Simon Beckett - The Restless Dead

‘Just coffee, thanks.’

Her unease added to my own. I followed her into the kitchen, standing silently while she poured steaming black coffee into a mug from a cafetière. ‘Milk, no sugar, right?’

‘That’s right.’

She added milk and handed me the mug. I sipped the hot liquid, my curiosity growing as she crossed to the top of the stairs and looked down. Music still played from the lower floor, but no one was in sight. Satisfied, she led me back behind the bookshelves. They made an effective partition, hiding us from anyone coming up the stairs, but with enough gaps between the rows of architectural text books and journals for us to see anyone who came up.

‘Grab a chair,’ Rachel said, sitting down at the desk. I pulled over a lacquered wood dining chair. ‘Sorry for all the mystery, but I wanted to talk to you in private. I’d have come to the boathouse, but Andrew’s visiting a client in Exeter. And after what’s happened I didn’t think it was fair to leave Jamie to babysit Fay.’

‘OK,’ I said, waiting.

She took a deep breath, her eyes going to the open laptop. From where I sat I could only glimpse its screen. The blue glow gave the enclosed space the private, meditative feel of a library.

‘I told the police about the motorbike photograph,’ she said. ‘You know, that it might belong to Emma’s ex, and that it was taken around here.’

I said nothing, but my guilt went up a notch.

‘They’re looking into it, but I got to wondering if Emma had any other photos of Mark kicking around. Ones she hadn’t framed. You remember I told you we’d had our computers stolen in the burglary? Most of Emma’s pictures were stored on them, and we can’t access any cloud back-ups because Andrew doesn’t have her password. But she had a few boxes of hard-copy prints, so this morning I started going through them. I found these.’

She slid a plain cardboard folder across the desk. I opened it and took out the thin sheaf of glossy photographs. The top one was of a tall man in tight black jeans and T-shirt. He was in his mid-thirties, good-looking and well built, with tousled brown hair and a heavy stubble. There was a cockiness about him even in the photograph, and more than a hint of narcissism in the not-so-casual pose, arms folded to accentuate his biceps as he grinned at the camera.

‘That’s Mark Chapel,’ Rachel said. ‘It’s an old photo but she obviously hung on to it.’

I would have known who it was. Although it was hard to gauge from a photograph, he looked tall, probably a couple of inches over six feet. But it was the stubbled chin that clinched it for me. Mark Chapel had a strong, heavily pronounced jawline, slightly flared at the angle of the base and with a deep, photogenic dimple in its centre.

I’d seen one just like it earlier, on the mandible belonging to the body pulled from the creek.

I went to the next photograph. At first I thought it was a smaller version of the motorbike print from the boathouse. It showed the same gleaming machine standing on the sand dune, the same criss-crossing of contrails in the deep sky. Then I looked closer and realized it wasn’t quite the same: the vapour trails were more diffuse than I remembered, and the angle of the shot was subtly different.

I leafed through the next few photographs. Each of them was a slight variant of the same shot.

‘Emma used to call them her outtakes,’ Rachel said. ‘That’s why she preferred digital to film. She could shoot as many as she liked, and then print the ones that came out best. If you look at the last two you can see the sea forts much more clearly.’

She was right: in the final two bike photographs the three surviving towers of the sea fort were plainly visible in the background, rising from the waves like a scene from War of the Worlds .

‘And you’re sure it’s the fort here?’

‘I’m certain. Here, take a look.’

She spun the laptop round so I could see. On the screen was a website about the Maunsell sea forts. It showed a photograph of the same arrangement of three towers I remembered from going out to the Barrows with Lundy, but in much better detail. The fort was a remarkable structure. Each of its derelict towers was an angular, box-like structure supported on four spindly legs that sloped inwards like a pyramid. Only one of them was still intact, the other two having partially collapsed over the years. A caption under the image read, Remaining towers of the Maunsell army fort off the mouth of the Saltmere estuary .

‘It’s the same fort you can see behind the motorbike,’ Rachel said. ‘And I found this as well.’

She shuffled through the photographs from the folder and selected one.

‘See? You can make out the bike’s number plate on this. I thought the police could use it to confirm if it’s Mark’s. Even if he doesn’t know anything the police will probably want to talk to him.’

I was sure they would, if his remains hadn’t been found decomposing on the barbed wire. But Rachel didn’t know anything about that. As far as she was concerned, the body from the creek bore no connection to her missing sister, and Mark Chapel was still alive.

‘Is something wrong?’ she asked.

‘No, I was... just thinking that Lundy will want to see these.’

Not looking at her, I put the motorbike prints to one side and turned to the remaining photographs. There were around a dozen, all of them taken out at sea and looking back towards the shore at a large Victorian house surrounded on three sides by trees. The viewpoint threw me for a moment, but then I recognized the distinctive bay windows of Leo Villiers’ estuary home. The photographs varied from long shots of the entire house to zoomed-in close-ups. Some of these showed the terrace, but most were of individual windows through which the rooms could be seen.

Rachel was leaning against my arm to see the photographs as well. ‘Do you recognize it? It’s Leo Villiers’ house.’

She looked at me expectantly. Making an effort to concentrate, I leafed through the photographs again. There were no people in any of the shots, and they had the rushed look of snaps rather than the poster-art feel of Emma Trask’s other photographs.

‘Sorry, I don’t get it. Am I missing something?’

‘Doesn’t anything strike you as odd about them?’

I went through the photographs once more, seeing no more than last time. They just looked like reference shots, probably from when Emma Derby had been hired to redecorate Villiers’ house.

‘No, should it?’

Rachel looked disappointed. ‘Where do you think they were taken from?’

I looked again. The photographs were all looking back towards shore, obviously taken from out at sea. ‘From a boat, I expect.’

‘That’s what I thought at first. But look at the angle . It’s too high up.’ Rachel sounded excited. ‘You couldn’t get that sort of vantage point from a boat. And the sea around the estuary mouth is too clogged up with sandbanks for anything bigger to get close enough to take these.’

She was right. I thought back to when I’d been to the house when the dog’s grave had been found, trying to visualize the view out to sea. It didn’t take long.

‘You think she took them from the sea fort?’ I said.

‘She must have. There’s nothing else out there but water.’

Rachel’s face was flushed. She looked pleased with herself. I turned back to the laptop, looking at the photograph on the fort website. Even the sole tower that hadn’t collapsed looked in poor condition, a rusted hulk stained with salt marks.

‘They look derelict. Aren’t they sealed up?’ I asked, doubtfully.

‘I’ve no idea,’ Rachel said. ‘They’re supposed to be, but I’ve never been out there. I don’t think anyone has, not since it was a pirate radio station back in the sixties.’