”

  “I might just come to stay,” Michael said.

  “But come down the valley and let us show you the best part.”

  Andrew and Jamie drove Sir Michael down to their pride of place: Trevega Mill. The mill race had long since been blocked, but the mill itself, an elegant gable-roofed almost three-story stone structure, stood proud but hollow-eyed above the stream that raced down from the moorland above. Its immobile oak water wheel, taller than two men, dry for decades, was still intact.

  Andrew and Jamie led Sir Michael inside the abandoned structure.

  “Careful how you go in here, Michael; floor’s not reliable. And this will take a little imagination on your part. But I see three separate rental units in this big space. Here on the ground floor there will be an open plan living area incorporating those magnificent granite grinding stones and the wooden shaft from the water wheel as a centerpiece in the kitchen. There’s never been a hearth in this mill, of course, but we’ll build one in the traditional style on the north wall of the lounge. It’ll be a gas fire vented directly out the back wall: very efficient, welcoming and blazing, but with almost no emissions. A fan will propel heat into the interior. There will be two bedrooms and a bath ranged along the south wall. It will be a top-of-the-line family holiday rental. Install high-end fixtures, appliances, linens, and the like and you’ll be able to charge luxury prices. Upstairs, where grain would have been loaded into the hopper to be sent down to the grinding stones, we’ll have two smaller studio suites with cathedral ceilings open to the rafters. They’ll have kitchenettes and be accessed by a new exterior staircase. All the utilities in this building will be located on the upper floor. In the unlikely event the stream floods, they’ll be protected. Nicola reckons that with St. Ives less than three miles north you’ll be able to have these units occupied almost the year ‘round.”

  Sir Michael lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “It gets pretty stormy here in winter, you know…”

  “Which is one reason why the windows will have triple glazing: it’s a new technology developed by an architect, David Gale, just up the coast in Devon. Central heating’s electric, by the way. But thanks to those windows and the dense foam slab insulation we’ll be using, there will be very low heating bills. You’ll earn back the extra cost of the materials in no time.”

  Sir Michael smiled and shook his head. “I don’t know how you can see these flats in this dingy old space, but I trust you to make it so, Andrew. And you, too, Jamie.”

  They stepped out of the mill into the sunshine and climbed into the Land Rover. But Andrew did not start the engine.

  “Michael?”

  “Yes?”

  “You didn’t come all the way down here to check on our progress. And you have no other business in Cornwall today, do you? You couldn’t, given the limited flight schedule between London’s Gatwick airport and Newquay. And you’ll have to leave very soon to get the last plane back, won’t you?”

  The old man looked at him. “When my people investigated you, Andrew, a full year or more ago and before I could fully trust you with my dear Nicola, they told me not to underestimate you. A highly developed analytic mind, they advised; MI5 quality, they said. And, no, I did not come to tour the estate.”

  In the back seat, Jamie felt like he was a football fan in the stands waiting for the real match to begin.

  “What is it, then?”

  “We have lost track of him.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Let’s just say my people.”

  “Who’s him?”

  “Jeremy, my own son, God help me…Nicola’s ex-husband. We have lost track of him.”

  “I thought you’d banished him.”

  “But I kept watch.”

  Andrew stared out the windscreen. “What, exactly, is Jeremy’s status, Michael? We’ve never known. All Nicola or I know is that you made him disappear.”

  Michael looked at the hands folded in his lap, which were blotched with brown age spots.

  “He’s been dispossessed. Of this property.”

  “If he knows that, why are you concerned? Why are you tracking him?”

  “He hasn’t known.”

  “What?!”

  “He gets a generous stipend, like some Victorian remittance man if you can credit it. But I have made it clear he is not to return.”

  “Where is he, then?”

/>   “He’s spent the last few years in Milan, working for Credit Suisse as a currency trader there. He is very bright but also, I believe, unstable. After all, no sane man would have beaten his wife the way he did our Nicola.” He looked out the windscreen for a moment and paused: “It may be his mother Caprice’s genes. Wild, she was.”

  “Yes, I remember: crashed her antique MG along the Thames Embankment road in London. Died instantly.”

  “A mercy that was, I suspect. But there were other signs, furious temper and chronic infidelity among them.”

  “Good Lord, I’m sorry.”

  Sir Michael waved a hand to brush the memories aside. “That’s in the distant past. But my watchers believe Jeremy’s left Italy. According to the bank, he left his job after sexually assaulting a female colleague. The Italians are hunting him.”

  Andrew looked at him and, for the first time, saw vulnerability in the old man’s clear gray eyes.

  “Please, do not tell Nicola. He tried to crush her once before. I don’t want this burden on her lovely shoulders. She must be kept safe.”

  “Look Michael, a man who abuses his wife is fundamentally a coward. That’s why he beat Nicky: to feel powerful. My point is that a coward will do nothing overt.”

  The old man looked at Andrew and smiled: “I may have to recruit you to MI5 one of these days yet, young Andrew….”

  “I’m just an architect, Michael, and now a stone mason.”

  “You’re not, thank goodness. You’re far more. I shall rely upon you.”

  “I’ll be on it, too,” Jamie said from the rear of the Land Rover.

  Sir Michael turned and grasped Jamie’s rough hand. “I know you will. And may I just say that I am so pleased that flood brought you and Flora together at last and that you both are part of our family now.”