stump.
Ruth followed them out. Up close Shaw could see her skin was unnaturally clean and slightly rucked, like corrugated paper. ‘I don’t think she can face any questions tonight,’ she said. ‘But she did say they argued this morning because she didn’t want to revise for the resits. She wanted to go with her mates — that’s what she said. In fact, she wanted to go up to Docking Hill, to the wind farm demo. But she didn’t tell Marianne that, or Joe.’
Shaw thought how odd it was that no one in the family ever shortened the victim’s name to something less formal, less cool. Marie, perhaps. And he wondered if Tilly had been there, up by the wind farm gates, when he and Valentine had driven through on the way down to the coast.
‘She’s been up there all day,’ added Ruth, answering a question Shaw hadn’t asked. ‘Till four. Then she went to the boyfriend’s down in Wells and they went for a drink on the front — The Harbour Lights. Marianne wouldn’t have approved of that either.’ Ruth looked down the short corridor to the bedroom, where the door was open but still blocked with the yellow and black tape. ‘It’s an awful shock,’ she said. ‘But the worse thing is she’s going to think it’s her fault.’
SIX
Shaw parked the Porsche by the lifeboat station at Old Hunstanton. It was past nine but a necklace of beach fires still sparkled along the dunes. He shrugged himself into his rucksack and began to run north along the high- water mark. Out at sea the spot where the sun had set was marked by a flash of green-yellow light, and silhouetted in it were the wind farms off the Lincolnshire coast. As he picked up speed he passed the new lifeboat station, built to house the inshore hovercraft. He’d been the pilot for nearly four years and the radio call-out pager was strapped to his belt, but the summer had been quiet and they hadn’t had a single shout in July. Tonight the sea was a sheet of mercury, untroubled by any wave.
The halfway point to his house was marked by a single stone pine, the branches buckled by the wind, thrown back as if in shock at the sight of the sea. He stopped, climbing the low dunes, to breathe in the view. He filled his lungs with the air that he always imagined had arrived direct from the distant Pole — a 3,000-mile fetch uninterrupted by any landfall. He unpacked the parcel of air he’d drawn into his lungs: salt, ozone and a trace of the exposed seaweed on the cockle beds. But with the wind following the shore there were other elements — a hint of a chemical barbecue tray, the strangely inert aroma of sand itself and a citrus edge from the lone pine.
He could see his wife and daughter long before they saw him, in chairs set out in front of the Beach Cafe. Lena had bought the old shop, derelict, two years earlier, a job lot with a small cottage to the rear and an old boathouse beside it, now transformed into from beach windmills at seventy-nine pence to a sand-yacht at?3,999. Wetsuits had got them through the first year because the surfing revolution had transformed the British beach into a stretch of sand dotted with human dolphins. And while surfing and the North Sea were not natural companions the north-west-facing beach at Hunstanton did catch a decent swell if the wind was right. Next year they planned to open the cafe in the evenings, thanks to a newly acquired alcohol licence. Supplies for the cafe and shop were currently ferried along the sand in an old Land Rover that Lena drove. But they’d need a new 4x4 van to run daily deliveries if they opened late, using the wet, hard sand below the waterline when they could. They’d made the most of this last summer of perfect sunsets because next year Lena might be struggling to serve iced Chardonnay, or bottled Adnams, to thirsty trippers.
His wife stood, black skin showing off the white bikini. Five foot three inches tall, a full figure, but the skin taut and lustrous, especially at the close of a sunny summer. She’d just been in the sea and as she shook her hair Fran screamed, jumping away, the old dog their daughter loved barking at the sudden movement.
Lena brought him a glass of wine, standing close with a hand pressed against his stomach, insinuated through the gap between the buttons on his shirt. Her face was made up of curves, not slight subtle lines but bold, strong facets, so that sometimes he thought of an African mask, the curves around the eyes defining the face. She had a slight cast in her right eye, an odd match for Shaw’s blindness in the left.
They watched Fran taking a Chinese lantern on a string out on the sand. She lit the candle within and it rose, just beyond her reach, and in the windless air drifted at walking pace to the north. She followed it, trying to coax it round, so that she could bring it back to show them. Shaw noted that she walked as he did, as if she might at any step float free of the earth, her elbows slightly out from her narrow body. It was one of many physical similarities: the fair hair, the wide cheekbones, the almost colourless pale blue eyes. One of the mild complications of having an only child was that discussions about which side of the family she took after were loaded. It wasn’t as if the fact that she looked like Shaw — the light brown-sugar skin aside — would one day be outweighed by another sibling’s likeness to Lena. Thankfully Fran’s psychological make-up was entirely in her mother’s mould: forthright, outgoing, matter-of-fact — with just the same added ingredient: an ability to step back and watch the world go by.
He sipped his wine, his hand on the back of Lena’s neck. This was the moment he had to fight the urge to talk about work, because Lena had left the city, left Brixton and an urban life, to get away from the kind of lives people had to lead there. She didn’t believe in trying to create a paradise, Shaw understood that, but she didn’t want any glimpses of hell either. In the winter they’d be lucky to sell a pot of tea, let alone a beach yacht, so there was nothing easy about it. On a wet Tuesday in February, under a grey sky, it could be soul destroying, watching the sea through rain-streaked glass. It was going to be a struggle, but she was prepared for that. She didn’t think life owed her anything. But the lives that Shaw saw in his work were not everyday lives; they were a cross-section of the damaged, the cruel, the victimized. It was his job to deal with that, said Lena, not bring it all home.
When they’d met she’d been a lawyer for the Campaign for Racial Equality, picking through the London housing benefit system, trying to help families get a home. She’d always thought that if she immersed herself in that world, a world of poverty, crime and abuse, she’d be untainted by it — be able to just walk away at the end of a day’s work. By the time she met Shaw — on his first placement from the Met College at Hendon — she’d realized she was wrong. The sceptical, logical, forensic mind she’d trained so well was being coloured with cynicism. She always recalled something a judge had said in chambers. ‘To the jaundiced eye, Miss Braithwaite, everything is yellow.’ And that’s how her world looked: tainted. So they’d planned this: to live away from the city, outside Shaw’s urban manor, and for Fran to have a childhood. Their daughter could do with her life what she wanted. but first they’d give her this: a wide sky and a beach.
Shaw looked out to sea, nothing in front of him and the world behind him. Lena pulled on a pair of Boden shorts. Shaw recognized the patterned material because
She thought about that. Lena’s attitude to the business was fiercely practical. This wasn’t a hobby, it was what she did, and it made her independent.‘?1,400 in the shop. I had Jon and Carole in the cafe and they took?550. Most of that was ice cream and coffee. A good day — up there in the top ten for turnover. Profits? Decent.’ Lena sat on the stoop steps, stretched her legs out and curled her toes into the sand: cold now the sun was gone. ‘You?’ she asked, a ritual invitation to talk about his day. Just the basics. If she wanted more, she’d ask again. There was no point Shaw
Shaw told her about the death of Marianne Osbourne. The dynamic tension in their relationship sprang from his decision as to when to
‘So this woman, Marianne, was on the beach at East Hills? Alone?’ said Lena. The moon was up now and she tilted her face to it as if it was the sun, so that the light gave her face an architectural quality.
‘Yeah.’ Shaw thought about that, sitting beside her. ‘Well, she said she hadn’t planned to be alone. Her friend just hadn’t turned up at the quay. And she may have met someone out there. But she said she was alone. I got George to read through her statement — the one she made at St James’ the day they took them off the island. She was sixteen, out of school, doing a course at the college, selling cosmetics door-to-door.’
