The House At Sea’s End

CHAPTER 19

‘So he was married all along?’ says Ruth.

‘Apparently so,’ says Nelson, who is finding it hard to drag his eyes away from Kate. ‘His wife’s due in England tomorrow. She’s going to fly his body back home.’

‘Did Clara know? That he was married, I mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Nelson, who is building a tower of red and yellow bricks. Kate watches him narrowly.

Clara Hastings had been in that morning to make her statement. Nelson had asked Judy to drop Eckhart’s wife casually into the conversation. Clara hadn’t flickered. Towards the end of the session, though, she had grown tearful.

‘It must be so hard for you,’ Judy had said sympathetically. She is good at this sort of thing.

‘I’m just thinking about his kids,’ Clara had sniffed.

So she had known about the children.

Nelson adds another brick and then knocks over the tower. Kate laughs delightedly. She loves destruction. Ruth is beginning to regret letting Nelson come at a time when Kate would be in the house. It makes her uneasy to see them together. Whilst, on one hand, she wants Nelson to love his daughter (and, by extension, her?), she knows that the more attached Nelson gets, the more complicated their situation becomes.

‘What did the post mortem say?’ she asks, to bring him back to earth.

‘Eckhart was stabbed with a sharp metal object. They think it was scissors.’

‘Scissors?’

‘Heavy-duty scissors. The sort used for dressmaking or cutting back plants. They were honed to a point apparently.’

‘Honed. So someone had planned this? It wasn’t spur of the moment?’

‘No,’ says Nelson soberly. ‘Someone sharpened those scissors and waited.’

‘Have you any idea who?’

‘I’ve got lots of ideas,’ says Nelson. ‘Each more ridiculous than the last.’

‘Do you think the same person killed Archie Whitcliffe and Dieter Eckhart?’ Nelson has told her about the autopsy report on Archie. Death by asphyxiation was the verdict, probably with a pillow.

‘Yes I do,’ says Nelson, still looking at Kate as she thoughtfully sucks the building bricks. ‘The method was different but I’m convinced the link was the murder of the six Germans. Someone is prepared to kill to stop that story getting out. There’s Hugh Anselm too, the old chap in the stairlift. I’m sure he was murdered too.’

‘It’s so far-fetched though,’ complains Ruth. ‘Like something out a murder mystery.’

‘Archie Whitcliffe was a big fan of murder mysteries,’ says Nelson. ‘Left a pile of them to his carer.’

‘Really?’ Ruth looks interested. ‘What sort of books?’

‘Nothing special. I hoped they might be worth something. She hasn’t got two pennies to rub together, the carer, but they were just a load of old paperbacks. Second hand, most of them.’

‘Do you have the list of the titles?’

‘Somewhere. Why are you interested?’

‘I don’t know. Just an idea.’

Nelson gets Judy to fax through the list of titles (Ruth is almost the last person in the world still to have a fax machine). Ruth reads through the names while Nelson plays peek-a-boo with Kate. Ruth wishes Clough could see him.

‘Was there anything else?’ she asks. ‘Just the list?’

‘Oh, there was some nonsense about which order to read them in. I can’t remember it now. Ask Judy.’ And he disappears behind the cushion again.

‘This is it,’ says Judy. Ruth can hear her rustling paper. ‘He says, read them in this order: 3,2,2,2,2,3,1,2. Crazy, isn’t it?’

‘Maybe,’ says Ruth, sitting down to look at the list again. Nelson, who is crouching on the floor beside Kate, looks up at her.

‘What is it, Ruth?’

‘I don’t know. I just thought… wasn’t this the bloke who liked crosswords?’

‘That was Hugh Anselm.’

‘But maybe Archie did too.’

‘Maybe. He did watch that programme, Countdown,’ says Nelson, remembering. ‘Mind you, Cloughie says all old people watch Countdown.’

‘Mmm.’ Ruth occasionally watches it herself but she’s not going to let Nelson know that.

‘Do you think he’s left us a clue then?’ says Nelson smiling.

‘It’s possible,’ says Ruth, turning back to the fax paper to avoid looking at Nelson pretending to be a bear.

Ruth always over-complicates everything, thinks Nelson, as he drives back towards King’s Lynn and home. It comes of being an academic. Mind you, when he first met her, he had needed her professional expertise. He’d called her in to look at the Iron Age body but he’d also asked her about some weird letters that had been sent to him, letters full of allusions to mythology, ritual and sacrifice. Ruth had done great work, looking up all the references and working out what the nutter was trying to say. But maybe that has left her unable to take anything at face value. Sometimes a list of books is just a list of books. That’s what he says to his team. ‘Don’t make things too complicated. Nine times out of ten police work is about simple stuff. It was a car number-plate that caught the Yorkshire Ripper, tax evasion that caught Al Capone. Never skimp on routine procedure.’ Mind you, he can’t see Cloughie and co being tempted to be too intellectual.

Katie’s a grand little kid though. He’d forgotten how much fun they are at that age. Michelle always used to tell him off for making the girls too excited at bedtime. He’d done the bear routine with them too, the old ones are the best. He remembers Laura, hysterical with laughter, falling off the bed and crying; Rebecca screaming when he’d jumped out at her wearing a gorilla mask. Maybe Michelle had a point. He could see that it must have been irritating, stuck at home with young children, having to do all the discipline and boring bits, then having someone come home at bedtime pretending to be a bear. But, then again, he had to have some fun with them. In the early years he’d hardly seen his daughters during daylight hours. It’ll be no different with Katie, he thinks. Worse because she won’t even know who he is. He’ll just be some lunatic stranger with funny voices and ingratiating presents. Cathbad will be more of a presence in her life than him. He grinds the gears furiously.

Michelle isn’t home but, amazingly, Rebecca is. Even more amazingly, she’s doing her homework. Admittedly, she’s listening to her iPod, texting her friends and eating a cheese sandwich but she’s also writing an essay entitled ‘Coastal Erosion and its impact on Rural Communities’.

‘What’s this about, love?’ he asks, dropping a kiss on her head.

‘It’s for environmental science. It’s about all these people who’re, like, getting really pissed off because their villages are disappearing.’

Nelson thinks of Jack Hastings who, by all accounts, is getting more than pissed off because Sea’s End House is disappearing. Whitcliffe has shown him a surveyor’s report condemning the house. Nelson thinks of the back garden, those few yards and then that vertiginous drop onto the rocks below. He tries to imagine how it would have been – a lawn, mown in those fancy stripes, roses, a sundial, Buster and Irene lounging in their deckchairs, drinking dry martinis, looking out over the cove. Will Jack be forced to leave the house his father built? He’ll be pissed off then, all right. Could the strain of losing his house be enough to turn Jack Hastings into a killer?

As usual, Rebecca is flipping between several internet sites, looking for material. She’s expert at cutting and pasting. Nelson hopes this will be enough for the A-Level examiners. She’s too quick for him though, scanning to and fro, highlighting, dropping in text files, finding clip art–

‘Hang on a second!’

‘What?’ She pauses in mid click.

‘That last site. Something about the war.’

‘Oh… do you mean ilovehistory.com?’

‘Possibly. Can you go back?’

Obligingly, Rebecca finds the page and makes it large enough to be seen by his decrepit eyes.

The coastal defence, he reads, was to include fifty tons of fuel, to be blown up in the shallow waters of the North Sea. This operation drew on fire ships used by Drake against the Armada…

He goes into the kitchen to ring Ruth, switching on the kettle as he does so. She takes a while to answer and sounds hassled. He can hear Katie crying in the background.

‘Ruth. Did you get the results back from the material? That you found in the barrel.’

‘Yes. I sent you a report.’

‘Tell me again.’

‘It was gun cotton. Cotton dowsed in nitric and sulphuric acid. The material’s immersed in the acid and then dried. Makes it extremely flammable.’

‘I bet.’

‘Apparently when it’s lit it produces an almighty blast. Jules Verne uses it in one of his books to power a space rocket.’

‘And what was in the other barrels?’

‘A mix of adhesive tar, lime and petrol.’

The beach at Broughton Sea’s End, thinks Nelson, as he drinks his tea, was one massive depth charge. The Home Guard had prepared a welcome for possible German invaders that would have blasted them into space. Was that the work of Ernst, the clever scientist? A German who had lived most of his life in Broughton Sea’s End. A German determined to do all he could to defeat the Nazis. Maybe he was a German Jew… Nelson knows that all sorts of people were interned at the start of the war – old people, youngsters, Jews, communists – people who had no reason on earth to side with the Nazis. Why was Ernst living in Broughton in the first place? And why did he have such a close bond with Buster Hastings? Buster kicked up such a fuss that he was released. Why was Buster so determined to have Ernst on his side?

And why hadn’t the defences been set off when the six Germans actually landed? The men had been shot from a few feet away, there was no sign of a struggle. Somehow Buster and his mostly ageing troops had been able to overcome six soldiers in their physical prime. But, having done that, why kill them? Surely they could just have taken the men prisoner? He’s no military expert but isn’t it important to take prisoners so you can interrogate them? The German commandos never gave up their invasion plans. Their secret died with them, buried under the cliffs until the sea itself exposed it.

Nelson is still sitting in the kitchen when Michelle comes home, tired from working late and distinctly put out to find that no-one has started supper.

After supper, Michelle and Rebecca settle down to watch CSI Miami – female bonding over mutilated body parts – and Nelson escapes back to the study. He types Second World War Invasion into the search engine and soon the screen is full of lurid stories: beaches black with bodies, the seas aflame, U-boats full of severed limbs, secret German bases off the Irish coast, 30,000 bodies burned beyond recognition washed up on the South Coast. Nelson enjoys a conspiracy theory as much as the next man (once, Cathbad almost convinced him that the Americans had never landed on the moon), but as a policeman he does require just a trace of evidence. It’s all very well saying that the authorities have covered everything up but could an invasion on this scale really have been hushed up? In a place like Broughton this would, effectively, have meant buying the silence of everyone in the village.

But what if this is exactly what happened? What if, amidst all the hysteria, the Germans did land one small expeditionary party in an isolated Norfolk cove? There they met, not sleepy villagers and bemused fishermen, but a tightly controlled army unit prepared to kill.

He is about to call it a night when, scrolling down a site called ‘Flame Over Britain’, he comes across this paragraph:

Lucifer.