As she walked along the path, she could see into one where a couple were having pre-dinner drinks, the man standing behind the counter of the open plan kitchen, stirring a pot whilst the woman flicked through a magazine in the seating area. Neither were aware of her standing on the path, looking in and Callie thought that she would hate being on public show like they were. She understood the need for net curtains, even if she didn’t like their look. She would be tempted to put in tinted glass, making it impossible to see in, if she owned one of these houses. Not that she would ever be able to afford one, she thought, even if she wanted to. Many were weekend getaways for city folk and although some had lamps on, Callie suspected most were empty midweek and the lights were to deter burglars rather than an indication that the houses were occupied.
The one picture Callie had found of the MP at his home, showed him in a large, minimalist, open plan “living space” as the gushing interviewer had described it. There was no way the photo had been taken in a small cottage, so she hurried past them to the larger houses beyond. Her problem was, there were several, large, white, modern, box-like, houses along the beachfront. She moved on to inspect the next brightly lit, minimalist white blockhouse, in which every perfectly neat and tidy room appeared empty of emotion as well as people. It was one of these larger and flashier houses that Callie felt sure belonged to the MP and his wife-slash-secretary. One of the facts Callie had managed to find out was that Mrs Savage had indeed been his secretary before marrying him and continuing her work for the MP but with a slightly elevated status.
Slowly, she walked the length of the houses but saw nothing to tell her which house was owned by the MP. Callie had noted several boats, pulled up on the shore, but none looked as if they had been used recently. She also realised that the noise involved in moving a boat from the shingle would mean that it would be likely to attract attention. She stopped at the last house, where a spaniel barked at her through the closed window, suggesting that this one was occupied, even if the home owners were sensibly hidden somewhere in a room not on show to the world, or at least that they would be back at some point to feed the dog.
Callie turned back; the path went on, along the top of the bank, but there were no more houses for her to look into.
She walked back to the slipway, still looking into any of the houses that she could see into in the hope that she would recognise one from the picture of the MP’s home. But there was nothing and no one, just the couple she had seen before, now seated at the dining table, eating whatever the man had cooked.
At the slipway, she walked down its short length to the end where it became nothing more than shingle. The tide was out and it would be a long, tiring and noisy job to try and launch a boat here at any time other than high tide. Callie couldn’t believe that Ted Savage could have man-handled a boat, and bodies, to the sea, not once, but twice without attracting attention. Not from here, anyway.
Feeling a little deflated that her theory on how the murderer got rid of the bodies really wasn’t working out, Callie went back down to the road and walked along the unpaved and poorly lit street, wanting to see the entrances to the buildings she had just walked past on the other side. Perhaps she would at least be able to identify the MP’s home from the road if she saw the car. First, she walked past the coastguard cottages, a terrace of well-kept homes with pretty gardens. Keeping as close to their front walls as possible, listening for traffic and looking for headlights that might mean she needed to get out of the way, she made her way forward. Beyond the cottages were the larger, more modern buildings.
Trying not to look suspicious, because the last thing she wanted was for some nosy-parker neighbour calling the police, Callie looked into the front driveways of all of the houses. Some had garages, double garages even, despite the lack of space between the road and the main entrances, and they could have had cars inside them, but Callie quickly realised that the houses that really were occupied, rather than empty and waiting for their owners to visit, usually had the cars parked outside, not in the garages. Probably because manoeuvring the vehicles in and out was difficult in the confined space.
As she moved onto the next house, Callie saw a small red car that she was sure was the one she had seen at the office and at the meeting where she had met Ted Savage. It was, indeed, parked outside a white minimalist cube of a house. There wasn’t another car outside, which perhaps meant that Teresa Savage was home alone and that her husband was in their London flat. Callie stood and thought about
