With siren and lights, it still took him nearly twenty minutes to reach Polcare Cottage, which was the only habitation along the road down to the cove. The distance wasn’t great as the crow flies?less than five miles?but the lanes were no wider than a car and a half, and, defined by farmland, woodland, hamlet, and village, not a single one of them was straight.
The cottage was painted mustard yellow, a beacon in the gloomy afternoon. It was an anomaly in an area where nearly every other structure was white, and in further defiance of local tradition, its two outbuildings were purple and lime, respectively. Neither of them was illuminated, but the small windows of the cottage itself streamed light onto the garden that surrounded it.
Mick silenced the siren and parked the police car, although he left the headlamps on and the roof lights twirling, which he considered a nice touch. He pushed through a gate and passed an old Vauxhall in the driveway. At the front door, he knocked sharply on the bright blue panels. A figure appeared quickly on the other side of a stained-glass window high on the door, as if she’d been standing nearby waiting for him. She wore snug jeans and a turtleneck sweater; long earrings dangled as she gestured Mick inside.
“I’m Daidre Trahair,” she said. “I made the call.”
She admitted him to a small square entry crammed with Wellingtons, hiking boots, and jackets. A large egg-shaped iron kettle that Mick recognised as an old mining kibble stood to one side, filled with umbrellas and walking sticks instead of with ore. A gouged and ill-used narrow bench marked a spot for changing in and out of boots. There was barely space to move.
Mick shook the rainwater from his jacket and followed Daidre Trahair into the heart of the cottage, which was the sitting room. Here, an unkempt bearded man was squatting by the fireplace, taking ineffective stabs at five pieces of coal with a duck-headed poker. They should have used a candle beneath the coal until it got going, Mick thought. That was what his mum had always done. It worked a treat.
“Where’s the body?” he said. “I’ll want your details as well.” He took out his notebook.
“The tide’s coming in,” the man said. “The body’s on the…I don’t know if it’s part of the reef, but the water…You’ll want to see the body surely. Before the rest. The formalities, I mean.”
Being given a suggestion like this?by a civilian who no doubt obtained all his information about procedure from police dramas on ITV?got right up Mick’s nose. As did the man’s voice, whose tone, timbre, and accent were completely out of keeping with his appearance. He looked like a vagrant but certainly didn’t talk like one. He put Mick in mind of what his grandparents referred to as “the old days,” when before the days of international travel people always known as “the quality” cruised down to Cornwall in their fancy cars and stayed in big hotels with wide verandas. “They knew how to tip, they did,” his granddad would tell him. “’Course things were less dear in those days, weren’t they, so tuppence went a mile and a shilling’d take you all the way to London.” He exaggerated like that, Mick’s granddad. It was, his mother said, part of his charm.
“I wanted to move the body,” Daidre Trahair said. “But he”?with a nod at the man?“said not to. It’s an accident. Well, obviously, it’s an accident, so I couldn’t see why…Frankly, I was afraid the surf would take him.”
“Do you know who it is?”
“I…no,” she said. “I didn’t get much of a look at his face.”
Mick hated to cave in to them, but they were right. He tilted his head in the direction of the door. “Let’s see him.”
They set off into the rain. The man brought out a faded baseball cap and put it on. The woman used a rain jacket with the hood pulled over her sandy hair.