The Facts of Life and Death

27

MISS SHARPE PICKED Ruby Trick’s diary off the top of the pile. The title on the cover was written so wrongly, and yet so carefully, that Miss Sharpe didn’t have the heart to correct it.

She skimmed the latest entries, corrected a few spelling errors, made a few ticks. She smiled to herself as she wondered whether the childish pleasure of a red pen would ever wear off.

The last line in the book made her gasp.

She had to read it twice to make sure she wasn’t imagining it.

And when she had, Miss Sharpe closed the little blue book and sat for a very long time, just staring at the words: My Dairy.

Then she picked up the phone to call Ruby Trick’s mother.

Just as Calvin Bridge had promised, the Burrows was a thousand acres of flat land that would have been a lagoon if it weren’t for the pebble ridge that ran for over a mile and was as high as a house.

These were not any old pebbles. Not pebbles that would sit snug in the hand or skip across a pond. These were kings among pebbles. Emperors of smooth grey sandstone – each one as rounded and as beautiful as the next, and ranging in size from palm to prize-winning pumpkin.

And the irony was that the sea itself had built the ridge that now kept it at bay. For a hundred thousand years, the tide had picked up and pounded jagged rocks from the foot of cliffs as far away as Clovelly. It had rubbed them and washed them and shaped them and rolled them along ten miles of beach, until each rock was worn to a smooth piece of perfection. Finally the ocean had piled them into this natural wall – slowly cheating itself out of the Burrows, which were instead annexed by locals for their sheep and their ponies and, later, their golf.

Twice a day, the angry sea came back for the Burrows. It slunk about the foot of the ridge, casing the joint. Then, with the full weight of the Atlantic behind it, it threw itself at the pebbles, clawing and snarling and roaring its intent to take back its rightful property. Once a month, General Moon ordered it over the top, where it sometimes caught a tantalizing glimpse of what it had lost, and hurled insults and froth, but rarely managed more.

Every year, the Potwallopers walked the tattered edges of the ridge by torchlight and heaved giant pebbles that had been dragged on to the sand back up to the top of the magnificent ridge. Then they feasted on the beach – taunting the sea, and daring it to try again, if it thought it was hard enough.

In sunshine the pebbles were a tasteful pale grey, some with elegant white crystalline pinstripes. But today it was raining, and they were slate and shiny.

On any day, Calvin knew they would break your ankle as soon as look at you.

‘Remarkable,’ said DCI King as they drove along behind the ridge, and Calvin felt a swell of proprietorial pride at this most prominent feature of his home town – as if he’d built it himself.

King yawned.

Calvin didn’t take it personally. He knew she’d been up half the night with some girl who’d been dragged down the Torrington road on her arse.

‘Any luck with that girl, Ma’am?’ he asked.

‘She’s not going to be any help,’ said King, and yawned again. ‘Even sober.’

They left the Volvo on a patch of gravel at the foot of the ridge and started walking. The grass underfoot was as smooth as lino. Any blade that dared put its head above the parapet was immediately cropped by sheep or ponies. Now and then there was a ditch for drainage, or a stand of spiky marsh grass to remind them that they should have been underwater. Calvin held out a hand to a passing pony. It stretched its neck and lips, but lost interest when it found that all he had to offer was fingers.

They stopped at a shallow pan of mud and Calvin bent down to scoop a sample into a small plastic jar.

‘Keep your eye open for Frannie’s nose ring,’ DCI King reminded him.

‘Will do, Ma’am,’ said Calvin, although they both knew it was a hopeless task.

‘So,’ said King, ‘when’s the big day?’

‘What big day?’

‘The wedding.’

‘Oh. Next year. March thirteenth.’

‘Lucky for some.’ She shrugged. ‘Looking forward to it?’

‘Sure,’ said Calvin, putting the lid on the little jar.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Who?’

‘Your fiancée.’

‘Oh! Shirley. She’s a really nice girl.’

‘You make her sound like a spaniel,’ said King.

Someone shouted ‘Fore!’ and they hunched their shoulders. A dozen yards away, a golf ball thudded softly into the turf beside an uninterested sheep.

Pans were a feature of the Burrows. They took mud samples from two more before it started to rain hard and King decided they had enough for Mike Crew to make a reasonable comparison with the soil between Frannie Hatton’s teeth.

They got back in the car.

‘You can take those samples down to Mike Crew tomorrow,’ said King.

Calvin made the outraged face of a fourteen-year-old boy and she added cheerfully, ‘Isn’t the chain of command wonderful?’

She put the car into gear and pulled off the gravel on to the narrow road.

Calvin looked out of the window at the wet grass and mud-pans slowly filling with sandy brown rainwater, and sighed deeply.

‘Getting cold feet about the wedding?’ said King, not unkindly.

‘No, no, no,’ Calvin said. ‘Yes.’

King laughed, but he didn’t, and she stopped.

‘It’s just that it’s all happening very fast.’ He made what felt like a ridiculous face and waved his hands to show he was totally OK with it all. ‘Very exciting, you know? Bit of a blur.’

He laughed awkwardly. King cleared her throat but said nothing. That was his invitation to say nothing too.

But instead, after a minute or so, he said something.

‘It’s just that everything feels different. People aren’t the same.’

‘You mean Shirley’s not the same?’

‘Yeah. Suddenly she’s not about us any more. She’s all about the wedding and the honeymoon and all the children we’re going to have.’

King raised her eyebrows and said, ‘All the children?’

Calvin nodded. ‘Three. Rosie, Charlotte and Digby.’

‘Digby?’ laughed King. ‘Bloody hell, Calvin! Get out now, while you still can!’

Calvin opened his mouth to tell her that Shirley had wanted Algie, and he’d got it reduced to Digby on appeal, but he was suddenly flung forward so hard in his seat that the inertia reel belt jammed against his shoulder and he braced his hands against the dashboard.

The Volvo fishtailed a little, then lurched to a stop.

‘Get out!’ said King.

‘What?’

‘Get out of the car! Out!’ And she poked him in the arm.

Confused and a little worried, Calvin opened his door. He didn’t move fast enough for King. She poked him twice more in the back as he went, shouting, ‘Out! Out!’

He did, then took a few paces before turning to face the car.

King got out of the driver’s side, looking flushed. ‘That’s it!’ she said. ‘Those marks on Frannie Hatton’s arm and back – they’re in the places they’d be if someone was poking her to get her out of a car!’

Calvin frowned and touched his arm where her forefinger had first landed. There would be a little bruise there, for sure – even through his jacket. And the two on his back were lower than the marks on Frannie, but then, he was a lot taller.

‘Get out!’ said King. ‘That’s what made me think of it. But Frannie didn’t want to get out – she must’ve known that something bad was going to happen. So he poked her with his finger and the nails left those short, curved bruises.’

She was pacing with excitement.

Calvin frowned.

‘What’s wrong?’ she said instantly.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘a man doesn’t poke. A man pushes.’

King stared at him, then jerked a thumb at the car. ‘OK, you get in the driver’s seat and push me out. Let me see.’

He did, and she saw. He sat behind the wheel and shoved her out with his spread fingertips and the heel of his hand. He didn’t poke.

‘And even if he did poke,’ he said, staring at his forefinger, ‘men don’t have nails long enough to leave marks like the ones on Frannie Hatton.’

King grimaced and said, ‘You’re right.’

‘And Katie Squire noticed that his nails were quite bitten,’ said Calvin. ‘It’s in the report.’

‘You’re right again. Bollocks.’ She sat back down in the passenger seat.

That made three times Calvin had been right in the past two minutes. He was never right about swatches.

‘Maybe it was a gun,’ said King.

‘Seriously?’ said Calvin. This was Devon; now and then a farmer sawed his granddad’s shotgun in half so that he could put the end of it in his mouth, but criminal guns – handguns – were still mercifully few and far between.

But King said, ‘Yes, seriously. The bit at the front. The barrel—’

‘The muzzle,’ he supplied.

‘Yes, the muzzle. That would leave a little curved bruise.’ She made her fingers into a gun and poked him slowly three times in the shoulder. ‘Would – ’nt – it?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it would.’ Then he paused cautiously and added, ‘But none of the girls who escaped mentioned a gun.’

‘I know,’ said King. ‘Although he could’ve had a Howitzer and Becky Cobb probably wouldn’t have noticed.’

‘And if he did have a gun, why didn’t he just shoot Frannie Hatton?’

‘Noise?’ shrugged King. ‘Or maybe she tried to run and he caught her and lost control of the situation or himself. Or he dropped the gun. Or she knocked it out of his hand and he had to improvise. Maybe it jammed. Or it’s traceable. Or he only needed it as a threat and never intended to use it. Could have been lots of reasons.’

Calvin nodded. They all seemed obvious now that DCI King had said them.

‘Or maybe he just likes the intimacy of suffocation,’ she added more slowly.

Calvin frowned at her.

‘You imagine it,’ King went on. ‘Putting your hands around somebody’s throat or holding them face-down in mud or sand or water. Feeling them fight and then weaken and finally give up and die.’

Calvin did imagine it.

‘You’d literally hold a life in your hands,’ said the DCI bleakly.

‘Yeah,’ nodded Calvin, and – almost unconsciously – his hands gripped the steering wheel in front of him, and squeezed so tight that his knuckles went white. ‘You’d really have everything under control.’

DCI King gave him a serious look.

‘Jesus, Calvin. Just tell Shirley to slow the fuck down, will you? Nobody has to die.’