Jake was waiting at the entrance to the beach car park when Jo drove in. Good thing he was so tall, because she wouldn’t have known him otherwise. He was in a navy blue jacket with the hood over his head like a boxer ready to enter the arena. Maybe he thought of this outing as a contest. She hoped not. More likely he wanted to be inconspicuous. Difficult when you’re six foot six.
‘We made it this time,’ she said.
‘You made it last time.’ His response came fast and free, a promising start.
The rain had given way to a spell of sunshine and there was a sharp breeze. The sea looked choppy, if not quite so wild as when Jo was here last time. She locked the car and they started along the path. Not many people were out.
On the drive down, she’d decided to tell him the whole sorry story about Fiona. Gemma had blabbed to Rick, so why shouldn’t Jake be told? He wouldn’t use the information to score points as Rick did at every opportunity. He’d be a sympathetic listener and wise counsel.
She missed nothing in the telling: the plot to undermine Fiona, the search of the house by the police, the finding of the body, and the news that Gemma was being questioned. Jake heard her in silence, occasionally using his foot to steer away pebbles the tide had deposited on the path.
‘I haven’t heard anything directly from Gemma,’ she finished up, ‘so I don’t know what the police got out of her. She could still be with them at the print works, I suppose. I don’t like to phone her in case they’re with her.’
‘She’ll call you,’ Jake said.
‘That’s what I’m hoping. I’ve brought my mobile. Do you think they’re holding her?’
He shook his head. ‘What for?’
‘I mean if there was some suggestion that Fiona was pushed in.’
‘Is there?’
‘I don’t know. How else did she get in the water?’
He shrugged. He didn’t seem to have thought of this.
She said, ‘I’m wondering if she’s ashamed to call me because she dropped me in it. There could be a police car waiting outside my house.’
‘If there is… ’ He opened his hands in a gesture of emptiness.
‘I shouldn’t panic?’
‘They’ve got nothing on you.’
‘That’s true.’
‘They’ll be wanting to talk to someone else.’
‘Mr Cartwright, Gemma’s boss? That’s for sure. He’s got a tale to tell. Yes, he’s got to be a crucial witness.’
‘Have you met him?’
There was a change in Jake, and it was positive. He wasn’t just responding to prompts from her. He was making points and asking questions.
She shook her head. ‘We’ve only got Gemma’s word for what he’s like, and I’m not sure she’s a good judge of character. She pictured him as a freeloader who got others to do all the dirty jobs while he kept his hands clean and worked on his image.’
‘Doesn’t sound like a killer.’
‘I agree-but where is he?’
‘Keeping out of the way.’
‘There is another possibility,’ she said. ‘He could be dead as well, lying in the Mill Pond. I bet they’re searching it as we speak. All that joking about thinking up ways to kill him was fun at the time, but it may have taken an ugly turn now.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You think he’s hiding somewhere?’
‘It’s more likely.’
‘Especially if he killed Fiona.’ She almost wished it were true and all the uncertainty were over.
‘Why would he?’
‘His motive, you mean? Fiona was overplaying her hand, according to Gemma, wanting a place on the board at the printer’s, or just demanding money. She was on the make, by all accounts.’
‘That’s only one version,’ he pointed out.
‘Well, yes, Gemma’s, like I said. Can we believe her?’
He didn’t answer.
Jo said, ‘All this speculation isn’t helping, is it?’
He smiled.
She said, ‘I know. I’m my own worst enemy. Not good for my nerves.’
They’d passed the southernmost point of Selsey Bill and now the East Beach came into view. First there was a large step down. Jake jumped into the shingle, turned, and held out his hand to help her down. A thoughtful gesture. She gripped the hand gratefully and made the jump. Her first physical contact with him. It was short-lived. He relaxed the grip and thrust both hands in his pockets.
‘You see the lifeboat station?’
She wasn’t certain if he was being serious. You could hardly miss it. The raised steel gangway projecting over the waves to the boathouse and slipway was about the only feature of the long stretch ahead. ‘Yes, I see it.’
‘Sixty years ago a prep school stood a short way back from there.’
‘What-on the beach?’
‘Above high water… then.’
‘Erosion got it?’
He nodded. ‘They built a lifeboat house in the twenties, close to the beach. They had to keep adding to the gangway. In thirty years it was eight hundred feet out to sea.’
‘Oh, my.’ She felt as she made the response that she sounded a touch too impressed. She wanted so much to encourage this dialogue he’d started.
‘Shingle and sand over clay,’ he said. ‘Easily eroded.’
‘But a whole building like a school going. That’s scary.’
‘It didn’t get washed away.’
‘I understand. It was no longer habitable, so it was pulled down.’
‘Soon after that, in the mid-fifties, the sea wall was built. Until then, this coast was disappearing faster than anywhere in Britain.’
‘I know erosion is a hot topic with the locals, but I didn’t realise it had been happening on that scale.’
He stretched out his arm and made a sweeping movement in the direction of the sea. ‘Somewhere out there is a deer park.’
She laughed, ‘Oh, yes?’
But he was serious. ‘In the time of Henry VIII, it was hunting country. Fishermen still call that stretch of sea “the park.”’
‘Hard to imagine.’
‘And still further out is a cathedral, they say.’
‘Under the sea?’
Jake didn’t waste words on make-believe. ‘There was this Bishop of York called Wilfrid.’ He drew a long breath, priming himself for the story. He related it slowly and with pauses, and the impact was stronger than a more fluent speaker could have managed. ‘Wilfrid was banished from the north for opposing the king, so he came south. Arrived in Sussex at a bad time, after three years of drought. Crops failing, desperate times, so he taught the people to fish. And the rain came, and he could do no wrong. He preached and built a monastery and a cathedral. When I say “built,” I mean he was the overseer. The locals did the heavy work. That was in the seventh century.’
He’d got through. She felt like hugging him. ‘An entire cathedral?’
‘Wilfrid knew about building. He’d already built them at Ripon and York. It was Benedictine.’ In his hood, staring out at the water, Jake could have been taken for one of the monks.
