Mark Pearson - The Killing Season

‘Someone has but I fear it is the hand of God, not mine. This is Jack Delaney,’ he said, gesturing at me.

The scientist held out his own hand and since there was no lightning bolt leaping from his fingers I shook it. ‘What’s happening, bro?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t have a clue. Not my area of expertise.’

Henry Hill left me to show Lewis the extent of the landslide. From the sixth tee we could see the fresh scars, as a twenty-foot-or-more-wide chunk of cliff had sheared off all the way down to the shoreline, leaving a heap of debris weighing many, many tonnes piled up on the beach. The landfall rising in a central mound like the remains of a sand sculpture of an enormous beached whale after the sea and the wind had been at it.

‘You can see the strata quite clearly defined in the cliff face now, Jack,’ said Martin Lewis, pointing out the exposed variations in colour and the various visible composite materials as the cliff rose higher. ‘Bit like a layer cake.’

‘And that makes it more liable to collapse, does it?’

‘Can do — depends what the elements are. But, in this case, yes — and certainly liable to slower erosion. That is more common along these shores than this kind of large-scale fissuring,’ he said, pointing animatedly. ‘There is a chalk base at the bottom of the cliff which you can see quite clearly and resting above that are what we call the Lower Pleistocene deposits of the Pastonian stage. These cliffs were formed many thousands of years ago by glacial deposits from the last ice age.’

‘The one we are still in, apparently.’

‘Yes, well done.’ He nodded approvingly. I was beginning to feel like I might need to put my hand up to ask a question. ‘That is technically so. The glacial movement from the north made landfall here and stopped. You can see the sections of the glacial deposits here.’ He pointed again. ‘And this is known as the Contorted Drift.’

‘Which makes it unstable?’ I asked, guessing.

‘The glacial progress churned up everything in its way and what you see here is a kind of geological cake mix. Add in chalk and sand and you get a truly variegated structure. But having a chunk this size just shear off is very uncommon. The chalk base is a sturdy one. Think of the white cliffs of Dover, for example.’

I nodded, mainly thinking about Vera Lynn but I didn’t reckon that was what he was hinting at. ‘There was some speculation that a lightning strike might have been the cause?’ I prompted.

‘It’s possible. There can be a lot of energy in a lightning bolt.’

‘How much?’

Lewis smiled. ‘It’s more than enough to fry an egg, that’s for sure. But larger bolts of lightning can transfer up to one hundred and twenty thousand amperes and deliver a kick of three hundred and fifty coulombs.’

‘What’s a coulomb?’

‘It’s the electrical charge at the rate of one ampere delivered in one second.’

‘So that’s definitely a lot?’ Physics and maths were never my long suits.

‘Oh yes. With a positively charged lightning bolt it might have originated several miles away in the storm. Travelling through the air for that distance enables the positively charged part to develop larger levels of charge and voltages.’

‘So now we really are talking about a lot of energy?’

‘Yes, we are. Your positive bolt can be up to ten times more powerful than your negative bolt. The potential for the positive bolt from the anvil at the top of the cloud formation could go over a billion volts and the discharge current, or the amount of time during which the bolt transfers that energy from the charged cloud to the ground below, can go on for ten times longer than a negative transfer.’

I nodded encouragingly. I didn’t really need all the technical jargon but in my job you learn to let people talk. It’s the listening that counts. Often people don’t know what they know, as it were. ‘So to sum it up, this partial cliff collapse could be the result of a lightning strike, possibly a positive-charged one?’

The scientist shrugged, his long hair swirling in the wind. ‘Could be. Like I say, we are dealing with a lot of energy. But if it struck at the top, here by the pathway, or even halfway up, there would be no reason for the cliff to shear all the way down. It’s possible with a vertical fault line. Normally If there is a landslide it is just from the top, and it produces nowhere near this amount of debris.’

‘What about if it struck at the bottom?’

‘It wouldn’t do that — it finds the nearest point to strike. Literally earthing itself, in this case. That’s the nature of the beast. It finds the higher ground.’

‘That’s true.’ I knew that much about lightning. People still get killed on golf courses because they hold long metal lightning conductors called irons and swing them up in the air during thunderstorms. Go figure. Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest, maybe, as a practical demonstration.

The geologist looked over the cliff again and smiled. ‘It sure is a puzzler,’ he said.

‘What are the implications for the course?’

‘None, I should think. This looks like a one-off occurrence — if there is some kind of fault line we can soon establish if it’s continuing, but I haven’t come across such a thing around here. I should imagine there is enough cliff edge here to establish the pathway again without encroaching on the course. May have to swing round a little but not enough to impact on your fairway.’

‘It’s a par three,’ I said. ‘You don’t have fairways on par threes.’

Nobody can say I’m not a quick learner.

‘I’m not a golfer,’ Lewis said dryly, knowing that he certainly didn’t look like one.

‘You say it’s a puzzler?’

‘It is that.’

‘Could it have been deliberate?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Somebody bringing down the cliff. Setting off an explosive device.’

‘Why on Earth would anybody want to do that?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s just my job to ask questions like that,’ I replied. ‘I’m trained mainly to look out for human wickedness in unexplained situations where people have come to harm or property has been damaged.’

He gave me a curious look. ‘As a security consultant?’

‘I used to be a detective inspector in the Metropolitan Police,’ I explained.

‘Ah, I see.’ Lewis looked thoughtfully at the collapsed section of cliff on the beach where it stretched out like a huge and ancient burial barrow. ‘Like I said, I can see no reason why anybody would want to do such a thing,’ he stated, looking at me steadily. ‘But yes — it is entirely possible that this collapse is the work of some human agency.’

The sun had risen now.

It was shining weakly through the ragged remnants of clouds that hadn’t been ravaged by the north-westerly wind. A wind which had come screaming in once more from the North Sea to punish us lowly mortal men and women scurrying on the surface of the Earth. The sky was a light, almost silvery grey and the sun creeping through was pale rose in colour and struggling to brighten. It wasn’t any warmer.

I was holding a large styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand and chatting with some of the hi-vis-coated men and women who had been posted at the barricade, such as it was. The heavy-metal-fan-cum-council-geologist had gone down on the shore to take some samples and assess the situation further. There was a cordon of tape still stretched all around the danger area up on the clifftop where we were standing. A mixture of uniformed police, club personnel and a few members had been drafted in, making sure that no curious people got too close to the landslide edge. I was keeping an eye out for my old pal Henry and his good friend the cherry-brandy hip flask, but as I looked back towards the clubhouse I saw a different yet still familiar face bearing down on me. It was a good-looking face, but not a happy one. Superintendent Susan Dean had a man of about five foot eleven walking alongside her who was wearing a brown suit with a duffel coat over it. A briefcase was in his hand, and he had a very officious look about him.