a taxi. Jo did the decent thing and joined him in the cab.
He closed his eyes most of the way.
‘I’d ask you in for a coffee,’ he said when they reached the block where his flat was, ‘but I’m damn sure I’m running a temperature and I don’t want to pass some bug on to you. The driver will take you home.’
‘Make sure you take something for it.’
Before getting out, he said, ‘Messed up your evening, didn’t I?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I had a good time.’
He took out his credit card, but she said she’d got change and would take care of the fare. He thanked her and turned away.
It was difficult to be certain, but he hadn’t carried total conviction as a headache victim. Jo had her own theory and wondered if Gemma would confirm it the next time they met in Starbucks.
A week later, just after seven on Sunday morning, Jo got in her Fiat Panda and took the winding road to the coast. The shoreline at Selsey had always appealed to her as a place to walk: stimulating, never the same. And now its possibilities had increased.
The night had been mild for late September, but when she arrived in the car park at the end of the High Street, an offshore wind was whipping foam off the crests of some sizeable waves. A few people, as always, were sitting in their cars watching from behind glass, as if it was television. Jo had definitely come to walk, but before getting out she checked her face in the mirror. She’d decided not to wear the woolly hat she sometimes pulled on for blustery days. Instead she’d fastened her hair at the top with two red clips and let the rest hang loose.
She stood for a moment to savour the smell of beached seaweed and feel the spray against her cheeks. The last high tide had spread pebbles and bits of driftwood across the concrete path above the sea wall. She picked her way through for a few paces and then took the steps down and crunched into the shingle. A real beach this, she thought, where you could hear the rattle of stones shifted by the waves and see the stacks of lobster pots. Free of day trippers, too. Most favoured the broad, clinically clean sands of West Wittering, a few miles up the coast.
The breakwaters at this end were almost submerged and easy to step over. She continued down to where the stones got smaller and blended with tiny shells. Strips of sand were exposed in places. In another hour there would be a clear stretch to walk on.
When she’d rounded the narrow section below the high sea defences at Bill Point, the southernmost tip of Sussex, she returned to the path for a bit and was treated to the long view of the East Beach stretching for a couple of miles to Pagham Harbour, the conservation area where Jake worked. Much closer stood the grey lifeboat house and slipway at the end of a pier long enough for launchings, even at low tide. Around it was moored the last of Selsey’s ancient fishing fleet, much favoured by photographers, about twenty small, brightly coloured craft moored to orange buoys. Beyond, a good six miles off, looking as if it was just a continuation of the walk, was the tentlike roof of Butlins at Bognor.
As always there were people walking their dogs, although fewer than usual this morning.
You could spot anyone coming from a long distance. A man of Jake’s height would be more obvious than most. She passed one tall guy a good bit younger, in a fleece top and tracksuit trousers. A jogger, maybe, though he was walking. He had iPod earphones.
Not that she expected to see Jake. Nothing had been arranged. But a chance meeting wasn’t out of the question. She told herself she wasn’t even sure if she wanted it to happen today. He might think it was a set-up. How cringe-making would that be? Far better at some time in the future.
Only a short way on she was reconsidering. A chance meeting might not be so hard to handle. The way she pictured it, they would exchange a few friendly words and then move on. Unless. Unless what? Well, unless he suggested they stop and sit on one of the benches facing the sea.
Get real, she told herself. He’s Gemma’s boyfriend and she’s your friend from yoga. You can’t behave like that.
Absorbed in these thoughts, she strolled for another ten minutes or more, past the lifeboat station and the upended dinghies opposite the place where the fish was sold.
It was increasingly obvious that Jake was nowhere on the front.
This end of the beach was divided by stout wooden breakwaters, and the tidal movement had produced a strange effect. On the side facing her the stones were heaped almost to the top, but on the reverse the wood was exposed, producing a drop of at least ten feet.
At one point she paused to watch a youngish man in army fatigues throwing a ball for a large frisky poodle. They’d been hidden below the breakwater until she got level with them. The dog was running fearlessly into the waves, emerging with the ball and insisting on a repeat performance.
What now, then? She had the choice of continuing the walk on the path above the beach or venturing down in one of these sections between the breakwaters and coming to a forced stop. This, in the end, was her choice. She picked a stretch inhabited only by herring gulls bold enough to stand their ground as she approached, the wind ruffling their feathers. She stood for a while watching the breakers until the same wind that was producing the spectacular choppy sea started to chill her, threatening a headache. She wished she’d put comfort before image and worn the woolly hat after all. Time to turn back, she decided. She was struggling up the bank of stones when her attention was caught by a pale object in the shadow of the breakwater.
All kinds of rubbish is cast up on a beach, particularly when the sea is rough. At first sight this had the smooth curved surface of a large fish, a beached dolphin perhaps.
Jo went closer and lifted away some seaweed. This was no dolphin, nor any other marine species.
She had found a human body.
‘No way! All I ever find is lolly-sticks and fag-ends. What did you do?’ Gemma asked when they met the next Saturday in Starbucks.
‘Went up the beach and knocked at the door of the first house I came to. They called the police.’
‘So whose body was it?’
‘Some woman. She was nude except for her pants.’
‘Drowned?’
‘They thought she probably fell overboard and got washed up.’
‘In her Alan Whickers? That doesn’t sound likely.’
‘I don’t know. If she was sunbathing on the deck of some yacht, a freak wave could have swept her overboard.’
Gemma raised her eyebrows in mocking disbelief. ‘You reckon?’
‘It’s only a suggestion. There has to be an inquest, doesn’t there? They look at reports of people lost at sea.’
‘What age would she have been?’
‘Late thirties, the cop said. I didn’t go too close when I took them down to see. I just pointed to where she was. They took my details and said I could leave. They’re going to put something in the paper in case anyone knows about her. A reporter phoned me later.’
‘Didn’t you get a look at the face?’
‘No, thank God. She was turned away from me.’
‘Are they certain she’d been in the water? She might have snuffed it on the beach.’
‘Some seaweed was twisted round her. It’s more likely she came in on the tide. They say the sea gives up its dead, don’t they?’
Gemma was remembering something. ‘When I was having my winter break in Tenerife last year there was a body washed up on the beach and the locals said he was an asylum seeker. These poor bloody Africans put to sea in boats that are unsafe and hundreds of them never make it. Was your woman black?’
‘Extremely white, by the time I saw her. I don’t think she was an asylum seeker.’
‘Escaping from the Isle of Wight,’ Gemma said, that fertile imagination at work again.
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘You’re smiling, but there are prisons on the Island.’
