The Deceit (7 page)

Maybe one day someone would, therefore, recover this astonishing truth, once again. And maybe, just maybe, they wouldn’t. It was right to let God decide.

If there was a God.

The wind whirred outside, at the end of the long cavern. Victor thought of his wife and of the children they never had; he thought of her on that bicycle, that holiday, a spaniel puppy, a car journey somewhere, a cottage with a well in the garden, a photo of his dead parents, snow falling on the Polish camps, and then his wavering and failing mind considered one final thought: the blessed name of Jerusalem, derived from Shalim, the Canaanite God of Night; the God of the End.

And here was that same spirit, coming into the cave like the cool desert wind: Shalim, the God of the End.

Cats? The cottage was full of cats: or rather the
corpses
of cats. Some skinned, most of them charred. Charred and burned and scorched and roasted. Piles of dead cats in one corner. Piles of dead cats in another. The stench was intolerable. They had begun to rot.

‘Jesus Christ.’

DI Sally Pascoe nodded, grimly. The white shirt of her police uniform was smeared with greasy soot. The stuff was everywhere. The burning fur and cat flesh had thickened the air and blackened the walls. The floor was actually sticky: Karen shuddered to think why that was, though she could guess – the heat must have been intense as the cats burned, so intense that the fat in their flesh had liquefied, had turned to oil or tallow, now congealing. Like candles.

These cats had been burned like candles.

She resisted the urge to vomit.

Sally pointed, and Karen followed the gesture. ‘That must have been where some of them were burned. A spit roast, but others appear to have been doused in petrol, and burned alive. We found some petrol canisters at the back, and firelighters too, used for kindling.’

‘They stink. Are you going to move them?’

Sally shrugged. ‘We don’t quite know what to do, I mean, who do we go to, Forensics, Pathology?’

‘Or a vet.’

‘Yes, maybe.’

Karen gazed around the awful scene. One cat was only half-burned: so they hadn’t all been burned at the same time. They had been torched one after the other. Ritualistically. And this ritual had not been completed.

Ritual?

Ritual.

She turned to Sally. ‘Maybe you should speak to an expert on witchcraft.’

‘Yes! That’s what I thought, some kind of terrible witchcraft. That’s one reason I asked you over, Kaz. Didn’t you handle a case in London, last year, African voodoo?’

‘Yes. A Congolese couple decided their kid was possessed, and they beat him to death.’

Sally shuddered visibly. ‘OK, OK, so this is just amateur night here, just a house full of barbecued cats.’

‘It’s quite bad enough, Sally. Properly Satanic.’ She stooped to one sticky, charred heap of corpses. Using a pen, she flipped one small corpse upside down. The mouth of the cat was open, agonized and screaming. Karen shook her head. ‘The noise must have been unbelievable. Right? Dozens of cats, being burned alive. Through the night? You know how cats yowl. I get them outside my house in London. Caterwauling. Imagine the appalling noise if you … burned them like this.’

‘Yes, that’s how we were alerted, someone heard the noise.’ Sally was backing away to the door as if she wanted to flee. Her face was pale. ‘Sorry. I’ve had enough for the moment: the smell. Can we get out, and speak in the car?’

‘Sure.’

The door was opened; the fresh air – cold and faintly drizzly – was unbelievably welcoming. Both women inhaled, greedily. Then they both laughed, very quietly.

‘Hey, I haven’t even said anything about your mum … Sweetheart, I’m so sorry. Karen, I’m so, so sorry. Come here.’ She hugged her friend.

Karen welcomed the embrace: human warmth. She missed her daughter; she missed her friends; at this moment, she missed her mum most of all.

A silent constable standing at the door watched them, perhaps slightly embarrassed by their open emotion.

Karen and Sally walked to the Range Rover and got in. Sally spoke first. ‘Look at us, two important policewomen. Or one slightly important and one really important. I mean, Detective Chief Inspector at the Met? What happened to little Karen Trevithick? A DCI at thirty-two? Go girl!’

Karen waved away the compliment. ‘It’s easier for women in some ways. We have a different way of looking at things. Changes perspective.’

‘Yes I find that too … Sometimes.’

‘Hard work too though; and it’s pretty tough on Ellie.’

‘Your daughter must be, like, six?’ Sally’s smile faded. ‘The father—’

‘Still isn’t really involved. But that’s my choice.’

‘You were never one to get married and bake scones, Kaz.’

‘No. I guess not. Not like Mum.’ She looked out of the car window, at the distant, yearning sea, way down the hill, beyond Zennor. ‘You know we used to come here, to Zennor. On holidays. We’d take a picnic and sit on the cliffs. Dad would always say the same thing – the same bit of history. He loved Cornish history. You see them? Those little fields, down there?’ Karen gestured towards the intricate labyrinth of tiny, vivid green fields, surrounding the granite village. ‘You see the stone hedges dividing them? The big boulders. They’re Neolithic. My dad told me those were the oldest human artefacts in the world still being used for their original purpose.’

Sally peered down Zennor Hill. ‘OK … Not a history fanatic, how old is that? Neo … lithic?’

‘We’re talking 3000
BC
– five thousand years old. The first farmers moved the huge stones they found in the fields to make hedges. And they’re still using them now.’

Sally nodded, absently. ‘I never liked it here. Penwith, I mean – this part of Cornwall. Creeps me out a bit, the tin mines and the standing stones, it’s all so brooding.’

‘Which is why people come here, right? Hippies and druids. Bohemians and artists. And Satanists. Which brings us back to the cats. You said the noise alerted someone, so you have a witness?’

Sally shook her head. ‘There was a bunch of rich kids, uni students, staying for Christmas and New Year. They rented Eagle’s Nest.’

‘Sorry?’

‘That big house down there.’

Karen stretched to see: a large handsome building, with extensive gardens, in a spectacular position hard by the highest sea-cliffs. ‘
Must
be rich, to rent that place. So they heard the noise? Of the cats being tortured?’

‘Yep, in the middle of the night, and they came up to have a look.’ Sally Pascoe frowned, expressively. ‘I guess they were drunk. They kicked open the door – and got
way
more of a fright than they expected. One of them was badly clawed by a cat, a burning cat, trying to escape. Must have been terrifying.’

‘They saw no one?’

Sally reached for a stick of Nicorette chewing gum. ‘I’ve given up for New Year,’ she explained, unwrapping. ‘So, yeah, where was I … yes, the two boys – Malcolm Harding and Freddy Saunderson – they both say they saw people running away, but it was dark. That’s all we know at the moment. No other witnesses, nothing. But it must have been those people who burned the cats.’

‘The kids aren’t involved?’

‘No.’ Sally’s negative was firm. ‘I’m convinced they have nothing to do with it.’ She chewed the gum methodically. ‘So we’re maybe looking for a gang of Satanists out on the moors of Penwith who like to torment cats by the hundred. How sweet.’

Sally’s phone rang. Karen raised a hand to say
I’ll be outside
and opened the Range Rover’s door. The wind was so gusty it almost slammed it shut against her fingers. Raising the collar of her raincoat, Karen walked around the cottage.

It was half-ruined. A shed of some kind, with a clear plastic roof, was attached to the rear. Most of the windows were broken. It obviously hadn’t been inhabited for many years, maybe decades. That in itself was odd, Karen thought: the cottage was spectacularly situated. It had the kind of view that you could rent to summer holidaymakers for two thousand a month. Even in winter it would attract arty types, who liked the rawness, the stern and brutal beauty of the West Penwith landscape. Why let it fall into ruin?

She turned a further corner and peered in through one of the few unbroken windows. The interior was dark, but there was still enough light to see the piles of contorted and tormented little corpses. What a ghastly thing. She shivered in the wind. Her mother had loved cats …

‘Karen, come over here!’

Stepping over tumbled bricks and shattered window-glass she saw Sally, in the Range Rover, gesturing.

‘Get in the car and shut the door. Listen to this!’

Karen obeyed. Sally could be a little bossy; she hadn’t changed all that much. But that was fine, it was actually reassuring.

‘What?’

Sally’s face was stern. She lifted up the phone, significantly, pointing it Karen’s way. ‘I just got another call, from my Detective Sergeant, Jones.’

‘And?’

‘They found a body.’

‘Where? Here? Zennor?’

‘No, down a mine, Botallack, you know that one, on the coast, over Morvah way.’

Karen’s thoughts whirled into confusion. She wondered aloud, ‘An accident? Falling down a mine shaft? I don’t see the connexion. How …?’

‘The owners found the body this morning, at the bottom of the shaft. They say it was covered in a weird grease, black soot and stuff.’

The Atlantic wind buffeted the window of the Range Rover. Karen looked at the charred and open door of Carn Cottage. It was covered with grease and soot.

What was that line of poetry her father used to quote, about the West Penwith countryside?

This is a hideous and a wicked country,

Sloping to hateful sunsets and the end of time,

Hollow with mine-shafts, naked with granite …

The poet was right.

DCI Trevithick steered her Toyota carefully along the narrow Penwith roads; to her left, the moors rose abruptly, scattered with enormous rocks, oddly deformed. To the right, the pounding and merciless sea, assaulting the cliffs. And in the narrow strip of flat land between, there lay the wind-battered farms and the grey mining villages. Ex-mining villages.

Just ahead was Morvah.
Morvah.
Karen mouthed the vowels, silently, as she slowed the car. There was another line, by some writer, her dad would quote: ‘the fearsome scenery reaches a crescendo of evil at Morvah’. It was so very true.

And yet people loved this country, too, which was why it got so many artistic visitors who adorned it with these famous quotes. Even on a raw and hostile January day, like today, it had a powerful and hypnotic quality that made you want to linger.

Who killed the cats? She had to find out. The case was starting to obsess her.

At Botallack Karen took the last turning, onto a winding, rutted track that seemed to lead past a farm, directly over the cliffs and straight down to the crushing sea three hundred feet below. But at the last moment the track veered right and opened up to a tarmacked car park at the very edge of the precipice.

And there below was Botallack Mine. Just seeing it made Karen shiver.

It was one of the oldest mines in Cornwall, three or four centuries old at least, though tin streaming and tin mining had been happening here for three
thousand
years. That was why the entire Penwith coast was riddled with tunnels and shafts and adits, like a honeycomb under the sea-salted grass. There were so many mine-workings that people occasionally fell down unsuspected shafts to their deaths; dogs disappeared quite frequently.

Yet within this ominous world Botallack had an especially sinister quality, not because of its age, but because of its position: right by the sea, halfway up an almost-vertical cliff. The mine had been built here to exploit the tin and copper
under the ocean.
The shafts were famously deep and the tunnels famously long: extending out under the Atlantic.

Imagine the life of the men who worked here every day …

Karen got out of the car and cringed from the cold fierce wind.

Yet, working here every day is precisely what her ancestors had done. Her father’s family ultimately came from St Just, and her great-great-grandfather, and no doubt the men before him, had been miners right here. At Botallack.

It must have been a horrible existence: they would have risen before dawn, often in a ferocious Atlantic gale, then walked in the wintry dark from their cottages along the coast and down the cliffside to the minehead, where they descended deep underground. In Victorian times they would have had to climb down half-mile-long ladders, deeper and deeper into the darkness. And after an hour, when they reached the bottom, they had to crawl for a mile under the sad and booming sea in terrifyingly narrow tunnels to the rockface.

Only then did their shift officially begin, hewing and drilling the vile, wet rocks to get at the precious black tin; only then did they begin to earn the pittance that paid for their families’ subsistence. When did they find the time or energy to live and pray and sing and make love to their wives? No wonder they died so young: at thirty or thirty-five. Apart from Sundays, they wouldn’t have seen the sun from October to March.

Karen locked the car, thinking. The word Sunday must have had a special resonance then. The only day they saw the sun.
Sunday.

An image of her father flashed before her. They had come here once and he had told her all this mining history, trying to make her proud of her Cornish heritage. In reality, the sight of awesome Botallack had just made seven-year-old Karen rather scared.

Slowly, she made her way down the perilous cliffside path, towards the handsome stone stacks of Botallack engine house, and the small cabins surrounding it.

She was greeted by a tall dark-haired man in a yellow hard hat and hi-vis jacket. He extended a firm handshake and shouted above the buffeting sea-wind, ‘Stephen Penrose. You must be Karen Trevithick?’