Elizabeth George: Careless in Red

“Don’t know yet,” she’d said.

Bodies at the bases of cliffs were not rare in this part of the world. People climbed foolishly on the culm, people wandered too near the edge of the cliffs and went over, or people jumped. If the tide was high, the bodies sometimes were never found. If it was low, the police had a chance to sort out how they had got there.

Pete was saying enthusiastically, “I bet it’s all bloody. I bet its head cracked open like a rotten egg and its guts ’n brains’re all over the place.”

“Peter.” Bea cast him a glance. He was slouched against the door, the shopping bag containing his shoes clutched to his chest as if he thought someone might rip it from him. He had spots on his face-the curse of the young adolescent, Bea remembered, although her own adolescence was forty years long gone-and braces on his teeth. Looking at him at fourteen years of age, she found it impossible to imagine the man he might one day become.

“What?” he demanded. “You said someone went over the cliff. I bet he went headfirst and splattered his skull. I bet he took a dive. I bet he-”

“You wouldn’t talk that way if you’d ever seen someone who’s fallen.”

“Wicked,” Pete breathed.

He was doing it deliberately, Bea thought, trying to provoke a row. He was angry that he had to go to his father’s and angrier still about the disruption to their plans, which had been the rare treat of takeaway pizza and a DVD. He’d chosen a film about football, which his father would not be interested in watching with him, unlike his mother. Bea and Pete were as one when it came to football.

She decided to let his anger go unconfronted. There wasn’t time to deal with it and, anyway, he had to learn to cope when plans got changed, because no plan was ever written in concrete.

The rain was coming down in sheets when they finally reached the vicinity of Polcare Cove. This wasn’t a place Bea Hannaford had been to before, so she peered through the windscreen and crawled along the lane. This descended through a woodland in a series of switchbacks before shooting out from beneath the budding trees, climbing up once again into farmland defined by thick earthen hedgerows, and descending a final time towards the sea. Here, the land opened to form a meadow at the northwest edge of which stood a mustard-coloured cottage with two nearby outbuildings, the only habitation in this place.

A panda car jutted partially into the lane from the cottage driveway, with another police vehicle sitting directly in front of it, nudging against a white Vauxhall near the cottage itself. Bea didn’t stop since to do so would have blocked the road entirely, and she knew there would be many more vehicles arriving and needing access to the beach long before the day was done. She went farther along towards the sea and found what went for a car park: a patch of earth that was potholed like a piece of Swiss cheese. There she stopped.

Pete reached for the handle of his door. She said, “Wait here.”

“But I want to see-”

“Pete, you heard me. Wait here. Your father’s on his way. If he shows up and you’re not in the car…Do I need to say more?”

Pete threw himself back against the seat, looking sulky. “It wouldn’t hurt if I looked. And it’s not my night to stay at Dad’s anyway.”

Ah. They were at it. He knew how to choose his moment, so like his father. She said, “Flexibility, Pete. As you well know, it’s the key to every game, including the game of life. Now wait here.”

“But, Mum-”

She pulled him towards her. She kissed him roughly against the side of the head. “ Wait, ” she told him.

A knock on her window drew her attention. A constable stood there in rain gear, his eyelashes spiked by water, a torch in his hand. It wasn’t switched on, but they would need it soon. She got out into the gusting wind and the rain, zipped her jacket, pulled up her hood, and said, “DI Hannaford. What’ve we got?”

“Kid. Dead.”

“Jumper?”

“No. There’s rope attached to the body. I expect he fell during an abseil down the cliff. He’s got a belay device still on the rope.”

“Who’s up at that cottage? There’s another panda car.”

“Duty sergeant from Casvelyn. He’s with the two who found the body.”

“Show me what we’ve got. Who are you, by the way?”

He introduced himself as Mick McNulty, constable from the Casvelyn station. There were only two of them manning the place: himself and a sergeant. It was a typical setup for the countryside.

McNulty led the way. The body lay some thirty yards from the breaking waves, but a good distance from the cliff itself from which it must have fallen. The constable had had the presence of mind to cover the corpse with a sheet of bright blue plastic, and he’d been prescient enough to arrange it so that-with the aid of rocks-the sheet didn’t touch the body.

Bea nodded and McNulty lifted the sheet to expose the corpse while protecting it from the rain. The plastic crackled and snapped like a blue sail in the wind. Bea squatted, raised her hand for the torch, and shone its light onto the young man, who lay on his back. He was blond, with sun-streaked hair that curled cherubically round his face. His eyes were blue and sightless, and his flesh was excoriated from hitting the rocks as he fell. He was bruised as well-an eye was blackened-but this looked like an older injury. The colour had yellowed as the skin healed. He was dressed for climbing: He still had his step-in harness fastened round his waist with at least two dozen metal bits and bobs hanging from it, and a rope was coiled on his chest. This remained knotted to a carabiner. But what the carabiner had been attached to…That was the question.

“Who is this?” Bea asked. “Do we have an ID?”

“Nothing on him.”

She looked towards the cliff. “Who moved the body?”

“Me and the bloke who found it.” He went on quickly lest she reprimand him, “It was that or drag it, Guv. I couldn’t’ve moved it on my own.”

“We’ll want your clothes, then. His as well. He’s up at the cottage, you say?”

“My clothes?”

“What did you expect, Constable?” She pulled out her mobile and flipped it open. She looked at the screen and sighed. No signal.

Constable McNulty, at least, wore a radio on his shoulder, and she told him to make the arrangements for a Home Office pathologist to get down here as soon as possible. This, she knew, wasn’t going to be soon at all as the pathologist would have to come from Exeter. And that would be only if he or she was actually in Exeter and not involved in something somewhere else. It was going to be a long evening and a longer night.

While McNulty radioed as ordered, she gazed once more at the body. He was a teenager. He was very good looking. He was fit, muscular. He was kitted out to climb, but like so many climbers his age, he wore no headgear. That might have saved him, but it might have been superfluous. Only a postmortem would be able to tell.

Her gaze went from the body to the cliff. She could see that the coastal path-a walking trail in Cornwall that began in Marsland Mouth and ended in Cremyll-marked a twisting passage up from the car park to the top of this rise, just as it did along much of the Cornish coast. The sea-cliff climber who lay at her feet had to have left something up there. His identification, one hoped. A car, a motocycle, a bike. They were out in the middle of nowhere, and it was impossible to believe he’d come here on foot. They’d know who he was soon enough. But one of them was going to have to go up there to see.

She said to Constable McNulty, “You’ll need to climb up and see what he’s left on the cliff top. Have a care, though. That path’s going to be murder in the rain.”