The Man by the Sea Read online

  ‘Any particular reason?’

  ‘Why do you even want to know?’

  Without asking, Arthur had driven into a drive-through McDonald’s and presented Slim with a steaming cup of black coffee.

  ‘I take three sugars,’ Arthur said, ripping open a sachet. ‘You?’

  Slim gave him a tired smile. ‘Dram of Bells if I’ve got one handy,’ he said. ‘But I’ll take it straight. Over-percolated works best.’

  Arthur pulled into a free parking space and shut off the engine. In the glow of the nearest streetlight, the police chief’s face was like the surface of the moon, a series of shadowed craters.

  ‘I’ll tell you straight up that you should leave this case alone,’ Arthur said, sipping his coffee, staring straight ahead at the railings that separated them from a ring road roundabout. ‘The Joanna Bramwell case broke one of the best policemen Carnwell ever had. Mick Temple was my first mentor. He led that case but retired straight after, aged just fifty-three. Hung himself a year later.’

  Slim frowned. ‘All because of a dead girl on the beach?’

  ‘You’re a military man,’ Arthur said. Slim nodded. ‘I guess you’ve seen things you don’t like to talk much about. Unless you’ve had a drink, and then you’ll talk about nothing else?’

  Slim watched the lights of cars blurring along the ring road. ‘An explosion,’ he muttered. ‘A pair of boots and a hat lying in the dust. Everything in between ... gone.’

  Arthur was silent for a few seconds as if digesting this information and giving it a customary period of respect. Slim hadn’t spoken of his old platoon leader in twenty years. Bill Allen hadn’t disappeared completely, of course. They had found bits of him later.

  ‘Mick always said she came back,’ Arthur said. ‘They found her lying high on the foreshore, as though carried there by a freak wave. You’ve been to Cramer Cove, I take it? She was thirty metres above the spring tide line. No way Joanna could have got there unless someone dragged her.’

  ‘Or she crawled there herself.’

  Arthur put up a hand as though to push the thought out of his mind.

  ‘The official report stated that the two dog walkers who found her must have moved her, to keep her away from the tide, but both were local residents. They would have known the tide was going out.’

  ‘But she was dead?’

  ‘Quite. Coroner examination and everything. Officially, she drowned. They put her in the morgue and later they buried her.’

  ‘And that’s it? No investigation?’

  ‘We had nothing to go on. No suggestion it was anything other than an accident. No witnesses, nothing circumstantial. It was an accident, that was all.’

  Slim smiled. ‘So why did you call it a cold case? That’s an unsolved murder investigation, isn’t it?’

  Arthur drummed his fingers on the dashboard. ‘You got me. It’s forgotten to everyone except those few of us who remember Mick.’

  ‘What else do you know?’

  Arthur turned to face Slim. ‘I’ve told you enough, I think. How about you tell me what you’re doing out trolling Carnwell’s streets in search of information?’

  Slim thought about spinning the police chief a lie. After all, if he’d opened a can of worms and the police got involved, he’d likely never get paid. In the end he said, ‘I have a client who has an obsession with Joanna. I’m trying to find out why.’

  ‘What kind of obsession?’

  ‘An, um, occult one.’

  ‘Are you one of those wacko ghost hunters?’

  ‘I wasn’t until a week or two ago.’

  Arthur groaned. ‘Well, this would be a good place to start. You heard of Becca Lees?’

  Slim frowned, searching his recent memory. The name appeared somewhere—

  ‘Second victim,’ Arthur said. ‘Five years after the first. 1992. There was a third in 2000, but we’ll get to that.’

  ‘Should I be writing this down?’

  In the gloom, Arthur’s gesture could have been a nod or a shrug. ‘I’m not talking to you right now,’ he said. ‘You’ll discover this on your own, in the end.’

  ‘But it would suit your purpose if the Joanna Bramwell cold case was ... warmed up a little?’

  ‘Mick was a good friend,’ Arthur said.

  Slim sensed the matter was closed. ‘What do you have for me?’

  ‘Becca Lees was nine,’ Arthur continued. ‘Found in the pools on the beach’s south side at low tide.’

  ‘Drowned,’ Slim said, remembering what he had read of the story. ‘Accidental death.’

  ‘Not a mark on her,’ Arthur added. ‘I was in the first car on the scene. I—’ Slim heard a sound like a suppressed sob. ‘—I rolled her over.’

  ‘I’ve heard a lot about those rip tides,’ Slim said.

  ‘It was October,’ Arthur said. ‘Right about this time of year. Half-term week, but we’d had a storm roll in and the beach was covered in debris. Young Becca, according to her mother, had gone down to collect driftwood for a school art project.’

  Slim sighed. ‘I remember once doing the same. And she decided to take a quick swim, and got pulled in.’

  ‘Her mother dropped her off on the way into Carnwell. Came back an hour later to pick her up, and it was too late.’

  ‘You think she was murdered?’

  Arthur thumped the dashboard with a ferocity that made Slim flinch.

  ‘Goddamn it, I know she was murdered. But what could I do? You don’t murder someone on a beach unless it’s already low tide. Know why?’

  Slim shook his head.

  ‘You leave tracks. Ever tried brushing away tracks left in sand? Impossible. Yet there was one set. That’s all. Down to the water’s edge, then there was a small space where the tide had gone out. The girl had been dragged through the water and dumped on the rocks, left marooned when the water receded.’

  ‘Sounds like drowning. She got too close, got sucked under, dragged across the beach.’

  ‘So it appears. Except Becca Lees couldn’t swim. She didn’t even like the beach. She had no swimsuit with her. We show up, and there’s a zigzag across the sand where she’s picking stuff up. Then from about halfway to the low tide mark, there’s a single straight line up to the water’s edge, which ends with two prints in the sand, facing out to sea. What does that tell you?’

  Slim let out a deep breath. ‘That either a girl who didn’t like water felt a sudden urge to walk right up to the shore ... or she saw something that caught her attention.’

  Arthur nodded. ‘Something that came out of the water.’

  Slim thought of the figure he thought he’d seen by the shore. Had Becca Lees seen something similar? Something that had compelled her to leave her driftwood collecting and walk straight to the water’s edge?

  Something that had lured her to her death?

  ‘There’s something else,’ Arthur said. ‘The coroner picked it up but it wasn’t enough to stop a ruling of accidental death. The muscles in the back of her shoulders and neck displayed an unnatural tightness, as though they had stiffened immediately after her death.’

  ‘How could that happen?’

  ‘I talked to the coroner, and I put it to the superintendent as my reasoning for extending the investigation, but there was no other evidence. What it could have proved was that Becca was trying to withstand a great pressure at the moment of her death.’

  Slim nodded. He rubbed his eyes as though hoping to banish an unwelcome image from his mind. ‘Someone was holding her under.’

  They exchanged numbers before Arthur dropped Slim off near his place with a promise to dig out whatever he could find of the case files. There was more to tell, he said, but with a wife and dinner waiting it would have to hold over for another time.

  Slim, with his brain frazzled after an exhausting day, had come to only one concrete conclusion: he needed to talk to Emma about Ted.

  10

  He met Emma in a forest park a couple of miles out of town. S
he had picked the location as one where they were least likely to be seen, where they could conduct their business with no way of it finding its way back to Ted. As he waited for her, Slim was plagued by the feeling that they were a pair of secretive lovers, and the loneliness that walked with him everywhere enjoyed the analogy rather more than he felt was appropriate. As Emma approached, walking briskly, her head lowered, Slim stuffed his hands deep into his coat pockets, lest they could in some way betray him.

  Emma’s expression was terse. ‘It’s been almost two months,’ she said. ‘Do you have answers for me yet?’

  No formal greeting. And the analyst in Slim wanted to point out that it was seven weeks and four days.

  ‘Mrs. Douglas, please sit down. Yes, I have some information, but I also need some.’

  ‘Oh, right, Mr Hardy, you’re on my payroll but you’re still figuring things out, is that it?’

  Slim was tempted to mention that he was yet to receive a penny. Instead he said, ‘It is my conclusion that your husband is not having an affair—’ The relief on Emma’s face was somewhat tempered by Slim’s final word: ‘—yet.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I believe, at this point, that your husband is attempting to contact a former girlfriend or lover. To what end, I’m not sure, but the obvious one comes to mind. However, I need to go over your husband’s background one more time in order to fully establish what kind of relationship Ted has or wants with the person he is trying to contact.’

  Slim mentally scolded himself for treating speculation as fact, but he needed to loosen her tongue.

  ‘That bastard. I knew we should never have come back here. Everyone’s screwing each other in these horrible little inbred towns.’

  Slim wanted to point out that if Carnell was in the grip of a mass orgy he’d been regrettably overlooked, but instead he tried to force a look of sympathy into his eyes.

  ‘Three years ago, you told me, wasn’t it? That you came back here?’

  ‘Two,’ Emma said, correcting Slim’s deliberate mistake. She took a deep breath, lining up a slew of background information that Slim hoped would contain something he needed. It was always best when a client told you before they were asked. It made the tongue, often such a suspicious beast, into a willing companion.

  ‘He got offered a job, so he said. I was happy in Leeds. I had my part-time work, friends, my clubs. I don’t know why he wanted to come back. I mean, his parents are long gone and his sister lives in London—not that he ever calls her—so it’s not like he has any ties here. I mean, we’ve been married twenty-seven years, and he’s only ever driven me through it a handful of times on the way to somewhere more interesting. Okay, there was this one time we stopped for chips, but they really weren’t nice; far too dry—’

  ‘And your husband, he’s in banking?’

  ‘I’ve told you all this before. Investment. He spends all his time knee-deep in other people’s money. I mean, it’s a soulless existence, isn’t it? But we can’t always make money doing what we want in life, can we, Mr. Hardy?’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘I mean, if we could, I’d be paid for drinking port at lunchtime.’

  Slim smiled. Perhaps he had found a kindred spirit after all. Emma Douglas was ten years older than he at best, but she had looked after herself in ways that women with Christmas gym memberships and too much free time were wont to do. In the interests of closing the case, he realised that, with a drink or two in him at least, he’d do whatever was necessary if it meant keeping tongues loose.

  And to hell with morals.

  ‘And your husband’s background ... he was always into finance?’

  Emma snorted. ‘Oh, good God, no. He tried his hand at all sorts, so I believe, after he graduated. But there’s not much money in rubbish like poetry, is there?’

  Slim lifted an eyebrow. ‘Your husband was a poet?’

  Emma waved a dismissive hand. ‘Oh, he was into all that. He studied English classics. You know, Shakespeare?’

  Slim allowed himself not to be offended. ‘I know a few of the titles,’ he said, hiding a smile.

  ‘Yes, Ted loved that kind of thing. He was a real hippy back in the late seventies. Tried his hand at stand-up poetry, acting, that kind of thing. He graduated in eighty-two, and worked for a while as a substitute English teacher. Doesn’t really pay the bills, though, does it? It’s nice when you’re young to be into all that, but it’s not something to do long-term. A friend got him a banking job shortly after we were married, and I think he found the income quite addictive, as one might.’

  Slim gave a slow nod. He was painting as much a picture of Emma as he was of Ted. The repressed romantic, shoehorned into a life based on money, with a materialistic, trophy wife glued to his arm, pining of the old days, of poetry, freedom, and perhaps beaches and old lovers.

  ‘Does Ted often talk much about the old days? I mean, before you were married?’

  Emma shrugged. ‘He used to, sometimes. I mean, I never wanted to hear about old lovers or anything like that, but he would talk about his childhood from time to time. Less as the years passed. I mean, no marriage stays as it was, does it? People don’t talk like they used to. Didn’t you find it that way?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You told me you were married, didn’t you?’

  Sometimes, painting himself as a victim made people open up, and he needed Emma to feel a certain companionship before he asked the next, difficult, questions.

  ‘Nine years,’ he said. ‘We met when I was on recuperation leave after the first Gulf War. I was in barracks most of that time during our marriage. Charlotte joined me on the first couple of bases, when I was stationed in Germany. But she didn’t fancy Egypt, or later Yemen. She preferred to stay back in England and “keep house”, as she put it.’

  Emma put a hand on his knee. ‘But what she was actually doing was taking control of your finances and taking other men into your bed?’

  Had the choice of words been his, Slim, who watched far fewer daytime soaps than it was clear Emma did, would have phrased it differently, but it wasn’t altogether untrue.

  ‘That’s about the whole of it,’ he said. ‘She was happy enough until a minor wound hunting pirates in the Persian Gulf got me transferred to military intelligence back in the U.K. Then I could go home at weekends. She lasted a month before she ran.’

  ‘With the butcher?’

  Slim smiled. ‘Did I tell you about that? Yes, with the butcher. Mr. Staples. I never learned his first name. I didn’t find out until later. She’d been flirting with a colleague who announced he was moving to Sheffield. I put two and two together and got screwed.’

  ‘Poor you.’ Emma patted his knee, then gave it a slight squeeze. Slim tried to ignore it.

  ‘It is what it is. I don’t miss the military one bit. Life is so much more interesting as a P.I., surviving from payday to payday.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad,’ Emma said, missing Slim’s heavy dose of sarcasm.

  ‘It got worse,’ Slim continued, going for the killer blow that would seal them as pity buddies forever. ‘She pulled a few legal strings while I was in service. She filed for divorce and I found out the house I was paying for had been changed solely into her name. She claimed it as a pre-existing property she had owned before our marriage. She’d had someone tweak a few dates on legal documents and I lost everything. Oh, and she was pregnant, which got her additional leniency. This after aborting our first child while I was on active duty, because she didn’t want the baby growing up without a father.’

  ‘The second baby was yours?’

  Slim laughed. ‘Hell no. I hadn’t been near her in years. I presume it belonged to the butcher, like the rest of my life then did.’

  ‘Oh, that’s awful.’ Emma was stroking his thigh, but Slim, with his hands still stuffed deep into his pockets, ignored it. Instead, he shrugged. ‘One of those things,’ he said.

  ‘It must have been heartbreaking.
’

  Slim closed his eyes a moment, remembering a pair of boots sitting on the sand. ‘I’ve seen worse,’ he said.

  Emma was silent for a moment, frowning as she stared at the path, hand still working up and down Slim’s thigh as though trying to warm it against the cold.

  ‘Can I ask you a personal question?’ Slim said.

  ‘How personal?’

  ‘Would this be Ted’s first affair?’

  Emma withdrew her hand and appeared taken aback. ‘Um, well, I believe so. I mean, I’m not sure, but he’s always been a good husband.’

  ‘And yourself?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sorry to ask you this, Mrs. Douglas, but have you?’

  Emma pulled away from him. The vacant space between them on the bench stared at Slim like a wide-eyed child.

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ Emma stood up and backed away. ‘Look, Mr. Hardy, I think it might be time I terminated our contract. You’ve given me nothing of any value and now you’re asking me questions like that. I’m not some lonely wife you can just—’

  ‘Did Ted ever show any interest in the occult?’ Slim interjected.

  Emma stared at him, open-mouthed, then shook her head. ‘I never should have hired you,’ she snapped. ‘I’ll find out what’s going on by myself.’

  Without another word, she stalked away, leaving Slim sitting alone on the bench, his fingers caressing the warm place her hand had left on his thigh.

  11

  With no better ideas, Slim headed for the library and checked out a Shakespeare anthology. Then, an hour later, he was back at the desk beneath the condescending gaze of the wannabe-writer clerk to return the book—which had been as useful as reading French—and in its place rent the library’s DVD film copies.

  By Thursday night, after a two-day television binge, he had watched all of the films he had heard of, and a couple he hadn’t. Even seeing the drama played out, a lot of it had made little sense, but if Ted Douglas had spent his formative years engrossed with the likes of Hamlet and Macbeth, it was easy to see where an interest in the occult might have come from.