‘How did a building of that size get destroyed?’
‘Three centuries later, the Church ordered a new one to be built in Chichester.’
‘There’s gratitude. Enough to turn the locals right off Christianity.’
‘Maybe their cathedral was already under threat from the sea.’
‘You shouldn’t be finding excuses for the Church,’ she said, tongue in cheek. ‘Selsey people built that cathedral and they deserved to keep it.’
‘They did, in a sense.’
‘How do you mean?
‘In bits. You can still find chunks of marble and Caen stone in local buildings.’
‘They looted it?’
‘Reclaimed,’ he said, looking out to sea.
Dr Austen Sentinel looked slightly older than his picture on the internet but still didn’t fit their stereotype of an academic. He was lightly tanned, casually dressed in linen jacket, T-shirt, jeans, and Reeboks. On another day in a different situation, he could have passed for a sportsman.
Little was said during the drive to the mortuary. Until formal identification had taken place there was no justification for asking questions about the marriage, so Hen confined herself to summarising the few known facts about the finding of the woman on the beach. Sentinel contributed nothing except single-word responses. His thoughts seemed to be on the ordeal to come.
When the sheet was drawn back to display the dead woman’s face there was a moment of uncertainty because he stared, frowned, and shook his head.
‘Isn’t that your wife?’ Hen said.
He released a long breath, vibrating his lips. ‘I’m at a loss to understand how this happened.’
‘But she is-’
‘Merry, yes.’ Death has a way of making everything sound tasteless.
‘You’re confirming that this is your wife, Meredith Sentinel?’
‘I just said. Can we leave now?’
Hen closed the car door on the widowed man and used her phone to call the incident room.
‘That’s a relief,’ Stella said after she was told. ‘Are you bringing him in now? Because we’ll need to break the news as soon as possible. Don’t ask me how, but the hounds have picked up the scent. They know you took someone to the mortuary, at any rate. I’ve taken two calls in the last ten minutes.’
Hen was philosophical about the leak. She doubted if it originated with the police. Obviously she’d been spotted entering the mortuary with Dr Sentinel. The public were quick to pass tips to the press. So, for that matter, were mortuary attendants. ‘No problem, Stell. You can say we’ll be issuing a statement within the hour.’
She walked round to her side of the car and got in. ‘You have my sympathy, sir.’
Dr Sentinel said, ‘I’m finding this difficult to take in. You’ll have to make allowances.’
‘Of course, but we need to talk at the police station.’
‘I can’t help you. I can’t get my head round this.’
‘You know a lot more about her than we do.’
He sighed. ‘She drowned in the sea, you said?’
‘Someone murdered her, sir, and it’s our job to find out who, and why.’
‘You’ll be making this public, I expect?’
‘Very soon. That’s part of the process.’
They strolled on, past the lifeboat station and the fishing boats. The world was a happier place now. In Jake’s company, the worries of the last twenty-four hours were not so threatening. Jo would have liked to tuck her hand inside his arm. It was a pity the moment didn’t seem right. An opportunity might come, but it wasn’t yet. She cared too much to risk giving him the wrong impression. Like some chaste woman out of a Victorian novel, she thought.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked. An unexpected question. Mostly he avoided anything personal.
‘Fine. Just fine.’
‘About walking here, I mean.’
She grasped what he was saying. They were almost level with the section of beach where she’d found the corpse and she hadn’t given it a thought. The mobile incident room was no longer parked there. Briefly she wondered how Jake knew which section it was, and then decided anyone with an interest in the matter would have no difficulty finding out. Everyone local would have seen that big police trailer and it was obvious that the bit of beach was just below there.
‘I think I’m over that,’ she said. ‘Being with you makes it all right.’
As if embarrassed, he stepped a little to the right, putting distance between them.
This process of getting to know him was a learning curve. She tried to sound more objective, more fact- based. ‘You’re from Cornwall and yet you know this place as if you were raised here.’
‘My job.’
‘Local history?’
‘Erosion and such. Or conservancy, I should say.’
‘It’s a lot more than that, what you’ve told me about this strip of coast. So unexpected. I mean on the face of things it’s just a long stretch of shingle, pretty unromantic. Then you tell me it looks out onto a hidden deer park and a cathedral.’
‘Folklore says you can hear the bells at low tide.’
She turned to look at him. He wasn’t all factual statements. ‘Now you’re laying it on.’
He shrugged and looked down towards the water’s edge, and she had a sense that he was enjoying this. ‘Good place for fossils, too.’
‘Do you collect them?’
‘I have a few at home. And just about here… ’ He stopped and measured a slice of the seafront with his hands ‘… the skeleton of a woolly mammoth was found.’
‘On the beach?’
‘At low tide, after a storm raked off the shingle and sand and laid bare the clay.’
‘A mammoth?’
‘A fisherman found it and marked the place. The bones were recovered by a team from Brighton University.’
‘When was this?’
‘Twenty years ago. A young specimen that would have stood about nine feet tall.’
‘Big enough.’
‘Elephant-size, at any rate. The biggest mammoths grew to fourteen feet.’
She gazed at the foreshore, trying to imagine the scene. ‘What an experience, excavating something like that. Those university people must have been over the moon to get such an opportunity.’
‘You never know what will show up here. Mostly relics of the last ice age. Bones from rhinoceros, straight- tusked elephant.’
‘Where is the mammoth now?’
‘London. Natural History Museum.’
‘The Selsey Mammoth. Has anything else been found, other than bones, I mean?’
‘We get the metal detectorists here looking for Roman gold.’
‘And finding any?’
‘They were finding it before detectors were invented. A hoard of three hundred coins on the West Beach. A solid gold bar. A pair of armlets.’
‘Have you found anything?’
‘Only fossils. But you have to wait for the right conditions when the clay beds are exposed.’
‘Low tide?’
‘Spring tides are best. If you like, I could take you when the chance comes.’
‘I’d enjoy that.’
