The Man by the Sea (The Slim Hardy Mystery Series Book 1)

by Jack Benton

  ‘Slim. Oh my, look at this.’

  Slim took a second picture from Arthur’s hand. It was similar to the first, but the woman’s head was slightly tilted, and someone had scrawled in red marker across the bottom: are you haunted yet?

  ‘Ah...’

  Slim turned at Arthur’s cry. The police chief had dropped two similar pictures onto the floor. One landed in the blood, and the woman’s face was quickly turning crimson. Arthur’s attention, however, was fixed on a fifth photograph, which he held in both hands.

  On this one, someone had written: you are now, aren’t you?

  Slim stayed at the woman’s face. ‘Wow,’ he said.

  In this picture, her eyes had flared, and her head lifted up off the table. Her lips were curled back in an expression of utter hatred.

  ‘Quite the shock when you think someone’s dead, isn’t it?’ a voice said behind them.

  Both men screamed. When Slim turned around, the corpse of Paul Edgar had lifted his head, and dark eyes watched them out of a sickly pale face.

  36

  ‘WE WERE TAKING ROUTINE PHOTOGRAPHS,’ Paul Edgar said, his voice echoey and ephemeral. He had shaken off their offers of help, and still lay where Arthur and Slim had found him. ‘For the files. We didn’t notice she was alive until she came at us.’

  ‘What happened?’ Arthur said.

  ‘We were terrified. We genuinely thought she had come back from the dead. She was mumbling, unable to speak except in grunts and growls. We panicked, and we beat the shit out of her, beat her unconscious. Then Mick and Dave took her.’ Paul’s eyes flicked to the ceiling and back to the wall. ‘Lord forgive us, she had come from the sea, so they threw her back. They took her down to the cliffs off Cramer Cove, and they tossed her in the sea.’

  Arthur sniffed. ‘Mick always said ... he always said she came back.’

  ‘We were still wondering what to do when a stiff came in. Runaway, died of an overdose. No personal effects, no identification. It was easy ... easy to fudge a few forms. I let Mick and Dave do it. Signed it where they asked me to sign.’

  Paul closed his eyes. Slim was thinking he had passed away, when his eyes snapped open again. ‘I took those photographs, and I have looked at them every single day since. I always wanted to say sorry to her, to apologise for what I did. She haunts me, Joanna Bramwell—she haunts me to this day.’

  With a sigh, Paul lay back and closed his eyes again. Slim and Arthur waited a long time, neither saying anything. Finally, Arthur reached forward and held a palm a couple of inches above Paul’s mouth. ‘He’s gone,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘We need to go, too.’

  They returned to the car in silence. Arthur opened the front door, then leaned over and vomited into the grass verge. When he was done, he waved at Slim to get in, then stood outside, making phone calls for a few minutes. Slim watched him pace up and down, passing the phone back and forth from hand to hand, the other making circuits of his face and hair, unable to stay still.

  When Arthur got in, he turned to Slim and said in a cold, hollow voice, ‘Now, I want you to tell me your theory about how she ended up like that.’

  Slim nodded. ‘We need to see a vet,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I need to know if what I think happened is possible.’

  Arthur’s face was pale. ‘Let me make another call,’ he said.

  37

  ‘I HAVE TO SAY, this isn’t the kind of question I have to answer every day,’ Rick Harris said, twirling a pen in his fingers like an amateur acrobat. ‘Nendril Hydrate was something of a stain on our proud profession.’

  ‘Tell me about it, please,’ Slim asked the retired vet sitting on the sofa across from him. Arthur, having set up the meeting, was waiting outside in the car, making phone calls, no doubt still trying to pull increasingly tangled strings.

  ‘Well, it was marketed as a cheaper anaesthetic to what was being used at the time. You’ve heard of horse tranquiliser, I expect?’

  ‘A little,’ Slim said.

  ‘It’s a powerful drug used during operations on animals. Its chemical name is ketamine, and unfortunately, it’s used by a lot of young people for recreation. It became something of a fashion back in the nineties.’

  ‘I’ve heard of ketamine,’ Slim said. ‘It’s like ecstasy, is that right?’

  ‘It has similar effects,’ Rick said. ‘Euphoria, an out-of-body sensation. Hallucinations if you take too much. Nendril Hydrate was an early version. For a while it was very popular, then problems began to appear. People—farmers, mostly—started to complain.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Animals were showing behavioural problems. It took longer to detect in non-human subjects, but eventually we figured it out.’ He lifted his spectacles and squinted at Slim. ‘Brain damage.’

  ‘What kind of behavioural problems?’

  ‘They varied. But, among others: aggression, a propensity to solitude, nervousness, erratic activity, loss of appetite.’

  Slim leaned forward. ‘This might sound like a strange question, but what would be the effect on a human?’

  ‘Similar to those of ketamine, but worse.’

  ‘Would it be possible to render a victim comatose to the point where they appeared dead?’

  Rick Harris looked uncomfortable. ‘Comatose?’ He let out a slow breath. ‘It’s very possible. Ketamine users have this thing they call the k-spot. If you take too much, you find yourself rendered inert for hours on end, unable to move or respond. Without research, I couldn’t tell you exactly, but I believe that, yes, it’s very possible. Is this what your research paper is about?’

  Slim remembered the lie they had told to get Rick to talk to them. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The effect on humans.’

  ‘Well, I guess it’s possible. Just to clarify, I wouldn’t advise you to try it. Not ever.’

  38

  ‘TED DRUGGED HER,’ Slim said. ‘He bought this Nendril Hydrate, and he got her to drink it. His plan was that Joanna would miss her wedding, and perhaps then reconsider.’

  ‘And how did he get her to drink it?’

  ‘They were rehearsing for their production of Romeo and Juliet. She had to drink poison in the end scene. My guess is he conveniently had a bottle of something to hand to use as a prop. He drugged her, then he took her to Cramer Cove, where he left her on the foreshore.’

  ‘She was wet.’

  ‘It rained that night. Check historical weather records. I’d put money on that it did.’

  ‘The voices his mother heard?’

  ‘It wasn’t just Joanna on a tape. It was both of them.’

  ‘Why didn’t he go back for her?’

  ‘My guess is that he did. He just didn’t figure for how early some people walk their dogs. He was confronted by a police roadblock and forced to go back.’

  Arthur shook his head. ‘It sounds―’

  ‘Plausible. Admit it. Remember, this is Ted Douglas, the wannabe actor. The poet. A hopeless romantic. It might sound ridiculous to you or me, but say Ted overhears his mother talking about Nendril Hydrate, about how it knocks animals out for hours, and gets an idea. He orders some using his mother’s veterinary clinic’s account―the receipt was with his papers―then intercepts the delivery. He drugs Joanna, then takes her to Cramer Cove, a place wild enough to appeal to the romantic in him yet also practically far away enough that if Joanna awoke earlier than anticipated she would still have no chance of making her wedding on time.’

  Arthur nodded. ‘Yet he gets it wrong. He gives her too much. She appears dead to dog walkers, her body so cold even the police are fooled. Then she wakes up, struggles to escape, scares the crap out of Mick, the coroner, and his crew. They panic and fight her, then faced with what they think is a dead body all over again, they dump her in the sea.’

  ‘And the sea, it seems, likes her. She wakes up on the beach at Cramer Cove with no recollection of her identity yet a desire for solitude as well as violence.’


  ‘And somewhere over the years, she sees Ted again, has a vague memory of what had happened, and wants her revenge. Ted thinks she’s come back from the dead, wants to protect his family from what he thinks is her attempt at revenge, and the romantic Ted resurfaces. He tries to exorcise what he thinks is her haunting spirit from his life.’

  Arthur nodded. Slim nodded too.

  ‘So where is she?’ Arthur said. ‘And how has she avoided discovery all these years?’

  ‘I think I know,’ Slim said. ‘Come on. It’s time we found her.’

  39

  THE LIGHT WAS STARTING to fade as they climbed the path up to the headland overlooking Cramer Cove. They had brought torches just in case, but as they reached the top, the sun broke through a line of clouds and bathed them in a welcoming orange glow.

  ‘This way,’ Slim said. ‘It was over here, under the hedge.’

  So much had happened in such a short period of time that Slim had nearly forgotten what he had found under the hedgerow on the clifftop, just before Arthur’s call to inform him of Ted’s accident.

  He followed the path to the place he remembered, marked by a twisted oak sapling bent back into the hedgerow by the wind. While Arthur watched, Slim lay on the ground and pushed his way into the hedge. At full stretch, his fingers closed over the hard edge of a wooden board.

  ‘Got it,’ he said.

  ‘Got what?’

  ‘A way through.’

  He felt along the edge of the board, which was damp and crumbly through age and exposure. Just as he was about to give up and try to get a better grip, his fingers touched metal.

  A clasp, the kind found on climbing ropes. It felt grainy and rusty, but when he maneuvered his fingers around it, he felt something threaded through, a piece of metal coil.

  ‘It’s tricky,’ he muttered, fingers trying to gain purchase. ‘Just a little ... more.’

  The clasp opened and the coil slipped free.

  The effect was immediate. The board sprung up about fifteen inches, revealing a dirt path underneath the hedgerow, like an animal trail. Slim crawled into it, pulling himself through. When he had scrabbled his way out the other side, he turned and called for Arthur.

  ‘Where’d you go, Slim?’

  ‘The other side. Crouch low. I’ll pull you through.’

  Two minutes later Arthur was wiping dust off his shirt as he sat beside Slim on the grass. Ahead, the land dipped away sharply, ending in a rocky cliff edge. Beyond it, the sea crashed and churned far below.

  ‘That’s quite the secret passage,’ Arthur said.

  ‘Someone practiced with those clasps could be through in a matter of seconds,’ Slim said. ‘It only took me a while to figure out because it was the first time.’

  ‘Where did she go from here?’

  The hedgerow sloped around toward an inlet valley, but it made no sense for Joanna to go that way. Slim stood and walked to the cliff edge.

  It dropped off almost sheer, jagged and deadly. A hundred metres below, the sea hassled a jutting cluster of rocks.

  ‘No way anyone’s getting down there,’ Arthur said.

  Slim shook his head. ‘She did, somehow,’ he said. ‘Let’s take a closer look.’

  ‘There isn’t anywhere closer!’

  Slim ignored him. He lay down on the ground and shuffled on his belly to the very edge of the cliff. His stomach grumbled as he looked over.

  ‘There.’

  ‘What?’

  A couple of feet down, a wire ladder hung fixed to the cliff face. It looked like the kind more commonly found on alpine trekking trails, with steel bolts securing it to the rock. For the last few feet, a climber had to rely on a couple of rocky outcrops for handholds, so it had easily remained hidden.

  ‘She went down that? You’ve got to be kidding me.’

  Slim remembered his military trading. ‘A lot of things are possible with practice.’

  ‘But why would she? I mean, why here?’

  ‘I don’t think she chose this place,’ Slim said. ‘I think it chose her. I think that after your friend and his colleagues threw her in the sea, this is how she got out.’

  40

  ‘I NEED TO SPEAK TO YOU,’ Slim said. ‘Emma, it’s important.’

  ‘What is it about? I was going to head over to the hospital to check on Ted for an hour or two.’

  ‘Have you given any more thought to going south for a while?’

  There was a pause. Then: ‘No. I don’t care what this thing or person or whatever is, I’m not going to let it scare me away.’

  ‘I’ve asked Arthur to have someone watch your house.’

  ‘I appreciate it, but the locks are quite secure.’

  Slim sighed. Emma, despite being aware of the growing threat, was digging her heels in.

  ‘Well, why don’t you come to my hotel?’

  He could almost hear her smile. ‘I guess I could, if it’s not too much trouble ... I know you’re busy.’

  They made small-talk for a couple more minutes, then Slim hung up. He didn’t really want to see her, but he could at least make sure she was safe.

  He went back to his flat before meeting her, to collect his recording equipment. In the dark space that stank of smoke, he felt like a thief in his own flat as he collected his things by the light of a torch.

  The hotel room was cramped, so he set the equipment up inside the only closet, unplugging an adjacent fridge and using the plug for his power cord. He switched it on, but heard nothing except a low hiss of emptiness with the occasional clump or bang, probably a doctor or nurse moving equipment around. Emma had told him there was no change in Ted’s condition. Her husband remained unconscious but stable.

  Slim set up a mic and left it running, but there was nothing further to hear. He thought he heard the sound of a car starting up, but he was already a couple of beers deep, so it could have as easily have come from the street outside. About twenty minutes later, Emma knocked on his hotel door. Slim shut the cupboard to make a little extra space, then let her in.

  ‘I’m not supposed to be in your room,’ she said, giving him a mischievous smile. ‘I sneaked past the reception while the server was busy with another guest.’

  Slim tried to find the enthusiasm to be happy to see her, but all he could see was a ladder leading down a cliff face and a line of dead women lying on a beach.

  ‘I think your life is in danger,’ he said.

  Emma rolled her eyes. ‘Joanna Bramwell? You really think―’

  ‘I have proof she’s alive. And while I don’t yet have hard evidence, I think she was involved in the deaths of at least three women and responsible for Ted’s accident.’

  Emma lifted an eyebrow. ‘Vengeful spirit indeed.’

  ‘I’m worried she’ll come after you. I also think she could be behind the fire in my flat. Did you see anyone?’

  Emma shook her head. ‘No, no one who stood out. To be honest, I wasn’t concentrating that hard. I was thinking about Ted ... and you, of course.’

  ‘I’m starting to understand what it feels like to be haunted.’

  ‘Are there no CCTV cameras near your flat? Maybe they caught the person responsible on video?’

  ‘I think the police are looking into it.’ Slim made a mental note to check with Arthur, but in truth he didn’t know. The blame had fallen at his feet for the fire, and Arthur had heard nothing about further investigation despite Slim’s wishes.

  ‘Make sure they do,’ Emma said. ‘Practically every square inch of this country is on camera these days.’

  ‘I will,’ he said.

  Emma patted his leg. ‘I don’t think it’s me that needs to worry. It’s you. If Joanna Bramwell really is out there, perhaps she knows you’re after her.’

  Slim remembered the photographs. He was still yet to hear back from Arthur’s friend. ‘Oh, I’m sure of it,’ he said.

  Emma kissed him. Slim wanted to tell her to leave, to leave him to his dark thoughts and his drinking, but th
e part of him that needed comfort was raising its head.

  He kissed her back, wishing he’d never met her, nor ever heard the names of Ted Douglas and Joanna Bramwell.

  41

  WHEN HE WOKE, the clock showed just after two. Slim rolled over, feeling for Emma, but the bed was empty. Instead, his fingers closed over a piece of paper.

  The bedside lamp, when he switched it on, sent a lance of pain directly into his brain. He squinted through it to read the note, brief and to the point:

  Your bed is a little small for two! I’ll call you in the morning.

  And don’t worry, I’ll be fine.

  Emma.

  Slim threw his pillow against the wall, where it hung for a moment before falling and knocking over a pot of complimentary teabags.

  Emma didn’t get it, that a ghost could be capable of killing people, but then a few weeks ago he might not have either.

  He sat up. Then again, had Joanna actually killed anyone? Not one of the dead girls had died by a human hand, despite the circumstances.

  Climbing out of bed, he scrambled to the room’s desk, where he found a piece of paper and a pen. He was just scrawling down some notes for Arthur when he heard a voice behind him.

  He spun around, his first thought that Emma was still here. She had just used the bathroom before leaving, maybe. But the bathroom light was off. Then he realised. The voice came from the closet where he had hidden his recording equipment.

  Certain he had switched it off, he opened the door and found a red light blinking on the display.

  The line was still active. A rustling sound came from headphones he must have unplugged. He plugged them back in and pulled them on.

  ‘I miss you, Ted...’