Martin Edwards - The Serpent Pool

Marc’s mother had suffered from insomnia ever since the day ten years ago when she woke up next to her husband to find that he’d died while she slept. She was up at five, and Marc lay in the room adjoining hers, listening as she shuffled about downstairs. All night, he’d tossed and turned, excited yet fearful that everything might go wrong.

Pale streaks of dawn crept through the curtains, furtive as trespassers. Birds chirruped on the branches outside. He levered himself from the warmth of the bed, shivering as he peered through the window. A haze hung over Morecambe Bay, but he saw none of the snow that had slanted down the previous evening as he drove from Ambleside to Grange. Perched on the slopes of the Cartmel Peninsula, the resort was sheltered by fells, and warmed by the Gulf Stream. It liked to think of itself as Cumbria’s Riviera. The climate was mild enough for a palm tree to have grown old in Mrs Amos’s small, steep front garden, although this morning, crystals of frost coated the leaves.

His mother had asked no questions when he phoned and asked for a room for the night. Give her half an hour, she’d said, and a bed would be made up and ready in his old room. She didn’t approve of Hannah’s job, and therefore of Hannah herself. He knew that, secretly, she would never think any woman good enough for him, but she contented herself with just an occasional snipe from the sidelines.

They breakfasted together, but he resisted her conversational gambits and, in silent reproach, she switched on the radio. He lingered over a second cup of milky tea, anxious to catch up with the local headlines. Police had confirmed that the body found in the grounds of Stuart Wagg’s house belonged to the well-known solicitor. Fern Larter explained that a witness had seen a small purple hatchback parked on the verge next to the house on the day of Wagg’s death, and asked the owner, or anyone who had seen the vehicle, to contact the police.

Back to the breakfast show presenter. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘here’s an oldie but goodie from Rupert Holmes.’

Marc winced as he listened to the words.

‘Over by the window, there’s a pack of cigarettes,

Not my brand, you understand,

Sometimes the girl forgets,

She forgets to hide them,

But I know who left those smokes behind,

She’ll say, “Ah, he’s just a friend,”

And I’ll say, “I’m not blind

To…

Him, him, him,

What’s she gonna do about him?”’

So what was Hannah going to do about Daniel Kind? He turned the radio off with such force that he almost snapped the knob.

His mother exclaimed with annoyance, ‘I was listening to that! So much nicer than the news. All these murders. I suppose Hannah is up to her neck in them?’

‘She investigates old, unsolved mysteries, remember? Cold cases.’

Mrs Amos sniffed to demonstrate what she thought of cold cases.

‘We’re not safe in our beds these days. They should build more prisons.’

An eerily cheerful weathergirl warned of dense fog blanketing northern and central parts of the county. The best advice was not to travel if your journey wasn’t really necessary. Mrs Amos clicked her tongue and said she blamed global warming.

Marc swallowed a last mouthful of tea and announced that he was setting off for a walk before he went into the bookshop.

‘Should you be driving at all if the fog-?’

‘Look outside, Mum,’ he said. ‘There’s even a glimmer of sun in the sky over the Bay.’

‘Well, I suppose you know best. But do wear something warm, dear.’

Once a mother, always a mother.

He kissed her leathery cheek and set off for the old promenade. Threads of mist gathered around the fells above the town, and he supposed that Undercrag would be wrapped in a cold grey shroud. Hannah’s problem, not his. She should never have set up secret meetings with Daniel Kind.

He passed the causeway leading to Holme Island, nowadays separated from the mainland by yellow-brown spartina grass so rampant and powerful that some people said it was all that saved the promenade from destruction by the waves. Sheep grazed where once children built sandcastles. Eventually, they’d have to rename the town Grange-over-Grass. Even the metal posts from a long-gone pier had been engulfed by the salt flats.

He leant on the railings at the spot which marked the end of an invisible route across the Bay. A month after his first date with Hannah, he’d taken her on the eight-mile walk from Arnside to Grange, led by a guide who knew the shifting sands like the back of his hand. At times, the water reached up to their thighs. One false move, and you were sunk. That summer Sunday afternoon, the hint of danger added a frisson as he squeezed her hand and whispered what they’d do when he got her back home.

Along the way, they’d watched oystercatchers probing for shellfish, and ducks whirring overhead, while she’d listened to his stories about books with the intense concentration of a woman newly in love. He told her about chancing upon the handwritten manuscript of a famous mystery novel in a Lunedale junk shop and selling it to a Japanese collector for a small fortune. The murderer in the story constructed an ingenious alibi. It was only broken when the detective realised the suspect could have reached the victim in time if he travelled, not around the long and winding coast roads, but diagonally across the still waters of the Bay.

Murder, murder, everywhere.

Times changed, familiarity bred boredom. Hannah was weary of books, and his business. Weary of him, too; he was afraid he didn’t turn her on the way he once had. Cassie was different. She was younger, not obsessed with her own career, but the clues suggested she fell for men who adored her, yet let her down in the end. She was ready for kindness. Last night, he’d sent her a text the moment Hannah slammed the door behind her on her way for a tryst with Daniel Kind.

What r u doing 2mrw?

Cassie wasn’t down to work a shift at the shop; and he didn’t need her to provide cover. In addition to Zoe, Judith, a long-serving part-timer, was due in today. He craved Cassie’s company, the ache of emptiness like a physical hunger, chewing at his guts.

Within thirty seconds, she texted back:

Nada.

Straight away, he asked if she fancied a drink, but she’d replied Sorry, no can do.

Shit; was the boyfriend back on the scene? Feeling sick in the pit of his stomach, he punched out another message, wanting to know if they could meet in the morning.

Another instant reply.

Love to.

She even added a couple of kisses.

On a clear day, you could see Blackpool Tower from the crumbling promenade, but this morning he could barely make out the water stretching beyond Holme. The sun had fled, leaving the sky as grey and cloudy as a fortune-teller’s ball. But who cared? His spine tingled.

Go for it.

He fished his mobile out of his pocket.

‘Daniel.’ Hannah’s voice was soft in his ear. ‘Sorry to disturb you.’

He rubbed his eyes. Seven-thirty, and the phone’s relentless wail had dragged him from under the duvet. Thank God he’d resisted the temptation to let it ring. He’d not climbed into bed until three that morning. Too tense to sleep, he’d switched on his laptop, determined to chisel the final paragraphs of his talk for Arlo Denstone’s Festival. He hated missing deadlines, often labouring long and late into the night to meet an editor’s timescale, and he’d crafted a dozen fresh sentences to sum up Thomas De Quincey and the fine art of murder.

But his heart was no longer in his subject. It was one thing to play witty and imaginative games with the notion of murder for pleasure, quite another to stumble across its cold reality. There was nothing exhilarating about murder in the flesh. For all its brilliance, De Quincey’s gleeful prose was streaked with cruelty, and Daniel saw something repellent in his morbid fantasies of vengeance. De Quincey was a voyeur, ogling murderers from a safe distance. His addiction to violent death might have been cured if he’d ever looked down into a disused well, and seen and smelt a rotting corpse.