AN HOUR LATER, Terry pushed the white electric buzzer mounted on the frame of the Biggins’s farmhouse door and waited. She heard footsteps descending from upstairs and then a pinched, birdlike face peered through the barely cracked door.
“Yes?”
“Mrs. Biggins?”
“Yes?”
“I’m Detective Constable Terry Bates from Devon and Cornwall Police.”
She showed the woman her warrant card and badge.
“Yes?”
We are talking to people who knew Mary Trevean in order to make sense of her death. I assume you know about that?”
“Yes. Terrible that is, but Eldridge isn’t here; he’s gone up to Camborne. With one of your people.”
“That’s true, but I wondered if we two might also have a chat?”
Alice pulled the door open and smiled as if welcome for the company. She was wearing what once might have been called a housedress and a vinyl apron in a fading sunflower print.
“I was just upstairs cleaning. Let me put on tea. Come through.”
“That would be most welcome, Mrs. Biggins.”
Alice filled and switched on the electric kettle in a kitchen that, to Terry, looked unchanged from sometime in the nineteen fifties, like in some show on the telly in the old days. But though outdated, the room was spotless and smelled faintly of cleaning fluid and bleach.
“Live hereabouts do you?” Alice asked as she scooped loose tea into a teapot.
“No, but I grew up nearby, to the south.”
“Wait: Bates? From down Porthcurno way? I knew them! Your dad still farming there? Your mother passed young, if memory serves.”
“No, dad sold up. Lives in a retirement community in Helston now.”
“Do you live near him?”
“No, I work and live in Bodmin now.”
“Bodmin!” Alice gasped, as if it were in a distant country.
“It’s only a bit over an hour; not much traffic of a Sunday.”
“No, I expect you’re right. But Bodmin! Goodness!”
Alice set the teapot and two mugs on a small rectangular table in the kitchen: stainless steel legs, Formica top, its surface pattern nearly worn through from years of scrubbing. “Please…” she said gesturing to a matching chair with a worn flat cushion.
“So, Mrs. Biggins…”
“It’s just Alice.”
“Right then, Alice: I understand that you and Mary Trevean were close?”
“’Course we were; she’s only a field away. We spent a lot of time with her and her Bert until…until he passed. She were so fragile after that, and my Eldridge and I looked after her, I guess you’d say. I made her suppers and Eldridge took them across the field.”
“That was very kind.”
“We’re all close down here.”
“Can you imagine anyone wanting to harm her?”
“Never!” Alice hadn’t even bothered to consider the question.
“I gather Eldridge bought up her pastures and livestock after a bit?”
Alice darkened. “I wasn’t in favor, actually. The cost, you see.”
“But he went ahead anyway?”
Alice shrugged and peered into her teacup. “He did, yes. That’s his nature.”
“You said you didn’t approve.”
“My Eldridge, he’s always after buying more land and expanding our dairy operation. Reckon that’s the ghost of his family history. Haunts him, I think. Not that he talks about it.”
“Ma’am?”
“The Biggins’s, they lost the land that’s now the Trevega estate, you see. Way back in the nineteenth century, that was. Went broke and sold out. But Eldridge…”
“Yes?”
“He’s forever trying to restore his family’s name. And he’s a brilliant farmer, I’ll give him that. But to me it didn’t seem sensible in a business sort of way, buying up all that land. I keep his books, you see.”
“But you’re doing well?”
“Apart from the debt, yes. He knows his dairy farming, that’s certain.”
“It must have cost a pretty penny to acquire the Trevean land.”
“Prime grazing land, it is. We’ve a big mortgage with AMC to show for it.”
“AMC?”
“Agricultural Mortgage Corporation. Based in Hampshire. Loan terms are fair, but it is a stretch for us. We’re right on the edge, we are, scrimping and saving, but don’t tell Eldridge I said so; he wants so hard to succeed.”
Terry switched subjects: “Your husband and Mary were close friends, I’ve heard. How did you feel about that?”
Alice looked away toward the kitchen window: “Those two? Joined at the hip, they were, almost, like sister and brother. Me and Bert, we understood and never had a worry. They had something special and we reckoned them lucky in their friendship.”
Terry looked around the outdated kitchen, so different from Mary Trevean’s trim, updated house. Though Terry guessed Alice was not yet fifty, her narrow face was already etched with lines: forehead, edges of eyes, cheeks. She was rail thin as well. To Terry, she looked worn beyond her age.
“You were never jealous?”
Alice’s head whipped back to face her.
“Never.”
Terry thought the answer a reflex.
“Eldridge has always been good to me. A fine man, he is. Lucky to have him. Not that many choices down here, anyway.”
“Children?”
“A son. Grown. He’s in finance, up in London, not that we see him. Too busy, I reckon. Plus, him and his dad, they fell apart…”
“Why’s that?”
“Keith—that’s his name—wanted nothing to do with the farm. But Eldridge, he’s all about heritage, continuity through the generations, you see. He pushed Keith hard to be the next in the long Biggins farming line. Keith wouldn’t have it. And he was right; he’s done very well up in London. Made bags of lolly. Sends me a bit on the quiet sometimes; Eldridge doesn’t know. Reckon Eldridge may be the last Biggins on this land.”
She gazed across the room for a moment, then turned back.
“I will say one thing about Mary…”
“What’s that?”
“She were glowing this last week, I swear. I took her some eggs, I did, from our chickens. We have tea together Thursday afternoons. We got into the habit when she were mourning her Bert and just kept on. But full of spunk she were this Thursday past, eyes dancing. I hope I’m not tellin’ tales out of school, but to my mind I wondered if she were seeing someone. You know what I mean? She were that alive.”
TERRY’S LAST STOP late that afternoon was Billie Kerrow’s duck farm at the top of Trewey Hill high on the wind-thrashed moorland above Zennor. Alice had given her directions. The small stone house—Terry figured two rooms up and two down, probably mid-Victorian and a former miner’s cottage—stood right at the edge of the remote single lane road, as if waiting for someone passing to look in. Yellow and gray lichens pocked the granite walls and slate roof. The peeling, vaguely blue window casings looked like they hadn’t been painted in decades, maybe longer. She searched for a buzzer, found none, and knocked. There was no response.
She walked around the leeward side of the house and found a low stone shed easily forty feet long and roofed in corrugated metal. It sat perpendicular to the house along one side of a large penned yard in which milled what she guessed were easily a hundred noisy, plump snow white ducks. Standing amongst them, a short balding man was slinging feed to the birds and talking to them.
“Mr. Kerrow? Billie?” She called above the din.
He turned his head and stared, motionless, as if his feet were nailed to the yard. A lifelong bachelor, he was not accustomed to female visitors, especially ones as comely as this one.
“I’m Terry Bates, sir. Police,” she called from the fence. She waved her warrant card. “Might we have a quick chat? It’s about Mary Trevean.”
Finally, he moved, wading knee deep in complaining ducks to reach the yard’s gate. She expected him to step out, but instead he waved her in.
“Feeding time,” was all he said and turned back to the ducks. White pinfeathers littered the yard like a late frost.
Though still new at her job, she’d never had her detective’s badge so summarily ignored. At the same time, she was charmed by the affection the man clearly had for his flock, talking to them softly, stroking one here or there. They followed him like pets. While Billie went about his task, she looked in at the long shed. It was built in two parts, the floors covered in clean straw. One section, by far the biggest, was empty, apparently where the grown ducks sheltered. The other section was penned and filled with still-maturing ducklings milling about and pecking absently for seeds in the straw. Their feathers were only just beginning to turn white from a golden yellow.
She didn’t hear him approach. “Pekins, they are. Much prized for their meat.”
“Peking ducks?” she asked, turning.
“Hell, no. That’s some kinda Chinese dish, I heard. Never had it. These here are the Pekin breed. I tried Muscovy’s for a while, but these lot fare better up here.”
“I suspect that’s because you take such good care of them; I watched you.”
He gave her a shy nod, like a boy caught out.
“Now, what you be wanting from me about that Mary Trevean,” he said finally, staring at his boots. “Hardly knew her. Lost her husband, you know. Bert. He were a fine man. Regular at church Sundays, too, despite the work of all them cows. I ring the changes there.”
“Sorry? Changes?”
“You know, the bell peals. I pull the tenor. At St. Sennara’s.”
It was the first thing he’d actually volunteered, and Terry smiled, though she had no idea what he was talking about.
“You say you hardly knew Mary. But wasn’t she a regular at the Tinners on Saturday evenings?”
“She were, but I don’t stay for the games; not my cup of tea. Too many people shouting and whatnot. But I heard from Eldridge that she were very good at them. Quick-witted. Close those two were.”
He looked away for a moment. “Mighty pretty she were, too,” he mumbled.
“What?”
He looked back. “Nuffin’.”
“Had she many friends?”
“Can’t say. She were known along this coast, that’s sure. Well, we all are; not that many of us, you see. But I reckon her best friends were the Biggins’s. They looked after her when Bert passed. Know them, do you?”
“I’ve just been chatting with Alice this afternoon.”
“Well then…”
“Mr. Kerrow…”
“Everyone calls me Billie…”
“Billie, then: can you think of anyone who might have wanted to harm her, anything she might have done to anger someone?”
“Me? Nah… Popular, she was. And made a tidy living off them cottages is what I heard. Maybe someone were jealous?”
“Someone else who rents vacation cottages, you mean?”
“Nah. None of them nearby. Couple of bed and breakfast rooms at a few other farms, but not self-catering cottages like hers. Handsome they are, too. Bert showed me when he’d finished them. Proud he was, as well he should have been. Built to a fine standard.”
“After Bert died, did you ever visit Mary?”
“Left some flowers at her doorstep right after. I’m not the visitin’ type. Got my ducks for company, see. I like that fine.”
Terry had never met anyone quite as walled off from the rest of the world as Billie Kerrow. Was it shyness? Trauma? She didn’t know how to ask. Morgan would have, though. She was a tougher interviewer.