Ken McClure - Dust to dust

Ten minutes later Steven turned off the main road and onto a single-lane loop on the coast side to enter the village of Leeford. The Porsche’s engine settled down to an irregular and unhappy burble as it was reined in to almost walking pace to allow Steven to look for somewhere he could enquire about the location of the Averys’ cottage.

For this purpose, Leeford proved to be inconveniently small: it comprised, as far as he could see, little more than a few cottages huddling together on a cliff top. It boasted no pub or garage, no shops and very few houses with lights on. A number had wooden shutters on the windows. Holiday homes, thought Steven: it was still very early in the season. Like many such places, Leeford would remain a ghost village until summer sun beckoned its absent owners from the cities. He recalled Louise saying that this would be her first visit of the year.

He passed a sign pointing to a cliff-top path leading to The Harbour and saw there was a light on in the second cottage down from the road. He stopped the car and walked back. He could smell the sea far below on the evening breeze and noted that the cottage he was approaching had seashells rendered into its front wall. A small tricycle lay on its side in the front garden beneath a swing with frayed ropes. Steven knocked on the door and apologised to the woman in her early thirties who answered.

‘Gosh, you’re the second person to ask about the Averys’ cottage today,’ she said with a smile and an accent that suggested she was not from around these parts. ‘Is Louise having a party or something? I thought we were going to be the first of the outsiders to open up this year. Apparently not.’

The news stunned Steven into silence: it seemed that his fears had been proved horribly right. If the earlier enquiry had come from Monk, he had seen Louise as a potential threat and had come to… deal with the problem. Hoping against hope all the way here had come to nothing. He should have known better. Monk’s background and reputation said he wasn’t the sort to leave loose ends lying around.

‘Are you all right?’ asked the woman, obviously feeling slightly uneasy in a situation she was finding difficult to read. Her young daughter had joined her at the door and was clinging to her leg. ‘Go back inside, please, Zoe,’ she said.

‘Yes, sorry,’ said Steven, snapping out of his preoccupation. ‘If you could just tell me where the Averys’ cottage is?’

‘Three doors along on the main street on the same side as us,’ said the woman. She pointed briefly with one hand while closing the door with the other. ‘The one with blue shutters.’

The door closed and snuffed out the pool of yellow light, making Steven realise that daylight was rapidly becoming a reddish memory in the western sky. He walked back to the main street. The small size of the village meant that it didn’t merit street lighting, something that made it difficult to tell if the east-facing cottage he picked out as Louise’s had blue shutters or not, especially as there were no lights on in the windows. There was no space for a car; three were parked on waste ground on the other side of the road but he didn’t know what Louise drove. He walked up the gravel path and knocked loudly on the front door.

The lack of lights predicted no response and that was what he got. He didn’t bother with a second attempt but walked round to the back where there was more light. The rear of the cottage was high above the beach and faced west so that the red glow in the sky bathed the building in what Steven thought resembled the safe-light of a photographic darkroom.

He rapped on the stable-style split back door and called out Louise’s name but again without response. His mind insisted he start imagining scenes of what might be lying inside but he tried to counter it by hoping that Louise might have changed her mind about coming here this weekend. An open window to the left of the back door, however, caught his attention and the hope died.

After a moment’s hesitation, he tried the latch on the door and found it unlocked. He stepped inside onto the cracked linoleum floor of a small, whitewashed utility room containing a fridge and a washing machine. The washing machine was old, its front showing signs of rust where the enamel had been chipped. He called out Louise’s name again but knew he was using it as a mantra to inject normality into a situation that was threatening to unfold into a nightmare. He ran the flat of his hand up the wall as he moved into the house proper and clicked on the light to reveal that everything seemed to be in order in the sitting room. There were no signs of a struggle, and a cardboard box full of groceries which presumably Louise had brought in from the car was lying in the middle of the floor, waiting to be taken through to the kitchen and unpacked. He moved on through the house but every door he opened was preceded by a vision of what he might find inside.

After drawing three blanks, he came to the last room, the bathroom, where he paused, preparing to find a corpse staring up at him through a tub full of water. The fear disappeared instantly when he found the room empty and smelling pleasantly of bathroom cleaner. Louise was not at home… but she had been.

He stepped out into the back garden and looked out over the Solway, trying to put himself inside Monk’s head. He didn’t like what he came up with. Monk was a professional; he wouldn’t have murdered the girl and left her body lying on the floor or in the bath at the cottage where it would precipitate an immediate police murder hunt and press outrage. He would have faked her death, made it look like an accident, just as he’d disguised the attack on John Motram and probably engineered Jim Leslie’s road traffic accident. Steven felt the chances were awfully high that Louise had had an ‘accident’ too and, standing in the back garden of a cliff-top cottage, he didn’t have to be a member of MENSA to figure out what the likely kind would be.

He walked down the sloping garden to the picket fence which marked the boundary between the Averys’ garden and a steep slope of rough grass leading down to the cliff-top path which zigzagged below. His heart sank when he noticed that a swathe of the grass had recently been flattened: something heavy had been dragged across it.

Taking care in the dying light, he scissored his legs over the fence and slid on all fours down the flattened grass trail to where it met the cinder path. Less than five metres to his right, where the path changed the course of its zigzag, he could see that the wooden guard rail between the path and a one-hundred-foot drop had been broken. It had given way… or someone had made it look that way. He felt sure he was looking at the site of Louise’s ‘accident’.

With a heavy heart, he made his way down the winding path and out on to the beach to discover the inevitable: Louise Avery, her neck broken and lower limbs at an impossible angle, lay spread-eagled on the sand, her eyes open but her life very definitely over. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he murmured, feeling almost overwhelmed by guilt. If only he hadn’t asked her to analyse those damned samples. ‘You bastard, Monk,’ he raged, slamming his fist into the sand once, twice, three times. When his breathing finally subsided, he brought out his mobile phone and called the police.

An hour later, when Steven had finished with the police, he called John Macmillan and told him what had happened, starting with his request to Louise Avery that she carry out a duplicate analysis on the Michael Kelly samples and ending with the circumstances of her death.

‘Ye gods, this is getting out of hand,’ said Macmillan, quickly assimilating all the facts and asking the right questions. ‘How much do the local police know?’