Trevega House

by Will North

  AN HOUR EARLIER, at dawn, Randall Cuthbertson, stiff-backed as a cavalry general, rode a chestnut roan stallion and led detective sergeant Bates and the Devon and Cornwall Police’s Scene of Crimes Office investigators across the moor to the site where his daughter had found the body the evening before. She did not accompany them. The police followed the horse in three all-wheel-drive BMW SUVs plastered with the yellow and blue checkerboard livery of the force. Their cars crawled uphill in first gear, zig-zagged around rock ledges and boulders and climbed more than three hundred feet before veering around the northern slope of Showery Tor and descending to the valley below. Black-faced sheep, their coats marked with red paint to identify their ownership, scattered as the vehicles approached. A small herd of piebald wild horses lifted their heads from grazing and stared, unperturbed.

  From the passenger seat of the lead SUV, Terry Bates studied the rider ahead. Randall Cuthbertson sported a bushy silver moustache and his bristly salt and pepper hair was cut so short that it looked like a hedgehog had sat atop his head. His face was ruddy, like someone who worked out of doors, but the paunch hanging over his belt belied that conclusion and Bates reckoned the coloration was more likely due to whisky-damaged blood vessels than to exposure to the elements. As she watched him lead, she could not help but think of Gilbert and Sullivan: he’s the very model of a modern major general…. and wonder if Cuthbertson had ever been military.

  When finally they reached the edge of the mire, the SOCO team cordoned off the scene with metal stakes and yellow police tape and spread out to examine the ground. Outside the cordon Cuthbertson remained on his horse like an overseer, offering neither guidance nor comment.

  “WELL, FACIAL RECOGNITION won’t help anyone ID this one, will it?” Dr. Jennifer Duncan said as she knelt beside the dripping, muck-covered corpse. The willowy forensic pathologist who’d confused many detectives by looking at least ten years younger than her real age, which was mid-thirties, wore the same sterile white Tyvek jumpsuit the SOCO boys did and had her long blond hair tucked into a light blue elastic bonnet. Her hands were encased in a double pair of blue nitrile gloves, the top pair eventually to be entered into evidence.

  But before she began her preliminary field examination, Rafe Barnes hovered over the body taking record photos with his police Nikon. The victim was clad in sodden black jeans and a red hoodie sweatshirt with the crest of the Liverpool Football Club on the left side of the chest. There was only one shoe, a black trainer; its mate was gone, stuck deep, no doubt, somewhere in the mire. Matching black socks. He photographed the clothed body first and the face…or what was left of it…last. He’d have preferred to photograph the victim in situ, but the mire had been too dangerous to approach. Bates stood beside him. She’d been to several murder scenes in her short career under DI Morgan Davies’s wing, but this victim’s shredded head turned her stomach and she struggled to maintain her composure. Bodies had faces. Faces had identities. This one’s face was erased, its identity a savaged blank slate.

  “What a horrible way to die,” Barnes mumbled, finishing. “Torn apart like that.”

  Duncan peered at the crest printed on the red hoodie. The team’s motto scrolled across the top of the crest read—You’ll Never Walk Alone. There was a single pencil-thin hole just to the left of the crest.

  Yes you will, she thought to herself.

  “Save your sympathy, Rafe. Come here you two.”

  She pointed to the small hole. “Bullet entry wound, unless I miss my guess. Close-up photo, Rafe, please; I need to have a record of this precise location. I’m going to end this examination until I can do the formal autopsy. These conditions create too much opportunity for contamination.

  She lifted an arm limp as a dead fish: “Rigor’s long gone off. And there’s no use in taking the body temperature either. He’s as frigid as that bog. I’ll have more for you after the post mortem, but I’m guessing time of death would have been sometime yesterday. The body is well preserved because the bog is oxygen-starved and acidic; aerobic organisms can’t begin to decompose it as they would have had our boy been on land. But the exposed head already has some blowfly damage. They’re aggressive opportunists, those little devils; I see eggs but no larvae yet.”

  “So that suggests slightly less than twenty-four hours?” Bates asked.

  “Correct.”

  As if on marionette strings, Bates, Barnes, and Duncan turned as one toward the sound of a fast approaching motor from the west. Cuthbertson’s horse skittered sideways but he controlled it. Then a tandem all-terrain vehicle appeared from around the north flank of Showery Tor and jounced down the slope. A young woman drove, her streaked hair streaming behind her. Bates recognized Jan Cuthbertson. She brought the vehicle to a stop just shy of her father’s fidgety horse. Her passenger, DCI Penwarren, climbed down from the passenger seat, stretched his back, and approached the cordoned crime scene. The woman remained in the ATV.

  “Terry, Rafe, Jennifer, thank you for all this work,” Penwarren said as he reached them. Usually so well dressed, this morning he wore an old olive anorak, baggy twill countryman’s trousers, and muddy black wellies. He waved at the other SOCO team members prowling the site. They returned his salute.

  “An honor to have you here, boss,” Bates said, an eyebrow lifted in question.

  Penwarren caught it and smiled: “No reflection on my confidence in you, Terry, or any of you.” He tilted his head almost imperceptibly toward the old man on the horse and mumbled, “I was summoned.” He looked across to the black mire and shook his head. “Nasty business, this…what have you got, Jennifer?”

  Duncan summarized her preliminary findings.

  “Mortuary next?”

  “Truro. Yes, sir.”

  “The undertakers’ van is waiting at the end of Rough Tor Lane, near the Poldue estate. Can you get the body there over this ground?”

  “My men and I can handle that, sir,” Barnes said. “Maybe the young lady with the ATV will help?”

  “That’s Cuthbertson’s daughter; she found the body yesterday. I’ll have a chat.”

  Barnes nodded. He and Duncan folded the white sterile sheet over the body and then Barnes had his men zip it into a heavy black PVC body bag with two handles on each side. He locked it with a plastic ratchet seal and took down the serial number. It took four of his team to secure it to a rigid body board. They strapped it to the rear flatbed of the ATV and Barnes climbed up to sit beside Cuthbertson’s daughter.

  “You okay with this?” he asked her.

  She nodded, put the vehicle in gear, and they crawled over the ridge and down to the awaiting undertakers’ van. Barnes would stay with the body all the way to the mortuary.

  Penwarren stepped away, looking out over the moor toward the mass of Brown Willy to the south. He knew this wild, inhospitable place, had explored it widely with Rebecca, his ex-wife, Randall Cuthbertson’s wife Beverly’s younger sister. Becca was a great walker and loved the moor. But its desolation had never appealed to him. The lonely expanse of barren hills, the sodden earth, and the somber, shattered granite tors depressed him. It was like a wet desert. This particular morning the air was nearly still but he’d been up here when the wind blew in hard from the Atlantic, whipped around the tors, and howled like a child in pain. And then suddenly it might cease without even an echo and the moor would turn suddenly silent as a crypt, a stillness that did not suggest peace, a stillness that reminded him of the mute but surviving pagan stone settlements scattered all across this moor: cairns, hut circles, walled settlements, prehistoric field systems, sentinels from the Bronze Age and earlier, the people long gone but their built presence surviving through the millennia. Sometimes, if the season were right, the trilling call of a golden plover might send its music across the waste ground. But not this morning. It was as if the moor were holding its breath while they worked.

  Away to the east, a small herd of wild ponies crested the summit of Maiden Tor. The brightening dawn was behind them and
their stocky bodies, already growing a thicker coat for winter, steamed in the cold morning air. There were six of them: four piebalds, one Appaloosa, and a black stallion with a white forehead blaze, their apparent leader. Scenting them even across this distance, it tossed its head and they vanished from whence they’d come.

  Now Penwarren ventured closer to the mire and saw there were hoof prints sunk deep into the soggy border. Terry Bates appeared at his side.

  “The SOCO lads will be taking casts of these prints. They are deep but fairly fresh. Unweathered, despite last night’s mist. Think they’re from Bodmin ponies?”

  “Hard to say at this point, Terry; is it one horse or several? Could someone on horseback have hounded this poor sod down into the mire and shot him there? I find that hard to credit.”

  “Jennifer agrees. The question is, how the devil did he end up way out here, sunk in that mire?”

  Penwarren smiled and touched Terry’s elbow as he turned toward the vehicles. “Terry, you’re doing a fine job here; Morgan would be proud. You’ll be at the post-mortem?”

  “Yes, sir. And it’s time for me to leave the rest to Calum’s people…I mean Rafe’s. Sorry. I’ll drive you back down to your car. Any news on when they’ll both be back?”

  “Soon, or so Morgan tells me. He’s like a caged animal there at home, she says.”

  “Davies and West back all at once? Lord help us,” she said, grinning.

  Acknowledgments

  The Davies & West mystery series is set in contemporary Cornwall. I love this far southwestern tip of England, a county studded with Stone, Bronze, and Iron Age monuments and settlements, many maintained by the Cornwall Ancient Sites Protection Network (CASPN), a dedicated group of mostly pagan believers in this magical place, several of whom have become my friends.

  After a long career as a nonfiction writer and ghostwriter, I have a passion for accuracy, even in fiction, and in this I have been aided throughout the Davies & West series by a splendid team of local advisers, especially former Scene of Crimes Detective Sergeant Martin South and former Criminal Investigation Division Detective Sergeant Tessa Adams. Additional advisers to the series include other CID detective inspectors; Forensic Pathologist Dr. Amanda Jeffers; County Senior Archaeologist James Gossip and his volunteers in the Meneage Archaeology Group, who keep unearthing new ancient sites; and the staff at the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro, among others. I owe a special note of thanks to chef, restauranteur, author, culinary entrepreneur, and hotelier Rick Stein for his generosity in letting me make him and his Padstow restaurant part of a scene in this book.

  Thanks, once again, to my eagle-eyed early readers/critics: Claire Booth in the UK, and Kate Pflaumer, Jo Hollingsworth, Lawrence Rosenfeld, and Stephanie Konat in the US, and also to my friend Nicolina Miller who made sure my Italian was accurate. And finally, a deep bow of gratitude to the entire creative team at Northstar Editions: my project manager and steadfast advisor, Stephanie Konat; gifted cover designer Laura Hidalgo, book formatting genius Adam Bodendieck, and Patricia Eddy, proofreader extraordinaire.

  Will North

  June 2017

  * also by Will North *

  The Long Walk Home

  (Romance)

  Forty-five year old Fiona Edwards answers her Welsh farmhouse door to a tall, middle-aged man shouldering a hulking backpack—he is unshaven, sweat-soaked and arrestingly handsome. What neither of them knows is that their lives are about to change forever.

  Water, Stone, Heart

  (Romantic Suspense)

  Nicola and Andrew have each come to the Cornish village of Boscastle to escape their troubled pasts. When they meet, they’re bristly and sarcastic—yet are attracted to each other. What neither of them knows is that a ferocious storm is brewing, one that could destroy them, and the entire village. And that storm is about to hit.

  Seasons’ End

  (Contemporary Romance)

  Every summer, three families spend “the season” on an island in Puget Sound. But when local vet Colin Ryan finds Martha “Pete” Petersen’s body in the road on the last day of the season, he uncovers a series of betrayals that will alter their histories forever.

  Harm None

  (British Murder Mystery/Davies & West Series: Book 1)

  When an American archaeological team discovers the skeletal remains of a missing child, British Detectives Davies and West unearth a growing list of suspects. Just as they close in on their prime suspect, another child goes missing.

  Too Clever By Half

  (British Murder Mystery/Davies & West Series: Book 2)

  The naked, maimed body found bobbing in the English Channel presents a vexing puzzle to Detectives Davies and West. Post-mortem confirms the body's wounds were inflicted by torture, but without a name or a crime scene, Davies and West are stymied. Unraveling this mystery of betrayal, deep secrets, and revenge will test their skills as never before.

  * For news about Will's books, special offers and speaking events, go to: www.willnorthnovelist.com.*