Devils way, p.11
Devil's Way, page 11
‘I was watching the fucking cable, Dec!’ she shouted back. She threw down the planks of wood and reached into the pockets of her muddy trousers to take out a packet of cigarettes.
‘No, you wasn’t. You were miles away!’
‘I wish I was bloody miles away. I need a fag.’
‘No, you’re gonna walk the plank and re-attach that fucking cable.’
‘I’m having a fag!’ She put the cigarette in her mouth and took out a long box of matches. As she struck one, Declan reached her. He grabbed the cigarette from her mouth and threw it into the mud. She went to protest, but it was then that they both noticed Kate and Tristan, and Declan did an almost comedic double-take.
‘What do you want?’ he said.
‘Hello, Declan? Can we talk to you for a moment?’ asked Kate. He hitched up his shorts and came slopping over to them in his muddy wellies. He raised his chin, and Kate felt a little twinge of anxiety at his posture. He wanted a fight. Cherry still held the box of matches and stared at them with her mouth slightly open.
Kate explained they were private investigators and that Jean had hired them. Cherry joined them all at the gate, and with her mouth still slightly open, she lit two cigarettes, passing one to Declan. When Kate said they were investigating the disappearance of Charlie Julings, he rolled his eyes.
‘Jesus Christ. I haven’t got time for this,’ he said.
‘We just want to ask you some questions about the night Charlie went missing—’ started Kate.
‘Went missing?’ said Declan. ‘Charlie didn’t go missing, Jean didn’t keep her eye on him, and he fell into the river or the Quakers. Isn’t that what the court ruled in the end?’
‘The court granted Jean a declaration of presumed death for Charlie. They didn’t rule on his cause of death,’ said Tristan, speaking for the first time. Declan took a puff of his cigarette.
‘Is this your son?’ he said, indicating Tristan with his lit cigarette.
‘No. We work together,’ said Tristan.
‘Ah. Right,’ Declan said with a leer.
‘We work together in our agency.’
‘Work together. Your “agency”. You can’t have a lot on if you’ve both got time to come here and ask me stupid questions.’
‘And how do we know you are who you say you are?’ said Cherry, peering at them. ‘You got ID?’ Kate found one of their business cards and handed it to her. She looked at it and gave it to Declan.
‘The Kate Marshall Detective Agency,’ he read. ‘Which one of you is Kate?’
Kate rolled her eyes. ‘I am.’
‘Who’s the pretty boy?’
‘I’m Tristan Harper. Partner in the agency.’ Kate could see Tristan puffing up his chest and squaring up to Declan.
‘Can we ask you about your relationship with Jean Julings?’ said Kate, wanting to diffuse the situation.
‘He ain’t got no relationship with Jean Julings,’ spat Cherry.
‘Yeah. And we’re fucking busy here. This van is worth a fortune, even as scrap, and as you can see, it’s about to go the same way as Charlie in this little Quaker.’
‘Quaker?’ asked Kate. ‘And what do you mean about Charlie?’
Declan looked at Tristan.
‘You sound local. You tell her what a Quaker is, and it’s nothing religious.’
‘It’s boggy land,’ said Tristan. Declan took another drag of his cigarette. ‘If you want to know what I think about Charlie, it wasn’t the river that got him. It was one of the Quakers near that campsite.’
‘Devil’s Way,’ said Kate.
‘Yeah. There are all kinds of nasty Quakers and Feathers… another name for boggy land, around the ground. And if you get sucked into a deep one, you’ll never be seen again. That’s what I think. The police used sniffer dogs to try and find him, and those dogs led them down to the river. Charlie went down to the water and then stumbled into the bog land.’
‘But the river was swollen the night he went missing,’ said Kate.
‘Then he fell in,’ said Declan, shrugging. ‘Listen, I liked the little bugger, but I didn’t have nothing to do with him going missing. It was an accident.’
‘The police found Charlie’s blood in your car,’ said Tristan.
‘I’d took him out for the day with Jean, a few weeks before he went missing, and he cut himself on some glass at a play park. Becky vouched for me on that. Look. I got drunk that night, and my car ended up in a ditch. The police questioned me, but then they realised I had nothing to do with it. They had no grounds to charge me. The case is closed, and Jean effectively locked it shut by going to court for a declaration of presumed death. They had a funeral. They buried an empty coffin.’
He dropped the cigarette butt and ground it out with his boot.
‘Can I ask you about a woman called Anna Treadwell?’ asked Kate.
‘Who’s she?’ snapped Cherry, turning on Declan.
‘Fuck knows,’ said Declan, putting up his hands in surrender. ‘Who is she?’
‘She was a social worker concerned about Charlie,’ said Kate.
‘Of all the women I’ve known, most have kids, and all of them have social services knocking on their doors.’
‘I’ve never had social services banging on my door,’ said Cherry.
‘You only had one kid. It’s the slags who have big litters of bastards that can’t cope, and then the social gets involved.’
‘And my Todd is a good lad,’ said Cherry. ‘You hear?’ she repeated to Kate.
‘Where is the boggy land that you’re talking about near Devil’s Way?’ asked Kate.
‘Look at a map!’ he said. ‘We have to get on.’ Without saying anymore, he went back off to the patch of mud. He picked up the planks of wood and started making a path back to the van. Cherry sneered and flicked their business card over the gate. Then she went off to help Declan.
Kate and Tristan returned to the car.
‘Boggy land, Quakers and Feathers,’ said Kate. ‘He thinks Charlie drowned in boggy land.’
‘Do you know how many people have drowned in bog land on the moors?’ said Tristan.
‘I don’t have the exact figures, but I’m guessing it’s a lot, over the years,’ she snapped. Kate took a deep breath. ‘Sorry. That wasn’t meant for you.’
‘It’s okay. He’s so sure of himself. He’s got me believing him,’ said Tristan. They looked back at Declan and Cherry arguing over the placement of the wooden planks across the mud to the van.
‘Let’s talk to that police officer, Lewis, who worked on the case. I’d like to hear everything that went down during their investigation into Charlie going missing,’ said Kate, starting the engine.
23
Kate and Tristan decided to split up the next day. Tristan arranged to meet Lewis Tate in Plymouth, and Kate opted to stay at the office and bring the case details up to date.
Tristan set off at nine and made it in good time for his meeting at eleven. Lewis had chosen a pub in the harbour area called The Ship. Tristan found a parking spot a few minutes away and still arrived early. The pub wasn’t open until eleven, so he sat on a bench outside, which looked out directly onto the harbour wall and the sea.
A bleary-eyed young woman with short, bleached-blonde hair was hosing down the harbour path just as a delivery truck arrived.
Lewis Tate appeared a moment later around the side of the truck. Tristan guessed Lewis was in his late forties. He was tall and wiry with a clean-shaven face and ink-black hair down to his shoulders. His face was chalk-white and gaunt, but his features were softened by his striking brown eyes. He wore baggy jeans, white trainers and a red T-shirt with the Versace logo on the front.
‘All right, mate, you Tristan?’ he asked. He had a swagger to his step and spoke with a trace of a cockney accent.
‘Yes. Hello,’ said Tristan getting up off the bench. He offered his hand to shake, but Lewis ignored it. He looked him up and down and said, ‘You got the cash?’
Tristan hadn’t expected him to be so blunt.
‘Yes.’
‘Can I see it?’
Tristan took the envelope containing five crisp twenty-pound notes from the back pocket of his shorts and handed it over. Lewis checked the contents.
‘And you’re buying the bevvies?’ he added, fixing him with a keen stare.
‘Of course.’
His gaunt face broke into a smile, and he slapped Tristan on the back.
‘Great. Ask me whatever you want. Let’s go inside. I’m choking for a pint.’
A pint, thought Tristan. It’s only eleven o’clock in the morning. The landlady was just opening the doors when they went inside. It was an old-fashioned boozer with a low ceiling and lots of wood and horse brasses.
Lewis asked for Guinness with two fingers of Jameson’s whisky. Tristan was going to order a cappuccino but asked for a pint of Guinness and no whisky. They were the only people in the pub, apart from a florid-looking man who came in with shopping bags and sat at the end of the bar. They took their drinks to a booth in the corner by the window. Lewis downed the whisky in one and then took a long pull on his pint. They made small talk, and then Tristan asked about the circumstances of Lewis leaving the police.
‘Everyone was at it, everyone. There were so many officers dipping into the stash of drugs we seized,’ said Lewis. ‘I was just stupid enough to get caught. And mind,’ he said, holding up his index finger where a sovereign ring was planted up to the knuckle. ‘I never used to sell the drugs on, not to adults or kids, not like a lot of the bent coppers. It was just for personal use.’ He took another drink of his stout and wiped his top lip on the back of his hand. ‘Anyway, I don’t miss the police work. It was getting far too political when I left. I do miss the uniform and the badge. And I got so much pussy. You wouldn’t believe it.’ Tristan nodded. He didn’t know how to respond to this.
‘You got a girlfriend?’
‘No. Single,’ said Tristan. A part of him just wanted to say he’d recently had a boyfriend. But he felt that Lewis had assumed they were two straight guys together. He didn’t think Lewis was homophobic, but telling him might shift the dynamic of the conversation, and he needed to win Lewis’s trust. ‘You got a girlfriend?’
‘Nah, I’ve got an ex-wife, though. Expensive she is too. I give her maintenance for our daughter, but I think the bitch just spends it on fags and tequila. I should never have married her. I should have paid attention to the genetics of her family.’ Tristan panicked that he was going to say something racist, but Lewis went on, ‘When you get serious about a girl, always check out the mother. Cos, nine times out of ten, that’s what she’ll turn into,’ he said, holding up the finger again with the sovereign ring.
‘What’s her mum like?’
‘Let’s put it this way. She makes Jabba the Hutt look like a supermodel.’
Tristan laughed. There was silence, and they looked out the window to the harbour wall.
‘So, do you enjoy private detective work?’ asked Lewis.
‘Yeah. It’s tough. I’ve only been doing it a couple of years. And I’m learning all the time on the job.’
Lewis leaned in and started to fiddle with the little sugar sachets in a pot in the middle of the table.
‘I’ve thought of doing it, but I haven’t got the patience. And I like a drink. Charlie Julings was my first and only truly “missing” kid case. I was involved in a couple of others where we found the kid a few hours later. He’d just gone wandering off. The other was when a father kidnapped the kid, and we tracked him down the next day to a flat in Scotland.’
He finished his pint and handed Tristan the empty glass.
‘I’ll have another one, no chaser.’
When Tristan returned from the bar, Lewis had a piece of paper on the table. It was a hand-drawn map of the Devil’s Way Tor and the surrounding landscape. Tristan put down the glasses and moved the sugar, salt and pepper out of the way.
‘Okay, so you can see Devil’s Way Tor, next to the tree where Charlie Julings tent was pitched underneath. The river runs beside the tree to the gorge, and the Devil’s Way sinkhole,’ said Lewis, taking a gulp of his fresh pint. ‘Have you been there?’
‘Yes, a couple of days ago,’ said Tristan.
‘Our first theory was that Charlie left his tent under the tree and could have gone to the river and fallen in.’
‘Why would he have gone to the river when his parents’ tent was so close?’ asked Tristan. Lewis shrugged.
‘Exactly. But with the river theory, the grandmother says that the water was low the day before, they were paddling. But then, during the night, the water level suddenly increased. We checked with the Met Office. There was a big storm further up the river, a few miles away in the mountains.’ He indicated the edge of the map. ‘The rainwater flooded down from the hills into the Devil’s Way river. If Charlie had gone down to the river in the dark, it would have looked very different from the twinkly little stream a few hours earlier. If he’d fallen in, he could have been swept downriver into the gorge and down the sinkhole.’
‘There’s a grate—’
‘—covering the sinkhole, yes, but after the storm, the water level was three feet higher than the grate. The kid could have easily been washed over. Another theory is that if he didn’t go to the river, he could have come out of his tent and gone along the road towards Okehampton, but someone would have picked him up or seen him. The road is a dirt track, but it’s surrounded a lot of the way by drystone walls. That leaves us with the rest of the land where they were camping. You see this area of boggy land? That’s a ten-minute walk along the river, moving away from the gorge in the other direction. It’s nasty bog land. If Charlie had wandered off in that direction, he could have come a cropper in the bog land. The search teams went along there and dug around with long sticks, systematically searching the edges of this bog land all along the river. Nothing.’
‘Did you use scanners or anything to check the boggy land?’ asked Tristan.
‘What do you mean scanners?’
‘Probes or magnetic scanners?’
‘You mean ground penetrating radar?’
‘Yes,’ said Tristan.
‘No. We deployed all our search dogs; cadaver and search and rescue. They didn’t pick up Charlie’s scent leading up in the other direction towards the bog land. But they did detect Charlie’s scent along the riverbank close to the Devil’s Way gorge.’
‘What’s this here, the Pixie Tree?’ asked Tristan, seeing where a smaller tree surrounded by a pool was drawn on the map.
‘Where the river veers off into the gorge, there’s a small fork and a narrow distributary runs in the other direction.’
‘We didn’t see that. It was all overgrown.’
‘Okay, this distributary is almost nothing, a small trickle, but it leads down through the undergrowth and forms a pool next to an ancient tree, what they call the Pixie Tree, where offerings are made.’
‘Offerings? You mean those trees where people tie on pieces of fabric as offerings of good health or to make wishes?’
Lewis nodded.
‘Yeah, it’s a lot to do with the pagan religion.’
‘Okay. But you said Charlie’s scent stopped at the river on the other side? Which led to the theory that he fell into the river.’
‘Yeah.’
‘What’s that?’ Tristan added, pointing to an arrow with “fields to Danvers Farm” written underneath.
‘Danvers Farm is a smallholding a couple of miles across the moors. We checked it out. The couple who lived there were a little odd. We asked to search the house, and they let us, but they were twitchy. It was a real tip.’
‘When did the search happen? Can you remember?’ asked Tristan, thinking Ade hadn’t mentioned this.
‘A day later at most.’
‘The 23rd June?’
‘Yeah. Charlie went missing in the early hours of 22nd June. And it was the next day. The National Park organised a big outdoor search with volunteers. We called in the dogs, and then we widened the search around the area, and that’s when we went to Danvers Farm.’
‘Why were the couple odd and twitchy?’ asked Tristan.
‘I dunno. Instinct told me something was going on there. The wife, in particular, was very shifty, but then again, the husband was quite an imposing bloke. Maybe she was scared of him, or what he would do when we left. They had a young baby. There was pictures up of him on the sideboard, I remember, but they said he was away with the grandparents. Their car also was in a real state.’
‘In what way?’
‘They were farmers. They had a tractor and an old banger car, which a lot of local farmers keep for going around their land. Their “good” car was in a right state, covered in mud. The guy said that the old banger car had broken down, so they had to use the other one.’ Lewis waved it away. ‘I dunno. We didn’t find anything, and we searched the place from top to bottom, and then just as we finished, the results got radioed back to us from the dogs that they’d traced Charlie’s scent to the river, where it stopped. I dunno. There are a lot of weirdos around that area. People who don’t get out much. We left the farm and that’s when we started to work on the theory that Charlie fell in. Oh, and the grandmother’s boyfriend, Declan Connoly, was also a suspect.’
‘What do you think happened to Charlie Julings?’ asked Tristan.
‘I worked a lot with sniffer dogs when I was in the force, both cadaver dogs and drug squad dogs and they’re rarely wrong. I think Charlie fell in the river and got sucked down the gorge into the sinkhole, never to be seen again.’
24
Kate slept well for the first time in days and woke up at 9am. She debated going for a swim and got as far as the kitchen door, but at the last minute, she chickened out. The thought of stepping into the breaking waves filled her with fear and dread.
Feeling like a failure, she made some tea and toast and sat in the living room with her laptop. She opened Google and stared at the search bar for a moment, wondering where to start.
