The Trebelzue Gate
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. The names of characters and places are either products of the author’s imagination or are used in imaginary circumstances. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
The Trebelzue Gate lay at the end of the main runway of RAF St Mawgan. In appearance it was unremarkable, a galvanised field gate set in a Cornish hedge, and yet it was fastened by an Ingersoll shackle padlock and its name appeared in bold legend on every one of the flight plans issued to the NATO allied services. This was the Cold War year of 1979, and, in the event of the events both dreaded and anticipated by the NATO allies, the Trebelzue Gate would stand witness to some significant departures.
A Cornish hedge is in fact a stone wall, a barrier of rocks and earth built up to enclose a field. Plants and sometimes trees take hold in the earth, greening and softening these stony boundaries. The trees in North Cornwall tend to grow sideways, bent into distortion by the prevailing Atlantic winds.
To one side of the gateway was a sign for the RAF Fire Service. Fixed to tall metal posts, this sign read ‘Emergency Crash Gate No 2’. Both the sign and the posts were well maintained and free from rust. RAF St Mawgan functioned as a small town, a busy community of many trades, with its own metal works and paint shop and much else besides.
In 1940 the gateway at Trebelzue had been widened as the surrounding farmland was requisitioned for the airfield. Throughout that long hot summer military convoys crawled back and forth, industrious and inexorable as ant columns in their determination. These drab painted vehicles and their occupants laboured to construct the widest runway in England. On the land sloping away from the runway to the south, row upon row of prefabricated SECO huts appeared. An air traffic control tower was completed and water tanks atop high metal scaffolding were installed. These were oddly modernist structures in a landscape where formerly only the steeples of churches and the chimneys of tin mines had stood tall.
In 1942 the Americans arrived. The Americans brought more vehicles and larger aeroplanes and free-spending, friendly men who liked to visit the Falcon Inn at St Mawgan village. Around the doorway of the Falcon Inn bines of jasmine wound and bound unchecked. In the warm evenings the starry white flowers filled the air with sweet scent. Some of those men who came and went away again took with them a memory of the scent of the jasmine flowers and kept it always.
Three decades on, men and vehicles and aircraft continued to arrive and work and build at the airfield. A company head quartered in Seattle was contracted to oversee a construction project which was under the ground and classified top secret.
The coast road ran beside the Trebelzue Gate, beyond the road there was a narrow slope of scrub land, an outcrop of dark rocks, and then the Atlantic Ocean. Because of its proximity to the sea, the aircraft flying out of RAF St Mawgan were always maritime models. Formerly it was the Lancasters and Shackletons of Coastal Command, now there were Nimrods, the submarine hunters of Strike Command, and Canberras. The Canberras of Number 7 Squadron, small and fast and bee striped on the under wing, were used to tug targets for firing practice out at sea.
In the early morning of this day, Nimrod call sign XV146 took off over the Trebelzue Gate, bound for a reconnaissance sortie of some twelve or thirteen hours. The Nimrod climbed steep and steady into a sky still insubstantially coloured, Venus was yet to disappear. As the aircraft described an angle of fifty-five degrees, not one of its crew of fourteen men, intent on their joint and several tasks, looked ground-wards. In consequence, none of the men saw the lovely girl who lay on the grass in the gateway, close by the metal posts of the fire service sign. Viewed from above, the girl’s limbs - arms bent at the elbow and hands uplifted, toes pointing downwards - might have seemed caught in the movements of some classical dance. A frieze image or a freeze frame image, if only the Nimrod’s camera operator had been at his post on the port bow. The gauzy fabric of her dress, pink and silver grey and crimped into tiny pleats, was printed with an irregular pattern of flower posies. These flowers might have served as votive offerings, scattered over her perfect form. Her hair, long and blonde, seemed also to have been arrested in motion. Some of the small yellow shelled snails who make their home among the stones of Cornish hedges were investigating the strands. The snails moved cautiously along the spread tresses, as though exercising a polite and respectful reserve. For this lovely girl, lying in a dancer’s pose on the midsummer grass, was dead.
The Nimrod, receding further and further into the sea sky, soon seemed as far distant as the morning star.
Monica Guard in her dressing gown switched on the electric kettle. In her early fifties, she was a tall, angular woman, green eyed, with short cut black hair. Intending once again to give up smoking, she hesitated over fetching her cigarettes and went instead to the doorstep for the milk. John Cowburn delivered the milk from his pick-up van some time after dawn. Hers was one of several villages on his route between the china clay works and the coast. He had offered to deliver potatoes as well, a huge paper sack full which breathed out a smell of earth. The quantity of potatoes was far too large for a single person household. However, because John Cowburn was one of the few people to have been welcoming, and not mistrustful or even hostile because she was an incomer, she had agreed to buy the sack full. More importantly, he said that he delivered Sunday newspapers, and Monica was fanatical about completing the Mephisto crossword in the Sunday Times.
But this morning the milk was not there. She looked out at the other cottage doorways, set deep in the thick cob walls. No step had its small white sentinel of a milk bottle. She returned to the kitchen and took the tub of Marvel dried milk from the cupboard. The cupboard was musty and damp.
‘Stands to reason, we’re on a peninsula,’ the desk sergeant had huffily replied when Monica, trying only to make conversation, had remarked on the constant dampness of the air. ‘We catch all the weather from both sides,’ he said.
Beside the tub of Marvel a bag of sugar had been melded by the damp into a solid brick. Cally, if ever she came to visit, would exclaim in disgust at the smell of the damp and the pinpoints of black mould on the walls and the slugs that came in under the back door at night. Cally objected to any perceived lack of comfort. When she was twelve or thirteen they had taken her on holiday, a gîte in Normandy. She had complained constantly about the rudimentary bathroom and the isolated location. Garth had said to her ‘Don’t forget, young lady, when you were little, your mother and I lived on an old motor torpedo boat by Battersea Bridge, we had to makeshift then.’ And his daughter had replied ‘Yes, but at least that was only a five-minute walk from the Kings Road.’
An article by a psychologist in the Sunday Times magazine had suggested that giving up smoking was easier if you made the cigarettes less physically accessible. Last night Monica had sealed her cigarette packet with Sellotape and shut it in the writing desk. Once more she hesitated over retrieving it, then went instead to the wardrobe.
‘Not a great girl for clothes, are you,’ Garth had once observed. This was true, clothes had never been important to her. It was also glancingly hurtful, though not, perhaps, intended to be so. In the beginning, his references to her foibles and character traits had seemed intended to emphasise their suitability to one another, a suitability predicated upon a mutual inability or unwillingness to conform. Later on, the references had seemed more like spitefulness or disappointment.
Since the move to Cornwall three months earlier, Monica had begun to consider her clothes more carefully. The dark suits which she favoured were plain and severe in design and tailoring, derivative perhaps of the uniform in which her career had begun. Dress was one more issue on
which the scrutiny of the staff at Newquay police station might judge and fail her. Daily she sensed their resentment, in silences which fell when she entered a room or the set of a subordinate’s back and shoulders at a desk when she had issued an order. She knew that she was resented as a woman and as an outsider, an incomer from London who had been appointed to the chief inspector post, hitherto a man’s role. There had been two favoured Cornish candidates. As yet there had been no significant case for her competence to be proved or disproved and so the staff judged and criticised on other issues – her physical appearance, her constant requests for past case files, her failure to invite them to the pub on pay day.
As she was putting on the jacket of a dark grey suit, the telephone rang. It was Constable Ellery.
‘We got a body,’ he said.
‘A what?’ It sounded as though he was eating something. Constable Ellery seemed to be perpetually eating. It irritated Monica. She saw greed in a man as a decided weakness. Garth never overate. But then Garth would have taken a large whisky in place of a meal any day.
‘We got a body, M’am. Trebelzue. Coast road, out by the RAF station,’ he made it into an acronym so that she heard ‘raff’ station. ‘Milkman found it,’
‘What, Mr Cowburn?’
There was a silence, then ‘That’s right, John Cowburn.’ The constable sounded surprised and perhaps annoyed by her foreknowledge of the news he had to impart.
‘So that’s why there’s no milk this morning,’ she said and immediately wished that she had not. Milk, domestic deliveries, were a woman’s preserve, the concerns of a housewife.
‘How’s that, M’am?’ he said and she hoped that he had not noticed.
‘Nothing, just thinking aloud, Constable. I’m on my way.’
She avoided asking him for directions. She opened the drop front of the writing-desk to find the Ordnance Survey map. The taped-up cigarette packet sat on top of the map. The map cover was pink edged with a saturated colour image of fishing boats in Padstow harbour. She put both map and cigarettes in her shoulder bag. As she approached the front door a light blue envelope was flipped through the letterbox. The handwriting on the envelope was Cally’s. She picked it up and went out to her car. At his desk in the police station Constable Ellery remarked that the boss woman had seemed more concerned about her ruddy cornflakes than anything else. His colleague asked what did he expect.
Monica drove with the map folded open on the passenger seat. Several times since her arrival in the county she had become lost; often she was confused by the many and unfamiliar saints in its place names – Mawgan, Merryn, Mabyn and Mawes, Erth and Eval and Enoder, Jidgey and Just.
At this hour there were few other cars on the road. The way to Trebelzue took her past farmland and a hamlet of cottages; there was a GR pillar box set in a wall below a fuchsia hedge and a new bungalow like a Western ranch house, the chimney made into a stone clad feature. Propped at the roadside, a sheet of fibreboard offered riding lessons and manure in white paint lettering. In the field beside a headland cottage a pheasant stepped out its coloured splendour. The road rose steeply, at the top of the hill there was a roundabout and signposts for the towns of St Columb Major and Wadebridge, the Trenant Woodlands Caravan Park and the iron age hill fort of Castle an Dinas.
She guessed and took a left-hand turn; she passed dense woodland which then, to her relief, gave way to the high wire fencing of the air base. A civil airline leased one of the smaller runways to operate a morning and evening flight to London. A propeller plane with blue and yellow livery stood waiting. For a moment she imagined herself parking the car and going to board the flight. She would arrive in London in time for rush hour. The tube in from Heathrow, the number 19 from Piccadilly. The buses stopped in a red line above the River. The Battersea smell which was either from Morgan Crucibles or the Price’s candle factory, no one could ever decide. The paper shop on the Ethelburga Estate. The blue lamp and the steps up to the station entrance. She stopped her imagination with a brief shake of the head. London was the past. The lease of the flat in Lurline Gardens had been sold. At the station there had been a presentation and a leaving party at which nobody had mentioned Sunningdale. Her job had gone to a young man with a beard named Nicky Leeder. Garth was no longer in the open secret world of Century House, but at a nursing home in Buckinghamshire.
She turned onto the coast road and had first sight of the un-English blue of the sea beyond the thin clifftop grazing. A line of vehicles had pulled up onto the grass verge. There were two police patrol cars, John Cowburn’s pick up van, an RAF police Land Rover and a Ford Escort estate car, its lines made less familiar by military olive drab paintwork. Monica’s sergeant, Martin Bee, stood talking with a group of men in police and air force uniforms. She edged past the line of parked cars, aware that she was being watched by the group. Although she was a careful driver, punctiliously observing the rules of the road, she disliked and was sometimes nervous of the responsibility of a vehicle. She had bought a car of her own only when Garth was moved permanently to the nursing home. She planned Sunday visits to take him out for drives in the countryside. She had done so only once, proposing a trip to the White Horse at Uffington and the Wayland Smithy. Dressed in layers of jerseys and a jacket and an overcoat because his circulation was so poor, Garth had sat silent and blue-lipped and rigid beside her, anticipating every manoeuvre. She had become tense and so had made mistakes, another driver hooted and swore as he overtook them. Monica had said that perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea after all and Garth had replied merely ‘Indeed’. They had turned back to the nursing home, pausing on the way at the Crown in Penn.
The suspension of the Mini Clubman rocked and complained as she pulled it up onto the verge. On an uneven slope, the car’s door handle swung from her grasp as she tried to close it and there was a loud slam. She settled the strap of her handbag on her shoulder and walked towards the assembly of men. Sergeant Bee stepped forwards, a man in his late thirties with receding brown hair and neat, well-pressed clothes in shades of brown and beige. Monica considered herself fortunate in being allocated Martin Bee as her sergeant. He was intelligent and conscientious, with a quiet self-containment and occasional hints of a wry and irreverent sense of humour. Although sometimes he was withdrawn and taciturn, it did not seem to indicate the resentment shown by other staff.
‘Morning M’am,’
‘Good morning sergeant, gentlemen. Right, what have we got here?’
‘Body of a young female, M’am, I’ve said nothing should be touched until Doc Skerrett arrives – he’s on his way, so’s Forensics. This is Flight Lieutenant Goodchild, station HQ officer, Flight Sergeant Stallwood, duty sergeant, and Warrant Officer Adams and Corporal Heywood from the RAF police. Our officers are over there, with the man who found the body.’
‘John Cowburn, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s right, the milkman, out on his rounds.’
‘Right, thank you Sergeant’, she stepped past the men to the body. Rigor had stiffened the dancing pose.
‘Oh dear,’ said Monica, bending to look more closely at the ribbon-like mark around the girl’s neck, ‘Oh dear, oh dear. Is there a handbag … or anything to identify her?’
Words were exchanged quietly among the men, the young corporal appeared to be seeking advice from the others. Sergeant Bee said
‘No handbag, M’am, but Cpl Heywood here says he recognises her.’
She straightened up and returned to the group.
‘Do you, Corporal?’
‘Yes, M’am, it’s Mandy, one of the sisters,’
‘The sisters?’
‘Yes, there’s three of them Roxy, Lexy and Mandy, they’re from the family that owns the Mermaid Inn,’
‘Are you absolutely sure, Corporal?’
‘Quite sure, M’am. Everyone knows them round here, don’t they?’ he turned to the duty sergeant for confirmation.
‘He’s right, that is - she is – Mandy, Amanda,’
&n
bsp; Both the corporal and the duty sergeant, in recounting the names of the three sisters, forbore to mention the customary local prefixes to the girls’ names.
‘And her surname?’
The corporal hesitated, ‘Shute’ said the station HQ officer. He had taken a pipe from his pocket and was poking at the bowl with a car key. Monica saw something old-fashioned, anachronistic, in his appearance and mannerisms. He might be a 1940s caricature of a Battle of Britain pilot officer. This impression was reinforced by the drone of aircraft propellers somewhere nearby.
Peter Goodchild held the pipe up halfway to his mouth and waited for the sound to recede.
‘We’ll just let Brymon take off for London town, shall we …’
In the distance the little blue and yellow aeroplane raced along the tarmac then lifted and turned to the east.
‘… with regard to her identity, I have to say I couldn’t have been one hundred per cent sure just by looking at the girl, but if she is definitely one of those three sisters, then her surname is Shute. The family’s well known on the station, Charles, the father, was a Shacks – Shackletons – pilot before he went into the hotel trade. He’s dead now, but the mother, Marilyn, keeps up the connections with us.’
‘So, Amanda Shute, we think – call it in, would you, Sergeant, check the address and so on. And find out how long that pathologist will be.’
As he walked off towards a patrol car she addressed the others.
‘Gentlemen, you have been most helpful in giving us a name, but I trust that I can rely on your discretion - that you will not discuss the incident with anyone for the time being? We need to inform the next of kin.’
‘Absolutely,’ said Peter Goodchild, he looked to the group and the men nodded.
‘Thank you. Now I’m going to ask the patrol if they can set up a screen, anything to shield her from the road once the traffic starts, we don’t want rubber neckers … talking of, what’s going on over there?’
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