Carter looked around at the broken crockery on the floor. Mawgan was sweeping it up. Towan was sitting at the table, holding a mug of coffee. He was staring at the table top. His hands were scraped with grazes and blood. His shirt was dirty with blood and mud.
‘I appreciate how upsetting it must be to you all but Martin Stokes needs to stay where he is until the forensics team have arrived. He will be covered with a tent as soon as they get here – I suggest you wait in here for the next hour until that’s done. I will need all your clothes,’ said Carter. Towan didn’t move. He didn’t look at Carter. ‘And, no one leaves this farm until they’ve been seen by the forensics officers.’
Marky nodded. He was standing resting against the Aga, his arms crossed over his chest. His face was set in a stony mask of anger and grief.
‘Where’s the woman who found him?’ asked Towan.
‘Lauren’s gone.’
‘She could have done it,’ Towan muttered into his mug.
‘Not likely though, is it, Towan?’ Carter said. ‘The doctor said he’d been dead an hour at the most. When did you see him last? Mawgan?’
‘When he left to bury Misty. Towan went with him. That was the last time I saw him alive.’
Towan laughed. ‘Yeah . . . and you think I didn’t see that coming, you stupid bitch? If you think you and Marky are going to stitch me up over this one – think again.’
‘Well?’ Carter looked at Marky.
‘It’s true Mr Stokes ordered Towan to go and bury the horse. The last I saw was them going out to do it. I left here and went down to my cottage for a shower. You came after that.’
Towan pushed his mug away and sat back in his chair so that he could see everyone properly. ‘And me and Dad got outside and I decided I had better things to do. I went to see if Marky had finished my surfboard. I went to his workshop. I went to check in the farm store next door. I’m supposed to be in charge of ordering when stocks get low.’
‘Who else was here today?’
Towan reeled off the list.
‘And Raymonds?’ Carter looked surprised.
‘He left a while ago; he picked up some things from the farm and drove up over the field, left that way,’ said Towan.
‘He didn’t come up the lane, we would have passed him,’ Carter pointed out.
‘He came over the back too. There’s a lane we use for getting the cows into the far fields.’
‘Mawgan, are you okay?’ Carter was staring at the bandages around her knuckles. One had slipped down as she bent her hands around the broom handle and he could already see the blackening and swelling around her knuckle. ‘Looks pretty nasty that.’ She shook her head but kept sweeping. ‘What happened here? Does someone want to tell me?’
‘Nothing happened,’ said Towan. ‘Just a bit of high spirits among siblings. Mawgan went off like a wild cat.’ He smiled.
‘Was Kensa here?’
‘She still is,’ answered Marky.
‘Where is she?’
‘Upstairs in my room,’ answered Mawgan. ‘I was going to take her home but she’s in no fit state. Not since her horse was stamped to death.’
Towan tittered to himself.
‘What happened there?’ Carter asked.
Marky and Mawgan looked at Towan to answer. When he didn’t, Marky did instead.
‘Bluebell’s in season. Towan thought it would be funny to have a stallion fight, except Brutus is two and Misty’s eighteen – not ever meant to be a fair fight. Thankfully it was over quickly.’
Towan looked up and around the room. He turned his chair to look at Carter.
‘Disappointing, really.’
Carter shook his head and stepped back out into the yard. He called an officer over to stand where he had been.
‘Start writing down your statements. I’ll send a Scene of Crimes Officer up here to take DNA swabs, and so on.’
Carter walked back down the lane to see Willis talking to the forensic teams who had arrived and were getting set up.
‘This is Phil Leonard, the Crime Scene Manager from Penhaligon.’ Willis did the introductions. ‘DI Dan Carter, my colleague from MIT 17.’
‘Pleased to meet you. I understand you have your own team arriving tomorrow?’
‘Correct. But we need you to make a start.’
Leonard was nodding thoughtfully as Carter spoke. His eyes were on the field where Stokes’ body, covered in a net, was being temporarily protected from further attacks by the birds.
‘We’ll carry on as we would normally here, and leave the rest of the farm to your guy.’
‘Good, appreciate it.’
‘Can we keep these birds off?’ Leonard asked, as the herring gulls continued trying to attack both the body and the forensic officer approaching to work around it.
‘Here.’ An officer appeared with a packet in his hand and gave it to Willis as she stood watching from the gate. ‘If you hang this over a tree and light it, it will get rid of the birds.’
She took it from him and read the instructions, then borrowed a lighter and walked back up the lane to the adjoining field. She hooked the string of bangers over a sturdy part of the hedge between the two fields and lit the rope. As she walked back down the lane she shouted over to Carter that he was about to hear a noise. When it came it boomed over the fields and scattered the birds as they flew squawking up and away.
‘Shit!’ Carter laughed and Leonard shook his head, smiling.
‘Willis – bit of an understatement.’
Leonard called back to the officer managing the forensic equipment. ‘We’ll need to take him down and get a tent up.’
They unloaded the tent from the trailer and brought it into the field. An officer was taking soil samples from around the base of the post.
Willis came back to stand at the gate.
‘It looks likely he was lured away from burying the horse,’ Leonard explained as he walked across to the corner of the field where a tractor stood sideways on to a pile of earth. ‘He hasn’t filled it in yet. Something got him down off his tractor, then there’s evidence of a scuffle and he was dragged from there to here. If the birds hadn’t opened up the wounds on his hands we might have been able to get someone else’s DNA on them. We might still get something from the postmortem. It was quite a big fight. We have shoe marks here, leather sole, but we can try for a match. The fact that someone killed him with an impromptu murder weapon speaks more of manslaughter.’
‘Yeah – they might have come up here just to talk to him and it turned into an argument.’
Carter looked at Stokes’ body.
‘Was he dead by the time he got to here?’
‘Probably.’
‘They did a good job tying him onto it,’ said Carter. ‘It may have been manslaughter but they didn’t run away straight after – they had time to gloat.’
Leonard was making a sketch of the body. ‘He’s secured with wire and there’s a spike driven into the base of his spine,’ he said as he drew the proportions of the stake in the ground. ‘Which I presume was meant to hold a real scarecrow in place. It had to be driven pretty hard into the base of his back to make sure he didn’t move.’
‘It’s not subtle, is it?’ Carter said as he moved to get a better view of the body without overstepping into Leonard’s zone. ‘Someone has really thought this through. Sort of a triumphant gesture, isn’t it? Bit like putting his head on a spike, but in a farming community way.’
‘Heads on spikes were a warning to transgressors – a deterrent,’ Leonard said as he wrote up his notes in the crime scene log.
‘Yeah – well, puts me off thinking of getting an allotment. Someone hates him – really hates him. Would it have to be a man to do it? Would he be too heavy for a woman to lift onto that spike, do you think? The killer has to ram it home.’
‘Someone used to lifting could do it, a man or a strong woman. I reckon he weighs about thirteen stone.’
Leonard was called back to oversee the erection of the tent.
Carter walked across to Willis: ‘Any luck?’
‘Robbo says he’s getting somewhere – he’s found one of the women who used to come to Cornwall. He’s talking to her today. She’s not happy to come to the police station but she’ll speak on the phone.’
‘While Kensa’s here at the farm recovering – use the time now to get down to that van of hers and have a really good look at the others too. Take Pascoe and five officers with you. You go into Kensa’s van on your own.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I don’t want it trampled over. Have you got your forensics case?’
‘It’s in the car.’
‘Take it and keep in touch. I can’t see me leaving here for a few hours.’
‘Yes, guv.’ Willis went across to talk to Pascoe and organize the search team.
Leonard walked back over to them. ‘Looks like we can cut the body down now. It can go to the mortuary ready for the post-mortem. We’ll wait for your man from the MET to tell us what he wants done about that but we’ll get all the paperwork in order.’
‘Thanks. I’m going to talk to the family again,’ Carter said, as he took off back up towards the house. He stopped in at the cottage to see Marky, who’d been allowed back to get some more clothes.
‘You want to tell me what happened at the house?’ Carter asked, as he closed the door behind him. ‘The place looks like after one of the Arsenal and Tottenham games. There’s debris everywhere and a lot of people nursing their wounds.’
‘A few broken plates,’ Marky said, ‘that’s all. I didn’t see anything else.’
‘Sure, okay,’ Carter sighed, exasperated. ‘Tell me . . . what is it with this place? Supposed to be a great place to live – everyone knows everyone else and you all look after one another – what kind of bullshit is that? You’d think you’d want to help me discover who killed one of your friends, but instead you’re trying to be as difficult as you can with me. You’re trying to give me the run-around.’
‘I’d like to help, but I just don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you want me to say.’
Carter sighed heavily again. ‘I see it. I can see what your problem is. There’s so much going on that’s secret in this village, isn’t there? So many things that no one wants to speak about.’
‘Probably.’ Marky rummaged through his pile of clothes. ‘And it’s never been any different. After you leave it will be the same,’ he said, as he rooted out two odd socks. He flashed Carter a look of defiance.
‘Ah . . . that’s where you’re wrong.’ Carter smiled. ‘By the time I leave here I will know what happened to Samuel, and I will know who killed Martin Stokes. I’ll go home after doing my job, same as I always do. After all, it’s just a job, right? My life will go back to normal. But yours? Your life will never be the same again, because this village is a boiling cyst that’s ready to burst. It’s not a bubble you have here – it’s a bubbling, angry, pus-filled boil, and we aim to tease it with a squeeze, enough to make it pop all by itself. When it does, it’s going to erupt good and proper, and cover you and all those people who think that the outside world can’t touch them here in Penhal. You think what occurs here in Penhal stays in Penhal? Sorry, mate, but you’re so wrong.
‘Soon you’re going to have every camera crew in the world focused in on this village and waiting for you to explode. BOOM.’ Carter mimed an explosion in the air. ‘The truth will come out whether you want it to or not, and I hope, for your sake, as well as mine, it comes out ASAP, so I can go home to people who know what it’s like to care about one another.’
Marky was watching Leonard and the SOCO team out of his front window.
‘So, tell me, surprise me with the truth, how did Mawgan get injured?’
‘I can’t interfere with family stuff. Ask her yourself.’
‘I will, and I will take her in for questioning and keep her there if I find matching injuries on her father’s body. But I’ve noticed that Mawgan is a woman of few words, and I’ve noticed that Towan is a pig, so I’m asking you first.’
‘You need to look on the back of the cellar door if you want to see how she got injured.’ Marky held Carter’s gaze.
‘What was she doing in there?’
‘She was locked in by Towan. His idea of a joke – mainly to stop her interfering with the horse fight, I expect.’
‘And the mess in the kitchen?’
‘When I found her, he got there first. He wasn’t going to let her out.’
‘Fights are common in this family, are they?’
Marky shrugged. ‘Not unless Towan is around.’
‘Him and the old man were close, weren’t they?’
‘Yeah, it wouldn’t stop him though. He should have gone far away when he came out of the nick. He only came back to try and get money out of his dad.’
Carter went outside and watched as Stokes’ body was bagged up. Marky followed and stood in the rain, watching them remove it. Towan stood in his cottage doorway.
The white forensic tent stood flapping as it took the brunt of the wind. The pigs were squealing to be fed, the horses whinnying. The noise of the cattle moving inside the barn, clashing their horns against the metal stalls, added to the din.
Mawgan appeared in the lane and she glared at her father’s body as it passed.
Robbo rang. Carter walked back down the lane to get privacy. He was still watching Mawgan as she passed. She touched Marky’s hand as he reached out to comfort her as she went by. She shook her head and walked on.
Willis waited while the caravans were jimmied open by Pascoe. They were empty – all except one which contained outside furniture for all of them stacked up inside. She left Pascoe to search them thoroughly inside and out, while she went back to Kensa’s. When he’d finished, he came to tell her he was going down to make sure things were fully operational for them at the old police station.
Kensa’s van was unlocked. Outside, the fire was still smouldering from the night before and the smell of horse hit her as she opened the door. The rain began pelting on the caravan roof and the wind came out of nowhere to buffet it, as if it was made of cardboard.
Willis took a step inside the van and took her time to look in every corner as she carefully lifted and replaced all of Kensa’s belongings. The shelves were full of things that didn’t seem to have a purpose. There were corks and bar mats and even dead flowers. Willis examined everything, hearing the officers getting on and searching the other vans. She took down a small photo album from the shelf above the seating in the lounge. It had been hidden beneath a few pictures of Misty and some horseshoes. She opened it up; it was affected by damp and some photos had begun to disintegrate and stick to the plastic. Turning the pages carefully, Willis saw it was a cross between a scrapbook and a photo album. There were stuck-in sweet wrappers and a love-heart drawn. There were photos of Kensa as a young teenager with her arms around a boy, who looked like Cam, and with Mawgan modelling hot pants, pouting at the camera. Another girl was in the shot, long blonde hair and Lolita looks. There were so many photos of the girls messing around. They were standing by a Kylie poster. Willis put the photo album aside to show Carter.