by Will North
This last bag was heavier, a big delivery. There already was a huge amount of cash in bags under a blanket in the boot of her locked car. She had no idea how much. She’d been terrified at first, but the exchanges had gone smoothly and mostly silently. The contacts were desperate. They’d waited more than two weeks for a delivery and their customers were restless, cranky, strung out. She’d clocked that these distributors were not users. Scruffy, though, some of them, but wasn’t she pretending to look the same?
She took her half pint of shandy to a round table off in a corner of the newer part of the pub and waited, the carrier bag atop the table by her glass. They were always late. She wondered if they’d watched her approach at each stop. She could have been any young woman. But she had the Tesco’s bag.
At coastal Newquay, the transfer was at a picnic table outside the surfing school attached to the massive brick and granite Headland Hotel, the contact muscular and bleached blond. The other stops were equally anonymous: a park in St. Austell. In Camborne, a bus stop only steps from the city’s police headquarters. In Redruth, the contact was an older woman, almost a granny, hair bleached platinum to hide the gray and with a bit too much pink rouge on her cheeks. They met at the recycling bins on the side of the Tescos Tolgus Hill Superstore. The woman had stood silently some distance away, uncertain that this was her courier. But the bag was right.
“Where’s the big bloke then?” the woman had mumbled into the maw of a big green recycling bin for brown beer and green wine bottles. There were two others, for clear glass and plastic.
Confused, Jan just shrugged. They picked up each other’s identical bag and parted.
Almost a half hour passed while she sat at the Sportsman’s Arms. She was tired, but also wired and thought a second half pint of shandy might be in order, when the Madron Road door opened and a slender man who looked to be in his mid-thirties entered and waved to the gent tending the bar. Full head of brown hair pulled back into a ponytail but, unlike her other male customers, wearing a tweed sports jacket and an open-collar dress shirt, pale blue and pressed. Handsome, with a touch of devilment in his dark brown eyes.
“Michael! Good to see you, lad!” the older, flush-faced chap behind the bar called. “Time you came to dinner one of these nights, yeah? The new chef is brilliant. Maybe come quiz night, given that brain of yours. Lift the tone, you would.” Jan reckoned he was the owner. The pub was a Free House, not leased to the publican by a chain.
The man named Michael ordered a pint of Skinner’s “Cornish Knocker,” a strong ale, and bag of Walker’s salted crisps, and took them to another small table away from the bar. He downed about half of the pint quickly, picked at the crisps, and made only the slightest, somewhat roughish eye contact with the woman sitting in the corner. She nodded and placed her hand on the Tesco’s carrier bag. When he drained his jar, he rose, thanked the man behind the bar, and left, turned right at the corner onto Bolitho Road, and walked a block to the local Warren’s Bakery shop on the wedge-shaped corner of Wesley Street—a barely one-lane, dead end lined with granite row houses squeezed right up against the pavement. There was a queue in the shop, and she waited behind the man called Michael. The fragrance of fresh-baked breads made her hungry. She hadn’t eaten all day. When it was his turn, he placed a Tesco’s bag, with the same red handles, on the floor beneath the counter. Jan reached around him and put her bag next to his.
“All right, then, luv?” the matronly woman behind the counter, her mostly white hair held in a pale-yellow net cap, said to him. “What’ll it be, Michael, the usual? Two small traditional Cornish pasties filled with beef mince, potato, onion, and Swede?”
“Yes, thank you, Doris. They any good today?”
“After a hundred fifty years of making them, they’d better be.” She filled a small white bag with the chain’s name printed on the outside.
“Didn’t know you went back that far, Doris! Goodness, you’ve held up well!”
She laughed and pretended to reach across the counter to slap him. “Pay up and get away, you scoundrel! You’re holdin’ up the queue.”
He pulled out a wad of notes and passed a tenner across the counter. “Keep the change, dear. A tip for your ever-courteous service.”
Then he reached down, picked up Jan’s carrier bag and, making no sign of acknowledgment, slipped out into the street, pausing to hold the door open for an elderly gent using a wheeled zimmer frame to help him walk.
The bag her contact had left was held shut by two large diaper pins with pick plastic clasps. She lifted it, paid for her loaf, thanked the woman behind the counter, and left. Outside, the man called Michael had vanished. His bag was lighter than hers had been. Bundles of paper currency are lighter than dense packets of cocaine and heroin.
SHE’D DRIVEN ALMOST halfway back north toward Bodmin on the A30 and was trying let go of the adrenaline rush of the day by listening to Classic FM on the radio, when she heard the rouged old woman’s voice again:
Where’s the big bloke then?
“I’M SORRY, SIR, but smoking is not permitted in reception,” the uniformed guard behind the Hub’s bulletproof glass security window warned through a speaker. “If you wish to smoke, please step back outside while you wait. Do you have an appointment?”
“Penwarren,” Lance Macleod barked, exhaling smoke through his nostrils.
“Is he expecting you, sir?”
“He’s always expecting me. Crime reporter, The Cornishman.”
The guard nodded. “I’ll see if the DCI is available, but please step outside or extinguish your cigarette straightaway.”
Macleod looked at the stick in his hand. It was only half-smoked and he was too cheap to let it go. There was no ash tray anyway. Outside, where he finished it, he pulled his greasy black fedora down over his eyes. It was a cold, clear autumn afternoon and the sun glared off the smooth granite flagstone pavement before the Bodmin Hub’s entry, the quartz crystals imbedded in the stone winking like diamonds. It hurt his eyes. He was going to have to go to the NHS soon to check for cataracts. Or maybe it was just all those years of squinting through the cigarette smoke.
“You!”
Startled, Macleod spun on his heel and nearly toppled.
It was the security officer, standing in the opened glass main door. “The DCI will see you now.”
Macleod was excited. He’d wanted to penetrate the new, very modern police hub ever since it opened to much fanfare and the blessings of a few lesser royals. He’d not been on the invitation list. But when he was ushered into the three-story glassed waiting area, Penwarren was already seated in a sleek, IKEA-style, black leather and birch chair with a sloping back. He gestured to the one beside him. Macleod was so scrawny compared to Penwarren, he felt like a child in a too big chair as he sat. The double electric interior doors behind the DCI were closed. Disappointed and, like the child he felt like in the soaring space, he made a face. He realized this was as far as he was going to get.
Penwarren smiled. “The redoubtable Cornwall journalist, Lance Macleod. How may I help you, sir?”
Macleod fished around in a pocket of his stained Burberry trench coat and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper. He bent over and smoothed out the wrinkles on the floor with nicotine-stained fingers, then lifted and flipped it around to face the DCI with what was nearly a flourish. It was Lugg in all his tattooed glory, the photo they’d circulated.
“Yes?”
“Sent to the media—no exclusive for me, of course. Your moorland murder victim, right?”
Penwarren nodded.
“It’s been two weeks since you found him. Who is he, then, Penwarren? Precious little in the press release from your lackeys.”
Penwarren waved the insult away. “Public information department. Not my people.”
Macleod bristled anyway. “You know more about this victim. You’re keeping it secret. That’s irresponsible.”
Penwarren closed his eyes briefly at the irony.
“We
know his name, yes, which we will not yet divulge. We know he is not local; I’ll give you that. But this is a murder investigation, Macleod, and I’ll tell you what is responsible. I have a responsibility to the victim. I have a responsibility to this community. We have a responsibility to get it right, and to build a case the Crown Prosecution Service will be able to prosecute. Badger us all you want, you’ll only get what we know, and only then when we know it.
“But that won’t stop you, will it Macleod? You’ll crank out another headline-grabbing story about a dead outsider found on the moor. You’ll spin something out of nothing, as you have countless times before. It will be wrong, as usual, and you will have to retract it. How The Cornishman tolerates you is beyond me.”
“I sell papers,” Macleod said with a sly grin, as if he were a star reporter.
“You know what, Macleod, you’re right about that. You sell papers twice: first when the story is wrong and second when you have to correct it.”
Penwarren stood and nodded to the uniform behind the thick glass security window. The sliding doors behind him slid open. “We are done here, Macleod. You will hear from us when we have something to tell you and the rest of your colleagues. Not before.”
Macleod watched the DCI disappear, pulled out a cigarette from his jacket and lit it, glaring at the guard for a protest before marshalling his dignity and exiting the building.
Thirty-Four
WHEN PENWARREN RETURNED to his office, his desk phone’s amber voicemail light was blinking. It was a land line phone he seldom used. Almost no one in Cornwall and Devon’s detective service did. It came with the office but was universally believed, despite assurances from Administration in Exeter, to be insecure. He punched a button and listened to a brief anonymous message. “Do you have a secure mobile?” Monotone and, he suspected, artificially slowed and lowered, the voice was almost robotic.
An 02 dialing code. London. He took the number down and deleted the message. He stood at his tall desk and didn’t return the call immediately. His desk, a waist high slab of black laminate on steel legs, was a little over five feet long, but only twenty-four inches deep. It held only a keyboard and monitor, also in black, an open graph-lined note pad, and an empty white porcelain coffee mug with a somewhat surprisingly old-fashioned Porthmerion wildfowl print. A small portion of its lip was chipped, the inside coffee-stained. It was practically antique and it had been his mother’s favorite. She’d had no taste for the pale, limp national beverage and preferred strong, black coffee. Stylish Becca had hated the old mug and had banished it to his office.
Off against one wall, was a low birch credenza with file drawers that held his papers. Atop it were a black wire in-tray, empty, and a framed color photo of the Healey where, perhaps, a family portrait might have been. The office was, like him, almost austere.
He was certain the doctored voice was either Calum’s friend in SO15, or someone higher. Please have something for me, he prayed.
He picked up his mobile and punched in the code.
“Yes?” a voice answered. A woman’s voice.
“Penwarren.”
“You were Met. Where?”
“SW9.”
“Brixton. Rough place.”
“Nicest people I’ve ever known. West Indians, Africans, others. Great little restaurants. Shopped every afternoon at the market stalls on Electric Avenue. Gangs less prevalent in those days.”
“I hear it’s gone upscale now,” the voice said. “All right, you’re you.”
“And you are?”
“Irrelevant.”
Penwarren laughed. “I hope not. Do you have anything for me, Ms. Irrelevant?”
“A name at the Merseyside headquarters. A Detective Sergeant Doherty.”
“Sounds Irish.”
“Northern Ireland. Father a notorious Provo who died in a bombing gone wrong in Derry. Son left for Liverpool.”
“What about him?”
“Not much, I’m afraid. Coded communications between this fellow and suspected New IRA operatives in the Republic. Specifically, Cork.”
“Names?” Penwarren was picking up her clipped delivery.
“Above your pay level.”
“Does it involve drugs traffic?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Won’t say?”
“To be truthful, we are still trying to unlock their code.”
“Have you communicated any of this to the Garda?”
“No.”
“Will you?”
“Soon. It will have to come from the National Crime Agency. Possibly the Home Secretary.”
“I am already in touch with the Garda in Cork.”
“And I am instructed to tell you that you are operating far beyond your remit.”
“I have a murder to solve.”
“Yes. But have a care, Detective.” For a moment there was a hint of warmth in her voice. Then she ended the call.
Penwarren sent Calum a text: Are you in the building?
A moment, and then, Yes.
Let’s talk. Bring Morgan if she’s with you.
JAN TOOK THE bypass circumventing the maze of one-way streets and seemingly perpetual road construction in the heart of Bodmin town and continued north on the A30. Shortly after the north and south lanes of the dual carriageway split in two to accommodate the rising and roughening topography of the moor, she exited left onto a one-lane road that wound roughly northeast, twisting around field ends. She was driving very fast, but she knew these lanes and their blind ninety degree turns by heart. She also knew the hedgerows on both sides hid solid stone walls. No wonder, she thought as she steered the BMW through another turn only to find sheep in the road being herded by a black and white border collie, that disk brakes were invented by an Englishman.
She had never felt so alive. It was like her blood was fizzing. She’d succeeded—succeeded at something crazy, criminal, and dangerous. Her car boot was filled with Tesco bags packed with banknotes. While she waited in a layby for the sheep and dog to pass and wondered where the farmer was, she used her hands-free phone to tell O’Dare she was close.
When she descended into the shallow green swale in which the big house sat and wheeled her car to a skidding halt in Davidstow’s gravel forecourt, he was waiting outside the small, unused tractor barn, arms crossed at his chest. He wore a short brown leather jacket that reminded her of the dashing RAF pilots in war movies. The sheepskin collar was turned up against the wind. She killed her engine, leapt from the car, and ran to him.
“I did it! Oh, Ronnie,” she said pressing her lips into his neck, “It was so exciting!”
He did not respond. She didn’t even notice.
“It went well then.” It was not a question.
“Yes, come look!”
She grabbed his hand, pulled him back to the car, and threw open the boot. It was packed. She pointed to each bag in turn: “St. Austell, Camborne, Redruth, Newquay, Penzance.”
“Good. Yes, good. I will do an inventory later. Some of those contacts try to shortchange me. If I find them out they have two choices, no next delivery or cover the shortfall next time. No exceptions. For them, it’s like a death sentence from their street peddlers. They shape up.”
“How will you know which customer is which?”
“There will be a note requesting the next delivery at the bottom of the bag.” He pulled the bags from her car and placed them in the back of his Range Rover.
“Come inside. I have champagne.”
What she most wanted was to drag him upstairs to his big carved oak bed and spend the night pleasing and being pleased, but she didn’t. She never did. She could never be gone for a night without giving her mother a reason, and Ronnie O’Dare could never be that reason. Her father, she was certain, would disown her. An Irishman, older than she, new money, no history. Bought that old estate and its commons land like he was buying a car, for God’s sake. Shouldn’t be legal! Though he’d never met O’Dare, only heard rumors
at the landowners’ meetings, he’d made up his mind and despised him. Jan, who’d found safety early in not even hearing her father’s rants, almost danced into the house.
Davidstow Manor’s long entry hall was floored in squares of local Delabole slate, not marble, their edges rounded by centuries of wear. Old but never quite grand, this had been a working farm. To the right of the entry, a massive oak staircase rose to the floor above. Up the flight of steps to the big bedroom above was all she’d really seen of the house.
Now, he led her into a room across from the staircase. It was roughly square, paneled with wood wainscoting that needed paint, and featured a hearth in the center of the inside wall surmounted by the pitted plaster crest of some previous Lord. This had been the office in which the Lord and his ancestors collected and recorded rents from their estate’s tenant farmers. Now it was his lair. A wood fire burned in the hearth and shone on the room’s oak parquet floor. The neat squares were beautifully crafted, but the wood was scuffed. She wondered why he hadn’t had them refinished.
An ice bucket rested on an old round oak table near the fire, the neck of the bottle beaded with condensation. He uncorked carefully, poured their glasses, then sat on a long, brown, tufted leather Chesterfield settee. It looked to her like it had been in the room since the Georgian Period, like most of the occasional tables that were scattered about.
She walked closer to the fire, swinging a large Gucci handbag she’d grabbed from her car, and set it on the floor. Slowly, very slowly, the warmth of the blaze at her back, she removed the second-hand Goth outfit: the tattered black denim jacket, the black mesh tee shirt underneath, the torn black jeans, the boots. One by one, she dropped them from her fingertips into a pile beside the hearth until all that she wore were an expensive Agent Provocateur black lace balcony bra and its matching thong panty. Jan liked having a very private persona beneath her usual countrywoman’s clothes.
