Trevega House Read online

  Will North

  Copyright © 2017 by Will North

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or to businesses, locales or institutions is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  For permission requests, contact the author at www.willnorthnovelist.com.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Fogarty's Cove Music for permission to reprint an excerpt from "The Mary Ellen Carter" by Stan Rogers, copyright 1978 by Fogarty's Cover Music.

  Published in the United States by Northstar Editions.

  Trevega House: A Davies & West Mystery / Will North — 1st ed.

  Cover Design by Laura Hidalgo

  ISBN-10: 0-9989649-0-5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9989649-0-4

  Epub ISBN: 978-0-9989649-5-9

  :

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  The Major Crime Investigation Team

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Murder On The Commons

  Garret Hardin Quote

  The Major Crime Investigation Team

  One

  Two

  Three

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Will North

  For former Devon and Cornwall crime scene manager Detective Sergeant Martin South and Criminal Investigation Division Detective Sergeant Tessa Adams (Retired), to whom I owe so much.

  Author’s Note

  This third volume in the Davies & West mystery series, set as they all are in far southwest Cornwall, England, brings back a few characters from one of my earlier, more romantic novels, Water, Stone, Heart, set in the coastal village of Boscastle which was devastated by a (real) flash flood in 2004.

  Countless readers have demanded to know what happened to those characters and, in particular, to the nine-year-old girl, “Lee.”

  Well, she’s back, older, and even more preternaturally wise. Also returning are several of the people who loved and cared for her.

  But now they all are in danger.

  Will North

  The Major Crime Investigation Team

  Detective Chief Inspector Arthur Penwarren

  Detective Inspector Morgan Davies

  Detective Sergeant Calum West

  Detective Constable Terry Bates

  Police Constable Adam Novak

  Prologue

  IT WAS, ALMOST everyone in Boscastle later agreed, a great mercy that death was so quick.

  That late spring morning, the sky sapphire blue and the grazing meadows emerald with new growth, Roger and Anne Trelissick, on their way to the shops up in Camelford, had just reached the top of the long gravel drive from their home, Bottreaux Farm, when an empty dump truck going far too fast failed to negotiate the B3266’s steep ninety-degree left turn toward the village. The truck lifted and tipped over to the right, became almost airborne, gave in to gravity, crushed the Trelissick’s Land Rover where it waited to enter the main road, and rolled once more before resting finally upside down in one of their fields, scattering the cattle that had been grazing there.

  Incredibly, the driver survived. Roger and Anne Trelissick did not. Roger died instantly, Anne before the emergency aides could cut her free from their mangled farm vehicle.

  The Cornish village of Boscastle was nearly a year into a reconstruction project following an epic and massively destructive flash flood, one of the worst in British recorded history. In a single afternoon, thanks to a bizarre meteorological convergence, nearly half a billion gallons of rain fell in a few hours and funneled from the hilltops into the Valency River Valley uprooting trees, rolling boulders like so many marbles, carrying dozens of cars out into the Atlantic, and ultimately destroying many buildings that had stood firm beside the harbor mouth for as long as five centuries. The task of rebuilding, of clearing the rubble, re-channeling the river, dredging the tiny harbor, and reconstructing underground utilities, had involved removing tons of mud, rock, crushed cars, and other debris. The heavy lorry and dump truck traffic roaring up and down the steep valley had thundered daily for months, right through the winter and spring. To residents trying to rebuild their lives and businesses, it was the thunder of hope. As spring advanced, apple and ornamental plum trees were blooming and the emerging new leaves were the freshest bright green. Life returned.

  To everyone’s amazement, the flood had killed no one.

  Until the Trelissicks.

  While the police picked their way around the accident scene, one of the emergency service officers, Jimmy Poundstock, a Boscastle native, pulled out his mobile and called Janet Stevenson, the young vicar at Boscastle’s Forrabury Church where he worshipped. Stevenson listened, said a silent prayer, and went out to her car to fetch the Trelissick’s only child, Lilly, a strong-minded girl who demanded to be called “Lee,” from the primary school she attended on Fore Street, just below the church. But she stopped beside her car first and placed a call to Nicola Rhys-Jones and Andrew Stratton. She knew that the couple, she a painter and he an architect, both ex-patriot Americans and dear friends of the Trelissicks, would come immediately to care for the girl. Lee had spent part of her Christmas holiday with them at their new home near St. Ives taking painting lessons from Nicola. They were practically family to Lee and they, too, were flood survivors.

  WHEN IT BECAME clear, a week later, that the little parish church would never be able to accommodate what turned out to be almost the entire village for the memorial service, the event was moved to the newly restored Wellington Hotel. This did not trouble the vicar; she knew her parishioners and she knew Roger and Anne. They’d have wanted a joyful remembrance with lively, heart-soaring music and plenty of refreshments, both in ample supply at the Welly. She offered a simple celebratory prayer to the assembled crowd and reminded those gathered that another Trelissick, young Lee, remained and needed their love.

  It was Jack Vaughan, the bearded singer and musician locally called the “Boscastle Busker,” who finally cried Amen and ordered the gathered musicians to play. He sat Lee beside him in the family room of the hotel’s bar and the celebrants first sang Amazing Grace in full throat. Then they launched into their weekly singing of the seafaring songs, a tradition so old no one could recall its beginnings.

  Jack, who raised money from his music for a cancer treatment center, wanted life and normalcy to prevail over tragedy and he
knew and loved Lee and her parents: what better vehicle than their regular Wednesday night sing? As if to a lifeline, Lee clung to the tradition as well. She slapped her palm against Jack’s knee to the tunes, brightening with each familiar song, and at the bar the drinks flowed. Jack had organized a similar community gathering a few days after the flood the previous year. That time they’d held it in the middle of the street by the hotel because the bar had been destroyed by a tributary stream called the River Jordan, which tore through the lower floor of the hotel. They’d built a bonfire from the wood remnants of the bar and a local brewery donated kegs of ale to the stricken village.

  But now, toward the end of the sing, as was their custom, the villagers began, slowly and then with more heart, for it seemed more appropriate than ever before, their traditional closing number: “The Shipwreck of the Mary Carter.” The guitars thrummed, a flute and a fiddle sang, and the voices rose until they reached the final stanza:

  Rise again, rise again,

  Though your heart, it be broken,

  And your life about to end;

  No matter what you’ve lost,

  A home, a love, a friend,

  Like the Mary Ellen Carter,

  Rise again…

  Jack scooped Lee into his lanky arms and held her as she finally cried. Everyone else applauded, their eyes brimming, too. The whole village was Lee’s family this night. Jack handed the girl to Nicola and Andrew and, once again, everyone cheered. With them, they knew, she’d be safe.

  One

  IT HAD TAKEN almost an hour of climbing for him to reach the moor top. The pale granite tors along the summit ridge were so weathered that their edges were rounded and their strata so eroded that they looked like stacks of petrified flapjacks. They rose from the heather, gorse, and bracken-cloaked slopes like the bones of some ancient beast stripped bare by eons of relentless storms. The ancients had revered these tors, given them magical names, built settlements nearby and fortresses atop, and buried their chieftains beneath cairns and quoits on the high ground facing west to the Atlantic.

  He leaned against a rock face and took in the view far below: the lush meadows of the farm, the stone mansion house, and the assortment of outbuildings that dotted the Trevega Estate north and south along the coast. As he watched, he beat his right fist against the stone like a pulse until the knuckles were nearly worn raw. He barely noticed. Anger rose like a fever:

  They don’t belong.

  “YOU ALL RIGHT, Lee?” Nicola asked. The now eleven-year-old at the table was staring out the kitchen window as if into another plane of existence.

  It had been many months since Lee’s parents had been killed, but the girl had surprised everyone by being as resilient as a willow whipping in a high wind. She missed them, of course, but she also accepted her loss with a strange equanimity unlike any other child her age might have done. Something of an old soul, Lee reckoned that her loss was a bit like the turn of the seasons: there was death in winter and rebirth in spring. The loss of her parents, she reasoned—because she was a thoughtful girl—was like the natural cycle of things: the world turns; things change. Sometimes change hurt. That was also to be expected. But she had Andrew and Nicola now and that was everything. Their love was warm as a thick down duvet on a stormy Cornish night. And she had this new home by the Atlantic cliffs.

  It was a chilly Friday evening despite being early summer, and Nicola was spooning out beef stew from a heavy Dutch oven. The updated but cavernous old kitchen on the ground floor of nineteenth century Trevega House was redolent tonight with the comforting aromas of their own farm beef, onion, garlic, rosemary and thyme, carrots, parsnips, potatoes, and new peas. Atop the stew were eight fluffy dumplings.

  “No, I’m fine, really,” Lee said, finally.

  Nicola had got used to this sort of delayed response; it was as if the girl chewed for a while on the gristle of every question, giving it thought before composing an answer. At her new school, she stood back from the chatter of her classmates. Her teacher was concerned that she did not blend in. The truth was that Lee could sense what her classmates really felt or cared about and for the most part it bored her silly. What she cared about were the lessons and there she excelled.

  “It’s just something I saw out on the coast path this afternoon,” she continued.

  The Southwest Coast Path, one of Britain’s many National Trails, edged the cliffs and hollows along the whole length of Cornwall and Devon’s Atlantic and English Channel coasts for some six hundred thirty miles. The Trevega Estate bordered the cliffside path above the Atlantic and ranged for nearly half a mile north and south along a gently sloping grassy plateau a few miles south of St. Ives. The plateau itself was the remnant of a shelf of beach from eons before, when a prehistoric ocean lapped at its shore. Now it stood high above the Atlantic and was crisscrossed by stone field walls, some of which dated to the Iron Age and possibly before. The verdant meadows, sequined by drifts of tiny white English daisies no higher than the grass blades, supported Trevega’s large herd of Black Angus cattle, a hardy breed and a major source of income for the estate.

  Having finished serving, Nicola sat and sipped from her own wine glass. A shapely woman a bit taller and more broad-shouldered than most, she had thick brown hair so dark it seemed almost black. It fell in gentle waves to between her shoulder blades. Raised in a poor Italian enclave in North Boston, her maiden name had been DeLucca. During an arts fellowship in Florence, Italy, she had met and later married Jeremy Rhys-Jones, the son of Sir Michael Rhys-Jones, an investment banker. The marriage had not gone well. She lived now at Trevega, the family’s “country house.”

  “So what did you see?” she asked.

  “Someone walking north. I’d just come ‘round Mussel Point on the way to Zennor when Randi noticed this walker far away to the south above that gully at Tregarthen Cliff. I was watching the pink thrift dancing in the wind at the cliff edge—they’re beautiful right now. The wind came at us from the south and maybe Randi caught a scent. He barked once, then twice, his warning bark, you know, and when I looked up,the figure had turned and was hurrying back the way it had come.”

  “It’s a public footpath,” Andrew said, looking up from his plate.

  “Plus, our big Siberian husky can be pretty intimidating,” Nicola added.

  “But from a tenth of a mile off?” It was like the girl thought them both idiots. She shook her head and continued eating.

  “What did you see of this walker? Male or female? Tall or short?” Andrew asked.

  “No idea, Drew. Dark trousers, olive green anorak I think, hood up because it was sprinkling.”

  “Probably just a tourist at the end of a walk, avoiding the rain and heading back to the Tinners Arms for a pint,” Andrew said.

  “Yeah. Probably. Yeah, that makes complete sense.” Lately, Lee liked things to make complete sense. So much of her life recently hadn’t.

  “Did you continue on to Zennor?” Nicola asked.

  “Me?” she said, laughing and shaking her head. Lee had let her previously close-cropped sandy hair grow to a bob after her parents’ death and now it danced along the line of her fine-cut jaw. As she matured, her features were becoming chiseled and angular, as if cut from the granite cliffs all around her.

  “No, me and Randi, we turned inland around Treveal Farm and came straight up our valley to home. When Randi speaks, I listen. He’s very wise, Randi is.”

  “Randi and I,” Andrew corrected.

  Lee made a face. “Like I didn’t know?” Lee had gained a good three inches in the past year and a half and had loose, gangly limbs that suggested she hadn’t quite got used to her new body. She’d also begun to develop a certain resistance to what she thought was expected by the adults in her life, no matter how much she loved and needed them.

  But Nicola heard Lee say “home” and it warmed her heart. She’d never had a child, nor had Andrew. In their mid-forties now, they never would. But they had Lee, and they could not imagin
e a finer daughter. Not that they had a clue how to raise one, especially a rare one like Lee.

  Nicola and Andrew had lived together ever since the flood. Nicola’s former father-in-law, who was among other things a financial advisor to Charles, Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall, had arrived in Boscastle with the Prince’s entourage a few days after the catastrophic flood to survey the damage. While the Prince moved through the shattered village talking with residents, Sir Michael stepped away to check on his beloved ex-daughter-in-law, Nicola, who had lived alone in a cottage near the harbor’s mouth ever since he had arranged for her divorce from his abusive son, Jeremy. But the flood had torn her house apart and there was no sign of her.

  When he found Nicola at last, battered, in shock, but alive, and met the man who’d rescued her, the visiting American architect Andrew Stratton, he begged the two of them to move to his family’s country estate, Trevega House, just south of the historic artists’ colony of St. Ives. The estate had been neglected, and he directed Andrew to begin its restoration. Andrew recruited his stone wall-building mentor, Jamie Boden, to join him, along with his partner, Flora Penwellan. They all now lived on the estate.

  This particular evening, Drew, as Lee always called Andrew, clutched a glass of red wine in his right fist but did not lift it. Nicola noticed his hands were raw and gave his arm a squeeze. She could tell he was exhausted. He hadn’t had time to bathe and his thick mass of curly salt and pepper hair was tinged with grit. He and Jamie had been heaving stone all day to rebuild a collapsing wall in the estate’s old gardener’s cottage so it could be converted to a rental unit. Lee, too, school now being out, had helped them most of the day. The girl had loved stone work ever since she’d watched Drew and Jamie working on that new wall behind the tourist car park in Boscastle, the unfinished wall that was washed away as if it were made of nothing of substance in the flood that had nearly destroyed her home village and so much else of what Lee once believed was rock-solid and permanent in her short life.