BLIND SPOT - AND TWO OTHERS

BLIND SPOT PART 3

9

  As Kimberley and I approached the door we heard a desperate scratching, whimpering, and groaning from inside.

  “Stop it, Charlie,” Kimberley shouted, as she fiddled with the key in the lock. The door opened and a black apparition flew at us.

  Once we managed to get through the emotional welcome home we discovered the remains of Charlie’s handiwork while we had been out. He had done what all spaniels do when we had been out for too long: he had found something to eat. In this case, it was to pull a box of porridge oats out of a kitchen cupboard and scatter oats and fragments of the box throughout the living room. I took a deep breath. At least he hadn’t eaten the mail, which had been pushed through the letter box in our absence.

  I put the post to one side to open later and while Kimberley busied herself in the kitchen preparing dinner, I took out the vacuum cleaner and in a few minutes the room was it had been. I fed Charlie, not that he needed much feeding, full as he was of oats and cardboard.

  I stood in the living room, briefly at a loss. I had a hundred and one things to do and there seemed no compelling reason to choose one to do first.

  Kimberley handed me a cup of black coffee, kissed me, and said, “While I’m getting dinner, why don’t you check your e-mails?”

  “Good idea,” I said and went to the smallest room in the flat, which I had converted into a sub-office for Handful Investigations, away from my main office in the town centre and there I sat at my desk and switched on my computer. It slowly came to life and I checked my e-mails. Most were the usual rubbish trying to sell me stuff I didn’t want to read about. It never ceased to amaze me why anyone could think that this type of direct marketing sells anything. I deleted all of them without reading them. In among the masses of junk and spam, however, one message was actually meant for me. It was from the local Oxmarket solicitors, Hogbin, Marshall and Moruzzi, and they required my services for a divorce case.

  Pleased with this additional source of income, I went into the main search engine and found the BBC weather web page and studied the coast and sea tide tables for the Suffolk coast. It showed me a graph of the past twenty-four hours, and it helped me understand what I thought I was looking for.

  An arm smelling of Chanel No. 5 snaked round my neck and Kimberley’s soft lips kissed the corner of my mouth.

  “Turn that off, darling,” she whispered. “Dinner is ready.”

 I logged out of the computer and sat down to a wonderful mixture of chicken, chorizo sausage, spinach, and pasta, which we washed down with a glass of Shiraz. We ate it on a tray on our knees while Charlie was banished in to the spare room and the meal was delicious. We finished our drinks with a rich chocolate mousse and coffee and then went straight to bed.

  We slipped delightedly into each other’s arms and experienced a physical voyage that was jointly satisfying culminating in us drifting off to sleep still entwined.

  Later, I felt Kimberley move against me in the warm dark and put her mouth on the thin skin somewhere just south of my neck. I tightened my arms around her and buried my nose in her clean, sweet-scented hair.

  “Did you mean that about next September?” She asked sleepily.

  “Of course, I did.” I stroked my hands slowly over her smooth skin. I felt relaxed and wholly content.

  “Any particular day?” She rubbed her nose on my chest.

  I smiled in the dark. The whole world was inside the duvet, inside the small private cocoon wrapping two bodies in intimate primeval understanding.

  “Saturday, September the sixth.” I said, after a pause.

  “You’ve thought about this, haven’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  We lay quiet for a long while. I felt heavy with sleep and fought to stay awake. I had experienced so few hours like this in my life lately and didn’t want to waste any of them.

  Kimberley’s limbs slackened and her head slid down on to my arm, her easy breath fanning softly against my chest. I thought of Zoë lying closely against me like that when she was alive, and we were first married and for the first time I felt no guilt, only regret.

  Kimberley woke of her accord a few hours later and pulled my wrist round to look at the luminous hands on my watch.

  “Are you awake?” She said. “It’s ten to six.”

  “Do you want me to cook you some breakfast?”

  “That would be lovely?” Her voice smiled in the darkness.

  While Kimberley showered, I went into the kitchen put a large non-stick frying pan over a high heat and added a teaspoon of sunflower oil along with some chestnut mushrooms that I had wiped and halved.

  When they were lightly browned, I pushed the mushrooms to one side of the pan and added two rashers of rindless lean smoked back bacon. While the mushrooms and bacon were cooking, I melted a small knob of butter in a medium non-stick saucepan and cracked open four large eggs, beat them with a metal whisk until smooth and seasoned with salt and pepper.

  When Kimberley appeared from the bathroom, towel drying her hair, I tipped the eggs into the saucepan and cooked them over a low heat for two minutes, stirring regularly until they were lightly set.

  She sat on the stool next to the small breakfast bar while I divided the scrambled eggs between the warmed plates, added the mushrooms, topped with the bacon, and served it immediately.

  “This is wonderful,” she said her lips curving with amusement.

  I poured her some freshly squeezed orange juice and made her a black coffee at her request. Once she had finished eating, she finished dressing, and I accompanied her down to the harbour where she caught the ferry across to the Headland at eight o’clock with ten seconds in hand.

  As I watched the passenger ferry disappear into the distance I sometimes thought that I had been fetched up near the world. The wintry light slanting on the colourless landscape; the moan of the wind, the shriek of sea-birds and melancholy boom of the passenger ferry’s foghorn far out to sea sent a shiver through me.

  Charlie, started to pull on his lead, so without too much resistance I allowed him to start leading me away from the harbour. When I had lived and worked in London I could go all day without seeing the horizon. In Oxmarket, it was all horizon: to the east the cliffs and coastal paths overlooking the grey, wrinkled sea and inland to the west miles of mudflats.

  We headed west where I could only see the glistening mudflats with their narrow, oozing ditches of water where waders were walking with high-stepping delicate legs and giving mournful cries, as if they’d lost something.

  Charlie thankfully paid them no attention, as my mobile vibrated into life and I noticed that my eyes were starting to water with the cold when I tried to focus on the illuminated screen.

  “DI Silver,” I said, when I had eventually worked out who was calling me.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m near the marshes with Kimberley’s dog,” I replied.

  “Can you call in at the station?”

  “Is it to do with Simon Nunn?” I questioned.

  “No, sorry,” he told me. “It’s something completely different. I’ve arrested a young lad who was involved with the failed robbery attempt at the Oxmarket Post Office.”

  “Congratulations,” I said, noticing that Charlie was waiting patiently at my feet, looking up at me with an expression of unconditional love. “You managed to arrest somebody without my help.”

  “Trouble is he’s absolutely petrified.” He ignored my sarcastic tone.

  “Of what?” I said impatiently

  “He’s absolutely convinced that the car he had stolen for the robbery has turned into a time machine.”

10

  The tiny Oxmarket Police station was the workplace for three people. Sergeant Pat Higgins, a tall, sun tanned burly individual in his late forties with the most sarcastic sense of humour I had ever come across. Melanie Softly, a pretty blonde-haired WPC with the wildest green eyes I had ever seen and of course DI Paul Silver, whose cramped office was at the back of the building.

  My friend’s office had no photographs. No certificates. No trophies. Instead, there were files stacked against every wall and perched on the windowsill was a small James Bond Aston Martin DB5, a five and half inch Cyberman from the TV series Doctor Who, and a limited edition hardback copy of The Hound of the Baskerville by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Varied interests indeed.

  Sitting at his desk, he was squinting as he was reading a statement. He needed glasses but wouldn’t get his eyes tested because he refused to succumb to any sign of diminishing faculties.

  He looked up at me and smiled, placing the statement in front of him on his desk, face down, so that I couldn’t read it.

  “Thanks for coming in, John.”

  “Against my better judgement,” I informed him.

  Paul stood up from behind his desk and guided me out of his office.

  “Just humour me, John, will you?”

  I followed him into a small box room which was laughingly known as the staff canteen where he took two mugs from their hooks and placed them on the worktop. He then filled the kettle with a thin thread of water from the tap.

  “Is this boy on the level?” I asked.

  “That’s what I want you to find out,” DI Silver said. He spooned cheap powdered coffee and dried milk into the mugs and poured on boiling water. One or two little white beads bobbed to the surface, and he pushed them down with the back of the spoon. Satisfied he handed me one of the mugs, and we cautiously walked down the corridor to the interview room.

  A lawyer from Legal Services had been summoned to advise young Archie, who was a spotty-faced eighteen-year-old who looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car. He stalked the four corners of the recently refurbished interview suite with his head down and his hands in his pockets. I asked him to sit down and eventually, he did as he was told next to his middle-aged and business-like counsel, Rowena Crutchley, who had tucked her briefcase between her knees and sat with a large foolscap pad beneath her clasped hands.

  “Would you like to tell me what happened, in your words?” I asked.

  “I was telling the Detective Inspector,” he sniffed, nervously. “My car turned into a bloody time machine. Just like that thing from Doctor Who.”

  “Tardis,” I told him.

  “That’s it.”

  “It’s not real,” I reiterated.

  “You weren’t there.” He said angrily.

  “Tell me what happened,” I persisted.

  “I was the getaway driver for the post office job,” he said. “They went in at quarter to six in the evening as planned, to catch the staff cashing up for the day. The lads told me not to leave the car running as that could arouse suspicion but to be ready to go exactly at six o’clock.”

  “Where did you get the car from?”

  “Nicked it from Magnolia Close.”

  “When?”

  “In the morning.”

  “Was it in good condition?”

  “Not really,” he shook his head. “But it did get bashed about a bit, while I got used to the gears and how it went and that.”

  He laughed but stopped when he realized he was the only one laughing.

  “Go on.”

  “Everything seemed to be going to plan, and I looked at the clock on the dashboard and I saw that it was five to six. I was getting nervous now, checking the time every minute. The next minute I looked it was four minutes to six. I got distracted by a pretty girl walking past. She smiled at me and I smiled back, and I watched her walk all the way down the street. She had a lovely arse. Then, when I looked again at the clock it still said, four minutes to six. I was thinking how time drags by when you’re tense. I looked again and this time it said five to six. I started to panic. Time was going backwards. I thought I was losing my mind and before you ask I don’t do drugs.”

  “That’s good to know,” I said reassuringly.

  “Then the boys came rushing out of the post office and I wasn’t ready. I tried to start the car rushing, and it bloody well stalled. The boys were furious with me. They jumped out of the car and ran off down the street when they heard the police sirens and left me there. I looked at the clock again and the time was right.”

  “Then what happened?” I pressed.

  “I was arrested outside the post office,” he shrugged. “The coppers quickly caught the others. I reckon one of them grassed me up for mucking up outside the post office. I’ll sort that out later. What I want to know is, while I was sitting in that car, what was happening to time?”

11

  “What do you think?” DI Silver asked, as I emerged from the interview room. I knew he had been watching me through the two-way mirror and had heard every word that Archie had said.

  “He’s petrified.”

  “Stupid isn’t it?”

  “Odd,” I acknowledged. “Has he been drinking?”

  “No.”

  “Drugs?”

  DI Silver shook his head. “Urine samples have come back clear.”

  I nodded understandingly. “Where is the car?”

  “In the compound on the other side of town.”

  “Let’s take a look then.” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “Can we stop at the Nunn crime scene on the way?”

  “Of course.”

  I collected Charlie from a relieved Sergeant Higgins and took him home where I was collected by DI Silver in an unmarked police car with no flashing blue lights or sirens.

  I was surprised to find that a few local photographers had gathered behind barriers patrolled by community police officers, their breath rising like steam. From time to time, there came outbreaks of desultory clicking, as the watchers filled their time snapping the white canvas tent on the beach that had been set up to protect the evidence at the scene. I glimpsed white-clothed forensic experts moving about and turned to DI Silver for confirmation.

  “We’re clutching at straws with this one, John.” He told me. “It’s looking like a suicide but nothing in his background gives a reason why he should have committed suicide.”

  We slowed and passed a parked white van with an enormous satellite dish on the roof. The reporter and the sound man hovered, stamping their feet, and warming their hands on hot beakers of coffee from a mobile café that was parked nearby.

  “Shall we go?” He asked me.

  “Yes,” I nodded slowly. “I’ll come back later.”

  He drove south along the coastal road that led along the crumbling sea wall. Ten years earlier there had been a winter of terrible storms and the sea wall had collapsed under the onslaught. We didn’t speak for a while. The tide was drawing nearer with rivulets of water running along the mud ditches. The long grass distantly shimmered like a mirage in the chill breeze. It was probably not more than half a mile, but the flat road stretched ahead of us, and we seemed to be getting nowhere, stranded in a monotony of scrubby grass, mudflats, and oozing ocean. There was a faint streak of light where the sea met the sky, and I kept my eyes on that.

  The car threw up splashing’s of water from a thousand crevasses in the road. Why was it, I wondered, that they never seemed to fix the roads here, while in Ipswich, which was only fifteen miles away, they worked on the surfaces so often that things were made even worse?

  Through the rain, falling as drizzle now, I noticed we were passing a series of creeks and salt marshes, old concrete emplacements, pillboxes, and paths that led to nowhere. As we went further south, the land seemed to firm and harden, and the path between the marsh and the mud reappeared. I looked over my shoulder and Oxmarket was difficult to make out in the haze of the winter day and where we were heading I couldn’t see at all, hidden as it was by lines of pine trees, planted for some obscure tax reason forty years ago and now left, unmanageable and unsaleable.

  I looked up and saw a plane at the beginning of its journey, small as the point of a pin, spilling out the smoke in its wake as it headed away to Europe, the Far East or Australia. People inside that pinprick were settling down to their drinks and miniature bags of salted nuts, their trays of food and their in-flight films, anticipating the beach or the ski slope.

We overtook a tractor, the driver sitting up high in the cab, staring down out of his meaty red face. Then a woman on her bike, her hair tied back in a scarf and her coat billowing around her. The Detective Inspector seemed to take ages to pass her, but when I glanced in his direction I could tell by the expression on his face that he was being extra cautious.

 We passed a row of pebble-dashed houses that had a small bakery right in the middle of them and I asked DI Silver to stop.

  “Do you fancy a bite to eat?”

  “Don’t mind.”

  I climbed out of the car. The wind was like iron and I ran into the bakery. There wasn’t an impressive selection of food – pasties and pies that looked scarily industrial. I chose a cheese roll and a ham roll. They were only a couple of pounds each. Back in the car, I handed a cheese roll to the Detective Inspector, then I peeled back the polythene from the other and took a bite. The bread was doughy and damp. The ham didn’t taste of anything. I struggled to chew and swallow it, but it didn’t matter. I just needed something to eat.

 “Not exactly cordon bleu,” DI Silver said before pulling away from the bakery.

  The road circumnavigated the coastline, curving round towards the Ox upland Parva primary school. It sat on its own, a tiny collection of grey and yellow buildings and a football field a stone’s throw from the beach, where the long finger of a stone jetty reached out into the sea and a small boat rose gently with the swell. It would be hard to imagine a more idyllic setting for a childhood education.

DI Silver slowed his car to the twenty miles an hour speed limit, giving me the opportunity to watch half a dozen children receiving road-safety lessons on their bicycles, weaving in and out of red traffic cones laid along the playground by their teacher.

  Filipa Silver waved happily to her husband. An attractive woman in her middle thirties, she normally fussed over her appearance, constantly sweeping a stray strand of chestnut hair behind her ear, but in a strong wind like today that would have been like a pointless task. She was wearing jeans and tennis shoes and an anorak. A marked contrast with the severe middle-aged ladies who taught me at that age.

  Once we were clear of the speed limit, DI Silver pressed his foot down on the accelerator and when over the rise a long string of lights of the village flickered in the mist following the line of the coast. I followed the intermittent beads of them north until at last we bumped down the drive to the police compound. The sea was hidden in obscurity, suffocated by the mist, but we heard it breathing its anger as the Detective Inspector parked, and we got out of the car. The reception was a ramshackle building, with a sagging roof and stained ancient walls. DI Silver knocked and after a while an elderly man came to the door in oil-stained overalls. His face was whiskery and shiny, and he seemed very pleased to see the Detective Inspector.

  I was introduced to Oliver Tennant who led us past an ancient tractor and a pile of wire netting to the lonely vehicle in question.

  It was a twenty-year-old blue Audi, which had seen better days. It had dents on the front right wing. Some were new, some were rusty. It looked just like the sort of car you would find down Magnolia Close.

  The search took me about twenty minutes before I found what I was looking for. I had covered everything. Under the bonnet in the boot, under the bumpers, and then I moved on to the interior, and it was after searching under the seats, in the seats and under the carpets, that I checked the dashboard and found the secret of Archie’s time machine.

  DI Silver had stood about twenty feet away while I carried out my search and I called him over when I was finished. I showed him what I had found and the smile on his face was one of the biggest I had ever seen.

12

  DI Silver drove back slowly and blindingly, as if minding the speed limits. Every so often he tapped a rhythm on his knee with his stubby fingers. I looked away to my left, my eyes flickering over the landscape.

  A sailing boat appeared out of the estuary from inland and began to make its way round the point. The large white and blue sail billowed out in the wind like a puffed cheek. I’d thought all the leisure boats had been safely tucked up on shore for the winter as this boat almost had the sea to itself, except for a small lumpy fishing-smack further down the coast and far away, dim on the horizon, a container ship making its way to Harwich or Felixstowe. From where? China, probably. The dentist I had started going to in Oxmarket had holiday postcards pasted on to his ceiling, so that you stared up at them as you lay back in the chair and perhaps thought of something other than what was going on in your mouth. I had gazed at the hackneyed scenes of Hong Kong harbour, the Sydney Opera House, a temple on a lake in Thailand, New York, the Eiffel Tower, a beach somewhere.

  Now I did the same with that sailing boat. I scrutinized it as carefully as I could, counting the sales (there were three), trying to identify the ropes and how they fastened the sails and what their purpose was. I looked at the two people on board, one in yellow, the other in blue. There were numbers on the side and a name, but the boat was too far away to make them out. If I could concentrate enough and make myself see as many details as possible: the person holding the large silver steering wheel, the one in yellow doing something with a rope. Maybe I could stop myself thinking about what didn’t bear thinking about. I didn’t have a clue how Simon Nunn, had died and that I was grateful for the respite with Archie and his time machine. So, I looked at the little green pennant fluttering at the top of the mast and the portholes and wondered if you could sleep on board.

  I held my breath as the boat veered suddenly. Its keel all but coming out of the sea as the sea rose and swelled around it, beads of spray riffling off the grey surface.

Then it righted itself, the two-man crew looking back incredulously at whatever they had just avoided.

  “You, okay?” DI Silver asked, obviously noticing a change in the expression on my face.

  “I think so,” I replied, as we passed the boatyards and the caravan site, passed the beach where the dinghies were turned turtle in the sand, passed the beach huts. Houses petering out, the road narrowing.

  “Anything the matter?”

  “Before we go back to the station, would you take me to the marina?”

  “Of course,” he acknowledged, winding to the left and then to the right, which took us past the garden centre, the bowling-green and the playing-fields, and then we were in open farmland and after a few hundred metres we took a right turn that led directly to the sea. At the end the road narrowed into a lane and then into a rough parking area. It was hard to believe that in the summer there was often a jam even to get into it but now only two cars were there.

  It was sometimes like these that I still felt that I had been fetched up near the world. The wintry light slanting on to the flat, colourless landscape; the moan of the wind, the shriek of sea-birds and the melancholy ringing of that ghostly bell far out at sea all sent a shiver through me.

  DI Silver stopped the car, and we got out and walked across the rough grass that led to what was loosely known locally as the marina. From here I could see along the path a mile to the north and almost as far in the other direction, to the south-west, until the path disappeared round the gentle curve of the sea wall. North, I could only see two people, dragging their boat up the beach. South-west, there was nobody. A small crane stood distantly where the sea wall was being repaired, but even that was still and unused.

  All around us there was nothing but horizon: the level land, the mudflats, the miles of marshes, the salting’s, the grey wrinkled sea. Little boats tethered to their unnecessary buoys tipped at a steep angle to show their blistered, slimy hulls; their halliards clinked and chimed in the wind. From the window of my flat, a bit further round to the south-east, I could make out the sea. Sometimes, when I woke in the morning and opened my eyes on its grey, shifting, expanse, I still wondered how I could be just seventy miles from London yet feel like I was living on another planet. This part of the Suffolk coast was gripped by weather and seasons; full of wild spaces, loneliness, the strange call of sea-birds and sighing winds. Oxmarket was even cut off from the mainland every so often when the highest tides covered the causeway. From my bedroom, I could hear the waters lapping at the shingle shore. Sometimes at night, when the Suffolk coastal town was wrapped in the darkness of the sky and of the rising, falling waters, I could scarcely bear the sense of solitude that engulfed me.

  As we walked, I took a deep breath and felt the cold wind and the cold sun on my face. Behind us lay the town, with its shops, cafés, roads, cars, and people. In front was a lonely wilderness where the small waves slapped and hissed against the diminishing stretch of sand. Here you couldn’t tell where the water ended and sky began.

  The two men breathing heavily from their exertion of having to drag the boat halfway up the beach, looked up as we approached.

  “You were lucky,” I said.

  “What caused you to change direction so suddenly?” DI Silver pressed, showing them his ID.

  The two men looked at each other.

  “You saw what happened?” The older one of the two asked.

  “The keel was virtually out of the water,” I told him.

  “It was a buoy,” the younger man responded. Now, as I looked closer, I could see they were father and son. “It was moving all over the place. It was as if its anchor rope had been cut.”