Murder on the Commons (A Davies & West Mystery Book 4) Read online

  Will North

  Copyright © 2021 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.

  Published in the United States by Northstar Editions.

  Murder on the Commons: A Davies & West Mystery / Will North 1st ed.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 1-10324900401

  Cover Design by Laura Hidalgo

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Map

  The Tragedy of the Commons

  The Major Crime Investigation Team

  Day One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Day Two

  Four

  Five

  Day Three

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Day Four

  Nine

  Day Five

  Ten

  Eleven

  Day Six

  Twelve

  Day Seven

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Day Eight

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Day Nine

  Eighteen

  Day Ten

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Day Eleven

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Day Twelve

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Day Thirteen

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Day Fourteen

  Thirty-One

  Day Fifteen

  Thirty-Two

  Day Sixteen

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Day Seventeen

  Thirty-Five

  Day Eighteen

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Day Nineteen

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Day Twenty

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Day Twenty-One

  Forty-Five

  Day Twenty-Two

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Will North

  Connect with the Author

  Dedication

  For Louella and Robin Hanbury-Tenison

  Cabilla Manor, Bodmin Moor, Cornwall

  “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

  Garret Hardin

  The Tragedy of the Commons

  The Major Crime Investigation Team

  Detective Chief Inspector Arthur Penwarren

  Detective Inspector Morgan Davies

  Scene of Crimes Manager Detective Sergeant Calum West

  Detective Sergeant Terry Bates

  Detective Constable Adam Novak

  Day One

  One

  IT WAS THE fierceness of the caws and keening cries echoing across the wastes of Bodmin Moor that troubled her as she neared the summit of Rough Tor late that chilly autumn Monday afternoon. Nearly the highest point in the whole of Cornwall, the bizarre outcrop of granite atop Rough Tor was visible for miles around. Over the eons, water, wind, and frost had eroded softer veins of quartz and split the tougher granite horizontally so that the huge weathered slabs at the summit looked like some giant’s stack of crumpets. She’d just paused to catch her breath when she heard the fracas away to the northeast. Except for the occasional storm off the Atlantic, the desolate moor was normally still and soundless as a moonlit midnight.

  She pulled binoculars from the pocket of her waxed cotton Barbour jacket but realized she’d have to move farther north to locate the source of the noise. Crossing a high ridge she reached Showery Tor and finally saw the fighters far below to the east. She was used to seeing carrion crows pester a hawk when it had prey in its talons, the scavengers and the hunter wheeling high in the sky. This was different. The birds were fighting over something on the ground—if ground were even an appropriate term for the sodden expanse of Rough Tor Mire.

  Jan Cuthbertson knew this austere landscape well and she knew that every once in a while one of the wild ponies that roamed the moor—usually a young one—would be lured by the brighter green vegetation at lower elevations and would stray downhill, lose its footing among the reedy tussocks and, as it struggled, sink slowly but inexorably into the bog until it died of exhaustion or exposure or both. Perhaps that had happened again. She had no great love of the ponies; their hooves tore up the moor’s thin turf and decimated the struggling grasses upon which her family’s sheep grazed. But her mother loved them. She was their self-appointed advocate, much to the chagrin of other commons landowners.

  The Cuthbertsons had been the Lords of Poldue Manor since the mid-sixteenth century when, having sided with the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I against her Catholic cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, they were forced to flee their native Scotland. For their loyalty, however, Elizabeth granted them the Poldue estate near England’s southwestern tip. The land was poor but over the centuries they improved the soil, spreading lime-rich beach sand to sweeten the natural acidity of the peaty ground. Today, their estate encompassed both lowland grazing fields bounded by ancient stone walls and wide swaths of open upland moor.

  Jan, just turned twenty-two, had completed agricultural and countryside management studies at Duchy College in nearby Stoke Climsland. She’d come home and now was in charge of overseeing the condition of the manor’s commons grazing land. Their estate encompassed almost fourteen hundred acres and stretched almost to Brown Willy Tor, just south of Rough Tor and the highest spot in Cornwall.

  The manor had an all-terrain vehicle by which to traverse the moor and herd sheep, but Jan preferred to go on foot: less damage to the fragile ground. She’d taken a keen interest in the ecology of the moor and its wildlife and she knew the ecosystem well, which was why the battling birds troubled her. Their behavior was peculiar. Creatures of the air, they never battled on the ground.

  She gathered her wind-blown mane of blond-streaked hair into a messy ponytail with an elastic hair band, took a slug from her water bottle, shouldered her small knapsack, and bounded down the rocky slope nimble as a roe deer, the ground becoming ever softer until her boots squelched as she approached the edge of the mire. She pulled out her binoculars again. Some twenty yards away, in an area of inky open water, the mottled-brown hawk looked up from its perch, hesitated for a moment, and then carried on with its grisly business, which was ripping apart the face of what she realized was a human head neck deep in the mire. The black talons at the end of the hawk’s lemon yellow legs were dug into the scalp for balance. Frantic and relentless, the carrion crows dove at the hawk and batted its head with their sooty wings. The hawk ignored them.

  Shocked by the ravaged h
ead, she shouted at the crows, waving her arms, and threw rocks at the hawk until it finally hauled itself into the sky, screeching in fury. The crows returned instantly. The body was too far out in the mire to be reached on foot, not that she reckoned there was anything she could do for the poor devil. She pulled out her mobile phone, punched in the 999 emergency number, and was put through to Devon and Cornwall Police.

  After the initial shock, something about the invisibility of the body itself and the anonymity of the missing face helped her calm herself, as if the thing before her were simply a preserved curiosity in some bizarre country museum. Using her pocket GPS, she gave the exact location to the police operator at the Comms Unit in Exeter, rang off, and finally took her bearings. The light was fading quickly, the shadows on the eastern flanks of the tors lengthening and the undulating hills beyond turning a dull gray-brown and losing definition, as if they had become a flat theater backdrop. She looked back at the summit of Rough Tor. Mist had slipped in from the west and was descending. If she left immediately, she could reach the safety of home before dark. She turned away from the horror before her and trudged westward, careful always to seek out firm ground. Though she knew the moor well, she also knew never to be upon it in the dark.

  IT WAS PAST five that Monday evening when Detective Chief Inspector Arthur Penwarren saw the report from the Comms unit. Though most of the other officers had left for the day he was still at his standing desk facing the tall windows that looked out over the rolling countryside beyond his office in the modern, three-story Bodmin Police Hub. Dusk had slithered up the valley, silent and snakelike, while he’d been doing paperwork. In the distance, the trees were already losing their color, the leaves yellowing and browning a little more each day as autumn advanced. In a week or so, when the nation turned its clocks back, it would be dark by now. The weather was closing in as well. Mist and rain were forecast to sweep down from the Scottish Highlands and hang about for a few days.

  The Comms report said only that a body had been discovered in Rough Tor Mire. There was no suggestion of murder so it was not a Criminal Investigation Department matter…as yet. Under normal circumstances, before the CID investigators were called in, a pair of uniformed constables would be dispatched to interview the reporting witness. However, Penwarren knew the Cuthbertsons and let Comms know he’d have his Major Crime Investigation Team people do the initial interview instead. Penwarren knew the lay of the land on that moor all too well and also knew no ordinary hill walker would have diverted from the well-beaten walkers’ route between Rough Tor and Brown Willy. There was simply no reason to stray and the Ordnance Survey map for the moor was clear about the danger of doing so. So what was it? Someone foolhardy? Lost in broad daylight? Forced or chased? Driven into the sucking mire? Nothing about it was normal.

  He also decided that his personal connection with the Cuthbertsons meant he shouldn’t conduct the interview himself. He hadn’t seen the reporting person, Jan Cuthbertson, since she’d been a rangy secondary school tomboy mad for horses. Her mother, Beverly, was his ex-wife Rebecca’s older sister and was closer to his own age. Taller than Becca and poised, he’d always admired her. Despite the divorce the family had remained in touch, at least for a few years, until that connection, too, withered like this season’s yellowing leaves.

  He looked out at the gathering darkness. There was no way he could assign anyone to examine a scene as remote and dangerous as Rough Tor Mire in the dark. That would have to wait until sunrise.

  Because of the family connection, such as it was, Penwarren wanted his best investigators, Detective Inspector Morgan Davies and crime scene manager Detective Sergeant Calum West, for this one. But they were both on medical and compassionate leave, the former, at her request, looking after the latter after his recent heart surgery. He smiled. Though the two officers were temperamentally as different as chalk and cheese—she the bulldog investigator, he the gently meticulous crime scene manager—they seemed to be getting along during his convalescence.

  Therefore, before he left his office, Penwarren phoned Morgan’s understudy, Detective Sergeant Terry Bates. She’d been a detective sergeant for less than a year but would rise quickly in the force if he had anything to say about it. Plus, she put up with Davies, which was no small achievement.

  Bates recognized the caller’s number and answered her mobile on the second ring.

  “Sir?”

  Penwarren pulled the phone away from his ear; the background noise was deafening.

  “Where are you, Terry?”

  “Umm...the Blisland Inn. Novak’s here too. Let me step outside.”

  Of course: while Davies was looking after the convalescing West at his home near the coast, she’d let Bates use her house, a renovated stone barn “with all mod cons,” near Brown Willy Tor and close to the Bodmin headquarters. The Blisland Inn was the local pub. It was renowned for its extensive line of locally brewed cask ales and savory pub food.

  Bates ducked out through the low front door and sat in the dark at one of the picnic tables on the stone terrace overlooking the village’s pocket-sized green, itself a rarity in the moor’s normally scattered small settlements.

  “Okay, I’m outside now. Sorry about that.”

  “How much have you had to drink?”

  Bates looked at her phone.

  “Not quite half a shandy, sir.”

  “Novak?”

  “Nursing a pint of some local brew called ‘Toast.’ We just got here.”

  “Good. I need you both.”

  Two

  NOVAK THREADED CID’S unmarked white Vauxhall Corsa Estate down lanes so narrow only a single vehicle could pass. Whether by time or intent, the lanes were sunken below ground level, the high banks topped with vegetation-cloaked stone hedges. Tree branches on both sides knit together above so tightly it was as if their auto lights were seeking a route through a dark green tunnel. From time to time, they had to stop and back up to a passing place to let an oncoming car by.

  “Bloody hell,” he said to Bates, “I can’t even get out of third gear!”

  “Just be glad it’s dark and we can see their headlamps coming.”

  They finally reached the two-lane B3266, turned, and sped west. After five miles, following Penwarren’s directions, they were again on a twisting single-lane road passing through Tresinney, Quitecombe, and Watergate. Ten minutes later, Novak braked hard as a silver, late-model Range Rover swerved out of a private drive, through the beams of their lights, and sped north.

  “Jesus!” Novak cursed.

  Bates wasn’t sure if it was because of the near miss or because, fearing a collision, she’d reflexively flung a protective arm right into Adam’s chest.

  “We have seat belts, Terry,” Adam commented, but he was smiling.

  The entrance was marked by a small Delabole slate sign lettered in white that said simply, POLDUE. They turned in and followed the lane east. The drive was hemmed by high stone hedges that even in daylight would have blocked any view of the fields on either side. It was surfaced with crushed gravel the quartz crystals in which glinted in the Corsa’s beams.

  After less than a tenth of a mile they entered a spot-lit cobbled forecourt. There was a two-story stone barn roofed in lichen-blotched slates on the left side of the yard and a rank of one-story stone and wood stables along the right. As they stepped out of the car, invisible horses whinnied at the disturbance. Ahead was a hip-roofed Georgian manor house built, like the other buildings in the compound, of smoothly fashioned blocks of Bodmin granite. The house rose two stories from a kind of stone plinth elevated a few feet above ground level. The bedrock here was so close to the surface that a cellar would have been impossible. There was a formal entry porch with a Doric pediment supported by four tapered stone columns. Two bay trees, their branches trimmed into matching green-leafed globes, rose from white Chippendale-inspired wood planter boxes that flanked each side of the entry, adding a touch of softness and color to the austere facade.


  The front door, painted in white enamel so shiny it looked wet, opened just as they reached the top of the broad stone steps. A woman stood backlit by the light from within and said nothing. Bates presented her warrant card.

  “Detective Sergeant Bates. And this is Detective Constable Novak.”

  “I’m Jan Cuthbertson,” the woman said after a pause as if to size them up, “I live here with my parents.”

  Behind them the forecourt suddenly went dark. To Terry’s unasked question, she added: “We have a sensor that tells us someone is approaching; it switches on the floodlights automatically. We’re isolated out here. My father is very careful.”

  Terry frowned: “Not much criminal activity up here on the moor.”

  The woman hesitated for a moment, then ushered them into the brightly lit main hall.

  “It’s just…it’s just who he is.”

  Terry guessed Ms. Cuthbertson was in her mid-twenties. Broad shouldered, a bit taller than average, she wore tight black jeans, matching black slip-on ballet slippers, and a droopy dove gray v-necked jumper that looked to be well-worn cashmere. The top of a black lace camisole peeked out beneath her neck: not Terry’s idea of night-at-home-alone-wear but then again, this was gentry of a sort.

  The woman’s hair was an unruly mass of wavy blond and brown strands that fell to her shoulder blades. She had a high forehead, prominent cheekbones, a strong, square jaw, and wide-set brown eyes tinged with green at the edges. There was something almost mannish about her and she reminded Terry of a young version of that American actress, Katherine Hepburn. Standing in the black and white marble tiled hall, she barely acknowledged Bates but regarded Novak with more than passing interest.

  “Come through to the kitchen,” she said to him, leading the way. “I have a fire going in there. I can make tea.” She said this as if it were a skill she’d only just mastered.

  “Tea would be fine,” Terry said as they followed her toward the back of the house.

  The kitchen they entered was spacious and warmer. At the west end a fire burned in a gaping stone hearth topped by a blackened granite lintel. The flames flared and died fitfully, as if struggling to breathe. Without being asked, Novak crossed the room and stirred it to life.