IT’S A FUCKING weird place, Beckford. It’s beautiful, quite breathtaking in parts, but it’s strange. It feels like a place apart, disconnected from everything that surrounds it. Of course, it is miles from anywhere – you have to drive for hours to get anywhere civilized. That’s if you consider Newcastle civilized, which I’m not sure I do. Beckford is a strange place, full of odd people, with a downright bizarre history. And all through the middle of it there’s this river, and that’s the weirdest thing of all – it seems like whichever way you turn, in whatever direction you go, somehow you always end up back at the river.
There’s something a bit off about the DI, too. He’s a local boy, so I suppose it’s to be expected. I thought it the first time I laid eyes on him, yesterday morning when they pulled Nel Abbott’s body out of the water. He was standing on the river bank, hands on hips, head bent. He was speaking to someone – the medical examiner, it turned out – but from a distance it looked as though he was praying. That’s what I thought of – a priest. A tall, thin man in dark clothes, the black water as a backdrop, the slate cliff behind him, and at his feet a woman, pale and serene.
Not serene, of course, dead. But her face wasn’t contorted, it wasn’t ruined. If you didn’t look at the rest of her, the broken limbs or the twist of her spine, you’d think she’d drowned.
I introduced myself and thought straight away there was something strange about him – his watery eyes, a slight tremor in his hands, which he tried to suppress by rubbing them together, palm against wrist – it made me think of my dad on those mornings-after-the-night-before when you needed to keep your voice and your head down.
Keeping my head down seemed like a good idea in any case. I’d been up north less than three weeks, after a hasty transfer from London thanks to an ill-advised relationship with a colleague. Honestly, all I wanted to do was work my cases and forget the whole mess. I was fully anticipating being thrown the boring stuff at first, so I was surprised when they wanted me on a suspicious death. A woman, her body spotted in a river by a man out walking his dogs. She was fully clothed, so she hadn’t been swimming. The chief inspector set me straight. ‘It’ll almost certainly be a jumper,’ he told me. ‘She’s in the Beckford Drowning Pool.’
It was one of the first things I asked DI Townsend. ‘Did she jump, do you think?’
He looked at me for a moment, he considered me. Then he pointed to the clifftop. ‘Let’s go up there,’ he said, ‘find the scientific officer and see if they’ve discovered anything – evidence of a struggle, blood, a weapon. Her phone would be a good start, because she’s not got it on her.’
‘Right you are.’ As I walked away, I glanced at the woman and thought how sad she looked, how plain and unadorned.
‘Her name is Danielle Abbott,’ Townsend said, his voice slightly raised. ‘She lives locally. She’s a writer and photographer, quite successful. She has a daughter, fifteen years old. So no, in answer to your question, I don’t think it’s likely that she jumped.’
We went up to the cliff together. You follow the path from the little beach along the side of the pool until it veers right, through a clump of trees, then it’s a steep climb up the hill to the top of the ridge. The path was muddy in places – I could see where boots had slipped and skidded, erasing the traces of footprints laid before. At the top, the path turns sharply left and, emerging from the trees, leads right to the edge of a cliff. My stomach lurched.
‘Jesus.’
Townsend glanced back over his shoulder. He looked almost amused. ‘Scared of heights?’
‘Perfectly reasonable fear of putting a foot wrong and falling to my death,’ I said. ‘You’d think they’d put a barrier up or something, wouldn’t you? Not exactly safe, is it?’
The DI didn’t answer, just continued on, walking purposefully towards the cliff edge. I followed, pressing myself against the gorse bushes to avoid looking over the sheer face to the water below.
The science officer – pale-faced and hairy, as they always seem to be – had little in the way of good news.
‘No blood, no weapon, no obvious sign of a struggle,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Not even much in the way of fresh litter. Her camera’s damaged though. And there’s no SD card.’
‘Her camera?’
Hairy turned to me. ‘Would you believe it? She set up a motion-activated camera as part of this project she was working on.’
‘Why?’
He shrugged. ‘To film people up here … to see what they get up to? You get some weirdos hanging around sometimes, you know, because of the whole history of the place. Or maybe she wanted to catch a jumper in the act …’ He grimaced.
‘Christ. And someone’s damaged her camera? Well, that’s … inconvenient.’
He nodded.
Townsend sighed, folding his arms across his chest. ‘Indeed. Although it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Her equipment’s been vandalized before. Her project had its detractors locally. In fact,’ he took a couple of steps closer to the edge of the cliff and I felt my head swim, ‘I’m not even sure she replaced the camera after the last time.’ He peered over the edge. ‘There is another one, isn’t there? Fixed somewhere below. Anything on that?’
‘Yeah, it looks intact. We’re going to bring it in, but …’
‘It won’t show anything.’
Hairy shrugged again. ‘Might show her going in, but it won’t tell us what happened up here.’
More than twenty-four hours had passed since then, and we seemed no closer to finding out what really had happened up there. Nel Abbott’s phone hadn’t shown up, which was odd, although perhaps not quite odd enough. If she’d jumped, there was a chance she might have disposed of it first. If she’d fallen, it might still be in the water somewhere, it might have sunk down into the mud or been washed away. If she was pushed, of course, whoever pushed her might have taken it off her first, but given the lack of any sign of a struggle up on the cliff, it didn’t seem likely that someone had wrested it away from her.
I got lost on the way back from taking Jules (NOT Julia, apparently) to do the ID at the hospital. I dropped her back at the Mill House and I thought I was heading back towards the station when I found that I wasn’t: after I crossed the bridge I’d somehow swung round and found myself back at the river again. Like I said, whichever way you turn. In any case, I had my phone out, trying to figure out where I was supposed to be going, when I spotted a group of girls walking over the bridge. Lena, a head taller than the others, broke away from them.
I abandoned the car and went after her. There was something I wanted to ask her, something her aunt had mentioned, but before I could reach her she’d started arguing with someone – a woman, perhaps in her forties. I saw Lena grab her arm, the woman pulling away and raising her hands to her face, as though afraid of being struck. Then they separated abruptly, Lena going left and the woman straight on up the hill. I followed Lena. She refused to tell me what it was all about. She insisted there was nothing wrong, that it hadn’t been an argument at all, that it was none of my business anyway. A bravado performance, but her face was streaked with tears. I offered to see her home, but she told me to fuck off.
So I did. I drove back to the station and gave Townsend the low-down on Jules Abbott’s formal identification of the body.
In keeping with the general theme, the ID was weird. ‘She didn’t cry,’ I told the boss, and he made a kind of dipping motion with his head as though to say, Well, that’s normal. ‘It wasn’t normal,’ I insisted. ‘This wasn’t normal shock. It was really odd.’