The House Sitter

“Is that definite?” asked Shanahan. “Couldn’t it have been made by some kind of necklace?”

“Unlikely. If you look here,” said Dr Keithly, pointing to the nape of the neck. “See the crossover? And there’s some scratching on this side where she tried to tug the ligature away from her throat.”

“Christ. Didn’t you notice this when you were carrying her?”Shanahan said accusingly to the lifeguard.

“Don’t turn on me, sport. I wasn’t looking at her neck. There was nothing tied around it.”

Shanahan sounded increasingly panicky. He could foresee awkward questions from CID. “How could this have happened on a beach in front of hundreds of people? Wouldn’t she have screamed?”

“Not if it was quick and unexpected,” the doctor said. “She might have made some choking sounds, but I doubt if she’d have been heard. What surprises me is that no one saw the killer actually doing it.”

“She was behind a windbreak.”

“Even so.”

“She was probably stretched out, sunbathing. It would have been done close to the ground, by someone kneeling beside her.”

Vigne said, “Hadn’t we better report this? It’s out of our hands if it’s murder.”

“Hey, that’s right,” Shanahan said, much relieved. “You’re not so thick as you look.”

3

Two hours were left before sunset. The local CID had arrived in force and sealed off the stretch of beach where the body was found, but they need not have bothered. Most visitors had left at high tide when only a small strip of pebbles remained and the breeze had turned cooler. Away from the beach, several barbecues were under way on the turf of the car park, sending subversive aromas towards the police vans where the search squads and SOCOs waited for the tide to turn.

Henrietta Mallin, the Senior Investigating Officer, was already calling this case a bummer. A beach washed clean by the tide couldn’t be less promising as a crime scene. There was no prospect of collecting DNA evidence. The body itself had been well drenched by the waves before it was lifted from the water.

The SIO was known to everyone as Hen, and superficially the name suited her. She was small, chirpy, alert, with widely set brown eyes that checked everything. But it was unwise to stretch the comparison. This Hen didn’t fuss, or subscribe to a pecking order. Though shorter than anyone in Bognor Regis CID, she gave ground to nobody. She’d learned how to survive in a male-dominated job. Fifteen years back, when she’d joined the police in Dagenham, she’d been given more than her share of the jobs everyone dreaded, just to see how this pipsqueak female rookie would cope. A couple of times when attending on corpses undiscovered for weeks she’d thrown up. She’d wept and had recurrent nightmares over a child abuse case. But she’d always reported for the next shift. Strength of mind got her through- helped by finding that many of the male recruits were going through the same traumas. She’d persevered, survived a bad beating-up at a drugs bust, and gained respect and steady promotion without aping male attitudes. There was only one male habit she’d acquired. She smoked thin, wicked-smelling cigars, handling them between thumb and forefinger and flicking off the ash with her smallest finger. She used a perfume by Ralph Lauren called Romance. It said much for Romance that it could triumph over cigar fumes.

“You boys got here when?” she said to the uniformed officers who had answered the shout,

“Four forty-two,” PC Shanahan said.

“So how was the water?”

“The water, ma’am?”

She brought her hands together under her chin and mimed the breaststroke. “Didn’t you go in?”

Shanahan frowned. He wasn’t equal to this, and neither was his companion, Vigne. Hen didn’t need to pull rank. She was streets ahead on personality alone.

She explained, “You reported suspicious injuries at five twenty. Forty minutes, give or take. What were you doing, my lovely?”

Shanahan went over the sequence of events: the call to the doctor, the search of the beach and the doctor’s arrival and discovery of the ligature marks. He didn’t mention the cans of Sprite and the spot of sunbathing while they waited for the doctor.

“Am I missing something here?” Hen said. “You didn’t notice she was strangled until the doctor pointed it out?”

“The body was inside the hut, ma’am.”

“Didn’t you go in?”

“It was dark in there.”

“Is that a problem for you, constable?”

He reddened. “I mean I wouldn’t have been able to see much.”

“There was a torch.”

“The lifeguard didn’t produce it until the doctor arrived.”

“Did you ask him for one?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Do you carry one in your car?”

An embarrassed nod.

“Heavy duty rubber job?” she said, nodding her head. “They come in useful for subduing prisoners, don’t they? But there is a secondary use. Did you look at the body at all?”

“We checked she was dead, ma’am.”

“Without actually noticing why?”

Shanahan lowered his eyes and said nothing. Vigne, by contrast, looked upwards as if he was watching for the first star to appear.

Hen Mallin turned her back on them and spoke instead to one of her CID team. “How many cars are left, Charlie?”

“In the car park, guv?”

With her cigar she gestured towards Shanahan. “I thought he was half-baked.”

“About twenty.”

“When does it close?”

“Eight thirty.”

She checked her watch. “Get your boys busy, then. Find out who the cars belong to, and get a PNC check on every one that isn’t spoken for. The victim’s motor is our best hope. I’m tempted to say our only hope. Have you spoken to the guy on the gate?”

“He didn’t come on duty until two. He’s got no memory of the victim, guv. They just lean out of the kiosk and take the money. Thousands of drivers pass through.”

“Was anyone else directing the cars?”

“No. There are acres of land, as you see. People park where they want.”

She went through the motions of organising a line of searchers to scour the taped-off section of beach, now that the tide was on the ebb. Around high-water line they began picking up an extraordinary collection of discarded material: bottletops and ring-pulls, cans, lollysticks, carrier bags, plastic cups, an odd shoe, hairgrips, scrunches and empty cigarette lighters. Everything was bagged up and labelled. She watched with no expectation. There was no telling if a single item had belonged to the victim.

“Did anyone check the swimsuit?”

“What for, guv?”

“Labels. Is it a designer job, or did she get it down the market? Might tell us something about this unfortunate woman. We know sweet Fanny Adams up to now.”

“The towel she was lying on is top quality, pure Egyptian cotton, really fluffy when it’s dry,” the one other woman on the team, DS Stella Gregson, said.

“There speaks a pampered lady.”

“I wish,” Stella said. She was twenty-six and lived alone in a bed-sit in a high-rise block in Bognor.

“Never mind, Stell. Some day your prince will come. Meanwhile come up to the hut and give me your take on