The House At Sea’s End

by Elly Griffiths

  ‘I’ve seen this picture before,’ says Nelson. ‘There was a copy in Archie Whitcliffe’s bedroom.’ He looks at Irene. ‘Which was Buster?’

  Judy is betting on the walrus moustache, who looks like a old-style army major, the sort of man who could be described as a ‘real old devil’. But Irene points to a small, insignificant-looking chap at the far right of the picture.

  ‘That’s Buster. Jack looks very like him, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Very,’ says Nelson.

  ‘That’s Edwin Butler next to him, he’d been badly shell-shocked in the first lot. That’s Syd Austin, he had the fish shop in the village. His son was killed at Dunkirk. That’s Donald Drummond, he was the gardener here. That’s Ernst Hoffman, the one with the moustache. He was German by birth but his family lived in Broughton for years. He was interned at the start of the war and sent to the Isle of Man. Buster kicked up such a fuss that he was released. Ernst was a scientist, a very clever one.’

  Stella wasn’t wrong about the old lady’s memory, thinks Judy. She looks back at the photograph. It’s hard to connect these faded figures, like something from a history book, with the stories of life and death. But to Irene the photo isn’t a historical curio, it’s a memento of her husband, of his friends.

  Hugh is unsmiling, as awkward and intense as in his First Communion picture. He looks like the sort of boy who might grow up to do the Telegraph crossword. Archie looks far more cheerful, grinning away as if the whole thing is a game of cowboys and Indians. He looks like his grandson, Judy realises. The same good looks and proud bearing, but where Gerry Whitcliffe seems afraid of showing his true feelings, Archie looks afraid of nothing.

  ‘Mrs Hastings,’ Nelson addresses Irene who is still looking at the photo, smoothing its edges lovingly. ‘Do you remember any talk of a German invasion in 1940?’

  Jack Hastings laughs but Irene says serenely, ‘There was always talk but it never came to anything, did it?’

  ‘Was invasion a big fear in these parts?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Irene, carefully covering the teapot with a knitted cosy. ‘We were sure they would come. Buster was sure. He insisted on nightly patrols. They had a boat too. I think it was Syd’s. They’d go out on the moonless nights, sailing along the coves. Buster thought it would happen on a moonless night.’

  Judy hears Archie’s voice: On moonless nights, the darks we called them, we went out in the boat. What happened on that dark night, nearly seventy years ago?

  ‘He set up defences along the beach,’ Irene was saying. ‘Ernst helped him. He knew all about explosives, you see. “They won’t take us by surprise,” Buster used to say. “They won’t find Broughton undefended.”‘

  ‘What happened to the defences after the war?’ asks Judy.

  ‘I don’t know’, says Irene. ‘Later on, the invasion didn’t seem likely any more. We never spoke about it again.’

  ‘What about you?’ asks Nelson. ‘Were you part of this defence scheme?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ says Irene proudly. ‘I was on the listening post.’

  ‘Listening post?’ repeats Judy. It sounds made-up, almost childish. Stella takes up the story, smiling at her mother-in-law.

  ‘During the war, Detective Sergeant, there was a military listening post at Sheringham, a few miles from here. It was literally a building, a tower really, where people listened for Nazi ships out to sea. It was manned by women. Irene was one of them.’

  Womanned, thinks Judy. She knows better than to say it aloud though.

  ‘What do you mean, they listened for ships?’ asks Nelson.

  ‘Just that. There were German E-boats out at sea. They could listen in on their Morse code. How do you think the code-breakers at Bletchley Park got the codes in the first place? From the listening posts. It was really important war work.’

  ‘The E-boats didn’t use Morse code,’ cuts in Irene. ‘We could hear them talking to each other in German. Where are you, Siegfried? I’m here, Hans.’

  Nelson and Judy exchange glances. Now it seems more like a children’s game than ever. Where are you, Siegfried? Nelson turns to Irene. ‘Did you husband ever discuss with you what you’d do if the invasion actually happened?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ says Irene. ‘My job was to shoot the children and shoot myself. Buster didn’t want us taken prisoner, you see.’

  ‘He was mad,’ says Judy. ‘Buster Hastings was mad.’

  They are sitting in Nelson’s car. Nelson has turned on the engine to demist the windows. Outside it is still raining, the windscreen wipers struggling under the weight of water. Occasionally a gust of wind rocks the car.

  ‘Kill the children and kill yourself,’ says Judy. ‘Didn’t some Nazi do that?’

  ‘Frau Goebbels, yes. She killed her six children rather than have them live in a world where Germany had lost the war.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ says Judy. ‘Even if the Germans had invaded, women and children would have been okay. They wouldn’t have come to a crazy little place like this anyhow.’

  ‘But they did come,’ Nelson reminds her. ‘Six Germans arrived and six Germans were killed.’

  ‘Do you think Buster Hastings did it?’

  ‘It’s possible. He certainly seems a determined character.’

  ‘He was mad.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Nelson is thinking of a world where a man would tell his wife to kill their children, rather than have them fall into enemy hands. A world where fishmongers, gardeners and clever scientists were prepared to kill to defend their little piece of land. Desperate times, Stella Hastings had said.

  ‘Do you really think Archie and Hugh were murdered to stop them telling the truth about it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Nelson wearily. ‘I feel like I don’t know anything.’

  But before they are halfway back to the station a message comes through on Judy’s phone. Clough has just come back from the autopsy. Archie Whitcliffe was killed, not by a stroke but by asphyxiation.

  CHAPTER 17

  The noise, thinks Ruth, is indescribable. In fact, it has gone beyond noise and has become simply a white sheet of pain, against which everything else appears in harsh silhouette, like the strobe light that turns Judy’s white shirt into pure migraine. There’s no music as far as she can tell, just thumps and crashes and the occasional ear-splitting screech. Her head has become a mere amplifier for the noise. She can’t think, she can’t feel, she can’t speak. She wonders if she’s about to pass out.

  ‘It’s great isn’t it?’

  A young policewoman, a friend of Judy’s, bobs in front of her. She is dancing wildly, her head thrown back in ecstasy, arms flailing.

  ‘Great,’ yells back Ruth but the girl has danced away again, back into the whirling throng. Ruth looks at her watch. One o’clock. Surely, surely she can go home soon.

  Lights, red and green this time, criss-cross the walls like snakes. Was this what the Inca sacrifice ritual was like, the capacocha? Deafening noise, incomprehensible sounds, adherents dancing in a drug-crazed frenzy, the victim garlanded and clothed in gold (she is wearing her best trousers), the tribal drumming, the sacred knife raised on high, the blessed moment of blackness, of death, of unbeing. The longer Ruth stays in the Zanzibar nightclub, the more she longs to be put out of her misery. Maybe she just needs some mind-altering drugs, but when she reaches for her glass it’s empty. Oh God, this means she has to fight her way to the bar and be ignored by the pierced and tattooed barman (the High Priest). Maybe there’s drink in someone else’s glass. But all the other women in the hen party are drinking lurid cocktails with blue curaçao or advocaat. Ruth is the only one on white wine. Yawning, she reaches under the table for her shoes (they are so uncomfortable that she has taken them off) and sets out on her quest. Maybe after one more drink she can go home.

  The evening started in a wine bar. That was quite pleasant – lots of talk about sex and wedding dresses, lots of plays on the theme of arresting, handcuffs and full body searches, some
talk of software and hardware (Darren is in computers). But at least there had been real wine and Ruth had liked Judy’s colleagues, with the exception of Tanya, whom she finds slightly scary. After the wine bar they had had a meal and things started to blur somewhat. Ruth tried to stay soberish; she doesn’t get out much and she wanted to do justice to her seafood risotto. But the wine kept flowing and soon she was discussing star signs with a policewoman called Mindy (Pisces) and singing along to Mamma Mia. Judy unwrapped some presents, all of which seemed to be furry handcuffs, and after much badinage with the gamely smiling waiters the party moved on to the Zanzibar.

  Here things started to go downhill. As soon as she entered the club with its zebra-striped walls, leopard-spotted chairs and tiger-skin tables, Ruth was struck by a wave of tiredness so acute that she could have lain down and slept on the snakeskin floor. Despite the skull-crunching noise, she had difficulty keeping her eyes open. Judy, on the other hand, who earlier on had confessed to Ruth that she ‘never wanted to get bloody married anyway’, suddenly had a second wind and dragged the others out onto the dance floor where they scandalised the cooler clubbers by dancing round their handbags and demanding Abba songs.

  Tatjana is in the middle of them, her hips, in skin-tight jeans, gyrating like a teenager. ‘Tatjana’s fab,’ pronounced Judy. Ruth, sitting alone at the tiger-skin table, knows that she isn’t fab, that she’s forty, that she has a five-month old baby who’ll be awake in four hours, that her shoes hurt and the waistband of her best trousers is digging into her skin. She’s too old for all this and she’s just remembered that she never liked clubbing anyway

  Should she ring Shona again? She decides against it. She has already rung four times, and the last time Kate had finally gone to sleep and Shona said that she was about to follow. Shona has kindly offered to stay the night (she will sleep in Ruth’s bed and Ruth will have the sofa) so that Ruth and Tatjana can ‘let their hair down’. Ruth’s hair, unpleasantly sticky from Tatjana’s application of hairspray, feels as if, metaphorically, it is in a tight little bun. She doesn’t want to let her hair down and do wild things: she wants to be in bed with her baby beside her and Flint purring on the duvet. Still it was kind of Shona to offer. She had originally asked Clara but she said apologetically that she couldn’t do Saturday. Probably out with Dieter, thinks Ruth, remembering the embracing figures in the snow.

  She seeks out Judy and asks if she wants another drink. Judy appears to be in a trance, her hair across her face, her limbs twitching randomly. Glancing around, Ruth sees that everyone else is in the same state. Except Tatjana, who is dancing abandonedly with an exceptionally handsome black man.

  ‘What?’ says Judy.

  Ruth repeats her question.

  ‘No,’ says Judy vaguely. ‘You’re all right.’

  Ruth approaches Tatjana, who is now draped around the man’s neck. His hands are firmly clenched on her bottom.

  ‘I might go soon,’ says Ruth, trying not to look.

  ‘Go?’ repeats Tatjana, eyes shut.

  ‘Home. Check on Kate.’

  ‘Kate?’

  Ruth gives up. She decides against another drink. Instead, she takes her gold lottery ticket and goes to retrieve her coat. She’ll send Tatjana a text to say that she’s left.

  Outside, it is freezing. There is already frost on the ground and on the nearby parked cars, none of which seem to be taxis. Ruth decides to walk to the station, to see if there are any cabs there. Her feet are blocks of ice in her unaccustomed high heels and she finds it impossible to walk fast. Some passing youths shout at her but she ignores them, head down. She wishes she’d brought a woolly hat, gloves, her trusty wellingtons…

  ‘You want a lift?’

  A car has come to a halt beside her and she looks down at a smiling, toothy face. The car is a dark saloon, slightly battered.

  ‘Are you a taxi?’ she asks.

  ‘Sure. Minicab.’

  For a moment she is tempted to get in beside the sinister smiling man. At least she’d be warm in his car. Before he murders her, that is.

  ‘It’s okay,’ says Ruth, trying to walk faster. ‘I’m meeting someone.’

  The car glides along beside her for a few minutes then, to Ruth’s relief, it veers away. She has reached the reassuring lights of the station. Here, thank God, are other people – a few disconsolate football fans clutching lager bottles, a bemused-looking man with a briefcase and a mother holding a baby. What can she be doing at King’s Lynn station at two in the morning? Ruth tries to give the woman a reassuring mother-to-mother smile but she looks away, clasping the sleeping child against her shoulder. Should Ruth offer them a room for the night?

  The taxi drivers do not want to go as far as the Saltmarsh.

  ‘New Road? That’s miles.’

  ‘No can do, love. It’s out of my zone.’

  Ruth is desperate. She almost considers going back to look for the smiling man in the minicab. But, eventually, someone takes pity on her.

  ‘All right,’ says a fat man in a Ford Cavalier. ‘Sunday rates, mind.’

  It is Sunday, thinks Ruth as the taxi shoots through the deserted streets. In a few hours, people will be getting up, going to church, buying the papers. For the first time in a while, she thinks of her parents. Sunday is the most important day of the week for them; church, elders’ meetings, Bible classes, a roast meal with all the trimmings. She pictures her mother and father walking down Avery Hill Road, dressed in their best clothes, thinking of Salvation. She really must take Kate down to see them soon.

  In a remarkably short time they are on New Road, crossing the marshes, blackness around them, the sea somewhere close, whispering in the dark.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ says the driver. ‘What do you want to live here for? Gives me the creeps.’

  ‘I like it,’ says Ruth. Stop talking, she adds silently, and just get me home.

  ‘Isn’t this the place where they found that little girl? About a year ago?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Rather you than me, love. I’d be scared of the ghoulies and ghosties, living out here.’

  But Ruth isn’t scared of ghosts. She pays the driver his Sunday rates and lets herself into the cottage. Creeping upstairs, she looks at the sleeping Kate. Her little face looks stern and thoughtful through the bars of the cot. Beside her Shona sleeps peacefully, her long hair spread out on Ruth’s pillow. Ruth takes a pile of bedding and heads down to the sitting room. She isn’t scared of ghosts. She is scared of nightclubs, of having to enjoy herself, of something happening to Kate, of waking up one morning and realising that she is in love with Nelson.

  Sighing, she curls up on the sofa, listening to the sea.

  At Sea’s End House, a single light shines from the turret. Like the beam from the deserted lighthouse, it illuminates the black waves as they thunder in towards land. They break against the walls of the house as if demanding entrance, turning the narrow inlet into a torrent, rising and falling as the moon waxes and wanes. Then, as the tide starts to turn, they retreat, sucking the stones from the beach where the six Germans soldiers lay buried, leaving the cliff path wet and gleaming. And leaving a body floating gently in the shallows, its blond hair streaming out in the dark water.

  CHAPTER 18

  Ruth’s first thought is that Kate is crying. Then she realises that the insistent noise is in fact her phone, ringing on the table next to her ear. Typical. The one morning that Kate doesn’t wake at the crack of dawn someone decides to make an early morning phone call. Who the hell can it be?

  ‘It’s me,’ says a brusque voice, though the screen is already flashing ‘Nelson’.

  ‘What is it?’ asks Ruth blurrily. She has just realised that she is on the sofa, that her neck aches and that she has a splitting headache.

  ‘Dieter Eckhart’s dead. Fisherman found his body this morning. Washed up by Sea’s End House.’

  ‘What? ’

  ‘Eckhart’s dead. Cloughie and I are at Broughton now.
’

  ‘What’s the time?

  ‘Nine o’clock. I didn’t think it was much use trying to get Johnson out of bed. Have a good time last night, did you?’

  Nine o’clock! Why hasn’t Kate woken up yet? Ruth is just about to rush upstairs in a panic when she sees Shona descending the stairs, carrying Kate in her arms. Kate looks smug; Shona triumphant.

  Ruth wrenches her attention back to Nelson.

  ‘Was it an accident?’ she asks. ‘Did he drown?’

  Nelson gives a humourless laugh. ‘Pathologist’s here now. Cause of death – a knife wound to the heart. It wasn’t an accident.’

  ‘Does Clara know?’

  ‘Yes. She identified the body.’

  So many thoughts are swirling around in Ruth’s head that she feels sick. Clara, Dieter, a knife wound to the heart, Tatjana, Judy, fisherman found his body this morning. Then Kate holds out her arms and everything else is forgotten.

  Kate coos loudly into the phone.

  ‘Is that Katie?’ Nelson’s voice softens. ‘I’ll call you later.’

  The phone clicks off. Ruth looks at Shona, who is still holding Kate and looking pleased with herself.

  ‘We’ve been up for ages,’ she says. ‘I got Kate dressed and gave her a bottle. We’ve been playing.’

  Of the two, Kate looks the best for the experience. She is bright-eyed and bursting with energy. Shona has, in fact, dressed her in pyjamas and a jumper that is two sizes too big but she is overcoming these sartorial disadvantages with aplomb. She takes Ruth’s phone and bites it, experimentally. Shona, on the other hand, looks pale and bleary-eyed, her hair is unbrushed and her shirt is on inside-out. But she is obviously so pleased with herself for having survived the night and the morning that Ruth feels a rush of affection for her.

  ‘You’ve done brilliantly,’ she says, taking Kate and putting her on the floor where she immediately rolls over on the rug – her favourite trick. ‘Did you hear me come in last night?’

  ‘No. Was it late? Did you have a good time?’