The Deceit

9

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.