Chapter 1
He had to get going. He had to move.
Sitting at the wheel of his old VW Golf, Nick Redpath tried to pull himself together.
He had to go for help.
To guide him he only had Betsy's vague instructions and his own sepia-tinted memories. It might be a long drive, he thought.
"There's a public house," Betsy had said. His wife insisted he should be called Marcus now, but he'd always been Betsy at school. "Just across the level crossing. Head towards the Ipswich Road. What's it called? Caroline? The name?"
Betsy had drunk a lot this evening and it was clearly a great effort for him to think straight. Even the shock hadn't sobered him up.
"Does it matter, Marcus?" Caroline snapped. "There's a pub. It'll have a telephone."
Nick left them arguing on the uneven wooden deck of the chalet. They'd be divorced in a year, he was certain of that: they'd been at each other's throats all evening.
A soft murmur of voices came from the next chalet. Trevor Carr was in there, comforting his girlfriend. Mandy's response had been erratic: one minute calm and rational, the next verging towards hysteria.
As Nick reached the parking area at the back Ronnie Deller appeared out of the night, still belligerent with drink. "I'm going," Ronnie said. "It's my place. I'm ... responsible."
"Come on, Ronnie," said Nick. He felt tired. He just wanted it all to be out of his hands, but not if that meant passing it on to Ronnie. "We decided," he said. "Will you let me through?" They'd all been drinking and at least Ronnie had been smoking dope. As Nick was the most sober it had been agreed that he should go and make the call while the others stayed together at the Strand.
For once Ronnie backed down, slouching away into the darkness. Before Nick had managed to start the engine, he heard him arguing loudly with Caroline Betts.
Alone with the night at last, Nick felt strangely secure in his old car. He felt that he might just slide down into the seat, wrap his arms around himself and try to forget. The temptation was strong.
He had to get going. He shook his head, slapped his face sharply. Once, twice.
Things seemed a little clearer now. Carefully, he set off, up Strand Lane with the Stour estuary spreading out behind him, all mud and water and drifts of sea-purslane.
It was mid-September, but the air was still peppered with bats and moths, sudden flashes of white in the full beam of the headlights. A long time ago he might have had names for them. Were those little bats called something like Pepperoni? Pipistrani? Pipistrelle?
He slapped his face again and then snatched at the wheel before the hedge could intervene. His mind was wandering. He had to pull himself together.
The lane could only be half a mile long, but it seemed to be taking forever, first surrounded by trees, now with open fields to either side.
Eventually, he came to the level crossing. There would be no trains at this time of night. Not even a late boat-train heading for an overnight sailing to the Hook.
He drove on and soon afterwards he came to a T-junction. Remembering Betsy's instructions, he turned right, and as he rounded the first corner he spotted the pub. It was called the Plough. A single bulb illuminated the sign. Other than that the place was in complete darkness.
He checked his watch. One-thirty.
He pulled up in the car park, convinced that he would be out of luck: the telephone would be inside, locked up. Maybe he could rouse someone to help, but there was something about the place, with its shabby white stucco walls and peeling paint, that told him he'd be wasting his time.
Betsy had been right, though. There was a call box—old-fashioned, red—tucked away by the road. To beat back the darkness Nick parked with his headlamps directed full into the box.
For a moment before he entered he froze in the twin beam, like a rabbit on a road. Inside, his body cut out most of the light and his eyes had trouble adjusting, but he could have made the call blindfold in any case.
Trying, without much hope, to gather himself, he swallowed and then pressed the three nines.
~
Driving back to the Strand seemed so much quicker—the way back never takes as long. He knew where he was going now, it was simply a matter of retracing his route.
He had waited a long time in that deserted pub car park. He had wanted to cry, but tears are never easy when you need them the most.
Back left out of the car park, on a short distance to the unmarked junction, then left again over the level crossing, still clear. He took the lane steadily, trying to convince himself that he was being sensible and not merely delaying his return.
The lane was single track, unsurfaced, with grass growing along its spine. Ahead, through the breaks in the trees, he could see the estuary again: lights on the water, and a dark grey smudge he knew to be the exposed mud-flats of Copperas Bay.
His rearview mirror suddenly flashed urgent blue at him and harsh headlights winked on and off impatiently. He pulled over into a gateway and waited as two blue-lighting police cars scrambled past, followed by a third unmarked Astra. They were in more of a hurry than he was. It was all in their hands now. He should be relieved, but all he could feel was the tiredness dragging at his every movement.
When he reached the Strand, he had to drive on past the police cars by Ronnie's chalet in order to park. There was a row of maybe twenty A-frames here, on the western lip of Copperas Bay. All the same triangular profile—timber roofs right down to the ground on either side—they backed onto a raised earth bank and the muddy track which the Strand Lane had become. At the front, the bank dropped away and the chalets were supported on stilts which plunged into the grassed-over ooze of the estuary. About halfway along, there was a gap between the cabins, and here a ramshackle jetty of roped-together pontoons snaked out across the mud. Years ago this development had been the start of something bigger but, in the Bathside way, it had never been completed.
Nick Redpath left the car and headed back to the chalet. There were already four or five uniformed men at the scene, and two officers in shabby, plain suits. Another car pulled up as Nick approached. He heard raised voices, lowered voices, Mandy Kemp whimpering again from the neighbouring chalet. Engines grumbled, tinny robot monotones came from two-way radios in the open cars and attached to heavy belts. Torches leapt along the path that led into the wood, then they clustered partway along. Lights around a moth, he kept thinking, irrationally. Lights around a beautiful, fragile moth.
But the moth was dead.
He leaned back against a tree, straightening the weary curve of his spine. He liked the solidity, the coolness against the spreading stiffness of his body. He shouldn't have tried to drink tonight, it always made him feel like this: instantly hungover and miserable. He had never been able to gain pleasure from alcohol or drugs, no matter how hard he tried to educate himself. Pints with the lads were always, for him, orange juice or Coke, and driving duties afterwards.
Slowly, his body slid down the trunk, snagging on the bark. He crouched, elbows on knees, face pressed into his hands.
Time passed, during which he was dimly aware of the buzz of activity around him, the occasional rush of air as someone passed nearby. He started to lose track of what was happening.
He rubbed his eyes, looked up.
Caroline Betts was pointing at him, talking to a stout man who looked like he dressed by mail order. "That's him," she said, her tone unusually low. "Over there. Against the tree." Beyond her, Betsy—Marcus—was dividing his attention between Caroline and a policeman who was trying to question him. He was trying to catch Caroline's eye, but she wouldn't respond.
"Nicholas Redpath?" A controlled, neutral tone.
Nick looked up at the officer, who had left Caroline and come to stand looming over him, cutting out the light. He was a tall man as well as broad, his shaggy black hair haloed by a car's headlights somewhere behind him.
Nick nodded and tried to work some spit into his dried up mouth so that he could speak.
"Nicholas Redpath," the officer repeated. "My name's Detective Sergeant Cooper. I'm arresting you on suspicion of the unlawful killing of Mrs Geraldine Louise Wyse. You're not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but anything you do say may be put in writing and used in evidence. Do you understand?" The forced neutrality of Cooper's tone never faltered.
Nick looked across to where Betsy and his wife were being questioned. Ronnie and Trev and Mandy were with officers in the chalets, he was sure. Why him?
Slowly, he shook his head. "What's going on?" he said, his mind in freefall. What was going on?
~
Nick Redpath stared at the tape machine, not really seeing it. He was in an interview room at the Bathside police station, only a couple of streets from the damp prefab where he had spent his first fourteen years. He'd already been passed fit for questioning by the police doctor, but he was still struggling, desperately, to understand.
The interview room had grey, scabbed walls, no windows, a glaring striplight stuck to the ceiling. Nick sat in a stiff plastic chair, a table in front of him bearing the tape machine and the elbows of a thin-haired man who had introduced himself as Detective Inspector Langley. The officer's jutting ears made Nick think of Prince Charles, except they were smaller. Ian Rush, maybe. Their scooped forward interior shone greasily, reflecting the single light of the room.
"Describe your feelings towards Mrs Wyse," said Langley. "When you were at school. When you met her again last week. Tell me again: what sort of relationship did you have with her?"
Nick stared at the blank face of the tape machine, struggling to shape a response.
"Answer me, Nick. Come on. You've already told me you were friends. Is there something more?"
He thought he'd always been discreet. He'd been in Jerry's registration class for three years, before they'd taken him away from Bathside. He'd sat behind and across from her. Even now he could picture her short, streaked, blonde bob, from behind and across—the way it moved with her head as she talked and laughed. Adolescent days spent watching her, studying her in secret, as an entomologist studies some rare and exquisite butterfly or moth, mentally logging every detail, every nuance of movement or mannerism. Nights spent in recollection.
"Were you attracted to her, Nick? Was that it?"
How did this DI Langley know? He'd always been subtle, he thought. Had everyone seen through him from his first lustful thought?
"What about tonight? What was it that you said to her? What were you hoping to achieve when you came back to Bathside?" Langley was suddenly animated. "Why did you go to the Strand? Did you want to give her one, like you should have done twelve years ago? Is that it?"
There was a cough from behind, which reminded Nick of the presence of a solicitor they had told him to hire. Langley caught himself, nodded, said more calmly, "What happened, Nick? When the two of you were alone in the woods."
He remembered her lips, moist against his own for that briefest of moments. Her hands against him. "Please, Nicky." Her voice had hardly changed after all this time. "Take me away from all this. I'd be grateful." Her meaning had been clear enough.
His own hands, rising quickly, forcing her away. Breaking contact. He remembered the suddenness of that movement, and then again, he remembered her lips against his own.
He shuddered violently, put his hands to his face.
"Tell me about it, Nick. Tell me all about it." Langley's voice was closer now. He was leaning forward, pressing his attack home. "You've told me already: you confronted her, you argued—a lovers' tiff? What did you do next? There's a gap: one moment you're arguing, then you skip ahead to being with the others and nobody knowing where Mrs Wyse has got to. There's a gap there, Nick. What happened?"
Nick shook his head. "I told you. I went for a walk. Try and clear my skull."
"Somebody tried to clear Mrs Wyse's skull. Did you strike her?"
"I went for a walk."
"In the woods? At one in the morning? Come on. You can do better than that. Did you strike Mrs Wyse?"
At last, he was crying, and he hated himself for it.
"Did you hit her?"
"I don't know," said Nick. "I don't know what happened. I just ... don't ... know."