Mark Pearson - The Killing Season

‘Well, you can count on that,’ she said as she slid under the duvet. Something in the way she said it implied she meant more than she was articulating and I had a damn good idea what she was referencing. But I let it slide for the moment and kissed her instead.

‘That’s for you,’ I said.

‘So now, tell me what she said.’

‘It’s 1941, and Helen Middleton is seven years old. The war is in full swing. England is getting hammered. This part of the country particularly so.’

‘I know that. I grew up playing amongst the pillboxes along the clifftops here, remember.’

‘So, young Helen is lying awake at night listening to the screaming bombs being dropped from thundering bombers. The explosions tearing up the towns and countryside. Being dragged out of bed down to the air-raid shelter in the garden. Her father is away, her mother is an emotionally closed woman. The only reassurance in her life comes from her older brother.’

‘And he was fighting overseas?’

‘No, he was a chronic asthmatic, excused service. Twenty-nine years old, so quite a bit older than her. She was unplanned. He was a music teacher and like a surrogate father-figure to her in those desperate times.’

‘I’m not sure that I like where this is heading.’

I took a sip of my brandy and soda and shook my head. ‘No, it’s nothing like that.’

‘Go on, then.’

‘One day she was hiding out in the shelter and still hearing the screaming bombs, but they were only in her mind now, in her memory. Her brother came to fetch her out, but she was terrified, traumatised. So he told her a secret.’

‘Which was?’

‘That he had fallen in love. He had met a young woman and they had fallen in love with each other. She had given him her dead father’s watch, not expensive but of great sentimental value to her. He showed her the inscription on the band that he had had engraved and fitted on a strap for the watch. “Amor Vincit Omnia.”’

‘Love Conquers All.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Our man in the cave.’

‘It certainly looks like it.’

‘So why was it a secret?’

‘She doesn’t know. She doesn’t even know the name of the woman that her brother met.’

‘What was his name?’

‘David Webb. He taught music at the local school, like I said. But he was also a member of the Home Guard and a volunteer on the Sheringham lifeboat crew.’

‘So what happened? He just vanished? Something to do with this woman? A jealous husband, a protective father?’

‘Helen doesn’t know. Nobody knows.’

‘He just disappeared.’

‘No, he didn’t. He was called out one night a few days after he had spoken to his sister. A fishing vessel in trouble at sea. It was a huge storm and he got thrown overboard as they went out to the stricken craft. Is it possible that the body you examined was that much older than you originally thought?’

Kate nodded. ‘There are cases where bodies much, much older than that have been preserved, almost mummified. It depends, like I said, on the soil and the nature of the materials where it was buried. Like peat bogs, for example. Again, a lot of salt.’

‘David Webb’s body was never recovered. It never washed up on shore.’

‘Well, it wouldn’t, would it, if it had been interred among blocks of chalk and buried in a covered-in cave instead.’

‘Unless it was a different man wearing his watch.’

‘Unless that, of course.’

It was late October and Ashleigh Ryan definitely should have been back at school.

But he wasn’t. School was the last thing on his adolescent hormone-filled mind. He was walking along the beach at Sheringham, heading towards the Runtons with a girl from his school who was in the year below him. He was a tall gangly youth with dark hair and a goth style about him that made him think that he looked like a hero out of a Twilight film. It didn’t. Emma Brundle beside him, had curly red hair and was wearing more make-up than was recommended in the guidelines from Brussels. She was wearing a shirt that was too small for her but she thought it would make her look like a member of her favourite girl band. It didn’t. And the fact that she kept her coat open to show the effect was probably not the wisest thing to be doing, given the weather conditions. But Ashleigh Ryan certainly wasn’t objecting. He was sixteen, she was fifteen — and young Ashleigh had decided he didn’t want to wait any longer.

There were plenty of nooks and crannies on this stretch of the coast and Ashleigh, with a gesture towards the romantic, had brought along a couple of bottles of strong cider, a pack of fags that he had nicked off his older brother, and a blanket in a basket that his mum used for storing logs in the lounge by their wood-burning stove. It was cold out after all, even in the nooks and crannies. If Ashleigh was to take her cherry, as Emma called it, then some comfort was going to be required. She had lost her virginity about a year ago and had been with several other boys since but she didn’t feel that the tall youth beside her needed to be told about those facts however.

The sun was out and even though there was a nip in the air it was a fine late-autumn day. There was a hint of woodsmoke in the air. Somebody not waiting a week or so until November the Fifth before lighting their bonfire. Ashleigh and Emma had planned to go to the fireworks show and bonfire at Cookie’s field on that night. But before then business had to be taken care of, and Ashleigh was in as good a mood as he ever had been in his young life.

Further up the beach he spotted a football that had been washed in by the tide.

‘Here, fucking hold this,’ said Ashleigh, handing the basket to his inamorata, forgetting in his excitement the romantic role he had elected to play. In truth, every other word he uttered was usually an expletive.

‘He shoots! He scores!’ he shouted as he ran up the beach. ‘Get in! Back of the net!’

He launched a kick at the ball, seeing the action in his adolescent mind’s eye as a penalty that Van Persie might have taken at Old Trafford. Except that the ball didn’t move and Ashleigh went flying over the top of it, holding his ankle and shrieking in pain.

His shrieks were nothing compared with the screams of Emma Brundle as she reached the spot and realised what young Ashleigh had failed to notice.

The object was not a football at all.

It was a head. A head presumably attached to a body that was buried beneath the sand.

‘Len Wright?’ DI Rob Walsh was asking Superintendent Susan Dean.

‘As close as I can tell. Yes, looks like him,’ she replied

‘How long have we got before the tide comes back in again?’ I asked.

‘About four hours,’ the expert among us, Sergeant Coker, answered. He was a volunteer on the Sheringham lifeboat, much like David Webb had been seventy-three years ago.

The Norwich DI signalled to a forensic crew who were standing by with trowels and shovels.

‘OK, guys, let’s get him out of the ground.’ Flashes went off as the men and women in light blue protective suits swung into action again. Video footage was shot and the slow process of getting Len Wright out of the cold sand began.

‘Was he alive when the tide came in, do you think?’ I asked Kate.

‘I hope not,’ she replied. ‘But we’ll soon find out.’

I glanced down at the murdered man’s head. His mouth had been taped closed but his nostrils left clear.

I certainly hoped so, too.

Two hours later and we were sitting with the team that had assembled in a two-storey function annexe at The Lobster pub. The police station in the Tesco car park wasn’t big enough to hold the amount of personnel that had been drafted in. Superintendent Dean was unhappy with my presence but I had officially been seconded to the Norwich team now, and was even being paid for it. She didn’t like that much, either, but the wishes and desires of Susan Dean were as the idle winds that passed me by and troubled me not, as the Bard had once said — or something very similar.