The Man by the Sea

by Jack Benton

  As the trail of tragedy lengthened, Slim felt reluctant to deepen his search. His one active tour during the first Gulf War in 1991 had destroyed much of his curiosity. There was a level for which the lift should be permanently disabled, and he already felt way beneath it, but he was on a different kind of payroll now, and his rent wouldn’t pay itself.

  He checked dates against ages. Ted Douglas was fifty-six, so in 1984 he would have been twenty-three.

  And there she was.

  October 25th, 1984. Joanna Bramwell, aged twenty-one, presumed drowned at Cramer Cove.

  Was Ted lamenting a lost love? According to the details Slim had requested from Emma Douglas, they had met and married in 1989. By then Joanna Bramwell had already been dead five years.

  Slim was glad there was no affair. It was far too ordinary, an anticlimax in many ways.

  The internet closed shop at a name and cause of death, so Slim coaxed life into his old Honda Jazz on a chilly morning and drove down to the library in Carnwell to trawl through microfiched newspaper archives.

  The three victims after Joanna were a teenager, a child, and an elderly lady. When Slim got to a page that should have run an article about Joanna’s death, he found the page smeared as though water-damaged, the words blending into each other, unreadable.

  The duty librarian claimed there was no other copy, despite Slim’s protestations. His request for information on the cause of the damage was met by a shrug.

  ‘You’re looking for an article on a dead girl?’ asked the librarian, a man in his thirties, who had the look of a wannabe-novelist, all roll-neck sweater, ornamental scarf, and wire-framed spectacles. ‘Maybe someone doesn’t want you to read it.’

  ‘No, maybe not,’ Slim said.

  The young librarian actually winked, as though this were some kind of game. ‘Or maybe the person you’re looking to dig up would prefer to remain undisturbed.’

  Slim forced a smile and what he considered the expected chuckle, but as he left the library, all he felt was frustration. Joanna Bramwell, it appeared, did indeed wish to remain undisturbed.

  6

  The army, for all its rigidity and rules, had taught Slim resourcefulness, and made him master of a panoply of disguises he could assume at will. Armed with a clipboard, a blank notebook, and a pen borrowed indefinitely from the local post office, he drank his way through a few hours masquerading as a local history documentary researcher, knocking on door after door, asking questions only of those old enough who might know, running his mouth to distract those too young who wouldn’t.

  Nine streets and no substantial leads later, he returned, drunk and exhausted, to a missed call on his flat’s landline from Kay Skelton, his translator friend from the army, who now worked as a forensic linguist.

  He called back.

  ‘It’s Latin,’ Kay said. ‘But even more archaic than usual. The kind of Latin that not even people who speak Latin would generally know.’

  Slim sensed that Kay was simplifying a complicated concept that he might fail to understand, but went on to explain that the words were a call to the dead, a lament to a lost love. Ted was begging for a recall, a resurrection, a return.

  Kay had scanned the transcript online and found it a direct quote, taken from a 1935 publication entitled Thoughts Encompassed upon the Dead.

  ‘Likely your mark picked the book up in a junk shop,’ Kay claimed. ‘It’s been out of print for fifty years. What kind of man wants something like that?’

  Slim had no answer, because, frankly, he didn’t know.

  7

  Another week of pretend-researching brought Slim another lead. At the mention of Joanna’s name, a smile came over the face of an old lady who introduced herself as Diane Collins, local nobody. She nodded with the kind of enthusiasm of someone who had not had a guest in a long while, then invited Slim to sit in a bright living room with windows looking out over a manicured lawn sloping down to a neat, oval pond. The only thing out of place was a bramble making its way up the wooden fence at the garden’s rear. Slim, whose knowledge of gardening extended only as far as occasionally kicking aside the weeds on his building’s front step, wondered if it might actually be a rose branch lacking any flowers.

  ‘I was Joanna’s form teacher,’ stated the old lady, hands encircling a cup of weak tea, which she had a habit of revolving in her fingers as though bidding to ward off arthritis. ‘Her death shocked everyone in the community. It was so unexpected, and she was such a lovely girl. So bright, so beautiful. I mean, there were some real terrors in that class, but Joanna, she was always so well behaved.’

  Slim listened patiently as Diane began a lengthy monologue about the merits of the long-dead girl. When he was sure she wasn’t watching, he slid a hip flask from his pocket and poured a drop of whisky into his tea.

  ‘What happened on the day she drowned?’ Slim asked, when Diane began to digress into tales of her teaching days. ‘Didn’t she know about the rips at Cramer Cove? I mean, Joanna wasn’t the first to die down there. Nor the last.’

  ‘No one knows what really happened, but her body was found at the high tide line early in the morning by someone walking a dog. By then, of course, it was too late.’

  ‘To save her? Well—’

  ‘For her wedding.’

  Slim sat up. ‘Say again?’

  ‘She disappeared the night before her big day. I was there, among the guests while we waited for her. Of course, everyone assumed she had jilted him.’

  ‘Ted?’

  The old woman frowned. ‘Who?’

  ‘Her fiancé? His name was—’

  She shook her head, waving away Slim’s suggestion with the flap of a liver-spotted hand.

  ‘I don’t recall now. I remember his face, though. Picture was in the paper. They never should have photographed a man heartbroken like that. Although, I should say, there were rumours…’

  ‘What rumours?’

  ‘That he knocked her off. Her family had money, his didn’t.’

  ‘But before the wedding?’

  ‘That’s why it never made sense. There are better ways to knock someone off though, aren’t there?’

  The way Diane looked up and gazed at him made Slim feel like she was looking into his soul. I never killed anyone, Slim wanted to tell her. I might have tried once, but I never did.

  ‘Was there an investigation?’

  Diane shrugged. ‘Of course there was, but not much of one. This was the early eighties. In those days a lot of crimes went unsolved. We didn’t have all these forensics and DNA testing and all that you see on the TV now. Questions were asked—I remember being interviewed myself—but with no evidence, what could they do? It got written off as an unfortunate accident. For some silly reason she went swimming the night before her wedding, got out of her depth, and drowned.’

  ‘What happened to her fiancé?’

  ‘He moved away, last I heard.’

  ‘And the families?’

  ‘I heard his went overseas. Hers moved south. Joanna was an only child. Her mother died young, but her father just died last year. Cancer.’ Diane sighed as though this was the height of the tragedy.

  ‘Anyone else you know of that I could talk to?’

  Diane shrugged. ‘There might be old friends around. I wouldn’t know. But be careful. It isn’t talked about.’

  ‘Why not?’

  The old lady put down her tea on a glass-topped coffee table with tropical butterflies beneath its pressed surface.

  ‘Carnwell used to be much smaller than it is today,’ she said. ‘These days it’s become something of a commuter town. You can walk to the shops now without seeing a single familiar face. It never used to be that way. Everyone knew everyone, and like every close-knit community, we had baggage, business we’d rather stayed secret.’

  ‘What could be that bad?’

  The old lady turned to look out of the window, and in profile Slim could see her lip was trembling.

  ‘There ar
e those who believe Joanna Bramwell is still with us. That … she haunts us still.’

  Slim wished he’d put a stronger measure of whisky in his tea. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said, forcing a smile he didn’t feel. ‘A ghost?’

  ‘Are you mocking me, sir? I think it’s perhaps time you—’

  Slim stood up before she did, putting up his hands. ‘I’m sorry, madam. It’s just that this all sounds unusual to me.’

  The woman stared out of the window and mumbled something under her breath.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.’

  The look in her eyes made him shiver. ‘I said you wouldn’t say that if you’d seen her.’

  As though a battery had run to its last, Diane would say nothing more of interest. Slim nodded along as she led him back to the front door, but all he could think about was the look in Diane’s eyes, and how it had made him want to look over his shoulder.

  8

  Slumped over a plate of reheated pizza, Slim mulled over what he ought to tell Emma.

  ‘I think my husband is having an affair,’ had begun Emma’s first recorded phone call to Slim’s mobile. ‘Mr. Hardy, would it be possible to call me back?’

  Affairs were easy to prove or disprove with a little stalking and a few photographs; they were bread and butter to private investigators, the kind of easy pickings that paid mortgages. He had already dealt with that job. Ted was in the clear, unless it was possible to have an affair with the ghost of a drowned girl.

  Emma had offered to pay on information, and Slim’s account was running low. But how could he explain the ritual Ted played out every Friday afternoon?

  He arranged a meeting with Kay in a local café.

  ‘It’s an ancient ritual,’ Kay told him. ‘It calls on a wandering spirit to return to the place it calls home. Your mark is asking a spirit to return to him. I matched part of the text to the manuscript I found in an online archive, but another part has been changed. It’s rough, the grammar a little uncertain. I think your mark did it himself.’

  ‘And what does it say?’

  ‘It asks that he be given a second chance.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘Quite sure. But the tone … the tone is off. It might be a translation error, but … the way he says it, it’s like something bad will happen if she doesn’t come back.’

  Kay agreed to translate the following week’s ritual too, to see if there was any variation, but following that, regretfully, he said he would need something for his time.

  Slim needed to say something to Emma. Expenses, both actual and possible, were beginning to mount up. First, though, he tried to pull another of his frayed old army strings, to see if he could dig up a little more background.

  Ben Orland had worked in the military police, before taking up a superintendent post in London. While his tone was cold enough to remind Slim of the disgrace he had brought to his division, Ben did offer to make a call on Slim’s behalf to an old friend, the head of Carnwell’s local police force.

  The police chief, however, wasn’t returning calls to internet-based private investigators.

  Slim decided to compile what information he had so far to pass to Emma, and leave it at that. After all, he’d achieved his initial commission, and if he let himself dig too much deeper, it would be on his own time and at his own expense.

  First, he swung past Cramer Cove to take a stroll, wondering if the wild headlands might inspire him.

  It was Thursday, and the beach was deserted. With the windy approach road, potholed, and in places so broken up it was little more than a dirt track over stones, it was no surprise that Cramer Cove was unpopular. Yet at the top of the beach he found stone foundations suggesting it had enjoyed far greater popularity in bygone days.

  On the plateau above the foreshore, Slim found pieces of wood lying in the weeds, traces of garish paint still visible. He closed his eyes and turned around, breathing in the scent of sea air and imagining a beach crowded with tourists, sitting on towels, eating ice-creams, playing with balls on the sand.

  When he opened his eyes, something was standing by the distant water’s edge.

  Slim squinted, but his eyes weren’t what they had once been. He patted his jacket pocket, but he had left his binoculars in the car.

  The thing was still there, a jumble of greys and blacks in a human shape. Water glistened on its clothes, in the long threads of tangled hair.

  As Slim watched, it melted backward into the sea and was gone.

  He stared after it for a long time, dumbstruck, and as the minutes ticked by, he began to doubt whether he’d really seen anything at all. Just a shadow, perhaps, as a cloud passed over the beach. Or even something not human at all, one of the grey seals that populated this section of coast.

  He tried to remember how many drinks he’d had today. There had been the usual dram in his morning coffee, a glass—or was it two?—with lunch, and perhaps one before he set out?

  It might be time to consider easing back. He played roulette every time he stepped in the car, but he had spent so long suppressing the guilt and shame of his own existence that he barely noticed it anymore.

  He was counting possible drinks on his fingers when he realised that the tide was not yet low. If something had really been there, tracks would be visible in the wet sand.

  Slim climbed over a rusty metal barrier, hurried down the rocky foreshore and out across the sand flat. Long before he reached the water’s edge he knew his search was futile. The sand was smooth, scored only by ripple lines left by the receding water.

  By the time he returned to his car, he had convinced himself that the figure watching him from the shoreline was a figment of his imagination.

  After all, what else could it be?

  9

  The following Friday, Ted repeated his ritual as usual. Slim had considered meeting Emma in the morning and then bringing her along to prove his story, but after a night filled with vicious dreams of sea demons and crashing waves, he thought better of it. Watching Ted from the same grassy ledge he had watched from over the five previous weeks, he felt strangely redundant, as though he’d run hard at a brick wall and had nowhere left to go.

  Walking back down to the beach after Ted had gone, he kicked at the faded pink remains of a plastic spade and decided it was time to do some more digging.

  He figured Saturday and Sunday were the days when most people would be at home, so he trolled the streets, knocking on doors and posing questions in his newly familiar guise as a fake documentary maker. Few people would give him the time of day, and by the time he’d stopped by three of Carnwell’s pubs to tally up what he’d learned so far, he doubted he was in the kind of state to make much headway anyway.

  He was stumbling along one last street on the northern edge of the town when a siren gave a quick blare to announce a police car pulling in behind him.

  Slim stopped and turned, leaning on a lamp post to catch his breath. A police officer rolled down a window and waved to Slim to get inside.

  In his early fifties, the man had ten years on Slim but looked fit and healthy, the kind of man who ate muesli and orange juice for breakfast and went for a lunchtime run. Slim fondly remembered the days when he had seen such a man staring back at him, but it had been a couple of years since he had dropped and broken his flat’s only mirror, and he never looked too hard at reflections in case the bad luck was catching.

  The police officer smiled. ‘What’s this about then? Three calls I get today. Doubled the weekly average. Which house are you planning to burgle?’

  Slim sighed. ‘I guess if I had to choose, I’d go with that green one on Billing Street. Number Six was it? Husband at work yet two Mercs in the drive? You could tell just from the hum of the air-con that the house is a treasure trove. I mean, who has A.C. in northwest England? I’d be in there already, but I didn’t fancy risking that the alarm just inside the door having a direct police linkup.’

  ‘It does inde
ed. Terry Easton is a local lawyer.’

  ‘Bloodsuckers.’

  ‘You got that right. So, I’m guessing, Mr—’

  ‘John Hardy. Call me Slim. Everyone does.’

  ‘Slim?’

  ‘Don’t ask. It’s a long story.’

  ‘As would be appropriate. So, I’m guessing, Mr. Hardy, that you’re not really interested in local myths and legends. What are you, Scotland Yard undercover?’

  ‘I wish. Military intelligence, discharged. Attacked a man who wasn’t actually banging my wife. Did my time, came out with a prior skill set and a drinking problem waiting to happen.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘P.I. Work mostly around Manchester. Starvation brought me this far north.’ He patted his stomach. ‘Don’t be fooled. It’s only beer and water.’

  As if unsure where Slim was crossing between truth and humour, the man gave a tentative smile. ‘Well, Mr Hardy, my name is Arthur Davis. I’m the chief inspector of our little constabulary here in Carnwell, though with the size of our force I barely deserve the title. I believe you tried to contact me about a cold case. Joanna Bramwell?’

  ‘Is this how you usually return calls?’

  Arthur laughed, a baritone that made Slim’s ears ring. ‘I was heading home. Thought I’d keep a look out for you. Now, do you want to tell what this is about? Ben Orland is an old friend, which is the only reason I even considered speaking with you. There are cold cases, and then there’s the case of Joanna Bramwell. It’s one this community has always been happy to keep buried.’