by Will North
Calum tipped half a kilo of minced lamb to the skillet, stirred in a couple of spoonfuls of tomato paste, added several dashes of Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper, and kept stirring as the meat browned. He added Kaitlin’s diced carrots, some frozen peas, and a big splash of red wine, and had a pot of water boiling for the potatoes. Kaitlin showed Megan how to use the chef’s knife safely to cut up the potatoes and Megan dropped each piece into the boiling water quickly, one by one, as if she thought they might jump back out.
Morgan settled into a chair at the kitchen table. “Any chance of a glass or three of a decent red wine?” she said, as if to the room in general.
Calum chuckled. “If there’s any left after the cooking.”
“There’d better be.”
“Long day, Morgan?”
“They’re all long lately, luv. I confess I wish you were back full-time. I miss your chronically annoying, but often useful contributions.”
“I’m the sand in the oyster that delivers you pearls.”
She made a face. “Adam and I interviewed the Cuthbertson girl and got nothing, except the certainty that she’s lying about who visited her the night she found the body. And our body, such as he is, is quickly becoming a cold case in the mortuary’s fridge and all we have is a handful of clues that lead us nowhere.”
She realized the girls were hanging on every word and waved a hand to dismiss her rant. “Sorry, ladies. Not a dinnertime topic, I know.”
Kaitlin joined her at the table and said, softly, “It’s okay, we’re used to it from Daddy.”
“Doesn’t make it right,” Morgan said and gave the girl’s hand a squeeze.
The potatoes now soft, Calum mashed and whisked them with butter and milk until they were silky, scooped the meat and vegetable mixture into a well-used casserole dish, and smoothed the potatoes across the top. He scored the surface of the potatoes into ridges with the tines of a fork, brushed them with shirred egg, then shifted the dish into the oven. He brought an open bottle of Australian shiraz and two glasses to the table, pouring them each a measure. Lemonade for the girls.
“About time,” Morgan said smiling as he sat next to her.
Like a mist off the Atlantic, their budding sense of family had crept up on Morgan when she hadn’t been watching. She didn’t know if she was excited by the comfort of it wrapping around her, or just terrified. The emotions seemed so similar. She caught up with their day talking about how the girls fared at school. Kaitlin was the achiever, Megan the dreamer. They were both doing well.
After a while, the kitchen timer dinged, and Calum went to pull the steaming shepherd’s pie from the oven. He set it, still bubbling around the edges and golden on the top, on a hot pad on the table.
“Let’s let this cool a bit, shall we?” He refilled Morgan’s glass.
Kaitlin’s elbows were on the table, her hands under her chin. “I’ve been thinking,” she said to the tabletop.
“Oh God, you’re as bad as your father,” Morgan said. “He thinks, too. It always means trouble.”
“No, really…”
“Okay,” Morgan said, trying to stifle a grin. “What have you been thinking, Detective Kaitlin?”
Calum’s eldest made a serious face, as if concentrating. She’d heard enough about the case to know what the big question was.
“So, we started reading this book at school. It’s a fantasy set in the future. Climate change and technology have changed the world, and not for the better. It’s called The Boy Who Fell from the Sky, and I was thinking, you know, maybe this guy did that? Fell from the sky?”
Kaitlin looked at Morgan and her father for support but got only indulgent smiles.
“Let’s have dinner while we think about that, darling,” her father said. Kaitlin shrank into her chair, embarrassed she had said anything.
MORGAN AND THE girls did the washing up and she shooed them off to finish their schoolwork when they were done. She found Calum in the sitting room watching a documentary on the telly. On the screen was a rock pinnacle apparently in the middle of the ocean somewhere. It was topped by a tall white lighthouse. “What’s that?” she asked as she joined him on the couch.
“Fastnet.”
“Sorry—what?”
“It’s a rock between Cornwall and southwest Ireland.”
“Wait, isn’t that one of the spots they mention on the radio when they do the shipping forecast? But I’ve never known where it was and frankly those forecasts always seem like they’re in code. You know: Fastnet: west northwest four to six, backing seven. Rough. Rain later. I guess you have to be a mariner to understand them. But why’s it on the telly?”
“It’s a BBC documentary about the Fastnet race a couple of months ago. The race is a big deal in the sailing world, international. They start at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. Dozens of boats compete. They race down the Channel, tack around Land’s End, and then head out into the Atlantic to round Fastnet Light. They finish back in Portsmouth, days later. Some of the boats are big, full of the latest technology. They’re mostly owned by international racing syndicates. Rolex is the sponsor. But there are several boat classes, including smaller ones.”
“Have you ever wanted to sail?”
Calum laughed. “Me? Not a chance. Give me cricket and football, right here on terra firma. The more firma the less terror.”
Morgan leaned over and kissed him full on his lips for the first time. “Let’s turn that off and check in with the girls. Almost bedtime.”
Calum was almost speechless. She kissed him again, harder this time, and stood.
That night, for the first time in so long she could not even remember, she came to a man’s bed and undressed. He watched as if mesmerized. Laying down beside him, her belly against his back, she stroked him gently, listening to his groans of pleasure. Then she rose to straddled him—her favorite position from long ago. She held on to his shoulders so she put no pressure on the lump in his chest where the new pacemaker lay—and rode him rhythmically until they collapsed into each other. It was hard to know which of them was more astonished.
They lay there together, spooned, breathing together for a while, but Calum soon slipped into sleep. She carefully slid from his bed. He had an en-suite bathroom, separate from the one the girls and she normally used. She slipped in and closed the door. There was a toilet, sink, and a shower stall stood in one corner with a curved sliding glass door. It had an instant-on electric hot water heater mounted above the shower head. On a small shelf in one corner there were two plastic bottles from Boots, the chemists: shampoo and conditioner. She checked the sell-by date. They were years old and almost glued to the shelf. She shook her head and wondered why Calum hadn’t tossed them by now. But she didn’t know this kind of grief. Her own divorce, years ago, had been hard but amicable, and she’d removed every trace of her husband, another cop, immediately.
She soaped her body clean from the sex, but almost regretfully. She felt so deeply alive again. Toweling off in front of the bathroom mirror she regarded her middle-aged body for the first time in years. Morgan was a big woman—taller than most and big-boned. Solidly built, but not overweight. Full breasts, of which she’d always been proud. High cheekbones and short, spiked, bleached hair like a helmet. Imposing, certainly, she acknowledged. That had been troubling to some other officers, but never to Calum.
She gathered her clothes and tip-toed to her own room so as not to awaken the girls. She folded herself into bed, pulled up the duvet, and fell asleep almost immediately.
Twenty-Two
IT WAS AFTER ten when Penwarren called Wednesday night. He thought it was late enough to be safe. He was in his flat on the top floor of the old harbormaster’s building in Padstow. He’d had take-away from his old friend Rick Stein’s upscale fish and chips shop just up the road, and was nursing a white French burgundy that was beginning to lose its chill. It was a calm autumn evening. Across the dark harbor in Rock a few lights glittered. They scattered bright shards
across the slack water.
“Bev. It’s me. Were you asleep?”
“No. Are you okay?”
“I just wanted to check in to be sure you are safe.”
“Oh, Artie, thank you.” There was a catch in his former sister-in-law’s voice. “It was hard this evening.”
“You said that time of day was the most difficult. I looked it up. ‘Sundown Syndrome’.”
“We were in the sitting room just after an early supper. He was agitated and belligerent and ranting about Jan, calling her a ‘traitor,’ but I couldn’t make sense of it and when I tried to calm him, he knocked me to the floor. I’m fine, Artie. He’s old, but he’s a big man. It’s frightening.”
Penwarren wanted to say something loving. He said nothing.
“I feel a failure,” she said.
“Don’t be silly, failure isn’t in you, Bev.”
“Except perhaps in marriage.”
“I wish I had known you’d been so unhappy for so long.”
“What could you have done?”
Penwarren stared out at the inky river. In the light from the streetlamps along the quay, he could see that the tide was reversing and beginning to fill the boat basin.
“You’re right. Probably nothing. I’m not even family anymore.”
“My sister divorced you, Artie, I didn’t. You’re still, as my increasingly beastly daughter would put it, ‘our Artie’.”
“What has happened to Jan, Bev? She was a delightful kid.”
He heard her sigh. “Randall never took notice of her and treated her as if she were, I don’t know, part of the furniture, never as his only child. And now, I don’t know who she is anymore. I thought she’d strike off on her own as soon as she finished school, but she chose to return here, as if helping look after the estate would gain her points with her father. It hasn’t. He’s continued to ignore her when he isn’t dismissing her. And now, given tonight’s rant, I worry he may try to harm her. Traitor? What could that even mean?”
“With respect, Bev, I do think that you, and Jan for that matter, might be safer with help in the evening. It wouldn’t need to be live-in—at least not yet.”
“It’s not just the end of the day, my good and dear man: he’s started wandering. I ran into Bodmin to Sainsbury’s today for groceries and when I returned, he was gone. On his favorite horse. God knows why.”
“He can still ride?”
“Yes. He’s always been a fine horseman. But I’m glad his best horse knows its way home. When he returned, he seemed unusually confused. I helped him into the house and went back to tend to his horse. When I returned he hadn’t moved from that bench in the hall where I’d left him. He was mumbling about foreigners, incoherent. Then there was this blowup this evening.”
“Have you spoken to his physician?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“He says it’s getting near the end.”
“What did he recommend?”
“Tranquilizers and, like you, a minder. But I don’t think he’d tolerate someone new in the house. He might get violent with her as well.”
“The minder could be male, Bev.”
“Okay. But I wish you were here, Artie. I miss you.”
Penwarren let silence extend, and then said, “Bev, I need you to know that I will be interviewing Jan tomorrow morning at Bodmin.”
“Yes, she’s told me. She’s furious about it.”
“If she is, Bev, she has only herself to blame. A man was murdered.”
“You can’t suspect her!”
“No, of course not. But she has not been, shall we say, forthright about that evening.”
“Yes, I saw that when Morgan was here. I don’t know what’s got into her. You will be gentle, Artie?”
“Of course.”
He rang off and sat for a while, staring out across the dark water. The little passenger ferry that ran across to Rock had stopped running and the river was dark and still. As if in a wrestling match, the river’s flow would soon be overcome by the incoming tide. Penwarren himself wrestled with the competing instincts of his carefully cultivated policeman’s reticence and his growing concern for his former sister-in-law—a woman whom he’d begun to realize meant a great deal to him.
Day Eleven
Twenty-Three
JUST AFTER TEN Thursday morning, Jan Cuthbertson stood in the soaring, three-story glass atrium lobby of the Bodmin Police Hub. The sky had cleared at last and morning sunlight suffused the lobby. She showed her driver’s license to the uniformed officer seated behind the bulletproof glass reception window. He smiled and waved her identification away. “That’s all right, Miss, you’re expected.” The door into the police headquarters buzzed open and Penwarren waited on the other side. He reached out his hand. She ignored it.
“Thank you for coming, Jan.”
“It’s not like I had a choice,” she snapped.
Penwarren simply smiled and nodded once in assent. “Shall we go upstairs?” He did not wait for an answer and she followed. As they climbed two flights, they met a couple of uniformed officers descending, each of whom greeted the DCI warmly, as if he were their superior, which he was not. The CID was fully separate from the uniformed service, but Penwarren had their respect.
At the top floor he ushered her into his airy office. Morgan Davies was already there, seated at his small, round, birch meeting table.
Jan did not immediately sit. “I was expecting a windowless interview cell with soundproofing and recording equipment.”
“We can arrange that, if you wish,” Davies said.
“Please, Jan, have a seat,” Penwarren said. He could see that Morgan would relish giving the girl the full treatment. “This is not an interrogation, Jan. We are not going to put you under oath.”
“We’re just trying to clear a few things up,” Morgan added, annoyance clear in her voice. Penwarren was the good cop, she was the bad cop this morning.
“I can’t imagine what more you could want of me,” the younger woman said, tossing her hair as she took a chair.
“The truth would be a good start,” Morgan said looking straight at her and opening a thick file folder that lay before her. She did not smile.
Jan looked to Penwarren. He stood by the window and did not join them at the table. His face was impassive. He nodded for Morgan to continue.
“By my count, Ms. Cuthbertson, you have lied to us twice in this murder investigation, once the night the victim was found and then again when Detective Constable Adam Novak and I interviewed you in your mother’s kitchen yesterday morning. Twice. So far. Are you aware that in a case of murder that is known as obstruction? And you could be charged?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.” Jan attempted an innocent smile, but the result was a smirk.
Her arrogance made Morgan want to throttle the girl. She glanced at Penwarren. He shook his head.
Morgan leaned in. “If you can’t put the pieces together, young lady, allow me to do so: you saw a gruesomely mutilated body some distance out in Rough Tor Mire. It must have been a shock. Upsetting. You phoned it in to police and then made your way home across the moor as dark approached. We understand that no one wants to be abroad on the moor in the dark. Your parents had already gone off to their Landowners’ meeting. You were shaken. It seems clear that you called or messaged someone you know and asked them to visit to help you. They came. When DCI Penwarren called to say he was sending officers to interview you, you sent your visitor packing—but not quite soon enough because he or she was seen speeding out of your drive as they arrived.”
Morgan paused, waiting for a response. None came.
“Of course, we can track down your visitor by way of your mobile’s history. We can use cell phone tower records to triangulate and locate whomever you called—amazing technology these days. But that’s time-consuming, costly, and so unnecessary, really, if you would be willing to fill in the blanks in your own story about that night.
”
Jan Cuthbertson said nothing but held Morgan’s eyes, as if their eyes themselves were warring. Finally, the younger woman looked away.
“Yes. I called someone,” Jan said finally. “A friend. A woman.”
“And this woman would be?”
“This woman would be a lover, okay?! We have been lovers for two years. My parents must never know. My father would disown me in a heartbeat.”
What Morgan noticed was that this confession had brought no color to Jan’s face. It was as if it were a prepared speech, delivered in a matter-of-fact voice. No emotion whatsoever. She glanced at Penwarren, then back to Jan. She leaned back against her chair. She wanted Jan to think she’d been shocked.
“You’re gay then?” she said finally, tapping a finger gently on the file folder before her, as if in time with her pulse…or as if to calm it.
“So? Does that shock you? Are we meant to look different? Act different? And what about you, Detective Davies? Mid-fifties? Unmarried? Who are you when you’re at home? Spinster? I somehow doubt that. Who looks after your needs? I’m sure you still have them. That petite redhead Detective Terry Bates, perhaps?”
Morgan rose in anger. Penwarren stepped forward immediately.
“Thank you, Morgan. I’ll take this from here. You’re wanted in the incident room.”
Morgan glared at him and stalked out of his office, her shoes echoing in the corridor outside. Penwarren waited until the echoes faded and then took her chair, facing Jan.
Jan smirked, delighted with her performance. Penwarren said nothing for at least a minute, letting her take in what she’d just done. He watched her blink several times, as if trying to maintain her façade of innocence. Her eyes today were nearly green. He wondered if they changed with her mood. The longer he waited the more rapidly she blinked. It was a tell-tale. Lying suspects blink a lot.
“Did that please you, Jan?” he said finally, his voice level. “Smearing Detective Inspector Davies? Did it?”
Jan stared at him and did not respond.
