sleeping teenagers. None of them were zipped up, and there was no sound. They must be empty. She looked around. There seemed to be the remains of a campfire, with a discarded scrunch of tin foil suggesting potatoes had been baked in it. Greta must have overlooked that, she was a terror over litter. Nothing else provided clues to the evening’s activities. No doubt the Girl Guides were all now safely at home in their warm and comfortable beds.
As if to hasten her in the direction of her own bed, a nasty gust of wind tugged at Amy’s hair. She had forgotten her beanie. She took a last look at the light silvering the rapacious tide as it surged in towards the shore and then retreated to gather strength for another attack. It was the only movement in the whole scene. She was alone on the beach.
Afterwards she couldn’t say why her attention had been caught by one of the drawn-up boats. Perhaps it was the moonlight shining on the stuck-on silver letters on its stern, identifying it as The Admiral, Fitz’s dinghy. But it shouldn’t be there. Its usual place was in the other direction. When had it been moved? She remembered seeing it earlier in the day, safely where she’d expect it to be.
Had the Admiral moved it this afternoon? But when would he have had the time, and why would he want to? Or had he gone out into the moonlight after ordering the last round and brought it here? If so, why?
Maybe someone else had moved it. The Admiral was known to be highly selective about who he allowed on his beloved dinghy. Never anyone without him, and only allowed to take the tiller after they had proved themselves seaworthy, as he called it. Once some pranksters had taken the boat out and then left it swinging drunkenly from its anchor in the far reaches of the bay. The Admiral had not been amused.
Amy reached the anchor and checked the way it had been set in the shingle. Right and tight it looked. The chain stretched down to the boat itself, now beginning to wallow drunkenly on the incoming tide. There was something not quite right about its movement. The beach shelved steeply down from where she was standing, so that it was almost possible to see inside the craft. Amy caught her breath. It looked as though… But surely it couldn’t be…
Without hesitating, and heedless of her sensible shoes, she ran down the beach and through the water to the dinghy. As she got closer, she saw that the waterproof cover had been rolled back and stuffed into the prow.
The boat was half-full of water – that was why it was wallowing. But there was more than water in there. Amy took hold of the dinghy’s side, forcing it towards her so that she could scramble aboard. With horrible squelches she managed to find a steady footing. A man was slumped on his front in the bottom of the boat, his face beneath the water. Supporting herself on the gunwales, Amy shuffled her way alongside the collapsed figure to the boat’s stern. Then she bent and slipped her hands beneath the shoulders and tried to pull whoever it was up far enough to bring his head above the water that slopped about as the boat veered from side to side with her movements, threatening to capsize.
In her heart Amy knew her efforts were hopeless, but still she struggled, lifting and pulling the shoulders, cursing her weakness, looking along the shoreline for help. But the beach was empty. With a final effort, using unexpected reserves of strength, she managed to pull the heavy body up, then to turn it so that the drowned man sat supported by the mast, his feet caught up in the oars that lay along the boat’s bottom.
For a moment she stood holding onto the mast, gasping, her eyes closed as she tried to recover from her efforts. Then she opened them and looked at the sorry remains of the man who had been lying in the bottom of the boat.
The grey hair was soaked, plastered to the skull, the eyes that had been so bright such a little time ago were staring sightlessly. All personality had been stripped away by death. Only the blazer with its brass buttons proclaimed the corpse’s identity.
Exhausted by her efforts, struggling not to fall as the dinghy moved with the rapid surges of the incoming tide, Amy looked at the body of her boss. What on earth had the old man been up to? What could have made him move the dinghy so late at night? And just how had he managed to fall and drown himself in his beloved boat?
Amy was surprised by the tears running down her cheeks. She knew it wasn’t just shock at discovering the body. It was an overwhelming sadness at the thought that she’d never hear the Admiral’s voice again. Maybe, somewhere deep down in her psyche, she had felt love for the old bastard.
She decided, rather than ringing the police from her cottage, she would have to go back to the pub and prepare herself for a long night of disruption and probably questioning.
Her basic knowledge of police procedure, gleaned from endless television cop shows, told her that she should touch as little as possible at a crime scene, but when she looked closer at the boat she saw something white, stuffed into the folds of the crumpled boat cover.
An envelope. Printed on it the words: ‘TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN’.
Sod not touching anything at a crime scene. No power could have stopped her from opening that envelope. Fortunately the flap was just tucked in, so she didn’t have to tear it.
She read what was written on the folded sheet inside.
I’m sorry. All the pressures were just getting too much. I’ve had my Last Hurrah and it’s better to go out on a high. Apologies to anyone who’s going to be upset by my death (though I don’t think there’ll be many).
Fitz
The text was not handwritten. It had been typed and printed. Possibly using the computer in the Admiral Byng’s downstairs office.
In other words, whoever had composed the suicide note, it certainly hadn’t been the computer-illiterate Fitz.
Which, to Amy’s mind was proof positive that the old boy had been murdered.
And made her absolutely determined to find out who had committed the crime.
A car in the blue and yellow livery of the Suffolk Constabulary was heading rapidly towards Crabwell.
‘Watch your speed, laddie,’ the DI in the passenger seat told his driver, Detective Constable Chesterton. ‘This isn’t life or death.’
‘It’s death, isn’t it?’ Chesterton said. ‘Death in my book, anyway.’
‘Come clever with me and you’ll find yourself back in uniform.’ DI Cole didn’t take lip from fast-track graduate detectives. ‘It’s only a suicide. There was a note beside the body, and it couldn’t be more plain.’
A suicide was difficult to envisage as anything other than a death as far as Keith Chesterton was concerned, but he knew better than to argue with ‘The Lump’, as Cole was known to everyone who worked with him. He cut their speed to fifty-nine and gave thought to the strange circumstances of the incident. They had collected the suicide note from the local bobby called to the scene overnight, who had told them the victim had been found on Crabwell beach lying in a dinghy partly filled with water and anchored in the shingle. A young woman out walking had made the grim discovery and then suffered a worse shock by recognising the corpse as that of her own employer, the owner of the pub that overlooked the beach.
‘So there’s no rush,’ Cole said. ‘It’s not like murder or a robbery, rounding up suspects. The perpetrator was the corpse, and he isn’t going anywhere.’
