‘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.
CHAPTER 2
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
‘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
