by Will North
And now Poldennis was laughing, too.
DAVIES WALKED TO the end of the nineteenth century stone quay and looked out over Mounts Bay. It was a fine mid-May afternoon. In the far distance beyond the harbor, water and sky merged as if without boundary, the one indistinguishable from the other. This far tip of Cornwall was accustomed to freshly-laundered air delivered daily from the Atlantic, but today was a rare one, with the wind from the Continent. The atmosphere was hazy and the water calm, as if catching a breath before the next onslaught from the west. Away to the east, the castle atop the rocky offshore pinnacle of St. Michael’s Mount shimmered in soft focus, as if it sat behind a lacy curtain suspended in the still, sunny air. Above Davies, grey and white Fulmars screeched and wheeled and the stench of fish guts and diesel fuel filled her nostrils. The stench smelled like home.
Across the broad protected anchorage, at the larger and longer Mary Williams Quay, trawlers and long liners, their hulls painted every color of the rainbow, were unloading for the next day’s pre-dawn auction. Forklifts stacked with red plastic bins filled with iced fish skittered about like wharf rats. Morgan knew these fishermen; they’d been her friends and neighbors from the days when she lived here in a renovated stone sail loft above the quays, before her promotion moved her north to Bodmin. Catching sight of her when she arrived at the car park, several of the slicker-clad men called out or waved. She waved back and grinned; she’d arrested more than one of them, and yet missed their rough and tumble company.
But now she was thinking about Calum. Calum West was the senior crime scene manager for the Scene of Crimes unit at the Bodmin Operational Hub, where she too was now based. West was the sort of chap who gave the impression of being perpetually and benignly amused, as if the everyday absurdity of life were a source of quiet joy. No matter the extremity of the crime scene, and his cases were always extreme, there was a brightness, almost a playfulness about him, as if he’d managed to preserve a childlike sense of wonder at all things, including murder. In the early days, Davies had taken this for a lack of gravitas. But after working together closely on the Chynoweth girl’s murder in Penzance the year before, she’d changed her mind: each new body was, for him, a new adventure, a new knotty problem to solve, and he went at it with enthusiasm and brilliance. She admired him immensely. But now she worried he would be annoyed with this new case: no scene to examine, no site to search, no clothing to test for distinctive fibers, no fingerprints. The body itself would be his only “scene.” Then she smiled. Knowing West, that would just make the problem all the more intriguing.
Finally, in the gauzy distance, she spied the Severn Class RNLI vessel with its navy blue hull and bright orange superstructure. It hurtled across the water, dragging its churning white wake behind like a long bridal train. Beside her, Detective Sergeant Poldennis stood with his hands thrust in his trouser pockets. A young, uniformed police constable waited just behind them. He’d been introduced as PC Claire Reynolds, and she had given him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. Thanks to their given names, he’d forever be assumed to be a woman, just as Morgan would forever be assumed to be a man. For more than twenty years she’d had to deal with policemen who were instantly dismissive when they discovered she wasn’t male. Try as they might, though, they never reached her and they soon learned that she gave as good as she got…and then some. Silently, she wished the young constable best of luck in the force.
While they watched the approaching vessel, Poldennis regarded the woman beside him. Davies was tall and big-boned, just three inches shy of six feet, he guessed. Handsome rather than pretty. And though she wore inch-high pumps with her plainclothes pantsuit, Davies didn’t strut as she walked like most women did in heels; instead, she strode, heavy-footed and leading with her chin as if perpetually recovering from a near-stumble. What made her arresting, besides her plush figure, was a sharply sculpted head—high cheekbones, knife-cut jawline, fair skin largely unwrinkled for a woman of forty-five, spiked hair streaked blond, and eyes blue as the interior of an iceberg and not much warmer. He’d heard she was Welsh by birth, but she looked more like a Scandinavian warrior goddess. She was blunt and acerbic, but also passionate about policing, and he often thought that if anything ever happened to someone he loved, he’d want Morgan Davies on the case.
As the RNLI vessel approached, Davies marveled at the breakneck speed the skipper maintained even as the boat approached the quay, then watched in amazement as it came to an abrupt halt thanks to suddenly activated bow thrusters. The boat wallowed for a moment in its own chop and then a uniformed crew member made it fast to the quay. She admired the boat jockey behind the wheel, imagining some rakish lad. But when the skipper who emerged turned out to be portly and old enough to be her father, she smiled at that short-lived fantasy.
Davies climbed down the rusting iron rungs set into the granite face of the quay, reached the vessel’s bobbing deck, turned, and punched her hand out to shake the skipper’s.
“Detective Inspector Morgan Davies, Captain: Major Crime Investigation Team, Bodmin.”
The dapper captain bowed slightly: “Rory MacDonald, and may I say it would certainly be more of a pleasure to meet you, Inspector, under more salubrious conditions.”
Morgan nodded and smiled: We all have our private fantasies…
Beckoning PC Reynolds, who held her bag, she pulled out a white Tyvek jumpsuit, shrugged the protective garment on over her clothes, and shoved her fingers into latex gloves. The body lay under a shroud on the deck.
“How’d you handle the body?”
“Can’t say about the fishing crew, but we used gloves,” the captain said.
“Well done.”
She lifted the cloth and took record photos with a small digital camera. She said nothing as she moved around, but noted the dead man’s peculiar wounds. She touched nothing. From time to time she knelt to look closely. Finally, she stood and nodded to the constable, and the two of them, the PC also now in Tyvek, wrapped the body in white sterile sheeting and then zipped it into a thick, black plastic body bag. She locked and tagged the zipper, and then Poldennis signaled for the body to be winched quayside where the undertaker’s van waited, engine idling. She stepped out of the Tyvek coveralls, thanked the captain, turned to the iron ladder, and then paused.
“Up you go, Ralphie,” she said, waving Poldennis ahead of her. “Don’t want you staring at my arse as I climb, you old rogue.” She knew Poldennis would blush, and he did.
Three
CHARLOTTE JOHNS HAD been Archie Hansen’s partner for coming up on five years. They’d met through Druidry, not long after his former wife divorced him and took their two children north to Cumbria where she had family. His wife, Margie, had charged that Archie was addicted to violent, pornographic videos and that she and her children were in danger. Though no direct evidence was presented to substantiate these charges, the court nonetheless awarded her custody. Hansen never saw the kids again, and had no idea how or where they were now. To Charlotte, it seemed Archie had a wound that scabbed over but kept oozing. And he told her the porn tapes had merely been a business sideline. He’d sold them by mail order and had made a tidy sum. Thankfully, from his point of view, neither Margie nor the court knew just how tidy a sum it was. Nor did Charlotte.
Charlotte believed Archie’s passionate embrace of Druidry was driven by a hunger to fill the hole left by his divorce and the loss of his children. As for being dangerous, that was nonsense. He liked his ale like any Cornishman, but was no drunk. He was strong minded, yes, and even autocratic sometimes, but also somehow compelling. Archie was a man you noticed, not because he was handsome, for he wasn’t, particularly; it was just the aura radiating from him.
They’d met at a pagan moot in Falmouth, and the sexual energy passing between them that evening reminded her of the arcing discharge between the globes of a capacitor in an old movie from the early days of electricity: flashing, crackling, blinding white, like lightning. They’d spent that night togethe
r, in frenzied abandon, and had been partners ever since. Physically, he was sinuous as a feral animal, but also balding, his wispy, red hair swirling around the back of his head as if in a windstorm. Not that forty-nine-year-old Charlotte, also divorced, thought herself a beauty deserving of something better. She was shorter than Archie and slightly built, almost elfin. Her close-cropped, curly hair was a light brown already threaded with silver—the color, she often thought when looking in her mirror, of an ailing field mouse. Her eyes were grey tinged with green at the edges, the same deep green as the Serpentine rock at Lizard Point from which local artists made shiny jewelry.
Charlotte overcame what she saw as her physical shortcomings with an erotic energy that was unquenchable. She’d captured and held Archie by worshipping him with her body and soul as if he were a god. She called him Thor, because he brought her thunder, at least in bed, but in her heart she saw him as Erik the Red, the mariner, the searcher and, in the end, the fugitive searching for emotional safety. His own carnality was a gnawing hunger she threw herself into satiating. In this, at least, they were well-matched.
In the years since, however, certainty about their relationship always seemed just out of reach. He had never wanted to marry or even be hand-fasted within their Druid circle. Nor did he want them to live under one roof. He lived at his family’s ancient farmstead; she lived alone a few miles away in a bungalow on the southern flanks of Goonhilly Downs.
A committed vegetarian, Charlotte had a small garden on the sloping hillside beside her bungalow that she worked daily. The Lizard’s mild climate meant that even in winter she was able to raise and store crops—carrots, beetroot, parsnips and other root vegetables, cabbage and cauliflower, kale, even lettuce and spinach, provided she covered the tender leaves with a sheet on the rare occasions when frost was predicted. The garden, and a modest settlement from her own divorce, made it possible for her to scrape by. For extra cash, she worked part time as an orderly at the Helston Community Hospital, close by the Culdrose Royal Navy Air Station. When she needed money, Archie sometimes helped her, but she always had to beg...and there was always a price.
Over the years, she’d persuaded herself that real intimacy with Archie—not physical, but emotional and domestic—was beyond him. Working at the hospital in Helston, where death was a frequent visitor, Charlotte had developed the turtle-tough outer shell required of anyone who regularly has contact with patients in advanced stages of age or disease. They were there one day and gone another, leaving behind only a freshly remade bed. Enduring emotional stress was second nature to her, so she stored her pain about Archie in a sort of cave in her heart, a bloodless chamber. But sometimes, in bed, the two of them cresting, she still dreamed they would be about more than just the banishing of each other’s emptiness. And year after year, she ignored the distance between them for one simple, unalterable reason: she needed him. That urgent need had never diminished and, in the heat the two of them created, her doubts always evaporated, like a fog upon the sea at daybreak.
Late Friday afternoon, thirtieth March, she arrived for the weekend as usual at Archie’s farm, Higher Pennare. Though they sometimes spent the odd weeknight together, weekends were their scheduled “together time.” That was also when most of the ceremonies of their Druid group were held, and that always added a certain magical edge to their nights.
She parked her aging silver VW Polo around the back in the yard of the old whitewashed, slate-roof farmhouse, and entered through the low kitchen door, her arms laden with the last of the winter crops from her garden—fat leeks, frilly kale, snowy parsnips, as well as groceries she’d picked up from the Sainsbury’s supermarket in Helston. The bag included a coil of fat and savory Cumberland pork sausage for Archie. She’d never been able to convert him to vegetarianism.
The house was empty, but that wasn’t unusual. Like most farms in the area, Archie’s fields weren’t contiguous; they’d been acquired over centuries, a small parcel here, another parcel a ways away, as land became available. She reckoned he was off in one of the distant fields. The farm at Higher Pennare was so old she could hardly credit it: it had been recorded in the Domesday Book, the survey initiated by William the Conqueror and completed in 1086. The present building, replacing who knew how many predecessors, was a thick-walled mix of stone, wood, and cob. It was built in the late seventeenth century and had gradually been expanded. Archie’s Scandinavian ancestors were themselves relative newcomers to the farm: they’d only owned the property for just over two centuries, and had made their living from it ever since. Archie, the eldest of three children, two of them girls, had inherited the land at his father’s death. The house was backed by a low hill above the Helford River that protected it from the winter winds from the Atlantic, and it had a panoramic view eastward to the English Channel. Archie had a crop of thousands of daffodils planted in the field beyond the front door, and Charlotte watched the sunny blossoms dance in the light evening breeze. He grew them to sell the bulbs. Later, she’d try to remember to bring in a bouquet of the useless blossoms.
It was a big house, and meant to be what it long had been: home to a sprawling family. Charlotte felt the generations all around her. Archie had lost his own family, and she’d been too old to begin one with him when they met, much as she might have liked to at some abstract level. Sometimes it was as if the house knew all that. She wanted to warm the house with her presence, as if with blazing hearths in every room, but she wondered sometimes if she even warmed Archie, other than at night.
Initially, at least, Archie’s sexual repertoire had been limited. She put that down to all those videos he’d once sold. But she had studied the spiritual magic of extended arousal and had managed to knit those practices together with Archie’s Druidry, gradually bringing him around. Oh yes, she had brought him around.
Upstairs, she stripped off her daytime clothes, opened a wardrobe, and selected Archie’s favorite: her Viking Wench outfit. Naked, she stepped into a short, tan suede skirt with a handkerchief hem, the points of which she’d trimmed with bits of rabbit fur. Then she slipped on a thin, white linen blouse with a drawstring peasant neckline, the strings left loose for maximum décolleté. Over it she cinched a burgundy velvet lace-up “balconette” corset, which lifted her breasts as if on a platter for Archie’s personal delectation. Then she pulled on a pair of black, lace-top stockings and finally stepped into a pair of calf-length, brown suede boots with heels that made her ever so slightly taller than him. As she clipped a black velvet choker with a silver Viking rune around her neck, she turned in the full length mirror they kept by their bed and smiled. Archie’d never twigged that she controlled him by her very eagerness to please.
That was the beauty of their intricate erotic dance: she acted the role of the submissive because it turned Archie on, and when Archie was turned on she got what she needed, which was long hours of love-making. Carefully, gradually, she’d initiated him into the finer points of domination and surrender, and he didn’t even know she was leading him, poor sod. If she dressed in a revealing outfit in the evening, he thought it was because she was hungry for him, because she wanted to submit to her “Thor.” But the truth was she loved luring him, having him perform for her, loved having her puppet think he was pulling the strings.
He was so into his fantasy of being descended from the Norse gods that he had taken lately to carrying an antique broadsword to the meetings of their Druid grove—in fact, he had a collection of swords mounted on the wall of his ground floor office. And he had become obsessed with the legends and occult practices he believed these gods practiced. The swords made Charlotte laugh; the symbolism was so obvious.
But she tolerated his eccentricities because what she needed, what she craved more than anything, was financial safety. Charlotte had been the eldest of five in a motherless family headed by her father, Brian, a laborer at the Delabole slate mine in the north of Cornwall. Her mum had died giving birth to her last child, another daughter. Her dad was proud to wor
k the mine: “roofed most of London from this mine over the years,” he’d crow. But even when her dad was working, they struggled to make ends meet, and when cheaper roofing materials began appearing and the mine began to cut back, they struggled even to be fed. She loved her dad, cared for her brothers and sisters, and had given up much in the doing of it. She was the vigilant one who got the bills paid, the one who got the younger kids to school, the one who shored up her failing dad, the one who made him believe he was still in charge, right up until he was gone. Lung cancer.
This was the only way she knew to be in a relationship with a man. Her blueprint, her template, the role she’d always played, was watchfulness and control. It worked just fine with her first husband, until he found someone younger. And it was a role she played still. For she was a miner, too, working on a promising lode called Archie.
Archie rumbled into the farmyard that Friday evening and parked the tractor beneath the shelter of the old slate-roofed stone outbuilding that served as his barn. Though he must have known she was there from her car, he rummaged around in the back of the machinery shed, out of sight, longer than usual.
There was a damp chill to the late March evening and Charlotte had set a fire in the kitchen fireplace, a hearth so wide she could step inside it and yet not touch its sides with her arms outspread. It had a massive and blackened oak beam as a lintel and there was still a forged iron arm hammered between the stones from which cooking pots would have been suspended long ago. Archie’d had a small coal grate set into the maw of the hearth: more efficient than burning wood, but far less romantic. It saved money on heating elsewhere in the house and made the big kitchen their warm lair. Later, supper done, she’d turn out the electric lights and there would be only candles and the light from the glowing coals. And the sturdy oak kitchen table to play upon.
But now, while she prepared their meal, Charlotte watched through the kitchen window and wondered what was taking Archie so long.
