The Body on the Shore Read online

  ‘No reversing required today,’ Gillard said, as he too went upstairs.

  ‘Good job an’ all,’ came the reply.

  The girls had completely taken over the upper deck, standing in the aisle, bellowing insults, swapping gossip, sharing videos. Gillard’s ‘excuse me’ as he tried to find an unoccupied seat brought the surliest of expressions, as if had gatecrashed the ladies’ changing room. One girl, with a rough topknot of jet-black hair, and cheeks powdered to the shade of jaundice, had eyebrows that looked like they had been drawn on in marker pen higher than their natural position, which gave her a look of permanent surprise. She was berating a short stocky teenager, who was blowing gum bubbles while examining her nails. The subject seemed to be text messages sent to someone’s boyfriend, and there were threats of significant violence. The detective sat and minded his own business, listening and watching, and appreciating Colin Hodges’ astute point that the upper deck of a busy bus was no place for an assassin.

  These girls were headed to Hawthorn Road Secondary, as it used to be known before it was taken over by a group called Alpha Academies. It was a world away from the kind of privileged education afforded the boys of St Cuthbert’s who had all stayed downstairs. These intimidating girls were on top now, but he didn’t suppose it was too snobby to imagine that most of those passing through Hawthorn Road Secondary would become tomorrow’s hairdressers, shelf stackers and cleaners. After all, he’d been to an equivalent school himself and fought his way out and up. Nothing was predestined. He was going to rely on their intelligence and cooperation.

  It was a good dozen stops before the bus crawled through the traffic to Roosevelt Avenue, and more girls had boarded. Not a single boy came upstairs. Gillard, on the left-hand side, peered down at each stop to see who got on and off. Finally, when the upper deck was full, and three stops before the architects’ office, Gillard stood up and tried to make himself heard.

  ‘Girls, can I have your attention for a minute? I’m Detective Chief Inspector Gillard of the Surrey Police, and I’m here to investigate a murder.’ As expected, this resulted in almost complete silence, though the activity of thumbs on smart phones and the nodding of heads to earphoned music was harder to extinguish.

  ‘I would like to know if any of you who were travelling on this bus last Friday saw anyone who was acting suspiciously on this upper deck…’

  ‘That was Belinda,’ yelled someone.

  ‘It wasn’t, you cheeky cow,’ came a hissed response.

  ‘Someone who you had not seen before…’ Gillard continued, raising his voice further above the hubbub.

  ‘Do you mean a bloke?’ asked a young-looking girl with hoop earrings.

  ‘Yes, probably male.’

  ‘Was he good-looking?’ someone whispered, to accompanying giggles.

  ‘We don’t know what he looked like, that’s why we’re asking you,’ Gillard said. ‘If you get any ideas, ask to speak to Mrs Calder, the student welfare officer, who has my business card.’

  At that moment the bus lurched to a halt. It was the stop before the architects’ office, and the girls piled off. It took a full cacophonous minute for the bus to empty, and as Gillard looked down into the street at the gaggle of them, he saw the short one who had been chewing gum holding her thumbs on imaginary trouser braces, and bending at the knees, as she leaned back and self-importantly announced something to a group of amused friends. It suddenly dawned that she was impersonating him. Confirmation came when a friend pointed to him on the upper deck, and when he waved back, the little actress put her hands over her mouth in embarrassment. He carried on watching until the bus rumbled away, at which point one of the other girls turned around and, with a brief grimace, gave him the finger. He couldn’t help but laugh.

  Two minutes later the bus arrived once again at the stop beside HDG+.

  Gillard was the only person on the upper deck. As the vehicle came to a halt, he stood at the quarter-light window, pulled in the flap and aimed a mock gun of fingers towards the architects’ office no more than 15 feet away. No one could see him do this, and the barrel of any weapon would only have protruded a few inches from the bus window. Despite Hodges’ misgivings, this really would have been the perfect place from which to murder Peter Young.

  * * *

  Thanks to the persistent bafflement of Colin Hodges, one of the big questions in the investigation remained: who would want to kill an architect? To find the answer, Gillard caught the train to central London to look at the biggest single piece of work in Peter Young’s career, the new London offices of Chicago-based agricultural traders Crowgill Mattison. Travelling with the detective was HDG+ architect Finlay McMullen, who had worked closely with Young and had agreed to explain the project.

  As they emerged at Southwark Tube station, McMullen pointed out the forest of cranes hard at work converting inspiration into concrete and steel. From this angle it looked like a giant blue-grey turtle squatting above an area of otherwise low-rise buildings. The shell was a shallow dome, still less than half constructed, of pentagonal tiles, while the neck was an open mesh corridor at third-floor level which would ultimately link the building to London Bridge station. ‘It’s a conceptual breakthrough, in several respects,’ McMullen said. ‘First, it straddles two existing Crowgill Mattison client sites in a very busy area of south-east London, adding 150,000 square feet of office space, assembled off-site, which will then be effectively suspended over a major road. The road is shielded by an innovative flexible mesh which has allowed the road closures to be minimized.’

  ‘Did Peter design the whole thing?’

  McMullen laughed. ‘Heavens, no. HDG+ was contracted in for the roof of the main building. The shell, so to speak. It’s the most high-profile aspect, using lightweight tensile framing techniques like those pioneered for the Millennium Dome, but on a structure intended to last hundreds of years.’

  As they approached the construction site, the vision of the whole was lost in a morass of scaffolding, concrete mixers, hard-hatted construction workers and deafening noise. McMullen flashed his lanyard and led him onto a temporary walkway. This crossed over several large trenches to a complex of Portakabins stacked like Lego bricks. Inside the topmost, he was introduced to several senior engineers and the site manager, Len Starkey, who were all fascinated and horrified in equal measure by the murder of one of the architects.

  ‘I’ve come here, really, with one question,’ Gillard said, trying to make himself heard over the sound of a pile driver ramming a tree-trunk sized metal rod into the excavation behind him. ‘I’ve read up about the many controversies surrounding this building: the overseas finance, the planning process, the objections from local residents and the contractual disputes between firms involved in the project. But perhaps you can tell me: is there any reason why a project like this might be connected with the murder of Peter Young?’

  ‘If anyone was going to be murdered, it would probably be me,’ Starkey said. ‘Or someone senior at the client’s. On a practical level, I’m the public face of this project. I’ve been to every planning meeting, I attended the coroner’s inquest over the death of a cyclist who was squashed by one of our quarry trucks. The thing is, Peter was not really the figurehead of this project. He was an important part of it, but it would be odd to go for him as an individual.’

  Gillard nodded. The answer was very much as he expected. ‘Are you aware of any personal animosities arising from his work on this or any other project?’

  Everyone shook their heads. ‘I don’t think Peter ever upset anyone,’ McMullen said. ‘Quite the reverse. He was charming and talented, not a prima donna at all. You might call it something of a rarity in my industry.’

  The detective looked around the room, assessing each face in turn. There was nothing in any of them to inspire further enquiry. He turned and looked out of the window at the site, the cranes soaring above him. On the furthest tower of scaffolding, perhaps 15 storeys high, there was a scarecrow figure, in gr
ey hoody and dark trousers, mounted on the protruding top of one of the scaffolding poles.

  ‘Does anyone have a pair of binoculars?’ Gillard asked.

  A pair was found in the site manager’s desk. ‘What are you looking at?’ Starkey asked.

  Gillard trained the lenses on the mannequin. ‘Who put that up there?’ he asked.

  Starkey didn’t even know what he was referring to until he taken a look himself. ‘Oh, that. It’s just a mascot from some of the men. A bit of good luck for the site, I suppose.’

  ‘Some of the East Europeans do them,’ one engineer offered.

  ‘How many deaths have there been on this site?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘Excluding the cyclist, none,’ Starkey said.

  ‘So it’s worked,’ laughed another engineer.

  ‘Not for Peter Young it hasn’t,’ Gillard said.

  * * *

  On the train back from Waterloo, Gillard asked McMullen a little bit more about Peter Young. ‘I got the impression that he got on well with everybody,’ the architect said. ‘He worked hard, probably longer hours than anyone but Kelvin himself. He would probably have made partner in two or three years.’

  ‘Any office gossip about him?’ Gillard asked

  ‘Well,’ McMullen chuckled. ‘The secretaries and admin women often had a thing about him. He was a bit of a charmer. There was plenty of speculation, but in all honesty I think he was totally faithful to his wife, if that was your question.’

  Gillard nodded, his lips pursed. ‘And what about Karen?’

  ‘Excellent receptionist, great references. A good-looking woman, if that’s not an un-PC thing to say. She had only been with us two weeks, poor thing. Terrible for that to happen to her. I imagine she will go back to South Africa now.’

  ‘Why? You’re not getting rid of her, are you?’

  ‘Quite the contrary. She’s getting rid of us. She resigned yesterday.’

  Suddenly Gillard realized that he had forgotten to ask Michelle Tsu to request that Karen Davies voluntarily surrender her passport.

  Chapter 10

  Earlier the same day, 250 miles north

  The aged Land Rover coughed and rumbled into the rough, potholed car park and shuddered to a halt, nose-on to the easterly wind howling in from the North Sea. It wasn’t yet nine in the morning and, as usual on a weekday, Jim Crowthorne had Theddlethorpe National Nature Reserve all to himself. He turned off the radio, leaned forward over the steering wheel and squinted up at the sky. This was the kind of Lincolnshire winter weather he remembered from his childhood in the 1960s, when parts of the county would regularly be cut off by snow.

  There had been a squall of hail earlier, pinging off the windscreen as he drove in. It would probably be like that all day, so he would have to take his chances. He pulled on thick woollen socks and wellington boots, then squeezed himself and his two thick jumpers into an anorak. With his woolly hat pulled well down over his salt-and-pepper hair, and a pair of Zeiss binoculars around his neck, he wrestled open the door into the buffeting gale.

  Crowthorne reckoned he was the luckiest man in the world. He was paid, modestly, to look after this stretch of England’s east coast. It was certainly one of the most obscure places in the British Isles, yet in its way also one of the grandest. The nature reserve covered an enormous area of tidal flats, salt marsh and dunes 20 miles north of the popular seaside resort of Skegness, and maybe 10 miles south of the depressed former fishing port of Grimsby. To walk right out at low tide took a leisurely 20 minutes. That’s a long way with a bucket and spade, so even on a sunny August bank holiday you would be lucky to see half a dozen people on the five square miles that it occupied. On a bitterly cold January morning like this you might see no one at all, just the occasional RAF jet shrieking through the clouds towards the bombing ranges a few miles north.

  The beach and the extensive grassy dunes behind hosted a variety of rare habitats, and boasted amphibians, damselflies and a handful of varieties of orchids. At this time of year there was the occasional dead seal washed up, quite often a young pup that had been born just a month or two before at the Donna Nook breeding grounds a few miles away. The reason Crowthorne was here this morning was because someone had phoned in a report of a dead seal close to the waterline.

  He strode along the path which ran between thick banks of spiky bushes into the dunes, and climbed onto one which gave a good view of the beach. The sky was painted in gunmetal grey and pewter, the cloud edges limned in pastel shades of mauve, lavender and tangerine. The tide was out and the beach was at its biggest, three quarters of a mile. He lifted the binoculars to his eyes and scanned the horizon. Sure enough, there was something there about two thirds of the way towards the water. The dark, hummocked form might have looked like a seal to the naked eye, but magnified by the lenses he could see that this was no animal.

  It was human.

  And it wasn’t moving.

  Crowthorne fingered his mobile phone but decided to make sure before ringing the police. He strode out onto the beach and was hit immediately by the power of the wind; as he marched into its full force, an ankle-high spindrift of fine white sand tore past him in wispy clouds, as if he were tracking across the Antarctic rather than walking on a Lincolnshire beach. The spindrift had already built dart-shaped shadows in the lee of the occasional samphire stem or razor shell fragment which disturbed the relentless horizontal, and crowned even washed-up seaweed, polystyrene and cans in sculptural invention.

  It took a good ten minutes to reach the body, which was partially buried. It was stuck in a sandbar, a semi-permanent feature close to low tide, and behind which a shallow but broad creek drained the beach. Protruding from the sand were a pair of hands bound together with plastic ties. The wind had partially covered them but for the curling fingers, from which were sculpted a series of elongated sand shadows. He could see no footprints nearby except his own, which to an amateur sleuth like himself indicated that the body had been dumped before high tide. In a moment of inspiration, and without approaching too closely, he took a series of photographs with his phone. He then rang the police.

  Chapter 11

  The call that Sophie Lund got on her phone on Wednesday evening justified all her paranoia.

  The train from Waterloo hadn’t yet reached Clapham Junction, and in the squeal and grind of the carriage moving across points she almost missed the buzz from her bag. It was Estela, and immediately Sophie knew from the sound of her voice that something was wrong.

  ‘I’d just picked up the children from school,’ the au pair said. ‘Then I was followed all the way back, right through the village, almost to the drive.’

  ‘Was it Geraldine?’

  ‘No. It wasn’t her car, and there was a man driving. I turned off on Tithe Lane, and he followed me.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes, he did. All the way until I turned off at the north gate to go in the back way.’

  ‘Did a child get into that other car at the school?’

  ‘Not that I saw.’

  Sophie could imagine that many parents with kids at the village school might drive past the estate’s front entrance, which was on the busy B-road. But Tithe Lane was hardly used. It was extremely narrow, and served only two farms plus the shared private road which provided back access to the pottery and estate cottages. ‘I suppose it could be somebody at one of the farms.’

  ‘No, Sophie. I don’t think so. There’s something else. He took a photograph on his phone as I was walking out of the playground with the children. Maybe it was not of us, but when he followed me I got nervous.’

  ‘Estela, you did the right thing. With any luck I’ll be home by half past seven. Have you seen any sign of that Hinchcliffe woman’s car?’

  ‘No not today.’

  I wonder where she is, thought Sophie. Something was going to have to be done about her.

  * * *

  Sophie now wished she had asked Zerina to stay longer. The children’s only su
rviving close relative, Aunt Zerina, had stayed with them over Christmas for the second year. Teto – Auntie – as she liked to be called in front of the children, was a bubbly and rotund lady in her 40s who dressed for a bygone era, with a beehive hairdo, sparkly tops, thick skirts to the mid-calf and, God help us, winged spectacles. She had been brought up in the Albanian countryside, but had married and was these days living in Italy. ‘I am from the Accursed Mountains,’ she had giggled when she first came to visit them a year ago.

  ‘That’s not a real place, is it?’ Dag had asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, it’s very real.’ She had brought up a map on her phone to show them. ‘Very tough life, even before the anarchy. Then we moved to fear.’

  ‘Where?’ Sophie had asked. ‘Is that a real place too?’

  ‘F-I-E-R. A big city, gangsters, bandits, trouble.’ She threw up her arms, making her copious jewellery jangle. ‘In Albania, everyone has gun. Bang-bang.’

  But for Teto Zerina, life improved dramatically in 2003. She was in the flush of youth, as she described it, working as a waitress in the northern town of Shkoder when an Italian on holiday began a romance with her. She got married, left her family and moved to Rome. Her husband Leo was a good 20 years older than her, and previously divorced, which her family did not like. ‘But, pfft. Anything is better than staying in Albania,’ she laughed.