Bad Sons (Booker & Cash Book 1)

by Oliver Tidy

  I was paying attention.

  ‘There were none. Nothing consistent with her receiving a battering from the tide and the physical features of the beach, anyway; nothing to suggest she’d been thrown hard against the concrete outfall or the ironwork when she got hooked up on it. The pathologist was actually interested in her injuries, or rather the absence of them. He did find some bruising to her upper arm, suggesting she might have been recently roughly handled, but nothing else other than the evidence she had recently struck her head, of course.’

  She gave me a moment to let that settle.

  ‘Doesn’t that strike you as odd?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t it strike the pathologist as odd? You remember you said yesterday that if she’d gone into the water at Dymchurch then she’d have been in the water for some time. There’s a lot of sea wall, scores of groynes and the outfall that she could have been thrown against by the tide. I remember you also said you’d be surprised if her body didn’t show signs of her having been battered by the sea and the geography of the place.’

  ‘Yes, I did, but just because she wasn’t knocked about doesn’t necessarily prove anything, does it?’ She breathed out heavily. ‘You seem like you could be capable of intelligent thought, Mr Booker, so why don’t you start reasoning a bit more and stop letting your own unsubstantiated theories cloud your ability for objective thinking? Is it odd that your aunt’s body hadn’t sustained any nasty injuries? Maybe. Is it suggestive? Possibly. Conclusive? No. The information is something to bear in mind. Something to store away. A part of the puzzle. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a job to do.’

  She turned and left me to it.

  ‘Thank you, Detective,’ I called after her.

  She looked around and nodded once but didn’t stop. I got the idea she found me hard work. I got the idea she didn’t suffer fools gladly.

  *

  They were in there a long time. They were being thorough. I paced on the pea-beach, smoked, got bored, smoked more and got more bored. Across the fence, the scrape of metal on metal was back even though there was no breeze and it got so I couldn’t stand it.

  I went back upstairs, asked Cash if she had any objection to me going into the shop. She said that as the paper suits hadn’t been down there yet she’d better come down and sit with me. She was still being professional and I couldn’t blame her. She couldn’t take the chance I was going to hide the lead piping that, in the library and Sprake’s twisted thinking, I must have beaten my relatives’ skulls in with before I carried them both across to the sea and threw them in.

  I picked up the book I’d started the day before and settled in for the wait.

  I was aware of Cash looking at the boxes and packaging, browsing the stock, picking a book off the shelf and sitting down in one of the wingbacks. I almost made some smart remark about making herself at home but capped it.

  The paper suits continued to pry and probe. When I’d calmed down a bit I made them all coffee to show there were no hard feelings. Not on my part anyway. I finished the lunch I’d started and gave up on the book.

  I sat around the shop thinking of Istanbul and my wife. I hadn’t made any attempt to contact her since my arrival. I’d barely spared her a guilty thought.

  After checking with Cash, I powered up the computer in my uncle’s shop-office and sat down to compose and send my wife an email detailing unfolding events and hinting that I might have to stay on. I spared her the melodrama of my situation and kept it factual and unemotional. Cash would have been proud. When it was done and sent I felt better in a shallow, hollow sort of way.

  When they were leaving, Cash didn’t see any harm in letting me know they’d found nothing to suggest I’d taken an axe to anyone and tried to clean it up.

  She said, ‘I’m going over to the pub now. I have to verify your version of your movements for the night you arrived back in the village. That is another professional duty I am performing because I am a thorough detective and because I’ve been told to. You can call that a heads-up, if you like.’

  I thanked her and started to feel a little stupid and regretful for how I’d spoken to her earlier. I watched her walk back to her car and she probably knew it. It was a nice walk and not a bad view. She didn’t look at me again as she drove away to the pub. She was the consummate professional.

  ***

  12

  Even though they had not been invited guests, the sudden absence of the law’s presence made the place the poorer for it – a miserable empty silence rather than a welcome quiet. As a rule, I didn’t mind being stuck with my own company but I was feeling stale and bored, frustrated and morose. I had pent up energy to expend.

  There were still a few hours of daylight left so I dug out some running gear.

  Running on Istanbul pavements invited a broken ankle or a traffic accident. Unless you had a death wish, lived near a track, the beach or a big park, sensible people didn’t run for fun outside. There were always the gyms with treadmills but breathing in other people’s sweat, suffering their noise and their nearness was, for me, unpleasant, irritating, monotonous and dull. Look in any plate glass gym window and see racks of joggers on treadmills staring at televisions. As far as I’m concerned that sort of thing is for hamsters.

  Running is good for my body, my mind and my equilibrium. I can switch off and think. Mind altering chemicals are manufactured and released and usually improve and heighten my thinking. I needed some of that.

  The irony was not lost on me that while I ran for exercise, for health, I was cancelling out much, if not all, of any positive effects with alcohol and nicotine abuse. Maybe if I gave up my vices and sat around all day I’d live to be a hundred and four. Maybe I’d get hit by a bus tomorrow. Lincoln said that a man without vices is a man without virtues. That sounded like a recipe for a dull life. And a dull life was no life in my book.

  I jogged up the high street to the slipway and dropped down on to the hard-compacted sand. The tide was a good way off and there was a wide band of exposed beach to choose a line from. I headed out to run along the shoreline.

  My usual distance was St Mary’s Bay and back – about twenty minutes at a steady pace and maybe a couple of miles there and back.

  It was only when I curved my run on auto-pilot to face my turning point up the coastline that I realised I was going to run past the outfall where my drowned aunt had been hauled from the water. I stopped. I was as incredulous at my callous forgetfulness as I was suddenly reluctant to go up there. How could I have been so thoughtless, so unfeeling, so stupid?

  I stood breathing heavily and deciding. Emotions gambolled around my conscience like spring lambs. This had been my three-times-a-week run for over ten years before I left Romney Marsh. My association with the beach was something I looked forward to renewing each return. As I grew older, the run of my younger, fitter days became something of a benchmark for me to measure my current state of fitness against. Should I have to give that up now?

  I turned through one hundred and eighty degrees. Of course, I could just run the other way and have done with it. Change the habit of a lifetime.

  And then I thought that with the tide still well out, the St Mary’s Bay outfall might warrant further investigation for evidence of how my aunt came to be there. Her footwear was still missing, I reminded myself, and the more I thought about it the more I wanted to see for myself how and where exactly she’d managed to become snagged on the ironwork. This was not for any macabre motive. I was intrigued to learn more about the physical circumstances surrounding her death, and there was the serious likelihood, for me, that if I wanted to understand what happened to my relatives I was going to have to be instrumental in that.

  I took a couple of thick lungfuls of tangy salty courage, made my decision and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other heading west.

  The outfall had been a feature of the coastline ever since I could remember. Its function was to provide somewhere for the surplus water of the drainage ditche
s in the surrounding marshland to empty into the sea. Without it, and others like it spaced along the low-lying Romney Marsh coastline, the land would have enjoyed a much higher risk of regular flooding.

  Depending on how local precipitation had been lately it could either be a decent flow of fresh water a couple of feet deep, loaded with the run-off from fields and agricultural pesticides, or a trickle that wouldn’t excite a thirsty sheep.

  The end pipe was the culmination of the network of marsh drainage ditches. It ran under the main road and the sea wall and then joined with a concrete channel, maybe six feet across and ten feet from lip to sand at its highest point. This was open to the skies and ran a few dozen metres down the beach to disgorge its contents either on to the beach or into the sea, depending on the state of the tide. A sturdy iron grille was fixed between the pipe and the concrete channel. The purpose of this was twofold: it prevented curious children from exploring further a potential danger while also acting as a screen-filter to prevent the flow from either direction of debris washed out from the marsh or in with the tide.

  I pushed myself hard, harder than I should have for a first time out and the outward leg. I crunched over a tide-line of broken shells and I scattered gulls picking at whole, closed ones. I jumped little streams and detoured around the deeper pools and the irregular deposits of the slate grey gault clay of the Early Cretaceous middle and upper Albian periods that could spoil the purity of the golden sands. In the summer months these exposed islands of mire both horrified and thrilled screaming children who walked barefoot through it to have it squeeze disgustingly and warmly up through their toes. As kids we would tell the summer visitors it was raw sewage disgorged from the public toilets on the sea wall.

  As I narrowed the gap between me and the outfall I noticed a solitary figure standing directly on top of it. They weren’t using the structure as a viewing platform, as most did; something to lean on and gaze out and dream. They were bent over, apparently interested in or examining something. Normally, this wouldn’t arouse a second glance but the day before someone had been found dead there and today there wasn’t another soul in sight along the whole expanse of beach or wall.

  The figure stood to watch me cut up from the shoreline and approach their position. My lungs burned and struggled to satisfy my need for oxygen. I made it to the outfall under the watchful attention of the observer without faltering and with some dignity, even though my calves, quads and lungs were protesting at their abuse.

  I wiped the sweat out of my eyes, used the moment to suck as much air into my lungs as I could find, put my hands on my hips and said, ‘Hello again, Detective Cash,’ in one quick rush of noise.

  Her lofty advantage over me seemed to exaggerate her appearance of not being particularly impressed with my efforts or pleased to see me there. At least the unhappy look I let her drag out gave me time for a couple more quick breaths.

  ‘You seem a little out of condition, Mr Booker, if you don’t mind me saying so?’

  ‘I don’t mind. It’s my first time for a long time. I’ll run back as well. And I bet I’ll do it quicker than someone I could touch with a short stick.’

  I was surprised to hear myself say that. It didn’t sound like me. I blamed those endorphins I’d been manufacturing that altered my thinking to make me appear stupider instead smarter.

  ‘I understand that as a man you must have your fantasies.’

  She still wasn’t smiling but I could detect something approaching amusement at the corners of her mouth. I was. It was quite funny and well delivered. With her deadpan expression she could’ve done stand-up if she ever got bored of playing cops and robbers. I kept that to myself.

  ‘What are you doing here, Mr Booker?’

  ‘At the risk of falling foul of the law, what does it look like I’m doing? Besides, at the further risk of talking in clichés, A, it’s a free country, and B, I could ask you the same thing.’

  She wasn’t in the mood for playing and I wondered seriously if her dislike of me might go deeper than simply finding me hard work.

  ‘I’ve been running on this beach for longer than I care to remember. Dymchurch to St Mary’s Bay is my exercise track. I’ll admit that when I set out it didn’t occur to me to think about why I shouldn’t be running this way but when I did I thought that with the low tide I might have a look around where my aunt was found.’

  ‘Look around for what, exactly?’

  ‘Her shoes that she wasn’t wearing, or the coat that she didn’t have on.’

  She ignored that. ‘Mr Booker, I understand you’ve had a shock and a loss. I understand you want to know what happened. But don’t start getting involved in something that is essentially a police investigation. I hoped to have made that clear to you already.’

  ‘Because I’m part of it?’

  ‘That and because you’re not a trained investigating police officer. I don’t need private interest stumbling about blindly, getting in the way and making my job any harder. Do I make myself clear?’

  I was more than a little piqued by her superior rebuke. ‘I understand what you’re saying but firstly, I don’t think there is a law against concerned citizens searching out the truth when a crime has been committed, and secondly, from what I’ve seen so far of the official investigation into my relatives’ disappearances I’d be a fool to hold my breath for a satisfactory explanation, let alone a quick one, especially when as far as I can tell the tree the police seem to be barking up isn’t even in the same orchard as the one they should be.’

  She took that better than I expected – just a sigh and a disappointed shake of the head.

  ‘You didn’t answer me about what you’re doing here.’

  ‘I should have thought that was pretty obvious, even to an English teacher. I’m barking up trees.’

  ‘Found anything interesting?’

  I noticed she was looking at my feet. ‘Were those trainers expensive?’

  I said they weren’t. Then I let her know I failed to see how that was pertinent to her investigation.

  ‘Because my shoes were,’ she said, ‘and I can see something lying at the front of the grille in that sewer pipe that I’d like a better look at.’

  I climbed up to join her on the top of the outfall. It was constructed of lengths of timber fixed with an inch gap between them. At each end they were bolted to the concrete walls. She had a torch and she shone it down between the timbers into the murky darkness. The beam picked out something red stuck up against the grille just like she’d said. It was probably nothing; a red plastic bag, perhaps, or a punctured plastic football. There was only one way to find out.

  To get to it would take a drop down into the outfall channel and a wade through the knee-high stream of water, which ran out to join the sea. While the water looked to be flowing only gently, beneath it would likely be a treacherous layer of sludge, silt and sediment the water had carried down with it through the marsh irrigation channels.

  I took off my trainers and socks. They might not have been expensive but they were the only ones I had. I put out my hand for the torch. Detective Cash hesitated. She looked like she was having second thoughts about involving me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That could be evidence and you’re involved in our investigation. Whether you or I think you should be is not my decision.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, if I let you go in there, I’m taking a risk that you could contaminate it.’

  ‘You’ve got two choices then: you can find me something to pick it up with so I don’t have to touch it or you can get in there yourself. I suppose it ultimately depends on how involved you personally think I am in my relatives’ disappearances.’

  She sighed a little dramatically. ‘I don’t think you are involved. All right? But I’m not the one making the decisions. And if it got back to him that I’d allowed you within a hundred yards of something that could be evidence in the case, let alone asked you to retrieve it, I’d be in big trouble.
’

  ‘I won’t tell if you won’t.’

  She looked at me with a hard intensity for a long moment and I waited. If she was going to bottle it I was going in there anyway and sod the consequences. If there was something in there that could be relevant to my aunt’s death I wasn’t going to risk losing it to the next tide and the sea.

  Maybe she saw something of this in my face. She looked around like she was expecting Sprake to spring out from his hiding place. ‘Wait there. I’ve got some evidence bags in the car. Let me get you one of those and you bloody well make sure you don’t let anything of you come into contact with whatever it is.’ I smiled at her and she gave me a very grim look back. ‘I’m serious. If anything of you turns up on that we’re both finished.’

  I got the message and sat on the edge of the outfall wall to wait for her. My legs were stiffening up and the sweat on my T-shirt was sticking cold against my skin.

  She hurried back over the lip of the sea wall as if she was afraid of what I might have been tempted to do in her absence.

  She handed me the evidence bag and a final reminder. ‘Please be careful not to touch it. It’s probably nothing, but it could be something.’

  I took the torch, the bag and her warning and dropped down into the water. It was bitterly cold. My body’s reaction was to suck in air. I was hit by the putrid smell of what existed down there, trapped in the confinement, heavier than air, a combination of the brackish water and the years of Nature’s deposits left to cling to and build up on the exposed surfaces: crustaceans and slimy green plant life. I shone the torch ahead of me into the greyness. I had about twenty feet of channel and murk to navigate. The last bit of it would be under the sea wall and in almost total darkness. This was not something I would have done for fun. Confined dark spaces, even those not prone to flooding, have never appealed to me as places for recreation. Just the idea of pot-holing made my mouth dry.

  I lumbered forward in the water that ran around my shins. My feet and lower legs were already numb. I was treading gingerly. With nothing on my feet, I didn’t want to step on broken glass, discarded fish hooks, rusting metal, dead animal carcasses and other things I tried to stop myself dwelling on. As I progressed I was aware of the crackling of the thousands of barnacles that clung to every available surface as they shrank to close at my approach – an alien in their environment, a possible threat.