Peter Lovesey: The House Sitter

The lifeguard was more upbeat. “At the end of the day you’ll find her car standing all alone in the car park. That’s your best bet. Most people come by car. This beach isn’t the sort you walk to.”

“Unless someone nicked the car as well.”

“Or she was driven here by a friend,” said Vigne. A few years in the police and you expect no favours from fate.

They radioed back to say they were unable to identify the dead woman and some of her property was missing. They were ordered to remain at the scene and wait for the doctor.

So they sat in the sun on the canvas seats outside the hut, with the wind off the sea tugging at their shirts.

“What age is she, this woman?” Shanahan asked.

“Don’t know. Thirties?”

“As young as that? Makes you think, someone dying like that.”

“Heart, I suppose.”

“Do you reckon?”

“Is sunstroke fatal?”

“Couldn’t tell you.”

“My money’s on heart. Could happen to anyone.”

Vigne said, “There’s something I heard of called sudden death syndrome.”

“Come again, lamebrain.”

“Sudden death syndrome. You can be perfectly fit and go to bed one night and never wake up.”

“I’ve heard of that,” the lifeguard said.

“But she wasn’t in bed,” Shanahan said. “She was stretched out on the beach.”

“There are worse places to die than a beach on a nice afternoon.”

“That’s priceless,” Shanahan said, “coming from a lifeguard. You should write that on a board and fix it to your hut.”

A dark-haired woman in a suit and carrying a bag stopped in front of the three of them reclining in the sun, and said, “Nice work, if you can get it.” This was Dr Keithly, the police surgeon.

They all stood up.

“You’ve got a corpse for me, I was told.”

“In that beach hut,” Shanahan said.

The lifeguard added, “A woman.”

“She came to you feeling ill?”

“No.” He explained how the body was found. “Do you want me to open up, Doc?”

“Well, I hate to spoil the fun, but… please.”

Presently Dr Keithly stood in the entrance to the hut beside the feet of the deceased. “I could do with some light in here.”

“I’ll fetch a torch.”

“That will help.”

Torch in hand, she stepped around the outstretched legs. She was silent for some time, crouching beside the body.

Shanahan stood in the doorway, watching until the examination was complete. It seemed to take an age. “What’s the verdict, doc? Definitely dead?”

“We can agree on that.” Dr Keithly stood up and stepped out, removing her plastic gloves. She sounded less friendly now. “Did you take a proper look at her?”

“We were waiting for you.”

She turned to the lifeguard. “But you recovered the body.”

“With a bit of help.”

“You got a good look at her, then. Didn’t you notice anything unusual about her appearance?”

“Such as?”

“The mark around her neck.”

“What mark?”

“I’d say it was made by a ligature. She seems to have been strangled.”

“Christ almighty!” the lifeguard said.

“Come and see for yourselves.”

This had to be faced. All three men squeezed into the hut and watched as the doctor pointed the torch at the neck of the dead woman, lifting the reddish hair. A broad line extended right around the throat.

“Is that definite?” asked Shanahan. “Couldn’t it have been made by some kind of necklace?”

“Unlikely. If you look here,” said Dr Keithly, pointing to the nape of the neck. “See the crossover? And there’s some scratching on this side where she tried to tug the ligature away from her throat.”

“Christ. Didn’t you notice this when you were carrying her?”Shanahan said accusingly to the lifeguard.

“Don’t turn on me, sport. I wasn’t looking at her neck. There was nothing tied around it.”

Shanahan sounded increasingly panicky. He could foresee awkward questions from CID. “How could this have happened on a beach in front of hundreds of people? Wouldn’t she have screamed?”

“Not if it was quick and unexpected,” the doctor said. “She might have made some choking sounds, but I doubt if she’d have been heard. What surprises me is that no one saw the killer actually doing it.”

“She was behind a windbreak.”

“Even so.”

“She was probably stretched out, sunbathing. It would have been done close to the ground, by someone kneeling beside her.”

Vigne said, “Hadn’t we better report this? It’s out of our hands if it’s murder.”

“Hey, that’s right,” Shanahan said, much relieved. “You’re not so thick as you look.”

Two hours were left before sunset. The local CID had arrived in force and sealed off the stretch of beach where the body was found, but they need not have bothered. Most visitors had left at high tide when only a small strip of pebbles remained and the breeze had turned cooler. Away from the beach, several barbecues were under way on the turf of the car park, sending subversive aromas towards the police vans where the search squads and SOCOs waited for the tide to turn.

Henrietta Mallin, the Senior Investigating Officer, was already calling this case a bummer. A beach washed clean by the tide couldn’t be less promising as a crime scene. There was no prospect of collecting DNA evidence. The body itself had been well drenched by the waves before it was lifted from the water.

The SIO was known to everyone as Hen, and superficially the name suited her. She was small, chirpy, alert, with widely set brown eyes that checked everything. But it was unwise to stretch the comparison. This Hen didn’t fuss, or subscribe to a pecking order. Though shorter than anyone in Bognor Regis CID, she gave ground to nobody. She’d learned how to survive in a male-dominated job. Fifteen years back, when she’d joined the police in Dagenham, she’d been given more than her share of the jobs everyone dreaded, just to see how this pipsqueak female rookie would cope. A couple of times when attending on corpses undiscovered for weeks she’d thrown up. She’d wept and had recurrent nightmares over a child abuse case. But she’d always reported for the next shift. Strength of mind got her through- helped by finding that many of the male recruits were going through the same traumas. She’d persevered, survived a bad beating-up at a drugs bust, and gained respect and steady promotion without aping male attitudes. There was only one male habit she’d acquired. She smoked thin, wicked-smelling cigars, handling them between thumb and forefinger and flicking off the ash with her smallest finger. She used a perfume by Ralph Lauren called Romance. It said much for Romance that it could triumph over cigar fumes.

“You boys got here when?” she said to the uniformed officers who had answered the shout,

“Four forty-two,” PC Shanahan said.

“So how was the water?”

“The water, ma’am?”

She brought her hands together under her chin and mimed the breaststroke. “Didn’t you go in?”

Shanahan frowned. He wasn’t equal to this, and neither was his companion, Vigne. Hen didn’t need to pull rank. She was streets ahead on personality alone.

She explained, “You reported suspicious injuries at five twenty. Forty minutes, give or take. What were you doing , my lovely?”

Shanahan went over the sequence of events: the call to the doctor, the search of the beach and the doctor’s arrival and discovery of the ligature marks. He didn’t mention the cans of Sprite and the spot of sunbathing while they waited for the doctor.

“Am I missing something here?” Hen said. “You didn’t notice she was strangled until the doctor pointed it out?”