The Man by the Sea (The Slim Hardy Mystery Series Book 1)

by Jack Benton

  He let his military instincts gauge the distance. About sixty metres. Even as out of shape as he was, with no cover in either direction for half a mile or more, he would back himself to run the figure down, unless he or she was some kind of athlete.

  It was also a perfectly adequate distance for someone with a little skill to aim and fire a shotgun.

  The bench was his only cover unless he went over the cliff edge, and that could only end one way. If someone was going to fire on him, they were more likely to try if panicked. If he just got up good and slow, perhaps they would hold their fire.

  It would also give him the best chance at getting a clear look at them.

  He put his arms on the back of the bench and lifted himself up with exaggerated movements. When he was fully standing, he paused, nodding as he looked out to sea, as though appreciating the view one last time before leaving. Then, with all the speed his military training had given him, he whipped his head around. At the same time, he dropped into a crouch with the bench for cover, and lifted his little digital camera, firing off a burst of photos.

  The figure bolted. Slim got one good look at a black-clad shape with a pale oval face framed by thick cords of hair, then it was gone, vanishing behind the field hedgerow, heading north along the path to Carnwell Sands.

  Slim stood frozen for more seconds than he would have liked, then dropped his bag and gave chase. Running up through spongy couch grass, he was out of breath in moments, but when he reached the stile and threw himself over, he should have seen the figure running along the bottom of the field, on a path enclosed by a thick hedgerow of rock, gorse, and brambles.

  But … nothing.

  Frowning, Slim started down the path. The grass was too short to hide anyone, and the hedgerow dense and almost impenetrable, its purpose of protecting the field from the elements meaning it was too high to be easily climbed. In any case, the angle of its line, sloping around to Slim’s right, meant no part of it was hidden from view.

  So where had the figure gone?

  Slim stopped and stood still, listening. There was only the sound of the sea and the wind. No footsteps, no heavy breathing, no shifting of vegetation as though someone was hiding nearby.

  Slim shook his head, wondering if he was losing his mind.

  Then he remembered the camera.

  He put a hand on his pocket, but it was gone.

  He spun, heart racing. A glint in the grass near the bench identified it lying where he had dropped it. He could retrieve it, or hunt for his observer. If he left the camera, the stranger might double back somehow and steal it. Slim recognised the same paranoia that had plagued him during his army days, but could do nothing about it. With a sigh, he headed back to get the camera.

  Fortune was not on his side. It had fallen on one of the few rocks protruding through the thick grass, and the screen was a spider web, unviewable. The memory card was undamaged, and his computer could read it, but that was at home.

  A fog bank had appeared out to sea. Within a few minutes it would engulf the clifftop, and while Slim felt comfortable enough out in the open during daylight, reduced visibility was another matter.

  With a last resigned scowl aimed both at the vanished watcher and his own ineptitude, he headed for his car.

  19

  WITH A LINGERING UNEASE making him reluctant to go straight home, he stopped in at a local pub where he could leave his car within walking distance of his flat, then used his mobile to dial up his voicemail provider.

  Emma had left three messages on his landline voicemail. Arthur had left one, and there was another from Kay.

  He called the translator.

  ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about that recording,’ the translator told him. ‘I knew I wasn’t quite right with it and I wanted to track down a copy of that book.’

  Slim sat up. ‘And did you?’

  ‘Out of print, out of stock. Copy on eBay at six hundred quid, but, you know, I’m not that keen. So I did some ringing around the second-hand shops. Most of them had no idea of what book I meant, but one did.’

  ‘You got a copy?’

  ‘No, but the owner sold a copy a couple of months back. Said he remembered the customer well.’

  Slim gave a slow nod. The customer could only be Ted Douglas. If he were ever to get to the bottom of this, he needed to speak to Ted. Until he could find a reason to accuse a complete stranger of a thirty-year-old murder, it would help to know as much about him as possible.

  He thanked Kay and took down the number.

  20

  SLIM STAYED a while longer in the pub and drank more than he felt was necessary, making banal conversation with a couple of early drinkers, but failing to banish the growing sense of unease that was creeping up behind him. Unable to put off the rest of his life any longer, he walked back to his flat, leaving the car in the pub car park to be collected later. He thought about calling Emma back, calling Arthur, going down to see the bookshop owner, or about thirty other things, but during the walk back he finally made peace with himself.

  He was avoiding looking at the photos. It was that same primal fear he remembered from the military: you heard the crunch of a footstep behind you and you wanted to do anything but turn and confront the horror, yet you knew you had no choice, that whatever nightmare lay in wait for you, your life could not continue on its path until it had been faced, and should you be lucky enough to find only a deer or a rabbit or a frightened boy running an errand, part of you would be disappointed that it was not your Room 101, that it was not the worst thing in the world, because you didn’t trust yourself to find that same level of courage again.

  An off-license lay between his flat and the pub. Slim drank half a quart of good old, liver-shredding navy rum before making the reluctant climb up the stairs to his flat.

  His laptop sat on the kitchen table where he had left it. He switched it on, drinking the rest of the rum while waiting for the old machine to load. By the time he plugged in the memory card and sat down, he was so drunk that he had to squint to clearly see the pictures.

  He had taken nine shots in his digital camera’s burst. Of those, four had missed the subject completely, while another three were so blurred to be of no use. One of the final two was of a black shape turned away from him, but the last shot had caught the figure in profile.

  A pale face beneath a hood, looking away from him as the figure started to turn. The picture wasn’t clear, and the distance was too great for the computer’s digital zoom to improve it, but if he could find a professional to enhance it, he might have an answer.

  One thing was certain, though, from the delicate jawline and the angle of the forehead.

  The face belonged to a woman.

  21

  ‘I’VE BEEN TRYING to reach you all day. I need you, Slim.’

  From another voice, the same words might have warmed his heart. From Emma they just filled him with dread.

  ‘The fire. I heard about it from someone,’ he said, hoping she wouldn’t ask who before he’d had time to come up with a believable but uncheckable source. ‘What happened? Do the police know anything?’

  ‘There was a local football derby last night. They said it was probably due to a few drunks on their way back from the game.’

  ‘Is Carnwell big enough to have hooligans? I didn’t even know there was a team.’

  ‘Exactly. It’s a cover-up.’

  ‘For who?’

  ‘For whoever is trying to kill me. This dead girl, most likely.’

  ‘Isn’t that something of a contradiction? And why burn Ted’s car? Why not your house?’

  Emma began a rambling monologue about the depraved minds of criminals, none of which made any sense. Slim agreed and disagreed in all the required places, eventually getting her to hang up with the promise of a liaison in a couple of days, once police interest had died down.

  The next person he called was Chief Arthur Davis.

  ‘Football hooligans,’ Slim said, before Ar
thur had even spoken. ‘You get a lot of trouble after Carnwell Athletic’s home games?’

  ‘It was the Cup,’ Arthur said, then laughed to confirm it was a quip. ‘What time are you free, Slim?’

  Slim dropped a cup into the sink. ‘I’m sitting in the car with the engine running, waiting to know our point of rendezvous,’ he said.

  ‘Tesco’s car park,’ Arthur said. ‘Half an hour. We’ll take it from there.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting,’ Slim said. As he hung up, he remembered his car was still in the pub’s car park, a good twenty-minute walk.

  ‘Traffic,’ Slim said, climbing into Arthur’s passenger seat. ‘Can’t you have a word with the town planning department about building a few more roundabouts?’

  Arthur didn’t smile. ‘We have no leads,’ he said. ‘She blames him, and he blames someone with no fixed name or address. Hooliganism was an easy explanation for the press.’

  ‘Those hounds at The Carnwell Daily?’

  ‘That’s them. But seriously, is there no light you can offer?’

  ‘I heard the arsonist,’ Slim said.

  Arthur turned to face him. ‘You what?’

  ‘I had a bug in Ted’s car. Cheap one, non-recordable. I thought I saw Ted’s car trailing me, so I loaded up, hoping to catch a door slam, which would have given me all the proof I needed. What I got was that and more. I got laughter.’

  Arthur said nothing for a few seconds. ‘I’m guessing it wasn’t a hooligan.’

  ‘It belonged to a woman. More, I don’t know.’

  ‘Emma? We have nothing on her.’

  Slim frowned. It would explain the stalking, but it was best if Arthur didn’t know they were sleeping together. The laughter, though, it hadn’t sounded like Emma. It had been too … wild.

  ‘I can’t explain it,’ Slim said. ‘There’s something else, though.’

  He pulled out prints of the two best photographs taken the previous day. ‘I went for a walk on the cliffs yesterday. Caught someone spying on me.’

  Arthur turned them around and peered at them. ‘They’re pretty grainy.’

  ‘My printer makes them look worse,’ Slim said. ‘Ink’s a bit old; don’t use the thing much. It’s a woman, that’s about all I can tell. I got off these shots before she bolted. Didn’t catch her, though. She just ... vanished.’

  Arthur squinted. ‘I can pull a favour from a friend in the forensics department, see if I can get these enhanced. That face might be identifiable.’

  ‘It looks similar to what I thought I saw by the shoreline a couple of weeks ago. I thought I was drunk or going mad. That’s no ghost. That’s a woman in an old, water-damaged jacket. I can’t explain where she went, but cameras don’t lie.’

  Arthur smirked. ‘Tell that to conspiracy theorists.’

  ‘Those guys are assholes.’ He wanted to add that when you’d seen a friend reduced to a pair of stumps in an old pair of boots, no camera double-exposure shared across the internet would ever haunt you again.

  ‘I have a theory,’ Slim said. ‘But I’m getting ahead of myself. Tell me about the third victim you mentioned before. The old woman. I need all the pieces before I can make the puzzle fit.’

  Arthur nodded. ‘I can do better than that,’ he said. ‘I can show you.’

  22

  LUCY TANTON WAS AN ATTRACTIVE, respectable woman in her forties, the kind Slim would turn down if she propositioned him on the account that she could surely do better. She smiled at Arthur Davis as though they were old friends, then tilted her head at Slim before giving Arthur a puzzled look, as though the police chief had mistakenly brought an accused to her place instead of the jail.

  ‘I know this might seem a little out of the blue, but I wondered if we could talk to you about your aunt,’ Arthur said.

  Lucy narrowed her eyes. ‘Is there new information? After all this time?’

  ‘A little early to say, but it’s possible.’

  Lucy let them in. A husband at work and kids at school, she explained, a day off from her own part-time job at a food packaging factory. Just the regular life of a regular suburban family.

  ‘My aunt collected shells,’ she explained over tea served in a cluttered living room where kids’ toys had been hastily stuffed into boxes. ‘She was something of an amateur artist. She created murals made from sea shells, some of which she sold in local cafes. Despite the warnings and all its history, she liked Cramer Cove because of its shingle foreshore and the fact that it was so quiet. No kids meant rich pickings.’

  Slim, whom Arthur had introduced as a friend from Greater Manchester Police, nodded. ‘So would I be right in assuming that your aunt, Elizabeth Tanton, was very familiar with Cramer Cove?’

  ‘Oh yes, very. I’d guess she was down there three or four days a week, for hours at a time.’

  ‘And you consider the verdict of accidental death to be incorrect?’

  ‘Of course.’ Lucy shook her head. ‘It’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Her body was found lying just below the high tide line,’ Arthur said. ‘No marks or anything else inconsistent with drowning, or anything to suggest foul play. The judge claimed that during her search for shells, she had misjudged the speed of the oncoming tide and been caught by it.’

  ‘Ridiculous,’ Lucy snapped. ‘It makes me so mad just to think of it. Someone murdered my aunt. There’s no doubt about it in my mind.’

  ‘There’s no way the drowning verdict could be possible?’ Slim asked.

  ‘None. My aunt knew Cramer Cove backward. She collected shells. She went down there in a jacket with a bag to collect them in. She wore light trainers that weren’t even waterproof. She never went anywhere near the water, and she had no reason to leave the high-tide line. She died in April, when the water is at its coldest. It’s absolutely impossible that she got caught by the tide because she had no reason whatsoever to be anywhere near the water.’

  ‘So what do you think happened?’

  ‘I know what happened,’ Lucy said. ‘Someone frightened her into the sea.’

  Slim was staring at his cup when he heard Lucy addressing him directly. ‘You don’t seem surprised by that, Detective Hardy. But it’s a preposterous claim, is it not? I mean, how could my aunt think she could escape anyone by going in to the sea? Surely she would have tried to climb the cliff or get up onto the lower southern headland? It makes no sense, does it? She was surely murdered.’

  Arthur shrugged. ‘I oversaw the full police report. There was no evidence to suggest foul play. None. She made a bad decision. That was all that could be given in response to the coroner’s report.’

  Lucy rolled her eyes. ‘And Max.’

  ‘As I told you at the time, a dog isn’t evidence of anything.’

  Lucy shook her head. ‘Perhaps Mr Hardy would disagree.’

  Slim steepled his fingers and leaned forward, doing his best to assume the role of consulting detective that had been assigned to him.

  ‘Whether the evidence can be used in a court of law is something I can’t assess unless I see it. Then I will pass judgement.’

  Lucy went out and came back with a laptop which she set up on a coffee table. She pulled the screen around so all of them could see.

  ‘I compiled this video in preparation for a court appearance. In the end, my evidence was dismissed, but I always kept it.’ She gave Arthur a stern look. ‘Just in case.’

  The video showed a woman in her sixties playing in a neat suburban garden with a dog, a little spaniel mix. It yapped at her and jumped up when she held out a ball, then rushed off to retrieve her gentle throw. The video cut to a scene in a field where a similar routine played out, then one in a living room with the dog lying on its back while someone tickled it. Delight was obvious from the way it whined and yelped, its tongue lolling.

  Just when Slim was beginning to make YouTube comparisons, the video cut again. He sat up, feeling an immediate sense of unease. The same dog, barely recognisable, quivered as it crouched in the corner
of a bedroom. Someone was trying to coax it away from the wall, where it was sitting in a puddle of its own piss. The video cut again, this time to a shot of the same dog lying in a basket, eyes wide, whining as someone laid a blanket over it.

  ‘All right, shut it off,’ Arthur said, and Slim let out a sigh of relief as Lucy closed the video.

  ‘There’s more,’ she said. ‘But not much. Max died three days later. He squeezed himself into a space between the washer and a kitchen unit and asphyxiated.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Slim drained the last of his tea, wishing it contained something stronger. ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘Dogs are known to pine for a lost owner,’ Arthur said. ‘There are a few famous cases. Hachiko in Japan, Bobby in Scotland. But Max, that’s not pining.’

  ‘Whatever scared my aunt into the sea also scared her dog to death,’ Lucy said. ‘I had an animal psychologist examine these videos, and he had no doubt that Max died of fright. Now, what could have done that?’

  Slim leaned back in his chair and drummed his fingers the side of his cup.

  ‘Joanna Bramwell,’ he said.

  23

  ‘WE HAVE to begin to consider it,’ Slim said. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts. That’s utter horse-shit. But what if she survived?’

  Arthur shrugged. ‘If Mick were alive, he would be the man to ask. He never let go of what he claimed, and it killed him.’

  ‘So let’s get this straight. We have a drowned girl, dead and buried, who might have been responsible for three subsequent deaths. A man who might have known her thinks he is being haunted and is performing a weekly exorcism ritual. His wife thinks he’s having an affair. Someone burned out their car, and while the official line is that it had nothing to do with anything, we both know that it probably did. What the hell is this?’