The Body in the Marsh

by Nick Louth

  ‘Ten to five, just gone. Sorry.’ She felt rather than saw his smile.

  ‘God. I’m not on until eleven.’ She blew a sigh.

  ‘Don’t worry. You can stay as long as you like. Let yourself out,’ he said. ‘There are some croissants, or there’s cereal. Skimmed or semi-skimmed milk. I defrosted a wholemeal loaf in case you wanted toast. There’s a tenner for a taxi.’ He put the cash on the bedside table.

  She murmured an acknowledgement as she felt the hand withdraw, and the other one that had been caressing her thigh slide away. The cash, particularly, made her feel cheap, though that obviously wasn’t his intention. But it still felt transactional, as if she had given him something in exchange for the favours he had done her, on the mountain and dealing with Gary. Through sleepy eyes she watched Craig ease out of bed. In the silhouette of the bathroom light, the well-muscled back and tight bum drew her eye. She wondered whether it was the rock climbing or the cycling that kept him in such good shape. She’d not been idle in the days since they’d met. She’d made her own inquiries, from a friend who worked at Surrey Police HQ. Craig was an enigma, much-fancied, known to have had the odd fling. But who his long-term girlfriends were, nobody knew. All this had excited her and troubled her in equal measure.

  What had happened last night she had wanted to happen. At one level the sex was great. Craig had extraordinary self-control; each crest of pleasure was wonderful. But it seemed somehow less than personal, like her father’s pride in tickling a tricky carburettor into life on his old Triumph motorcycle. She craved passion for her, even if it were amateurishly delivered, rather than this detached focus on performance.

  An hour after Craig’s departure, Sam was padding around his flat eating toast, wearing the same white shirt she had enthusiastically torn from his back last night. A naughty part of her was dying to delve into drawers and cupboards, to find out if the cool detective chief inspector had any past. She excused her own curiosity. There was little to see otherwise. He clearly lived alone now, five years after the brief marriage. Apart from the large bedroom where they had slept, the flat had a tidy, somewhat understocked kitchen; a spare bedroom full of neatly arranged mountaineering gear, with an expensive lightweight bike hanging on the wall. There were no family photographs anywhere, though she found a wedding picture in a drawer of a younger Craig with a dark-haired woman. Neither of them looked as happy as you should on your wedding day. Maybe they already knew it was doomed even before they got hitched. It’s amazing how many people do, but are trapped in marital momentum.

  She carefully slid back the picture, closed the drawer and turned to the few shelves of heavyweight books: Shakespeare, Dickens, John Donne, Robert Graves. Gillard the intellectual: this was something that nobody knew about. She flicked through the volumes. They were mostly old cheap paperbacks, bar one. This was the hardback edition of the selected letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, in a dust protector. She picked it up, and inside on the flyleaf saw a dedication, written in fountain pen and dated 18 September 1986.

  Dearest Craig,

  As the great man said: We need in love to practise only the act of letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it. When I go to Cambridge next week, I will slip the moorings of your love. But one day, who knows, I may seek out your harbour. In the meantime, take this, my favourite book. Keep it close and look to the bold, blue horizon. There are many fine ships there, seeking havens as sheltered and welcoming as yours.

  Farewell.

  L. xx

  Sam stared in amazement, before guilt made her slip the book back. This couldn’t be his wife, it was far too old. She walked away, then found herself pacing backwards and forwards across the lounge. A decision made, she returned to the shelf, slid out the book and took it into the kitchen. She grabbed a sheet of kitchen roll, dabbed some diluted washing-up liquid on it and then wiped the plastic dust protector. No fingerprints now. With a tea towel she then picked it up and returned it carefully to its slot, as if it were radioactive. Craig was a detective, after all, by reputation a very good one, and she had committed a crime. She had slipped between sheaves of precious memory and burgled his heart.

  * * *

  Six thirty on a grey and windy Thursday morning found Gillard on the A23 heading out of London towards Brighton and the south coast. The car ate up the miles as he turned off onto the anticlockwise carriageway of the M25, the truck traffic already heavy on the inside lane and the early commuters yawning their way to work. He thought about the pretty woman probably still snoozing in his bed. It made him smile. He jabbed through the radio stations and settled for some retro 1980s hits as he headed east towards the M20. Berlin’s ‘Take My Breath Away’, Simply Red’s ‘Holding Back the Years’, Chris de Burgh and ‘Lady in Red’. Older memories washed over the new.

  He almost overshot the M20 junction and had to cross the between-lane hatching, an offence. That wouldn’t do. Having examined the map, Gillard was surprised to be reminded how far away Dungeness really was. The elbow of Kent stuck out east below London for 60 miles, looking to dig Europe in the ribs. Hanging beneath it, between Hastings and Folkestone, was a little fin of marsh and shingle sticking out south into the English Channel. At its furthest point, Dungeness.

  At Ashford, Gillard turned off the motorway and headed down into Romney Marsh, a densely hedged and pastoral land of sheep and pretty villages. Gradually the dirty white chalk hills toward Hastings came into view on his right and the landscape became more open, dotted with wind farms and pylons. After the small towns of New Romney and Lydd the grey boxy bulk of Dungeness ‘B’ nuclear power station rose in the distance.

  It was 30 years since his previous and only trip down here, with Liz, a five-foot-three-inch bundle of affection, tucked behind him on the Kawasaki. Every time he’d accelerated hard, he had felt her arms tighten around his waist and the lower edge of the visor on her helmet dig into his back. As he lowered the bike into sharp corners he had relished her little squeals of fear and excitement. The anticipation had been almost unbearable. She had promised to make love with him, but only if they had a proper bed and no chance of interruption. For weeks he’d been unable to think of a way to arrange it. Craig knew that her parents wouldn’t let her stay away overnight, not even with close friends like Kathy. Then one night in the pub, she had waved the key to Great Wickings at him. ‘But we have to be there and back in a day,’ she teased. ‘Can your motorbike manage that?’ Craig just grinned. He would have pushed the bike to Dungeness if that was what was required.

  The Ford swept past the gravelly wetlands, a huge expanse of Romney Marsh famous for its birdlife, and took a right turn into the village of Dungeness. Great Wickings, as he well remembered, was a sprawling single-storey wooden house, more like a fishing shack on the coast of Newfoundland or Labrador than a holiday cottage in the Garden of England. There had originally been an external staircase to a dormer room in the roof, which had been used for drying fishing nets but had been turned into bedrooms by Liz’s father. The sky-blue painted door and window frames were as he remembered, but the front garden which he recalled being full of forget-me-nots and wallflowers was now going native. Rosebay willowherb and numerous long-stalked weeds whose names he didn’t know had spread across the finer shingles and the shallow, gravelly soil. A police patrol car sat outside the property, and a single strand of police tape stretched across the door. He got out of the Ford and walked up to the patrol car. An officer in high-vis sat in a reclined seat with the radio on low, his arms folded across his chest. Asleep.

  Gillard rapped on the window with his phone, and the officer jerked. He looked up, slid the window down and scrutinized the ID card that Gillard held in his face.

  ‘Apologies, sir,’ the PC said.

  ‘Any visitors?’ Gillard asked, looking back at the house.

  ‘No, sir. A few locals have popped past, but there’s nothing I can tell them.’

  ‘Okay. I’m going in to take a quick look myself
. I’ve got the full Noddy suit, so you won’t have to worry about contamination. I believe my office has contacted your CSI chief to tell them.’

  ‘Righto.’

  Gillard returned to the Ford, opened the boot, and from a plastic bag slipped on a crackly white Tyvek overall, plastic overshoes and blue latex gloves. He slipped a compact camera into his pocket. He walked over to the drive, which was of very coarse beach-type shingle, leading up to a car port which adjoined the house’s left-hand side. He walked up carefully, and noticed signs of disturbance among the stones where smaller, damper shingle from underneath had been uncovered. He walked into the car port, which was a concrete slab just big enough for a typical saloon car. There were no recent signs of oil spillage on the concrete, but there were some vague tyre marks of indeterminate age.

  Gillard took Oliver’s key from his pocket. It was an old and rather simple iron mortise key, somewhat corroded in the shank, with a paper label dangling from it on a piece of string. It wouldn’t fit the front door; he’d already seen there was a more modern Yale lock on that. He tried the door that faced the car port. The key fitted, turned, and he was in. He was immediately hit by the bottled-gas cooking smell that reminded him of caravan holidays in his youth, and of a rather special day here with Liz in 1986.

  * * *

  They had arrived at Great Wickings one Tuesday in September at half past nine, and Craig had almost leapt on her the moment she had opened the front door. She, the more experienced, made him wait, and had slowly undressed and caressed him. Only then did she show him by guiding his virgin hands how to gently and unhurriedly arouse her. His first view of her naked body straddling him, his hands on the hard little nipples on her apple-sized breasts, his first experience of the grasping, sweet joy of entry had remained with him for ever. But there was more. He remembered still the green whorl patterns of the loose-weave curtains of her parents’ bedroom, the insanely squeaky bed, the curling roses on the wallpaper he stared at as he surrendered to the inevitability of post-coital sleep, and the stupid little porcelain dog figures which stared down at him from the shelf. He lost himself in five or six hours of endless pleasure in Liz’s embrace, her heat, her delightful energy. And then, while it was still light and with the rain just beginning to sweep across the shingles, she nudged him awake. They had to return. The bittersweet memory – of a chilly journey back, of a perfect day that somehow he knew would never be repeated – ate into his heart even more than the cold and the rain.

  * * *

  As Gillard trod carefully further into the house he scented something else – an unsavoury odour, a combination of bad drains and rancid meat.

  He stepped into the storage room. There was a chest freezer there. He lifted the lid. The smell didn’t come from there. It was barely a quarter full, mainly of branded frozen veg, and items wrapped in silver foil. It looked like a normal collection of household food, something for CSI to investigate.

  The corridor behind the storage area took him through to a dining room, in which there was a big La-Z-Boy-type recliner. To the left was an old-fashioned looking kitchen with side-by-side butler sinks designed for doing laundry. The taps had the old-fashioned rubber nozzles on he hadn’t seen for decades. The kitchen windows gave out onto the sun lounge. Nothing seemed out of place. He opened the refrigerator, an old-fashioned waist-high job with an open icebox. There was a bottle of white wine with a vacuum stopper in it, and a couple of cans of beer. Next to it was a pantry, its shelves still lined with newspapers. There was no fresh food. Strange, if Liz had been down here for a painting weekend.

  He went up the two steps into the lounge and turned on the light. The room seemed clean and tidy. He could no longer detect the bad smell that had assailed him. He took the staircase and peered into the two upstairs dormer rooms. The rose wallpaper was still there, but the curtains were different. He pressed the modern bed. Not a squeak. Not really a surprise after 30 years. Having satisfied himself there were no bodies in any of the rooms he made his way downstairs, took a quick glance into the kitchen, and then let himself out the way he’d come in. At the back of the house, the plot just ran away to the distance where marshes and reeds began. In the far distance were old fishing boats, up on repair frames, abandoned long ago to the rain, the salt air and the wind. This was the strange thing about Dungeness. There were a couple of rough roads, but few fences or boundary marks, and the hundred or so homes, fishing sheds, abandoned boats and shipping containers that were randomly scattered across the shingle looked like they had been washed ashore by some giant tsunami. The only mark of human planning was the narrow-gauge railway whose track ran along behind the shoreline and ended with a loop just by the power station.

  Craig turned his gaze back to the immediate area. At what looked to be the end of the plot, marked by a line of scraggly bushes, were a couple of wooden sheds, side by side and weathered to the shade of parchment. In front of them was a blackened and dented oil drum in which fires had been lit. It still smelled of old bonfires, or even barbecues. He’d leave that one for the Kent CSI boys. He peered into the sheds through mildewed windows, but could see nothing more than a few old tools. Gillard peered down the hand-width gap between the two sheds and spotted something at the far end, partially hidden under the remains of a toddler’s plastic beach set, its bucket cracked and bleached by the elements. It was a garden spade, the varnish on the wooden shaft still intact, not salt-paled like most of the wood here. He took several pictures, then carefully walked around to the back of the shed, where he could reach it. Lifting it up and away, he saw the blade in the space beneath. At the base of the handle, where the wood fitted into the metal sleeve, was a tiny smear, like a squashed midge, a couple of tiny legs stuck in the air. He knelt down on the unforgiving shingle to take a closer look. He removed a folding magnifying glass from his pocket, popped it out of its sleeve and leaned as close as he could. It confirmed his initial suspicion: there were a couple of folded human-looking hairs in a sticky fleck of blood, trapped in the metal sleeve of the spade. At least one had the root intact, so there could be DNA. He would normally be reluctant to move any evidence before the CSI people arrived, but he didn’t want to leave it at the mercy of the weather until tomorrow, so he took two large evidence bags from his pocket. The first he slid over the handle, where any fingerprints might be recovered, and the second he carefully eased over the blade, then taped it well up the shaft and above the hairs.

  Something unsavoury had happened within the Knight family, he was increasingly certain. He was used to terrible discoveries in lock-up garages, tragedies in cramped, untidy rooms in worn-out council estates, to the twist of the knife in families whose lives were at the best of times a maelstrom of chaos. The strangest thing about this case was not what might have happened but the fact that it had happened to the Knights: a gilded family, the kind of family who never experience horrific events.

  Could there be any innocent explanation for what he had found? Or was this evidence of an ignominious end to Liz’s life, crushed beneath a spade wielded in all probability by her husband? As he looked to the horizon, and the line of cliffs to the west, a gust of wind came. It wasn’t particularly cold, but he shuddered and turned his back on it, his mind as dark as the gathering clouds.

  * * *

  While DCI Gillard was just approaching Dungeness, DS Claire Mulholland was showing Kathy Parkinson into the interview suite at Caterham Police Station. Ms Parkinson was an elegant woman in her mid-40s in a royal blue trouser suit and black court shoes.

  ‘Mrs Knight is still missing, I’m afraid,’ Claire said.

  ‘Oh God. What’s Martin got to say about it?’

  Claire paused, unsure how much to reveal. ‘We spoke to Professor Knight just after he arrived at the holiday home on Tuesday evening. But he’s been avoiding us since then.’

  ‘I just don’t understand it,’ Kathy said. ‘If something had gone wrong between her and Martin, I’d be the first person she’d call. But there’s been
nothing.’

  ‘Perhaps we can go back to the beginning. How long have you known Mrs Knight?’

  ‘Liz and I went to school together from the age of 11. She went up to Cambridge, and I went to Bristol. We spent occasional weekends with each other, when Martin wasn’t around or was busy. I was one of her bridesmaids when she got married in, oh…’

  ‘1991?’ Claire said, looking down at her notes.

  ‘That’s it, yes. We lost contact for a while, and then I got married too, and it was down to cards at Christmas and the odd phone call for a few years. When she first got depression she came to stay with Keith and me at La Porcherie and then—’

  ‘La Porcherie?’

  ‘The pigsty. It’s the holiday home that Keith, my ex-husband, stupidly bought for us to do up in Normandy. It actually used to be a pigsty, and needs masses and masses spending on it. Now he’s gone, and I’m single, I can’t see me ever doing the work to get it up to scratch. I got it in the divorce settlement in exchange for the Merc and caravan, but I’m beginning to think he got the better end of the deal. It’s not even in a saleable condition…’

  Claire cleared her throat to steer the conversation away from the woes of DIY and divorce. ‘What about in recent years?’

  ‘Well, Liz and I ended up living back in the same area. When Martin got the LSE post and left Oxford, Liz managed to persuade him that they should move back near her parents in Old Coulsdon, as they were getting elderly, and I’m not so far away in Warlingham. There was a bit of argy-bargy apparently, but he eventually agreed when they found this beautiful house with a long garden on the edge of the Downs. Martin quite fancied slowing down a bit, getting a chocolate Labrador and going for long rambles on the Downs. But of course he hasn’t. The Home Office consultation and report work started in earnest then, so he’s been nose to the grindstone ever since. And of course Liz was stuck with having to do the garden as well as working as a deputy head and bringing up the kids.’