THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END (2 page)

Still Judy doesn’t move.

‘Where were they found? Exactly?’

Clough doesn’t know. He was too busy swinging into action to ask questions. He glowers.

‘Was that Trace on the phone? Did she find them?’

‘Yeah. She’s doing some sort of survey of the cliffs and what have you.’

‘An archaeological survey?’

‘I don’t know. All I know is they’ve found some bones, human remains. Are you coming or are you going to ask questions all day?’

Sure enough, by the time that they arrive at Broughton Sea’s End, the tide is coming in and it’s too dangerous to go down onto the beach. Clough shoots Judy a reproachful look which she ignores completely.

Trace and Steve are waiting for them at the top of the cliff, near the entrance to Sea’s End House. The sea has reached the bottom of the sloping path, the waves breaking with a smack against the stone. On the far side of the cove, the cliffs rise up, dark and straight, cut off now by the tide.

‘You were a long time,’ Trace greets Clough. ‘Ted and Craig have gone to the pub.’

‘Irish Ted?’ says Clough. ‘He’s always in the pub.’

Judy gets out her notebook and double checks the time before writing it down. Clough is finding her incredibly irritating.

‘Where exactly did you find the bones?’ she asks.

‘There’s a gap in the cliff,’ says Steve. ‘A sort of ravine.’ He’s a wiry weather-beaten man with grey hair in a pony-tail. Typical archaeologist, thinks Clough.

‘How did you find them?’ asks Judy.

‘I was investigating a rock fall. I moved some of the bigger stones and there they were, underneath. The soil was probably dislodged by the landslide.’

‘Are they above the tide line?’ asks Judy. Across the bay, the first waves are breaking against the foot of the cliffs.

‘At present we think they’re protected by the debris from the rock fall,’ says Trace.

‘Spring tide though,’ says Steve. ‘It’ll be a high one.’

‘If we clear away the rocks and dig a trench,’ says Trace, ‘the sea’ll get them for sure.’

They watch as the water advances, incredibly quickly now, joining rock pools together, submerging the sea walls, turning the little bay into a churning pool of white.

Trace looks at her watch. She hasn’t made eye-contact with Clough since he arrived; he doesn’t know if she is pissed off with him for being late or just in professional, archaeologist mode. It’s a new departure for him, going out with a career girl, much less a girl with punk hair and a pierced tongue who wears Doc Martens. They met when Trace was involved with another case involving archaeologists and buried bones. Clough remembers how strongly he felt drawn to Trace from the very first when he saw her digging, her thin arms quilted with muscles. Even now he still finds the muscles (and the piercing) incredibly sexy. For his part, he just hopes that the six-pack compensates for the fact that he hasn’t read a book
since he got stuck halfway through
Of Mice and Men
for O-Level English.

‘Are you sure they were human bones?’ Judy is asking.

‘Pretty sure,’ says Trace. She shivers slightly. The sun has gone in and the wind is rising.

‘How old?’

‘I don’t know. We’d need Ruth Galloway to have a look.’

Trace, Clough and Judy exchange looks. They all have their own memories of Ruth Galloway. Only Steve does not react to the name. ‘Isn’t she the forensics girl? I thought she’d left.’

‘She was on maternity leave,’ says Judy. ‘I think she’s back at work now.’

‘Should be at home looking after her kiddie,’ says Clough, rather ill-advisedly.

‘She’s a single mother,’ snaps Trace. ‘Presumably she needs the money.’

‘How did you come to be on the beach?’ asks Judy hastily.

‘We’re doing a survey for the university on coastal erosion. We’re surveying all the north-east Norfolk beaches. We’ve made some interesting finds as well. Palaeolithic hand axe at Titchwell, a Roman bracelet at Burgh Castle, lots of shipwrecks. Steve was examining the cliffs here when he saw the rockfall. The bones were in the gap behind. It looks like they were buried fairly deeply but the earth got dislodged when the stones came down.’

‘How come you’re discovering these things?’ asks Judy, as they walk back along the cliff path. ‘If the sea’s advancing, wouldn’t it cover everything up?’

Clough is glad she has asked this. He’d wanted to but was scared of looking stupid in front of Trace.

‘Tides change,’ says Trace shortly. ‘Sand gets moved; parts get silted up, other parts uncovered. The pebbles get pushed further up the beach. Things that were buried become exposed.’

‘Like our bones,’ says Steve. ‘They may have been buried well above the tidal line but the water’s getting closer, it’s wearing the earth away. Then part of the cliff came down on top of them.’

‘Did you get a good look at them?’ asks Clough.

‘Not really,’ says Steve. ‘Tide was coming in too fast. We didn’t want to get stranded on the wrong side of the beach. But, just at a glance, I’d say we were looking at more than one body.’

Clough and Judy exchange glances. ‘Definitely human?’

‘In my humble opinion, yes.’

‘We found something else too,’ says Trace, whose opinions are never humble.

They have reached the pub. Its sign, which, rather tactlessly, shows a man falling off a cliff, creaks in the gathering wind. They can see Ted through the window, raising a pint to his lips. In the yellow light from the window, Trace holds out something that looks a bit like loft insulation, a small ball of fluffy, yellowish fibres.

‘What is it?’ asks Judy.

‘Cotton wool?’ suggests Clough.

‘Whiffs a bit,’ says Steve. There is, indeed, a strong sulphuric smell coming from the material.

‘Fantastic,’ Clough rubs his hands together. ‘The boss is going to love this.’

‘Where is Nelson anyway?’ says Trace.

‘On holiday,’ says Clough. ‘Back on Monday. He’ll be counting the days.’

Judy laughs. Nelson’s dislike of holidays is a byword at the station.

Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson is sitting by a pool with a glass of beer in his hand, thinking dark thoughts. It is evening and fairy lights, strung in the trees, are twinkling manically in the still water. Nelson’s wife Michelle is sitting beside him, but she is carrying on an intense discussion about highlights with the woman at the next table and has her back turned. Michelle is a hairdresser so this is her area of expertise, and Nelson knows better than to expect a pause in the monologue. His own area of expertise – murder – is less likely to prove a promising starting point for conversation.

When Nelson informed Michelle that he had a week’s holiday still owing, she suggested that they go somewhere ‘just the two of us’. At the time, he had quite liked the sound of this. Their eldest daughter, Laura, had left for university in September and their seventeen-year-old, Rebecca, was unlikely to want to spend an entire week with her parents. ‘Besides,’ said Michelle, ‘she won’t want to miss school.’

Nelson had grunted sceptically. Rebecca hardly ever
seemed to go to school, her life as a sixth-former apparently consisting entirely of mysterious ‘free periods’ and even more mysterious ‘field trips’. Even her A-Level subjects are incomprehensible to Nelson. Psychology, Media Studies and Environmental Science. Psychology? He’s seen enough of that at work. Every so often his boss, Gerry Whitcliffe, will wheel out some weedy psychologist to give him an ‘offender profile’. The upshot of this always seems to be that they are looking for an inadequate loner who likes hurting people. Well, thanks and all that, but Nelson reckoned he could have worked that out for himself, with no qualifications except a lifetime in the police force and an O level in metalwork. Media Studies seemed to be another name for watching TV, and what the hell was Environmental Science when it was at home? It’s about climate change, Michelle had said knowledgeably, but she couldn’t fool him. They had both left school at sixteen; as far as higher education was concerned, their children had entered a different world.

Nelson had fancied Scotland, or even Norway, but he had to use up his week before the end of March and Michelle wanted sun. If you don’t go for long haul, the only sun in March seemed to be in the Canary Islands, so Michelle had booked them a week’s full board in a four star hotel in Lanzarote.

The hotel was nice enough and the island had a strange ash-grey charm of its own, but for Nelson the week was purgatory. On the first night, Michelle had struck up a conversation with another couple, Lisa and Ken from Farnborough. Within ten minutes, Nelson had learnt all he
had ever wanted to know about Ken’s job as an IT consultant or Lisa’s as a beautician. He learnt that they had two children, teenagers, currently staying with Lisa’s parents (Stan and Evelyn), that they preferred Chinese takeaways to Indian and considered George Michael to be a great all-round entertainer. He learnt that Lisa was allergic to avocados and that Ken had Irritable Bowel Syndrome. He learnt that Lisa went to Salsa on Wednesdays and that Ken had a golf handicap of thirteen.

‘How many children do you have?’ Lisa had asked Nelson, fixing him with an intense short-sighted stare.

‘Three,’ said Nelson shortly. ‘Three daughters.’

‘Harry!’ Michelle leant forward, gold necklaces jangling. ‘We’ve got
two
daughters, Lisa. He’ll forget his own name next.’

‘Sorry.’ Nelson turned back to his prawn cocktail. ‘Two girls, nineteen and seventeen.’

Only once, in the course of the evening, did the conversation falter and die.

‘What do you do for a living, Harry?’ asked Ken.

‘I’m a policeman,’ answered Nelson, stabbing ferociously at his steak.

‘Thank God,’ said Nelson to Michelle when they got back to their room. ‘We’ll never have to talk to those God-awful people again.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Michelle, wrapping herself in a towel and heading for the shower.

Nelson hesitated before answering; he didn’t want to piss her off too much as he was counting on first-night-of-the-holiday
sex. ‘Well, we haven’t got a lot in common with them, have we?’

‘I liked them,’ said Michelle, turning on the water. ‘I’ve asked them to join us for crazy golf tomorrow.’

And that was it. They played golf with Lisa and Ken, they went sightseeing together, in the evenings they ate at adjoining tables and once, in a night of unparalleled awfulness, they had visited a karaoke bar. Hell, muses Nelson as he sits listening to the relative merits of gold versus red with a hint of honey, can hold nothing worse than singing ‘Wonderwall’ in a duet with a computer programmer from Farnborough.

‘We must get together another time,’ Ken is saying now, leaning towards Nelson. ‘Lees and I were thinking of Florida next year.’

‘We’ve been to Disneyland Florida,’ says Michelle, ‘when the girls were younger. It was great, wasn’t it Harry?’

‘Grand.’

‘Well, time to go again without the kids,’ says Ken. ‘Why should they have all the fun eh?’

Nelson regards him stonily. ‘Harry’s a real workaholic,’ says Michelle. ‘It’s hard to get him to relax.’

‘Must be a stressful job, being a policeman,’ says Lisa. She’d said the same thing, with variations, whenever his job was mentioned.

‘You could say that,’ says Nelson.

‘Harry’s had a tough year,’ says Michelle, in a sympathetic undertone.

You could say that, too, thinks Nelson, as they finally leave the poolside restaurant and repair to the lounge for
coffee. Last year had produced two child-killers, at least three madmen and a curious relationship, the like of which he had never known before. Thinking about this relationship, Nelson stands up suddenly. ‘Going to stretch my legs,’ he explains. ‘Might give Rebecca a quick call too.’ Mobile phone reception is better in the open air.

Outside, Nelson walks around the pool twice, thinking of crimes with which he could charge Ken. Then he retreats into the darkness of the ‘Italian Terrace’, a rather desolate area full of empty urns and artistically broken columns.

He clicks onto Names and scrolls down the Rs.

‘Hallo,’ he says at last. ‘How are you doing?’

Dr Ruth Galloway is, in fact, doing rather badly. Phil, her Head of Department at the University of North Norfolk (UNN), had insisted on holding a planning meeting at five o’clock. As a result, Ruth was late at the childminder’s for the third time that week. As she screeches to a halt in front of the terraced house in King’s Lynn, she can’t help thinking that her name is now on some mysterious blacklist of Bad Mothers. The childminder, a comfortable older woman called Sandra, found after much exhaustive interviewing and reference checking, is understanding. ‘Doesn’t matter, love. I know how it is when you’re working,’ but Ruth still feels guilty. She never knows quite how to talk to Sandra. She’s not exactly a friend but she’s not a student or another academic either. She once heard one of the other mothers (Sandra looks after two other children) having a chat with Sandra in her kitchen, all about her husband and his untidiness, about her other children
refusing to do their homework or eat their greens. It sounded so friendly and comfortable, Ruth longed to join in. But she doesn’t have a husband or any other children. And her job as a forensic archaeologist, specialising in long-dead bones, is hardly conducive to cosy kitchen chats.

As soon as four-month-old Kate sees Ruth, she starts to cry.

‘That always happens,’ says Sandra. ‘It’s relief at seeing Mum again.’

But as Ruth struggles to get Kate into her car seat, she can’t detect any relief or even affection in her crying. If anything, she just sounds plain angry.

Kate was a big baby. Long rather than heavy. ‘Is your partner tall?’ one of the midwives had asked, putting the red-faced bundle into Ruth’s arms. Ruth was saved from having to answer by the arrival of her parents, hot-foot from Eltham, bearing flowers and a cop of
Baby’s First Bible Stories
. Her mother was meant to have been with her during the birth but contractions had started during a Halloween party hosted by Ruth’s friend and sometime druid, Cathbad.