The Crooked Shore

by Martin Edwards

  ‘Please!’ Kingsley had never seen Logan’s face harden or heard such an icy note in his voice. The changes made him almost unrecognisable from the kind-hearted boy who meant so much to him. ‘I only said …’

  ‘I know what you’re really saying.’ Logan stood up. ‘I’m just a young layabout, not good enough for the high-and-mighty Meltons. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my gob, so the minute something goes wrong with your cosy little lives, I’m obviously to blame.’

  ‘No!’ This was horrendous. Kingsley felt one of his headaches coming on. ‘Remember last time you were here! I care so much about you.’

  He moved forward and reached out to stroke Logan’s silky fair hair, only to have his hand jerked away in a rapid, painful movement. Logan’s cheeks were crimson with rage.

  ‘Get your dirty paws off me, you filthy pervert!’

  ‘What?’

  Logan shoved Kingsley so hard he fell backwards on to the carpet. ‘I ought to have known. Your type are all the same. You’d better watch your step, Melton, otherwise people will find out what you’re really like.’

  Heart pounding, Kingsley looked up into Logan’s narrowed eyes. ‘Please, don’t! You know how I feel about …’

  ‘I know exactly how you feel, remember?’ Logan was spitting at him. ‘Soft and squishy, like rotten fruit. Don’t you ever dare to mess with me again. Or everyone else will know your mucky little secrets.’

  With that, he marched out of the sitting room. Tears streaming down his cheeks, Kingsley hauled himself to his feet. Through the bay window he caught sight of his former friend getting into the dirty Fiat van, slamming the door so loudly that a passing pedestrian almost dropped her shopping.

  Half an hour later he sent Kingsley a text. As his phone pinged, Kingsley’s spirits soared. Logan had come to his senses, surely. He must be ready to apologise.

  Within an instant, his hopes were in shreds. Logan hadn’t written a word, just sent him a photograph as an attachment. A candid shot of him on all fours, taken covertly in the bedroom of the bungalow, during his second visit here.

  For Kingsley, the grinding agony of shame felt like being tortured with an electric drill.

  He screamed.

  When, much later, he’d recovered the power of rational thought, he knew one thing for certain. If anyone else ever clapped eyes on that vile photograph, he’d throw himself off a Windermere steamer into the deepest part of the lake.

  There was a wooden kissing gate on the way to the shore, not that Kingsley had ever seen anyone kissing there. Squeezing through, he made his way towards the moored boats at Ferry Nab. Mamma had kept her wits right to the end, he reflected. Provoked by Logan Prentice’s rapid transfer of affections to Ivy, she’d cottoned on to the selfishness and cruelty bubbling just beneath the surface affability. At least the young rogue hadn’t profited from his crime as he’d hoped. Poetic justice, in Kingsley’s opinion. The only problem was, he was probably still short of money and intent on finding his next victim.

  Prentice was a gambler who relied on instinct rather than judgement. He’d murdered Ivy within days of her solicitor’s visit to Sunset View, and her announcement in the residents’ lounge that she’d changed her will. Surely he’d have been wise to allow a decent interval to elapse? Ivy was a frail old woman and it would have made sense to allow matters to follow their natural course. The crime illustrated his impatience.

  Kingsley watched the car ferry chug away on the short trip across the lake to Hawkshead. What game was his adversary playing? Tory Reece-Taylor was a very different kettle of fish than Ivy Podmore, and she was thirty years younger. Did Prentice plan to beg, borrow, or steal from her? It was perfectly possible that he’d dreamt up a way to soak her money, but somehow Kingsley didn’t believe that would be enough for him.

  Logan Prentice enjoyed making people suffer, that was the top and bottom of it. The two men had never spoken to each other again after Logan had sent his text with the compromising photo, but he’d caught Kingsley’s eye at Sunset View on that last afternoon, while he was playing ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’. There was no disguising the gloat of triumph that twisted his features when nobody else was looking. He relished humiliating Kingsley, loved to have him at his mercy. Power mattered to him; it gave him pleasure. How he must have loved pressing that pillow down over poor Ivy’s mouth and nose.

  Kingsley had read in a tabloid that once a psychopath tastes blood, once he’s committed murder and got away with it, he finds the temptation to repeat the trick irresistible. Even if Prentice didn’t need more money, he relished the sport of seduction. It gave him a thrill to charm people into making themselves vulnerable, into surrendering to his will.

  For all her feistiness, Tory was susceptible. A rich woman with a weak heart. She gloried in the memory of her sudden cardiac arrest, she loved to boast about coming back from the dead. A pound to a penny, she’d regaled Prentice with the story soon after they’d met. For Kingsley, the anecdote helped to explain her philosophy of carpe diem. For Prentice, it would signal an opportunity. As a victim, she was no less suitable than beguiled and befuddled Ivy Podmore. More suitable, in truth, because at Strandbeck Manor there were no prying eyes, nobody to watch what Prentice was up to. Tory didn’t possess a panic alarm of the kind old people (including Mamma, before she went into Sunset View) hung around their necks. If she died in her flat of a heart attack, accidental or induced, there was every chance that she’d lie there for a long time before her body was discovered.

  Kingsley stopped in his tracks.

  Surrounded by the beauty of the most popular part of the Lake District, he could only see one thing in his mind. A vision of Tory’s prostrate corpse. Of her decaying flesh.

  She must be protected, from both Logan Prentice and herself.

  Kingsley squared his shoulders. Only he could save Tory’s life.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘For as long as a serious crime remains unsolved, suspicion swirls around everyone involved,’ said the woman on the television screen.

  Kingsley had put the TV on for company, as was his habit. He’d been paying even less attention than usual to the regional news until his eye was caught by a photograph of the jogger who had died at Strandbeck. The fallout from the man’s death was never-ending. Now the police had vowed to look afresh at the case of Ramona Smith.

  A caption on the screen named the woman as Detective Chief Inspector Hannah Scarlett. She looked pleasant, fresh-faced, surprisingly attractive, in fact, but with a determined set to her features that Kingsley found intimidating. He was surprised that this youngish woman held a post of such high rank. Probably she’d benefited from some kind of positive discrimination. It was everywhere these days. Nobody had much time for people like him. What was the phrase? Pale, male, and stale?

  There was a clip of an interview with an obese, heavily pierced woman in a gaudy yellow T-shirt. Jade Hughes, denouncing those who had failed her former partner. She hoped the new cold case enquiry meant the police would put right the failures of the past. Good luck with that, Kingsley thought, as he muted the volume.

  Why bother with the Ramona Smith mystery? Twenty-one years was a very long time. Hannah Scarlett should concentrate her energies on something more recent. Why not re-examine the death of Ivy Podmore? For all their platitudes about crime prevention, the police never tackled the likes of Logan Prentice.

  He scrolled through the endless list of television channels. So much choice, and so little worth watching. He resorted to his store of documentaries, choosing an old history series that explored the way the past cast light on present-day social challenges. In this programme Daniel Kind and a bearded expert were discussing the psychological drivers of crime over the centuries.

  ‘Murder for the sheer lust of killing,’ the expert said, stroking his beard.

  ‘Like the Ratcliff Highway case?’ Daniel suggested. ‘Those multiple murders in early nineteenth-century London which intrigued Thomas de Quincey?’
>
  Lust of killing. Exactly, he might have been talking about Logan Prentice. Kingsley wondered. Greed was the obvious reason for trying to steal Mamma’s lapis lazuli and worming his way into the hearts of wealthy older women, but Kingsley was sure there was more to it than that.

  Logan Prentice enjoyed the thrill of persuading people to drop their guard. Once he got well and truly under their skin, they were at his mercy. Lust was the right word for his love of power, Kingsley thought. Yes, Logan Prentice was a lustful criminal.

  Something clicked in his memory. He’d read an interview with Daniel Kind in a Cumbrian lifestyle magazine in which Greengables advertised. The piece coincided with publication of the historian’s latest book. He’d mentioned moving from Oxford to Cumbria and the fact that his late father had been a police officer up here.

  Kingsley switched off the television and opened up his laptop. Diligent googling yielded dividends. From archived articles in local newspapers and magazines, he picked up several references to Ben Kind. He’d played a part in the hunt for Ramona Smith’s killer. An article about a dinner held to mark his retirement included tributes from colleagues, including Hannah Scarlett. None of them mentioned the Ramona Smith case.

  Kind senior hadn’t enjoyed his leisure time for long. There was a report of his death in a hit-and-run accident one evening. He’d been knocked down on a country lane, walking home from a pub, and an appeal for witnesses hadn’t borne fruit. Kingsley found no reference to anybody ever being convicted of the crime. Ironic, he thought. A senior detective’s family denied justice, just like Ramona Smith’s.

  How had Daniel dealt with his bereavement? Did it help to explain his interest in crime? His most recent book was The Hell Within, and when Kingsley looked inside the online version, he saw that the book was dedicated to Hannah Scarlett.

  Well, well, what a turn-up.

  A plan began to take shape in his mind. At the time of Ivy Podmore’s death, he’d felt despairing and impotent. Things were different now. Tory needed him.

  He must talk to Daniel Kind and enlist his support.

  A collision between two lorries had turned the M6 into a car park. It took Hannah an hour and a half to escape the jam, and when she finally made it back to her flat, Daniel was nowhere to be seen. Instead she found a brief note from him. Exhausted from jet lag, he’d gone home to his cottage to get another night’s rest. See you soon, the note said and finished with a flourish of kisses. She wished he was there to kiss her in person.

  Had she upset him by mentioning his father’s failure to solve the Ramona Smith case? Ben Kind had walked out on his family and moved up to Cumbria with his girlfriend. Daniel and Louise were schoolchildren at the time, and their father’s desertion hit them hard. The divorce proceedings proved messy and bitter. Louise sided with her mother, but Daniel idolised his father and felt more conflicted. Sensible and objective though he was, even now he tended to take criticism of Ben personally.

  It wasn’t as if she’d even criticised him. Daniel knew how much she’d admired the man. No police officer solved every case. It …

  Stop it. She dug her nails into her palm and told herself not to overanalyse. Daniel had just got back to England after a long and demanding trip. He was weary and needed time to himself. The note was brief, but there was nothing to fret about. No reason to listen to the still small voice whispering in her ear that their relationship was going nowhere.

  She walked over to the roses and inhaled their sensual damask fragrance. After all, he’d brought her flowers.

  Daniel was woken by the trilling of his ringtone. Rumer, ‘Some Lovers,’ a current favourite. He reached for his phone and muttered, ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You’re back,’ his sister’s voice announced.

  Daniel rubbed his eyes. ‘Yes, I’m trying to catch up on my beauty sleep.’

  ‘You need it more than most,’ Louise said briskly. ‘Good time?’

  ‘Great, thanks.’ When he tried to shift position, his limbs felt as though they were set in concrete.

  ‘I was wondering if you’d like to get together. How about dinner this evening? Stay the night if you want to have a drink and not worry about getting home. If you’re not seeing Hannah, that is.’

  ‘I was with her in Kendal last night.’

  A momentary pause. ‘You sound grumpy.’

  ‘You did wake me up.’

  ‘Sorry. So how about it? Alex is dying to meet you.’

  ‘Alex?’ He thought for a moment. ‘The woman who rescued you from the river?’

  ‘Yes, she’s wonderful. Fantastic company. You’ll love her.’

  He yawned. ‘I hope you’re not matchmaking?’

  ‘No, cross my heart and hope to die. I love Hannah to bits, you know perfectly well. It’s just that Alex is a bundle of fun. Not to mention stunning.’ Louise paused. ‘And she’s read all your books.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ He could hardly keep his eyes open. Any minute now he would be out for the count.

  ‘She loves your writing.’

  ‘OK, you win,’ he said. ‘What author could possibly resist?’

  At midday, Bunny Cohen joined her new colleagues for an impromptu briefing. Les Bryant had just arrived back from Windermere. He’d made rapid progress. Not only had he traced the whereabouts of Ramona Smith’s father, he’d paid him a visit.

  ‘Jimmy Smith is in a care home,’ he reported. ‘Not got much time left. Memory loss is only half the story. A lifetime’s boozing has turned his brain to mush.’

  ‘You didn’t get much sense out of him?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘The carers reckoned I was lucky, he was having a good morning. He has what they call lucid intervals.’ Les frowned. ‘If that’s lucidity, I’d hate to see him on a bad day. At least his long-term memory is better than the short-term, which isn’t saying much. I managed to piece a few remarks together, but it doesn’t take us any forrader.’

  ‘You discussed Ramona?’

  ‘As Bunny said, he wasn’t a devoted father. Ramona was secretive, he said. Liked to keep her boyfriends dangling, puppets on a string. He took no interest, couldn’t recall any names. Said she was no better than her mother. A tart, only interested in how much money she could get out of a man.’

  Hannah turned to Bunny. ‘Sound familiar?’

  ‘You bet. A real charmer, that’s Jimmy. Ramona never forgave him for deserting her. Messing men around was probably her way of taking revenge.’

  ‘Did he blacken her name as a form of cover-up?’ Maggie asked. ‘Was there something going on between him and his daughter?’

  Bunny shrugged. ‘He was a nasty piece of work, and I expect he gave the girl a good hiding whenever she got on his wrong side, but he was pretty much out of Ramona’s life by the time she turned seven. If there was anything sexual between them, we never got wind of it.’

  ‘OK,’ Hannah said, ‘but who knows? Maybe they met up at Grandma’s cottage. What if this supposed mutual dislike was just a blind? If she tired of an abusive relationship and threatened to grass on him, Jimmy would have a strong motive to silence her. Les, can you do a bit more digging?’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘Thanks. Maggie’s still trawling through the old files at present. She’ll give us a detailed overview of the case tomorrow. As of Monday, Bunny joins us full-time, and then it’s all hands to the pump. Gerald Lace is still very much in the frame, obviously, but he’s dead and gone. We must consider other possibilities. Not just men, but women who might have been jealous or wanted revenge because she’d slept with their husbands.’

  ‘That’ll take a while,’ Les said.

  ‘Ramona wasn’t a happy person,’ Bunny snapped. ‘We shouldn’t judge her. Any of us, if we came from a background like that …’

  ‘All right,’ Hannah interrupted. ‘Nobody’s making judgements. Our job is to find out what happened to her. As that Van Beek woman said yesterday, we owe it to the innocent suspects as well as the victim.’

  ‘The Van Bee
k woman, yeah,’ Les said. ‘I saw her on the news bulletin last night. Thought it was a bit odd, actually.’

  ‘Odd?’

  ‘A well-known TV reporter, turning up for a press conference in the far north west? Darren Lace’s death is a big story, admitted, but even so …’

  ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘Maybe she’s taking a special interest because of a personal agenda.’

  ‘Such as?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Turns out she is an ex-wife of our revered new PCC, Mr Gleadall.’

  Hannah was taken aback. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Good old-fashioned foot-slogging detective work. Pounding the pavements, knocking on doors.’ Les allowed himself a sardonic smile. ‘Not really. Tell you the truth, I looked her up on Wikipedia.’

  A young woman from admin put her head round the door. ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘Yes, Manjiri?’

  ‘Message from Mr Ravi Thakor. He saw you on television and he’d like to have a word with you. In person, if that’s possible, at a time to suit you. Apparently he knew Ramona Smith.’

  Hannah glanced at Bunny. ‘So he did.’

  ‘Didn’t take long to rattle his cage,’ Les said.

  ‘Old sins,’ Bunny said. ‘Long shadows.’

  ‘Thanks, Manjiri,’ Hannah said. ‘Sounds like an offer I can’t refuse.’

  The phone in Tarn Cottage summoned Daniel just as he finished a call on his mobile to his London publisher. He’d kept his landline because of the unpredictability of cellphone reception in Brackdale, though most of the calls he received on it were from confidence tricksters masquerading as internet service providers or H.M. Revenue and Customs.

  ‘Daniel Kind.’

  ‘Mr Kind, I’m sorry to bother you like this, out of the blue.’

  The caller paused, as if to give Daniel a chance to bang the phone down on its cradle. He was male, diffident, a local, judging by his accent. His voice was gravelly and he sounded to be in his fifties.

  ‘I used to enjoy watching you on television …’