Seascape With Body

by Raymond Flynn

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

Alice Draper was everyone's sweetheart. She was fun-loving and pretty and the wasn't fussy about her lovers: they included middle- aged businessmen and teenage tearaways. Years after she died, her murderer is still unpunished. Six of her lovers still have lives blighted by unspoken suspicion. Exiled to seaside Eddathorpe in November, Detective Inspector Robert Graham expects to have lots of time to brood about his failed marriage and his formerly promising career. Instead, he finds himself drawn into the Draper case, and unwittingly taking the lid off a suprising variety of old scandals. Some of which involve senior policemen...

Release date: November 21, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 280

Sample

I drove slowly from the Pirate’s Haven and the Fun Castle at the north end of the Esplanade to the Jolly Fisherman and the autumnal remains of the floral clock at the south. I saw everything from the sand dunes to the shuttered cafés and empty amusement arcades and I counted five people in half a mile of wet promenade. Inside the car, neither of us were impressed.

I stopped directly opposite the sign. No parking between the first of May and the thirtieth of September. It was the third week of wet, windy, semi-deserted November, and, depressingly, there were no immediate laws to break. At that moment I could have done with an officious traffic warden, a yellow-banded black nasty, just for the sake of variety. I would probably have introduced him to Stalin.

Not his real name, of course. Angie had called him Joe, and what with his moustache, his expression of false amiability and his penchant for unexpected violence, he soon became Uncle Joe, finally graduating to Stalin whenever he went over the top. And I’d ended up with him when it came to the parting of the ways. Just the sort of companion I needed, she’d said. In any case, he’d always been more my dog than hers.

A Lakeland; eighteen pounds of curled, uptilted tail and cute, well-cocked ears: black and grizzle-red. As pretty as a picture, as smart as paint, the old ladies’ favourite; the lapdog from hell.

Prudently, I slipped the lead over, his head, wriggled across to the nearside of my elderly Volvo estate and, keeping a firm grip on the little bastard, slid out of the passenger door. He snarled appreciatively and made a dive for the gap in the iron railings, eager to sample the beach. I was ready for that. Hauling him back, I examined the potential battle area with care: it was apparently empty, apart from a couple of sub-teenagers at the edge of a far-out German Ocean throwing stones at the waves. It seemed a suitably stark, unfriendly title for today’s North Sea; field-grey where it met the clouds on the horizon, massing for the attack.

All clear. Stalin has nothing against kids; they probably share his wholly anarchistic view of life. I released him; he bounced down the slipway on to the hard-packed sand and raved through a couple of puddles with a view to improving the upholstery on his return to the car.

I watched as he flew, yipping madly, at a couple of strutting, sullen seagulls, just to let them know who was boss right from the start. Never one to let the weather – or exile – depress him; a sort of canine Marine, prepared for battle anywhere, anytime, by land or sea, the lad. The gulls, recognising the quality of the opposition, swore and took to the air, circling, making threats, before they finally sloped off.

Exile. I turned up the collar of my wax jacket and wished I was wearing over-trousers as well. The Eddathorpe sky was a universal dirty grey; a thin, soaking rain swept in from the sea. A hundred and fifty yards away the disgusting brownish breakers were slurping flotsam, or even jetsam for all I cared – chip papers, fast-food cartons, and possibly the redeposited contents of the town sewage system – upon the sand.

I picked up a stick and threw it morosely after the dog. He loves sticks; I hated the town, the weather, the hired wooden bungalow, my new force and my new job. Not necessarily in that order.

I’d known it was coming, of course. You don’t disrupt the social event of the Constabulary year and walk away scot-free; not in my old force, you don’t. The annual Ladies Night of the Senior Officers’ Mess, with an entirely unnecessary emphasis on Senior. God knows why we didn’t have an ordinary officers’ mess like the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, or, just possibly, the Salvationists, the refuse collectors and the RSPCA.

Anyway, it had turned out to be the mess-dressed, dinner-jacketed and entirely scandalous occasion when Superintendent Clive Jones, BSc, had been decked by Detective Inspector Robert Graham, Regional Crime Squad, for having it off with his wife. Whizz-bang! And a quick trip to casualty for Casanova amidst one or two muted cries of encouragement from the uncivilised elements within the CID, and a very convincing bout of hysteria on the part of Angie, my erring spouse.

Like many an idiot before me, I’d been among the last to know.

Not done. And lucky not to be starring in a script winging its way in the direction of the DPP. Luckier still, no Star Chamber, no disciplinary proceedings in front of the Chief. Just a rapid exit from the Regional Crime Squad, a return to duty with my own force, the break-up of the happy home, gentle advice on the subject of applying for jobs elsewhere, followed by a swift transfer of forces to a frontier province. Another naughty legionary sent off to keep the barbarians in check on the distant Saxon Shore.

I was grateful; well, fairly grateful would be closer to the truth. No need to go over the top. Sweet charity, unsullied altruism, had a pretty low priority in official circles. Buckets of whitewash, and an earnest desire to save a flourishing career (not mine), had been the order of the day. And, I suspected, a nifty shuffle around the old-boy network to ensure I got a suitably distant post.

So here I was, six months later, wallowing in the wages of sin: sand, sea, but with minimal possibilities so far as sun and sex were concerned in the immediate future.

Divorce … money … the Job … money … that bloody wooden shack. What on earth had possessed me, taking a lease on that cedarwood, verandahed monstrosity? I knew the answer to that too: money again. I was, I suspected, going to need it. Unless Superhero was going to keep Angie in a style to which she’d very much like to become accustomed.

I was so far gone in self-pity I didn’t hear the shouts at first. It was only gradually that I became aware that some sort of disturbance was going on two or three hundred yards away.

Stalin had to all intents and purposes emigrated, but there was a fair amount of excitement going on amidst the piles of boulders set as sea defences further down the beach. A substantial, broad-hatted figure appeared to be lashing out and screaming something pretty rich. Two tiny dots were dancing: one, a master of tactics, was keeping well out of range. As I watched, experiencing a familiar sinking feeling, rehearsing an over-worn series of apologies, the two dots joined, and the shrieks reached a crescendo of fury and despair. I am, I admit it, lazy by nature, unfit; I don’t believe in violent exercise, but I lumbered into a reluctant jog.

‘Stal – Joe!’ I howled diplomatically for the sake of form. ‘Come, Joe!’

I knew I had about as much chance as a United Nations peace mission in Bosnia, but I wanted to show a measure of goodwill. Fellow dog-owners can get very het-up about their first experience of Joe.

I approached the scene of the action at a speed which, while showing willing, gave me ample time to assess the situation. The shrieking figure was female, expensively belted, Burberried, and sporting a pair of green wellies. Her hat was one of those flat-crowned, broad-brimmed country favourites much in evidence at game fairs.

Late thirties, Junoesque and furious. I had her pegged: middle- to upper-middle-class. Things were not looking good. It wasn’t a dog fight, mind.

‘Does this animal belong to you?’ The voice carried well in the wind.

‘Sorry. Yes.’ I was tempted, but.

‘That mongrel is trying to rape Sophie!’

I looked at the grinning Hunt terrier bitch; some would have described her, inaccurately, as a Jack Russell. It was, however, far from rape. Attempted Unlawful Sexual Intercourse, depending on her age, perhaps.

‘He’s not a mongrel; he’s a pedigree Lakeland terrier from a championship strain.’

Me and my big mouth. It was not exactly the moment to leap to Stalin’s defence.

She took a deep breath and fixed me with a cold, appraising eye.

‘That’, she snapped, ‘is rather like saying everything’s all right, providing the rapist is a member of the House of Lords.’

She was, I decided inconsequentially, a good-looking woman; what I would call a big, healthy girl. Right. I don’t really live in the nineties. It’s quite true, I am a male chauvinist pig.

‘I’ll try and call him off,’ I muttered weakly. ‘Joe! Joe!!’

I advanced. The woman stopped yelling, and stared thoughtfully at the dogs. My aristocrat had not quite succeeded – yet.

‘He’ll probably take your hand off if you upset him. They’re awkward little devils!’ She was obviously more interested than worried by the prospect.

He had never, ever, made a pass at me. Biting the hand that fed him was not, I hoped he’d realise, a smart move.

‘Joe, Joe – Gerroff!!’ I flourished his lead.

Miraculously, he left his girlfriend to her own salvation, and backed away snarling, cursing, and giving me an understanding of precisely how ungentlemanly and unpopular I was. Then he ran away.

The little bitch took one look at her mistress, bestowed a bare, contemptuous glance on me, and shot off like a rocket after her new-found love. Given a straight contest between lust and loyalty, lust is likely to secure the first prize every time.

‘You – you bloody man. Sophie! Sophie, darling!’

She turned and followed her animal, Burberry flapping, Wellingtons thumping clumsily along the sands. Dog and mistress were obviously in perfect accord so far as my character was concerned.

I followed at a fairly brisk walk, making preparations for a silent personal poll: an electorate, since Angie’s defection, of one. Stalin and I were fast approaching a permanent, and probably violent, parting. All those in favour of catching that beast and giving him a one-way ticket to the dogs’ home, say Aye!

I was only too aware, however, that all my previous self-deluding election promises had produced a series of identical, wholly nugatory results. Just like his namesake, Joe could afford to ignore the democratic process. I was never going to summon up the courage to kick him out. Bloody man; obscurely, I felt I belonged to that equally bloody dog.

I tramped the beach in the wake of that female fury for a good twenty minutes. I must admit I let her do most of the calling. ‘Sophie! Sophie!!’, I figured, would probably produce more effect than ‘Joe!’, or even, ‘Stalin, you evil little sod, come here!’

She didn’t see it quite that way. Occasionally she halted, turned her head and shouted, ‘Go on, you fool; call that damned dog of yours back!’ And I would give a couple of half-hearted shouts, then, once again, I’d give up.

The rain intensified. We got wet. We both covered a lot of sand; we checked boulder piles and breakwaters, water pipes and the backs of shabby bathing huts on the edge of the dunes at the bottom end of the beach. No dogs.

Finally, but not companionably, we tramped the length of the Esplanade – the Grand Esplanade – searching for the escapees. I was, despite her opinion of me and mine, sorry for her. The woman obviously loved her dog and she was worried about traffic. Fortunately, it was practically non-existent. Eddathorpe; November; Saturday; wind and rain – a recipe for keeping death off the roads.

Eventually, we got as far as my car. Joe had returned. He sat, cocky as ever, his paramour pressed against him, next to the front nearside door. I looked at Sophie, a panting, self-satisfied little bitch: whatever was going to happen had happened, I decided.

So had the broad-brimmed hat. By this time she’d acquired a definite Clint Eastwood look. Fortunately, she wasn’t armed.

She reached out and clipped the little bitch to her lead. Then she looked at me, my dog, the occasional spot of rust on the estate, and she positively snarled.

‘I’ve a good mind’, she said, dragging her reluctant animal away, ‘to report both you and that dangerous dog to the police.’

I had, for once, the perfect answer. But, madam, I am the police.

No. No smart-alec remarks; not twice in one afternoon. Stupid, yes; pig-headed at times, but not quite so stupid as that.

‘Are you much of a church-goer, boss?’

‘What?’

‘Do you go to church?’

I stared disbelievingly at the huge, greying bulk of my Detective Sergeant. Comfortable, fiftyish, wearing a rumpled grey suit, he didn’t look the type to go in for a wind-up within half an hour of meeting the new DI. A joker, then, George Caunt.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Mormon – and I go around in a long fawn mac making converts: what’s your home address?’

He grinned. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Seriously; don’t you know about Teddy Bear?’

Superintendent Edward Baring; a light began to glow at the back of my mind. Hadn’t somebody, somewhere, mentioned this back home? The strangest rumours – true, exaggerated, totally unfounded – trickle across force boundaries, but I’d never met Baring in my life.

I’d heard a bit of gossip on my visit to Headquarters after I’d been appointed. Lunch in the canteen, and they’d marked my card about him and his town. The Chief Constable of Eddathorpe, they called him; independent, unaccountable, a law unto himself. They were trying to scare me, or so I thought: according to them I was about to fall victim to a medieval robber baron, isolated in his own dreary little fief. One road in, one road out. See Eddathorpe and die.

‘Tell me, George. I can bear it.’

‘He’s a bit of an … enthusiast. Lay preacher, that sort of thing.’

‘And?’

‘He’s likely to have a word with you about your religious convictions. He quotes scripture from time to time.’

‘In other words he’s cracked?’

‘No-o, he’s not a bad bloke in his way. But he’s been around since Adam was a lad: he’s a bit set in his ways. And he’s had a hard time, one way and another.’ He was giving me a message, but I missed it at the time.

‘Thanks!’

It was all I needed; a geriatric. One of Cromwell’s russet-coated captains; a soldier of the Lord with his Bible and his sword. It was a punishment posting, all right.

I stared around the cluttered CID office; a bank of filing cabinets on a parquet floor, an oak-cased wall clock, a noticeboard, photocopier, paper-shredder, an open cupboard with untidy, overspilling piles of forms, five overloaded desks. One for George and four belonging to the absent Eddathorpe Detective Constables.

The calendar, our one splash of colour, featured an outstanding example of the politically and sexually incorrect. I didn’t need to be much of a detective to work out the absence of women DCs. The blatant sexual stereotype on the wall hadn’t got much to grin about, either. Not in our particular seaside November weather.

Half past eight on Monday morning; the two eight o’clock men were out already, examining the overnight breaks. There were criminals everywhere: burglaries at the end of the world. Gas meters broken open. A Ford Escort stolen. Assaults.

Still, it was, in all probability, better than working for a living. Removal leave was over: time to get down to work.

I walked into my glass-partitioned rabbit hutch at the far end of the room, and unpacked. To be honest the police station itself wasn’t bad. It had been built at the turn of the century; red brick, riveted impressively with stone. Huge, high-ceilinged offices with covered-over fireplaces containing gas fires, a vast parade room, interview rooms, a superabundance of cells; a sort of barrack yard at the back.

Unfortunately, the town had never grown; if anything it had shrunk since the days of its brief Edwardian boom. The building was too big for Eddathorpe except in summer, when, for a couple of months, the population doubled.

An uncommon complaint for a police station: too much space. We rattled around in the place like peas in a can, yet my office had been tacked on to the end of an existing room. I can only assume that some previous incumbent of the Detective Inspector’s spot had been lonely, or he liked to spy on his men. Hence the glass-fronted hutch.

I unloaded the junk of years into my desk drawers, into the filing cabinet and the massive steel cupboard which looked as if it should have contained a rocket launcher, at least.

I had not been selective, exactly, when I’d cleared out my stuff at the other end. My copy of the Offences Against The Person Act, passed in Queen Victoria’s heyday, was still going strong; but the Forgery Act, 1913? And where on earth had I acquired the old Larceny Act, dead for more than twenty-five years? I’d still been at school the last time they’d used it, in 1968.

I leafed idly through its curling pages; on conviction the culprit could be once privately whipped (and that bit repealed another twenty years before). Wastepaper basket, or should I send an urgent fax to Conservative Central Office? They could reintroduce the legislation; cheer next year’s conference up.

A place for everything, and everything jumbled up. A few specimen files, an old Civil Defence manual, stated cases, police promotion handbooks, a copy of my new Force Orders, Archibald’s Criminal Pleading and Evidence, and a year-old Stone’s Justices Manual, contributed by a friendly Crown Prosecutor. A Handbook of Police Discipline, my personal version of a train-spotters’ guide; I could have ticked off quite a few of the juicier bits over the past few months – been there, done that!

Pens, pencils, paperclips, old pocket books – I wasn’t going to let my previous employers get their sticky fingers on some of those. I selected, filed, or binned my past as I went along. Two pictures: one, unframed, of Joe, the other, Angie smiling out at me, blonde, sexy and self-assured, from her silver frame. I remembered her giving it to me.

Instant promotion: a silver-framed devil-dog. In any case, I’d never felt comfortable with pictures of nearest and dearest on the desk. Too many oily brass-hats displayed the images of the wife and kids in the office, covering up their multitudinous sins with unctuous family smarm. Stalin, all circumstances considered, would do just as well.

I’d completed my first chore and I was turning my attention to the Current Crime State when one of my two telephones rang.

‘Good morning, Inspector. Mrs Kelly here, Mr Baring’s secretary: he sends his compliments, and wonders if it would be convenient for you to visit him now, before he goes out? He’s got an appointment.

‘Yes? Thank you so much.’

Nothing like getting off on the right foot: old-world courtesy. My morale went up a notch or two; I was quite surprised.

Initiative test; where did the boss hang out? George gave me directions, but I wandered around the corridors of an under-used first floor for four or five minutes before I found him. He merited a massive oaken-doored sanctuary with a glittering brass door-plate and a set of miniature traffic lights in red, amber and green – Engaged; Wait; Enter – on the corridor wall.

Middle-aged Mrs Kelly smiled through the open door opposite his room. ‘Don’t worry about the silly lights,’ she said. ‘They haven’t worked for years. Knock, and go straight in.’

The room was impressive; Edwardian wood panelling, a massive old-fashioned glass-fronted bookcase packed with leather-backed Law Reports and bound volumes of the Police Gazette. A mahogany corner cupboard, a free-standing safe with a brass coat of arms, a dark green carpet, venerable curve-backed chairs, and a partner’s desk gleaming with polish. Not your usual shabby cop-shop pit.

Teddy Baring watched my reaction with the merest hint of a down-turned smile. Contrary bugger. I got that right from the start.

Seated behind his desk, he still looked lanky, hunched, too narrow-shouldered for the Job. His head was abnormally small for his size, balding, close-cropped, while the slightly protuberant. . .