Shadow Sands

by Robert Bryndza

  There was a knock on the back door, and it opened. The roar of the sea below the cliff grew louder, and the wind blew through the kitchen, causing the notes and pictures stuck to the fridge to flap and sway.

  “I saw your light was on,” said Myra. She was in her sixties with wrinkled olive skin and bleached blonde hair that was short and scraped back. She came into the kitchen, closing the door behind her. She slipped off her welly boots and put them on the piece of newspaper Kate kept by the door. “I can see you’re on the iced tea,” she said, taking off her waxed jacket and hanging it over a chair. She was dressed typically Myra-style in old, baggy jeans and a Def Leppard T-shirt. Her big toe was showing through a hole in the fluffy pink sock on her left foot. The dark-blue sock on the right foot was less threadbare.

  “I could murder a Jack and Coke. Really, really murder one,” said Kate.

  “I could double homicide a Newcastle Brown Ale with a shot of Teacher’s,” said Myra, going to the kettle and switching it on. “And I’m holding twenty-six years’ sobriety in my hand.”

  Kate put her head forward on the table. Myra came over and patted her on the back.

  “You know the score. Hunker down. Grit your teeth. Imagine you’re having really great sex,” she said.

  “I hate it.”

  “Really great sex?”

  “No, not that that’s happened for a while. The cravings.”

  “Grit, grit, grit those teeth, love, and grit some more,” she said, rubbing Kate on the back. “I’ll make us a cuppa, and let’s get high on chocolate Hobnobs. Talk to me. What’s caused this?” asked Myra, filling the kettle and then taking down the teapot from the cupboard.

  “It’s that lad who died, Simon . . . The police now think his best friend killed him.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s possible, but it’s a bit too convenient.”

  “Convenient for who?”

  “That’s the big question.”

  12

  When Tristan arrived back at the flat, he heard his sister, Sarah, in the front room talking to her fiancé, Gary. He’d hoped to have the flat to himself and a bit of peace and quiet to think after the meeting with Geraint.

  The hall led into a small living room. Every inch, including the furniture, was crammed with boxes, piled high, of duty-free alcohol.

  Sarah and Gary were sitting at the dining table in the corner, working on the seating plan for their wedding. The TV was on in the background.

  “Hey, Tris. Do you mind if my friend Georgina from work sits at the top table next to you?” asked Sarah, looking up from the plan.

  “That’s cool,” said Tristan. He took his phone and wallet from his pocket and put them in the bowl on the mantelpiece.

  “Hi, how’s it going?” he said to Gary.

  “Can’t grumble. I get to spend the rest of my life with this one,” said Gary, swooping in for a kiss with Sarah. She batted him away, scribbling on the seating plan with a pencil.

  “Right. I’ll pencil in Georgina. Just in case,” she said. Tristan ducked into the small kitchen and grabbed a can of Coke from the fridge.

  “Just in case what?” he said, coming back into the living room.

  “In case, I don’t know, you decide to invite someone,” said Sarah, sitting back, retying her ponytail, and allowing Gary to plant a kiss on her cheek.

  “What about Kate?”

  “I’m not having that woman come as a glorified seat filler,” snapped Sarah.

  “Kate won’t be a glorified seat filler. She’s my boss, and my friend.”

  “Tristan. This wedding is costing twenty-seven fifty, plus VAT, per plate,” said Sarah, tapping her pencil on the seating plan. “We’re being very generous and having a free bar,” she added, indicating the boxes piled up around the room.

  “Kate doesn’t drink,” said Tristan.

  “No, but she’ll pull focus . . . Darren from work is obsessed with true crime books, and people might think you’re her toy boy.”

  “I’m not her toy boy.”

  “I don’t want to spend the whole reception telling people that. I want them to admire me in my dress, which isn’t cheap, either, and it’s not the kind of thing I can wear twice.”

  Gary looked at Tristan and raised his eyebrows awkwardly. He was forty, fifteen years older than Sarah. When Sarah first met Gary, his hair had been going gray, but he now sported dark hair and had taken to wearing a shoe with a slightly thicker heel. Gary was a head shorter than Sarah.

  “I’m going to have a shower,” said Tristan.

  “You’ll need to turn on the immersion heater,” Sarah shouted after him as he went upstairs. Tristan heard Gary murmuring for her to calm down.

  “No, Gary. It’s my wedding, and I’m not going to compromise!”

  When Tristan came back downstairs twenty minutes later, Sarah and Gary had cleared the wedding plan away and were sitting on the sofa watching TV. They looked at him expectantly. Sarah was grinning.

  “What?” said Tristan, squeezing past the boxes to the kitchen to get himself something to eat.

  “Your phone rang when you were in the shower,” said Sarah.

  “Was it Kate?” he asked, hoping she had some more news.

  Sarah’s face dropped briefly.

  “No. It wasn’t Kate. I didn’t recognize the number, so I picked up. I thought it might be something important . . . It was Magdalena.”

  “Oh. Right,” said Tristan, remembering she’d said she’d call.

  “She sounds very Italian.”

  “She is Italian.”

  “She wants to know if you can call her back about having a coffee,” said Sarah, now almost ecstatic with glee.

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “Who is she? And where did you meet? Is it serious? Is she attractive? She sounded attractive, didn’t she, Gary?”

  “I didn’t really hear, cos you were on the phone to her, not me,” said Gary.

  Sarah shot him a look.

  “Trust me, Gary. She sounded attractive, and Tristan is also attractive. I can say that, as his sister, so I’d expect him to attract someone who is equally attractive.”

  Gary grinned.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Well, ergo, you are attractive, so it must make me attractive . . .”

  Sarah ignored him and turned back to Tristan.

  “Tell us about Magdalena.”

  “She’s a professor from work who asked for my number,” said Tristan.

  “A professor! Ring her back,” said Sarah, holding out Tristan’s phone.

  “Can I finish my tea?” he said, annoyed that Sarah was sticking her nose in. He wanted to go and have a quiet coffee with Magdalena and decide how he felt.

  “Speaking as a woman, I don’t like it when men play games. Gary never played games with me, did you, Gary?” Gary opened his mouth to say something, but she was scrolling through Tristan’s phone. “I told her you’d ring back. Here. It’s already ringing.”

  Tristan snatched his phone and ended the call.

  “Jesus! Back off, Sarah.”

  He left the room, slipped on his shoes and grabbed his coat from the hallway, then went out the front door, closing it behind him. He huddled under the porch. It was now cold and dark on the seafront, and the wind was blowing off the sea. He dialed her number, cupping his hand over the phone. Magdalena picked up after a few rings.

  “Hello, thank you for calling back,” she said. “Does your sister always answer your phone so thoroughly?”

  “Sorry about that. I was in the shower,” he said.

  There was a pause. He was about to ask her about the Shadow Sands reservoir when she said, “I know I suggested Starbucks, but would you like to go to the cinema? I’m a real David Lynch fan. They’re showing Eraserhead at the Commodore on Sunday evening.”

  “Yes, that would be great,” said Tristan.

  “Text me your address, and I’ll pi
ck you up at seven thirty,” said Magdalena, and she hung up. He stared at his phone for a moment, feeling unsure. It was now an official date.

  He crossed the road and went down the steps to the seafront. There was something very lonely about being around people who didn’t have to hide their emotions. Sarah and Gary drove him crazy, but he envied the way they didn’t censor themselves. He walked along the dark beach, hearing the waves hit the shingle, enjoying being lost in the darkness, out of the reach of the streetlights along the promenade.

  Just as he reached the other end of the beach, his phone rang, making him jump. It was Kate.

  “Tris, are you at home?” she said.

  “No. Why?”

  “The local ITV News has just started. They’re trailing a headline about Geraint being arrested for the murder of Simon Kendal.”

  Tristan stayed on the phone and hurried to the greasy spoon café at the end of the seafront, where they always had the TV on. The café was almost empty. He ordered a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich and asked the waiter to change the channel to ITV News.

  He watched as footage was played of Geraint being taken, handcuffed, out of a police car and into Exeter police station. They showed a picture of Simon Kendal at one of his swimming competitions.

  “Police have arrested twenty-year-old Geraint Jones in connection with Simon Kendal’s murder and have seized property which they believe is connected to his murder.” At this point the officers were shown emerging from the front door of a block of flats with camping gear, and there was a lingering close-up of tent pegs wrapped in a clear plastic evidence bag. “And they have recovered a jacket which they believe contains a trace of the victim’s blood. Simon Kendal and Geraint Jones were camping at the Shadow Sands campsite on the night of August twenty-seventh, when Simon Kendal went missing. His body was later found in the Shadow Sands reservoir.”

  The report showed some stock footage of the empty campsite and the reservoir from the point of view of the power plant. The news concluded with a reporter outside Exeter police station, reading out a number the public could call to give information.

  “They pulled that together quickly,” said Tristan.

  “Yes, they did,” said Kate on the other end of the phone. “Whoever arrested him wanted to put lots of info out into the public domain.”

  “It looks pretty damning,” said Tristan. His bacon sandwich arrived, but suddenly he didn’t feel hungry. “Tent pegs wrapped in plastic and paraded past the TV camera. Do you think they’ve got his coat with Simon’s blood on the sleeve?”

  “We should assume so if the police briefed the media about a blood sample on Geraint’s clothing,” said Kate.

  “How does it work with the police? I thought they had to keep details of a case confidential.”

  “This is a managed leak. The police are using the press to set the narrative.”

  “Do murder cases need a narrative? I thought it was about facts,” said Tristan.

  “It should be, but there’s something odd going on. They quickly ruled Simon’s death an accident, and when I got Alan Hexham to look over the postmortem report and he saw something fishy, things changed, and it’s in the press as a murder investigation . . . They made sure the news camera got pictures of the tent pegs, the potential murder weapon. I’m sure they’re hoping that someone as poor as Geraint won’t be able to afford decent legal representation . . .”

  “If the tent pegs have been sitting in Geraint’s flat, wrapped up in plastic . . .”

  “Then any forensic material would have been preserved, unless they’ve been cleaned,” said Kate.

  “I’m sure Lyn will be happy. They’ve changed the cause of death from accidental to homicide, I presume. That’s what she wanted,” said Tristan.

  “I know. But I don’t want us to take her money. I don’t think anything has been solved. It’s just opened up more questions,” said Kate.

  After Tristan ended the call, he stared at his face reflected in the window of the café. He thought of how lucky he was in comparison to Geraint. It put his problems into perspective. What would it be like to be suspected of murder?

  It made him shudder.

  13

  On Sunday morning Kate got up early, pulled on her swimming costume, and left the house through the kitchen door, working her way down the cliff for her early-morning swim. It was a crisp morning, and the sun glinted golden off a bank of low clouds, scattering diamonds across the water.

  She’d taken up sea swimming after reading that it could combat depression. It had taken courage to keep swimming all year round, but the cold water was addictive. The positive feeling when she emerged after a swim stayed with her most of the day.

  She waded into the rolling surf and dove headfirst into a breaking wave. The cold water woke her up, and she swam out for a few minutes, then stopped and floated on the surface, enjoying the rolling motion of the waves and feeling her hair zing at the roots as it shifted and fanned out in the water. With her ears submerged, she listened to the strange clicks and noises under the water, the soft echo of the pull of the surf on the rocks.

  Kate felt such freedom in the sea, and it made her think of Simon Kendal. When had he first started swimming? Had he felt this same freedom? The joy of just being in the water on his own terms, to swim, to stop and float? Geraint had told them that Simon grew to hate his early-morning training sessions and the feeling of being trapped in the pool—what did he call it?—a concrete hole full of chlorine.

  Kate had never heard of a swimming pool framed in that way by an athlete. She felt disturbed by the case—not only Simon’s death but Geraint being the prime suspect. He’d demonstrated such fondness and brotherly love for Simon. What would Geraint gain from killing him? Violence manifested itself in many ways. When violence came with an uncontrolled flash of rage, it was messy and unplanned. Like Geraint’s fights in pubs and bars, when he was defending himself. If Simon’s body had been found stabbed repeatedly at the campsite, or dumped in the woods, Kate would have been more inclined to believe Geraint was the perpetrator. But how had Simon ended up in the middle of the water, so far from the campsite? If Geraint had stabbed him with a tent peg, where was the trail of blood to the water? There wasn’t a clear path from the campsite to the water; it was blocked by a high fence topped with razor wire. How had Simon climbed the fence with a stab wound, and why didn’t he have the cuts and lacerations associated with razor wire?

  When Kate came back up to the house, her phone was ringing, and she hurried to pick it up, still dressed in her towel. It was Lyn Kendal.

  “Kate. Thank you,” she said excitedly. “I didn’t expect a result so quickly. I’m really impressed.”

  “They’ve arrested Geraint. They have ninety-six hours to formally charge him,” said Kate.

  “They’ve charged him. I just heard.”

  “Did the police call you?”

  “Yeah. A policeman, Henry Ko, phoned me up . . . Did you know that bastard Geraint is on probation for attacking a bloke in a club?” Kate perched on the edge of the sofa, still wrapped in her towel. She felt her heart plummet in her chest. Lyn went on. “It was an unprovoked attack. This bloke had started seeing Geraint’s ex-girlfriend. Did you know?”

  “No.”

  “Nor did I . . . Simon never said anything. Who knows what Geraint is capable of? It always worried me that Simon could get involved . . . with the wrong sort.” Lyn started to sob. Kate tried to pull her thoughts together.

  “Lyn. There’s so much of this case that doesn’t add up.”

  “Henry said that you raised some kind of issue about Simon’s postmortem, and that’s what led them to the new evidence, the, er, the tent peg being a murder weapon . . .” She started to cry again.

  “Yes. Did you tell Henry Ko that you’d asked me to look into the case?”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “Did Henry Ko give you any other information? Have they been able to prove a tent peg is the murder weapon?”


  “He said they’re DNA testing all the camping gear they seized . . . I’m just relieved that the police are now doing their bloody job. I wanted to phone and thank you,” she said between sobs. “Can we talk again in a few days? This is all a lot to take in. I need some time.”

  “Yes. Of course,” said Kate. She sat for a few moments after Lyn ended the call.

  Alan Hexham must have spoken to Henry about Kate looking into Simon’s death. Alan was a straight-down-the-line guy. He’d offered help to Kate in the past, but his ultimate loyalties were to his job and to the authorities. Kate suspected she’d soon get a call from Henry Ko. The police didn’t like it when private investigators sniffed around.

  She looked out the window. A low bank of clouds now obscured the sun, and a layer of mist was forming above the sea.

  Kate shivered. The cold had seeped into her bones. She went upstairs and took a long, hot shower.

  14

  Magdalena Rossi wheeled her yellow Vespa motor scooter through the cramped tiled hallway of the flat she shared with two postgraduate students, out the front door, and onto the road.

  Her flat was perched on a quiet street high above the seafront. Her bright-red coat, blue jeans, and green patent leather walking boots were a splash of color against the gray pebble-dashed houses. Magdalena pulled on her crash helmet with mirrored visor and swung her leg over the seat, pushing off with her foot. She let the Vespa freewheel down the steep hill toward the seafront, enjoying the sensation of speed.

  At the bottom, she leaned into the curve as the road turned sharply to the right onto the promenade. Halfway along the beach, by the boarded-up ice cream hut, she stopped to kick-start the engine. She didn’t see any sign of Tristan as she sped past his flat. There was a little buzz of excitement in her stomach about their forthcoming date. He was delicious. Very sexy. She’d shown a picture of him to her housemates, Liam and Alissa, and they both agreed.