Will North
Copyright © 2015, 2017 by Will North
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or to businesses, locales or institutions is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
For permission requests, contact the author at www.willnorthnovelist.com.
Published in the United States by Northstar Editions.
Too Clever By Half: A Davies & West Mystery / Will North — 2nd ed.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015908375
Cover Design by Laura Hidalgo
ISBN-10: 0-9989649-4-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-9989649-4-2
Epub ISBN: 978-0-9989649-9-7
:
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
The Major Crime Investigating Team
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Epilogue
Trevega House Prologue
One
Two
Acknowledgments
Also by Will North
For my son Eric and grandson Baker,
of whom I am so proud
The Major Crime Investigating Team
Detective Chief Inspector Arthur Penwarren
Detective Inspector Morgan Davies
Detective Sergeant and Crime Scene Manager Calum West
Detective Constable Terry Bates
Police Constable Adam Novak
Prologue
IF THE SURFACE of the English Channel off Cornwall’s Lizard Peninsula had not been as smooth and glossy as wet enamel that soft Thursday, seventeenth May, the snub-nosed beam trawler, Catherine P, would never have spotted it.
They’d pulled nets late into the night, and now the skipper, Mike Perran, was running his vessel southwest, roughly five miles east of the peninsula’s cliffs, bound for the port at Newlyn with a hold full to bursting with cuttlefish, monkfish, and gurnard from the inshore fishery off Lyme Bay. Tide was slack and his boat made good progress. Perran was young for a ship’s owner. With a sun-bleached head of curls and a face already weathered beyond his years, he’d been working the fishing grounds off Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall since he was fourteen as a hand on his father’s boat. And when, six years later, Jack Perran suddenly died of a pulmonary embolism after minor knee surgery, Mike stepped into the wheelhouse. He had just turned twenty, but his father’s crew, twice his age and more, stayed with him. It was a matter of respect for the old man. And it was a job.
The sky over the Channel was a bell of milky blue. The sun-sequined swells were so gentle it was as if the bejeweled sea were in deep sleep. Far off, toward France, a scud of clouds white as batts of sheep’s wool hung low on the horizon.
It was Perran’s newest crewman, stocky and eager Ronnie James, just turned nineteen, who spied it first, alabaster white against the royal blue water, drifting on the swells. It could have been a thick slab of white Styrofoam from some yachtsman’s floating dock.
Except for the head.
James signaled to the wheelhouse, and the skipper, catching sight of the floater, turned the boat to starboard. As it drew abreast of the corpse, the rest of the crew clustered along the rail. Young James, without waiting for orders, dropped overboard with a line. When he’d wrapped it around the body, the other crew members hoisted it aboard. Perran watched all this and decided Ronnie James was a keeper. He set the gyro compass and climbed down to the deck.
Perran knew that it was common for someone who pitched overboard to have their clothes pulled off by the drag and wash of the chop, but the sea had been glassy, as if oiled, for two days. He scanned the horizon for a drifting boat but saw none.
“All right, you lot,” he said, turning back toward the bridge, “I’ll get on to the Coastguard in Falmouth. Cover him, but don’t touch the body.” The older crew members hesitated; Ronnie James fetched a canvas tarp.
On the wheelhouse radio the Coastguard operator squawked, “Change course and return to Falmouth.”
“Not a chance, mate,” Perran replied, his voice even. “Not unless you’re ready to buy my entire catch; I’m inbound for tomorrow’s auction at Newlyn, last of the week. I’ve got one dead body on deck, but I have hundreds more dying by the minute in my hold. By Monday I’ll have a total loss.”
A pause: “Understood then, captain. We’ll send a high-speed RNLI rescue boat out to collect the body and take it ahead of you to Newlyn. Penzance police will collect it there. The vessel does 25 knots; we should be with you shortly.”
“Roger that. We’ll keep you posted on our location.”
One
ONE MINUTE ARCHIE Hansen was jouncing across the stony field in his aging, rust-red Massey Ferguson tractor, the next minute he was airborne. Like a stumbling horse, the lurching tractor had pitched him right out of its cab.
“Son of a bitch!”
It was Thursday, twelfth March, and Hansen was doing a shallow weeding of his field of Maris Peer potatoes. Now, right shoulder wrenched, his side bruised by the jagged granite shards that studded his ancient field on Cornwall’s Lizard Peninsula like a crop of their own, he struggled to his feet while the tractor, still in gear, labored helplessly to move forward, its big rear power wheel turning uselessly because the right front wheel was deep in a hole.
Hansen, on the wrong side of fifty and beginning to show it, was rawboned as a goat but for a developing paunch that spoke of too many nights spent downing pints of Doom Bar at his local, the New Inn at Manaccan. He fetched his cap from the ground and slapped it on a skull that was as bald to its crest as a half-peeled orange. He offset this tonsorial desert with a greying beard which, fastidiously trimmed to a sharp point at the chin, gave him a vaguely Mephistophelian air. The leader of a local group of Druids, he’d lately been straying from the faith and experimenting with spell-casting and darker magic. The devilish beard was, he thought, only appropriate.
He climbed up to the cab, shut off the motor, and cursed himself for not owning a four-wheeler that could have pulled itself out of this dilemma—not that he’d ever spring for something that pricy. Depending on the year and the field he was rotating during Cornwall’s mild winter months, Hansen cultivated daffodils, cauliflower, early potatoes, and followed
with grains—barley or wheat—in the spring. He was as successful as any farmer in Cornwall could say he was these days, but he was tight as a Shylock, and therefore better off than his neighbors.
Now he knelt beside the sunken wheel. The ground he’d farmed for years here on the Lizard, and that generations of Norwegian immigrant Hansens had farmed before him, inexplicably had given way beneath the tractor. Looking down on either side of the knobby, black front tyre, he saw only darkness. He climbed back into the cab, started the engine, and gunned it, only to have the front wheel dive even deeper.
“Son of a bitch.”
Hansen’s verbal expressions of both disgust and surprise were limited. He yanked his mobile from the pocket of his dirt-encrusted navy blue coveralls and rang up his young neighbor, Bobby Tregareth. The two of them farmed adjacent fields just inland from Nare Head, on the soft, undulating hills above the pastoral reaches of the Helford River on Cornwall’s English Channel coast.
A half hour later, Hansen had a chain hooked between the front axle of the tractor and Bobby’s beat-up, tan Land Rover Defender. Burning up the four-wheel-drive Defender’s clutch in low gear, Bobby managed to pop the tractor’s wheel from its trap and pull it away. Archie grabbed a torch from the cab, and like a terrier after a fox gone to earth, tore away turf and stone and managed to get his head and the light into the hole. What he saw, to his astonishment, was a rectangular stone-walled chamber. At the eastern end, two roughly five-foot granite pillars suggested an entrance tunnel, long since collapsed and filled with rubble. Directly opposite, to the west, a six-inch-thick slab of granite the size of a small, misshapen door lay flat on the earthen floor, its surface studded with white quartz crystals that glittered like diamond chips as the beam of his torch swept it.
“One of them ancient chambers, Bobby. Fetch a ladder; I’m going down an’ll need a way back up.”
“But Mr. Hansen, surely this is a matter for the archaeologists at the county council…”
“Don’t be wet, Bobby; nothing comes to ditherers.”
Bobby did it. He’d little choice: he leased much of his farmland from Hansen and depended upon his good will.
After Bobby left, Hansen shoved the torch into a pocket, swung his legs into the ragged mouth of the hole, held himself suspended above the gap on wobbly arms for a moment, then dropped in, his arms extended above his head.
He fell farther and hit harder than he expected; the roof of the chamber was a good six feet high. Groaning, he rolled to his knees, stood, and looked around. The four walls of the chamber were curved inward ever so slightly until they met three granite roofing slabs, roughly four feet wide, a foot thick, and five long. The tractor wheel had dropped through a weak spot at the edge of one of these slabs.
The day was clear, and a shaft of light pierced the musty chamber from the hole above like sun slicing through cloud. Hansen sat on the edge of the thin slab on the floor for some time, scanning the perfect walls, looking for anything of interest—not that he had a clue what “interest” might look like. It was like being inside the belly of a beast.
A restless, impatient man, as he studied the walls and waited for the ladder, he thumped the rubberized butt of his torch absently on his stone seat as if keeping time with his pulse. It took a few moments before he noticed a tonal difference toward the center of the stone that didn’t exist around its periphery. He stood up and tapped again. No question: hollow.
“You down there, Mr. Hansen?”
“You see me anywhere else, Bobby?”
“Right, right; I’ve got the ladder. You need help down there?”
“I’m done here. Just send the ladder down.”
“What’d you see, Archie?” Bobby’s enthusiasm was almost childlike as Hansen squeezed to the surface.
“Not a damned thing. Just another of them Iron Age fogous. Bloody nuisance, they are, just like them big standing stones we got to plow around. Not to mention that Roman mosaic floor poor Johnny Sayer found in his field over Porthallow way. English Heritage were all over that and they’ll be all over this, too, wanting to protect it for God only knows what reason, which means I lose one of my best fields.”
“That’s just not right, Mr. Hansen.”
“Too true, Bobby, because it’ll mean I’ll need one of the fields you’re leasing from me back again.”
“Straight up? But I can’t get by…”
“Hush now, lad; I know. I’ve a simple solution. We don’t report this; we just carry on as per usual and no one’s the wiser, yeah?” Hansen said, tapping a knowing forefinger to the right side of his nose.
“You won’t report it?”
“Dime a dozen these underground chambers are hereabouts. What they don’t know about they won’t miss, am I right?”
“Sure. I guess. What about the hole?”
“Bit of corrugated roofing to cover it and then dirt so’s it looks like everything else, only I don’t plow near it again. Take me a couple of days and then—hey, presto!—it’s just our little secret. Few weeks, it’s grassed over. Invisible. Right, Bobby?” Archie looked at the young man, hard.
“Right, right. Invisible.”
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, though, Hansen was back in the chamber, alone. He’d slipped webbed strapping around one corner of the stone slab and was cranking a come-along winch anchored with spikes he’d driven into the hard pan of the chamber floor. It was brutal, hot work, even for late March. The sweat from his forehead left small black craters in the dim dust. Several times he’d had to re-anchor the come-along as the slab inched away from its resting place in a slow, rasping arc. His back and arms burned. He could have got Bobby to help, but he didn’t want the company.
Having moved the slab some sixty degrees off center, Hansen shone the torch into the hole he knew would be there. It was roughly two feet square and the same deep. Nestled in its center was a lidded clay vessel. Belly down on the slab, he reached in, and lifting the lid, shone the light on its contents.
“Son of a bitch,” he whispered.
JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT, Archie flicked on his most powerful torch, and descended into the chamber. Prone again on the displaced slab, he made to lift the earthenware vessel nestled in the underground compartment and then gave up. He had no idea gold could be so heavy.
The clay container was the color of weathered slate, grey and ribbed as if made from coils. It was roughly eighteen inches high, a foot wide at its shoulder, and narrow at the bottom, like an upside-down pear. The lid was an upended bowl and covered an opening at the top he guessed was about eight inches in diameter. He’d thought to bring a burlap seed sack from his machinery shed and had planned to lift the container into it, but there was an ominous crack along one side of the vessel and he decided to remove the contents instead. Hands trembling with excitement, he lifted two large, intricately-braided, nearly circular gold objects he reckoned were neck ornaments, six gold and bronze pins, brooches his partner Charlotte probably would call them, two gold rings with embossed signets, and what looked like an ornamental gold belt buckle. He was stunned to find that the bottom half of the vessel was filled with small grey coins. Hundreds of them.
Working in darkness, he loaded his trove into the back of his own Land Rover, strapped the ladder to the rack on the roof, eased the vehicle into gear, and moved off across the field as quietly as possible, lights off and navigating by habit and the penumbral gloom of a quarter moon.
Two
WHEN THE CALL about the floater came in from the Coastguard just before noon, seventeenth May, the Comms division of the Devon and Cornwall Police immediately contacted the Major Crimes Investigation Unit headquartered at Bodmin. Detective Chief Inspector Arthur Penwarren was at a briefing at Devon and Cornwall Police headquarters in Exeter, so the call fell to newly-promoted Detective Inspector Morgan Davies.
Davies was already speeding south on the A30 in her unmarked, white Ford Escort estate wagon when she finally called Detective Sergeant Ralph Poldennis, the senior CID officer
at the Penzance Basic Command Unit. Newlyn, where the Coastguard would off-load the body, sat cheek by jowl with Penzance on the scythe-like curve of Mount’s Bay and was Poldennis’s jurisdiction.
“Ralph, it’s Morgan,” she barked into her mobile. “I’m just clearing the Hayle roundabout.”
“Imagine my excitement. Did I call you?”
“Comms did.”
“Splendid.”
“Control your enthusiasm, Ralphie.”
“Should I be enthusiastic? Look, the RNLI boat isn’t due here for at least half an hour. We have nothing so far but an apparent floater…”
“A floater is enough to get my juices flowing.”
“Takes all kinds…”
“Don’t be coarse. When your ship comes in, as they say, we’ll transport the body to the mortuary at Treliske.”
“Splendid.”
“You said that before.”
“As you say, my enthusiasm is unbridled.”
“Look, Ralph, I’m not trying to pirate your patch.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“Come off it; the body was found off the Lizard Peninsula. That’s Falmouth’s patch anyway. You’re receiving it because Newlyn’s where the RNLI boat’s landing; that’s all. Where will it be unloaded, by the way? Which quay?”
“I suggested the old north quay. Little used these days; skippers prefer the newer Mary Williams Quay. Better services.”
“Good thinking; fewer sightseers that way, too. Funeral director’s wagon on its way?”
“No, Morgan, I hadn’t even thought of it...”
“Jesus, Ralph, I’m just trying to do my job.”
Poldennis sighed. Davies had been his boss at Penzance before her promotion. “I know you are, Morgan. Wouldn’t have thought it possible, but we sort of miss you down here…like we miss being rubbed with sandpaper.”
Davies laughed: “Be there in fifteen.”
“We’ll put out the welcome mat.”
“Electrified, no doubt.”