Mark Pearson - The Killing Season

‘Yeah — we got a cliff, and we got what’s left of the stuff that fell down that you haven’t cleared yet.’

I walked up to the jumble of chalk blocks and ran my hand along an edge.

‘These have been tool-cut.’

‘Who’s your buddy?’ the man asked Harry Coker.

‘Jack Delaney, meet Simon Brown,’ he replied.

I held my hand out and shook his.

‘You have a sharp eye, my friend.’

Coker laughed. ‘Don’t you know who this is? This is DI Jack Delaney. Poster boy for the Metropolitan police and darling of the press. Nothing gets past him.’

‘What’s a hotshot like you doing in these parts, then?’ asked Simon Brown.

‘I’m on a gap year.’

‘He’s taking a sabbatical.’

‘And you’re helping out while you’re up here?’

The sergeant grunted. ‘Technically, I am supposed to be taking him in for questioning, so in that sense you could say he is helping us with our enquiries, yes.’

The guy handed me a torch. ‘Get down and have a squint through that gap,’ he said, pointing to a space between a few of the blocks of chalk. I bent down and shone the torch as Harry Coker leaned down beside me.

‘It’s a cave,’ Harry said.

‘Certainly looks like it.’

‘Your mystery man wasn’t buried at the top of the cliff, he was buried under it. And then he was blocked in.’

‘Yo, sergeant!’ a voice called from along the beach near the promenade. ‘You better get over here.’

Coker, myself and the young police constable walked back along the beach. The man hailing us was someone I recognised from The Lobster. A member of the lifeboat crew and a local electrician. His name was Ian Hart but everyone called him Spike, because of his spiky hair that hair-care products seemed unable to control. A tall man in his late forties with a broad Glaswegian accent.

‘You’d better get here, Harry,’ Spike called again.

The sergeant picked up on the urgency in the man’s voice and we quickened our pace.

‘He’s at the slipway, bottom of Beach Road.’

‘Who is?’

‘Not sure.’

A few minutes later and our cars had headed back down the promenade towards Beach Road again.

A fishing boat was pulled up on the beach. The net beside it on the slipway was empty of fish but had something else in it.

A human body.

We walked over and looked down.

‘We saw it on the water,’ explained one of the fishermen. ‘Thought it might be a seal or dolphin at first, then we realised.’

He opened up the net and the naked corpse flopped on its side. Male, in his thirties, with skin the colour of eight-week-old milk. The smell was not too fresh either.

It was the Reverend Nigel Holdsworth. Late, I guess, of this parish, as they say.

‘You better get out of here, Jack,’ said Harry Coker.

I nodded. ‘I’ll go up to the station and give them my statement.’

‘Might want to call your wife on the way.’

‘Super Susan’s not going to hold me.’

‘I wouldn’t put it past her. But no. I meant we might need Kate down here.’

‘I think this guy’s beyond the benefit of medical attention, Frank.’

‘Still, nice to get a jump. Cause of death. Norwich are going to be on this like white on rice.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll make a move.’

‘Jack,’ he said as I went over to my car which was parked now on Beach Road.

‘Yes?’ I looked back at him questioningly.

‘You ain’t brought a lot of luck to our town, have you?’

Kate and I were sitting in The Ship at Weybourne.

It was another decent bar, one that hadn’t been totally made over into a pub-themed restaurant. They did food but had a separate restaurant for the gastropods — as I like to call them — and a proper bar separately. I was having a club sandwich. It was good. Kate was tucking into a BLT, and none too daintily. One of the things I liked about her was that she looked like a model, sounded like the well-educated doctor that she was, and ate like a hungry field worker. A woman of appetite. My kind of woman. My woman, in fact. . and that put a smile on my miserable Irish face pretty much every waking day.

She put her sandwich down and took a sip of diet Coke. ‘So they’re not going to charge you?’

‘No,’ I said after swallowing the last mouthful of my sandwich. ‘Although I get the impression that nothing would make Susan Dean happier. Short of a multiple orgasm and even then it’s a toss-up.’

Kate frowned. ‘I’m not sure I am happy with your choice of phrasing, Jack.’

‘You’re a doctor, Kate. You should know about these things.’

‘I meant the fact that you choose to associate the woman with a sexually based comparison. To say such a thing indicates it is possible, and maybe probable, that you have had such images in your mind.’

‘Then put such thoughts from your own mind, cherry pie. Jack Delaney is a one-woman man. He has seen the light, oh Lord. And the light is shining from your big brown eyes.’

‘Did you just call me “cherry pie”?’

‘I certainly did. My one and only cherry pie.’

‘Well, that’s OK, then.’

‘She can’t charge me with assault. Enough witnesses were there to prove that I was acting in self-defence.’

‘And were you?’

‘No. But that’s not the point.’

‘And now the Reverend Holdsworth is dead and the best man is still missing.’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s why I called you.’

‘Go on?’

‘I need some advice.’

‘Advice of what nature?’

‘Supposing a girl was about to be married.’

‘A girl like you?’

‘Well, not like me, exactly. Let us say a more adventurous sort of girl.’

‘Adventurous in an outgoing kind of way?’

‘Maybe just in the going sense.’

‘As in a goer?’

‘You are more down with the vernacular of the street, darling. But yes. Promiscuous, shall we say, or sexually experimental.’

‘This girl was going to be married soon?’

‘Yes.’

‘And she works with you?

‘You are quite the detective.’

‘I just follow the clues like a bloodhound. And when I have eliminated the impossible then what remains, however improbable, leads me to conclude that a nurse in your employ has been getting up to the naughties.’

‘Naughties?’

‘Indeed.’

‘Anyway, she is not in my employ: she just works with me. But yes, she has been getting up to the naughties — as you so delicately put it.’

‘In Ireland you learn to be careful with phrasing — as you put it — or you get hit on the arse with a wooden spoon.’

‘I shall have to remember that.’

‘So Elaine the hen has been wandering away from the cock, as it were?’

‘I can see that they didn’t use the spoon enough on you, Jack.’

‘The Brothers had harsher techniques. Would “stag” be a better term?’

‘It would.’

‘And it has relevance, you think, to the death of Nigel Holdsworth?’

‘Nigel Holdsworth was stabbed before he was put into the sea. I was able to determine that much before the Norwich crew arrived to take charge.’

‘As you said.’

‘So I need some advice as to whether I should go to the police.’

‘About what?’

‘The hen. Elaine. Marrying Len Wright. Apparently she wasn’t just seeing the vicar for spiritual advice.’

‘He was diddling her?’

‘Charmingly put.’

‘They were having an affair?’

‘Maybe your description is more accurate. I don’t think it was a love affair as such.’

‘So the Reverend Holdsworth has been stabbed and the groom-to-be of the fiancée whom he was diddling would seem to be a prime suspect.’