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.
What was that line of poetry her father used to quote, about the West Penwith countryside?
This is a hideous and a wicked country,
Sloping to hateful sunsets and the end of time,
Hollow with mine-shafts, naked with granite …
The poet was right.
DCI Trevithick steered her Toyota carefully along the narrow Penwith roads; to her left, the moors rose abruptly, scattered with enormous rocks, oddly deformed. To the right, the pounding and merciless sea, assaulting the cliffs. And in the narrow strip of flat land between, there lay the wind-battered farms and the grey mining villages. Ex-mining villages.
Just ahead was Morvah. Morvah. Karen mouthed the vowels, silently, as she slowed the car. There was another line, by some writer, her dad would quote: ‘the fearsome scenery reaches a crescendo of evil at Morvah’. It was so very true.
And yet people loved this country, too, which was why it got so many artistic visitors who adorned it with these famous quotes. Even on a raw and hostile January day, like today, it had a powerful and hypnotic quality that made you want to linger.
Who killed the cats? She had to find out. The case was starting to obsess her.
At Botallack Karen took the last turning, onto a winding, rutted track that seemed to lead past a farm, directly over the cliffs and straight down to the crushing sea three hundred feet below. But at the last moment the track veered right and opened up to a tarmacked car park at the very edge of the precipice.
And there below was Botallack Mine. Just seeing it made Karen shiver.
It was one of the oldest mines in Cornwall, three or four centuries old at least, though tin streaming and tin mining had been happening here for three thousand years. That was why the entire Penwith coast was riddled with tunnels and shafts and adits, like a honeycomb under the sea-salted grass. There were so many mine-workings that people occasionally fell down unsuspected shafts to their deaths; dogs disappeared quite frequently.
Yet within this ominous world Botallack had an especially sinister quality, not because of its age, but because of its position: right by the sea, halfway up an almost-vertical
