‘I have the shop to take care of,’ I told her the other night when she started to reel things off her list, or one of her lists. ‘I can’t simply lock up my shop and shoot off to Cornwall. I have a business to run and there’s only me to do it. I don’t open, I don’t make any money.’
‘You don’t make any money whether you open for business or not, so what’s there to argue about? And Cornwall?’ she said, exasperated. ‘Is that the furthest from these shores your tiny little mind can think of? Cornwall! Jesus!’
‘You meant abroad?’
‘Of course I meant abroad!’
‘OK, abroad, then, wherever. But there’s nothing wrong with Cornwall,’ I defended.
And that’s when she told me about me being the most boring person she’d ever known, and she gave me an ultimatum; come back to the land of the living or she’d go and find someone who was alive.
And that’s weird, too. Because it was after that fight – more fight on her part and punch bag on mine – that I disconsolately closed the shop door and went for a walk on the beach.
I wasn’t to find anyone that was alive. I was to find someone that was very much the opposite.
And now back to the second thing that I never expected to happen.
Lyme Regis is famous for a number of things – it’s on the Jurassic Coast, which has got World Heritage status, so lots of fossils and that kind of thing; it’s got Mary Anning, the woman who famously found lots of fossil firsts and that kind of thing; it’s where the Duke of Monmouth landed on his way to kick-starting his Monmouth Rebellion with the failed aim of usurping the monarchy of the day, and that kind of thing; and it’s got John Fowles, who set his novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in Lyme Regis, and he’s so famous he’s even got a path in Lyme Regis named after him. And that kind of thing.
I’m sure there must be many other things associated with Lyme Regis but those are the ones people tend to think about. It’s a picturesque little place, nice hilltop gardens, charming walk along the front past beach huts and cafes, a crescent moon of a beach with lovely soft white sand they imported from France, and the long, curving stone harbour wall that is the Cobb sticking its massive finger out into the sea. That’s where you’ll find lots of tourists braving the waves that hit the Cobb’s base to rise and soak the unwary as they pose at the end of this formidable eighteenth century sea barrier, hopefully in the very spot where Meryl Streep stood and looked enigmatically out to sea in the movie version of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. That little spot is one of the most famous spots in Lyme.
So whatever else Lyme Regis is famous for, it is not famous for murder.
Because, yes, the body I found had been murdered.
2
Long-dead
It was the end of October. It had been raining for a week or so now, the sky constantly overcast, like a depressive had painted it with a uniform coating of liquid lead. It suited my mood of the moment as I closed the shop door behind me and locked it.
By nature I am not a morose man. Quite the opposite in fact, or so people are always telling me. Ever the optimist. Annoyingly so. Looking in at my shop window, beyond the array of books on display to the shelves sitting in darkness, which in my mind appeared like a bleak library from a gothic novel, I felt my optimism take a bit of a beating. It was like looking into my dreams to see that someone had turned the light off on them.
I was upset with our little tiff and Trisha’s opinion of me – Trisha, by the way, is my girlfriend-cum-fiancé. I was upset that I couldn’t seem to make my business work. I was feeling a failure in both arenas, mauled by the lions of despair and powerless to fight them off.
I loved my bookshop. Well, not the shop itself. I think I was in love with the idea of chasing my dream and fighting to make it work. The pain I was feeling inside now at the thought of Trisha’s upset face as she grabbed her coat and stormed out of my room – I live above the shop, another fact that irked her for some reason – was very real, and so I assumed I must love her to feel this bad. I was failing both of them, the shop and Trisha.
I’d known Trisha nearly a year. I first met her in a local pub where I was having a drink with my friend. He was the one that introduced her to me. I’d known Mark since we were children. He’s a local boy made good out of selling antiques. My mother and father used to rent a cottage on the outskirts of Lyme nearly every other year, and I met Mark Boothman as a boy while playing on the beach. The same age as me, we shared a lot of the same interests, wrote letters to each other after we parted, then met up again every time we came on holiday. Years later I was to be best man at his wedding. He wants to be best man at mine, so I guess he was trying to push things on a bit, given that my luck with women was legendary bad and I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere under my own steam.
We were sitting having a drink when he motioned for someone to come across to our table. ‘This is Trisha,’ said Mark, grinning.
‘Mark tells me you’re in business,’ she said, sitting down with us, my face still displaying my bewilderment at what was going on.
‘Yes,’ I replied vacantly. ‘I run a bookshop.’
‘That’s so exciting!’ she said.
I remember how attractive she appeared to me, the strong smell of heady perfume wafting over me, and I felt overawed by her. It cannot be denied that Trisha has a large personality, to which even then other men in the pub were drawn to as she went on to talk about Richard Branson, that Dyson man, Alan Sugar and a few other successful businessmen I’d never heard of.
‘I’m not like them at all,’ I said, glancing at Mark, who was sitting back in his chair enjoying the proceedings. He winked at me.
‘But one day you might be,’ she said.
She was mousey-haired; it was long and sat on her bare shoulders like twin cats. Her eyes were like glossy pale-blue sapphires and they reeled me in like a fish on a hook. She spoke with a strong local accent, faintly quaint and comforting. And I admit, giving in to my base emotions, she had nice breasts as well.
‘Maybe, one day,’ I returned uncertainly. I’d not thought that far ahead.
Trisha and I dated regularly after that initially meeting, and Mark told me later he had his eye on a great venue for the wedding reception. I hit him on the shoulder. I told him he wasn’t the best advert for weddings; he’d been divorced twice, and he was only thirty years old.
It was Trisha who sort of proposed the marriage idea. I sort of agreed and that’s when she became my girlfriend-cum-fiancé, sort of. I just went with the flow, and maybe that’s my problem. I tend to follow my heart not my head, and I obviously don’t think ahead enough before leaping into something, my struggling bookshop included.
Trisha’s ambitions for me were evident from our very first meeting but I didn’t read the signs. I was now an intense disappointment to her and her plans for me, no nearer to becoming Richard Branson than Bertram Moffat was to buying one of my books. And trust me, the latter’s never going to happen. She told me she’d have given me back the engagement ring, if I’d had enough money to buy her one. It was that bad.
So I tore myself away from my disconsolate looking shop window, pulled my coat tight around my neck against the gusts of cool wind and light rain, and trudged down the hill towards the front.
There’s this thing about Lyme Regis. It makes no difference what the weather is like during the day, no matter what the time of year, there is always someone around. It never really gets quiet except on bitterly cold days and late into the evening. That was my one nod to market research – I remembered how heaving the place always was, how popular with not only the tourists but with the locals. It was, in my mind, a perfect place to set up shop. Lots of passing trade. In the end it seemed to be just that; passing trade.
But I was just feeling sorry for myself and was determined to take a walk by the sea in order to let the wind wash away a few of my sorrows, to help me think things through. My optimism was never far below the surface, and as I strolled
in the fading light along the front I felt a little of it return. I knew why I wanted things to work. I loved it here. I wanted to stay here forever, even if it meant holding onto the place with my clawed, bloody fingers.
The small shops that sell ice-cream and buckets and spades were closed for the night, the few stragglers and dog walkers left on the rain-glossy front at last hurrying home – to seek their household fires, as Thomas Hardy once said. I headed for Monmouth Beach, past the beach huts, soon to be removed for the winter; past the beach of soft French sand; past the harbour and the now deserted Cobb; past the yachts and small boats hauled onto dry land, where the wind rattling their lines made a mournful moaning, clanking sound; past the locked boatyard whose large double door were always open in summer so that you could see men going about their magical art of crafting small boats, and smell the wood shavings that carried over to you; and finally across the white pebbles and onto Monmouth Beach itself.
The beach appeared to be deserted too. Not a soul in sight. This suited me perfectly. I needed to be alone with my brooding. And both the light and the topography helped me in this respect, for together they created a brooding atmosphere. The sea was throwing itself against the pebbled shore, the waves whipped up by the wind. The water was restless and grey, but glowed with a mysterious light under the last gasp of the dying Sun. Dark clouds massed on the horizon. The steeply shelving cliffs to my right were already looking quite black. But they looked almost black during the day, too.
This coast is notorious for its shifting land. I’ve heard it’s probably the most active bit of coastline in all England in this respect, if not the entire UK, but don’t quote me on that. Up in the cliffs you can plainly see the many different layers of grey rock and mud – called Blue Lias, a mixture of limestone and shale laid down more than 200 million years ago. When the tide occasionally washes away the coating of pebbles and sand on the shore below the cliffs, it reveals carpets of ammonite fossils under your feet preserved in these once muddy marine deposits. The area is justifiably famous for them. The worn away spiral forms of these long-dead sea creatures look like ancient tribal paintings, or abstract white etchings on the face of the many grey rocks that have tumbled from the cliffs to the beach. You can walk over the massive abraded humps of colossal ammonites some three feet across embedded in the ground, and pick up tiny ones no bigger than your thumbnail shining in golden iron pyrite. I never fail to marvel at how many millions of creatures there must have been swimming in those ancient, tropical seas to have created such a tremendous graveyard.
Landslides are frequent, particularly after periods of heavy rain. The water percolates through the soft deposits and dribbles out in places along the tall black cliffs like weeping wounds. Trees that once stood proud high up on the cliff tumble down to end up smashed and lying like broken bones on the shore, scraped clean and sculpted into Art Nouveau forms by the sea. Occasionally you can hear the slithering tumble of rocks and mud, a warning not to get too close to the cliffs; warnings which a lot of people choose to ignore in their search for newly exposed fossils at the bottom of the cliffs. Some do it for money, some do it for fun and a lot of people consistently do it carelessly. There are signs everywhere warning people not to get too close to the cliffs, and often parts of the beach have to be cordoned off for a while when the rainwater, acting like a lubricant beneath the layers of Blue Lias, wash great chunks of the coast down to the beach.
I’d been a visitor to these cliffs many times. First as a child, then as a young adult, now as a failing shopkeeper. Every now and again I’d find a fossil that I’d put on sale in my window to pad out my takings, but I wasn’t very good at it and it was largely due to luck that I found anything at all. I have developed the ‘fossil squint’. I can’t walk along this stretch of coast without looking constantly for fossils. I know it affects a lot of people.
Even though my mind was elsewhere, labouring over recent events and a possibly bleak future, I was constantly searching the ground and the huge boulders of dark-grey Lias in the hope I’d find another fossil. I was about to turn back and head home, the sky growing almost too dark to see by, when I saw the first bone sticking up out of the mud, rocks and stones close to the foot of the cliffs. At first I didn’t know what it was. Because of its whiteness it appeared almost luminescent in the encroaching gloom and stood out from the uniform blackness as if beckoning me. I approached it out of curiosity and with a great deal of caution; there had been a number of recent landslides. But my fear of landslides disappeared, replaced by my growing fascination with the object as I bent down to it.
I removed it from the mud, held it up to the faint light.
It wasn’t a fossil, that’s for sure. It was a bone. Quite a large one.
My first thought was that it was the bone of some long-dead animal, a cow or something, that had died a long time ago on the cliff top and some of its scattered bones had fallen down with the last slide. This pile of rocks and mud did belong to a recent fall, after all.
I saw more bone close by, a dome of sorts sticking out of the mud. This is the cow’s skull, I thought. I now needed to know exactly what animal had perished, and if indeed this was a dead cow. Its skull would tell me. And some people like skulls, I mused. Maybe I could get a few quid for it. So I scraped away the mud.
I fell back in horror, sitting on the damp beach.
It wasn’t a cow after all.
It was a human skull.
3
The Woman from the Blue Lias
That impromptu stroll on the beach was to change everything. At the time I just didn’t know how much.
At first I think the police thought I was having them on, or that I was some kind of blabbering idiot high on something illegal. It was only when I told them that I ran a local bookshop that they began to take me seriously, which I didn’t think much about at the time, but afterwards I wondered what that said about people who run bookshops. Are they inherently trustworthy, or so dry as to possess no humour, and as a group are bookshop owners unlikely to take illegal substances? My musings were swept away by the frenetic activity that followed.
They sent an officer to my shop and together we went back to the beach armed with torches. His was bigger and better than mine. I tried not to let it bother me. I also think the man was highly sceptical. He said it was probably a cow or something. Maybe scepticism’s a natural part of a police officer’s personality and I really shouldn’t have read anything personal into it, but by the time we approached the spot where I saw the bones, I began to doubt they even existed. And to make matters worse I couldn’t find the damn pile of rocks where they lay, which added greatly to my escalating consternation. I scrambled about the place like a novice mountain goat, tripping up in the dark and getting myself all heated up. With a huge sigh of relief I at last caught a piece of bone in my torchlight and called out (almost a relieved shriek, to be honest) that I’d found the place.
It took him no time at all for him to confirm that which I’d told him all along. It was a human skeleton.
Things went crazy after that.
I was sent home and told to expect someone to take a statement from me at some time soon. The beach was immediately cordoned off, and by morning a white tent had been erected near the foot of the Blue Lias cliffs, covering the spot where the bones lay. Police tape had been strung about here and there, with a number of officers standing guard and keeping curious early morning dog walkers at bay. I came down early and joined the small group of rubbernecks standing by the cordon tape, feeling a certain smugness that I had discovered the body and thereby had a right to be there, whereas they were just plain nosey.
People in white one-piece overalls were digging away in the cliffs, no doubt trying to find the rest of the body.
‘Do you reckon it’s another dinosaur?’ said a woman desperately holding onto her dog lest it dash under the tape and get arrested. ‘They’re always finding dinosaurs and the like. It means we can’t use that bit of the beach and
that’s Freckles’ favourite bit, too.’
‘It’s a body,’ I said with authority. ‘They’ve found a body.’
She looked at me like I was a piece of litter and narrowed her eyes, the wind causing strands of her dry hair to shift like sea worms dancing in strong currents. She grunted something that sounded like ‘absurd’ and said, ‘It’s only another dinosaur. Come on Freckles; let’s do our business at the other end till they’ve dug the old thing out.’
As I was turning to leave I saw Steely Jacobs.
He was standing some distance away, wearing his trademark long army coat that should have been binned a long time ago. His craggy face was shaded by one of those cowboy-style leather hats, the brim of which flapped in the breeze. His eyes were like narrow gashes in a russet-coloured apple.
Steely Jacobs was what they call a ‘local character’; he lived the life of a semi-recluse in a small bungalow somewhere out in the sticks. He was retired now but had lived here all his life, except, I guess, for the time he used to play steel guitar in a band, hence his nickname. People have told me he was very talented, in that shake-of-the-head way they talk when they mean it was a talent wasted. Drugs, they say, had been his downfall. I don’t know the full story, but whenever I saw him – which wasn’t often, the occasional glimpse in town, that kind of thing – he looked like a sponge full of hidden sorrow and regret. Or maybe that’s just me wanting to read things into him.
He saw me looking at him. With his hands deep in his coat pockets he turned his back on me and trudged back up the beach. Who knows, perhaps he felt a sort of kinship with the skeletal remains. Forgotten, buried, unknown. His non-emotion was the nearest thing to real emotion I saw on any of the faces lined up near the cordon tape.
Later that day I gave a statement to the police and I thought my part in the affair was over. I was to be so wrong. It was only just beginning.
The D.M. Mitchell Supernatural Double bill Page 22
