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

by Jack Benton

  Slim reached down and touched fingers as dry and brittle as the squid pods that were left on the high tide line to bake in the sun.

  ‘Oh, Joanna,’ he whispered. ‘How long have you been down here? Ten, twenty years?’

  Joanna Bramwell’s long-dead corpse gave no answer.

  57

  ‘I WONDERED when you’d show up,’ Emma said. ‘I cooked for you last night. It went cold, but it’s in the fridge. You can heat it if you want it.’

  Slim smiled. ‘Thanks. Maybe later.’

  Emma went through into the kitchen. Slim followed. Two cups sat upturned in the drying rack. Another pair of glass tumblers sat on a polished marble worktop, filled to halfway with an amber liquid.

  ‘Well, I thought you might like a drink.’

  Slim stared for a long time at the glasses, then shook his head.

  ‘I’ll pass.’

  Emma shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. I won’t.’ She scooped up the nearest glass and downed it in a single swallow. She suppressed a cough with the back of her hand, touched her lips with two fingers then glared at Slim, her eyes issuing a challenge.

  ‘I wondered how long you’d be. You didn’t show up last night, but I knew you wouldn’t stay away for long.’

  ‘I had business to attend to.’

  Emma nodded. Her voice was strangely hollow as she said, ‘Police Chief Davis called around looking for you.’

  ‘I’ll call him back in a while. Can we go upstairs?’

  Emma gave him a coy smile. ‘Already?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Emma headed for the hallway. Slim glanced back at the glass on the worktop, then scooped it up and slammed the drink back as he followed Emma into the hall. Emma was waiting at the foot of the stairs. Slim slipped past her and headed up to the second floor. Instead of going to Emma’s room, he went into Ted’s.

  Emma followed him as far as the doorway, then stopped. ‘So soon? Don’t you want one last time with me?’

  Slim ignored her. He walked around the bed and drew back the drapes. In the driveway, Arthur’s patrol car sat alongside Emma’s car.

  Slim sighed, then turned to the bed and picked up the little teddy bear he had given Emma to put in Ted’s hospital room.

  ‘When did you kill her?’ he said.

  Emma looked at him. She frowned, cocked her head, then gave a little illegible mumble. After a second attempt at finding a voice, she muttered, ‘I like you, Slim. Don’t you like me?’

  ‘I’d like to say I’ve met worse people, but I’m not sure that I have.’

  ‘For a man like you to judge me—’

  ‘I’ve never killed a child.’

  Emma looked down. Her voice trembled as she said, ‘I only meant to scare her.’

  ‘Was it harder to live with Becca or with Joanna?’

  Emma shook her head, rolling her eyes at the same time as though trying to brush off a fly. ‘I must say, it took you a long time to figure it all out. I imagine there are worse detectives in the world, but there can’t be many.’

  ‘I’m something of a novice.’

  Even as he spoke, Slim felt a tingle running down his legs. It felt like the first drink for a while, only much stronger.

  ‘Goddamn it, what was in that drink?’

  Emma smiled. ‘Something the hospital gave me.’ She shrugged. ‘To help me sleep.’

  ‘How did you know I’d drink it?’

  ‘You’re an addict. Of course you would.’ She lifted her hand, and something glinted between her fingers: a razor blade. ‘Though my confidence isn’t what it was. I’m glad I didn’t have to use this. I really do like you, Slim. In another time, another place ... maybe.’

  Slim’s legs buckled. Emma came forward as his knees hit the floor. He tried to lift his hands to defend himself, but his arms were as useless as two logs taped to the sides of his body.

  He felt her pushing him back, rolling him onto his front, then the blur that his vision had become faded to nothing.

  58

  THE ENTIRETY of Slim’s body felt as though it had been twisted around and replaced back to front. He opened his eyes as a breeze ruffled his hair.

  ‘Huh?’

  The Lancashire coast laid itself out before him in a series of inlets and jagged headlands. Slim recognised the curve of Cramer Cove to his left. A stormy November tide battered the foreshore.

  ‘Are you wondering how you got up here?’

  Slim turned to find Emma sitting beside him, cross-legged, looking out to sea. She was wearing a parka jacket, the hood pulled up, framing her hair around her face. As she glanced at him, Slim caught shades of long-forgotten actresses in the cut of her jaw, a reminder of what might have been.

  ‘There’s another road,’ she continued. ‘It goes up to the headland. We borrowed Chief Davis’s patrol car, which can handle roads like that a lot better than my little thing. I had to push you out along the path, though.’

  ‘Push me?’

  ‘Ted woke up yesterday. It appears from new hospital reports that he might be paralyzed, but the doctors aren’t sure yet. They gave me the chair to figure out the house. What I’d need to move about, where I’d need to put in ramps, that kind of thing. It wasn’t easy, though. The coastal path isn’t exactly designed for it. Thank God it hadn’t rained.’ She smiled. ‘I’d have had to drag you.’

  ‘You’re strong.’

  She shrugged again. ‘I guess it’s all the climbing. I had a lot of time for hobbies, what with Ted always at work or on his pretend business trips.’

  ‘I can’t believe it took me so long to see it. The hints were there, weren’t they? You were playing me for a fool all along.’

  Emma sighed. ‘You weren’t supposed to get so involved. I wanted to know what he was doing, whether he was still looking for her. That was all. I didn’t want all those dark days dredged up again. You don’t get it, do you? I loved him.’

  ‘I should have twigged you were following me when you showed up at my house,’ Slim said. ‘I never told you where I lived. And when my recording equipment switched itself on.’

  ‘Joanna ... I miss you,’ Emma said in a male voice that sent a shiver racing down Slim’s spine. Emma grinned. ‘It’s some way off, isn’t it? But it was enough to fool you. You just needed to hear a man’s voice to be convinced.’

  ‘You called him Ted. Joanna called him Eddie, didn’t she? I missed that, too.’

  ‘You’d never make a cop, Slim.’

  ‘And that box you gave me, you knew it had nothing of any use to me.’

  ‘I missed a couple of things. That’s why I had Joanna burn it.’

  ‘Were you trying to kill me?’

  Emma nodded. ‘I panicked. When I realised you’d gone out, I had to play the thankful lover.’ She frowned, her lip trembling as though she might cry. ‘I was thankful, though. Isn’t that strange? I’m not joking, Slim. You’ve come to mean as much as anyone.’

  ‘But not as much as Ted?’

  ‘No one could ever mean as much as Ted. He was my world. As she was his. That’s why, Slim. That’s why everything.’

  Slim tried to reach into his pocket, but for the first time realised his hands were bound behind his back with electrical ties.

  ‘The flyer is in my pocket,’ Slim said.

  Emma reached over and pulled out the faded picture of the theatre group. She smiled fondly and pointed at a girl near the end of the line.

  ‘There I am.’

  ‘I didn’t recognise you at first, but you were there all along.’

  Emma sniffed. ‘Don’t feel bad. Ted didn’t recognise me either. When I met him again in eighty-nine, he thought we were strangers. He didn’t care much about my past, so I just changed my home town and my school, and he thought nothing of it. I called myself Emmie Clovelly back then. I actually did better than either of them, with a couple of minor television parts in the mid-eighties. I was never her, though. I was never Juliet.’

  ‘You killed Joanna out of jea
lousy.’

  ‘When I found him again, I thought my world had exploded. Everything I had ever wanted, Ted was it. I didn’t care where we went, what we did; I just wanted his arms around me, his eyes on my face. At first I thought our romance was real, that he truly loved me, and I wanted it so much that I just went along with it. I deluded myself for a while, but eventually I realised he was looking through me, seeing someone else. Seeing her.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  Emma laughed. ‘A woman always knows. Ted was as open as a summer market. Ted, he wrote everything down.’

  ‘I found his diary.’

  Emma nodded. ‘A lucky spot. I left that there after I noticed you’d found it. I wondered what you’d think. One of the reasons I hired you was because he’d stopped writing in it. I fought tooth and nail over moving back to Carnwell, because I knew he couldn’t give up on her, he couldn’t give up on the myth. In the end it was out of my hands. His company transferred him. I thought he’d finally given up on her after the old lady died, but then I found out about his missing Fridays.’

  ‘But Joanna was long dead by then, of course?’

  Emma let out a long breath. ‘Around ninety-one, I think. I knew Ted thought he’d seen her, and there were rumours about a woman haunting Cramer Cove. I came with him on a business trip and while he was in a meeting I drove down to the beach, and there I found her.’

  ‘At Cramer Cove.’

  ‘She was sitting by the water’s edge. She looked a mess. When I talked to her, I realised there was little left of the girl I had idolised. She could barely speak, and what she did say made little sense. Too much exposure to water and salty air had ruined her skin, and her clothes were rags on rags. She was homeless, stealing from bins around Carnwell, scavenging what she could for her secret little lair. She was there in plain view. No one notices the homeless, do they?’

  ‘You followed her to the cave?’

  Emma scoffed. ‘She showed me. Oh yeah, Joanna Bramwell knew Emmie Clovelly, all right. Unlike Ted, she noticed me right away. I think she thought we were friends.’

  ‘But you killed her?’

  Emma shivered as though caught by a sudden gust of wind. ‘I hit her with a rock when her back was turned. She had picked up this flyer, pointed at me to prove she knew me. After that I saw red. I left her there. After all, where else could I hide her where I knew she’d never be found?’

  ‘And you put the bookmark back in the book?’

  ‘It was lying open. She had been reading it in the light of the borehole.’

  Slim felt another shiver. He thought about telling Emma what he had learned about the last hours Ted and Joanna were together, but now, at the end of everything, it made no difference.

  ‘Ted suffered, too,’ was all he could think to say.

  ‘We all suffered,’ Emma said. ‘We just dealt with it in different ways.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  Emma turned to him, tears in her eyes. ‘Can you, really? I spent my life competing against a ghost. All I wanted was Ted. You think I’m a monster? I’ve had one on my back my whole life. Her name is Joanna Bramwell.’

  ‘He destroyed your life, so you destroyed his, by turning Joanna Bramwell into an object of fear, and using her memory to haunt him. You killed those three women to get back at him.’

  Emma shook her head. ‘I killed none of them. Becca ... I never meant to hurt her, and Elizabeth ... I only meant to scare her. Andrea, though, that was before my time.’

  ‘She fell from the rocks.’

  ‘I read about it. I think Joanna tried to talk to her, and scared her into attempting an impossible climb. If you didn’t know Joanna ... if you weren’t looking for her ... she was fearsome.’

  ‘But I found those piles of stones you left. There were more near Ted’s crash.’

  Emma smiled. ‘So you do notice some things? It was a game. I saw a photo of Andrea’s body once. I saw the stones, guessed Joanna had tried to cover the body, in her simple way.’

  ‘Like a mourner?’

  ‘Yes. I remembered it after Becca died. I panicked, and to the sharp-eyed it tied the two deaths together. I had no alibi for Becca, but for Andrea I was living in Manchester. I was safe.’

  ‘And with Elizabeth it became a game again?’

  Emma shrugged. ‘Why not? I’d got away with it once.’

  Slim sighed. ‘How did you deal with it? How did you deal with the guilt?’

  Emma shook her head. ‘I’m not sure if I did. I put it away, and tried to forget, and when it reared its head, I did it over again. Isn’t that how anyone deals with something traumatic? You have to, don’t you? Otherwise it would drive you mad.’

  Boots in the sand.

  Slim nodded. ‘I think I understand you. I could never forgive what you did, but on a certain level I understand why you did it.’

  Emma gave a sad laugh. ‘You’re a useless detective, but you’d have made a great counsellor.’

  ‘I guess I never found my true path either. So what happens now? You know you’ll never get away with it. You’ll be caught if you run.’

  ‘I know that, of course.’ Emma sighed. ‘Look, it’s almost sunset. It’s a good time, don’t you think? It fits with the theme and everything.’

  Emma stood up and took a few steps forward, craning her neck to peer down at the rocks. Slim suddenly understood what she meant to do. He began straining at his bonds, but he was tied too tight.

  ‘Emma, no ... you don’t have to do this. We can figure something out. I don’t want to—’

  She looked back, and gave him a smile that for a moment was filled with all the radiance of a beauty hidden behind years of pain. ‘Whether you live or die is up to you, Slim. It’s not my choice to decide what you do with your life.’

  ‘Emma ... what?’

  ‘You think I’d kill you, the one person who made me feel like her?’ She sniffed. ‘I was Juliet for a while, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Emma?’

  ‘You’ll figure something out. You were military after all. They must have taught you about these things.’

  She turned and walked away toward the cliff edge.

  ‘Emma, no!’

  ‘Goodbye, Slim. I hope I won’t be remembered ... like her.’

  Slim struggled, wanting to follow, but the bonds on his legs wouldn’t let him get up. As the sun dipped, Emma became a silhouette, and then she was gone.

  59

  A PAIR of dog walkers found a trussed and struggling Slim halfway down the path to the beach. With temperatures rapidly dropping, they helped cut him free and get him to safety.

  By the time he had made his way back to Carnwell Police Station, Arthur’s body had been discovered. While information was difficult to obtain, Slim was able to ascertain that the police chief had been found in the Douglases’ dining room, killed by a blow to the back of the head with a blunt object, most likely an ornamental vase found nearby.

  Slim, with his fingerprints all over the Douglases’ house, was considered a suspect by the local constabulary, and knew he would spend many hours in police interview rooms, but because he was not considered a threat, he was released, provided he stayed in the area while the investigation was ongoing.

  A week later, he received a call to inform him that he was no longer under suspicion. He was free to do as he pleased, provided he remained available for contact in the event that he was required to provide evidence, as the investigation remained ongoing.

  Despite search teams working twenty-four hours a day, Emma’s body remained unrecovered. Slim could only hope that she had found peace at last, and while in a confusing way he pined for her despite what she had done, in many ways he was glad to have brought the case to a conclusion, even if there were threads that might never be fully resolved.

  ‘Arthur’s last message to me, it was to say that the photographs I took on the clifftop showed Emma,’ he told the man sitting across from him in the cafe on Carnwell’s high street. His hands
shook slightly as he held the coffee cup—three days sober and it was better as the hours passed. ‘I went up to the fishing cabin and it was still there, the costume she wore, hidden in the roof space.’

  ‘What did you do with it?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s still there.’

  Ted Douglas nodded. ‘Could you do me a favour, Mr Hardy? Could you burn it, please?’

  Slim looked into the eyes across the table from his, and saw weariness beyond even that he saw in his own.

  ‘If that’s what you want.’

  Ted nodded. ‘It is. Thank you.’

  He made to stand up, reaching for a pair of crutches resting against the edge of the table.

  ‘Can I help you with that?’

  Ted shook his head. ‘I’ll manage,’ he said. ‘That’s about all I can do now, isn’t it?’

  ‘I wish there was something I could say.’

  Ted shook his head. ‘I don’t think there is.’ As he steadied himself with one hand, he reached out to shake Slim’s hand with the other.

  ‘Good luck with everything, Mr Hardy. I can’t imagine this has been easy on you, either.’

  Slim opened his mouth to respond, but could think of nothing to say. Instead he gave a short nod, then watched as Ted limped away to the door, out into the street beyond, and away into the world.

  END

  AFTERWORD

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