Peter Lovesey: The Headhunters

‘I already told-’

‘No you didn’t,’ DCI Mallin cut in. ‘Not to us. Sit down, please.’ She was a small woman with a substantial presence.

Jo was glad of the chair. This sudden face-to-face with the law had thrown her. Her legs had gone wobbly. She’d been trying to move on from that gruesome business. ‘There isn’t much to say. I drove to Selsey and went for an early morning walk along the front.’

‘Any special reason?’ DCI Mallin asked.

‘Exercise, I suppose.’

‘Why Selsey?’

She wasn’t going to tell them about Jake. He had no conceivable connection with what had happened. ‘I like it there, that’s all.’

‘Many people about, were there?’

‘A few. Some in cars, some walking dogs. Not many. It was early and quite breezy down there.’

‘See anyone you knew?’

‘I don’t live there.’

‘We know that, Josephine,’ DCI Mallin said in a withering tone that made Jo even more uncomfortable. ‘If you simply answer the questions, you’ll help yourself as well as us.’

‘It’s Jo. My name. No one calls me Josephine.’ But my mother does, she thought. No wonder the name humiliates me.

‘Jo it is, then. I have the same trouble,’ the chief inspector said as if she realised she’d been a touch too severe. ‘I was named Henrietta and that’s a mouthful I don’t care for. People close to me call me Hen. Not him, though.’ She tilted her head at DC Pearce but she didn’t smile and neither did he. ‘My question, Jo, is did you see anyone you know on Selsey beach?’

‘No.’

‘That’s all right, then. Carry on with your statement.’

She hadn’t thought it was anything so formal as a statement. She was just telling what happened that Sunday morning when she found the dead woman. ‘I don’t know how much you want to hear.’

‘Start from when you first got there,’ DC Pearce suggested, seating himself quite close to her on the edge of Adrian’s desk.

She found it easier speaking to the young constable. She cast her thoughts back. If they wanted the entire story, they could have it. ‘I parked the car at the bottom of the High Street and walked all the way along the front, past the lifeboat station and the fishermen’s huts. I’d been on the path for some time, at least twenty minutes, and I wanted to get closer to the waves before I turned round, so I picked a section of the beach at random. After I’d been at the water’s edge a few minutes I turned and climbed up, and that was when I saw her against a breakwater. Well, at that point I didn’t know it was a person. I saw her pale skin under some seaweed and wondered what it was and went to investigate and had the biggest shock of my life.’

‘Against a breakwater, you said?’

‘Yes, they’re really massive, about ten feet tall on the side where she was. She was right up against the wood, partly hidden behind one of those posts that support it all.’

‘Was anyone else about?’ DC Pearce asked.

‘No one I noticed. I would have asked for help, wouldn’t I? I had to go up to the top and call at the nearest house that backs onto the beach. The people phoned nine-nine-nine and I waited for the police to come.’

‘Hold on a bit,’ DCI Mallin said. ‘Before you went up to the house, didn’t you try to resuscitate her?’

‘She was well dead.’

‘How do you know that? Did you feel for a pulse?’

‘I didn’t touch her. I could see.’

‘See she wasn’t breathing, you mean?’

‘It was obvious,’ Jo said, more annoyed than defensive. ‘Her skin was deathly white. There was seaweed clinging to her. Flies.’

‘Have you ever done a life-saving course? People apparently dead can be saved with mouth-to-mouth or chest compressions. Drowning cases offer the best hope of recovery. But I won’t labour the point. We’ve established that you did nothing. Carry on.’

Jo’s so-called statement had long since ground to a halt. ‘I don’t know where I was.’

‘Waiting for the police,’ DC Pearce prompted her.

‘Where?’ Hen Mallin asked.

‘What?’

‘Where did you wait? On the beach?’

‘Of course.’ To keep up her confidence she reminded herself that this hard-nosed chief inspector was Hen to her friends. She’d also noticed that the chief inspector’s fingers were nicotine-stained. Even the police experienced stress.

‘Did you notice anything of interest?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Stuff lying around.’

‘What sort of stuff?’

‘We’re asking you, Jo,’ Hen Mallin said. ‘It isn’t our job to put words in your mouth. Apart from the dead woman, was there anything you noticed along that bit of beach?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Hen Mallin spelt it out as if to an Alzheimer’s patient. ‘You were there, Jo. We weren’t. The place has been covered by the tide many times since that morning. Things get moved, washed out to sea, covered over. The site isn’t of much use to a crime scene investigation team now, but while you were there it was fresh.’

At the words crime scene, Jo’s insides clenched. ‘Are you saying there was a crime?’

‘Didn’t you notice?’

‘Notice what?’

‘The marks on the flesh.’

‘I expect there would be some. It’s a stony beach.’

‘Bruising to the neck consistent with finger pressure.’

A pulse throbbed in her temple and she thought she would faint. ‘No-how dreadful!’

‘We’re treating it as a violent death and possibly murder.’

Gooseflesh was forming on her arms.

‘She drowned, as you must have guessed,’ DC Pearce said in a tone meant to make it less of a shock, ‘and the marks suggest she was held under the water.’

‘Horrible.’

‘Yes.’

‘I had no idea. And this happened at sea?’

‘Not in the way you mean,’ Hen Mallin said.

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘You’re assuming she was attacked on a ship. We don’t think so. Human skin immersed in water for any length of time gets bleached and wrinkled. It used to be called washerwoman’s hand, but these days we don’t use the term. This woman’s skin was in good condition, wet from the waves, and no more. We think the attack happened close to the beach.’

‘I can’t believe this.’

‘It seems she was in the water with her killer and held under until she stopped breathing. Now do you see why your recall of the scene is so important?’

She released a large, shaky breath. And nodded.

Hen Mallin pressed on with her questions. ‘You found the body at the base of the breakwater, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘As you pointed out, they stand ten or twelve feet high, those breakwaters. On the one side, that is. On the other, the stones are stacked almost to the top, so you don’t see much timber at all. It’s the action of the tide, dragging the stones from under one breakwater and heaping them against the next one.’

Jo waited for her to get to the point.

‘And the sea was quite rough. Had been for some hours. Do you follow me? If the body had been washed up, it wouldn’t have got where you found it.’

It was as if they were questioning her account. ‘That’s where it was.’

‘So it looks as if the tide went out and the body was left there, more or less where she drowned. That would explain why it was on that side of the breakwater.’

‘I suppose.’

‘You didn’t find any clothes nearby?’

‘No. Why?’ She knew the question was stupid as soon as it left her mouth, but all this had come as a shock.

‘She’s not going to be on a public beach in no more than her knickers.’

‘There weren’t any clothes that I could see.’