In a small place like Lyme Regis news gets around fast, and especially news as momentous and as juicy as a dead body found on the beach. The local reporters were first on the scene, followed swiftly on their heels by the nationals. And of course they all wanted to speak to the man who had discovered the skeleton. The BBC and ITV camera crews, and a couple of others I’d never even heard of, swarmed all over the place, parking their big vans in places where they shouldn’t and upsetting shoppers and the like. They snared anyone they could find to interview, but most of all they snared me.
My phone was hot for days, and all manner of people in smart suits and ties came into my tiny bookshop looking for me. For a couple of days I was plastered all over the television news – I think I even cropped up in China on one of their bulletins. I didn’t enjoy being in the limelight. I’m not very good in front of a camera, and I fall to pieces when confronted by anyone looking remotely official. My ability to speak coherently went out the window and I only caught sight of one short interview with me, and that was enough. I cringed the whole way through at my nervous twitch and vowed I’d do something with my hair.
I was asked stupid questions, like had I found anything like this before? As if I made a habit of doing so. Did I think the bone belonged to an ammonite? Obviously from someone who hadn’t the foggiest idea what an ammonite was. And best of all, did I know who the dead person was? Presumably, as it’s such a small town, everyone supposedly knows everyone, even by looking at their bones.
I declined as many interviews as I could, and would have had nothing to do with any of them if it hadn’t been for Trisha. How she’d heard about my involvement in the macabre discovery so fast I’ve no idea, but she came to the bookshop within an hour of me getting back from my early morning reconnaissance down on the beach and even before the police had been to take my statement.
‘You found a body!’ she exclaimed, her eyes bright and alive. ‘A real body!’
‘Yes, it was very real,’ I said. I was still hurting from the argument and her telling me we were no longer engaged, even if we didn’t have an engagement ring. But apparently all that had been forgotten now.
‘That’s so cool!’
I hated it when she said words like ‘cool’. Don’t ask me why. I must be pretentious, another of my many faults she’d held up before me the previous night.
‘What do you want, Trisha?’ I said.
‘You’re going to be famous, Toby.’
No I’m not,’ I said. The thought horrified me.
‘Everyone will want to talk to you. You wait and see. It’s not everyone who finds a body, you know.’
‘I doubt it will raise much interest,’ I said, thinking about the woman with her dog at the cordon.
But Trisha was right, of course. And she revelled in it. She put on her best dresses and tried to get in as many of the photographs as possible, at times making out that she was supporting me after what had been so obviously a traumatic time for me. Reporters, ever after a new angle on a story, went down the route that I’d been traumatised by the ordeal and was suffering some kind of mental anguish. Which wasn’t true. The bones, after my balking at their initial unearthing, and that more from surprise than anything else, didn’t cause me the least distress afterwards. It was the fuss raised by everyone else that caused the most misery. I just wanted to get back to my everyday life and sink my head below the parapets away from the unwanted glare of publicity. But for a while afterwards it refused to die down.
After the reporters came the locals. My shop had never been busier, but no one was buying my books. Mostly they came in to pump me for information so they could try and take away a tasty morsel of gossip. At times my little shop couldn’t contain them all. Then the tourists descended, who found out about the body from the national news. People would stand outside my shop and point at it, take photographs of it, or come inside and ask to take my photo. If Trisha happened to be there she’d jump at the opportunity, and tellingly she happened to be there nearly every day, whereas before this hoo-ha she’d taken not the slightest interest in my bookshop, or my mental state for that matter. Now she was acting like Florence Nightingale and Mary Anning all at once. It all became so dispiriting.
I thought about closing the shop down for a week or two, but I simply couldn’t afford to. I felt like I’d become a rare and exotic sea creature and my shop the aquarium to house it. Exposed with nowhere to hide. Pointed at, talked about, photographed, written about. The longer this continued, the more I wished I’d never taken that walk and discovered the skeleton. I ought to have left it to someone else. Maybe that’s why you never hear of anyone finding a dead body even though there are hundreds of thousands of people who’ve done just that; maybe it’s just so damn invasive, gives you too much grief and swamps your entire personal life. I know it did with mine.
My friend Mark Boothman came round to see me one afternoon. He’d been at an auction in Crewkerne in Somerset and was grinning like he was the cat that got the cream, flushed with the great deals he’d so obviously secured. There was a man in the shop haranguing me for details of the skeleton. He was a wiry, hawk-faced middle-aged man who looked like he collected indecent photos (sorry if that’s not the case, but you get the picture). He wasn’t satisfied with my answer that he should buy a newspaper as everything I knew was in there. He was like a morbid terrier and wouldn’t let go.
‘Time to leave,’ said Mark, rather more brusquely than I’d have liked.
‘I don’t want to leave,’ said the man. ‘I’ll leave when I want to leave.’
‘Buy a goddamn book or get the hell out of here,’ he said.
Mark was built like a rugby player. And his face, when he chose to, could become a terrifying vision of inner-city mugger-cum-murderer, so the man exited sharply. After Mark had turned the ‘open’ sign on the door to read ‘closed’ and he’d turned the key in the lock, he faced me and smiled broadly. The mugger had disappeared into whatever dark alley he’d been hiding.
‘Thanks,’ I said, feeling a little embarrassed that I couldn’t have done that for myself. I just hate being rude to people. Even rude people.
‘You could do with a break,’ he said.
‘I need to make money.’
‘That’s true, but as that doesn’t seem to be happening how about you and me going out for a beer?’
‘I’d love to, but…’
‘Fine. All agreed then. Beer it is.’
Mark has his nose in many things. If anyone knows anything first then it’s usually Mark. He has a shadowy, spidery network of friends and business contacts that has helped him make a small fortune out of selling antiques. Intelligent, quick-witted, a regular Jack-the-lad when he wants to be and a charming toff the next, I’m envious of Mark. I always have been. The world was always a playground to him, a world that held no fear and filled only with opportunities. I swear he didn’t have an ounce of fear in him. His confidence was as hard as the rocks on the beach. And yet he was a nice bloke with it. I guess he thought of me as someone who needed his protection, even at the very beginning of our long relationship. Someone to take under his wing. In his company I always felt like a lame duck being nursed. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not that much of a wimp that I can’t take care of myself, but to even think those kinds of things highlights what must be a fragile confidence. One that is easily shattered. Trisha shattered it first, now the dead body-thing was having a go. Mark, bless him, recognised that and so took his lame duck down to the pub to administer a bit of alcoholic medicine.
Like I said, he knows a lot of people. Before he even sipped his beer he moved closer to me over the table and said, ‘It’s murder.’
I didn’t quite know what he meant. My business? Being hounded by the press? ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Everything’s murder these days.’
‘The body. The police are investigating a murder.’
‘No!’ I said. ‘How’d you find that out?’
‘I’ve got this friend,’ h
e said, and left it at that. ‘The skull had suffered three blows to the head, the last one killing her.’
‘It’s a woman?’
‘They found the pelvis. It’s definitely a woman. And what’s more someone was very intent on making sure she wouldn’t be identified. Whoever did it deliberately knocked out most of her teeth so that her dental records couldn’t be traced.’
‘Poor woman,’ I said, my head bowing a little. ‘Do they know who she is yet?’
Mark shook his head. ‘Nah, not yet. They don’t know how long she’s been there either. Could have been a few years, could have been a decade and maybe longer.’
‘How much of that is speculation on your contact’s part?’ I asked. ‘Or yours.’ He’d been known to spin a yarn or two in his time.
Mark smiled as lifted his glass to his lips. ‘That would be telling,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. Soon all this fuss will pass away and you’ll forget you ever found a dead body on the beach.’
‘Trisha won’t let me forget it,’ I said sullenly.
‘Ah, she does like her place in the spotlight. Things not too good between Trisha and you? I somehow feel responsible.’
‘I hold you fully responsible,’ I said.
‘You said you were on the lookout for a woman of spirit. Trisha’s got spirit.’
‘Spirit? I’ll say. She reminds me of the first time I drank gin and tonics as a youngster. Had a great time while I was drinking them – admittedly too many of them – but it left me with a bad head and feeling like I never wanted to drink a gin and tonic ever again. Trisha’s just like that. That’s not the kind of spirit I was looking for.’
‘She’d be mortified to hear you say that,’ Mark said.
‘I doubt it. She’d blame me. It would be my fault in the end, like it always is.’
‘So why stay with her?’
I shrugged. ‘Everyone needs someone.’ Then I lowered my head. ‘Poor woman,’ I said, staring blankly into my untouched glass of beer.
‘Who, Trisha?’
‘No, the woman from the Blue Lias. Now that I know it’s a woman and that she’d been murdered it makes it feel like she was a real person, not just a collection of bones on a beach.’
He raised his shoulders like it didn’t matter. ‘It’s not your problem. No sense in getting all worked up over someone you never knew, someone you never met and never will.’
I smile now when I think back to the irony of that conversation.
I mean, how wrong could he be?
4
Reflections
The first time I saw her was in the middle of November.
I felt a cold current of air hit me as I sat at my desk that I had near the shop window, and for a moment I thought someone had left the door open. It was bitter outside and the ancient heating system inside Page Turners was struggling. I had taken to wearing two jumpers and two pairs of socks. I had a portable fan heater working overtime and it had started to feel a little warmer, but the sudden downward change in temperature caused me to groan in frustration.
I looked up from my accounts book, in truth glad of the distraction. It made sombre reading. Customer numbers had been thin. The tourists had gone home long ago, apart from a few hardy veterans, and even the locals hurried to finish their business in the high street and get home to houses considerably warmer than mine.
She was standing by the shelves containing second-hand travel books. And I was inexplicably hooked.
She was tall, her hair blonde and streaked through with darker strands, as if lines of molasses had been dribbled down a wall of golden syrup. It was cut short, revealing the narrow sweep of her neck. She was one of those hippie- types, I decided, dressed in what I assumed to be vintage clothes from the 1970s, or their reproductions. I noticed a lot of women these days were wearing clothes that might have come from the 40s through to the 80s. Anything goes, I thought. She wore a long brown jacket, tailored so that it hugged her waist. Her legs were covered by a long flowered skirt that almost reached the floor, its base autumn colour interspersed with flashes of white and reminding me off those old Laura Ashley designs. It didn’t look odd. In fact it was now decidedly contemporary and up-to-the-minute.
I watched her. Stared at her back, at the way her head bent slightly as she read the books’ spines. I couldn’t take my eyes off her and for a moment I even forgot the cold. I realised that if anyone saw me looking at her this way they’d think me a kind of pervert, so I bent my head to my accounts. But I couldn’t resist looking up again as she glided down the line of books. There was a faint smell of perfume in the air. It came at me in little puffs, as if blown across to me by an invisible set of bellows.
‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’ I asked.
I was taken aback by the sound of my own voice. I hadn’t meant to say anything, but it slipped out of its own accord like an errant child that did as it wanted the more it was chastised, just to get at you.
She faced me.
And my insides melted.
‘I was wondering if you had a book about decent local hotels to stay in.’
Her skin was luminescent, flawless, with wide eyes of blue fringed by heavy black lashes. Her lips were full and unadorned with lipstick, or so cleverly applied that it wasn’t immediately noticeable. That pale, Laura Ashley English-rose-look again. Back to how nature intended. She smiled in such a familiar way it was as if she’d known me ages, and it had the effect of putting me at my ease. Ordinarily, confronted by an attractive young woman, I’d be reduced to a pile of rubble. But she was different. I knew that instantly. Don’t ask me why. She made me feel completely at ease, almost as if I’d known her for years.
‘Sure,’ I said, getting up from behind my desk and going over to the shelves. The smell of her perfume grew stronger, but it was the smell of the outdoors, of hawthorn blossom in May, or clouds of cow parsley, I thought, fascinated at the way she’d opened up an imaginative, almost romantic, side to me I’d always thought crass and the stuff of novels. ‘We have some more over on this side,’ I said. I went to the other side of the shelf, scanning the rows of books and pulling a couple down that I thought might please her. ‘Is it just Dorset you’re interested in? What about Somerset? It’s not far away over the border, so to speak, and it’s a lovely county with a topography ranging from the flatness of the Somerset Levels to the Blackdown Hills, with everything in-between.’
There was no reply.
I put my head around the side of the bookshelf, thinking she hadn’t heard me.
But she wasn’t there.
I admit I must have stood there looking quite stupid. I even searched among the other shelves, assuming she must have somehow drifted past me without me seeing or hearing her. But the shop was empty. I looked at the door. I never heard it open or close.
I shrugged and put the books back on the shelf. I must have been so absorbed in thinking about her that I didn’t hear her leave, I surmised, feeling inexplicably deflated. Whatever, I decided I really must get a bell or something over the door for when people come in and out of the shop.
I stood at the window for a long time afterwards looking out onto the empty street, hoping that I’d catch sight of her again. But she never reappeared.
Trisha came to the shop in the late afternoon. She told me she thought our engagement ought to be back on again and that she’d kindly give me a second chance. She’d come to the conclusion that she could probably live with my eccentricities, and that she’s seen a perfectly gorgeous engagement ring in a jewellers in Yeovil that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg, even for me. She then shoved a magazine in front of my nose, on the cover of which was a beautiful bride and the caption ‘No need to skimp on the bells and whistles on your special day; we show you how you can do it for less than ten thousand pounds!’
Honestly, she blew hot and cold like – well, like a hot and cold blowing thing.
‘We don’t have to get married,’ I ventured. I needed space to think things thr
ough. I’d just got used to the idea that the engagement was off, and now it was on again. I wasn’t sure I wanted it back on.
‘Not get married? That wouldn’t do. I’m a good Catholic girl, I am.’
‘You’re Catholic? You never said.’ I never thought to ask, either.
‘Does that matter?’
‘I’m CoE,’ I said.
‘Not everyone’s perfect,’ she returned, flipping through the magazine. ‘My mother would die if we…’ She held up the magazine. ‘Isn’t that just gorgeous?’
‘I still have no money.’ Odd, I thought; I was fishing for excuses. And at the forefront of my mind was the woman who came into the shop earlier. Suddenly I had the feeling I was cheating on Trisha simply by thinking about her, and I felt my cheeks colour.
‘You can sell the shop.’
‘I don’t own it,’ I said, aghast at the thought.
‘You can sell your stock.’
‘And what am I to do for a job?’
‘You can work at my father’s cigarette factory. I’ve asked him already.’
‘Trisha, I don’t want to work for your father, and certainly not in a cigarette factory.’
She slammed the magazine down on my desk. ‘Suddenly my father’s not good enough for you, eh?’
‘I didn’t say that…’
‘He owns a Mercedes, you know. A big silver one with a sat nav and everything. I don’t see you owning a big silver Mercedes, Toby. Now you’ve been on the telly you think you’re better than us, is that it?’
‘Now that’s ridiculous.’
She stormed out of the shop, slamming the door behind her, and I felt awful for upsetting her when I didn’t mean to. She came back into the shop a minute or so later, strolled haughtily up to my desk and took her magazine. She didn’t say a word and left me alone again.
I slumped down at my desk. It was getting dark outside. I hated the winter and wasn’t looking forward to it. I wasn’t looking forward to anything.
The D.M. Mitchell Supernatural Double bill Page 23
