During the Cold War, the island had been home to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment to help develop the atomic bomb and carry out tests on it in half-buried concrete buildings. The Americans also used the island for ‘research’ during the sixties and seventies. No details about that – presumably still very much under wraps. It was also thought there were areas with buried landmines, though many of the areas had been cleared of the mines. The Rider family, Lauren wrote, was given the island back in the late eighties.
Her mind was buzzing. All at once she wanted to get into a boat with Reg and go across to the island. She would find answers there, she was sure of it.
Lauren had also attached an old map of the island. Alex opened it up. Like a child’s drawing, it showed the lighthouse and an assortment of old buildings. Three were called ‘pagodas’, whatever that meant, and there were several labelled as ‘bunkers’. A control room. A bomb ballistics building – that sounded alarming. Where they tested the bombs? Airfield site. A Bailey bridge. Marshes. A network of paths criss-crossed the island. There were even three ‘Danger – Landmines’ signs.
Bunkers. A perfect place to hide things. Or people.
God, how she wanted to get across there.
Her phone vibrated on the table beside her.
‘Have you got Lauren’s email?’ Heath said.
‘I have. I’m reading it at this very moment.’
‘Good. Good. Interesting, don’t you think? All that guff about anthrax. Pack of bloody government lies. Though why should we be surprised?’
Alex could hear phones ringing in the background and Heath typing at his computer.
‘Lauren’s done a great job. And fast, too,’ she said. ‘She’s saved me from wading through dry and dusty documents by managing to weed out what is and what isn’t important. Say thanks to her for me.’
‘I will. She’s a good kid. Will go far. She reminds me of you before you got soft.’
‘Before I got soft? What are you talking about?’
‘Making money from populist books.’
Alex didn’t know whether she should be angry with him, whether he was being serious. It was difficult to ascertain over the phone. ‘Enough, Heath.’
‘Now, about Boney, aka Nigel Bennet.’
‘Yes?’
She heard him sigh at the other end of the phone. She imagined him leaning back in his chair, crossing his ankles and tapping a pen on the desk. ‘Obviously there was nothing on Google about him.’
‘Obviously.’
‘But the Dark Web threw up a couple of shadowy references. Drugs. Supplying women. Trafficking. He’s heavily into Internet porn, too.’
‘Watching it or providing it?’
‘Both, I expect. No pictures of course. Shame. I was looking forward to seeing his tats. No known associates. And anyway, as you know, the Dark Web usually means the end of any investigation. Impossible to crack.’
Alex wondered if Boney did, indeed, have a wireless router in that shed of his. ‘Any idea who his customers are?’
‘No. But he’s dangerous, Alex, that’s for sure. Leave him to the police.’ Heath had his serious voice on.
Alex fervently hoped she need never see Boney again.
‘So, what else besides missing people, UFOs and secret government experimentation is going on in deepest, rural Suffolk?’
Ethel started making whinnying noises and her legs paddled madly. Dreaming of chasing rabbits. ‘I’m not one hundred per cent sure, yet. Look, I’ve got to—’
‘Alex, you’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?’
‘Like what?’
‘Go over to that bloody island. I don’t want you being washed up on a beach somewhere and languishing in a mortuary because you can’t be identified.’
She sighed impatiently. ‘Don’t be so macabre.’
‘I mean it.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Good. Because it would be stupid. And you’d have to fill out a health and safety form.’
She smiled. ‘And I’ve got a ton of them hanging around.’
She looked out of her window. Raining again. When would it ever stop? There were flood warnings for some of the water courses in the county. Rivers threatening to break their banks. High tides washing away sand from the beaches, undermining houses perched on the edge of dunes. The roads swilling with water. Every time she looked at a weather map there were black clouds with great fat drops of rain dripping from them. She didn’t envy anyone who was sleeping rough through it all. She thought of Emmy, who had looked as though she really needed a few square meals, dry clothes and someone to hug her. Alex really didn’t want her to end up in a pauper’s grave.
Emmy homeless.
Lindy. Tiger. Dead.
Where was Martin? Nobby? Karolina? Rick?
Lindy on a railway line. Tiger with a needle in his arm. What had Heath said? Don’t get washed up on a beach. And didn’t she read a story on the local pages of BBC News Online the other morning about a body on a beach?
She opened up her computer again. There it was.
Mystery surrounds the identity of a man whose body was found washed up on a beach in Suffolk.
The man, described as white and middle-aged, was found near Southwold Harbour.
Suffolk Police say the death is not believed to be suspicious.
She leaned back in her chair and gazed out of the window for inspiration. She started to look for news stories about bodies found on East Anglian beaches.
These are the eleven unidentified bodies washed up on Suffolk beaches in the past fifty years.
It was an article about the unidentified remains found: ‘A bone, believed to have been in the water for less than six months,’ she read, ‘a body thought to have been in the water between two weeks and two months. White European male, aged over forty, 185 cm (6 ft) tall—’
She scanned the rest of the article: a one-eyed man, a woman with arthritis, a man with one leg. All sorts.
So, eleven in fifty years, not that startling. The article had been written in 2011.
She clicked around some more.
Rise in number of bodies on beaches
In the last year, wrote the author, more than six unidentified bodies have been found washed up on the beaches of Suffolk and Norfolk.
Alex sat back in her chair. So, eleven in fifty years, now six in the last year.
Detective Inspector Sam Slater, in charge of a task force looking into the rise in the unidentified bodies said he and his team were still investigating. ‘It is a worrying trend, and we are looking into one or two possibilities,’ he said.
Well, well, well. Sam Slater. She would have to ask him about that. Another coincidence to add to a string of coincidences.
She typed ‘railway line suicides’ into the search bar.
She discovered there had been a rise in the number of people jumping in front of trains over the last two or three years. Some of the journos speculated it was because of the economic slump, hard times, families not coping. Alex suspected that was true for some, but did it explain them all?
Then she found a couple of articles about bodies found on railway lines that had not been struck by trains. Frustratingly, there were no follow-up stories, so no way of knowing what they had died from. Presumably not deemed murder, otherwise there would have been more written about them.
She poked around. No mention of any increase in washed-up bodies in Cornwall or Dorset or Yorkshire. Two or three more in Lincolnshire and Essex. Nor an abnormal number of deaths on the East Coast London to Edinburgh line.
She sat back in frustration. She was looking for negatives. Non-stories. Still. A lot of bodies washed up on beaches. Bodies on railway lines. All in the area. Almost as if it was deliberate. As if someone was making these deaths look like suicide or even an accident in order to hide something more sinister.
Like murder.
But why?
Her intercom buzzed, interrupting her thoughts. Ethel
scrambled up, startled awake by the noise.
‘Hello?’ she said into the speaker.
‘It’s me, Cora.’
Alex hesitated, then pressed the button to open the downstairs door and waited for her to reach the top of the stairs.
‘I need to talk to you,’ said Cora.
Alex held the door open wide, shocked at Cora’s bedraggled and haggard appearance. She looked as though she had been sleeping under a hedge, the purple bruising under her eyes even more noticeable than before and her skin waxy. Her beautiful red curls were hanging limp and dirty and her boots were caked with mud. She was wrapped in a thin coat and misery.
‘Sorry, I don’t look great, do I?’ she said, obviously noting Alex’s shock as she followed her into the flat. ‘I’ve been walking all over the place, trying to find Rick, but with no luck.’
‘Sit down. What do you mean, walking everywhere? Since when?’
Cora sat at the table. ‘Since the early hours.’ She hung her head. ‘I’m so sorry about barging in like that. To your sister’s exhibition, I mean. I was brooding from the moment you said you were going with Jamie Rider. It built up from there. Then I went to the pub and downed drink after drink until the landlady refused to serve me any more. But the booze had given me Dutch courage. I had to come and say something.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘I’m suffering today, though. This’, she pointed to herself, ‘is not only the early morning and worry.’
Alex smiled, realizing Cora hardly dared look at her. ‘Don’t worry about it. Nothing you could have said or done would have marred Sasha’s evening. She was having a wonderful time.’
‘I’m also sorry if I spoiled your evening,’ she said, awkwardly.
‘You didn’t, I promise. I’ve got a lot to tell you, but first let me make you some food while you fill me in on where you’ve been.’
Alex took bacon and eggs out of the fridge and put a frying pan on the cooker. Soon the little kitchen area was filled with the noise and sound of sizzling bacon. She deftly cracked two eggs into the pan, then turned on the kettle to make a coffee.
‘I’ve been looking for Rick,’ Cora said eventually, tracing patterns with her finger on the table top. She sighed. ‘I seem to have spent a long time lately looking for him. I went to Norwich. I even went to poke around Riders’ Farm. Cost me a fortune in taxi fares.’ There was the glimmer of a smile on her face.
‘To the farm?’
Cora nodded.
‘And did you find any sign of him?’ Alex poured milk into two coffees.
‘No. Nothing. I tried everywhere. I tramped around the city again – God knows I know that place like the back of my hand – then at the farm I looked in barns, sheds, peered through the windows of a couple of those stupid lodges. I even tried to get into one of those ridiculous yurts. Nothing. I did have to dodge out of sight more than once as there were a couple of thugs who looked as though they were patrolling the area. Trying to keep people like me away, I suppose.’
‘Did you find any caravans?’
‘Caravans?’ echoed Cora.
‘Yes.’ Alex slid the bacon and eggs on a plate and put it in front of Cora before sitting at the other end of the table. Ethel slunk in and sat by Cora’s side, her chin resting on Cora’s thigh. ‘When I was talking to Jamie about Karolina, he said she was employed at the farm as a cleaner and that their staff – or some of them at least – live in “state-of-the-art” caravans as he called them, in a field. Did you see any?’
‘No, nothing like that.’ Cora was shovelling the food into her mouth as if she hadn’t eaten for days. ‘I could have missed a field of caravans, I suppose, but it seems unlikely. I went all over that farm.’ She pointed to Ethel. ‘Does she always drool this much? My thigh is soaking.’
‘Always,’ Alex confirmed.
‘Do you think Martin will come back?’ Cora pulled gently at the dog’s ears. Ethel shifted her body, whimpered, and settled her chin complete with drool back on Cora’s damp thigh.
Alex put the pan in the sink, letting it sizzle. ‘I hope so,’ she said quietly. ‘Because if he doesn’t it means something’s happened to him.’
Cora nodded.
She finished her bacon and eggs. ‘Thank you for that.’ Her fingers drummed the table. Alex knew she was itching for a smoke.
‘Have a cigarette if you like.’
‘Trying to give up. Haven’t got any with me.’ Her fingers drummed some more. ‘But I could kill for one now. Look, I owe you an explanation.’
Alex took a deep breath. ‘Cora, I know a little about what happened twenty-four years ago. Jamie told me.’
Her face was stony. ‘I bet he loved that.’
Alex shook her head. ‘Not really.’
Her fingers stopped their drumming. ‘What did he say?’
Alex’s heart was thudding. She had started on this path, and now she had to carry on down it. ‘That you took Lewis to court because you believed he’d raped you.’
‘Believed. Such careful language, Alex.’ Her lips settled into a thin line. ‘Is that the journalist in you? That I believe he raped me, but it might not be so?’
‘I’m not the enemy here. Honestly.’
Cora ran her hands through her hair, her fingers becoming tangled in the rats’ tails. ‘Lewis Rider raped me. Sex without consent. Rick persuaded me to go to the police and they wanted to prosecute. But of course, he had the big fancy pants lawyer. I didn’t. He won.’ She closed her eyes and shuddered. ‘I was like a fish on a slab. Flapping this way and that without the means of breathing. I wasn’t so much stitched up like a kipper as boned and filleted – just to keep the fish metaphors coming.’ Her smile was sad. ‘It was awful. Beyond awful. I’ll never forget the smirk on Lewis Rider’s face as I crossed to the witness box. I had to concentrate to even put one foot in front of the other. I thought I wanted to see his face when I testified. I wished to God I hadn’t.’ Her face was ghostly pale. ‘It haunts my dreams most nights, even now.’
Alex found her emergency stash of cigarettes and handed one to Cora. ‘You don’t have to go on, you know, if you don’t want to.’
Cora’s hand shook as she lit the cigarette. ‘I do. Now I’ve started. I’ve never told anyone the whole story before. The thing was, it – the rape – happened after a late-night shift in the pub. A rowdy night. Hot. Sweaty. So, of course, in court I was asked the usual sort of questions. How much had you had to drink, Ms Winterton? You regretted the sex act, didn’t you, Ms Winterton? Why didn’t you call the police straightaway, Ms Winterton? Ms Winterton, Ms Winterton, Ms Winterton, even my own name sounded false when he’d finished with me.’ She dashed away some tears with the heel of her hand.
Alex put an ashtray in front of her.
‘And can you imagine what it’s like to have details of your sex life laid out in front of your parents? Mum sat through the whole thing, tears pouring down her face. Dad’s face – oh God, Dad’s face—’ She closed her eyes, trying to compose herself. ‘His face was a mixture of horror and revulsion and it took every ounce of strength I had to keep my knees from buckling; I could only imagine what it must have been like for him to have heard about his daughter’s sex life, to have his daughter accused of being provocative, of bringing it upon herself, to have consented to sex and then regretted it. What must it have been like for a father to hear that?’ The tail of ash on the end of her cigarette dropped into the ashtray.
Alex sat completely still, absorbing Cora’s words.
‘Actually, I can tell you what it was like.’ She pulled on the cigarette as if her life depended on it. ‘Devastating. But do you know what was worse? He blamed me for the rape. He became more and more morose and drank, oh God how he drank.’ She rubbed her eyes with her free hand until they were red and sore-looking. He used to ask me questions like “why did you have to encourage that Rider boy?”, as if it was all my fault.’
Alex got up and poured them both another cup of coffee. She felt weighed down with sadness.
‘It killed him, literally killed him. Because of me he lost his job with the Riders, so we lost the house. And he never worked again. That’s when we moved to Bury St Edmunds. My mum’s sister rented us a place, so at least we had a roof over our heads. Rick took all sorts of jobs to help my mum out and to help me get my nursing degree. Dad sort of faded away to nothing.’
‘Lewis Rider has a lot to answer for.’
‘Not only Lewis, but the whole family. Look, I know you like Jamie and maybe he’s not as bad as the others—’
Alex shook her head. ‘I’m not so sure.’
Cora gave her a sharp look, then carried on. ‘Marianne and Joe sat in that courtroom every single day. Staring at me.’ She shuddered. ‘I was a wreck by the end of it.’
Alex gave Cora a hug. ‘Your poor, poor thing. What a terrible ordeal.’ She leaned her chin on top of Cora’s head. She could not imagine how much it had cost Cora to talk about the rape and its aftermath.
‘Do you believe me?’ she asked in a small voice.
Alex rubbed Cora’s back as though she was comforting a child, thinking how close she had come to questioning Cora’s story. ‘Yes. Absolutely. I never doubted you, Cora.’ She sat back down. ‘I’m guessing all this is connected to whatever it is Rick’s doing now?’
Cora nodded.
‘And you’ve no idea where he might be?’
Cora rummaged in her pocket and took out a gold chain. ‘Eventually I went to the quay at Gisford and found this on the ground. It’s Rick’s.’
Gone in the Night Page 23