The Killing Season (2 page)

The Cromer ridge is where the glaciers from the ice age that we are technically still in stopped, creating a landscape unlike anywhere else in East Anglia. People might tell you that Norfolk is flat. But not on this part of the North Norfolk coast it isn’t. The onset of the ice age literally tore it up and over the next few days I was to discover that certain people hereabouts had a mind to do likewise.

Somehow or other, through events partly of my own making, I had ended up here in North Norfolk. A journey every bit as traumatic as that of the ‘ice rock’ to the hard place that I mentioned earlier.

I was in a large static caravan that I was using as a temporary office. It was based near the cliffs, just outside the town of Sheringham in the grounds of a small farmhouse a quarter of a mile or so away from one of the trailer parks that proliferated on this part of the coast like a rash.

I had been a detective inspector in the Metropolitan Police for many years. Technically I still was. My boss didn’t have the good sense to accept my resignation. She had talked me into taking a twelve-month sabbatical and used her not inconsiderable influence – and called in some favours – to make sure that my application was approved. Doctor Kate Walker, my wife-to-be, had co-opted my young daughter Siobhan and together they had talked me into us all coming up here to live for a spell. Away from the madding crowds. As the poet Gray expressed it, ‘Along the cool sequestered vale of life’ – where people apparently kept the noiseless tenor of their life.

I will concede that in this part of the country, compared to the shrieking heart of the metropolis, the tenor of life, whatever that was, was pretty noiseless. In the main. Just not at that present moment.

Standing in a forty-foot-by-ten-foot tin box with the rain drumming on the roof like a million miniature marching bands, listening to the winds howling and looking out as they battered the foaming waters of the North Sea, I questioned the decision to move here. Not for the first time.

Kate had family ties in the area: she had been born in Sheringham before she moved to London after the untimely death of her parents. I had told her that I wanted out of the Met and she had seized on it. She wanted out of the madness of London full stop, and with our newborn baby girl, Jade, and my eight-year-old daughter Siobhan it seemed like a good plan: Team Walker Delaney escape to the country. I just wished it had been a Caribbean sea that I was looking out at, and not the roiling grey bleakness of this blighted stretch of the British coast. It wasn’t as though I was unused to it, mind. I had grown up in Ballydehob, in County Cork on the western shores of Eire. Not far from the ‘top of the bottle’ as the county capital was called and sitting on the North Atlantic, no less wind-blasted and rain-battered a place than my present locale. Especially at this time of year in the last days of October when the dark nights arrived early, and there was nothing more heart-lifting to a weary soul than the sight of a log fire burning in an open grate in the local. Or
one
of the locals, I should say, as you could practically walk through one door of a pub in the town and straight into the next. Four of them cheek by jowl – as your man with the bald head once remarked – huddled against the ocean that I could hear now, grinding and crashing some hundred feet below me on the shore, and another two pubs further up the road from those four. Not bad for a town on the furthest edges of civilisation.

My thoughts had turned to roaring fires not just because of the miserable weather outside but because it was near lunchtime. Somehow my miserable disposition is heartened enormously by a pint of the black gold in my hand or a jigger of Jameson’s swirling seductively in a glass. Hell, enough of those and North Norfolk in the pelting rain looks pretty damn peachy to me. Not that I was allowed to swirl much of the healing fluid any more – not at home, at any rate – by order of the boss. Or should I say bosses, both young and older ones and all of them distinctly of the female gender.

I had almost finished a report for Brian Stenson who owned the caravan park that I mentioned earlier, the one further up the coastline. He wanted some security recommendations. His park had been subject to some ongoing petty vandalism. The sort of thing that usually stopped when ‘The Season’ ended and the hordes of holidaymakers that descend like a plague of brightly coloured locusts on the town scattered north, west and south. The fact that the caravans were unoccupied made them vulnerable at this time of year. But a greater number of incidents were occurring, and the local plod seemed to be doing nothing about it. I had surveyed Stenson’s existing set-up, luckily before Hurricane Norma that was then still ripping towards us had made landfall, and was recommending the usual to him. Sensor lights, taller fences at the points of ingress and egress, some CCTV. No rocket science to it, a patrol now and again by yours truly or someone I could hire more cheaply. Stenson had been pretty clear that he didn’t want to spend a fortune, and I had told him to just get a large dog. But he was allergic, apparently.

I took another sip of the lukewarm coffee, sat back at my desk and attached the report along with a list of suppliers I could get discounts from. Another click and the email was sent. One of the benefits of modern science that meant I didn’t have to go out in the weather and deliver by hand.

I was closing up the laptop when the door opened. The wind howled in and she walked in with it.

‘
WHAT’S THE HAPS,
Stretch?’ said Laura Gomez as she flipped back the hood of a rain slicker two sizes too big for her. I looked across at her and shook my head, amused.

By rights, given that I had handed in my Met warrant card and hung out my private-eye shingle it should have been a tall husky-voiced blonde or a dangerous redhead squeezed into a dress custom-engineered for purpose, who had walked through my door, asking me to defend her from someone following her. Wasn’t quite the case here. Any men following Laura Gomez were likely to be dressed in white coats or blue serge.

‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ I said, gesturing at her with my coffee cup and taking a last swallow.

‘Say what?’

‘Don’t sweat it,’ I said. ‘What brings you out here on such a lovely day as this?’

Laura Gomez worked for a local solicitor, Amy Leigh, who put a lot of work my way – like the job for Brian Stenson that I had just finished the report on, for instance.

Laura sat down on the sofa next to the table I was working on and grinned at me. ‘Do I need a reason to see you, Stretch?’ she said.

‘Don’t call me that.’

She looked me up and down and smiled. ‘Well, tall, dark, blue-eyed and handsome is pretty much a mouthful. The boss said I’d find you here.’

Laura Gomez was a petite Asian woman of twenty. She was five foot nothing of attitude with spiky dark hair and a fashion sense straight out of the Addams family. Her family had come over from Goa, apparently, forty-odd years previously. Her father was an engineer and her mother a beauty queen. Amy Leigh had represented her when she’d been eighteen and up on an assault charge. Her family had disowned her – they considered the way she dressed tantamount to inviting rape and they’d refused to pay for a solicitor. Nice people. Amy was appointed to handle her case. It seemed that a twenty-three-year-old Ipswich supporter with red hair and a failed goatee had attempted to molest her outside the Crown pub on carnival night. He had a gang of mates with him. Laura managed to get away when a group of Norwich City fans took a dislike to the Ipswich shirts the members of the other mob were wearing, but the following day she saw the man who had assaulted her walking out of the kebab shop on the High Street and beat the bejeezus out of him with a left-handed five iron. Which was odd, come to think of it, because as far as I was able to establish she was right-handed and had never played golf. But then, I’m also a security consultant to the Sheringham golf course and I’ve never played golf either.

Amy had changed Laura’s wardrobe, schooled her for the trial and got her off all charges. Amy told me that she had no idea how Laura had ended up working as her PA and had no recollection of offering her the job. But, as she told me, employing Laura was cheaper than buying and feeding a guard dog and, despite appearances to the contrary, the girl was pretty damn good at her job.

‘Well, you’ve found me. What do you need?’

‘Anything you’ve got, Stretch.’

She grinned at me lasciviously and I laughed despite myself. ‘What I’ve got is a wife and two daughters.’

‘Why have hamburger when you can have horse meat at home – is that what you’re saying?’

‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that to Kate.’

‘No, you’re safe, Irish,’ she said. ‘Just tugging on your lariat.’

There were only a few people I let get away with calling me ‘Irish’.

‘The boss wants to see you,’ she said.

‘Now?’

‘After lunch is cool. You can buy me a bacon sandwich at the Lobby.’

The Lobby she referred to was The Lobster public house, set back from the coast by about fifty yards and where the roaring log fire I had been contemplating in my mind’s eye was to be found.

The walk into town was cold and windy enough for us both to hurry inside The Lobster when we got there. Laura was dressed as if it was summer whilst I had my leather jacket zipped tight. I nodded to the barman as we walked in. He nodded back and held up a Guinness glass.

I grinned at him. ‘You’d better get the vampire a Bloody Mary.’

‘I’ll have a pint of Kronenbourg!’ she shouted to the departing barman, who had gone to the back bar where the Guinness was on tap. This was the real-ale bar and I had slowly been brought round to enjoying a pint now and again. Hitherto I had regarded real ale as enthusiastically as I would a glass of pond water. But when in Rome or Paris, like I always say, don’t take a taxi. Today I fancied a glass of the Guinness, as they served a decent pint here and, well, you never quite forget your first kiss, do you? Your first love or your first pint of the black magic!

The Lobster was built sometime in the mid-nineteenth century, 1850 or thereabouts. The ceiling had been covered with old maps some time ago, nobody knew exactly when: they were yellowed with age and tobacco stains from back in the happy days when bars really were bars, and you were allowed to smoke, swear, make some noise and generally have a good time without drawing the censure of diners. The walls were festooned with pictures of old lifeboat crews and fishermen, nets hung from the ceiling and there were lobster pots, boathooks, long oars. There were etchings on the old sash windows that looked out onto Gun Street where an old cannon was mounted at the corner of the pub. The blazing fire was large, housed in the original brick-built fireplace and chimney breast, with a brightly polished copper hood above it. It sounds like a dreadful theme pub but it wasn’t – it just hadn’t been altered for years. Hadn’t been got at by the corporate chains and breweries who are seemingly motivated to drive all character out of the public houses of England. That was one thing you could say about North Norfolk – they do pubs well.

After I had drunk a third of my pint of Guinness in one swallow, I looked down the menu and ordered the sausage and mash. It was that kind of day. Laura ordered the
fruits de mer
from the specials board. As it was on my tab, I told her to think again. She ordered a double-stacked burger and a large side order of fries. I looked at her thin frame and shook my head.

‘What now?’ she asked.

‘I reckon you must have hollow bones.’

‘Purity of heart, a cheerful disposition and an abstemious nature are the fundamental building blocks of a healthy shape, Jack. Heart, mind and body in perfect harmony.’

‘Abstemious! I’ve seen you at The Crown on a Saturday night, remember.’

She grinned. ‘Must be the genes, then.’

‘There is something you can do for me.’

Laura rolled her eyes. ‘Never trust an Irishman, that’s what my grandmother always told me.’

‘Did she now?’

‘Maybe not. But she should have done.’

‘A strictly professional matter.’

She leaned forward, her expression animated. ‘So what’s the case?’ she asked. ‘Drug smuggling? Prostitution? People-trafficking, coming in from Holland via the North Norfolk coast and then down to London?’

‘There’s been a bit of ongoing vandalism up at the campsite along the cliffs. Graffiti, broken fences, locks forced even though the vans are empty.’

Laura gave a disappointed sigh, rolled her eyes again for dramatic effect and shrugged, her blade-like shoulders belying the strength she had in her slender frame. ‘The yoot be bored. What are you going to do about it, bro?’

‘I want you to find out who’s behind it.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because, like you said, it’s probably some feckless youngsters like you with their brains in their toecaps.’

‘None taken.’

‘And the local flatfeet don’t seem to be bothered enough to do much.’

Laura laughed again. ‘The police. What use are they?’

I returned her sardonic look.

‘Well, you ain’t proper police, are you, Jack?’

‘Just keep your eyes open.’

‘Yes, sir. Eyes peeled, ears to the ground.’

‘Well,’ I said, looking at her pointedly. ‘You’re close enough.’

She punched me on the shoulder. ‘You kill me, Stretch.’

‘Don’t tempt me,’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s get you back to work.’

AMY LEIGH HAD
her offices above a gift shop in Gun Street that ran past The Lobster to Lifeboat Plain, a misshapen kind of square bordered by a café, two pubs and a community hall, with a narrow lane beside it that led down to a slipway and the ocean beyond.

You could pick up a pebble, if you had a mind to, from the lower corner of the Plain and hurl it into the sea. I didn’t have an urge to do any such thing just then, so I followed Amy Leigh’s young assistant instead, walked into the shop and nodded at the blonde woman in a pink jumper behind the till. She was a friend of Amy’s so getting to the office through the shop wasn’t a problem for either of them. Wasn’t a problem for me, either. The jumper looked good on her.