Trevor Cordon lived in a converted sail loft in Newlyn, together with a springer spaniel, a small library of mainly nineteenth-century novels – he was on his way through the Barsetshire Chronicles for the third time – and several teetering piles of cassettes and CDs, picked up at charity shops across the county, Penzance to Redruth and beyond. Cordon and the springer were both getting on a little, starting to creak at the knees.
A detective inspector in the Devon and Cornwall police, further promotion stalled by a mixture of his own intransigence and a lack of ambition, Cordon was content enough to ply the local brand of neighbourhood policing, spiced up as it was, from time to time, by excursions in the company of the Major Incident Team – in which context he’d met Frank Elder, Elder having been drafted in to help with training, and assist, in a civilian capacity, in the pursuance of the occasional serious investigation. Most recently, a double murder, mother and daughter, initially thought to be victims of a fire; the house in which they’d lived, on a secluded spot deep into the peninsula, had gone up in flames, a dozen fire appliances to deal with the blaze; only later, when the charred bodies were autopsied, was the true cause of death revealed, asphyxia caused by a combination of smothering and severe chest compressions, rather than, as had been assumed, by smoke inhalation.
Elder had helped to plot a path through a circuitous trail of potential witnesses, unravel a complex family tree. Who had the most to gain, the least to lose? What slights, what jealousies had grown, festering through the years? More and more, Cordon had said, like a Daphne du Maurier novel.
The daughter had been in her late fifties, twice divorced, twice remarried, five children, three living within a hundred-mile radius; her mother, in her eighties, had been a minor celebrity in her day, a poet and painter in her own right and the muse and lover of one of the latter-day Lamorna colony of artists.
Art, Elder said as if it were an infection, it gets bloody everywhere.
In the end, the perpetrators proved to be a pair of drugged-up sixteen-year-olds, lured to the house by rumours of hoarded cash, the prospect of easy money, and acting out their angry disappointment before setting fire to the place in an attempt to cover up their crime. They were caught when one of them attempted to sell a silver watch at a pawnbroker’s in Camborne and the owner, checking his list of stolen goods, phoned the local police.
Little or nothing either Elder or Cordon had done amounted to much more than the expense of police time and money. That was how it was sometimes. An apparent waste of diminishing resources. Still, it was the job; you did what you could.
‘Miss it, don’t you?’ Cordon said. They were in the Star Inn, not far shy of closing. ‘Wish you’d never chucked it in, I’ll be bound.’
‘Do I, buggery! What little I’m doing now, that’s quite enough, thank you very much. And I’d not be doing that if it weren’t for the money.’
Cordon chuckled. ‘I’ll believe you, millions wouldn’t.’
Outside, a narrow strip of pavement facing towards the harbour, the air struck cold. Stars plentiful overhead.
‘Nightcap?’
‘Best not.’
‘Taxi, is it?’
Elder laughed. ‘It’s a long bloody walk else. And I’ll not be driving. Last thing I want, one of your lads breathalysing me, making me walk a straight line.’
‘Come back and help me crack this new bottle of Bushmills, then. Call a cab from there.’
The interior of the old sail loft was warm and smelt faintly of dog. Cordon poured two good shots of Irish whiskey into appropriate glasses; sliced bread and cut generous chunks from a hunk of cheese.
There was a photograph, faded a little now, fixed to the fridge door, Cordon and a youth of fourteen or fifteen side by side on a small boat out to sea, wind catching the boy’s hair, sunlight glinting off the surface of the water. No disguising the look of pleasure on Cordon’s face, the smile.
‘Your lad?’ Elder said. ‘See him at all?’
‘Not since he was over a few years back. I say a few, must be five now, maybe six. Talk once in a while. Christmas and New Year. Birthdays.’ Cordon shrugged. ‘You know how it is.’
‘You’ve not been out to see him?’
‘Australia? Too bloody far by half. Scillies, that’s far enough for me.’ His face creased in a smile. ‘He used to say, when he’d got settled, it’s great here, you’d love it, you should come, and I’d be yes, yes, of course, but not just now. Both of us knowing it’d never happen.’ He reached for his glass. ‘His mother went the one time, I believe.’
‘Miss him, though?’
‘Once in a while. You? Your lass? Katherine, is it?’
Elder shrugged. ‘London, not Australia.’
‘See quite a bit of her then?’
‘Not really.’
‘Comes a time. Live their own lives.’
‘She was down not so long back.’
‘Like to have met her.’
‘Only here a couple of days.’
‘Maybe next time then.’
He refilled Elder’s glass and then his own. Time to talk about something that didn’t matter. What was going on in the Premiership. The current state of Cornish rugby. Twenty minutes or so later, Elder’s phone beeped with a text from the driver; he was waiting at the end of the street.
As soon as Elder was back from his morning run and showered, coffee on the stove, he switched on the computer. Three email messages, one from Vicki.
If you haven’t already seen it, there’s something about that Anthony Winter in the news.
A link to the BBC News website. British artist Anthony Winter threatened with legal action over alleged breach of contract.
The gist of what followed being that Winter had apparently walked out on a long-standing agreement with one gallery in favour of exhibiting with another. Rebecca Johnson, described as an art consultant, was quoted as saying, ‘Anthony is only interested in having his work displayed in the most sympathetic settings and the most appropriate circumstances. As regards the galleries concerned, I’m sure that any disagreements can be resolved to everyone’s mutual advantage.’ There followed extracts from conflicting interviews with Rupert Morland-Davis, owner of Mayfair-based Abernathy Fine Art, and Tom Hecklington of the Hecklington and Wearing gallery in Shoreditch. From Anthony Winter himself there was no word.
Elder typed Hecklington and Wearing into the search bar.
The gallery was pleased to announce a major exhibition of New and Recent Work by the renowned British Artist, Anthony Winter, opening in three weeks’ time.
Legal action, Elder assumed, notwithstanding.