The Doll's House

69

The three figures stood alone, whipped by the wind that roared in off the Solent. Helen was on one side of the trio, Harwood on the other, with an uncomfortable DS Fortune in between. The two women had hardly spoken to each other since arriving and the atmosphere was tense. Helen got the feeling that Lloyd would rather be anywhere else but here, but that was too bad. This was too important not to have her right-hand man by her side.

The beach had been deserted when they arrived, so securing it wasn’t hard. Given the brief window she’d been allowed, Helen had pulled out all the stops, dragging a dozen uniformed coppers off the beat, so that that the beach could be taped off swiftly and the necessary public notices erected. Nobody was swimming off this beach today.

A POLSA team had been scrambled from Kent Police, making it to Carsholt in under two hours – Helen had impressed upon them the urgency of the situation. They were now at work, the metal detectors, cadaver dogs and ground-penetrating radar scouring the broad expanse of sand for any signs of burial, deposition or human remains. The occasional bleep from the metal detectors was all Helen could hear above the wind.

The beach presented in a very different light from the last time Helen had been here. When they had found Pippa, the weather had been incongruously glorious, the sun beating down on the SOC officers as they’d completed their painstaking forensic work. Today the sun had disappeared behind looming grey clouds, hiding its warmth and cheer from the scene. Even the sea seemed to be getting in on the act, raging and crashing on the surf nearby.

DS Fortune sneaked a look at his watch.

‘How many hours of daylight do we have left?’ Helen asked him.

‘About seven,’ he replied quickly. His voice was clipped, infused with the anxiety of a man serving two masters.

‘Seven hours before we can bring this charade to an end,’ Harwood added. ‘Are you planning on staying down here all day, DI Grace? Or do you have some police work to do?’

‘I’ll stay as long as is necessary,’ Helen replied evenly. She wasn’t going to embarrass herself by squabbling with Harwood in front of a junior officer. ‘After all, we only have limited time.’

Harwood didn’t respond, so Helen took this as her cue, heading down to the water’s edge. Once there she turned, taking in the full panorama of Carsholt beach. Harwood and Fortune were chatting easily – more relaxed now Helen had left them – in sharp contrast to the men and women from Kent, who had worked out a grid and were now combing every inch of it.

Helen felt the tension within her rise as she watched their patient, diligent work.

Had she been too hasty in ordering the search? She had little credit with Chief Constable Fisher and even less with Harwood, so it would be hard now to ask for extra resources later in the investigation, if today’s search proved fruitless. For a moment, Helen berated herself for her characteristic impatience. It was like an obsession for her, the desire to chase down leads, to complete the story, to find out what had happened. Once you climbed inside an investigation of this magnitude and urgency, it was hard to wrench your mind from it, as you constantly checked and double-checked your assumptions to see if there was something you could be doing better or faster. Sleep was hard to come by and it was almost impossible to relax, but that was as it should be. You didn’t come into this line of work for an easy life – you did it because you wanted to make a difference.

Helen snapped out of her daydreaming, because one unit of the POLSA team had suddenly stopped. They weren’t combing any more, they were digging. Helen raced across the sand, making it to the quartet of officers, just before DS Fortune. The look on their faces said it all.

‘We’ve found something.’