The Case of the Screaming Beauty (An Inspector David Graham Cozy Mystery Book 1)

by Alison Golden

  “I’ll take that statement,” Janice told him rather curtly. “I can do it once I’ve dropped off DI Graham at the White House.”

  There would be, Roach saw at once, absolutely no discussion on this point. Fifteen minutes alone in a car with their new arrival was apparently well worth the tedious grunt work of noting down this rather routine complaint.

  “Very good, Sarge,” Roach replied. “You’ll enjoy the White House, Detective Inspector. Nice place.” He thought on for a second. “Roomy.”

  “I’m sure I will,” David Graham told him, refusing a polite offer of help with his suitcases. He slid them into the trunk of Harding’s blue-and-white police sedan and still fawning over him like an adolescent, the Sergeant drove him along the coastal road toward Gorey itself.

  “You’ve arrived in just the best part of the year,” Harding enthused. “The tourists can be a nightmare, but there never seems to be more than we can cope with,” she said. “It will make a big change from London.”

  Graham was soaking up the scenery; the small, neat houses by the road, the farms with walking, fluffy clouds that must have been sheep, the pleasant mix of sultry summer warmth and upbeat, fun-loving energy that Jersey had become famous for. As they approached the cliffs on which the seaside resort of Gorey perched, the green fields gave way to sparkling blue ocean and the marina beyond, festooned with pleasure craft of all sizes.

  “Beautiful,” Graham found himself saying. “Not a lot like London, you’re right there, Sergeant Harding.”

  Tourists were gathered in little knots, eating ice cream, deciding where to have a late lunch, sometimes popping into one of the local shops for supplies.

  “The White House is up on the hill there,” Harding pointed. It was an imposing, solid building, aptly named. Its paintwork shone brilliantly in the early afternoon sunshine. It reminded Graham of a rural French chateau, uprooted and then plonked on this towering cliff, providing perhaps the most spectacular and restful views on the island.

  “A little B&B would have done the trick, you know,” Graham admitted.

  “Oh, nonsense,” Harding said, waving him away. “We wanted you to feel welcome here. I’d be happy to help find you somewhere more permanent, but I’m sure you’ll be comfortable. The tea room has the best cakes on Jersey and…”

  “There’s a tea room?” Graham interrupted, his curiosity instantly piqued.

  “Yes, indeed. They have all those “frou-frou” types of teas, if you like that kind of thing.” Harding chuckled. “Why?”

  “Oh, nothing,” he replied, biting down his enthusiasm. “Just good to know.”

  The lobby boded well, high-ceilinged and tastefully decorated with flowered wallpaper, statues and a venerable grandfather clock which thundered out the two o’clock chime just as he was checking in.

  “Ah yes, Detective Inspector Graham,” the clerk said, finding him quickly on the reception desk’s tablet. “I’ve put you in one of our nicest rooms, overlooking the marina.”

  “Splendid,” Graham said. “Is the hotel busy at the moment?”

  His black hair swept back by copious gel, the clerk reminded Graham of an extra from a pulp novel set during the Roaring Twenties. All that was missing was the pencil moustache and a quick blast of the Charleston.

  “Almost full, I’m glad to say. Mostly long-termers,” he said, and then explained further when he saw Graham’s quizzical expression. “Retirees, sir, people who prefer to live a more active lifestyle rather than checking into one of the retirement homes here on the island. There’s plenty to do,” he said, handing Graham a brochure from behind the desk. “Sailing, swimming, windsurfing, fishing.… Enough to keep anyone out of trouble,” he winked.

  “Trouble?” Graham inquired.

  “Just a joke, sir,” he smiled. “I noticed that you’re part of the Constabulary. Here's hoping you’ll have a quiet stay in Jersey. We’re a pretty unspectacular bunch, I’m glad to say.”

  “Splendid,” Graham replied again, rather automatically, as he scanned the brochure. “I’ll unpack and then maybe try a pot of one of your famous teas.”

  “Best on the island, sir,” he said proudly, handing Graham his key. “I do hope you enjoy your stay.” He tapped the tablet a few times and scuttled over to welcome a group of tired-looking Germans who were sweating profusely with the weight of three truly gigantic suitcases.

  A well-traveled and rather sophisticated man despite his rustic Yorkshire roots, Graham was not easily impressed by hotel rooms, having seen many. However, his room at the White House was large with a comfortable bed, and a view of the ocean, the marina, and Gorey beach that was simply breathtaking. He opened the windows wide and took three long, deep breaths of the cleansing sea air.

  “Entirely adequate,” he mused to himself before heading down to the tea room in the hopes of a delicate Assam or Darjeeling. “Yes, indeed. This will do nicely.”

  Nearly two hundred feet below, a tall figure of purposeful – one would almost say military – bearing was striding down the beach on his afternoon walk. Colonel Graves, a man whose retention of his army title was not simply an affectation but rather also a statement of his values, brought down his tall cane into the sand with a mechanical precision that in its very rhythm pleased him greatly. It was important to keep one’s own traditions, he’d always felt. Especially during retirement, when one was apt, in the absence of care and discipline, to become addled and flabby, two things which were anathema to the sixty-year-old ex-officer.

  In an open-collared, eggshell-blue shirt and pressed Bermuda shorts, he was every inch the self-exiled retiree, enjoying hard-earned sunshine and spending hard-earned savings. For him, a lifetime of service had left little time for family or even for courting. There had been women, of course, but none who had wanted to stick by the kind of chap who would jet off to war every few years, returning each time a little more cynical, a little less certain of his belief in the fundamental goodness of humanity, each time somehow older than before. He had survived the Argentine fighter bombers strafing his ship in the Falklands, the best efforts of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard, and six months among the Taliban of Helmand before something in him had simply said stop. And so, to Jersey, where he busied himself keeping in shape, visiting the old German fortifications from World War II, and keeping an eye out for Miss Right.

  Or, he chuckled – hang it all, we only live once – Mrs. Right, for that matter.

  It was just this attentiveness, which usually let not a detail pass by him, which brought him to a discovery both heartbreaking and, even for a military man, unbearably gruesome.

  Just where the beach met the sea wall, the sand swelled up into a mini dune, perhaps four feet high, studded with tufts of grass and a discarded soda bottle, Graves noted with distaste. But then there was something else, and it attracted his eye because it absolutely did not belong.

  It was a dainty, pale, human hand.

  “Well, what in the blazes…?” he muttered darkly.

  His first thought, given the location, was that this might be someone washed onto the beach from the ocean. An unfortunate migrant, perhaps, dead from exposure and then deposited here at high tide. This would hardly be his first encounter with a corpse, but a quiet beach on this idyllic little island was the last place he’d expect to see one. He frowned and slowly approached the small rise of the dune, peering at the hand as if it might transform into something innocuous, and this strange moment might then be discarded as no more than a reason to visit the eye doctor.

  He knelt by the dune and carefully smoothed away a little of the sand that covered what was clearly the almost translucent skin of an inanimate forearm. At once, the Colonel knew that this was no washed-up asylum seeker. Nor was this some prank, the kids burying their mother in the sand and then forgetting about her as ice cream and soda beckoned.

  There was a silver bracelet, rather expensive, which shone brightly now in the sun. And it was instantly familiar.

  “Oh,
no,” Graves shuddered. “Oh, good heavens, no…”

  “Gorey Police Station, Constable Barnwell speaking.” His bright and cheerful manner contrasted markedly with the tone of this caller, only the third of the day. It was the sound of a man still struggling to bring his emotions under control despite decades of practice.

  “Yes, I’m… erm… This is Colonel George Graves, and I’m calling from the beach at Gorey, just opposite the pier and about ten yards west of the stone stairs that lead down from the Inn,” he said. Barnwell, who was struck by the Colonel’s precision, began making notes at once. “Yes, sir?”

  The Colonel took a breath. “There’s… Well, a body here.”

  Barnwell’s eyebrows shot up. He gesticulated toward the office where Roach was filling out a report.

  “Get in here!” he whispered loudly.

  “I see, sir,” he said, bringing his most professional and sober tone. “Have you checked for signs of life?”

  “Yes, and I’m afraid there are none,” Graves said soberly. “No pulse. And… Well, I believe I may know her, you see.”

  The bushy black eyebrows were aloft once again. Just for a second, Barnwell felt that he might be about to hear a man confess to a murder.

  “Are you able to identify the deceased, sir?”

  Graves cleared his throat and bit back the urge to unleash some of the emotion he was feeling. It wasn’t fair. They’d met only a few months earlier, just after Graves arrived on Jersey to begin a long hoped-for retirement of sand and sun and…

  “I believe it’sDr. Sylvia Norquist. She’s a resident at the White House Inn. I have…” he began, fighting back his first tears in many years, “I have no idea how she came to be here.”

  No confession, then, Barnwell noted with a slump of his shoulders.

  “Well, sir. You’ve done the right thing. And I’m sorry for your trouble. As it happens,” he said, one hand aloft and circling in his continuing efforts to get Roach’s attention, “our new Detective Inspector has just checked into the White House. I’ll let him know what’s happened and ask him to join you immediately.”

  “Do I need to do anything?” Graves wanted to know. “Call her family?”

  “We should wait until there’s a formal identification. Would you simply stay where you are for the moment, and Detective Inspector Graham will be with you shortly?”

  Graves said that he would before ending the call.

  He squatted uncomfortably by the sand dune, part of him needing to hold the small, ash-white hand, another repelled by it, and yet another simply stunned at the continued, harsh unreasonableness of the world.

  “Oh, my darling,” he said softly, a single tear finally rolling down his face. “My darling girl. Whatever happened?”

  DI David Graham found Graves sitting by the dune. Graves looked shattered, ashen and old beyond his years.

  “Colonel Graves?”

  He stood and extended a hand, more by habit than any impulse to be friendly. “At your service.”

  “I’m truly sorry, sir. And I understand that you knew her?” It was always troublesome, Graham found, to select the most appropriate tense in these situations. Using the past tended to reinforce the unrelenting reality of the loss, but the present seemed strange, uncomprehending, a form of denial.

  “Quite well. We were…” It took all of the military man’s trained self-control to keep his composure. “I was going to ask her to marry me, you see.” His gaze became distant, his jaw muscles tensing rhythmically as he began to contend with the pain of his own grief, with the lost promise of happiness so brutally snatched from him.

  Graham brought out his notebook – he was still an old-school pen and paper type– and began making notes. “And when did you last see her?”

  Graves thought for a moment. “We had dinner two nights ago. At the Marina. She was in great spirits. Full of life,” he said, with great pain.

  “But you hadn’t proposed yet?” Graham asked as sensitively as he could.

  “No,” Graves said, shaking his head sadly. “Should have taken my chance, eh, Detective?” He felt the need to sit down again, his legs unsteady and balance betraying him. “Oh, God, the poor girl…”

  Graham brought out his phone, turning to mask his words amid the waves of the low tide.

  “Barnwell? Yes, I’m here with Colonel Graves. I need an ambulance – discreetly, Barnwell, let’s not make a fuss if we can help it… and the pathologist…. Good lad. Quick as you can. And send Harding to secure a room at the White House Inn… Sylvia Norquist.”

  Graham took a moment to spell the name. He turned to see Graves staring inconsolably at the sand dune then spoke into the phone once again.

  “That’s it for now, Barnwell.”

  Two volunteer Community Support Officers in their reflective yellow tunics kept back a small crowd as the pathologist, Dr. Marcus Tomlinson, and his assistant delicately brushed sufficient sand from the body to carry out their initial investigations. Tomlinson was a 40-year veteran, thorough and perceptive, and little escaped him. He took Graham to the shoreline so that they could speak without being overheard.

  “The time of death will be difficult to ascertain. The sand, sea, and salty air all combine to mess with the state of the body.” Tomlinson was apologetic.

  “Can you give me a clue?” Graham retorted.

  “My best guess is sometime in the last eighteen hours. I can’t be more accurate than that, I’m afraid.” Tomlinson reported.

  “Hmm,” Graham was surprised. “So she could have ended up here in the middle of the night, or she may have keeled over at midday on a busy beach?” he said, thinking out loud.

  “Admittedly,” Tomlinson added, “on one of its quietest stretches.” They both glanced around and noted the slightly secluded nature of the spot, beneath the steps but away from the broader, most popular stretch of sand. “I’ll know more once we complete toxicology screens,” Tomlinson told him, “but for the moment we can’t rule out foul play.”

  “Oh?” Graham said, witnessing the complexity of this case ballooning before his eyes.

  “She’s in her early fifties, and according to the Colonel, in robust health apart from painful arthritis in her knees. Although you hear the uninitiated say it often enough,” Tomlinson warned, “people generally don’t simply keel over and die. After four decades in this business, I’ve become a firm believer in cause and effect.”

  “So you think,” Graham asked, his voice deliberately low despite the waves crashing a few feet away, “she might have been murdered?”

  Tomlinson shrugged. “Like I say. No way of knowing until the tox report is in. I’m troubled by the blood around her mouth.” He referred to his own notebook, shrugged, and closed it. “Standing here, right now, I’d bet fifty guineas and dinner at the Bangkok Palace that Dr.Norquist met her end neither by her own hand nor by natural causes.”

  DI Graham cursed colorfully under his breath. “You know I’ve been here about five minutes, right?” he mused aloud.

  “And you know we haven’t had a murder here since the Newall Brothers axed their parents for the inheritance money, back when you were in college?” the older man replied. He gave Graham a comradely pat on the back. “Well, DI Graham, welcome to the Bailiwick of Jersey.”

  To get your copy of The Case of the Hidden Flame, visit the link below:

  http://cozymysteries.com/hidden-flame

  Books by Alison Golden

  FEATURING REVEREND ANNABELLE DIXON

  Death at the Café (Prequel)

  Murder at the Mansion

  FEATURING DIANA HUNTER

  Hunted (Prequel)

  Snatched

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Alison Golden was born and raised in Bedfordshire, England. She writes cozy mysteries and suspense novels, along with the occasional witty blog post, all of which are designed to entertain, amuse, and calm. Her approach is to combine creative ideas with excellent writing and edit, edit, edit.

&nbs
p; She is the creator of the Reverend Annabelle Dixon cozy mysteries, a charming, fun series featuring a female vicar ministering in the beautiful county of Cornwall, England. She also produces a Jersey-based detective series featuring Inspector David Graham and the Diana Hunter series, set in Vancouver.

  Her books’ themes range from the humorous and sweet to harder hitting suspense. They are recommended for readers who like to relax and unwind with their books, who enjoy getting to know the characters, and who prefer the tougher side of life implied.

  She is based in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and twin sons. She splits her time traveling between London and San Francisco.

  For up-to-date promotions and release dates of upcoming books, sign up for the latest news here: http://cozymysteries.com.

  Thank you for taking the time to read The Case of the Screaming Beauty. If you enjoyed it, please consider telling your friends or posting a short review because word of mouth is an author’s best friend and very much appreciated.

  Thank you,