Kent - Silent Gull: The Fowey murders - a dark chilling crime thriller. (DI Treloar Cornish Crime Thrillers Book 3)

It was cold on the water. It was late November in Cornwall. It was late evening. A figure clad in a wetsuit, in a navy blue kayak, was pulling against the inflowing waters of the tide across the River Fowey from the Fowey side. A bright intermittent moon was shining off the water then disappearing behind sweeping clouds. The kayaker moved silently and expertly between the boats moored in the channel, then hugged the far side of the river which was uninhabited and safe from prying eyes. It steered into a tributary, where the going was easier, and glided up to a small jetty where a second figure clad in jeans and a dark hoodie was waiting, breath misting in the cold air.

A large tanned hand reached down to grab the prow and secured the kayak to a ring before moving to repeat the action at the stern. The paddle was handed up and then the paddler raised its arms and was lifted onto the jetty and into a passionate embrace. The paddler pulled a beanie off its head and a mass of red curls fell down its shoulders.

Hey Babe, said the lifter, smiling to reveal perfect white teeth in a tanned handsome face with piercing sapphire eyes. He was a good-looking boy.

Hey Hitch, said the girl returning his smile.

Her name was Georgiana Spargo and her father, Christian, was one of the most feared and despised men in Cornwall. If he had known the purpose of her crossing and who she was visiting, he would have killed her with his bare hands.

At the end of the jetty was a series of old terraced buildings and thatched roundhouses, all entirely in darkness. The lovers should have been alone. But someone was watching and listening. A man was standing inside the nearest roundhouse in the darkness having just emerged from the flotation tank. He should not have been there at night. What psychologist Dr Ivan Speer, ever on the lookout for an opportunity for blackmail and betrayal, with all his experience of troubled minds, should have remembered, was that secrets are dangerous, and even other peoples can get you killed.

Christian Spargo resented Jackson Power. How could anyone leave California for Cornwall; abandon the weather, the space, the money, the opportunities? Christians greatest regret in life was that he hadnt left for the US years ago. Opportunity lost. His dreams had been limited to the narrow grey horizons of the UK.

The US would have understood him; appreciated him; valued him; Christ, honoured him! Here he was treated with civil contempt. Oh, they respected his money and feared his assumed violence, but they didnt like him. They bridled at his uncouth presence in their riverside idyll. Just like his hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, he was misunderstood and despised. They had a stereotypical image of a gangster and they had pinned it on him.

But the real reason for his hatred of Jackson Power was a bitter, festering obsession with a commercial defeat. Christian had been about to exchange contracts on the purchase of Seal Hall when he was outbid by a ridiculously higher offer by Power, the Hollywood superstar, much to the delight of the local community. Everyday, Christian could stare from the upstairs windows of his substantial home, Corsica House, set among the evergreen trees above the narrow streets of Fowey, across the Fowey River to the domain of his enemy on the top of the opposite wooded slope. He tried not to, but sometimes it was irresistible.

Power, a Minnesota farm boy whose real name was Rolf Lindstrm, had shot to fame in the nineties when he had been cast as an unknown Hollywood newcomer to play the hero in the first of a phenomenally successful series of movies about a fictional medieval kingdom. Twenty years later he was a multi-millionaire with a beautiful wife, Erin, a family home on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles and millions of devoted fans. He had gained great fame and fortune, but he had lost his eldest son.

Jackson and Erin had named their four children for their Hollywood favourites. The eldest, a boy, Ford after director John Ford; then daughter, Davis, after actress Bette Davis; son Hitchcock, known as Hitch, after director Alfred Hitchcock; and finally daughter Gardner, known as Posy, after actress Ava Gardner. All had been wonderful in their Camelot life until Ford fell in with the wrong crowd, took to drugs, escalating to heroin, and despite his parents frantic efforts and copious cash, died of a massive overdose in a seedy motel on Hollywood Boulevard the previous year.

Erin had turned to her therapist, but bereft and inconsolable, Jackson Power had left for Europe. He had toured the continent fleeing his pain and eventually found himself in London. Sitting in the bar of the Savoy hotel, he had been leafing aimlessly through a back copy of Country Life magazine when he had come across an estate agents details of a property for sale in Cornwall: Seal Hall. He knew it was perfect for a project that had been ripening in his mind. He phoned the agent and secured the property sight unseen. Over the course of the following eighteen months he had created The Valley of the Tides: a therapeutic centre for traumatized young addictive personalities and their families.