As she had many times before, Carol marvelled at what Stacey could dig up in what must have been a short break from the Bradesden convent inquiries. Now she’d have to play a waiting game. She’d parked her car at the far end of the village and set off along the path, which was separated from the seafront cottages by a narrow strip of scrubby marram grass and a single-lane tarmacked road. Cove Cottage was marked clearly on the Land Registry plan and Carol was trying to identify it as she walked. Second cottage past the pub, she thought, slowing slightly. She could see a name etched in a curly script on a piece of slate but it was too small to read at this distance.
As yet there had been no sign of anything with a pulse in Balmouth. So she took a chance and strolled across the grass towards the cottage. As she drew near, she felt a moment’s satisfaction as she read COVE COTTAGE. There was a narrow passage that ran down the side of the cottage and she turned down as if it had been her destination all along.
The cottage looked well-maintained. The render was painted sky blue, with the windowsills and the front door a contrasting darker shade. Two windows on either side of the front door, three windows on the first floor. She took all this in as she passed, as well as the fact that the curtains were drawn in the downstairs rooms and one upstairs window. No lights were showing yet, but it was early. And drawn curtains weren’t incontrovertible evidence that there was anyone home.
Cove Cottage was clearly a single room deep, with a boxy extension on the back that looked like a kitchen with a bathroom above. A low wall surrounded a paved back yard, just big enough for an uncomfortable-looking wrought-iron table and two chairs, and beyond them, a trio of wheelie bins. No plants; nothing that demanded attention. Beyond it, a single-storey building shielded it from whatever lay on the other side.
Carol emerged from the alleyway on to another single-lane roadway, lined with a similar group of cottages. A couple of them had cars parked in what had clearly been part of their original front gardens, but the road was too narrow to allow roadside parking. Nowhere to sit unobtrusively in a car. No café with a convenient window table for a stake-out. No handy woodland to lurk in. Harrison Gardner – if this was indeed his bolthole – had chosen well.
Carol ambled along the road, still the only visible living thing. She wished she had Flash at her side, for companionship as much as camouflage. But she’d had no idea what the day might bring, so she’d left her with her neighbour. She had brought a pair of binoculars, thinking she might be able to pose as a birdwatcher. A website she’d checked had informed her that this part of the coast was famous for its seabirds. ‘Particularly migratory birds,’ it had said. Not that she would have recognised one of those if it had landed on the bonnet of her car. The only drawback was that any self-respecting twitcher would be looking out to sea, not focusing on one of the cottages in the middle of the village.
She came to the end of the cottages and turned back towards the waterfront. She gazed up at the cliff and wondered if she could find a vantage point there that would allow her to look down at the cottage. Only one way to find out.
Quarter of an hour later, Carol was perched on a flat rock close to the edge of the cliff, her binoculars trained on the front of Cove Cottage, grateful for the level of fitness she’d gained from walking the moors a couple of times a day with Flash. It turned out that the dog had bestowed more than companionship on her. She’d scrambled easily up the precipitous track that twisted up from the dunes, almost losing her footing only once when a shard of loose sandstone had slipped from under her boot.
She’d come equipped for a long wait. She took a folding sit-mat from her day pack and opened it on the rock. Carol was trying to avoid thinking about Vanessa. The only way she could get through this was to consider it in the most abstract sense as the pursuit of justice. Harrison Gardner was a predator and a crook. Once she’d extracted Vanessa’s cash, she could hand him over to the police and find some satisfaction in seeing him miss out on his well-padded retirement.
All the same, Carol hated that she was here at Vanessa’s behest. She loathed the woman for the way she’d treated Tony over the years, from his brutal and neglected childhood onwards to her attempt to cheat him out of his inheritance.
