The Body on the Shore

by The Body on the Shore (retail) (epub)

  Sophie stepped carefully down towards the bridge, balancing on the protruding roots of a large chestnut, which acted almost like a spiral staircase down to the stream bank. She shone the torch towards the bridge, illuminating the racing waters beneath. The rain had swollen the stream, which in summer was barely more than a trickle. Now it looked to be several feet deep.

  ‘Come on, Balfour, you bad boy! Doggie snacks!’ She really was quite annoyed now. Finally getting down to the level of the bridge, she grasped the rotten handrail. Then she looked up, pointing the light across to the other bank.

  What she saw there, suspended from a tree, tore an involuntary scream from her. Her wellingtons skidded on the narrow plank, she lost her grip on the handrail and fell into the cold, rushing water.

  Chapter 8

  Numbing cold water tumbled and roared about her head, and she took a few seconds to re-orientate herself. Pushing hard with hands and feet she levered herself vertical, the water-filled wellingtons dragging like concrete, pulling her downstream as she reached for overhanging bushes at the bank. She grasped at thorny stems, ignoring the pain, just to get herself to her feet again. After a breathless and panicky minute she emerged into near-blackness. The torch was lost somewhere in the water and the branches way above her head were like knotted, gnarled fingers closing out most of the pewter sky, and dripping onto her. Dangling above from a rope was the body of a child: neck broken, face twisted in anguish. It was wearing a woollen hat, similar to the one Amber wore, a green anorak, just like Amber wore, and tiny wellingtons. The last flash of the torch before she fell had burned those wellingtons into her mind. They were the same red and black-spotted ladybird wellies that she had bought Amber a year ago for her first walk around her new home.

  Drenched, chilled and terrified, Sophie reached up to the footbridge, grabbing the plank, and hauled herself out of the water. Without looking up she scrambled on hands and knees back up the muddy bank towards the main path. Only when she was safely at the stile did she fumble in her pocket for her soaked phone. She pressed and swiped. Nothing. She barely dared to think about what she had seen, and panicked about what to do next. The corpse could not be Amber, because Amber was safe at home with Estela. So who was this little girl? This little girl who resembled her own precious child?

  She turned round to the wood again and bellowed angrily for Balfour. As if by magic, the dog appeared, mud-soaked and with something in its mouth. Sophie didn’t even want to know what it was. ‘Balfour, drop.’ The dog looked up at her, big-eyed and sad, but did not comply. She yelled at him again, and then in her anger and her fear, she struck him across the head. ‘I said, drop it, you stupid animal.’ The dog whimpered and lay on the ground quivering, paws splayed, ears flat to his head, tail between his legs. He dropped whatever it was, which looked like a dead pigeon.

  ‘Oh, Balfour. I’m sorry.’ Suddenly overwhelmed, she knelt by her dog, embraced him and burst into tears. ‘You’ve got to protect me, boy. You’ve got to protect us all.’

  Sophie knew that there was a house down by the road just five minutes away, but her first priority was to get home to check on Amber. Even though she knew Amber must be safe, it was the absolutely essential thing to do. It took half an hour, half running, half walking, fully breathless before she burst into the house shouting for Estela. Only when she had raced upstairs, dripping water, and pulled the little girl out of her bed and into her arms did Sophie dare to think about ringing the police.

  * * *

  Despite it being a 999 call, the police took nearly an hour to arrive. A patrol car with blue lights but no siren pulled up at the porticoed main door of the Manor. Estela called to Sophie, who was upstairs in a bathrobe, getting splinters out of her hand, while on the phone to Dag. In expectation of the police’s imminent arrival, she had not run the bath she so desperately wanted. She opened the door to two reassuringly solid, uniformed male PCs. She had a brief flash of empathy for those women who found men in uniform attractive. Despite the delay, they were certainly the solidly male reassurance she was hoping for.

  She explained where the body was.

  ‘Is there road access, madam?’ asked the slightly shorter of the two, who introduced himself as PC Kerrigan.

  ‘No. Well, not this way. You could drive down to Hallam’s Brook, and it’s only ten minutes up from there. But last time I was there the slurry pit had flooded across the track, so it might be better to go from this end,’ she said. ‘It’s straight on down the bridleway towards Ewhurst Hill.’ They visibly wilted at the prospect of having to walk for half an hour in the rain. Police these days spend too much time sitting on their bums in a car, Sophie thought. It was the kind of thing her mother would have said.

  ‘It’s no good, you’ll never find it. I’ll have to show you,’ she said. Sophie asked them to wait while she changed upstairs. She emerged, in less than a minute, in a clean pair of moleskin trousers, thick pullover and comfy socks. From the boot room she grabbed a fresh coat, dry wellies and an umbrella, and led them out the way she had come. She was surprised to find that she walked much more rapidly than they did, their unsuitable footwear slipping and sliding on the wet grass. They went to absurd lengths to step gingerly around muddy puddles. The taller of the two walked with a torch, while Kerrigan asked questions. ‘Did you touch the body, madam?’

  ‘No, it was quite high off the ground. I probably could have reached it on tiptoe. You’d have no trouble.’

  ‘Did it smell?’

  ‘No. Not to me at least. But it was the dog that led me to it. I hadn’t even planned to walk that route.’

  ‘And you are sure that it was your child’s actual wellingtons on it?’

  ‘Well, no. They are ladybird boots, so they are not that uncommon. The size was about right.’

  ‘And are your child’s boots missing?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t really looked. But I didn’t see them in the boot room. I’ve left the dog in there to dry off, so I wasn’t keen to go squatting on the floor to check. Of course they could be in the back of the Discovery. I haven’t had time to look, you see.’

  When they got to the stile that led down to the stream, the two PCs leant over the fence and shone powerful beams towards the bridge 50 yards away. But there was too much undergrowth for them to get a clear view. ‘That looks very muddy,’ said the tall one, illuminating the churned-up path. ‘There might be some useful footprints.’

  ‘Mainly mine, I suppose. And Balfour’s.’

  They looked at her.

  ‘The dog,’ she added.

  ‘I’m going to see if I can get in a different way,’ said Kerrigan. He clambered over the fence a few yards downhill, cursing as he got his uniform snagged in brambles and a branch plucked his cap off, revealing a balding pate. He was gone for five minutes, though they could see the glow from his torch.

  When he finally returned he was smiling. ‘Mrs Lund, someone’s been playing a joke on you. I’m glad to say that isn’t a child hanging up there. It’s a model of some kind, like a penny-for-the-guy for bonfire night. It was dressed up, wearing some kind of wig as well as the clothing.’

  The taller PC groaned and looked at his watch.

  ‘But it’s been made to look like my daughter!’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ Kerrigan said. ‘Could be some other kids having a joke.’

  ‘This is a bit sophisticated for kids, surely.’ Sophie was getting angry now that they thought this was a trivial matter. ‘I want to know who did it. I want you to take fingerprints, on the boots.’

  ‘I don’t think we can resource that,’ he replied. ‘I think you would be better off thinking who would want to play such a practical joke on you. If you can work out who it is, we will go round and have a word.’

  By the time they left she was fuming. Partly because she felt a fool, but partly because she suddenly realized exactly who it was who had done this.

  * * *

  The next morning, as soon as the au pair had driven D
avid and Amber to school, Sophie searched the boot room and her Land-Rover Discovery. There was no sign of Amber’s wellies. The boot room was never locked, so it would all have been terribly easy. She would only have had to walk a hundred yards.

  Sophie prepared herself for a confrontation. She freshened her make-up with a bright red lipstick, shed her working trousers and slid into her tight new jeans and a figure-hugging blue pullover. Thus girded for battle, she marched across the yard towards the Little Pottery. Right from the moment that she and Dag had moved in, they had had problems with the Hinchcliffe woman. It was only after they had been there for six months that they discovered that Geraldine Hinchcliffe was the first wife of Clive Gashley, the estate’s previous owner. That is why a decade or so ago she had been given two cottages, a stable and six acres of paddocks. It was part of her divorce settlement. This was done in a stupid way, to Sophie’s mind. A cake slice shape of land cut to the centre of the estate and, because of the established rights of way, the damn woman could go pretty much where she wanted. Naturally having been Lady of the Manor before, she still coveted the entire estate.

  If Sophie had known what an irritant the woman was, they might never have bought the place. There had been disputes over parking, over access to the farm buildings at the back, and of course the bloody leylandii trees. During the very week they were moving in, the Hinchcliffe woman slid in a planning application to convert her stables into a commercial pottery. She and Dag didn’t get the official notice because mail was still being forwarded to the previous owner by the post office, and ‘someone’ had removed the yellow planning notice from the telegraph pole on the bridleway. So they hadn’t known of it and it passed without objection. Of course they might not have objected to it, had they known in advance, except on account of the extra traffic from pottery students going up and down the shared private drive, and parking all over the place on their shared and limited piece of hardstanding. It was two weeks ago when they had had a stand-up row over one of Geraldine’s students blocking in the garage which housed Dag’s quad bike.

  So this was Geraldine Hinchcliffe’s revenge. She was an artist, no doubt quite capable of making a mannequin if she could make pots and crockery.

  Standing at the door of the Little Pottery, Sophie rapped hard with the knocker, some carved hardwood lump that was presumably supposed to resemble a woodpecker. There was no reply. All she could hear were the stupid earthenware wind chimes that she seemed to breed here and gave an air of melancholy to the place whenever there was a breeze. She looked through the window at the wheels, the kiln and the sacks of clay stacked under the table. The woman didn’t seem to be there, though she normally was on a Tuesday. Her car was gone. Sophie would ring up and leave a message. The woman was not going to get away with this.

  * * *

  It was no surprise that Geraldine bloody Hinchcliffe was away, Sophie thought. She probably wanted some kind of alibi for this atrocious behaviour. If she hadn’t been so rude, Dag probably would have trimmed their row of leylandii that shaded her newly constructed sun lounge-style pottery room. The trees were there first of course, but they did grow very quickly. Then the woman had the nerve to claim that the land on which her former husband had planted them was in fact hers. She had waved some damn piece of legal paper at her, ignoring the fact that the trees were the wrong side of a long-established fence.

  Dag, his usual emollient and diplomatic self, had in the first few months urged Sophie to be calm and even suggested that they should cut the leylandii, as an act of forbearance. But Sophie had been so furious about the underhand planning application and the parking nonsense that she would have none of it. It was easy for Dag to be forgiving. He was away three weeks in every month, jetting round the world, leasing his oil rigs to giant corporations. She had to live near the damn woman, to watch her exercise her spaniels, which she shouted for in a silly high voice. Pixie and Mixie. They were always off the lead on the footpath through the formal lawns, and she had not once seen the woman stoop to pick up after them.

  The whole of Tuesday, her only day off, Sophie stamped about the estate in a bad mood, being short with Estela and blowing up at the plumber on the phone for his failure to get the right taps for the new bath. Tomorrow and for the rest of the week she would be up in London during the day. Dag would not be back until Friday. In the back of her mind, anxiety was crystallising into a nugget of fear. Until Friday, for six hours each day, her children would be alone with just tiny, shy Estela to look after them. Three months ago, even though she hated Geraldine Hinchcliffe, she would never have contemplated that the woman might harm her children. But now this sick mannequin had been hung on the path to terrify her. Thinking about it, it was probably Geraldine Hinchcliffe who threw a dead pigeon into the woods to lure Balfour, knowing that she would follow the dog. It was a campaign of hatred, and the woman was clearly mad.

  * * *

  That evening, Sophie decided to play with the children rather than work on the marketing documents that she needed to prepare. At Amber’s insistence they played hide and seek. Well, it was better than watching Frozen again. With six bedrooms, two lounges, a dining room, a galleried hallway and half a dozen basement rooms, there was no shortage of places to hide. Amber, as always, was just too excited to hide effectively. Her giggling could be heard echoing along the hallway, and she always chose the same two or three places: the linen basket in Sophie and Dag’s bedroom, under the back stairs where the vacuum cleaner and brooms were stored, or under the tiny bed in the attic bedroom where Sophie’s own antique doll’s house and rocking chair were kept. Amber would not go downstairs into the basement. She had had nightmares, claiming that the shtriga lived there, and if it was disturbed, she would come for her in the night. Time after time, Amber had awoken screaming about the shtriga. Finally, Sophie had looked it up online. Albanian folklore’s shtriga was a truly horrifying belief, presumably designed to terrify disobedient children: a vampire witch, in the form of an old woman who would suck the blood of sleeping children. This monster could also assume the form of an insect, usually a moth. Not surprisingly, Amber was afraid of moths too.

  David by contrast was very inventive at hide and seek. It could take a good 15 minutes to find him, and quite often he would run for home base in the kitchen and get there before Sophie could catch him. He was quite a speedy little runner, though sometimes a little reckless. On one occasion he had tumbled down the staircase and cut his forehead. It was quite a nasty cut, and any normal eight-year-old would have cried. David didn’t.

  At the end of the game, and after giving it considerable thought, Sophie asked Amber and David to come with her. She led them down the back staircase, in what would have been the old servants’ quarters, and into the basement. Amber said she didn’t want to go, so Sophie carried her and reassured her that she would be safe. ‘I just want to show you something, darling,’ she said. She put all the lights on and led them to a very special room. It had originally been the old bakery, but Clive Gashley, who was a precious metals dealer, had turned it into a safe room. There was a thick, shiny metal door of the kind you might imagine for a bank vault, and which was opened by a four-digit combination punched into a keypad. Inside was a comfortable lounge five yards square with a vaulted ceiling. There was no window but a giant TV gave a panoramic view of the main lawns, from a CCTV camera. It had its own air supply, its own independent Wi-Fi network and satellite phone, and originally, access to CCTV cameras both inside and outside the house.

  Dag had decided that this room was completely over the top, and had removed the CCTV. But now Sophie was beginning to think the room had its uses. Earlier today she had told Estela that if anything really scary happened, she should go down there with the children. Estela’s eyes had widened at the idea that anything that terrifying could happen here.

  ‘Mrs Lund, is there something I should know?’

  Sophie had told her about the mannequin, and she had thought it a bit creepy, but not having seen
it dangling there from a tree in the pouring rain she had not experienced the full horror. The last thing Sophie wanted to do was to terrify the Portuguese girl, who had been reliable and full of common sense. God knows it was hard enough to find someone she could trust, who could drive the kids to school and who spoke good enough English. But it was only at times like this that the reality of her isolation became apparent. Two women in the middle of a 600-acre estate, without a man in the place at night, and only Michael the estate manager there intermittently during the day at his office, a good five minutes away on foot. If it took the police an hour to arrive, then anything could happen. Especially with a lunatic woman, twisted and embittered, living nearby.

  Chapter 9

  Detective Chief Inspector Craig Gillard was in full civvies for the Tuesday morning trip on the bus: zip-up leather jacket, jeans and trainers, and a folding umbrella, just in case. He was aiming for the second double-decker which left Surbiton station at 7.15 a.m. while Hodges would get the third, departing at 7.35 a.m. The moment he arrived at the bus stop, he realized what kind of trip this was going to be. The shelter was packed with rowdy teenage girls, sporting only oddments of school uniform, tiny skirts, untucked blouses, and bedecked with jewellery, make-up and smart phones. Pure jailbait. Hanging back a little were some younger boys, who looked to be about eight or nine. From his homework last night he identified their neat royal-blue uniforms as that of St Cuthbert’s, the boy’s preparatory school in Thames Ditton. The moment the bus arrived the girls charged for it, thundering up the stairs with only the most peremptory flash of their passes to the driver, a man whom Gillard recognised and vice versa.