by Jack Benton
‘Did I give you a key?’
Kim shrugged. ‘It was in the top drawer of your desk.’
‘Oh.’
‘I do wish you’d be more careful, Mr. Hardy,’ Kim said, picking up a kettle, then frowning at the water that burst from the tap with a pop of escaping air. ‘In a certain way I have a fondness for you beyond even my salary. I don’t want to see you dead.’
‘I’ll be all right.’
‘Someone tried to kill you, Mr. Hardy.’
‘There’s a good chance. I can’t be entirely sure. Either way, I appreciate the concern.’
‘Have the police caught who did it yet? I saw Max Carson’s death on the news and it was reported as a suicide. Have they updated their case yet?’
Slim shook his head. ‘I’ve heard nothing. I keep expecting to be pulled in as a suspect, but I have no idea what they’re thinking. All I know is that I’m deeper into this than I’d ever expected to be.’
After making him a cup of coffee and producing a casserole in a glass dish she had made before picking him up, Kim left. Alone again, Slim dumped an extra spoonful of instant into his coffee, microwaved it, and sat down at a desk by the window to consider what to do.
He had told Kim he planned to take a couple of weeks to recuperate from his injuries, but he had known when he said it that it was only an excuse to keep his schedule clear. She would be appalled at his plan, but the case of Max Carson and now Irene Long had caught him like an angler’s hook, and there was no chance of it letting him go. Part of it was genuine interest, but there was definitely another part which had been left angered by the possible attack that had nearly left him dead. He had his suspicions, of course, but nothing concrete, nothing he could prove.
An hour later he arrived at the local bus station, limping a little on his bad ankle having left the crutch behind, a bag containing clean clothes and toiletries over his shoulder.
After a change in Exeter, he was back in the Dartmouth area just before nightfall. This time he stayed well clear of the main town, taking a room in a Travelodge on a fork off the main road, sandwiched between a Sainsbury’s and the park-and-ride car park. He got something to eat in a downstairs restaurant populated by a few traveling businessmen, then went outside to familiarise himself with the local bus stops and timetables.
It was a ten-minute ride into Dartmouth. Slim had let his beard grow out since entering hospital, and now wore a battered wind-cheater, its hood pulled up, over old blue jeans. He got off at a central bus stop in front of the port. The last fishing boats had come in, and the area was quiet. He walked down the harbour side to the old pier where someone had made an attempt on his life. It felt strange to be back, the sling on one arm hidden beneath his jacket a reminder of how close he had come.
As he stood there, the wind ruffling his hair, his nostrils filled with the sour scent of fish entrails, a feeling came over him unlike any he had felt before. He had wondered what had truly brought him back here, when most people might never have dared return.
The longer he considered it, the more clearly he felt that feathery touch of hands on his back, helping him on his way over the edge of the fishing dock, and whoever had pushed him might not have realised at the time, but they had done something no one else ever had.
They had offered him a challenge.
16
Nearly two weeks had passed since the attempt on his life. Of course, the last guests from his tour had long since gone home, the remnants of the dark days of his stay only the two tour guides, Alex and Jane, whom he now watched through binoculars from the cover of the trees on the bank of the River Dart. The first excursion of the week was a general sightseeing trip, the boat setting off a little after nine and first heading out into the deep waters of the estuary, before turning and heading back upriver in the direction of Totnes.
With his jacket’s hood pulled up, he had stood nearby, ostentatiously holding his phone to his ear while Alex made a gruelling twenty-minute welcome speech before the group embarked. After Totnes, they were planning a stop at Dittisham, where Slim could catch up by bus if he felt so inclined, but he had already gathered there was little information to be had.
Another week, another tour party. The trials of the last already dusted away.
Slim shrugged. As the boat went out of sight upriver, he packed up his things and headed back to the town.
Kingswear, directly across the river from Dartmouth, was a picturesque place occupying two sides of a hill jutting out into the river. A regular ferry operated between the two, while a number of small pleasure craft stood moored up in a small marina. Known as Dartmouth Harbour, several dozen other craft were moored to offshore piers. Slim caught a ferry across the river, then walked along the pier, idly looking at the pleasure boats that ran the gauntlet from Sunday hobby craft to multi-million pound yachts. From here, Dartmouth Castle was visible to the south, straddling a wedge of land near the river mouth.
He found a quiet café on one of Kingswear’s back streets, slid into a booth and pulled a file out of his bag. Arranged in alphabetical order, it was background information on everyone he had recently come into contact with in the Dartmouth area, from Max Carson and Irene Long to fringe players such as WPC Oaks and PC Rogers. He had put both Kim and Don on the case, and the information included everything from press cuttings to print-outs of social media posts, responses and photographs. He was looking for connections, but the vast majority was of no interest whatsoever. Some profiles were less than a page long—Jane Hounslow, the tour rep, for example, had almost no online profile at all. All Kim had found was an old resume posted on a jobseeker’s website in 2012, which listed her hobbies as baking and show-jumping. At the other end of the spectrum was Carson, who, among other things, was overly active on Twitter. From a quick skim through of the twenty-odd pages of printed tweets and replies, however, he liked to comment with no more than a couple of words or an emoji icon.
None of it was particularly useful. Slim concentrated his efforts on Carson and Irene, desperate to find some sort of connection, or even a reference to one, a shared interest in a particular company, for example, or even a particular place. But, despite his best efforts, he found nothing. They were polar opposites. Irene had posted more than two hundred pictures of a dog which—according to one last heartbreaking post—had been hit by a car in June, 2015. Carson, on the other hand, made no mention whatsoever of animals of any kind, and most of the pictures of him were dishevelled distance shots from the tabloid newspapers.
Slim, exasperated, ordered a fourth coffee, along with a cake which resembled a lump of sugar, since lunchtime was approaching. As he waited for the barista to pour his coffee, he looked over a rack of local business cards beside the counter.
Most were for tourist events and boat tours, but one was for an upcoming art exhibition in Totnes, showcasing local artists. Slim looked down a list of attending artists and saw a familiar name.
Alan McDonald.
Unusually for someone who sold his work in local shops, Slim had been unable to find out much about the man online. He had no website or social media page. The only references to him were in descriptions of a couple of original paintings for sale on eBay, one of which described him as “reclusive”. Having seen the man out on his boat, Slim would hardly agree with the description, but Don had been unable to find a local address. Slim had asked around, but the best information he had received was ‘he lives up in Totnes, but you’ll see him about if you spend much time down the harbour.’
Since his return, Slim had seen nothing of the artist, but it might be about time to track him down.
17
Kingswear Station was the terminus of the Dartmouth Steam Railway, a seven-mile heritage railway which ran from Paignton to Kingswear, catering mostly to tourists. Slim’s departure left at 15.30. He rode it as far as Greenway Halt, a small rural station with no ticket office, where he found himself the only person to get off. From there, he ignored a waiting shuttle bus and
chose to walk instead, taking a pretty, meandering forest road with occasional views of the River Dart through the trees.
Despite being barely wide enough for two cars to pass, Slim began to encounter traffic on the road, moving in both directions. A couple of cyclists gave him a cheerful greeting as they passed, and once he had to wait while a group of American tourists took a photograph outside a low stone building set back from the road. A sign announced it as Greenway Lodge - Holiday Lets, and shortly afterwards he passed a welcome sign to Greenway House - National Trust property.
A short distance after that he came to an information board.
Greenway House
The Summer Residence of Agatha Christie
He couldn’t help but smile at the irony. That he would be so close to a legend of mystery fiction, while trying to solve his own, felt somehow appropriate.
The narrow lane wound away up ahead. Through the trees Slim glimpsed the angles of a white-walled manor house. He walked on a little farther, until he came to a footpath leading down into the trees. He paused, pulling a crumpled map out of his pocket. A cross drawn in biro seemed to match where he was standing. He stepped off the road and followed the trail downhill until it began to arc around, following the curve of the hillside. The Dart was visible through the trees, arcing around a last bend before straightening into Dartmouth Harbour. On the far bank, a car ferry was just pulling away from a pier.
Halfway down to the river, a smaller path broke off the main path. Slim took it, heading downhill. The path took him down through an old boathouse before rising up again. He sensed from his location that he was now on the south side of Greenway House, not far from an inlet the railway line had passed over via a bridge.
The main path continued on up towards the gardens at the rear of the house. Slim took out his map and examined it again, noting the location of the house and the X marked a little to the south. He walked to the nearest tree, then squatted down, feigning to tie a shoelace. As he did so, he glanced around, then closed his eyes and listened for the sound of footfalls. Certain he was alone, he stood up and stepped into the trees.
He was only pushing his way through leafy undergrowth for a minute or so before he emerged on a level section cut out of the hillside. Behind him it ended at a stand of trees that looked younger than the surrounding foliage, but ahead what appeared to be a carved path followed the contours of the hill. A little farther on Slim passed an outcrop of rock which still bore the scars of cutting equipment. Nearby, a dirty, sagging information board announced the path as an abandoned route for the Kingswear branch of the railway line. Slim wiped away accumulated dirt to read over the information, which detailed how in the 1920s, a post-war boom in tourism to the English Riviera had provoked a dramatic redevelopment plan to extend the riverside section of the Paignton-to-Dartmouth line. Several sections had been cut, a bridge half built, and even some gravel and sleepers laid down, but subsidence, fears of erosion, and rising costs had caused the plan’s abandonment. As a way to cut losses, the train operator had sold a half-mile stretch of the track bordering Greenway to its owners at the time. When later, in 1938, Agatha Christie bought the estate, she had left the section of abandoned railway untouched.
Since taking over the property, the National Trust had blocked access to the section from the gardens. Slim was some way past Greenway now, which was above and behind him. The hillside curved around behind the house, then the trees dropped away as he approached the inlet river valley he had seen from the train. A line of police tape, appearing starkly out of place, hung between two trees, directly crossing the trail. Slim looked down, picked a path that wouldn’t leave any boot prints, then circled around it, emerging from the trees on the other side.
A narrow valley stretched away to his left, cut by a river which spread into a marshy inlet below. The rusting iron frame of half a railway bridge stretched partway out across the boggy, reed-clogged water.
Slim took a deep breath, then walked out to the end and peered down.
The end section of the unfinished bridge, either collapsed under natural causes or destroyed for some reason, lay below, rusting metal bones of a giant decayed robot, part submerged, part overgrown. Little eddies flowed between pools where it had caused the river to back up, and the branches of a few gnarly trees bent and twisted through the metal slats.
Slim leaned out, looking straight down. Thirty feet, the police had said. It was enough to kill a man if you went headfirst and hit the metal rather than the sludge in between, but you could easily get trapped among the twisted metal and drown. It was clear where Carson had landed, because a section of the undergrowth had been cleared, exposing bare metal and boggy mud.
Slim sat down on the ground. Gravel covered the bridge’s surface, dirt packed into a metal frame below. He looked back at the trees, noting the distance and the length of open space. A few thoughts came to mind he would write down later. First, how far it was back to the tree cover—a hundred feet at least. Second, how remote the location. It seemed inconceivable that Carson had found his way here by accident. Had he taken a tour of Greenway he might have been aware of it, but there had been none on the early days of their itinerary and Carson hadn’t come across as the National Trust type.
Secondly, that in the grey of pre-dawn, when Carson was estimated to have died, it would have been hard to surprise someone standing at the end of the severed section of bridge. Of course it was possible had Carson been intoxicated, but more likely someone had brought him here and thrown him over the edge.
Slim took a deep breath. He wondered what the police had thought as they stood here. Greenway was farther up the hill, invisible through the trees, and the small hamlet on the opposite riverbank was mostly out of sight around the bend. Only boats on the water that night could have seen him, or—
Slim paused. A tickle of irrational fear ran down his back. An old cottage stood back among the trees farther inland from the bridge, barely visible behind the screen of foliage that had grown up around it. The closer Slim looked, the more he realised it was tumbledown, its windows shattered or gone, its front door torn off and discarded. Branches threaded through holes gouged in the wooden walls.
Yet it looked familiar from somewhere. He retraced his steps back along the bridge and waded into the undergrowth that covered the hill right down to the waterside. There was no path here, no sign that the building had ever been accessible from this side. Too nervous to approach it directly, he circled around it like a cat assessing its prey.
It was larger than he had first thought. Rotting wooden outhouses stood to one side, while the cottage itself had a second floor hidden by overhanging tree branches. Glassless windows watched him as he clambered through the bushes.
He was staring at the dark, doorless space which led inside when the ground gave way beneath his foot. He fell, brambles scratching through his jacket, a nettle stinging as it encircled his wrist. He was nearer to the water’s edge than he had realised. His foot had broken through the rotted remains of a jetty now buried in weeds and scrub.
He stood up and turned around, trying to imagine what it had been like before the collapsed bridge had created a makeshift dam and allowed the inlet to fill with silt and become marshland. With views downriver in the direction of the English Channel, it would have been charming, beautiful even. With the trees cut back, the views from the cottage’s upper floor would have been even more impressive. Slim turned back to look again, in time to catch movement in one of the upper windows. A dose of freezing terror rushed through him and he caught a momentary glimpse of an old woman standing there, leaning against the window frame, the fingers of one hand visible as they curled around the wall. Even after he realised it was only a shred of ancient curtain blowing in the breeze, the fear refused to abate until he turned away and slowly began to make his way back to the old train line.
18
From a local library, Slim checked out what non-fiction books on Agatha Christie and the history of the Gre
enway estate he could find, and retreated to the café in Kingswear to go over them. Not being much of a reader, he found them a hard slog, but passing off the job to Kim would reveal his intentions. He was officially on sick leave, he reminded himself. One book, however, had a glossary at the back which made references to Greenway easy to find. The few brief mentions had little substance though, stating merely that it had been a holiday home for the Christie family and that Agatha had been happy there. He found no mention of the tumbledown cottage.
Frustrated, he caught the ferry across to Dartmouth, where he spent an hour browsing tourist shops, picking up another couple of local history pamphlets. Returning by bus to his hotel, he read them over dinner, but again found little of substance. The only mention of the abandoned section of railway said just that: it had been abandoned due to fears of erosion and rising costs. There was no mention of the bridge, the house, or any connection to Greenway. Slim tossed the books aside. It was possible he had got everything wrong, and that there was no connection between the deaths of Carson and Irene Long, that both had been elaborate but undisputed suicides. The bridge was a collapsed bridge, the house an old house, the connection to the former home of a famous mystery writer pure coincidence.
Unable to sleep, he sat at the room’s desk and began poring over the information Donald Lane had sent him, but found nothing of interest. No connections, nothing, just a list of isolated individuals who had nothing to do with each other.
He shook his head. Perhaps he was going mad. Perhaps there really was nothing to find and he was chasing ghosts.
Ghosts.
The word floated around his head like an embodiment of its meaning. No doubt Max Carson and Irene Long had been haunted in their separate ways, but the longer he considered it, the more real the hands that had tried to push him over the pier’s edge had been.