The Man by the Sea Read online

  ‘Fear can do funny things to people.’

  Arthur finished his drink and shook his head. ‘She was the kind of girl who would have chanced the swim despite knowing the rips. If the water was a bit rough, she might have climbed up to a dry ledge to wait for the tide to turn. She would know it was about six hours. It was October. It was cold, but it wouldn’t have killed anyone.’

  ‘Yet she chose to attempt the climb?’

  ‘Have you been out to the cliffs at Cramer Cove at low tide?’

  Slim nodded.

  ‘Then you’ll have seen how it gets steeper farther up. It would take serious balls to take that climb on.’

  ‘I couldn’t do it,’ Slim said. ‘And I was in the military.’

  ‘But if it was your only choice, you would damn well have taken care, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘For sure,’ Slim agreed.

  ‘So tell me why a girl like that climbed with such desperation that she cut the shit out of her hands before falling to her death?’

  Slim nodded. Only one answer made any sense. ‘Something was after her,’ he said.

  Arthur said nothing. He just stared at the tabletop, his fingers slowly drumming on the wood.

  16

  Emma needed him, she said. And Slim needed information, so he did what he had to do.

  And it wasn’t that bad, not when the gloom inside the cabin hid some of the lines on her face, and he could imagine how she had been, back before time took her best days from her. When they were among the sheets, he talked to her as he had once hoped he might talk to his wife before she ran off with the butcher, touched her where she liked to be touched, caressed her, told her words he hoped were true more than they were, and for a while, he was about to shut out the bad thoughts that seemed constantly craving for his attention.

  Emma had brought a flask of tea, although it didn’t taste like tea, and Slim considered again that he ought to start cutting back. Perhaps if it were just tea he could focus and think, but Emma seemed less concerned with her original intention for hiring him and more about what he could do for her in bed. To his relief, though, she had brought a large cardboard box along with her, and suggested there might be answers somewhere inside.

  It was filled to the brim with paperwork of all kinds: correspondence, piles of old letters, forms, documents, and other odds and ends that Slim paled at the thought of sorting through.

  ‘He brought this when we married, and it has followed us around everywhere,’ she said dismissively, as though her interest in the case was waning in place of her interest in him. ‘Ted won’t notice it’s gone, but I’ll be picking spider webs from the loft out of my hair for weeks.’

  Later, with the box open on his dining table, together with a bottle of red wine he was trying not to drink, Slim balked at what looked like an impossible task. Ted had seemingly kept everything, and a couple of neat stacks of unimportant bank statements and notices still in ripped envelopes, wrapped with elastic bands, showed how far Emma had got with the sorting before giving up.

  Thinking about how the second half of the afternoon had gone with barely a mention of Ted, Slim knew the focus had shifted. He was Emma’s case now, and the story of Ted and Joanna was his to pursue alone. He sensed this was how life worked for Emma: she cared little for what Ted did while her own idle attention was captured, and assisting Slim now kept him in her life a little longer.

  As he glanced up at one of his own bills protruding—half-opened—from his kitchen’s rubbish bin, he wondered if it was inappropriate to ask for payment.

  He had forgotten to return the borrowed Shakespeare DVDs, and since the fees were already mounting up, he put one on to pass the time while he sorted through Ted’s belongings, looking for clues.

  Macbeth. He could see the appeal, and felt if it was written in slightly more layman’s language he might enjoy the book. It was also clear how someone interested in both poetry and Shakespeare, and who grew up in the free-rolling 1970s, might have an interest in the occult. That the ghost of Joanna Bramwell haunted Cramer Cove seemed without doubt, but where Ted fitted in remained the issue.

  Was it really possible Ted could have murdered her?

  That a man spouting Latin by the seashore could have killed someone seemed preposterous, but Slim had seen shy-faced bookworms turn into machine-gun-wielding psychos in the heat of war.

  Anything was possible when the situation was right.

  The bottle of red was done before blood appeared on Lady Macbeth’s hands, and Birnam Wood was on the move by the time Slim had figured on a system for sorting Ted’s papers. Anything with handwriting on it went in one pile, anything without in another.

  As the movie came to an end, Slim wondered whether the shop at the end of his street was still open, and whether his need for both more booze and food was worth the excursion.

  In the end, he hauled himself up out of the chair, avoided his reflection in the hall mirror, and headed out. It was just before nine. Sunset was already several hours past, and the wind had got up. Slim, wearing just a light sweater, scowled as he reached the corner and found the shop’s lights off and a shutter drawn down.

  8.30p.m. He would try to remember next time.

  As he turned to start the windy journey back to his flat, a car pulled out of a parking space farther up the street and accelerated past him. Slim frowned, and turned to look. On a tight residential street with two lines of parked cars leaving only a single-lane channel, it was lucky the street was one-way. Had the car not accelerated so sharply, he would have paid it no attention, but as it stopped at the junction farther up the street, its brake lights flashing briefly before it pulled out, Slim recognised Ted’s green sedan.

  17

  The radio equipment was still in Slim’s car, but he pulled it out and hauled it up to the flat, checking his watch repeatedly, wishing he had drunk less. By the time he’d dumped the equipment on his bed, got it plugged in and switched on, he estimated he had a couple of minutes at best. Carnwell was a twenty-minute drive from Yatton, fifteen on clear roads if you really floored it.

  The radio was giving off only a fuzzing, which could have been engine sound, or just dust in the receiver. He needed more to know for certain.

  He pulled off the headphones, turned the volume to max, and sat down on the edge of the bed to listen.

  He was starting to doze off when he heard the thump. He sat up, jubilant.

  A closing car door. It proved beyond doubt that he had seen Ted’s car, for here was Ted, arriving home.

  Or was it Emma? After all, she, not Ted, had a reason to stalk him.

  No other sound came from the microphone, so Slim went into the other room and checked his phone. No calls or messages from Emma, but there was one from Arthur Davis, checking in about their scheduled meeting tomorrow.

  The police chief’s keenness to hand over details and information regarding the case of Joanna Bramwell and the other dead girls was beginning to unsettle him. Slim, a financially destitute private detective being shoehorned cold cases by the one man with the power to revive them hinted at a greater depth of unwelcome feeling than Slim had encountered so far. What if the residents of Carnwell wanted Joanna Bramwell left alone? What can of worms was he dragging up out of the sand of Cramer Cove?

  He was just thinking to retire to bed when his phone went again.

  An unrecognised number. Slim picked it up but said nothing, waiting for the other person to speak.

  After a few seconds he heard a grunt, then a voice. ‘Mr Hardy? You there? Name’s Nathan. Nathan Walter. Is this a recorded message? Where to start … Christ.’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Ah, Mr Hardy. You’re quiet.’

  ‘It’s late.’

  ‘So it is. I apologise for that. Listen, I needed to talk to you. I seen something out on the road—’

  ‘Where did you get my number?’

  ‘I just got picked up, see. Taken in? Chief Davis let me off with a caution, told me if I
wanted to run my mouth I should give you a call.’

  Nathan belched. Slim suppressed a groan, wondering if it was time to delist his number.

  ‘Why did Chief Davis give you my number?’

  ‘He said Greater Manchester Police had a department that deals with stuff like this.’

  Greater Manchester Police? Slim lifted an eyebrow.

  ‘Uh, yeah, that depends. Why don’t you just tell me what, uh, happened, the same way you told Chief Davis?’

  ‘He cut me off before I got to say much—’

  ‘Well, I’m not cutting you off. Lay it out. All of it.’

  ‘I was walking my dog along the cliff this evening. Bull Mastiff, takes a lot of walking. You a dog owner, Mr. Hardy?’

  ‘I’m not. Had a cat once. My wife’s lover stole it when he stole my wife.’

  ‘Oh, well, anyway, me and George—that’s me dog’s name—we’re up on the cliff and the fog’s rolled in. Not unusual that, but we—I mean George and me—we see someone throwing bags over the edge of the cliff. I mean, they could have been disposing of a body, couldn’t they?’

  ‘More likely dumping rubbish,’ Slim said, wishing he could just end the call. ‘Did you see who it was?’

  ‘Nah. Looked like he was wearing a big coat. Might have been a homeless guy.’

  Slim forced a smile the man couldn’t see and resisted the urge to hang up.

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘See, that’s just it. I don’t know. Fog closed in for a sec and when it cleared he was gone. Like, just vanished. Thought he’d gone over the edge like, but it’s sheer right there. Me and George went and had a look but couldn’t see nothing down there in the water, not plastic bags, nothing. Like he disappeared into thin air. Think that’s what I saw? You know, that ghost?’

  ‘What ghost?’

  ‘They say there’s that girl, don’t they?’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘The beach-walker, cliff-walker, whatever they call it. That one people reckon they see at night, down on that beach. Cramer Cove?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘That’s right. Well, I think I saw her. Chief Davis said you were making a documentary. I mean, I’m happy to do an interview. How much will I get paid?’

  Slim suppressed a groan. ‘That depends. Tell me the exact spot you say you saw this ghost and I’ll get back to you.’

  ‘Well, I’m not a hundred percent sure…’

  Slim made a mental note of everything Nathan said except his phone number. Whatever he had seen—if anything—it was unlikely to help, but Slim logged it as something to check out anyway.

  The phone call over, he retired to the couch with a beer to mull over the latest developments. His head was spinning with a dozen different threads, none of which led anywhere. He was no longer sure why he was involved in the case, now that he had established Ted Douglas was not having an affair—with a living person at least—and Slim himself had graduated to sleeping with Ted’s wife. It was an unholy mess which he had somehow become entangled in, but there were people desperate for him to solve it. Whatever else, he was certain that there was murder at its heart.

  He was getting up for another beer when a loud thump came from the other room. Ted froze, straining his ears, at the same time glancing around for something to use as a weapon should the intruder attack him.

  His eyes had settled on a glass vase on his dining table when he realised he was being stupid. The bedroom window didn’t open, and no one could have got to the bedroom without walking right past him.

  He had left the microphone on, that was all.

  Someone must have got into Ted’s car and slammed the door. He went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed, listening. Nothing. He waited, considering plugging in the headphones, when a rustling came from the speaker.

  Slim sat up. Someone was in Ted’s car. He heard a crackling sound like crumpling paper. It continued for a few seconds before Slim realised it was rasping laughter. A scraping noise, like nails down a blackboard, followed, then the laughter again. The person shuffled around, then came another thump.

  The door closing. Slim shivered. He looked up at the window and really needed the curtains closed. He got up and drew them across, and as he went back to the bed, a pop came from the microphone.

  He tried the volume dial, but nothing happened. As he checked over the machine, an LED began to flash, indicating a signal failure.

  Either the bug had been destroyed, or it had been discovered.

  Slim’s first instinct was to drive over to the Douglases’ house and see for himself what had happened, but he was far too drunk even to trust himself getting down the stairs. His second was to call Emma, but it was nearly eleven o’clock and it might arouse suspicion. In the end he went with the third option, which was to down a large whisky, throw his equipment off the bed and go to sleep.

  First, though, he went around the flat, locking all the doors and windows. Something about that laugh … wasn’t quite right.

  18

  He woke after a fitful slumber filled with nightmares. Stumbling into the kitchen, he brewed coffee while he checked his appointments for the day. His answering machine flashed to indicate received voicemails, and he found the first two were from other clients he had left in the lurch after his interest in the Ted Douglas case took off. He scheduled to return both calls later in the day, after finding a red reminder for his electric bill poking through the letterbox.

  A third voicemail was from Emma and a fourth from Arthur Davis. Reluctant to hear either so early in the morning, he chewed down a bowl of cornflakes then checked both, listening with disbelief as they related two versions of the same thing.

  Ted Douglas’s green sedan had been burnt out last night, shortly before midnight. Started with paraffin taken from a lamp in the family’s garden shed, there was no sign of forced entry to the car.

  Ted Douglas swore he left it locked. Emma blamed him. Ted blamed a disgruntled client. And Chief Arthur Davis, who had to sort through all the chatter to find the answers, didn’t know what to think.

  Ted had spent the morning in the police station, but the police had no evidence to support anyone’s claim, so as of yet, no charges had been laid. Ted had been upstairs sleeping, and no trace of paraffin had been found on his clothes. Emma, who had been watching TV in the lounge, admitted Ted would have needed to pass her to get outside. When suspicion had fallen on Emma, she claimed to have been on the phone to a friend at the time she noticed the fire outside, something her friend’s call log had confirmed.

  Ted continued to blame a client, Emma one of Ted’s multiple supposed lovers. Arthur’s message said he was sorry to cancel his scheduled meeting with Slim over lunch, but he was stuck at the station until the matter was sorted out.

  Left with time to fill but not wanting to stay in his flat, Slim headed to Cramer Cove, the bright October sun chasing away enough of the shadows to set his mind at ease while he stood on the wide foreshore with a view across the beach. The sea was choppy today with a westerly wind off the Irish Sea. Seagulls dived and swooped out over the water. Slim tasted salt spray on his lips.

  As soon as he took the path up the cliff out to the headland, his unease began to gather. Dipping down into a carved hollow with a thick hedgerow of gorse on either side to keep out the wind, he found himself hurrying past clefts in the trail where it passed blind gateways or stands of scraggly trees. He remembered his military days, early morning patrols through enemy territory, and the fear that was ever present on his shoulder like an angry parrot, ready to scream at him without warning.

  That all but one patrol

  (a boot and another boot and a bloody stump and pieces and pieces)

  ended without alarm only served to worsen the problem. You were forever waiting, building the enemy up in your mind into some terrible destructive beast, so that when it finally emerged, all you felt was a twisted sense of relief.

  From the clifftop, the coastline laid itself out i
n a tapestry of crags and bays. A few miles to the north, the wide expanse of Carnwell Sands and the town tucked up against its shore was in stark contrast to the narrow, enclosed beach of Cramer Cove, with its impassable cliffs, jagged pincers of rocks, and an invisible undertow that had lured several people to their deaths.

  Quite the place for a romantic, pre-wedding walk.

  It had to be murder. Joanna Bramwell had met a secret lover here the night before her wedding, and whatever had transpired had left her drowned.

  That she was supposedly haunting Cramer Cove made little sense, but the evidence was there: the argument existed that both Becca Lees and Andrea Clark had been murdered, even if the evidence was circumstantial at best. Slim wouldn’t like to argue it in court, but over a few beers he was certain he could prevail.

  And there was another death, yet for Arthur to explain.

  Slim walked to the top of the path, then along to the headland where he found a single lonely bench looking out to sea.

  It would make sense that Ted had been involved in all three deaths. It seemed absurd that he could be a serial killer, but perhaps he had made one bad mistake and had been trying to cover it up ever since. That he would have moved back to Carnwell to be close to a life he wanted to forget made no sense, particularly when the cases were closed, but perhaps there was something pathological about him, and he couldn’t keep away.

  Slim made a note to ask Emma to check the dates of Ted’s business trips dating back to those days, but it was so long ago now it might be impossible to get accurate information.

  Or maybe Ted had an associate, or even someone on the payroll. With his money, nothing was discountable, but none of it explained why Ted spent every Friday afternoon at Cramer Cove reading out an archaic banishment spell.