Bad Sons (Booker & Cash Book 1) (3 page)

I took my tea to the bathroom, cleaned up, changed and headed out the back. I went to each of the little premises that shared the right of way and the immediate high street with my uncle and aunt. They were all nice, friendly and helpful, but no one had seen either of them since the morning before. The lady in the baker’s told me my uncle had dropped in for his usual loaf at his usual time. She also told me he had mentioned my visit. They all seemed surprised and concerned by my story.

I was properly hungry by the time I’d seen out that pointless twenty minutes. I walked the short distance to the Martello Cafe. I was going to eat out of necessity.

I wished I could have been in a better frame of mind. Living in a Muslim country made bacon an indulgence normally out of my price range. And in any case, the bacon available to buy in Turkey didn’t taste like English bacon. That’s not meant to be a compliment. An English breakfast was something I really looked forward to enjoying on my visits. I didn’t feel there was much chance of that now.

The day was another typical seasonal cocktail of compressed greyness and damp air. The wind had dropped and the temperature was up a little. The shop fronts looked drab and appeared to have suffered a harsh, wet, dirty winter war. The kind no one wins. Like all wars, just degrees of losing. No one seemed in a hurry to smarten the place up for the hordes of summer visitors that saw most businesses through the lean winter months. May wasn’t far away and I thought the shopkeepers would need to get their skates on.

In the cafe I got a table to myself, although it was busy. I tried to look like someone with problems; someone you wouldn’t want to share a table with in a village cafe. Given the circumstances, it wasn’t hard to do. And I didn’t want to be recognised and have to recount my story again. Every telling dragged me further down and every reaction was the same: sympathetic understanding but no help.

I ate hungrily, drank a couple of mugs of proper coffee and left unmolested. I decided to walk away from the flat and take a look at the sea. I crossed the road, went another hundred yards and there it was. It had done a full turn since the previous evening because it was back in – a heaving, uninviting, intolerant brown-grey mass. Forbidding. The antithesis of its summer self when it could sometimes manage hues of blue and green to make one wonder why people went abroad.

The sea wall renovations were finished. A plaque to the side of the slipway commemorated and celebrated this fact. The contractors had gone over time and over budget to the chagrin and cost of several local businesses hurt by the trade that had stayed away with the beach being off limits. I looked for the apology. There was none.

It was all concrete and conventional, millions of pounds and maybe millions of tonnes of the grey stuff: practical, ugly, intrusive and on the cheap. I hated it. To my eye, it was an abomination of functionality with all the charm of a wartime installation. An opportunity wasted. A perspective ruined. I wondered what Paul Nash, one of Dymchurch’s more famous temporary resident artists of times past and recorder of many sea wall impressions would have made of it. As a war artist, he might have understood it better.

I leaned on the high smooth concrete coping in the shadow of one of the few remaining Martello towers – a preserved relic of the unrealised fear of Napoleonic invasion. I didn’t dwell on the juxtaposition of old and new. For a while I just stared out in the direction of France, cleaning out my lungs with the salty tang of sea air – and then I spoiled it with a cigarette.

The only sound was the soothing constant motion of the water, bustling in to bully the wall, and then a distant wail of an emergency services siren broke the spell.

I was so deep in thought as I stared out at the horizon I missed the approach of a curious collie. He sniffed around my ankles and I bent to scratch behind his ear. Neither of us seemed to mind the attention. He moved on and his walker strode by: a good-looking tall woman in her thirties. From the look of her legs, she walked that dog a lot. We nodded good morning. She even smiled.

I decided to walk home via the sea wall and then cut down on to the main road by the pub, opposite the village’s little supermarket. I didn’t like the grey wall of concrete adding to the grey of my outlook and my mood, so I dropped down a level through a gap in the wall to the wide expanse of brushed-pebble slabs that served as the first, lower, section of the defence. Now it was just me and the English Channel. That was better.

Dymchurch is a tourist attraction because of its beach. The area is part of a wide bay that curves inland from Folkestone to the east to Dungeness towards the west. Dymchurch is roughly in the middle. Face the sea and look left or right and you can see the land arcing out to these two points like a pair of embracing arms. At low tide there are literally miles and miles of golden sand in either direction. Plenty of room for everyone.

I was walking west. At the furthest visible point along the coast, at the tip of the shingle peninsula where the land sticks its nose out the furthest into the English Channel before it turns back in towards East Sussex, stands Dungeness nuclear power station – a blot on the landscape if ever there was one. But it has it uses. It’s a big employer of local labour, for one. Heading back towards Dymchurch along the coastline there’s nothing much to grab the eye – unless an uninterrupted seafront of holiday bungalows excites you – until it falls upon the old water tower at Littlestone.

A mile up the shoreline, between the water tower and Dymchurch, is the smaller settlement of St Mary’s Bay. As my eyes strayed that way I saw the flashing blue lights of at least two emergency vehicles parked up on the sea wall there. My stomach turned a slow revolution, like the drum of an overloaded washing machine. Something unpleasant had happened; I was certain of that. And I didn’t like it. I didn’t like where my imagination, like a freak salt-water wave toying with a discarded plastic bottle, had picked me up and deposited me.

Instead of turning off and cutting back towards the empty flat, somewhere I didn’t particularly want to be, I let my fears and anxieties lead me by the nose to see what all the fuss was about.

***

4

I hadn’t got halfway before a light drizzle started to fall. The sort that’s wetter than anything else the sky can throw at you. That put smoking off the list of things to calm my senses. By the time I could understand the focus of the activity ahead I could feel my damp clothes against my skin.

There was a margin of sand now: unmarked, ironed flat by the weight and motion of the water.

A police car and an ambulance and, by the time I arrived, a fire engine were cluttering up the promenade. I couldn’t imagine what they needed the latter for. There was nothing could stay alight in that weather.

A man dressed a lot like a policeman stopped me from getting any nearer with a raised palm and a polite sentence. I could see the attention of the professionals was focussed on something in the water by the outfall. I couldn’t make out what it was, but I could guess it wasn’t a missing inflatable beach toy.

‘Is it a body?’

He nodded.

‘Just one?’

He looked at me strangely then.

I told him about my missing relatives.

He thought about it and told me to wait where I was. He turned his back and spoke quietly into his radio.

A real policeman broke away from the group huddled on top of the outfall structure – another squat ugly concrete fixture for Nash to give his attention to – and walked to where we stood.

The policeman nodded at me and tried a tight smile. ‘What’s your name, please, sir?’

I told him.

‘And your aunt and uncle are missing?’

I agreed.

‘Since when?’

I explained what I thought would help him.

‘How old is your aunt?’

‘Late sixties.’

‘If you arrived in Dymchurch after they had gone missing, you wouldn’t know what she was wearing last would you?’

I could see that sounded pretty clever to him and I had to agree with his logic. I was feeling pretty clever too; I noticed he questioned me only about a female so I reasoned that whoever they had discovered it must be one. I told him so. He looked like he might have thought that was pretty clever of me. He didn’t argue with my logic either. We were a pair of clever guys passing the time in the rain at the beach. All we needed were a couple of ice creams.

The emergency teams behind him seemed to have stopped wondering what to do and done something. Someone had gone into the waist high water. It looked like one of the fireman. It would be. Several of them bent to help heave a sodden lifeless form out of the sea and lay it on the wooden planking that topped the outfall. It was done quickly and efficiently but with little dignity for the dead person. Not that they’d be complaining.

From the distance I was being kept at, I couldn’t tell if my worst fears had been realised. My heart said yes and so did my gut, but I like to see things with my own eyes to believe them.

The ambulance team had stepped in and were wasting everyone’s time seeing if there was anything that could be done. They weren’t at it for long. The body was sealed in a zippered rubber bag, heaved by four of them on to a wheeled bed and pushed towards the open back doors of the waiting ambulance. There was no rush.

The policeman made a decision. He called to them to wait and asked me if I would look at the body. I heard myself saying I would. And then I realised I really didn’t want to. I’d never seen a dead body before. I didn’t particularly want to make my first one of my closest relatives. And then I thought if the body wasn’t a woman in her late sixties he wouldn’t have asked. And then I tried to remember the last time I’d heard of a body, any body, being washed up on Dymchurch beach. I couldn’t because in my living memory there hadn’t been one.

I didn’t like the odds on me knowing the deceased and neither did my recently consumed breakfast. I belched quietly behind my hand. I tasted half-digested meat, scrambled eggs and coffee. I felt hot on the inside, but my surface temperature must have been low. I was shaking. My mouth was dry and I thought I might cry. And they hadn’t even opened the bag.

I walked with him to the trolley bed. In the rain and the wind and the chill of the miserable English spring morning the bag was unzipped to show the cadaver’s face and I stood staring down at my aunt. I was numbed. Her eyes were closed. She had always worn make-up whenever I had ever seen her: rouge, lipstick, eyeshadow. She had allowed her hair to grey naturally but always kept it neat and tidy. She had always made an effort.

Now she was a bluish white: ghostly. Her hair lay lank, soaking and plastered to her scalp. Where the make-up hadn’t washed off it had run and smeared. Her lips were thin and her skin was mottled with her immersion in the salt water. Life was clearly extinct, but I still stood there half-expecting her to open her eyes.

‘Is it your aunt, sir?’

I confirmed it was with an economical nod. If I’d tried to speak I think I would have been physically sick.

I was dimly aware of the bag being zipped back up and the trolley bed with my aunt strapped to it being loaded into the ambulance. The professionals started packing away and the man who was dressed like a policeman was encouraging a small cluster of people – drawn to the scene and inclined to form a huddle – to disperse.

The policeman asked if I was all right. I thought I might still puke. I breathed hard in and out a couple of times and he waited. I willed my recently consumed meal to settle down.

‘I think so.’

‘You mentioned an uncle?’

I nodded.

He asked me to wait where I was. He moved away and spoke into his radio. He was back in a couple of minutes. ‘Would you mind coming with us to the police station?’

I didn’t see I had much choice.

***

5

I looked at the clock again. I’d just entered my thirteenth minute of sitting alone in a drab, depressing and foul smelling interview room. I wanted to smoke.

The stench of sick – not mine – was thick, despite the damp stain of detergent that showed where the floor had been recently cleaned.

The whole room needed a jet wash and then a lick of paint.

The door had been left open by the officer who had dumped me there. I idly wondered whether protocol allowed me to be left alone, but it didn’t seem to bother anyone else.

The sounds of men and women going about their duties, the odd loud voice and a couple of laughs, echoed down the lino corridor.

I sat and waited.

The uniforms who’d driven me to the station to help the police with their enquiries were all right. They seemed sensitive enough to my loss and they didn’t bother me with stupid questions. They even let me drop in at home for a quick change of dry clothes.

I identified a pair of rubber-soled shoes squeaking their way purposefully in my direction and then coming to a stop at the doorway. I looked up at the face of a thirty-something woman not in uniform.

Over a crisp-looking white shirt she wore a matching black skirt and jacket. She could have been anything from a hotel receptionist to a CEO. She introduced herself as Detective Constable Cash and treated me to her stock unfriendly smile. She wasn’t tall, wasn’t big, wasn’t ugly. She was all business.