Elizabeth George: Careless in Red

Mick silenced the siren and parked the police car, although he left the headlamps on and the roof lights twirling, which he considered a nice touch. He pushed through a gate and passed an old Vauxhall in the driveway. At the front door, he knocked sharply on the bright blue panels. A figure appeared quickly on the other side of a stained-glass window high on the door, as if she’d been standing nearby waiting for him. She wore snug jeans and a turtleneck sweater; long earrings dangled as she gestured Mick inside.

“I’m Daidre Trahair,” she said. “I made the call.”

She admitted him to a small square entry crammed with Wellingtons, hiking boots, and jackets. A large egg-shaped iron kettle that Mick recognised as an old mining kibble stood to one side, filled with umbrellas and walking sticks instead of with ore. A gouged and ill-used narrow bench marked a spot for changing in and out of boots. There was barely space to move.

Mick shook the rainwater from his jacket and followed Daidre Trahair into the heart of the cottage, which was the sitting room. Here, an unkempt bearded man was squatting by the fireplace, taking ineffective stabs at five pieces of coal with a duck-headed poker. They should have used a candle beneath the coal until it got going, Mick thought. That was what his mum had always done. It worked a treat.

“Where’s the body?” he said. “I’ll want your details as well.” He took out his notebook.

“The tide’s coming in,” the man said. “The body’s on the…I don’t know if it’s part of the reef, but the water…You’ll want to see the body surely. Before the rest. The formalities, I mean.”

Being given a suggestion like this-by a civilian who no doubt obtained all his information about procedure from police dramas on ITV-got right up Mick’s nose. As did the man’s voice, whose tone, timbre, and accent were completely out of keeping with his appearance. He looked like a vagrant but certainly didn’t talk like one. He put Mick in mind of what his grandparents referred to as “the old days,” when before the days of international travel people always known as “the quality” cruised down to Cornwall in their fancy cars and stayed in big hotels with wide verandas. “They knew how to tip, they did,” his granddad would tell him. “’Course things were less dear in those days, weren’t they, so tuppence went a mile and a shilling’d take you all the way to London.” He exaggerated like that, Mick’s granddad. It was, his mother said, part of his charm.

“I wanted to move the body,” Daidre Trahair said. “But he”-with a nod at the man-“said not to. It’s an accident. Well, obviously, it’s an accident, so I couldn’t see why…Frankly, I was afraid the surf would take him.”

“Do you know who it is?”

“I…no,” she said. “I didn’t get much of a look at his face.”

Mick hated to cave in to them, but they were right. He tilted his head in the direction of the door. “Let’s see him.”

They set off into the rain. The man brought out a faded baseball cap and put it on. The woman used a rain jacket with the hood pulled over her sandy hair.

Mick paused at the police car and fetched the small flash camera that he’d been authorised to carry. Its purchase had been intended for a moment just like this. If he had to move the body, they’d at least have a visual record of what the spot had looked like before the waves rose to claim the corpse.

At the water’s edge, the wind was fierce, and a beach break was coming from both left and right. These were rapid waves, seductive swells building offshore. But they were forming fast and breaking faster: just the sort of surf to attract and demolish someone who didn’t know what he was doing.

The body, however, wasn’t that of a surfer. This came as something of a surprise to Mick. He’d assumed…But assuming was an idiot’s game. He was glad he’d jumped only to mental conclusions and said nothing to the man and woman who’d phoned for help.

Daidre Trahair was right. It looked like some kind of accident. A young climber-most decidedly dead-lay on a shelf of slate at the base of the cliff.

Mick swore silently when he stood over the body. This wasn’t the best place to cliff climb, either alone or with a partner. While there were swathes of slate, which provided good handholds, toe-holds, and cracks into which camming devices and chock stones could be slid for the climber’s safety, there were also vertical fields of sandstone that crumbled as easily as yesterday’s scones if the right pressure was put upon them.

From the look of things, the victim had been attempting a solo climb: an abseil down from the top of the cliff, followed by a climb up from the bottom. The rope was in one piece and the carabiner was still attached to the rewoven figure-eight knot at the end. The climber himself was still bound to the rope by a belay device. His descent from above should have gone like clockwork.

Equipment failure at the top of the cliff, Mick concluded. He’d have to climb up via the coastal path and see what was what when he was finished down here.

He took the pictures. The tide was creeping towards the body. He photographed it and everything surrounding it from every possible angle before he unhooked his radio from his shoulder and barked into it. He got static in return.

He said, “Damn,” and clambered to the high point of the beach where the man and woman were waiting. He said to the man, “I’ll need you directly,” took five steps away, and once again shouted into his radio. “Phone the coroner,” he told the sergeant manning the station in Casvelyn. “We need to move the body. We’ve got a bloody great tide coming in, and if we don’t move this bloke, he’s going to be gone.”

And then they waited, for there was nothing else to do. The minutes ticked by, the water rose, and finally the radio bleated. “Coroner’s…okay…from surf…road,” the disembodied voice croaked. “What…site…needed?”

“Get out here and bring your rain kit with you. Get someone to man the station while we’re gone.”

“Know…body?”

“Some kid. I don’t know who it is. When we get him off the rocks, I’ll check for ID.”

Mick approached the man and woman, who were huddled separately against the wind and the rain. He said to the man, “I don’t know who the hell you are, but we have a job to do and I don’t want you doing anything other than what I tell you. Come with me,” and to the woman, “You as well.”

They picked their way across the rock-strewn beach. No sand was left down near the water; the tide had covered it. They went single file across the first slate slab. Halfway across, the man stopped and extended his hand back to Daidre Trahair to assist her. She shook her head. She was fine, she told him.

When they reached the body, the tide was lapping at the slab on which it lay. Another ten minutes and it would be gone. Mick gave directions to his two companions. The man would help him move the corpse to the shore. The woman would collect anything that remained behind. It wasn’t the best situation, but it would have to do. They could not afford to wait for the professionals.

CADAN ANGARRACK DIDN’T MIND THE RAIN. NOR DID HE mind the spectacle that he knew he presented to the limited world of Casvelyn. He trundled along on his freestyle BMX, with his knees rising to the height of his waist and his elbows shooting out like bent arrows, intent only on getting home to make his announcement. Pooh bounced on his shoulder, squawking in protest and occasionally shrieking, “Landlubber scum!” into Cadan’s ear. This was decidedly better than applying his beak to Cadan’s earlobe, which had happened in the past before the parrot learned the error of his ways, so Cadan didn’t try to silence the bird. Instead he said, “You tell ’em, Pooh,” to which the parrot cried, “Blow holes in the attic!” an expression whose provenance was a mystery to his master.