by Oliver Tidy
A miserable black-hearted thought had been hopping from foot to foot in a darkened recess of my mind for a while and I finally invited it to show itself and have it out with me. I suspect I was not the only one who had given it room: what if my uncle was responsible for my aunt’s death in some way? I despised myself for even acknowledging the idea. What if he’d been directly involved and fled? What if he’d just witnessed it helplessly and fled grief-stricken?
Perhaps if my aunt had fallen in, hit her head, got sucked out a few feet by a dirty malicious wave and he had gone in after her and lost his footing and flailed and tried to reach her and waded and gone down again and got a lungful and had a heart-attack... I decided to stop that stupid stuff and make myself busy with something. I’d need to eat later and there wasn’t much milk left. I shrugged on my jacket and walked to the mini-supermarket opposite The Ocean.
*
Walking back towards home fifteen minutes later I noticed a Luton van parked outside the shop and a man with his hands cupped at the window. I went to speak with him.
‘Help you?’
‘You the owner?’
I shook my head. ‘But I’m staying here with them.’
His face brightened. ‘I’ve been banging for ten minutes. Where is everyone? I’ve got some packing stuff for you.’
I told him to wait and I’d go around the back, get into the shop, open up and take delivery. That seemed about the only thing I could do.
*
When he’d left and I’d locked up the front again I called Detective Cash.
She answered neutrally. She didn’t have my number in her phone. I reminded her who I was and said the boxes had just arrived – flat packed with some other packing material. She didn’t ask for it, but I gave her the name and number of the suppliers. I wanted her to check me out with them. I wanted her to know for herself they’d been ordered a while ago.
‘The pathologist’s report on your aunt’s death has been done. Do you want to hear the details?’
‘That was quick wasn’t it?’
‘Maybe they just weren’t busy. It happens.’
I wondered if the police had requested a jump of the queue – suspicious circumstances and all that.
‘How did she die?’
‘She drowned. I’m sorry. It’s a rotten way to go, but the pathologist suggested she would have been unconscious for it. There was a contusion to the back of the skull indicating she’d banged her head hard. Looks like she fell, hit her head and drowned.’
I noted the police were still making it an accident. ‘Were they able to say when she died?’
She didn’t answer immediately and I supposed she was consulting the report: ‘No later than nine o’clock yesterday evening.’
That was a like a kick to the solar plexus. I had been in Dymchurch by eight thirty. She might have still been alive.
‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes. Sorry. That’s just a bit of a shock.’ I explained why.
She didn’t want to dwell on my feelings. She wasn’t The Samaritans. ‘Nothing else your end?’
I said there wasn’t.
‘I’ll tell you that at the moment we’re treating this as misadventure. My DI says we’ll see what happens in the next twenty-four hours.’
‘You mean whether my uncle turns up?’
‘Yes. And if he does, what he’s got to say for himself.’
That sounded a bit harsh to me.
We said goodbye.
I put away the few things I’d bought for the refrigerator. While I was there, I took out a bottle of beer, went back downstairs, had a cigarette, came back up and thought I might unpack my suitcase. Keep busy.
Without shoes my feet were cold. I opened the shoe cupboard looking for the slippers I’d got last Christmas. It crossed my mind I hadn’t seen either of my uncle’s or aunt’s slippers. They always wore them. They were that age. They didn’t like outside shoes in the house and they wouldn’t go around in their socks.
Usually, they kept them visible and accessible. I looked around for them. Nothing. I searched more earnestly. Still nothing. I remembered Detective Cash had said my aunt had had nothing on her feet when she had been recovered from the sea.
I called the policewoman back. She must have put my number in her phone because she greeted me by my name. Her tone was still neutral, like she was thinking I was going to become a phone pest.
‘Sorry to bother you.’
‘You’re not. What’s happened?’
‘Nothing. I just wanted to share something with you.’
‘I’m listening.’
I explained about the lack of slippers and my aunt’s bare feet. ‘You also said she wasn’t wearing a coat.’
‘So what are you suggesting? That your aunt and uncle were out walking on the beach in the rain at night with no coats and wearing their slippers? Did either of them have Alzheimer’s?’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Absolutely. They were old. Old people get Alzheimer’s and do strange things.’
‘Neither of them had Alzheimer’s.’
‘As far as you know?’
‘They would have told me.’
‘What about other illnesses. Did either of them have anything terminal?’
I briefly wondered whether I was imagining the phone call. Detective Cash’s comments were about as subtle and welcome as an eggy fart at a first date dinner table. I was also aware she’d spoken of both of them thrice, in the past tense.
‘Neither of them had anything wrong with them physically or mentally. What I’m suggesting is that’s how it might look, but it’s nothing either of them would ever do. And, just for your information, the tide was in yesterday evening. There wouldn’t have been any beach to walk on.’
She asked if there was anything else.
‘That’s all. Does it help?’
‘Maybe, but until your uncle turns up, nothing’s really going to help, Mr Booker.’
We thanked each other again and hung up.
I didn’t want to loiter around the flat so I took my beer and went down into the shop. I wondered about making a start on the packing. I could probably find the inventory easily enough. In the end I picked a title off a shelf and made myself comfortable on one of the leather Chesterfields. Before I’d managed a chapter I’d fallen asleep.
***
8
It was dark when I woke. I looked at the clock on my phone. Coming to eight.
I got myself upright, stretched out the kinks in my body, remembered how everything was, felt depressed and went back upstairs. No sign of my uncle, of course.
I considered the microwave meal I’d bought for myself and then I reconsidered. The pub did good food, good beer, a good fire and it would probably be quiet.
The air outside was dank and weighty with the threat of further rain. The high street was desolate, not even a car passed me as I made the short trek to The Ocean.
It didn’t occur to me until I had my hand on the door handle of the saloon bar that word of the body pulled out of the sea that morning and its identity would have circulated already. I hesitated as my doubts edged up beside me. Would I have to suffer the well-meaning sympathy of people I knew; the pitying looks and whispers of those I didn’t? I resigned myself to the inevitability of it the longer I stayed in the village. I’d have to get used to it. I didn’t think how it would look, me going out drinking and dining on the evening of the day my aunt was found drowned under suspicious circumstances. Callous, perhaps?
I let go of the handle and went around to the door off the car park at the side. At least I could avoid the regulars.
The restaurant area was empty. Mid-week, mid-evening, quiet time of year. I was served at the bar by a callow youth, skinny as a stick and sullen with it. He didn’t know me and I didn’t know him. Neither of us seemed to be looking for a new friend. So far, so good. I made the mistake of casting a glance through to the saloon bar and caught the eye of someone wh
o I did recognise. Recognition was mutual. We had a blank look for each other.
I ordered something from the specials board and took my drink to a quiet corner. I sat with my back to the room and drank off half the pint quickly. I stared at the wall and then a pen and ink drawing of someone’s idea of the pub and the high street before the motor car came to Dymchurch.
I heard the squeak of the little swing door at the end of the bar and imagined the approach of silent footsteps on the carpet. Pam took a seat across from me. She had a drink with her. Something with ice and a slice. Once she knew I was in she couldn’t not have come over and said something.
‘We’re all so sorry to hear about your aunt, David. Maybe you want to be alone, but you should know that everyone’s shocked and saddened. She was popular and she’ll be missed.’
‘Thanks, Pam.’ I forced a tired smile.
‘Someone said you were there. When they pulled her out.’
I nodded. ‘I saw the emergency services when I was walking on the sea wall. I just had a bad feeling.’
‘How awful for you.’
We were never particularly close, but she reached out to cover my hand with hers in what I took to be a maternal way, a gesture I took to show her genuine sympathy. She squeezed my hand once and then let go.
‘No sign of your uncle?’
I shook my head. ‘Nothing. The police are involved now, but they’ve told me to fear the worst, given the circumstances and how long it’s been.’
She breathed out heavily and I caught a whiff of cigarettes and spirits. ‘If there’s anything you need, anything at all, please just ask. A lot of people will be glad to help if you need anything.’
Her old-fashioned language and sentiment reminded me that I was in a small Kentish village and not some heaving city of indifference. I thanked her again and she stood and left me to it. In a good way, I appreciated that as much as anything. If she’d thought it odd or insensitive of me not to be hanging around the flat being morose and waiting for the phone to ring with bad news, she didn’t indicate it.
My dinner arrived. I ate without great appetite. I heard the main door open behind me. I hoped it was just another solitary soul like me out for something to eat, some peace and quiet. A man came and stood off to the side of me, just in the periphery of my vision. I ignored him. He made a little noise in his throat. Then I had to look at him. I didn’t know him. A thickset middle-aged man with friendly enough features. He put me in mind of a well-fed butcher.
‘Sorry to disturb you. I just wanted to offer my condolences for your loss today.’
I managed a nod and mumbled my thanks, hoping that would be it.
‘I was the one who went in the sea to lift her out.’ He had my full attention. ‘I’m a retained fireman in the village. Anyway, sorry again.’ He turned to leave.
A thought struck me. ‘The police said she had no shoes or coat on.’
I hadn’t asked a question, but he said, ‘That’s right. But if she’d been wearing slip-on shoes, she might easily have lost them or kicked them off if she fell in and struggled.’
‘But not the coat?’
He looked blankly at me and then shrugged. ‘I couldn’t say. If it wasn’t done up it could have come off if she was thrashing about, maybe. Depends what she was wearing, I suppose.’
I remembered Detective Cash saying the pathologist’s report detailed my aunt had suffered a blow to the head. She wouldn’t have been thrashing about if she was unconscious or stunned. And if she wasn’t unconscious or stunned I couldn’t see how she wouldn’t have been able to get out of a shallow swell.
He wasn’t finished: ‘What was a bit strange, though, she was properly snagged on the metalwork of the outfall. Sorry, you probably don’t want to hear something like that, do you?’
‘How do you mean?’ He must have understood something in the intensity of my enquiry and the look I gave him.
‘Well, the top she was wearing had caught on the ironwork. Gone right through the material. It was lucky really. If she hadn’t got hooked up on it, she’d have probably drifted out into the Channel on the falling tide and never been found.’
He stood there awkwardly for a long moment and then dipped his head and left.
As I sat thinking about what he’d said something else occurred to me that seemed strange. I think it had been at the back of my mind for a while, but the fireman’s comments had dislodged it. I had lived beside the sea here long enough to know that when the tide was coming in it came from the west, surging up the narrow English Channel between England and France from the direction of the Atlantic Ocean and when it receded that’s the way it ebbed.
When it rose it would naturally carry any flotsam and jetsam eastwards towards the North Sea and when it fell it would suck any floating debris with it. Just like an unplugged bath. How then, assuming my aunt had gone in the sea at Dymchurch, as the tide was coming in, had she managed to end up at St Mary’s Bay?
It was just a novice’s question. I was no expert on tides. I decided to find out more about the specifics of tide and times the next day. I could buy a tide table at the local shop. Maybe find someone at the fishing club on the sea wall to run it past them. I’d leave out the bit about a dead body.
I didn’t finish my meal and left. The ale had tasted good, but what I needed was spirits and cigarettes.
Fifteen minutes later I was pacing around in the noisy pea-beach out the back of the building and under the stars, feeling quite wretched. I was facing up to the idea that my uncle was probably also dead and his body was likely to be floating at the whim of the currents.
The whisky was doing things to my system that mere ale had no hope of achieving. I decided that I might get properly drunk on it. But not outside. That scraping of metal on metal across the fence was killing me. If I was going to spend my time out here smoking, I might have to clamber over, find the source of my irritation and do something about it.
***
9
Next morning. My head felt like someone had pumped it full of something expanding. I’d slept on the sofa, again. And I’d slept well, again. I should have done; I’d got down to the proof declaration on the label.
I showered, dressed, made coffee, poured it into a Thermos mug, clamped the lid shut and went to the beach. It was for the air as much as anything.
It was after eight. The high street was busy with traffic. It wasn’t raining. A light breeze carried a tepid suggestion of spring with it.
At the baker’s I bought a baguette stuffed with hot meat and oozing brown sauce, then called in at the general store for a tide timetable.
Back on the pavement and looking up at the thin cloud cover, I thought the sun might make a brief appearance before lunch. The air had that feel to it.
I still hated the sea wall. The arrogantly-curled lip of the concrete barrier sneered its contempt at the sea. If I had my back to it, it kept the wind off me and I couldn’t see it. I sat and had my breakfast, then a cigarette. I watched the Channel and the gulls. Not another soul came my way the whole time. Not even a collie dog.
I wiped my hands on the tissue that came with the food and took out the tide timetable. If I was making sense of all the confusing columns and figures, high tide would have been about ten o’clock the night I arrived and then about an hour later every twenty-four hours.
I smoked another cigarette, gathered up my rubbish and my thoughts and walked. I was heading in the direction of the lock-up further east along the sea wall that the Dymchurch Sea Angling Club maintained as a base and store for their boat-launching tractor and other equipment.
A weather-beaten old salt dressed in waterproof dungarees and boots that seemed fashionable with the fishermen was fiddling with something in the engine compartment of the old farm vehicle.
I excused myself and asked him about my theory regarding things that floated on the surface of the water at the mercy of the ebb and flow of the tide. He wiped his hands on an oily rag and eyed me with in
telligence from under white bushy eyebrows.
‘Why you asking that, then?’ It was a slow local drawl and I got the impression that his motive for the question was to prolong social interaction rather than for the answer.
I didn’t see any reason to lie to him. ‘The body that was found at St Mary’s Bay yesterday – if it had gone in the water at Dymchurch, say about eight, should it have ended up east or been carried west? High tide was at ten.’
‘I know what time high tide is,’ he said. Then he gave some serious thought to what I’d asked him, or seemed to. ‘Depends. Maybe. Hard to say for sure. Probably should have done but it’s not an exact science. Too many variables.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as weight, shape, strength of the tide, sub-currents created by obstructions like the outfall at Dymchurch and the slipway. Depends where exactly the body would have gone in. What makes you think it went in at Dymchurch?’
‘Just a guess.’
‘What are you? Reporter? Police?’
I shook my head. ‘Relative.’
He raised his heavy eyebrows half an inch. ‘Then I’m sorry for your loss. I didn’t know the lady, but it’s not a nice way to go.’
I agreed, thanked him for his time and walked home.
*
I was standing staring out over the English Channel from the top floor window of my room. The sun was making an effort to get noticed and transform the panoramic view that the aspect offered. My phone rang. It was Detective Cash. We said hello.
‘Any news this morning?’
‘No sign of my uncle, if that’s what you mean?’
‘That’s what I mean.’
‘I was in the pub last night. I spoke to the man who fished my aunt out of the sea.’
‘What did you do that for?’ I couldn’t tell how she meant that to sound, but I got the idea she didn’t want me involving myself in their investigation, being amateurish and being a problem.