by Will North
“Andrew?”
He came back from his thoughts. “Yes, love?”
“Lee. She’s changing. Have you noticed?”
He blinked, took a sip from his glass and prodded the coals, buying time: “Well, she would do, wouldn’t she, after losing her parents. It’s got to have shattered her, not that she’d ever show it. Not our Lee. Too tough for that, she is. But let me tell you, when she works with me and Jamie I feel like she’s trying to build a new life through the stone, she’s that focused.
“We’ve adopted her, or will have done when the paperwork’s finalized, and we love her like she’s our own. She feels safe with us, too, that’s clear, but I doubt it’s the same as a bond of birth. And I think she needs a bit of distance from us sometimes, her alone time. So, she goes off walking. I think that’s fine.”
“No. That’s not it. That’s not what I’m talking about.”
Andrew turned. “What, then?”
“I mean that in Boscastle she was such a supple girl, absorbing the energy of the world around her as if she were a fruit ripening. But lately she seems, to me at least, to be hardening, or maybe toughening is a better word. She’s such a bright girl, but she questions everything now, no matter how trivial. It could be just an inquiry about how her day went, but she takes it almost as an intrusion. She’s becoming private, almost secretive. Now that school’s out, I really have no idea where she is when she’s not working with you and Jamie. And she seems to have lost interest in painting just at the very point when she was becoming uncommonly good. She has a wonderful eye and I love teaching her.”
Nicola looked at the fire. “I miss her, Andrew; I just miss my old Lee.”
Andrew took her hand. “Nicky, she’s always been her own person, even back in Boscastle, remember? Wandering up the river valley for hours all on her own, exploring and discovering what so few other children her age ever would: a wood nymph, almost? It nearly killed her in that flood. She was lucky to have escaped that valley alive.”
“That was mostly your doing…”
“And her dad’s, too. He was brilliant to think of setting that smoky brush fire to catch the rescue helicopter pilot’s attention. But as wise old Flora tried to explain even then, our Lee is different. You can’t expect her to be otherwise, nor can she continue to be a little girl.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Yes, you do; you just don’t want to accept it. She’s not your fantasy of a daughter. Nor mine, either, for that matter. No flouncy dresses for this one: it’s denim coveralls in winter and shorts and tee-shirts in summer. I’m never going to be able to spoil the girl, much as I might like to. She wouldn’t have it, and I love that about her. I guess we could call her a tomboy, but with an edge of something else, according to Flora, something beyond our guidance or in any child-rearing manual. This is Cornwall: there are people, like Flora, who tap into deeper streams of the spiritual world here than we ‘normal’ folks do. I’m only beginning to accept their alternate vision of reality. Lee is just plain gifted, Flora says. She senses things, like that loft about to collapse during the fire. She sensed it, ran back in even as it fell, pulled Flora out, and saved her. Can’t we just accept her differentness and love her all the more for it?”
“But she’s become so headstrong…”
Andrew chuckled, his modest belly bouncing. “Like you’re not? But she always was, love. Always. And then there’s that other matter…”
“What?”
“Hormones.”
Nicola punched his shoulder. “That’s such a ‘man’ explanation! And anyway, what would you know about pre-adolescent girls? She’s only eleven!”
“No, almost twelve, but I know girls are maturing earlier than ever. And, as I understand it from my inadequate ‘man’ perspective, that will not be easy either for her or for us. So, I’m expecting a bit of a rollercoaster ride in the next few years…are you up to that?”
Nicola flashed back to her own early adolescence in Boston, and to the older brother who repeatedly molested her. No, she’d never had the opportunity to be a rebellious pre-teen; she’d been too busy trying to protect herself, and doing so unsuccessfully. She wondered whether she’d ever have the courage to tell Andrew the whole story. Was it even necessary? Couldn’t that part of her past just stay buried? She often feared she was not an affectionate enough partner for Andrew and wondered if she’d ever find the trust to give her heart and body fully and fearlessly, like a precious gift, to the man she truly loved. And she wondered if she could protect Lee from the dangers of being a young woman out in the world and knew she could not. Not really. She could only prepare her…if Lee would even permit it.
“Of course I’m up to it,” she said. But her answer was mostly bravado. However uncertain she was in this new role as mother, at least she had Andrew, her anchor. And Lee adored him. They had Jamie and Flora, too. They’d be fine. She looked at the clock on the kitchen wall; it was time for Lee to be home. The fog was thickening. She opened the kitchen door and beat an iron rod against an old bronze bell hanging outside. The bell had been salvaged from an old sailing ship that had been wrecked on the Carracks, a group of rocky inshore islets just off their coast that had brought many ships to grief over the centuries. Away across the valley she heard Lee’s answering whistle. Randi, on the hearth, heard it too, barked once, and dropped his head back to the rug. He was still recovering.
“I think she’s been with Flora and Jamie,” she said, and she felt her body relaxing.
Twelve
NIGEL LAWRENCE DISCOVERED the poisoned well early Wednesday morning while the fog was still lifting.
Shortly after Andrew and Nicola had moved in, Sir Michael had arranged for the estate to receive its fresh water supply from South West Water’s mains line which ran parallel to the B3306 between St. Ives and Zennor. Mains water was expensive but reliable. The bore hole well that had long served the house in the old days was now used only to fill the water tubs in the fields for the cattle and for watering the garden that Nicola had only just begun restoring. Using the well for these high-flow needs was far cheaper than using mains water.
Just after dawn, Nigel had hitched the farm’s wheeled cylindrical water tank to the back of his tractor, filled it directly from the well’s electric pump, towed it across several fields, and had just begun discharging into one of the galvanized field tubs from which the cattle drank when he noticed soapy foam. He didn’t even pause to call Andrew first; he dumped the tub and phoned the police directly from his mobile.
Given the other events at Trevega, Comms headquarters in Exeter contacted the Bodmin Operational Hub instead of the local St. Ives station. DCI Penwarren took the call as he was driving to work. He decided to assign it to Morgan’s understudy, Detective Constable Terry Bates, and met her at Bodmin.
“You’re asking me to investigate a possible well poisoning? Down in West Penwith? Is this a test or something, Sir?” This was not the sort of crime, if it even was one, for which Bates had become a detective to solve.
Penwarren laughed. “There is no question in my mind, Detective Constable Bates, that you are tailor-made to be Morgan’s successor. Cut from the same bright but very scratchy cloth you both are, but I still have hope for you. I’ve given up on Morgan. She’s impossible: brilliant, but impossible. Let’s you try not to be, okay? And yes, this is now your case.”
Bates blinked. Slender, petite, late twenties, with a cascade of ginger blond hair and mischievous green eyes, she was much admired by many of the men at the Bodmin hub, but she took no notice. Taking a lesson from Morgan, she stayed utterly focused on her job. If you were a female detective in the force, that’s what you did to stay above the male fray. The coarse comments? You gave back as good as you got.
“There may be more to this than first appears, Terry,” Penwarren continued, “so please bear with me a moment.” And he then filled her in on the other odd events at the Trevega estate.
“So, we’ve
got a dead beast, a suspicious fire, a mangled dog, and now a fouled well?” she said.
“Exactly.”
“It doesn’t add up.”
“Exactly.”
“Sir?”
“We’re missing something, Terry. I don’t know what, but it troubles me. And with each new event, it begins to look more troubling.”
“And so you want me to…”
“Go down there. Look around. Ask questions. I’ve contacted West and he has called in a bore hole expert.”
“A what…?”
“Bore hole. A well. The engineer is coming down from Exeter and will be there later this morning, eleven or thereabouts. Lucky to get him on a weekend. Talk to him. Get his analysis. And talk to the others at Trevega. I sent Morgan down there a while back. She says the locals all like the folks at Trevega. The question is: who doesn’t?”
Bates made to leave but stopped and turned. “Why your interest in these odd events, if I may ask? They seem a matter for local police, not CID.”
“Friend of the family, Terry. Let’s just leave it at that, shall we?”
She nodded: “Sir.”
Penwarren would not reveal, not to anyone, that he had been one of Caprice Rhys-Jones’s lovers just before she died in that fiery car crash in London years before. He had been an up-and-coming detective at Scotland Yard and had provided security for Prince Charles at a charity event she attended. Sir Michael’s young wife was always on the prowl and she soon made him one of her triumphs.
What Penwarren did not know was that Sir Michael knew about it but held him guiltless: Penwarren was just another among his wife’s trophies. But he’d kept an eye on the young detective, especially after he transferred, unexpectedly, to Cornwall after Caprice’s death. Michael reckoned it was grief, and he respected that in a man. Over the years in Cornwall, Penwarren had revealed himself to be a thoughtful and intuitive investigator. Having attended a gentleman’s school, he had a gentleman’s reserve, even though he was not born to it. Sir Michael had often thought of recruiting him into MI5, but somehow, he knew the brainy but soft-spoken inspector would never fit in with the security service. In Cornwall, Michael had watched Penwarren grow and succeed where older, more seasoned detectives had failed. Even Morgan Davies, about whom he’d heard much—brash, aggressive, a rule breaker—even she was a feather in Penwarren’s cap. They’d now been a team for years; he gave her free rein and she got cases solved, even if Penwarren had to save her sometimes from the bosses in Exeter. Sir Michael’s respect for Penwarren was deep.
Penwarren watched the disgruntled young detective constable leave his office. Could Bates be another Morgan Davies? He wasn’t sure whether he hoped or dreaded it.
“THIS IS A very old bore hole,” Carl Herbst explained to Andrew and DC Bates that afternoon. He was a well engineer and the owner of Geophysical Drilling Ltd. in Exeter. Thick-set, late middle age and balding, he spoke with a slight German accent and wore navy blue cotton work coveralls with his company’s name embroidered on the left breast pocket. They stood at the edge of the rear terrace of Trevega House beside a narrow, stone-edged hole. Once, there had been a manual water pump mounted here, used by staff to haul up water for the house. But that had long since been replaced with an electric one. Herbst was just removing his testing instruments.
“More than a century old, maybe older. Hard to tell. But it’s in fine shape, according to my probes. That’s because the bedrock here is basically coarse-grained granite. Drill through that to the water table below, as someone here did long ago—and I don’t envy them—and the well will never collapse. Might as well be lined with concrete. A fine well, this is.”
“And yet poisoned,” Bates said.
“Yes, certainly, but also simply: my test says someone dumped a load of laundry powder with bleach down the hole. You can buy the laundry powder anywhere, no one the wiser. It’s the bleach that’s dangerous. It’s a trick I haven’t seen in a long time, what with so many people being on mains water nowadays. Anyone sick yet?”
“No, the house has mains water now,” Andrew explained. “Our farm manager only found this when he tried to fill the field tubs for the cattle. Called police immediately.”
“That was smart. You could have had a very sick herd by now. I recommend you keep the electric pump running, draining the discharge off to that field below. If it were not for the bleach, you could use it in your garden: plants love the phosphates in laundry water.”
“What next?” Andrew asked.
“Bleach dissipates quickly and in time the well’s own recharge rate will flush it out.”
“How much time?”
“Depends on the rate. But my instruments suggest just a few days. Still, I wouldn’t give this water to the cattle for at least a week.”
“I don’t understand how this happened,” Andrew said, almost to himself.
Herbst was packing up his instruments. He did not look up. “Got any enemies, Mr. Stratton, neighbors who might wish ill of you?”
BACK AT THE house, Terry Bates accepted a cup of tea from Nicola and Andrew in their kitchen.
“So, Mr. Stratton,” she said, looking up from her cup, “you did not answer the engineer’s last question. Do you, or perhaps Ms. Rhys-Jones, have enemies who might wish you ill—quite literally physically ill?”
Nicola answered for him: “Look, we’ve been over this before, detective, given what else has happened here recently. We’ve spoken with our neighbors. So have the police. No one seems to have a grudge that we can identify. This is a small and somewhat remote community; word gets around. There’s been not a whisper.”
“And yet your well was poisoned.”
“Yes, but what was the point? We hardly ever use it!”
Andrew stood and paced the kitchen. “As you no doubt know, we’ve had a couple of potentially dangerous events here recently, but they’re so random. I don’t understand it. And now this.”
Terry Bates sipped her tea and then looked away as a new thought approached, as if from a distance. She blinked and turned to Andrew: “You said you had mains water connected to Trevega House. When was that?”
“Less than a year ago. Sir Michael Rhys-Jones, Nicola’s former father in law and the owner, ordered it. Apparently, the well was not always reliable. And as we are renovating some of the outbuildings to convert them to holiday rentals for him, he wanted a reliable supply.”
Bates stared into her teacup for a moment and then looked up.
“It’s someone who doesn’t know you now have mains water. Someone who thinks you still rely upon the well and wants to cripple you. Someone you know…or who knows you. But not lately.”
Thirteen
ON THURSDAY MORNING, Andrew climbed into Trevega’s fifteen-year-old workhorse Land Rover Defender, shifted it into low gear, climbed up their steep lane to the main road that ran along the moorland foothills, and turned north toward St. Ives, shifting up to top gear as the road leveled. The yellow gorse blossoms on each side of the road were so vivid it was like driving through sunshine, even though the day was overcast. He and Jamie had finished repairing the ground floor level of the gardener’s cottage front wall and Jamie had sent him to Travis Perkins, the builders’ merchants in town, for scaffolding boards so they could begin work rebuilding the upper story. Andrew smiled; despite all his education, he’d essentially become a builder’s assistant, running errands. But he’d never been happier.
It was a dry morning but the sky to the west threatened rain. He’d coasted down the long gentle slope from Trevega Hill and was approaching the sharp right turn into the outskirts of St. Ives when the southbound bus to St. Just took the turn wide to avoid a cyclist. With no room to pass, Andrew slammed his foot on the brake pedal but it went straight to the floor. He yanked the steering wheel left aiming for the narrow gravel entrance to his neighbor’s property, Folly Farm. Making the turn smartly, he pulled up the emergency brake to slow the speeding car but the Defender skidded and crashed into t
he stone hedge lining the farm lane. Andrew’s head slammed into the driver’s window.
When he opened his eyes again there was a female medic kneeling beside him. He was on a stretcher in the lane.
“Mr. Stratton? Can you hear me?”
“Well of course I can. How’s the Land Rover?”
The medic laughed. “Dented but drivable, sir. A bit like yourself, I suspect. I want to look into your eyes a moment, if you’ll permit me.”
“Very romantic, I’m sure, but why?”
“It’s a good sign that you have your sense of humor, sir, but this is serious. You’ve had a nasty crack on the right side of your head. There is swelling but no blood and I reckon all that curly hair helped cushion the blow, but you were knocked unconscious and we have to check if you’ve had a concussion. Your eyes will tell me.”
She peered.
“Yes. The right one is dilated, without question. Do you know where you are and what happened, Mr. Stratton?”
Andrew made a face. “Had to avoid a bus, then the brakes failed. Hit a hedge. Now I’m lying here and would like very much to get up, if you don’t mind. Have things to do.”
“No doubt you do, sir, but not this morning. We’re taking you to West Cornwall Hospital in Penzance for a head scan. That’s the rules. We want to make sure your brain isn’t bleeding inside. But I’ve been at this job for some years now and I’m a pretty good diagnostician. Between you and me, my guess is you were lucky and I doubt that you’ll be detained for very long. West Cornwall Hospital’s just over seven miles away and we’ll use the lights and siren just for you.”
“Will you be with me?”
“Of course. Why?”
“You’re quite lovely.”
The medic laughed. “I’ll just put that down to the concussion, shall I? Is there someone who might meet you there?”
